“What would be enough?”
“God damn it,” he exploded, making me cringe. “What the hell kind of third degree am I getting?”
Barney whistled because Josh had never talked to me that way before. He was often casual—even sardonic—with Mimi, but he’d always treated me with tenderness.
“She has no idea, Josh,” Lily said. Fantastically smug and self-righteous. “She has no idea of what’s involved.”
“Oh, I dunno about that, Lil,” Barney said. “She knew it was the house that was involved, which was more than the rest of us realized.”
“It’s not the house!” Josh snapped. “They don’t want the goddamn house. They probably wouldn’t take the fucking monster house if I handed it to them on a silver platter.”
“Is it only land then?” Mimi asked quietly.
“Of course it’s land,” Josh said. “What do you think they want? The suburbs are getting built up like crazy, or hadn’t you heard? You kiddies knock me out. Hollywood is a hotbed of realism compared to this place, you live in a nice little dream world of your own up here. A nice big dream world, I should say. Thirty-two acres. Did you really think thirty-two acres an hour from Grand Central Station was going to go unnoticed forever?”
“No,” Mimi said. “I guess I didn’t think so. I mean, I guess none of us really thought about it seriously, at all. We knew there’d been offers in the past but we never took them seriously. The only time we ever got worried was when something like the road came up, something we might not be able to control, otherwise we didn’t really think about it.”
We assumed that we were safe.
“I bet you didn’t think about it,” Josh said. “You’re all quick to grab lawyers’ letters out of my hand”—as though it had been one of us, instead of Lily, who’d snatched the letter—“but no one ever bothers to sneak a look at my tax bill, that’s just forwarded to California.”
There was silence for a moment. Barney broke it.
“You’re losing your posture, Josh,” he said.
Josh glared at him but unthinkingly straightened his back.
“Not that one, J.C. I mean your liberal posture. Your Paying-Taxes-is-a-Small-Price-for-Living-in-a-Democracy- Posture.”
Josh laughed but he wasn’t really amused. “Thirty-five years ago,” he said, “I tried walking down the hill alone one night and I had my pants pulled off and my ass and dick painted red by a bunch of guineas who didn’t know the difference between Leon Trotsky and Benedict Arnold.” He paused, added irresistibly, “They only knew both of them were Jews. . . . Today I pay a small fortune every year to send their goddamn guinea kids and guinea grandchildren through public school. For what? No doubt I’m supposed to sit in Beverly Hills, holding my balls and paying Lily’s bills and telling myself that if their kids have enough education their attitudes’ll be different from their parents. But you know and I know that all that’s so much horse manure. They get their attitudes from their lousy guinea parents long before they ever get to school and nothing they learn in school ever changes them.”
“Listen to him,” Barney said. “He hasn’t been near a school in half a century.”
Silence.
“What do you use it all for?” Josh suddenly demanded of Mimi.
“Use what for?” Mimi asked, confused.
“The land, Mimi,” Barney said. “Your father wants evidence that you make good use of this land that he sacrifices to let you keep occupying. You know, how often you tread on each square inch of the acreage, what healing potions you make from the herbs thereon, that kind of thing.”
“Josh,” Mimi said, “there are ways to hold on to land without paying taxes. There’s a group called Nature Conservancy, that’s just one of them, and you can deed them the land and they leave it wild but you don’t own it any more so you don’t have to pay taxes.”
I was completely bewildered by all this. We had never talked about any of it. But Josh pounced on it gleefully.
“Aha!” he said. “How interesting. I thought you never thought about such things, daughter mine.”
She blushed deeply. An announcement that she thought about them more than I could have dreamed. She must have sensed long before that something could happen.
“I meant,” she said lamely, “I hadn’t thought about them in concrete terms.”
