Americana

  “Is that what you do up in New Hampshire?” my father said. “Go to the movies every night? It’s costing me a small fortune to send you to that school.”

  Mary was not a pretty girl. But there was an animation to her face, an intelligence, which nullified her plainness. She read her favorite authors in curiously appropriate ways—Proust supinely, Faulkner with bourbon, O’Casey wearing my father’s turtleneck. She was a fine swimmer and tennis player, although at times there seemed a touch of condescension in her attitude toward sport; it was all so easy, so predictable in outcome. She treated the family almost the same way she might treat her tennis racket, with rough affection and a charming lighthearted contempt. The latter did not extend to me, however. Her kid brother. I think she loved me very much. Almost everything my father said was received by Mary in a spirit of high delight. “Daddy,” she used to say, “you’re almost as funny as Eisenhower.” But he was not delighted by her as much as bewildered. I think she made my father question the structure of his own nature, for to him it was surely apparent that only the rebel mischief of his seed could have produced this stray comedienne.

  Mary and I were playing checkers in the attic. A cold rain was falling. She was drinking rum, neat, from a beer glass, and smoking a cigarette like Lauren Bacall, the cool appeal of those sleepy rhythms. Although it was late afternoon she was still in pajamas.

  “How did you meet him?” I said.

  “Thereby hangs a tale, brother. But I may as well let you in on it, if only to forestall another trouncing by the checker king of Westchester. After I made my controversial decision to leave school, one little thing kept nagging at me. What would I do next? I didn’t want to come back here, as we all know by now, but I wasn’t very anxious to get an apartment in the city and pursue a career in stenography either. The thought alone made my knees buckle. All I knew was that I had to get out of college. Massachusetts is no place to get educated, despite all the raving about intellectual ferment. My most vivid memory is of earnest young men banging their pipes into ashtrays, a sight that depresses me more than I can say. I was sick of the whole thing. I was sick of hearing the same expressions over and over. Just constantly. The same phrases, sentences, paragraphs. I’m hypersensitive, I know, but I was under the impression that up there, if nowhere else, my petty talent for finding fault might be allowed to dwindle and die. It was a false impression. The whole place was too inbred for me. The whole educational complex and the particular lollipop factory I was privileged to attend. The passion for ritual was overpowering. And of course nobody learned anything. One nice and bitchy memory I’ll keep. Our democratic little sorority had a sort of informal initiation process. About one-fifth of us were in on it. The others thought it much too unladylike. It was simple. Whenever a new girl sat down to her first dinner in the house, one of us would say to another: Pass the motherfucking carrots, please. Or words to that effect. The response would be in a similar vein and we’d usually keep it up all through the meal, tossing off the worst obscenities imaginable and doing it with a certain politesse, as if we were discussing sisal-growing in the Bahamas. By the time dessert arrived, the newcomer was in an advanced state of shock. I’m getting way off the mark, aren’t I?”

  “Arondella,” I said.

  “Want a sip of rum?”

  “Okay.”

  “I finally packed it in,” Mary said. “I took a cab to town and got on the first bus to Boston. Then I took another cab to the railroad station. I paid the driver, stepped onto the sidewalk and there he was. Sitting in that blue whale of his. Combing his hair. It was forty degrees but he had the top down. He was wearing a light windbreaker with the sleeves rolled all the way up. He was sitting on the passenger’s side of the front seat. He put the comb away and placed his right arm out over the top of the door. The arm was flexed and his bicep was pressing against the door so that it would look enormous. I was trying to carry two heavy suitcases, an overnight bag and a purse. And I knew he was watching me. He said hey. I stopped and looked at him—he obviously thought he was God’s gift to the virgins of Boston—and he said I’ll take you wherever you want to go. Anywhere in the continental United States. I said New York. He said hey, that was the one place I really meant. And we both smiled. Leslie Howard and Ingrid Bergman. Later I found out he had been sent to Boston to kill a man.”

