Pages from a Cold Island

by Frederick Exley

  In Alden Whitman’s front-page obituary in the New York Times (and what other newspaper in the world would have put it there?) he’d written that Wilson’s marriage to Mary McCarthy had “tended to be troubled” and that in the McCarthy recollection everything that came under Wilson’s hand was shaped into “an authorized version,” not entirely excluding Miss McCarthy herself who had in a way become Wilson’s version of her. She was to write: “Mr. Wilson said, ‘I think you’ve got a talent for writing short stories.’ So he put me off in one free room with a typewriter and shut the door,” which seemed to me pretty much the way “Mr.” Wilson had “shut the door” to any further dialogue as to what this rather nondescript drugstore on Boonville’s Main Street should be called.

  Unhappily, I very quickly came to understand that, like Kramer’s Pharmacy or Mary McCarthy, Mary (I asked and was told it was okay to use her given name) had also become Wilson’s authorized version of her. To escape the heat we went to Slim’s cafe a few doors south on Main Street, slid into a booth facing one another, and ordered tea. Besides my pocketful of ball-point pens, I’d brought along a copy of Upstate with the pages on which Mary was mentioned turned over at the corners, and a copy of A Fan’s Notes inscribed “For Mary Pcolar, 6/2/’72, Sincerely and with thanks, Frederick Exley.” I’d had a difficult time obtaining a copy of the latter, and had finally got my lawyer’s copy on the promise to get him another, and a first edition (very easy as there was only one edition). With a razor blade I’d excised the page on which I’d inscribed it to him, and on another page I’d written the one to Mary. At forty-three it was all I had to offer by way of portfolio. When I presented it to Mary I offhandedly said, “Here’s a copy of my last book.” I wasn’t lying but I nevertheless de livered the line in such a way as to suggest that prior to this there’d been more volumes than I could at the moment recall, which in fairness might have been had I not been such an unregenerate drunk. I’d added the “and with thanks” in hopeful anticipation of the wonderful Wilson anecdotes Mary would pass on to me.

  * To a Manhattanite “upstate” means “the uthuh siduh Oddsley” (“the other side of Ardsley”) but to true upstaters this notion verges on the laughably blasphemous. We do not even look on Albany, Schenectady, Utica, Rochester or Buffalo as upstate and feel that to be genuinely “northern” one has to know the Adirondack Mountains and the St. Lawrence Valley and towns like Old Forge and Hammond, Canton and Potsdam, Cape Vincent and Chaumont (never pronounced Shummoo as Wilson alleges in Upstate), Plattsburg, Gouverneur, Massena, Tupper Lake, Lake Placid—the list is as long as one cares to make it but does not include White Plains, which is “the uthuh siduh Oddsley.”

  Mrs. Pcolar was a youthful-looking and strikingly handsome forty-four, not in the least reticent about her age. She had an erect sturdy bearing, and had she not been so oppressively feminine one might have thought her somewhat muscular. Save for the graying that would come with age, one was certain she’d look as good at sixty-four as she did now and not much different now from what she’d looked at twenty-four, the kind of woman—watching one’s own aging by comparison—with whom it would be unnerving to grow old. Hence I was surprised to learn she’d once been fat.

  “Yes,” she emphasized, sensing my doubt as to whether fat was quite the word. “I was fat, ballooning up. I went to Dr. Smith”—the elderly Boonville doctor who’d min istered to Wilson and had been at his bedside when he died—”for some diet pills. He wouldn’t give them to me, he brushed me off. He told me I was too good-looking and too intelligent to lay around the house all day, that my stuffing myself was just nerves, and I ought to go to work and the weight would take care of itself. So I did. I went to work at Kramer’s. Then I met Mr. Wilson.”

  Mary wore her soft hair short, becomingly shorn just beneath the ears. It was light brown and wavy, attractively tinged with traces of blond coloring. By his own account in Upstate Wilson had once reprimanded her for making her hair too blond, which he thought unbecoming and cheap, and I smiled now to think that even from the beyond Wilson was holding dominion over her. There were the high striking Mongolian cheekbones Wilson had remarked, a facial structure inherited from her Hungarian ancestors.

