by James Jones
“Gentlemen, this is Weintraub’s new love,” Weintraub told us in his deepest voice, with an arm flourish. “Take a good look. Samantha-Marie Everton. Yes sir, she’s bunking up with me in my little one-bed pension. The old joint has never seen the like.”
She smiled directly at Harry behind the bar. “Because I’m broke and have no place else to go,” she said sweetly.
“That’s true, that’s true,” Weintraub added quickly. There had been genuine pride and pleasure on his face when he looked at her, as well as a look of surprise at his luck. It made me feel sad for him.
There was a reliant compactness about her, as if she were holding herself all in solidly together. As she had moved further away from the door, and therefore further into someone else’s territory, it seemed that this compactness got visibly more compact. She slipped up onto a bar stool.
She was clearly wearing no underwear at all. Her eyes were a striking green, and she had dressed to them. Above was a green knit pullover with no sleeves at all, which showed off her lean, exquisitely shaved armpits; and on the front of this the nipples of her small unrestrained breasts made two visible bumps. Below, she was wearing those lowcut, skintight summer stretch pants, of a lighter green, with a wide belt and big buckle. The tight crotch of these was up so tight against her that the pants outlined quite clearly for you the two lips of her little crack. This was not unusual, though, was par for the course, in the spring of 1968.
She was quite dark. But her features were not very Negroid. She had some white and some Indian in her. And she had a 19-year-old’s body which, in my day, was a valuable asset one never appreciated until one had lost it. But that could not be said of Samantha. She was small. Her hips were narrow and boyish. But she still had that high, hard, large-buttocked Negro derrière that a great many find so attractive. Her hair was cut short, boy-like, around her ears.
We had been talking about our adventures of the day watching the riots. There were five of us at the bar. There was the famous TV commentator, there was the young UPI man, there was Ferenc Hofmann-Beck. He was the young part German, part Jewish, part Hungarian-American who was the French publisher’s assistant. There were Harry and myself.
I would have thought that those tight pants would have been most uncomfortable, for a girl, but if they were, Samantha gave no sign of it either standing or sitting.
Samantha, it turned out, liked to be called Sam. She had an annoying, and arrogant social habit. When she shook hands, she would hold onto your hand and search your face, slowly, and quite openly, for something. Then, not finding it, whatever it was, she would drop the hand and turn away to the next, indifferent. I thought it had to be a ploy. Nobody could do something like that unwittingly. She lingered over some hands longer than others. She spent no time at all over mine. Somebody told me later that she had lingered over Louisa’s longest of all. I looked around for her, but Louisa had left us.
I like to remember that moment, though now it is always with a touch of sadness. Nothing that I know of anywhere exists, now, as did that apartment at the moment before Weintraub hove into view through the entry doorway with Samantha-Marie in tow, for all the world like some tiny burly tug hauling, not some great ocean liner, but a sleek black-hulled racing yacht. His formidable voice, always too loud anyway, continued the metaphor and served as the tug’s deep, belching steam horn, announcing to the rest of the harbor the acquisition of a new major prize, as he introduced her, hovered over by Louisa, to first one group and then to another.
“And this is your host Harry Gallagher,” Weintraub’s steam horn brawled.
“Hello, Mr. Gallagher. I know your films,” Samantha said, and thrust her hand at him across the bar. She turned from me to Harry a smile that was much too ancient, much too ironic for any 19-year-old “This is some pad you got yourself here.” She looked back down the room.
Down its length, polished Louis Treize refectory tables covered with art books and statuettes glistened in the fading sunlight. Around them Louis Treize fauteuils or smaller armchairs clustered, where people sat and talked or stood. Against the inner wall sat a rare hexagonal Louis Treize chess table, with the pieces laid out in some opening. On every bit of available wall space were paintings. The French windows were open on the summery May twilight, and the breeze riffled the white under-curtains, which had been drawn back against the drapes, to let the windows open and let in the night air.
Harry looked at it, too. “What can I get you to drink?” he smiled.
