Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  On this day, as I came in, he and his battle tweeds were sheeted in anger. For practical purposes, I was not unlike one of those little wives who are married to huge sea captains: I could feel his thoughts. He had been busy on some serious job before lunch, and had nearly cracked its difficulty; now he was putting down his first martini with all the discontent of interrupted concentration. I could imagine how he said to some assistant, “Damn, I’ve got to see my son for lunch.”

  To make matters worse, I was late. Five minutes late. When it came to promptitude, he was always on the mark, a headmaster’s son. Now, waiting for me, he had had time to finish the first drink and review in his mind an unpromising list of topics about which we might converse. The sad truth is that he invariably gave off gloom on those rare occasions when we were alone with each other. He did not know what to talk to me about, and I, on my side, filled with my mother’s adjurations, injunctions, and bitch-fury that I was going to see a man who was able to live in whole comfort apart from her, was jammed up. “Get him to talk about your education,” she’d say before I was out the door. “He’s got to pay for it, or I’ll take him to law. Tell him that.” Yes, I would be in great haste to tell him. “Watch out for his charm. It’s as real as a snake,” and, as I was going out the door, “Tell him I said hello—no, don’t you tell him that.”

  I gave a nod with one quick bob of my head and got onto the barstool next to him. Naturally, I scrunched my larger testicle by too abruptly lowering my butt to the seat. Then I sat there through the small wave of discomfort this brought on and tried to study the signs above the bar.

  YO, HO, HO, AND A BOTTLE OF RUM, said one old wooden placard.

  21 WEST ZWEI UND FÜNFZIGSTE STRASSE, said a painted street sign.

  “Oh,” I said, “is that German, Dad?”

  “Fifty-second Street,” he told me.

  We were silent.

  “How do you like St. Matthew’s?” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Better than Buckley?”

  “It’s tougher.”

  “You’re not going to flunk out?”

  “No, I get B’s.”

  “Well, try to get A’s. Hubbards are expected to get A’s at St. Matt’s.”

  We were silent.

  I began to look at another sign hanging over the bar. It obviously enjoyed its misspelling. CLOSE SATURDAYS AND SUNDAYS, it said.

  “I’ve had one superior hell of a lot of work lately,” he said.

  “I guess,” I said.

  We were silent.

  His gloom was like the throttled sentiments of a German shepherd on a leash. I think I was something of a skinny version of him, but I believe he always saw every bit of resemblance I had to my mother during the first five minutes of every one of our meetings, and I even came to understand over the years that she might have done him a real damage. There was probably never a human he wished to kill more with his bare hands than this ex-wife; of course, he had had to forgo such pleasure. Blocked imperatives brought my father that much nearer to stroke.

  Now he said, “How’s your leg?”

  “Oh, it’s recovered. It’s been all right for years.”

  “I bet it’s still stiff.”

  “No, it’s all right.”

  He shook his head. “I think you had your trouble with the Grays because of that leg.”

  “Dad, I was just no good at close-order drill.” Silence. “But I got better.” The silence made me feel as if I were trying to push a boat off the shore and it was too heavy for me.

  “Dad,” I said, “I don’t know if I can get A’s at St. Matthew’s. They think I’m dyslexic.”

  He nodded slowly as if not unprepared for such news. “How bad is it?” he asked.

  “I can read all right, but I never know when I’m going to reverse numbers.”

  “I had that trouble.” He nodded. “Back on Wall Street before the war, I used to live in fear that one bright morning my touch of dyslexia would make the all-time mistake in the firm. Somehow, it never did.” He winked. “You need a good secretary to take care of those things.” He clapped me on the back. “One more lemonade?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll have another martini,” he said to the bartender. Then he turned back to me. I still remember the bartender’s choice of a keen or sour look. (Keen when serving gentlemen; sour for the tourists.) “Look,” my father said, “dyslexia is an asset as well as a loss. A lot of good people tend to have dyslexia.”

  “They do?” Over the past term a few boys at school had taken to calling me Retardo.

