Speedboat

by Renata Adler

  At Christmas, in this country, as before in Germany, the family did not have a tree. Not being at all devout, however, and having grown over the years to a considerable number, including one great-grandmother and seven small children, the family had to make some accommodation to the season. This accommodation became increasingly festive and odd. Christmas was called Christmas, but it was celebrated on any day in December when the entire family could make it, could return conveniently from their separate places to the country house where the grandparents lived. This day seldom, any longer, fell on December 25th. Decorations were eclectic. Presents were placed, in fact, on and under the piano—an old Steinway grand that no one any longer played. Out of a vague conviction that the youngest children ought to be reminded that they were not really quite Christians, their grandmother yearly lighted candles on the eight-branched silver holders, which she had inherited from her own grandparents, and which were polished for whatever day was the designated Christmas of the year. The maid, however, a strong-minded Catholic, felt the occasion was too bleak with just those frail and flickering candles. Yearly, she placed more ribbons, tinsel, twigs, pine cones, and finally colored light bulbs on the piano and around its base. The year she put a painted wooden angel on top of the largest present on the piano, it was thought that she had gone too far. The angel was removed.

  The presents were an annual disappointment. The great-grandmother, who approached the occasion with the highest expectations, liked to unwrap, not just her own presents, but everyone’s. Among the youngest children, this sometimes brought tears. The grandfather, who pretended not to care about the holiday, every year, until the precise moment when the door to the study, where the piano stood, was opened and the presents were revealed, became, every year, at that moment, hopeful, eager, even zealous, and then dejected, utterly. No one had ever found a present that actually pleased him. “Very nice,” he would say, in a tight voice, as he unwrapped one thing after another. “Very nice. Now I’ll just put that away.” The year his sons gave him an electric razor, he said, “Very nice. Of course, I’ll never use it. I’m too old to change the way I shave.” When they asked him at least to try it, he said, “No, I’m sorry. It’s very nice. Now I’ll just put that away.” Everyone in the family, through a run of years, had taken this reaction as a challenge, to find him something, anything. But from the years of the clay ashtrays, through the year in the war when his nine-year-old son somehow bought him an object, at the fair, called a butter stretcher, to the years of things in gold, scrapbooks, and family poems, he was, for his own reasons but like almost everyone else, as saddened by Christmas as though the world had died.

  What everyone dreaded was the birthday song. Anthems are sung in crowded halls. You can stand and mouthe. Carolers and singers from the Fireside Book are volunteers. You can stand and smile at them, or go away. But when the birthday song is imminent, the group is small. There is the possibility that everyone will mouthe. Someone begins firmly, quavers. Others chime in with a note or two, then look encouragingly, reprovingly, at the mouthing rest. The mouthers release a note or two. The reprovers lapse. The thing comes to a ragged, desperate end. If the birthday person’s name is Andrew or Doris, the syllables at least come out. Otherwise, you can get Dear Ma-ahrk, or Dear Bar-barasoo-ooh, or a complete parting of the ways—some singing Herbert, some Her-erb, some Herbie, and, if the generations and formalities are mixed enough, Herbert Francis, Uncle Herbles, and Mr. Di Santo Stefano. The song is just so awful, anyway. I cannot imagine, though, from what the double shyness about singing, about being seen not to sing derives. There seems to be no early trauma that would account for it. Someone may accuse a small child of being unable to carry a tune, although I’ve never heard of this; but surely no one then insists that the poor child be seen to mouthe. Then, then, just when the song has faltered to its abysmal close, the birthday person inhales somewhere near the candles of that hideous pastel cake, inhales, perhaps singes his mustache or gets frosting on his tie, gets wax onto the cake or, if it is a she, into her hair, sprays everything with the exhaling breath. Applause. But it may well be that having no respect for occasions means having no respect for the moment, after all.

