“Her companion, a Brit named Alfred Arbuthnot. He is devoted to her.”
I went back out onto the deck and joined Mr. Benchley, who was snoozing in the deckchair I had occupied earlier next to Saul Gold. I took Gold’s vacant deckchair and bundled myself up in the woolen blanket he’d left behind and closed my eyes.
It must have been the fresh, salty air, or perhaps it was the whooshing of the waves against the hull and the hum of the engines as the ship slipped through the surface of the water; maybe it was the flapping of the flags or the whipping of the lifeboat’s rigging that lulled me to sleep, or the music of all of the sounds of an ocean voyage played together that slowed my pulse. Under that scratchy wool cover, my head tented against the constant gale, I felt an odd sense of peace. And I languished in that mood for some time, enjoying the sheer safety of my cocoon—as if a blanket could protect one from the powerful fury of the sea. But warm and safe and at peace I was, nonetheless.
I didn’t know how long I had been asleep, but I was pulled out of my gentle doze by the familiar giggling voice of Mr. Benchley. I was too much out of the world to bother to see why he was laughing so, and once again sank down into my feathery slumber. Again I was awakened by more giggles and the words, “Behave yourself! . . . That tickles! . . . Your fingers are like ice! . . . Oh, you naughty girl! I must insist—”
What was Mr. Benchley up to, I wondered? Curiosity was winning out over sleep.
“Just dreaming,” he replied to my swearing. “Time for my daily exercise!” he said, leaping out of the chair and beginning a series of jumping jacks, at which I just rolled my eyes and retreated once again under my tent. But, it was the peculiar hooting sounds that yanked me out from under the blanket yet again, and my perspective was thrown out of whack when I saw before my eyes a pair of size-ten Oxfords attached to brown Argyle hose below the buttoned cuffs of tweedy plus-eights that looked very familiar. The feet were dangling, tossing back and forth, and below them I saw that Mr. Benchley was no longer performing his Canadian Air Force deep-knee lunges. I looked up and there he was! Mr. Benchley was levitating—in a vertical position! My mind put things right just then, and I realized he was climbing a rope.
What was he doing climbing up a rope? Where had the rope come from?
I threw off the blanket and got out of the chair to see what he was hoping to achieve in this madcap adventure. Truth is, Mr. Benchley doesn’t usually engage in calisthenics—that is, he considers exercise a drain on his energy, and more than a short walk to the bar doesn’t suit him at all. I called out to him to inquire if he’d lost his mind, but the only response I got were a series of whoops and hoots. It was then that I realized that my friend was being carried off and over the side of the ship by a rope that had him swinging and flying in the air like a middle-aged Peter Pan. I followed the rope up and saw that it was attached to the arm of a winch, the kind used to unload cargo.
Mr. Benchley was trying to keep his hold on the rope and to haul his weight up the line. But the man who was once the boy who was belittled in gym class wasn’t succeeding. I started to scream.
The deck was deserted. It was the luncheon hour. A man jogging around the deck stopped, stood on a deckchair to grab at the rope, and crashed to the floor when the chair gave way. I continued to howl for help, and then a face peered over the rail above our deck. He disappeared for a time as I watched the rope suddenly descend to the water line; there was nothing else for me to do but scream some more.
Now my friend was being dragged in the violent beating of cut water like bait on a fishing line, his grip on the rope, tenuous. But it was the fast response of a crewman, whose attention was turned at the sound of the creaking winch, who finally came to the rescue, and with the help of several others managed to hoist Mr. Benchley back up out of the water and slowly into the air where he dangled before being gently set down on the deck above.
I raced to the staircase leading to the upper deck. There, a group of people were huddled over my friend. I managed to squeeze through, close enough to see a man placing a blanket over a dripping-wet, shivering Mr. Benchley, and encouraging him to drink from a flask. It was then that my friend passed out.
“Fred!” I cried. I collapsed at his side, and began slapping his face, and the gentleman checked Mr. Benchley’s pulse and then put his arms around my shoulders. My world was falling apart.
“Come, come, my dear, you’re shivering.”
“But, he isn’t—”
“He is just passed out, my dear. He will be all right.”
“Are you sure?” I growled, grabbing the man’s lapels, violently pulling him to me, face to face, and demanding the truth. I confronted brown eyes that bored into mine with an assured intensity.
