For the most part Bumpy demanded nothing of me save that like a young bride I sit at the bar, obediently sip my drink, look pleasingly discerning and attractive, and exude intimations of possessing recondite sexual expertise. Fortunately for me, Bumpy had no capacity for not upstaging all the bit players, including myself, with whom he came in contact. Ludicrously attired in a straw boater, a red suede vest making his stomach look like a rubescent mosquito’s ripe for bursting, his faded and frayed Levi’s, and a pair of glossy paratrooper boots, on entering a place he would make a direct, nearly maniacal line for the biggest assemblage of talkers at the bar, an assemblage that on spotting him seemed to shrivel visibly, to grow troubled and wan, to exude an unmistakable aura of sniffing recoil. To all of which reaction I invariably smiled. Young advertising men and bond salesmen, they were in their twenties and thirties, some in their forties; they wore Paul Stuart or J. Press jackets and bow ties; they puffed suavely at cigars or pipes; they sipped their scotch with a kind of Old World sang-froid; they saw themselves as the kind of tweedy squires to whom the advertisements of The New Yorker and Esquire are directed—ironically, they saw themselves as having the kind of money Bumpy had, not realizing that that kind of money gave Bumpy immunity from having to dress like them. Bumpy approached them forthrightly. With a furious flick of his fingers, he undid their bow ties. He gave them unsignaled, “playful” punches on their arms. He cuffed them “affectionately” on the back of the head. To those sitting on barstools facing him, their legs propped up and slightly spread, he reached up near the groin and ferociously gave them “chummy” little pinches on the inner thigh that drained the blood from their faces. Ordering drinks from the bar tender, Bumpy bellowed, “Give us a drink here, you ape!” and thereupon disdainfully threw a fifty-dollar bill on the bar. Without the least heed to what their previous conversation might have been, Bumpy immediately began telling the dreadful jokes he had “stored up” for me during the week.
“There was this farmer, see, whose wife couldn’t pop her nuts! Har! Har! Har!” Frothing at the mouth, his forehead glistening with sweat, tears of laughter streaming down his feverish cheeks, he disintegrated into a state of sickening and hysterical ribaldry, his obscene clucking denigrating his words into meaninglessness. Watching him, most of the men became salaciously hysterical themselves, as though caught up in a tornado of monstrous smut. Some few of the men sat defensively, like shrilly priggish women, forcing sickly smiles, and priming themselves to be ready to ward off Bumpy’s unexpected punches, cuffs, and pinches, which continued to come even as he told his stories. These were the men I watched, the ones who gave my afternoons a kind of perverse pleasure. It was obvious they wanted to knock Bumpy down, but they never did. Why I don’t know—one good blow to the belly would have been all that was required. Certainly part of their restraint was due to their nauseating deference to Bumpy’s money, part to the reputation with which Bumpy had surrounded himself, that of a “tiger.” Beneath his wooden jollity, Bumpy was consuming himself with hate; and for one so seemingly self-conscious, so oppressively inward, so apparently aware of nothing outside his own filthy tongue, Bumpy had an acute, nearly pathological insight into the temperature of all those about him. Just before the temperature reached the boiling point, Bumpy struck. Just at the moment one of the more courageous of their number was about to call him or challenge him for one of his vicious pinches, unexpectedly, violently, fist doubled, the weight of his obese body entirely committed to the blow, Bumpy struck the man in the face. Standing over the prone and bleeding figure, Bumpy would focus on him with his finger and say, “Next time, you pisspot, I’ll shoot you fucking dead.” Belly out, he’d make a hard-charging, theatrical exit. He hated all of them, but not nearly as much as he yearned to be hated by them. Within twenty minutes of one of these episodes, he would have hit the brakes, pulled to the side of the highway, and grabbed his thirty-aught-thirty. Under the impact of that weapon’s shell, a cat so disintegrates that state police can’t find the evidence to convict one. Watching him smile to himself after this, I could see that he reserved for himself some irony I couldn’t comprehend. It was at these times, watching him so full of hate and smiling that sneering, inner-directed smile, that he looked absolutely brilliant, a creature of world-shaking capacities. It was at these times that I knew Bumpy had a good deal more intelligence than one supposed.