  The onset of the state of mind consisted in a loyalty to objects. She apologized to one egg for having boiled it, to another for not having selected it to boil. Since it was impossible to know with much precision whether an egg prefers to be boiled or not to, she was always in a state of indecision, followed, as soon as she had taken any action, by extreme remorse. Since this is not far from the predicament of most people of any sensitivity or conscience, she passed for normal. It was not immediately apparent that her oscillation between regret and indecision was brought on as much by this matter of the claims and preferences of objects as by more ordinary moral quandaries. When these oscillations began to shatter her sleep and her poise entirely, it became clear something must be done. What we did was to leave her alone. Vlad told us one evening of two patients in a state asylum. One was catatonic, the other melancholic. The catatonic, like catatonics, just sat there. For years. But, also like catatonics, when once, after all those years, he bestirred himself, he did so with enormous energy and force. He tore his iron bedstead apart. He rushed into the next room and hit the melancholic, with tremendous force, upon the head. The catatonic relapsed. But the melancholic, from shock and surprise presumably, recovered. When Jane was mildly struck by a Vespa, her aphasia and craziness went. She was fine.

  One more island, this one in the Caribbean. Our nationalities were mixed, as usual. Hendon was English, handsome in a way that was somehow flat and imbecilic. His sandy forelock was always in place. His eyes were green. His hands were long, with very broad, flat fingers. He wore bathing shorts, with vertical stripes in rainbow colors. Quite late every morning he appeared on the beach with his girl, a tall, dark, thin person in black. It was said that she was one of the most highly paid models in England. Her presence with Hendon on the island had to be kept secret from anyone back home. Any home. It turned out that she had, in fact, been a model in London tabloids. It never did become clear why her secret must be kept. But visitors to the island were always rumored to be one of the best, or most highly paid of something, and preferably to have some mystery as well. Of Hendon it was said, and he cheerfully confirmed it, that he had spent nine years in English prisons, for the crime of having inflicted “grievous bodily harm.” A nine-year sentence meant that he had done his work extremely thoroughly. He had been a gang enforcer. He had beaten several men almost to death. The explanation would have been enough to include Hendon among the other best and most and mysterious members of the beach group, but he had another quality. Whenever he was asked to, and often when he wasn’t, he would pull down the front of his bathing suit and flash. He did this quickly and somehow discreetly. He did not dwell on it. He would pull up his trunks again at once, politely laugh. People began to call him the flasher. Jokes were made about the sexual honor of the white visitors among the black islanders. Other jokes like that.

  On the day the Queen was to arrive on the island, all the islanders gathered at the airport—which consisted of a shack and one runway of not altogether smooth tarmac. When everyone had arrived, by jeep or on foot, the governor of the island arranged them in an L-shaped line. The base of the L was parallel to the shack, and stood facing in the direction from which the plane would land; the spine of the L stood along the runway itself. Hendon and his girl stood in the base line, with the few whites who knew the Queen already and the few blacks who were island officials. Some people wore bathing suits. Some people wore sports clothes. Some people, mostly the island blacks, wore dresses, or suits and ties. Hendon was in his striped, many-colored bathing suit. There was the sound of an engine rumble in the sky. The plane appeared from the wrong direction, then circled and landed as it should. Everyone waved as it taxied down the runway. Hands could be seen to wave at the small plane’s window. The door opened. Pilot and passengers got out. Hendon flashe
d for the Queen.

  There was, of course, no way of knowing whether the Queen had noticed. With her lady-in-waiting, and a tall man who appeared to be limping, she paused to shake hands with everybody. The governor introduced Hendon as the flasher. The Queen gave no sign. She shook his hand. When she had said hello to everyone, and gone with her group, by jeep to her house on the tip of the island, Aldo and I somehow got into the jeep with Hendon and his girl. The girl drove. Hendon was in a fugue state. He began an intense monologue, the gist of which was that the Queen had class. “Real class,” he kept repeating. He would emphasize his remarks by grabbing, from time to time, for his girl friend’s crotch. Impassive, she continued driving. She did not even turn her head. “Real class,” he went on. “She sees a man for what he is. She takes me for what I am.” He reached for his girl again. “Not,” he said, staring dreamily out of the window, “like these middle-class cunts.” He rambled on until we were on the hill to our house, when, in a kind of extase, he began to slap his girl friend’s face. With his open palm he slapped the left side of her face, and with the back of his hand the right. His girl just drove, as though this were windshield wipers, or some other feature of the jeep. “Wasn’t that something, luv?” Hendon kept saying. Class.

