After Gregory

by Austin Wright

  The takeoff held your body in a vise of invisible motion, while outside a table of lights tilted and leveled and spread, grids of light in geometrical clusters which reformulated into one line and disappeared. Producing the imagined ocean while the only thing in the window was your face. Inside, Jane Delaware and the backs of the seats in front and golfball reading lights. Big geographical thoughts against imprisonment, the streets and houses which the now vanished lights represented, your country falling behind, icy October water and ocean waves and fishing boats in the dark straight below if you fell through the floor. Cast your thought forward over the great Atlantic, the latitudes of the Great Circle up the coast beyond Labrador to Greenland, the Arctic Circle, and Iceland before night was out. Geography against what was stuck in your head, the notion you had been kidnapped into an unknown where all familiar connections were broken, no mail, no telephone, nor even language to protect you.

  Reluctant suspicion, Jack is setting you up to take Sharon away. Not clear why he would take her back after going to such trouble to give her to you, but your manufactured marriage seemed as fragile as the metal skins holding you up over the dark old sea. Your life compacted into passenger and baggage compartments, suspended by abstract laws of aerodynamics thousands of feet, higher than mountains, over water. You required a deliberate rhetoric: Thousands make this trip every day. A favor for Jack Rome. You had a name, money, and a home, the wife on your island was last seen on the porch rail holding the cat, etcetera.

  The trip had its own rhetoric: the dignified first-class hostess brought champagne and dinner, with menu in elegant gourmet script. First class glamor, though no one to share it with, since Jane Delaware was used to it. After dinner, the movie, then a couple of hours of night intended for sleep misting by like fragments of clouds.

  At 36,000 feet according to the captain, the ocean would be seven miles below. Somewhere down there, give or take a few hundred miles, the sea once caught Uncle Phil and took him in. Uncle Phil: Do you believe in God, son? In the boat at Marblehead, untying and tying, getting ready to sail, the fittings dazzling in the sun. Cussing and stomping around, more rageful than the difficulties of the moment could explain. Later he leaned back against the coaming, puffed his pipe in the deep blue air, acting the gentleman sailor in fine weather, the breeze strong, the blue and white water splitting against the bow. Hiding the cuss between his lips. This was basis for imaginatively watching him years later, days and nights alone in his perfectly fitted boat, well stocked pantry with cold meats and Campbell soup, his efficient cabin, mahogany panels, silver cleats, compass and radio, destination unannounced: I’ll tell you when I get there. Guessing what he did on nights like this, setting the sail, fixing the wheel, catching sleep below in his stiff blanketed bunk. On some unknown day while you were ignorantly acting out Peter Gregory’s daily calendar, he on a different calendar hunched in the cockpit and faced it, glowering in the rollers that rose gray to black, next and next, watching the sky darkening in the west. Undulating sea crest by crest blowing spray on his cheeks, and the sky turning black as it always had since before the sea’s chemistry congealed into life, while he looked for the God’s awe the sky was preparing for him.

  But first Uncle Phil at Marblehead, bright sun glinting off the fittings, tapping his pipe, saying, Do you believe in God, son? Depends what you mean, right? Old guy in a beard, not likely. Old geezer giving orders you’d damn well better obey because I get wrathful when you don’t, not likely. What does the question mean, boy? God the creator? Hell, kid, if it’s God it’s got to think. It don’t need arms, legs, or a dick, but if it don’t think, if it’s only force, it ain’t God, right? So tell me, boy, do you believe in a thinking God somewhere around?

  Uncle Phil’s Marblehead proof, who knows if it was still valid on the old gray ocean? You think, don’t you? But if you think in a thoughtless universe then you must have invented yourself, which don’t seem likely either. This don’t necessarily prove God’s still there, of course. He could have created the world and told it to fuck itself, or fuck by itself, whichever you prefer. Or died, while the universe spins on, like people still crossing the Brooklyn Bridge though the builder is dead. But what if he’s still there thinking away, letting us have some of his thought to look at his work, you know, from a variety of angles like a bunch of eyes? You know what that makes us, don’t you? God’s eyes, what do you think about that? Transmitting our messages back to the collective think tank, so he can enjoy the goddamn life he created. Makes you a piece of God, boy, what do you know? And me too, by God, me too.

