CHAPTER 58
It was not until after VJ Day that I was able to leave for New York. Warner Brothers in Burbank, in the talking person of a man called Buzz Dragon, came up with the notion of three or four little films based on short stories I had written, bound together into a whole called Troika or Foursquare or something, depending on number, with myself not only scripting but also linking the elements with a few well-chosen words. There had been a change of government in Great Britain. The old gang, led by Churchill, was out. The new world was for the workers, and I, as I loudly proclaimed in the corridors of bureaucracy, was one of them. I had the right to get out there to the States and start earning dollars, part of the export drive. The new world was also the world of the atomic bomb, and the prospect of everything blowing up fairly soon seemed to have a quietening effect on those official forces that might otherwise on principle have opposed my getting a new passport and an American visa and a passage on the Aquitania, New York outward bound from Liverpool.
There were a lot of GI brides. There was also the Archbishop of York, quondam Bishop of Gibraltar and later Bombay. He had not changed much. Thin and boyish, his unthinning silver hair looking like an allochrome of blondness rather than grey, he greeted me cheerfully in the bar and said, "I take it you were first to get the news?"
"What news?"
"Milan has a new archbishop."
"Ah."
"It was on the radio this morning. They had it on in the breakfast room at that damnably grimy hotel. Why is everything so damnably grimy here? Look at that monstrosity of a Liver Building. The news, yes, not as important as computing the casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and naturally jazzed up a bit. Bishop Campanati, burly cigar-puffing freedom fighter who spat on the fascists and snapped his fingers at the Nazis. Very popular choice, one gathers. I suppose the red hat will come through at the next consistory."
"I'd better go to the radio room. Send off a congratulatory cable. How are you, by the way?"
"How am I?"
"Do you still have trouble remembering the Athanasian Creed?"
"What a memory you have, Toomey. That must be all of twenty years ago. A lot's happened since then, ah yes. Pretty little things, aren't they?" He meant the sororities of GI brides with their gum and nylons. "One of the functions of war, the promotion of exogamy. Biology moves in a mysterious way. You going stateside to lecture, film?"
"Film."
"I'm attending an international conference at Washington. On birth control. And these deliciously vulgar little creatures here are traveling in the service of natural increase. Their wombs are already at work manufacturing the postwar generation. Look at that one there, six months gone if she's a day. Ill-timed, this conference, when you consider how hard the major Malthusian check has been operating these last years. Millions dead, Toomey, scores of millions." He beamed.
I had in my tweed jacket pocket a paperback edition of Thoreau's Walden. I took it out and flicked through it. "Listen," I said and read:
"There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organisations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp, tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood."
The archbishop did not now beam. "Rained flesh and blood, eh? Strong appetite and something or other health. Hm. A bit too eupeptic for my taste, Thoreau. Talking about the raining of flesh and blood, I heard some talk at high levels of your writing the big definitive book on the concentration camps."
"That was Churchill's idea. But I don't have to bother now. The old bastard's out of office."
"Weeping all the time at the ingratitude of the British people, they tell me. Emotional lability, Toomey, very embarrassing."
"From now on," I said, with a sudden anger that surprised me, "I write books for myself only. You remember a particular book I was bludgeoned into putting together about the New Christianity? You were there, vox and nothing else like the nightingale, and Carlo bullfrogging back at you."
"The great synthesis," he said with great sincerity. "We're on our way toward it, Toomey." He looked kindly again at the pretty lower-class girls who, as the ship boomed its first warning of leaving, prepared to enter the classless comity of the New World. Their accents were eclectic film American: one girl seemed to believe that the Bogart lisp was part of the general phonemic inventory, another had made herself Bette Davis southern jezebel. They would do all right over there. "We have to think," the archbishop said, "of the generation they and their coevals everywhere in the West are going to bear. The adolescents of the early nineteen-sixties. The new faith will be for them." I did not know at the time that my niece Ann, in an apartment on West End Avenue, was now quick with one of those adolescents.
