The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  But after all that trouble, Cathlin did not get an opportunity to demonstrate her knowledge of “Danny Boy” when she accompanied her instructor back to his apartment after class. For the first hour or so, I. remained I. and did not become Ah, and sang no songs, because there was something important he wanted to discuss. “Your latest chapter,” he said. “Chapter seven. As I attempted to point out in my note, you are getting lost in your flashbacks. This may be a result of what I’ve warned you about: the mistake of making your heroine, Cathlin, yourself. Cathlin is too obviously nostalgic for her County Derry, and she is carried away with all these lyrical descriptions of her native countryside and the people and their way of life and all.”

  I. went on, making his perhaps valid point that the narrative pace of the story was considerably slowed and hampered by Cathlin’s abandoning herself to romantic longings for the somewhat idealized highlands of the Foyle Valley. As you listened, divorcing yourself for minutes from your Doppelgänger, you realized that everything he was saying about Cathlin’s being lost in her highlands applied painfully to your own feelings about Svanetia, and you were overcome with such a terrible homesickness that your tears could not be concealed as they rolled down from beneath your opaque spectacles. I. laid a hand on your arm and said, “I know how you feel, believe me. Sometimes I’m so eager to see the Bodarks again that I’d sell my soul to the devil for just a glimpse of them. But I have to struggle not to let that yearning contaminate my writing. Here, let me freshen our drinks.”

  It was almost welcome to watch I. becoming Ah, and Cathlin began to hope he’d sing “Danny Boy” so she could tell him the missing words to the other stanzas, wherein Danny’s sweetheart, left behind to die, tells him what it’s going to be like for him when he returns and finds her dead. But Ah, despite tossing back several that he no longer diluted with branch, remained sober enough to say, “I’ve got a theory. Many of the people who first settled the Bodarks in the first half of the nineteenth century were descendants of those Scotch-Irish you write about. I’ve never seen the Ulster highlands myself—the closest I got was a visit to Yeats’s Sligo—but from your description of them I think there must have been something in the genetic memory of the Bodark settlers that made them seek out a countryside that looked exactly like your County Derry.”

  Cathlin waited, and she wrote nothing in response. She had not got out her pink cards once so far this night. She had thought a lot, with your help, about his upcoming invitation, and she knew, more or less, what she would have to write when it came.

  “Is it true,” he asked, “that if you went back home you’d be arrested?”

  And without lying at all, you were able to nod Cathlin’s head.

  “So you’ll never be able to see your home country again? That’s terrible. Here, let me freshen our drinks.” Although he never touched the stuff himself, Ah had acquired a bottle of Glenlivet unblended Scotch for Cathlin’s benefit. “I have an idea,” he said, pouring her fourth drink, and he proceeded to explain to her what bow was, an organization of amateur free-lance poetesses and poetasteresses and a few fair writers who actually sold something to the Sunday supplements, and then he told Cathlin that he had been invited to address their annual convention in April, and he “wondered” if “there was any chance” that Cathlin’s doctors might not have apoplexy if she were to accompany him for a few days to that “enchanted land of glens and dells and gentle peaks.”

  Ah got so carried away in his description of it that she wanted to caution him against “too obvious nostalgia,” but she only wrote, These Bodarks. Are they in North Carolina?

  He read it, puzzled momentarily, but then he seemed to remember her “obituary” and said, “No. That’s the Appalachian Mountains, south of here. The Bodarks are a sort of range of Appalachians misplaced westward”—he gestured—“out in the heart of the country.”

  You thought he said—or maybe it was his tipsy mispronunciation—“apparitions.” You wrote, I would like to see the Apparition Mountains.

  “Would your doctors let you go for a few days?”

  You wrote, They cannot cure me. They have given up. And in sympathy for poor Cathlin’s hopeless condition, you shed a few more honest tears.

  He did not have any Kleenex. He got you a paper towel. He said, “I’m sorry. But are you okay to travel?”

