by Don DeLillo
“Don’t you like him, dad?”
“It’s not a question of whether or not I like him. I don’t even know the guy. It’s a family thing. It’s a question of him coming into our house and Christ only knows what goes on between him and Jane. Jesus, look at him. He’s so goddamn big. He could hurt her or something. For all I know he’s the sweetest guy in the world. But that’s not the point. It’s a family thing, kid. Now go get him. Go run his ass ragged.”
“Right,” I said.
I beat him in straight sets, easily, embarrassing him, taunting him with soft raindrop shots which sent him from one end of the net to the other, then drilling a hummer past his ear. When it was over my father clapped me on the back, rubbed my neck, congratulated me on what he called a truly historic blitz, a glorious rout. All at the expense of the interloper, it was one of those strange bursts of bloodlove which are both puzzling and overpowering in the dimensions of their joy. I told my father I had barely worked up a sweat and he laughed at that as if it were quite the funniest thing he had ever heard. Then we walked to the locker room with our arms around each other’s shoulders. Big Bob preceded us like a snowplow.
* * *
My father drank Irish stout. He bought most of his suits in England. He liked Dutch cigars and drove Italian and British automobiles. Most of the books in his library were about London before the Great Fire and the American West before the Little Bighorn. His shoes were handcrafted in London by a firm which had cast impressions of his feet the day after they first stepped on British soil. Although he didn’t ride much he had several Western saddles in his den as well as a small collection of Winchester 73s and one Sharps .50 caliber rifle which he liked to call his buffalo gun. He favored German cameras and smoked Danish pipes that cost almost two hundred dollars each.
He used to have lunch at the Playboy Club about twice a week. Later he began accompanying friends or clients to their clubs for lunch—the Harvard or Princeton Club, the New York A.C., the Yale, the New York Yacht Club. My father was a graduate of Long Island University. He used a brand of men’s cologne that was aged in oak casks and blended with over three hundred ingredients. The cars he owned at one time or another included an MG, a Jaguar, a Ferrari, an Aston-Martin and a Maserati. I don’t know whether or not all that horsepower was supposed to take the curse off LIU.
“A man works hard to get two hundred thousand dollars,” he said to me once as we drove through the outskirts of town in the Mark IX Jag. “You save, you finagle, you invest. You work yourself up to x-amount of dollars and if you plan well and get lucky in the market you can begin to build something for your family. That’s what makes a democracy worth all the sweat and corruption. Security for your wife and children after you’re gone. What if something happens to me? Your mother hates to hear me talk like that but you have to prepare for such contingencies. That’s your job as head of a family in a free republic. I’ve got about nine different kinds of policies that’ll provide for you and your mother and your sisters if anything should happen to me. It could happen any time, you know. Right now a dog could walk across the road, I swerve the car, and bang. Understand what I’m talking about? The turning point was the money my father left me. That put us over the top. But if you’re not careful, all you get is stomach trouble. I’ll tell you a true story right out of one of the country’s most distinguished scientific journals. They pulled an experiment on these two monkeys. They gave them electric shocks every sixty seconds. Now the first monkey had a button and all he had to do was press it and he wouldn’t get any shock. The second monkey also had a button but it was completely useless. Eventually monkey-A caught on to the gimmick and started pressing the button like mad to avoid that juice. Whereas monkey-B realized his button wasn’t worth shit and he just squatted in the corner, scratching himself and getting jolted every minute. So what happens? The first monkey gets stomach ulcers and kicks off in two weeks. The second monkey, who had resigned himself to the shocks, lives happily ever after. That little experiment is a moral for our time. It shows the price you have to pay for working yourself up to a decision-making post. I’ll have to show you around the office sometime. You’ll see sixty-five executive monkeys weeping into their telephones and pissing blood. That’s the kind of business your old man is in. But don’t worry about me, kid. I’ve got cast iron in my gut and I’m an odds-on favorite to pull through. In my heart I’m deeply conservative. I come from a long line of secret Presbyterian drinkers. My grandfather was a blacksmith in Sag Harbor. What was the point I was trying to make?”
