Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “That’s good,” I said. I was ready to cry. Not because of the operation. I had not realized an operation was this near, but it had been part, certainly, of my inner horizon. I had been taking tests for three months. No, I was ready to cry because now I knew why my father had taken me to lunch and favored me with professional secrets.

  “I convinced your mother,” he said. “She’s a very difficult woman under any and all circumstances, but I got her to recognize that one of the best neurosurgeons in the country is available for this. I can tell you in confidence he also works for us. We’ve talked him into putting his toe in the water for some studies we’re doing on brainwashing techniques. We need to keep up with the Russians.”

  “I guess he’ll learn a little more about brainwashing with me.”

  My father gave a half-smudged smile for the joke. “He’ll give you every chance to become the man you want to be.”

  “Yes,” I said. I had an awful feeling I could not explain. There was no doubt in my mind that the tumor was the worst part of me. Everything rotten must be concentrated there. I had always supposed, however, that sooner or later it would go away by itself.

  “What if we don’t have surgery? I can keep living with my headaches,” I said.

  “There’s a chance it is malignant.”

  “You mean when they open my head, they could discover cancer?”

  “There’s one chance in five.”

  “You said 95 percent. Isn’t that one chance in twenty?”

  “All right. One in twenty.”

  “Dad, that’s twenty to one in our favor. Nineteen to one, actually.”

  “I’m looking at other kinds of odds. If you’re debilitated with headaches during all the formative years to come, you’ll end up half a man.” I could hear the rest. “Shape up” were the words he was inclined to speak.

  “What do the doctors think?” I asked at last.

  I had given up the game by asking this question. “They say you must have the operation.”

  Years later, a surgeon would tell me that the operation would have been elective, not mandatory. My father had lied. His logic was simple. He would not manipulate me or any other family member who was arguing a point out of his own feelings; if third parties, however, were consulted, then the debate had become a recourse to authority. Since I asked what the doctors said, my father was ready to substitute himself as final authority.

  Now he got out his wallet to pay the check. Unlike Al, my father did not snap his money down. He laid it like a poultice on the plate.

  “When this is over,” he told me, “I’m going to introduce you to a dear friend of mine whom I’ve asked to be your godfather. It’s not customary to have a brand-new godfather at the age of fifteen, but the one we gave you at birth was a friend of your mother’s and he’s dropped out of sight. The guy I’m bringing in is wholly superior. You’ll like him. He’s named Hugh Montague, and he’s one of us. Hugh Tremont Montague. He did wonderful stuff for OSS while on liaison with the Brits. During the war he worked with J. C. Masterman—I can tell you that name. An Oxford don. One of their spymasters. Hugh will fill you in on all of that. The English are such aces in this kind of work. In 1940, they captured a few of the first German agents sent over to England and succeeded in turning them. As a result, most of the German spies who followed were picked up on arrival. For the rest of the war, the Abwehr was fed the niftiest disinformation by their own agents in England. And, oh, how the Brits got to love their German agents. Just as loyal to them as to their favorite foxhounds, yes, they were.” Here my father began laughing heartily. “You have to,” he added, “get Hugh to tell you about the code names the English gave their little Germans. Perfect names for peachy dogs. CELERY,” said my father, “SNOW, GARBO, CARROT, COBWEB, MULLET, LIPSTICK, NEPTUNE, PEPPERMINT, SCRUFFY, ROVER, PUPPET, BASKET, BISCUIT, BRUTUS. Is that, or is that not, the English?”

  For years, I would fall asleep surrounded by men and women holding brass nameplates in capitals: BRUTUS, COBWEB, TREASURE, RAINBOW. As I grew ready in the last of this lunch at Twenty-One to lose a part, forever, of the soft meats of my brain, so were old spies with the code names of hunting dogs filing one by one into the cavity waiting for them.