  You dried your eyes (careful not to dislodge the sunglasses) and wrote, I could not share a room with you.

  Ah wanted clarification. “You mean a room, period, or a bed?”

  You and Cathlin had given this much thought and discussion between yourselves, and had considered the possibilities. Did he intend to drive his Blazer to the Bodarks? How far was it? Would you not have to stop at motels overnight en route? And this Halfmoon Hotel, would they frown upon your presence? Also—and this was the biggest hitch—making the trip would mean that he would see Cathlin, often, in broad daylight. Thus far, he had only seen her at night, in dim illumination. Wouldn’t he perhaps recognize you in the strong glare of sunlight? And one of the reasons (there were several) why you could not share a room with him was that you couldn’t sleep in your red wig with your sunglasses on. For bed, you’d have to remove all your disguise.

  You took the last card you’d written and wrote additionally upon it, Room, period. Bed, whatever. We could not be pals.

  “But aren’t we already pals? How could we spend all that time together without becoming better pals?”

  Not sleeping pals, you wrote.

  “Well, thanks anyway,” Ah said, and dropped the subject. He did not take it up again. You and Cathlin both began to wonder if he had simply abandoned the invitation. He proceeded, as usual, to become very drunk, but when he began singing, it wasn’t “Danny Boy.” It was something truly operatic but waltzlike that went:

  “Ah! sweet mystery of life, at last Ah’ve found thee!

  Ah! Ah know at last the secret of it all!

  All the longing, seeking, striving, waiting, yearning:

  The burning hopes, the joy and idle tears that fall!”

  You thought, for a while, that the “Ah” he was addressing was himself, and you thought it a conceited song, though it had its tender sentiments. Cathlin hoped it wasn’t a North Irish song that would require more library research. It was, in fact, Irish of sorts, or rather the composer was Irish in origin, one Victor Herbert, who, Ah explained, had been an American master of light opera, or operetta, and had, coincidentally, spent much of his life in this city, as director of the burgh’s symphony orchestra.

  “He wash a drunk, too,” Ah said. “Like Stephen Foster, only worsh. Do you know, as soon as Ah knew Ah was coming to this town, Ah started thinking of Foster and Herbert, and that melody started helplessly playing itshelf over and over again in my head: Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last Ah’ve found thee! Does that ever happen to you? I mean, do you ever get some tune stuck in your head and can’t get it out? Stop looking so spooked. I don’t know the secret of it all. I haven’t found any sweet mysteries of life. I never shall.”

  Chapter twenty-four

  That April was not the cruelest month you’d ever known, but it ran a close second or third. The mansion began to go to hell. You couldn’t help thinking of the Poe story: This was “Fall of the House of Elmore.” Poor Kenny couldn’t cope with the heavier responsibilities of superintending the place: He could fix plumbing, but trying to fix the electrical problems that were developing was too much for him. He almost electrocuted himself, and you fussed at his mother and demanded to know why she didn’t hire a professional electrician. “Why are you out to take up for the brat?” she retorted with a supercilious glance that was your first indication she had an inkling of where Kenny was spending his nights.

  On one of the rare nights when Kenny stayed in his own room because his parents weren’t sufficiently bombed for him to sneak out and up to yours, you were lonely, and Lawren visited you. He actually, confound him, materialized, and you knew you’d had too much vodka
but not that much. He actually spoke to you, as a Svanetian lanchal would have done (he even spoke Svanetian, your first experience of another talent we ghosts have). He told you you’d better think about getting out of here. He told you the house’s days were numbered. He said, “If you don’t believe me, watch this.” And he caused one of the tall mirrors to detach itself from the wall and crash to the floor.

  Elsewhere in the mansion, including next door in the rooms of Professors Ah and Koeppe, mirrors crashed to the floor. The spring’s first thunderstorm began, with much dramatic lightning, although it was only like fireflies compared with a real Svanetian lirkunal. It woke everybody and petrified them, and gave them an explanation for all the falling mirrors, but you knew that the mirrors had fallen before the thunder crashed.

