Returning each day as I would to Woodlawn from the hospital, one would remain in a pall. Despite walking along Fifth Avenue for some cheer, and feeling a guilty response to the Christmas organ music, and the white-bearded Santa Claus ringing a bell. Then to brave the evening hours away eating at my desk in the front room, hunched over a tray of turnips, broccoli, mashed potatoes, and chicken. Could it ever leave one in any doubt about withdrawing and living forever away from this world. And go instead back to where one was surrounded by nothing but bogs, moorlands and open fields. Able to walk amid the purple heather, the cornflowers, the golden gorse, thistles and nettles. And these flora coming alive, I now found in such books as Patrick Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn and The Green Fool. Reminders, and I needed them, that a writer’s life and work was worthy to the world. And that there was at least some solace in having written the first sprawling draft of The Ginger Man.
It turned out that Gainor’s friend John Preston published by Scribner’s whom he occasionally visited in Greenwich Village, when told of his publisher’s reaction to S.D., said I was being treated with great consideration, which he said was rare for an unknown writer and certainly meant that one day someone somewhere would publish such a manuscript. I remembered too Wheelock’s words that there was hardly anything he could criticize about it as a novel. But with the thump, thump, thump pounding of daily reality, what might be in the future did leave me now with none. It seemed that only letters I wrote to Valerie allowed one to at least briefly escape out of one’s own painful little world of angst. Gainor saying on the phone, “Mike, in Europe it was merely petty pilfering out of one’s emotional reserves, but here in this nightmare it is wholesale rape and demolition.”
Gainor also felt that Lea, who, like us decamped from Ireland and who invited us both back again and again to her house and continued to show us boundless hospitality, was a lady who in fact hated us both, if not for one particular reason then maybe for a million. And Gainor said that he was already depressed enough without being further depressed by her. It could have been that Lea had achieved respectable survival, whereas Gainor and myself, for all our struggles, were samples of the very opposite. Lea had, however, attempted to chivy along Ernie’s agent Mavis Macintosh over S.D., so that as much as I might suspect Gainor’s words of being true, I for the time being had to withhold judgment. But then Gainor’s predicaments were now so many. And his friends in America perhaps growing fewer. Especially in matters where he had incurred indebtedness, when Gainor was likely now to resent any move or action to recover same.
“Mike, it seems that for whatever one has been accused of having done, one must then naturally expect to be disliked, hated or sued. But lawyers, Mike, they seem to come in their legions out of the woodwork. Indeed, I think this whole bloody country and its citizens have set sail out upon one vast uncontrollable sea of litigation. Upon which I would hope one day soon to have my own monetary little craft to cruise about upon the topmost waves. But, Mike, above all, beyond all, we must ourselves keep possessed of the admirable, the seraphic, and trust to fondness and charity, no matter what destiny doth deliver us in woe.”
Days going by now, one’s animation suspended, and able to stand less and less the brunt of misfortune. Taking one’s temperature by morning and evening. And knowing numerous symptoms from medical studies, I was then choosing a matching disease that might be in the slow process of killing me. I was kept meanwhile alive by tuna fish, mushroom soup, lettuce and home-preserved peaches. My mother said if my sister, Rita, had gold she should wear it to be seen by the world. But I also sensed that despite my nonaccomplishment in the American tradition of success, that my uncompromising words and more my behavior was making itself felt on the whole of this family. Although I despaired the telephone, which seemed to ring insistently with the most purposeless interruptions to destroy one’s mornings, there were still these wonderful long calls from Gainor for which I am sure he still owes the bill. He would enunciate in his precise manner his opinions and comments, which could be enjoyed and savored at a safe distance.
“Mike, forgive me if I should bore you with this. But I am still bedeviled by the event of my involuntary erection in front of Mutt’s girlfriend in the chill hallway, where my member sprang to its full limits of rigidity in about the three or less seconds flat. And as it did so, it actually quivered. It positively seemed as if it were provoked by something primeval and had its own mind in the matter. Mike, can you from your broad knowledge obtained in the study of zoology possibly give me an explanation of this. I know that dinosaurs had a plexus of nerves situated at the latter end of the spine which served as a secondary brain to operate the back half of their body.”
