“Just as it’s been proved that two dissimilar stocks produce the best offspring, so being reared by a third is very likely an added advantage,” Hubert put in. Cornelia sat smoothing out a pleat in her skirt with her palm. “Well, let’s go see the picture then. You’ll excuse us.”
When they were gone, Cornelia said:
“What did you do that for?”
“Augie’s name must under no circumstances come into this,” I emphasized, pointing the coal of my cigar at her. “As you know, he’s trying to negotiate an adoption,”
She gave a nervous laugh, ducking her head.
“They mistook me for him. That’s all right. That’s fine. I have nothing to lose, and I’m glad to do this for Augie. Just as Augie’s glad to do this for you.” I drew the money out of my pocket and went over and set it on the table beside her. She looked at it without taking it.
“But I don’t want anything from him. I’ll take care of this myself,” she said.
“It’s a thousand dollars. It should see you through. If it doesn’t, get in touch with me—not him. He must be given a wide berth, now and forever. Is that clear?” I said in firm tones.
“You’re very sweet.”
I smoked the cigar till I was nauseated, which point was reached when the band which I had left on it caught fire, then I dropped it into an ashtray.
“It’s your money. I’ll bet it is—isn’t it?” she said. “Augie hasn’t got it to spare.”
“It’s his—every mortal penny, and I won’t go into what it’s cost him here, in terms of his career.”
I watched her a moment as she sat with her head bent, smoothing out her skirt, which was flat as a table-top. Overshadowed by her brothers indeed. Was she one of those who must always distinguish themselves heretically—sue clients for defacing her work with the normal number of eyes, get pregnant as a spinster, smoke cigars?
I rose and stood over her again. I spoke quietly and deliberately.
“Some day, mark my word, you’re going to meet a nice fellow and fall in love. You’ll want to marry and settle down. Have a home life and children,” I went steadily on. “But that’ll be out forever if you already have one. Don’t be a miss mother.” I let this sink in. “So do the right thing, by this one as well as by yourself. I mean make it possible for it to have two parents instead of one. Well, now, if you want this—I mean if you want this child to have two parents instead of just one, and yourself to be a wife as well as a mother—now get this because it’s important—there’s a wonderful place in New Haven called Rock-a-Bye. That’s where you should go. I recommend it highly. It’s a first-rate place, which you can rest assured is very particular about who they give babies to. They turned Augie down, and so that’s why it’s absolutely essential that this is the one place you go and nowhere else so that—are you listening?” The head bobbed. “So that Augie won’t end up adopting his own child.”
I followed her responses sharply, ready in case she said anything unreasonable or was in any way emotional or illogical, in which event I would say, “Women! How much easier it is to chase them than to follow them.” But I was given no grievance on that head, which irked me to some extent, as I had gone to a great deal of trouble preparing for this interview. Cornelia was the soul of compliance, repeating “Rock-a-Bye” after me as I asked, to make sure it was firmly printed on her mind. And when the brothers came clomping back it was with the same enlightened bonhommie and badinage and broad-minded tolerance as when they had left. I stood ready and waiting for them with my back to the fireplace, now gone cold, holding the snifter in one hand and the retrieved and rekindled cigar in the other, with a forbidding expression. It was the look of a man accustomed to buying his way out of every scrape. Instead of bristling, they “quite saw my situation,” that it was “just one of those things,” and regarded the thousand dollars, left visible on the table and explained by Cornelia, as damned handsome of me—better than lots of chaps would have done considering the trouble was mostly Cornelia’s carelessness and unfortunately ill-timed impulse.
As I went out the door, taking my leave about eleven o’clock, gluttonous for the night air after all those brandies, the cleric called, “Come drop in at my church sometime.” The invitation did not pass off without a rejoinder.
“Oh, don’t let him do that,” Carveth chaffered as I picked my way down the stairs to the sidewalk. “The poor chap might lose his faith.”
Eleven
“WHAT happened? How did you make out? What did she say?”
Augie’s questions tumbled out.
“Women are like lobsters,” I said. “The tenderest meat is in the claws.”
“What’s the matter, are you stewed?” he asked, raising his voice into the transmitter, for I was reporting to him by phone from a tavern booth later that night. “How was she?”
“Having a mind of one’s own doesn’t necessarily imply having any mind as such,” I felt constrained delicately to lay before him. What a hoodwinker Sex was! C.B. indeed!
“But what happened? The coast is clear for a minute so I can talk—but hurry.”
I told him. I explained that it had gone quite well on the whole and that everything looked to be under control. There was nothing to worry about that I could see, barring the unexpected. Accounting from a phone booth wasn’t very satisfactory, but I had wanted to reassure him. I told him I’d give him a full report the next day.
The excitement of the evening in general conspired to murder sleep, or at least inflict serious injuries on it, in my case, and hours later I was still wide awake. I thought of the days when I had nothing to worry about but a rat in the wall. Would that time come again? Don’t lie here revolving on a spit, I told myself—sleep.