  2

  IN ADOLESCENCE, I HAD ONLY TO SAY “GOD,” AND I WOULD THINK OF MY groin. God was lust to me. God was like the image of the Devil offered to us at St. Matthew’s. Chapel was daily and devoted to Christ, but once a week on average we might hear of the temptings of a somewhat legendary master-ghost named Satan. Chapel kept God and Satan well separated, but I, unlike other Matties, kept mixing them up. I had my reasons: I was introduced to carnal relations during my first year in the school by an assistant chaplain of St. Matthew’s who glommed—I choose the word to convey the sensation of that rubbery, indefatigable seal—my fourteen-year-old penis in his tight, unhappy lips.

  We were in Washington, D.C., on a school trip. Maybe that is one more reason I dislike our subtle, oppressive capital, that broad, well-paved swamp. Boredom and bad memory are at the root of many an oppression, I would suppose, and that night I was sharing a double bed with the assistant chaplain in an inexpensive hotel not far from H Street, NW, and was unable to sleep and feeling full of apprehension just about the time that the chaplain came out of a millrace of stentorian snoring, murmured his wife’s name several times, “Bettina, Bettina,” and proceeded to embrace my hips and strip my bewildered young privates of their primeval dew. I remember lying there with a complete sense of the sixteen other members of my class who were also on the trip and in the hotel. I visualized them, two by two, and four by four, in all the other six bedrooms where they had been placed. On this annual trip to Washington the assistant chaplain was our guide, and since I had not succeeded in my first year at the school in being associated in anyone’s mind with anyone else, and was marked as a loner, the assistant chaplain, a sympathetic fellow, had assigned me to his room.

  In the other cubicles, who knew what might be going on? At St. Matthew’s, they used to call it “kidding around.” Since my memory was seared with images of the two-backed beast of my father and stepmother (it was a two-backed beast long before I ever encountered the phrase in Othello), I stayed far apart from such gang play. All of us knew, however, that there were goings-on all up and down the dorm. Boys would stand side by side and stroke themselves into erections to see who was longer. It was the age of innocence. Being wider was not even a concept to us, for it would have suggested penetration. The nearest any of the boys came to that was by mounting a sweet, fat little creature named Arnold; we called him St. Matthew’s Arnold. Even at the age of fourteen, literary wit was not discouraged among us, and St. Matthew’s Arnold (in no way to be confused with Reed Arnold Rosen) used to drop his pants and lie on a bed, buttocks exposed. Six or eight of us would watch while two or three of the more athletic of our skulk would take turns slapping their brand-new instruments onto the crack between St. Matthew’s Arnold’s cheeks. “Ugh, you’re disgusting,” they’d say, and he’d whine back, “Aaah, shut up. You’re doing it too.”

  It was never homosexual. It was “kidding around.” Once done, it was not uncommon for the budding jock to leap off the body, wipe himself, and say, “Why can’t you be a girl? You look just like a girl.” Which was true—Arnold’s cheeks were cousins to the moon—and Arnold, having his own male dignity to defend, would reply, “Aaaah, shut up.” He was smaller than the boys who did it to him, so they barely cuffed him for being rude.

  I would, as I say, merely watch. I was not up for studies in comparative phallitude. I was electrified by them, but even at fourteen I had already acquired some of our Hubbard insulation. I didn’t show a spark.

  My own relation to these sports and circuses was revealed to me, however, by the sweet-edged shudder which the chaplain’s mean little lips pulled from me. When it was over, and I had been given an adolescent’s peek into the firmament, he swallowed all the nourishment offered the parching of his mouth and b
egan to sob in shame. Deep sobs. He was not a weak man physically, and his strength, like my father’s, was in his upper body. So his sobs were strong.

  I felt injected with ten tons of novocaine. Except, that is not true either. Two rivers were flowing in me, although to opposite directions. I felt relief I had never known before in my limbs, yet my heart, liver, head, and lungs were in a boil. This was even worse than seeing Mary Bolland Baird and my father in their roll-around. I knew myself to be the compliant apprentice of a monster.

  After his sobbing, the man began to weep. I knew he was worried about his wife and children. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll never tell.” He hugged me. Gently, I disengaged myself. I did it gently out of no noble funds of generosity, rather in the fear he would turn angry and grow rough. I think my secret instinct knew he wished me to have, in turn, a thirst I would slake on him. If I had none (and I did not), well, went his unspoken imperative: Generate some! You damn well better generate some.

