You heard things. You read things. Caitlin put out a memoir, oh it must be more than ten years ago now. Leftover Life to Kill, she or her ghost scribe called it. He and Sylvia both read it and then, in giddy cahoots, they gave their copy a Viking funeral while on holiday at a beach resort to the north of Rouen. They did it for the greater good of literature. By rights, it should have been torched in its planning stages. Upon her husband’s death, Caitlin’s life, itself an integral part of Dylan’s legacy, had been put into trust. Not metaphorically but legally and legitimately. A group of Swansea solicitors, who had indulged Dylan with loans during his lifetime, now controlled his publishing rights. Like the grieving miner’s wife with only the chill of her beloved’s body in hand, only the chasm of the marriage bed to show, and only the winding sheet to wave, she signed away her privileges for the sake of a monthly subsidy. Dylan, previous to Sylvia the last of all renegades, became upon death the creature of a committee. Now outside interests held the purse strings. Caitlin’s children ate well while her hankering for dominance was made to starve. The widow had the trustees into court biannually. Poetry reviews back home would refer to these exercises as “another Welsh jig.” Mrs. Thomas did her song and dance and recurrently received unenthusiastic reviews from the justices, who would inevitably side with the Swansea bailiffs. Ted knew full well what she was now doing in America, coming on this talk show. She was pubbing, just as he was. There was a photo book, hot from the presses. Dylan Thomas’s Wales, Ted had heard it was being called. He anticipated squibs of verse alongside of shots of schooner prows, dunes, driftwood, gull configurations, and whitening gooneys lying in the low tide. Also her and Dylan’s private life had undergone the Sean O’Casey treatment, secondhand of course since O’Casey was content at last in his grave, and the result was being readied for the West End stage with an eye toward a Broadway run. Vision and Prayer, the play was going to be titled, in acknowledgment of the couple’s mutually antagonistic natures.
They sat in silence. Mary von Schrader Jarrell, presumably Randall’s living casualty, had the good sense to stay in her dressing room. Caitlin and the Sheik, assuming that the Sheik could read, must have pored over published versions of Ted’s and Sylvia’s lives as well. If Caitlin and Ted failed to acknowledge each other, then neither one of them would have the opportunity to disappoint the other. He was constantly being compared to Dylan. So was Sylvia. Dylan’s Deaths and Entrances was such a nominal cognate to Ariel. Caitlin was herself, in many ways, comparable to Sylvia. At least as far as Ted could ascertain. She was possibly what Sylvia would be if Ted had been the one to kill himself. If his death had accroached her voice, as unquestionably it would have, and left her with only his to parrot for a living and for dear life.
Caitlin had borne a child by the Sheik at the age of forty-nine. Everyone in the literary world had assumed that it would be impossible for her to attach scandal to Dylan’s memory, for that would be sort of a coals-to-Newcastle affair, given the way that the bard had carried on. Then she attempted to have this child of her middle age and Dylan’s posthumous-ness covered for life under the terms of her late husband’s trust. She had endeavored, in effect, to swaddle her infant in Dylan’s dead coattails. Served the grand old cadger right, some said, although the probate judges disallowed it out of hand. When Ted heard about it, he recognized method, Medean method, in the aging lady’s madness. She was out for vengeance and she was willing to go to the extreme of using her shriveled, nearly fifty-year-old womb to achieve it.
Sylvia would have gone to just such an extreme. In fact, she had. Never mind what she might have done if Ted were the one to go to his reward first; what about what she had indeed done from the parapet of her final resting place? He had been forced to answer for the slander of Ariel just as though he had been the one who had written the book. It outsold his oeuvre ten to one, by the way.
Could it be that Caitlin Thomas wasn’t speaking to him because she detested him owing to the rumors that she may have heard? It was just ludicrous enough to be true. Rumor, Ted had found, had an appeal similar in many ways to the appeal of poetry. Rumor had the habit of insinuating much more than was being said. Ted couldn’t hate Caitlin, for all that he had heard. Affairs, abortions, a loveless later-life birth, the law-suits against her benefactors, the drinking, the tantrums, the sanitariums, the trite memoir, and the suicide attempts. He could take all that in stride. She was a compromised survivor. She was his boatmate in that sense. It was said that she had attacked her husband while he lay in a coma in Saint Vincent’s Hospital in New York. At least she was given the opportunity of viewing him alive one last time. Ted, in her shoes, would have been tempted to either beat Sylvia for what she had done to herself, or throw himself from the window of her death room. Owing to what he had been doing the night before.
