Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  "Yes," I said without conviction, "they seem to be doing all right. So long as the oil lasts."

  "Meanwhile," John said, "the tribes get corrupted and lose their gods to the god of uniformity." And then, "Dotty's brother seems to be doing all right too. The poet as man of action."

  "He was never much of a poet."

  "Give my love to Dotty. And, of course, to Mother."

  Dorothy was, I saw, far from well. She lay in bed limp, her once glorious hair graying and without life, the once sumptuous lushness of her skin now taking on the hue and texture of an elephant's hide, her fine eyes at the mercy of tearducts which never dried. I kissed her with affection and compassion; she put her bare thin arms lovingly about my neck. "How is it?" I asked.

  "It comes, it goes. We just had Hortense's brother-in-law on about offering pain up to God." At the bottom of the bed was a small television set, now off.1-lortense was seated on the bed, her arm about her friend, her one tired eye on me.

  She said, "You're old, Ken."

  "I don't deny it. Old and lonely." She herself did not look old, save for a crepiness about her neck. She was in blue linen, bell-shaped skirt, boat-shaped neckline, bow tie, short jacket with welt pockets, bronze stockings. She had kicked off her high fine stiletto heels. Her eye patch was a frank accessory, attractive in itself: a cluster of miniature blue roses on a green ground. Her hair kept, though cunning cosmesis, its schoolgirl color: the blue roses peeped through a flow of its honey.

  "Stay with us," Dorothy said. "For good, I mean." And then her eyes brimmed. "No, not fair to you. You don't want to see oh hell." Hortense hugged her.

  Hortense said to me, "Before I forget, your agent called. Something about somebody filming one of your books. He thought you'd be here earlier. He's gone to Martha's Vineyard, you won't get him now till Monday."

  "Which book?"

  "The one you wrote while I was still at school. About Socrates. I'd forgotten it. Then his mentioning it brought it all back."

  "Socrates on the screen. Well, things are looking up."

  "I had another call too. From one of the Campanati brothers."

  "What, His Holiness actually deigned?"

  "No, it was the other one."

  "For God's sake, bloody Domenico."

  "I just love that bloody," Dorothy tried to smile. There were teeth missing. "Real breath of Oldy England."

  "Where was he, is he?"

  "Menton or somewhere. He must have remembered a happy day we spent there together. All those years ago. He wants to come back to me. He says he's failed in everything. Couldn't we, what's Mr. Eliot's phrase, make a fresh start? He sounded drunk. Maudlin tears over the transatlantic cable. Too late, I told him, saddest words in the language." She hugged Dorothy more tightly.

  'Poor Domenico," I said. "Last I heard he'd taken the way out of all hopeless musicians. Noises. A Moog synthesizer. Birdsong played backwards."

  "Oh Christ," Dorothy suddenly went. "Sorry sorry sorry. It's the not expecting it that--Oh Jesus." The sweat of pain was frightful in its copiousness. Hortense tenderly wiped her with one of a number of towels that lay in crumpled disarray on the table by the bed. A double bed, the one I took it they still shared. "You go, Ken," Dorothy gasped, "you don't want to--Christ, it's not--" Dignified, she meant; she was right. Then the spasm passed. She lay very spent and said, "Hemlock," smiling weakly. "Cigue. You remember that Socrate of Satie? They say there's going to be a recording of it."

  "I'll watch out for it," I said, "and send it."

  "I didn't mean that, honey," smiling twistedly at Hortense. "It's just the sharp jabs when I don't expect ... it's the surprise." I caught, with a sharp jab, that day in the Chicago hospital thirty years before. Carlo was now, I knew, being pelted with paper as he drove blessing along cheering Fifth Avenue; paper like palm fronds was under his holy wheels. I had had taxi difficulty getting here, streets closed to traffic, honking jams. De Pope, the driver had explained through his wet chomped stogie. Please come and perform another miracle. The friend and lover of the woman you said was a saint. No, one didn't beg favors any more. The power, I had been shown, fell where it would, indifferent as grace, wild like goodness. No favors to friends, no friends.

