“It’s a long ways back there all right,” Foley said.
Dickie came in and said, “Maybe I didn’t have one hell of a time!” He turned the coonskin cap so the tail hung in front of his face.
“Oh, I guess we all had a wonderful time, didn’t we?” said Mrs. Pierce.
“I mean today,” said Dickie.
“Well, I would say that in the past hour—” Mrs. Pierce said and lidded her eyes. That didn’t help, so she opened them.
“Now just where did you meet?” Lou Baker said.
“I used to be a hostess, honey,” Mrs. Pierce said. “I’m still with Air France, and when the news got around about the man who—” She stopped, looked at Dickie, and couldn’t go on.
“I’m a boy, but a man at heart,” Dickie said and held up his nails, blew on them, then polished them on the tail of the cap.
“I know how you feel, Mrs. Pierce,” Lou Baker said.
“About the man who wanted, who said he wanted, a girl who had been in Paris in the twenties. Now if she’d been in Paris in the twenties she was no girl now!” Mrs. Pierce said.
“I didn’t say young or old,” said Dickie. “Just girl. There’s old girls and then there’s young girls.”
“Well, that was just what I got to thinking!” Mrs. Pierce said. “And if that was what he wanted, why, I’d been a girl in Paris myself. I was there chaperoning one of those awful college groups!”
“You’ll pardon me,” said Dickie, “but Mrs. Proctor is a prominent Delaware Group alumna. Author of that handy pocket guide ‘Sex on Shipboard,’ including some harbors, each volume with index to—”
“So you answered the call, Mrs. Pierce?” said Lou Baker.
“I must have been simply out of my mind, but I did! I didn’t know at all what he wanted, but I said I would speak to him and ask him, and he said all he wanted was a girl who had been there in twenty-nine. In May, he said, of twenty-nine. And you know, I was. I really was. So I said if that was all he wanted”—she gave him a look, and he leered—“if that was all he wanted, why, I would be free till half-past ten. There’s no train or bus out where we live after eleven. Just joking, I said, Mr. Livingston, what in the world will I tell my husband, and he said to say that I’d been out drinking with some refugees. Exiles, I think he said, and refugees!”
“Ha!” Proctor said suddenly and startled all of them. They turned from Mrs. Pierce and looked at him. Foley had a feeling that he had heard it—that Proctor, somewhere, had previously said it—but it had not been Proctor. No, it had been Lawrence. Lawrence in the diner just outside Bakersfield. The night he had not watched his language, argued with the cook in the diner, and later that night, in a lemon grove, had tried to bum his hand in a smudgepot. That had been like Lawrence, but the “Ha” had been out of character.
“Why, Mr. Proctor,” Mrs. Pierce said, edging around so the light was behind her, “don’t tell me you’re the Mr. Proctor all this talk is all about!”
Proctor said nothing. What she said didn’t seem to register.
“Mr. Proctor,” Dickie said, “is the current public enemy number one. One of two—or is it three?—one of the three surviving Americans. Visitors will please not taunt the exhibit or throw ground glass into the cages.”
“Well, I certainly do like your—pluck,” Mrs. Pierce said. She had been about to say nerve, but had remembered, just in time, that Proctor was described as a man who suffered from a failure of it. “Isn’t it simply ghastly,” Mrs. Pierce said, feeling pluck herself. “I mean, really?”
“There’s a heartwarming rise in the sale of Mother’s Day cards,” Dickie said.
Mrs. Pierce gazed at him soberly. “I certainly do admire a man who will stand up to—it.”
“You’ve got the gender right on the head,” said Dickie.
“I mean, really,” she said, “don’t you really think so?”
On her upper lip Foley could see the beads of sweat. Keeping a stiff one. Wondering what the hell she had got herself into. Nest of ex-Commies? Bathroom full of C-day bombs, wireless sets, small, laundromat-size brainwasher, and set of Russian folk songs, sung by Cossacks, for broadcasting over Voice of America.
“In spite of the rules of the house,” put in Foley, so casually he noticed his hands were shaking, “I suggest a little corn be laid under the grape.”
