There Should Have Been Castles

by Herman Raucher

  I got in. “I have no home.”

  He ran around to the other side, got in behind the wheel, and started up the boat while looking at me in the rear-view-mirror, puzzled as shit. “The hotel, Miss?”

  “The airport.”

  “The airport?”

  “Please.”

  He guided the car down the long driveway. “Would you want to stop back at the hotel and pick up some things, Miss?”

  “No.”

  “Somebody sick, Miss?”

  “Yes. Me. Of the whole fucking thing.”

  “Yes, Miss.”

  We drove to the airport where I selected American Airlines because I liked their advertising. And in my clinging blue gown and my elbow length gloves, I flew first class to New York, having first borrowed twenty bucks from my driver. It was all he had but it was twenty dollars more than I had. I would need it for pocket money, cabs and stuff for when I got to New York. Johnny would pay the man back. My plane ticket I charged to American Express, and to Johnny, and to experience.

  Some of the passengers leered at me suspiciously, but the stewardesses seemed to know that it was an affair of the heart. Bless all stewardesses, in and out of love as frequently as they flew in and out of time zones. In my next life I would come back as a flat-chested stewardess in a trim business suit. And I would live in a big apartment with hospitable boys and make love against the bannisters.

  But it was okay. Maggie had paid me back. We were even. If we were never to see each other again, she had made up for my losing Ben by bailing me out of Johnny. And I was no longer an orphan—and no longer had to cry. Vive la Mama!

  New York felt cold. Especially for people who traveled in sheer evening gowns and open-toed sandals. I got a cab at the airport terminal building. I could have gotten a dozen of them, the way I was dressed—all those frothing cabbies practically driving over one another to get a shot at picking up “the Blue Slink.”

  The drive into Manhattan and I was elated, on fire. I was an Easterner, a New Yorker. And as much as I ever had a home it was in the East. In New York. I was cyclical and deciduous. I shed leaves and took on new colors almost in sync with the seasons. And I knew that, if I ever researched it, I’d discover that each time I’d shed old love for new, the exchange had taken place on the day of an equinox.

  I pulled up to the Delmonico, where the doorman smiled because he knew me. It didn’t bother him that I showed up in an evening gown sans luggage, for he had seen me show up in jeans with a cabful of wardrobe. He was used to Ginnie the Kook. I gave the cabbie the twenty dollars, not out of generosity but because I wanted very much to hit the suite without a sou to my name. Some kind of symbolism there, whatever.

  Not that it proved anything. If I wanted money all I had to do was reach into my closet and whatever I came out with would be worth no less than a fifty. I poured myself such a shot of bourbon that my ears stood out. I did it twice. Maybe a third time—I don’t remember. I woozied around the suite, feeling like a burglar. For it was no longer mine. You walk out on your landlord, kiddo, you walk out on your flat. That there’s the Law.

  I was drunk and knew I shouldn’t be driving so I pulled over to the bed and lay down, reaching over to slide open my closet. I looked at all my clothing, hanging like ready-to-go showgirls. They were no longer mine either. Whoever came next would inherit them, though if she had any backbone, she’d burn the lot and make Johnny trot her out new.

  All I wanted were my leotards, sneakers and jeans. That’s what I had arrived in, and, if fair was fair, that’s what I would leave in. And even as I thought that noble thought, I realized I was being the schmuckeroo of schmucks because another way to look at it—a better way—was that I had earned everything he’d given me, that by living with Johnny and being his mistress, all those goodies were rightfully and immorally mine. It was not as though we’d been engaged and that, because I changed my mind, I had to return his ring. I had been lied to and taken advantage of, stalled and balled with nothing to show for it but a bad reputation and a scolding from my mother.

  So, finding my old luggage and loading up with a little of thissa and a little of thatta, I stood in my doorway, weaving about in my darling blue gown and asking myself that most pertinent question, “Where the fuck are you going?”

