The Delectable Mountains

by Michael Malone

  “Well, Leila darling,” Mrs. Thurston said as she shifted one of the vases on the shelf to make them perfectly equidistant, “it’s more than Nadine left to me, her only living blood relation.”

  Leila stopped stirring the giant pot of leftover chili still simmering on the stove for our supper.

  “What about Esther?” she asked her mother. For though she had never met her other aunt, Leila still felt a deep empathy with and a strong affection for her. From periodic Christmas cards, they knew that Esther had traveled from Baltimore and the “night club” to St. Louis to New Orleans to New York, where she was presumed to be living with a man in express violation of the Holy Scriptures as well as the city ordinances.

  Nadine’s husband, Ethan, had in fact written to Esther once and told her that she had a niece. After that, she began sending Leila presents—a gaudy tea set, a stuffed bear, a fake ermine muff. And though Leila was fifteen when these gifts started arriving, so that the red kimono fit the bear instead of her, she treasured each present as a mystic bond between herself and the unmet aunt. She kept them all with her. The bear and tea set were now in Maisie’s room.

  “No, darling,” Mrs. Thurston replied in her slow, precise, imperturbable southern accent. “We ass-ume your aunt Esther is still alive. If you can call the way she has chosen to con-duct herself leading a human life.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mother,” Leila said as she sat down, threw her feet up on the table, and lit a cigarette.

  “Now, Leila Stark, I have asked you many times not to use that manner of language with your mother. And I think if you will analyze your subconscious motivations, you will have to admit that you only say such things just to shock people.”

  Here she paused to smile at the rest of us and to direct a remark to Nathan Wolfstein. His attention at the time was more fully focused on efforts to move his cup of coffee and bourbon from its saucer to his mouth than on listening to Mrs. Thurston’s conversation, but she had isolated him as the only other adult available to her, and went right on.

  “You know how it is,” she reminded him. “Young people have to de-fy the teachings of their elders so they can establish their own i-denti-ties. They have to think simply nothing at all of everything we ever said to them, in-cluding the importance of civilized manners!”

  With that, she daintily shoved Leila’s feet off the table, and removing the cigarette from her daughter’s mouth, soaked it under the sink faucet and dropped it in the trash can.

  Chapter 11

  Our Housekeeping

  After dinner, I ventured to ask Mrs. Thurston what had happened to Mrs. Clyde’s house.

  She put down her coffee cup and touched her napkin to her lips. “I will tell you that, Devin, and you will simply not believe what Leila’s aunt, my own sister, did with that duplex. Though, of course, she was not a well woman at the time she made up her testament, as her later desperate action showed only too well. But, honey, she left that entire duplex, ow-er home, to the First Avenue Baptist Church, lock, stock, and barrel. Now, that is the truth. And they are ‘kindly’ allowing me, her own flesh and blood, who nursed her in those last sad years when she just lay in bed with those nervous headaches of hers, they are allowing me to stay on at the same rent for three months. Stay on. For three months! And then they are going to sell that duplex to the city for some undisclosed purpose.”

  She paused to let the impact of this protestant perfidy take effect. She nodded her head at me as I grasped the horror. The chances of her ever renouncing Catholicism and returning to her first faith seemed increasingly remote.

  “That’s awful, Mrs. Thurston,” I told her. “What are you going to do?”

  Leila gave me a funny look in response to my inquiry, but I saw no reason not to be polite.

  “I do not know what I am going to be able to do. Maybe I will just go right on out to California in September,” she smiled coyly, “and live with my son-in-law and his wife.” She looked at Leila, whose eyes, on hearing this maternal suggestion, went from blue to steel-gray and back again.

  Then Mrs. Thurston efficiently and speedily began clearing off everyone’s dishes. Joely tried to protest that he had not finished with his plate; Wolfstein clutched his cup to his chest and faltered into the living room. Everyone left but Leila, her mother, and me.

  As Mrs. Thurston scrubbed down the table top with a sponge, she told us in some detail the details of her sister’s death.

