There Should Have Been Castles

by Herman Raucher

  I touched the clothes in her closet, those Ginnie things hanging with no Ginnie in ’em. I saw that thing again, pressed against the far wall of the closet, wrapped in brown paper, tied in string—a picture of some sort. Just as I reached for it the phone rang.

  I ran to answer it because maybe it was Ginnie, and I grabbed it as if it were oxygen and I were a dying man. “Hello?”

  “Ben?”

  “Ginnie?”

  “Who?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Maggie.”

  “Maggie?”

  “Yes. I’m in town. Come see me.”

  “Maggie?”

  “Yes! Ben, is that you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I just flew in. Please come and see me. I’ve been thinking of you all the way down from Boston. Got a pencil?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take this down. St. Regis Hotel. You know where that is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Room 735. Got it?”

  “735.”

  “When will you be here?”

  “Well—”

  “Oh, Ben for Christ’s sake, I’m on my way to Europe and may not see you for a year. And I won’t be in New York for more than two days. Are you coming over or do I have to call Rock Hudson?”

  “Maggie, I’ve been seeing someone.”

  “Wonderful. You can tell me all about it when you get here.”

  “I don’t know if—”

  “Ben, I’m seeing someone, too. Stop being so fucking bourgeois. This is Maggie. Get over here and—we’ll talk. We’ll just talk, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I hung up the phone and was surprised to find that I was trembling. I thought about calling her back and telling her that I couldn’t make it. I mean, how could I go see Maggie after Ginnie and I had taken a vow? I pulled myself together. Of course, I could go see her. Maggie and I were friends. We’d talk, I’d tell her about my play. It would be harmless. Ginnie wasn’t around, and at least with Maggie I’d be with someone on a night I just had to be with someone. Nothing would happen, I’d see to that. We’d just talk. I took a fast shower, got dressed, and took a cab to the St. Regis.

  Alone in the elevator I determined not to let our reunion get out of hand. We would meet as old friends, or former lovers—same thing. We would have a few laughs, hoist a few daiquiris. I’d stay maybe a half hour and that would be it. We’d see each other again—next time the Red Sox came to Yankee Stadium.

  Still, I knew that if Maggie was of a mind, I’d be stripped and screwing inside of thirty seconds. At least, that’s how the old script went, the one we broke in in Boston in its pre-New York run. So I prepared some excuses. Sprained back, migraine headaches, acid indigestion, painful arthritis, bent cock. Any or all of them would have Maggie so hysterical that she simply wouldn’t be able to concentrate on making love. So I thought of more excuses as I walked down the seventh floor corridor: torn knee cartilage, deviated septum, embarrassing dandruff, the heartbreak of psoriasis, dislocated scrotum…

  I knocked on the door of 735, as close to death as I had ever come, a doddering old man with debilitating diabetes, chickenosis, halitosis, galloping crud, encroaching senility, and an erection so outrageous that I had to raise a leg and shake it, like Fido at a hydrant, to calm it down.

  Maggie came to the door and took immediate note of my condition. “Why, Ben, how nice of you to bring me such a lovely present.” And she hugged me very close and the game was over.

  She let go, turned, and went back into her suite. She was magnificent. A black dress up to the chin, so form-fitting it looked as though it had been painted on. High-heeled shoes so provocative that I could suddenly understand why certain men liked to be walked on by such seductively shod ladies. “Ben, it’s a disaster. I don’t have more than ten minutes. I tried reaching you but you’d already left.”

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, suddenly as disappointed as a man finding out that his beautiful mail-order bride had to be sent back for additional postage.

  “Oh, it’s this charity. I don’t know what it is. Angela Corrigan got me involved in it and I have to meet with their fundraisers and at this hour, my God, is it really eleven thirty? And I so wanted to be with you. I don’t suppose you’d care to wait here until I got back.”

  “What if you come back with a sailor?”

