After Gregory

by Austin Wright

  You’d already been doing that. His irony was a marshland, but you said you’d try.

  You are Stephen White, and we’re talking about Peter Gregory, okay?

  Okay.

  So I’ll tell you one thing that bothers me about this story. Peter Gregory was blind drunk that night. Am I overstating it?

  No sir.

  Well, listen to this. I don’t like drunks. I hate ’em, I find ’em disgusting. Do you follow me?

  You hate drunks.

  Peter Gregory must have been pretty disgusting that night.

  He was, he was.

  So tell me honestly, Stephen, because this is important: was this habitual for him?

  Not really. He liked a drink at Lenny’s before dinner, but to get as drunk as he was that night, that was unusual. I can also tell you that after the accident, he never touched another drink in his life, and that was two years ago.

  Cold turkey?

  Yes sir.

  Why did he do that?

  Why, because of the accident. A vow, Never Again.

  Has Stephen White made a similar vow?

  The question was a surprise. It hadn’t occurred to you.

  Or does he consider himself bound by Gregory’s vow?

  You’d have to think about that.

  I’ll tell you, Stephen, I don’t want to throw my money away on an alcoholic who’ll blow it in drink.

  Peter Gregory didn’t touch a drop for two years, and the notion of a drink has never occurred to Murry Bree or Stephen White, you said, lying a little.

  Maybe so, but you need to tell me, if it was unusual for Peter Gregory to get so drunk, what made him do so on that particular Friday night? The papers don’t explain it.

  No?

  They don’t say why that night was different from others.

  Now you wondered what else he knew that had not made it into the papers. What private sources among Peter Gregory’s untrustworthy intimates had his investigators also discovered?

  He reminded you: If you’re still embarrassed or ashamed on Peter Gregory’s behalf, then you’re still Peter Gregory.

  Oh.

  Anita Long had not made it into the papers. Because you had been with her earlier on that fatal night, you mentioned her, though still unable not to be shamefaced, unable to escape the wince in the recollection. Nature woman in the Activist Bookstore who came in to Lenny’s for a drink every weekday afternoon after five, who knew the rumors about your wife and the Professor in Romance Languages whom she named sneeringly Louis the Lover, and who, friendly to you (Gregory) invited you (Gregory) to her apartment one evening instead of going straight home as you (he) usually did. With a domestic uproar as a result, confessions and accusation, which didn’t prevent a second time, which happened to be the particular Friday night we have been talking about.

  So, Rome said, other events of a dramatic kind also happened on that significant day? A little sex before submersion?

  A little sex, a little drink, a little talk about what to put up with and what not, moral support and whose rights, a shot in the arm, and have a nice day. Also the flight of time, and the need to explain to Linda why he was late, which caused him to postpone his return home until he’d be so late she’d have gone to bed, returning meanwhile to wait it out at Lenny’s, where the whiskey said Drink me in a stronger voice than usual. Then it was so late and he was so drunk he decided he should work it off before going home. Too dangerous to drive, work it by a combination of exercise and coffee. Exercise meant activity, going somewhere, movement, and when he thought of movement he thought of the car, and it occurred to him, with permission, that the way to work it off was to drive the car fast out on the open road. Let the cold air stream through his lungs. So (telling Jack Rome) he went out from Lenny’s to the car at midnight, afraid of driving in the city streets because he was drunk, eager to get out to the highway where he could air it out, let the blood coursing through his body restore him to sobriety. He found the Interstate without disaster, and turned up the ramp where—we’re back where we started.

  Jack Rome laughed again. It isn’t funny, you said.

  So the police came down into the ditch, and took him in an ambulance. And then the reporters and lawyers, the charges filed, and outrage, and letters in the paper and hate mail to the house, the anonymous telephone calls, and almost everyone agreeing that Peter Gregory was a slob if not a villain, and these are the kind of people we have teaching in our high schools?

