Ah, Sweet mystery Of Life Read online

  He drew out the last note.

  "Runions aren't a vegetable," Mac objected. "Aren't they a fish?"

  Whitey shrugged. "Sounds like onions. The good wives of Philadelphia couldn't differentiate. But they did get peeved with my father when they ran out of their kitchens only to find that we had none of the afore-sung delicacies. My father would placate them, then give me a thorough drubbing as soon as we rounded the corner."

  "He beat you for that?" Mac exclaimed, appalled. "That's monstrous!"

  Whitey cocked an eyebrow. "Don't impugn my honest father for such a trifle. Why, I owe much to that capital fellow, such as my lightning reflexes and excellent timing. The old man had a formidable backhand. He lacked the little finger on his left hand; a deprivation he attributed to the Crimean War. A blow with that hand was particularly painful. We would have long conversations . . . or rather, monologues on his part." Whitey sat sideways to Mac, barely looking at him. "They went something like this:

  " 'Eaven 'elp me, Claude!" Whitey whacked at Mac's face, striking a hair short of his cheek.

  "You've a roof over your 'ead." Whack!

  "Food in your gut to make you 'appy." Whack!

  "Yet you carry on something 'ellish." Whack!

  "Would the king be proud of that?" Whack whack whackity whack!

  By the end of this soliloquy Whitey had built up a nice rhythm and Mac had stopped flinching. "He was a full-blooded Cockney," Whitey said, explaining the dropped h's and reference to the king. "Of course, he actually made contact. Under his tutelage I learned not to duck, or he'd just hit harder the next go-around. I honed my responses to pull back just enough so I was spared the worst of it but he still achieved sufficient satisfaction. A most equitable arrangement for both of us."

  Mac winced more than he had during the demonstration. He eyed the overgrown boy speculatively. "Surely he doesn't do that anymore?"

  "Not for years," Whitey admitted. "He thrashed me one time too many. I ambushed him one morning from the eves of our workshed when I was eleven. Dropped a big crate on his head. It knocked him out cold. I lit out. I've never been back."

  "Never?"

  "Never. My whole life he always called me Claude. I hate the name Claude. He had other unbearable habits as well. For instance . . ." the juggler snarled, turning to look down the length of the bar at the saloon keeper, who was humming an old sentimental tune as he pulled draughts of beer. "The old man loved to sing nostalgic swill like that. Whenever I hear that damnable ditty it's all I can do not to lose my dinner."

  Mac listened for a moment before he recognized the song. It was one of his father's favorites, too: "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life."

  "But once you left home, how did you live? How did you survive?"

  "By my wits. I slept in a wood-lined hole in the ground for a while. I survived by stealing. Don't look like that. A man can be justified in stealing. One does what one must to survive. It excuses everything and anything," the boy said, eyes haunted. Then he recovered with a sardonic grin. "All the while I honed my juggling skills."

  "What about school?"

  "Didn't go," Whitey said promptly.

  Mac smiled. He'd finally caught the boy out. Whitey's extravagant vocabulary wasn't something he'd learned on the streets. Mac wondered how much of the youth's story was a facade of entertaining lies.

  Whitey caught the smirk. "I do not exaggerate," he said with dignity. "I have little need of the repetitive drone of formal education. If I read something but once it is mine. Whenever I feel the need for learning I find books and delve in. I'm particularly fond of Dickens. I believe The Artful Dodger to be one of the great characters of English literature, and a worthy role model.

  "In fact," and his tone became more boasting, "with my freedom from parents and academic institutions, I became such a hero among the youth of Philadelphia that jealous boys spent their hard-earned change to catch trolleys to my neighborhood simply for the honor of beating me up." Whitey pointed to his lumpen nose. "I don't know how many times this was broken. It bears noble witness to my fame." He sipped his ginger beer thoughtfully. "In the future I will probably take up the vice of hard drink so as to explain the condition of my proboscis. I already have a penchant for cigars, when I can afford them."

  "How long did you live in the hole in the ground?" Mac was still dubious.

  "Not long," Whitey conceded. "It was a terribly wintry spring when I ran away, much like this one. I almost froze to death. One night after a heavy rain the walls of my domicile turned to mud and caved in on me. My friends dug me out barely alive the next morning. After that I drifted. I fed myself with ill-got gains from petty thievery and cadging meals at bars such as this.

