An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  “Actually the house was a groaning display, too many floors put down in marble, Burne-Joneses lit with candles, homosexual sculpture—fat little cupids with pointy little pricks and bottoms like a chorus girl—froufrou in her bedroom, lily pads in the pond, obscene rubber trees. Even a scorpion she kept in a glass cage. She had no taste. But she was grand, grander than anything I’d ever seen, and I was petrified of her. She was all of forty, though she didn’t look it a bit, and I wasn’t twenty-five. She had an awful reputation, four marriages, three children, lovers in every corner, anything you wanted, from an Egyptian with a cellar full of whips to a young American racing car specialist. And unbelievable stories about her, way off my spectrum, for Bess was petite, just as lovely as an orchid. Very elusive of course, you could turn to get a drink and she’d disappeared from the room, but her air was exquisite. She had a delicate humor. I couldn’t digest the awful stories about her, but I had to swallow some part of them, because Bess was in communion with something. You didn’t have amour with her, you had some species of interplay. Messages went back and forth—it was the first time I ever understood there is a hocus-pocus of the cells. Something astral in her, or whatever, was avid to snatch up bits of me. I couldn’t stop the process. She kept stealing my pigeons, so to speak. Then afterwards she’d fly them back—the loan was returned—but something had been added, something foreign. I felt as if I now too was in touch with forces I would just as soon have left alone. Mangaravidi had a bit of that—I always believed he was a hussar of the ghosts, but Bess was queen of the spooks. Never met anyone so telepathic. If there hadn’t been Marconi she would have been the one to dream up the radio. I remember one time we were in her garden and she asked for a five-franc piece. Soon as I gave it to her she zipped into her bag, pulled out a nail scissors, and clipped a couple of hairs from my head. Then she bent down, scooped up a stone from the bottom of a rubber tree, set the five-francker on top of the hairs and put back the stone. ‘Squeaks,’ she said, ‘I might be able to hear you.’ Well, I tried to be ha-ha about it, but it wasn’t that funny—the tree stood there like a statue. And now Bess began to have a way of telling me all about private conversations I’d had with Leonora, or worse: she’d tell me some of my own little thoughts. Given that damn tree, I was directly in her power. I thought myself a competitive fellow, just consider—I had to be nearly as supersensational with sex as I was with dinero, and Bess and I gave each other some glorious good times in a row; up would climb the male ego; applause from Bess was accolade from Cleopatra; then swish! she’d vanish. Gone for a day or week. ‘Had to, darling,’ she’d say on her return, ‘he was irresistible.’ Only to tickle my ego up again by confessing I was more irresistible, ergo she was back. Or to the contrary, she’d leave me pulp; she’d say, ‘Well, he’s gone, but he’s unforgettable.’ I was like a hound halfway through a steak, have it snatched from him. She got me to the point where I could be in the middle of doing my work and all of a sudden I’d think, ‘Bess is off with somebody.’ My brain would scoot out of me just as fast as feeder ants from a piece of carrion that’s just been kicked. I was carrion. I was in her damn grip. Intolerable. I was afraid of her. More afraid of her than I’d been of anybody. Each time we got together I felt as if I were an open piggy-bank: had to take whatever she would drop into me; her coin was powers. My nose for the market turned infallible. Lying in bed I could feel the potential of a given stock as much as if I were bathing in the thoughts of a thousand key investors. I could almost hear the sound of the mother factory. It was like soaking up a view. Then I would be left with the final impression, ‘Artichokes is going up tomorrow, Beethoven is going down.’ Whatever! I was spoon-fed on expert opinion, of course, I was just about a clearinghouse for tips, but this went a distance beyond that, I promise you. And there were other spookeries. One time a bugger started to give me a hard time, pompous little promoter. As he was walking away, I said to myself, ‘Drop, you bugger,’ and he had epilepsy right at my door. Wondrous sort of power.

