Stanley Elkin - Boswell

“Oh yes, I missed it before.” He opened it up and went down a few columns with his finger. “Nothing tonight,” he said, as if to himself. He looked relieved.

“Are you looking for a job?”

“No.”

“A new place? Look, Penner, if I’m making you uncomfortable I’ll get out.”

“No, of course not,” he said.

I must have looked skeptical.

“No,” he told me, “I like having you. Really.” He lowered his voice as though he were embarrassed. “Sometimes — in the ads — there are people in trouble. Perhaps I can help them.”

“Oh,” I said.

Penner went back to the paper. What was he all about anyway? Birds? Ads? Alices? Oh yes, Alices.

“You had a visitor today, Penner.”

He hadn’t heard me.

“I say you had a visitor today.”

“A visitor,” he repeated.

“A girl.”

That worried him. He looked like someone who had been told he had mice.

“Alice was here,” I said.

Now he just looked disappointed, but there was shock in it, too, as though coming to his room were a vicious weakness he thought he had cured her of. “Oh,” he said, “I’m sorry to hear that.” He put the paper aside. “Did she want anything?” he asked wearily.

“To see you. She said she’d come back.”

“I don’t know what to do,” he said,

“Penner, she told me she was with you last night and that you threw her out.”

“No,” he said. “That’s not true. I told her she could stay. I did.”

“But I was coming.”

“Please,” he said, “you don’t understand.”

“Well, Penner,” I said, getting up, “I’ve still got my key to the gym. I’m sorry I inconvenienced you, or if not you, Alice. After I leave she’ll come back and you can work something out.”

“No,” he said, looking genuinely frightened, “you can’t go. You asked to stay. You have to stay.”

“What are you talking about? Come on, Penner.”

“Oh, Boswell. Boswell, you’re pushing me into hell.”

“Penner, please. What is it with you?”

“Nothing. Just stay.”

“Goodbye, Penner.”

“A vow,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“I’ve taken a vow. That’s all.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A vow. I took a vow never to refuse anyone anything. It’s so hard.”

“A vow?”

“I want to be a saint.”

“Then share your eggs,” I said.

He looked about to cry. First me, then Alice, now Penner. There was something tragic loose in that room. The heart’s raw onions.

“God forgive me,” he said. “I am not a naturally virtuous man. It’s harder for me. I have a terrible sensuality, Boswell. When Alice was here last night we did awful things. She’s in love with me. She wants me to marry her. I can’t do that.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Saints are all single men. Penner, stop this crap. What are you giving me?”

“For nine years I have never refused a human being anything. That is the vow I made to our Lord.”

“All right, why?”

“I am in love with Jesus.”

“Okay, Penner.”

“I’m going into the Church.”

“You? A priest?”

“If He will have me.”

“Okay, Penner.”

“Why are you scorning me? Is your soul saved?”

“Who knows, Penner?”

“Do you want me to pray with you?”

“Play with me?”

“Pray with you.”

“No.”

“If you stay we can go to church together.”

“Is that where you go in the daytime?”

“Yes. I’m there all day.”

“Penner, I don’t know if you’re conning me or what, but you put on a terrific show.”

“It’s because I’m not innately virtuous that you don’t believe me. I saw the eggs you bought. I pretended to ignore them because I was jealous of your generosity.”

A weight-lifting saint. A sound soul in a sound body. Why not? Didn’t the Virgin herself like tumblers? Penner was an athlete of God like the old ascetics. He played it too close to the chest, though. His room, his conversation when he wasn’t being baited, his hospitality, his days in church. If he never refused you he made it awfully hard for you to ask. He gave you the classified section, put you up on the fourth floor. He kept his eggs in coffee cans.

“Penner,” I said, “I wish you a happy journey to God. I hope you go Pullman, but personally I can’t stay with a man who is not innately virtuous. So goodbye and eat plenty of eggs.”

“You asked to be my guest,” he said pathetically.

“I’m releasing you, Penner. It’s okay. Hey, God, did you hear that? I’m releasing your servant Penner. I don’t want to stay in his room any more. How’s that, Penner? All right?”

“You son of a bitch,” he said. “You mother fucker.”

“You’ve got a lot of class, Penner. Tell Alice goodbye and give her a little pinch for me, Saint.”

“Boswell, forgive me. Please,” he said. “I’m so sorry. Let me pray for you.”

“Okay, Penner, pray this. Pray I stop crapping around.”

Perhaps there are men in the world’s counting houses with larger fortunes than Midas’. Perhaps there are anonymous fourths sitting around the world’s tables who have played better bridge than Hoyle. But it doesn’t make much difference. Midas has had fortunes named for him; the Earl of Sandwich, lunches. So it’s not quantity alone. One speaks, too, of the quality of a fortune, the quality of a love affair. My heroes don’t give only their time or their lives to their works. They give their names as well. They know what they’re doing. They cast their names upon the waters and they come back tenfold, a hundred, a million. It is the Christianity of Fame.

You can imagine, then, what the Hercules/strength equation must have meant to a man like The Great Sandusky. He could afford it, you say. Yes, but it hurt.

“He was a strong guy, sure, but could he have had better developed lumbar lats than that?” Sandusky has asked, his feet a careful nineteen inches apart, his hands locked in impossible tug-of-war behind his neck. He couldn’t have. In his prime Felix Sandusky had the biggest lumbar lats in the business. According to Sandusky, “Hercules got a good press only because the rest of your Greeks were little men. Sure, vitamins have killed the strong-man game. People are taller now, bigger in the arms, the legs, the chest. You hear a lot of talk about longevity, statistics about the average man living thirty or forty years longer than his great-grandfather, but that’s only half the story. Your trunks are vaster now. Look, it’s like anything else. It’s all contrast. Everybody has force.” (Sandusky liked to call his strength force.) “But if a guy has only a little force then a guy with just average or a little better than average force is a big deal. Hercules could probably take care of himself, but your general run-of-the-mill Greek was a guy with lousy force. So don’t tell me about Hercules! What with health foods and wonder drugs and vitamins and scientific weight training it takes a real man to stand out today. Every Tom, Dick and Harry has force today.”

Getting to meet The Great Sandusky was my first campaign.

I left Penner’s as elated as I had ever felt. Twenty- four hours before I had been broke. Since then I had earned twelve dollars and still had more than eight, which meant that I was getting, including expenditures, at a rate of better than seven-hundred-fifty per cent. That was very high-grade getting for me and quality keeping for anyone. Furthermore, I had made a decision which would change my life: a decision not to mess around. Herlitz helps him who helps himself.