“Oh, no,” Josh said. “Nothing concrete. Nothing profitable, you mean. You just sat around and figured out a good way for me to get rid of all my land without getting a red cent for it. Your generalities bore me, sport, but I’ll give you one of my own. Land around here’s going for about six thousand an acre and I’ve got thirty- two acres, here, let’s say thirty that could be sold for a grand total of a hundred and eighty grand.”
“It’s unimproved land,” Mimi said quietly. “And you don’t get that price when you sell a large parcel.”
“Fine,” Josh said. “Cut it in half and laugh off ninety thousand.”
“Nobody’s laughing off anything,” she said.
“Well I’m glad,” Josh told her. “Because ninety- thousand clams’ll pay a lot of Bonwit bills and I’ve got a lot of Bonwit bills to pay, eh, Lil?”
She kissed his cheek.
“Hey,” he said, “if I say that again will you do that again?”
It was repulsively mechanical. A parody.
“Look at them,” Barney said. “Shirley Temple and Bob Hope.”
“Are you serious about it, then?” Mimi asked Josh.
“I’m not serious about anything, sweetie,” Josh said. “It’s the secret of my charm.”
“I looked around at all of them. They had the air of having settled something, but I couldn’t tell what.
I said, “I don’t understand what’s happening.”
Lily laughed shortly as though to say I never did.
“We seem to have established that your father owns a rather valuable piece of real estate, even if one doesn’t consider the land immediately around this house,” Barney said, “and that his inclination is to take advantage of that fact, sooner or later.”
“But why, Josh?” I asked, my throat aching with held- back tears. “Why should you do it? Are you punishing us for something?”
“Sweet Jesus,” Josh said, smacking his forehead, looking unutterably pained. “What the hell can I say to a question like that?”
“Beth,” Mimi said, “listen to me. We’ve got to be reasonable. He’s not talking about selling the house out from under us.” She hesitated, turning to Josh, “You did mean that, didn’t you, Josh? About not taking the house or the immediate grounds?”
“What’s going on?” Josh asked with an unsuitable bitterness. “What are you two trying to make me out to be? I can see it now—Junior, I want you to meet your Grandpa Josh who kicked us out of our house in a blizzard when we couldn’t come up with the mortgage money.”
“You see?” she said. “He has no idea of selling the house.”
It had never occurred to me that he had. My mind simply never separated the house from the rest of it. “What about the farm? And the pond? And the stables?”
“The farm is half a mile down the road,” Josh said. “The piece of land it’s on is legally bound to this only by the fact that I own it all and someday you will, or the remaining proceeds therefrom. I fail to see why you should take more than a normal neighborly interest in it.”
“Oh, come off it, Josh,” Barney said. “If you’re going to do it you’re going to do it, but let’s not have any of this fail-to-see stuff. You understand Beth as well as anyone does and you know how she feels about this place.”
Did he? Did he understand that when he asked why I should care about having the other land as long as the house and gardens were left intact, it was very much like asking why I should mind having my limbs cut off, provided my internal organs were left alone?
“All right,” Josh said. “I know, I know.”
What we had was inseparable from what we were. Mimi used to get
upset that so many people should be hostile to us without even knowing us but to me it seemed quite reasonable. Without it we would have been no better than they.
“Listen to me, Beth,” Josh said.
The world is impossible. Nothing but madness and confusion. And in their crowded homes on tiny plots on paved streets they have no protection from its most casual violence. To say they should not resent us was to say that having nothing was as good as having everything.
“Beth?”
“I don’t see why you bother, Josh,” Lily fretted. “She’s off in a trance, she won’t listen.”
Lily was always the one person from whom Yiytzo’s protection was inadequate. And even with Lily the size of the land helped because she never ventured beyond the interior gardens so that when I found it entirely unbearable to be in the same house with her I could disappear into the forest.