  “Well, poco a poco, I started to trundle along on Bess’s extra ventures. They were wows. Had to talk my way out of a bad place or two—Bess was incorrigible. Only one thing could make her put on the brakes. She had a niece—her sister’s daughter—nineteen, virgin. Lovely girl. Bess adored her. Only thing she really cared about. The niece came for a visit and before you knew it the two women were up to the elbow. Inseparable. The stickiest attraction between them. You can imagine how this put Bess at odds. A parting of the seas in her overcharged libido. Like Moses, I kept taking one nimble step after another into the Red Divide. I headed right for the heart of the problem, as if the way to get thumbs on Bess was to make her girl fall in love with me. I did not even know if I did this at Bess’s bidding, or against her will, but we certainly came closer and closer all of us to the jewels. Then, one night, one more or less pregnant night in Bess’s boudoir, the three of us sat about for hours. Bess was drinking a little, I was drinking a lot, this girl was sipping champagne. The longer we tried to make small talk, the more powerful became the itch to set off an earthquake. After awhile, we all got silent. There was gunpowder in the nostrils. And a whiff of something ghoulish. As if we breathed a winding sheet to and fro. I’ve never been so excited in my life to make the move, and yet my bones were soup—look,” said Kelly, holding up his palm, “let me give the truth: the girl was not a niece but a daughter, Bess’s little girl whom she had lost by divorce years ago. I had the feeling that to say a word would strike a match, and yet to quit the game at this extraordinary moment would deprive me of my strength. Afraid to go on, afraid to quit, we just sat in a furnace. And dear Bess melted first. She gave me the wink. I got up on the spot, it was too much, she had suggested it five minutes too soon. I bolted. Ran downstairs to have a drink by myself. Made a vow I’d give Bess up. Started to leave her house. But on the way through the garden, I thought of that rubber tree, and knew I couldn’t go away while Bess still kept her little ear beneath the stone. So I started to pluck it up. ‘Don’t you dare,’ I heard Bess say clearly, even though she was nowhere about.

  “ ‘Damn you,’ I said back, and picked up the stone, stuck the franc piece in my pocket, kicked the hole with the toe of my shoe to scatter the bits of hair, and off I went. I hadn’t taken five steps before I knew I’d never make it, I’d pass out. So back plunged Kelly, took the first bathroom he could find on the ground floor, and proceeded to get sick as a boy with his first bottle of whiskey. There on my knees at that moment, pinching the five-franc piece as if it were all the riches I had, in slavery to the plumbing, I heard, clear across town, a sound of Deborah screaming. What screams! I saw flames as clear as a movie film on Bess’s bathroom wall, flames licking at Deborah’s crib. My house was on fire, I was convinced. Well, I got out of that bathroom fast, and got across town as ever fast I could, I don’t know if I’ve ever driven so fast, and what do you think? Our house was perfectly all right. It was only the house next door which was on fire. A total conflagration. No one knew how it started, either. And Deborah was screaming in her crib.

  “That was warning enough. I sat down with Leonora to make a complete confession. And she—I should have known it—went into hysterics. Next morning was disaster. Bess’s daughter had a breakdown in the night: she carried on. The servants heard a bit of it. Result: Antibes heard all of it. We were shunned. You can make any kind of splash you want in that world, but keep the water clear of mud. Leonora took off and left me. Took Deborah with her. Forbid a divorce, forbid all right to the child. I was not allowed to see Deborah again until she was eight, and then for an hour. I never really saw her until she was fifteen.” He took a breath and stared at the fire. “I had a lot to think about. I’d never been so tempted in my life as I was that night. I kept being bothered by the thought that if I had taken a chance, I would have had the opportunities of a president or a king.” He took a deep pull of his brandy. “I decided the only explanation is that God and the Devil are very attentive to the people at the s
ummit. I don’t know if they stir much in the average man’s daily stew, no great sport for spooks, I would suppose, in a ranch house, but do you expect God or the Devil left Lenin and Hitler or Churchill alone? No. They bid for favors and exact revenge. That’s why men with power sometimes act so silly. Kaiser Wilhelm, for example. There’s nothing but magic at the top. It’s the little secret a few of us keep to ourselves, but that, my friend, is one reason it’s not easy to get to the very top. Because you have to be ready to deal with One or the Other, and that’s too much for the average good man on his way. Sooner or later, he decides to be mediocre, and put up with the middle. I know I was ready. Incest is the gate to the worst sort of forces, and I’d had my belly-full early.” Kelly sighed. “The experience put me off sex for years.”

