Contents
PREFACE: The Man in the Overstuffed Chair
INTRODUCTION by Gore Vidal
The Vengeance of Nitocris
A Lady’s Beaded Bag
Something by Tolstoi
Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll
The Accent of a Coming Foot
Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton
Sand
Ten Minute Stop
Gift of an Apple
The Field of Blue Children
In Memory of an Aristocrat
The Dark Room
The Mysteries of the Joy Rio
Portrait of a Girl in Glass
The Angel in the Alcove
Oriflamme
The Vine
The Malediction
The Important Thing
One Arm
The Interval
Tent Worms
Desire and the Black Masseur
Something about Him
The Yellow Bird
The Night of the Iguana
The Poet
Chronicle of a Demise
Rubio y Morena
The Resemblance between a Violin Case and a Coffin
Two on a Party
Three Players of a Summer Game
The Coming of Something to the Widow Holly
Hard Candy
Man Bring This Up Road
The Mattress by the Tomato Patch
The Kingdom of Earth
“Grand”
Mama’s Old Stucco House
The Knightly Quest
A Recluse and His Guest
Happy August the Tenth
The Inventory at Fontana Bella
Miss Coynte of Greene
Sabbatha and Solitude
Completed
Das Wasser Ist Kalt
Mother Yaws
The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Preface:
The Man in the Overstuffed Chair
He always enters the house as though he were entering it with the intention of tearing it down from inside. That is how he always enters it except when it’s after midnight and liquor has put out the fire in his nerves. Then he enters the house in a strikingly different manner, almost guiltily, coughing a little, sighing louder than he coughs, and sometimes talking to himself as someone talks to someone after a long, fierce argument has exhausted the anger between them but not settled the problem. He takes off his shoes in the living room before he goes upstairs where he has to go past my mother’s closed door, but she never fails to let him know she hears him by clearing her throat very loudly or saying, “Ah, me, ah, me!” Sometimes I hear him say “Ah, me” in response as he goes on down the hall to where he sleeps, an alcove sunroom connected to the bedroom of my young brother, Dakin, who is at this time, the fall and winter of 1943, with the Air Force in Burma.
These months, the time of this story, enclose the end of the life of my mother’s mother.
My father’s behavior toward my maternal grandmother is scrupulously proper but his attitude toward my grandfather Dakin is so insulting that I don’t think the elderly gentleman could have endured it without the insulation of deafness and near-blindness.
Although my grandmother is dying, she is still quite sound of sight and hearing, and when it is approaching the time for my father to return from his office to the house, my grandmother is always downstairs to warn her husband that Cornelius is about to storm in the front door. She hears the Studebaker charging up the drive and cries out to my grandfather, “Walter, Cornelius is coming!” She cries out this warning so loudly that Grandfather can’t help but hear it. My grandfather staggers up from his chair by the radio and starts for the front stairs, but sometimes he doesn’t make them in time and there is an awkward encounter in the downstairs hall. My grandfather says, “Good evening, Cornelius” and is lucky if he receives, in answer, a frigid “Hello, Mr. Dakin” instead of a red-eyed glare and a grunt.
It takes him, now that he’s in his eighties with cataracts on both eyes, quite a while to get up the stairs, shepherded by his wife, and sometimes my father will come thundering up the steps behind them as if he intended to knock the old couple down. What is he after? A drink, of course, from a whiskey bottle under his bed in the sunroom, or the bathroom tub.
“Walter, watch out!”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Dakin,” my father grunts breathlessly as he charges past them on the stairs.
They go to their bedroom, close the door. I don’t hear just what they say to each other, but I know that “Grand” is outdone with Grandfather for lingering too long downstairs to avoid this humiliating encounter. Of course Grandfather finds the encounter distasteful, too, but he dearly loves to crouch by the downstairs radio at this hour when the news broadcasters come on, now that he can’t read newsprint.
They are living with us because my grandmother’s strength is so rapidly failing. She has been dying for ten years and her weight has dropped to eighty-six pounds. Any other person would be confined to bed, if not the terminal ward of a hospital, but my grandmother is resolved to remain on her feet, and actively helpful about the house. She is. She still does most of the laundry in the basement and insists on washing the dishes. My mother begs her to rest, but “Grand” is determined to show my father that she is not a dependent. And I have come home, this late autumn of 1943, because my mother wrote me, “Your grandmother has had to give up the house in Memphis because she is not strong enough to take care of it and your grandfather, too.”
Between the lines of the letter, I read that my mother is expecting the imminent death of her mother and I ought to stop in Saint Louis on my bus trip between the West and East coasts, so I have stopped there.
I arrive there late one night in November and as I go up the front walk I see, through the curtains of the front room windows, my grandmother stalking across the living room like a skeleton in clothes. It shocks me so that I have to set down my luggage on the front walk and wait about five minutes before I can enter the house.
Only my grandmother has stayed up to receive me at this midnight hour, the others thinking that I had probably driven on through to New York, as I had so often before after promising to come home.
She makes light of her illness, and actually she manages to seem almost well for my benefit. She has kept a dinner plate on the stove for me over a double boiler and a low flame, and the living room fire is alive, and no reference is made to my failure in Hollywood, the humiliating termination of my six-months option as a screenwriter at MGM studios.
