The Pale Criminals

By Richard Bankowsky

Meet JOHNNY, the gambler, who falls in love with Lady Luck embodied in a photograph of another man's wife and ends up castrated; GELDSTUCKER, the artist who panders for his own bride and ends up murdered by his whore in Korea; and MR. WADZIO, who trades the syndicates controlling interest in a Seventh Avenue Suit and Cloak firm for the love of a women, with, of course, fatal consequences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Bankowsky
• Release date: Nov 20, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452472775

Richard Bankowsky

California State University Emeritus Professor of literature and creative writing. Yale and Columbia degrees. National Institute of Arts and Letters and Rockefeller grants in literature.

Book preview

Of Bankowsky's novels the critics said:

A GLASS ROSE

A brilliantly constructed first novel . . . thoroughly convincing . . . great, raw impact. from a lead review in TIME.

Bankowsky is with one novel among our finest writers. L.A. MIRROR

AFTER PENTECOST

A grit of reality and an ecstasy of vision . . . as remarkable and intense a novel as the season is likely to produce. N. Y. TIMES

ON A DARK NIGHT

An ability to endow the most naturalistic of characters with mythical and heroic lineaments. N. Y. TIMES

THE PALE CRIMINALS

A high and strongly-marked talent right on the verge of full maturity. CHICAGO TRIBUNE

THE BARBARIANS AT THE GATES

Devastating . . . The novel is a work of revelation. KANSAS CITY STAR

A lesson for all mankind. NATIONAL REVIEW

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

Part One-Fortune

Part Two-Freedom

Part Three-Fate

EPILOGUE

Books by Richard Bankowsky

A GLASS ROSE

AFTER PENTECOST

ON A DARK NIGHT

THE PALE CRIMINALS

THE BARBARIANS AT THE GATES

REX NEMORENSIS

THE JUDAS TAPES

HELLO CENTRAL GIVE ME HEAVEN

GENIUS IN LOVE

HELLO CENTRAL GIVE ME HEAVEN

THE PALE CRIMINALS

or

The Recalcitrant Fourth

A Novel By

Richard Bankowsky

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2010, by Richard Bankowsky

For Jack, Richard, and Katya

The Ascension Altarpiece

COVERING THE ENTIRE WALL ABOVE AND BEHIND THE MAIN ALTAR OF THE MONASTERY CHAPEL OF THE DISCALCED CARMELITE FRIARS OF THE ASCENSION DESERT IN MEXICO STANDS A HUGE ALTARPIECE CONSISTING OF SIXTEEN TRIANGLES SEVEN AND ONE-HALF FEET ON A SIDE, FITTED TOGETHER TO FORM A THIRTY-FOOT EQUILATERAL TRIANGLE, THE VERTEX OF WHICH, RISING OUT OF A BASE RESTING ATOP THE ALTAR, FITS SNUGLY INTO THE CHAPEL'S CATHEDRAL CEILING. WITHIN THIS TRIANGLE A CIRCLE CIRCUMSCRIBING A SQUARE CONSISTING OF FOUR SMALLER TRIANGLES EACH OF WHICH CONTAINS PAINTED PERSONAGES IN VARIOUS BIBLICO-CONTEMPORARY SITUATIONS APPEARS TO REVOLVE.

TOGETER THE SIDES OF THE FOUR TRIANGLES FORM A CROSS WITHIN A SQUARE CIRCUMSCRIBED BY A REVOLVING CIRCLE FULL OF STARS AND PLANETS AND METEORS, INSCRIBED WITHIN A THIRTY-FOOT EQUILATERAL TRIANGLE CONTAINING IN ITS THREE ANGLES RESPECTIVELY, A CROWN, A CROSS, AND A DOVE, IN FIELDS OF AIRY WHITE, WATERY GREEN, AND FIERY RED.

PROLOGUE

Und wenn das mein A und O ist

das alles Schwere leicht, aller Leib Tanzer,

aller Geist Vogel werde:

und wahrlich, das ist mein A und O!

ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA

I am the Alpha and the Omega

.

When he arrived back in the city that evening, he found his recently re-orphaned twelve-year-old adopted kid brother in a deserted and, except for the single music lamp over the grand console, darkened Manhattan church; found him there booming away on what the choirmaster assured him were not merely simple reproductions of the opera and tone poems but absolutely ingenious transcriptions of the original Strauss pieces to suit the tonal and mechanical possibilities of their six Romantic swell-organs, amid which, incidentally, he thought he detected interspersed in almost unrecognizably baroque variations the musical car-horn MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB tune of their recently deceased mother's rose colored custom limousine.

According to the uniformed chauffeur he'd found waiting outside in the snow covered limousine, the boy had been at it since a little after the funeral that morning, having refused to take time out for even a light supper. He did not interrupt, however, either the performance or the modest choirmaster's accompanying ecstatic assurances that no ordinary artist like himself was capable of compelling such a magnificent instrument to obey his will, that only a miracle maker like his prodigious and precocious brother―a musical magician capable of endowing inanimate matter with sense and motion―could be expected to breathe life into those electric cables, those multiple switches, those motors, those valves that open and close, those expanding and contracting pneumatic engines . . .

He simply knocked the snow off his homburg, unbuttoned his chesterfield, loosened his muffler and sat down next to the choirmaster in a pew at the rear of the nave, not so much to listen as simply to immerse himself in the huge stillness, the sort of photographic negative of silence the booming organs developed around him, to put off as long as possible his having to confront the boy or anyone else, for that matter. For he was tired. He had just driven a couple of hundred snowy miles in from the Catskills, where that afternoon, just hours after burying his mother in a Bronx cemetery, he'd been invited to appear as the star witness in a syndicate trial at which his Seventh Avenue cloak and suit firm business partner, cousin, and deceased mother's thirty-five-year-old lover was given the kiss of death.

The fun had begun Christmas week when his kid brother was asked not to return to the Ponce de Leon Catholic School for the deaf after the holidays. The dismissal disturbed their mother, Stella, out of all proportion. Neither he nor Rosen, the family physician, could convince her that the dismissal had nothing whatsoever to do with her affair with his business partner, that the boy probably knew nothing of the affair to begin with, and even if he did, there was no reason to believe it had anything to do with his having supposedly been a bad moral influence on his companions, as the headmaster had unfortunately put it in an interview, though the official grounds for termination were the inability of the school to teach the boy anything since he was so far advanced scholastically that he belonged in college not secondary school. There was, however, the matter of the Schneewitchen essay, which, as Rosen put it, resulted, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred fifty-eight, in the state of Massachusetts, U.S.A., in the accusation, trial, and sentencing, by the inquisitorial court of the Ponce de Leon Catholic School for the deaf, of a twelve year old boy, for heresy.

The essay, A Psycho-theological Interpretation of the Apocalyptic Implications of the Schneewitchen Allegory, published in the Fountain of Youth, the Ponce de Leon literary magazine, founded and edited by the kid and subsidized by his mother, was harmless enough up to a point, which accounted for its getting by the strict faculty censorship, since according to the headmaster only the harmless part of the article had been submitted to him for scrutiny and imprimatur so to speak, the offensive part having been added without his knowledge. The kid himself did not contradict the old priest, ostensibly on the grounds, as he admitted later, that he could not accuse the old man to his face of not having done his homework as thoroughly as he should.

The harmless part of the article simply proposed that the Good King and Queen in the Snow White story were God and Mother Earth or Eden before the fall, that Snow White represented Mankind, that the Wicked Queen represented the earth fallen from vanity and pride up to whose beauty art holds a mirror. Mankind's original sin was signified by Snow White's birth, the death of the Good Queen Mother Earth and the appearance of the wicked Stepmother Earth who sends the child into the forest to die at the hands of the Huntsman representing Mankind's ouster from Eden.

