Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge Jr.

  It will be good to see you again, my boy, after eleven years. At eight o’clock in the station, an old man, drooling and decrepit, will accost you. Do not spurn the poor old dotard. ‘Twill be I.

  JERUSALEM WEBSTER STILES

  The Centennial Special from New York slid by him breathing softly, its power couched in massive metal haunches. The long line of coaches, buntinghung, shrugged to a stop. Instantly, young people sprang from the doors into the arms of lovers; whole families disembarked, waving flags and rushing to get out of the station as if a door might slam shut and cut them off from happiness forever.

  He was repeating to himself with a curiously deep emotion the name ‘Laura Golden.’ Since the receipt of the Perfessor’s letter he had been busy fitting out this name of notoriety with fictitious faces like so many masks. He was deeply moved too by the thought that he was about to see again the Perfessor and Cash Carney, neither of whom he had seen since the Civil War.

  Was it really possible, then, that the tide of the indifferent years, passing blindly through a thousand gates and sluices, could cast up again these discarded faces?

  —Mr. John Wickliff Shawnessy, I presume? said a familiar voice.

  He had come suddenly face to face with the Perfessor, Cash Carney, and two women. Blinking and embarrassed, he began to shake hands around.

  —My God, boy, the Perfessor said, catching him by the arm, you’ve aged a little!

  John Shawnessy’s first impression was that the Perfessor had decayed considerably too, but on a second look it seemed to him that he recovered entirely—or almost so—the pattern of his old friend’s face—the black busy eyes, the still black hair slicked back hard from the middle part, the trim, tall, erect figure. The vivid, hacking motion of the face remained invincibly the same and the highpitched crackling voice with its cutting edge. Meanwhile the Perfessor, resuming his old manner of genial showmanship, stepped back and motioned grandly with his cane.

  —And now, folks, it gives me great pleasure to present Miss Laura Golden of New York City to Mr. John Shawnessy of Raintree County, Indiana.

  —So this is the Gentleman from Indiana!

  The woman who spoke, though only a little taller than middle height, somehow gave the impression of gazing down at him from a queenly eminence. Her face—this entirely unforeseeable face—wore an indefinite mocking smile fixed upon it like a mask, its habitual look, its hovering essence. The cheeks with their unusual fullness, the eyes with their drooping lids, the wide cheekbones, the full-lipped mouth, the nose delicate but receding too quickly to the bridge, the pointed chin gave this face an oriental lushness at variance with its pale, clear skin. The tawny gold hair was parted precisely in the middle, pulled flat, and gathered into a heavy ball behind to show the ears. The face, thus thrust forward, as it were, and nodding on a slender neck, this face—inescapable, fullorbed, calm with its disdainful smile—abruptly destroyed all the imprecise masks he had been fashioning.

  At first he thought the smile was from the eyes—wideset, long, fountain-green—halfclosed under languid lids. But on looking directly into them, he saw that they did not smile at all, that they had a kind of jadelike impassivity. The smile then came from the mouth. It was lushly fleshed, mobile, beautifully formed, but just at the left corner a faint scar twisted the upper lip. Perhaps this scar made it impossible for the face not to smile its imperial smile.

  —This is a long deferred pleasure, Miss Golden, he said. I have been waiting at the stage door eleven years for the purpose of making your acquaintance.

  She pointed one smoothly sculptured shoulder at him, and in a voice mocking, lowpitched, thrillingly distinct, said,

  —That makes you the most persistent stage-door Johnny of all time, Mr. Shawnessy.

  Her mocking laugh reverberated in the hollow shell of the train station, blending with the murmur of wheels and voices. Smiling his pensive, innocent smile, Mr. John Shawnessy made a stately bow, and Miss Laura Golden (as if they had rehearsed their parts) gracefully extended her white hand, softfingered, with lacquered nails, and with one green jewel blazing on the ring finger. He kissed her hand, surprised at its warmth; he smelled the perfume of it vaguely disturbing; the great jewel blazed in his left eye.

