And that’s how he left it, slamming out of the house, trailing his furious spoor of sabbath anger, leaving her, if she even heard him, cowed, wide-eyed, dumbstruck, amazed, and about the same, he imagined, even if she didn’t. (Damn, she was clever!) Seeing out of the corner of his eye as he quit his hearth, too, the lurking, hulking, dangerous Mikey, that beamish boy, that piece of work, his son, of whom more later, he thought, and already rehearsing in his head their inevitable confrontation: “There comes a time,” he’d say, “when you get frail and your kids get strong. You’re afraid they’ll hurt you, beat you up, shake you down. It was ever thus. Well, we’re old now, Mother and I, living in fear for our lives, blaming the niggers, blaming the Japs, niggers and Japs just water off a duck’s back when we were healthy and young and you kids were feeble. So get out,” he would say. “I want you out of my tent.” Was this legal? he wondered. Could he call the cops? Would it stand up in court? Be perfectly frank, he didn’t know. Out of his jurisdiction. He’d ask Dick, he’d take it up with Doug. Solons and Solomons of law, Doug and Dick, angels of arbitration.
And was outside, outraged and angry in the streets—his streets — and had walked as far as a good few blocks before he caught a calm breath, was outdoors in the groomed spring weather, the tactile, sensible air, fussed, clean, scented as shoreline, making as much of itself as a kind of primped, laden, reversed fall, Commissioner Druff clomping along the unaccustomed sidewalks like someone needing an address, a reporter or lawyer in the neighborhood, a fellow with appointments. Commanding — he’d quieted down enough by now to notice — a sort of curiosity, a kind of respect, some thin, hospitable deference anyhow, whatever it was, thought the commissioner, that a competent, assured citizenry owed its strangers and outlanders. This was puzzling and at first he thought, why, of course, the limousine (or its absence, rather), accepting, smiling, surprised, the tribute of his admirers and well- wishers, the shy smiles and unblown kisses of his constituency.
And who only then, wheedled down from his dudgeon by the curious amiability of their attention, understood it, took it in. Recognizing the truth in their windbreakers and comfortable old-shoe ways, in the holes in their sweaters and the stained sweatshirts they wore, their patched trousers and cotton drawstring running pants, all the lazy weekend mufti of their relaxed civilian stances. Or, looking up at him from the broken concentration of their jogging, their jammed athletic traffic, as if he, respectably dressed, rather than they, clothed in their juices, in all the garb of their flushed selves, their soaked shorts and sweaty T-shirts, curiously revealing and intimate almost as the furious metabolism of violent lovemaking or of bodies in fever crisis, was the street’s odd eyeful. Or stooped, looking up at him from the level of their spades and shovels and trowels, all their trident tools and modified hoes, pausing over paper packets of spinach and pea and lettuce seeds to brush the hair out of their eyes or knock away excess dirt with the Mickey Mouse fingertips of their enormous, rough cloth gardening gloves, taking, he now realized with some embarrassment, not the pleasure of recognition so much as the quick profit of a small amusement at the sight of their commissioner — only he knew better now, even if they didn’t; they wouldn’t know he was any kind of commissioner let alone “their” commissioner — in full dress, in the workweek’s suit and tie on an early Saturday afternoon. Well, he was stunned to discover himself so set apart from his fellows, stunned!
Feeling, by virtue of his spick ‘n’ spans and all the tailored accountability of his respectable three-piece suit, caught out, like a man nude in dreams, a comical figure, someone in pajamas, say, accidentally locked out of his house. Forced thus to bluff, to carry it off, vaguely go “through” with it, and wishing meanwhile for props, pamphlets perhaps, or that he might represent himself to the neighborhood as a canvasser, or, of course, a candidate, introducing himself, pressing the flesh, seeking their support, begging their pardon for interrupting their Saturday (though in their shoes, his shoes, he’d probably have welcomed the interruption, even embraced it, pulled the poor guy indoors, offered him coffee, sat him down, invited him to discuss the issues) but wishing to leave just this little bit of campaign literature with them to look over (the pamphlets with their smeary block letters and their blue photographs of poor resolution) when he’d gone. (And feeling, who felt so much, quite out of it, nothing there save a soft nostalgia for the vanished old hurrahs.)
But the heart had its fingerprints, and old Druff, who either knew better than to wage war against the forensics of character, or understood that there wasn’t all that much diff between a political war-horse and a political appointee, that a City Commissioner of Streets needn’t know any more about macadam or cobble than a Commissioner of Parks and Playgrounds did about landscaping and sandboxes, that power was its own information, gave up, almost volitionlessly — he hoped disarmingly — one of his City Hall, downtown, really blockbuster smiles. Smiling his way, this way and that, down the boulevard, a cheerful, for-a-Saturday-dressed-to-the-teeth, dressed-to-the-nines, suited-up fellow of parts showing the flag. (Was he still troubled? Did he still have the blues? Always up for a bluff, he thought rather not.)
He’d thought neighborhood, but he’d left his neighborhood long ago, was in a different neighborhood now, a good, upper-middle-class neighborhood, just the sort of precinct — if he lived to be a hundred he’d never understand it — a pol had to win if he was to take the election. America was a well-meaning, go-ahead country. Yet even in America more people were poor or lived on the edges the break-even life than in places like these — doctors’ houses, lawyers’, with wide lawns and a suggestion of property hidden away behind their homes like inner courtyards in architecture. If the poor couldn’t keep up with the Joneses, then maybe they felt they must at least vote with them. It’s true, he thought. Politicians squandered resentment, it was the emotion they least understood or knew how to use.
So Druff smiled away and was smiled away at in return. A suited-up guy in a one-man parade. What did they make of him all dressed up, anachronistic by a mere day but as out of style for all that as if he wore the fashions of a bygone age? And had them all over again. The blues. Could even put a name to them now. Stopped smiling and put a name to them. — The All-Dressed-Up, No-Place-to-Go Blues.
And now was passing one of the city’s tonier synagogues. Wooden horses had been set up to close the street to traffic. Druff read the temple’s name, black, transliterated, stenciled across the bright yellow planks of the barriers. (B’nai Beth Emeth, it said, and Druff, feeling lost, momentarily flashed on the old Chi Phi Kappa sorority house of his and Rose Helen’s youth. Sure, that had been about weekends, too.)
A young man in his mid-thirties, a sharp dresser in a knit skullcap like a tiny area rug, lounged, chain-smoking cigarettes, in the middle of the street against one of the temple’s yellow sawhorses.
“Yontif, Commissioner there,” said the man.
“How are you?” Druff said, smiling widely and greeting the man as if welcoming someone invited to an open house. (It was the way he saluted people sometimes, not voters so much as folks vaguely in the political trade themselves, not even cronies exactly, but precinct workers, laborers in the vineyards. A human professional courtesy he extended, was how he thought of it.)
“Hamilton Edgar,” the man said, lazily raising the cigarette hand he rested on his left shoulder, vaguely posing, and looking more slender than he really was, and oddly taller than his height, like a young man, it struck the commissioner, out of the Jazz Age. “We had a meeting in your office yesterday.”