However, instead of casting Mankind into hell for his disobedience, as the wicked stepmother had proposed in asking that the child's heart be brought back in a box; the Huntsman, a form of the Good King appearing as a wrathful but merciful God, merely sends Mankind out of Eden into the forest of the world to die, where luckily the dwarfs, who mining the earth of its gold representing classical humanistic civilization built on the seven hills of Rome, come to the aid of poor Mankind, saving him from the certain death in the fearful forests of proto-history, feeding and clothing and protecting him. At a price, of course, the price of domestication and socialization.

If you will keep house for us, cook, make bed, wash, sew and knit and make all neat and clean thou cans't stay with us and will want for nothing, the dwarfs promise. But they also warn, Beware thy wicked stepmother, which is to say beware the temptations of the fallen earth, roamed as it is by the serpent and Satan combined in the form of the wicked stepmother, that is, beware fallen man's own angelic and animalistic desires, which are irrational and anti-social and anti-civilizing.

Beware thy wicked stepmother, who will soon find out thou art here. Take care to let nobody in, the dwarfs warn, meaning that Mankind must not only not give in to extravagant super-or sub-human angelic or animalistic desires, he must not even think of them. Mankind must root them out of his heart completely, for if they are let into the house even for a second, they will surely outwit him, just as the wicked stepmother in her disguises outwits Snow White, selling Good wares cheap, very cheap.

The colored silks and laces and the comb and the apple, represent the three temptations Christ successfully overcame in the desert but to which Mankind eventually succumbs, succumbing, that is, to the materialism and unqualified naturalism and angelism of the Roman Empire in its decline, symbolized in the apple, the fruit of the forbidden tree of Eden returned, the eating of which signifies the Roman Empire's repetition of Adam's attempt to deify himself.

The Prince who wakens Snow White out of her deathlike sleep is of course Christ the son of the Good King and a projection of the wrathful but merciful Huntsman, who loves Mankind even though he is apparently dead, knocking out the apple stuck in his throat since Eden by way of the crucifixion, which in the fairy tale is modified and minimized just as it is in all forms of Christianity , save Roman Catholicism which are little more than fairy tales themselves minimized and modified into the stumbling of the Prince's servants over a shrub and the jolting of the casket in which Snow White lies as dead.

And as the fairy tale would have it, the Prince and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ―the Roman Empire now become the Holy Roman Empire― all live together happily in the palace of the Prince's father, the Holy Roman Church; the Wicked Queen, as the Brothers Grimm tell us in a very ambiguous ending, having been forced to put on red-hot shoes and dance until she drops to the ground dead.

That much of the essay the headmaster of Ponce de Leon approved; it was what followed that caused the stir. The essay went on to say that the statement about the disposition of the wicked Queen was meaningfully ambiguous.

To say that the Queen has to dance until she drops to the ground dead, is not to say that she is dead, or how long it will be before she is. For the dance the Queen is dancing in those red-hot shoes, which symbolize the Medieval Christian conquest of worldly Naturalism and Angelism in the ascetic doctrines of the Church, is the dance of the seven veils, whose voluptuous whirls and undulations, as they always have throughout the long history of the so-called belly-dance, represent the writhing and undulation of copulation and childbirth.

And it is during this dance that the wicked Queen androgynously gives birth to an hermaphrodite called the Renaissance, with whom Snow White, tiring of the connubial but unromantic and ascetic bliss of holy matrimony, begins a perverse extramarital affair, which has been going on now for five centuries while the bastard Prince bides his time, anticipating that moment when he may safely proclaim to the world that Snow White's marriage is incestuous, since she is wedded to her own brother, a proclamation which will result in the dwarfs' annulling the marriage and banishing the Prince and his children from his father's palace wherein the bastard hermaphroditic Prince and Snow White, united in an unholy passionate and of course sterile marriage, together with the wicked Queen and the Seven Dwarfs will frenziedly and passionately dance away their lives in red-hot shoes.

