On the River Styx: And Other Stories

  And so, to amuse myself, I set one upon the other, confident that both secretly enjoyed this. “Their claws,” as someone once remarked of a somewhat more auspicious pair, “were set so deep into each other that if they pulled apart, they would soon bleed to death.”

  BOUND FOR HAITI, our freighter trailed smoke south through the horse latitudes, where in other times dead horses were heaved overboard from ships becalmed in the Sargasso Sea. Horace, still cheerful to a fault, had held the upper hand on the bounding main of the North Atlantic, but in the pewter calms of the horse latitudes his companion began to stir into dull life, and ashore in Haiti, where seasickness no longer stayed him, Hassid moved very quickly to the fore. Scarcely had his slippered foot touched land—and land, moreover, where his favorite tongue was the official language—when he stood full-blown before us, a true bon vivant whose delicate French and urbane manner made him the natural leader of our little party. Who then if not the bold Turk dismissed Port-au-Prince as unworthy of our custom? No, no, quoth he, we would hire a conveyance and escape the sea, à la campagne, à la montagne! So enchanted was he by this inland prospect that he waved his arms in fine Gallic abandon, inadvertently inciting to near hysteria the hordes of jobless Haitians who rushed along with us, desperate to attend to every need.

  The human din, the forceful smells, the ribald colors of the waterfront juxtaposed with grinding poverty and filth, drove Horace to condemn the Roman Church, which he blamed—with bitter looks at Hassid—for the plight of this beautiful, unhappy country. Politically oblivious, Hassid ignored him, having commenced dealings with a sober-suited native who had persevered so with his winks and hisses as to commend himself at last to the Turk’s attention. Even now our new Haitian acquaintance was revealing the existence of another friend, almost as dear to him as we were, who knew more about Haiti than anyone since Toussaint l’Ouverture. As luck would have it, this same friend was the master of a splendid car designed perfectly for whatever purpose les gentilshommes might have in mind. This friend, said he, might be engaged upon short notice, and sure enough, a spavined Ford came forward even as he spoke, honking and backfiring along the curb. Its clairvoyant chauffeur turned out to be none other than Charles (“Tous mes amis Americains m’appellent Shar-lie”), the international authority on Haiti, who swore he would place his awesome expertise at our disposal for a prix d’ami that was nothing short of laughable. In proof of this he laughed, more or less merrily, hurling his car door wide to show us in.

  Gold-toothed and fragrant in a many-colored shirt, Charlie was as festive as Pierre was somber, and his black skin shone in the very places where Pierre’s old hide looked gray and dull. Adjusting his tone from the first instant to the whims of Hassid, he said, Yes! Yes! We would make a tour de ville, and afterward un petit séjour à la campagne, à la montagne—and afterward? Here Charlie permitted himself a discreet pause, an elevation of the eyebrow, recognized at once by the worldly Turk, who fetched poor Horace a whack across the back. It now transpired that Charlie’s rate had been set so ludicrously low owing to his confidence that après?… his new friends would refresh themselves at a private club of his acquaintance where nice clean girls of eighteen were awaiting us.

  “Cloob?” Horace whimpered.

  “Maison de rendezvous!” Hassid exulted, embarking at once on a spirited discussion of what lay in store for us. “They don’t call you Whore-ass for nothing!” he told the missionary—for my benefit, since Horace would never in a month of Sundays understand this subtle jeu de mot.

  “Well, this boy’s not ronday-vooin at no durn cloob,” Horace hollered. “Gonna ronday-voo right back to that durn boat!”

  Fearful—as I thought at first—of losing his advantage, the Turk assured the highly agitated missionary that this talk of cloobs meant nothing whatsoever. “I suppose I’m used to folks who speak the truth,” said Horace, with a sniff of pinch-nosed sanctimoniousness that collapsed Hassid in silent harem mirth. He had not seen Horace wink at me.

  Negotiations concluded, we set off in Charlie’s car, accompanied by the glum Pierre, who wished to keep an eye on his investment. Honking his way up the main street, our guide stopped at every shop to extol its ethnic wares. Only Horace bought a few peculiar odds and ends, to perk up his mission in Brazil, and Charlie’s repute must have suffered in these places. Relieved to whisk us from the city, he drove off in a scattering of dogs and children for Pétionville, up in the mountains.