  What Wilson had not got were her eyes. Although small, they were beautiful and of a pale blue so luminous they appeared flecked with a flashing silver quality, an incandescence so disarming that after a time I found I could not look steadily at her and rest easy. She wore a well-cut sleeveless orange dress, one of the new wrinkleless double-knits she’d bought for a trip to Budapest (on her way back through London, Mary was with a note from Wilson to visit Stephen Spender), a simple gold bracelet, a gold watch, and at the base of her strong columnar white throat a gold onyx brooch pinned to her dress.

  The dress had been Wilson’s favorite. “Mr. Wilson called it his orange sherbert dress.” He had had his father’s gold-rimmed spectacles fitted with his own prescription— “Mr. Wilson called them his Ben Franklin glasses”—and whenever she wore the dress he’d reach up with his right hand, with exaggerated drama lower the spectacles to the tip of his nose, look searchingly over their tops, issue a pleasurable Ahhhh and say, “You have on my orange sherbert dress.” When she wore something else, Wilson would go through the same charade with his glasses but with mock exasperation at Mary’s extravagance say, “Another new dress—again?” Her well-made legs were sheathed in flesh-colored pantyhose and on her feet she wore beige-colored shoes with squat blue heels and moccasin-style toes about which were decorative little gold chains. Even the shoes were Wilson’s doing. Feeling audacious Mary had one day worn spiked heels and in a huff Wilson had remarked that No, no they would not at all do. Wilson had wanted her to wear “pumps.” Mary had almost cried, “But these are pumps!” when it abruptly occurred to her that Wilson believed that pumps were necessarily low-heeled or walking shoes.

  “And you never corrected him?” I asked, laughing.

  “No one—at least not me—ever corrected Mr. Wilson.” Mary sat pensively. “Besides, I guess now I’ll always think of low-heeled shoes as pumps.”

  “I guess I will, too.”

  I’d asked Mary to begin at the beginning of the end, to tell me about the last days, and though I tried to take down most of what she said I found myself impatiently saying, “Yeah, yeah, but Wilson covered all that in Upstate:’ Then suddenly it occurred to me what was happening. It wasn’t so much Mary’s memory, her intelligence, or her imagination, which were all perfectly capable, as that she was so intimidated by Wilson she felt her recollection of their relationship must necessarily correspond with his, that under the distinguished Farrar, Straus & Giroux imprimatur Upstate had been set forth against posterity’s judgment and she daren’t contradict or elaborate for fear of toying with that judgment. Had I told her Upstate was one of Wilson’s lesser efforts, one that probably wouldn’t have seen print had it been offered over another’s name, not only wouldn’t Mary have believed me but it occurred to me that Mary herself as a person in the Wilsonian drama would have been eliminated along with Upstate and I couldn’t say this without running the risk of hurting her.

  I now asked Mary if we mightn’t drive around and look at some of the places Wilson had been fond of, mentioning all the food I had in the back seat of the Pinto and how I prayed it wouldn’t spoil. To this Mary suggested we immediately transfer the styrofoam container to her air-conditioned Impala and use her car.

  I had to get out of Slim’s. The village fuck, who because nobody said hello or paid her any mind must have been some other village’s fuck, had come into Slim’s and ordered a Coke. Her actions reminded me suddenly of someone else, and I found myself watching her intently out of the corner of my eye, hoping Mary wouldn’t notice. I hadn’t been fucked since the night of my farewell party on the island, nearly a month before, and that occasion had been one of the strangest encounters I’d ever had, as close to rape as I’d ever come.

  We were having our rigatoni, marinara sauce and sausage fe
ast at the big round corner table of the bar; the gang was shouting and laughing raucously; and then this woman I’d seen before came in, took a seat at the bar directly opposite our table, ordered an extra-dry martini, and turning her barstool halfway round to us got obliquely and mutely caught up in the spirit of the party, silently laughing on cue at the awful jokes, lifting her eyebrows in feigned but good-natured outrage at the furious obscenities, cooing with pleasurable surprise along with the others as I opened and read aloud my wacky cards and viewed my even wackier presents of farewell. She was about thirty, had short black hair, a marvelously compact little figure, and the fact that she was nicely groomed and always attired in dresses and heels—unusual in Florida—suggested to me she might be an interior decorator or one of the many real estate saleswomen in the area.

