“Ah, your royal highness, how good it is to see you so refreshed from taking, as I trust you just did, the air on deck. Do please sit here and join me. As you see, I am, courtesy the kindness of the ambassador’s widow with her husband’s eyeglasses, able to read again. Being without my own specs was cause for the worst of my last hours in New York on the subway. Not being able to read signs, I daren’t get off the line I was on. Ah, and I see you notice what I am reading. Got it out of the ship’s library. Potted biographies of great Americans.”
I THOUGHT YOU’D HAD ENOUGH
OF THAT PLACE
“And so I have had, Dinnlay. But I am also concerned that there must have been deeper reasons why we have fled from that land where all things seem dramatically possible. And indeed one knows now in one’s bones that neither of us shall ever return there to live. Ah, Dinnlay, I know I have squelched your freedom of utterance. But understand I did so for what I know you will finally appreciate was for a better purpose. And perhaps it has caused you to have had to listen to me more than you’d like to. But let me now say this. America, as we grew up, Dinnlay, gave us our dreams and aspirations. And has now handed them back to us shattered. We were born in that land to the promise supreme. That life would give us whatever one wished. To have whatever one wanted. And to be whatever one wanted to be. And perhaps one goal above all was dangled in front of us and was undoubtedly the worst of all. It was that we could become president and commander in chief of that massive burgeoning nation. And follow in the footsteps made for us by Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. The latter, whose early forebears were described as gentlemen. And the former born in a backwoods cabin. Just like April was up her family gulch. Abraham helping his father clear fields and plant pumpkin seeds and take care of crops. He saw, as I did as a young boy, his mother die. And then be buried in the forest. Whereas I kissed my own mother’s cold lips good-bye in her hospital bed. And watched her coffin lowered into her grave in a cemetery. And they had to hold me back because I said she was going to be lonely. And then my father would not let his second wife have any children because she might not pay enough attention to me.”
I MAKE NO COMMENT
“Dinnlay, it was the same Washington under whose bridge so named where I stood hitchhiking and who in the story so told, admitted to his father that he’d chopped down the cherry tree, saying, ‘Father, I cannot tell a lie, I hacked the defenseless, bloody thing down with my own highly sharpened axe.’ Dinnlay, at the time of our young innocence we believed all those things. Trusted them. And always relied upon getting what we would ask Santa Claus to bring us for Christmas. Wrapped as it would be in all the colors of the rainbow. Otherwise, we would throw a foot-stamping tantrum. And in spite of all this, and do forgive me if I put it this way, but I think we duly got our faces shoved in the shit. And that we end up now preferring a more sophisticated stack of same to anoint our visage with.”
AND WHICH KEEPS
OUR
OLFACTORY NERVES
IN TRIM
“And, Dinnlay, even this far out at sea, one can not shake off the nightmare of America and its strange moments to be remembered. Especially if you recall that afternoon when I lay contentedly on April’s sofa just before Christmas waiting for her to return from shopping and I with all my myriad of troubles lay back on a divan in front of April’s windows. Pictures at an Exhibition playing on the gramophone. A wood fire sparkling and crackling in the grate. A full and as yet unopened bottle of Power’s Gold Label Irish whiskey nestled and resting in the crook of one’s arm. And I was even reaching to dip a Ritz cracker in a bowl of whipped cheese and sour cream and chives. When I heard a loud deep bark out the window and rose up higher to see. The girl in the basement apartment beneath was returning from walking her dog. She was quite remarkably stunning as she stood a few moments and whispered in the dog’s ear before descending the steps. And, Mike, I absolutely saw the dog smile. And would not believe I had until April said that she could no longer stand the noises coming up through the floor. Or indeed the happy look on the girl’s face. As T.J., your brother, said, Dinnlay, There’s enough in this nation to give everybody the life they want to lead even if it’s the life of a dog. Ah, but, Dinnlay, we are exactly poised now between two continents floating upon peaceful oblivion. Please tell me how you are.”
DO YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW
“Yes.”
I FEEL CONTENTED
ENOUGH
JUST TO WANT TO DIE
FOR
I NEVER EXPECTED TAIL BETWEEN MY LEGS
TO BE RETURNING WITH S.D.
UNPUBLISHED
“Ah, Dinnlay. Patience, my friend. You must come out of your lovely gloom and put to rout all maudlin misgiving. Remember that now we come back to a land where one knows that there will soon be so many things to be sad about that it will be hard to make a choice. But as for Sebastian Dangerfield, it seems your opposition is censorship. The liberal world of France may be your answer. And from whence, once the words you have written have been made known in print they will burn holes through all opposition. Mike, everything is going to be all right. Provided you stay out of Wales. And the mother of all of us, whomever she is, will take care of us.”
HOW ARE YOU
“Me fine. Me very fine. Me only sorry me miss wigwam. Ah, but my sight, Dinnlay, with these glasses is now passably good. My thinking, my understanding, my memory, concentration, mood and mobility are, to say the very pessimistically least, absolutely magnificent. Confidence restored. Depression and frustration put to rout. Gonads, as a result, possibly overactive. And except for our not being able in tourist class to have our breakfasts served in bed, one makes no complaint aboard this ship. I do believe we are being given a sample of what we have held as being our true way in life.”