What Patience and Prudence did in the sumptuously furnished fifteen other rooms while Bumpy and I were embarked on our Saturnalian outings is easy to imagine: Prudence talked and Patience listened. Older than Patience by a year, Prudence was a three-child version of my wife, hippy, hard-used, and looking ten years older. The same lovely roan hair, Prudence’s was always dim and lank with poor care; where Patience’s mouth was full, inviting, and quick to smile, Prudence’s had defined itself into a perpetually severe and unappetizing slash; where my wife’s eyes were limpid green, calm, and friendly, Prudence’s had become crow’s-footed, directed inward, and charged with bile. Though she hadn’t had a child in four years, Sams’ ages being seven, six, and four, she always seemed puffy and brimming with the fluids of a pregnant woman, a flatulence that had me always accusing her to Patience of being a “closet” drinker. “If I ever saw one!” I’d emphasize. So often and so vehemently did Patience deny this that she grew weary of doing so and one day, with no little exasperation, said, “I don’t give a damn if she drinks a gallon a day, do you?” Embarrassed by my obvious stridence in behalf of false accusations, I said, “No, I suppose not. But she’s so suffocatingly high and mighty, I’d like to boot her in the ass!”
My affection was reciprocated. Dear Prudence loathed me with something like genius. Except for the slight influence she always had had and still had on Patience, I didn’t much care. Bumpy’s basement daybed was more utilitarian than decorative, there was something gravely wrong with his marriage to Prudence, and she was blindly spitting the hurt of that wrong in all directions. Twice on coming unexpectedly into a room I overheard Prudence admonitorily advising Patience that once I got my life “straightened out,” some moneys due her from an estate would be forthcoming. It was in this way I first learned that because of me Patience was being denied access to her own money, presumably quite a bit. Everything that Prudence said to me was filled with the venom of her own disappointments. With Bumpy she had staked her happiness on trappings; now that she had the three cars, the fifteen rooms, the mink, the nurse, the maid, the cook, she knew they weren’t enough; and yet, such is the dangerous vindictiveness of unhappy mentalities, she loathed anyone for being presumptuous enough to dare hope for anything other than the grief she had given herself. With a hate out of all pro portion to the subject at hand, she one Sunday morning identified Thoreau as the most “despicable, loathsome, self-centered, and phony man I ever heard of.”
Unlike Bumpy and Patience, Prudence saw through my literary pretensions. Each weekend she asked, “How’s the book coming?” in a tone of such contemptuous mockery that I suspected she had sneaked into our apartment and found the labeled envelopes stuffed with the blank pages; immediately following this savage query with one about my “job prospects.” “Patience and I,” she said, as Patience sat shaking her head that it wasn’t true, “have had a long talk and have decided that it’d be better if you had something to occupy your mind during the day. You could write evenings and week ends.” “What I’d suggest, dear sister-in-law,” I said, “is that you occupy your own mind with your own marriage.” “Now, now,” Patience said, clucking reprovingly at me. “That’s telling her!” Bumpy said to me. Looking hatefully at Prudence, he added, “And knock off that stuff about Thoreau! Talk about somethin’ somebody understands!” “What’s that?” Prudence asked, and there is no need to indicate how she added, “Grilled-cheese sandwiches and beer?” “Up your ass!” Bumpy said, to which the oldest daughter, the stunning and innocent Sam, broke into tears and ran from the room. Once when I was in the next room, I heard Prudence say, “Surely he can get a
job on a newspaper in the city,” the smug tone of her voice indicating that, unlike Bumpy who was up to such high and enduring stuff “downtown,” any stumblebum could do that. Laughing, and unable to let the moment go by, I charged into the room, suavely announced, “Tomorrow, my dear Prudence, I’m going down to the New York Times and offer myself as editor of their book section,” and smiled with the self-relish of a man who was certain his background as managing editor of The Rocket, as dipsomaniac, and as lunatic who had undergone both insulin-and electroshock treatments eminently qualified him for the job. Prudence outdid herself: her eyes corruscated with flaming, unadulterated venom.