  On to the trial, the lawyer who hoped to mitigate it for Gregory by saying it wasn’t his car but the other that killed the family, which only added to the outrage of people writing to the paper, with the kindly well-meaning woman judge who suspended the sentence, and the shouts of loathing and execration in the courtroom. And the questions raised, the long talks with the principal of the high school and the decision to return to classes quietly with as little publicity as possible, and the quiet reserve of the students who knew what had happened but dared not mention it, but be sure they talked about it to each other. And so it went for two more years.

  And what did your wife and children think about all this?

  So you told how Linda stood by him in public, the loyal wife. How he did his allocated community service afternoons to the offices downtown, to neighborhoods on errands, interviews with poor people like a social worker, telling himself this was atonement to wash his soul clean, only that when it was over he was still the same person, known to anyone with memory as the Gregory who had been in the news, who had done that terrible thing. Wondering how many generations of students it would take for them to forget, with new people always popping it on him.

  He was stuck with Peter Gregory, that was the problem. Frantic to think better of himself, he would tell himself Never Again, a solemn vow, in hopes this would distinguish the new Peter Gregory from the old. The question was, Never Again What? Since drink had brought the worst of his troubles, try that. Never Again drink. It worked, but it did not help. By Never Again, he kept from drinking, but this did not prevent people from reminding him, nor him from remembering. He detected the silent shift in his wife’s attitude from pity to contempt, the euphemism that was pity giving way to the reality that was contempt. He saw the contempt in his children too, Patty and Jeff, who looked upon him with strange alien curiosity, listened to him cautiously, held themselves in reserve, as they understood and were not allowed to forget what Daddy did, for which they had never received a sufficient alleviating explanation. This continued, while Louis the Lover became a fact of life, until two months ago when she moved out, taking the children with her. They called him Poor Daddy and did not object.

  Never saw Anita Long again, either. Everybody talked about him behind his back, Peter Gregory Who. That’s Peter Gregory who, you mean Peter Gregory Who? Who kept repeating, Never Again, though what he really wanted to achieve by incantation was Never Was, which was impossible. He had these views of himself, glimpses of Gregory in the eyes of others, where he would see that damned accident with its disreputable origins attached to him like a smokestack on a steamboat, or else Peter Gregory himself a kind of shell wherein he lodged like a turtle or a hermit crab, how get it off?

  Actually, when Linda got fed up, she didn’t move out but kicked him out, right into the voice range of Jock Hadley, who wouldn’t let him forget either. Jock Hadley lived across the street from Gregory’s new bachelor room, Hadley in a onestory bungalow, on his porch shouting insults across the street: that’s the man who killed them kids, folks, still teaching in our schools, right over there across the street.

  Jack Rome asked, Jock Hadley? Is that the old man who got killed?

  By the Hammer Man. Yes.

  So the Hammer Man did you a favor?

  What?

  You weren’t relieved?

  I thought they were after me.

  Who’s “they”?

  I thought everyone was after me. Except Florry Gates. Florry Gates said, I heard about your accident Mr. Gr
egory. I want you to know I sympathize. I think you got a rotten deal.

  She was in his class, seventeen years old, scraggly looking, and she came by to see him, he didn’t ask her to. She heard old Hadley asking where she was going, and when she told him he said something and she said, Mind your own business, you old fart.

  Jack Rome laughed again. You said, It’s not funny.

  So you couldn’t take it? he said.

  There was Florry’s father, last straw, who called up the principal’s office and accused Peter Gregory of statutorily raping his daughter and what were they going to do about it?

  You wrote a suicide note and took your car down to the river and went in, Jack Rome said.

  Peter Gregory, you reminded him.

  Thinking you’d like to try something different for a change, having got yourself deformed, a little twisted and cramped in that shell you’d grown, named Gregory, so you’d try a different fit, a new person, is that it?

  Something like that.

  And it was just a coincidence that the Hammer Man happened to kill mean old Jock Hadley the night before you went into the river?