One summer evening my father came home from work and told the family what had happened on the 6:17 out of Grand Central. There was blood all over his suit and shirt.
“We were all reading our newspapers. All up and down the car you saw nothing but newspapers. The conductor came around and started punching tickets. At this point we were still underground and I remember I was just finishing up the stock page when the train boomed out of the tunnel and started going through Harlem. That’s when the first rock hit. It hit a window across the aisle from me and glass went flying in every direction. Strange thing is nobody said a word. The next rock hit on my side of the train and the window two windows in front of me shattered and then I realized we were being bombarded by more than one or two wise guys and I looked out my window and then out the window across the aisle and there they were, standing up above us behind the fence, Puerto Rican kids, and they were flinging rocks like crazy, dozens of kids, a whole row of them on each side of the train, laughing and heaving rocks at us. Nobody was reading newspapers now. We were all scrambling under the seats and again it was strange but nobody said anything. It was as though we knew it was coming sooner or later. And today was the day. Rocks were bouncing off the side of the train and smashing through the windows. Little kids. Twelve, thirteen years old. Anyway it stopped then. It stopped for about ten seconds and we started coming up when the next barrage hit. These were Negro kids and they really busted up that train. Negro kids on rooftops. More windows went and there was somebody moaning at the back of the car, some guy either hit by a rock or who cut himself on the glass that was all over the floor. We thought it was over when we got out of Harlem and we started pushing the glass off our seats and a few guys even came out with some funny remarks that had us all laughing even though they weren’t really funny. It was shock-laughter if you know what I mean. But the rocks started flying again in the south Bronx. All through the Bronx we got hit in flurries. It wasn’t as concentrated there for some reason. But that’s where some little spic sharpshooter hit my window and a piece of glass caught me on the hand. It finally stopped up around Woodlawn. The inside of that train looked like a tornado hit it. Glass, rocks, newspapers were all over the place. Nobody seemed outraged or bitter. Just mildly upset. And when I got off the train there were three or four other men getting off with me and we walked to our cars and nobody even mentioned that we had nearly been killed back there. Those little bastards. What did we ever do to them?”
“You moved to the suburbs,” my sister Mary said. “Have a nice day at the office tomorrow, daddy. And if you decide to work late and stay in the city overnight, we’ll all understand.”
* * *
St. Dymphna’s was located in southwestern New Hampshire and it was a nice place to be educated. It was quiet and picturesque. The leaves turned color in autumn and there was plenty of snow in winter. Everybody dressed neatly. Here and there a building was showing signs of falling apart but this didn’t bother anybody; it was one of the traditions of the well-bred Northeast. The staff, wholly Episcopalian clergy at one time, now included many laymen, a few Unitarian ministers, a Duck River Baptist, and a lovable Irish janitor named Petey who was always challenging freshmen to identify the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. The student body was composed almost wholly of cynical little anti-religious boys. My guidance counselor was a layman and on Reciprocity Day he introduced himself to my mother and father.
“My name is Thomas Fear
ing. My clubs are the Millbrook Golf and Tennis, the Rhinebeck Tennis and Saddle, the Players of New York, the Nassau of Princeton, the Princeton of New York, and the Church Street Social of Millbrook.”
“Most impressive,” my father said.