When we arrived at New York I went, straight after clearing customs, to the Algonquin Hotel. I would not claim as of right a room in my own flat, since Hortense must now regard it as hers. After a couple of whisky sours in the Blue Bar I walked up Fifth Avenue. The September heat was intense and the air was all woollen shirts aboil. The town was full of jumbo steaks and ice cream, the shops pleaded that we buy useless gadgets. This was not Europe. This was very far from being Europe. Victory in Europe and Asia confirmed the excellence of the American way of life. Strong appetite and inviolable health. The afternoon sun was higher here than in any town of Europe, forced upwards by the skyscrapers. The place was rife with life. The question punched me as I waited at a crossing, watching large cars rife with cheap gasoline hurl toward the East River or the Hudson: where was I now to live? Not England, no, not ever again. Look, we have come through. The world offered itself to me and I drew back from its giant tray of rich pastries. I was fifty-five, not too old, and a reasonable working life stretched before me, but I felt timid, dusty, a failure, unloved and unloving. And now, as I entered the apartment block and told the uniformed concierge I had come to see Mrs. Campanati, I began to tremble.
"Mrs Camper Neighty. Yes sir. Tenth floor. Number one oh fahve."
I rang the bell, trembling worse, and the door was opened by a black woman who radiated warmth like a stove. "Dorothy?" I said with caution. "Dotty? I'm her brother."
"You don't have to tell me, Ken. Just great to see you, great. Come right in." She was a very lovely woman in her late thirties, in a silk dress of screaming scarlet that would have etiolated a white woman to bled veal. Her hair had been straightened but lacquered to a becoming complication of billows and puffs and curlicues. Black is no color, merely a brutal politico-racist abstraction, and it was the texture of her skin that struck before its indefinable hue, or rather was inseparable from it, the pleasure of the sight of it only, one knew, to be completed by the most delicate palpation: as if honey and satin were one substance and both alive and yet sculpted of richest gold. Hortense, I felt, should take to painting and devote her life to the exact rendering of this glorious creature's beauty. And now, in the salon that was not the salon I had known before the war, here was Hortense.
She was dressed simply in a beige suit of kneelength flared skirt, low hiplength jacket with elbowlength sleeves, tailored belt with long gold buckle, welt pockets, tailored collar and revers. Her elegant legs were skinned in bronze nylon. I dared to look at her face. It was the left eye that had gone. She wore over the hollow a pad that matched her suit and wore a melleous wig with a tress flowing down to her cheek. I held out my arms, my eyes flooded. I grasped her, hugged, kissed her cold lips, sobbed my darling my darling. "Leave you two a while," Dorothy said. "Bring you some tea, real British style hot and strong in say ten minutes, okay?" Okay okay. Hortense held me loosely. She gave off a whiff of patchoul
i but also of raw gin.
"I tried the moment I got Ann's letter. I went on trying. They made the war being over an excuse for not letting me go. My dearest sweetest darling girl, what have they done to you?"
"What do you mean, they? I did it myself, didn't I? You always did talk wet, Ken Toomey." And she not only suffered my embrace but returned it keenly. I knew the first solid sexual response for years to a stimulus not merely imagined. She led me to a long russet couch with tossed humbugpatterned cushions. We sat close, my arm loosely about her waist. I took in distractedly deep grassgreen carpeting, Calder mobiles turning sluggishly in the conditioned current, her own metal sculptures of attenuated epicene bodies. The hard Manhattan afternoon light was on her, no longer a young woman, in her mid-forties, the chin thickening charmingly, the skin above and below the eyepatch puckered. She was hurt, aging, in need of protection, so my glands told me. She said, "What have they done to you? You're so grey."
"Worrying about you." Distractedly, photographs of John in uniform on a white baby grand piano, probably Dorothy's. The noise of cups in the kitchen. Beefeater gin on the bar. "God, you're all I have." I had a base desire to see the inert horror under the beige shade, the shrivelled lids closed on nothing. My glands spoke of this desire. Jews in the ovens in Europe, corpses with stick limbs ploughed under, now this. It was of the same order, it provoked the same hopeless anger. "My dear angel. And I still don't know how it happened. Ann's letters just talked of an accident, very vague." I felt a shudder under my hand.