  "Thankfully, every now and then the local constabulary apprehended me and locked me up in the safety, warmth and comfort of the local hoosegow for several days, till they tired of my presence.

  "Eventually I took up honest employment working at a pool hall racking cues. My payment was that I was allowed to sleep on the pool tables at night. I practiced my juggling with the house paraphernalia. The habitués were so entertained that they took it upon themselves to teach me billiards. After a few months I became so good that I was appointed the house pool shark.

  "For a while I was doing well enough that I could afford to abandon a life of crime. But the chalk dust began to affect my health, already weakened by too many cold nights sleeping out in the elements.

  "The time seemed right to pursue my chosen profession. My first job juggling, not counting the cursed Methodists, was at the nearby Norristown amusement park. Between the cost of the trolley fare out and back and the hefty commission the manager paid himself for hiring me, I almost broke even. By then I had chosen the stage persona of a Tramp Juggler so that I could costume myself for almost nothing." He tipped his shabby hat at Mac.

  "With Norristown under my belt I was ready to leave Philadelphia. I held a big benefit performance for myself at the pool hall. I invited not only my friends, but also cops, bartenders, and anyone else who might be happy to see me gone. It was the greatest monetary success I've ever experienced, to this day.

  "The next morning I left for New York City. I quickly found work in Coney Island." Whitey interrupted himself. "Did you know that I've drowned more than any man alive?"

  "No," said Mac, bewildered.

  "Precisely one hundred and sixty eight times," Whitey said with a solemn face. "The first arcade owner I ran into would only hire me as a juggler if I consented to moonlight at a second occupation between performances. His scheme was thus: whenever business slowed I donned a bathing suit, swam out from the piers in full view and began to 'drown' with dramatic ostentation. That and the subsequent rescues always drew large crowds."

  The boy held up his mug of ginger beer in a toast. "The experience left me with an abiding hatred of water. I've never touched the stuff since.

  "After that I worked at dime museums and flea circuses. At last I happened upon an agent who outfitted burlesque shows for the road. My job is to open for the other routines and act as stand-in if any of the thespians take ill. As you can imagine, I do an excellent 'Little Nell'."

  Mac strangled at the thought of Whitey dressed in pink ruffles, wigged in golden locks, trying to warp that shark-skin voice into soft, high-pitched simpering.

  Even Whitey struggled to keep his face straight. "So, here I am," he said, recovering.

  "Yes, here you are," Mac said, looking around at the railway beerhall. "But I don't understand why. Isn't it a waste of time to send a fellow with your talents all the way out from town to woo this small crowd?"

  Whitey took a long sip of ginger beer. "We just arrived ourselves. The rest of the troupe is guarding the stage gear in the baggage area, waiting for the manager to return with a conveyance to take us into town. If in fact, he does. Managers have a way of disappearing whenever a troupe gets a little ahead in cash receipts — especially when the principals have not been paid for six weeks." He scowled, then brightene
d.

  "However, Chillicothe is a good sized town, offering splendid prospects. Surely our esteemed manager will not abandon us until sometime further down the road, at one of the smaller venues — Peebles, or Fincastle or Seamus. Perhaps not even till after remunerating us a little for our labors. Anyway, rather than freeze outside like the rest of my associates, I chose to barter my talents for food, drink and warmth in here."

  "What do you mean about your manager disappearing?" Mac asked.

  "An honored tradition among the administrative class in burlesque. I've been on three abandoned tours so far. Ditched in," the youth counted on his fingers, "Puxsatawney. Kent. Wheeling." He shuddered as he said the last, dropped his eyes to study his battered hands. "But enough about me." The boy gestured at Mac with the handful of sketches. "Tell me, inestimable colleague in the greater league of prestidigitators, more about your own hard road to genius."

  Mac didn't know how to react to the almost cheerful condemnation of theatrical managers. Surely it was another invention, or at least an exaggeration. No one not engaged in openly criminal activities would be so dishonest, if for no other reason than it made bad business sense.

