Wrong Information Is Being Given Out at Princeton

by J. P. Donleavy

  “Hey, mister, got a dime. For a cup of coffee. Or maybe you could spare a quarter for something to eat.”

  Reach into my pocket and flip what will soon be my last quarter toward this wanderer who, missing the catch, picks the coin up out of a small puddle of water. Wipes it on his sleeve, puts it in his pocket. But for the solemn sadness in the man’s face, you could envy him his freedom, with no one taking the trouble to denigrate him. Someone’s father, brother, could even have been in a gun turret on the old Missouri.

  Sylvia standing still as a statue. The last cars of the train passing. The caboose with it’s rear red lights disappearing with another faraway lonesome wail of the train’s whistle. Sylvia maneuvering her Tiffany box and bouquet of red roses to peel off one of her black kidskin gloves. Pulling open the outside rusted screen door and pressing a bell. A dog barking. The faint tune of chimes ringing. The first bars of “Home on the Range.” The shadow of a figure inside the screen door as it opens, slightly ajar. Sylvia stepping back. A woman, wisps of dyed blond hair in curlers, one hand holding closed her pink dressing gown at her throat. A growling, gruff woman’s voice.

  “What do you want.”

  “Annie, I’m Sylvia, your daughter. And I know you are my mother.”

  The sound of the waiting silence. This slattern and slovenly coarse woman in her soiled pink dressing gown suddenly lunging out the half-open rusting screen door and spitting into Sylvia’s face.

  “I know who you are. Get the hell out of here, you bitch, all dressed up to the nines, and leave me alone and don’t come back.”

  First drops of rain beginning to fall out of blackening skies. A tight constriction in the throat. A shudder in the breast. How could the sorrow ever be greater that you can feel for someone so distressed in a grief so deep. To offer to take their hand and lead them away from hurt. As once was offered me as a little boy when big tears welled and rolled out of my eyes and down my cheeks when someone said I was bad.

  Sylvia descending the wooden steps, a purple silk handkerchief wiping the sprinkle of moisture from her face. Her bag slung askew across a shoulder, tears bulging in her reddening eyes. Her gloved hand holding the glove from the other hand and her shiny aqua box from Tiffany’s and the bouquet of red roses under her arm. On the last step, her ankle twisting as she slips. A wounded animal cry. As she turns. Raises an arm. Throwing away the red roses on top of a pile of old tires stacked underneath the stairs. And dropping the Tiffany box to the ground, kicking it away with the toe of her black patent-leather shoe to join the grimy debris of the gutter.

  “My mother. Jesus, that was my mother.”

  The next train back down to New York was in another hour. Sylvia, in a defiant gesture of extravagance on top of the modest fare tipped the taxi driver ten dollars.

  “I sure thank you kindly, ma’am. Hope to see you again sometime.”

  “You won’t. But thanks.”

  In the station Sylvia sat on a bench as I walked back and forth on the platform. A guy trying to pick her up soon retreated away from her absolute silence. As she stared up at him, through him. And away from him. On the train, as I sat on the aisle Sylvia looked out the window. I tried to comfort her with a gentle pat on the arm.

  “You, you’ve had a family. You know what it’s like to have a father and mother. You knew real sisters and brothers. Well I found my real mother through the Red Cross tracing service. And exactly as I used to think she was. In a shack by the railway tracks. And I won’t ever know now what her face is like when it’s smiling. Or when it’s sad. But I sure as hell know what it’s like when it’s mad.”

  Sylvia putting her black-gloved hands up to her face. The towns going by. The conductor punching tickets, reciting off their names. Rome, Utica, Schenectady. This was America. A vast land of the brave and the free. Free country to be rich in. Free for a goddamn sight of a whole lot more to be poor. Free for anybody to tell you to go to hell. And sometimes, like a few of the Mafia kids I played with growing up, they were friendly till you told them to go to hell, and you always knew they’d wait patiently till it was a good time to try to kill you for it. And that’s why if you were Irish you would always try to wade in swinging and kill them first on the spot. And Sylvia was told to go to hell. And had already to stand as she did, waiting till that train went by. And then stood for just those few seconds, for someone to spit in her face. A door slamming, to leave her so utterly forlorn on the landing of her mother’s slatternly abode. A child who sought the loins she came from. To be with that flesh again. To touch it. To take her hand. Be held close. Be comforted in her skirts. And all dressed up to be desecrated. Told to go away. Never to come back. Another soul shot down in cold blood. Wrong and terrible information is being given out at Syracuse.

