A detective came and listened kindly to me and made a pretense of taking me seriously. I was such a thin, wretched child, you see—in that hospital bed that was too big for me, fed intravenously, with my weak near-blind eyes and my bruised arms. I believe he wrote things down to be polite, information about the buried rifle and the boots. (The boot prints in the ground had been one of the police's strong clues.) But for some reason I never heard from the detective again, and when I questioned Father desperately about him, Father cleared his throat and said it was “Coming along, coming along.”
What about the Baptist who confessed? Nothing happened to him either. He disappeared from the newspapers, and that was that. They didn't believe his confession either. They are very jealous and suspicious, the police. But to hell with him.
As soon as I was released from the hospital I made Father take me at once to the site of the shooting. I marched triumphantly to our neighbors' shrubs and went to what I thought was the correct spot and poked around and finally got to my knees and dug wildly, but I found nothing. Father watched me in silence. I said, “Please may I have a shovel, Father,” and he brought me one but did not offer to help. I dug in the dirt but found nothing. Father said that the police had been in this, everywhere, digging up everything, but I ignored him, turning my sweating face to the ground that had betrayed me. How was it possible the gun was gone? Can you explain that? What happened to my rifle? And I hadn't even had sense enough to keep the box it had come in, but I had thrown that away immediately. Father all but picked me up under his arm and carried me into the house.
Did our neighbors find the gun and, not wanting to be involved, dispose of it themselves? Did one of the sullen, muscular men who worked for the Cedar Grove Green Carpet Lawn Service discover the gun and steal it?
I never found out.
We moved from 4500 Labyrinth Drive to another house, about the same size but more expensive, with a living-room ceiling that was three stories high and quite a conversation piece, across Broad Road in the heart of Pools Moran. Of course we had to move. It wasn't just the memory of Nada, but Father was shoulder-tapped for a presidency, which he modestly accepted (the product was—still is—some sort of wiring, perhaps for detonators), and after his remarriage he spoke less and less of Nada, which was not surprising, until one day I thought I might as well steal those snapshots Mrs. Romanow had given him in a tearful moment of sentiment. So I took them out of his bureau drawer, and he never mentioned them, thinking, perhaps, that his new wife had destroyed them, out of jealousy for Nada. She had already relegated Nada's expensive French Provincial living-room furniture to the back part of the house and decorated everything with her own Spanish rugs, swords, and spears, her Oriental tapestries and Mexican church doors.
Are you wondering if you know the second Mrs. Everett? A week after my discharge from the hospital I was sitting in my usual daze out in the sun porch, fingering the part where the screen had rusted and broken (in an interesting pattern, a hexagon), digesting breakfast and waiting for lunch (and after lunch I would wait patiently for dinner), when Father came home at a surprising hour, eleven in the morning, and with him was Mavis Grisell, in a splendid new fall outfit and dusky-gold jewelry that clattered as she approached me. “Richard, Mavis and I have something to tell you,” Father announced. I saw on Mavis' finger a diamond large enough to pierce your hearts, my readers, and I was silent in awe of that diamond and the fact of its being bigger, far bigger, than Nada's had been. My silence displeased Father, I think. He took Mavis out to the car and came striding back, a large, rather paunchy, but still attractive man, at whom I glanced in surprise as if I hadn't seen him before. He came right to me and said, “Look, you little brat, you neurotic little nut, I'm through with all this horse-shit! Mavis is going to be your new mother, and if you don't like it you can go to hell! I've had enough of this lousy American father bit! I've had enough of smiling and gritting my teeth and taking it in the guts, from you or your mother, both of you, and from now on things are going to be different. It's no happy, forgiving Elwood Daddy—it's going to be your Father vihom. you are going to respect, Buster, or get the hell out, I don't care how young you are or how nuts.”
And I recognized then my real father, who was shouting at me out of that familiar man's face.
Yes, there was a series of psychiatrists. Father did that much for me, or against me. My favorite was Dr. Saskatoon, who explained gently to me that I had loved my mother so much, indeed overmuch, that I could not accept the fact of her death being caused by anyone except myself; a familiar delusion, he assured me. I had wanted, poor deluded brat, to be my mother's destroyer simply because I had wanted to establish forever a relationship between the two of us which no one could transcend, not even my father. “You have a very ambivalent, may I say rather negative, attitude toward your father,” Dr. Saskatoon told me.
“Dr. Saskatoon,” I would say, my teeth about to grind together in a spasm of shuddering, “Dr. Saskatoon, you don't understand what it is like to be free and alive when everything is finished—no, please let me talk,” I would cry, shivering convulsively. “Nobody ever lets me talk and I have to say this—there's nothing more terrible than to commit a crime and still be free, there's nothing more terrible than to be a murderer without a murderer's punishment. Dr. Saskatoon—”
And he would say, “Richard, let me assure you of this: hallucinations are as vivid as reality, and I respect everything you say. I know that you are suffering just as much as if you had killed your mother.”
And so in the end I stopped saying anything at all.