  "I'll be back before bedtime," I said. "I promised to spend the evening with my niece. And--should it be grandniece or great-niece? I've never really known. Both seem to be preposterous titles."

  "A preposterous girl," Hortense said.

  "Oh honey, she's okay. She's just like the rest of them."

  "Yeah," Hortense said echt Americanly, or really (gea) echt Alfred the Great. "One of the inheritors."

  "It should really, I think, be inheritrices," I said.

  "Dear Ken. Dear bloody Ken. You write as badly as hell and yet you're pedantic as hell. I must do a bust of you." I did not see the connection.

  CHAPTER 71

  My niece Ann cooked a dish called New England Boiled Dinner, which tasted of little except sponges and salty water. It was followed by a Sara Lee banana cake, insufficiently defrosted, and caffeineless coffee: none in that household could tolerate caffeine. When I started to light up a Romeo and Juliet Ann said: "Please don't smoke, Uncle Ken. Eve's allergic to it." Eve said, "Gimme one more slice of that, Mom, and then Tune can smoke all he wants. Bob's taking me to the movies."

  "What are you going to see, dear?"

  "On the Beach. At the Symphony. It's Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. About the end of the world in nineteen sixty-two."

  The father and husband was away in Denver, Colorado. There was a weekend Comparative Literature conference, and he was reading a paper on Strehler's Debt to Kafka. I remember distinctly Strehler's telling me, the day before the Gestapo arrived, that he had not read Kafka, or rather that he had started to read Der Schloss but had been so appalled by the quality of the German that he had been unable to go on. Still, I had no doubt that Professor Michael Breslow would make, or had already made, a very plausible case for the alleged debt. You could prove anything in literary scholarship. Why, somebody had somewhere read a paper on my indebtedness to Sir Hugh Walpole.

  So I drank my caffeineless coffee unmitigated by smoke while Eve, my fourteen-year-old great-or grandniece, ground at her second portion of banana cake. I could hear her little teeth engaging the thin ice of its surfaces. What can I say about her except that she was doomed? She was emptily pretty like her mother, with a firm little bosom upheld by a Maidenform brassiere. She wore an off the peg dirndl dress, not every young person at that time wearing jeans, and on her long American legs were lime woolen stockings. Her pretty little feet were in scuffed black ballet slippers. Her squeaky clean yellow hair was caught just beyond the crown in an elastic band and it wagged behind in a ponytail. She had delicate little pink ears and a charming piggy nose. Her brain was furnished with all the rubbish that the earnest promoters of American values, comforts and stimulants could provide. She was indeed one of the inheritors or inheritrices. While Nevil Shute's vision of the end coming to South Australia was being rerun at the Symphony Cinema on Broadway, Eve's other great-uncle was telling, in Madison Square Garden, of a new beginning coming to everybody. Eve was the inheritrix of a joy and a despair which were somehow cognate.

  While she was scraping up the last of her Sara Lee the doorbell did a jaunty eyetiddlyeyetie and, a second later, pom pom. "It's Bob," she said. Chewing she ran to the door and let Bob in. Bob was another of the inheritors. He was six and a half feet tall but had not yet put on the mature flesh that his skeleton demanded. He gangled. He wore glasses. My idle brain wondered a moment why the cartoon American male had always worn glasses. A stronger sighted race had never before existed. It was something to do with the consumer philosophy, perhaps. If there was a space, you filled it. Pangloss had praised God for providing nose and ears for the fitting of spectacles. Carlo, man of many voices, probably approved of Pangloss. I had never asked him if he read Voltaire, and it was too late now. On the other hand, I did not deem it too late to m
ake a more urgent communication. I had that afternoon sent off a note to him care of the Archbishop of New York: the reader will know what was in that note. I had no hope of a response.

  "This is Tunc," Eve said. "Mr. Toomey the great writer. This is Bob."

  A long thin cordial arm shot out. "Hi, Mr. Toomey. What kinda things do you write?" He was in endlessly long fawn trousers and an acidgreen windjammer. In the young face there was a whole continent of innocent benevolence.

