Bech at Bay

by John Updike

  When the rudimentary business of announcements and minutes was over with, the shapely brown hand of Jason Marr was lifted for recognition. Bech imagined he would be commenting on the unprecedented number of African-American candidates brought forth into nomination. But no, it was on a graver, more general matter that Marr spoke. “Mr. President,” he said, in his rich slow voice reminiscent of the pulpit, “as we discovered at our last meeting, there is an element within this institution that for unfathomable reasons of their own wishes to see it dissolved. I would like to give expression to my righteous horror at this development. Since I was a boy on the mean streets well north of here, I had heard of the Forty; the streets were not so mean, nor was our ignorance so complete, that word was denied to the least of us that somewhere on this rocky island the pinnacle of artistic accomplishment could be located—as it turned out, in the very building where I am now privileged, unto my everlasting wonder and gratitude, to sit. I have often heard the other members complain that this institution serves no distinct purpose, save that of self-glorification. But of how many institutions can it be said that, even if their distinct good deeds do not make a legion of headlines, they do symbolize in their very being something eternal and unquestionably to be valued? Are love and respect for the arts so dead—are we so far gone in electronic degradation and the lust for monetary profit—that we can seriously contemplate writing ‘finis’ to a dream born at the outset of this cruellest of centuries, in the heart of a refined lady of means, one Lucinda Baines, who dared hope to redeem her drug-peddling family’s unsavory fortune by devoting a fraction of it to the establishment of a golden hill, a hill to be set before the eyes of the nation’s young as a Mount Sinai, a Mount Olympus, a Mount Everest of the spirit existing to be climbed by them? Mr. President, I would welcome a comment from the chair, and an endorsement or a refutation of these sentiments.” He sat down.

  Bech’s head spun a little; there was more going on here than he knew. What did “the lust of monetary profit” have to do with it? He said cautiously, “Mr. Marr, your sentiments endorse themselves, by virtue of the eloquence of their expression. But someone playing the devil’s advocate could ask, Might we not embody an idea whose time has come and gone, with its distinct savor of elitism and of outmoded establishment values? Values, I need not tell you, established by a white male hierarchy whose comfortable idealism rested on the unconfessed exploitation of women, workers, and people of color.” Martina, he felt, would have especially liked the insertion of “workers” in the litany of abused minorities.

  Marr was on his feet indignantly. “Mr. President, I did not speak as a person of color. I spoke as a person of sensibility one elected to this body on the strength of my work. If the content of my work is rage, black rage, its form is timeless, of the ages. As a poet I claim fellowship with Sappho, with Whitman, with Shakespeare—yea, with Kipling and Tennyson and the singers of the white empire of their day. If the Forty is disbanded, I will be denied one of the few venues in which I can express that everlasting fellowship—I, and all my brothers and sisters of color. We are set to climb the golden hill; now some would take the golden hill away!”

  “But,” Bech pointed out, “there is no motion to disband the Forty.”

  “I so move, Mr. President,” a voice boomed from within the several rows of heads, shadowy beneath the thrumming rain. Bech recognized the voice of Isaiah Thornbush, its topping of English accent on a base of local gravel. There was a host of eager seconds.

  “Would Mr. Thornbush,” Bech asked, striving to keep a level head, “like to speak to the motion?”

  “You’ve already nailed it, Henry,” Izzy said with impudent coziness. “Elitist. Edwardian. Establishment. Extinct. You’re either in the march of progress or you’re obstructing it. This luxurious, idle, honorary”—scornfully emphasized and prolonged—“organization is an obstruction. It’s cultural clutter, if I may coin a virtual anagram.”

  At Bech’s elbow Edna’s pencil was stabbing frantically on her yellow pad. Charter by-laws don’t provide for dissolution, he made out. The spinning in his head had increased; he was feeling helicoptered high above the fray. The members’ heads looked like eggs in a carton. His desk looked the size of a shoebox. “The directress,” he stated to the meeting from on high, “informs me that the by-laws have no provision for dissolution.”

  “Laws are for men, not men for laws,” one of the composers in the back row shouted.