  At a quaint hostelry decked in poinsettias, Charlie disappeared into the kitchen, hoping we would decide to eat while we awaited him. He did not bother his head about Pierre, who perched his cadaverous frame on a kind of dunce’s stool just by the doorway, the better to watch our consumption of lean steak and local greens. Even the hard heart of Hassid was touched by Pierre’s mournful demeanor, but our offer of sustenance was declined with dignity. He required no food for himself, Pierre intoned, but if we wished, he would accept a monetary offering with which he might hope to feed his hungry children.

  Charlie emerged, wiping his mouth, and we drove on. Burping a little, he discoursed freely on the subject of the ex-slave Dessalines, as well as on Pétion, Henri Christophe, Toussaint l’Ouverture—“Dat is my hero à moi,” said Charlie, pointing at himself—and other champions of Haitian independence. Not infrequently during our journey, this enterprising man with the gold incisor would shout pow-pow-pow! in wild patriotic fervor, to demonstrate how the Haitians of old shot down the French. Why modern Haitians did not do as much for their modern despots he would not say.

  From atop a mountain, we gazed down upon Port-au-Prince and the great Gulf of Gonave, assailed the while by five musicians who stepped from a bush to coax hideous sounds from hollow gourds and other unpromising implements. Our freighter, loading a cargo of grain meal across the bay, was a mere white speck in the blue distance. At a shop which enjoyed our guide’s unqualified approval, the curios, though more costly, were otherwise identical to those in Port-au-Prince—sisal and mahogany, real voodoo fetishes, real voodoo drums conveniently inscribed “Souvenir of Haiti,” stuffed hawksbill turtles, crafted seashells, and other useful Caribbean gewgaws. The whole display was enshrined on film by Horace, who made the tortuous journey down the mountain more exciting by shouting at Charlie to stop on each blind turn so that he might “snap” the bright-clothed native women, the fruit baskets and flower-bedecked burros, swaying down against the sky and distant sea.

  SINCE CHARLIE had flattered us as types sportifs, we permitted him to transport us to the cockfights, which were held on Saturdays and Sundays in a rickety arena on the city’s outskirts. The vivid plumage of cock and man was intensified that afternoon by the tropic sun that came pouring like gold air through the slats as through a stained-glass window—or so, at least, I read aloud to Hassid from what I was writing on the “local color” page in my field Horace, diverted momentarily from the fights, the bets, the reek of cane liquor, the wicked happy laughs of “fallen women,” denounced my irreligious simile in no uncertain terms as he changed film.

  “Should a missionary witness such things?” Hassid asked Horace. “Blood sports and gambling? Scarlet women?”

  “Lord Jesus did,” Horace informed him, adjusting his pink bow tie.

  The cocks, shorn of combs and tail plumes, were rangy little roosters of starved and hard-bitten demeanor. Prior to the fight, their leg horns, or spurs, had been rasped to two sharp points, and water was now spat copiously upon them, lest they expire of heat prostration before winning money for their owners. For the first suspenseful moments, the two birds circled, beak to beak and taut as arrows. Then the doomed things jumped and fluttered, pecked and spurred until one dropped. The loser never learned from hard experience but went right on flailing at the stronger bird. When finally it toppled from exhaustion and loss of blood, the victor, itself close to death, squatted down and blinked.

  Feeling ran high at the cockfight, each telling coup greeted with stamps and hoots, or loud cries of Bis, bis!?
??Again, again!—and another round of reckless betting. Between fights, the bird owners crowded pell-mell into the tiny ring, insulting one another at the top of their lungs as if to invigorate their charges. The cocks, which were wedged beneath their arms, facing backward, missed no chance to go at each other en passant.

  The crowd of sinners made a glorious spectacle.

  “Most of these poor lost souls are your feller Catholics,” Horace told Hassid, not bothering to come out from behind his camera. “We’ll title this one ‘Sodom and Gomorrah.’ ”

  “You seem to be enjoying this as much as they are,” Hassid nagged Horace.

  “Have mercy, Lord”—click—“they know not what they do.”

