The Delectable Mountains

by Michael Malone

  Mr. Beaumont was too old, too mild to fight. He acquiesced in relinquishment, yielded to what he was told were the natural rights of the natural mother. He did not want Leila hurt by a battle. He let her go, settled his estate on her, and went back to being lonely and alone, except for his housekeeper. He died three years later.

  In the few photographs of Leila taken after she left St. Paul, the surprised look of the unexpectedly betrayed (first seen by her grandfather when he told her that Mrs. Thurston was taking her to Norfolk, and later saddening my mother when Leila brought her the pictures to look at as they talked) never quite left her eyes. How, she wondered the rest of her childhood, did I fail him that he should let me go? In what way was I inadequate? What is the matter with me?

  She watched Mrs. Thurston with a shy wariness through their first year together. And she tried, she told me, to construct hypotheses to explain these confusing adult relationships that apparently were always so abruptly to change her own life. Had Mrs. Thurston been married to her daddy (but no, he was her grandfather) and left him because she liked Mr. Thurston better? Mrs. Thurston was her mother, but Mr. Thurston told her distinctly he was not her father and never would be. She spent a great deal of her time with him, watching him, for while his deals were still on the verge, he stayed at home, dealing out poker hands, and Mrs. Thurston kept her job at the V.A. hospital. Leila knew that Mr. Thurston disliked her, although she did not know why he felt the way he did. Nor why he took such pleasure in inflicting pain on her by surreptitious pinches and slaps and jerks on her hair or arms when no one else was around. Or why he did things that he then told Mrs. Thurston Leila had done—things like scrawling on the walls with crayons or pulling the plants out of the window boxes. Leila was punished by her mother for these transgressions, and since she was punished further for saying that her stepfather was the real culprit, she stopped saying it, and accepted the unreason of life as it continued to be presented to her.

  Finally, Mrs. Thurston discovered her husband’s sabotage for herself, once returning home early to find him wiping huge blobs of mud on her pink flowered rug. She sent him to a psychiatrist; by now she was a devout believer in the scientific efficacy of psychoanalysis practiced by diplomaed, and thus expensive, professionals. But Thurston having shown no diagnosable progress at the end of four years (the magnanimous time limit she had mentally set him), Amanda “divorced” him, which is to say evicted him, deprived him of room in which to play cards, and of board of far more snacks between meals than her salary could really afford. Snacks of kippered herring and sardines, whose cans he then used as ashtrays for his cigars and as repositories for the numerous orange peels he accumulated over a day of solitary seven-card stud.

  Commanded to go, Thurston departed sorrowfully (after phoning in one last grocery order to tide him over on his long bus ride to Florida). His revealed destination, that magic land he was always to take her to, was by then a source of neither suspicion or regret to Amanda, for she had years ago developed so pervasive a cynical skepticism in regard to Florida land sites that she scarcely believed the state to exist physically at all, even as a swamp.

  Thurston’s farewell speech to the ten-year-old Leila, plenished with tearful lamentations at their forced separation and with lofty advisory warnings concerning what her future would be like deprived of him, left Leila confused. He seemed so sorry to leave her that she wondered whether perhaps he had loved her all along and whether she had loved him too, and was sorry that he, like her grandfather, was to be removed from her life without satisfactory explanation. She missed him. She even wrote to him in Florida, wrote him for two years, though she never received a reply.

  Mrs. Thurston (she kept his name and a framed photograph of her second “wedding” for future verification) then, in an economy measure, transported her goods, self, and Leila down to Earlsford, North Carolina, for there, Nadine and her husband, Ethan Clyde, the pharmaceutical supplies salesman, owned a small but respectable duplex. They lived in the larger half. Amanda would get a job and rent the other side. However, finding in Earlsford no immediate position commensurate with her qualifications (educational and experiential), she was forced to take a temporary post, which she held for the next twenty years, as assistant office manager of a dry cleaning plant, whereby, she reasoned, they would at least have freshly laundered clothes on their backs.