  The Perfessor’s creature comfort, a Miss Phoebe Veach, was a monumental blonde, ripely thirty-five, with a healthy, appealing face and marvellous hair, the color of ripe corn, full of yellowness and life.

  Back at the hotel, where the whole party had reservations, the ladies spent some time in their rooms, while the gentlemen waited in the lobby reviewing the years between.

  —I suppose you’re running the country now, on the sly, Cash, John Shawnessy said. You’ve gone fast and far since you hitched your star to a locomotive—and your locomotive to a star.

  —I barely keep ahead of my creditors, Cash said.

  He pulled out his palmsmoothed gold watch. Eleven years had faintly stained and yellowed him and fixed the rapt abstraction of his eyes.

  —This business recession, he said, has had us all humping. The layman has an erroneous idea of wealth. What you fellas call wealth is only an increased ability to go into debt. You heard of the man who was boasting about his speculations: Two years ago, he said, I didn’t have a nickel. Now I owe two million dollars. Ha. Ha.

  He said the laughter flatly without humor. He went on to explain how his various interests were still suffering from the Panic of ’73 and how important it was for Hayes to get the nod in November. After a while, he said,

  —I got to keep some business appointments here. Good chance to see the Republican nominee and the men around him. Hope you boys’ll pardon me if I don’t go to the program. Maybe John’ll look after Laura for me.

  —Sure. Be glad to, Cash.

  —The ladies already know, Cash said. See you at the Centennial Ball tonight, boys.

  He nodded without smiling and walked off briskly through the station and was lost in the crowd.

  The Perfessor, nervous and fidgety as ever, began to pace in a corridor off the lobby. The two men followed each other up and down the corridor, while the Perfessor gestured with his cane.

  —Great to see you again, my boy. High time you got out of Raintree County. Hell of a place to bury a talent like yours. Well, we’ve all come a long way since ’65. What do you think of Miss Golden?

  —I’m already depositing bouquets at the stage door. What sort of person is she?

  —Miss Laura Golden, the Perfessor said, chief ornament of the metropolitan stage, was born some thirty years ago in New York City from a poor immigrant family. When I first knew her, she was a young actress understudying Laura Keene. She disappeared then entirely—did the western circuit, I understand, and went to Europe. Then about three years ago, she turned up in New York with her own troupe billed as Miss Laura Golden in Mazeppa. She cased her lovely legs in pink tights, pulled a tight tunic over her tits and had herself tied to the backend of a real horse. It was in half-light, and she looked damn near naked. The boys stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the aisles for nights. It was terrific. She became overnight the most notorious actress in New York City. No one seemed to know anything about her but me, and I didn’t know much. She became a myth. The stories about her were right out of Apuleius. I made a major contribution to her fame myself by referring to her as ‘the most beautifully undressed woman in New York City.’ The crush around her stage door was homicidal—and I was smack in the middle of it, hoping to play Justinian to her Theodora. But lo! it turned out that she was already married to an old millionaire she had picked up in California, who had both feet and his backside in the grave, and inside of two weeks she had fitted her pretty palm against the poor old codger’s face and shoved him all the way in. She swore to me once privately that he never got a thing—and I don’t doubt it. She still has the house he fitted out for her on Fifth Avenue before the marriage, but I think she’s running out of money. The stories about Laura’s house are—by the way—richly flavored. I’ve been i
n it for balls and things myself, and they always seemed reasonably circumspect. But you hear about lewd pomps and prurient games, and some of the theatre gossips swear that Laura’s bedroom is decorated with a Pompeian lavishness for the entertainment of her lovers.

  —Like Mr. Cassius P. Carney for example?

  —No, she wipes her little boot on him—and he loves it.

  —Like Professor Jerusalem W. Stiles then?

  The Perfessor shrugged his shoulders.