“Grand” says she’s come here to help Edwina, my mother, who is suffering from nervous exhaustion and is very disturbed over Cornelius’s behavior. Cornelius has been drinking heavily. Mother found five empty bottles under his bed and several more under the bathtub, and his position as sales manager of a branch of the International Shoe Company is in jeopardy due to a scandalous poker fight in which half of his left ear was bitten off, yes, actually bitten off, so that he had to go to a hospital and have a plastic-surgery operation, taking cartilage from a rib to be grafted onto the ear, and in spite of elaborate precautions to keep it under wraps, the story has come out. Mr. J., the head executive and my father’s immediate superior, has at last lost all patience with my father, who may have to retire in order to avoid being dismissed. But otherwise everything is fine, she is telling me about these things because Edwina may be inclined to exaggerate the seriousness of the family situation when we talk in the morning. And now I ought to go up to bed after a long, hard trip. Yes, I ought to, indeed. I will have to sleep in brother Dakin’s old room rather than in my usual retreat in the attic, since the bed in the attic has been dismantled so that I won’t insist on s
leeping up there and getting pneumonia.
I don’t like the idea of taking Dakin’s room since it adjoins my father’s doorless appendage to it.
I enter the bedroom and undress in the dark.
Strange sounds come from my father’s sunroom, great sighs and groans and inebriate exclamations of sorrow such as, “Oh, God, oh, God!” He is unaware of my sleepless presence in the room adjoining. From time to time, at half-hour intervals, he lurches and stumbles out of bed to fetch a bottle of whiskey from some place of naive concealment, remarking to himself, “How terrible!”
At last I take a sleeping pill so that my exhaustion can prevail over my tension and my curiously mixed feelings of disgust and pity for my father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, the Mississippi drummer, who was removed from the wild and free road and put behind a desk like a jungle animal put in a cage in a zoo.
At supper the following evening an awful domestic scene takes place.
My father is one of those drinkers who never stagger or stumble but turn savage with liquor, and this next evening after my homecoming he comes home late and drunk for supper. He sits at one end of the table, my mother at the other, and she fixes on him her look of silent suffering like a bird dog drawing a bead on a covey of quail in the bushes.
All at once he explodes into maniacal fury.
His shouting goes something like this; “What the hell, why the hell do you feel so sorry for yourself? I’m keeping your parents here, they’re not paying board!”
The shout penetrates my grandfather’s deafness and he says, “Rose, let’s go to our room.” But my grandmother Rose remains at the table as Edwina and Grandfather retire upstairs. I stay as if rooted or frozen to the dining-room chair, the food turning sick in my stomach.
Silence.
My father crouches over his plate, eating like a wild beast eats his kill in the jungle.
Then my grandmother’s voice, quiet and gentle: “Cornelius, do you want us to pay board here?”
Silence again.
My father stops eating, though. He doesn’t look up as he says in a hoarse, shaky voice: “No, I don’t, Mrs. Dakin.”
His inflamed blue eyes are suddenly filled with tears. He lurches up from the table and goes to the overstuffed chair in the living room.
This overstuffed chair, I don’t remember just when we got it. I suspect it was in the furnished apartment that we took when we first came to Saint Louis. To take the apartment we had to buy the furniture that was in it, and through this circumstance we acquired a number of pieces of furniture that would be intriguing to set designers of films about lower-middle-class life. Some of these pieces have been gradually weeded out through successive changes of address, but my father was never willing to part with the overstuffed chair. It really doesn’t look like it could be removed. It seems too fat to get through a doorway. Its color was originally blue, plain blue, but time has altered the blue to something sadder than blue, as if it had absorbed in its fabric and stuffing all the sorrows and anxieties of our family life and these emotions had become its stuffing and its pigmentation (if chairs can be said to have a pigmentation). It doesn’t really seem like a chair, though. It seems more like a fat, silent person, not silent by choice but simply unable to speak because if it spoke it would not get through a sentence without bursting into a self-pitying wail.
Over this chair still stands another veteran piece of furniture, a floor lamp that must have come with it. It rises from its round metal base on the floor to half a foot higher than a tall man sitting. Then it curves over his head one of the most ludicrous things a man has ever sat under, a sort of Chinesey-looking silk lamp shade with a fringe about it, so that it suggests a weeping willow. Which is presumably weeping for the occupant of the chair.
I have never known whether Mother was afraid to deprive my father of his overstuffed chair and weeping-willow floor lamp or if it simply amused her to see him with them. There was a time, in her younger years, when she looked like a fairy-tale princess and had a sense of style that exceeded by far her power to indulge it. But now she’s tired, she’s about sixty now, and she lets things go. And the house is now filled not only with its original furnishings but with the things inherited from my grandparents’ house in Memphis. In fact, the living room is so full of furniture that you have to be quite sober to move through it without a collision…and still there is the overstuffed chair.
A few days after the awful scene at the dinner table, my dearly loved grandmother. Rose Otte Dakin, bled to death in the house of my parents.