  “Did he do it?”

  “The man had been arrested the night before. Some kind of narcotics charge. Eventually he was killed in prison.”

  “Last week daddy said if Arondella’s in the rackets you won’t be allowed to see him anymore.”

  “David, I won’t be living here much longer.”

  “Are you going away with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He’s got a wife and three children. It’s a delicate situation to say the least. All sorts of relatives are applying all sorts of pressures.”

  “What exactly does he do in the rackets?”

  “He goes places. He’s in Syracuse now. He makes business trips. That’s what he calls them. His territory seems to be upstate and New England.”

  “Does he kill people?”

  “I imagine so. He as much as told me. I don’t think the Boston trip was an isolated instance. But there are different kinds of death, David. And I prefer that kind, his kind, to the death I’ve been fighting all my life.”

  “Give me some more rum,” I said.

  “Don’t you love it when it rains like this? So gray and dark. I love dark chill days. We’re doing just the right thing for a day like this. Sitting in the attic drinking rum. It’s nice up here, isn’t it? Those skinny gray trees outside and the sound of the rain. We should have some music. Organ music would be perfect.”

  “I’ll go get the radio.”

  “Leave this house,” she said. “As soon as you can, get out of here. Run like hell, David. This place is haunted and everybody in it is haunted. Mother is terribly ill. And if she goes, if she slides all the way out, she’ll try to take you with her. I know her, David. I’m the only one who knows her.”

  * * *

  Meredith and I were married between my junior and senior years at Leighton Gage. A week before the event, I got a letter from Ken Wild.

  I’m writing because I want somebody to tell me whether I am alive or dead. I have been asked that question recently and I couldn’t think of an answer. So if you get this letter, write back as soon as you can. This way I’ll know I’m alive. Are you really going to marry Miss Dairy Products USA?

  I’m in the Michigan woods photosynthesizing. My big problem this summer, aside from life and death, is that I don’t have any classes to stay away from. A man should never be left without a class to cut. I flew up here in my father’s company’s plane, which was full of territorial managers on their way to hunting lodge for business meeting and ribald chortling. Two thousand pounds of condemned pork. Just before we were due to land, an engine flamed out. First thing I did was put out my cigarette. I believe this is called coolness under fire. But a second later I found myself on the edge of panic. Nobody else seemed even slightly upset. Were they really a planeload of Zen masters? Then we were landing, no trouble at all, and I was filled with disappointment. Because it had not been enough. I wanted to land in flames with crash-wagons screaming down the runway. Perhaps you understand this sort of pathos.

  Dostoyevsky sat next to me

  barbering his humorous fingernails

  I fish, I hunt, I write my wounded lines. My father wants me to join the firm after graduation. For the moment all I have to do is assure him I’ll think about it seriously. Everybody craves assurance. It’s the coin they insert in reality. It doesn’t matter whether anything comes out of the machine as long as they get their money back. What a pity it is that you’re reading this with such lack of compassion. Saying poor dumb Wild he’s like everybody else, pissing all over his own toes. I am writing a mock-epic poem—you won’t believe this—I
am writing a mock-epic poem about a boy who grows up among wolves somewhere in Siberia. Several distinguished publishers have indicated a wary interest.

  Write to me with news of the archduke. Jesus I hate this kind of letter. If only I were less sane. I could write poems the size of cathedrals!

  I had taken Wild’s letter, along with paper and pen and three cans of beer, to my favorite spot in Old Holly. This was the slope behind the firehouse, a green and treeless place, always private, facing west so that the grass turned slowly golden green as the sun circled toward the far hills. The slope dropped a hundred feet or so to a sort of lesser valley, a barren area of boulders, stunted trees and the scratched earth of a dried-out creekbed. Across the valley was a small hill, and on top of it, at the eastern limit of a large estate, was a pasture; and from the slope you could see the horses moving slowly, heads down, the lovely mild curves of their necks, grazing, moving against the more distant hills; or standing, where the hills dropped away as if to graze also on some low meadow, standing against the sky and the rich citrus setting of the sun.

