by Paul Pipkin
I had managed to be reposted to London, in hopes of getting back to a front. There had been some talk of making the convention an annual event but, as it adjourned, the Wehrmacht had begun to roll across Poland. In a few days, even as I hurried back to my post, England had declared war. The Chicago Tribune had sent Miss Kuhr to Poland, and I’d lost track of her. I guessed that I might grieve for Constance along with all the others, if not dead, then lost to me as if she had been. Like a ghost from that past that never was, Constance would find me again, late in an other life. But, I will hold to myself what was between us. Here, she is the mother of my son, the widow I leave behind.
Some pleasant diversion was offered, in the company of a young-old fashion-photographer-turning-war-correspondent. Her grim and glorious pictures of the Blitz were gaining fame both in England and at home. Through the shrouded streets of the London night, she seemed to carry the sunshine with her. Her aggressive intelligence did not put me off; Constance had given me the cure for that little conceit. The wear and tear of a frenetic early life had left her perhaps a mite too haggard to excite me. More likely, it was just a matter of my candle fizzling out. She would reach out. I would retreat. At last, she had drifted back to her lover.
In that otherworld, I had no one left to leave, so I then stood vigil with all the brave Conways of London, as they awaited the coming of the Luftwaffe’s Valkyries. I pray that they, too, prevailed in the end. Was it only as seen through the lens of my own hopelessness, that the dawn seemed a thousand years removed? By that final night, I was through, and I knew it, as far as any effort to save myself was concerned. It had been so late, too late for me with Mink, or to find another Katie. And never, or ever again, could there be another Justine. At the last, I would invite oblivion, but it would be something else that answered.
X
The Fan-Shaped Destiny
In this life that we have succeeded in building amongst ourselves, things have gone differently. I’m sure you will agree, better—however much flawed, we did do that. But by the fall of 1928, I was disconsolate over the prospect of soon parting ways with Katie. You should know that my unconscious had compounded the thirty-three “ghost years” along with the rest, in establishing my sense of duration. I reckoned time spans, consequently, as might a man of seventy-five years. Our sixteen years together, this time around, sounded so pathetically brief. Perceiving the early traces of Katie’s erosion, under the battering of my neurasthenic temperament, I exerted myself to find another way.
Might not the changes I had wrought be sufficient? I had become a successful author by the age of forty-two, with a couple of best-sellers under my belt and preparing to produce a third. We had had exotic years in Haiti and Arabia, where Katie had many wonderful adventures. At home and abroad, we’d go de luxe and group with the most interesting people. Why, in this world, the club at 156 Waverly even belonged to her, and was a far cry from the dingy Cubbyhole.81 Most and dearest of all, our darling Justine still lived and loved with us. Might not she, alone, make up for the shortcomings of life with me?
After a morbid attraction to their wedding almost resulted in an unwanted encounter in the spring of 1923, I had heroically avoided even so much as meeting, much less becoming involved with, Mr. and Mrs. Lyman Worthington. I would run across Mink around the Village, but would quickly cross the street, avoiding contact. I had managed to forget all about the meeting that had never happened. Then my friend Don McKee, aware that I was in the doldrums, invited me to make a fourth at bridge one night late in October.
Appalled to discover that I seemed to have been maneuvered, into spending the evening across a card table from Mrs. Worthington, I still thought I might get through it gracefully. Rather, I found I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her. Never conventionally beautiful, Marjorie was always striking. She registered, and the attempt to confront a person and body that I had known so intimately, as if just casually met, was excruciating. How often had I twined that luxuriant dark mane around my … well, you get the idea.
Thus distracted, I was undone by the simplest thing. Beginning to relax, imagining that I was in control of the situation, I slipped. I addressed her as “Mink,” the pet name I had for her the time before. When she dropped her cards, I had an inkling of what had clicked. My fears would be confirmed when I went around to see her later. She had, indeed, harbored ambitions toward encountering the notorious writer and adventurer. The convenience of Don’s card party aroused no misgivings or forebodings; it had just turned out that way. Yet, ever afterward, she would remain beset by spells of queerly distorted deja vu. Glimpsing an otherworld, whether she had experienced it or was, God forbid, as yet to experience it, dream polluted her reality thenceforth.