  The telephone interrupted the questioning and, putting my bags down, I went over to answer. I got it on the fifth ring because the damned thing kept avoiding my every move at it. It was the hotel operator advising me that Mr. Farrar had called a number of times and that, if and when I came in, I was to call him back in Los Angeles. I told her that, if and when I came in, I would indeed call Mr. Farrar in Los Angeles—but—if and when I did not come in, would she please tell Mr. Farrar that I had jumped out the window and could not be reached. She told me to tell him myself as he was once again on the line.

  “Ginnie?”

  “No. It’s Betsy Ross. How dare you call me after what happened at Concord?”

  “Ginnie—I can’t believe you took off the way you did. When Hawkins told me he took you to the airport—”

  “Fuck Hawkins. What I want to know is how many stars do you want on this fucking flag, George? I mean, is Massachusetts in or out? They’ve got to make up their minds. If it was up to me, I’d say out because thirteen’s an unlucky number anyway.”

  “I love you. I want you to come back.”

  “And what do you want me to do about this Christmas Eve deal? The boys are freezing their nuts off at Trenton, and you’re going across the Barringer’s pool in a fucking lounge chair!”

  “I want you to listen closely, okay? I want you to close your clever mouth for just a little while and let me talk. Can you do that?”

  “You always talk. You and that loudmouth, Patrick Henry. This would still be Merry Old England if it wasn’t for you two—and I wouldn’t be knitting this fucking flag! How do you spell ‘Don’t Tread On Me’?”

  “Ginnie, let’s do it this way. I’ll be in New York on Wednesday. That’s four days. We’ll talk about getting married.”

  “Beautiful. And what are you going to tell Martha?”

  “Who?”

  “Your wife. Martha, from all the ice cream.”

  “You’re drunk. Are you drunk, Ginnie?”

  “You do have a wife, don’t you, dollink?”

  “No. But I’m going to.”

  “Anyone I know, dollink?”

  “Kid name of Betsy Ross.”

  “Never heard of her. What shows has she been in, dollink?”

  “Ginnie, I’ll be there Wednesday. Can you find something to do till Wednesday?”

  “Yes. I’ve been thinking of invading Mexico. Mexico or Canada. Either one. They’re both in the way, you know.”

  “Stay where you are. Reinforcements are on the way. I love you. Bye.”

  “Bye, George.”

  We hung up. He was coming after me. “He’s coming after me, Maggie. Did you hear that? He’ll be here in four days. How’s that for action? Is that fast enough? Well, what’d you expect him to do—get on the next plane? Really, Maggie, you’re being quite unreasonable. I do not think he’s stopping over at Denver! What? Yes. Yes, damn it. I suppose you’re right, dollink. It is another con. Of course, it is. He’s smooth-talking me. Figures he can put me on the back burner till I cool off. Well, I tell you, Mama, I ain’t gonna hang around four days till Johnny comes marching home. I am leaving this place because everybody here is drunk!”

  There was a letter for me. On the Louis XIV table. From Candy. Two weeks old. I opened it. Crazy. She and Don had gone on to New Haven, where Don would be directing Arnie Felsen’s play. I wished them all Godspeed and then cried for myself as in days of yore—for I had no place to go and no friends to speak of and no phone number to hang up on just to prove he was there.

  Ben. Sneaking through. The sonofabitch. I’d been able to keep the lid clamped on him pretty good, pretty good. But with my past ganging up on my present, and my future about as w
ell-planned as a star-burst, the lid had come off. And out popped the boy who had me cry.

  So much of him was me. So much of me was him that we never really knew where the separation began, where the zipper was or whether or not the seams showed. We were like the hands of a clock, neither of us knowing the right time if the other wasn’t around. And how many times did the words come out of his mouth just as they were lining up in mine?

  When we made love, when we did it right, it was so total that we climaxed into one person, slotting together so perfectly that we could have slid ourselves under a door. Oh, how we did flabbergast the mathematicians by continually proving that one plus one equaled one.