  Seidensticker in his vast abstract irritability announced, “Don’t elect anybody, don’t elect the crap artists, that’s the way to end this boondoggle. Bad as the NEA, supporting all this performance art, some woman shaving her cunt in public, smearing herself all over with chocolate pudding, all this so-called earth art, some big ditch bulldozed in the desert, who needs it? Photorealism—what a crock. Any fool with a Polaroid and an enlarger can do it! That’s not drawing, it’s tracing!”

  Others, too, vented the injustices and slights endured in a lifetime of practicing the arts. Frauds, phonies, pedants, narcissists—that had been the competition, garnering prizes and acclaim. Izzy’s orotund voice rolled through the hubbub: “Could the directress kindly answer a simple question: Who owns this building?”

  Bech glanced aside at Edna; color was high in her cameo profile. A raspberry tinge had crept up, like a stain in litmus paper, to color her throat. The membership grew quiet. “The terms of the will,” she said, her upper lip lifting in disdain at this invasion of institutional privacy, “are somewhat imprecise. The lawyer who drew it up was a close friend of Miss Baines who himself administered the trust until he died a good many years later; since then his Wall Street firm, Briggs, Parsons, and Traphagen, has acted as trust officers and overseen the financial details.”

  “But in trust,” Izzy pressed, “for whom?”

  “Well,” Edna admitted, her throat slowly regaining its whiteness, her upper lip now stiffening as if frosted, “it would seem from the phrasing that Miss Baines was leaving it directly to the Forty, as the group would be constituted after her death. But this is a legal impossibility.”

  “I don’t see why,” Izzy said. He no longer had to raise his voice to be heard; such an alert silence had fallen over the solarium that the caterers could be heard downstairs setting up their bottles and slamming the stainless-steel doors of their steam cabinets. “The Forty owns the building, with the endowment for its upkeep, and if there were a dissolution, the proceeds would be divided among the forty members. Since—how many memberships are open now, Edna?”

  “Nine, actually.”

  “Since nine are open, among a mere thirty-one. A pretty penny, I would estimate—way uptown in Lucinda’s day, this lot has come to be prime midtown real estate. And let’s not forget the pictures on our walls. Chase and Sloan ain’t exactly chopped liver.”

  An excited furor ensued; Bech faced it, but with an irresistible sense of drifting away, of being disconnected. Halfway through his three-year term, he was tired of presiding. J. Edward Jamison spoke with quivering outrage of breaking with tradition; his gray smudge of a Brian Aherne–style mustache seesawed as he sneeringly mouthed his opinion of those who would sell their father’s mansion for a mess of pottage; Jason Marr had set a convenient Biblical tone. Von Klappenemner, his bald head ridged like a quartz hatchet-head, stood and enunciated thoughts upon group euthanasia that had become, in his advanced dementia, totally unintelligible, though all of his compellingly graceful conductor’s gestures remained. Lulu Fleming said that in her opinion all of the little nobility that was left in the United States was right here in this room; disbanding would be an atrocity, though since she was also an honorary member of the Academia Brasileira de Letras and the Academia Venezolana it wouldn’t really be the end of her world.

  The antis, the pros, they sounded alike—the same stridency, the same ready recourse to the first person singular, the same defensive encirclement of imaginary prerogatives. Bech thought of Martina opening her bathrobe to release zephyrs
of carnal odor, her face stern and unsmiling atop her sturdy nudity, and everything else seemed vanity and maya. His quiescence, his psychological absence during the rhetorical storm, was slowly sensed as an insult by the agitated members. Izzy called, “Mr. President, I move the question.”

  “What is the question, Mr. Thornbush?”

  “To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether or not the Forty should disband, sell the mansion, and divide the proceeds among the members as an encouragement to the living best in American art.”

  “Second!” snorted Seidensticker.

  The vote was eleven to disband, eleven to continue as before. Bech himself had not voted. All eyes turned on him. Edna’s were alarmed, above her suddenly hectic cheeks. She was pure nerves, and Bech had always vibrated in response to the nervousness of women, their iridescent aura of potential hysteria. Adrift, he tried to haul himself in and to dock at the distasteful and awkward matter at hand. “Well, you do wonder,” he began, “if half of an organization is willing to sell itself out, what purpose there is in the other half denying them the pleasure. I would like to resign, and let my esteemed old friend and colleague Isaiah Thornbush come preside in my stead. He seems to be running things anyway, from the back bench.”