Driving home that night, I said, “I guess we’ll have to stop going there.” “Don’t pay any attention to her,” Patience said, add ing, “Frankly, I think Bumpy’d die if you ever stopped going up there. I’m not in the least kidding when I say you’re probably the only friend he ever had. And, let’s face it, Prudence doesn’t have anyone to talk with save me.” As things turned out, we were to stop going there anyway. In a contest between
Nature and science, Nature had won and Patience had become, alas, pregnant. As an indirect result of this pregnancy, I’d soon be back at Avalon Valley; and though we were to see a good deal of them after my sons were born, on those occasions both Prudence and Bumpy would leave me to my own devices to the point of outright ignoring me; and this, as the reader will see, proved to be fine with me. Oddly, though, and after so many years, I heard from Bumpy only recently.
Beginning his letter, “Ah, to be in Paris, now that spring is here!-!!” Bumpy went on to explain that, as he quite often had to get into Africa on business, he was now calling “good, gay, faggy old Paree” home and was, in fact, writing his note from
a sidewalk cafe he frequented in the Saint Germain des Pres. Apparently a lovely spring day, Bumpy wrote, “The birds is singing, the bees is buzzing, the cats is mewing. Though one cat sure ain’t,” he added ominously. On the route from his
apartment to the cafe a “black bastard” had made the fatal mistake of attempting to steal across Bumpy’s path, Bumpy had given him in the “arse” the full kicking force of his cyclist’s boot, and in the gutter he had left the “sneaky mudder fudder for dead!” Bumpy’s comment on the episode was: “Har! Har! Har!” Never having been good at languages and “all that horseshit,” he was yet to acquire a speaking knowl edge of French and thus hadn’t made any friends, finding Paris lonely, hostile, and inhabited by a “bunch of chiseling, anti-good-ol’-Americee, and muff-diving greaseballs! Utter swine,” he emphasized. Heavier than ever, he had been warned by his doctor that his blood pressure was such that he’d never reach forty. Having been ordered to diet and exer cise, Bumpy took long walks on weekends, browsing through the bookstalls on the Left Bank and to no avail asking after a book by “M. Frederick Exley.” “Did that horny book of yours ever come out?” he asked. “How about sending me a copy? I’ll bet it’s hornier than horny, you scurvy old cross-eyed degenerate you!” Bumpy told me that of course I had heard (and of course I hadn’t) about Prudence divorcing him; and whether it was true or not, I was most gratified to hear that “I just got plumb up to here one day, grabbed my toothbrush, and moved out on that la-di-da Vassarite bitch!” Prudence was now re married to a Pratt & Whitney engineer and with the children was living in a house fronting Lake Worth on Singer Island (“a swell fucking place to raise kids!”) at Riviera Beach, Flor ida; and Bumpy “gol dang sure” missed the three Sams and bet me that, as they had grown so big, I wouldn’t even recog nize “the cute little snot-noses.” The last time he visited them in Florida he had taken them to a drive-in movie (“we had a fucking brawl”) and afterward, because it was still early and a lovely, tropical evening, he and the Sams had sat on the dock in front of the house (“a real dump compared to what ol’ Bumpy gave them!”) eating popcorn and throwing pebbles into the lake. The location reminded him of a hotel on the west coast of Africa where he often stopped when he was there on business; and now he couldn’t go to that hotel without remembering that “gol dang night with the three Sams and feeling all kind of sad and sick inside.” Speaking of Africa, he said that the one time he had got to the Congo he had hired a couple “spear-thrower guides” who recalled the incident and after much travail had found the place where his parents had been “slaughtered in the uprising of ‘,” and parenthetically he added, “I must have told you before, didn’t I, how Mom and Dad were killed in the bush uprising of ‘?” Finally attempting to get at his reason for writing, he said that he wanted to make amends for his never having visited me when I was back at Avalon Valley, explaining that it was Prudence who had forbidden him to come, telling me that she had in fact called my doctor (“a Doctor K., wasn’t it?”) and told him that Bumpy and I acted as unhappy catalysts on one another and that under no circumstances should the doctor allow Bumpy to take me from the hospital grounds. “Now that I think about it,” Bumpy added morosely, “I don’t suppose the doctor knew who the fuck she was or what she was trying to say.” After my sons were born and Patience and I had once again gone to Bumpy’s weekends, he couldn’t ask me to come along on his “drives” with him as Prudence had threatened to divorce him if he did so. He wanted me to know after all these years that his having to ignore me hurt him deeply and that he took full responsibility for doing so. He should have taken a stand right there, he said, and an unfortunate marriage would have terminated that much sooner. “I’m sorry,” he wrote. “You were the only real friend I ever had.” Getting dramatically maudlin in the way of B-class gangster movies, he added, “and, like the swine I am, I double-crossed you!” Then he became nostalgic. “Gol dang, though, we sure had a brawl, didn’t we? Mucking those tweedy bastards about, shooting the fucking cats, and all?” Summing up, Bumpy said he was over there trying to save the family’s oil interests in Africa, but that what with one different “nigger nation emerging every third day and nationalizing the refineries,” he hadn’t much hope of succeeding and ended his letter thus: “I left my capacity for hoping on the jet planes that led to the little emerging nations.” Signing it “Bumpy here!!!” he added this postscript: “Write me a nice long letter, you old muff-diver, and tell me some of those screwy things you know—about Plutarch and all.”
