by John Irving
'Oh, I know you're still in shape,' he teases me, 'but you're no match for what you were in the summer of sixty-four.'
'You can't be twenty-two all your life,' I remind him, and we lift and lift for a while. On those mornings, with the Maine mist not yet burned off, and the sea damp settled upon us, I can imagine that I'm just starting the voyage all over again -- I can believe I'm lying on the rug old Sorrow liked to lie on, and it's Iowa Bob beside me, instructing me, instead of me instructing my father.
I would be sneaking up on forty before I would try living with a woman.
For my thirtieth birthday, Lilly sent me a Donald Justice poem. She liked the ending and thought it applied to me. I was feeling cross at the time and fired back a note to Lilly, saying, 'Who is this Donald Justice and how come everything he says applies to us?' But it's a nice ending to any poem, and I did feel just like this at thirty.
Thirty today, I saw
The trees flare briefly like
The candles upon a cake
As the sun went down the sky,
A momentary flash,
Yet there was time to wish
Before the light could die,
If I had known what to wish,
As once I must have known,
Bending above the clean,
Candlelit tablecloth
To blow them out with a breath.
And, when Frank was forty, I would send him a birthday greeting with Donald Justice's 'Men at Forty' poem enclosed.
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
Frank fired me back a note saying he stopped reading the damn poem right there. 'Close your own doors!' Frank snapped. 'You'll be forty soon enough. As for me, I bang the damn doors and come back to them all the fucking time!'
Bravo, Frank! I thought. He has always kept passing the open windows without the slightest trace of fear. It's what all the great agents do: they make the most incredible and illogical advice sound reasonable, they make you go ahead without fear, and that way you get it, you get more or less what you want, or you get something, anyway; at least you don't end up with nothing when you go ahead without fear, when you lunge into the darkness as if you were operating on the soundest advice in the world. Who would have thought Frank would have ended up so lovable? (He was such a rotten kid.) And I do not blame Frank for pushing Lilly too hard. 'It was Lilly,' Franny always said, 'who pushed Lilly too hard.'
When the damn reviewers liked her Trying to Grow -- when they condescended to her with their superior forms of praise, saying how in spite of who she was, the Lilly Berry of that famous opera-saving family, she was really 'not a bad writer,' she was really very 'promising' -- when they prattled on and on about the freshness of her voice, all it meant to Lilly was that now she had to get going; now she had to get serious.
But our little Lilly wrote her first book almost by accident; that book was only a euphemism for trying to grow, yet it insisted to her that she was a writer, when perhaps she was only a sensitive and loving reader, a lover of literature who thought she wanted to write. I think it was the writing that killed Lilly, because writing can do that. It just burned her up; she wasn't big enough to take the self-abuse of it, to take the constant chipping away -- of herself. After the movie version of Trying to Grow made Franny famous, and after the TV series of 'The First Hotel New Hampshire' made Lilly Berry a household word, I suppose that Lilly wanted to 'just write,' as one is always hearing writers say. I suppose she just wanted to be free to write her book, now. The problem was, it wasn't a very good book -- the second one. It was called The Evening of the Mind, from a line she stole from her guru, Donald Justice.
Now comes the evening of the mind.
Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood;
and so on. She might have been wiser to take her title and make her book from another Donald Justice line:
Time a bow bent with his certain failure.
She might have called her book Certain Failure, because it was just that. It was more than she could handle; it was over her head. It was about the death of dreams, it was about how hard the dreams die. It was a brave book, in that it departed from anything directly relatable to Lilly's little autobiography, but it departed to a country too foreign for her to grasp; she wrote a vague book that reflected how foreign the language she was only visiting was to her. When you write vaguely, you are always vulnerable. She was easily wounded when the critics -- when the damn reviewers, with their dull, plodding cunning -- jumped on her.
According to Frank, who was usually right about Lilly, she suffered the further embarrassment of writing a bad book that was adopted as heroic by a rather influential group of bad readers. A certain illiterate kind of college student was attracted to the vagueness of The Evening of the Mind; this kind of college student was relieved to discover that absolute obscurity was not only publishable but seemingly identified with seriousness. What some of the students liked best in her book, Frank pointed out, was. what Lilly hated most about it -- its self-examinations that led nowhere, its plotlessness, its people fading in and out of character, its absence of story. Somehow, among a certain university population, the obvious failure to be clear confirms that what any fool knows is a vice can be rearranged, by art, to resemble a virtue.
'Where in hell do these college kids get such an idea!' Franny would complain.
'Not all of them have this idea,' Frank would point out. 'They think what's forced and strained and difficult with a fucking capital D is better than what's straightforward, fluent, and comprehensible!' Franny shouted. 'What the fuck's wrong with these people?'
'Only some of them are like that, Franny,' Frank would say.
'Just the ones who've made a cult out of Lilly's failure?' Franny asked.
'Just the ones who listen to their teachers,' Frank said, smugly -- happily at home in one of his anti-everything moods. 'I mean, where do you think the college students learn to think that way, Franny?' Frank asked her. 'From their teachers.'
'Jesus God,' Franny would say.