  Sometimes your little radio came on by itself, without your having consciously turned it on. It was always WQED, but that station had invariably played good “longhair,” as Kenny called it, and this hair was rather short and curly: Stephen Collins Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer,” “Old Folks at Home,” and “Swanee River.” Victor Herbert’s “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life,” as performed by both Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. And, over and over again, night after night, “Danny Boy,” as sung by Colleen MacNamara. The question of Ah’s you’d never answered, “Do you ever get some tune stuck in your head and can’t get it out?” (of course you did; everybody does), began to take on new meaning, only this wasn’t stuck in your head, it was stuck in your radio, and if you turned your radio off, it would turn itself back on. You thought of complaining to Kenny, but he’d get himself electrocuted taking your radio apart.

  Ah never brought up the subject of the trip to the Bodarks again, so after a while you went to him and asked him (writing it on a card) if Cathlin had agreed to go with him. He was already so drunk that he held your card upside down and stared at it for a long time before righting it and responding to it. Then, half-incoherently, he delivered himself of a tirade against Cathlin. She was a “maybe talented” writer, he said, but she was a goofball, a clown, a “daffy damshel.”

  But why won’t she go with you?

  “She’sh just too dumb to ‘chosh’.”

  Bur you told me she’s been sleeping with you here.

  “I lied.”

  Toward the end of the term, you began to cut several of your morning classes, preferring to stay in murphybed. You examined your motives and decided that since you were only a “temporary” and would be out of work in another week or so, and since the students appeared free to cut classes whenever they wished (and they often wished), you might as well. Len Dalrymple called you in for what was to be your last visit with him, and not a pleasant one. He had been watching you, he said. Did you know they had considered extending your appointment? Bill Turner would be taking over mycology again, but they had thought of finding “some use” for you. Now, however…You seemed to be indifferent to your work, and you weren’t doing any research at all, were you? So it would be difficult to recommend you for continuance. What were your plans for the future?

  WQED was playing in your head, and you were strongly tempted to sing to Dalrymple, “Oh, Lenny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling…,” but you said, “I’m doing a research project in the Bodark Mountains.” How interesting, he remarked. Phallales? Geastra? Everything, you said, and Len Dalrymple said, Well, he hoped you’d show up for your final examinations. And you cleaned out your office, everything except your “costume.”

  Ah came to your room that night, not yet drunk or, rather, still sober enough to declare, “I never wanted to ask Cathlin to go with me, anyway. I just did it because you suggested it. You said that if she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, you would consider it. Have you?”

  You had, but you wanted his sober answer to a question, Why do you prefer me?

  “Because…” He had to give it some thought. “Because you’re much smarter, and nicer, and more attractive. You’ve got everything she hasn’t. The only thing she’s got is a perfect nose, but it’s not a bit better than your nose.”

  You smiled and resisted the impulse to feel your nose. You did, however, feel your hair, which was now long enough that you did not need to cover it with the scarf when you were at home. She has such beautiful red hair, you wrote.

  “How would you know? Have you seen her?”

  Yes, once when you were bringing her here, I saw her.

  “Every time I’ve brought her here, I’ve pounded on your door so I could introduce the two of you. You’ve never been here.” You were slow to think of something to write in response to that, and he, looking around the room to emphasize “here,” let his eye fall upon something you’d forgotten to hide. He spotted it on the small table beside your murphybed, and grabbed it, and waved it at you. “Where did you get this?”

  It was the paperback of Pale Fire that he had loaned to Cathlin. Was the jig, as they say, up? Had the time come to confess, to reveal the masquerade? If so, then all was lost, because it was Cathlin who really needed him, not you. It was Cathlin who wanted his help for the writing of Geordie Lad, Cathlin who would love to visit the Bodarks and perhaps even meet some of her McWalter kinfolk, Cathlin who could, if given time, possibly persuade herself to share his bed. There was no way on earth that the Bodarks could be found to resemble Svanetia, but they probably did look much like County Derry.

