Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  Could Rage give a son nothing more than a newspaper clipping that called him "The Baudelaire of the Bathroom Wall"?

  Thoughtful, he munched the last biscuit. Beanie was now upholstering an old chair she had carried up early that morning from the trash pile on the sidewalk. Happy green flowers spread over the castaway and gave it life. "Darlin'," said Richard after a long silence, "I'm gonna write an apology to the past." He laughed. "I'm gonna say I'm sorry I asked the past to kiss my ass. What do you think of that?"

  Beanie smiled, her mouth full of tacks.

  "I got to get my shit together. We got to get ready to have a baby," he told her. "I'm thirty-nine, you know."

  The metallic taste in Beanie's mouth was suddenly sour.

  "Richard, a doctor told me years ago that I couldn't—"

  "Oh, bullshit. Doctors! What do doctors know? Shaman with a few shoddy chants and a saw. Do doctors know this?" He kissed her.

  "Now look. Smile. Come on."

  "I'm fifty-two."

  "Then we don't have any time to lose. Come on!" He tried to pull her up and toward the couch. She shook her head but laughed.

  "All right then." He sat down beside her. "Tell me about your ancestors instead."

  "Like what? They're all in the cemetery behind Town Hall, I guess."

  Rage beamed. "That's beautiful. Tell me all about the past."

  "Oh, I don't know. I think there's a book. My Aunt Ramona knows." Tearful, Beanie put down the hammer and strip of green cloth. "Richard, this is just wrong."

  "Us? Don't be crazy. You know better."

  "I don't know."

  "Yes, you do." He took her hands in his. "Go back, talk to anybody you have to. I'll still be here. But Beatrice, darlin', trust me, fuck the brain."

  "I'm scared. I'm scared if I go I'll lose you. And now I think I couldn't stand not to have you now that I know you are. If you're not with me, I won't be real to you."

  "Are you kidding? Makes no difference, darlin', where you are, I'll think of you, night and day."

  "Oh, Richard, you're crazy." Beanie stood up and smiled. "Why don't we make paella for lunch? Want to?"

  "Love it," said the laughing poet.

  It was not merely that no one Walter Saar had ever loved had died; no one he had ever known had died. Those of his family who went before him went before he was born. The rest clung on. By the chance of circumstance, death had remained to him a literary condition. Never before had he experienced the incomprehensible though uncomplicated fact that someone with whom you'd been talking one morning might simply not be there the next, that someone could be unreachably, irrevocably absent. Dead.

  After eluding the Thespian Ladies at the train station Wednesday night, Saar had hitchhiked all the way home and fallen diagonally into bed. Awakened by his familiars, hungover drink and memory, he'd thought with a twinge of Oglethorpe. Had he not promised to check on the old fellow's condition last night? The headmaster had then groped his way from one handsome piece of furniture to the next, finally located his desk, and called the hospital, which led him through a series of switches until finally a nurse in intensive care explained that she was sorry but the patient had died at 4:00 A.M.

  "Are you sure?" She was. (Of course, what an absurd question.)

  Where was the sister, Miss Oglethorpe? They had no idea. Mr. Oglethorpe was currently in the morgue. (Was it Archibald or Theobald Oglethorpe? How cruel not to remember, when he must have seen it written down hundreds of times.) Saar had a drink. He had a shower. During breakfast assembly he announced to his staff and students that their teacher, Mr. Oglethorpe, had regrettably passed away and that as headmaster he knew everyone would be sorry to hear this because everyone remembered with gratitude all Mr. Oglethorpe had done for Alexander Hamilton Academy through long devoted years, and that everyone would want to consider some fitting token to be chosen by committee, and that the guidance counselor would now offer a brief ecumenical prayer. One boy from Oglethorpe's homeroom (a seventh-grader burdened with sensibilities that had led him often to beg Saar to let him return home) began to cry in loud snuffles. Everyone else fingered his silverware.

  Saar then had a few more drinks before teaching the Cavalier poets to his senior English class for, thank God, the last time that year. Ray Ransom informed the guffawing group that by "Gather ye rosebuds as ye may" the poet meant "Rack up as many virgins on your score pad as you can while there still are any."