“Gainor, you are quite correct about dinosaurs, but I must in your case, based on what you have told me of the incident and the girl’s physical features, assume that you were overtaken by purely hysterical, unpremeditated lust, which may have been aided and abetted by you and Mutt’s girlfriend having both been to high school in Ohio.”
Gainor seemed amazingly to turn my explanations over in his head, thanked me and hung up the phone. But now came a week of silence from him. And I was to later learn that he was away again visiting pals he’d made of a decidedly Bohemian couple, Justin, a painter, and Sally, his attractive heiress, who lived at Woodstock, upper New York State. A town of a thousand in the Catskill Mountains, where Gainor urged me now to come with him to sample the peace and calm that could be found in the rural surroundings but where he said a rainstorm unleashed a cloudburst, which washed out the roads. But I found myself now tending to decline invitations which took me into strange company. I preferred, with my own hopes growing fainter, to reclusively stay afloat midocean with one’s tiny life preserver. It being harder and harder to awaken and come alive to rise up in the battle once more. The tentacles of despair locked around one. Sitting there in the old white house atop the hill. Deep in trouble. Staring at my fingernails. Hart Island on one’s mind. And the unsung who died friendless and unmourned in this city. Their flesh and bone abandoned to be taken to be buried with the other unknown and forgotten. Under a cross bearing an inscription over their anonymous graves, “He calleth his children by name.” And April had said, “J.P., what does it matter what happens to you when you die.” And I wrote out in tiny capitals on a piece of paper I gave her.
IT MATTERS ALL THE DAYS YOU LIVE.
My mother, from her continued remarks about T.J.’s girlfriend, seemed to have no thought for the years T.J. had got yet to live and that it was his life. His very life. Which indeed I thought she might now see end. Although one started one’s withdrawal and was even becoming fearful of stirring out, I went daily to visit T.J. in the great anonymous bowels of Bellevue. I still had left my life-giving letters of love I wrote to Valerie in Europe. And I somehow garnered enough strength to brace myself and to face everything. For now I felt that the whole family could go. One had heard the expression “big casino.” And I in some way began to connect this term with catastrophic disease, that when it came to one or another member of a family it could wipe the entire family out, striking almost as a lethal pestilence sowing its seed of death. I could not believe that doctors, with the largest incomes of any professional sector in American life, were against any form of socialized medicine, which could protect from such ruinous calamity. I was more concerned now than ever that my passage was finally booked. And that at least and at last I was able to focus on that final day one could get out.
Although he seemed to have amazing powers of recovery, each day of T.J.’s survival came with relief. But there was no doubt that T.J., whatever else besieged him, had heart. The doctor admitting that they had not expected him to survive. His good physical condition and his will to live keeping him alive. Moved to another ward now, T.J. had spoken to a young man who was of an Irish background and had been to good Catholic schools. One day he noticed he had a sore on his side which got progressively bigger and grew into a hole, and he had to be removed to the
hospital. His mother came each day visiting as the hole got even larger and he was slowly dying. And T.J. announced that he suspected the mother was killing the boy and now the boy was dead. As were other occupants of the ward each day when someone new appeared in their bed, and they were taken away, white sheets drawn back over their faces.
I made now every effort to get T.J. home. Out and away from the atmosphere of despair, sorrow and death. That what there might be of hope and recovery was better found back in his room, where the winter branches of a cherry tree could be seen out the window. But I could also sense that life in America was for T.J., as it was for Gainor and I, becoming impossible. I was hardly even keen to get calls from Lea, who had previously been asking Gainor and I to breakfast, which when we were unable to accept was now converted to lunch. She seemed exhilarated but told Gainor she was living out of her top emotional drawer.
“Mike, I told her so were we all. Except in our case, we had no drawers left.”