During my third year a controversy developed. There was a boy on the basketball team named Brad Dennis who used to make the sign of the cross before taking foul shots. Brad’s mother was a very militant Roman Catholic and apparently she had not only ordered him to bless himself before taking foul shots but had also told him that St. Dymphna was an exclusively Catholic saint and that the Episcopalians, as nice and neat as they were, had no claim to her patronage and absolutely no right to use her name in connection with one of their prep schools, as fine and proper as that school might be. Brad spread the word and for his trouble got himself black-belted on the ass by the dean of discipline. This only aroused him to greater fervor and to an early-Christian lust for martyrdom. I began to get interested. Brad was like an anarchist running loose in the Pentagon. He distributed literature published by the Knights of Columbus and he offered to debate anyone his age on the relative merits of the world’s great religions. Some of us would meet illegally in his room after lights-out to hear him discourse on the transubstantiation and papal infallibility. It was evident that some of his zeal was being transmitted to the small circle of disciples which had gathered about him. The student body began to take sides and the subjects of free speech and the right to proselytize soon became the main topics of conversation. Since the faculty knew little or nothing of Brad’s post-flogging activities, there was an exciting underground feeling to those days. Many sided with Brad simply because of his run-in with the dean of discipline, who was known as the Son of Dracula and was universally feared and despised. Others seemed genuinely interested in the doctrines he promulgated. Those who were against him called him a papist, a crossback, an anti-intellectual and a pissyhole. I decided it was time for me to get to the root of the controversy and that was St. Dymphna herself. I asked Brad for one of his leaflets. It was put out by the Franciscan Missions and it had these words on the front page:
ST. DYMPHNA
(pronounced dimf-nah)
PATRONESS OF THOSE AFFLICTED
WITH NERVOUS DISORDERS
AND MENTAL ILLNESS
“The Nervous Breakdown Saint”
It turned out that St. Dymphna had been born in Ireland, the only child of the pagan king of Oriel. When her mother died, Dymphna’s father decided to seek a second wife. Ultimately he concluded there was only one female worthy enough—his own daughter. Dymphna, who had been baptized by a priest of the church, was fourteen years old. With all the persuasiveness he could muster, the king outlined his scheme to his trembling daughter. Dymphna sought safety in flight, settling finally in Belgium along with her confessor. Spies, however, traced the exiles’ route and it all ended when the king drew his sword and struck off the head of his only child. In time, many people with mental problems were cured due to the intercession of St. Dymphna, whose fame as the nervous breakdown saint gradually spread from Belgium to Ireland and thence to almost every corner of the globe.
The story fascinated me. I felt much the same way I would months later when Jane would read her YWCA notes on the primitive religions of the world. All those magnificently demented people made me feel small and well-dressed. I even liked St. Dymphna’s father. I pictured him with a red beard, drinking mead from a ram’s horn and secretly worrying about his masculinity. I went to Brad Dennis’ room to return the leaflet and hopefully to engage in a fiery conversation about science, religion and eternity. Miles Warren was in there with Brad. Miles, fresh from two weeks of atheism, was the most brilliant student at St. Dymphna’s. When I gave Brad the leaflet and told him how much I had liked the story of St. Dymphna, he said he had given me the wrong material. This is a childish piece of whimsy, he said. With that, he handed me a booklet titled Some Preliminary Concepts of Metaphysical Psychology.
“The Little Sisters of the Poor are the only people who believe that kid stuff about virgin saints,” he said. “The modern Catholic is a hard-nosed kind of guy who asks piercing questions. The whole thing can be brought down to a question of metaphysics and first principles. Whatever is, is.”
“What about the Inquisition?” Miles said.
“The modern Catholic isn’t afraid of that question anymore.”
“What about all those popes who had wives and mistresses?” Miles said.
“Speaking retroactively, we can say they weren’t truly part of the mystical body of Christ in the doctrinal sense. It’s like the lying and cheating General Motors does. You still need cars.”
“If a tree falls in the forest,” Miles said, “and there’s no one around to hear it fall, does that tree in fact make a sound when it hits earth or is the phenomenon of sound contingent on the presence of someone or something which possesses the faculty of hearing? Is the absolute dependent on an agent who can interpret it? Or is the absolute what the word itself implies? The question is as old as Plato.”
“Whatever is, is,” Brad said.
