Henderson the Rain King

  To be disarmed in ambush was a joke to me for the first few minutes, but when we were told to pick up our packs and move ahead I began to change my mind. These men were smaller, darker, and shorter than the Arnewi but very tough. They wore gaudy loincloths and marched energetically and after we had gone on for an hour or more I was less merry at heart than before. I began to feel atrocious toward those fellows, and for a small inducement I would have swept them up in my arms, the whole dozen or so of them, and run them over the cliff. It took the recollection of the frogs to restrain me. I suppressed my rash feeling and followed a policy of waiting and patience. Romilayu looked very poorly and I put my arm about him. His face because of the dust of surrender was utterly in wrinkles, and his poodle hair was filled with gray powder and even his mutilated ear was whitened like a cruller.

  I spoke to him, but he was so worried he scarcely seemed to hear. I said, “Man, don’t be in such a funk, what can they do? Jail us? Deport us? Hold us for ransom? Crucify us?” But my confidence did not reach him. I then told him, “Why don’t you ask if they’re taking us to the king? He’s Itelo’s friend. I’m positive he speaks English.” In a discouraged voice Romilayu tried to inquire of one of these troopers, but he only said, “Harrrff!” And the muscles of his cheek had that familiar tightness which belongs to the soldier’s trade. I identified it right away.

  After two or three miles of this quick march upward, scrambling, crawling, and trotting, we came in sight of the town. Unlike the Arnewi village, it had bigger buildings, some of them wooden, and much expanded under the red light of that time of day, which was between sunset and blackness. On one side night had already come in and the evening star had begun to spin and throb. The white stone of the vicinity had a tendency to fall from the domes in round shapes, in bowls or circles, and these bowls were in use in the town for ornamental purposes. Flowers were growing in them in front of the palace, the largest of the red buildings. Before it were several fences of thorn and these rocks, about the size of Pacific man-eating clams, held fierce flowers, of a very red color. As we passed, two sentries screwed themselves into a brace, but we were not marched between them. To my surprise we went by and were taken through the center of town and out among the huts. People left their evening meal to come and have a look, laughing and making high-pitched exclamations. The huts were pretty ordinary, hive-shaped and thatched. There were cattle, and I dimly saw gardens in the last of the light, so I supposed they were better supplied with water here, and on that score they were safe from my help. I didn’t take it hard that they laughed at me, but adopted an attitude of humoring them and waved my hand and tipped my helmet. However, I didn’t care one bit for this. It annoyed me not to have been given an immediate audience with King Dahfu.

  They led us into a yard and ordered us to sit on the ground near the wall of a house somewhat larger than the rest. A white band was painted over the door, indicating an official residence. Here the patrol that had captured us went away, leaving only one fellow to guard us. I could have grabbed his gun and made scrap metal of it in one single twist, but what was the use of that? I let him stand at my back and waited. Five or six hens in this enclosed yard were pecking at an hour when they should have gone to roost, and a few naked kids played a game resembling skip rope and chanted with thick tongues. Unlike the Arnewi children, they didn’t come near us. The sky was like terra cotta and then like pink gum, unfamiliar to my nostrils. Then final darkness. The hens and the kids disappeared, and this left us by the feet of the armed fellow, alone.

  We waited, and for a violent person waiting is often a bed of troubles. I believed that the man who kept us waiting, the black Wariri magistrate or J.P. or examiner, was just letting us cool our bottoms. Maybe he had taken a look through the rushes of the door while there was still light enough to see my face. This might well have astonished him and so he was reflecting on it, trying to figure out what line to take with me. Or perhaps he was merely curled up in there like an ant to wear out my patience.

  And I was certainly affected; I was badly upset. I am probably the worst waiter in the world. I don’t know what it is but I am no good at it, it does something to my spirit. Thus I sat, tired and worried, on the ground, and my thoughts were mainly fears. Meanwhile the beautiful night crawled on as a continuum of dark and warmth, drawing the main star with it; and then the moon came along, incomplete and spotted. The unknown examiner was sitting within, and he exulted probably over the indignity of the grand white traveler whose weapons had been taken away and who had to wait without supper.

  And now one of those things occurred which life has not been willing to spare me. As I was sitting waiting here on this exotic night I bit into a hard biscuit and I broke one of my bridges. I had worried about that—what would I do in the wilds of Africa if I damaged my dental work? Fear of this has often kept me out of fights and at the time I was wrestling with Itelo and was thrown so heavily on my face I had thought about the effect on my teeth. Back home, unthinkingly eating a caramel in the movies or biting a chicken bone in a restaurant, I don’t know how many times I felt a pulling or a grinding and quickly investigated with my tongue, while my heart almost stopped. This time the dreaded thing really happened and I chewed broken teeth together with the hardtack. I felt the jagged shank of the bridge and was furious, disgusted, frightened; damn! I was in despair and there were tears in my eyes.

  “Whut so mattah?” said Romilayu.

  I took out the lighter and fired it up and I showed him fragments of tooth in my hand, and pulled open my lip, raising the flame so that he could look inside. “I have broken some teeth,” I said.