  “Albany next. Albany next.

  All get off for Albany.” The conductor singing out up and down the carriages. Till we stop and wait in the station. In the hiss and throb and steam of the trains. Then head out of this capital of New York State and towards the majestically flowing river. As the rain streaks by across the window. So much beautiful passing countryside passing. Then through the towns and the grim industrialization, the factories and the rail sidings. That road in Syracuse. Potholed. Strewn with debris. Will now have a surprise to be found in a Tiffany box. A loving cup. Maybe the taxi driver who saw it, will go back to see. And read engraved on the silver:

  To my dearest mother

  Annie

  From her loving daughter

  Sylvia

  And where in the same city of Syracuse there’s a university where my closest childhood friend, who hunted and trapped and explored the lore of wildernesses and who was killed in the war, had planned to go to study forestry. He taught me Indian games of swinging down to the ground from the tops of sapling trees. He knew how to tie knots and make and follow trails through the woods. He’d give me a ten minutes head start and track me to anywhere I would try to hide. Another life ended that promised so much. To inspire another generation. And his memory kept me alive to the wonderful principles he practiced. In all matters but girls. All of whom sought his company and loved him. And not till we reached Poughkeepsie did Sylvia again speak.

  “I’m so exhausted. And feel so alone. And I am so, so shamed.”

  To reach now to take her hand to comfort her. Wrap my fingers around her fingers just tightening for a moment until she gently drew her hand away. Her indifference to me confirmed and supreme. And my consolation proffered rejected. But when I insisted that I go back with her to the apartment at Sutton Place, she didn’t demur. Said she wanted to collect something. Something that was all that was left of her life. She disappeared to her bedroom, while Gilbert, as if for my benefit alone, announced that Mrs. Triumphington was out. When Sylvia returned, she sat and smoked a cigarette and asked Gilbert to make her a daiquiri. And I asked for a beer. More than anything I wanted to go into the music room and strum out some Beethoven. Feel and listen to the notes tumble soft and tenderly upon each other. But sat there where we’d all sat before. Noticing now the same tulip glasses for candlesticks that were on Dru’s friend’s chimneypiece. Christ, a diamondback rattler could come squirming out right now from under this sofa. Where sits so near the body which once presented so many agonizing jealousies. She who through all those years of childhood suffered a desperate nagging mystery in her rich life. Searching everywhere for a mother to rid herself of the emptiness she felt inside her.

  “Stephen. Thank you for coming with me. I suppose I’ve discarded guys like you all my life and I guess I should have discarded you a month or two sooner than a month or two later. But I didn’t. I guess only because at least you’re an artist doing something that has value. Anyway. I’m going to give you a divorce. Of practically the cheapest kind it is possible to get. And forgive me if I now drink my daiquiri in one gulp. I’m going. I presume you’re staying. You don’t have to pretend. I know all about it.”

  “About what.”

  “I s
aid you don’t have to pretend. I’m going if you’re staying.”

  “I’m not staying.”

  “Okay then, let’s save electricity on the elevator and both go. But don’t you ever say anything to anybody ever about what happened today. And don’t watch me as if I were going to fall in front of a truck or jump out of a window.”

  Back on the street, it was still raining. The doorman running out under an umbrella to get a taxi. Sylvia with a much-worn gladstone bag, put out her hand for me to shake.

  “So long, Stephen.”

  “Sylvia. I’d like to at least know where you’re going.”

  “What the hell do you care. If someone doesn’t love you, it doesn’t matter where you’re going. But I’m going somewhere. Where to have no one who loves you, it doesn’t matter. This bag belonged to my real father and I don’t even know who he is. Good-bye. Anyway, free of me, nothing should stop you now maestro from fucking my pretend mother all you want.”