It was the essay that had convinced Stella that the kid knew about her affair with Wadzio. She was certain he'd written the analysis as a response to that knowledge. Rosen told her that she was behaving stupidly, that none of it had anything to do with her, but confided in her natural son, that if his kid brother did happen to know of the affair, some such response as the essay was not out of the question. Obviously, according to Rosen anyway, the boy didn't find it easy to tolerate having to share Stella with anybody, not even with him, her own flesh-and-blood son, much less a complete stranger like Wadzio. For there existed, Rosen assured him, some sort of secret subterranean and unformulatable carnal ties between Stella and the boy that went much beyond those embryonic attachments that supposedly bind mothers and their first-born natural sons like himself, ties which in precocious children were sometimes replaced positively by religious orientations or even vocations and negatively by anti-social or even criminal behavior.

According to the all-knowing Rosen, Stella's intuitive awareness of those ties, together with her own increasingly burdensome guilt over her affair with a fellow young enough to be her son, was what probably caused her to fear―though she would never admit it even to herself―that the bad moral influence he exerted over his classmates might somehow have been sexually perverse, which of course was not the case at all; Rosen having done his best to convince Stella that examinations of, and talks with, the boy before and since his dismissal had proved to his satisfaction at least that if anything the boy was healthily asexual, having devoted himself so thoroughly to his studies and to his music that our little pseudo adult, our little abortion, as he put it, couldn't be less interested in sex of any variety, at least not for the moment.

And though the boy's theological rendition of a fairy tale might very well have been a manifestation of an attempt to adjust to conflicts rising out of the stepmother's situation in the family as well as the problem of child adoption, problems with which the fairy tale was indirectly concerned; its allegorical and anagogic implications were much more important than its psychological sources and were evidence not of the boy's illness but rather of his extraordinarily prodigious intellectual health. The essay was in fact the straw that broke the camel's back, leaving him from the point of view of the Ponce de Leon School stranded out in the desert of Anathema, but from the point of view of the modem world ensconced in an Edenic oasis that the rest of his companions in the schoolboy caravan toward Rome had completely by-passed

Rosen said he had seen it coming for a long time. For though it was true the boy was a perfect gentleman, dearly beloved of all the nuns and priests at school, a perfect little charmer, and on the surface at least as loving and warm-hearted and generous as Stella herself; he had more than once confessed to him that back at school every time he opened his mouth his teachers were impressed but scandalized.

Because certainly, Rosen said, the Ponce de Leon School can't be expected to accept, without at least a battle, the obvious fact that the symbols of Christianity as the Church dispenses them in the twentieth century are no longer sufficiently vital to sustain any but the most superficial kind of belief from the modern muddleheaded Christian much less from a genius like the kid; saying, "Why even among the muddleheaded the Christian god is about in the same state of disrepute as the anthropomorphic Roman gods and goddesses were in the first century A.D., worshipped but not believed.

As a matter of fact, the advent of psychotherapy, the rediscovery of the physical and the psychic after nearly two centuries of depreciation in the name of the spirit, is a modern analogue of the Advent of Christ and the consequent rediscovery of spirit after a long classical depreciation in the name of the body. But certainly you can't expect the Ponce de Leon pietists to admit that the seesawing between overemphasis on flesh or spirit throughout the history of Western civilization will cease only when we finally realize that flesh and spirit are one and that the incestuous dualism implied in traditional Christianity, with its insistence on the absolute goodness but separateness of matter and spirit, is apocryphal. And the Church's attempt to get us to accommodate the contradictory dualistic concepts of our superstitious past, to live in such tension under such an intolerable burden is to force us to our knees when we ought to be dancing.