  “Oh! Bad! You got lot so pain, sah?”

  “No, no pain. Just anguish of spirit,” I said. “It couldn’t have happened at a worse time.” Then I realized that he was horrified to see these molars in the palm of my hand and I blew out the light.

  After this I was compelled to recall the history of my dental work.

  The first major job was undertaken after the war, in Paris, by Mlle. Montecuccoli. The original bridge was put in by her. You see, there was a girl named Berthe, who was hired to take care of our two daughters, who recommended her. A General Montecuccoli was the last opponent of the great Marshal Turenne. Enemies used to attend each other’s funerals in the old days, and Montecuccoli went to Turenne’s and beat his breast and sobbed. I appreciated this connection. However, there were many things wrong. Mlle. Montecuccoli had a large bust, and when she forgot herself in the work she pressed down on my face and smothered me, and there were so many drains and dams and blocks of wood in my mouth that I couldn’t even holler. Mlle. Montecuccoli with fearfully roused black eyes was meanwhile staring in. She had her office in the Rue du Colisée. There was a stone court, all yellow and gray, with shrunken poubelles, cats tugging garbage out, brooms, pails, and a latrine with slots for your shoes. The elevator was like a sedan chair and went so slowly you could ask the time of day from people on the staircase which wound around it. I had on a tweed suit and pigskin shoes. While waiting in the courtyard before the hut with the official stripe above the door, Romilayu beside me, and the guard standing over us both, I was forced to remember all this…. Rising in the elevator. My heart is beating fast, and here is Mlle. Montecuccoli whose fifty-year-old face is heart-shaped, and who has a slender long smile of French, Italian, and Romanian (from her mother) pathos; and the large bust. And I sit down, dreading, and she starts to stifle me as she extracts the nerve from a tooth in order to anchor the bridge. And while fitting the same she puts a stick in my mouth and says, “Grincez! Grincez les dents! Fâchez-vous.” And so I grince and fâche for all I’m worth and eat the wood. She grinds her own teeth to show me how.

  The mademoiselle thought that on artistic grounds American dentistry was inexcusable and she wanted to give me a new crown in front like the ones she had given Berthe, the children’s governess. When Berthe had her appendix out there was nobody but myself to visit her in the hospital. My wife was too busy
at the Collège de France. Therefore I went, wearing a derby and carrying gloves. Then this Berthe pretended to be delirious and rolling in the bed with fever. She took my hand and bit it, and thus I knew that the teeth Mlle. Montecuccoli had given her were good and strong. Berthe had broad, shapely nostrils, too, and a pair of kicking legs. I went through a couple of troubled weeks over this same Berthe.

  To stick to the subject, however, the bridge Mlle. Montecuccoli gave me was terrible. It felt like a water faucet in my mouth and my tongue was cramped over to one side. Even my throat ached from it, and I went up the little elevator moaning. Yes, she admitted it was a little swollen, but said I’d get used to it soon, and appealed to me to show a soldier’s endurance. So I did. But when I got back to New York, everything had to come out.

  All this information is essential. The second bridge, the one I had just broken with the hardtack, was made in New York by a certain Doctor Spohr, who was first cousin to Klaus Spohr, the painter who was doing Lily’s portrait. While I was in the dentist’s chair, Lily was sitting for the artist up in the country. Dentist and violin lessons kept me in the city two days a week and I would arrive in Dr. Spohr’s office, panting, with my violin case, after two subways and a few stops at bars along the way, my soul in strife and my heart saying that same old thing. Turning into the street I would sometimes wish that I could seize the whole building in my mouth and bite it in two, as Moby Dick had done to the boats. I tumbled down to the basement of the office where Dr. Spohr had a laboratory and a Puerto Rican technician was making casts and grinding plates on his little wheel.

  Reaching behind some smocks to the switch, I turned on the light in the toilet and went in, and after flushing the John made faces at myself and looked into my own eyes saying, “Well?” “And when?” “And wo bist du, soldat?” “Toothless! Mon capitaine. Your own soul is killing you.” And “It’s you who makes the world what it is. Reality is you.”

  The receptionist would say, “Been for your violin lesson, Mr. Henderson?”

  “Yah.”

  Waiting for the dentist as I waited now with the fragments of his work in my hand, I’d get to brooding over the children and my past and Lily and my prospects with her. I knew that at this moment with her lighted face, barely able to keep her chin still from intensity of feeling, she was in Spohr’s studio. The picture of her was a cause of trouble between me and my eldest son, Edward. The one with the red MG. He is like his mother and thinks himself better than me. Well, he’s wrong. Great things are done by Americans but not by the likes of either of us. They are done by people like that man Slocum who builds the great dams. Day and night, thousands of tons of concrete, machinery that moves the earth, lays mountains flat and fills the Punjab Valley with cement grout. That’s the type that gets things done. On this my class, Edward’s class, the class Lily was so eager to marry into, gets zero. Edward has always gone with the crowd. The most independent thing he ever did was to dress up a chimpanzee in a cowboy suit and drive it around New York in his open car. After the animal caught cold and died, he played the clarinet in a jazz band and lived on Bleecker Street. His income was $20,000 at least, and he was living next door to the Mills Hotel flophouse where the drunks are piled in tiers.

