On one occasion Waldo Brown had found:
In my dry brain my spirit soon,
Down-deepening from swoon to swoon,
Faints like a dazzled morning moon.
The wind sounds like a silver wire,
And from beyond the noon a fire
Is pour’d upon the hills, and nigher
The skies stoop down in their desire …
He shut the book so quick, so tight, the explosion might have been heard by anyone coming to catch him at something forbidden disgraceful and which he would never dare again until he could no longer resist. He looked round, but found nobody else in the stacks. Only books. A throbbing of books. He went to the lavatory to wash his hot and sticky hands.
So the life had its compensations, an orgasm in dry places, a delicious guilt of the intellect. It made him superior to poor Dad, whose innocence from a previous age must have denied him even the vicarious sensuality of literature.
Waldo Brown was superior also to Walter Pugh, his superior by eighteen months.
Waldo didn’t care for Walter. Pimples were just about the only thing they had in common (if you discounted literature, which, in Wally’s case, Waldo couldn’t believe in). Waldo was thin, might pass for tall, with thin to disappearing lips, his sculptured chin, good carriage inherited from his mother — distinction, in fact, was how he saw it in writing — whereas Wally was thick, to very fat on hot days, a splurge of lips a little open, a little shiny from the bacon he could have been eating a moment or two before, his seams splitting, especially at the thighs of those pants belonging to something else.
Wally said: “I’d give anything for a tart tonight on me way home. Sit all night there at home with Cis and Ern. Sometimes I think I’ll bust, Waldo, if I don’t get meself a girl. There was one on the ferry gave me the eye. I just on accepted the invite walking up from the wharf. You could do it in that bit of scrub before you get to Permanent Avenue.”
“You’d be very unwise,” Waldo said.
“Oh, I know,” said Wally Pugh. “The pox and all that. Or a kid. But I’ll bust, Waldo, if I don’t. I’m gunna!”
Even when the glass above the wash-basin spelled the warnings out.
“The trouble with you, Waldo, you’re cold. Or is it luck? Praps after all you’re a lucky bugger.”
“It’s not what they told me Friday,” Waldo felt himself compelled.
His hands folding over the soap enjoyed a sensuality of their own.
“Who?” asked Wal.
“The two of them. I can’t say they appealed. Not particularly. Though the one in pink wasn’t bad.”
“You mean you did them both?”
Waldo was too superior to answer.
“Golly!” Walter Pugh said. “Did you know them?”
“One of them, slightly. The other was her friend.”
“What was their names, Waldo?”
“I think the friend was Nell. Yes, Nell. The one I knew — slightly, she’s called Dulcie.”
“And Dulcie’s good, eh? You bloody old bugger! You fast old dark horse!”
“She’s only what I’d call pretty average. She’s a thin, dark, plain girl. She’ll never be up to much because of the salt-cellars. She’s hairy too, about the arms.”
Betrayals brought the gooseflesh out on Waldo. Irresistibly.
“But you got your whack, you old bugger!”
“If that’s what appeals, but it doesn’t — to me — particularly.”
“Go on! Then you are cold, Waldo. You’re the coldest fish I’ll ever hope to meet.”
Only superior.
Walter Pugh showed Waldo three poems he had written. Waldo would have called them jingles, rather. When he had written enough of them, as he intended, Walter was going to offer them as a volume, and join the ranks of the Australian poets. Waldo’s lips fairly disappeared, though he didn’t comment. He knew for certain he would never show Wally anything he wrote, he would never show anyone; it was too foolish. Certainly he had confided in Dulcie Feinstein that he was going to be a writer, but then he was only — sixteen, was it? and stupid.
And not long after, Mrs Feinstein had taken her daughter away. So it was told.
Arthur said: “They’re going on a visit to the relatives, so that Dulcie can learn the languages. There are relatives all over the place, like Jews seem to have. And languages come easy to the Jews, Mrs Musto says. I bet they have a good time. Not Mr Feinstein. He can’t leave the business. But Dulcie and her mother. Mrs Hochapfel, she’d be too old to go gadding about, but there’s still that Mrs Terni in Milan.”
A couple of times Waldo walked home past the villa in O’Halloran Road, not to nurse a sense of deprivation, simply out of curiosity, and the shutters were fastened, and the weeds had grown, as though old Feinstein didn’t come there any more, as though the air of Sarsaparilla had lost its savour for him since his wife and daughter went away. On a third evening, Waldo decided to go in, climbing the picket fence because the gate was chained. The grass banks he clambered up no longer seemed to give. Under the hydrangeas, where a steamier, yellower green intensified the desolation, some animal had probably died. His own feet sounded horribly detached on the tesselated veranda, but he had to try to look through the shutters. On fitting his eyes to the slanted slats he couldn’t see anything of course, because of the angle; he had more or less expected that before making the attempt. And then the footsteps began approaching along the gravel. From round the side. He stood and waited.
The icy moment finally arrived. It was old Feinstein himself.
“What do you want?” he asked.
He was not wearing the capple, but a bowler hat, which made him look and sound more formal. He stood there looking at Waldo as if he hadn’t seen him before, although they had met not so very long ago.
Waldo was transformed forcibly into the complete stranger.
“I thought the house might be up for sale. All shut up,” he mumbled.
“Well, it isn’t,” Mr Feinstein said rather angrily.
As he jolted down the concrete steps which the couch-grass was breaking open, Waldo knew that the owner had continued watching him. The fact that the old man’s daughter had given herself to him in his conversation with Walter Pugh seemed to make the incident more icily corrupt.
So much so he would have liked to boast about it to somebody, but there was no one at hand, perhaps never would be, worthy of its subtlety. At tea he merely mentioned, while trimming the fat off his cold mutton:
“Saw old Feinstein up at the house. Didn’t know he went there any more. Wonder what he gets up to on his own?”
Dad suggested he had come to assure himself his property was not deteriorating. Mother thought he might be lonely, and hoped to re-enact some moment before his loneliness set in.
“Trouble with Feinsteins is they’re so damn Jewish. That’s usually the trouble with Jews,” Waldo said, and laughed.
Though he hadn’t met — well, perhaps one other.
“I’ll trouble you not to speak in those terms,” Dad said through a piece of gristle. “Mr Feinstein’s a fine man.”
“Oh yes, old Feinstein,” Waldo agreed.
He knew his father was not acquainted with Feinstein, but that a lifetime of tolerance was at stake, and he was having difficulty in finding the vocabulary to protect it.
Mother too, was looking pained.
“I have never met Mrs Feinstein,” she said, “but I’m sure nothing about her calls for such an unprincipled remark. Besides,” she said, “I thought you were fond of them.”
“I’m not married to them!” Waldo said.