All of which was immanent in the Schneewitchen essay, and generally accepted issuing from the mouths of scientists like himself in the real world, Rosen pointed out, whereas out of the mouth of a twelve-year-old at the Ponce de Leon Catholic School for the deaf . . . well . . . . His defense of the boy was apparently wasted on Stella, however, who even agreed that she was probably blowing the whole thing up out of all proportion, and then simply and absolutely proceeded to refuse to have anything more to do with Wadzio, though she was dying to see him and was tearing herself up with drink in her loneliness.

It wouldn't be any good, she said, absolutely refusing to see him under any circumstances. I'd be expecting him to burst in on us any moment. He must have followed me there sometime last summer or whenever. Anyway, I'm sure he knows. He thought I was perfect. He thought I was an angel. And now? He's not like you, darling. He's only a boy. You're a man. You know that even mothers aren't perfect; saying over and over again, with that incredible note of fear in her voice, how uncanny it was, how the boy seemed to know things about her she never would have dreamed anyone would ever be able to fathom.

Intimate things, things he shouldn't know. Things you wouldn't expect a child . . . I mean not even a grown man would be expected . . . I mean it's just impossible to keep any secrets from him, even though he isn't home but a few months of the year. Don't ask me how he knows. Maybe it's his deafness, his ability to read lips at great distances. But how does lip reading explain his knowing things I've never spoken of to anyone? I just can't help thinking that even now, somehow, even though he's in bed with his nanny watching over him, somehow to compensate for his hearing loss or something, he can see through walls, through darkness and over great distances. And if I were to go to Wadzio just for an hour, he would know. And even now, this minute, lying there in bed in that absolutely hellish silence that surrounds him, I know he's reading my lips as I talk to you.

All of which, as far as he, her natural son, was concerned, was just a little too spooky to be anything but her guilty conscience operating overtime, even though his own observations and his talks with Rosen about the kid's precocity more or less confirmed Stella's awe and downright superstitious fear of him. For that was what it was, awe and fear. And as far as he was concerned, only a mother, or rather a stepmother who was willing, when she already had a natural son of her own, to take into her home not only somebody else's bastard, but a handicapped one at that, could ever be naïve enough to call it love.

The kid’s handicap of course accounted for the orphanage's giving him to her in the first place, since they didn't usually give kids to widows unless, as in her case, the widow happened to be wealthy enough to provide special tutors and special care to develop an obvious precocity which parents who might have provided a more stable family environment couldn't have afforded to nurture even if they had been willing to take a handicapped child in the first place. And of course they knew nothing at all about her drinking, a problem which, even increasing as it had through her menopause, none but her intimates were aware of, and certainly not St. Michael's orphanage.

Her drinking never interfered, for instance, with her frequent weekend trips to visit the Ponce de Leon School or, in the last two years, her just as frequent weekend trips to visit a mental-patient cousin of Wadzio's up in a Connecticut sanitarium, whom Wadzio, according to Rosen, apparently never took the time to visit himself; Wadzio, of whom she said that final night after several weeks of not seeing him, Oh God, how I wish he'd go out and get himself a beautiful young thing to marry and leave me alone. There are so many in the district. Honestly, it makes an old woman like me weep to see all those beautiful young things all over Seventh Avenue.

Her back was to him but her face reflected in the vanity mirror, that sad faraway smile on her lips, just as serious and pensive for a moment as he'd ever seen her, putting on a diamond choker she'd just removed from the safe hanging open on the wall, dressing to go to a show with Glory, she said, though he knew that Glory and Rosen had made plans with him to go with them, since Stella had called Glory earlier that day saying she didn't feel well enough to join them after all. He of course did not question her, assuming that she was going to Wadzio's or at least was going to meet him somewhere, since he was supposed to be out of town for the weekend. Or at least that was the excuse Wadzio had given Glory when she'd asked him to the show earlier that day hoping to play Cupid.