She would not ask for a part in The Evening of the Mind; there was no way to make that book into a movie, anyway. Franny became a star with so much more ease than Lilly became a writer. 'Being a star is easier,' Franny would say. 'You don't have to do anything but be relaxed about who you are and trust that people will like you; you just trust that they'll get the you in you, Franny said. 'You just be relaxed and hope that the you in you comes across.'
For a writer, I guess, the you in you needs more nourishment to emerge. I always wanted to write Donald Justice a letter about that, but I think that seeing him -- only once, and from a distance -- should suffice. If what's best and clearest in him isn't in his poems, he wouldn't be a very good writer. And since something good and strong in him emerges in his poems, it would probably be disappointing to meet him. Oh, I don't mean that he'd be a bum. He's probably a wonderful man. But he couldn't be as precise as his poems; his poems are so stately, he'd have to be a letdown. In Lilly's case, of course, her work was a letdown -- and she knew it. She knew her work wasn't as lovable as she was, and Lilly would have preferred it the other way around.
What saved Franny was not just that being a star is easier than being a writer. What saved Franny, too, was that she didn't have to be a star alone. What Donald Justice knows is that you have to be a writer all alone, whether you live alone or not.
You would not recognize me.
Mine is the face which blooms in
The dank mirrors of washrooms
As you grope for the light switch.
My eyes have the expression
Of the cold eyes of statues
Watching their pigeons return
From the feed you have scattered.
'Jesus God,' as Franny has said. 'Who'd want to meet him?'
But Lilly was lovely to know -- except, perhaps, to herself. Lilly wanted her words to be love
ly, but her words let her down.
It's remarkable how Franny and I once thought of Frank as the King of Mice; we had Frank figured all wrong. We underestimated Frank, from the beginning. He was a hero, but he needed to get to that point in time when he would be signing all our checks, and telling us how much we could spend on this or that, in order for us to recognize the hero that Frank had always been.
No, Lilly was our King of Mice. 'We should have known!' Franny would wail, and wail. 'She was just too small!'
And so Lilly is lost to us, now. She was the sorrow we never quite understood; we never saw through her disguises. Perhaps Lilly never grew quite large enough for us to see.
She authored one masterpiece, which she never gave herself enough credit for. She wrote the screenplay for the movie starring Chipper Dove; she was the writer and director of that opera, in the grand tradition of Schlagobers and blood. She knew just how far to go with that story. It was The Evening of the Mind that didn't live up to her own expectations, and the difficulty she had trying to begin again -- trying to write the book that would have been called, ambitiously, Everything After Childhood. That isn't even a Donald Justice line; that was Lilly's own idea, but she couldn't live up to it, either.
When Franny drinks too much, she gets pissed off at the power Donald Justice had over Lilly; Franny sometimes gets drunk enough to blame poor Donald Justice for what happened to Lilly. But Frank and I are always the first to assure Franny that it was quality that killed Lilly; it was the end of The Great Gatsby, which was not her ending, which was not an ending within her grasp. And once Lilly said, 'Damn that Donald Justice, anyway! He's written all the good lines!'
He may have written the last line my sister Lilly read. Frank found Lilly's copy of Donald Justice's Night Light, opened to page 20, the page dog-eared many times, and the one line at the top of the page was circled and circled -- in lipstick, once, and in several different tones of ink from several different ballpoint pens; even in lowly pencil.
I do not think the ending can be right.
That might have been the line that drove Lilly to it.
It was a February night. Franny was out on the West Coast; Franny couldn't have saved her. Father and I were in Maine; Lilly knew we went to bed early. Father was on his third Seeing Eye dog at the time. Sacher was gone, a victim of overeating. The little blond dog with the perky, yapping bark, the one that was hit by a car -- its vice was chasing cars, fortunately not when Father was attached -- that one was gone too; Father called her Schlagobers because she had a disposition like whipped cream. The third one was a farter, but only in this way did he bear an unpleasant resemblance to Sorrow; it was another German shepherd, but a male this time, and Father insisted that his name be Fred. That was also the name of the handyman at the third Hotel New Hampshire -- a deaf retired lobsterman named Fred. Whenever Father called any dog -- when he called Sacher, when he called Schlagobers -- Fred the handyman would cry, 'What?' from whatever part of the hotel he was working in. The whole thing irritated Father so much (and so much, unspokenly, reminded us both of Egg) that Father always threatened to name the next dog Fred.
'Since that old fool Fred will answer whenever I call the dog, anyway, no matter what name I'm calling!' Father shouted. 'Jesus God, if he's going to be calling out "What?" all the time, we might as well get the name right.'
So Seeing Eye Dog Number Three was Fred. His only bad habit was that he tried to hump the cleaning woman's daughter whenever the little girl strayed from her mother's side. Fred would goofily pin the little girl to the ground, and start humping her, and the little girl would scream, 'No, Fred!' And the cleaning woman would holler, 'Cut it out, Fred!' and whack Fred with a mop or a broom, or with whatever was handy. And Father would hear the fracas and know what was going on, and he'd yell, 'Goddamn it, Fred, you horny bastard! Get your ass over here, Fred!' And the deaf handyman, the retired lobsterman, our other Fred, would cry out, 'What? What?' And I'd have to go find him (because Father refused) and tell him, 'NOT YOU, FRED! NOTHING, FRED!'