  "Novels. Like Nevil Shute. Well, not quite like Nevil Shute. He's an engineer, you know. He helped build the R101."

  "Is that so?" He had never heard of Nevil Shute. "I don't read much, Mr. Toomey. Eve and I go to the movies a lot. Sooner or later you get all the books in the movies. Just a matter of waiting."

  "On the Beach is by Nevil Shute."

  "Is that so? Well, like I say, all you got to do is wait," with a most charming intonation. "You ready, Evie?"

  And off they went, inheritors of movies with popcorn and Coke machines in the vestibule. And also, though some place else, mushroom clouds and starvation. I was permitted to smoke now. Ann left the dishes till later. We sat in a pair of rocking chairs in the long drawing room that was really Professor Breslow's Comparative Literature library. It was a fine spring evening. The window looked onto West Ninety-first Street and, if you opened it and craned left, Riverside Drive and a fine chemical sunset over the Hudson. Well-fixed, this family, a decent future to anticipate. My niece Ann, in her middle thirties, was as sweet and innutritious as a Hershey bar. Teeth good, complexion radiant, plumping figure well contained.

  "I was just thinking," I said, "that those two kids prefer to go and see the end of the world through the southward drift of toxic atomic dust than to hear the new word of the Lord in Madison Square Garden."

  "Bob's a Baptist," she said. "Eve just doesn't care much for religion. Don't tell Mother that, though." Mother? Of course, Mother was Hortense. "Mike had this idea that kids ought to choose what to believe in when they get old enough to understand what it's all about. He didn't want a repetition of his own childhood."

  "Ironic. There's Eve's other great-or granduncle as head of the faith, and she prefers atomic fallout."

  "I told Mike that you've got to start them off early. He insisted she went to schools where they didn't teach religion. What she's never had she doesn't miss. I told her about Our Lord dying on the cross and she said 'Poor guy. Did it hurt much?' She'll come to it when she needs it." And then, "He's not really any relation, is he? I can hardly remember Father, and then he ran off and said we weren't his children. And Mother said nothing."

  "Legally," I said. "Legally." I said, "Your mother got a telephone call from your legal father. Did she tell you?"

  "She tells me nothing. I don't see much of her. She doesn't like me. Never did. It was always John John John. What did he say?"

  "He wants to come back to her. Catholic law and Catholic guilt are nagging him in his old age. Indissoluble bonds. She won't have him, of course. He'll probably drink himself to death."

  "Would you like some homemade lemonade?"

  "I'd prefer brandy." She went to a cupboard underneath shelves full of Comparative Literature and a photograph of Thomas Mann as a disdainful Hamburg industrialist. She had her mother's elegant legs. She brought out a bottle of Christian Brothers. She said, pouring, myself saying enough very soon: "You had time for a talk with Eve. What do you think of her?"

  "Too soon to say. A nice child, but for God's sake what do they teach them these days? Her mythology's the Saturday morning TV show of kids' cartoons. She started to read The Catcher in the Rye but couldn't get on with it, found it kind of hard going. It's difficult for someone of my generation to converse about Superman and Donald Duck and Debbie Reynolds. God, you were brought up on French and Italian, but she knows no languages. They read twenty lines of Virgil at school in bad English prose. She saw a movie about Helen of Troy. The past is dead and the world outside the United States doesn't exist. Haven't you even taken her to Europe?"

  "We went to France but the food made her sick."

  "I fear," I said prophetically, "the great vacuum. You can fill it for a time with Walt Disney but some big wind is going to blow that fluff away. Stronger anodynes. She tells me that one of her instructors was onto drugs. He'd read a book by some guy, she said, I might know him, it turned out to be my old friend Aldous Huxley. All about visions and reality and you got the truth the easy way, like switching on the TV."

  "Yeah, that was a teacher called Perrin. They had to fire him."

  "Well," I said, "she's your child. And America's. But, speaking as a decadent European, I'd say she needs stuffing with something solid. Not candyfloss and wow and zowie."

  "She's just a good normal healthy teenage girl," she said defensively.