  “If I knew you were here, I’d come back alone.” She was in front of me, her arms about me coquettishly, her perfume seeping right through my skin, paralyzing my capillaries. “Whaddya say, big boy? And my, but you are big.” She reached down, fingering me, then finding me. “Have you grown since last I—sucked this?”

  “Jesus Christ, Maggie.”

  “Jesus Christ, yourself,” she said, seeming to come all undone. “When the day comes that I don’t react this way to hard meat, that’s the day I want to be dead.” She was using both hands. “You’re back to zippers, are you? In the Army you had buttons. Zippers are faster but they’re also more dangerous. Don’t want to get snagged. Ah, there he is, my old champion. And ready to pop, too. Well, let’s see what we can do for him.”

  “Maggie, I really don’t think—”

  “I know you don’t. That’s why I’ll do all the thinking. Come with me.” Again, as in days of yore, she was leading me by the pecker, to the bed.

  “Maggie, you’ll miss your appointment.”

  “So what?”

  “It’s an important charity.”

  “Charity begins at home. Take your things off, darling, or I’ll rip ’em off, and I’d hate to do that to your nice sports jacket. Gentree or Tripler’s?”

  “Broadstreet’s.”

  “Swell, but off it comes.”

  And off it came, plus everything else I was wearing. She undressed, too, and we were on the bed in seconds, banging away at each other like knights in combat. The acrobatics that Maggie performed would have won the United States an Olympic medal had there been a competition in free-form fucking. She could have made love on the parallel bars, the uneven bars, the rings—the hammer throw, the long jump, and especially the pole vault. The marvelous thing was that, no matter what she did, she was graceful and lovely. Positions that might have made an ordinary woman look like a slut so flattered Maggie that she appeared as some kind of sylvan creature, clad in webs, wafted on zephyrs. And she enjoyed it so. Even the profanities that she bit into my ear went into my head as sonnets and came out of my penis as passion.

  “Maggie, Maggie, you are a fucking wonder.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re too much.”

  “I never charge.”

  “I won’t be able to walk for a week.”

  “Anybody can walk.”

  There was a knock on the door and Maggie looked up at me. “Who the hell is that?”

  “Beats me. I’m new in this neighborhood.”

  Maggie called out. “Who is it?”

  “Chambermaid!”

  “Come back later, I’m fucking!”

  “Maggie!” I gasped.

  “It’s okay. They love it. Makes their day.”

  The voice from the corridor again, slight French accent. “But, madame—I’ave fresh towels for you.”

  “Later! I’m sucking this big cock!”

  “Jesus Christ, Maggie! They’ll throw you out of the hotel.”

  “Never. I give it an air of class.”

  The knocking again, and the voice. “Please, madame—will only take one minute.”

  Maggie looked up at me. “Go answer the door, love. Give the lady a thrill.”

  “She’ll faint.”

  “She’s French, darling. She’ll probably applaud.”

  I grabbed a towel and wrapped it about my waist. “Maggie, one day they’re going to lock you up.”

  “Never. There’s not a jail that can hold me.”

  I walked to the door, careful to keep the towel over my privates. I was unaware that Maggie was tip-toeing behind me. I opened th
e door, and, as I did, Maggie pulled the towel away from me, reached around, grabbed my cock, and began jerking it from behind, a hundred strokes to the minute, while shouting over my shoulder, “Vive la France!”

  I stood there like a fool, looking into the face of the chambermaid, and my heart stopped—and Maggie stopped. And all life as I knew it, and all the planets—stopped.

  It was Ginnie.

  She froze for a moment, poised as if in midair, a pretty, blonde hummingbird just minding her own sweet business. Then she turned and flew, disappearing around a bend in the corridor. I kept standing there, seemingly for hours, hoping for some kind of comprehension. Was it really Ginnie? Ginnie?

  I turned to look at Maggie who was sitting in a chair, shakily attempting to light a cigarette that never did get lit. “You’re not going to believe this, Ben—but—that was my daughter.”

