However, actually Mother Pearce’s correspondence was far and away more loquacious than these twice yearly announcements to her traveling son would suggest, and “loquacious” is the mot juste for it, since all her outgoing letters and wires were shouted to a personal secretary, little Miss Genevieve Goodleigh. And “shouted” is the correct way to put it, as this correspondence was dictated while Mother Pearce was receiving her Vibra-Wonder treatment, a very loud, three-hour treatment that kept her from looking her age by a comfortable margin of give or take a few hours.
Now on this particular morning to which time has been reversed, a wire had come in from Gewinner, but Mother Pearce ignored all incoming letters and messages till after she’d shouted out, to the phenomenal Miss Goodleigh, her outgoing correspondence, and “phenomenal” is the precise term for Miss Goodleigh since she caught every word of this correspondence even when the Vibra-Wonder was operating in the highest of its five gears.
At this time, on this particular morning. Mother Pearce was shouting out a letter to the most prominent hostess in the nation’s capital.
Darling Boo, she shouted, I am telling you no news that is news to you when I tell you the President and the First Lady with their divine daughter. Babe, were house guests of mine last weekend, and, oh my soul and body, what fun we girls had together while the menfolks were holding their top-level consultations on the crisis in Ghu-Ghok-Shu. Of course I already knew from previous get-togethers that the First Lady is more fun than a barrel or a boatload of monkeys, but this last visit was one continual howl. The climax of it was a jamboree at the Club Diamond Brite. I said to Mag, The ship of state is in responsible hands so we don’t have to worry about it, and I want you to know we didn’t, why, honey, while the Chief and my precious boy Braden were deciding where to strike next and what to strike with, you would never have guessed from our fun and frolic that anything more serious than a possum hunt was going on anywhere in the world. We had a couple of jazz bands to spell each other, we had the Wildcat Five which you know are the latest craze, we had a nigger you threw baseballs at and if you hit him he fell in a tank of cold water, and we had a couple of boxing kangaroos with a dog referee. So! What suddenly happened but this! The doors bang open at the height of the frolic and in comes my precious boy Braden pushing the Chief in a red, white and blue wheelbarrow, the Chief firing blanks out of two pistols. They were like two kids who have just burnt down the schoolhouse, and I tell you, honey, the photographers and newspaper boys had a field day, they went absolutely hog-wild, and the commotion and pandemonium was way, way out of control till all of a sudden the band struck up “Babe’s Stomp,” in honor of Babe, and Babe shot like a cannon ball over to my boy Braden and caught him in such a bear hug that I was scared for a second she’d crack his ribs. Do my stomp with me, honey, I heard her holler, and off they stomped together. It was a sight to be seen when they accidentally stomped into the honorary co-hostess and knocked her into the pastry end of the buffet table. Then Babe hollered to the band to play a slow number called “The Clinch,” and, well, you know. Boo, I don’t embarrass easy and it would be hard to find a First Lady as up-do-date as Mag is. This is what Mag said to me. Boo, she leaned over to me and said. Do you see what I see, Nelly? Our two children are dancing so tight together you couldn’t paste a postage stamp between them, and look at the look in their eyes, I could cry like I do at a wedding!
Now what do you make of that. Boo? I’m sure you must see the tragic irony of it. Poor Violet was never and never could be cut out for her present position in life, I mean she was suddenly escalated way up beyond her natural limitations and would be a happier girl if she had recognized and never overstepped her personal potential. However, what I feel. Boo, is that here is a tragedy that can still be corrected in life. If Braden and Babe have been drawn together by such a powerful attraction to each other and a little propinquity like this, I think it’s the will of God and we ought to feel morally obliged to do everything we can to bring them together more often. I’m writing you this because you’re in a perfect position to throw them together up there and I can throw them together down here, and believe you me, it would be much harder to hold Babe and Braden apart than it is to get them together. Boo, do you see my point? I know that question is unnecessary because if you don’t see my point you’d have to be blind as ten bats in a belfry, which isn’t the case with you. Boo. Your vision and your thinking apparatus have always been up to snuff and a good deal higher. I think just a bit more propinquity at banquets up there and at cookouts and frolics down here will salvage the lives of a pair of fine young people that providence meant for each other. Now, Boo, keep this under your hat but if you think my suggestion is as wonderful as I do, get back to me on the teletype right away with one word, “wonderful,” but if you have any reservations or questions about it, get back to me with the word “fog,” and—
Oh, cried out Miss Goodleigh, my pencil point’s broke!