  "In a sense," sighed the headmaster, and let them go. He did not feel very cavalier. It seemed unlikely, too, that Oglethorpe had seized very many days, not even pedagogically. Only in longevity had the old man resembled Mr. Chips. Years from now, no one would mention in a preface or speech that Archibald (or Theobald) Oglethorpe's inspiration had made all the difference. Saar stacked the smudged final essays. Well, it was unlikely that anyone would mention Walter Saar either. It was unlikely that anyone from Alexander Hamilton Academy would ever write a preface, though, unfortunately, most of them probably would give speeches, if only to their employees. Saar went to his rooms, put on a Mahler recording, had a few more drinks, and smoked a dozen cigarettes.

  In the parish office, Father Fields was rummaging through the rubble on his superior's desk, right on top of which, Highwick had assured him, he would find "a little outline of church finances," which the curate was to "spiff up a bit" before they met with Ernest Ransom and the rest of the vestry to explain that they needed the roof money to repair the choir screen. Finally, beneath birthday cards, old New Yorkers, and a rare embroidered ecclesiastical stole that should have been locked up with the other vestments, Fields found a scrap of paper titled "Budget," in which annual expenses were said to be "around $50,000,00," though clearly the last comma had been a slip of a pen for a decimal. As the curate stood to let one of the rector's cats back in, he saw, with a rush of adrenaline, that Walter Saar was in the garden looking around in some confusion.

  Quickly, Jonathan pulled off his glasses, which he wore while alone to rest his eyes from his contact lenses. He ran his hands through his hair, down his jacket, and over his shoes, and then called "Hello" from the open door. Holding a ledger and financial papers made him look, he hoped, adult.

  "Ah, hello!" Saar came toward him, cool in fashionably crumpled summer clothes and dark, rich loafers boasting the designer's signature in gold initials. But Saar's face was splotchy red. "I wasn't sure where…Didn't see anyone inside the church." A fit of coughing finished the sentence.

  "Oh, I'm sorry, I—"

  "I thought I'd—"

  And so for longer than strangers would want to, or lovers need, they paused and echoed, ahed and ohed, stumbled their way through broken syntax into a clear resting place, grabbing as they went such flotsam as Father Highwick's being on the train, Evelyn Troyes's having been there as well, the rain's having ended, the flowers' having bloomed.

  Finally Jonathan noticed that he was blocking Saar's entrance into the office. "Oh, I'm sorry, please. Come in."

  "Can you spare a second?"

  "Of course. You drove over from the academy?"

  "Yes. Just have a few minutes. Duty screams."

  "Is it, oh, I'm sorry, here, take this chair. Something about the choir? They're still meeting, aren't they, I mean this evening?" Ever since Saar's invitation on Monday to "play for him," after the practice session, Father Fields had, with growing anticipation, been rehearsing his best Bach all week.

  "No, of course, yes, the rehearsal." Saar had forgotten, Fields realized, blushing. The headmaster suddenly uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. "Jonathan, I hate to be blunt, but have you got anything around here to drink?"

  Panicked by the first half of this sentence, Fields was shocked as well as relieved as well as disappointed by its conclusion. Saar managed a wry smile. "I realize," he added, "the hour is early, the surroundings incongruous, and the request on the pushy side, but frankly, even a shot of the Communion wine would do."

  As a habit Jonathan did not drink, but
after having sherry in Saar's study, he had purchased a bottle of the same brand, gratified by the expense. It was now in the Waterford decanter that the rector had been bequeathed by a Dixwell matron and had in turn given Jonathan. (The rector gave everything away.) "I have some sherry in my cottage, I'll just run and get it."

  "But I'd love to see your place."

  Mentally, Jonathan raced through his three rooms. His bed was made, his underwear was in the hamper, his dog-eared picture magazine Sir Nude he now kept locked (and why didn't he throw the thing away?) in his desk, ever since Father Highwick (who had no sense of private property) had rambled through his curate's possessions in search of shampoo. "All right, forgive the mess. It's just across the garden here."

