Pages from a Cold Island

by Frederick Exley

  “I told Jason Epstein what he could do!”

  “Certainly your father and Epstein were on amiable terms?”

  “Huh! Who knows? To me Jason was just another courtier. Maybe father only used him. When there were any difficulties with his contracts, I know he used to kid Roger Straus, Jr., that he could always take his manuscripts to Epstein at Random House.” Suddenly Rosalind Baker Wilson’s eyes again narrowed furiously. “Jason! I don’t want to talk about Jason Epstein!”

  We sat in charged silence for a moment. Then she asked, “What have you done so far?”

  “Not much. I’ve read all the obituaries and eulogies I could find. I’ve talked with a few people.” When she asked if I’d read anything I liked I said I’d liked the Wilfred Sheed piece in the Times, not daring to tell her I’d also liked the Epstein piece. She was skeptical that the Sheed piece could be any good and challenged me to illustrate what was any good about it.

  “It was nice,” I said, trying to get the conversation on a jollier plane. “Sheed began by saying that only a knave would profess to an intimacy with a dead man he hadn’t had in life, he wanted it understood he had no preferred place among your father’s acquaintances; then he went on to say your father had once invited him to Wellfleet for Christmas, how once invited he’d be damned if he’d let your father back out of the invitation, how he and his wife had got snowed in at Wellfleet, and the pleasant week they’d spent with your father, drinking and talking books on snowbound Cape Cod.”

  Rosalind Baker Wilson said, “You’re darned right Sheed wasn’t going to let Father back out of his invitation!”

  I did not know what to say. Was she going to tell me that Sheed and his wife had forced themselves on Wilson during a family holiday? Certainly everything that was known about Wilson made this impossible, and I sensed some need on her part to preclude anyone’s having had any significant place in her father’s life. To point out subtly the implausibility of what she was suggesting—Wilson’s opening his doors to anyone he didn’t want to open his doors to—I told her I might once have met her father had it not been for my unfortunate mention of Edwin O’Connor. She really laughed at this, bringing her knuckles to her cheeks to steady her face, and slapping her bare feet on the floor.

  “Don’t worry about that!” she assured me. “Ed was a helluva nice guy but no writer!” Once she’d told a friend that if O’Connor had never written a word the loss to American Letters would be negligible, and as she’d then done for the friend, Rosalind Baker Wilson now lifted her glass ceilingward and in a gay toast said, “Sorry about that, Ed, wherever you are up there!”

  After a few more ryes we had our hamburgers, and I had mine with the works—mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup, and a slice of raw. Rosalind Baker Wilson defied me to convince her I really believed she’d give me hamburger.

  “Why wouldn’t I believe you? It’s delicious.”

  “I thought you’d really expect something fancy. When I say hamburger, you get hamburger!”

  I told her I’d talked with Mary Pcolar and to my immense relief she nodded her head approvingly and said, “That’s okay. Mary’s okay. You can trust her.” Feeling emboldened, I then mentioned another couple with whom I’d spoken. Rosalind Baker Wilson came boltingly off her chair. I literally shrank back in my own. my mouth went slack.

  “God, that’s a laugh. I’ll make us another drink. You’ll need one to hear this. Take this down.”

  When Rosalind Baker Wilson came charging back from the kitchen and handed me another “good” one, she told me the couple with whom I’d talked were health-food quacks. A few days before Wilson’s death they’d come to the stone house bearing bottles and bottles of vitamins— B12, C, E, the gamut—and for a long time the man had sternly lectured Wilson on his health, giving Wilson directions for the taking of the pills, the numbers and times of day and so forth. Having at seventy-seven reached an age “off the charts” for a writer, having been told he hadn’t much time left without the insertion of a pacemaker and having scorned the extra time under such clinically aloof conditions, living constantly within the foreboding arm’s length of bottled oxygen, Wilson had apparently viewed the offer of yellow and orange capsules as the kind of unconscionable black humor that can only issue from people totally oblivious of their hang-ups. Aware of the generosity of their offer and out of politeness Wilson had heard the man to the near-interminable end of his lecture on robustness, and then Wilson had looked quizzically and ruefully at the man and with an ironical and theatrical longing had asked, “What about griddle cakes?”