"There's no point in going over it. It happened. Worse things have happened to others. Call it my contribution to the war." The voice was harder than I had known, and not only in stony reaction to long floods of wholly just self-pity, also roughened with gin and smoke, perhaps also assimilated to New York induration, the hardness of culture as well as of pain. She had no softness in her now; my embracing arm was discouraged. She leaned to the onyx cigarette box on the coffee table, a slab of marble set on piled thick slabs of black glass. I lighted up her Chesterfield with my gold Rocher.
"I have to know. You know I have to know."
"In the studio," she said, and coughed. She detached a tobacco fibre from her lower lip. "In the Village. I was shearing aluminium, what they call aluminium here. A heraldic lion, commissioned. Then the girl who used to work with me rushed in. She had the cold water flat at the top. She'd been out for lunch and she met the telegraph boy in the street. She ran in yelling He's dead, John's dead. Then my hand slipped. There wasn't any pain, just blood. And before I passed out I realized it was her husband, not my son. John's a common name."
"Christ," I said.
"She's dead," Hortense went on. "I don't think she meant it, but she's dead. Drink and barbiturates. I'm still alive. And my John's still alive. Or was when he telephoned from Chicago an hour ago. And if he dies now I'll never again have any way of reacting. I've done my reacting. But if he got through wartime Europe he'll survive peacetime Chicago."
Chicago, town of the lengthy necrologies. I was blushing with helpless fury. Somebody had to be blamed. "The stupid silly little bitch," I said.
"Oh, you and your bloody wetness. I should have taken a deep breath and remembered that there's more than one John in the world. Her John shouldn't have been killed. She shouldn't have been stricken to death. There shouldn't have been any war. People shouldn't be killed in air crashes and road accidents and by choking on peach stones. Hands shouldn't slip. Everything should be different. The world's been made wrong." And then, fiercely, "Bloody stupid Carlo."
"What's Carlo done to you?"
"He doesn't believe the world was made wrong. He wrote me a smarmy religious letter about sacrificing my beauty to God. Who told him, anyway?"
"John may have written. I didn't. You know he's an archbishop now?"
"Oh yes, he was bound to be. Some day he'll be a bloody saint. It's his job to smarm about God's will and leave the suffering to others."
"If only it could have been me." I tried to embrace her again but she held me off with her cigarette.
"There's nothing to stop you stabbing your eye with a fountain pen. You'll be all right, you'll always be all right. I'm all right too. I can work well enough the way I am. Not metal any more, though. I could work totally blind with clay or stone. Sculpture's a matter of touch. Like love."
She'd never mentioned physical love to me before. I said, "Money."
"I'm all right for money. I get commissions. I get alimony. I'm all right for everything. I even have faith still. I accept Christian logic. But I don't want to be smarmed over by an Italian bishop. Archbishop," she emended.
Dorothy or Dotty came in rattling and radiant with a tea tray which she set down with great grace on the marble slab. "Dorothy," I said, "accept a brother's grateful thanks."
Hortense wailed. "Listen to him, Dot. He talks like Shakespeare. Pity he doesn't write like him. Brother's grateful thanks quotha or forsooth or whatever it is."
"It's nice to be called Dorothy again," Dorothy said. "I get tired of being Dotty or Dot. Too big for a dot and too sane to be dotty. I hope this is how you like it, Ken." And she poured black tea into big cups, no delicate china nonsense. She had made tiny sandwiches in the British manner. There was a dish of the cake called devil's food.
"Fine, perfect," having sipped. "However ineptly I put it I mean what I say."
Dorothy was seated on the carpet beyond the marble disclosing long bare legs of a strong but exquisite molding. "Hortense," she said, "looked after me in a bad time and still does in a good." And she fired love at my sister with a directness that would have been impossible in a white woman schooled to the deviousness of the long European tradition. Her purple lips that gleamed with tea glowed with love as much as her great eyes, the fine wide nostrils dilated with it. I felt a prick of complicated emotions. It was evident they went to bed together. I saw them an instant writhing on crimson sheets and felt a sharp aesthetic joy, like the joy of imagining incest. All beauty hath a strangeness in it, or an element of the forbidden. In a sense my own more than brotherly love for Hortense was sanctified by the vision. And of course one of the emotions was jealousy. There were also rage and frustration though damped or much muted.