  “No question.” He put his eyes on me. “About ten years ago in Kenya we were going for leopards. Sure enough, we found one, and it charged. I’ve hit elephants coming at me, and lions and water buffalo. You hold your ground, look for a vulnerable area in the crosshairs, then squeeze off your shot. If you can steer between the collywobbles, it’s as easy as telling it to you now. Don’t panic and you have yourself a lion. Or an elephant. It’s not even a feat. Just a measure of inner discipline. But a leopard is different. I couldn’t believe what I saw. All the while it was charging it kept leaping left to right and back again, but so fast I thought I was watching a movie with pieces missing. You just couldn’t get your crosshairs on any part of that leopard. So I took him from the hip. At twenty yards. First shot. Even our guide was impressed. He was one of those Scotsmen who sneer at all and anything American, but he called me a born hunter. Later I figured it out for myself: I was a good shot because of my dyslexia. You see, if you show me 1-2-3-4, I tend to read it as 1-4-2-3 or 1-3-4-2. I suppose I see like an animal. I don’t read like some slave—yessir, boss, I’m following you, yessir, 1-2-3-4—no, I look at what’s near me and what’s in the distance and only then do I shift to the middle ground. In and out, back and forth. That’s a hunter’s way of looking. If you have a touch of dyslexia, that could mean you’re a born hunter.”

  He gave my midriff a short chop with his elbow. It proffered enough weight to suggest what a real blow would do.

  “How’s your leg?” he asked again.

  “Good,” I said.

  “Have you tried one-legged knee raises?”

  The last time we had been to lunch, eighteen months ago, he had prescribed such an exercise.

  “I’ve tried it.”

  “How many can you do?”

  “One or two.” I was lying.

  “If you’re really working at it, you would show more progress.”

  “Yessir.”

  I could feel his wrath commencing. It began slowly, like the first stirring of water in a kettle. This time, however, I could also sense the effort to pull back his annoyance, and that puzzled me. I could not recollect when he had treated me to such courtesy before.

  “I was thinking this morning,” he said, “of your ski accident. You were good that day.”

  “I’m glad I was,” I said.

  We were silent again, but this time it was a pause we could inhabit. He liked to recall my accident. I believe it was the only occasion on which he ever formed a good opinion of me.

  When I was seven, I had been picked up at school one Friday in January by my mother’s chauffeur and driven to Grand Central Station. On this day, my father and I were going to board the weekend special to Pittsfield, Mass., where we would ski at a place called Bousquet’s. How the great echoes of Grand Central matched the reverberation of my heart! I had never been skiing and therefore believed I would be destroyed next day flying off a ski jump.

  Naturally, I was taken over no such towering jump. I was put instead on a pair of rented wooden slats, and after a set of near-fiascoes on the long rope-tow up, attempted to follow my father down. My father had a serviceable stem turn which was all you needed to claim a few yodeling privileges in the Northeast back in 1940. (People who could do a parallel christie were as rare then as tightrope artists.) I, of course, as a beginner, had no stem turn, only the impromptu move of falling to either side when my snow plow got go
ing too fast. Some spills were easy, some were knockouts. I began to seek the fall before I needed to. Soon, my father was shouting at me. In those days, whether riding, swimming, sailing, or on this day, skiing, he lost his temper just so quickly as first returns made it evident that I was without natural ability. Natural ability was closer to God. It meant you were wellborn. Bantu blacks in Africa, I came to learn in CIA, believed that a chieftain should enrich himself and have beautiful wives. That was the best way to know God was well disposed toward you. My father shared this view. Natural ability was bestowed on the deserving. Lack of natural ability spoke of something smelly at the roots. The clumsy, the stupid, and the slack were fodder for the devil. It is not always a fashionable view today, but I have pondered it all my life. I can wake up in the middle of the night thinking, What if my father was right?

  Soon he grew tired of waiting for me to get up.

  “Just do your best to follow,” he said, and was off, stopping long enough to call back, “Turn when I turn.”