“Yes, yes! He will be all right, believe me,” he answered and held me to his chest as I burst into tears. He handed me a handkerchief, and then turned me toward my reviving friend.
“It’s adding insult to injury, you slapping me like that, Mrs. Parker!”
“Oh, dear, precious Fred!” I said, collapsing on his chest, slobbering like a spanked child all over his shirt. And then seeing that he was all right, as the man with the brown eyes had assured me he would be, I lifted my head to scold: “What the hell were you playing at, you maniac!”
“I . . . was . . . .”
A little redheaded man in a trench coat and sporting a French beret and dark glasses passed by and looked at Mr. Benchley with inquiring eyes.
“You saw what happened, uhhh, Mr.—” I said, remembering I had seen him on the upper deck when I had called for help.
“Yes. I am Claude Dubois, Madame. Yes, I was walking along and heard a peculiar noise, and when I turned to look, I saw a rope with a big hook at the end descending to the deck below. I looked over the rail, and saw your friend rising up in the air. I called to a steward.”
“We didn’t lower that line!” shouted a crewman. “Why would we lower the line?”
“I didn’t know—”
The commotion brought more people to speculate on what had actually happened, along with Captain Fried and other members of his crew to assess the situation. Mr. Benchley was by this time sitting up in a deckchair, the ship’s doctor assessing for injuries after speaking with the gentleman who had first come to his assistance, a passenger who was himself a physician by the name of Dr. Hartley.
The ship’s physician said, “Better get him out of these wet clothes.”
“No! Don’t say that!” said Mr. Benchley.
“Say what?” The doctor, not understanding, repeated himself: “You need to get out of those wet clothes.”
“Yes, yes,” I said. “We’ll get him out of those wet clothes—”
“—and into a dry martini,” said Mr. Benchley, relenting and warily quoting himself.
“I never wrote that line, you know. Some other smart-aleck wrote it, but I am forced to repeat it whenever I’m caught in a rainstorm or dunked in an ocean . . . .”
“This can be sorted out later,” said the confused doctor.
“Come on, Fred; let’s go.”
I followed the entourage indoors as a shivering Mr. Benchley was assisted down to his cabin, babbling all the way about his experience becoming a new, exhilarating sport worthy of Polar Bear Clubs around the world. A steward ran a hot bath, which was my cue to return to my cabin to fetch Woodrow Wilson. Dr. Hartley and the ship’s physician left the cabin with me. I thanked them both, and as I turned toward my room, Dr. Hartley said, “Are you all right, Mrs. Parker?”
I realized that I was still quite traumatized by the scene I had witnessed, and a cold shiver ran down my spine upon acknowledging the fact. Had it not been for the actions of some very quick-thinking people, my friend might have been killed. I felt wobbly-legged, even though the ship was steady.
I pulled myself together, looked into the soft brown eyes and told the doctor that I was just fine and thanked him for his prompt response in attending to Mr. Benchley. We parted ways, in opposite
directions along the hall. Alone in my room, I looked at myself in the mirror and I could see why Dr. Hartley had expressed concern. I was a mess. My nose was red, cheeks blotchy; my hands were blue from cold and shaking. I threw off my coat and scarf, and belted back a tumbler of scotch. I combed my hair, washed the tear streaks from off my cheeks, and recovering, Woodrow and I walked down the hall to the dining room, where I spotted Hem and Mathew engaged in conversation and halfway through their meal.
The thought of sitting there chatting about poetry and writing and art didn’t appeal to me at the moment. I wanted to see to Mr. Benchley, and I needed another drink, so I hailed a waiter in passing and asked that three luncheon trays be sent to Mr. Benchley’s cabin.
Mr. Benchley buttoned up a wooly cardigan and sat down in an easy chair. Lunch arrived and we sat quietly for a while, eating, Woodrow at my feet contentedly licking off the remains of his Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes from his plate. As Mr. Benchley drank his hot consommé, I finally asked how he found himself dangling over the ship’s side.
“Well, you know I was doing my jumping jacks.”
“Yes,”
“And then I did a series of eight deep-knee bends—”
“All right.”
“After that, I began the pushups—I only did twenty-five of them because the ship was rolling.”
