that by the summer of ’58. By then I’d seen what a low opinion he had of the human race in general – not his
friends, he would’ve died for them, I have no doubt, but everyone else. Everyone was out looking for a buck
to stroke, he used to say – I heard him use that phrase again and again. Stroking the buck, stroking the buck,
everyone was stroking the buck. It seemed like him and his friends thought stroking the buck was a real bad
thing, unless they were playing poker and had a whole mess of em stacked up in front of them. Seemed to me
like then they stroked them, all right. Seemed to me like then they stroked them plenty, him included.
“He talked ugly and laughed at People who were trying to do good or improve the world, he hated the blacks
and the Jews – which he always called the goddamn sheenies – and he thought we ought to go in there and
clobber the Russians or the Cubans or whoever there was going.
“I listened to it all and started to wonder how come all the critics and book-reviewers could say he’d written
great books. One of them had even won a National Book Award prize, and there was talk right up to the time
he died about giving him a Pulitzer Prize. They never did, though, and I bet that frosted his balls plenty.
“Finally I decided I would just have to see for myself how everybody could be so wrong as to mistake a
garbage-eater like him for someone with heart. I went down to the Public Library and got his first book, Blaze
of Heaven.
“I expected it would turn out to be something like the Emperor’s new clothes, everyone lying each other up
because no one wanted to be the first to admit he’d made a mistake, but it wasn’t like that at all. The book was
about these five men and what happened to them in the war, and what happened to their wives and girlfriends
back home. When I saw on the jacket it was about the war, I kind of rolled my eyes, thinking it would be like
all those boring stories they told each other.”
“It wasn’t?”
“I read the first ten or twenty pages and thought, ‘This ain’t so good. It ain’t as bad as I thought it’d be, but
nothing’s happening.’ Then I read another thirty pages and I kind of … well, I kind of lost myself. Next time I
looked up it was almost midnight and I was two hundred pages into that book. I thought to myself, ‘You got to
go to bed, Martha. You got to go right now, because five-thirty comes early. But I read another thirty pages in
spite of how heavy my eyes were getting, and it was quarter to one before I finally got up to brush my teeth.
”
Martha stopped, looking off toward the darkened window and all the miles of night outside it, her eyes hazed
with remembering, her lips pressed together in a light frown. She shook her head a little.
“I didn’t know how a man who was so boring when you had to listen to him could write so you didn’t never
want to close the book he wrote, nor ever see it end, either. How he could make up characters so real you
could cry over them when they died – and when Norah got hit and killed by a taxi-cab near the end of Blaze of
Heaven, I did cry. I didn’t know how a man who could be so nasty and sour could make you care so much.
That book was full of pain and bad things, but it was full of sweetness, too … and love .
She laughed.
“I can’t explain it like I want to,” she said. “I’m not a critic.”
“You’ve explained very well,” Delores said.
Martha looked pleased but disbelieving.
“There was a fella worked at the hotel back then named Billy Beck, a nice young man who was majoring in
English at Fordham when he wasn’t on the door. He and I used to talk sometimes-“