“I hope you don’t mind my coming,” she said.
It was not an easy meeting. Leaning on the Mercedes next to her, so that she could not, without continually and obviously turning her head, study my ill-kempt appearance, I smoked her Parliaments and answered the questions she forced herself to ask with such rudeness that I was surprised she didn’t leave before she did. “How is the food here?” “Swell.” We smoked two, three, four of her Parliaments apiece while I mumbled my answers and framed in my mind a perfectly hysterical epistle to my family, demanding to know what right they had telling anyone I was in the loony bin. By the time I had the letter completed, mentally scrawling a violent signature (very formal: Frederick Earl Exley) across the en tire bottom of the page—oh, my sense of outrage knew no bounds!—she was in the car, the motor was running, it occurred to me she was leaving, and, panicking, I stammered, “Look, come back some time, will yuh? I’m, I’m—it’s one of those days, yuh know?” She looked at me quizzically for a moment, as if she perhaps didn’t know; then, speaking in a voice that told me nothing, she said, “Maybe—if I can.” Watching the Mercedes till it was out of sight, I walked slowly back to the ward and with Snow White watched Ed Sullivan. Snow White had a running dialogue with Ed and all his performers. Ed said, “Good evening, ladies and gentle men”; Snow White replied, “Fuck you, Ed.”
One Sunday went by, then another, and on the third Sun day she came. She brought me a carton of cigarettes. I thanked her so profusely that she came the following Sunday, and by then I had of course come utterly to rely on her visits —a dependence which, despite my attempts to act detached, she soon came to recognize. More than that, she was aware that in the act of visiting me initially she had instituted that dependence, and because she was a person of character— and I suspect that it was as much for this reason as out of any affection she felt for me—she continued to honor that obligation. She continued, and that fall became for me the one I will remember above all—the autumn I discovered the Hudson Valley.
I drove. With the top down on the Mercedes and the chillness of the season cutting our faces a fierce pink, we shot through the autumn-lemon hills of Putnam County, and across the snakelike mountain roads into that valley. Beyond the river, its waters flat blue and cold now, rose the mountains, rose just as Irving had said they did, now purple, now russet, now shrouded in mist. I especially liked the antiquated towns where the old limestone houses sat flush with the streets beneath the fall trees. Looking at them, one thought of cavernous hearths opening onto great, smoldering logs, of huge cop per kettles, of the odor of things baking, of family reunions, of rooted people with a sense of the past, warm, loyal, dignified people who endured in a kind of unending autumn—I could not, and cannot, imagine that valley save in autumn. We—the girl with the roan-colored hair and I—stood at outdoor stands inhaling the pungent odor of burning foliage, feasting on hot dogs piled high with sauerkraut, and watching the cars, whizzing by, tear up the leaves and send them scurrying, like little furry animals in flight, across the bonelike highway.
By two o’clock, and as likely as not before then (such was my anxiety), we were in one of those country taverns with spotless checkered tablecloths and no customers, as if the owners—an amiable, starchy, and aging Dutch couple—had been granted their existence to serve patrons that very day, that very hour, and then would be no more. We drank coffee, sometimes draft beer, and nibbled on potato chips and old cheese, making small talk about the wonder of our complexions. The moment the game started she fell silent, studying me, I’m certain, with that bemused curiosity with which a woman views a man’s enthusiasms, knowing, as she instinctively does, that for the most part a man’s preoccupations are trivial, even contemptible things.
“No, no—not now!” I would exclaim, raising my hand with forbidding finality if I even suspected her on the verge of introducing some topic foreign to what was taking place on the television screen. I never looked at her when I did this, to gauge her response. I didn’t have to. I knew that she would be smiling, not exactly as if I were mad, simply as though I were a man.
“Oh, Jesus, Frank! Do it, kid! Catch it, baby!” Now would come a breathless silence, followed by an incredulous, “He did it! He caught the goddam thing!” I would turn to her then. “Cha see that? Cha see that, for Christ’s sake?”
Though she would smile and say that she had, I knew that she hadn’t, rinding my show—as she would that of an exhilarated child’s—much more interesting.
More often than not we had to speed back to the hospital to get me there on time; even when the Giants played at home, and the television blackout surrounding New York City was in effect, in order to see the game we would drive way north, at times nearly to Albany. It was on one of these trips back, when I was punishing the Mercedes, that she asked me a question which led to my making a strange reply. Only a woman
would have been capable of asking it. Another man would have simply thought him my favorite athlete.
“What is this thing with you and Gifford—or whatever his name is?” she asked.