He assumed Stella was keeping her date with Wadzio a secret even from him and Rosen and Glory in order to keep the kid from finding out about it, which seemed an extraordinary precaution, but hardly a surprising one considering the way she'd been acting the past few weeks since the kid was home from school, refusing to go out at all in the evening and spending all day with him at the city museums, or visiting various alumni groups of Ivy League colleges interested in having the boy apply at their schools for the fall term, or searching out suitable tutors for the spring and summer before the fall term began, or listening to him play the organ at the uptown church he was permitted to use because of his extraordinary talent as well as Stella’s generous endowment of her parish

And so he did not question. And late the next morning he walked into the apartment and called her name. And there was a note on the secretary blotter from the kid, saying he'd borrowed her chauffeur and would be down at the church practicing and would send the car back around noon to pick her up for some Bromo and brunch, and that long talk. And it was almost noon by then, and the snow was oh so white on the terrace behind the glass doors; and he called her name, and the door to her bedroom was open and the room still and her face just as polished and beautiful as ever under the sleeping mask. And he tried to wake her. And there were a few last words and then nothing, only the silken headed pigeons bobbing and strutting out there on the terrace beyond the glass doors, picking at the bread crumbs she had tossed out for them into the snow.

It was over her deathbed that Rosen, in a fit of despair, finally revealed the little bit of incredible melodrama they'd been so successfully keeping from him all those years, which bit of melodrama Rosen confessed he held to account for Stella's unconscionable guilt and what he considered her consequent suicide, despite the fact that on the attending physician's report he'd entered the cause of death as heart failure; saying, "She's had a long history of heart trouble, your mother had. And so what I've written on this report is the truth. Much more the truth than if I had gone and performed an autopsy to prove what I suspect even though there's no note or empty vial of sleeping pills around.

Because your mother has had more trouble of the heart than anyone could ever imagine. And she died of heart trouble whether she'd taken an overdose of sleeping tablets or not. And maybe I shouldn't tell you, but I guess you have a right to know. And I can tell you, only because next to you and Harry nobody loved her more than I did. And you know as well as I do there was never a better person, but even saints make mistakes. So I don't know what good it will do to tell you; because nobody ever was a better father than Harry, and for all anybody knows, including her, he might very well have been your father after all.

That was when he learned that his father, Harry Greenglass, the originator of the Greenglass and Son Seventh Avenue cloak-and-suit firm, had found a little seventeen-year-old Polish Catholic girl from a little town across the river in Jersey called Anderson, the same town Wadzio happened to come from; found her almost literally in a gutter and had given her a modeling job in his New York show rooms even though she didn't fit his suits, and within three or four months had married her even though she'd told him she had a baby in her belly which if it weren't his might have been fathered by any number of derelicts, numbered among whom was her own father; which information he, her son, in a fit of despair himself over that same deathbed, accepted as a rather trite, melodramatic, and tedious story about somebody he had not only never known, but who did not even exist except as a character in a trite, melodramatic, and tedious story that Rosen showed very poor taste in detailing

At that point, however, considering the extent of their loss, poor taste was not only forgivable but even acceptable or desirable, even to the extent of wailing and the wringing of hands, and the beating of breasts and tearing of hair, which outward trappings of grief unfortunately neither of them had the requisite bad taste to indulge themselves in. And even if the girl Rosen was talking about had been the Stella he'd known, it wouldn't have made any difference. For as Rosen himself had said even saints make mistakes, just like anybody else. The only difference was that a saint's mistakes were something to be not so much forgiven as cherished.

And even if she weren't a saint, which everybody knows all mothers are even if they aren't, amid all the mistakes that Rosen had so tastelessly documented, even if Wadzio hadn't been her greatest, even if he had somehow indirectly or even directly caused her death. He had been a part of her. He had been one of her mistakes and therefore had to be cherished, the more so the bigger the mistake he represented. Because you didn't judge right or wrong by any kind of absolute standards; he knew that now. You judged it by who was doing the right or wrong.

He'd learned that a long time ago, that evening way back in '52 as the girls adjourned to Stella's