  I smiled, I choked on my drink, I roared.

  “But that’s not even it!” Rosalind Baker Wilson cried. “The ceremony at the stone house was no sooner over and the guy wanted his vitamins back! The body was still warm!”

  “Aw, Rosalind,” I said. “Now take it easy on me— take it easy.”

  “I swear, Fred. And he kept after me. I finally sent him a check for fifteen dollars and told him not to bug me anymore.’“

  I said, “But surely people don’t do those things.”

  “But surely people do,” Rosalind said.

  After that we relaxed with several more ryes, and Rosalind set me “straight” as to her father’s relationship with her Uncle Otis. I then read Rosalind a few pages about her father 1 had in first draft, and to my unabashed pleasure she laughed heartily and asked if I thought Manning would publish it.

  “I doubt it.”

  “I doubt it too. It’s not the kind of stuff the Atlantic publishes. And even if they do they won’t give you any money.”

  “I know nothing about their rates.”

  “Forget about it,” Rosalind assured me.

  From that point on she refused to say anything more about her father, anything at all, leading me to believe that if ever we met again the subject of Edmund Wilson would be taboo, and by way of thanking her for her kindness I asked her if she might not come one day to Alexandria Bay and let me take her for a ride through the Thousand Islands in my brother-in-law’s speedboat. “Then I’ll feed you some spaghetti or something.” Rosalind had again become Rosalind Baker Wilson and would have to think about it.

  Going out the door, I said, “I know it sounds corny but your father meant a great deal to me. More than writing about him, which will be done by the scholars and academics qualified to do so, I was hoping to have something of him to carry with me. Would it be awful of me to ask for one of his walking sticks?”

  For the first time Rosalind Baker Wilson became angry with me. She did not think it would be in the least possible. Someone had already walked off with Wilson’s favorite stick, and what if everyone who had admired him sauntered off with one or another of his possessions? More than that, I could see that I had disappointed her. Before even going to her I’d surmised that all her life people had undoubtedly tried to use her to gain access to her father and I could see now that with that one unfortunate request she’d relegated me to that damnable category. I smiled apologetically. “I thought I’d ask. I’m sorry.” We said goodbye a final time. I did not think I’d see Rosalind Baker Wilson again. Afterwards, thinking what I’d asked for, I didn’t much blame her.

  To my great surprise I heard from her twice within the next ten days. In her first letter she told me she probably shouldn’t have read Wakefield’s letter to me but she thought it so complimentary she did. Rosalind Baker Wilson again straightened me out on her father’s relationship with her Uncle Otis and now reiterated that if the two men had ever broken over the contents of Upstate it must have been a trivial business. On Wilson’s death. Fern Munn had been the first to arrive at the stone house, and the Munns’ flowers had been the first to come. Because of Otis’s bad heart and the fact that the service was at milking time she had telephoned Fern Munn and specifically requested they not attend as she didn’t want Otis put under the strain.

  Rosalind Baker Wilson then implied that her disparagement of the health-food addicts hadn’t been prompted by
grief, any distraught condition brought on by her father’s death, or the amounts of rye we were consuming that evening. She assured me that the wife had been even more boorish than the husband, the wife worrying about a paperback shed left with Wilson. Rosalind Baker Wilson said she was surprised the couple hadn’t asked for the “inlays” in her father’s teeth. Her last line informed me she was looking forward to a boat ride if I was still game. I telephoned her immediately and we made a date for a week from the upcoming Friday.