They should really talk, he and Caitlin. Compare notes, no? Share some of the salt of their long bereavement? Rage together against the dying of the light and the glare of the radiation? Wasn’t it somewhat silly for the two of them, the three of them counting the nonentity in the Borsalino, to sit here and pretend that they had nothing at all to say to one another? How to begin? Should he offer his name and his hand as if they didn’t already know who he was and as though he and Caitlin were not already holding hands, after a fashion? Should he mention Sylvia?
He leaned forward in his chair. “I’m on the BBC Third Programme back home just as Dylan was,” Ted said, “and from the day that I began, ten years ago now, they’ve been comparing me to him. We were like two rustics riding into town on our high horses to a lot of people.”
The two heads turned toward him.
“I count myself lucky, coming as I have after Dylan,” Ted continued. “Dylan forced people to judge a man and his work in two separate contexts.”
It hadn’t come out the way he intended at all. It had sounded like a preamble to a blanket apology, covering both his sins and Dylan’s. The two heads turned away as one. Then together they nodded. Both Caitlin and the Sheik went back to drinking their champagne and watching the blank monitor.
Her nod had been too distant to contain any trace of acrimony. It was a gesture from the queen to a liegeman’s privy person when crossing at distant paces in the corridor. Caitlin couldn’t talk to Ted because of the difference in their pedigrees. She was plainly superior to him in every way that mattered, and that is just the way things had been ordained.
Ted said, “I hope you know that I meant—”
“Huu-ssh!” Caitlin hissed, her head snapping sideways until her chin was resting against her collarbone, her brine-colored eyes flashing and her white locks falling down over her forehead. “Can’t you see that I’m preparing?” she asked in her unadulterated Swansea accent. She closed her eyes, and her chin dropped to her chest as if she had gone to sleep.
The Sheik looked over. He beamed his latakia teeth and then looked away.
Then Merv came on the monitor in a Palm Beach suit and with his arms outstretched to greet the upper deck of the audience. He did a quick bow, and the sax men in the stage band leaped like circus tigers through hoops. The percussion guy went at it with his mallets as though someone were about to be beheaded. Caitlin’s chin hadn’t left her chest. In explicit keeping with the show’s “poetic survivor” theme, Merv chose to open with a popular ballad of the moment titled “I’ll Give You a Daisy a Day,” done with a Vegas arrangement. The lyrics told of a suitor who wooed a woman with the same flowers that he would later daily mark her resting place with. Merv cut the song short. He snapped his handkerchief from out of his breast pocket and waved it at the bandstand to cool the boys down after their workout. He and his bandleader, a fireplug trumpeter apparently named “Lonesome Jack Sheldon,” compared suits and post-show dinner dates. Merv was going to be dining at the Duc d’Anjou with his announcer Arthur Treacher and the winners of a breakfast cereal box-top derby. The bandleader would be having a chili dog at the rest stop on I-90. He solicited the audience for paying compa
nions. Merv announced the show’s theme and its guests. In his best Old Vic voice, Arthur Treacher let it be known how delighted he was to be here this evening. They went to a break.
On the monitor, Merv had moved to the center-stage desk. Arthur sat next to him on the couch. The band stopped playing, and Merv introduced Mary von Schrader Jarrell. If Caitlin Thomas was a ravaged Calypso, this one was a Merry Widow all the way. Tanned and looking not a surgical procedure over forty, forty-five, she strolled onto the stage, goggling the flood- and footlights. She said in a fairly unendurable mummery of the genteel Kentucky accent, “Ah told you not to fuss!” Arthur hitched his trousers and moved a space over on the couch.
Widow Jarrell went directly to work while Merv tucked his lower lip beneath his upper teeth and kept sidelonging the studio audience to let them know that this was one of those solemn moments in the show. Her husband, Mrs. Jarrell said, was equal parts suicidal and life loving. The incongruity, although it killed Randall, was the thing that made him a poet in the first place. Yes, he had, on occasion, attempted to take his own life, but the occasion of his death was not such an instance. He was in the home in Chapel Hill for observation and he began to feel as though he had been stared at enough. He slipped out of the institution and, heroic poet that he was, he took his difficulties with his own self-image out onto the open highway. He solved his problems with his self-image unexpectedly outright when he misjudged the speed of the oncoming car as he tried to cross the road.
