The Disappearance Page 6

  He walked with other walking men and a few boys under flowering trees to the summit of the drawbridge. Ahead of him, the skyscrapers, boulevards, streets and parking yards of Miami glittered as usual, sidewalks crowded with males, streets packed with beetlelike cars. No boats moved below on the gleaming river; none moved at sea excepting far out, where the lights of a tanker inched against the dark horizon. Gaunt wondered if they knew.

  He strode into the maelstrom of people. Every sort of man walked there, drove, ran about. The poor in the clothing of the poor, the well-to-do in the business suits they’d been wearing at four-oh-five. The men who had gone meaninglessly home to dinner and returned. The men who had stayed in town. Tourists in such clothes as only tourists wear.

  On the varied faces, all kinds of expressions: shock, foremost; overt weeping and sobbing; horror and fear; plain excitement, commonly: wonder and awe; a look, here and there, of secret amusement or relief or even of thinly guarded bliss—an inscrutable and ominous expression. Many of the men were drunk and the bars roared so specifically that they could be located, in any block, above the general pandemonium.

  Papers were being dumped in bundles from trucks; the bundles were ripped open and the sheets sold from fast-melting heaps, papers with enormous black headlines: WOMEN VANISH.

  Gaunt’s stride slackened because of the numbers of pedestrians, somewhat, and more because of the dreamlike sensation that seized him. Men and boys snatched at him, said something or other. . . .

  “Hey, mister!” A young Latin. “Want to buy a watch, cheap?”

  “Hello, Gaunt.” A familiar face but unplaceable. “Horrible thing, isn’t it?”

  “Come on in here, pal.” A weeping, bleary citizen with a dirty shirt. “Buy me another drink—I’m out of cash!”

  An old man, bald, with nasty eyes: “This is the Last Judgment of American capitalism!”

  Gaunt said peevishly, “Nonsense!”

  The old man sneered. “You wait! The ships of Marxist destiny will wing over us before dawn!”

  The philosopher stared at the cranky derelict. “Crap,” he said.

  A crying child. “Mister! Mister! Please, mister! My dad went in there and I can’t even get in so he can find me.”

  Gaunt looked at the boy and at the dozen-deep press of men around the seedy bar.

  He picked up the child, pushed into the place ferociously, and finally reached the swilled wood surface. He stood the child there and thundered, “Whose boy is this?”

  It took repeated efforts to get any attention but finally a flat-chested man held up a hand. “Mine.” He seemed ashamed. The kid yelled, “Daddy!” and dove at his father, spilling his beer.

  Gaunt went on.

  Ahead, beyond the alabaster walls of a tall building and the yellow-brown arch of a tawdry arcade, he saw some men and a few boys moving up a stairway and realized, after a puzzled moment, that they were entering St. Paul’s. He thought of the Reverend Connauth, smiled fleetingly, and forged ahead.

  The organ, as he entered the vestibule, was hammering insistently while a huge congregation sang, “Faith of our fathers, Holy Faith, We will be true to thee till death. . . .

  In spite of dungeon, fire and sword. . . .”

  The church itself—Gothic, shocking in the middle of Miami’s medley of the modern, of nineteen-twenty nondescript, and what someone had termed William-Jennings-Bryan-Spanish—glowed with pinkish lights set behind pointed arches and downhanging festoons of concrete molded to look like stone. It was filled almost to the last row with men who torrentially expressed the faith of their fathers.

  Gaunt was led to a seat by a young usher who had been weeping. A fat bullock, a man whose cheeks were flooded by tears and whose breath poured forth in a sweet, gin-flavored tenor, held out a hymnbook, pointing to the place with a clean, conical finger.

  Gaunt knew the hymn—it belonged to his childhood faith more than to the minister’s denomination.

  On the platform, Connauth sat in the panoply of his dark robes. Behind him rose another wall of ornamental cement that terminated in stalagmites—crosses and fleur-de-lys and other such ornaments as, no doubt, the Goths had carved better in better cathedrals. High overhead the vaulting jumble came together above a rose window of colored glass which surged with intermittent light as neon signs outside flashed on and off again. But the groins, where the rocketing concrete came together, were as gloomy and complex as the roof of a limestone cave.