  There are no words.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Ginnie

  1952

  The night before I left to tour with the Pickering Trio, I typed up Ben’s play so that it would be clean, legible, and saleable. It was so good. He had so captured all the joy and pain of Tony’s life and death. Damn, but Ben could write. No, I was no judge, not of writing, per se, but I knew when something reached me, when it touched me. I knew when there were tears in my eyes and lumps in my throat. I didn’t have to be a critic or a producer to know that my emotions had been wrung so much that there was nothing to hang out to dry. There was no doubt in my mind but that someone would buy “Tony.” It was just a matter of Ben’s patience and the world’s waking up. The former worried me more than the latter.

  We made good love that night, total, insane, physical love. I don’t think we spoke a word until we had finished. If Henry Ford had given his first tin lizzies the tests we gave to our beds, they’d still be on the road. We sashayed from bedroom to bedroom, like strolling troubadors, and each time we did we’d pretend to be two other people. I made love to seven different men that night—no, eight—mustn’t forget the polo player from Grosse Pointe who scored three times in the very first chukkah.

  I left in the morning. It was a merry parting but sad. It was, “Here I go, when you see me again I’ll be a star.” But it was also, “Good-bye, darling, and if I never see you again what a lousy trick that’ll be.” Anyway, I was off, Midwest, ho.

  It was our first separation, and, as I got into the cab, my stomach felt as though I’d left my insides upstairs. Florrie had been waiting. The meter already showed over a dollar. I cried all the way to the airport. I cried in the waiting area. I cried when Barry Nadler showed up with the sleep still in his eyes. I cried when Richie showed up with seven valises and a fifty-fifty chance for a hernia. I cried when the old lady came up to me and told me not to cry. And when the little girl gave me two Tootsie Rolls if I’d stop crying, I practically had to be carried onto the plane.

  During the flight I thought of Mary Ann and Walter. They lived in Chicago. Should I go see them? Had they seen me, on TV? Did they have any children? Were they happy? Did I care? No. Would I call them? Never.

  In Chicago we stayed at the Hotel Morrison—comfortable without being posh, relatively inexpensive, conveniently located in the loop, and within walking distance (three blocks) of the Palmer House, where we would be opening in two nights in the Empire Room. Not bad. Jane Morgan was headlining. Then there was us, “Sensational dance trio from The Joey Magnuson Show.” And an MC, a comic, and Eddie O’Neal and his orchestra. Barry hadn’t quite been able to swing us free rooms at the Palmer House because of some kind of convention being held by the National Association Of Soft-Water Service Operators, if you can believe that.

  Still, it wasn’t bad. Florrie and I shared a nice room, Richie had his own, and the Palmer House paid for it all. We checked in and unpacked, and, before going to the Palmer House to check the stage and hand over our musical arrangements to the orchestra, Richie took us to dinner. The Boston Oyster House at the Morrison.

  Over a bowl of chowder, Richie let us in on something that had been bothering him. He was concerned that, despite our ability as a “straight act,” we had made our reputation on my always coming in late, busting in, and all of us kind of working our way out, which was swell. Only this wasn’t television where you do a routine once and forget it. This was night clubs where we’d be doing our routines twice a night, six nights a week, and the issue was: could we still make it all look funnily spontaneous?

  Richie laid out our strategy. We had four numbers, two of which we had performed “straight,” and two of which I “screwed up.” We would open with our two straight numbers (“Sing, Sing, Sing,” and “My Blue Heaven”). The problem was that we only had time for one more number. That meant that we’d have to cut either “Sweet Georgia Brown” or “Jet.” Only it wasn’t a problem, it was simple. Since there were two shows a night, we’d close the first show with “Georgia Brown” and the second with “Jet.” That way we’d never be improvising either of those two routines twice in one night. And, with any luck, we might just get the same effect we got on television. We just might look totally spontaneous in our closing routine’s madness.

