Who was Klee, you ask? I do not know, I do not care. (If I knew, do you think I would have broken silence for such a matter as this — or any man’s — death? Really, my friend, you do me an injustice and forget my vows. Though this is no disparagement. I confess, I forget them frequently myself.) Wilbur Klee was Wilbur Klee, that’s where it starts and ends. And already I may have pushed too far, perhaps that’s not his name at all, I may have made it up, very likely in fact, given my peculiar and unprincipled penchant for logogriphics — but no matter! Whether it was his name or not, it will do as well as any other.
But enough of Klee! It’s time for an assessment of some kind, time, as it is so enigmatically put by the storybook people, to wrap it up and call it thirty, to prophesy by the clouds and sign off… but I am reminded for no clear cause of the case of Orval Nulin Evachefsky. Let us hope for some link, some light, and drive on.
Orval was born exactly forty-two years ago today, the second son of Felix and Ilse Evachefsky, on a small Eastern farm which Felix had acquired with the savings of his deceased immigrant parents. Orval’s early years were largely uneventful. A strong but timid boy of average intelligence, he passed through Porter County High School as a popular athlete and incurious student. Times were difficult, the world was large and redoubtable, and the family farm was deeply mortgaged, so Orval and his two brothers, Perk and Willie, the first older than Orval, the second younger (the only sister Marge was married and living some distance away in Huffam County), stayed on after high school to help their father. Old Felix had lost his right arm in a threshing machine accident and doubtless would have lost the farm as well, had not Perk, Orval, and young Willie pitched in. He lost it anyway, as it turned out, not many months after all three boys were drafted into the service during the war, they having failed to declare their status as farmworkers. Felix died two years later, a broken and disillusioned man, entirely de pendent upon state relief. Even at that, some might say he was fortunate in not living long enough to learn of the lackluster in-the-service-of-their-country deaths of his sons Perk and Willie. Only Orval returned from the wars, though not entirely whole: an otherwise well-meaning buddy had introduced him to a Maggie Wilson, who in turn had introduced him to Treponema Pallidum, and the cure was long and psychically debilitating. For several months after his discharge, Orval lived isolated and unshaven in his mother’s apartment (she had moved here to the City after Felix died), and had the old lady not been totally impervious to all external phenomena, she might have discovered in her son a tendency toward morbid melancholia. But luckily an old friend encouraged Orval to take advantage of governmental education handouts to veterans, and Orval went off to business school, soon forgetting — apparently any way — his worries. At school, he met Sissy Ann Madison, rescued her from the humdrum of the business world and introduced her to the humdrum of housewifery, though not without suffering a few weeks of strange and irrational panic just before the ceremony. Orval and Sissy Ann were painfully slow at reaching a state of what people call perfect union, and in fact, much too slow for Sissy Ann? who grew increasingly nervous about the delay, and who would certainly have sought her own solutions had she had enough imagination to do so. Meanwhile, though lacking most of the business man’s arts, and often the gull of unscrupulous colleagues, Orval developed steadily into a dependable and conscientious salesman, unimpeachably loyal to the Company and embarrassingly honest in his negotiations. Then, as oftentimes happens, as Orval’s self-confidence grew, Sissy Ann came to enjoy him more, and finally, with appropriate gaiety, surprised him on the night of their ninth wedding anniversary with the news that a child was expected. A kind of delirium possessed Orval. He! A father I For the first time in at least sixteen years, he thought of his own father, that morose but proud old man, and on the day after Sissy Ann had told him, he impulsively bought cigars for everyone in the Company, even though he still had nearly eight months to wait. Well, such things are understood and, more often than not, forgiven in the business world. His sales soared over the next few months, his self-confidence climbed to a new and exhilarating peak, and in short, life was extraordinarily bountiful for Orval Nulin Evachefsky… until one day, late in the autumn, Sissy Ann, only a month away from parturition, developed a strange red splotch on her face. She thought nothing of it, in spite of feeling a little funny, but then a second one appeared a day later, and she began to grow alarmed. Yet her alarm was the purest serenity, compared to what was happening to Orval. He did not need the second splotch, that first one was quite enough to dredge up all the forgotten and unconfessed fears of his troubled past, and in particular, to call up the grinning specter of Maggie Wilson and her spirochaete. He staggered away from the breakfast table, forgetting his hat and briefcase, and hours later found himself stumbling blindly about in the port area of the City, a piece of cold toast in his hands. With the aid of three gin rickeys, he was able to pull himself together by nightfall and find his way home, but his sleep was shattered by terribly biological visions. The next day, hardly noticing the second splotch on Sissy Ann’s face, he left without hat, briefcase, credit cards, or tie. Whether or not he went to the office is unfortunately not known. But at 12:47, Orval took the elevator to the thirty-seventh floor of the Federal Building, and at 12:52, without the slightest hesitation, leaped from a west window to his death, impaling himself on a parking meter in the street below, to the immense horror of Carlyle Smith, schoolteacher, age thirty-six, who was about to put a penny in the meter. Just before learning of his death, his wife Sissy Ann was told by her obstetrician that she had a fairly acute case of infectious erysipelas. He gave her a shot of penicillin in the bottom and ordered her to bed.
Their lunch — an indescribable amalgam of black meat, greenish-brown gravy, and thick wet wads of some uncertain doughy matter — concluded at last, the city firemen emerge belching from Jenny’s Home Cooking Cafe, cross the small square, and, armed with putty knives and plastic buckets of soapy water, begin to remove Klee, once and for all, from our sight, and thus, let us hope, from our minds. The Chief, a withered crowfaced career man with a bent bluish nose and a citywide reputation for a strict interpretation of the Laws, is shrieking obscene commands into a microphone hooked up to a public-address system with three oversize speakers and an unholy howl (a fourth speaker is present, but disconnected).
The growing bulge of spectators huddles about the accident, so-called, staring with astonishingly blank faces at the sweating black-slickered firemen. One o£ these latter, an enormous fire man whose uniform is, literally, splitting apart where sewn, stamps furiously up to the — what do you call it? — the point of impact, and as though in protest against the pressing dull-faced crowd, stoops and farts indelicately, yet, as it turns out, wholly unintentionally: though the crowd is visibly delighted, his own fat face reddens perceptibly, and he ducks to the task at hand with exaggerated interest. What he is doing is merely collecting in a small pouch the fragments of Klee’s dentures, which He scattered over the pavement like… ah… like miniature milestones, let us say, marking the paths of his spilt life’s blood. Well, we could say more, but the direction is dangerous.