Well hell, exclaimed Mother Pearce, what’s going on here this morning?
Having never heard her employer speak with such violence before. Miss Goodleigh rushed sobbing into the bathroom to pull herself together.
While she was in there. Mother Pearce completed her Vibra-Wonder treatment and, having nothing else to do at the moment, idly picked up a wire which had come in that morning. This wire happened to be from Gewinner. It went as follows: Dear Mother, I was shocked and sorry to hear that father has gone to his heavenly mansion. I feel that I ought to be with you in this time of grief and remain as long as necessary to straighten out the unexpected curtailment of my travel expenses. Kill no fatted calf but expect my homecoming within the next few days. Will wire the precise time later. Fondest love, Gewinner.
God have mercy upon us, cried out Mother Pearce. She had observed that the wire contained no phone number she could call, no address to which she could wire to let the Prince know how little she needed his presence to console her in her newly widowed condition.
Now to turn back time more than a little bit further, Gewinner had been on the go since the spring of his sixteenth year, since a morning in that spring when his tutor-companion, the late Dr. Horace Greaves, had convinced Father and Mother Pearce so quickly and easily that their first-born son, the Prince in the tower, could be better instructed in the humanities while traveling here and there among foreign lands and seas. The late Dr. Horace Greaves had hardly begun to address the parents on this topic when the late Mr. Pearce had boomed out. Fine, wonderful, great, for God’s sake get going, and Mother Pearce had almost simultaneously buzzed the chauffeur to whisk her son and his tutor as fast as a streak of blue lightning out to the airport and not let them out of his sight till they’d boarded a plane and the plane was off the ground.
So began the travels of Gewinner with his tutor-companion.
Gewinner thrived on these travels but the tutor-companion developed a nervous condition, complicated by insomnia, which culminated in a collapse that was followed by several relapses, and he finally wound up in a Bavarian spa that specialized in the ice cure for nervous disorders. So poor Dr. Greaves was packed in ice for three months, his temperature kept at the temperature level of the fish and the lizard, and during that chilly period in the doctor’s stoical experience on earth, Gewinner somehow managed to enlist in the navy. His hitch in the navy was remarkably short, it lasted for just ten days, give or take a few minutes. Then Gewinner was returned to civilian status and his name and all else pertinent to him was expunged from all records of the naval branch of the armed services, as if he, Gewinner, had never so much as existed.
Gewinner then wired Dr. Greaves; Get off the ice and let’s get cracking again. And it just so happened that Dr. Greaves had, that very day the wire reached him, been taken out of the ice, and though the distinguished scholar and educator in the humanities had not yet had time to completely thaw out, he was at least as eager as Gewinner to get cracking again, especially toward the equator.
Two things occurred i
n close sequence to delay the resumption of their travels, and this delay was really more in the nature of a cancellation. One of these occurrences has been mentioned already, the fatal misadventure of Dr. Greaves in the Turtle Bay section of Manhattan, ironically at a farewell banquet on the roof of a five-story town house, a banquet at which the main course and the only course was a species of fungus related to the mushroom, under the influence of which the good doctor took off like a parachute jumper and ended his earthly travels on the inexorable pavement below. However, the second occurrence has yet to be mentioned. It was a bit of information that Gewinner received from a bank official, the information that his father had recently been planted in the family plot and that the estate had passed into the custody of Mother Pearce and the younger son, Braden. This circumstance affected Gewinner gravely, since it meant that his remittances would no longer be adequate to support his former high style of life and travel here and there on the earth’s surface.