I showed up first at Lea’s. Ringing the doorbell and at the delay of an answer, I had looked in the window to see if anyone was home. A large fire roaring in the front living room where John Fountain was sitting alone and seemed to look vacantly out into space. Now answering the door, he welcomed me in and offering whiskey to drink, he explained Lea was still out shopping. Minutes later Gainor arrived freezing without an overcoat and in sandals and white socks. And then all of us ensconced by the fire, suddenly Fountain asked Gainor of his life and then of both our marriages and then he smiled, a killed smile, and said,
“You don’t know what happiness is till you’re married and then it’s too late.”
When Lea arrived out of a taxi and overflowing with packages, the neighbors on either side were invited in and champagne flowed. And all three men were jolted out of their doldrums. There was no doubt that if this beautiful and vivacious lady had shortcomings, she had many fewer than most. And even Ernest Gebler, left back in Ireland without her, had written me that she was innocent of any grave intent and a woman he had, and still did, deeply love.
But going to and from Bellevue Hospital day after day, I was randomly wandering and making visits elsewhere in the city. Seeing tall April, the golden girl of the rapierlike words and tumbling blond hair, who said she wanted and would get a steel priapus for Christmas to give the girl downstairs to use instead of her Great Dane. She was, in spite of her betrayal and leaving us in the lurch with the lesbians, becoming Gainor’s and my mentor and mascot, and joining us on a visit to see Tally Brown. She came all bundled up as if ready to go skiing. And as arctic winds blew snow down the Hudson, and along by the barren high cliffs of the Palisades, it was nearly what we had to end up doing, only snowshoes would have proven better than skis. But inside Tally’s, we were safe from the descending blizzard. Incense burned as we sumptuously dined by candlelight off pasta, filet mignon, creamed spinach, garlic bread, and exquisite Burgundy. These two ladies contrasting so much in shape and size, traded equally wise words of wisdom and kindly for dessert offered us both blow jobs to which suggestion Gainor rose to announce,
“Although I only speak for myself, I am ready, my dear ladies, in acknowledgment of your great compassion, kindness and charity to have my brains blown out if it makes, as you suggest it does, for any modicum of contentment and indeed serves as a dessert which clearly shall have no peer.”
In this acoustically resounding chamber, April vocalized a song of her own called “My Jangles No Longer Jingle for Yingle Yule.” Then Tally, whose unparalleled bel canto voice could tear at one’s heartstrings and ranged through opera, the blues, jazz and to Stephen Foster, sang from Fauré’s requiem and arias from La Traviata. And then came the Hungarian lament “Gloomy Sunday,” which Gainor often played upon comb and paper and hummed back in the old sod. Tally’s graceful fingers gently touching across the keys of her great black concert grand piano, as this haunting music and its words pervaded the sprawling drawing room and her exquisite voice rung from the words their deathful sadness. Tears welled in Gainor’s eyes, and a couple of globules of moisture fell down even my own cheeks. And it almost seemed in these transcending moments that we could be back in Balscaddoon House on Howth Head in Ireland with the stormy seas pounding the cliff side.
It was as if a sacredly if brief wonderful redemption had been given us this night in Washington Heights which could preserve us through all the clobberings and defeats that had been or might yet come. And stave off for indefinite time that last and fatally depressing ignominy that Gainor and I awaited to befall us. But as I began to retreat into a shell of silence to fight my last round, this was to be nearly the very last of social occasions in America. A blizzard had fallen during the night, leaving the city silent, traffic stopped and stranded all over New York. And good ole April was the only one ready for the weather. Holed up as we were next day till early afternoon with Tally’s pancakes, sausages, maple syrup, homemade raspberry jam, and coffee. With no shortage at all of further compassion, kindness and charity interspersed by laughter and croissants. Plus a tot of brandy for the road to aid us, hiking away, climbing the hill to the subway in the deep snow, when Gainor said,
“If there’s any voice anywhere in this world as magnificently beautiful as Tally Brown’s, I’ve never heard it.”
With him Gainor had been carrying a book, Berkeley’s Immaterialism by Arthur Aston Luce, M.A., Litt. D., D.D., a senior fellow and vice provost of Trinity College, Dublin, as was Berkeley himself in 1707. When asked by April about the book, Gainor waxed lyrical.