  The sudden cold dawning sun rose over tumbles of ocean clouds, while Jane Delaware slept with her mouth open, face polished shiny by the speed of the night. Though her fine features in daylight always reminded you of somebody, the dawn had bronzed her face so that she looked like an old woman corpse without teeth. She was this and the brilliant young woman without incompatibility in the morning light where all appearances were the same.

  The wake-up girls brought heavy red towels soaked in hot water to remove the bronze. Good morning, as if the two hours since the movie actually were the eight they pretended to be. Breakfast time. A change in the engine, beginning the long descent, the blank white unshaped cloud surface rising to meet you. Entry cards. It’s only England, you said, a civilized country, land of ancestors, mother tongue, origins, morality, restraint. The sky disappeared into undifferentiated motionless white, requiring another deliberate rhetorical act: to assert England with its tight colonies of trim houses and gardens and roads deliberately because otherwise this would be limbo. Otherwise everything since you met Jack Rome—money, marriage, house—was merely a diversion in your projectile flight from the river. You were a missile with no control hurtled east into space by the river god, unless you could persuade yourself this white blank was not space but only an overcast over busy morning England, and the strangeness was only metaphor.

  You broke out of the clouds not far from the ground. There: the patterned clusters of houses, highways, and railway lines. Now we should be safe. The plane landed and you got busy. Practical necessity: baggage and customs with Jane Delaware and Copzik. A big black left-handed taxi which Gregory could not have afforded. Hammersmith, Westminster, the logo of London Transport. With Jane Delaware to the check-in desk to register. The clerk had two rooms adjacent on the third floor and a third on the fourth. Who gets what? She picked the two rooms for herself and her maid. An old bellman up the elevator with your luggage wished you a pleasant stye in London.

  She said jet lag, call me later. The drawn shades in your room subdued the morning sun to brown twilight. You peeked out at the street, the marble and brick buildings across and people in line at the bus stop. You lay down to rest, pretending day was night. When you woke you thought you had been hitchhiking.

  TWENTY NINE

  You stayed in London four days, then flew to Zurich. With a British intonation you had not noticed before, Jane Delaware told you each day’s program day by day. Everything was prearranged, her duties in London and Switzerland, with no responsibilities for you before Venice.

  It was easy and nice, the pre-selected small restaurants with special rooms, dark corners, and polite waiters. In afternoons when Jane Delaware visited offices and banks, you escorted Copzik, a reader of Henry James, to museums and castles. You waited to learn about your mission. In a swan boat on a chilly lake in the mountains, wrapped in heavy sweaters, Jane Delaware thought it was funny. Miranda Landis, Osgood’s daughter, never named without the epithet, the Virgin Miranda. Whose healing powers, which sustained the weekly television program, depended on that virginity, guarded by God’s Police Force ever since the first manifestation. She told about that: one day when her father brought her up to the stage as he always did to praise her for remaining virgin another week, she accidentally brushed the elbow of a young man in a wheel chair. Recorded on camera, the man cried out: Hey, I’m healed, a miracle. And lo, he got up from the wheel chair right there on
TV. So began Miranda’s Miracle Cures, thereafter a regularly scheduled feature of the program, despite the lack of interest in the press, which Landis regards as proof of an anti-God conspiracy in the corridors of power.

  That was three years ago. Now, according to Jane Delaware, the poor girl is fed up with her miracles and maybe her virginity too. Pale prisoner in the Landis Palace of God, guarded in the Adirondacks like a German concentration camp. God’s Police Force.

