We Can Build You (3 page)

There in the living room sat the Stanton, in the middle of the sofa, its hands on its knees, discoursing with my dad, while Chester and my mother went on watching the TV.

“Dad,” I said, “you’re wasting your time talking to that thing. You know what it is? A machine Maury threw together in his basement for six bucks.”

Both my father and the Edwin M. Stanton paused and glanced at me.

“This nice old man?” my father said, and he got an angry, righteous expression; his brows knitted and he said loudly, “Remember, Louis, that man is a frail reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but goddamn it, mein Sohn, a thinking reed. The entire universe doesn’t have to arm itself against him; a drop of water can kill him.” Pointing his finger at me excitedly, my dad roared on, “But if the entire universe were to crush him, you know what? You know what I say? Man would still be more noble!” He pounded on the arm of his chair for emphasis. “You know why, mein Kind? Because he knows that he dies and I’ll tell you something else; he’s got the advantage over the god-damn universe because it doesn’t know a thing of what’s going on. And,” my dad concluded,
calming down a little, “all our dignity consists in just that. I mean, man’s little and can’t fill time and space, but he sure can make use of the brain God gave him. Like what you call this ‘thing,’ here. This is no thing. This is
ein Mensch
, a man. Say, I have to tell you a joke.” He launched, then, into a joke half in Yiddish, half in English.

When it was over we all smiled, although it seemed to me that the Edwin M. Stanton’s was somewhat formal, even forced.

Trying to think back to what I had read about Stanton, I recalled that he was considered a pretty harsh guy, both during the Civil War and the Reconstruction afterward, especially when he tangled with Andrew Johnson and tried to get him impeached. He probably did not appreciate my dad’s humanitarian-type joke because he got the same stuff from Lincoln all day long during his job. But there was no way to stop my dad anyhow; his own father had been a Spinoza scholar, well known, and although my dad never went beyond the seventh grade himself he had read all sorts of books and documents and corresponded with literary persons throughout the world.

“I’m sorry, Jerome,” Maury said to my dad, when there was a pause, “but I’m telling you the truth.” Crossing to the Edwin M. Stanton, he reached down and fiddled with it behind the ear.

“Glop,” the Stanton said, and then became rigid, as lifeless as a window-store dummy; the light in its eyes expired, its arms paused and stiffened. It was graphic, and I glanced to see how my dad was taking it. Even Chester and my mom looked up from the TV a moment. It really made one pause and consider. If there hadn’t been philosophy in the air already that night, this would have started it; we all became solemn. My dad even got up and walked over to inspect the thing firsthand.

“Oy gewalt.” He shook his head.

“I could turn it back on,” Maury offered.

“Nein, das geht mir nicht.”
My dad returned to his easy
chair, made himself comfortable, and then asked in a resigned, sober voice, “Well, how did the sales at Vallejo go, boys?” As we got ready to answer he brought out an Anthony & Cleopatra cigar, unwrapped it and lit up. It’s a fine-quality Havana-filler cigar, with a green outer wrapper, and the odor filled the living room immediately. “Sell lots of organs and AMADEUS GLUCK spinets?” He chuckled.

“Jerome,” Maury said, “the spinets sold like lemmings, but not one organ moved.”

My father frowned.

“We’ve been involved in a high-level confab on this topic,” Maury said, “with certain facts emerging. The Rosen electronic organ—”

“Wait,” my dad said. “Not so fast, Maurice. On this side of the Iron Curtain the Rosen organ has no peer.” He produced from the coffee table one of those masonite boards on which we have mounted resistors, solar batteries, transistors, wiring and the like, for display. “This demonstrates the workings of the Rosen true electronic organ,” he began. “This is the rapid delay circuit, and—”

“Jerome, I know how the organ works. Allow me to make my point.”

“Go ahead.” My dad put aside the masonite board, but before Maury could speak, he went on, “But if you expect us to abandon the mainstay of our livelihood simply because salesmanship—and I say this knowingly, not without direct experience of my own—when and because salesmanship has deteriorated, and there isn’t the will to sell—”

Maury broke in, “Jerome, listen. I’m suggesting expansion.”

My dad cocked an eyebrow.