“I never drink,” the dark girl said. “I might smoke a little if you’ve got some. A little pot? Otherwise, just give me a Coke. I love Coke. I like you,” she smiled.
Harry went at once onto the defensive. “Well, I like you, too. Or I’m sure I will, when we get to know each other a little better.” He looked flustered, and confused. He busied himself fixing her Coke.
“Oh, you will,” Samantha said. She accepted the Coke gravely. Then suddenly she laughed, a rich, high, girlish tinkle, vastly amused. I thought—we all thought—that she was darling. But I thought I just ought to cough a little here. Ferenc Hofmann-Beck had been entertaining us at the bar with one of his famous French-namedropping routines, when Samantha and Weintraub came up. Ferenc, thoughtfully, took my cough as his cue to continue.
Ferenc Hofmann-Beck had been coming to the Gallaghers for about three months at this time. He had met Harry and Louisa at a party somewhere and had fallen madly in love with both of them, but particularly with Louisa, and had sent her a huge mass of flowers the next day with a card asking if he might telephone. When he telephoned, he begged that he might come by on one of her Sunday evenings Louisa often had, was invited, and had been coming ever since.
Ferenc resembled nothing quite so much as a huge, cuddly, reddish-colored, American brown bear. Strong as an ox, and shaped exactly like an upright pear, he affected, or truly believed that he had, a condition of permanent ill health brought on by his liver. He had once had hepatitis years ago. His dull, carefully tailored English suits complete with matching waistcoats made him look like one of those roundbottomed dolls from your childhood which you could not knock over. He wore a Baron’s coronet on his monogrammed shirts and handkerchieves, but suavely never mentioned whether he was a Baron or not. In fact, his grandfather Hofmann-Beck had been a Baron, in the long-evaporated Austro-Hungarian Empire of Franz Josef; and Ferenc knew by heart the right name and title, if there was one, of just about every family in Europe. He was a walking Debrett’s. He had a serious eating problem of which he made much fun, hated all forms of violence including the bloodless, cocktail-party variety, and could easily have been mistaken for some kind of a fag if you did not have a good eye. Lately he had taken to wearing a monocle: a scallop-edged one: the latest, chicest type: which he would fix in his eye or fiddle with to punctuate his poking fun at French society engaged in a spelling-match, namedropping contest. Now he fixed his monocle and peered at all of us, but especially at Samantha, putting on his thickest Hungarian accent.
“As I wass sayink about the O’Donnells.” Someone at the bar had mentioned the name O’Donnell. “O’Donnell? O’Donnell? Mit two Ns and two Ls? I knew such an O’Donnell in Boston. Two Ns and two Ls. Peasants. Bums. Family had to leaf Ireland durink the second famine. Made money. But American money doesn’t make peasants not peasants. My grandmother used to say the silk purse iss not from the ear of the sow made. But now, O’Donell Mit one Ns and one Ls. I know such an O’Donel. In London. Big estates in Ireland. Two big estates. I vissited there. Very fine family. Grows horses.
“Ziss is rather like Gramont in French. Gramont mit one Ms is more chic than Grammont mit two Ms, though both are good. Gramont one Ms old and a duke. Grammont two Ms less old and only a baron. But hass wines.
“Ah, Miss Everton! Ve have not met! I am Hofmann-Beck.”
He seized her hand and bowed over it without carrying it quite to his lips, clicked his heels and stepped back.
“Everton? Mit one Rs and one Ts? I
knew some Everrettons outside London mit two Rs and two Ts. Very large house. Excellent gardens. Could be of you some relations?”
Samantha smiled at him. “Are any of them niggers?”
At the bar there was a sort of helpless, full-stop pause, of utter silence, a sort of consternation of silent helplessness.
“Actually, no,” Ferenc said. “None are niggers.”
He said it in his sweetest, politest voice, with no accent, and he smiled.
“Then I doubt if they’re relations,” Samantha smiled back.
A short while later Ferenc drifted away, down the room, and I don’t blame him.