  “Nadine,” she explained, “simply refused to make an effort to be happy. She was always given to a sullen disposition, as Leila here can witness, and she just got more and more soured on life as the years went by, especially after your uncle Ethan destroyed his bodily organs, as you know he did, honey, from the constant consumption of alcohol, just sat down in that basement and drank himself into the grave. Which is not something that it is easy for a wife to watch her husband do, especially a woman like Nadine who is prone anyway to look at the dark side of the street.”

  I nodded. Leila was making stacks of meatballs, storing them in the freezer.

  “Well, she just let herself go. Sat in that house with not enough lights on to properly see by. Lay on that bed day after day watching television programs, eating sweets and undermining her system with those nerve pills (which, it might as well be admitted, are just about as addictive as her-o-in), until she simply did not have the will left in her to make an effort.

  “I begged her, Devin. I went over there every single day and pleaded with her, ‘Get out more,’ ‘Take a drive to the shopping center some Saturday.’ Why, I invited her to visit my Toastmistress Club with me. But no, she preferred to lie there and complain and take a gloomy attitude. I made every effort in my power. I invited Father McGray over to advise her to get herself some professional help from a psycho-ther-a-pist, and, I’m sorry to have to say it, but she was practically rude to that good man.”

  “Mother,” Leila said, as she pried the sponge from Mrs. Thurston’s energetic hand, “we aren’t going to operate on this table!” Mrs. Thurston gave up trying to restore the kitchen table top to its natural grain, and began instead to scald the dishes clean in the sink. Meanwhile, the flow of her report was unbroken.

  “It got so bad, she would just leave that television set on all night long rather than exert herself to the point of reaching over and turning it off, at least until the morning shows came on. Just left the test-pattern buzzing away.”

  She sat down for a moment and dropped her voice to a whisper, “Why, Leila, she began to neglect her personal hygiene to such an extent that it was not merely embarrassing, it was downright unpleasant to be around her. Now, I cannot help it, that is true. But somebody had to take care of her, and who was there to do that, honey, but your mother? But even I, close as I was and watching her every day before I went to work and every night when I came home just as soon as I possibly could, even I had not realized that your Aunt Nadine was as unwell mentally as she apparently had become over the years. And you simply cannot stand over a person every single moment of the day and night when you have to work for a living and when they are unwilling to help themselves or seek medical assistance.”

  “Yes, that’s true, mother,” Leila said, quietly. Was she thinking of Mittie?

  “It is, isn’t it? There is simply no way,” Mrs. Thurston shook her head. “She had saved up an en-tire bottle of those pills, and when I reached her bedside the next morning, she was gone. That bottle was right there beside her—and not a note, not a word of explanation! Her television set was still playing. Still playing on and on, and her there dead in front of the picture.”

  Mrs. Thurston stared at the wall with a puzzled look, then jumped up and went back to the dishes. “The doctors said she had consumed thirty-two of those pills, had collected them for God knows how long—and why in His name Ethan ever let her have them in the first place—saved them up, and consumed them late that very eve
ning. I have had many tragedies to bear in my life, Leila, sorrows I have not burdened your young heart with.”

  Here Leila rolled her eyes to the ceiling and lit another cigarette. She looked to me as though she might be playing an imaginary violin in her head.

  “But when I saw your Aunt Nadine lying there that awful way in that dusty room”—Mrs. Thurston paused as if to let us call up the image in our minds—“why, if it hadn’t been for Father McGray’s comfort, I doubt I could have gotten through it.”

  By that point, Mrs. Thurston had finished washing and inspecting all the dishes, including those we had not used on the shelves. She had even emptied the sugar bowl into a measuring cup, washed it, returned the sugar, and then washed the measuring cup. This done, she popped off her rubber gloves and sat down. She believed, she said, in doing things right.

  In order to accommodate her mother, who was visiting, it seemed, for an unspecified length of time, on leave from the dry cleaning plant, Leila had to make a few alterations in our living arrangements. Seymour and Sabby were deported to the company boarding house downtown, and their room was made over for Maisie and Davy, so that the children’s grandmother, who didn’t think it would be proper for her to be sleeping in the basement with two young men (Joely and myself), could have their room.