  I’d seen her in the Islander Room two or three times late in the evening with one or another well-dressed, wellheeled-looking guy, and as nothing ever happened there until ten (at the moment we had the room almost to our selves) when the first show began, I was surprised to see her that early and alone. So obviously did she seem to be enjoying our party from her short distance across the aisle, and so obviously did she seem to want to be a part of it, that I vigorously but with silent furtive stealth nodded my head two or three times for her to come over and take the empty chair next to mine, but to each summons she smiled jovially by way of declining, once wagging her finger fetchingly at me by way of saying I was obviously a nasty boy with nasty thoughts. Then she did something un mistakable. She asked the barmaid Diane for change for a dollar and directions to the pay phone and she did it so loudly that I had no doubt that whatever her motive—to prevent her calling another man?—she definitely wanted to be overheard.

  Too excited to analyze motives, I said to myself, and I was sure I would, “I’m going to fuck her.” Then I excused myself to the gang, saying that if we were going to go on all through the night I’d have to take a shower and would return momentarily. The pay phone in the hotel was located on the wall above a one-step landing leading up the front stairs, just off the lobby. I stood in the middle of the lobby watching her for some moments. She had her back to me, she was facing the phone, and in her uplifted left hand she tentatively held a dime, as though she were having trouble recalling a number. I thought, That phony. Moving quickly and noiselessly across the carpeting, I stepped up onto the landing, slid my hands around her waist, clasped them together at her tummy, and pulled her lovely little fanny back into my semi-erection. We hung suspended there, hotly riveted. She had the decency not to feign outrage or indignation.

  Speaking quietly over her shoulder into her ear, I said, “Who are you calling?”

  “A friend.”

  “Do you have to call him now?”

  “Probably not.”

  Grabbing her still upraised hand with the dime in it, and squeezing with all the base fury of my excitation, I dragged her up to the landing of the second floor. There she yanked her hand free and in perfect control told me that that kind of thing was not in the least necessary. I then followed her—walking as cool as a Ziegfeld chorine up a ramp, she was—up to the third floor where I led her to my digs. Once there I was so distraught I couldn’t wait for her to undress. Seating her on the bed, I took hold of her shoulders and pushed her back with her head against the pillow, then dropped my “foul fucking Bermudas” to the floor, lifted up her skirt, removed her panties, mounted and penetrated her wetness. Leaving her in the shower, where after wards we’d gone together, I was back with the gang within a half-hour; and within another half-hour she—freshly showered and ready—had been joined at the bar by one of the suave joes I’d seen her with before. For the rest of the evening I watched her for some sign, but she never looked in my direction and all I could think of was Robertson Davies’ Mary Dempster in Fifth Business. When she’d been found in the gravel pit by her minister husband and half the males of her village being passively mounted by a tramp. Parson Amasa Dempster had asked his heartfelt why, and Mary had said, “He was very civil, ‘Masa. And he wanted it so badly.”

  And now this village fuck was doing the same thing that other had done, sipping on her Coke, turning round on her counter stool, and, trying her best to focus those hideous eyes, listing toward the various booths with people in them, including Mary and me, as though she desperately wanted to get invited into one of them and share the Sun day morning of less lonely souls. Too, I had no doubt that Mary’s striking femininity was hardly abetting my abominable satyriasis—talk about prisoners of sex!—and I had to get some air in my lungs, to see the green lush of the early summer trees, to do something to help me get it together and keep my demeanor commensurate with the solemn nature of my pilgrimage.

  9

  On May 18, 1972, Wilson wrote Mary the last letter he would send to her. It was verification of an earlier telephone call from Wellfleet in which he’d designated his ar rival time on the 3 ist and asked Mary to pick him up at the Utica airport. In the letter was a lengthy piece on Wilson from England with an accompanying caricature depicting him with prominent double chins. Wilson was pleased with the caricature, and shortly after his arrival he borrowed it back from Mary to show to someone else, promising to return it. Mary was never to see it again.