From his opening and inadvertent paraphrase of Browning to his concluding travesty of Fitzgerald, I had thought— almost able to hear him boast of his felinicidal mania, watching him so trouble himself with notions of sinister “niggers” and “emerging nations,” thinking of him sitting so fat-bellied and so bebooted at a cafe table in, of all places, the Saint Germain des Pres and while writing his letter perhaps being taken for a famous author, envisioning him charging up to startled Parisian book panderers and demanding the horny works of “M. Frederick Exley,” trying at once to envision all these singular and wonderful twists of life—from beginning to end I thought I had read the letter in a state of wild hilarity. But an odd thing happened. When I went back to reread it, attempting gluttonously to re-experience that gaiety at Bumpy’s expense, I found that I could barely discern the words from where the dampness had run the ink, found that after so many years, and as Felix Krull had done for his father, I had finally reciprocated Bumpy’s love by paying him “the abundant tribute of my tears.”
By the time I finished my first sentence and believed myself ready to undertake my epic tale of “pity,” in Patience’s fourth or fifth month of pregnancy, I began experiencing sudden and excruciating pains in my chest and decided that in my father’s image I was dying of lung cancer. Hence I took to a drinking which even by my standards was torrential, characterized, as it was, by an unutterable hopelessness. It is obvious to me now (and of course no psychiatrist enlightened me) that as I watched Patience’s body blossom forth, as almost day to day I witnessed the growth of what was to be a responsibility I neither wanted nor could accept, in all its perverse wonder my mind succeeded in bringing me totally and intransigently back to myself, even at the debilitating expense
of living intimately, like a doomed and illicit lover unable to help himself, with the thought of my own death. Not that death itself engrossed me. Owning dim memories of that to which my father had been reduced (a man, I knew, more suited by temperament to pain than I), I was sure I couldn’t see the disease through to the end; and during the next few weeks all my waking hours were given over to mapping strategies for aborting the malaise’s hideous course. Late mornings at Sam’s Bar on Gedney Way in White Plains, I ordered the first of my twenty to twenty-five daily Vodka Presbyterians, struck up conversations with strangers, and with only a rudimentary discretion worked the conversation round to suicide. I asked timid clerks and burly beer-truck drivers whether an overdose of sleeping pills caused painful hemorrhaging, what they thought of the theory that a man leaping from the Empire State Building would lapse into merciful unconsciousness before splattering the pavement, if there were any possibility that a twenty-two pistol (I had one of Bumpy’s in mind) placed properly against the temple could fail to do the job. Like me, these strangers were daylight drinkers eluding their own phantasma; and yet I found it oddly edifying that none of them found the subject bedeviling; none exclaimed, “Let’s leave off this morbidity!” Such was the clinical and speculative enthusiasm for the subject—”Now, if I was gonna knock myself off …”—that I came to see suicide occupying a greater piece of the American consciousness than I had theretofore imagined. And this gave me comfort. Thinking that so many men were ready to make jubilant jumps into oblivion, or to put tidy little holes in their heads, with me, I was unable to view my own self-destruction as anything but a trifling and dreary item.