My Father's Ghost: Other Excerpts from Robin's Journals

Other Excerpts from Robin's Journals

[In some of the earlier volumes I found brief stories that strike me as at least half reportage, and that offered to me as Robin's daughter glimpses into the rather dark, gritty world of his early personal and working life. I think the word "louche" applies; the settings seem to be either "joints" of one kind or another, or the Bohemian world of artistic people that he inhabited when he was married to my mother more than in his later, more isolated years. You may note touches of Joycean wordplay, along with an Edward Hopper atmosphere, in some of this.

[I feel lucky to have these vivid glimpses into a vanished time. The dates are those of the journals these pieces come from.]
-- SMC

I

A great, fat creature who oozes with cunning and hard, high laughter, she cadged a buck to put on a horse. That was a week ago. Tonight, with secret signal, meaningful giggles, she indicates with too-quick figures how the buck, plus three of her own, was parlayed to materialize thirty-five "rocks" at the Track. There is a rapt expectancy in her that one will catch and be consumed by the fever, the itch, the disease. One scents a con-game; the feel of one's own suckerhood; a twinge of adolescent greed.

Tomorrow night, she gushes, she'll deliver; meanwhile, how's about another buck for tomorrow's race? She got it. ['45-'47]

II

Savage Interlude

[This one seems to refer to a murky incident I only heard Robin refer to once, and that obliquely, concerning the dangers and futility of trying to organize a cartoonists' union.]
-- SMC

Tonight you feel rotten. A fever blister all over the lip. You haven't painted or thought anything for a week. You grovel in your mind, you sicken; lousy, a cad, black... To think suddenly of kings and rich men as the only live ones, as gods in power, as ultimate beings, is to gain an insight into the laboring popular mind, so fed -- or underfed -- by its passions that anything other than passionate matters is waste, shit; and power, aliveness, and wealth is passionate, is matter.

"What you don't know won't hurt you."

"What'd he say?"

"Ah, skip it."

"You skip it."

But the old guy goes on; sitting there upright, hatless, bearded -- bandages cover his forehead and broken nose. Applepie, chocolate ice cream, coffee, iced coffee, yeh, Tom... the goatee juts out like an Egyptian pot handle.

"My son. Eighteen yesterday. He beats me up every year about this time. Needs psychiatric treatment... " (You are ordered by the NCRB to appear at... trial... Union local 1461... contract. "Now, Bob -- pointing forefinger -- try to remember... remember, too, what you are saying might be perjury. Did you write this note?" The whiskey breath made you shrink.)

You shrank, remembering the already uncertain interrogator; and seeing him plain, now.

"His own mother had to have him barred from her apartment... " The voice, still harsh, rattles on. You look, listen, as he pins you with painpins from his own eyesockets, appealing -- yet logical blue -- to you. (A sudden enemy, the impersonal -- then -- lawyer (they said) from Wall St. -- bigshot -- cross-examining you) a broken hack, a beautiful oldmanhack, appealing to...!

"My own son. Knocked me down. Yes. What? Broke my nose. Contusions. Lacerations... Fell against the television set and lacerated my scalp. Ten stitches. Police? They won't intervene. No proof of simple assault. I can prove it; blood on the carpet shows where I fell, near the television... no cooperation from the civil authorities. What caused -- ? I blame the Catholic Church, absolutely. The boy has never been right. Worse, since he got out of St. Gabriel's. Priests there approve of his attitude. They incite him. He never was any good."

(Last September he stood there clutching at his trousers, samelooking, appealing, coldly logical blue eyes... You got it, beckoned. Went in the back of the restaurant after him. "What's the matter, Tom?"

("Could you arrange my clothing, Bob? Can't quite reach my clothing... "

("Sure, Tom." You tie his tie, zip up his fly, put his jacket on his other shoulder, button it up, looking him in the eye with a man-to-man-nevertheless look. "That's it, Tom; any time. Just ask."

("Thanks, Bob, thanks a million... never will forget this. You fellows really are okay. Thanks." Jerks his way out, embolism's puppet.)

He doesn't know you now, doesn't recognize you -- but does he? You don't know. "My God, what happened to you, Tom?" you mutter.

"My boy came to see me yesterday. Demanded money. Does it every year. Broke my nose. Bleeding all over the rug."

"Jesus, Tom -- sorry. What's the matter with him?"

"Does it every year. He's not right. The boy needs psychiatric treatment -- " (level eyes, level misery).

"Christ, Tom, what can I say... "

"Can't reason with the boy. He won't let me into my own place."

"You mean he's there now?"

"Yes. I can't get in, myself."

(Last August, it was, you suddenly recognized him: memory, that bitch, would not this time be held off. Same name, Day, Thomas Day!

("What happened to him, Tony?"

("Strokes, not one but two, three, three in a row."

(Christ -- think he recognizes you? You shaved off the mustache; you got dentures, your mouth is different. Does he know you? Sometimes you think YES -- that pigeon-holing legal mind.)