  How the poor man must have been hung between his lust for one good, reciprocal suck on his charged-up end and the horror of knowing that he was inching out along the precipice of his career. When I remained still and did not move at all, his sobbing finally ceased and he lay still as well. I did my best to picture him officiating at a High Mass in school chapel, white silk surplice over white linen cassock, his ritual gestures a talisman I could employ against him. It may have been a real magic. After an interval of silence, equal in weight to the darkness of our hotel room, he gave a sigh, slipped out of bed, and spent the rest of the night on the floor.

  That was the extent of my homosexual experience, but what a bend it put into the shape of my psyche. I stayed away from sex as though it were a disease. I had bog-and-marsh dreams where I was Arnold and the chaplain released streams of the foulest suppurations over me. In turn, I would awaken to feel infected. My sheets were wet, sprayed with nothing less than the pus, I was certain, of my unholy infections. The headaches grew worse. When the boys got ready to kid around, I took off for the library. I believe I finally accepted my father’s desire to have an operation on my head because I could not overcome the part of me that was certain there was awful matter in the brain to be cut out.

  Conceivably, something may have altered. When I went back to St. Matthew’s in the fall of 1949, after my summer of convalescence, the school seemed at last a reasonable place. Our soccer teams (it was the first prep school I knew to take soccer seriously), our football scrimmages at every class level, our Greek, Latin, daily chapel, and prayers before meals, our ice-cold showers from October to May (lukewarm in June and September), our button-down shirts and school ties for all occasions but sports (starched, white collar and shirt on Sundays) had now become an agreeable order of the day. My dyslexia seemed to wane after the operation. (As a result, my case was written about in neurosurgical papers.) I felt more like others, and stronger for average tasks. I had a B-plus average.

  Left to myself, I think I might have ended like most of my classmates. From Yale, where many a good Mattie went in those days, I would have continued on to Wall Street or the Bar. I probably would have made an acceptable, even a good, estate lawyer, my experience with the chaplain keeping me alert to the pits of horrible possibility in the most proper affairs, and like many another not quite notable prep school product, I might even have improved with the years. The odds are favorable if you can hold your liquor.

  Hugh Tremont Montague intervened. My father, who always kept his promises, if late by many a season, finally arranged for the meeting a year and a half after our lunch at Twenty-One. My operation had come and gone, as well as my convalescence. I was now a senior, and a responsible figure to my younger cousins and brothers in the summer frolics at Doane, curious frolics—the eight-hundred-yard swimming race around the island, four hundred with the current, four hundred back in the channel against it, and the all-day hike that commenced at The Precipices south of Bar Harbor at eight in the morning, went over Cadillac Mountain to Jordan Pond at noon, then up to Sargent Mountain and down all the way to Somesville; next, Acadia Mountain descending to Man of War Creek. We ended at the dock in Manset by eight in the evening. There a lobster boat came to meet us for the trip by water around the Western Way, up to Blue Hill Bay and Doane. A platoon of Marines would have complained of a twenty-mile march over hills like that, but we were rewarded by explorations in the lobster boat over the next few days to islands scattered around the bay, islands so small their names were in dispute, and their topography eccentric—great grass meadows on one, guano-encrusted sea ledges on another, forests with unearthly trees warped by long-lost winds. We would feast on lobsters boiled over driftwood fires and clams baked in the coals—even the charred hot dogs tasted as good as wild game caught with bow and arrow. To this day, Kittredge and I are visited in summer by cousins who have shared these Hubbard gymkhanas. No great tennis players ever came out of such a regimen, but our family life was our social life.

