From her earliest childhood, Jametta Anna Scozzafava had mysterious sources of information about what holiday it was. No school tomorrow, she would say — often quite late for a small child to be up on a cold evening: Scragg Day, or Teachers’ Records Day, Moss Day, State Commemoration Day, or High School Bus Repairs. Mysteriously, these holidays did exist, although few of them recurred from year to year. Jametta also knew holiday nights: Chalk Night, Garbage Night, Crab Night — and, I think, Teachers’ Records Night, although I am not sure. Chalk Night and Garbage Night were clear enough. I never knew what were the right observances for Crab Night and, one year, for Seven Moon. From third grade on, Jametta spent most of her classroom hours either whispering with Moose Natale, or absent altogether with the Passcard. In her senior year, however, Jametta sat in front of one Alvin Benso, in the first row of Miss Keane’s English class. We were doing our required Shakespeare play. The state seemed to require of its students one half year of world history, Mesopotamia to the present; one half year of American history, Jamestown to the present; one solid year of Biology, in which one earthworm and one frog must be dissected; and, somewhere in four years of English classes, a Shakespeare play. Miss Keane’s method of teaching Shakespeare was to assign parts for reading by row, characters in order of appearance: first seat, first row, first part, and so on along the rows. The class was doing The Merchant of Venice, Miss Keane’s favorite. Miss Keane had done her disquisition about Shylock — a villain she found comparable, and perhaps even related, to all the many traitors in our own time, our own country, brainwashing our boys abroad, flashing subliminal messages on television, stealthily approaching, if they did not already have, our minds. Miss Keane had subsided. The reading started. Jametta was Portia. It fell to Alvin to read Lorenzo. “Lorenzo Benso!” Jametta shouted. “Lorenzo Benso!” swept the classroom. It was our first political slogan, and the witticism of Jametta’s academic life.
“Far from it,” the shuffling man is muttering to himself again. “Far from it.”
The Albany legislator wept as he cast his vote. His brother-in-law was up for a judgeship. He had no choice. “I will hear no ill spoken of Rosa Addio,” the head of a local school board said. “She is a fine Christian woman.” The lobbyist for the teachers union blanched. “Now, on the Alabama resolution,” the convention speaker said to the delegates in caucus, “you can vote your conscience. Or with your union.” “Ah, jobs, jobs in the ghetto,” said the tenured pedant on the investigating committee that, yearly, covers up corruption in our branch of the city university. “Ghetto jobs is our bête noire. Excuse me.”
The clerk of the morgue of this paper is an irascible man. Reporters are always taking his files away, forgetting to sign for them, keeping them, losing them, throwing them away. Over the years, it has made the clerk ill. I signed for a file, took the folder to my desk, and then took it home. Everybody does it. It is against the rules. After four days, I brought the folder back. The clerk of the morgue was incensed. What, he demanded to know, if the man whose file it was had died in those four days; what, in the absence of the file, would the obituary have been constructed from — had I considered that at all? Well, I said, since I had signed for the file, if the man whose file it was had died, somebody could have called me up. I would have brought the folder back. True, the clerk said, but there were questions of another sort. What if, in those four days, a new fact about the man had come to light, a fact that ought quite surely to be added to the file; what, in the absence of the file, was there to add the fact to, what rubric, category, or place was there to put the new fact in — had I considered that at all, had I given it one moment’s thought? I said I had not. The clerk, becoming pale with rage, said he might have to raise the matter with management. People seem to be unhappy in so many different ways. I’ve always liked the wrathful keepers of the files.
“What you say is true,” the professor said, staring through his study window at the sky, “but not so very interesting.”
He ran up the stairs and they were after him. He fumbled with his keys, opened the door, slammed it behind him and listened for their breathing and for their steps. He heard their steps first, heavy feet on the carpeted stairs; then, he heard breathing. He looked through the peep-hole in his door and saw, as usual, nothing. He turned suddenly, caught his own reflection abruptly in the mirror, and nearly scared himself to death.
“I have a collect call for anyone from…”
“Yes, operator. That’s fine.”
“Miss Fain in Wash…”
“That’s fine, operator. I accept the…”
“…ington, D.C. Will you accept the charges?”
“Thank you. Yes.”
Sometimes cooperation impedes the gist. Someone, many people probably, had urinated in the phone booth. That is common. Many things serve something other than their original, unarguable purpose. The left lane, for example, on the highway. Some people use it because they prefer it. Some people use it because it looks like any other. Some people use it for some other reason. But the thing is, you are supposed to be driving faster if you use that lane.
“Hello, Jim?”
“Hi.”
“Just a moment, please. I have a collect call for anyone from…”
“Yes, operator. That’s fine. I accept the charges.”
“Hello, Jim. I’m…”
“Go ahead, please. Your party is on the line.”
The slowest-talking man I know tends to loom in elevator doors, in hallways, booths, and other narrow places. He coughs, nods to himself, begins a sentence, continues nodding to himself in all the pauses along what he has to say. Eating with him is a problem. He chews so thoroughly. He raises his fork, speaks, pauses in midsentence, nods, takes what is on his fork, meditates, chews. When he swallows, one thinks he is about to say his sentence to the end. But no, he loads his fork again, eats, nods in silence, has a little sip of coffee and another mouthful before going on. One tends to drink a lot on these occasions. Agreement stalls him. Sometimes, when it has been clear for several phrases just what Moe is going to say, when one has been standing, for example, in the rain beside a taxi one had hailed at the very instant Moe loomed, one tries to complete his sentence for him. It slows him down. He waves his hand irritably, as though warding off a swarm of gnats, before his face. He moves his head like a pitcher shaking off a signal that he does not like. Then he starts again, nodding, waving, pausing, finishing his sentence in his own good time.
“Hello, Jim. I guess they’ve fired me.”
“They have?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it just isn’t our day, then. I’ve just been chased all the way up the stairs from the hallway, by what looked like two crazies.”
“You ought to call the police.”
“No. They’re gone. I heard the outside door shut.”
“Well, then. How are you?”
“O.K. And you?”