Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

“I’m very sorry, Rose. I didn’t know how awful it was for you.”

“He’s a good provider,” Rose Gold said.

“Don’t patronize me,” Morty said, raising his voice. “Don’t hang up. I’m sorry I yelled. Listen, I think I can help you. In my knapsack I have a special soap. Its lather brings understanding. It won’t give wisdom, but it opens the mind to the wisdom of others. Do you think you could get him to bathe?”

“Is that what you wanted to say to me?” Rose asked angrily.

“No. Listen. Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes, tomorrow. I move up. I close in on the truth. Frankly, I’ve been putting it off. I’m a little nervous about it.”

“Well sure, a big thing like that.”

“I told you, Rose, I don’t permit people to patronize me,” Morty said, controlling himself. “Now,” he said, calm again, “this thing tomorrow will be tremendous. I’m qualified for it to be. Before no — now yes. I told them in 1934, when I refused the doctorate. That was a speech. That was. What was I in 1934? A small, marked man, thin as a warrior, passionate in the guts but unripe as next week. Still, I told them. ‘Doctors Lopus and Moore and Stitt and Frane,’ I said, ‘I decline to be examined. What of music, gentlemen? What of medicine and history and physics and literature? What of military strategy and folk dancing and astronomy and law? I know nothing, doctors. Good-by.’ ”

“Good-by,” Rose Gold said.

“Not you. It’s what I said. So now I’m prepared. Listen, it wasn’t easy. These aren’t the old-timey German-beer-garden days when all you had to do for knowledge was sell your soul. It’s a buyer’s market now. It probably always was. Anyway, it hasn’t been easy. Those damned jungles, that creepy food, those redundant world capitals — all that lousy note-taking and collating and waiting for boats and keeping your ears off their bloody necklaces. Phooey, Rose. But — you prepare and you’re prepared. Tomorrow.”

“Hah!” Rose Gold’s husband shouted. “Hah! You see? The man’s a fool. He’s crazy. Tomorrow is Sunday. Everything’s closed! ”

“ Tomorrow! ”

He left his room and went downstairs and crossed Amsterdam Avenue and walked the two blocks to the park. He entered and turned right, walking south along the western margins of Central Park, crossing intricate foot and bridle paths, raising his stout stick to greet the few early morning riders, cutting through greensward where the wet grass swished against his cuffs. He was grateful it was cool, for his knapsack was heavy and he had a long way to go. From time to time, from a hilly rise, he could see the fine apartments across the avenue, and once, down a wide, plunging street, the hazy green of Jersey like something at the bottom of a moated hill. Then the road — there was barely any traffic — swung next to him and he moved along narrower and narrower grassy plots out into Columbus Circle. “Oh, brave new world,” he said, and caught his breath, and looked for a moment at the stunning marble brightness of the Coliseum. All around him were the city’s new museums, theaters, concert, and exhibition halls. “This is it,” they boasted to him. This ain’t it, he thought, and shoved the knapsack higher, lifting it as one would push up on the buttocks of a piggybacking child.

He crossed the wide street and walked past the expensive hotels toward the Grand Army Plaza, seeing his face, like something on fire, in the brassy medallion plates of the Essex and Hampshire Houses and the Barbizon-Plaza and the St. Moritz and Plaza hotels. And this ain’t it , he thought, catching a dim fragrance of open luggage, cuff links on the rug, melting ice.

He headed south on Fifth Avenue past the fine stores, their clean enormous windows reminding him of nativity scenes, glassed, moneyed crèches. He paused for a moment before a window, looking past his reflection into the cool, tweedy depths of the scene, and admired the horsey, intelligent dummies, a season ahead in a different time zone and climate, in some heaven off earth, standing, awkwardly graceful, self-conscious and chosen in front of the precious furniture and rare books. He caught a scent of the turning wheels inside Swiss watches. “This ain’t it,” he sniffed. “It’s only the way it ought to be.”

A policeman moved up behind him. Morty could feel the cop’s eyes on his back. “I’m no revolutionary, Officer,” he said without turning. “The thought of smashing this thick glass makes me shudder. I only wish I could afford some of this stuff.”

“You a peace marcher?” the cop asked.

“Too old,” Morty said. ‘“Truth walker.”

He crossed the street to look into the window of F.A.O. Schwarz and stared in amazement at the toys for the emperor’s children, the king’s kids, and then went down 56th Street toward Madison Avenue. In the distance, on both sides of the street, he could see the striped, fringed canopies and bright pennants of French and Italian restaurants. They looked like the gay tents of ancient, opposing armies. Knights could have appeared under the awnings, buckling armor.

He turned down Madison Avenue and smelled electric-typewriter ribbons. At Abercrombie & Fitch on 45th Street, Morty stopped, startled. There in the window was a manikin, burdened as Morty himself was by a knapsack, but pithhelmeted, superbly, masculinely bloused, with clever canvas loops for his shells running like intricate braid across his handsome shirt, his field marshal’s jodhpurs flowing like twin, wind-whipped flags into the rich leather boots. He marched proudly through his air-cooled, Platonized jungle, his eyes like jeweler’s crystal, toward the grand bull koodoo of creation somewhere behind Morty’s back. Morty was not put off. “No, this ain’t it either, is it, oh, wax brother?” he said and moved east along 45th Street past Park, where the banks were and the new office buildings like upended trays of ice cubes.

He went on to Lexington, walking abreast of the stocky, Greeky splendor of the Grand Central Terminal, still idle and almost cabless this early on a Sunday morning. He followed the big building, like a stone roadblock, around two corners and came out at 42nd Street.

He moved toward Broadway. Now he could smell dollar-nine-cent steaks. He could smell publishers’ remainders, paperback books, lenses, tripods, leatherette camera cases, record albums, little Statues of Liberty, transistorized tape recorders — plastic. Overwhelmingly he could smell plastic. “This ain’t it, and this ain’t even the way it ought to be,” he said.

At Times Square he looked north into the great valley of Broadway. Slogans, the names of movie stars, trademarks, colossal painted labels stuck flat to the buildings like ripped shards of poster on a kiosk. In the wilderness of unkempt, unlit tubing scribbled across signs, he could just make out glassy, ghost traces of airplanes, fountain pens, the complicated wing movements of birds.

“Pretty wonderful, ain’t it?” a man with a thick New York accent said to him.”

“Sure is, hick,” Morty said.

He turned around and walked down Broadway. Once he left Times Square and was into the Thirties he felt more comfortable, but he was very tired. He walked into the little square at 32nd Street and sat down on a bench to rest. An old woman in a dark cloth coat too warm for the day was across from him. She had on black, broken, high-heeled shoes and white bobbysocks, and sat feeding pigeons from a deep paper sack.

“Good morning there, mother,” Morty said.

“Good morning there, tramp,” the woman said.

Morty sat contentedly, looking from the great complex of department stores to the jerky thrusts of pigeon neck. “I am a traveler from the West who has come a long journey,” he said after a while. “Can you tell me the meaning of life?”