  It was apparent that the congregation had greatly moved itself by its own singing.

  Gaunt could feel the sensation—the zeal, the supplication, abandonment in the hope that mere abandonment would bring relief. He could feel, too, a speciousness.

  Outside lay the city, the mechanistic city, the shoddy city, the workaday city, the city of technical ingenuity, of penny-snatching glamours, of petty sports and games and gambling, of ten thousand greasy dishes seasoned to vulgar taste. But here, in its soul, for all the rosy glow and sumptuous cement, for all the incense, real gold of cross and chalice, glimmer of valuable tapestries and silks, he found only a false replica. Here, the very attitudes and sensations were not germane to the disaster but to woes of ignorant, impassioned folk five hundred and more years dead. Goths.

  The hymn ended, bringing peace to vibrating eardrums.

  Connauth rose and moved to the pulpit with slow steps. He spread his silk buzzard’s wings and spoke in his voluptuous, paternal voice-the voice, Gaunt had often thought (he knew the minister well), that the Redeemed and the Saved no doubt expected to hear issuing from the lips of Jehovah on the Day Gabriel loosed the Trump.

  “Let us pray,” Connauth intoned.

  The heads went down.

  “Oh, Lord, oh, great, omnipotent Heavenly Father”—pause—“in this mighty hour of crisis, of the Unknowable”—pause—“we who inhabit the humble footstool upon which Thou hast seen fit to situate us all—”

  He is going, Gaunt thought, to see to it that God gets blamed, in part anyway. I wonder if he misses his Berthene? I don’t imagine I would. She should have been a man.

  She should have been a blacksmith. Big as she is, it’s hard to imagine how she can contain quite that much righteousness.

  Could.

  Could have contained.

  It was then, curiously enough (and probably because, since he knew prayer per se so intimately, his mind wandered away from non-essential listening), that Gaunt was struck by the fact of missing Paula.

  The bemusement of some five hours fell away from him.

  His viscera drew together as if in response to a deep stab.

  His breath caught. He had the self-possession, or the false pride, to glance once at the fat man beside him before he leaned forward as if in attentiveness or humility and became paralyzed by his sensation of loss. It was literal paralysis. He could not budge or even breathe. His mind was set upon by such a pain as might ensue if serpents could strike the soul direct and bring it down writhing. His long, tough hands grew white with hanging on the pew ahead. He gasped, finally, and no one turned, though he did not look this time to see. He was aware, for a minute, of nothing save the terrible fury of grief.

  Out of it, or in its midst, he made an attempt to fight back. The very aggressiveness of his emotion required such an effort.

  My children, he said to himself. But his children had become their own selves long since. Edwinna in her marriages. Edwin—Edwin had been given leave by his father when, a very boy, he had flown away to the wars. It was Paula alone who still belonged to him and who had been tom from him. There was no surcease. Paula was gone. The accepted, the expected companionship was ended. What remained?

  The world, then, the stricken world?

  But there was not, in that interval, any compensation to be had from thinking of how the world shared it with him. He broke into sweat and his breath raked back and forth through dry lips. But he did not hear it or feel it or still its harsh suction. Yet he tried to deal with himself.

&n
bsp; Why now? Why here? Why in this crass travesty of a cathedral? Was God actually present in so indecent a chamber? And why ask that?

  Paula, Paula, Paula, his heart wept.

  The unquenchable flicker of his forebrain went on:

  There is a guiltiness in you over this matter. The church has reminded you of the primitive essence of guilt. You should have felt it earlier this evening. (But when? At what instant? For what reason? He could not recollect.) Your sorrow is a double sorrow, for you have brought about a portion of it, yourself.

  That sensation. . . .

  It left him.

  There was organ music.

  Connauth had stopped intoning. God had been blamed, appeased, entreated. Now they would sing again.