She had washed the dinner dishes, had played Chopin on the piano, which she’d brought with her from Memphis, and had started upstairs when she was overtaken by a fit of coughing and a lung hemorrhage that wouldn’t stop.
She fought death for several hours, with almost no blood left in her body to fight with.
Being a coward, I wouldn’t enter the room where this agony was occurring. I stood in the hall upstairs. My grandmother Rose was trying to deliver a message to my mother. She kept flinging out a wasted arm to point at a bureau.
It was not till several days after this death in the house that my mother found out the meaning of that gesture.
My grandmother was trying to tell my mother that all her savings were sewn up in a corset in a drawer of the bureau.
Late that night, when my grandmother had been removed to a mortuary, my father came home.
“Cornelius,” said Mother, “I have lost my mother.”
I saw him receive this announcement, and a look came over his face that was even more deeply stricken than that of my mother when she closed the eyelids of “Grand” after her last fight for breath.
He went to his overstuffed chair, under the weeping-willow floor lamp, like a man who has suddenly discovered the reality in a nightmare, and he said, over and over again, “How awful, oh, God, oh God, how awful!”
He was talking to himself.
At the time of my grandmother’s death I had been for ten years more an irregular and reluctant visitor to the house than a member of the household. Sometimes my visits would last the better part of a year, sometimes, more usually, they would last no more than a week. But for three years after my years at college I was sentenced to confinement in this house and to hard labor in “The World’s Largest Shoe Company” in which my father was also serving time, perhaps as unhappily as I was. We were serving time in quite different capacities. My father was the sales manager of that branch that manufactures, most notably, shoes and booties for kiddies, called “Red Goose Shoes,” and never before and probably not to this day has “The World’s Largest” had so gifted a manager of salesmen. As for me, I was officially a clerk-typist but what I actually did was everything that no one else wanted to do, and since the boss wanted me to quit, he and the straw boss made sure that I had these assignments. I was kept on my feet most of the time, charging back and forth between the office and the connecting warehouse of this world’s largest wholesale shoe company, which gave me capable legs and a fast stride. The lowliest of my assigned duties was the one I liked most, dusting off the sample shoes in three brightly mirrored sample rooms each morning; dusting off the mirrors as well as the shoes in these rooms that were intended to dazzle the eyes of retailers from all over the States. I liked this job best because it was so private. It was performed before the retailers came in: I had the rooms and the mirrors to myself, dusting off the sample shoes with a chamois rag was something that I could do quickly and automatically, and the job kept me off the noisy floor of the office. I regretted that it took only about an hour, even when I was being most dreamily meticulous about it. That hour having been stretched to its fullest, I would have to take my desk in the office and type out great sheaves of factory orders. It was nearly all numerals, digits. I made many mistakes, but for an amusing reason I couldn’t be fired. The head of the department had gotten his job through the influence of my father, which was still high at that time. I could commit the most appalling goofs and b
oners and still I couldn’t be fired, however much I might long to be fired from this sixty-five-dollar-a-month position. I left my desk more often than anyone else. My branch of “The World’s Largest” was on the top floor but I had discovered a flight of stairs to the roof of the twelve-story building and every half hour or so I would go up those stairs to have a cigarette, rather than retiring to the smelly men’s room. From this roof I could look across the Mississippi River to the golden wheat fields of Illinois, and the air, especially in autumn, was bracingly above the smog of Saint Louis, so I used to linger up there for longer than a cigarette to reflect upon a poem or short story that I would finish that weekend.
I had several enemies in the office, especially the one called “The Straw Boss,” a tall, mincing creature who had acquired the valuable trick of doing nasty things nicely. He was not at all bright, though. He didn’t realize that I liked dusting the shoes and running the errands that took me out of “The World’s Largest.” And he always saw to it that the sample cases that I had to carry about ten blocks from “The World’s Largest” to its largest buyer, which was J.C. Penney Company, were almost too heavy for a small man to carry. So did I build up my chest and slightly damage my arterial system, a damage that was soon to release me from my period of bondage. This didn’t bother me, though. (I’ve thought a good deal about death but doubt that I’ve feared it very much, then or now.)
The thing I most want to tell you about is none of this, however; it is something much stranger. It is the ride downtown that my father and I would take every morning in his Studebaker. This was a long ride, it took about half an hour, and seemed much longer for neither my father nor I had anything to say to each other during the ride. I remember that I would compose one sentence to deliver to my father, to break just once the intolerable silence that existed between us, as intolerable to him, I suspect, as it was to me. I would start composing this one sentence during breakfast and I would usually deliver it halfway downtown. It was a shockingly uninteresting remark. It was delivered in a shockingly strained voice, a voice that sounded choked. It would be a comment on the traffic or the smog that enveloped the streets. The interesting thing about it was his tone of answer. He would answer the remark as if he understood how hard it was for me to make it. His answer would always be sad and gentle. “Yes, it’s awful,” he’d say. And he didn’t say it as if it was a response to my remark. He would say it as if it referred to much larger matters than traffic or smog. And looking back on it, now, I feel that he understood my fear of him and forgave me for it, and wished there was some way to break the wall between us.