“Is that your wife?” Allbee looked over Leventhal’s head at a framed photograph on the secretary.
“Yes, that’s Mary.”
“Oh, say, she’s charming. Ah, you’re lucky, you know?” He stood up and bent over him, turning the photograph to the light. “She is charming.”
“It’s a good picture of her,” said Leventhal, not liking his enthusiasm.
“She has that proud look that’s proud without being hard. You know what I mean. It’s a serious look. You see it in Asiatic sculpture.”
“Oh — Asiatic!” said Leventhal scoffing.
“Certainly, Asiatic. Look at the eyes, and those cheekbones. You’re married to a woman and don’t know she has slant eyes?” He made a descriptive turn of his thumb. “She’s positively Asiatic.”
“She comes from Baltimore.”
“First generation?”
“Her mother is native-born, too. Further back than that I don’t know.”
“I’m willing to bet they came from Eastern Europe, originally,” said Allbee.
“Why, that’s not so stupendous. You wouldn’t get any takers.”
“I know I wouldn’t get any takers in your case.”
“No? Maybe since you investigated me and found out so much about me, you took the trouble to find out what part of Europe my parents came from.”
“It’s apparent enough; it doesn’t need any investigating. Russia, Poland… I can see at a glance.”
“You can, ah?”
“Well, of course. I’ve lived in New York for a long time. It’s a very Jewish city, and a person would have to be a pretty sloppy observer not to learn a lot about Jews here. You know yourself how many Jewish dishes there are in the cafeterias, how much of the stage — how many Jewish comedians and jokes, and stores, and so on, and Jews in public life, and so on. You know that. It’s no revelation.”
Leventhal refrained from answering. It was, after all, no revelation.
Allbee once more turned his attention to Mary’s picture. As he studied it and nodded, his eyes, to Leventhal’s amazement, filled with tears, and he took on an expression of suppressed grief and injury.
“Your wife…?” Leventhal ventured in a low voice.
“She’s dead,” replied Allbee.
Leventhal’s tone fell even lower as he said, with a resonance of horror, “Dead? Oh, too bad. I’m sorry. .”
“So you should be. So you should.” The words seemed to have been brought up from Allbee’s chest as if they had been stored there and were now dislodged and uttered irregularly before he could hold them back.
Leventhal concentrated on them, averting his face — a characteristic of his when he was puzzling something out. He did not understand what Allbee meant.
“Of course I should be,” he murmured, not quite aware that he was acknowledging a charge. The things that had happened to him in the last two days had made him acutely responsive, quick to feel. “What a shame!” he said in deep emotion, recalling the woman’s face. “She was much too good for him, much too good,” he thought. “But why should I say that? He was her husband, so that doesn’t enter in now. He has to be considered. She’s dead, but he’s alive and feels. That’s what brought him down. He wouldn’t be like this otherwise.”
“So you’re alone, now,” he said.
“Yes, I’m a widower, have been for over four years. Four years and about three weeks.”
“And how did it happen?”
“I don’t know exactly. I wasn’t with her. Her family wrote the news. She was hurt in an automobile accident. They thought she would recover, but she died suddenly. That’s all I know. She was buried before I had a chance to get to Louisville.”
“They didn’t wait till you came?”
“Well, to tell you the truth I didn’t want to be there. It would have been a terrible business. The family would have relieved itself by being angry with me. I would have tried to relieve myself by sneaking out to a bar, probably sat in the bar and missed the whole thing. That would have made it ten times worse for everybody. I was in that condition. And it was hot then. Louisville in hot weather. For that! Oh no, brother, I holed up where I was. It would have been brutal. She was dead. I wouldn’t have been going to see her but them, her people. Dead is dead. Finished. No more. You long for your wife when she goes, if you love her. And maybe sometimes if you don’t love her so much. I wouldn’t know. But you’re together, she bends to you and you bend to her in everything, and when she dies there you stand, bent, and look senseless, fit nothing. That’s my personal feeling. Of course, I’m the first kind. I loved her. Well, I say, you long for her… but everything inanimate is the same to me. I’m not sentimental.”
He was acting, lying, Leventhal decided. His moment of genuineness had passed and once more he had taken up his poise, mystifyingly off center and precarious. When he had announced his wife’s death, he had sounded wrathful, but Leventhal had felt himself come nearer to him or to something clear, familiar, and truthful in him. Now he was repelled again. He wondered whether Allbee was not actually a little drunk.
“But,” said Allbee, “that’s not all there is to it.”
“No? There’s more, eh?”
“Somewhat. We were separated before she died. That’s why my relations with her family weren’t good. Naturally, from their standpoint…” He paused to rub his eyelid and when he stopped it was red and appeared to have gone lower than the other. “They were prejudiced against me, wanted to shove the whole blame on me. I could blame them, if I wanted to. Her brother was driving the car; got off with scratches and a few bangs. The way those Southerners drive. Pickett’s charge over and over again. Well… we were separated. Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because after Rudiger fired me, I couldn’t get a job.”
“What do you mean? You couldn’t find any jobs? No jobs at all?”
“Not in my line. What could I have earned at any job? Not enough to keep going. After a man spends years in one line he doesn’t want to change. He isn’t in a position to do much. In something else he has to start at the bottom. What was I going to do, become a peddler? Salesman? Besides, I’d have to stop looking for what I wanted by taking any job.”
“I would have taken anything before I let my wife go.”
“We’re made of different stuff, you and I.” Allbee grinned. “And I didn’t let her go. She left me. I didn’t want her to go. She was the one.”
“You’re not telling me all there is to tell.”
“No, no,” he said, almost delightedly. “I’m not. And what’s the rest? You tell me.”
“Didn’t your boozing have something to do with it?”
“Oh, there you go, there you go,” said Allbee, smiling at the floor and swaying his large frame slightly. “My vice, my terrible vice. She left me because of my drinking. That’s the ticket.”
“A woman doesn’t leave her husband for anything — just for a trifle.”
“That’s perfectly true, she doesn’t. You’re a true Jew, Leventhal. You have the true horror of drink. We’re the sons of Belial to you, we smell of whisky worse than of sulphur. When Noah lies drunk — you remember that story? — his gentile-minded sons have a laugh at the old man, but his Jewish son is horrified. There’s truth in that story. It’s a true story.”
“Watch your talk,” said Leventhal stiffly. “You sound like a fool. I don’t know what you’re after, but you’re not doing yourself any good with talk like that. I tell you that straight.”
“Well…” he began; but he arrested himself. “All right, never mind. But it’s unfair to try to put the blame for my wife’s death on me. It’s worse than unfair; it’s cruel when you consider what she was to me and what I’ve been through. I don’t know how you look at it, but I take it for granted that we’re not gods, we’re only creatures, and the things we sometimes think are permanent, they aren’t permanent. So one day we’re like full bundles and the next we’re wrapping-paper, blowing around the streets.”