“Let us now milk the Phoenix, poor bird!” cried Dickie and followed Lou Baker out of the room to where the french windows opened on the river view. “Oh, my America!” he cried. “My Harpies Bazaar! Or is it Three-D movies?”
Lou Baker led him off.
“Hasn’t it been just a scorcher?” Mrs. Pierce said; then, catching Foley’s eye, “I really thought he must be crazy. I really did. I guess we’re all mad these days.”
“God help all of those who aren’t,” said Lou Baker. She was back with Dickie and the drinks.
“ ‘This itself was their madness,’ ” Foley intoned, “ ‘that they would not join Dionysus in his madness.’ ”
Turning, Proctor said, “Who said that?”
“Something Greek,” said Foley. “Forget where I read it.”
“It’s certainly Greek to me,” said Mrs. Pierce and turned to Dickie, who bowed, kissed her hand, then sang:
“Thank ya, fathurrr
Thank ya, mothurrrr
Thank ya for meetin’ up with one anothurrrr.
Thank the horse that pulled the buggy that night,
Thank ya both for bein’ just a bit tight—”
He took from his pocket a small atomizer, sprayed his throat.
“You folks must be in show business,” Mrs. Pierce said and looked at them with admiration.
“You’re not far off, lady,” said Dickie.
“Do I smell something burning?” Mrs. Pierce wheeled slowly, sniffed the draft from the kitchen.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Dickie. With her drink, Lou Baker left. “And now, if I may have your attention,” he went on, and screwed his head around, to the left, then the right, like a man about to pass around some dirty postcards. “I have here,” he continued, slipping his hand beneath his coat, “a simple cure for the troubles, great and small, that threaten the lives of us vanishing Americans.”
Foley waited for him to take from the holster a toy gun. One of those jeweled and flashing weapons that the small fry brandished, then fired, from the rocket ships and bucking broncos in the arcade of every chain store. But Dickie held off a moment, checked the room at his back with a look that was not feigned, then thrust out at them the Colt revolver with which Proctor had shot himself.
“Heavens!” gasped Mrs. Pierce and stepped out of the line of fire.
The gun had been well kept. The barrel and the stock were shiny with oil. Proctor neither stepped forward nor fell back, but his good hand, which held the cigarette, crossed his front and pulled at the lobe of his ear. Foley thought it might be shock. Proctor rocked his head, slowly, as if there might be water in that ear.
From the kitchen Lou Baker called, “We should have gone for a taxi ride. Before we’d eat or drink we’d always ride in a taxi.”
Dickie cracked the gun open, blew through the barrel, then snapped it shut. The stunt had not come off. What had he expected? Something positive. Something from Proctor. But Mrs. Pierce said again, “My heavens!” and Foley said nothing. Proctor stood there silently pulling the lobe of his ear.
“It’s an awfully quiet party,” Lou Baker said and came to the door of the room with her drink. She saw that Dickie’s whisky, untouched, still sat on the plywood tray. But she did not see the gun; he stood with his back to the door. “I see that Mr. Livingston is observing the rules of the house,” she said. “Upset stomach?” Dickie slipped the gun back into the holster and reached for his drink, but Lou Baker had caught the movement. “I miss something?” she said.
“Just a few dirty imports for us boys,” Foley said.
“Mrs. Pierce,” Lou Baker said, moving up, “are they showing you those awful w
iggly-part postcards?”
“Boys will be boys, honey,” Mrs. Pierce said, seeing in Foley’s face that this was not funny. “But nothing you didn’t enjoy more thirty years ago!” Mrs. Pierce rolled her eyes, sucked air between her teeth, and let her upper half shake as if she had been tickled.
Coming up fast, Lou Baker said, “Is it charades, or just none of my goddam business?”
“Right the second time,” Dickie said and buttoned his coat.
She studied his face, the still young-looking face of an aging juvenile delinquent, pimpled along the jaw and boyishly clean-cut. She turned from him and looked at Proctor, who dusted his ashes in his empty glass, sprinkled them on his ice cubes, returned the cigarette to his mouth.
“It’s the Colt,” he said calmly. “You know, the one I shot myself with.”
Foley could see Lou Baker stiffen, like a cat, before she relaxed. She watched Proctor stir the cubes in his glass with his finger, then she said casually, “Well, just so it isn’t loaded.”
