“No, I didn’t want to work,” he said. “I had a hell of a time after my wife was killed and I decided to take myself off the market for a while. I lived like a gentleman.”
Leventhal said grimly to himself, “Oh, gentleman. It looks like it. A marvelous gentleman.”
“Well, what do you want from me?” he asked Allbee. “You lived like a gentleman. I guess that means getting up at eleven or twelve every day. I get up at seven and go to my job. You’ve had a long vacation. Still you want me to do something for you. I don’t know what you want. What do you want?”
“I could use some help. The vacation’s lasted a little too long.”
“What sort of help?”
“I don’t know what sort. I wanted to take that up with you. You could help me if you wanted to. You must have connections. I’d like to get away from my old line, something new, a complete change.”
“For example?”
“Do you think you can get something for me in a bank?”
“Oh, you want to go straight where they keep it, where the money is,” said Leventhal.
“Or a brokerage firm?”
“Stop your joking,” Leventhal said somewhat sharply. “I don’t care for the sort of jokes you make. I’m not under an obligation to you. I’ll do something for you if I can. And just remember, it doesn’t mean I admit anything. I think you’re crazy. But Stan Williston thinks I ought to help you, and out of respect for him I’ll try.”
“What!” exclaimed Allbee. “You discussed me with Williston? What did you tell him about me?”
“Qh, you don’t like that? No, I see you don’t,” said Leventhal. I didn’t make anything up.”
“What did you tell him?” he said again, in agitation.
“What do you think I could tell him? Are you afraid I blackened your character? Are you touchy about your reputation? I thought you had lost your sense of honor?”
“You had no business-no damned business!” Allbee cried out in a flash of hatred and with an intensity of shame that disturbed Leventhal in spite of himself.
“Well, you’re a crazy, queer bastard,” he said. “What’s the matter with you? You come to me with this hokum about being too down and out to have any pride left — you can even come to me, and this and that. I knew it was all fake. One minute you’re on the bottom, couldn’t be any lower, and the next you’re a regular Lord Byron.”
There was an interval of silence during which Allbee appeared to be struggling for control over himself. Then he said in a low voice, “Williston is an old friend of mine. I just happen to have special feelings about him and Phoebe. But I guess it really doesn’t make much difference.” He gradually recovered his smile and he remarked, withdrawing his eyes from Leventhal and beginning a protracted, glittering study of the street behind him, “I should have expected you not to miss still another chance to get at me.”
“Are you in your right mind?” Leventhal demanded. “Are you straight in the head? Is it the booze or what? God almighty! Every day I see new twists.” He looked heavenward and gave way to a short laugh. “So help me, it’s like a menagerie. They say you go to the zoo to see yourself in the animals. There aren’t enough animals in the world to see ourselves in. There would have to be a million new feathers and tails. There’s no end to the twists.”
Allbee, preoccupied with the dwindling violets and grays of twilight and the swarms of light, seemed also to find this comical.
“Well, you’ve got nothing on me,” he said.
“You think not?”
“You’re just as much of a monster to me.”
“I am?”
“Hell, yes. Well, you look like Caliban in the first place,” Allbee said, more serious than not. “But that’s not all I mean. You personally, you’re just one out of many. Many kinds. You wouldn’t be able to see that. Sometimes I feel — and I’m saying this seriously — I feel as if I were in a sort of Egyptian darkness. You know, Moses punished the Egyptians with darkness. And that’s how I often think of this. When I was born, when I was a boy, everything was different. We thought it would be daylight forever. Do you know, one of my ancestors was Governor Winthrop. Governor Winthrop!” His voice vibrated fiercely; there was a repressed laugh in it. “I’m a fine one to be talking about tradition, you must be saying. But still I was born into it. And try to imagine how New York affects me. Isn’t it preposterous? It’s really as if the children of Caliban were running everything. You go down in the subway and Caliban gives you two nickels for your dime. You go home and he has a candy store in the street where you were born. The old breeds are out. The streets are named after them. But what are they themselves? Just remnants.”
“I see how it is; you’re actually an aristocrat,” said Leven-thal.
“It may not strike you as it struck me,” said Allbee. “But I go into the library once in a while, to look around, and last week I saw a book about Thoreau and Emerson by a man named Lipschitz…”
“What of it?”
“A name like that?” Allbee said this with great earnestness. “After all, it seems to me that people of such background simply couldn’t understand…”
“Of all the goddamned nonsense!” shouted Leventhal. “Look, I’ve got things to attend to. I have a phone call to make. It’s important. Tell me what in the name of hell you want and make it snappy.”
“I assure you, I wasn’t trying to be malicious. I was only discussing this…”
“I assure you, you were trying, I assure you!” Leventhal flung out. “Now what are you after? Probably a few bucks for whisky.”
Allbee laughed aloud. “They say drinking is only another kind of disease,” he said. “Like heart disease or syphilis. You wouldn’t be so hard on anyone with heart disease, would you? You’d be more sympathetic. They even say crime is only a sort of disease and if you had more hospitals you’d need fewer prisons. Look how many murderers are let off and get treatment instead of execution. If they’re sick it’s not their fault. Why can’t you take that attitude?”
“Why?” Leventhal involuntarily repeated. He was bewildered.
“Because you’ve got to blame me, that’s why,” said Allbee. “You won’t assume that it isn’t entirely my fault. It’s necessary for you to believe that I deserve what I get. It doesn’t enter your mind, does it — that a man might not be able to help being hammered down? What do you say? Maybe he can’t help himself? No, if a man is down, a man like me, it’s his fault. If he suffers, he’s being punished. There’s no evil in life itself. And do you know what? It’s a Jewish point of view. You’ll find it all over the Bible. God doesn’t make mistakes. He’s the department of weights and measures. If you’re okay, he’s okay, too. That’s what Job’s friends come and say to him. But I’ll tell you something. We do get it in the neck for nothing and suffer for nothing, and there’s no denying that evil is as real as sunshine. Take it from me, I know what I’m talking about. To you the whole thing is that I must deserve what I get. That leaves your hands clean and it’s unnecessary for you to bother yourself. Not that I’m asking you to feel sorry for me, but you sure can’t understand what makes a man drink.”
“All right, so I can’t. What then? What did you stop me for, to tell me that?”
“No, you never could and I’ll tell you why. Because you people take care of yourselves before everything. You keep your spirit under lock and key. That’s the way you’re brought up. You make it your business assistant, and it’s safe and tame and never leads you toward anything risky. Nothing dangerous and nothing glorious. Nothing ever tempts you to dissolve yourself. What for? What’s in it? No percentage.”
Leventhal’s expression was uncomprehending and horrified. His forehead was wrinkled. His heart beat agonizingly, and he faltered out, “I don’t see how you can talk that way. That’s just talk. Millions of us have been killed. What about that?”