“Ah, it concerns Bishop Berkeley. A remarkable man of salty satire and teasing wit. Who selflessly devoted himself to the economic and spiritual betterment of Ireland. Recommended tar water as a general medicine. He was a believer in natural logicality and meditative philosophy. Espoused purity of sentiment and good will toward mankind. Espoused insight into principle. Theorized on the perception of space. His dictum, April, was Esse is percipi. To be is to be perceived.”
“Well, Gainor, this ole hillbilly gal can’t perceive a goddamn thing you’re talking about, but I’m listening.”
“April, you see. Here in my hand. A snowball. The existence of immediate objects of sensation consists of their being perceived. The whole corporeal world only exists as a set of objects of consciousness. It’s all in the mind and its internal sensations.”
“Well, Gainor, you sure could have fooled me. But too many of those kind of internal sensations could make you a nut case for Bellevue. And my little ole external sensation right now is to get us some goddamn transport downtown out of these snowdrifts, before somebody comes along and thinks we’re looking for a fight. Hey, but you know if you two guys do go skidaddling out of here back to Europe, I think I’m really going to miss you and could die.”
As we stood atop this hill down to the Hudson, these were prophetic words of April’s spoken in reference to Bellevue and someone coming along looking for a fight. The winds were now swirling over the drifts of snow as a plow made its way through the streets. The area populated by apartment houses, and once reasonably respectable, was not now thought entirely safe. Her own husband away, April was concerned at Gainor’s and my survival in this roughest and toughest of cities.
“Hey, J.P., you and Gainor are my dearest, closest, mostest soul-mates, but you should get wised up. Like in this town where we were the other night. You see a fight about to happen, hey, gee, you just get right the hell out of there soon. And as I said before, I just didn’t want to get my little ole ass all busted up by them big ole ornery bull dykes. Not anyway while I’m still hard struggling to support a nonsupporting husband until I can get permanently rid of him and sell half my ass on a monthly lease to the highest bidder. You guys forget I was in the military and had big dirty ole dykes trying to jump and rape me all the time. Except that I was a first lieutenant, they would have been trying to stick their tongues anywhere they could get them into little ole me.”
I was loathe to disclose to April Gainor’s own
frequent and often justifiably violent behavior caused by his quickness to anger but also provoked by his being dreadfully, eye-poppingly rude. Which was just about to happen as we approached the 175th Street station of the subway, to take April and Gainor downtown. Gainor was inquiring on my behalf for the train to take me uptown to the nether wilds of Broadway and 242d Street on the western edge of Van Cortlandt Park and had walked up to a line of people waiting for a bus. With his first question for directions receiving no answer, Gainor demanded one. And still there was silence.
“Look here, you people, can’t anyone of you tell me where the goddamn nearest subway stop is of the 7th Avenue-Broadway line. One of you must know. Or is that too much for your brains to fathom. What the hell’s the matter with you all. Are you all dumb. Do you understand English.”
It was not for the first time in our friendship that I was tempted to tell Gainor he was on his own. That both of us having grown up in this country, he knew as much as I did about handling oneself in a strange street. And although indoctrinated with the principle of fair play and a fair fight, we were both ready for the situation to any second get unfair. Nevertheless, we were raised at a time when the world seemed to be getting bigger and better. Faster and faster. With more leisure, less work. Cleverer machines making for less to do for more of men. And nothing you dismay. Except as Gainor was finding out in Queens, that when you reached to use anything, everything, as he said, became fucked out of kilter. But with all this evolution and change, one might have also thought the place had to be getting a little more courteous too. But not so. Just as one would now awkwardly and rapidly find. While this cold day’s bright sun shone blindingly on the snow. And as a man swaggered forward out of the line who looked tough enough to be acting as spokesman for the group waiting for the bus. And one was to hear again those old-fashioned provocative words said to Gainor, this once-upon-a-time paragon of diplomatic behavior, who had perhaps been one of the most courteous men who ever lived.