“Mal-hurrrrr-oooozemahn,” said Dickie matter-of-factly, “that is the case. They don’t sell slugs for the old cannon in the pawnshops no more.”
“There’s two rules of the house,” said Lou Baker, turning to Mrs. Pierce, “no corn on grape is one, and all guns have to be turned in at the door.”
“I know just how you feel,” Mrs. Pierce said. “It’s always the empty gun that kills somebody.”
The drink he hadn’t touched, Dickie raised to his lips and finished off. For the length of time it took him to do that, his Adam’s apple pumping up and down, Foley was sure that he would put down the glass, then politely leave. With or without Mrs. Pierce, but with the upper hand, and the gun. He had never been a man to take Lou Baker seriously. It brought up the old question of the Livingston prerogative.
Dickie finished off the whisky, stirred the ice cubes, then, in a strangely detached manner, as if answering traffic questions, he said he would observe the rules of the house. Without removing his coat he unstrapped the holster, pulled the belt from his back, and tossed the outfit on the bed.
“Couldn’t we all take a ride in a taxi?” Lou Baker said. She looked at Foley, but he had no money; she looked at Proctor, and he said, “In a taxi on the boulevard Raspail, Dr. Hemingstein professed to be bored.”
“Do you realize,” Lou Baker said, “almost twenty-five years. What is twenty-five years?” She turned to Mrs. Pierce.
“It’s a long time, honey.”
“I mean, what do they call it?” Lou Baker said. “When it’s twenty-five, what do you call it?”
Mrs. Pierce looked at them sadly, one at a time, then she slowly smiled. “I suppose you mean silver,” she said. “It’s silver for twenty-five years.”
THE CAPTIVITY: X
When Lawrence and I got back from Indiana we found that Proctor had moved out of the dorm. Lundgren had helped him move over to Hogan’s Alley, a collection of shacks where the seniors used to live. Some of the upperclass boys had complained about the noise of his typewriter. Over on Hogan’s Alley he could type all night if he wanted to. And he wanted to. He also liked the idea, he said, of being alone.
That left the three of us in the swanky suite of rooms, but we were hardly ever in it together. If we were, Lundgren usually had his door closed. He couldn’t stand to hear Lawrence play his phonograph records any more. I didn’t mind the records, but I got awfully tired of the showers Lundgren liked to take, sitting on the shower floor and letting the water drum on his back. He took a cold one in the morning and an hour-long hot one every night. Everything in the bathroom was wet with steam and smelled of the olive oil he rubbed down with. After his shower he took about another hour drying off.
As that began to get on my nerves, I did most of my work in the library basement or in the booth behind the radio at the Sugar Bowl. The noise coming out the rear didn’t bother me so much.
Both January and February were so foggy that Lawrence and I didn’t do much night driving. We would take a little spin in the afternoon, then call it quits. On the weekends we usually drove down to Long Beach, if we were sure Lundgren wouldn’t be there, and take in the dance halls along the coast. Neither of us danced, but we liked to sit at the back and watch. The Santa Monica kids had a different style from what you saw at Balboa, or along the strip that Lundgren called the cemetery with lights. That was how Long Beach looked from the foothills, if you felt about it the way he did, and saw the lights through the oilfield derricks like windmills with their heads blown off.
Once a week I’d go by and see how Proctor was making out. A magazine in the East had paid him thirty-five dollars for a story about a pole vaulter, Lindquist by name, who was always running into the pole. But they had cut the story about half, so the reading time was twelve minutes; the magazine featured a twelve-minute story every month. He showed me the check, but he wouldn’t let me see what the magazine was.
In February he had a letter from an editor who had read and liked the story and wondered if he might be thinking of something with a little more length. Proctor had about a hundred pages of his novel, but he decided to send the editor just fifty, since he wasn’t too sure about the second fifty himself. He thought a great editor might point out something he had overlooked. The editor sent it back with a letter saying that he liked the start of the book very much, especially the fresh quality of the writing, and asked if what Proctor needed was a little ready cash to get on with it. They could let him have a couple hundred dollars if he could indicate, to their satisfaction, just what it was the book was about, and how it would end. But that happened to be what Proctor wanted to know himself. First, just what it was about. Second, just how the hell it should end.