It certainly put a pall over the bar. Of course, Samantha probably could not really be expected to get the joke. She had never heard Ferenc’s name-spelling routine before. But she ought to have heard the laughter at the bar as she came down the room. The joke of course was that in a suave, handsome way Ferenc was totally ignoring her color. Maybe she didn’t want that. Perhaps it was just that she was diffident. That was what Louisa thought later.
A long time afterward, weeks afterward, Samantha herself, during one of several long talks we had, told me in all seeming honesty that she had thought it was a funny line, thought that it would get a big laugh at the bar. I find that hard to believe. It certainly got no big laugh. At the time I thought it was one of the most wantonly cruel things I had seen in a long time.
And yet, there was about her that gamin-like quality, so coltish and innocently young when it cropped out in her grin, that delighted. You were continually being suddenly brought up short by the realization that this child after all was really only 19 years old.
From behind us Louisa, sensing potential upset or dissension, had come back up.
“Isn’t there something else I can get you? I mean, since you don’t drink? Isn’t there something else you’d like to have, my dear?”
Samantha smiled at her, warmly. “Well, I don’t suppose you’d have any—” She stopped. She looked at Louisa a long moment, smiling. “No, you wouldn’t,” she said. Then she smiled again, warmly, almost lovingly. “I think you’re beautiful.”
Louisa blushed right up to the roots of her hair. “Oh, now!” she said, in a sort of confused breathless way.
“I really think you’re one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. I love you,” Samantha smiled. “I’ll tell you. What I’d really like, is a Hershey chocolate bar. With almonds? I don’t suppose you’d have any of those, would you.”
“I do!” Louisa cried. “I do!” She was suddenly all eager eyes and bony smile. She positively glowed at the idea of doing something for this girl. “I do have some! I’ve got stacks of them, loads of them.” She turned on her heel toward the kitchen door in the corner. “Our daughter happens to be an addict of Hershey chocolate bars with almonds.”
I looked down the room to where my Godchild lay stretched out in front of the empty fireplace. McKenna was all curled up like some half-grown kitten, oblivious of the party all around her, her gold hair hanging over her face as she read one of her perpetual Tin-Tin books. Tin-Tin was a young French comic strip character, who had all sorts of adventures with a bearded sea captain as his sidekick. Not even quite eight yet, she could already read like a ten-year-old. I remember, now, how completely secure she looked there. Her hair caught glints from the various lamp fixtures in the room, and their overlapping lights and shadow lit up softly the small-nosed, wide-eyed, serious little-girl face.
“Can I have three or four?” Sam Everton asked, when Louisa came back with the box.
“Take all you want!” Louisa pulled out a stack of them like letter envelopes.
“Thank you. Thank you. I really do love you,” Samantha said, and leaned forward on her stool and kissed the taller woman lightly on the cheek.
“Oh, now!” Louisa said, and blushed again. “Come on, now! It’s only candy.”
Samantha drifted away from the bar herself shortly after that, holding her stack of Hershey bars. Later, I was talking to Fred Singer the TV commentator by the chess table, and happened to glance down the room and saw that Samantha was lying on the floor with McKenna. The two of them were lying on their bellies side by side, propped up on their elbows, contentedly munching Hershey bars, and reading the stack of childish Tin-Tin books with equally complete absorption. I knew McKenna did not make friends easily. Soon after that, Samantha and Weintraub left. “She’s taking me to some orgy,” Weintraub whispered, grinning.
“Orgy!” Sam said, looking at him contemptuously. “Orgy! Orgy!”
“It’s the truth!” Weintraub whispered to me, grinning. I went back up the room to Harry, and the bar.
Ah, that bar.
Was there ever such a bar existed anywhere, in such an apartment?
I guess Harry’s bar needs a whole paragraph to itself. It got to be famous in Paris. It was a wooden Renaissance pulpit, made over. What the French call a chaire, one of those pulpits which hang up on a column in the church, with a circular staircase mounting to it. In Harry’s apartment it stood on the floor. He had hunted two years for it, to find it. It cost him a lot; and it cost him almost as much to have his ébéniste fix it up for him. The ébéniste repaired it, gave it a new, raised floor of ancient wood, and fitted it with two bar shelves of the same, for bottles. It was a five-sided object, with one side open at the back for the drink server (or priest) to enter. The other four sides were of wood panels, with peaked arches carved across their tops, below which dim worn figures carved in very low relief and vague with age could be presumed to be doing something religious. It jutted out from the far end wall of the room like the nose of a PT boat cresting a wave.
