An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  I must have fallen asleep on the ride. When I looked out we were almost in Harlem and again I had a moment where I could have believed I was dead. The cab driver was silent, the streets were wet, and the vehicle was like a hearse. The handle of the umbrella seemed alive to my fingers. I had a thought. It suggested I should go into Harlem this night and drink until closing. That was right. That was the way to pay for it. There had been nights when I had done this. After very bad nights with Deborah I had made the rounds and walked down back streets and toured from bar to bar, but nothing had ever happened. The waiters had been polite, the drinkers had been polite, the streets were quiet. Even the hookers had done no more than cast an eye. I had spent some of the politest nights of my life in Harlem, and yet now—no, I believed in Africans and demons. If tonight I entered those bars the sound of Shago’s fall would reverberate from my mind and I would not escape some evil incident. “Do you want your love to be blessed?” said my mind, “go to Harlem.”

  Something was wrong, very wrong. It had been right for a little while, for an hour with Cherry in that room it had been almost right, I had felt safe, and now it was bad again—some air of hurricane lay over my head. Once again I wished to rush back to her—she was my sanity, simple as that—and then I remembered the vow I had made in her bed. No, if one wished to be a lover, one could not find one’s sanity in another. That was the iron law of romance: one took the vow to be brave.

  Therefore, I must go to Harlem. One could see Kelly later. Or was that still another excuse? Was it Kelly I feared the most; would I waste the early morning hours in one uptown bar after another, my bankroll ($75) safe, my person safe, neither mugged, nor accosted, nor even recognized as the latest white man to give up the guilt; would I come to understand at four in the morning, all bars shut, that I played a trick on myself to skip an encounter with the real fear? “Go to Kelly,” said a voice now in my mind, and it was a voice near to indistinguishable from the other voice. Which was true? When voices came, how did you make the separation? “That which you fear most is what you must do,” said my mind. “Trust the authority of your senses.” But I had taken too long to decide: I had no senses. I was now nothing but fear. “A curse on the logic of the saints,” I thought, and the taxi, making the circuit of the Park, passed the rain-washed exit to 110th Street and Seventh Avenue; we were turning back to the center of the city. Too late for Harlem. Was it woe I knew, relief, or some nausea of the cells? The handle of the umbrella felt sullen in my palm.

  I opened the window, receiving a mist of rain on my face, and breathed deeply. The air was almost clean of smog, the whiskey was burning away, guttering in my stomach like the dregs of liquid in a spirit lamp. Did it matter where I went? If there was a dislocation to the heavens, it followed me: I would meet something tonight—was that not the odds? And the voice again: “Still it would have been better to choose.”

  I had been in states like this before. Possessing the salt of Mohammed or Buddha I could have founded a religion. Doubtless. It is just that I would not have had too many followers. Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love but courage. Love came only as a reward.

  The metaphysics, however, was vast—buried in the twenty volumes I had not written. And I at this moment was buried in fear. I no longer had the confidence my thoughts were secret to myself. No, men were afraid of murder, but not from a terror of justice so much as the knowledge that a killer attracted the attention of the gods; then your mind was not your own, your anxiety ceased to be neurotic, your dread was real. Omens were as tangible as bread. There was an architecture to eternity which housed us as we dreamed, and when there was murder, a cry went through the market places of sleep. Eternity had been deprived of a room. Somewhere the divine rage met a fury. I shivered in the open window of the cab. What was it Shago had said? “Man, I was spitting in the face of the Devil.” He was wrong. It was the Devil’s daughter. And the memory of Barney Oswald Kelly came back. For we were approaching the Waldorf and I could feel his presence in a room near the top of the Towers.

  8 / At the Lion and the Serpent

  THE TAXI turned around on Park Avenue, came up to the canopy, the doorman said good evening and gave a smile. I had passed him five dollars one blizzard of a night long ago when he managed to produce a cab for Deborah and me; the gift was old, but he remembered, and I, remembering that evening, had a sudden unaccountable urge not to enter by the main lobby, not at this late and empty hour. It was raining harder now, a cold rain which gave a hint of ice underfoot; I opened Shago’s umbrella. The spars slid up the mast with an intake of breath, a grating swooping asthmatic sound as the cloth filled out. A voice came through the handle and into my palm—so it seemed. “Go to Harlem,” said the voice. But I was on my way to the Towers. There was a private entrance on Fiftieth Street not a hundred feet from the corner, and I would take an elevator there, and avoid the lobby.