  Recently direct flights from Boston to Utica had been canceled by Allegheny Airlines and to his chagrin Wilson had had to fly to Syracuse. As it would do for twenty-two days of June, before and after both his death and Hurricane Agnes, the rain came in squalls the day of Wilson’s arrival and his flight was put in a holding pattern over Syracuse for some time while Mary waited uneasily below in the terminal. At the announcement that his plane was at last landing, Mary ran to the parking lot and moved her Impala close to an exit to prevent Wilson’s getting wet. When she returned to the disembarking ramp she found him waiting nervously in his wheelchair attended by a porter. As he invariably was, he was dressed in a brown pin-stripe suit, long-sleeved white shirt and dark patterned tie. On his lap he held a very British, scruffy and torn Mackintosh, and on his head he wore his wide-brimmed and floppy felt hat that might once have been beige but was now sweat and finger-stained to a dark unwholesome color. He had two pieces of old brown leather luggage, with straps and gilt-initialed EW, one stuffed with clothes, the other bulging with manuscripts and books. He was ready to do “a piece of work.” He had his favorite walking stick made from the handle of one of his mother’s umbrellas. Whereas years ago Scott Fitzgerald had remarked another stick of Wilson’s as an affectation befitting a young Vanity Fair editor and dandy about Manhattan, time had done what it does—things, as Fitzgerald himself might have said, had now “come round” and after half a century Wilson had at last “grown up” to his walking stick. To Mary’s surprise Wilson sported a McGovern button on his lapel. For years Wilson had seemed to despair increasingly of political solutions and when Mary playfully asked him what the McGovern button was all about, Wilson said. “But of course we must all vote for McGovern!” It was, Mary said, a trumpeting command issued from Wilson’s Olympianly pedantic heights.

  To Wilson’s ironically apologetic smile at the porter— it had the character of a bemused shrug at the fatuousness of women—Mary focused her Instamatic, handed it to the porter, and asked him to take a picture of Wilson and her. She then sidled gingerly up to Wilson’s chair and rested her hand palm-down on his shoulder while he sat, a fallen, embattled and tolerant eagle. Either because of the poor light or the porter’s incompetence the picture was never to reproduce, and Mary was glad for the porter the camera hadn’t been a Polaroid so Wilson could have immediate evidence that someone was screwing up. Had Mary ever been cognizant of Wilson’s much-remarked rudeness to people (and on this score she insisted he was much maligned) it was with porters, waitresses, sales clerks—with menials—and after she’d come to know him she viewed this gruff impatience as little more than a comically Dickensian eccentricity. She said he approached such people in a state of heady exasperation, as if,
before he even made his demands known, he was certain the fates had set these people to thwarting his simplest needs.

  A dozen years before he had twice come into Kramer’s Pharmacy and without identifying himself had demanded the New York newspapers he believed held in reserve for him. When Mary explained she held no newspapers for him, he had literally shuddered and left the store in a grandiose huff, the magisterial frustration of the prince fully aware that lackeys were conspiring to put him off his day. On the third occasion Mary saw him coming and in literal fear fled to the prescription section at the back of the store and asked Kramer to wait on him. Afterwards Kramer explained to Mary who he was (it meant nothing to Mary), that Wilson was only in the area at certain times of the year and that as he was a “big man” they best make sure he got his newspapers.

  Shortly thereafter Mary and Wilson became friendly.

  She read his impressive biographical data in Who’s Who, and he said he wanted her to do some part-time typing for him. Only recently he had learned that two of his plays had been translated into Hungarian, and he’d set himself the task of learning the language to check the translations. When he learned Mary knew Hungarian he was more insistent than ever.

  Some days later Mary went to the stone house to discuss the job further, and when she knocked on the door a voice from on high demanded Who-is-it? in a tone that suggested Is-it-anyone-who-should-be-presuming-on-me? When Mary was at last told to enter, she did so and to her horror the first things she saw were white hairless bare legs descending the staircase. To her immense relief a bathrobe at last came into view, followed by the rest of Wilson, unshaven and holding in his hand a tumbler full of Scotch. It was ten-thirty in the morning and Mary’s worst expectations were being borne out (what Mary didn’t learn until later was that Wilson had worked all the preceding day and all night, which he often did in those days, and was only then un winding and preparing himself for bed). When Wilson asked her if she had a typewriter, Mary said she did but wasn’t all that sure she wanted to work for such a dangerous character.