  "I'm probably keeping you from something celestial."

  "No, nothing. Well, I have to pay a church call, but no special time." Unable to fit the key into the lock, Jonathan, embarrassed, took his glasses from his jacket pocket so that he could see the opening.

  "Let me give you a ride then," offered Saar, trying not to analyze the fact that Jonathan's hand was shaking so that he seemed unable to get the key into the lock.

  "Oh, no, thanks. There! Come on in. Walking is about the only exercise I get." This disclaimer was not precisely true, for Fields had a half-hour program of calisthenics that he did just before going to bed, both for his physique and as an anticoncupiscence measure. "I try to keep a little fit at least, walking."

  "My dear man, you must hike around all day!" Jonathan blushed at this, and at the hyperbolic archness of Saar's eyebrow as the latter continued, "But why don't you come use the academy gym? Now, I go in there at least once a year and tug at a barbell for five minutes, sometimes more. Your study? Charming!"

  There were dinner parties (none in Dingley Falls) sufficiently open that Walter Saar, when passing around the aperitif of a gym joke, could offer quips on the secret life of a shower peeker or confessions of a public steam bather (the gaiety of gays being often, he knew, at their own expense—the cost of that "just a talent to amuse" to which alone Wilde and Coward would lay claim, their sung-for supper perfectly in tune), but such mock lechery, such parodic ogling of pectorals and penises could not be tried on Jonathan Fields, who had (thank God, thought Saar) no notion of the game's style. So the headmaster stopped talking, noticing when he did so that, probably as a result of his drinking since dawn, he had almost no sense of gravity (not a quip) and was in fact out driving illegally while both drunk and hung over and on the verge of slobbery tears.

  The curate looked at Saar, leaning elegantly against the arm of the Edwardian love seat. A handsome man in handsome clothes who seemed to have the secret of how to hold his glass, cross his feet, look at a picture, light a cigarette as if the possibility that he could slop sherry on his shirt, expose a hole in the crotch seam of his pants, light his filter, or burn a hole in the couch (all of these, coincidentally, faux pas actually committed by Saar at some time or another) had not penetrated the man's perfect self-confidence. No, Saar sat there just as Jonathan, in daydreams, had often imagined his doing.

  But suddenly his face went wrong, the lines drew tight, and when he spoke the words were not at all those that Jonathan had often written for him.

  "Did you know old Oglethorpe died early this morning?"

  "No. No, I didn't. Oh, I'm sorry. Poor man." Jonathan's eyes closed, and he lowered his head for an instant. He's praying, Saar realized, surprised that he had never before consciously connected this beautiful young man with Christianity, though he had noticed his clothes. (Of course, he must actually believe…naturally, he would pray.)

  Saar waited, then said, "This is absurd, I know, but I'm afraid I'm rather, rather terrified by my response." He laughed quickly. "I never believed in death. I don't think anyone does." He drank a third glass of sherry.

  It was so difficult for Jonathan to imagine the headmaster as anything but perfectly at ease that he did not at first hear the excessiveness of the laugh that followed Saar's saying, "Though I suppose all of us are scared to death of death."

  The curate tried to mimic the wry smile. "I'm the opposite. It's life that terrifies me."

  "That, too." Saar gulped down another glass. "But no one believes it. After all, it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense, does it, death?

  Not even the poets, much as they rant and wail, they don't believe it's true." He traced with his toe the pattern of cerulean flowers in the small rug in front of the couch. "It's just a horror story they read to scare the young and beautiful into surrender. Give me your virginity before the worms devour it." Saar's cheeks brightened and his eyes filled.

  (I've never seen him like this, Jonathan thought. He's in pain, and he's come here to me. The curate's body was tense with the carefulness with which he listened.)

  Saar looked up at him. "The worms always win, don't they? In spite of swans and urns and nightingales and roses getting gathered.

  No matter what the color of your hair is. Despite all their raging against it, the poets are dead now, mute and deaf, dirt just the same."

  Jonathan placed his silver candy dish beneath Saar's ash, but the headmaster seemed to have forgotten he was smoking. "Do you know Yeats?" Saar asked him.