  In the week Rosalind Baker Wilson was scheduled to come I had another letter from her, a carbon copy of a letter shed sent to Bob Manning at the Atlantic. Apparently she hadn’t been as offended with me as I’d thought and had now decided to “champion” me. In her letter Rosalind Baker Wilson told Manning—and I smiled sadly thinking it’d be the first and last time Manning got tied up with a loony like me!—that I was uncertain he’d publish what I wrote, that she was very spoiled where editors were concerned, used to letters of introduction, and so forth. She then told him she’d heard nothing but good about my first book, that I had been considerate, and that she could tell from the pages I read her I was a talented writer. She said she hoped Manning published me and that he paid me a lot of money, which he probably wouldn’t—that is, pay me a lot of money! Oh, Lordy, I thought, had Manning ever intended to publish me, he must be having serious second thoughts by now. On my copy she had added a postscript in ink in which she said that she hoped her letter helped me. That, of course, was a matter of opinion. But I promised myself that, grit my teeth if I must, I wouldn’t bring the matter up when Rosalind Baker Wilson came for her boat ride.

  In the early afternoon Rosalind Baker Wilson arrived in rain squalls. She was wearing a blue cotton dress with a flare skirt, ocher ruffles at the cleavage and at the sleeves more ruffles and little ocher bows. She’d brought from the cheese factory at Lowville a five-pound wheel of Cheddar for my brother-in-law, as it was his boat we’d be using. For me she had a tin of fifty Turkish cigarettes, which I opened and started wolfing then and there, not having tasted such a robust smoke in the twenty years since I’d worked with a guy whose father had sent him cartons of Picayunes from New Orleans. Almost immediately Rosalind Baker Wilson seated herself in the big easy chair in the front room and asked if it was okay (it was) to remove her tennis sneakers. I had some Frank Sinatra albums on the stereo, had fixed some rye and waters for her and my mother and was telling her that if the weather didn’t clear we’d never that day see the islands. In her letter Rosalind Baker Wilson had told me that the longest boat ride she’d ever had here abouts was a half-hour tourist ride and her disappointment now was profoundly obvious. I quickly proclaimed, “Think positively!” Then I turned to my mother and for emphasis said, “Everybody think positively!”

  Attempting to leaven my faux pas of having asked for Edmund Wilson’s walking stick, I then chidingly gave Rosalind Baker Wilson hell for not bringing me one of them, sure that she would detect in my kidding tone that it hadn’t really meant that much to me. But she was without subtlety when it came to impositions regarding her father, and to my red-faced uneasiness she took my chiding seriously and again became upset and huffy. “But, Rosalind Baker Wilson,” I protested, “I’m only kidding, for Christ’s sake, only kidding.”

  That was one of the occasions I almost told Rosalind Baker Wilson to stuff it. Thereupon my mother, who lacks subtlety on most scores, jumped into the breach and said that if I really wanted to appear a dandy and buffoon and carry a walking stick about Iowa City I could have the silver-handled, hand-tooled one that had been owned by my Great-grandfather Champ. When she went off to the store room to fetch it I took her drink to the kitchen, poured most of it out, and diluted the rest of it with water.

  My mother cannot drink, has never been a drinker, she does not know how to drink, and yet she had this nutty compulsion to the social amenities which makes her feel she ought to do what everyone else in the room is doing. An irreverent friend of mine once characterized it by saying, “Old Charlotte’s got a lot of heart. She really tries to hang in there with the big folks.” Charlotte’s trouble is that she understands none of the niceties of highball sipping, and she pops off a drink as if it were a glass of ice water and she’d just come from weeding her flower beds on a sunny, oppressively humid day. After three drinks she brings her elbows up on her knees to steady herself, and without saying anything lets her eyes drift from speaker to speaker, as if she were politely listening to native chieftains converse in Swahili. Sooner or later she finds her way to her bed. On this day, however. I had not only to entertain an already disappointed and huffy Rosalind Baker Wilson but I was counting on “Old Charlotte” for a chicken and dumpling supper and wanted her sober and out of bed. Outside it continued to pour, and the three of us drank and listened to Frank Sinatra and examined Great-grandfather Champ’s silver-handled, hand-tooled walking stick. I made sure I mixed the drinks so I could prevent Charlotte’s going dodo-eyed and coming on like Dopey Dildocks.