The best part of prep school was suiting up for a baseball or basketball game. I loved that phrase—suiting up. We would sit around the locker room mentally preparing ourselves for the game. We had all read about pro football players who become so tense prior to kickoff that they get sick to the stomach. There was a kid on our basketball team named Rich Higgins who would always go into the small toilet just off the locker room and try to throw up. He never got any further than the dry heaves but it made us feel good to know that one of our teammates was so affected by the impending contest that he was in the toilet with his finger down his throat. As soon as Rich Higgins returned, drained of emotion if nothing else, Coach Emery would say: “This is it! Let’s suit up!” And we would all suit up. It was more fun to suit up for baseball games because there was more to wear. Brad Dennis was the shortstop on the baseball team. He never blessed himself, as he did in basketball, but with his bat he used to make the sign of the cross in the dirt just outside the batter’s box before he stepped in to hit. He batted eighth in the order, which brought about a mild complaint from his mother.
* * *
America, then as later, was a sanitarium for every kind of statistic. We took care of them. We tried to understand them. We did what we could to make them well. Numbers were important because whatever fears we might have had concerning the shattering of our minds were largely dispelled by the satisfaction of knowing precisely how we were being driven mad, at what decibel rating, what mach-ratio, what force of aerodynamic drag. So there was a transferred madness, a doubling, between the numbers themselves and those who made them and cared for them. We needed them badly; there is no arguing that point. With numbers we were able to conceal doubt. Numbers rendered the present day endurable, heralded the impressive excesses of the future and stocked with a fine deceptive configuration our memories, such as they were, of the past. We were all natural scientists. War or peace, we thrived on the body-count.
Numbers matter less now that the adding machines, the super-calculators, the numerical systems and sub-systems have been uninvented. However, thinking back, I recall how important it was for me, personally, to define a situation, or a period of time, with as many numbers as I could assemble. They seemed the very valets of clarity. If I were on my deathbed today, and did not know the date, my cells would probably refuse to surrender. Without a calendar, a stopwatch, a measuring cup on the night table, I couldn’t possibly know how to die.
It was in the winter of my fifteenth year that Mary met Arondella. This means that Mary was nineteen at the time. It also means that Jane was eighteen, that my best friend Tommy was sixteen, that Kathy Lovell was fourteen, that my father was forty-two and my mother thirty-seven. That was the winter in which Tommy and I first took Kathy to the yacht club and it was the winter before the summer in which, age sixteen, I sat through two showings of From Here to Eternity starring Bu
rt Lancaster. That same summer was the summer of the party.
Excepting Mary, no one in the family ever referred to Arondella by anything but his last name, and that only rarely. The second time they saw each other was on Christmas Eve. After she’d left to meet him somewhere, the rest of us sat in the living room looking at the tree.
“I wonder how old he is,” Jane said. “She won’t tell me a thing so I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a lot older than she is.”
“It’s not his age I’m worried about as much as what he does for a living,” my father said.
“Mary says he’s in the rackets,” I said.
“Yeah, well, you never know when Mary’s telling the truth and when she’s playing games. If he is in the rackets, all hell is going to break loose around here. No daughter of mine is going to be seen dead with any two-bit racky. I’ll break both his arms for him. Wait and see if I don’t.”
“Clinton, your bark has always been worse than your bite. Now tell the truth, dear, hasn’t it? You’re forever threatening to dismember someone. But when the time comes I look around and where’s Clinton? Oh, he’s in the den, mother, polishing his saddles. Jane, I swear to you if fire ever breaks out in this house, you just head straight for the den and there will be your daddy, polishing his saddles. Fire, plague or famine, there you’ll be, Clinton, far from the madding crowd.”
“Let’s unwrap the presents and get it over with,” Jane said.
“I think we should wait for Mary to come home. That’s always been the tradition in this house and I don’t see why we should alter it now simply because she’s taken leave of her senses temporarily. We’ll wait for Mary.”
“What if he comes back with her?” I said.
“Your father will suggest that he leave. There are diplomatic ways of handling such things. I see no reason to hurt the man’s feelings.”
“What if he won’t go? If he’s in the rackets, he’s probably not used to getting pushed around. Did you see Cry of the City, Jane? Victor Mature and Richard Conte. Richard Conte plays a gangster and Victor Mature is his old buddy from the same neighborhood who became a detective instead.”