Life with Marjorie would educate me to additional dangers of our peculiar existence. Later, when we were living in the Villa Les Roseaux near Toulon, I had to employ extreme measures to shoo away a phony cleric, a dangerous dabbler in the esoteric, who was always mooching about. He had deeply affected her, and I wouldn’t stand for it a minute. I gratified his curiosity by educating him in the darker aspects of the fan-shaped destiny! Resistant to comprehension of their true nature, Mink remained so heart-breakingly, pathetically vulnerable to the power of her sporadic episodes. She would insist, years later, on having followed me abroad in 1926, even though she could never recall much, in the way of events, which might give flesh to the two missing ghost years.
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As always, I first tried to flee. Katie and I were due in Paris in November to put together, with Paul Morand, the African expedition he’d made possible. There, I hoped to find that which I had sought from the mountains of Kurdistan to the Haitian forests. Katie just laughed at my flight from still another peccadillo, though I suspected that the pain hidden by her mirth rivaled my own. This is all detailed in my writings, including the body of my association with Wamba. From that insolent young witch, I finally learned the lore of the branching paths, and its African origin. Wamba’s last words to me, however, have gone unreported until now.
On the day of leave-taking, as our party readied to cross the Cavally River, Wamba spoke in her mix of French and Bambara, “I say no adieu, for you are not seeing your last of me. Would that I were there now, on a day you do not cross over, but stay here and live with me.” She gazed off into the haze of the African morning. In my heart I doubted that I should again return, whatever vision she had conjured. Giving me her bland, disturbing smile, she went on in the pidjin mix, garnished with Yafouba terms, of which my understanding was unsure.82
“I have seen such a day.” She held out her hands as if in benediction. “You walk this path a while, then were it like a dream that dissolves with the morning mist.” Like a sign, a burst of rays broke through the hazy dawn. She nodded with emphasis. “On this same morning, you would not cross the river.” I stared at her, I think not daring to comprehend. Her voice returns now, which is as may be, the one and only solace I hope to find. She concluded the litany with an even less comprehensible prophecy.
“I bethink how you turn this way again, farther along the path. Before I go on ahead, I shall send the message to my sisters across the sea. Should they cross your path in years to come, then shall you remember your old friend.” I watched after her until she disappeared into the forest. The sunbeams, refracting through the haze, were disorienting. There were kaleidoscopic moments when I couldn’t tell whether I was approaching the river or following Wamba.
But cross I did, and went away into the country of the Guere. On Christmas Eve, lost in the forest of Khabara en route to Timbuctoo, I suffered my first recurrent dream of Wamba’s farewell. I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that, better than Jimmy, or Walter, or Paul’s friend to whom I’ve blurted out portions of the shameful truth, she was able to see into the darkness of my secret heart. I believe that I now understand whence followed Wamba’s affection for me. I think that she was another creature like myself, a consciousness molded by metemp
sychosis—a “metem” who had walked amongst the worlds, from a place where she had known me very long and well.
I first met her in this life, but I think she insisted upon becoming my guide owing to having first met me in another. If God will tolerate my impertinence yet one more time, I will try to live up to whatever first impression gave birth to such friendship. For the longest, for fifteen years, I’ve dreamed of Wamba walking away into the forest. Then, as happens in dreams, the scene would shift to a crisper morning than in Africa, a morning much like today, and it would be Justine walking away.
I would wake up in the melancholia I’d known before. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now; must it be always so, as it was with Katie? Sounding reconciled to our parting, once I had delivered the promised trip to Africa, she was fine about it. It was Justine who had raised wildcat hell. Like the time before, Marjorie had come to France to find me, and I conceded that I had obligations and unfinished business with her as well.