  Gaunt straightened up, sobbing unreservedly, unnoticed. He looked at the angels and prophets and saints on the stained glass and at the golden gleam of the Cross. He watched the minister in his medieval costume turn the pages of a prodigious Book older than the Dark Ages.

  “The Lord is my Shepherd.”

  Gaunt did not want to hear the Twenty-third Psalm at that moment. He took a clean handkerchief from his hip pocket, wiped his long, narrow face, blew his nose, and stood. No one paid him any heed as he walked down the aisle still dabbing at nose and eyes.

  Green pastures . . .

  Fear no evil . . .

  He was on the steps again. Outside.

  But through the small, impalpable sensation of guilt within himself he had found, mystically, Jim Elliot would have said, the beginning of a way to bear his anguish.

  Now, somehow, the roar of the city, the soft, sweet air of the Miami night on his wet brow and two sea gulls winging unnaturally in the starlit air between the church and the loft building across the street, enabled him to go on, to go ahead, wherever that might lead.

  The streets, as he continued through them, had taken on an aura of madness.

  Vehicles were at a standstill, blatting helplessly. Some, he saw, had been abandoned in the middle of a fixed stream of traffic—which explained why none could move. No police were to be seen, though he heard sirens in the distance.

  He went toward the park and the waterfront.

  The lobbies of hotels were packed with men—men talking, men yelling, men drunk, men with drinks in their hands. Radios with thicker clusters of men around them were drowned out at a few paces. Gaunt passed the window of a jewelry shop. It had been staved in and ominous teeth of plate glass showed around its empty cases. No one tarried to observe this evidence of plunder; all edged away, rather, as if they half felt suspect. Through the palms, across the water (where more rows of headlights stood motionless upon the causeways) he saw the shimmer of Miami Beach, and, at three points, the orange gleam of buildings afire.

  Presently, moving down Biscayne Boulevard with the interweaving thousands, he came to a congestion of men and pushed in to see what held them there. They were spilled roundly into the street and even standing on the cars of strangers in front of a night club called “The Powder Puff.” Gaunt, who was very tall, soon saw the reason.

  Under the name of the club was a gaudy sign showing what appeared at first glance to be women entertainers. But over the picture were the words “World’s Most Famous Female Impersonators.” At the entry of the club a small stage had been improvised and on it, as he looked, two of the “impersonators” suddenly appeared, dancing, nearly nude, in the manner of burlesque girls, a manner old before there had been any civilization.

  The crowd cheered.

  The two men dressed as women, dancing as women, now hoisted a sign: “We’re all you’ve got, boys! Come up and see us sometimes!”

  From the crowd rose catcalls and whistles, fountains of noise as obscene as fountains connected with sewers.

  Gaunt stared, listened and shuddered.

  He decided to go home. . . .

  The journey, normally a walk of fifteen minutes and a drive of twenty, required more than two hours. Toward midnight, however, he sat again on his porch. The images faded, lunatic crowd, shattered windowpane, wriggling impersonators, concrete—Gothic interior of the compromise cathedral—the half portion of a deceased reality: nave, section of a transept.

  Remembrances of Paula eased his barbarian visions:

  Paula in certain dresses at particular places, in situations engraved on the mind, and Paula’s shaped lips making phrases as fresh now as her breakfast conversation that morning.

  Paula giving birth. Twins, darling! What a husband!

  Or nursing in the elegant, the voluptuous, the somehow enviable. . . . Obviously, Bill, twins are the thing nature planned. As you can figure out for yourself!

  In Paris and Vienna and Lucerne and Verona and in Venice and in London too, when the V-2’s began to fall. They’re like a lot of people I know: you only realize they’ve arrived after the damage has been done.

  Paula in the flat they’d occupied when they’d been married. And then, Paula as mistress of the fine house they’d rented after the success of his play. How swell to change overnight from a professor’s wife to something like a trustee’s kept woman!

  Paula turning the leaves of the first copy of his first book. How much more acceptable the royalties will be than the reviews! Or at Edwinna’s second marriage. The groom will learn nothing from this; the bride might, though—when it’s washed up.

  The first time he’d seen Paula.