  Edna wrote on her pad, in handwriting that seemed to be tracing a cardiac seizure, “Can’t be done. New elections necessary.”

  Bech regained a presidential timbre: “But since it can’t, evidently, be done, I will stay in my chair and vote against the motion and propose that our able directress consult Briggs, Parsons, and Traphagen as to the financial and legal parameters of the case and give us a full report at the fall meeting.”

  Von Klappenemner’s long waving arms were unignorable, and he was getting to his feet whether or not Bech recognized him. “Oh no you don’t, Mr. sassy President,” he fluted in his demented but still musical voice. “Oh no you don’t, you literary wiseacre. You’re not cheating me out of my share of this mansion—we’re talking millions, all my fellow composers have just assured me. Millions for everybody! I change my vote. I vote Yes, yes, let’s for common decency’s sake put ourselves out of our misery and disband. Die, everybody! This place has been on life supports for years. No intubation, no respirator, no plastic hearts, no liver and lung transplants. Let’s all die! Die rich!!”

  Bech asked Edna quietly, “Did he vote against it before?”

  “I’m afraid he did, Henry.”

  “Ah,” he announced, with an unconscionable relief. “Very well. With Mr. Von Klappenemner’s change of vote, the motion then stands twelve to eleven for disbandment and liquidation and division of the spoils. On such a drastic decision, however, the entire membership must be notified and the matter put to a paper ballot. The lawyers must be consulted. The U.S. Congress should be consulted, since they granted us our charter in 1904. All this will take time. Now is the time, however, ladies and gentlemen, for us to go downstairs and drink and dine. Carpe diem, the night is coming.” Still lacking a gavel, he rapped his knuckles several times on the resounding desk.

  “Well said, Mr. President,” Edna murmured as the jostling, thirsty, hungry shards of the dissolving organization filed out.

  “But, Edna, it doesn’t look good. Once word gets out that there’s money to be had …”

  She hooted: a brawling, what-the-hell noise emerged from her refined small face, a sort of a snort confessing that the two of them had been, as it were, in bed together. An aboriginal wilderness lurked in that hoot. Then her face snapped shut again, upon its own composure. A decisive fatigue veiled the chalk-blue eyes and pursed the chiselled lips. “I’ve been thinking of retirement, Henry. This has been a long haul, thirty-five years with the Forty. I came to Manhattan when I was twenty-two—graduate work at Columbia in anthropology of all things—and never intended to stay. You were born here, I believe; it doesn’t sit on your chest the way it does on mine. For years, when I woke up, I felt I was caught in some enormous machine rattling all around me. Grace Paul took me on as an assistant when I was at loose ends and she was growing dotty, and the year to get out never quite came. I was well enough paid. I enjoyed the building; I liked as well as admired the members, and, the oddest thing, I think I fell in love with Lucinda Baines. You’ve seen the portraits and photographs of her that we have about the place; poor thing, she was terribly plain. I pitied her, fancying myself not plain, but, looking back on my life, I see that I might as well have been. I’ve led the life of a very plain woman. Anyway, love, don’t mean to be bending your ear.”

  “Bend away. The sphinx speaks.”

  “You’re a good sort. Most of you are. You all have to be self-centered, I realize that, if you’re going to do anything worthwhile.”

  From downstairs arose the din of the members talking and wolfing down the free drinks and watercress sandwiches. The nearly deserted solarium was gathering the spring dusk in its high inverted bowl of leaded panes. Pollen and pale-green catkins tinted the gutters and car roofs, in the Manhattan spring, and the smell of tar underfoot intensified. Pollen and catkins / tint gutters and car roofs green. / Underfoot, sweet tar.

  Edna touched a spot below one eye, and then looked at her fingertip to see if it were wet. “Sorry, old Henry. This is an emotional moment for me, evidently. My widowed sister has an enormous spread in the hills north of Adelaide. For years she’s been wanting me to come and help her manage the vineyards. And the sheep.” She brushed back a silken strand of white hair and returned to stroking the spot below her eye, as if she were awakening to simple sensation. “It will be a strange thing, after New York, being able to see the horizon. My memory of it is, there’s a dreadful amount of horizon.”