  “I can’t believe it,” people said, almost with passion. It was that year’s version of hello. “I can’t believe it,” people said, on the beach, on the slopes, in hotel lobbies, in cells, at parties. Apparently incredulous, astounded, people met. Sometimes the rejoinder was “For God’s sake,” as in “Harry! Maude! I can’t believe it.” “Marilyn! Well, for God’s sake.” Sometimes people changed it slightly. When we had just come back to the office, a middle-aged couple, he with the heartiness of another era, she with a certain trembly superstition, met in the elevator only yesterday. “Well, as I live and breathe,” he shouted. “Touch wood,” she replied.

  WHAT WAR

  THE SURVEYOR moon shot was, in many ways, the best, a coltish tripod on its spindly legs; the first shot it transmitted back to earth was a shy little photo of the shadow of its foot. The Russian instrument had been, by contrast, stolid, plump; it sat up there. We were not told what photographs it sent. The second thing Surveyor did was to use its little shovel, and to send back information about what it dug. It kept sending photographs, of its foot, of its other feet, of its own long, thin shadow on the moon. After some weeks, its batteries expired. It had been useful. It was written off as dead. A few weeks later, sunwarmed, it suddenly began to transmit again. Taking those photographs of its shadows and its feet, like a tourist posed, bashful and proud, on its lunar monument. Then, it again expired. But when, some weeks later, Surveyor II was sent up, Surveyor I woke up yet again. They would both transmit. For weeks and months, they would wake up, drowse, wake up, transmit. They were frail and gangling, but they frolicked quite a long time on the moon.

  And, right after the first man landed and walked upon the moon, there was a television program in which a reporter for a network interviewed small children in their school about their views of the event. He asked various questions and received various answers, straightforward or coy. When he asked his last question, what was the moon made of, he heard from the smug children, about green cheese. Some said the moon was made of paper, two said neon light. A vote was taken. The green-cheese children, in their nyah nyah voices, seemed to have chanted everybody down. There remained one unconvinced, iconoclastic child. The moon, she said, in a sensible, lofty tone of pure conviction, is made of grabbedy.

  “Now, we’ll keep our chin straps down, and the mouthpiece in the mouth,” the coach said to the ten-year-olds, in their expensive uniforms, preparing to play football. “Anybody sees wishbone formation, he yells ‘Wishbone!’ Don’t look at them,” he said, nodding toward the other team, which was from a larger town and looked a little older. “They’re bigger than us, some of them, but they’re leery of us and they’re thinking. Now, we’ll do our huddle, say our Hail Mary, and then,” he said, “we’ll get them.” It is true that we all grew up in a gentler spirit than that might reflect. It is also true that we are all here now, in our city lives, and our city jobs, and nobody came and got us for them in our bassinets.

  Later, years later, when nobody was thinking of the moon, the orphans from Vietnam arrived. To a baby, presumably, being picked up by giants and put down in one place seems no more arbitrary than being picked up by other giants and put down in another place entirely. Here they were. A family named Cavanaugh or something was being interviewed about its newest member, the infant Kim Su Cavanaugh, who was already fast asleep beside her teddy bear. The adult Cavanaughs, particularly Mrs. Cavanaugh, kept burbling about how happy they were. Asked how she felt, Mrs. Cavanaugh said happy, many times. Then the Cavanaugh children were interviewed. The youngest Cavanaugh, a seven-year-old, who looked particularly miserable and embittered, was asked how she felt to have a baby sister now. “Happy,” she said. The reporter asked whether there was anything she hoped to do with her baby sister. Her face became frightening. In what was still a baby voice, she said “No.” The reporter, happily insistent, asked whether there was anything she would like to teach her baby sister. The face contorted with thought for a moment; then she said, in her baby voice, very slowly, “Monopoly.”