  It aggravated things. Everybody was after him. Peter Gregory was afraid they would blame him for Hadley’s death on top of everything else.

  Why would anybody think that?

  Because Hadley was such a pain in the ass.

  Like they would think Gregory had paid somebody to shut him up? Peter Gregory had become so huge to Peter Gregory that he thought the whole world was as obsessed with him as he was?

  It wasn’t rational.

  You didn’t bump off the old man, did you?

  Of course not.

  “Of course not.” Neither Gregory nor you. That’s the trouble with the both of you, of course. You couldn’t possibly do such a thing, to save your soul if you had one. Never mind. The whole story’s fine, but there’s one problem yet, my friend. When you went into the river, did you intend to drown? ( Jack Rome in his white suit, looking at you with his indecipherable robin’s eye above the masquerading mustache.) If you planned to swim out, it would have been safer not to go in. Swimming suggests you meant to drown. Your subsequent behavior suggests the reverse.

  You: Could you have one motive concealed behind the other, discovered when faced with the consequences of the other?

  Rome: Whatever it was, we are faced with a notable lack of conviction on your part. Look at your names. Hal Hastings, when you were still suicidal, when the only thing you knew about yourself was that Gregory had committed suicide, and no other you was yet conceivable. Then a series of characters in fiction, reflecting your desire to create a character for yourself in the belief created characters exist only in fiction. Though why you didn’t prefer to be Aladdin or Sinbad the Sailor (or Popeye) I don’t know. With Murry Bree you began to regress. Alien, inferior, deliberately innocuous, soft, for the world to shelter like a pet. As for Stephen White, you could have been Stanley Caruso or John Figueroa. What does it mean?

  You didn’t know.

  It means Gregory is still alive and sick. Those are Gregory names, names a Gregory would think of to cover the life a Gregory would think of for a Gregory pretending to be a non-Gregory. And you know what I think of Gregory.

  Do I?

  Peter Gregory was a jerk. A failure. Treacherous, cowardly at all levels: at the trivial social level, timorous and servile in gutless relationships, and in the big moral issues, where he couldn’t face anything. No wonder Linda couldn’t stand him. I don’t blame you for wanting to get rid of him.

  You were turning red, you felt it in the ears.

  Quit blushing. I’m not talking about you.

  You were afraid he might forget the distinction later on. You said, Peter Gregory was not treacherous.

  Then how come I don’t trust him? Let me tell you what makes people go, because you don’t seem to know. Set aside the animal instincts, food and shelter, self preservation, sex. What compels people, the human thing? This: the competitive ego. Write that down. Come on, write it.

  Where?

  Here, here’s a pad. “The competitive ego.” What do mortally conscious beings want in the world? They want their difference to be recognized. What distinguishes one person from another? The competition by which one beats the other. Ergo ego, competitive ego, remember, Jack Rome told you. What is your self? It’s your human part which pursues success, the drive to win. To win is to beat out somebody else. That’s the human story: you ratify life by coming in ahead of somebody else.

  You remembered the free enterprise man, but this was the great Jack Rome.

  Jack Rome: I changed my name when I set out to make my first million, the better to represent myself. Just as you changed yours. Succeed means exceed. Outdo someone.

  More Jack Rome: Everybody picks a competitive field or two in which to win. Little people pick little fields. Big people pick big ones. Athletes, financiers, professors. Husbands, fathers, lovers. Saintly mothers of children—you don’t believe me? Good implies bad. If you’re a good mother you’re better than some other mother, that’s the point.

  You thought, if Jack Rome is to make a difference in your life, you should adapt to his ways of thinking.

  Rome: Peter Gregory didn’t understand this. His truth was obscured by righteous sentimentality and sentimental guilt. He let a stupid cowardly accident ruin his life. That’s how losers express their competitiveness, by rising below themselves. Peter Gregory is a better loser than anybody else. Everything goes wrong for Peter Gregory. Suicide shows his superiority to all the hypocrites who go on living, indulging their vulgar pleasures and soon-to-be-forgotten little wins.