  "Well," he faltered, trying to think of experiences in common with this fellow artiste of sorts. "Like you, I worked in dime museums. In fact, I still do, on the side. Started out in Detroit at Sudett and Wiggins Wonderland designing flyers and fast-sketching customers' likenesses. I moved to Chicago to apprentice at the National Printing and Engraving Company. While I was there I did lots of circus posters, and worked the local dime museums on the side." He blushed. "In fact, that's where I met my wife, Maude."

  A train whistle shrilled outside, followed by an equally high pitched conductor's call. "Passengers for Logan, boarding now."

  Mac looked at the boy apologetically. "Gee, I'm sorry, but that's my train. I've got to go." Mac felt as though he'd cheated the juggler. Whitey had shared so much, and he had given so little. Whitey handed over the drawings wistfully.

  "Would you like one to keep?" Mac asked.

  The boy's eyes gleamed in answer. "Really? Which one?"

  Mac smiled. "Whichever one you choose." It didn't matter to him. As with Whitey's ability with the written word, once Mac saw something, it was in his mind's eye for life. Whichever sketch the boy picked, Mac could reproduce it again at will.

  Whitey held out the sketch with the eraser and mystic symbol-writing chalk.

  Mac was surprised. He'd guessed that the juggler would select the woman and the mackerel. "Why did you pick that one?"

  The boy's answer surprised him even more. Whitey studied the drawing closely. "There's a certain elegant mysteriousness about it. The sense of one's future writ on the wind, subject to change, perhaps even by our very selves." He looked up at Mac with a strange glint in his eye.

  The train whistle blew again. Mac packed up his sketches hastily. As he did so the newspaper beneath, with Outcault's cartoons, slid out and dropped toward the floor. Whitey caught it effortlessly and handed it to Mac with a flourish.

  Mac muttered his thanks and shoved the offending paper in with his drawings. From nowhere his jealousy bloomed full again.

  Why did it have to be this other man, Outcault, to make the breakthrough that could have been his? Beautiful, imaginative, insightful drawings rendered as serial glimpses of a person's life — time no longer the moment by moment enslaver, but transcended and escaped from when viewed all at once.

  Mac turned. "Whitey, what do you want most in life, what's your greatest goal . . . to be the most magnificent juggler in the world?"

  Whitey drew himself up like a dignified dirigible filling with air. "Of course not. I already am the most magnificent juggler in the world. No, my greatest goal is to become so rich that I can sleep on clean sheets every night."

  Mac settled himself onto the hard train seat, portfolio balanced on his lap, a handful of blank paper spread out waiting to be drawn on. He was grateful that this last leg of the trip to Logan would be a short one.

  He still felt guilty about the inequality of his encounter with Whitey. When he'd left the bar the young juggler was carefully packing the sketch into a battered portmanteau. Whitey had shared his life, albeit with undoubtedly great exaggeration, and all Mac had given in return was an easily reproduced sketch. Even as he thought this Mac's pen traced again the wild pattern of chalk, arcane symbols, eraser and juggler.

  What was it that Whitey had called him? "Inestimable colleague in the greater league of prestidigitators." Ah yaas, as Whitey himself would say — a member of the brotherhood of sleight-of-hand. Mac hadn't thought of jugglers that way before, as a sort of magician, but why not? That was one of the realities and one of the illusions of any art: to make the difficult, the near impossible look easy. And eventually, perhaps, Mac considered as his fingers thoughtlessly completed the sketch, to make the difficult actually as effortless as it appeared. Whitey could do it with both words and actions. Mac had only art as his means. Mac had never been cheated out of his pay, had never left one job till he had another, better one lined up. The riskiest, most daring thing Mac had ever done, his single act of defiance and deceit, had been at age nineteen to sneak away from the business college in Ypsilanti his father had sent him to and flee to Detroit, where he apprenticed with an artist and started working the dime museums. This incident, so central to Mac's self image as the defiant Bohemian, paled beside Whitey's struggles.

  Mac shook his head. His busy, hectic life suddenly seemed torpid, insipid. What was he really but a wholesome, steadily employed family man?

  He blushed. A wholesome family man? Even now his wife, Maude, was swelling like a blown rose, waiting the birth of their first child. At nineteen years of age, people took her for a newly pregnant bride. In truth, she and Mac had been married for five years; Mac wooing and hastily wedding her when she'd been a mere child of fourteen. Like a middle-aged woman, Mac had taken to lying about his own age, trimming off a good four years to close the gap between them, hoping not to appear to be such a cradle robber.