  “That’s not your reputation.”

  “I have a late reputation,” said Kelly. “But I was a good boy for quite a period. Very good I was. Then I got custody. Know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Leonora was broke. Figure-toi. All that bloody Catholicism. She couldn’t take a deep breath until the saints were put to bed; nonetheless, she lost almost half of her inheritance in the market, that idiot! Suddenly, she was obliged to live on principal. She’d never taken a cent from me, but now she needed the stuff. Turned out Leonora loved cabbage more than morals. In return for a large piece of cash, I got full custody of Deborah. In fact the girl and her mother couldn’t bear each other. Leonora had stashed her in a convent. Now Deborah and I had a home.”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “Happy times,” he said. He looked away. “Of course one does well not to talk of that. Not tonight. But I was happy until Deborah got married to Pamphli. Mind you, I did like him, Pamphli was a bit in the style of Mangaravidi. But he was much too old for her and ill. Well, let’s not talk about bad parts.”

  “Deborah told me Pamphli was a fine hunter.” I was making conversation—I was uneasy. I did not know if the story were finished or half-begun.

  “Pamphli had been a good hunter once. And he did actually take her all the way over to Africa for the honeymoon, but Deborah did most of the bush work with the guide. They weren’t out long. Pamphli was too sick. Besides, Deborah was having a damn sick time with Deirdre.”

  “Then she was pregnant when they married?”

  “Afraid she was.” He shifted irritably. “Now what the hell do you want to know?” he asked. He was about to shut down on the British accent.

  “Who Deirdre’s father might be.”

  “You don’t suppose Deborah advertised every last little fling, do you?”

  But in saying this, her death opened again between us. “All right,” he said, “there’s a little more of the story. Can’t conceal it from you, can I?” He threw me a look, almost a jeering look. “You see, by the time Deborah came to live under my roof, I had hardened up. You don’t live alone for years devoted to nothing but soul and business without getting fairly rich. I didn’t smoke, booze never. Let me tell you, boy, in a situation like that, it’s hard not to keep making new boodles. On the one hand, you’re clear-minded. On the other—you would have to hurt a great many people’s feelings not to fall on another buried treasure every six months, because they’re begging you to take it, take their money, take their invention, take their export license, take their wife, slip it up grandmother, they are sordid with eagerness. You get bored. A rich man cannot afford that—his boredom is infinite in its dimensions. So I looked for diversion. Bought into a news magazine, I think you met the fellow who’s supposed to run it. He doesn’t. Some of us run it. We leave the praying to him. Mousy fellow. He’s just a missionary on the capitalist highway of life.”

  The only sign Kelly gave of being the least bit drunk: he now smiled at his own remark.

  “Yes,” he said, “well, the magazine got me interested in what we call ‘the problems of governments’ and governments got interested in me. London’s the only place to have headquarters for anything like that—what a wicked place it is. You take all of Europe and America—I suppose I was one of the hundred most important fellows around. Which is more than I could say today. Today, everybody is important. Well, boom, Deborah landed in all that. Fifteen years old. Full of force, all untouched, a sweet wild thing, plump, green Irish fire in her eyes, all those Mangaravidi graces. She hadn’t been in the house two days before she brought home three young Bolsheviks—students at Oxford, Communists. They had palpitations when they saw me, I was the great villain, never been more seductive in my life. ‘You were marvelous with them, Daddy,’ Deborah said afterward.”

  “Kelly, it’s getting more and more difficult to listen to this.”

  “Then don’t keep me waiting. You can hardly enjoy hearing what she was like at fifteen. I don’t want to go on. I just want to hear you say you’re going to be at the funeral, aren’t you?”

  I could feel the pressure of his motive but could not name it. To fill the pause I took another half-inch of gin and caught a sniff of my lungs. They were like the air in a subway at midsummer. An imperative came through my drunkenness: I had the certainty I must not leave Kelly’s suite until I went out to the terrace and walked around the parapet, around all three sides of the parapet. All three sides. I began to tremble very quietly at the force of this desire.