The question took me unawares, and I did not answer her for a long time. I had never before tried to articulate what the thing was, and I was fairly sure that whatever I said would come out badly and be taken all wrong. But I thought I would say something. The heavy hum of the wheels was beneath us, the darkness of the cab enshrouded us, the atmosphere seemed conducive to talk. I told her about my first year in New York, how I had had this awful dream of fame, but that, unlike Gifford—who had possessed the legs and the hands and the agility, the tools of his art—I had come to New York with none of the tools of mine, writing. I told her how I had tried to content myself with reverie, envisioning myself emblazoned across the back of dust jackets. I told her how I had gone each lonely Sunday to the Polo Grounds where Gifford, when I heard the city cheer him, came after a time to represent to me the possible, had sustained for me the illusion that I could escape the bleak anonymity of life. At the time of my “confession” Gifford was reaping the benefits of the Jim Thorpe Trophy, and, I told her, as a kind of ironic comment on the extent of my own failure, it seemed that every time I picked up a magazine in the hospital I was confronted with his picture. There was, I said, a particularly distressing advertisement that continued to appear in the pages of The New Yorker and Sports Illustrated. A tartan cap tilted rakishly to one side of his head, a football tucked under his arm, a how-the-hell-did-I-get-here? expression on his face (exactly the kind of thing I might once have imagined for myself), he was showing the reader how splendidly handsome and virile he might look were he to wear a V-necked Jantzen pullover. That sweater, I said, seemed to make my state-issue cotton plaid shirt burn hot on my flesh, the hot humiliation of having hoped for too much.
She was silent for a very long time when I had finished. Then she said something which elicited a singular reply from me, a reply that kept us both in silence for the rest of the trip. Whether she ever grasped my meaning, I can’t say. I know I never completely did, though I suppose that in the act of revealing so much of myself to her I had begun to have this thing for her.
“I should think you’d despise him,” she said. “Oh, maybe not despise him. Envy him to the point of disliking him immensely.”
“Despise him?” I said. I’m certain my voice reflected my great incredulity. “But you don’t understand at all. Not at all! He may be the only fame I’ll ever have!”
Within not too many days of this revelation, within a few days of Paddy the Duke’s departure, I, too, left the hospital. Had I gone directly to the girl, I think I might have made it on the outside and thereby thwarted Paddy’s smug prophecy that I would one day return to Avalon Valley. Shaking hands first with Dr. K., I had the boys crowd round and say the things they say: “Don’t let the shits get yuh down!” and “Don’t let us see yuh back here, yuh heah?” I had laughed, and to the latter had proclaimed, much too vehemently, “Don’t worry about that!” and had sensed in the shrill falseness
of that protest with what trepidation I was actually going out.
I had a right to my misgivings. Within three hours of leaving the hospital I was standing on the upper level of the Grand Central Terminal, debating whether in fact it might not be the wiser alternative to return to Avalon Valley. For a fleeting moment I thought then of going to her, but I immediately discarded the notion, thinking that at some later, happier moment I might go to her in an aura of more presentable splendor. Presently I also rejected the idea of returning to the nut house and found myself on the train moving to the upstate city where the Counselor was then practicing law. All the way there my mouth tasted of old leather, iodine, and blood, the way my mouth tastes when I have made some wrong and seemingly irremediable choice.
A thickset, balding, timid little man I had met at the AA meetings had asked me to telephone long distance to his sister in Rochester and ask her if she wouldn’t be willing to take him into her house until he was working and could set up for himself. He told me, his voice grave as doom, that his sister was his last chance, that though he had two brothers both had refused to take him. There was no rancor toward the brothers. Each of them, he said, had over the years sponsored untold “new lives” for him and in a way he felt rather relieved that they had finally spurned him, he was so afraid of disappointing them once again. For the first time he overcame his timidness and, popeyed, he looked directly at me.
“Give she and the kids my love,” he said, “and impress on her, uh—you know—the urgency—”
“I know,” I said.
Then he forced two wadded, filthy, and oily dollar bills into my hand and began anticipating for me all sorts of objections his sister, and especially his brother-in-law, might have to taking him in. I did not want to take the money. But I did. I thought it would give him, at least momentarily, some surcease from the hopelessness of his situation, thinking, as he would, that having been given the money I couldn’t “forget” to make the call. Requiring such glib verbosity, such pleading cries to often all-but-deaf ears, I didn’t in the least want to make it. But I had no choice whatever. Having once been in Avalon Valley, one never leaves the place and finds oneself, consciously or otherwise, forever obligated to those wretched men weeping their fierce tears in the night. I took the train to New York, fingering the oily bills in my pocket all the way. Getting two dollars’ worth of quarters, I put the call through from Grand Central.
It was at the far end of the rush hour, about seven in the evening, but the closed booth was compact and soundless and I heard the ringing as clearly as though I were calling next door. The sister answered. She had a good, pleasant, and either sultry or timid voice; and I conjured an image of an attractive, perhaps sensual woman quite at home in a starched apron in a cheerful kitchen. In the background I heard a dog bark, a little girl shriek (“Dumbhead’s after the cat!”), the canned laughter of the inevitable television set, and once— distinctly and from some remote corner of the house—the cascading rush and gurgle of a toilet flushing. Coming down on the train, I had planned my pitch pretty well. Rather than risk her thinking me just another loony, I explained to her that my name was Earl Fredericks, that I was an attorney at law, that I had recently been visiting a client at Avalon Valley, and that there I had met her brother who had asked me to telephone her. Couching my language in what I deemed impressive-sounding legal jargon (gleaned from Avalon Valley’s “clubhouse lawyers”), I explained to her the problems connected with her brother’s ever getting out without her assistance, throwing in a lot of lunatic phrases like “the state takes the position that” and “the courts hold that your responsibility is negligible,” summing up by explaining that all that was really necessary was that she affix her signature to the most innocent of papers and feed her brother and give him carfare to look for work.