“Beth,” Josh said, “come with me. I want to talk with you.” He took my hand and led me out to the terrace. “Beth, I have no intention of doing anything right now. If I sounded that way it was just because I felt as if I’d been put on the defensive. I’m not seeking out this thing. I haven’t put it up for sale and I’m not going to. But I get constant pressure. It’s too beautiful a piece of property, too big a piece to be neglected. There’s one developer who’s been after me hot and heavy for six years and I’ve been saying no all that time and I have no intention of saying yes in the near future, but I can’t promise you that I never will, can’t you see that?”
He seemed terribly earnest but I couldn’t believe in his earnestness. Maybe it was the deep deep suntan and the white hair, which always made him seem a little unreal, anyway. Mimi and Barney had visited him once in Beverly Hills and reported that he seemed entirely different there. He looked just like everybody else.
“You’ve got this vision of me as some kind of millionaire,” he said.
This wasn’t true. I’d never thought twice about Josh’s money, except to be grateful for that part of it which allowed him to support Lily away from Yiytzo and thus made possible my continued existence. Money never had any reality to me otherwise.
“It simply isn’t so, Beth. I’ve made a lot of money and I’ve spent a lot of money. The only thing I’ve got that would make me rich by anyone’s standards is this land, and it also keeps me poor. Not this alone, but after all, I maintain an expensive apartment for myself, I have to, and I pay Lily’s hotel bills all year ’round, so I spend a lot of money just on places to live. And I don’t mind. Not the part of it that’s necessary, or even that adds substantially to our pleasure, any of us. I love you and I want you to be happy, you know that.” Still very earnest. So many words without a single joke. Still playing the role of doting father. It was the first time I’d actually thought of it that way. “But to ask me to hold on forever to a piece of land that drains my blood without giving anyone very much in return, most of it, when I could make a small fortune by selling off a bloc of it and investing the money. That isn’t fair to me. It isn’t even fair to you. What would happen if I just passed it on to you? You couldn’t afford to hold on to it, anyway. It takes most of my income from stocks just to pay the taxes and the basic maintenance costs and when I die you won’t have that income because the stocks are going to Lily.”
“She’ll die, too,” I pointed out.
He smiled. “Only you could say it with such equanimity. Anyway, I wouldn’t count on it. She could outlive me by thirty years, probably will, and the place would bust you in much less time than that. There’s a trust fund for the two of you but it just won’t cover-everything. I’d show it to you in writing if I thought it would help but I know it won’t . . . would it?”
Help what, Josh? Your writing could only help you to show your reasons for what you were going to do, it couldn’t change my reasons for not wanting you to do it.
“No.”
“Is there anything that would help?”
“No.”
People do what they are going to do. All my life I’d had fewer enemies than Mimi because I never asked nor expected anything of people. There was in Mimi’s wholesale affection and eternal optimism an implicit demand that people attempt to fulfill their better selves. While lacking the belief in those better selves, I never summoned them to action.
“I guess I should stop trying, then . . . is there anything you want to say to me, Beth? Do you want to argue? I’ll listen to anything you have to say. I don’t want to be arbitrary. Talk to me.”
• • •
That day you lost your partisan in this household, Josh. I can’t say you betrayed my trust because that would suggest that I’d believed you would always protect my interests while in point of fact it hadn’t occurred to me that I would need your protection. I’d only assumed that in any discussion with Lily of where our interests lay, you would be more likely to be on the right side. And of course it was true, it just didn’t go far enough. It seemed strange later on that I’d never questioned further. It seemed strange now that the things you and Lily together did to us, I only blamed on her until that day.
“You only blame her,” Mimi had said to me more than once. “Why is everything her fault?” Followed by a recitation of Josh’s faults. “I don’t mind that you love Josh, that’s fine, but can’t you have a little sympathy for her, too?”
I couldn’t of course. Why should I have? Why should I have torn myself to pieces attempting to hate someone and sympathize with her at the same time? So, hating Lily, I sympathized with you until that day when your interests became hostile to mine. And then you lost me, Josh. As Lily had lost me years before from not caring, you lost me that day from caring but not nearly enough.