  Leila loved her uncle Ethan. She spent her early evenings in the basement with him, where they fed lettuce to the rabbits, played checkers, and hid from the calls of Amanda and Nadine as long as they dared. There Leila attempted, though without much success, to substitute her affection for Ethan’s alcohol, for she knew that when he had drunk so many glasses of rye whiskey, which he kept in an old dismantled washing machine, the progressive results were fuzziness of speech, carelessness of movement, and the incurrence of his wife’s (her aunt’s) anger.

  Leila loved but did not like her Aunt Nadine, whose housekeeping she was charged with doing as her contribution to the rent. Nadine, now quite plump, still begrudging, but unbegrudged (to her face at least) by Ethan, Amanda, and Leila, spent most of her day lying on her living room couch with her flowered heating pad, her boxes of dietetic candy, her collection of drugs for her nervous condition—supplied by her husband, the pharmaceutical supplies salesman—and her current copies of Redbook and Popular Medicine. When not reading, she watched the daytime television shows or listened to the radio serials, her favorites being those whose characters suffered year after year in a domino tumble of diseases. She would call to Leila to take time out from her dishwashing or dusting or vacuuming to come into the living room and change the stations for her.

  Leila told the few of her school acquaintances with whom she forced herself to converse during recesses occasionally, (acquaintances, not friends, for she acknowledged none, nor was asked to do so), that her father had been lost in the war. Which was true in the most literal sense, since no one had ever heard of Brian Beaumont again. Then when her uncle Ethan from time to time began to stop by the school building to accompany Leila on the walk home to the duplex, she implied to these same few acquaintances that Mr. Ethan Clyde was the lost father previously referred to—now miraculously recovered and restored to the arms of his family. She told me she was unable to determine whether they received this new information with compliance, indifference, or skepticism. On the whole, she kept herself apart, in self-imposed isolation from the tribe, out of fear of hurt, out of self-deprecatory acceptance of her difference. The neat certitude with which her peers mentioned incontestable and confirmable fathers, mothers, grandparents, siblings, friends, possessions, skills, values, and preferences confused her and defined her only as alien.

  So Leila’s childhood passed while she dreamed of an adolescence that must of necessity be an improvement. Her uncle Ethan died. She was not surprised. Since she had loved him, his departure was to her already an inevitability. Her Aunt Nadine sold the rabbits to a grocer, and in arbitrary memoriam, never again made use of the overhead lights. Instead she kept burning two electric lamps of pink flowered glass globes, which Leila was obliged to dust daily. The widow’s one other obsequy was biweekly attendance at the neighborhood Baptist church, which Amanda and Leila were therefore also pressed to frequent.

  Then at fourteen, by the hormonal miracle of pubescence, Leila gained a sense of her, at least, external worth. She began in bodily form to resemble her personally unknown, but at home much discussed, Aunt Esther. At the same time, she began to command the attention not only of the male half of her peers, but of four-, five-, or even six-year male elders.

  A motorcyclist (loosely associated with that awesome, distant structure, the senior high school) now substituted for her uncle Ethan and waited for her after the three o’clock bell. He was Link Richards, who, with one revolution of his Harley-Davidson, vanquished rivals before they even dared enter the ring, much less reach up to cuff his face with their gauntlets. Link was before h
is time in personal rebellion against the orthodoxy as to, for example, hair style, dress, and subservience to rules other than those that he himself formulated. He was the third person whom Leila had allowed herself to believe genuinely cared for her—the other two being her grandfather Beaumont and her uncle Ethan, both deceased. And so, in return for Link’s affection, she was more than willing to perform those at first inexplicable manual and oral rites that he asked of her, though she already knew instinctively not to mention them to the girls who were for the first time desirous of her company at lunch and on the playground, but who were (she also knew) banded in an unadmitted tribal hostility toward her, not selfhood perhaps, but body. Nor did she mention to them that Link came to perform the companionable rites on, for her, and that she came to enjoy, to desire them.