  I lost him at once. We were going along a lateral trail that went up and down through the woods. Going uphill, I did not know how to herringbone. I kept getting farther behind. When I came to the top of one rise and saw that the next descent was a full-fledged plunge followed by an abrupt rise, and my father was nowhere in sight, I decided to go straight down in the hope such a schuss would carry me a good way up. Then he would not have to wait too long while I climbed. Down I went, my skis in a wobbly parallel, and almost at once was moving twice as fast as I had ever traveled before. When I lost my nerve and tried to switch to a snowplow, my skis crossed, dug into the soft snow, and I wrenched over in a somersault. There was no release to the bindings in those days. Your feet stayed in the skis. I broke my right tibia.

  One did not know that at first. One only knew more pain than ever felt before. Somewhere in the distance my father was bellowing, “Where are you?” It was late in the afternoon and his voice echoed through the hills. No other skiers were coming by. It started to snow and I felt as if I were in the last reel of a movie about Alaska; soon the snow would cover all trace of me. My father’s roars were, in this silence, comforting.

  He came climbing back, angry as only a man with a powerful, sun-wrinkled neck can be angry. “Will you rise to your feet, you quitter,” he cried out. “Stand up and ski.”

  I was more afraid of him than the five oceans of pain. I tried to get up. Something, however, was wrong. At a certain point, my will was taken away from me completely. My leg felt amputated.

  “I can’t, sir,” I said, and fell back.

  Then he recognized there might be more than character at issue here. He took off his ski jacket, wrapped me in it, and went down the mountain to the Red Cross hut.

  Later, in the winter twilight, after the ski patrol had put on a temporary splint and worked me down to the base in a sled, I was put in the back of a small truck, given a modest dose of morphine, and carried over some frozen roads to the hospital in Pittsfield. It was one hell of a ride. By now, well into the spirit of the morphine, the pain still rasped like a rough-toothed saw into my broken bone each time we hit an evil bump (which was every fifty yards). The drug enabled me, however, to play a kind of game. Since the shock from every bump shivered through my teeth, the game became the art of not making a sound. I lay there on the floor of the truck with a wadded ski jacket under my head and another beneath my leg, and must have looked like an epileptic: My father kept wiping froth from my mouth.

  I made, however, no sound. After a time, the magnitude of my personal venture began to speak to him for he took my hand and concentrated upon it. I could feel him trying to draw the pain from my body into his, and this concern ennobled me. I felt they could tear my leg off and I might still make no outcry.

  He spoke: “Your father, Cal Hubbard, is a fathead.” That may be the only occasion in his life when he used the word in reference to himself. In our family, fathead was about the worst expression you could use for another person.

  “No, sir,” I said. I was afraid to speak for fear that the groans would begin, yet I also knew the next speech was one of the most important I would ever make. For a few moments I twisted through falls of nausea—I must have been near to fainting—but the road became level for a little while, and I succeeded in finding my voice. “No, sir,” I said, “my father, Cal Hubbard, is not a fathead.”

  It was the only time I ever saw tears in his eyes.

  “Well, you silly goat,” he said, “you’re not the worst kid, are you?”

  If we had crashed at that moment I could have died in a happy state. But I came back to New York in a cast two days later—my mother sent chauffeur and limousine up for me—and a second hell began. The part of me that was ready to go through a meat grinder for my father could hardly have been the poor seven-year-old boy who sat home in New York in his Fifth Avenue apartment with a compound fracture surrounded by a plaster cast that itched like the gates of sin. The second fellow seethed with complaints.

  I could not move. I had to be carried. I went into panic at the thought of using crutches. I was certain I would fall and break the leg again. The cast began to stink. In the second week the doctor had to cut the plaster off, clean my infection, and encase me again. I mention all this because it also cut off my father’s love affair with me nearly as soon as it had begun. When he came over to visit—after an understanding with my mother that she would not be there—he would be obliged to read the notes she left—“You broke his leg, now teach him to move.”