  When Hugh Tremont Montague came up one weekend with my father in a light chartered plane from Boston, it was, therefore, an event of the first measure. We had a much spoken-of visitor. I might have heard of my anointed godfather for the first time during lunch at Twenty-One, but his name seemed present everywhere thereafter at school. A new file in my personal history had been opened. He was, as I now discovered, one of the myths of St. Matthew’s. All through my first year at school, teachers must have spoken of him, but the name never entered my ear. Once my father inscribed his importance on my attention, however, accounts of him popped up everywhere. One spoke of him now as if he had been headmaster. By actual record, he was coach of the soccer team and founder of the Mountaineering Club. A graduate of St. Matthew’s, ’32, and of Harvard, ’36, he taught at the school until he joined the OSS. Instructor in English and in Divine Studies, he installed his own dicta in our dogma and lore. At St. Matthew’s I had heard of the Egyptian goddess Maat before I ever heard of Hugh Montague. Maat had the body of a woman and a large feather for her neck and head. As the Egyptian Goddess of Truth, she embodied a curious holy principle: In the depths of one’s soul, the difference between a truth and a falsehood weighed no more than a feather. St. Matthew’s tended to equate this weight to the presence of Christ, and Montague was the determined author of that addition. St. Matthew’s had always taken Divine Studies seriously, but after Montague’s influence on us, we felt we had a greater contribution to make than any other school of our ilk in New Hampshire or Massachusetts, or, if one is to lower the bars, Connecticut. We were closer to God than the others and Mr. Montague had given the clue: Christ was Love, but Love lived only in the Truth. Why?—because one’s ability to recognize the presence of Grace (which I always saw as a leavening in the region of the chest) could be injured by a lie.

  Harlot left other precepts at St. Matthew’s. God the Father—awesome, monumental Jehovah—was the principle of Justice. Mr. Montague added that Jehovah was also the embodiment of Courage. Just as Love was Truth and there could be no compassion without honesty, so was Justice equal to Courage. There was no justice for the coward. There was only the purgatory of his daily life. Did a student feel despair? Look to the root. A cowardly act had been committed, or a lie told. Somewhere in the school pamphlets sent out to increase St. Matthew’s endowment, there are a few lines quoted from an address Hugh Montague gave on a special occasion to a senior class in chapel. “The first purpose of this school,” he said, “is not to develop your potentialities—although some of you do indeed bear the unruly gift of quick mentality—but to send out into American society young men keen to maintain their honesty and sense of purpose. It is this school’s intention that you grow into good, brave young men.”

  I will say it for Mr. Montague and St. Matthew’s. Our theology was more complex than that. There was the special temptation of evil for the good and brave. The Devil, Montague warned, employed his finest wits to trap the noblest soldiers and scholars. Vanity, complacency, and indolence were a curse, since
bravery was an ascending slope and one could not rest on it. One must succeed in rising to every challenge except the ones that would destroy us needlessly. Prudence was the one amelioration God allowed to the imperative of Courage; Love, on fortunate occasions, could offer support to Truth.

  Competition on the playing field became, therefore, an avatar of Courage and Prudence, Love and Truth. On the playing field, one could find the unique proportions of your own heart. Later, properly prepared, out in the world, one might be able to deal with the Devil. Although it was never stated so at St. Matthew’s, we all knew that women—as opposed to mothers, sisters, cousins, and ladies—had to be one more word for the world.

  Since Mr. Montague had been gone for six years before I entered, I had no notion of the dialectical niceties of his mind. Only the precepts came down to us in strong doses imparted by instructors who lived with the conclusions. So hypocrisy also abounded at St. Matthew’s. We were all smaller than our precepts. Indeed, the assistant chaplain who minted my adolescent glans was a disciple of Hugh Tremont Montague, even a rock climber, although I heard he was not a good one.

  Rock climbing, after all, was the objective correlative of Virtue, which is to say, the meeting of Truth and Courage. I was soon to find out. That night in the summer of 1949 when Hugh Montague came to the Keep for the first time, he was thirty-five and I was seventeen, and much as I expected, he looked half a British officer with his erect posture and mustache and half an Anglican clergyman by way of his wire-rimmed eyeglasses and high forehead. Let me say that he could have been taken for a man of forty-five, but continued to look no older for the next twenty years, right up to his dreadful fall.

  On shaking hands, I knew immediately why Christ was Truth not Love for Mr. Montague. He had a grip to remind you of the hard rubber pads that are put on vise-jaws to keep them from injuring any object in their grasp. Heaven help me, went my thought, this man is a real prick.