  I am normally the sort of reporter who hangs around, or rather, tags along. I have never been any good at interviews. The first man I was ever sent to interview was an English actor, middle-aged, successful, easy, talkative. I went, with my notebook, to see him backstage after his play, which was a hit. I was introduced to him. He said Hello. I said Hello, how are you? It was the last question I could think of to ask. He managed to talk for quite some time. He said he was fine. He went on with an anecdote, in a little monologue. When he came to a pause and seemed about to falter, I tried repeating the last few words he had said, with a little interrogative inflection at the end. “Little interrogative inflection at the end?” I would say, if he had just said that. That worked all right. I would repeat what he’d said, as a question. Yes, he would say, and start out on another little monologue. He was not a reticent or a shy man. A boring man, in a way, but not at all shy. In the end, I was getting him down. Only a half-hour had passed. The actor’s words were slowing, limping; one could hear his verbal engine cough. He smiled. He started up again. “You know,” he said, heartily, “I’m very eager to get back to England.” Pause. “To see my two sons.” He looked at me, encouragingly. I tried. “You have two sons?” I said. “Yes,” he said. He was not going any further. I tried again. I tried to look moved. I scribbled in my notebook. “Two,” I said. “Sons.” He said, “Tell me, Miss Fain. Are you a professional reporter?” Well, I am. I’m the sort who tags along, that’s all.

  Mattie Stokes, who is black and from Trinidad, grew up in Rochester and was sent through college by Xerox. She became a systems analyst, taught nights at the New School, and was the assistant to a radical Fordham dean. She was living in Bedford-Stuyvesant when I first went to see her. I was writing about blacks in the city universities. There were hardly any. Mattie’s rooms were in an elegant townhouse of the sort that still exists in the middle of Brooklyn’s hardest criminal warrens. It was cold. The landlord was trying to drive the tenants out. Ninety slum tenants in a given space at the going rate per yard is more profitable than twelve bourgeois tenants, even at high rents. So it was cold. The radiators were off, the hot water was off, the boiler was off. Everything was off. Friends kept wandering into Mattie’s apartment to talk about legal matters. Everyone was drinking beer. I drank beer. I tried to look as though I knew what I was doing there. “Are you here for an interview,” Mattie finally said, “or are you going to sit there like death on a soda cracker?” We became friends, of course.

  The reporter had arrived at the catastrophe without his notebook. He wrote down everything he could on the backs of blank checks. Long after midnight, when he had finished phoning in his story, he stopped, on his way home, at the neighborhood liquo
r store. He bought Scotch. He asked the clerk, who knew him well, to add on ten dollars cash; he made out his check for the total. “My, my, what’s this?” the clerk said, as he started to put the check in the cash register. “I can’t cash this check. There’s endorsements or something all over the back.” The reporter mumbled wearily that they were story notes, that they were on the backs of all his checks that night. “Gosh,” the clerk said, when he had gotten the check approved by the owner of the liquor store. The owner added, “You must have been in a poetic mood.”

  Mattie was married in those days to a man who was, in effect, her brother-in-law. Mattie’s youngest sister, who worked in Manhattan, was still a citizen of Trinidad. She had met a Jamaican newspaper reporter. They wanted to marry. Mattie was a U.S. citizen. She married him. He went straight from the wedding to live with Mattie’s sister, which was the idea. Some months after I met Mattie, this brother-in-law became a fugitive from justice. This husband, really, since they had never bothered to divorce. Mattie was by this time planning to be seriously married, to the lawyer who took over her building’s tenants’ case. There she was, married to a fugitive from justice. Within weeks, he was on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted List. Mattie pretended to be bitterly pleased by this development. If the F.B.I. managed to find him, she would be able to find him, to arrange for divorce. Everyone who had known him had thought of him, anyway, as married to Mattie’s sister. The sister hadn’t liked him or seen him in years.