Lest I leave the silly suggestion that it was self-sacrifice moving me from woman to woman, I ask you. Could anyone, save Wamba, have imagined the nature of my bond with Mink? The unnatural conviction of destiny, with which her spells imbued her passion for me, would certainly have let me ruin her life again, had I not acknowledged us. But the passion was returned in full measure. Neither was it any fault of Mink’s that my drinking was getting out of hand.
God forbid that any part of this record become a temperance lecture! No man has ever been a victim of whiskey—only of his own weakness. Determined as I was of the correctness of my course, much as I enjoyed to be with Mink, any excuse would suffice. Letters from Katie, samples of her writing, as though for my critique. Colette and Baba in Timbuctoo,83 indeed! News of her slutting around in Mexico, with another member of the Estranged Wives Club, would move me to crack open the next bottle.84
Once Mink’s divorce was final, I even wrote the presumptuous letter of all time to Lyman, demanding why didn’t he make Katie an honest woman? Eventually, he would. Justine, I continued to keep at arm’s length. Mink and I were living in Toulon. A demon, which I couldn’t exorcise as easily as I had the “Abbe Penhoel,” was the one reminding me that France had held mortal danger for Justine. Perhaps it was irrational, but I had the same sexual tastes, grouped with even wilder sets, and Justine would always go to extremes, push things too far. So how could I know, I ask you?
It might have been fortunate that Justine chose to despise Marjorie as much as she loved Katie. For play beyond that which Mink could accommodate, there were always others. Hell’s bells, sometimes I just ran ads! Popular misconception aside, it’s never difficult to find girls, like my young friend Eleanor,85 who will volunteer to be chained and whipped. The dearth is of men able to distinguish this practice from mindless brutality.
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Returning to France, after the publication of my book on Africa, we visited my friend Walter Duranty at his wife Jeannot’s St. Tropez home. Walter had just made the coup of his historic interview with Stalin, and was basking in the admiration and brilliant accolades of the smart set. Some were bemused by our camaraderie, ignorant of Walter having been more deeply involved, in his youth, with Aleister Crowley than ever was I. Comparing lives touched by the Great Beast, checking them on each other, had led us to believe from early on that I was not alone in my conscious congress with otherworlds.
Walter had rounded up the journalist George Seldes in the company of a recently acquired, beautiful blonde leftist from Texas, of all places. As my friend Max has always contended, Texan Communists are of a different cut—more anarchist than red, and open to anything. To George’s amazement, I promptly persuaded her to spend some time, exquisitely suffering, in a cage in my Toulon loft.
The real fly in George’s ointment was Walter, with whom I was sharing the girl’s attentions. A brouhaha started up at dinner, Walter surprising everyone with a very serious proposal that she return with him to Moscow. Jeannot threw a large fish across his face, and then ordered us all out of the house. Walter put the blonde up at a hotel and asked me to look after her, so I moved her into the loft. George, by that point, sounded relieved.
Mink, on the other hand, got sore and drunk on rum. Out of humor with these “Lizzies-in-chains,” as she called all my substitute Justines, she promptly ran the girl off—at the point of one of my Damascus blades. I’m sure she never understood why I was so amused, taking her out for her favorite dinner and wine. A reserved and easily embarrassed person, Mink is generally mute when she first meets people. Intimidated by waiters and clerks, switchboard operators, haughty saleswomen, guests at teas and literary cocktail parties—even her own publisher, or so it seemed—but you’d never have made that blonde believe it.
Across the table, I contemplated her fine manners, the perfect antithesis of undeniably other-than-decorous Justine, and my renewed fondness and appreciation were bittersweet. Why, it was simply that the holy terror I’d just witnessed, uncharacteristic of sweet-natured and polite Marjorie, was so reminiscent of my red-haired angel herself!