Part II.
November-December
Finally I had a letter from Vincent. He was in Vincennes. He asked me to send his wallet and papers but to discard the clothing he’d left. (I brought it up to the attic.) Not a word about what had happened, of course. He was boarding with a family there, a woman and her son, and expected to stay for a while.
You know that I hate it here, Beth, but you must also know that aside from battle periods during the war it’s the only place where I’ve ever been able to briefly delude myself that I exist. In all the time that I’m traveling—that is to say in most of the time of my life—I am looking for someplace else that will have this same effect on me. Not because I hate Vincennes—hating things has never bothered me in the least, I enjoy hating—but because it seems inappropriate that I should be the embodiment of that otherwise charming cliche, the small-town boy who’s uncomfortable when he’s away from home. Out of his element except in his—Oh, Jesus—except in his birthplace. His birthplace, his deathplace. Still, if it surrounds him he must be there. Why this more than any other place? Memories? ‘Nothing that happens after the age of five has any importance,’ one of those phony perpetually couch-ridden types once said to me as she spread her legs beneath me. But I have no memory of anything that happened in the first five years of my life, which taken to its obvious conclusion means that nothing of importance has ever happened to me or ever will, a conclusion which would be as laughable as the idiot who made the pronouncement if it weren’t obviously true.
The identity thing has become the new groove, of course, groove alias rut. Safe harbor for the TV walkie-talkie creeple peoples who get their kicks from rubbing up against half-baked potatoes and ejaculating sour cream at them. Identity is a bag and a gag. Yet it exists for me with all the force of a fatal disease. Obviously I’m here, a mind and a body. To say there’s no proof my body exists would be arty and specious and if my mind is more ephemeral, less provable, the solution of being a writer with solid (touchable, tearable, burnable) books is as close as anyone has come to a perfect answer. The obvious reason that every asshole in the world wants to write. So. I’m here. But where do I end? I wasn’t finished when I was born, a hole was left and most of the time I can’t tell what part of my surroundings has seeped into the hole to masquerade as part
of me . . . or vice versa . . . while the ancient—prehistory—dull familiarity of Vincennes makes me relatively certain that I would know if something were out of place.
It took me four days to hitch back to Vincennes, with good long night rides from trucks and shorter ones in the day. A surprising number from women alone in their cars. Particularly surprising since I’ve been given to understand that my appearance is generally formidable and I’d been without shower, clean clothes (or food, for that matter) since leaving you. I was picked up by teenage girls out driving daddy’s Buick, by good-looking women in sports cars, and so on. At some point during the time I was in Europe—or maybe it began before then and I just didn’t notice—women stopped thinking of rape as being something to avoid.
My last hitch was with this woman I’m staying with, Myrna. She was on her way to Vincennes with her kid, a great little nine-year-old kid named Steven. Her husband was killed in Vietnam. She was in a pretty bad way—I noticed how she was driving before I even realized she was going to stop for me. To do that, she cut from the left lane across the middle one in front of a little Jaguar that was doing at least sixty itself, and then to stop she braked so hard that the kid, who was sleeping on the back seat, was thrown onto the floor. It took a few minutes to straighten him out but he wasn’t hurt. I don’t suppose you’d go for her, Beth, it’s hard to see how she’d fit into that little nineteenth-century convent that Pope Joan runs there, but there’s something about her that gets me . . . her hands . . . maybe it’s just those wild hands. She’s got a lean muscular body and her face is as hard as a whore’s. The general effect is of the lady villain in a Sunday comic strip. But her hands are very small, very soft, incredibly fragile, holding one is like holding a sparrow, there is the constant fear that you’re going to break one of its bones. Or all of them. When I touch her hands I feel for her a tenderness that I’ve felt for only one woman—girl—female—oh, shit. You’re the only person in the world, Beth, for whom I’ve ever willingly imposed even a little caution on myself.
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