"What happened?"
"Pills. He was giving out all sorts of illegal pills. But I'm right in the middle of my breakfast…"
"I'm sorry," Nailles said. He could drive into the city, or could he? He could take a bus. He could take a taxi. A man spoke to him from a car parked beside his. "You looking for the doctor?"
"God yes," Nailles said, "God yes."
"What was he giving you?"
"I don't know the name of it. It was for the train."
"What color?"
"Gray and yellow. It was a capsule, half gray and half yellow."
"I know what it was. You want some?"
"God yes, God yes."
"I'll meet you in the Catholic cemetery, out on Laurel Avenue. You know the one I mean. There's a statue of a soldier."
Nailles got to the cemetery before the stranger. It was an old-fashioned place with many statues, but the monument to the soldier stood a head taller than the host of stone angels and was easy to find. Gravediggers worked in the distance. Nailles had guessed that graves were dug by engines, but these men worked with a shovel and pickax. He passed an array of motley angels-some of them life-sized, some of them dwarfs. Some of them stood on the tombs they blessed with half-furled wings, some of them clung with furled wings to the cross. The soldier wore the uniform of 1918-a soup-plate helmet, puttees, baggy pants, and he held in his right hand, butt to the ground, a Springfield, bolt-action, 1912. He had been carved from a white stone that had not discolored at all but it had eroded, obscuring his features and his insignia so that he looked like a ghost. The stranger joined Nailles, holding a few tulips that he must have stolen somewhere. He put these into a container in front of the ghostly infantryman and said: "Twenty-five dollars."
"I've been getting a big prescription for ten," Nailles said.
"Look," the stranger said, "I can get ten years in jail for this and a ten-thousand-dollar fine."
Nailles gave him the money in exchange for five-pills. "You'll need some more on Monday," the man said. "Meet me at the railroad-station toilet at half past seven." Nailles put a pill into his mouth but he needed water. Rainwater had collected in one of the commemorative urns or ewers and he scooped enough up with his hand to get the pill down. Driving to the train he waited for the pill to take hold, for his cloud to gather1, and by the time he got to the parking lot it had begun its wonderful work. He was moderate, calm, a little bored and absentminded. He forgot to put a quarter in the parking meter but when he had completed his painless journey into the city he telephoned Nellie and asked her to try the guru.
X
After lunch Nellie poured herself a whiskey. I should go to a shrink, she thought, until she remembered the doctor circling his invisible dentist's chair. She hated him, not for his real-estate business, but because she had always felt vaguely that in any crisis psychiatry could be counted on to work a cure, and he had taken this solace out the door with him. She remembered that the cleaning woman-the thief-had false teeth. Her favorite disinfectant had been a chemical, advertised to smell of mountain pine woods, but this imitation of the sweet mountain air was so crude, flagrant and repulsive that it amounted to an irony. Snowcapped toilet seats. Eliot had asked her to see the guru and so she went.
The slums, the oldest part of the village, were down along the banks of the river. She never had any reason to go there. She had read in the paper that women were mugged and robbed in broad daylight. There were knife fights in saloons. The rain was heavy that afternoon; the light narrow. All rain tastes the same and yet rain fell for Nellie from a diversity of skies. Some rains seemed let down like a net from the guileless heavens of her childhood, some rains were stormy and bitter, some fell like a force of memory. The rain that day tasted as salty as blood. So down into the slums went Nellie, down to Peyton's funeral parlor. This was a shabby frame building with a peaked door- a stab at holiness under which the dead (murdered in knife fights) entered and departed for the black cemetery at the edge of everything. There was a door on the left leading, she guessed, to the rooms upstairs, and she opened this onto a bare hallway with a staircase.
The strangeness of this environment disturbed her deeply as if she inhaled, in the rooms of her own house, not only the buttressed proprieties but an essence that conditioned her chromosomes and lights. The alien reek of the hallway-the immemorial reek of such places-seemed to strip her of any moral reliability. She looked around for something familiar-a fire extinguisher would have served-but there was nothing in the hallway that belonged to her. Had one of the legendary rapists she read about in the evening paper approached her she would have been helpless. She was lost. She was frightened. Her instinct was to turn and go; her duty was to climb the stairs; and the division between these two forces seemed like a broad river without bridges-seemed to give her some insight into the force of separateness in her life. She seemed to be saying goodbye to herself at a railroad station; standing among the mourners at the edge of a grave. Goodbye Nellie.
She had no role in this place and she felt it keenly. Census taker? Relief worker? An advocate for planned parenthood, distributing free pills? An adviser to unwed mothers? Lady bountiful dividing the proceeds from the church bazaar? She was none of these. She was a woman with a sick son, looking (at the advice of a thief) for a magician. I am a good woman, she thought. This foolishness was unintentional-compulsive-she seemed helplessly to ridicule herself. I've never once run over a squirrel on the highway. I've always kept seed in the bird-feeding station. She climbed the stairs. There was a window at the head of the stairs where someone had written on the dirty glass: "Sid Greenberg chews and smokes." There were two doors off the hall. One had a sign saying: "The Temple of Light." There was music beyond the door-singing-the voices compressed and funneled through a radio. She knocked and when there was no answer she called: "Swami Rutuola, Swami Rutuola…"
From behind the second door there was a loud sound of giggling-lewd or alcoholic-and then a woman imitated Nellie's accent. "Oh Swermi Rutaholah, Oh Swermi Rutaholah…" A man joined in the giggling. They must have been in bed. "Oh Swermi…" the woman said. She was nearly helpless with laughter. Nellie knocked again and a man asked her to come in. She stepped into a room where a light-colored Negro was tacking upholstery webbing onto a chair frame. There was a smell of shavings. Which came first, Christ the carpenter or the holy smell of new wood? There was an altar in the corner. A votive candle burned in a display of wax flowers. Wax flowers meant death-death and Chinese restaurants. "Welcome to the Temple of Light," he said. The voice was high, definitely accented. Jamaican, she thought. The face was slender and one of the eyes was injured and cast. A war, an arrow, a stone? This eye, immovable, was raised to heaven in a permanent attitude of religious hysteria. The other eye was lively, bright and communicative. "I'm Mrs. Eliot Nailles," she said. "Mary Ashton gave me your name. My son is sick."
"Would you like me to come with you now?" he asked. The voice was a very light singsong.
"Oh yes," she said, "if you could, if you think you can help him."
"I can try," he said. "I'll just wash my hands. I don't have a car and it's most difficult to find a taxi in the rain."
She described Tony's trouble and some of its history as they drove back to her house. The accent, she decided, was not Jamaican. It was a rootless speech, aimed at fastidiousness or elegance. She took him up to Tony's room and asked if he'd like a drink. "Oh no thank you," he said, "I have something within me that's much more stimulating than alcohol."
"Is there anything I can do?"
"I would like to be sure that we won't be disturbed."
"I'll make sure of that," said Nellie and went down and poured herself another drink.