  Wild, of course, had yet to meet Meredith. Miss Dairy Products USA was a name of my own making and Wild was merely repeating my own bad joke. I had known, as junior year drew to a close, that I would ask her to marry me. I also knew, pending her acceptance, that we would return together to Leighton Gage for my final year. My classmates in their evolving worldliness would consider Merry too pure, too naive, too inexperienced to be let loose outside of Disneyland. So I tried to prepare them—a joke here, an anecdote there, an occasional nervous quip. And as I said these things I would often think of her, in a London park or square, on a bench beneath some granite admiral, and she’d be so pretty, nodding as the pigeons nodded, pouting at the pouting children in their prams, so pretty and white, those thrifty breasts, salvation of Western man, furling a yellow umbrella. Some good-bad nights I spent, loving my self-hatred. I was trying to prepare them, that’s all; take the glint off their eager scalpels. I punished myself by going for long underwater swims in the artificial lake, coming up gasping, the sky regarding me through misty spectacles, quite curiously. And still I tried to prepare them. These are the things men do when they have orchestrated their lives to the rumble of public opinion. Merry arrived with me on campus the following autumn. They all said she was a nice girl and seven of us took a mass touchless shower.

  Writing to Wild on the slope I did not mention her. I made no reference to the flaming engine and his soul’s need for crisis. I said nothing of his mock-epic poem, which was obviously just another scenic dream. In fact I wrote just one line: I didn’t get your letter. Then I sipped beer for an hour. I thought of adding something about his desire for less sanity. Wild truly believed that he would never be a great poet because he was not sufficiently insane. I tended to agree with him but I didn’t bother getting into it. I was on the third can of beer by this time and it tasted warm and flat. The sun had set and it was time to be getting home.

  * * *

  Even from this long way off, in the magnet-grip of an impending century, it is painful to write about her. It has taken me this long just to organize my thoughts. And although I think I have come to terms with everything, it will be interesting to see whether I can put it on paper clearly and openly. Or whether I must blow some smoke into this or that passage—some smoke to hide the fire.

  One summer she bought two dolls, one for Jane and one for Mary. Jane put both dolls on her dresser. But my mother objected and so Mary’s doll was put into Mary’s abandoned room. Jane was always trying to discuss these things with me. In her confusion she was comforted by the sound of voices. It was an article of her faith that tragedy could be averted, or at least detained in the sweep of its tidal and incomprehensible darkness, by two reasoning people sitting in a familiar room and discussing the matter. I didn’t want to talk about it. I feared silence less than the involvement of words. Distance, silence, darkness. In the vastness of these things I hoped to evade all need to understand and to cancel all possibility of explaining. Jane came into my room with a pot of tea and closed the door behind her.

  “What are we going to do?” she said.

  “About what?”

  “You know what.”

  “There’s nothing to do,” I said. “We should see about a doctor. Some shrink on Park Avenue. But that’s up to daddy, isn’t it? I’d like to finish this book and get it back to the library before they close.”

  “What are we going to do about the dolls?”

  “Leave them where they are and forget it.”

  “What do you think it means, David?”

  “How the hell do I know? Now let me finish this book in peace.”

  “You can finish the book tomorrow.”

  “It’ll be overdue.”

  “It must have something to do with our childhoods,” Jane said. “She must be trying to make up for something.”

  “Sure. Childhood. Absolutely.”

  “I’m trying to remember whether I had any dolls like this when I was little. Maybe we wanted this particular kind of doll and she didn’t buy them because they were very expensive. They look expensive. I wish Mary was here.”