  Jane Delaware shivered in the swan boat, expository. The reason Miranda’s in Venice is, Landis and God’s Police think she is with her angry little old mother in Paris. What they don’t know is, she also has an angry little old aunt in Venice. This gives us our opportunity. Jane Delaware shapes her fingers into claws: Jack’s hooks. Don’t worry, she said, it’s Miranda’s idea, she made the first move. Help, she wrote to Jack, with tokens to show her sincerity. Spite, of course, since she knew her father and Jack had this feud, but what an opportunity for Jack, to get a daughter back for a son. Numerically he’s still behind two to one because Landis has Jack’s wife too, but Miranda was the star of Landis’s show, which doubles her value.

  This needs more explanation.

  Well yes. The angry little old mother in Paris, whom Miranda is allowed to visit once a year. Why is she angry? Why is she in Paris? How did that hick from the Bible Belt happen to hook up with this Italian from Paris? How long were they hooked up? Were they in fact hooked up? Is she Italian? The anger is hypothetical. So is the littleness and the old. The only known fact is, she must be old enough to have had Miranda, who is twenty or so, provided she really is Miranda’s mother. And this: the help letters from Miranda to Jack, and his replies, all had to go through the mother in Paris to avoid being intercepted by God’s Police.

  Poor Jack, the jerk. How hard for him when Helen his wife, in all her ease, Cadillacs, golden bathrooms, round the world cruises, announced, I’m going forth to seek God under Osgood Landis. How humiliating. Osgood Landis, this hick from the Bible Belt whom Jack had elevated. Served him right, actually. And when Jack thundered to her, Thou shalt not go, up jumps Alec, Thou shalt not thunder against my mother, and off he goes too. Alexander, his only begotten son, did you catch his name? who never cared for money, only for drawing on a sketch pad and worrying about whales and acid rain and species of frogs: if she goes I go too. What can poor Jack do? Kidnappings, counter kidnappings, programming and deprogramming, glory what a mess.

  Osgood Landis and Jack Rome as presented by Jane Delaware, pedaling vigorously the swan boat, holding down her skirt. Here’s this runty little guy standing in the square in New Orleans, waving his Bible and ranting at the lunching office workers or university students about their Satanic philosophy professors, and along comes the great Jack Rome and gives him forty million. Not that Jack is religious, as you and the IRS might think. He’s not even pious. Not the tax break, though of course he thinks of that. You have to get into the spirit of it, forty million dollars spent in pure irony. Only a Jack Rome is rich and powerful enough to buy forty million dollars’ worth of irony.

  But for Jack, it’s worth more, for forty million was just priming the pump for what the public would give to the chrome and plastic Palace of God’s Word, multiplying the value of the irony hundredfold. A great unconscious display, originated by Jack for the pleasure of the few, voyeurs to the mating of religious message and television commercial. Imagine his disgust when his own wife and son joined up.

  You were surprised to hear Jane Delaware talk like that. It raised questions in your mind. Good, you should have questions in your mind. Why, for example, he chose you for this mission. Good question. One reason might be that God’s Police don’t know you. Or you are a nice looking young man, making things nicer for Miranda. Or you have a house they don’t know about, where you can keep her safe for a while. Do you believe those reasons?

  Did you say a house to put her in?

  Until someone safely takes her off. Another question might be why Jack excluded Sharon and sent you and me out together with only our chaperone reading her book on the shore. After all, you have a wife, and I am Jack’s wife.

  Do you have an answer to that?

  She laughed. Jack’s games, what more do you want? Once again he proves his superiority to normal human weakness. By sending you out with me, he shows his contempt for suspicion and jealousy and for you and me. His lack of fear you and I will have an affair. (She was looking at you with rich blue eyes.) With a contingency fallback, she said. He is too powerful for us to dare. But if we should dare, he is far too above to care. Contempt for your wife, too, since he can make you travel around the country with another woman and knows she won’t complain.

  Her jewelry eyes sparkled with liberty, while you hung tremorous between excitement and shame. Shame anesthetized in the cold Swiss air. The next question came from you: if Rome’s gift to Landis was full of irony, what was Stephen Trace’s gift full of? The mountains were pale and pinkish, you could see through them. She thought a moment, which proved the question worth asking. You looked at the tiny figure of Copzik on a park bench on the shore. Colder and colder.