"Anything I can do, Tom?"

"Thanks, Bob, you've done enough -- what did you say, Kelly? Oh... " Rises, jerks out of the place, a hanging man with the invisible noose tightening with every step, every stiff-legged, limping step. Holy smokes, three strokes!

"Son of a bitch," Kelly says, "I'd beat the goddamn mothafucka to a pulp -- treat his father like that... "

"Yeah, goddamn," roars Whitey, eternally re-polishing the pastry cases; "I'd kill 'im, break his own goddamn shit head with both the sonabitch's fuckin' arms... "

"Don't forget," you say, "the old guy's weak. Three strokes!" you holler, somehow indignant.

"Today's the fifth anniversary of the day I stopped drinking -- three quarts of whiskey a day. Five years ago tonight, fellows, Bob... " (Christ, 1944 -- one year after the trial... whiskey on his breath) "My wife left me, took thirty thousand dollars cash and jewelry and insurance and titles to other properties... My boy looked me up and beat me when he found me. Tried five cases a week, made seventy-five thousand a year not including bonuses and various gratuitous fees. Thought nothing of spending a few hundred a night for dinner and entertainment and drinks... " rattles on...

Straight back, trouser cuffs up around his calves, stumble-steps across the street out there, beyond the window with "Texas Lunch" on it -- left hand crooked, paralytic. You watch the silver head, the white visor of bandages, disappear...

Suddenly, you are in the groove. You work better, best -- quick, you snap around, everything falls into place. You feel okay -- a blank. ('49-'52)

III

How to Gain Experience, and Other Prejudices

At the door, Zack and Ella said goodbye to Bee, while Avery waved to them from the other end of the short hall. Bee's prairie-dog features looked white and small under the sliding tower of bubbling curls on her head. And she seemed thinner and flatter and shorter than usual; sick, probably. She was the sickly kind.

But Avery maintained his pink poise, his appearance of an undersized Heidelberg student who had turned Lit'r'ry; black horn-rimmed glasses and his small, dissatisfied smile, bracketed by a mustache whose hairs were as exact in length, breadth, thickness and spacing as the markings on a slide rule. Every time Zack looked at that mustache, he wondered how the Hell Avery managed to paint and draw as freely as he did. And every time he looked at Bee's waterfall teeth, he suspected the truth behind Avery's fervent enthusiasm for talk of buxom, beautiful, hyper-thyroid women.

Ella liked the two of them out of perversity, Zack felt. It was a minor nicety of life to be able to needle people who had no children by talking of your own. And Ella was going to have another one.

She certainly did not look it as she gabbled away, partly in somewhat affected English, partly in somewhat disaffected Yiddish. (He liked Yiddish, though he did not understand most of it.) Finally, she said so long to Bee and Avery and joined Zack on the stairs.

They caught up with Tworsky and his wife. Ella repeated the Yiddish to them, and they all laughed, looking quickly at Zack. He laughed too. Comic things are often funny even if you don't understand the language, which is only the most obvious expressive medium.

Tworsky was lean, tall, and well-dressed a la Esquire. He was a viola player. He had had a debut at Carnegie the week before, and was only beginning to take on that extra meaning to every gesture and word which the famous acquire in spite of themselves. For Tworsky was good. His lank young Russian face was pale and responsive and had the delicately wry expression of one who has been recently and furtively licking lemons. He knew all the orchestra conductors, and had told many stories that night.

From Humzinger's flatly shouted, corny USO gags, through politics, painting, and a riotous session on buying fine, accredited musical instruments, the talk had been rhythmic with puns, jokes, little anecdotes, and a great deal of laughter. Bubbly Humzinger and his Negro wife had left at one o'clock, when Tworsky's wife, Sylvia, had happened to glance at her watch.

Sylvia was darkly beautiful until she smiled and showed an excess of gums. She was as tall as Tworsky himself. In certain lights her hair had vibrant, Prussian Blue tones. Her clear and fruity complexion and blackest hair called for a rose in her teeth or behind one ear. They made a striking couple.

Zack and Tworsky stopped at a newsstand on the corner of fifty-ninth Street and Third. Over the stand, an unshaded 150 watt bulb blazed coldly. Shops to the left and right were blanks. A faint glow from red neon signs indicated where fifty-ninth crossed Lexington. Above, the huge dark shape of the El station hung over them, where they huddled like attendants in a morgue.

Tworsky tried to buy a Sunday Times. Too early, or too late: no Times. Sylvia and Ella, the one glowing in her Latin beauty, the other fullmoon-slav pallor and enormous eyes, spoke desultorily, lazily, in low tones about the lousy maid situation, lousy apartment situation, and clothes.

They all hung there on the corner waiting for the crosstown car to come out of the east side. Zack was telling Tworsky about politics, how it was an industry of checking power here, balancing power there, but always maintaining power in certain hands.

The streetcar drew up and stopped. Tworsky was ahead of Zack; he fed all the necessary nickels into the machine and laughed when Zack protested. He liked to feed things, he said.