23
Because I stopped raving and weeping, I remained in the Normal World. You might have seen me, years ago, sitting sadly on a park bench, doing nothing. Not even waiting any longer. I was a quiet, bespectacled child growing into a quiet, bespectacled teen-ager (far removed from the happy, sweating hordes led by the music of Dr. Muggeridge's pipes!). I sleepwalked my way through the years, and as I slept I ate, and as I walked I ate, because there was this peculiar hol-lowness inside me that I had to fill—but that's just sentiment, ignore it.
So I am waiting out the last minutes of my life sentence of freedom, and outside on the street are—what now?—some kids playing. They don't act like kids though; their movements are jerky and brutal when they throw and catch their ball, and one of the children is smoking a cigarette, and the big one is always ready to punch the others in the arm or back—there he goes again, the little bastard! Ah, summertime here in the city! I pull toward me a few cans and my rusty can opener. Time to begin … Did I explain to you that I left home at sixteen and was not lamented, and Father sends me an allowance that is generous enough to keep me well stocked with food? Look at the size of this can of apricots! Enough to stuff a horse! Yes, my dear harsh Father appeared to me at last, after eleven years of disguise. But I did find him at last, and isn't that what we all crave, a confrontation with the truth? I was confronted with the truth. And I found my true mother, or one of her truer selves, that girl Nancy Romanow (younger than I am now), and of course here in my room are many of her stories, everything I could get hold of, and I read them and reread them and sometimes think that I am coming close to … something, I don't know what.
As for God—did I find God through suffering and repentance? Indeed not. I am afraid not. God came to me in a dream once disguised as Father and backslapping and loud as usual, but his slaps on my back were harder than need be. And that is the secret of the backslapper— he is really pounding you to death. In my reading I came across Freud's remark that everyone's notion of God is based upon his unconscious notion of his father. Well, I am stuck with a sadistic, happy, backslapping God and to hell with that.
And here are eight bananas, just flecked with brown and therefore ready to be guzzled, and as soon as you turn your back I will begin. The softness of bananas, the hardness of peanut brittle, the pliant cool sanity of lettuce! I have sauces and jams which I will pour over those pieces of bread and t
hose cookies which have gone stale, never fear. This must be the end of the memoir. I excuse you at this point. My career as a writer now ends, and I don't have time to look through what I've written. Let it stand. I am being carried along on the wave of a most prodigious hunger. All I ask is the strength to fill the emptiness inside me, to stuff it once and for all!
That, and the fierce consolation of knowing that whatever I did, whatever degradations and evils, stupidities, blunders, moronic intrusions, whatever single ghastly act I did manage to achieve, it was done out of freedom, out of choice. This is the only consolation I have in the face of death, my readers: the thought of my free will. But I must confess that there are moments when I doubt even this consolation …
AFTERWORD
Expensive People:
THE CONFESSIONS OF A “MINOR CHARACTER”
Expensive People, originally published in 1968, was imagined as the second of an informal, thematically (but not literally) integrated trilogy of novels written in the 1960's, the first and third being A Garden of Earthly Delights (1966) and them (1969). These novels, differing considerably in subject matter, language, and tone, have in common the use of a youthful protagonist in his or her quintessentially American adventures; they were conceived by the author as critiques of America— American culture, American values, American dreams—as well as narratives in which romantic ambitions are confronted by what must be called “reality.”
Appearing in the fall of 1968, Expensive People, with its climactic episode of self-destructive violence, was perceived as an expression of the radical discontent, the despair, the bewilderment and outrage of a generation of young and idealistic Americans confronted by an America of their elders so steeped in political hypocrisy and cynicism as to seem virtually irremediable except by the most extreme means. What is assassination but a gesture of political impotence?—what are most “crimes of passion” except gestures of self-destruction, self-annihilation? When the child murderer of Expensive People realizes that he has become, or has been, in fact, all along, a mere “Minor Character” in his mother's life, he is made to realize absolute impotence; inconsequence; despair. He has slipped forever “out of focus.” A desperate act of (premeditated) matricide will not restore his soul to him but will at least remove the living object of his love and grief.
A complex, multi-tiered novel can be an exercise in architectural design and it can be, in the writing, true labor; a novel like Expensive People with its relaxed first-person narration, its characteristically succinct and chatty chapters, and its direct guidance of the reader's reading experience, can ride upon the ease of its own melting, as Robert Frost said of the lyric poem. Of my numerous novels Expensive People glimmers in my memory as the most fluidly written in its first-draft version; my precise memories of writing it, giving voice to the doomed Richard Everett in long unbroken mildly fevered sessions, are tied to the upstairs, rear study of the first of the several houses of my married life, a brick colonial, modest, with four bedrooms, at 2500 Woodstock Drive, Detroit, Michigan. (What happy days: at the time I was an instructor in English at the University of Detroit where I taught, with unflagging enthusiasm and a boundless energy that perplexes me today, four courses including two generously populated sections of “Expository Writing”—freshman composition.)