  —O, no, I never fall in love anymore, he said, his eyes unfocused and oblique as they always were when he was telling a whopper. Too exhausting. I admit I tried hard to break into that Forbidden Room myself. I was damned curious about it and her, and still am. But I guess I wasn’t virile enough for her. Laura’s a cheat, but so am I, and we’ve become good friends. She pretends to confide in me—that is to say, she tells me grave, gigantic lies about her past, which I pretend to believe. One of these is some kind of hokum about a great love back in her obscure years from which she hasn’t yet recovered. No doubt luckier and lustier lovers than I file in and out of her famous bedroom all the time. But getting any hard facts about Miss Laura Golden’s private life is pretty hard. She gives the impression of being jaded from too much passion, but it’s probably just part of her act. She acts all the time on and off the stage, and there’s no truth in the woman.

  —Is she a great actress?

  She’s a great stage personality. As an actress, she simply plays herself—aggressively, emphatically, shamelessly female. She does Shakespeare’s vicious, bitchy women to perfection. Mainly she goes in for grand exhibitions of herself, and every play she appears in—whether Shakespeare or Boucicault—comes out a big spectacle, in which Laura strides around the stage in her queenly way, strikes attitudes, and spellbinds the audience with her voice and her regal beauty.

  John Shawnessy was surprised.

  —You find her beautiful?

  —Devil take her! the Perfessor said with emphasis, I find her ravishing! Don’t you?

  —Why—yes.

  He had not, as a matter of fact, until that moment thought of her as ravishingly beautiful, but now he waited with heightened interest for her re-entrance upon the scene, and when she came down the stair of the hotel a few minutes later, wearing a green dress trimmed with gilt and asserted by a saucy bustle, swinging a parasol, walking in a manner that subtly accentuated the opulent contours of her long-stemmed figure, smiling her twisted smile at no one in particular, he was sure that she was indeed ravishingly beautiful, with that rare beauty which was only derived—as the Perfessor had been wont to say many years ago—from a strangeness in the proportion. Certain it was that from the moment when she took his arm, her face, held proudly averted, glowed like an aloof yet sensual moon over the whole landscape of his Centennial Day.

  A platform had been set up in the square opposite Independence Hall, the ancient tiny brick building where the Republic had been born. The party of four wedged its way through hundreds of Centennial Americans onto the grandstand erected for the occasion. It was rumored that the orchestra was playing, though no one on the grandstand could see or hear the orchestra. Finally someone said that the National Anthem was being played, and everyone groaned to a standing position. The sun was implacably hot. Small boys sold wilted flags and tepid lemonade. A band came by, marching through a cleared space and followed by troops, thousands, advancing tediously. Someone said that General Sherman was on the stand. Craning for a look, John Shawnessy saw, standing at attention among other notables, a thin, grizzled person, the faded remnant of what seemed now an old-fashioned and rather improbable legend. Someone said that General Sheridan was on the reviewing stand. The soldiers kept on marching, and it got hotter. All the women were fanning, including Miss Laura Golden.

  —Do you enjoy the theatre, Mr. Shawnessy?

  Her voice had a studied indifference.

  —Why, yes, Miss Golden, I love it, he said. But I haven’t had much opportunity to enjoy it. The last time I saw a really first-rate troupe was in Washington eleven years ago, the night we almost met. By the way, what happened to you that night?

  —Like everyone else, I was almost out of my mind, she said. Most of us just milled around and screamed at each other and finally we all went back to the hotel.

  —You had another name then, I believe—and I composed a girl around that name, who was nothing like you.

  —Let me see, she said. What was my name then?

  —Daphne Fountain.

  —One of my better names, she said, laughing a delightful mocking laugh that came from her throat without disturbing her smile.

  —Have you had several names?

  —O, yes, she said. I used to put on a new personality with each name, Mr. Shawnessy. It’s as well that you didn’t know Daphne Fountain, poor little innocent thing. She was thin, scared, and very, very poor. She had some good qualities that I don’t have—she was much more openhearted, generous, and sweet. But I had to discard her—poor little creature. She wasn’t getting anywhere. I tossed her back into the costume closet.

  —And then?

  Miss Laura Golden gave him an amused glance over her undulant fan.

  —I’m sure I don’t know why I tell you these things. But since you ask, then there was Diana Lord. She appeared with a magician and was sawed in two. That was the end of her.