Merv asked, apologetically, if there was a shadow of doubt in her mind regarding her husband’s intentions that evening.
“No,” she concluded, “Randall wasn’t the dramatic sort.”
Merv sidelonged the camera to remind its recording iris that they were still in the solemn phase of the show. The band played and they cut to another commercial.
Merv introduced Caitlin. She was indeed a very big lady now, but she walked with a sprightly step, half acknowledging the audience’s response to her entrance with a sideways nod that appeared to Ted almost as a tic. Had she spent a great deal of her mourning interval looking over her shoulder? She shook hands formally with Merv, and he frowned, perhaps anticipating the protocol of being allowed to give her a buss on the cheek. Mary von Schrader Jarrell and Arthur Treacher seemed unprepared for the ceremonial handshake as well. The applause quelled to a placid hush. Arthur and Mary scooted over on the sofa. Merv dutifully mentioned the publishing of the photo book and the imminent opening of the West End drama. How did she feel about the attention that her husband was receiving so many years following his passing? She not only deigned not to answer the question, but deigned not to answer it in her own voice. She began talking and her voice did not so much imitate as instead resurrect the spot-on bardic swell box that Ted, as a lad, would contest sleep in order to listen to via the radio.
Ted had heard the voice initially over the Home Service Network and later the nascent BBC Third Programme, both of which were broken up with tootling ads for Persomnia Pills if you suffered from sleeplessness, Proctor’s Pinelyptus Pastilles if you were nervous, and appeals from the Shipwrecked Mariners Society and the Orphans of War Association if you possessed a shred of conscience. Cat had her Dylan dead to rights, all right. She let out with the reedy nasal-inflected cocksure sagacity of the Oxford don, interposed with that rolling follow-through of the cockle criers upon the pagan shores of Wales. She merged the Bristol Channel, the Severn River, and the great Thames. That voice that was not a tributary but an actual limb, an actual wing of the Atlantic. The absence of his voice had ruined the effect of Dylan’s poems and stories for Ted, so much so that the only Dylan Thomas books that he now owned had been Sylvia’s. Interspersed with the radio coverage of the war in the long years of the dark of darkest night, this voice had read a eulogy for all former generations.
Caitlin had learned Dylan’s trick of lagging on her s sounds and sucking the orotund o’s down the wind tunnel of her flue pipes. He hadn’t known it until now, but there were apparently areas of Ted’s memory still under quarantine. Caitlin was running all the gauntlets in the stately craft of Dylan’s larynx.
His father would lock him out of the workshed until midsummer when the neighbor’s wheat stalks were sharpening their sabers high over either of their heads. As though Ted didn’t know that he was lathing and whittling the spindly frameworks from fine balsam and then stretching the sheer, tight vellum to the same ratio of wind resistance that the burn ward plasticist alluded to in one popular war documentary when he bragged that his patients would once again “feel Zephyr’s kiss and Apollo’s scorn.” Dad was blowing and molding the light, lozenged glass over the flare cylinders that he had picked up off the beach at Gallipoli on the evening when a bandaged lieutenant had happened to come around with his service revolver drawn, ordering survivors to scrounge souvenirs so that their children could never call them liars. In memory Dad comes into the bedroom with his lantern dangling as Dylan is playing Satan’s part in a radio play of Paradise Lost, the Beeb overnight having been given over to drama clubs charged with taking the edge off the day’s war coverage through outright disconcertion, as nightmares served to render the cold, dim Yorkshire mornings bearable. The swinging light in Dad’s hand paints a ship’s hull that climbs the slope of the wall. Dad stamps his work boot and Ted rises up, retrieving his overalls from the nail driven into the door. Dad hangs the lantern upon the newel of the three-tiered porch stairway and cuts the tether of his box kite from the oak with his pocket blade. Ted moves to free the identical kite that Dad has fashioned for him, tied to an adjacent tree.
