Billiards at Half-Past Nine Read Free Page B

sunshine.…
    “What’s he up to? What does he do with himself, my son, the only one I have left, Leonore? What does he do in the Prince Heinrich Hotel every morning from nine-thirty to eleven? I remember how we used to let him watch the way they tied the nosebags onto the horses. What’s he up to? Can you tell me that, Leonore?”
    Hesitantly she picked up the violet stamp and softly said, “I don’t know what he does there, I really don’t.”
    The old fellow put the cigar in his mouth and leaned back in the armchair, smiling—as if nothing at all had passed between them. “What do you say, Leonore, to working for me regularly afternoons? I’ll come and pick you up. We can have lunch together at noon, then from two to four or five, if you want, you can help get me straightened out up there. What do you say to that, my dear?”
    She nodded, said “Yes.” She still didn’t trust herself to draw the violet Heuss across the sponge and stick it on Schrit’s letter. Someone in the post office would take the letter out of the box and the machine would stamp “Sept. 6, 1958, 1 P.M. ” on it. And there sat the old man, come to the end of his seventies, starting his eighties.
    “Yes, yes,” she said.
    “Then it’s a date?”
    “Yes.”
    She looked into his thin face, the face in which for years she had vainly sought a likeness to his son. Politeness, it seemed, was the only trait common to the Faehmels. But with the old man it was more ceremonious, decorative, the courtesy of the old school, almost a
grandezza
. Nothing mathematical in it like the politeness of his son, who made a point of dryness and only by the glimmer in his gray eyes indicated he might be capable of more warmth.
    The old man, now, he actually blew his nose, chewed hiscigar and sometimes complimented her on her hairdo, her complexion. His suit at least showed some sign of wear and tear, his tie was always a little crooked, on his fingers ink stains, on his lapels eraser rubbings. He carried pencils soft and hard in his vest pocket and occasionally he would take a sheet of paper from his son’s desk, sketch an angel on it, an
Agnus Dei
, a tree, the portrait of one of his contemporaries, hurrying by outside. And sometimes he gave her money to go and buy cake, asked her to make a second cup of coffee, making her happy that for once she could plug in the electric percolator for someone beside herself. That was the kind of office life she was used to, making coffee, buying cakes and being told stories with a proper beginning and end. Stories about the life lived back there in the apartment wing of the building, about the dead who had died there. Back there for centuries the Kilbs had tried their hand at vice and virtue, sin and salvation, had been city treasurers, notaries, mayors and cathedral canons. Back there in the air still lingered some intimation of the acrid prayers of would-be prelates, of the melancholy sins of Kilbian spinsters and the penances of pious Kilbian youths. All in that gloomy part of the house back there, where now, on quiet afternoons, a pale, dark-haired girl did her homework and waited for her father to come home. Or was he at home afternoons? Two hundred and ten bottles of wine emptied between the beginning of May and the last of August. Did he drink them all by himself? With his daughter? With ghosts? All of it unreal, less real than the ash-blond hair of the office girl who fifty years ago had sat there in her place, keeping watch over legal secrets.
    “Yes, she sat right there, my dear Leonore, on exactly the same spot where you’re sitting now. Her name was Josephine.” Had the old man said nice things about her hair, too, and her complexion?
    The old man laughed and pointed to the proverb hanging up on the wall above his son’s desk, solitary relic from times past, painted in white letters on mahogany. “Their right handis full of bribes,” it said. A motto of Kilbian as well as Faehmel