  Most of all, I didn’t want her to go anywhere it could be cold and winds make her shiver. Or loneliness make her silent and more alone. Her silhouette through the rain-spattered back window of the taxi, telling the driver where to go. Wait in case she turns around to wave and I can wave back. But the cab pulling away, the shadow of her head hunched forward. The leather of the gladstone bag with the initials J.C.H.D., was creased and cracked with wear. Whoever owned it at least had some pretensions to elegance. And it is a cruel thought, but I hope that, Holy Christ Almighty, she doesn’t go off now searching for her father.

  Next morning at eight o’clock in Pell Street waking to the eccentric alarm clock. Which at first seemed to be an insistent ring of the downstairs doorbell. But couldn’t be, because the buzzer in the apartment didn’t work. But it was a dream and a nightmare so real that I woke in a sweat. Having dreamt of Sylvia’s death and burial and that I had gone down to the front door where a policeman standing there asked if I were Stephen O’Kelly’O. And informing me that Sylvia fell from a Biltmore Hotel window, and her remains were removed to Bellevue Hospital morgue where if I could make a positive identification, I could collect my wife’s effects. I kept asking the policeman at the door did it really happen. And it seemed that he said all the guys from the “Men Only” bar rushed out to see her broken body on the sidewalk where she landed in front of the phony blind musician who so outraged Max. And then in the morgue I was asking was that really her body on the slab looking astonishingly beautiful and uninjured. And I found myself thinking that although she bitched at me and had her own independent agenda which meant, Go fuck yourself if you want me to do anything for you, that perhaps she wasn’t such a bad old skin.

  Not much lifted in spirits, Stephen O’Kelly’O sitting this day watching out the window the traffic of Pell Street. Where the motor vehicles slowly cruise past looking for space to park. Old habitués go by with whom no word is spoken but whose faces have become familiar to know. This is now my lonely home. A percolator bubbling. A hot cup of coffee in my hand and munching on crumb cake and a Danish pastry. Wearing a dressing robe, a birthday present from Sylvia, that once jeering sneering voice which finally took on a kindly sound and now is vanished. And a day unfolds when everything looks so solemn that a deep deep gloom hovers into Pell Street. Despite all the kindnesses, forgiveness, friendship, and consideration that is felt and shown to others, still you wonder what bad things there are that the world will do to you next. There goes by down in the street a familiar Oriental gentleman of noble mien, pushing his barrow loaded with boxes and a Caucasian son of a bitch in an automobile behind him blowing his horn. The story of America told in one simple message. Get the fuck out of my way I am in a goddamn hurry. Just like the guy in the bus station who was telling everyone wrong information is being given out at Princeton.

  The morning fading away. Noontime coming. The afternoon descending. Premonitions looming of never seeing Dru again. Such different worlds we live in. Yet I was in hers as close as you can get. Her words wonderfully astonishing being conferred upon me as I sank my cock into her for the third time. And she screamed like a wounded animal and the rattler rattled. And my world seemed all in radiant glory as a great cascade of chorus came from Gounod’s St. Cecilia Mass as I cried out with my own scream of joy. We lay there enraptured, legs and arms enveloped, the moisture of our bodies she said had become one.

  Stephen O’Kelly’O turning to look out at the sound of a beeping horn down in the street. And there suddenly below as I open the window for a breath of differently polluted air is Maximilian Avery Gifford Strutherstone III, waving his bright cap held in a hand wearing a lemon yellow driving glove. And dressed in a hacking jacket, cavalry twill riding britches, and grinning up from his open Bentley, beckoning me down. And of course leaning out I knocked a carton of milk off the windowsill and it went plop in front of the landlord, the splash turning his shoes white just as Max shouted.

  “Hey pal, old buddy boy. I’m on my way to take a little canter in the park. Why don’t you come along and join me for a bit of a spin. And later take you to a meal and swim at my club.”