Dad has run off into the neighbor’s wheat field, flying his standard. The flares are sputtering in the skulls of the kites. Ted steers by the ripple in the wheat, the stalks golden in the moonlight, rebounding in waves up from the ground. If he lifts his head up, his steps will slow. If he fails to keep his eyes upon the field, he might well brain himself against one of the hidden spars that mark off the acres. He cannot see the kites anymore and he can only imagine that the vellum has melted into a quick-drip wax, and that the sputtering flares have exploded the lantern glass, and that both he and his father are bounding along with bare strings above them. The wheat stalks ahead are motionless now. His father has veered off or made it into the clearing, winning the race for one more year.
The wheat jungle has fallen away. Ted stands in the grassy clearing, yellowed over by the moon, holding the burning flower of his kite, stiff upon the end of its stalk. Dad has had time to cord his box kite to another tree. He has gone off into the woods alone to savor the victory over his only son.
One of Merv’s assistants was standing there hissing and windmilling both arms. He was either attempting to put out a fire in his armpits or meaning to tell Ted that it was now time for him to go onstage. He hadn’t heard the way in which Merv introduced him and wasn’t sure at all of what to expect, although the host had played patsy with the other two guests, fairly reveling in his own respect for the dead. There was a tepid applause as he walked onto the stage—the audience members putting just enough into it to say afterward that they had tried to be fair—filling the studio with the communality of the single hand wanking. The atmosphere did not bode well. It was always easiest for a moderator to pick a side, and Ted couldn’t kid himself that his would be the winning one. Merv offered his jujitsu handshake, regardless. Ted shook hands with Caitlin and found that her palm was calescent and sticky. So that was why the other guests seemed to recoil when she made her entrance. He hadn’t any choice but to pass her hot kiss on to Mary Jarrell and Arthur Treacher, but they knew better than to offer anything more than a curt brush of skin.
“Stay off the ropes, son,” Arthur Treacher whispered as Ted moved to sit next to Merv.
5.
Assia
Etienne de Born sits with his driver in the Bentley at the road’s edge and their figures are aligned like two riders in a frieze. Etienne is nearly blind. In the auto, he turns his head and aims his eyes at he
r from the distance through two panes of glass and the separate barrier of his inked-over trifocals. The morning when he first arrived, after a series of phone conversations, he commented on the cucumbers and the sweet onions in Sylvia’s garden that had been left to wither to their acidic essence. His blindness is a boon to his other senses. Such as memory. The smell reminded him of his return after each of the notable foreign wars of his lifetime. The victory gardens gone to seed. How contradictory his service designation had sounded when he first admitted it to her. “Intelligence officer in the king’s War Office,” he said, curtly. His follow-up seemed even more abashed. “That is an area of my life,” he said, “that I cannot put into words.” Yet he is asking her, even bribing her, to break her own life down into the germ warfare of written language. “So that we will all have a better understanding of all that’s happened,” he says.
Assia tried to resurrect Sylvia’s garden early one morning. She misplaced the time. In the afternoon, the scotoma crept up behind her back. She found herself sitting trapped in a plot of holes. She stepped in clear to her hip joint. She stretched and clawed for the garden hose that lay there in the coruscant grass. She caught hold of the lifeline and pulled so hard that she wrenched it from the brass penis in the garden wall.
The scotoma was a fluke. Her migraine aura is usually painted with the smeared iridescence and the balanced density of a Legueult painting. Her doctor, the same one who had delivered Shura, questioned her about the visions. What did they look like, he wanted to know.
“To you, they would look like art.”
“What do they look like to you?” the doctor asked.
“The rearview.”
“The rearview of art?”
“To you, they would look like the rearview of art.”
“I’ll prescribe painkillers.”
They didn’t work. The regimen that he tried to put her on didn’t work, either; what’s more, it was draconian. He sought to disallow her perfume and red wine. What then was she living for? She and Shura bake and eat, mostly. A quiet soul who lives above the surf with several cats comes every other Friday to clean. A Mrs. Orchardson who tells funny stories about her cats, saying that they foul the mirror with their tongues and that they leave their rodent quarry upon her pillow for her approval. They bake early in the A.M., Shura bringing and fetching, so that the oven will be cool for Assia’s afternoon migrainal ordeal.
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