  But eventually Link himself was routed from the victor’s circle by Leila’s need for acceptance inside the tribe’s citadel. He was, after all, an outlander, a barbarian. There were smoother, smaller gentlemen who sneered at his leather jacket and even at his most potent weapon, the chrome-gleaming motorcycle—which, after all, he couldn’t use to storm the bastions of clubs and cliques, nor to ride in triumph on around the gymnasium during the half-time of basketball games, nor during the intermission of proms.

  And in the meanwhile, eleven years previously, my own life had come to Earlsford and adapted itself happily to furnishing its own niche as one of those same smoother gentlemen.

  So on an October 7th, everything former and accumulative of Leila’s foundations (now fully hypothesized), beginning with her great-great-grandfather Arvid Andrew Sluford’s death by mistaken password, was ready to be joined to my foundations (ending with my mother’s return to Earlsford, her ancestors’ home, following a nine years’ Irish fling). Both our pasts had moved from their antipodes of origin and were now ready to be led inexorably by the chance impurposefulness of the gods to their inevitable conjunction.

  On that day, I, hurrying from an eleventh-grade Latin class toward an American Literature class, saw Leila leaning over a water cooler in the high school corridor holding her blond hair back from the spigot with one hand, her notebook carved with innumerable initials in the other, wearing a red nylon sweater, a plaid skirt, and Dickey Brown’s, the fullback’s, going-steady ring fashionably beaten out of a new quarter.

  And it took all that I have told (Buford’s drowning, the failure of King Cobacco, Esther’s burden of identity, the undisclosed marital status of Brian Beaumont and Jerry Thurston, the fall of Link Richards), and all that Leila told us of herself, and endlessly uncountable other decisions, coincidences, the probably infinite spinning tumbler of flukes, to bring Leila and myself to that water cooler at that moment.

  And from there by more involutions and twined progressions out to a gray June morning in 1968 to find myself lying in a bed in Floren Park, Colorado, tapped on the shoulder by the four-year-old daughter of Leila Beaumont Thurston Stark (granddaughter of Boris Strovokov, great-great-great-granddaughter of Private A.A. Sluford, C.S.A.).

  “Grandma’s upstairs,” Maisie said.

  “Does she know I’m here?”

  “She says you ought to get a job.”

  The reason Mrs. Thurston had flown so unexpectedly to Colorado, when she did not trust the airlines and when, as she said, this trip had already cost her more than she could afford, was that she had some bad news to deliver and needed family to deliver it to. Her sister, Nadine, had departed this mortal life. And on her own prerogative, which was the worst part of the whole thing, as far as Amanda was concerned.

  For Amanda was a Catholic now and knew, she informed us, that people had no right to fly in the face of the Higher Being by killing themselves because it was for Him to give and to take away, and not something for us to decide. According to her, the Sluford family had always displayed a careless disregard of the privileges of the One Above, as evidenced by their willful insistence on disposing of themselves and their kin whenever and however they pleased. The position of the Church regarding such behavior was quite explicit and not subject to interpretation.

  Ironically, it was Nadine herself who had led Amanda down the road to Rome, making her the first Sluford to travel that way since the Reformation. For Amanda had intensely disliked being obliged to walk her sister up to attend the Baptist church twice a week, as Nadine felt compelled to do in the post–Ethan Clyde days. She, Amanda, found the parishioners there so déclassé that, as she said, she frankly would be surprised if the minister himself had a college degree, much less there being another in the whole congregation besides her own.

  After a particularly benighted Sunday school class in which someone suggested that there was no such thing as mental illness, just devils, Amanda quit the flock. Such ignorance was intolerable to one who believed as strongly as she did in the reality of insanity.

