“I beg your pardon?” The policeman, when nervous, had a way of nibbling his moustache with his lowers.
“Mrs. Grundy, dear boy, who did you think I was?” She patted the policeman’s thin cheek, tweaked his nose. “But you can call me Charity, handsome!” The policeman blushed. She twiddled her index finger in his little moustache. “Kootchy-kootchy-koo!” There was a roar of laughter from the crowd.
The policeman sneezed. “Please!” he protested. Mrs. Grundy curtsied and stooped to unzip the officer’s fly. “Hello! Anybody home!”
“Stop that!” squeaked the policeman through the thunderous laughter and applause. Strange, thought Paul, how much I’m enjoying this.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
“The story!” the policeman insisted through the tumult
“Story? What—?”
“This young fellow,” said the policeman, pointing with his pencil. He zipped up, blew his nose. “Mr, uh, Mr. Westerman… you said—”
“Mr. Who?” The woman shook her jowls, perplexed. She frowned down at Paul, then brightened. “Oh yes! Amory!” She paled, seemed to sicken. Paul, if he could’ve, would’ve smiled.
“Good God!” she rasped, as though appalled at what she saw. Then, once more, she took an operatic grip on her breasts and staggered back a step. “O mortality! O fatal mischief! Done in! A noble man lies stark and stiff! Delenda est Carthago! Sic transit glans mundi!”
Gloria, corrected Paul. No, leave it.
“Squashed like a lousy bug!” she cried. “And at the height of his potency!”
“Now, wait a minute!” the policeman protested.
“The final curtain! The last farewell! The journey’s end! Over the hill! The last muster!” Each phrase was answered by a happy shout from the mob. “Across the river! The way of all flesh! The last roundup!” She sobbed, then ballooned down on him again, tweaked his ear and whispered: (“How’s Charity’s weetsie snotkins, enh? Him fall down and bump his little putsy? Mumsy kiss and make well!”) And she let him have it on the — well, sort of on the left side of his nose, left cheek, and part of his left eye: one wet enveloping sour blubbering kiss, and this time, sorrily, the police man did not intervene. He was busy taking notes. Officer, said Paul.
“Hmmm,” the policeman muttered, and wrote. “G-R-U-N-ah, ahem, Grundig, Grundig — D, yes, D-I-G. Now what did you—?”
The woman labored clumsily to her feet, plodded over behind the policeman, and squinted over his shoulder at the notes he was taking. “That’s a ‘Y’ there, buster, a ‘Y.’” She jabbed a stubby ruby-tipped finger at the notebook.
“Grundigy?” asked the policeman in disbelief. “What kind of a name is that?”
“No, no!” the old woman whined, her grand manner flung to the winds. “Grundy! Grundy! Without the ‘-ig,’ don’t you see? You take off your—”
“Oh, Grundy! Now I have it!” The policeman scrubbed the back end of his pencil in the notebook. “Darned eraser. About shot.” The paper tore. He looked up irritably. “Can’t we just make it Grundig?”
“Grundy,” said the woman coldly.
The policeman ripped the page out of his notebook, rumpled it up angrily, and hurled it to the street. “All right, gosh damn it all!” he cried in a rage, scribbling: “Grundy. I have it. Now get on with it, lady!”
“Officer!” sniffed Mrs. Grundy, clasping a handkerchief to her throat “Remember your place, or I shall have to speak to your superior!”
The policeman shrank, blanched, nibbled his lip.
Paul knew what would come. He could read these two like a book. I’m the strange one, he thought He wanted to watch their faces, but his streetlevel view gave him at best a perspective on their underchins. It was their crotches that were prominent. Butts and bellies: the squashed bug’s-eye view. And that was strange, too: that he wanted to watch their faces.
The policeman was begging for mercy, wringing his pale hands. There were faint hissing sounds, wriggling out of the crowd like serpents. “Cut the shit, mac,” Charity Grundy said finally, “you’re overdoing it.” The officer chewed his moustache, stared down at his notebook, abashed. “You wanna know who this poor clown is, right?” The policeman nodded. “Okay, are you ready?” She clasped her bosom again and the crowd grew silent. The police officer held his notebook up, the pencil poised. Mrs. Grundy snuffled, looked down at Paul, winced, turned away and wept “Officer!” she gasped. “He was my lover!”
Halloos and cheers from the crowd, passing to laughter. The policeman started to smile, blinking down at Mrs. Grundy’s body, but with a twitch of his moustache, he suppressed it.
“We met…just one year ago today. O fateful hour!” She smiled bravely, brushing back a tear, her lower lip quivering. Once, her hands clenched woefully before her face, she winked down at Paul. The wink nearly convinced him. Maybe I’m him after all. Why not? “He was selling sea-chests, door to door. I can see him now as he was then—” She paused to look down at him as he was now, and wrinkles of revulsion swept over her face. Somehow this brought laughter. She looked away, puckered her mouth and bugged her eyes, shook one hand limply from the wrist. The crowd was really with her.
“Mrs. Grundy,” the officer whispered, “please…”
“Yes, there he was, chapfallen and misused, orphaned by the rapacious world, yet pure and undefiled, there: there at my door!” With her baggy arm, flung out, quavering, she indicated die door. “Bent nearly double under his impossible sea-chest, perspiration illuminating his manly brow, wounding his eyes, wrinkling his undershirt—”
“Careful,” cautioned die policeman nervously, glancing up from his notes. He must have filled twenty or thirty pages by now.
“In short, my heart went out to him!” Gesture of heart going out. “And though — alas I — my need for sea-chests was limited—”
The spectators somehow discovered something amusing in this and tittered knowingly. Mainly in the way she said it, he supposed. Her story in truth did not bother Paul so much as his own fascination with it. He knew where it would lead, but it didn’t matter. In fact, maybe that was what fascinated him.
“—I invited him in. Put down that horrid sea-chest, dear boy, and come in here, I cried, come in to your warm and obedient Charity, love, come in for a cup of tea, come in and rest, rest your pretty little shoulders, your pretty little back, your pretty little…” Mrs. Grundy paused, smiled with a faint arch of one eyebrow, and the crowd responded with another burst of laughter. “And it was pretty little, okay,” she grumbled, and again they whooped, while she sniggered throatily.
How was it now? he wondered. In fact, he’d been wondering all along.
“And, well, officer, that’s what he did, he did put down his sea-chest — alas! sad to tell, right on my unfortunate cat Rasputin, dozing there in the day’s brief sun, God rest his soul, his (again, alas!) somewhat homaloidal soul!”
She had a great audience. They never failed her, nor did they now.
The policeman, who had finally squatted down to write on his knee, now stood and shouted for order. “Quiet! Quiet!” His moustache twitched. “Can’t you see this is a serious matter?” He’s the funny one, thought Paul. The crowd thought so, too, for the laughter mounted, then finally died away. “And… and then what happened?” the policeman whispered. But they heard him anyway and screamed with delight, throwing up a new clamor in which could be distinguished several coarse paraphrases of the policeman’s question. The officer’s pale face flushed. He looked down at Paul with a brief commiserating smile, shrugged his shoulders, fluttering the epaulettes. Paul made a try at a never-mind kind of gesture, but, he supposed, without bringing it off.