  And, when we parted, how the suction rang like a Chinese gong. Still, I never really did let go; I only pretended to, doing the “good-bye” number, yes, but only as a grandstand play against being made to appear the fool.

  As though with pins on a military map, I had been able to trace, at least for a while, all of his deployments. “Ben is here, having moved from there.” “Now he’s thither, on his way to yon.” No exchanging of Christmas cards, no birthday presents arriving unerringly. None of that because the breech had grown too wide. But it didn’t matter. We were together, like separated identical twins. Like the Corsican Brothers. Hurt him, I’d feel it. Hurt me, I’ll bet he knew.

  It was such a nice story we had going for us—two kids in the big city and all that. But somebody slipped some bad pages into the script, and all that love went a-squandering.

  There should have been quatrains and cellos instead of silence and discords. There should have been pennants on tall towers and people granting boons. There should have been castles, I do believe.

  I left the hotel wearing leotards, sneakers and jeans and leaving all else. Ashes to ashes and baubles to shit—it was the way I’d arrived and the way I’d depart.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Ben

  1954

  Flying back to New York I had the unfulfilling feeling that I had blown LA, that my decorum in that city could hardly have been applauded as exemplary. I had heard that Faulkner and Fitzgerald had behaved with a similar peevishness, but they were Faulkner and Fitzgerald. I wasn’t even Hammacher and Schlemmer.

  I tried to suppress the woe, drowning it in drink, but there was a halo of “last chance” all about me and it discomfited me. It had boarded the plane with me and fought me for my window seat. And though I had elbowed it out of the way, it all the same set up camp in the aisle seat beside me. (There were so many empty seats that it could have sat anywhere, even in first class, or up front with the pilots, so why me?)

  The “why me” was simple enough. I had invited it to do so. Right from the day I had arrived in California, right from the moment Steiner the Cougher picked me up and rumbled me to the Hollywood Roosevelt, I had comported myself with such a lofty arrogance that “last chance” could not fail to pick up my scent and shadow my missteps with the deadly certainty of a leopard tracking, attacking, and alacking a bunny.

  I had been a fool in my dealings with the studios, and a bumpkin in my reliance on Sam Gaynor. I had alienated friends, irked agents, and debased women. I had minimized the human animal at every turn and, in so doing, had developed an early proclivity for self-destruction into a fine art worthy of a generation of lemmings.

  The plane squatted down at Idlewild at about noon. As I had no luggage it was easy for me to be the first passenger to get a cab. I told the driver “Manhattan,” and in Manhattan I told him, “East Eighty-third.” And on East Eighty-third I said, “Here.” And when I got out I was standing in front of ye olde building.

  Five flights up. I figured Candy would be there. Or Don, or both. It was neither and the place was locked. And how long ago it suddenly seemed. I had played that scene before, returning from a different despair to find the castle similarly locked.

  I sat down on the top stair that I had once sanctified with love and blew cigar smoke through the bannister curls. I had done that once before, too, and the image of her flew at me from all that time ago.

  Laughing ponytail, cohabitant of the most perfect time of my youth, frozen in my memory by the wrenching suddenness of our parting. For almost two years she had lodged there despite all my efforts at casting her out. She had stayed on, an intransigent tenant, unchanged and unscarred by the event that had blown her away. Ginnie in my head, steadfastly defying eviction and erosion.

  I was tired. Sleep, seconds away—blanketing in, lecturing me that the perfection of any given moment could sustain for only as long as the next moment could be held back, that pictures in sequence are destructive in that they each undermine the impact of the first.

  Girl on the stairs, floating up as in a cubist painting, image over image. The face, like a photograph in the developer, slowly transforming from vague blankness to specific contour. Each step toward me endowing the subject with more contrast, greater clarity, sharper definition.

  Girl. Blonde. Pretty. Ginnie.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Ginnie

  1954

  Walking aimlessly up Park Avenue from the Delmonico, veering East on Seventy-second Street—it wasn’t much further to East Eighty-third, so there I went, like some kind of fuzzy-thinking homing pigeon.