  At four, when I felt a little dodo-eyed myself and there was still no sign of the rain’s letting up, we drove to the camp on Dingman Point and I persuaded my nephew Ed, who knew the river better than I, to take Rosalind Baker Wilson, his mother (my sister) and me on a ride through the islands. Ed was an all-league high school halfback, and at seventeen he owned the swaggeringly intrepid way of that breed. I was sure the rains and the poor visibility held no wariness for him, and as he’d just come in off the river with a couple hoodlum footballer buddies he couldn’t very well claim he wouldn’t be caught dead out there on a day like this. Still, I could see that he thought we were all tetched and that the Point might better be named Dingbat. When I looked at Rosalind Baker Wilson to see if she’d caught Ed’s attitude, I could see that she hadn’t and wouldn’t have been dissuaded if she had, so much was her heart set on this ride. The speedboat, a Classic (that, it isn’t!), was a small inboard but the front half was securely battened down with canvas. Rosalind Baker Wilson had scorned a football parka Id offered to keep her dry, and I assumed she was going to perch under the canvas in the cockpit and look out the plastic windows. I donned one of those hotshot royal blue parkas, with Indian river central lettered in white on the breast over the heart, and grabbed a six-pack. The four of us boarded. Ed started the engines and, snaking his head in sympathy with our dementia, roared off on the oddest boat ride I’ve ever had.

  Rosalind Baker Wilson not only refused the canvas shelter of the cockpit but stood exposed aft in the boat, rocking uneasily back and forth on her sturdy scratched legs while the rains beat relentlessly against her, soaking her blue and ocher dress and gray-tinged hair so that both cloth and hair lay against her like seaweed. For the life of me I don’t know what Rosalind Baker Wilson was up to. Perhaps it was her way of telling us that she knew it had been terrible of her to insist on a ride on such a day as this but wanted us to see that she was by way of enjoying herself immensely. Perhaps she was telling us that when all was said weather was no more than a condition of the heart, and that if we really looked as we sat huddled cravenly in the cockpit, throbbing to the roar of the engines, we’d be able to see that back aft where Rosalind Baker Wilson stood the sun was shining.

  Compounding everything, Ed was expecting one of his cheerleader-type girl friends (oh, my satyriasis!) at the camp and to get the adult lunacy of this “tour” over as quickly as possible was traveling at speeds that gave the already frightful rains a near-hurricane impact so that they appeared to pound on Rosalind Baker Wilson’s face, now thrust defiantly out in this forbiddingly stubborn and admirable attempt to enjoy herself. I think I never liked a person as at that moment I liked Rosalind Baker Wilson. At a severe nudging of my arm from my sister, indicating I should join my “guest” aft, I reluctantly snapped up my windbreaker, uncapped another can of Budweiser, sighed, took a deep breath, stepped out of the cockpit and was almost immediately drenched. Adapting myself to Rosalind Baker Wilson’s Viking posture, I thereupon thrus
t out my jaws and began pointing out the various islands and land marks, hardly visible through the rains pounding our faces a fierce pink. We stood together rocking precariously back and forth, back and forth, while to my barely seen sightings Rosalind Baker Wilson exclaimed “marvelous” and “great” and “lovely” and apparently everything was as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it could be.

  Before supper there were daiquiris and more rye and chilled cans of beer and then we enthusiastically engaged our chicken and dumplings, tossed salad, bean salad, asparagus, green corn, olives and celery, and homemade strawberry cheesecake. By then I was very tipsy and do not know who was there when it happened; in any case I’d thought I’d told everyone that Rosalind Baker Wilson did not like to talk about her father. Not knowing who was present at the table had nothing to do with my being slightly inebriated. Ours is a family whose various doors are by tacit agreement left open to one another, and because it was Friday, the lead-in to a weekend of yet another waning season, nephews and nieces, brothers and sisters, boyfriends and girl friends, aunts and uncles, all having heard the magic words chicken and dumplings, descended on my mother’s house, some eating and moving on, whereupon their places would be immediately usurped by someone else, others lingering at the table to smoke, drink, talk and laugh. Abruptly someone told me to explain to Rosalind Baker Wilson what I’d done on the publication of A Fans Notes.