As I talked, I was very proud of myself. She had not once interrupted for explanations. All she had done was come in with those peremptory yeses, uh-huh’s, and / see’s, indicating that she understood and sympathized with me completely. Incredible as it seems to me now, I got the distinct impression that on finishing my heavy monologue she was going to say, ever so gaily, that she’d be pleased to help in whatever way she could.
She fooled me. What I had not been able to isolate in her voice was not sultriness but timidity, a family trait, I had no doubt.
Silent for a long time when I finished, she then excused herself and began calling upstairs to her husband, asking him to pick up the extension. Having anticipated this, I wasn’t unduly worried until the husband, instead of picking up the phone immediately, began calling back downstairs and asking what it was about. Twice she called back her brother’s name, but she did so with such unsettling timorousness that I could scarcely hear her myself and thought, “Uh-oh, the poor bastard’s name must be forbidden in Rochester.”
George (for that was the husband’s name) obviously heard her though. “Who?” he suddenly shouted into the phone; and when she sheepishly repeated the name into her downstairs extension, he said, “Oh, Christ!”—spoken not in a groan that gave me hope, a here-we-go-again thing, but with such absolute loathing that I all but dropped the receiver.
Up to this point, as I say, I had been pleased with the sane and reasonable timbre of my voice; but now, having to begin my tale all anew for George, and a George whose hostility was heated, I began, alarmingly, to disintegrate. My voice grew more quavering, clammy perspiration began running freely down my sides, my hands grew so slippery that it proved a monumental effort to hold the receiver, and I had to keep shifting it from one hand to the other, intermittently drying my free hand on my trousers. The inflexibility of George’s eardrums seemed palpable. Like his wife he kept saying yeah, though unlike her he spoke not with any comprehension but with the staccato .and impatient yeah-yeah-yeah’s of a man not hearing a word being said. Worse than all this, the television had with each moment seemed to grow louder, mocking. And I began to think that George had purposely turned the volume up, that he used it, this squawking idiot box, to keep himself utterly removed from the pain of life.
“He’s a no-good bastard!” George suddenly shouted.
“Pardon?” I said. The blood rushed to my face, and I felt as humiliated as if I were confronting the man in his own living room.
“He’s a no-good bastard!” George cried from what passed with him for a heart. He seemed in a perfect paroxysm of rage. “Never sends the kids so much as a card at Christmas!”
Frankly, I was by then so totally unmanned by George’s inordinate anger that I could scarcely find my voice and kept clearing my throat. When finally I could speak, I said, “Well, he’s been sick, you know? He told me to send his sister and the kids his love. That’s what he said, ‘Give them my love.’ “
After that I just rambled on, losing all coherence, attempting to appeal to their sense of family, their decency, their humanity. The sister was still on the downstairs extension, and it was she I was trying to reach. Very painful to me as I talked was the memory of that timid, balding, popeyed little man. He was one of those who had made his grim confession at the AA meetings; and I was remembering that above all the others he had moved me with the groping, sheepish, and awful sincerity of his tale—so much so, in fact, that frequently my eyes had sought the floor in refuge from his pain. Above all, I recalled that his tale had been full of the airy and alcoholic dreams of gestures he had wanted to make on the side of life, not the least of which had included great, extravagantly wrapped gifts for these very nephews and nieces.
“Look,” I said, “he’s probably in his heart given more to your kids than you’ll ever know.”
“Couldn’t have him in the house,” George said. He seemed to be talking around a cigar; there was not a shred of equivocality in his voice.
“/ know, I know,” I said, remembering that the man had anticipated this objection for me. “He said something about a room over the garage!” Then I volunteered, as though it were my idea: “He could stay there!” I wa
s helping out, ar ranging, solving problems, showing everyone how limpid things were, simple as mud. “He could stay there!”
“No dice,” George said. “Couldn’t have him around the kids—and that’s all there is to it.”
The television was still blaring on, louder. The program was one given over to frolicsome domesticity and starring Lucille Ball. In the hospital I had often watched the show in the company of Snow White and had laughed myself silly, not at Miss Ball but at Snow White’s running and one-sided conversation with her, most of which had to do with Snow White’s suggestions on how Miss Ball might please him sexually. In the show, Lucy had done wonderfully witty things like look cross-eyed in mockery of the world’s ugly. Invariably she had had a scene where, by blacking out her teeth, she had smiled to expose a wide expanse of gums. More often than not she was feigning madness, palsy, or idiocy; and she must have had America rocking in the easy comfort that it was neither so zany, so lunatic, nor so ugly as she. But it did not seem so hilarious to us at Avalon Valley; and only Snow White’s unrelenting and wildly droll derision of her had made it bearable. Snow White explained it to me once. Unlike Chap lin, he said, who was always with his tramp, or Breughel with his peasant, Miss Ball’s farce was conducted on an incredibly cheap level and one never doubted that she was no more with us than was the rest of the world out there.