  Your gift is the result of a bet between Jack and David Trace.

  Stunning news, but she was so casual it took a while to realize it.

  What kind of bet?

  If I tell you I’ll prejudice the results.

  Tell me anyway.

  Well sure, darling. The bet was that within two years you’d go back to Peter Gregory.

  No doubt those were enormous confused feelings you should have felt (anger, insult, terror), but first you had to know who bet what.

  Jack bet you wouldn’t go back, David bet you would.

  Why were they betting? What’s the point?

  Jack the Philosopher, his old obsession: can a person manufacture himself by an act of will? Jack says yes, David says no.

  You listened to your amazement, not sure whether you should be outraged, or afraid, or whether it was all right to enjoy the possible power this gave you. What does it mean? Are they betting on me or on people in general? Is it whether I can conform to the norm, or are they deciding the norm by what I do?

  She said, it’s funny except to you.

  What happens if I do go back?

  Jack loses.

  Then what? Will he punish me?

  I’m not supposed to tell you any of this.

  Tell me anyway.

  Jack says your love of the money will keep you from going back. David says your money removes the obstacles to your going back.

  What does Jack say to that?

  He doesn’t think you’ll take the chance.

  What chance?

  Of jeopardizing your good fortune.

  How would it be jeopardized?

  That’s what you want to know, isn’t it? What you’ve always wanted to know.

  What would happen to me if I went back?

  Are you thinking of going back?

  No. No, I’m not.

  Then why ask?

  I thought I ought to know the conditions of my existence.

  She laughed at that. Will he punish you if you go back—in express violation of his command? How should I know? she said. He wants you to think so. Theoretically your disgust with Gregory and your success as Trace will keep you here. But you need something to lose, else there’s nothing to prevent your being both Gregory and Trace.

  Does David know I’m forbidden to go back?

  David’s betting you’ll go back no matter what the cost.

  You said, I left Gregory to escape horrible things.

  I know, darling.

  You know? What do you know?

  Whatever you think I know.

  Does David know? He wouldn’t bet that way if he did.

  David knows everything there is to know.

  You thought about what would happen if you did go back. My grant had no strings attached—except that, you said. It’s a gift, not a loan. Can he really take it away?


  God knows what he can do. Poor Jack, she said.

  What do you mean, poor Jack?

  All that money, but what he wants is adulation, subjects who depend on him. Mannequins and models and automatons. Like you.

  Me?

  Made to order, in his image, miniature, fake. Rich and powerful but not like him. You reiterate him, your inferiority adds to his greatness. With fake free choice.

  I’m not fake.

  We all are when Jack gets hold of us. Me too. Who am I? Aren’t you curious? I’m Delaware because I came from Maryland, which is near enough. I’m really a very nice person. Worked my way up through the ranks, nice to high officials while I polished my manners. Even nice to the romantic Luigi Pardon, thus fulfilling according to Luigi the desires of all women in America, whom at that moment I represented. There was really no need to change my name, but Jack wanted me to for company morale.

  She talked and shivered in the swan boat. Are you cold, want to go back? Enjoying this too much to notice the cold. What else would you like to know?

  Is David Trace really Jack’s brother? Yes. What can you tell me about Sharon? That depends how touchy you are about women with pasts. Sharon, as you may have noticed, is very high class. Not as high class as me, but not everybody gets to marry the boss.

  Did you ever hear of this fellow who calls himself Crazy James?

  Jimmy Dziadech, one of Jack’s reclamation projects, which failed. He’s back in jail. Jack wanted to prove money would cure him of his gun and robbery habits, but Jimmy decided he’d rather be his own man. Set out to demonstrate he still had his skills. Proved it by getting caught again.

  Sorry to hear that.

  You’d better be. You owe him. If it weren’t for him, you wouldn’t be here.