Harry had once seen one in an antique shop in St.-Germain, thought it would make a great bar, only to find it had been sold the day before, and then had waited two years to find another. It was the showpiece of the entire collection of things. It was also one of Harry’s most prized possessions.
“After all,” he liked to say, and said it often, especially when in his cups, “what are the real fucking churches of today, in mid twentieth century? Where is the one fucking place where a modern city man can go if he wants a dim, quiet place to commune with himself?
“Where nobody will fucking bother him. Or make him feel guilty. Or tell him what he ought to do or believe. Or try to change his philosophy or ideology or faith. Where in short he can be by himself in quiet contemplation and suck spiritual nourishment from the liquid Communion in his hand and clarify his head. Where! BARS! That’s where! And that’s the only where!”
Ah, that bar.
Behind it Harry had had the entire end wall covered with a pleated, silver-beige velvet curtain, to accentuate it. No paintings hung there. And against this drapery, on the one side leaned a beautifully made sixteenth-century German executioner’s sword; and on the other, head down, leaned a horribly crudely made, brutally hammered, steel thirteenth-century executioner’s axe with a brass studded, unlathed and unturned pole handle.
“The three greatest things mankind has given to the world!” Harry liked to say, waving at the three of them.
He meant, I gathered from questions I asked him after the first time I heard him say it, by the third “thing” not so much the exquisite sword itself as its clear evidence when compared to the axe, of man’s vast and divine increase in mechanical dexterity, within which Harry hastened to include both the Industrial Revolution and our own Technological Revolution as well.
As if all this were not sacrilegious enough to suit him, or perhaps one could even say funny enough, humorous enough, Harry had completed the whole tableau with a clutch of five bar stools which were not bar stools at all but in reality those hardest to find and most expensive for their size Louis Treize items of all: the prie-Dieu prayer stools. There is a story that the first time Buñuel ever came to the place, he peered at Harry’s bar and its accouterments and then seized the two-handed German sword and tried to cleave Harry from shoulder to waist as he carried a tray of gl
asses in from the kitchen, crying, “You son of a bitch! You son of a bitch! My mother used to pray on a prayer stool just like that!” And rushed from the house. Later, of course, he sent an apology.
In fact, “Harry’s Bar” (everyone made the obvious pun on Harry MacElhone’s New York Bar on the rue Daunou) had picked up quite a singular history all its own in its seven years of existence. Certain dedicated Catholics, though known to be hard drinkers themselves, had walked out of the house after seeing it. Several times there had been drunken near-fistfights over it right there in the living room. It had been dedicated by James Baldwin the first night Harry unveiled it, with a hellfire sermon on the evils of drink.
Ah, that bar.
Harry instituted a set of ground rules regarding it. The drunken political, social, racial, philosophical and artistic discussions got so hot and heavy around that bar that finally no one could get a word in edgeways, and if he did, could not hear himself, let alone the others. So one night Harry drew up rules. We had a lovely pulpit, why not use it? Therefore, in any future discussions, anyone who wished could “Invoke the Pulpit” by simply saying so. The invoker would then be allowed to mount behind the bar and for a measured five minutes could have his say, all alone, while the room remained silent. This would be followed by an optional five-minute question period, at the discretion of speaker and audience. There were cries of applause and of “I invoke the pulpit!” from all over the room, and the ground rules remained. Harry had them printed and framed and hung them up behind the bar on the silver-beige drape.
As I have said, it is with more than just a touch of sadness that I remember it. That apartment, and that bar. I imagine it closed and darkened, with the shining tables and rich fauteuils, antiques and statuettes all gathering dust in the gloom. I imagine it like that, even though I know that Harry has kept on a Portuguese maid to come in and take care of it twice a week. I am a romantic fool.