IT SEEMS AT THE MOMENT
THAT YOU ARE A MAN OF
INVISIBLE MEANS
“Which, Dinnlay, sadly are certainly not private by any stretch of the wallet or imagination. But as a man who expected to be of at least semiprivate means, I have found that one of the hardest things to do in life is to patiently and complacently wait for one’s inheritance. For one has to assume that when it comes in the expectedly not too distant future, things are going to be different and that one’s present state is not worthy of the effort to particularly change it.”
AND APROPOS
OF NOTHING AT ALL
PLEASE LET ME STATE
THAT LIFE IS BUILT
ON RESISTANCE
NOT SATISFACTION
“Mike, you know, had we been to April’s party, everything could have changed for us in America. But perhaps not. As we return to Europe, I think now we should both know better. We should always live by each other’s advice and never trust our own. And, Dinnlay, everyone in that land that we have now left some distance behind us, is in a repressed rage. Everyone wanting to strangle and kill each other for all slights and indifferences that have been ethnically and economically heaped upon them and accumulated from the moment they were born or left the nest of their parents, if indeed they did have a nest and if indeed they did have parents. But let us now raise these glasses of good grog and be of good cheer. Here’s to your good health and your quick return to colloquial discourse.”
I’LL MOST GLADLY
DRINK
TO THAT
The approaching culmination had come now to the magical pleasure of shipboard routine. As if the whole world approached an end. And it had. We were west now of Ireland, with only a day’s sailing ahead. The swells of the sea under the Franconia, moderate. Gainor, instead of being an international ambassador at large, reverting again to being the lonely highway man. No longer having to be on his shipboard toes for every contest from Ping-Pong to guessing the number of eggs used that day in the kitchen. He instead bowed, smiled and clicked heels to everyone and also let drop the rumor that upon landing at Cobh, he was about to have secret talks with the Irish government on behalf of the bearded silent g
entleman in the fur-collared greatcoat who would continue to travel incognito on to Liverpool. At Halifax I had written and posted my last letter to Valerie stamped PAQUEBOT POSTED AT SEA. I showed the ten-cent stamp to Gainor which was a picture of an Indian stretching his fur skins outside his wigwam. This produced, as I knew it would, a paroxysm of immense delight, and I was summoned below to Gainor’s stateroom for a drink as well as to collect back clothes prior to his embarkation at Cobh.
“Ah, my dear Dinnlay, the trip is well nigh over. We have weathered every storm and the destination we sought is won. Our injuries healed, our modest if not meek self-esteem restored, we now gird our loins for the challenges ahead. Let there be no looking back. Let there be no regrets. And let there be much mercy. And upon those words you have written. Which tell of the wild ginger man. Let the eyes of the world be ready to look. For they shall. And I fervently know that one day somewhere I will sit delightedly turning those printed pages. And your day and the day of Dangerfield will come.”
THANKS
FOR THE HOPE
THANKS
FOR THE FLATTERY
Gainor poured out yet another swig or two left in his apparently inexhaustible gallon bottle of Chianti wine stowed in his Pan American Airways bag. And it seemed to be one of the few things he had brought back with him from America. I watched him pack his Ocean Times newspapers and thrust a magazine into his brown paper bag he still had. And in his single suitcase, there seemed nothing but a motley array of soiled and tatty underclothes. But then from beneath these, he lifted up a neatly tissue-wrapped parcel and carefully opened it. And from out of his own bedraggled clothes came these two pristine children’s cowboy outfits. One for each of his daughters that he had promised to bring back to them from America. I watched as he lovingly held up these small reddish suits one at a time to the light, each pinned with a star-shaped sheriff’s badge. It seemed as if he had lost all his personal possessions and only had left now these two precious things, shiny and smelling new. Which carefully he refolded and laid back reverently in his suitcase. And I was suddenly stunned with the utter sadness of this sight. Of something of which he never spoke. Was the deep devotion and obvious love he had for these two of his little beautiful daughters. Each with her own small beautiful name.
Mariana
The eldest and the youngest
Called
Jane
31
GAINOR’S LAST NIGHT aboard the Franconia was indeed gala. Sporting every article of clothing I had left suitable to lend him, he danced with lady after lady on the dance floor. And never a dull moment as he would return to the table where I sat to play “Raggle Taggle Gypsy” on his devised instrument of comb and paper. The first-class passengers trespassing out of control among us. Anxious to pay their respects to me, the pretended prince of the principality, and my equally deceiving chief of protocol. As I sat slightly apostate, my friend Joyce demanding but only once getting me to hopelessly waltz.
“Come on, J.P., get your curmudgeonly old bones up out of that chair and shake a leg.”