The “I” of my protagonist Richard became so readily the “eye” of the novelist that, at times, the barrier between us dissolved completely and the voice in which I wrote was, if not strictly speaking my own, an only slightly exaggerated approximation of my own. (The most immediate model for the novel's peculiar tone was evidently Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveler: or, The Life of Jack Wilton, 1594, often called “the first novel in English”; my narrator alludes to “ that other unfortunate traveler from whom I have stolen so much” in Part I, Chapter 23, but in rereading the ebullient sixteenth-century work I can see only occasional and glancing similarities.) The fluid writing experience of Expensive People would have been impossible if I had not worked from an earlier first-person “confession” also narrated by a disturbed and self-destructive adolescent boy, in a more subdued, naturalistic key; this was a completed novel of about two hundred fifty pages with which I was dissatisfied, as an unworthy successor to A Garden of Earthly Delights, which yet had its hooks in my soul and could not be discarded. (With the completion of Expensive People, however, the manuscript was quickly and unsentimentally tossed away: no more than self-conscious Richard Everett would I have wished to keep any evidence of early botched and faltering versions of my more “eloquent” self.)
What a powerful hold the world of “expensive people” had upon me in those years! The short story collections The Wheel of Love (197?) and Marriages & Infidelities (1972) focus upon similar themes, frequently from the perspective of estranged and hyperesthesiac adolescents like the protagonists of “Boy and Girl,” “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction, and Began My Life Over Again,” “Stalking,” “Stray Children,” “Problems of Adjustment in Survivors of Natural/Unnatural Disasters,” and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” The novella Cybele (1979) most clearly resembles Expensive People—it is set in precisely the identical suburban-Detroit world—but its tone is far more pitiless and unyielding than Richard Everett's; the voice is that of the ancient goddess Cybele mockingly recounting the rake's-progress misadventures of one of her doomed mortal lovers.
—
Normal men and women—by whom I mean, I suppose, non-novelists— may be surprised to learn that novelists are haunted by a quickened sense of mortality when they are writing novels; the terror of dying before the work is completed, the interior vision made exterior, holds us in its grip. Once the work is completed, however, once transformed into a book, an object, to be held in the hand, the novelist does permit himself or herself to feel a modicum of accomplishment: not pride so much as simple relief. Here it is. Now I can die. Rereading a novel after many years is thus a disorienting experience. For while there does remain the original, however unmerited satisfaction of the achievement in itself, there now arises, unexpectedly, a sense of profound and irrevocable loss.
The novel has become, in the intervening years, a species of “look-back” time, to use the poetic astrophysical term; it has, for all its immediacy to others' eyes, a fossil-image glimmer for the writer. Behind many of the proper names of Expensive People (“Fernwood,” “Johns Behemoth,” “Epping Way,” “Bebe Hofstadter,” “Mr. Body,” even “Spark,” et al), as behind a scrim, there exist authentic names, and authentic entities; the descriptive scenes bear witness to a greedily appropriated authentic landscape, that of Birmingham/Bloomfield Hills,Michigan; at every interstice, in virtually every turn of phrase, use of metaphor, literary allusion (to, for instance, Nada's note to herself, to revise “Death and the Maiden” and change its title—which title, changed, will be “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”), literary parody, and aside, I am forcibly reminded not only of my old long-forgotten sources but of my former, now lost self in the act of writing: inventing. Yet more painfully I am reminded of the losses of dear friends and acquaintances of that crowded era of my life more than two decades ago; and of the era itself, so tumultuous in our American history and so crucial in our fractured sense of our national identity. My romance with Detroit, I've characterized this phase of my life. My romance with novel-writing itself.
So the vertigo of memory haunts me in rereading Expensive People. Did expensive houses sell for as little as $80,500 in those years? Comedy ends abruptly with death and since so many of my “expensive people” have indeed died, including the exemplary woman to whom Expensive People was dedicated, isn't the jocular tone of the narrator inappropriate? Isn't it … too unknowing? too young? Even the novel's thinly codified secret (having to do with the execution of an ambitious woman writer as fit punishment for having gone beyond the “limits of her world”—upstate New York) strikes me as sobering and not, as I'd surely intended, blackly comic. I
recall too that the shooting of a woman by her son was based upon an actual incident of that era, but I can't recall any of the details of that case, nor even if I made any effort to seek them out. For the writer, emblematic material is most highly charged when it is only glancingly and obliquely suggested; once the idea presents itself, our instinct is to turn discreetly away. Sometimes even to shade our eyes.
Most of Expensive People is fiction, of course. An invented tapestry of “observed” data stretched upon a structure of parable-like simplicity. I saw myself then, as I see myself now, as a perennially romantic traveler, an “eye” enraptured by the very jumble and clamor of America. Richard Everett is speaking of his parents but he may well be speaking of all the inhabitants of his world when he confesses, “Yes, I loved them.”
JOYCE CAROL OATES
January, 1990
ABOUT THE INTRODUCER
ELAINE SHOWALTER is professor emeritus of English at Princeton University, where she taught courses on contemporary fiction, women's writing, and nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature. The author or editor of eighteen books on English and American literature, she has reviewed contemporary literature and culture both for scholarly journals and for periodicals such as The Guardian Review, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, The Washington Post Book Review, and the Los Angeles Times. Her current project is a literary history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.