  This usurpation of territory did not endear Grandma Thurston to Maisie, nor did the child receive with docility Amanda’s persistent directives on her behavior, manners, language, cleanliness, and godliness, in none of which areas the child was, in Amanda’s opinion, making enough of an effort. Maisie pointed out to her grandmother that she was not her mother, and that, lacking such authority, she might do better to mind her own business. Amanda had begun by saying that Maisie certainly was a precocious little girl; she ended by observing to Leila that the four-year-old might not have been raised with the proper respect for her elders, an attitude that perhaps should be closely watched, since it often indicated underlying sociopathic tendencies, and even criminal impulses. To this, Leila repeated, in effect, that Mrs. Thurston might do better to mind her own business, and in this echoed suggestion, Amanda heard once again the battle cry of her age-old foe, a mad genetic inheritance; in this case, as with Genesis’s, congenital failure to honor thy parent.

  Meanwhile, to my surprise, Mittie and Mrs. Thurston seemed to get along beautifully together. Leila said one day that she had read somewhere that everyone marries his or her mother, and while she had been at first skeptical of this theory, she had subsequently admitted to herself that her mother and her husband had a lot in common.

  “Now, Mittie honey,” Leila would say, playfully addressing me in a brisk imitation of her mother’s voice, “you have a college degree, and I myself have attended college for four years and received my diploma, and so I know you will understand what I am talking about: that it is the good Lord’s blessed truth that our darling Leila is simply not a terr-i-bly neat person. Now, that is a literal fact that simply cannot be denied, darling Mittie. Our Leila is…well, honey lamb, she is a little ole pig. And the reason she is this way, darling angel, as any professional psychoanalytical therapist who has his diploma would tell you himself, is that she just will not exert herself to the point of making an effort.”

  Well, as a matter of fact, the house had been considerably cleaner since Mrs. Thurston joined us. Plastic runners extended like an artificial starfish from the front door to all other parts of the house. It served the purpose of prohibiting us from bringing the outdoors inside on the bottoms of our shoes because everything belonged in its rightful place, and earth and grass were definitely not meant to grow upon the floor.

  The fireplace was vacuumed daily, the toilet bowl water was bright blue, the rooms were sprayed with aerosol pine-scented fresheners that, as little Davy remarked, smelled nothing at all like the pine trees outside the windows. In a week’s time, you could eat off the floors, the counters, the beds, the window sills, and the chairs. You could eat off the table too, as long as you kept a firm grip on your plate—for Mrs. Thurston so disliked a dirty dish that she stared at your plate as Tantalus must have looked at the fruit suspended just out of his reach by the gods. She was as quick to clear as an eager busboy in an Automat.

  During this sanitizing, Leila refused to allow her mother inside her bedroom, so she and Mittie enjoyed an oasis of clutter while the rest of us lived in a desert of order. Leila and I were sitting before the fire one evening, she singing to Davy on her lap, while I worked on a poem about Jardin. I asked her if she wouldn’t admit that she went out of her way to be messy around her mother. “You’re the one always talking about the importance of structure. Structure. Structure. Structure,” I said to her. “Then what’s wrong with having some order in your surroundings?”

  “Nothing,” she replied, leaning back in the couch, slowly smoothing Davy’s hair. “But not that way. Listen, I used to be just as compulsive as my mother, just the way she brought me up. Crazy. And you know what I decided? It’s doing things on the outside because you’re too damned scared to look at the inside. So, when I talk about structure in life, I don’t mean that crap. I mean having a meaning. I mean trying to learn how to just sit still inside yourself. Liking what you are. Peacefully, and with some kind of, well, gracefulness. And I’ve taught myself how to drop a lot of the outside crutches because if I let myself get started on that shit, I’d be down on my knees next to her, scrubbing out the drainpipes with a toothbrush.”