  She laughed again, swaying her head on the slender neck.

  —Then there was Vivi Lamar. Less said of Vivi, the better. And then there were one or two others. I don’t know why I had such a passion for changing my name.

  —Now, of course, you can’t do it any longer.

  —I know—and it’s annoying in a way.

  —Didn’t it dissolve your feeling of identity—to be so many names, Miss Golden? How did you hang on to yourself—I mean that never-changing essence that we like to call our Self?

  —Who wants to hang on to it, Mr. Shawnessy?

  He tried to imagine this tall, voluptuous woman changing with the years, receding in a series of poses toward that unknown actress who had stood in the wings of a theatre waiting for him long ago. Were the eyes always as they were now, with this green impersonal fire in them? Was the mouth always scarred and smiling as it was now? It seemed to him that whatever fluctuations there might have been in her appearance and her personality, she had slowly fashioned a costumed, imperial, scornful creature and finished her with such immense certitude that she was immune from time and change.

  Was it possible—was it really possible, he was wondering—that this statuesque woman with the many names gave lavishly of her beauty to random gay gentlemen in a secret chamber of the City?

  Shortly after nine, the rostrum before Independence Hall was entirely filled with dignitaries, and the program started. It was very hard to hear what was being said.

  A minister arose and said a prayer for the Nation. He asked God to shine favorably upon this great nation as she began the second hundred years of her existence. He thanked God for having shone favorably upon her during the first hundred years. Everybody was sweating fiercely from the way God was at that moment shining on the Nation.

  Then Richard Henry Lee got up and read the Declaration of Independence from the Original Document containing the Original Signatures. People applauded from time to time.

  Bayard Taylor, regarded by many as America’s Greatest Living Poet, was introduced and recited by heart his Centennial Ode.

  William Evarts got up and delivered the Address of the Day. He spoke lengthily about the Progress of America. He said that this was an Inspiring Occasion. He reviewed the Great Strides since 1776. He said that we had won the Revolution and several other wars. He reminded his auditors that the Civil War was over and that the Nation was One. He pointed out that a Great Mechanical Progress was necessary for a nation to reach the condition which America was in today. He affirmed that all this had been a Good Thing. He said that America had a Future. He gave it as his considered judgment
that America was a Nation Shone Upon by Providence and Almighty God.

  As the hours went by, John Shawnessy tried to reconstruct the scene of the Founding Fathers founding and fathering the Republic. But it wouldn’t come clear and have any meaning. Penetrating into the reality of the Past was an impossible undertaking, he decided. There was, he felt, only one reality—the reality of someone’s experience. What people dealt with when they spoke of the Past was a world of convenient abstractions—myths—Events. And even the world of the Present was sustained by the same omnipotent creative fictions. His own life was a myth to himself and others, an agreeably confused, aspirant myth loosely tied together under the title ‘Mr. John Wickliff Shawnessy.’ And if he was a myth, other people were even more so.

  He thought of the talented creature who sat beside him. All names were costumes, it was true, that subtly changed the appearance and behavior of the wearer, but how was it possible to know a woman who had worn so many costumes of names? When you called a thing by a name, you gave it form. By clinging to its name, it clung to its being. But here was a woman who had dissolved her being into many names, the discarded costumes of her outworn years.

  The Centennial Day was halfspent, approaching noon when the program ended. After the program, they were an hour getting out of the Square. They tried to find a place to eat, but whenever they put their heads inside a restaurant, they saw that all the tables were already full of hot, healthy, hungry Centennial Americans who looked as though they intended to sit all afternoon and eat everything in sight like goats or locusts. They decided after a while that they might as well go out to the Exposition Grounds in Fairmount Park and try to get something to eat out there. After failing to hail a carriage, they wedged themselves into a streetcar and were carried into the passenger railway concourse just outside the Park and under the massive brick backside of the Main Exhibition Building, which was almost a halfmile long. After passing through one of the near-by entrances, they bought a little red book with black letters on the outside.