Sylvia and Ella sat together. Zack pulled over the straw-covered seat in front of them, and he and Tworsky sat facing them and looking toward the end of the car, which was almost empty. Across the aisle and a few seats back, a soldier in summer tans lolled. He had the bloated look of New York's finest. His Gaelic lip was smeared with lipstick. He dozed.

A couple of hatless, eagerly puzzled Italian guys in gray suits sat behind him. As the car rolled, crashed, and screeched like a commercial juggernaut toward Columbus Circle, Tworsky was telling Zack, Sylvia, and Ella about a guy named Cohen. Cohen was a swell musician, liberal, an inventor, according to Tworsky. Since the car made a great uproar that seemed to echo and re-echo down the streets, Tworsky was forced to raise his voice in order to be heard.

"Cohen, his name is," he was saying, with his smiles and his hands too. "He fools around his shop when he is home. An electricity shop. Tools, work bench. He makes, he invents -- and such a musician he is! My God, what a clarinet! And he's patent a lot of stuff, or something. A new one he's got, he just applied patents for. It's a recording machine, built in a cabinet, like a -- like a credenza. You know, it's the kind you record by wire? But his is on tape, metal tape.

"You see, the other kind, does the wire bust? Your luck is out. But his is on tape. Does the tape bust? All you do, you take some of that -- that, you know, what you call it? That mending stuff, like cork plasters?" He stopped, waving his hands, hopelessly lost but still bursting with story.

Zack, who had been listening and at the same time wondering why it was that the soldier across the aisle wore no insignia, no bars or campaign ribbons, turned and said, "Scotch tape?"

"Yeh, yeh, yeh," Tworsky rushes on. "Cohen says, you patch -- "

"I don't like guys like you." It was a loud, Broadway auctioneer's type of voice.

Tworsky stopped talking and looked at the soldier.

"I said, I don't like guys like you who talk about guys like that." the soldier was glaring at Tworsky.

Ella looked at him and turned her glittering eyes away as if he did not exist. Sylvia sat straight, her smile gone.

"So, Cohen," Tworsky continued, almost inaudibly, waving one hand, "he says -- "

"You guys think you can say anything about guys like that, don't you? Well, I don't like your kind, see?" The soldier got to his feet. The yellow light from the ceiling bulbs smeared comic book shadows under his jaw as he swayed forward, hot glazes on his hair as he swayed backward. The lipstick was like a swatch of blood. He shuffled heavily past Zack, then stopped and turned.

"Your kind stinks," he said. "You stink."

He flapped a lamb-roast hand at Tworsky and staggered on toward the front.

Tworsky was silent and ice white. Zack felt helpless and a little scared: after all, these guys were supposed to be trained to fight. He hoped there wouldn't be trouble. What the hell was wrong with the guy anyway?

The car lurched to a stop. Columbus Circle.

The soldier got off, shouting, "And if you didn't hear me, come on out and I'll tell you, all right. You stink."

Zack and Ella stood. It was their stop. And it was Tworsky's stop. When they came to the front doors, Ella turned to Sylvia. "Look, honey, there's prob'ly going to be trouble. Why don't you and Tworsky ride on to the next stop?"

"Yeh," Zack agreed.

"All right," Sylvia said. Tworsky didn't say anything, but he and Sylvia sat down on a front seat. Zack and Ella got off.

The soldier was standing by a traffic stanchion. He looked big enough to use it as a weapon. "Hey -- you wit' him?" he called, motioning at Tworsky in the car.

The doors banged shut. The car jerked and clattered off toward Ninth Avenue.

"Yeah," said Zack. He walked over, with Ella trailing behind him.

The soldier mumbled, "I don't like guys like him. I seen guys, my pals, my friends, dying all around. Over there, we didn't know nothin' about guys like him and his Cohen."

Zack said patiently, "But what was it he said that you didn't like?"

The soldier stared levelly at him, no hatred in his bleary eyes. "He don't know what goes on. There they was, bleedin' and dyin' -- and he don't know." He was tapping Zack on the chest with a fat forefinger.

Zack said, "It's not his fault he's four eff. There's lots of guys who are. What did he say that made you sore?"

"Don't matter what he said. Who said he said anything?" The soldier flung a heavy palm upward, fanning the air. "His kind is no damn good, that's all."

He put the raised hand behind his head and pushed his service cap forward over his eyes, turned dizzily, and crossed the trolley tracks toward fifty-seventh Street, staggering and muttering to himself. Zack and Ella stood looking after him.

Red neon flashes played over the Royal explosive green boot across the street, which seemed to move. Another streetcar came, heading east.

"Let's take a bus," Ella said.

"No, it'll take too long. Subway's better, this time of night."

He took her arm and they walked toward the subway entrance.

"But what was it?" Zack said. "What did Tworsky say?"

"Everything," Ella said. "He said 'Cohen.' The guy wanted to talk to you. He wasn't sore at you. You he didn't hate."

[written '51-'52]