Justine had last been in France the previous summer, in 1930, about the time I became acquainted with the artist Man Ray, who shared my interests, if only aesthetically. One evening, when Justine was staying at my Paris flat, Mink and I had to attend a banquet where I was the guest of honor. I telephoned Man Ray and asked if he and his date, Lee Miller, a good-looker recently arrived from the States, would drop by and visit with Justine.
Lee was so young then! She’d begun outraging taboos a couple of years earlier when, at age twenty-one, she’d been the first photography model to appear, elegantly gowned in McCall’s magazine—in a Kotex advertisement. The supercilious mortification of our countrymen had prompted her to sail for the more sophisticated climes of Europe, where she would become a brilliant photographer in her own right. There must be poetic justice that a woman I had foolishly rejected the time before would not, this time around, have any interest whatsoever in me.
I could scarcely believe that I had seen her as too old and worn, at thirty-three! Meeting her again, a decade earlier, my foreknowledge of how she would begin to season made her youthful vibrancy only the more precious. Youth wasted on the young? More honest, though a less colorful piece of reporting, is for me to concede; to that young Lee, I was but a degenerate old soak.
On the other hand, the time before might have been only of a moment, which was as may never be; of the Blitz, or a spat with her lover. Today, promoted by her skill, the Army, and Vogue magazine into the love-idol photojournalist of the Western Front, she seems to have come into this more than I had intended. I do hope Roland Penrose appreciates what he’s getting.
In truth, I did have ulterior motives, beyond disliking Justine to be on the streets of Paris in a mood. While Man Ray and Lee enjoyed our company, Lee had declined to participate in our photography sessions, though she liked watching them. To Man Ray, Justine in her leather bonds would look good enough to eat. I hoped she would register with Lee sufficiently to get her out of her clothes during our next session.
Justine, accustomed to going everywhere with me when I was with Katie, chose to see it in a different light. She threw one of her ferocious tantrums, tearing off her clothes and screaming that, if she had to have baby-sitters, they would damned well see the whole show. She insisted that she be found chained to the newel post and would accept only the compromise of a loincloth. Mink, typically, was mortified, though I was amused.
Still, I sent her home again, ostensibly because of her friction with Mink—that convenient fiction being a mere fig leaf for my fear. Three years later, my trepidation would be confirmed in New York. Marjorie had written a novel, entitled Scarlet Josephine, that had overtones of D.H. Lawrence.86 Interestingly, it was about a bookish woman writer who became obsessed with a reciprocal life and inadvertently brought it into being.
Mink appeared at a party celebrating its publication wearing her collar of two pieces of hinged si
lver with shiny knobs that snapped into place about her neck as her one and only adornment. The wearer had to hold her head high and was unable to turn it, producing a regal appearance. A slinky black gown matching her luxuriant mane, Mink created a sensation. When asked about the collar’s unusual design, her replies were the customary dumb, polite banalities.
In Paris, I’d labored long in its production, sending Man Ray exact measurements of her neck and chin by way of pneumatique mail. His little silversmith, who lived way over by the Buttes Chaumont, had made repeated bus trips to my Montparnasse studio, with his satchel of tiny anvils and hammers, before he got the art moderne collar and its companion bracelets to fit just right.
It was my stupidity for having invited Justine, allowing the poor girl to be taken, when she made a row, for behaving like a jealous child. It was my burden alone to understand the veracity of her impossible contention that the tailored collar somehow belonged to her. I endeavored to handle her so gently, for only I could know of a design the time before, in a world where it had been hers, where our play had helped cost her precious life.
Only after her altered destiny had been assured, did I fully confront its uncertainty. Her new fate would be as indeterminate as that of any other man or woman. Of the one I loved most, I would no longer have foreknowledge, and I feared the effect of my own continuing influence. I suppose it fortunate that she had given birth to a beautiful little girl and, consequently, was otherwise occupied. Now, there was a mirror into which I could not begin to look. By then, my drinking had gotten to the point that it was to be either a stretch in Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet, or the graveyard …