  The street outside the side entrance was decked, however, with three limousines double-parked and a squad of motorcycle policemen stood at the door. I had a moment of panic—they were there for me, they must certainly be there for me—it took the time to light a cigarette before I recovered sufficiently to walk through the file and through the door; then up in the foyer against still another eight, each man more than six feet two, handsome as a prize herd of test-tube bulls. Their herder (I almost bumped into him) was a small plump detective from the Commissioner’s office, well-dressed, with a round petulant face and a fresh carnation. He was waiting by the elevator and as I approached he did two things at once: he managed to avoid looking at me, yet succeeded in studying my clothes. There was something wrong with me, he knew that—some remnant in his memory of my picture in the paper. But he gave it up, and turned to the elevator girl. “She’ll be coming down in three minutes. In about one minute I’ll be going to the floor with you.”

  Then I knew the police were there to escort the First Lady to her limousine or there to take a visiting princess out to a nightclub—some woman of huge institutional importance was about to descend—and I had no desire to wait. The air had the virile blank intensity of a teller’s cage. So I went out again, opened my umbrella, took the short trip back to the main entrance, smiled at the doorman, and climbed the marble steps into the lobby of the Waldorf, a mountaineer’s fatigue coming into me with this ascent. A pain gripped me in the angle between my shoulder and my chest, a pain so bright it gave promise of severing the nerve—there was nothing to save me but the pain itself—it reached to climax, opened an iron glove, ebbed, went away, and left me staring at the lobby of the Waldorf. But for a moment I had died and was in the antechamber of Hell. I had long had a vision of Hell: not of its details; of its first moment. A giant chandelier of crystal above one’s head, red flock on the walls, red carpet, granite pillars (as I proceeded) now a high ceiling, was it gold foil? a floor of white and black, and then a room of blue and green in whose center stood a nineteenth-century clock, eight feet high with a bas relief of faces: Franklin, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Washington, Grant, Harrison, and Victoria; 1888 the year: in a ring around the clock was a bed of tulips which looked so like plastic I bent to touch and discovered they were real.

  I needed a drink but the Peacock Lounge was closed. One old woman in ermine came trailing by, and left a perfume behind, faint as the ghost of a jewel box. I had to quit the clock. But back in the lobby, the Waldorf looked like one of those silent rooms in the Casino at Monte Carlo, one of the dead and empty spaces which collect about the exit of a man who has lost a million in an hour. I had thought to mount the stairs to Kelly’s apartment, all thirty-plus flights, a passing thought, but it would not quit me. I had some sense this was what I must do, it might be the equal of going to Harlem. Yet I could not begin. It seemed too heroic to mount those fire stairs, go through locks and ambushes, up through vales of anathema exuding from the sleep of the wealthy; and night detectives to be encountered. I could see my picture in the paper, professo
r-picked-up-as-prowler. No! Yet I was certain it was better to walk those stairs, ascend through fear and fever, even fail in some exhausted spasm of the heart, than be whipped along by elevator through the belts of psychic magnetism which guarded the tower.

  In an alcove of the main floor, one flight above the entrance from the street, was a continuation of the private cars. While I waited, I went into a study of the doors, a frieze of nymphs and willowy dryads with stainless-steel hair and slim steel breasts. The elevator stopped with a strain of annoyance, as if, at this hour, visitors would not be walking through the lobby. I gave the operator—a sturdy turnip of a woman—the name of Barney Kelly, and she studied me like a police matron.

  “Mr. Kelly expecting you?”

  “Indeed he is.”