I remembered something I’ve heard from time to time all my life, namely that the last thought we think before we go to sleep is important because it is amalgamated into the subconscious. I’d read it recently in a magazine and a short time later heard an inspirational counselor on television, expounding it, say, “Dwell on some worth-while or uplifting thought as you drop off. Maybe just a line of poetry. I once lulled myself to sleep with the phrase, ‘the darling buds of May.’ The sheer beauty of a line like that, taken over the brink with us, can’t help permeating us with its moral or aesthetic merit.”
While lying in bed, waiting to fall into the arms of Morpheus (or into his hands, rather, as I prefer to think of it, and as you would, too, if you had some of my dreams) I remembered the counselor’s suggestion and acted on it. Composing myself between the sheets, I set my mind to the task of selecting something to dwell on. I fetched up with several possibilities, famous sayings and fragments of poetry and one thing and another, but discarded them all for various reasons—not suited to meditation, too flippant, etc. Among them was “Say not the struggle nought availeth,” which I felt to be rousing rather than mesmeric in its effect. A capital thought to get up with, say, and face the new day. For some reason, I recalled Samuel Johnson’s “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and also that it was he who first said Hell was paved with good intentions. Neither of these seemed quite right for the purpose at hand; one did not want anything “trenchant.” I could see that this method was not as easy as it sounded. Then suddenly there swam into my mind a line of poetry that I found as felicitous as the TV counselor apparently had the fragment from Shakespeare. It was from a poem by Dylan Thomas that I’d heard someone read aloud at a party the week before: “Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house.”
I dwelt on that awhile. The cadence of the words and the gentle profundity of the mood they evoked utterly charmed and, gradually, soothed me. An excellent idea, this. I would make a regular practice of it, taking a thought or a line a night and immersing myself in it, giving myself over to its overtones. How much better than indulging in some flabby reverie full of woolgathering and wish-fulfillment. I reiterated the line hypnotically to myself: “Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house . . .” Just as I was gett
ing pleasantly drowsy, I sensed something nagging the back of my mind; something about the line. I didn’t know what it meant.
I lay with my hands laced under my head, looking up at the ceiling. Did the poet mean to convey the idea of religious experience in middle age under nocturnal conditions? Or was the owl designed to suggest a pagan element (as the bird traditionally linked with Minerva) rather than mere physical nightfall? Or was a note more funereal than either of these intended to be struck? Was the symbolism all private and obscure? After maybe half an hour of this, I glanced at the dresser clock, which was not obscure, being phosphorescent. It said a quarter after two. (I hadn’t gone to bed till one-thirty.) This was a hell of an hour to get into textual criticism.
I lit a cigarette from a pack on my nightstand and, propped on one elbow, lay on my side smoking. Was the trouble that the line was torn from its context? Maybe if I had the entire poem, or a stanza from it, it would help, provided it did not open exegetical vistas that would keep me till dawn. I mentally ran over the poetry collections in my library, without being able to think of one that was likely to contain any Thomas. Nor could I remember a word more of the poem as the man had read it at the party, or even what it was about.
My arm felt strained and I straightened to a sitting position. Perched tailorwise on the bed, I myself stared like an owl into the gloom. I was stark awake now. Tailorwise by owl-light in the half-awake house. “The hideous clarity of insomnia.” Who said that? Wasn’t it Chesterton? Know any more Chesterton? No. How about Chesterfield? “The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.” Not a very edifying thought, nor one the TV counselor would have been likely to sanction. Turning my back on the deep waters into which I had permitted myself to be lured, and fixing my mind firmly on the names of Longfellow, Whittier and Holmes, as on the lights along the shore, I made for the havens of corn. “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul.” I should have picked that. Or better yet, “Tell me not in mournful numbers life is but an empty dream.” Yes, that was the ticket. I would switch to that.
As I mentally intoned my substitute selection, however, curious and persistent alterations kept creeping into it—“Tell me not in mournful owl-light life is but a half-baked dream,” and so on. There was no getting ashore; like a firm undertow my original selection drew me back. A question of sportsmanship, the pluck to see a thing through, came into it too. “Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house.” How could a line so analgesic to the ear be so exacerbating to the intellect? “Not by eastern windows only, when daylight enters, comes the light,” would soon cover the situation.
I threw back the quilts and groped my way into the hall. Snapping on a light, I squatted before a bookcase there and ran my eye along the volumes on a lower shelf. Through the open bedroom doorway I could hear my wife stir.
“Whah you doing?” she mumbled.
“Looking for a book.”
“Can’t sleep?”
“No. Do you know where that anthology of criticism is I bought last week? You know, the one with the section on modern poetry.”
“Oh, I dah noh. . . .” Her words trailed indistinguishably off.
“Look, are you awake? You heard Fred Hume read that poem of Dylan Thomas’s. What does this line mean to you? ‘Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house.’”
“O my God you raven bow this sour a night?” she said, and turned over with a violent groan of the bedspring. “Stew o’clock.”
I found the book and took it to bed with me. Tilting the shade of the lamp on my nightstand so the light wouldn’t bother my wife, I burrowed down in the chapter I wanted. It had, as I’d recalled from having flipped through the volume when I bought it, several pages on Dylan Thomas.