  You listened gloomily, feeling betrayed.

  You don’t like this? he said. Tell me then, what exactly was your idea of Stephen White’s future, there while you were working in Crestmeyer’s store with your young friends?

  You hadn’t got that far looking ahead. You had to get used to the feel, first.

  Feel of what?

  Of not being Gregory any more.

  Well good, that’s where your hope lies. As we both agree, you’re not Gregory. There’s a difference between you and him. You’re not about to allow Peter Gregory back. That, my friend, is what interests me in you.

  (You wondered how Jack Rome would like the comparison between his eye and Murry Bree’s.)

  Do you think you can succeed as someone else?

  Forced to speak: You can try.

  That’s the spirit.

  The smoke went deep into his lungs and filtered out through his fine nostrils and delicate mouth upward into the air-conditioning system. I said I would do something for you. What do you think I should do?

  I don’t know. What do you have in mind?

  Listen to this question and don’t answer without thinking. I could do this for you. How would you like to be rich?

  What?

  Suppose I gave you a gift that would make you rich, easy and comfortable for the rest of your days, would you like that?

  What would I have to do in return?

  Nothing. No strings. Would you like it?

  Sure I’d like it. What’s the gimmick?

  Don’t be so suspicious. I’m talking about a real possibility. A gift from me to you to make you rich.

  The devil and your soul. You remembered Crazy James. A grant?

  All right, a grant.

  Why?

  Because I’d like to see what you do with it.

  Why me?

  Leaning back in the deep chair swinging his polished pointed shoe on the end of his toe, chain smoking, Jack Rome: Why you? Because you had the brains to realize you didn’t have to be Peter Gregory and the guts to do something about it. I’d like to give you the chance to continue the experiment.

  By making me rich?

  You aren’t going anywhere in Crestmeyer’s store. Let me predict what will happen if you stay. You’ll move into a place of your own. That will give you a sense of accomplishment. You’ll get
married, a big move. Time will pass. A kid or two, life gets better and better. Time passes, you have trouble telling better and better from worse and worse, knowing which is which. They seem about the same to you. Working in nice small dusty intellectual shops on side streets, your worry about keeping your identity secret is so habitual you won’t even realize it’s worry. Keeping Stephen White modest and inconspicuous as a matter of life and death, forgetting what death you mean. If you like the girl you marry, you might stick it out. If you don’t, you’ll go back to Gregory. It makes no difference either way: in the end you won’t know the difference between White and Gregory.

  Jack Rome’s point: you’ve already reached the ceiling on which you will bump your head. Now you’ll thicken and harden, you’ll age, sweet and sour, doing nothing you haven’t already done. Your boring new life will be less than average, not more as it was meant to be. That’s why you need a gift.

  Best to keep quiet, unavid, uncritical, let his will unfold.

  Listen to me. Jack Rome is ready to give you, whatever your name is, a grant large enough for whatever you want. Enough to make you think you’re rich, to live as you like, where you like, to travel, buy, whatever your imagination requires.

  You, cautiously stunned, warily astounded, deeply grateful, still didn’t understand: what’s expected in return?

  Develop the new Stephen, living alternative to Peter Gregory. What you could never be in Mr. Crestmeyer’s store.

  How do I do that? Do you have a plan?

  That’s the interesting part I’ll leave up to you. Let me explain the conditions of this gift. No one will interfere with what you do. The interesting question is, what will that be? What choices will you make when you have the means to make them? In exchange I’ll ask only that you stay away from Peter Gregory. Your divorce from him must be complete.

  You need to know just what that means.

  It means ( Jack Rome said) there will be no return to the Gregory world. Your tie is cut. You’ll do nothing to disturb the common belief Gregory is dead. No contact with any person from that time, no visit to any place. No secret messages, no solicitations for news, no anonymous donors endowing college educations for certain children. You start from scratch, without trace, never to double back. Clear?