  Every now and then, Leila would come out with statements like this. They always surprised me. Usually, she was more diffident; slightly insecure, I imagined, about her lack of college education, she would hesitate, blush, and stumble over the pronunciation of words, sometimes even words you knew she knew.

  Then, all at once, she would burst forth with a barrage of argument on politics or ethics or whatever, as if she dared you to challenge her logic. Occasionally, when we were dating, it occurred to me that she might be just pretending that I was inordinately brighter than she was and her intellectual guide.

  The day that Mrs. Thurston arrived, Jennifer Thatcher had, with unprofessional irresponsibility, gone to Aspen to visit a college friend for a few days. So Mittie begged Leila’s mother to take Jennifer’s part in our next melodrama, A Daughter’s Ruin and a Mother’s Prayer. The part of the mother. At first, she modestly demurred; she was not a trained stage performer, she explained to him, and had never considered appearing behind the footlights before a live audience, though she appreciated Mittie’s confidence, and though she certainly wished to make herself useful in any way she could. Mittie assured her that anyone who had served for two consecutive terms as Co-Chairwoman of the Toastmistress Club could not fail of theatrical success, especially someone of her intelligence and education.

  Finally she accepted. She studied her part diligently and, during rehearsals, exerted herself to such a point that Mr. Wolfstein began drinking twice as heavily as he had before she joined the company.

  As she delivered each speech, she would walk to the footlights, shade her eyes with her hand, and call out to Wolfstein for confirmation. “Now, was that all right, Nathan? Or would it be better if I said it this way, ‘A-lasss, where shall I find the money to save my hapless child?’ You know, accentuating it like that?”

  Wolfstein would invariably reply, “Fine, Amanda, you’re doing fine. But let’s go on through the play and see what we’ve got in a broad run-through. We can work out the fine points later.”

  She would smile, nod, return to her speech, and be back peering out in five minutes, “Or maybe it should be, ‘A-lasss, where shall I find the money?’ Would that be better?”

  Rehearsals began to run three or four hours longer than usual, as Amanda exerted herself through a line-by-line linguistic analysis of her part. Leila told me that now I ought to understand what her mother had asked of poor Father McGray: “But suppose cannibals tortured you and then you denied Christ because you wer
e afraid you would be eaten if you didn’t, now would that be loss of faith? What is the difference between despair and just, you know, being depressed? Am I remiss not to spend more of my time trying to convert the people at the dry cleaning plant?”

  Amanda spent a great deal of time talking at Wolfstein, even apart from rehearsals. She solicited his advice on personal and philosophical issues, prepared healthful snacks to pick up his appetite, and warned him not to abuse his body, which was the temple of his sacred soul. He began leaving the house at dawn and retiring to his room immediately after dinner. Amanda did not take this behavior as a personal slight, but told him she was delighted to see he was letting his organs get the rest they needed. Wolfstein told Mittie that he felt certain Tennessee Williams and not God had created Mrs. Thurston.

  On opening night, Amanda was a great success in A Daughter’s Ruin, etc. At first she herself had thought that the play was failing miserably; no one had really explained to her that the melodramas were played completely for laughs and not for drama. The regal indignation with which she stared down the audience for their disrespectful attitude only delighted them more, and they gave her a big ovation at the curtain calls.

  During this time, Leila and I had become much closer than we had been in the several weeks subsequent to that first rainy night. I think she needed an ally in her stand against the past, a past that her mother represented, and I was the one person there with the relational longevity to fill that role. My memory was to be her witness for the prosecution. Soon we began going over to the Red Lagoon Bar together and reciting over drinks the litany of our shared recollections. I liked being with her this way. She sympathized with my pain over losing Jardin to James Dexter. And so I decided I had been wrong to doubt the reliability of her feelings for me as I had done in the weeks since the night of the storm. Now things were right again.

  Then one evening after I had returned from marching the streets to advertise Mrs. Thurston in A Daughter’s Ruin, Leila confided to me that she was worried about Spurgeon Debson, that he seemed lost and confused (!), that she cared a lot about him.