  "With an allergy to cigar smoke. And, she tells me, to tomato skins. And goldenrod in the season of goldenrod. And she gets all itchy when she touches the cat. These are substitutes for European guilt."

  She's normal sexually, anyway," Ann said. That seemed to be a crack at me. And of course her mother. "Thank the Lord for that."

  "You mean she's already slept with that long youth who takes her to the movies? And had the right physical responses?"

  "That's just dirty, Uncle Ken, and you know it. I mean she likes boys and scored eighty-live in that sex quiz in Mademoiselle. She's normal. And she's good." Ann then blushed. "She started to read an article in one of those literary magazines that Mike had. It was about what it called the homosexual strain in the British novel. She saw your name there and said there's a bit here about Tunc, I didn't know they wrote about him in magazines. And she said, 'What's it mean, homosexual?' That's how innocent she is."

  "And you, or Mike, enlightened her?"

  "Mike was very good. He said homosexuals liked men, that's what homo meant, man, and she said, 'Well, that makes me homosexual.'"

  "His etymology's at fault. Well, so her Tunc or Tunkie is a kind of corruptive influence. And Superman and Gregory Peck and Senator McCarthy are just fine. I'd better go. A little chat with your mother before bed."

  "You won't say what I told you about Eve not going to church or anything?"

  "She's not particularly interested in Eve. She's got enough on her plate at present."

  "Look, Uncle Ken, I didn't want you, you know, to be offended. I mean, I know you can't help being the way you are--"

  "The way I was, Ann. I'm now what your daughter thinks I am--past all that, you know, a hundred years old and all the rest of it. Thanks for the dinner." And I gave a dry kiss to her narrow forehead.

  Hortense was at the bar in a tigerstriped housecoat. She was weary, I could tell, and she was sipping pure scotch with a lot of ice. "Is she asleep?" I asked.

  "She got off about half an hour ago. I gave her a shot of PT6. The shots have to get bigger all the time. She was on again about hemlock, and then she said sorry sorry. I think she's right about the hemlock."

  I took a shot of brandy unblessed by Christian brothers. I felt, while pouring, a faint simulacrum of the pain that Dorothy was suffering. The growth was located in the lower bowel. Inoperable. "What's the modern version of hemlock?"

  "I'd say a bottle of scotch and about a hundred aspirins."

  "Cumbersome. And Carlo wouldn't approve. Did you by any chance hear anything from Carlo?"

  "You mean on television? We had him on for about fifteen minutes telling the world about love. Then Dot said let's have an old movie. So we had Bette Davis in Dark Victory. Not the best of choices."

  "I meant something personal. A personal message or something. He always thought highly of you."

  "That changed when the Milanese discovered that Saint Ambrose had balls. No, nothing from him and I expect nothing. Let him keep out of my life. I was grateful that time for the commission, but I would have been grateful to anybody. And it won't be long before I'm grateful to these people in Bronxville."

  "What people?"


  "Wheeler College. They'd like me to teach the History of Art. I gave them a talk once on the technique of sculpture. It went down well enough. I'm going to need a job. Not for the money, of course."

  "Poor poor Dorothy. How much longer can she stand it?"

  "How much longer can I? Christ helps a bit. But I don't think crucifixion could be as bad as cancer."

  "Do you think Dorothy will--well, seriously ask?"

  "She'll seriously scream. And I'll take that to be seriously asking."

  "I've had trouble sleeping. Doctors in Morocco don't have any qualms about overprescribing. In my bag I have one hundred brown pills. I know that will do it. Poor Jack Tallis in Tangier sailed off on thirty-five. That wasn't cancer, it was thwarted love. I'll leave them with you. Having them there makes it easier to put off and off and off till you can't put off any longer. Why don't you get some sleep? You won't need any tablets."

  "She'll wake in an hour. Or less. I have to be ready. I slept this morning when the nurse came for her two-hour stint. I'll sleep again tomorrow. I don't need much sleep. I'll sleep while the bells are clanging and Carlo's proclaiming love and peace to the TV cameras." And then, "I'm sorry about Ralph."

  "Ralph's doing all right."

  "No, I mean you and Ralph. It was my idea, after all."