  It has been said—meaning no derogation, of course—that Henry Bech writes American haiku. But, though some of his precious paragraphs, distilled molecule by molecule like dewdrops, give the studied impression of his having counted the syllables, I do not see Bech as belonging to the company of Bashō, Buson, and Issa. Travel Light, the novel with which he burst upon the mid-Fifties like a leather-jacketed biker into a party of gray suits, surely finds its affinity in the tales of the raffish demimonde of the compassionate and uninhibited Ihara Saikaku, and his next, Brother Pig, in the grotesque fantasy of the splendid Ueda Akinari. The Chosen, with its undercurrent of moralism no less irresistible for its being saline with sardonic irony, evokes yet another Tokugawa master, the copious yet high-minded Takizawa Bakin, and Think Big, if not quite Bech’s Genji monogatari (to give the famous tale its precise title), certainly contains scenes that, in their easy warmth of stylization and elegant candor, might not have embarrassed Lady Murasaki. But it is to a poet far too little known, Tachibana Akemi, who was born the year when Napoleon was defeated and died the year in which Ulysses Grant was elected President, that Bech has his closest affinities, so powerful they are foreshadowed anagrammatically. For it was, of course, Tachibana, along with Ōkuma Kotomichi and the Buddhist priest Ryōkan, who wrested the tanka—a form two lines more capacious than the haiku—away from court poets and wrought it into a vehicle for describing not just the autumn moon and cherry blossoms but the ineluctable details of daily happenstance, including political developments and otherwise unheard rumblings within the sealed room of the Tokugawa era. This is the Bech of inestimable value—he who hustles toward us like a waiter laden with not just the tureen of soup made from the tortoise upon whose back the universe legendarily rests but the meat, potatoes, and peas of quotidian fare, transformed into ambrosia by its painstaking cookery. If Bech had taken less pains, the shelf of his books would be thrice as long, but we might be but a third as grateful for his exquisite yugen, to use the Japanese term most easily translated “mystery and depth.” Congratulations, indispensable Henry—seventy is but a number to conjure with, for those who still possess the conjuror’s boyish spirit!

  Thus read Isaiah Thornbush’s cagey contribution to Henry Bech’s Festschrift volume, which had been assembled, over Bech’s objections, by the assistant
to his editor, Jim Flaggerty. The assistant that Bech had first known, petite, black-haired Arlene Schoenberg, with the shadow of whose fine female hands on the photocopying machine he had briefly fallen in love, had long since moved on; her latest replacement, with the New Age name of Crystal, had done an adequate job assembling the volume, but the overall production values, not to mention the fervor of the tributes, fell considerably short, Bech felt, of what Thornbush had received two years earlier. The Festschrift party, instead of being held in a Park Avenue penthouse, was held in some back rooms of Michael’s Pub. A pianist and bassist mutteringly played, but Woody Allen, though invited, had declined to sit in. Nor did Donald Trump come, though Pamela Thornbush had extracted from him and Marla what she had thought had been a promise.

  Thornbush himself was trying to ease his bulk inconspicuously through the Bech-oriented crowd, but his reflective bald head, winged like a swan alighting on a pond, was hard to miss. Bech swiftly sidled over to him, knifing through a trio of Armani-clad agents. “Izzy, I didn’t know you knew Japanese,” he said.

  “I don’t. I consulted the Britannica. The ’69 edition, the last solid one before they ruined it with that micro/macro crap. Pam had told me you seemed offended when she told you you wrote haiku.”

  “Am I that kind of sorehead? Have I ever even complained about the vile way you panned Think Big in Commentary? At the age of three score and ten, who should hold a grudge? Where is Pam? I’ll give her a hug that’ll make her tits squeak.”

  Izzy seemed a shade depressed. “She couldn’t come—some Christian good cause her brother got her on the board of. Canned milk for starving Ethiopians—who knows? Zeke Jr. turns out to be a kind of holy Joe. She said she’d hope to drop by but these do-gooder meetings go on forever.”