  All right, I., I will tell you, you wrote, stalling for time to think something up. Cathlin was here. After you invited her but changed your mind because she told you she couldn’t share your murphybed, she came to see me, to tell me that she thought it was I who should go with you. We argued much about it. I insisted I could not go with you. She felt I should. She showed me that book. She said I must read it, to see how much I am like Kinbote: he was the exiled king of Zembla, I am an exiled princess of Svanetia.

  You handed him that card to read while you grabbed a fresh card and continued, So I read it, and yes, perhaps I am like Kinbote, his story is mine, and there is even a Gradus on my trail, but I insisted to Cathlin, because I had read her “obituary,” that it is she who must go with you to the Bodarks, not alone because of the fantasies of the Halfmoon or Moonbeam and of the Indians and all that, but because she needs your help in order to become a published writer. You must help her.

  You gave him that card also and took yet another one, a third one. And it is she who can help you more than I, if you will but give her the opportunity, and if you are patient with her. She explained to me about her photodysphoria and her hebephilia. The former can never be cured, and she must always wear those dark glasses, and you will never see her eyes. But the latter, someday, she hopes, you will help her heal.

  He read each of the three cards, more than once. Then his only response was a question, “Are you really a princess of Svanetia?” You nodded your head. He stared at you, got up, and helped himself to your bourbon, County Fair, which Knox Ogden used to drink when he came to your room. And, like Knox, he began to address you formally: “So Your Highness cannot go with me?” You shook your head. “Because Your Highness is royal, or because there’s something else wrong with you?”

  In Svanetia, you wrote, they are saving me for the wedding night. If I slept with you, the men of Svanetia, all the warriors of Lisedi—and they are fierce and terrible—would track you to the ends of the earth and destroy you.

  Later that same night, Ah enticed Loretta Elmore into his room, without any difficulty, and got her as drunk as he was, without any difficulty, and took her to bed, with some but not much difficulty, which is where Kenny, with his key, leaving your bed to investigate the strange noises coming from the next room, found them. Kenny took one look and retreated without being seen, and told you, “The old fart is fucking my mom!” He didn’t like it one bit, but you persuaded him, with some difficulty, to return to your bed, for what would be, as it turned out, the last time you ever slept with him…or tried to sleep; the radio blared Colleen’s “Danny Boy,” and then there was another
horrendous thunderstorm that actually approximated a Svanetian lirkunal and could be blamed for all of the other mirrors of the mansion crashing down.

  The next day, the next evening, the police arrested Kenny in the act of removing the wheel coverings from a Lincoln parked on Forbes Avenue, and they obtained a search warrant for his room, where they found a considerable collection of similar stolen articles.

  After his parents posted his bond and removed him from jail, he, in retaliation against his mother’s scolding (“You’re not going to sneak out of the house any more nights, buddy boy”), told them that he had not been sneaking out of the house, but up to your room, where you had taught him how to fuck.

  Loretta came to you and said, “I want you out of this house tonight, Evie. And don’t forget to give me back my jewelry and clothes and stuff, especially that coat.”

  Chapter twenty-five

  In Svanetia, April 23 is always observed as Saint George’s Day, and Svanetians worship the dragon slayer almost on an equal footing with Christ. Indeed, Saint George takes third place in the holy Trinity of the Svanetian church. Since the day before, April 22, was observed throughout the Soviet Union as Lenin’s birthday, Svanetians had a two-day feast that left them stuffed and still and silly. But did you know that both Shakespeare and Cervantes died on April 23, and that our friendly ghost Nabokov was born on that day? And is it entirely a coincidence that Cathlin was scheduled, according to her obituary, to die on that day?