  While we ascended, I felt the air burning from the shaft and some rich exhaust went out of my lungs as if I had fallen asleep in a room with a fire and awakened from a long sensual dream to discover that the fire had consumed the oxygen and my satyr’s heaven was compounded of suffocation. Up we went, rocketing the stories of the Waldorf, while the umbrella in my hand quivered like a rod, a dowsing rod, as if here, here, we had just passed some absolute of evil to the left, and there to the right an unknown concentrate, crypts of claustrophobia, abysses of open space, now through a distillate of gloom—what depression surrounded the rich—and some compass of direction went awry in my mind; I had the physical impression we were moving through a tunnel rather than rising in a shaft; once again I felt something begin to go out of the very light of my mind, as if the colors which lit the stage of my dreams would be more modest now, something vital was ready to go away forever even as once, not thirty hours ago, I had lost some other part of myself, it had streamed away on a voyage to the moon, launched out on that instant when I had been too fearful to jump, something had quit me forever, that ability of my soul to die in its place, take failure, go down honorably. Now something else was preparing to leave, some certainty of love was passing away, some knowledge it was the reward for which to live—that voice which I could no longer deny spoke again through the medium of the umbrella. “Go to Harlem,” said the voice, “if you love Cherry, go to Harlem—there is time.” Then I knew how afraid I was of Harlem, and argued with that voice, saying, “Let me love her some way not altogether deranged and doomed. It makes no sense to go to Harlem. Let me love her and be sensible as well.”

  “The sensible are never free,” said the voice.

  “Let me be free of you.”

  “Free as you wish,” said the voice, and something departed from me, some etched image of Cherry’s face turned to mist. And the handle of the umbrella peppered my palm, I almost tottered. For the elevator decelerated with a plunge of sinkers at my chest; we were there.

  I went down the hall, a long hall with a carpet of civilized brown, much milk in it, and pale green walls, light as a new leaf. Kelly’s door was familiar, it had a medallion beneath the knocker, a miniature of the coat of arms of the Mangaravidis and the Caughlins, quarterly, 1 and 4, gules, a lion rampant; 2, 3, sable, serpent argent, crowned azure, vorant a child proper—so Deborah had delineated the blazons. And the motto: Victoria in Caelo Terraque. For a moment I began to shake, as from a chill. Not from the motto (yes, from the motto, too) but from the memory of the half-dozen times I had come to this door. Then I lifted the knocker.

  Ruta answered. She was wearing an expensive black silk with a string of pearls, and her face stared back at me, piquant and painted, inquisitive, rapacious—some energy returned to my blood—the blood no longer felt as if it would flow away to the moon, no, some pig’s riot gave promise of existing still, and I stood at the door, giving a full stare at her, while a provisional sanity began to form.

  “You look well,” I said.

  She smiled. Two or three hours plus a full twenty-four must have gone by since she quit the precinct, but she had found the time to go to a beauty parlor, the best beauty parlor in New York no doubt. Now the red in her hair was perfect as the red and brown of a fine wood with a lick of flame, the soft lick of a flame, and the red of a rich clay to support the fire and the wood.

  “Good evening, Mr. Rojack,” she said.

  The last time I had been this close, Ruta’s hair was half down her neck, the roots had shown, lipstick was half off her mouth, clothes up, off, to every side, her clump in my fingers and both of us dripping ozone in the haste of making love while standing up. A host of the heats came to me on a whiff of my own odor now and the hint was there again between us. Her pointed nose, sensitive to mood as the antennae of a cat, tilted to the side and looked at the unprotected space between my cheek and my ear.

  “Well, bless you for being so good with the cops,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, “you are much too kind.” We were thinking that she had been not so very good after all, not with the cops.

  “But, in fact, I tried to do you no harm. After all, I do not dislike you.”

  “I would count on it that you didn’t.”

  She stirred in the attention between us. “Of course not,” she said, “of course. But what woman enjoys the just liking a man? That is all crap.” Then she smiled sweetly as if to think of secrets. “Between us,” Ruta said, “your father-in-law had something to do with getting you off.”

  “I wonder why?”

  “You must ask him yourself.” She looked, for an instant, about to offer me more, but her expression moved on. “Look,” she said, “it is disturbed here tonight. There have been people all evening. Now two are left. I tell you in secret they are horrible.”