Dorothy said, "There's a room all ready for you, Ken. I hope you'll be staying a good long time."
"Alas, I have to fly to Los Angeles the day after tomorrow. And I, well, I didn't want to presume. I booked in at the Algonquin."
"But why?" Dorothy looked operatically hurt, prolonging the vowel operatically. "This is your place."
"Yours, yours. Where shall I take you for dinner?"
"We don't go out for dinner," Hortense said quickly. Yes. Stupid drunks going yo-ho-ho at the pirate eyemask. "Besides, you've got to see Ann. Mrs. Breslow. And Professor. Dot bought a big turkey. With all the fixings. Like Thanksgiving." She gulped at that and Dorothy got in quickly with: "Well, there's a lot to give thanks for, isn't that the truth? The war's over and we're all alive and families aren't separated any more. Thanksgiving, right, why not?"
"I think I'd like a drink now," Hortense said.
"Oh, honey, no." I could tell this was a regular, almost ritual, cry of distress. "Isn't tea a drink, good, strong, hot, crammed with stimulating tannin?" It was a desperate mockery of some unctuous radio commercial voice. "Give it another hour, okay? Soon as I put the turkey in the oven we'll all sit at the bar and have a nice long cool highball, okay?"
"Not too long not too cool," Hortense said. "Sing us something, Dot. Ken's never heard you sing."
"Well, sure I'll sing," and Dorothy looked at me in a way that seemed to signify: don't let her nip over to the bar while my back's to her at the piano she's clever at grabbing a quick one. So she got up with wonderful grace and went over and sat and struck some blue chords and began to sing:
"Ich nehm' ein' Zigarett'
Und ich fuhl' du liebst mich nicht mehr
Und ich weiss es ist aus
Und da macht mein Her
z so schwer."
She paused to smile at me, expecting some comment. I knew the song: I'd heard it in Berlin in 1935.
I said, "Where on earth did you--I mean, such a perfect German accent." Such a rich terra-cotta voice too, like a meat extract that was also an aphrodisiac.
"I've been around," Dorothy said. "That's my Dietrich style. Now I'll do it in English." And she did, right to the end:
"Yet
With my cigarette
Though I give no more than I get
There's no sigh of regret
At the end of my cigarette."
During the song Hortense made a move to get up, but I held her hand tight.
I said to Dorothy, "You fire me with a desire to get back to the musical stage again. It's a long time since I did book and lyrics. God." And I saw it: Cleopatra. "Cleopatra, with you in the lead."
"Cleopatra was white, wasn't she? Greek. I'm black, brother, all black."
"Cleopatra was what you are. To hell with the facts of history."
"I'll get that turkey started," Dorothy said. "Good little Hausfrau, that's me, right, Hortense honey? With a little French literature on the side."
"You're wonderful," I said. "What stage work have you done?"
She did a mock or genuine curtsy to my compliment, saying: "I was in Porgy and Bess in Atlanta, but it's not really my style. I'm a gal strictly on her own, me and my lii' piano. I did nightclubs. Now I stay in nights. I'll see about dinner." And with great humor she danced her way to the kitchen, doing another curtsy at the door. I clapped.
"I'll have that drink now," Hortense said.
"No, you heard. We all have a nice long cool highball together."
"I want a quick sharp neat gin. And I want it now." She was quick in getting up. I was quick enough to grab her and hold her halfway to the bar. "Let me go, bloody Ken Toomey."
"How much are you drinking?"
"None of your bloody business." We stood there in the conventional posture of struggling woman and importunate man.
"No, but apparently it's Dorothy's business. Take it that I'm just standing in for her." She relaxed in my hold. I let go. There was probably another reason for their not going out in the evenings: Hortense's intake not easy to control in public, people seeing at once why she drank and saying poor bitch no wonder. "Perhaps we ought to go and help her get that turkey in the oven," I said.
Earthly Powers Page 63