  "Not really. A little, we studied him, I mean. Did Mr. Oglethorpe teach Yeats?" (Why was Saar breathing like that? Was he going to cry?)

  "No, well, I don't know. I was thinking about the poem about the swans. The offspring of those swans are swimming just where he said they would. I went there. But you see, I just don't believe he really thought a time would ever come when it wouldn't matter to him whether they swam there or not. Wouldn't matter what color somebody's hair was. Now he's dead—he warned us he would be. But even when he said it would happen to him, that was only because other poets who had said so really were nothing but dust then. And now the new ones will talk about him, because he really is dust now, and they think, in their heart of hearts, they'll never be. Never be nothing. And it comes to that nothing anyhow. All to that incredible nothing."

  (He has no faith, thought Jonathan, surprised that he had never before considered Saar's religious beliefs or lack of them.) The headmaster's hand trembled as he poured another drink. He turned his head aside, and the curate went quietly into his kitchen, where he put on some water for tea. When he returned, Saar looked suddenly up into his eyes. Jonathan wanted to blink away the hurt exposed there, and the shame at being exposed, but he kept his eyes unblinking on the other man's. "So, Jonathan, you see, it doesn't do anyone any good to be a poet."

  Silence moved with sunlight across the room. A curtain billowed, then flattened against the windowpane.

  "But Yeats isn't nothing, isn't dust."

  "Up in heaven with the swans, I suppose?" The headmaster shook out another cigarette.

  "That's not what I meant. I don't know if heaven's 'up.' I meant, he's in here, in this room. You brought him." (Please, Jonathan prayed, let me be some little help this once, of all times, this time, please.) "Isn't that who Yeats was, really? What you keep alive?"

  "What good does that do Yeats?"

  "The good it does you."

  Saar put the glass down on the floor and hugged it between his shoes.

  "I probably won't remember this right," Jonathan said. "'An aged man is like a tattered coat upon a stick unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.'"

  Slumped over, the teacher ran his finger slowly around the rim of the glass. "But Oglethorpe was no Yeats. I very much doubt he's done anything to warrant many postmortem visits."

  "Besides this one, you mean?"

  "Ah. Very good."

  "We don't know, Mr. Oglethorpe didn't know, what he may have done, or even, you see, what he may do?' The curate heard the kettle whistle.

  Saar followed him into the kitchen. "Well, Oglethorpe was a harmless old fellow. Let's hope your Christ will open the gates of the kingdom for him."

  "Oh, His gates are always
open. But the kingdom's inside you.

  That's what makes it hard."

  "Well, I'm afraid I don't know your book nearly as well as you know mine. And now I should apologize for sloshing my soul all over your study like this. Weeping into your rug like Little Eva over Topsy.

  Was that the name of her lover?"

  "Please, let me fix you some tea."

  "Very kind, but I have to get back. I was just passing by and thought I'd drop in and go to pieces."

  Jonathan turned, realized he had never said, "Walter," tried, couldn't, and called, "Mr. Saar."

  His neck arched, Saar laughed. Tension left his face. "Mr. Saar?

  My God, am I that tattered a coat on a stick? Please. 'Walter.' Haul me back out of the tomb. 'Walter,' please! My God, I'm immediately rushing off to get my chest pumped and my hair dyed. Is it gray? I haven't looked since yesterday. Oh, thank you very much, I feel so much better, really." He stopped laughing and took Jonathan's hand with one of his. "Really. It was very kind of you."

  The other hand he moved quickly over the young man's hair and down the line of his cheek, "And about tonight. What about going to a party with me after the rehearsal. Something or other at the Ransoms'. I never turn them down as my life is in the man's pocket.

  Might be pleasant. Why don't we go over there and appraise their furniture?"

  "I don't know. I wasn't asked. I don't know them that well."

  "Doesn't matter a bit, I doubt anyone does. Well, whatever you decide. Now, I should let you get back to work. I should get back to work. Frankly, the blessed fact that those hordes of junior Visigoths are actually going home Monday is almost enough to make me start igniting candles at an altar!"