  Allowing for his small patience, he finally succeeded in getting me up on crutches, and the leg eventually mended, just a bit crooked, but it took too long. We were back in the land of paternal disillusion. Besides, he had more to think about than me. He was happily remarried to a tall, Junoesque woman absolutely his own size, and she had given him twin boys. They were three years old when I was seven, and you could bounce them on the floor. Their nicknames—I make no joke—were Rough and Tough. Rough Hubbard and Tough Hubbard. Actually, they were Roque Baird Hubbard and Toby Bolland Hubbard, my father’s second wife being Mary Bolland Baird, but rough and tough they promised to be, and my father adored them.

  Occasionally I would visit the new wife. (They had been married four years but I still thought of her as the new wife.) It was just a trip of a few blocks up the winter splendor of Fifth Avenue, that is to say, an education in the elegance of gray. The apartment houses were lilac-gray, and Central Park showed field-gray meadows in winter and mole-gray trees.

  Since finding myself on crutches, I no longer ventured from my apartment house. In one of the later weeks of convalescence, however, I had a good day, and my limb did not ache in its cast. By afternoon, I was restless and ready for adventure. I not only went down to the lobby and talked to the doorman but, on impulse, set out to circumnavigate the block. It was then the idea came to me to visit my stepmother. She was not only large but hearty, and succeeded at times in making me think she liked me; she would certainly tell my father that I had visited, and he would be pleased I was mastering the crutches. So I decided to attempt those five blocks uptown from 73rd to 78th Street and immediately went through a small palsy the first time I put my crutches out from the curb down six inches to the gutter. This small step accomplished, however, I began to swing along, and by the time I reached their apartment house, I was most talkative with the elevator man and pleased with how much pluck I was showing for a seven-year-old.

  At their door a new maid answered. She was Scandinavian and hardly spoke English, but I gathered that the nurse was out with the twins and “the Madame” was in her room. After some confusion the new girl let me in and I sat on a couch, bored by the wan afternoon sun as it reflected on the pale silk colors of the living room.

  It never occurred to me that my father was home. Later, much later, I would gather that this was about the time he had given up his broker’s slot in Merrill Lynch to volunteer for the Royal Canadian Air Force. To celebrate, he was taking th
e afternoon off. I, however, thought Mary Bolland Baird Hubbard was alone and reading, and might be as bored as I was. So I hopped across the living room and down the hall to their bedroom, making little sound on the pile carpet, and then, without taking the time to listen—all I knew was that I did not wish to return home without having spoken to someone, but would certainly lose my nerve if I waited at the door—I turned the knob, and, to keep my balance, took two big hops forward on my crutches. The sight that received me was my father’s naked back, then hers. They were both pretty big. They were rolling around on the floor, their bodies plastered end to end, their mouths on each other’s—if I say things, it’s for want of remembering the word I had then. Somehow I had an idea what they were doing. Importuning sounds came out of them, full of gusto, that unforgettable cry which lands somewhere between whooping and whimpering.

  I was paralyzed for the time it took to take it all in; then I tried to escape. They were so deep in their burrow they did not even see me, not for the first instant, the second, nor even the third as I backed my way to the door. Right then, they looked up. I was nailed to the door frame. They stared at me, and I stared at them, and I realized they did not know for how long I had been studying them. For heavens, how long? “Get out of here, you dodo,” my father roared, and the worst of it was that I fled so quickly on the crutches that they thumped like ghost-bumpers on the carpet while I vaulted down the hall. I think it was this sound, the thump-thump of a cripple, that must have stayed in her ears. Mary was a nice woman, but she was much too proper to be photographed by anyone’s memory in such a position, let alone a slightly creepy stepson. None of us ever spoke of it again; none of us forgot it. I remember that in the time it took to reach my mother’s apartment, I generated a two-ton headache, and it was the first of a chronic run of migraines. This pressure had been paying irregular visits from that day. Right now, here at lunch, I could feel it on the edge of my temples, ready to strike.