Gewinner suspected, sensibly, that if he went home for a while, it might not take him too long to convince Mother Pearce and his brother that he, Gewinner, had better be allowed to go on with his travels in the opulent style to which he was accustomed.
Though Gewinner’s brother was a year younger than Gewinner, Braden Pearce had the maturity of a family man while Gewinner kept about him a graceful, adolescent look, thanks to his slimness and the quality of his skin, so smooth that it seemed to be made without pores, the way that the finest silk shows no sign of being woven.
Gewinner stayed in the tower of the gray stone mansion which had been designed to have a sort of pop-art resemblance to a medieval castle. He had moved into the tower while he was in his early teens in order to remove himself as far from the Pearce family life as the geography of the mansion permitted, and he had had an iron fire escape, almost as steep as a stepladder, put up between the lawn and a window of the tower so that his restless comings and goings at night would not disturb the family. They had called him the Prince as much in awe as in mockery of his refinements.
Braden Pearce had the look that football players get when they have been in business and married for several years; coarsening, thickening, getting flushed in the face, turning into one of those bullish men who shatter all opposition by the sheer weight and energy of their drive until drink softens them up at forty-five or fifty and the heart quits on them at sixty.
Right now Braden was at the peak of his male power. His wife, Violet, had a pale, dampish look in the mornings as if she had spent the night in a steam bath. Their bedroom, unfortunately for Gewinner, was directly under his room in the tower and they made noises like beasts of the jungle when they had sex, which was about every night. At his climax, Braden would howl and curse, and at hers, Violet would cry out like a yard full of peacocks. Apparently they would also roll and thrash about in their ecstasies, knocking things off their bedside tables. Some nights Mrs. Pearce would come to their door and call out. Is something wrong in there? Son, Violet, is something wrong in there? Neither would answer at once. Violei would be sobbing and making sounds as if she were dying of strangulation and Braden would be cursing and huffing for a minute or so after Mother Pearce’s anxious call at the door. Then, at last, they both would answer together in hoarse voices. No, no. Mother, no. Mother, everything’s fine, go on back to bed. Mother.
One night a widowed lady and her bachelor son, the Fishers, residents of the house next door, came over for a bridge game that went on after Violet and Braden had gone up to bed. Gewinner was in the game because he loved to outwit his mother at bridge, and they were playing away when the howling, cursing and religious and profane exclamations began to reverberate through the castle. Mrs. Pearce kept clearing her throat and then she asked Gewinner to turn the hi-fi on, but Gewinner, grinning wickedly, said. Oh Mother, I can’t concentrate on my game with music playing. I think, said Mrs. Pearce—but she never completed the statement, for just then some very heavy object, probably Braden, fell to the floor and there was a shower of plaster from the ceiling over the bridge game and the chandelier swung like a pendulum, to exaggerate only slightly. The neighbor lady, Gewinner’s partner in the bridge game, made repeated coughing sounds, explaining that she had a frog in her throat, while brushing plaster dust off her clothes.
Hmmm, said Mrs. Pearce with a tight-lipped attempt at a smile, partner, I have to pass.
Then, being dummy, she got up from the table, murmuring. Excuse me a moment, and went clattering upstairs to knock at the young couple’s door.
Son? Violet? she could be heard calling, and before she could ask if anything was wrong, Braden’s voice boomed through the house, bellowing out. For Chrissake, will you keep your ass on the bed? And Violet cried out shrilly. You’re killing me, honey. I’m dying, let’s stay on the floor!
Mrs. Pearce’s partner, a nervous bachelor in his late forties, was quite flurried and flushed, since scenes of this nature are particularly embarrassing to Southern boys in the presence of their mothers. He forgot what was trumps, he almost seemed to be putting down cards at random. Nobody said anything after the neighbor lady’s announcement that she had a frog in her throat but she and her son took turns at coughing. Then Gewinner began talking out loud but as if to himself, selecting a subject that seemed to have no relevance to the games upstairs and down. The speech unwound itself evenly from his lips which wore a smile like Hamlet’s or the Mona Lisa’s, or rather a bit on the sly side and also a bit on the side of the quietly savage. What he said in this curiously elliptical monologue, under the swaying chandelier and the continuing shower of dust, would never pass the scrutiny of a logician, if it were put on paper—where it is now being put, as if it came from a tape recorder that had picked up the very free associations of a hallucinated romantic.