“Now, you Rosens can go on making all the electronic organs you want,” Maury said, “but I know they’re going to diminish in sales volume all the time, unique and terrific as they are. What we need is something which is really new; because after all, Hammerstein makes those mood organs and they’ve gone over good, they’ve got that market sewed
up airtight, so there’s no use our trying that. So here it is, my idea.”

Reaching up, my father turned on his hearing aid.

“Thank you, Jerome,” Maury said. ‘This Edwin M. Stan-ton electronic simulacrum. It’s as good as if Stanton had been alive here tonight discussing topics with us. What a sales idea that is, for educational purposes, like in the schools. But that’s nothing; I had that in mind at first, but here’s the authentic deal. Listen. We propose to President Mendoza in our nation’s Capitol that we abolish war and substitute for it a ten-year-spaced-apart centennial of the U.S. Civil War, and what we do is, the Rosen factory supplies all the participants, simulacra—that’s the plural, it’s a Latin type word—of
everybody
. Lincoln, Stanton, Jeff Davis, Robert E. Lee, Long-street, and around three million simple ones as soldiers we keep in stock all the time. And we have the battles fought with the participants really killed, these made-to-order simulacra blown to bits, instead of just a grade-B movie type business like a bunch of college kids doing Shakespeare. Do you get my point? You see the scope of this?”

We were all silent. Yes, I thought, there is scope to it.

“We could be as big as General Dynamics in five years,” Maury added.

My father eyed him, smoking his A & C. “I don’t know, Maurice. I don’t know.” He shook his head.

“Why not? Tell me, Jerome, what’s wrong with it?”

‘The times have carried you away, perhaps,” my father said in a slow voice tinged with weariness. He sighed. “Or am I getting old?”

“Yeah, you’re getting old!” Maury said, very upset and flushed.

“Maybe so, Maurice.” My father was silent for a little while and then he drew himself up and said, “No, your idea is too—ambitious, Maurice. We are not that great. We must take care not to reach too high for maybe we will topple,
nicht wahr?”

“Don’t give me that German foreign language,” Maury grumbled. “If you won’t approve this … I’m too far into it already, I’m sorry but I’m going ahead. I’ve had a lot of good ideas in the past which we’ve used and this is the best so far. It is the times, Jerome. We have to
move.”

Sadly, to himself, my father resumed smoking his cigar.

Still hoping my father would be won over, Maury left the Stanton—on consignment, so to speak—and we drove back to Ontario. By then it was nearly midnight, and since we both were depressed by my father’s weariness and lack of enthusiasm Maury invited me to stay overnight at his house. I was glad to accept; I felt the need of company.

When we arrived we found his daughter Pris, who I had assumed was still back at Kasanin Clinic at Kansas City in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Mental Health. Pris, as I knew from what Maury had told me, had been a ward of the Federal Government since her third year in high school; tests administered routinely in the public schools had picked up her “dynamism of difficulty,” as the psychiatrists are calling it now—in the popular vernacular, her schizophrenic condition.

“She’ll cheer you up,” Maury said, when I hung back. “That’s what you and I both need. She’s grown a lot since you saw her last; she’s no child anymore. Come on.” He dragged me into the house by one arm.

She was seated on the floor in the living room wearing pink pedal pushers. Her hair was cut short and in the years
since I had seen her she had lost weight. Spread around her lay colored tile; she was in the process of cracking the tile into irregular pits with a huge pair of long-handled cutting pliers.

“Come look at the bathroom,” she said, hopping up. I followed warily after her.

On the bathroom walls she had sketched all sorts of sea monsters and fish, even a mermaid; she had already partially tiled them with every color imaginable. The mermaid had red tiles for tits, one bright tile in the center of each breast.

The panorama both repelled and interested me.

“Why not have little light bulbs for nipples?” I said. “When someone comes in to use the can and turns on the light the nipples light up and guide him on his way.”

No doubt she had gotten into this tiling orgy due to years of occupational therapy at Kansas City; the mental health people were keen on anything creative. The Government has literally tens of thousands of patients in their several clinics throughout the country, all busy weaving or painting or dancing or making jewelry or binding books or sewing costumes for plays. And all the patients are there involuntarily, committed by law. Like Pris, many of them had been picked up during puberty, which is the time psychosis tends to strike.

