I promised Ed, somewhat sentimentally, that I’d come back for one last talk before he closed up the place.
I should have been drunk, the amount of liquor I’d poured into me. But I wasn’t drunk. I was just depressed.
I started back to the office, but halfway there I decided that it wasn’t worth it. I had only an hour or so to go to fill out the day, and this late in the afternoon, with most of the editions put to bed, there’d be nothing I could do. Except maybe write some columns, and I didn’t feel like writing any columns. So I decided I’d go home. I’d work over the weekend, getting out the columns, to make up for goofing off.
So I went to the parking lot and got my car untangled and headed home, driving slow and carefully so no cop would pick me up.
I pulled into the alley and swung into the area back of the apartment building, parking the car in the stall that was reserved for it.
It was peaceful back there and I sat for awhile in the car before getting out. The sun was warm and the building, wrapped around three sides of the area, kept out any wind. A scrubby poplar tree grew in one angle of the building, and the sun was full upon it, so that, with its autumn-colored leaves, it glowed like a tree of promise. The air was drowsy, filled with sun and time, and I could hear the clicking toenails of a dog trotting up the alley. The dog came in sight and saw me. He sat down and cocked anxious ears at me. He was half the size of a horse and he was so shaggy he was shapeless. He lifted a ponderous hind leg and solemnly scratched a flea.
“Hi, pup,” I said.
He got up and trotted down the alley. Just before he went out of sight, he stopped for a second and looked back at me.
I got out of the car and went down the alley and around the corner to the building’s entrance. The lobby was hushed and empty and my footsteps echoed in it. There were a couple of letters in my mailbox and I jammed them in my pocket, then trudged slowly up the stairs to the second floor.
First of all, I told myself, I would have a nap. Getting up as early as I had was catching up with me.
The semicircle of carpeting still was missing from before my door and I stopped and stared at it. I’d almost forgotten it, but now last night’s incident came back with a rush. I shivered looking at it, fumbling in my pocket for the keys so I could get inside and shut the semicircle in the hail behind me.
Inside the apartment, I shut the door behind me and tossed my hat and coat into a chair and stood there and looked around me. And it was all right. There was nothing wrong with it. There was nothing stirring in it. There was nothing strange.
It wasn’t a fancy place, but I was satisfied with it. It was my very own and it was the first place for a long time that I’d lived in long enough to really count as home. I had been there six years and I fitted into it. I had my gun cabinet against one wall and the hi-fl in the corner, and one entire end of the front room was filled with books piled into a monstrous bookcase I’d cobbled up myself.
I went into the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator and found tomato juice. I poured a glass of it and sat down at the table and, as I did, the letters in my pocket rustled, so I pulled them out. One was from the Guild, and I knew it was another warning about delinquent dues. The second was from some firm with a many- jointed name.
I opened that one up and pulled out a single sheet.
I read: Dear Mr. Graves: This is to notify you that under the provisions of clause 31 we are terminating your lease on apartment 210, Wellington Arms, effective January 1.
There was a signature at the bottom of it that I was unable to make out.
And there was something terribly fishy about it, for these people who had sent the letter didn’t own the building. Old George owned it—Old George Weber, who lived down on the first floor in apartment 116.
I started to get up, intending to go charging down the stairs and ask Old George just what the hell this meant. Then I remembered that Old George and it.”
Mrs. George were out in California.
Maybe, I told myself, Old George had turned the operation of the building over to these people for the time that he was gone. And if that were the case, there was some mistake. Old George and I were pals. He’d never throw me out. He sneaked up to my place to have a drink or two every now and then, and every Tuesday evening the two of us played pinochle, and almost every fall he went out to South Dakota with me for some pheasant shooting.
I took another look at the letterhead and saw that the name of the firm was Ross, Martin, Park Gobel. In little letters under the firm name was another line, which said “Property Management.”
I wondered exactly what clause 31 might be. I thought of looking it up, then realized that I had no idea where I’d put the copy of my lease. It was probably in the apartment somewhere, but I had not the leastidea.
I went into the living room and dialed the number of Ross, Martin, Park Gobel.
A telephone voice answered—a professionally trained, high-pitched, feminine, how-happy-that-you-called voice.
“Miss,” I told her, “someone at your office has pulled a boner. I have a letter here throwing me out of my apartment.”
There was a click and a man came on. I told him what had happened.
“How come your firm is mixed up in this?” I asked him. “The owner, to my knowledge, is my good neighbor and old friend, George Weber.”
“You are wrong there, Mr. Graves,” this gent told me in a voice that for calmness and pomposity would have done credit to a judge. “Mr. Weber sold the property in question to a client of ours several weeks ago.”
“Old George never told me a word about“Maybe he simply overlooked it,” said the man at the other end, and his voice held a tone just short of a sneer. “Maybe he didn’t get around to it. Our client took possession the middle of the month.”
“And immediately sent out a notice canceling my lease?”
“All the leases, Mr. Graves. He needs the property for other purposes.”
“Like a parking lot, for instance.”
“That’s right,” said the man. “Like a parking lot.”
I hung up. I didn’t even bother to say good-bye to him. I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere talking to that joker.
I sat quietly in the living room and listened to the sound of traffic on the street outside. A couple of chattering girls went walking past, giggling as they talked. The sun shone through the westward-facing windows and the light was warm and mellow.
But there was a coldness in the room—a terrible iciness that crept from some far dimension and seeped not into the room but into my very bones.
First it had been Franklin’s, then it was Ed’s bar, and now it was this place that I called my home. No, that was wrong, I thought: first it had been the man who had phoned Dow and who had finally talked with Joy, telling her how he had been unable to find a house to buy. He and all those others who were being quietly desperate in the classified columns—they had been the first.
I picked up the paper from the desk where I had thrown it when I came into the room and folded it back to the want ads and there they were, just as Dow had told me. Column after column of them under the headings of “Houses Wanted” or “Apts. Wanted.” Little pitiful lines of type crying out for shelter.
What was going on? I wondered. What had happened so suddenly to all the living space? Where were all the new apartments that had sprouted, the acre after acre of suburban building?
I dropped the paper on the floor and dialed a realtor I knew. A secretary answered and I had to hold the line until he finished with another call.
Finally he came on.
“Parker,” he asked, “what can I do for you?”
“I’m being thrown out,” I said. “I need a roof above my head.”
“Oh my God!” he said.
“A room will do,” I told him. “Just one big room if that’s the best there is.”
“Look, Parker, how long have you got?”