  The stage at the Empire Room gave us more room to work with than we had on TV, and that was a plus. And the orchestra was literally right behind us, which was another plus because we could feel the percussion coming right up through the floor. And the fact that we didn’t have to play to the camera was a plus because it gave us one less thing to worry about. The comic, Ricky Davis, was not a plus. He was a double minus, homing in on me like a bloodhound.

  I had learned by then to accept a certain amount of that stuff as coming with the territory. Where once I might have leveled the guy with some choice bombast, I let Ricky Davis just bounce off me. So nobody got angry and nobody got hurt. He came at me for just two nights, which was all the time he could devote to the sport since his wife showed up from LA on the third night. Sally Davis, an ex-showgirl with cherry hair and three chins, was not to be fooled with, and Ricky, though all cock, went limp when that lady blew into town.

  The man who really disturbed me was Johnny Farrar, and most of the disturbance was the result of his looking so much like Ben, except that he was about ten years older, a touch taller, and a helluva lot less emotional. Johnny had money. Old money. Family money from way back. In World War II he had been some kind of hero, and, when he got out of the Navy, it was with a flock of decorations and a seat on the board of directors of Daddy’s company, which had to do with electronics and the millions of dollars that it manufactured.

  Johnny had a style. He had a repose and an intelligence and a quiet kind of veneer; and when he came up to me after our first rehearsal, I did a double-take because he looked like Ben only without the fire.

  “I didn’t mean to make you jump up in the air like that,” he said. “I wasn’t going to bite you. I just wanted to say that I think you’re lovely—and a fantastic dancer—and that, if you have the time, I’d like to buy you a sandwich.”

  The sandwich turned out to be something flaming at the Pump Room. I was vulnerable to Johnny and I knew it, and so I told him immediately about Ben, describing Ben as a playwright and my fiancé. Johnny smiled and said he was flattered that I was so afraid of him. I tried to deny his observation but it did me little good because both of us knew he was right. So I laughed and agreed and enjoyed the dinner.

  We walked back to the Morrison and he left me at the elevator and I knew I’d better be wary because there was a smoothy at work. He asked if he could drop by the next day at rehearsal, that his office was nearby and that he often wandered in because one of his friends had to do with the management of the Palmer House, and I said it would be fine, providing he’d tell me again that I was lovely and a fantastic dancer.

  The next day he did just that. Dinner was at The Buttery where we got to know each other bettery, telling each other about each other and enjoying each other’s company very much. It was staggering how Johnny was the extens
ion of Ben—without the rough edges. Ben with style and maturity. And the whole Johnny Farrar package I found to be irresistibly fascinating.

  In the course of our candid conversation he told me that he was married but not too happily and that though hopeful of getting a divorce it was presently tangled and gluey. He “played” occasionally but never to a point where he thought himself a bounder. Stuck in a hopeless marriage, he had certain options for satisfying certain drives—and that that’s the way he was living his life.

  “You kind of have it all your own way,” I said.

  “To some degree. Yes, I suppose so.”

  “You want to go to bed with me.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Some. But they’re not so—sneaky.”

  “Am I being sneaky? I thought I was being straightforward.”

  “It translates as being sneaky because no one is straightforward.”

  “I’ll make a deal with you.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Here’s the deal. If and when you decide we should go to bed, you just let me know. And if you don’t, then this is as far as we go.”

  “That’s what I meant by being sneaky.”

  “Then sneaky it is, but the offer still stands.”

  “And in the meantime, you’ll just take me to dinner and leave me at the elevator.”

  “Unless you invite me up.”

  “That is so sneaky. You mean, you won’t even ask to come to my room?”

  “No. You have to ask me in. However—”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “No uh-oh. The ‘however’ is that you understand, from this point on, that I have made my pass at you, okay? The pass has been made and will not be made again. The next move, if there is one, will have to come from you.”

  “How long do I have till your offer runs out?”