“Yes, all right, for God’s sake: How’d you get caught by the rope?”
“Well, after ten toe-touches—you can’t bend your knees, you know, or it doesn’t count—I like to do a few pull-ups, or try to, that is, so I grabbed onto one of the horizontal lines securing a lifeboat, and when I came down from—I think it was the seventh one—well, I felt a drag, a pull on my elbow. I saw the rope, and I said to myself, ‘By golly, you’ve been lassoed!’ And I wondered if Will Rogers was aboard ship, showing off the way he always shows off, the big ham, with his rope tricks, and then before I knew it I was hoisted into the air.”
“You weren’t caught in a lasso.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“A winch hook caught your arm.”
“But how could that be?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“Why not ask the fellow who was watching.”
“Watching? There was nobody there. I didn’t see anybody!”
“Well, there was this fellow—beret, dark glasses—and then—well, then I got trussed up like a Christmas goose. That’s all I recall,” he said, pouring more scotch into our glasses, “except the part where I was waterskiing on my ass in subfreezing waters. Not a pleasant sport, I can tell you,” he said, belting back the liquor in one gulp and then sitting back exhausted in the club chair. “Freak accident! But, I won’t let a little thing like shark baiting ruin this trip.”
Although his face was flushed from the effects of the hot bath after the dunk in the icy sea, my friend seemed rejuvenated, as is often the case when one escapes imminent death.
“Anyway, I’m ready to take away all your pennies at cards this afternoon, my dear.”
We were joined for card games by Hem and Mathew and then Saul Gold strolled in looking for a game. He took a seat next to me, and Mr. Benchley dealt the first round of cards. Mathew won the first hand and Saul the second. After a couple of hours we stopped for cups of “fortified” tea and a leg stretch. I was down six dollars, Hem had won the last three pots, and Mathew was looking rather green from his loss of two-twenty-five. Mr. Benchley was fifty cents in the hole. Soledad hadn’t showed up for the game.
“I believe that old boy is wiping the floor with those men,” said Mr. Benchley, looking over in the direction of another card game going on a few tables away. I turned to see four men deep in concentration over their cards, and recognized the elderly gentleman I had seen assisting the Russian Duchess into the dining room at breakfast time. His place at the table was piled high with chips. Just then, cards were folded, others revealed, and the old fellow swept in the stacks of chips from the center of the table toward his already-towering pile. I could see they were playing for high stakes, and it appeared that the other gentlemen were not taking their losses well; one man shot up out of his chair, and, by the look on his face, I feared he might decide to walk out on deck and jump into the ocean to end it all. From where we were watching it appeared the game was over, but Major Arbuthnot just sat there with his winnings as two of the three remaining and defeated men grudgingly stormed out of the room. The remaining man, a bald fellow who reminded me of our friend, Jimmy Durante (without Jimmy’s comical smile, but due to his bulbous nose and stuck-out ears), leaned back in his chair, chuckled, and wagged a finger at the Major, before he got up casually, and with no hurry left the room. The Major signaled to a steward to help gather his chips onto a tray.
I hadn’t noticed him before, but as I watched the two losers leave the room, the red-haired man who had witnessed my friend’s aerial act this morning caught my attention when he abruptly popped up from his chair at a table where he had been playing a hand of gin with a party of two other players. He made fast apologies and hurriedly quit the room.
“Turgenev,” said Hem, pulling my attention back to our game as he shuffled the cards to deal. “I started with Turgenev. Sylvia Beach—she’s the woman who owns this wonderful bookstore, Shakespeare and Company—well, she let me borrow books on credit when I was strapped for cash. She lent me the Turgenev books and stories. He is a fine writer.”
Hem was now engaged in the education of Mathew.
“I haven’t read any Turgenev, but I like Dostoyevsky,” said Mathew.
“I liked Crime and Punishment, but I couldn’t finish The Brothers Karamazov. Maybe someday, I’ll go back and read it,” said Hem. “It was probably me. Something about me that made it hard to read, because I liked the other book. Chekov, you read Chekov?”
“Yes.”
“Like him?”
“Chekov? Yes.”