  She had arrived early for class—a girl of eighteen, looking many years older and much younger—even childish: a face saved from overmuch passion by piquancy, and embellished with that insolent red hair. I took your course so as to be sure to learn everything about everything. And she had winked.

  A cry now escaped him, a forlorn sound, embarrassed even by his lamplight and escaping quickly into the jasmine-scented dark beyond the screens:

  “Paula! Dear! You must find your way back to me!” There was, for answer, the confused reverberation of some fresh, unguessable disaster in the distance. But this, he thought, was not the agony of the church. He could stand it.

  He could, he found, even tum from it.

  For now his mind went to Edwinna, the Family Problem. And to little Alicia, who had appeared to be a new development in the same field. To Edwin also. Edwin would be—where? In Manhattan, certainly. With his wife, Frances, and with their daughters, Jean and Carlotta-and the three of them gone, also. What, then, would Edwin do? The sturdy thing, the audacious thing, whatever it might be. Gaunt hoped he would soon see his son. Maturity, marriage, or the wars had led him to create in his mind an independence for the boy—for both his children—and it stood him in good stead now.

  But toward Paula, he would never have a similar sensation of discreteness. He found himself wondering, momentarily, at the fact that he had not thought (since the disaster) of the dead Theodora; to that old tragedy he was accustomed.

  Where his dreaming next would have led, he never knew.

  His phone rang.

  4

  WHEREIN THE END OF THE WORLD AS THEY KNEW IT REVEALS TO

  MANY GALLANT LADIES THAT THE WORLD ENDED WAS ONE THEY DID

  NOT KNOW.

  The Disappearance required imagination for its understanding. Women deficient in the quality were unable to assimilate the event and, as a result, their responses were unsuitable. To deal with problems that immediately arose required vast imagination, as well as logic, and also a variety of informations which are popularly referred to as

  “know-how.”

  These three—know-how, logic, and imagination—are all that distinguishes man from beasts. The first is the product of the other two; it is the ranging imagination that suggests new concepts and brings to awareness concepts thitherto buried in instinct; it is logic which sifts true imaginings from the merely fanciful and practical ideas from the merely bizarre, aimless, or wanton. The employment of the two thus furnishes humanity with its occasional increments of knowledge, or know-how.

  Imagination without logic is worthless.
It conceives uncritically; pursued for its own sake, it but deforms the mind. Logic by itself is only futile; without imagination it can only reprove the proven and so discover nothing. The integrated person needs to develop both and to use both, equally and constantly.

  Unfortunately for his own good, man has placed above those two divinest attributes another property: his vanity, his ego. Through that inflated organ (an organ which, as men multiply, multiplies itself into the ego of groups and nations and becomes identical with a culture) men create the misshapen patterns of their societies. The tendency to establish a pattern is innate and absolute, whether it be done in the name of Zeus, Moloch, Jehovah, or Marx. But, wherever men set aside their imagination and their logic to insist upon patterns that originate in vanity, they obey the rules of conceit and not truth. At the same time they shut themselves away from their best opportunity to learn.

  So all that distinguishes them from beasts is diminished and they inevitably grow more toward beastliness and less toward the humanity for which they are truly shaped.

  In Western society, and particularly in American society, imagination is stultified from infancy. The imaginative child is discouraged and upbraided. He is told that the process is mere dreaming, that it wastes time and leads nowhere. It is said to be

  “impractical.” As the child grows and its imagination inevitably leads it to express unconventional ideas and to try new behavior, it is chided and even viciously punished for such signs of unorthodoxy.

  In America, the child is schooled, if a boy, toward fiscal endeavor. It is taught to want to be a “good provider,” if not a millionaire. From babyhood it is pursued by advertisements and commercials which give it the aggregate impression that the aim of life is to acquire funds wherewith to obtain all it hears recommended. The American media of communication hypnotize it into a set of special desires. A girl, of course, takes up the same doctrine. Her aim becomes to find a mate with money to act on every radio commercial . . . or, at the very least, to set herself up in a career which will enable her so to act, independently.