'Oh,' he'd say, going back to work. 'Thought somebody called.'
So it would have been hopeless for Lilly to call us in Maine. We wouldn't have been able to do much more for her than yell 'Fred!' a few times.
What Lilly tried to do was call Frank. Frank wasn't that far from her; he might have helped. We tell him, now, that he might have helped her that time, but in the long run, we know, doom floats. Lilly got Frank's answering service, anyway. Frank had replaced his live answering service with one of those mechanical services, with one of those infuriating recordings of himself.
HI! FRANK HERE -- BUT ACTUALLY I'M NOT HERE (HA HA). ACTUALLY, I'M OUT. WANT TO LEAVE A MESSAGE? WAIT FOR THE LITTLE SIGNAL AND TALK YOUR HEART OUT.
Franny left many messages that made Frank cross. 'Go fuck a doughnut, Frank!' Franny would scream into the infuriating machine. 'It costs me money every time that fucking device answers me -- I'm in fucking Los Angeles, Frank, you moron, you dip-shit, you turd in a birdbath!' And then she'd make all sorts of farting sounds, and very liquid kisses, and Frank would call me, disgusted, as usual.
'Honestly,' he'd say. 'I don't understand Franny at all. She just left the most disgusting message on my tape recorder! I mean, I know she thinks she's being funny, but doesn't she know that we've all heard quite enough of her vulgarity? At her age, it hardly becomes her any longer -- if it ever did. You've cleaned up your language, I wish you'd make an effort to clean up hers.'
And on and on.
Lilly's message must have scared Frank. And he probably didn't come in from his evening date very long after she had called; he put the machine on and listened to his messages as he was brushing his teeth, getting ready to go to bed.
They were mostly business things. The tennis player he represents had gotten in some difficulty over a deodorant commercial. A screenwriter called to say that a director was 'manipulating' him, and Frank made a fast mental note -- to the effect that this writer needed lots of 'manipulation.' A famous choreographer had bogged down in her autobiography; she was blocked in her childhood, she confided to Frank, who just kept brushing his teeth. He rinsed his mouth, turned off the bathroom light, and then heard Lilly.
'Hi, it's me,' she said, apologetically -- to the machine. Lilly was always apologizing. Frank smiled and untucked his bedcovers; he always put his dressmaker's dummy in bed before he crawled in. There was a long pause on the machine and Frank thought the thing was broken; it often was. But then Lilly added, 'It's just me.' Something about the tiredness in her voice made Frank check the time of night, and made him listen with some anxiety. In the pause that followed, Frank remembers whispering her name. 'Go on, Lilly,' he whispered.
And Lilly sang her little song, just a little snatch of a song; it was one of the Heurigen songs -- a silly, sad song, a King of Mice song. Frank knew the song by heart, of course.
Yerkauft's mei G'wand, I Fahr in Himmel.
Sell my old clothes, I'm off to heaven.
'Holy cow, Lilly,' Frank whispered to the recorder; he started getting dressed, fast.
'Auf Wiedersehen, Frank,' Lilly said, when her little song was over.
Frank didn't answer her. He ran down to Columbus Circle and caught an uptown cab. And even though Frank was no runner, I'm sure he made good time; I couldn't have done any better. Even if he'd been home when Lilly called, I always told him that it would take anyone longer to cover twenty blocks and a zoo than it takes to fall fourteen stories -- the distance from the window of the corner suite on the Stanhope's fourteenth floor to the pavement at Eighty-first and Fifth Avenue. Lilly had a shorter trip to take than Frank's, and she would have beaten him to her destination -- regardless; there was nothing he could have done. Even so, Frank said, he didn't say (or even think to himself), 'Auf Wiedersehen, Lilly,' until after they'd shown him her little body.
She left a better note than Fehlgeburt had left. Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note.
Sorry,
<
br /> said the note.
Just not big enough.
I best remember her little hands: how they leaped about in her lap, whenever she said anything thoughtful -- and Lilly was always thoughtful. 'Not enough laughter in her, man,' as Junior Jones would say. Lilly's hands could not contain themselves; they danced to whatever she thought she heard -- maybe it was the same music Freud tapped his baseball bat to, the same song Father is hearing now, the bat stirring gracefully at his tired feet. My father, the blind walker: he walks everywhere, he covers the grounds of the Hotel New Hampshire for hours every day, summer and winter. First Sacher led him, then Schlagobers, then Fred; when Fred developed his habit of killing skunks, we had to get rid of him. 'I like Fred,' Father said, 'but between the farting and the skunks, he'll drive the guests away.'
'Well, the guests aren't complaining,' I told Father.
'Well, they're just being polite,' Father said. 'They're showing their class, but it's loathsome, it's truly an imposition, and if Fred ever attacks a skunk when I'm with him ... well, for Christ's sake, I'll kill him; it's the baseball bat for him, then.'