Mrs. Fisher, he said, as if he were talking to her, the course of history changed when a troop of mercenary foot soldiers, equipped with a new weapon called the long bow, plopped to their knees among the little wildflowers that sprinkled the morning-dew-spangled grass on a certain field, in Normandy I believe, which became known to history as the Field of Agincourt….
Mama, was the bid five spades?
No, son, it was six diamonds, doubled and redoubled, before the— Oh.
Gewinner went on serenely and illogically as he played a brilliant game. Yes, he went on, the common foot soldiers didn’t pick the wildflowers, probably didn’t notice the wildflowers there, but set their arrows to the strings of their bows and let them fly at a charge of plumed knights in armor, and then something snapped in the clear morning air and was going to stay snapped for the rest of human time. The long bows’ arrows struck with appalling accuracy, the charge of the knights was routed, the mercenary foot soldiers rose from the dewsparkling field, rushed forward and knelt again upon the little wildflowers and let their arrows go twanging again at the white and silver foe on the field at Agincourt. I suppose it was a little bit like suddenly switching from a game of chess to a game of checkers. I mean the big game of sides against each other in the world. Am I making any sense? I doubt it. But since you’re not listening to me, it doesn’t make much difference. I used to feel that there was a sort of demented romanticism in this house being designed to suggest a medieval castle, but the absurdity went too far with the construction of the Laughing Boy Drive-in, catty-cornered across from the fake castle. The last time I was home for a visit, the castle had a banner flying from its tower, a bifurcated triangle of white silk emblazoned with a coat of arms and a motto, Carpe Diem, which means seize the day. All of which makes me suspect that back of the sun and way deep under our feet, at the earth’s center, are not a couple of noble mysteries but a couple of joke books. However, as for myself, I still go out alone at night, and feel something back of the visible stars and something deep under my feet. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just the pleasure of getting a little away from the fake medieval castle and the Laughing Boy Drive-in.
Pardon me, said Mrs. Fisher, did you say some
thing?
I was just saying, said Gewinner, that every time the earth turns on its axis, a clerk in heaven, some badly paid little clerk, jots down another minus sign after whatever symbol they use for the Quixote syndrome, or whatever the hell they call it in heaven, and I don’t know whether the angels burst into weeping or song every time.
The neighbor’s son spoke up and said, What were you saying, Gewinner? I didn’t catch it, either.
Oh, I was making no more sense than an agnostic priest mumbling Mass, but someone had to say something, and so I said that across the street, diagonally across from Pearce’s Folly, there is a perfect little gem of neo-Colonial architecture that’s famous for its barbecued ribs and chicken-in-a-basket and chocolate malts as thick as fresh cement and piping-hot ever-fresh coffee. And I’m not a liar when I tell you it makes as much noise, well, nearly as much, as Violet and Braden in bed, at least it’s that noisy, or nearly, when one shift at The Project has sallied forth to make way for the next shift, let’s see now, doubled, redoubled and you’ve lost seven tricks, what a blow for Mama when she comes back down.
The thumping on the floor above was still going on, and the son and mother, the Fishers, had turned from rose red to paper white, but the Widow Fisher produced her voice to ask Gewinner again what he was saying while she’d been preoccupied with her cards.
Oh, just babbling, he said, just to hear myself babbling, it helps my concentration to babble away playing cards. But when Mother Pearce comes down from her luckless effort to clip the wings of Eros, I’m going to make a suggestion. I’m going to suggest to her that she install a pipe organ in Violet’s and Braden’s bedroom behind a screen or tapestry. The organist could come in by way of a secret staircase and a sliding panel, and whenever Violet and Braden retire before guests have left the castle, the organist could play the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah or Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”