  So much for the torpid insipidness of his life. Mac shouldn't have worried about boring Whitey. If he'd been willing to share it, there was darkness enough in his life.

  Like Arthur, his angry shadow of a brother. Arthur, less than a year younger than Mac.

  Mac was sure he retained at least a ghost of a memory of Arthur and himself as small boys playing together happily. But that had changed as the whole family slowly became aware — Mac, their parents, their sister Jane, and worst of all, Arthur himself — that something was missing from Arthur. It wasn't his intelligence, nor physical prowess — he towered over Mac. But rather he suffered from some subtle yet terrible incompleteness.

  Arthur had spent childhood lapsing further and further into depression and stillness. Only when he reached adolescence did he occasionally reemerge, in great gushing bursts of anger and paranoia.

  Mac was his most frequent target. Arthur accused his barely older brother of somehow having stolen his life and taken his place; that their positions and roles had been switched. Sobbing, eyes desperate with fear more than hatred, he would back a cowering Mac into a corner and scream, "Give my life back to me! It's not yours! You tricked me! Give it back! Please! Please!," until Jane and their parents dragged him away. Then Arthur would mercifully collapse into a months-long fugue of docility.

  Jane told Mac after he'd left for college that Arthur's silence had become almost complete, broken only for Mac's infrequent visits. When he did go home, Arthur was not silent. The rages had become overwhelming, the hallucinations and delusions of persecution even more frantic and extreme. Mac never took Maude home with him for a visit. He guessed that it was only a matter of time before his aging parents would be forced to institutionalize his brother.

  Mac moodily slid the completed copy into the portfolio and decided to use the next sheet to write his daily letter to Maude. He wouldn't have wanted to tell Whitey about Arthur. Or about Maude. Just as well
to leave his image to reflect his true reality: a regular Joe with a talent for drawing fast and well.

  The Cincinnati Commercial Tribune had sent Mac to Logan to cover a lynching. Two brothers named Erickson had come plundering out of the wilds of Minnesota on an off-and-on crime spree that had lasted since last autumn. Three days earlier they'd been discovered near Logan wintering over on a farm they'd commandeered, eventually murdering the old farmer who owned it. The county sheriff was brother-in-law to the victim. The lawman coincidentally happened to leave on an ice-fishing trip the afternoon the brothers were caught.

  The tiny town decided to take its time in dispatching the wayward brothers, relishing its moment of vengeance and capitalizing on the brief notoriety. Although word had gotten out on the wire and eager newsmen were swarming to Logan like lemmings, legal authorities seemed to be having trouble moving swiftly enough to intervene.

  The first person Mac saw when he got off the train was his old friend Charlie J. Wuest, a fellow apprentice at the National Printing and Engraving Co., now a reporter/illustrator for The Dayton Gazette. Charlie was also the man who'd gotten Mac into the Masons.

  Charlie pumped Mac's hand up and down like a pump handle the way he always did. "Son-of-a-gun, Mac, I didn't think I'd get to see you this year till the Order's annual state meeting."

  Mac good-naturedly bounced along with the force of the handshake. "What are you doing here at the train station, Charlie? I'd have thought you'd be at the scene of the crime and the crime-to-be."

  "I'd like to be. We'd all like to be," Charlie said. "But the locals are, uh, busy 'interrogating' our erstwhile Viking marauders out at the farm, trying to find out the location of all the hidden loot before sending them to kingdom-come. Rumor has it that the brothers aren't talking. Maybe our boys are secret Masons; think they'll reincarnate and be able to retrieve their cache in the next lifetime." Without asking, Charlie hoisted Mac's carpetbag.

  "In the meantime we, the distinguished members of the fourth estate, have been left to cool our heels in this little hamlet, paying the usual momentarily inflated prices for food and drink. There's not a horse, nay" — Charlie stretched out the word into a whinny and Mac politely laughed — "not even a donkey to be had for transportation. And not a single Loganite will reveal the location of the farm till the time is right, no matter how mightily we bribe them. That's why I'm down here. I just wired my desk editor to advise him of the situation." Charlie pointed to a line of men queued up along the other side of the station. "That line leads into the telegraph office. This is one of those towns too small to have separate facilities."