  “I hate you,” Hassid said, with sudden feeling.

  “Forgiveness is divine,” said Horace. “I forgive you.”

  From the cockfights we repaired once more into the countryside, to the coastal villages and bright green rice paddies along the southern shore of La Gonave. The haunted appearance of thin country folk, the strangled graveyards on the silver bay, made me ask Charlie if any real voodoo was still practiced. After some muttering about “way back in de mountain,” Charlie changed the subject, not because I had struck a hidden vein of native folkways but because he had been distracted from his purpose, which very shortly came to light.

  Without warning, he ran the old Ford off into a rutted side road, nearly killing an old woman who was trying to cross. Ignoring Horace’s frantic queries, he drove up smartly to a villa on the shore where a large group of lightly clad young ladies (members of the cloob, I assured Horace) were taking the air of afternoon under the palms.

  “Drive on! Drive on!” cried Horace, gaze averted.

  I assured him that there were colors, shapes, and sizes for even the most spiritual taste, all wearing the most angelic smiles imaginable. A few now rose and sashayed forward, as Hassid flared his nostrils in anticipation. “Whore-ass, you have come to the right place,” he gloated, poking the forefinger of one hand through the fist of the other.

  “Drive on!” Horace implored him. “Please. Drive on!”

  Just then, a girlish voice rose above the dulcet clamor. “Hey, Joe!” the siren called, “I yam a virgin!”—an unpardonable donable insult to the Turk’s intelligence, it appeared, since he immediately frowned and turned away. Yet what he had heeded, I realized later, was the anguished yelp of a soul about to be cast down into perdition—was it that, or was it Horace’s use of his first name?

  “Please, Hassid,” Horace had whispered, leaning forward and pressing his brow to the back of the front seat.

  Hassid stared straight ahead and did not speak. Then, shrugging his shoulders in apology, he asked me gently, “All right, my friend? What is a day, a week, a month, after all …?” And to our astonishment, he folded his arms on his chest and sat back with a lordly sigh.

  “Drive on,” he said.

  Poor Pierre, half-turned in the front seat, shook his bony skull in unashamed grief. Failing to avail ourselves of these young women, his expression said, might prove a mortal blow to his poor children. As for Charlie, he gave vent to his outrage in a furious burst of speed that nearly wrecked his car in the deep ruts. Pursued by a large and savage dog—nowhere to be seen as we drove up—we hastened away to the coast road and the harbor, our entire sojourn having occupied less than a minute.

  Horace, by his own fervent statement, had never had carnal knowledge of a woman other than her to whom he had cleaved in holy matrimony. To his dismay, the wicked Turk, regretting, perhaps, his kindly gesture, spoke lightly of a carnal caper in the morgue. These revelations, which came to light in the high excitement that followed our departure from the private club, engaged our attention all the way back to the ship.

  Under hard lights, in the steaming air, soft sacks of meal tumbled by stevedores raised a fine dust from the freighter’s hold. The day aboard ship, the Chief confided, had been uneventful save for one thrilling event: The First, intoxicated, had attempted to descend a rope boarding-ladder without troubling to secure it properly beforehand, and had descended farther than he might have wished, into the bay.

  DOMINICA, SAINT LUCIA, Barbados, Saint Vincent, Grenada, Trinidad. Horace no longer went ashore except to mail letters to his wife and pay calls on the local missionaries. He had produced a thin mustache which did not suit him, and a pair of shorts which suited him still less, and perhaps these accoutrements dissuaded his peers from offering him the opportunity to preach that his heart desired. The nearer he drew to wife and children, the more he gave way to abject homesickness. Try as we would to tease him out of it by promising him young girls at Port of Spain, he did not rise up to denounce us, as he once had, but only complained disspiritedly of the smell of fish, which had escaped its unknown source and trailed him everywhere. And still he wrote daily to his wife, even when our journey was so advanced that no letter would reach her before he did.

  “What do you tell?” Hassid would yell, tearing his hair. “Excuse me, I don’t get it! You reveal how many pieces of meat you ate up at your dinner, or what is it? What happened to you on this stinking ship between yesterday and now? What can you possibly be saying to her? What?”