  After that, she began taking lessons from one of the priests at the single Catholic church in Earlsford—a handsome modern structure nearly half-filled when every Catholic in the county, plus several dozen curiosity seekers attended Mass together. So they were pleased to receive Mrs. Thurston into their fold. And she was pleased with them. They knew how to do things. Properly. They were gentlemen. Why, her instructor knew Latin and three other foreign languages. She could talk to him. It wasn’t like being with those Baptists who were downright illiterate, or might as well be, for all they ever got out of a book. Amanda, on the other hand, had last year read a library book every three weeks of her life, including the complete works of Mr. Thomas Costain.

  So she often invited this priest to dinner and was, in general, so willing to bestow attention on him that, as Leila told me, the poor man would cut across the lawn to the rectory whenever he saw Amanda heading down the steps toward him after Mass. It was he who had recommended St. Lucy of the Pines for Leila’s education and salvation for me.

  Thus, because of her new faith and theories, Amanda found Nadine’s suicide particularly upsetting. But by paying a late evening visit to the rectory after she found the body and by making six subsequent phone calls to the priest, she came to feel a little better. She told us why at breakfast the morning after her arrival in Floren Park.

  The priest, a Father McGray, had given her the hope that her sister might have been insane. Amanda had interjected at once that such had been her suspicion for some time. Now, suicide, if deliberately chosen of one’s own free will, was a mortal sin. But insane people could not be held morally responsible for their actions since they lacked the free will to choose good or evil. This possible loophole provoked a mixed reaction in Amanda. On the one hand, it was comforting to think that as a result of their quite evident insanity, her mother, father, brother Genesis, sister Nadine, and brother-in-law Ethan were now in heaven, where they had been, or eventually would be, joined by her husbands Brian Beaumont and Jerry Thurston and by her sister Esther. On the other hand, she rather resented it that everything, even heaven, came so easily to lunatics when she had to bear all the heavy responsibilities that went along with being sane.

  Sitting there, I felt certain that Mrs. Thurston liked me as little now as she had the day six years ago when she came across that sonnet sequence I had written fully describing Leila’s earthly delights. Sending Leila to a Catholic boarding school had cost her more than she could afford, and I could tell that when she looked at me she saw the sum total of those expenses branded on my forehead. However, now she pretended that bygones were bygones and even told me not to think she held the past against me because I was only a child then and didn’t know what I was doing, whereas she was an adult and the guardian of her daughter’s soul, and so she had had to do what she’d done in order to save that child from her own foolishness. But despite these disclaimers, I knew that she wasn’t overjoyed to see me there. My suspicions were confirmed by a suggestion she made to me as we sat together that first morning. Or as I sat, and Mrs. Thurston scrubbed the table. She was thin, pale,
blonde, and very, very thin.

  “Devin, honey,” she said, “a young man like you, with a college education behind you, why, you ought to be out there seeing the world, not sitting in a little dinky place like Floren Park painting on play-acting sets. You ought to be doing something exciting. Why, like teaching in a war zone! Someplace like Vietnam, where things are happening to change the very world we live in. You know, I read where the government has special jobs for young people like yourself who want to do something to help the less-privileged little ones and give them an opportunity to better themselves and seek an education.”

  I thanked Mrs. Thurston for this advice and kicked Leila under the table to keep her from laughing.

  Leila did not seem unbearably upset about her aunt Nadine’s death, although she said she was sorry that any human being should apparently have been that unhappy.

  Her mother explained that Aunt Nadine had bequeathed Leila the two pink flowered glass globe lamps that she had for many years required her to dust daily. Mrs. Thurston had brought them out on the plane wrapped in newspapers in a big cardboard box. Laughing, Leila placed the lamps on the mantelpiece and said she would enjoy watching them getting filthy dirty. She gave me the newspapers, as I was eager to have some recent copies of the Earlsford Herald to read; I thought I might find a wedding picture of Jardin in one of them.