While he was trying to decide we discussed the matter quite a bit. I said I thought he should take the two hundred bucks, naturally. My idea was that he should take the two hundred bucks and go to some place like Santa Fe, or Taos, where he would meet other writers and find a more creative atmosphere. In a place like that he might figure out how to finish the book. But he didn’t seem to think so. He seemed to think that Taos was phony as hell.
Every time I saw him we worked over the same old ground. The real trouble was, in his opinion, that two hundred bucks was not a lot of money when you put it up against something like the barbed-wire empire. It just so happened, naturally, that there was a mention of an Indiana family, and certain Indiana families might mistakenly think they were the family he meant. And there was also the mention, at considerable length, of a small, swanky college in southern California, but not in just the terms that might please somebody like the dean of men. The dean was not the type, to put it mildly, to understand the processes of creative fiction, and he might be led to think that he was one of the characters in the book. Put up against the sort of squawk that such people might make, two hundred measly bucks was not much dough. Once he got out in the world, on his own, two hundred bucks would not be so much.
In March I didn’t see him for a while, because we had our exams. Then we had a big rain, with a foot or so of very fast water in the gutters, and Hogan’s Alley was a solid stream of water about ten yards wide. A stream of it lapped under Proctor’s shack all night long. He would come to class barefoot, his pants rolled up, the scar showing blue where he had shot himself, and sit in the back of the class, smelling wet and sucking oranges. It was still raining a little the night he came over to see me. He didn’t want Lundgren snooping around, so we walked through the rain to the Sugar Bowl, where he said that they had upped their offer to a clean five hundred bucks. What he wanted to know was, where he ought to go to live on it. Where he could write a book and live the longest, that is, on five hundred bucks.
I hadn’t given that particular problem much thought. I gave it some, then said that he might try one of the Great Blasket Islands—if what he wanted to be was alone. If being alone wasn’t so important he might try Majorca, or Paris, if what he wanted was a more congenial atmosphere. Some writers did. While
living in Paris they had written some pretty good books. Proctor said he was delighted to hear me say so, because in his own mind he had thought of Paris, but everybody thought of Paris, and he would hate to end up where everybody was. Then we talked about Capri and Rapallo, where he might run into Ezra Pound, and about St. Cloud, where he just might run into Lawrence. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to run into Lawrence, since the book did have a tennis player in it, one from St. Cloud and Indiana, and some people might be led to think it was Lawrence.
We went on in this vein till after midnight, when the Sugar Bowl closed up, then we walked up Hogan’s Alley and listened to the radio in his shack. We went through the Guy Lombardo records that he wanted to save, and asked me to keep for him, and a little after four in the morning I got back to the dorm. I came in through the back, under the lemon trees, where Lawrence liked to keep his Bugatti, but the car was gone, and so was the tarpaulin. He was never off by himself at that time of night. I lay awake for an hour or more, waiting for him, then I slept through till late afternoon, when I heard someone fooling around in his room. I thought it must be Lawrence and called to ask him where the hell he’d been. He didn’t answer, so I opened the door and saw a uniformed van man, out from L.A., packing everything in his room into shipping crates. The van man cleaned his room out, roped up the crates, then left them there for further instructions; the shipping labels turned up on my desk.
According to Proctor, the trouble was Lundgren; he knew Lawrence couldn’t stand him, the mercurochrome between his toes especially. According to Lundgren, Lawrence had been pretty smart. He had decided to leave before the college threw him out.
There was a little of both, in my opinion. Lawrence had not troubled to take his exams, and nobody else had troubled to turn in a set for him. There was that, there was Lundgren, and there was also the fact that he had gone for a ride, and, being alone, it hadn’t been necessary for him to come back. He had probably got over as far as Needles, saw Arizona beckoning across the river, and just kept his eye on the white line, following it east. Over in Flagstaff, having his breakfast, he had probably remembered about his classes, and the Fanny Brice record he had left on his phonograph. He probably worried about that, knowing Lundgren, and called the van man to come out and pack up.
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