  “Let’s go in nonetheless.”

  “You would not like to see Deirdre first?”

  “She’s back from school?”

  “Of course she is back. She waited until midnight for you to appear. Then her grandfather sent her to bed. She is up, however.”

  I had a pure woe, as if an airplane dropped suddenly. The route was too round about. I had forced my nerve to be ready for Kelly; now such preparation would be lost. Memories might begin. I did not want them. Indeed I had met Deirdre on the day I met Kelly, here in this suite nine years ago, and the recollection was not pleasant. Deborah had too been terrified of her father. Her lips quivered when Kelly spoke to her. I was never to see her so useless again, and thus had a hint of the shame she felt in marrying me.

  Only Deirdre had been able to save a part of the meeting. She had not seen her mother in more than a month, she had been sent from Paris to visit Kelly six weeks ago, but it was my face she ran to across the room, there in front of her mother and grandfather.

  “Moi, je suis gros garçon,” she said to me. For a three-year-old, she was very small.

  “Tu es très chic, mais tu n’as pas bien l’air d’un garçon.”

  “Alors, c’est grand papa qui est gros garçon?”

  We laughed. It was the only laughter of the visit.

  Now Ruta took me up from the memory by putting her hand on my arm. “I don’t know,” I said to her, “if I can bear to see Deirdre.”

  “Pay cash,” said Ruta.

  She drew me to a bedroom. “Look,” she said, “I will try to wait for you. There’s something I want to talk about.” She gave another smile, reached across to open the door and said, “Deirdre, your stepfather is here.”

  There was a flight from the bed. A thin figure, a wraith with arms, hugged me hard.

  “Turn on the lamp,” I said. “I want to see what you look like.” Actually I had a fear of being in the dark with Deirdre, as if my brain would be too vivid. But with the lights on, there were no pictures of the night before. I was suddenly happy to see Deirdre. For the first time since entering the hotel I felt back in myself again. “Well, give us a look,” I said.

  She had grown since I had seen her last at Christmas, she was going to be tall and very slim. Already I could no longer kiss the top of her hair. Soft as a bird’s feather, Deirdre’s hair offered the suggestion of a wood where birds were nesting. She was not a
pretty child, she was nothing but eyes—she had a thin triangular face with a chin much too pointed, a mouth as wide as Deborah’s and a nose whose nostrils were too chiseled for a child—but eyes she had! Enormous, and stared at one with a clear luminous look, an animal’s fright, some creature with huge eyes.

  “I was afraid I wouldn’t see you,” she said.

  “Of course you would. I wasn’t going to disappear.”

  “I can’t believe any of it.” She always spoke like an adult. She had one of those charming accents which belong to children who have grown up in a convent; something disembodied in her voice invoked the precise breathless tone of her nuns.

  “Mummy doesn’t feel dead.”

  “She doesn’t.”

  Tears came to Deirdre’s eyes like a tide welling into two hollows of sand. “Nobody mourns her. It’s awful. Even Grandfather is in a state.”

  “He is?”

  “Cheerful.” She began to cry. “Oh, Steve, I’m lonely.” She said this in the voice of a full widow, then kissed me with a pure flesh of grief.

  “The shock must be worse for your grandfather than anyone else.”

  “It’s not shock. I don’t know what it is.”

  “Is he numb?”

  “No.” Grief passed her by like a wind. She was thoughtful again. Suddenly I knew that the nerves were shattered: her skin kept her intact, but the nerves spoke in separate broken bits. One bit wept, another had a thought; a third was dumb. “Once, Steve, when I came here with Mummy, Grandfather was in a very good mood. He said, ‘You know, children, a celebration is in order. I made twenty million today.’ ‘That must have been a bore,’ Mummy said. ‘No,’ he said, ‘this time it wasn’t because I had to take a big chance.’ Well, that’s how he is now.” She shivered again. “I hate being here. I was writing a poem when they told me this morning. Then there was nothing but Grandfather’s limousine to take me back.”