  “You would know that, Hassid, if you’d ever found a wife,” Horace said pityingly. He winked at me, but Hassid did too. I felt an unexpected twinge of isolation.

  We left the Windwards in our wake, cleared Port of Spain. Day after day, down the long and empty coast of the wild continent, the freighter rolled southeastward through an olive sea, against the might of the equatorial current. The long meals were purgatorial, the white sun mute; the cargo gave off a sweet reek, the warm air thickened. Once again Hassid was seasick and depressed, and took such comfort as he could from reviling Horace. In the iron bow, hands fluttering like birds, they shrieked their love song to the wind, stick figures lifted toward the far light of heaven, plummeting again, on the oily clouds of the vast tropic horizon.

  1959

  MIDNIGHT TURNING GRAY

  Once, when approaching the hospital by the side road through the woods, she knew she would round the final bend to find it gone—not gone, precisely, but sunk back into that coarse New England hillside like a great crushed anthill, its denizens so many mad black dots darting in and out and over the dead earth. Earlier she had imagined that the season here was always autumn, and she struggled still with an idea that the inmates, in some essential way, did not exist at all.

  But Lime Rock State Mental Hospital surged out from behind the corner of the wood, awaiting her. Her heart quickened: if the sun shines here, she thought irrationally, it must shine everywhere.

  She was relieved to see the buildings. There were always figures on the woods road, figures whose status or intent was never certain. And patients, as one of the nurses had once warned her, tried now and then to get away. In her caution, Anne Pryor perceived in all strange faces on the grounds a certain secretive sly sickness, and was glad each morning of the protection of the buildings, where the ill, organized like livestock, were dealt with by the duly authorized.

  The wings of each building extended toward the recesses of others, in a pattern like a puzzle pulled apart, and unless one knew one’s way—as Anne, though three weeks here, was certain she did not—the puzzle seemed malevolent and confusing. The roofs of these buildings were slate and steep, overhanging dark grilled porches set into the ends, like caves, and the windows, hollow-eyed and barred, crouched back in brick of a rufous earthen color. This color pervaded the place, even to the lifeless ground from which it rose.

  For though Lime Rock Hospital had stood for thirty years, it had never been absorbed by the countryside. Rather than creep forward to camouflage its outline, the growth on this New England hill had seemed to shrink away, leaving it more and more exposed. The grass was thin, and the earth maintained its excavated look. It had a violent iron smell, like blood.

  This morning the smell was muted by the new November cold. Leaving the car in the ya
rd behind the Administration Building, Anne took a last deep breath before entering its basement by the fire door. In the converted boiler room Dr. Sobel and Mrs. McKittredge and Harry Marvin were having coffee. Dr. Sobel put down his cup as Anne entered the room and said good morning to her as he left. Every day Dr. Sobel, an odd soft little man with a Phi Beta Kappa key, moved a little more quickly, more intensely, toward the wards. He called them the Augean Stables. The term was facetious, and Dr. Sobel was not a facetious man. He used it only because he did not want people to tell him—as Mrs. McKittredge, or Mac, as she was called, had long since told him—that, for his own sake, he ought to recognize the element of hopelessness in his task.

  “He’s going to die here, old Doc Sobel, and he may be a patient by the time he does.” Harry Marvin, twenty-eight, was sallow and dark, with a long cropped head and a manner which was not Harvard, as he imagined, but only faintly effeminate. He had been, in the war, a pharmacist’s mate, and on this slim medical background based his opinion, shared by Anne, six years his junior, that she had neither the experience nor the temperament to work here.

  “Mental hospitals,” Mac remarked, “must settle for what they can get.” In saying this, she implied no criticism of Dr. Sobel but was simply stating for the first time that day her favorite fact. Mac was a social worker and, unlike Sobel, was less concerned with the patients than with their treatment at the hands of the state. “And what do they get?” she demanded. “They get the Sobels, who are too starry-eyed to see that two thirds of what their salaries should be go for the mushrooms on those politicians’ steaks. They get the Harry Marvins, whose medical training wouldn’t qualify them for a job in an Old Dogs’ Home. And they fill in with little student nurses and nice kids like Anne, who are overworked for nothing!”