  There was considerable gladness to see and hear this friend. The spiritually corrosive element of the city had made itself felt upon me as I attempted to go to sleep last night, when I had a ringside view of a fight erupting down in the street. A drunken man distributing ten-dollar bills and the guy slapping his hand on the back of a passing taxi to distribute his largesse. Taxi stops. Guy gets out. And to the proffered ten-dollar note, instead of taking it and saying, Thanks pal, the taxi driver punches him on the jaw, knocks him down and his head hits the curb. So much for outright giving people money. Like a good and true New Yorker, the taxi driver jumps back in his cab and drives away in a smoking blaze of tires. I was about to venture out to assist the vanquished citizen but a police patrol car happening down the street intervened and soon had an ambulance coming along. Then the junk searchers came patrolling down the street to see what they would take as they examined the best garbage in the world. Which more than half-furnished everything in this room and which was collected off the sidewalks of the surrounding streets. Now I hear Max beeping his horn again as I put on a tie and feel horny for Dru. Where is she in her daily itinerary. At the chiropodist, hairdresser, psychic, or swimming at her club. Her lithe body undulating through the water. The shiver I feel whenever I remember the rattling rattlesnake. Maybe like one used to try and kill ole Max in Texas. And even in its stuffed variety scaring the shit out of me. Dru asked if I were ever scared in the war. I said plenty and especially once or twice manning twenty-millimeter guns, firing at kamakazi that flew straight at you and kept coming through the tracer bullets while you tried, with all the aircraft crisscrossing the sky, to make sure you hit the bandits instead of the angels. My gunner’s mate third class nearby, got hit and blown to pieces and his blood and parts of him were splattered and stuck all over me. Now go down these stairs. The dust on the carpeted steps comes up as a fume to asphyxiate you. Like you’d feel loading sixteen-inch guns behind massive armor plate and being driven crazy with claustrophobia. Go out the vestibule. Past bills stuffed in the mailbox. Better there than a worry on my brain. Climb up into the old Bentley.

  “Boy pal, it sure is good to see you. How are you.”

  “I’m okay Max. How are you doing.”

  “Well ole buddy boy pal, let’s answer that by saying we’re on our way to take in some riding. Can’t really hold your head up socially unless, when the season comes, you aren’t already socked in with a good hunt in New Jersey. Isn’t that where ole Sylvia hunted before you married. And you objected to the chasing of the fox as a cruel sport. Rumor has it that ole Sylvia has a trace of Iroquois Indian blood.”

  “Well Max, there are rumors now of so many sorts that all I believe is what I see with my own eyes. The truth is she found her natural mother, and she spat in Sylvia’s face.”

  “Hey, pal, old buddy boy. That’s awful. Worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

  As we
roared off down the street, chill air blowing upon our faces. It was astonishing how Max’s appearance could in a second or two transform one’s life from verging on an unheralded session of manic depression into at least a milder form verging on a feeble spark of hope in the distance. Even the landlord seemed impressed by Max’s car and remained noncomplaining about the milk on his shoes or two months owed rent but I suspected he preferred my not lowering the tone of the building any further if I kept my milk off the windowsill. It was as if moving in such stylish company gave the landlord the notion that affluence the like of Sylvia’s clothing and behavior and Max’s elegantly flamboyant appearance, largesse was not far away and coming up with the rent was only a matter of a short delay, with family lawyers and trustees ladling out funds from an office near Wall Street which, with Sylvia was in fact the case in receiving her monthly emolument, alas no longer being injected into her bank. And I told Max to say nothing about Sylvia’s mother.

  “Well old buddy, I won’t and at least we’re taking you up to a better part of town up there around the park.”

  It was in itself cheerful to find how in Max’s company one’s mood could change so fast and a sense of purpose prevail. Even though it be for a superficial pursuit. With every part of this city that you passed still reminding you of something which instantly could become inspiring for one’s aspirations. In a metropolis you didn’t always realize you lived in as if it were a dream. For unless you did, its lonely sadness could tear you apart.

  “Max, my mother used to say, who before she got married worked as a ladies maid for a rich household on Fifth Avenue, that nobody who was anybody lived north of Fifty-seventh Street.”

  “You don’t say. Well pal, things have sure changed. But sorry to hear that about your mother having to do something servile like that. But go back far enough I guess in social lineage in this country we all had to come from the wrong side of the tracks. And rely on the good example of others who made it over to the right side of the tracks. Where one refers to oneself as one.”