  Four flights up, a turn at the fourth floor landing, and I saw him, sitting there, on our step, wearing cigar smoke, pushing it out at me.

  Three steps up that last flight I took. Four. Slowly. Five, six—like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar, too guilty to protest her innocence, but slowing nevertheless to at least acknowledge her capture. Seven, eight—God, can it be? “Ben?”

  “Ginnie?”

  Courage, girl. Poise. Sophistication. “Jesus Christ.”

  He stood. “We’ve done this before.”

  “I guess.” Another step up. Wanting to run, to grab, to devour. But slowly, girl. Cool. Composed. “You out of the Army?”

  “Ginnie, I’ve been bad.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I’ve blown it all. The whole thing. Soup to nuts. Memphis to Mobile.”

  “Natchez to St. Joe.”

  “I’ve got nothing. No clothes. No toothbrush.”

  “Me neither.”

  “No typewriter.”

  “So what? You can’t type.”

  “A man may come looking for me, to kill me.”

  “Me, too. To marry me.” Another step up. How to keep from flying.

  “You look wonderful.”

  “My hair is different.”

  “The place is locked. Do you have a key?”

  “Don’t I always?”

  “Yes.”

  Another step up. How tired he looks, how lost. “Guess what? In two weeks I’ll be an heiress.”

  “In two weeks I’ll be a plumber.”

  Standing beside him. Can he feel the heat of me? Fumbling for the key I always kept, no matter what bag, what purse. “I was the one who kept calling and hanging up.”

  “I know.”

  “It was childish.” Key, get in the lock, please.

  He takes the key. “Should we talk about it?”

  “About what?”

  Opening the door. “About Maggie.”

  “Okay. But a hundred years from now, who’ll care?”

  “We will.”

  The door is open and I’m walking in. Oh, sweet Jesus.

  “I love you, Ginnie.”

  “Okay.”

  “Always have. And I honestly believe that—if two people, two intelligent people—”

  “Ben?”

  “Yes?”

  “How about a little fuck?”

  The door closes. Life begins. Was there ever such a lucky girl?

  More from Herman Raucher

  Summer of ’42

  Captivating and evocative, Herman Raucher’s semi-autobiographical tale has been made into a record-breaking Academy Award nominated hit movie, adapted for the stage, and enchanted readers for generation
s.

  In the summer of 1942, Hermie is fifteen. He is wildly obsessed with sex, and passionately in love with an "older woman" of twenty-two, whose husband is overseas and at war. Ambling through Nantucket Island with his friends, Hermie’s indelible narration chronicles his frantic efforts to become a man, especially one worthy of the lovely Dorothy, as well as his glorious and heartbreaking initiation into sex.

  Maynard’s House

  Austin Fletcher, a disturbed young Vietnam War vet, is willed a small house deep in the woods of northern Maine. He comes to own it by the generosity of a brother-in-arms—a fellow soldier and confidante, Maynard Whittier, killed in action by a wayward mortar shell. The rugged landscape of Maine is an intoxicating blend of claustrophobic interiors and endless frozen wastelands. Little by little, the mysterious force in the house asserts itself until Austin isn't exactly sure what is in his mind and what is real. And just when our hero's had enough and is ready to quit the place, a blizzard arrives and the real haunting begins.

  A Glimpse of Tiger

  Tiger is a nineteen-year-old runaway who comes to the big city to start anew. There she meets Luther, a quirky con artist with charm to burn. Together they pull small scams and petty crimes on the populace of New York in the 1970s, making their money and falling in love. But a con artist is a con artist seven days a week, and soon Tiger finds herself wondering if Luther will ever be able to settle down and start building a life with her.

  This mesmerizing, surprising novel explores two unforgettable people as they live and love in Manhattan—and enchants readers with a romance impossible to forget.

  Connect with Diversion Books

  Connect with us for information on new titles and authors from Diversion Books, free excerpts, special promotions, contests, and more:

  @DiversionBooks

  www.Facebook.com/DiversionBooks