Undoubtedly Pris was much better now, or they would not have released her into the outer world. But she still did not look normal or natural to me. As we walked back to the living room together I took a close look at her; I saw a little hard, heart-shaped face, with a widow’s crown, black hair, and due to her odd make-up, eyes outlined in black, a Harlequin effect, and almost purple lipstick; the whole color scheme made her appear unreal and doll-like, lost somewhere back behind the mask which she had created out of her face. And the skinniness of her body put the capper on the effect: she looked to me like a dance of death creation animated in some weird way, probably not through the usual assimilation of solid and liquid foods … perhaps she chewed only walnut shells. But anyhow, from one standpoint she looked good,
although unusual to say the least. For my money, however, she looked less normal than the Stanton.

“Sweet Apple,” Maury said to her, “we left the Edwin M. Stanton over at Louis’ dad’s house.”

Glancing up, she said, “Is it off?” Her eyes burned with a wild, intense flame, which both startled and impressed me.

“Pris,” I said, “the mental health people broke the mold when they produced you. What an eerie yet fine-looking chick you turned out to be, now that you’ve grown up and gotten out of there.”

“Thanks,” she said, with no feeling at all; her tone had, in former times, been totally flat, no matter what the situation, including big crises. And that was the way with her still.

“Get the bed ready,” I said to Maury, “so I can turn in.”

Together, he and I unfolded the guest bed in the spare room; we tossed sheets and blankets on it, and a pillow. His daughter made no move to help; she remained in the living room snipping tile.

“How long’s she been working on that bathroom mural?” I asked.

“Since she got back from K.C. Which has been quite a while, now. For the first couple of weeks she had to report back to the mental health people in this area. She’s not actually out; she’s on probation and receiving out-patient therapy. In fact you could say she’s on loan to the outside world.”

“Is she better or worse?”

“A lot better. I never told you how bad she got, there in high school before they picked it up on their test. We didn’t know what was wrong. Frankly, I thank god for the McHeston Act; if they hadn’t picked it up, if she had gone on getting sicker, she’d be either a total schizophrenic paranoid or a dilapidated hebephrenic, by now. Permanently institutionalized for sure.”

I said, “She looks so strange.”

“What do you think of the tiling?”

“It won’t increase the value of the house.”

Maury bristled. “Sure it will.”

Appearing at the door of the spare room, Pris said, “I asked,
is it off?”
She glowered at us as if she had guessed we were discussing her.

“Yes,” Maury said, “unless Jerome turned it back on to discourse about Spinoza with it.”

“What’s it know?” I asked. “Has it got a lot of spare random useless type facts in it? Because if not my dad won’t be interested long.”

Pris said, “It has the same facts that the original Edwin M. Stanton had. We researched his life to the nth degree.”

I got the two of them out of my bedroom, then took off my clothes and went to bed. Presently I heard Maury say goodnight to his daughter and go off to his own bedroom. And then I heard nothing—except, as I had expected, the snap-snap of tile being cut.

For an hour I lay in bed trying to sleep, falling off and then being brought back by the noise. At last I got up, turned on the light, put my clothes back on, smoothed my hair in place, rubbed my eyes, and came out of the spare room. She sat exactly as I had seen her first that evening, yogi-style, now with an enormous heap of broken tile around her.

“I can’t sleep with that racket,” I told her.

“Too bad.” She did not even glance up.

“I’m a guest.”

“Go elsewhere.”

“I know what using that pliers symbolizes,” I told her. “Emasculating thousands upon thousands of males, one after another. Is that why you left Kasanin Clinic? To sit here all night doing this?”

“No. I’m getting a job.”

“Doing what? The labor market’s glutted.”

“I have no fears. There’s no one like me in the world. I’ve already received an offer from a company that handles emigration processing. There’s an enormous amount of statistical work involved.”

“So it’s someone like you,” I said, “who’ll decide which of us can leave Earth.”

“I turned it down. I don’t intend to be just another bureaucrat. Have you ever heard of Sam K. Barrows?”

“Naw,” I said. But the name did sound familiar.

“There was an article on him in
Look
. When he was twenty he always rose at five a.m., had a bowl of stewed prunes, ran two miles around the streets of Seattle, then returned to his room to shave and take a cold shower. And then he went off and studied his law books.”