The serenely attractive Joyce at last overcoming her charming reserve and strangely sounding like my dear April, whose voice, sadly, I did not hear again over the sea waves. And as I watched Gainor dance wearing my smoking jacket and dancing pumps, and looking every inch the ambassadorial representative of a decently important principality, I thought again of the first time we ever met, in the Pearl Bar in Dublin. A drinking place of journalists and poets in a shadowy street just a short stroll from the north side gates of Trinity. Here the portly figure of Bertie Smylie, the editor of the Irish Times, held court in the upstairs lounge with reporters and those who would be such. I was standing at the ground-floor bar having a rare drink with the elusively shy James H. Leathers, with whom I shared rooms. And who, by the account of anyone who had ever met him, was beheld as the most charming man ever to set foot in Ireland.
“Hello, Mike.”
I turned from the bar to be confronted by two gents, one of whom, a Randall Hillis, a few days previously had asked me if I could lend him a silk shirt with French cuffs, a pair of gray flannel trousers and a yellow sweater because his brother-in-law was applying to perform a job as a male model. And these three articles of clothing of mine, a bow tie added, I now saw upon the man to whom I was introduced. None other than the present man Gainor Stephen Crist out on the dance floor doing a boogie-woogie. And I recalled again that back that day in Dublin there was not even the slightest trace of self-consciousness, condescension nor embarrassment that Gainor was walking around in my wardrobe but he merely gave me a look of benign curiosity as we were introduced and shook hands. Even with the incident of the broken watch which allowed me to keep time an hour at a time. Gainor instantly proving that I was hoaxing myself. Which indeed I was, but in Dublin such things were encouraged. However, this interjection of correction in matters of accuracy in the face of my abstracted musefulness undoubtedly formed the basis of our relationship ever since.
Aboard the Franconia, excitement now with every hour passing. Ahead on the horizon the towns and places we knew well. From Slea Head to Cape Clear. The bays, inlets, jutting peninsulas, and towns. Dingle, Killorglin, Cahirsiveen. And now it was nine-fifteen A.M. in the morning as we rounded the southern coast of Ireland and its low hills lay there softly green and silent. Gainor and I taking what would be our very last early morn, post-breakfast constitutional on the open deck in the chill breeze of the Atlantic Ocean. The taste of salt on one’s lips. The roaring sound. The dark sea passing by. And as he was taking deep breaths of sea air, I was about to listen to the very last of Gainor’s conversations.
“Ah, Dinnlay, the contours of Erseland are just there on the horizon. And strolling here as we do, I want you to know that I can recall all that has ever happened. And with the understandable exception of cunnilingus, buggery and blow jobs you need only come to me to learn of any details concerning past fights, insults, betrayals, calumny, backbiting, infidelity, cuckoldry, Judas kisses, stabs in the back or just general banjaxing.”
HOW GOOD TO KNOW
THAT I SHALL BE ABLE
TO KNOW
ALL THERE IS
TO KNOW
WITH THE VERY UNDERSTANDABLE
EXCEPTION OF BUGGERY
BLOW JOBS AND
CUNNILINGUS
“Ah, and, Dinnlay, do you remember when you were not so silent on a memorable night in Dublin some years ago when I had in a pub run out of money, having most inconveniently not yet established credit with the barman. And you said you would get money from the very citizens of the city so that I could continue to drink. And I did not believe you.”
ALWAYS
THE WISEST
POLICY
“Ah, but you led me out to the middle of the O’Connell Street Bridge, where you spoke and gathered a massive crowd. Who stood there in the cold gray night. As beneath us, the dark Liffey waters ebbed out to sea. You preached to them a new philosophy to which they avidly listened and which I must confess the substance of which slips my mind at this moment. But I acted as your front man, making sure you were not mobbed and had space. When you requested money in appreciation for what you told them, I was astonished that they threw you pennies, a few of which landed and rolled loose on the grimy pavement and were chased after by a band of barefoot urchins that one had to shoo away from the larger dimensions of coin. And I was even more astonished when you took the threepenny bits and threw these back into the crowd and asked for six pences and shillings. And when such were unbelievably forthcoming, I picked up the coins from the pavement and handed them to you. You then threw these too back into the crowd and asked for half crowns. Mike, I now have a confession to make. Concerning a matter which has made me feel quite guilty ever since. I must now, as we approach Cork, Ireland, at these steady eighteen or slightly more knots, own up to you. I pocketed a lot of that change. For as you threw a few of the half crowns back and asked for paper pounds, I knew that no matter how m
arvelous your words that we were about to get fuck all.”
WE DID,
IF
I REMEMBER CORRECTLY
GET ONE OR TWO
TEN-SHILLING NOTES
“Ah, quite right we did. But then too if you remember, the whole plan backfired. Although my pockets were heavily loaded with coin, you were simply too bloody convincing about everything you said and we found we could not disband the crowds nor stop the ardent who followed you from the bridge. We had in fact to flee to your Trinity rooms and be admitted by the porters into the front gates which had to be shut and locked behind us. And thus were we prevented from being able to get back into a pub to drink. Dinnlay, I often remember that night as an object lesson. That one must not be too good at what one attempts to do else everyone is after you to keep doing it. But here let me write something for you on your piece of paper.”
The History of the Ginger Man Page 42