  “You’re going to be at the funeral, aren’t you?” he repeated.

  I felt as if I were now going out to do war with him in an alley. “You haven’t made it clear to me,” I said, “why you waited so long for Deborah …”

  “Yes?”

  “And then put her back in a convent.”

  “Well, I did.”

  “You got her back after fifteen years, and gave her up again?”

  “Not instantly. She stayed in my London house for a year.”

  “Then she went to the convent?”

  “The war had just started and I was traveling a bit. I thought she’d be safer there.”

  “I see.”

  “Look, Stephen.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you have something on your mind …”

  “It seems unusual to me,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, with a profound sigh as though relieved I had forced him to go on, “you’ve guessed. There was something unusual. Listen to this: I couldn’t even bear for Deborah to spend the night away with one of her little girl friends, I had to call the parents at one A.M. to check on her health. If the poor child went out to a concert with a boy, I had the horrors. Thought it was because she was fresh out of a convent and I was worried about her innocence. Good God, I was more jealous of that child than I’d ever been of Bess. Then one night the pigeons came home, every last one. Deborah came back twenty minutes late from a supper dance. I was so furious I was ready to fire the chauffeur. Took her upstairs, started to scold her, she tried to talk back, I slapped her. Whereupon she burst into tears. Whereupon I grasped her, kissed her, put my tongue on hers”—Kelly’s tongue peeped out of the corner of his mouth—“and then thrust her away. I thought I’d have a heart attack—she came up to me and kissed me back. Accept that for a horror?” But there was not exactly a horror between us. It was more like the tension provided by a joke which is likely to reveal some truth about the man who tells it or the man who listens, but just whom is not yet certain. Kelly looked at me and said, “I walked away from her. Locked myself in my room. I had all kinds of thoughts. Suicide. Murder. Yes, I thought of killing her. First time I felt unbalanced in fifteen years. And then I felt an awful desire to go to her room: my teeth were literally grinding, my belly was a pit of snakes. It was as if the Devil had come into the room at that instant and was all over me, I tell you I could smell him, he smelled just like a goat, it was horrendous. ‘Deliver me from all this, O Lord,’ I cried out to myself. Then I felt a powerful impulse to go to the window and jump. That was the message I seemed to receive.” Kelly paused. “Now, I was up on the second story, and the ground floor was gracious in its proportions. So, say
the jump down was as much as sixteen feet, or a little more. Nothing fabulous. Worst, I suppose, was that I would break a leg. But if it had been Heaven there waiting for me at the bottom, I didn’t have the nerve to jump. Look,” he said, “I had played knees under the table with a lot of people who could cut your throat, that didn’t bother me, good even nerve I’ve had most of my life, but I was—do you know that phrase of Kierkegaard’s, of course you do—I was in a fear and trembling. I stayed at that window for an hour. I was almost blubbering at my inability to take that simple jump. And the goat kept coming back. ‘She’s down the hall,’ said the goat, ‘she’s on her bed, it’s there for you, Oswald.’ Then I would reply, ‘Save me, Lord.’ Finally, I heard a voice say quite clearly, ‘Jump! That will cool your desire, fellow. Jump!’ The Lord, you see, had a bitch of a humor about me.

  “ ‘Lord,’ I said at last, ‘I’d rather give Deborah up.’ The simple thought came, ‘Let me send her back to the convent.’ The moment I said that, I knew I’d give up having her in my house. And the compulsion disappeared.”

  “And Deborah went back to the convent?”

  “Yes.”

  “You gave up your daughter?”

  “I did. Don’t you see now why you’ve got to come to the funeral? It has something to do with her forgiving me, I know that. Good God, Stephen, can’t you see I’m suffering?” But he didn’t seem to be. His eyes were a bright green, his skin was flushed, he had never seemed more like a big animal. A flush of greed came off the air about him. “Look here,” he said when I did not respond, “do you know why Ganucci came by tonight?”