“Chekov’s stories have the depth of a fine burgundy, and the clarity of spring water, though some of his stories sound like journalism. Some of the best writers start there, I suppose. If you want to write a book, start with clarity. That’s the ticket. Find what is true. Why, I sometimes spend a whole day trying to write a true sentence.”
Now, let me start by saying that I really like Hem. He is a most attractive and charismatic man who is quite charming and agreeable to spend time with. I really like the short stories he’s had published, and I am assured by friends who know Max Perkins over at Scribner’s that my friend Scott Fitzgerald was not mistaken in recommending they take on Hem’s new book, The Sun Also Rises, for publication. But over the past few weeks of our acquaintance, I have heard him spout out some rather pretentious crap. Chalk it up to youth. He is only twenty-five years old. The idea that one sentence could be truer than another strikes me as preposterous.
“Are you saying,” I asked him last week when we stopped in for drinks at Tony Soma’s, “true to the character, when engaged in dialogue?”
“Not only then.”
“When else?”
“The sky is blue. That is a true sentence.”
“But it is not true,” I countered, “if it is a rainy day and the sky is gray.”
“Then it is gray, and that is true. It is when the writer lies, as most do, that the work becomes muddied.”
“What do you mean lie? How does one write lies? When one writes a novel that is fiction, the whole damn thing’s a lie.”
“But, is it true?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Is the lie stripped down to reveal a truth?”
“It makes a point; I try to show the real point of what is really being said under the guise of polite social conversation. The subtext.”
“All right, what is really being said, then, is quite simple. And that is the truth.”
“What do you mean, stripped?”
“Contrived. The similes, the adjectives. Cut them out of your prose.”
“How do
you express what a character is feeling, what the atmosphere is like?”
“Once I wrote a long paragraph describing how the rain fell over the city. That was how they used to write—the Henry Jameses, the Zolas—but I learned that what I wrote was not true. They were my lies. The only truth is: It was raining. Forget the adjectives. The less said the better.”
“Are you suggesting that one should ignore how actions affect emotions, the state of mind and the quality of the setting?”
“Use the simple words like good, true, fine, real, nice, cold, warm.”
“Four-letter words, Hem.”
“So they are,” he laughed. You don’t need more than those words to describe anything, really.”
Some time later, after his book, Sun, was finally published, I noted additional four-letter words repeated in his standard vocabulary: kill, hunt, fish, bull, and shit—and a couple of others that Max Perkins insisted be purged off the printed pages and substituted for with a benign series of hyphens.
I thought of Fitzgerald, and how his style was so different from Hemingway’s, about how his prose was filled with heartbreakingly visual imagery, his characters alive with color. Still, I thought I might learn from Hem.
“Tennyson, anyone?” cut in Mr. Benchley.
But before anyone could respond, a steward interrupted and handed Mr. Benchley a note.
“Oh, good, they’ve found my mandolin. There will be music.”
“Alleluia,” I said.
“It’s been put in my room.”
“Amen.”
We played another hour, Mathew recouping his losses with a nickel profit, Hem handing over his earlier winnings to Saul Gold, who’d also taken Mr. Benchley’s short-lived profit of four-fifty but then lost it all in one grand but obvious bluff to me, the winner of the afternoon, walking away with the grand total of nine-dollars-and-fifty-five cents!
“Drinks, my cabin before dinner,” I said, as we left the card room. I went to fetch Woodrow so we could both stretch our legs in a walk around the deck. When we went outside, the sun had already set and a full moon had risen brightly in the cobalt sky. I spotted Soledad leaning against the rail, wrapped in luxurious mink, her head swathed in a pale-blue chiffon scarf, its ends floating on the breeze like ethereal apparitions. And by her side was the Dr. Hartley of the soft brown eyes, who had comforted me after Mr. Benchley’s high-wire escapade. They were deep in discussion, standing quite close, and I didn’t want to interrupt what might be the beginnings of a shipboard romance, so I turned to walk in the opposite direction. Woodrow would have none of it. Whenever he spied people he knew, there was a chance that they would bend to pet him, murmuring words of admiration. Woodrow was a very social creature, full of tricks and clever antics.He resisted my pull on the leash, so I lifted him up into my arms. Before getting very far, however, Soledad spotted us and beckoned us to join her.
[Dorothy Parker 05] - A Moveable Feast of Murder Page 5