  But a father is a father after all, and I had gone as far as California to try to talk to Edward. I found him living in a bathing cabin beside the Pacific in Malibu, so there we were on the sand trying to have a conversation. The water was ghostly, lazy, slow, stupefying, with a vast dull shine. Coppery. A womb of white. Pallor; smoke; vacancy; dull gold; vastness; dimness; fulgor; ghostly flashing. “Edward, where are we?” I said. “We are at the edge of the earth. Why here?” Then I told him, “This looks like a hell of a place to meet. It’s got no foundation except smoke. Boy, I must talk to you about things. It’s true I’m rough. It may be true I am nuts, but there is a reason for it all. ‘The good that I would that I do not.’ ”

  “Well, I don’t get it, Dad.”

  “You should become a doctor. Why don’t you go to medical school? Please go to medical school, Edward.”

  “Why should I?”

  “There are lots of good reasons. I happen to know that you worry about your health. You take Queen Bee tablets. Now I know that …”

  “You came all this way to tell me something—is that what it is?”

  “You may believe that your father is not a thinking person, only your mother. Well, don’t kid yourself, I have made some clear observations. First of all, few people are sane. That may surprise you, Edward, but it really is so. Next, slavery has never really been abolished. More people are enslaved to different things than you can shake a stick at. But it’s no use trying to give you a résumé of my thinking. It’s true I’m often confused but at the same time I am a fighter. Oh, I am a fighter. I fight very hard.”

  “What do you fight for, Dad?” said Edward.

  “Why,” I said, “what do I fight for? Hell, for the truth. Yes, that’s it, the truth. Against falsehood. But most of the fighting is against myself.”

  I understood very well that Edward wanted me to tell him what he should live for and this is what was wrong. This was what caused me pain. For every son expects and every father wishes to provide clear principles. And moreover a man wants to protect his children from the bitterness of things if he can.

  A baby seal was weeping on the sand and I was very much absorbed by his situation, imagining that the herd had abandoned him, and I sent Edward to get a can of tunafish at the store while I stood guard against the roving dogs, but one of the beachcombers told me that this seal was a beggar, and if I fed him I would encourage him to be a parasite on the beach. Then he whacked him on the behind and without resentment the creature hobbled to the water on his flippers, where the pelican patrols were flying slowly back and forth, and entered the white foam. “Don’t you get cold at night, Eddy, on the beach?” I said.

  “I don’t mind it much.”

  I felt love for my son and couldn’t bear to see him like this. “Go on and be a doctor, Eddy,” I said. “If you don’t like blood you can be an internist or if you don’t like adults you can be a pediatrician, or if you don’t like kids perhaps you can specialize in women. You should have read those books by Doctor Grenfell I used to give you for Christmas. I know damned well you never even opened the packages. For Christ’s sake, we should commune with people.”

  I went back alone to Connecticut, shortly after which the boy returned with a girl from Central America somewhere and said he was going to marry her, an Indian with dark blood, a narrow face, and close-set eyes.

  “Dad, I’m in love,” he tells me.

  “What’s the matter? Is she in trouble?”

  “No. I tell you I love her.”

  “Edward, don’t give me that,” I say. “I can’t believe it.”

  “If it’s family background that worries you, then how about Lily?” he says.

  “Don’t let me hear a single word against your stepmother. Lily is a fine woman. Who is this Indian? I’m going to have her investigated,” I say.

  “Then I don’t understand,” he says, “why you don’t allow Lily to hang up her portrait with the others. You leave Maria Felucca alone.” (If that was her name.) “I love her,” he says, with an inflamed face.

  I look at this significant son, Edward, with his crew-cut hair, his hipless trunk, his button-down collar and Princeton tie, his white shoes—his practically faceless face. “Gods!” I think. “Can this be the son of my loins? What the hell goes on around here? If I leave him with this girl she will eat him in three bites.”

  But even then, strangely enough, I felt a shock of love in my heart for this boy. My son! Unrest has made me like this, grief has made me like this. So never mind. Sauve qui peut! Marry a dozen Maria Feluccas, and if it will do any good, let her go and get her picture painted, too.

  So Edward went back to New York with his Maria Felucca from Honduras.

  I had taken down my own portrait in the Natio
nal Guard uniform. Neither Lily nor I would hang in the main hall.

  Nor was this all I was compelled to remember as Romilayu and I waited in the Wariri village. For I several times said to Lily, “Every morning you leave to get yourself painted, and you’re just as dirty as you ever were. I find kids’ diapers under the bed and in the cigar humidor. The sink is full of garbage and grease, and the joint looks as if a poltergeist lived here. You are running from me. I know damned well that you go seventy miles an hour in the Buick with the children in the back seat. Don’t look impatient when I bring these subjects up. They may belong to what you consider the lower world, but I have to spend quite a bit of time there.”