“The Welsh bard’s rich kaleidoscope of images projects a highly personalized, memory-charged idiom,” I read, “through which is restored the virginity of the lyric impulse. . . .” There were a number of passages quoted from his poetry—none, however, containing the line in question.
But the reference work turned out to serve its purpose nevertheless. A page or two of “the cistern of Self” and “perpendicularity as distinguished from horizontality of feeling fund,” and I felt my eyes grow heavy. I laid the volume aside and put out the light, the raveled sleeve of sleep already half knit up. Drowsily wadding my pillow under my head, I remembered something Disraeli had once said, to the effect that he didn’t know to which he was the more grateful—the books that kept him awake or those that put him to sleep.
And with that thought I drifted off into the Land of Nod.
I awoke from a dream in which I was to get a medal provided I could endure having it pinned on my skin. Didn’t make it. Looked over to my wife’s bed. Sprawled out on her side with one leg arched up, her thigh exposed under a rumpled blue silk nightgown. A beautiful sleeper, quiet as a Cadillac. I reached a leg across the aisle between us and prodded her with a toe. She twitched awake and smiled.
“I suppose you expect me to marry you now,” I said. She yawned and stretched voluptuously, curling her fists over her shoulders. “Well, don’t get any ideas, Liebchen. I prefer things strictly à la carte.”
“So do I. I don’t plan to spend my life washing a man’s shirts and bearing his children,” said my wife, who occasionally fell in with my rigmaroles when she had the time.
“Can you bear children?” I said, sizing her up.
“I can bear children all right. It’s men I can’t bear.”
I went into the bathroom to wash. She meant well, but she didn’t know how to hold her end up in a rigmarole—always said things that were out of character.
I made breakfast, as I frequently do. I brewed coffee and squeezed oranges. As Audrey and I were sitting at the breakfast table, each sipping his coffee and with his separate ruminations, the children began to troop in. First little Phoebe, naked except for a tweed vest; an old salt-and-pepper affair of mine. The implication that she had slept in it was one that I did not care to explore.
Maude said when she came in: “Tell us that joke about Mrs. Obenhaus.”
“We mustn’t make fun of people’s names,” I said. “After all, we know the Obenhauses.”
The thing was that last night’s mood curiously persisted, and I found it difficult to throw myself into the family japes. I could not shake myself free of the role. These poor children, did they dream their father was a viper? How would they take it when one of his numerous scandals broke at last, making his double life front-page knowledge? Would they forgive him in later years?
“Go on,” Maude persisted. “We never tell any of these jokes outside the house.”
“Oh, all right. Why, we’re going to visit the Obenhauses to-night. They’ve been married ten years and are having Obenhaus,” I said, unwillingly. “Is that what you mean?”
Ralph said: “What’s a father vexation?”
I looked accusingly at my wife. “I thought we were going to restrict them to kids’ programs—no television after dinner. It’s bad enough having to explain what a jeopardy sheriff is, but at least Westerns are boys’ speed.”
“We heard this on a Western,” Ralph said. “The bad guy in it had a father vexation.”
“Somebody on a dude ranch? For heaven’s sake?”
“No, regular out West. He kept holding up the Wells Fargo over and over because he had a father vexation. What is that? There’s father vexations and mother vexations I know.”
“Just what it sounds like,” I explained. “His father vexed him when he was a child, that means got under his skin. Can you understand that?”
“I think I can,” Ralph said, giving me a thoughtful look, and returned to his cereal.
I felt more and more isolated from all this; not part of a family picture at all, but separate from it, a stranger to it even, whose sins might be visited upon his children unto the third and fourth generation. I saw it all: the lawyers filing at last into the house, the youngsters being spirited from the vicinit
y of disgrace, my wife exclaiming, “How could you?” as she paced behind drawn blinds. The scene was so vivid to me that I shuddered and shook my head, as if to shed it from my mind’s eye.
“What’s the matter with you?” my wife asked, watching me across the breakfast table.
“Nothing. I’ll be all right.”
The illusion was not lifted—nor the sense of apprehension dispelled—by a couple of the children coming over, as they presently did, and tousling their Pa. That these scenarios were premonitory was revealed in the course of the next week, several days which preceded the descent of Mrs. Mash, but followed certain events out of which was being brewed, unsuspected, a little hellbroth of my own.
Twelve
AMONG the Saturday and Sunday spring and summer suburban nights, germinal to these follies, in which I have tried to show Augie as going from strength to strength, was an occurrence more directly relating to myself, whose role was not always a spectatorial one. It arose out of that old pain in the ischial protuberance that the self-designated peers of the Age of Foible gave me, in particular with that fancy categorical singular, “the artist,” which they were forever using on themselves. I decided not to let that one pass the next time it came round.
It came round next in the course of a barbecue, on the beach at Avalon, on a night now so lost among the moral dog days of that summer that I would be put to it to fix it chronologically amid the lawn parties and fist fights that also helped form its social tapestry, except that my wife was at her mother’s in Pennsylvania at the time, with the children, on what was supposed to be a last holiday before school started. So it was probably the end of August. I was giving a light to a matchless blonde, not to put too fine a point on it, when someone remarked, “Of course the artist is at odds with the culture of his time.”
The Tunnel of Love Page 12