  “Look, she bought a couple of dolls. I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. All I can say is I’m hurt that she didn’t get anything for me. I wanted a fire engine. No fire gingin for Dabid. Dabid want big wed fire gingin. Dabid want to play with Jane and Mary. But mommy no buy him pwetty toys. Jane go way now so Dabid can wead his wittle book. Go way, Jane. Bye-bye. Jane go way. See Jane go. Jane is mad. See how mad Jane is. Jane slam Dabid’s door. What a bad wittle girl. Jane all gone. Bye-bye, Jane.”

  The following April, at school, I was summoned to the telephone. It was my father. I remember what I was wearing. I was wearing white Top-Siders, white sweatsocks, a pair of olive chinos, and an old basketball jersey, white with blue trim and lettering, bearing the number nine. While we spoke I studied these articles of clothing intensely, as if keeping a mescaline vigil, my eyes seeking those immense explosions of beauty which are known to occur in the swirl of a grain of cloth.

  “Bad news,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Your mother’s come down with something bad.”

  “She’s sick? What is it?”

  “I think she’s dying, kid. They found it too late.”

  “What?” I said.

  “What?”

  “What did they find?”

  “It looks like cancer. She doesn’t want to go to the hospital.”

  “Cancer where? What part?”

  “Take the first plane you can get. Wire and I’ll meet you at the airport. You need money, I’ll send it right out. But, look, hurry it up if you can. I should have called you weeks ago but I couldn’t get myself to believe it. Everything’s caving in. How the hell am I going to get in touch with Mary?”

  “Where’s the cancer?” I said.

  “It’s inside. It’s in the female region. Look, can’t we talk about it later? The doctor can tell you these things better than I can.”

  “Who’s the doctor?”

  “I got Weber.”

  “Get him the fuck out of there,” I said. “I don’t want Weber in there with her. Get another doctor. Anybody. Just get Weber out.”

  “It’s all my fault,” he said. “I’ve done everything wrong. I should have had her examined years ago. I should have had her examined for the other thing. Now there’s this thing and it’s too late. It’s funny, kid, but she said the same thing you did. She said to get Weber out.”

  The plane, smelling vaguely of a child’s vomit, ranged through stormclouds over the mountains and then broke clear into a calm blue afternoon. When I came out of the toilet a man stopped me to introduce himself. He said his wife would like to have my autograph. He said she had recognized me and he wondered if I would say hello to her on the way back to my seat. I told him she had mistaken me for someone else. He said it didn’t matter; sign any name. And I did
, I signed Buster Keaton, and when I stopped at her seat she took my hand and told me how very nice it was to meet me, how kind I was to interrupt my busy flying schedule in order to say hello to an admirer. An hour before we landed, the man came to my seat and offered me a twenty-dollar bill. Throughout the flight I kept getting mental pictures, against my will, of a growth inside my mother’s womb.

  The vase held seven wizened zinnias. My father whispered to me as she slept. It was the cervix. It had been discovered at an advanced stage. The doctor had wanted to take everything out. She had refused. She told my father that she had known about it for a long time. There had been unexplained bleeding and she told him she had felt the thing spreading, a radial plague, spreading like medieval death. Only her collapse had told him that something was wrong. And she had refused to let them take anything out. God has been defeated, she said. And nothing anybody could do with their knives and clamps could ever change the fact of this defeat. He was in my body and I let Him out. He was the light of my body and I blew Him out. I believe in the Middle Ages. Fire for witches and plague for the sins of the world. I believe in ancient Egypt. These things were read to me in a garden full of sunlight by a beautiful and shining woman.

  I opened the window. All the sweet reek of April filled the room and when I sighed it was almost possible to believe that something out there returned the sigh, something raving in the wind as it stirred those groping trees, something terrible on the grass, an instant in which nature gave in to rape, birdshaped and muddied in blood.

  Jane touched me on the shoulder. The Reverend Potter was standing in the doorway like a ship in an upright bottle. My father leaned over to tie his shoe. I heard the bells of the ice-cream truck.

  And in the morning I cut myself shaving. The bleeding stopped seven minutes later and I knew it was safe to go out.