“I asked one question—”
“You want to get going on the differences in me and you? We have an agreement—you and I—we don’t speak of the past.”
“I’m only a little interested . . . I’m not letter-of-the-law—you know?”
“The rules are off?”
“I’m not grilling you—whatever you may think.”
“Ora—”
“I’m not interested in family, in your family past: I’m not asking family stuff . . .”
“Don’t you have any fear that this stuff may go off in our faces?”
“I’m afraid of you. I trust myself. I know my feelings can be counted on.”
I said, “It’s true you have no interest in family—what if I married you for your family?”
“You didn’t. I hate genealogy. It’s all lies. But I am interested in your past . . .”
“But isn’t my sexual past unbearable to you?”
“It is unbearable,” she said, using the same word but as a change of subject.
“You don’t even ask if your sexual past is unb—”
“You son of a bitch.” She took the ashtray off the bedside table and hurled it into the dark, not at me, at the wall; and in the dark, it clattered and rang, banged, and skidded barkingly on the shadowed wall and then was silent.
“—bearable to me.” Then: “Sleep and late-night talk and you in your feelings are all—”
“Yes?” she said as if she’d thrown nothing.
“—part of some category of suicide.”
She said sturdily, “I am a coward who is also a very, very brave person.”
“Helen Thwaite”—a woman writer of quite high-ranked family (Boston), a good-looking woman, bossy, interesting, untamed; she’d taken a liking to me and to my work; her own work was about herself; she’d done a very successful novel which had in it two chapters of a second husband maddened and torturing his wife with questions about her past. It was shabbier, plainer, more horrifying, more unendurable than any good book on such a subject was—“says I am un homme fatal and you are a woman of great good sense but absolutely untalkable to; and neither you nor I know what we are doing; but it’s all right because we’re blessed.”
“I should have been named something like Rachel—I’m an impossible person—I’m old-fashioned, Wiley. I think Helen Thwaite is a mad old egomaniac who’s full of shit.”
“God . . . You’re so wide awake. You really want to talk about forbidden and daring things at two-ten in the morning?”
Without a pause: “Yes.”
“Well, maybe. But if it’s going to be forbidden subjects, let’s talk about your family and not about my fucking around—tell me about your family.”
Pause. Her breathing and then a faint ahem and then her voice indicated she was making a deal. “My grandmother, Bomma, didn’t like my mother and insulted her at mealtimes. In Maine. This was Mount Desert. Bomma had fifteen people at any meal, sometimes twenty-five, even forty—people did that in Maine then. You were just plain folks even if you were social but you were plain in a large-scale way. So, this was in Maine—in front of everybody—the cook and the maids and the men who served. Some of the kids helped serve. My mother was very pretty. She tried, Wiley. She was remarkable-looking. She might have been a little nervous—a little drunk. Bomma was mean to her.”
“What did she say?”
“I don’t remember. My mother ran out on the porch—it was a very large porch—it went all the way around the house—it was a large house, thirty rooms, forty—and she looked at the ocean and she cried: she was very hurt. I went to her. I didn’t like her but I am the same as she is. Blood is thicker than water. I was darker than my blond cousins . . .” Pause. “My father insulted everybody. He thought they were dumb—and he said so. They were dumb. I didn’t fit in. Not ever. I was always miserable . . .”
To know the fakery in the speech, one would have to know that Ora was being nice; one would have to know how nice she was being; the dark side of Ora and what her unniceness is, its degrees, its effect at various times, and what it includes, how far it goes: the comparison, the unhurtingness, but the hurt at not being really told anything: one has to know Ora to know what is going on.
“Jack”—John Lorrimer “Jack” Perkins, her father—“said it was interesting the two lines of people you come from, the café-society part, the gangster connections there, then his family, crooks to start with, in with the Vanderbilts—then becoming reputable—with their seats on the board, the vestry, whatever it is, of Trinity Parish, and with all their charities, looking down on your mother and her father, when, on that other side, and it is a little funny, one of your great-grandfathers robbed his regiment in the Civil War and founded a fortune on that robbery, and your grandfather got away from him and married a woman he thought was well-bred and one of her grandfathers was a crooked lawyer who started a college but not a good one—it’s not much, Jack said, as a family history but it’s American. And it’s better to be descended from true stories than from false ones. Jack said the crooks who founded the Republican Party in New York State looked down on the crooks who came later—well, why not? Jack said the Republican Party was a party that lasted for seventy years.” Jack sounded to me a little like, oh, a newspaper columnist, someone who makes wiseacre sentences when he talked. Intelligence shows the era that formed it. “Then your aunt on your mother’s side married that Hindu poet, Mahoti . . . And hated gangsters and became a Communist and slept around for the sake of the party—so that’s quite a spread . . . It is American . . . All the stuff about club memberships and getting thrown out of this and that—cabal, club, whatever—and slights and feuds—and well-run weddings and vulgar weddings and the scandals and the bad investments and the good investments and the good marriages—you understand things differently, America differently when you look at it from the point of view of family. It was always a sort of lower-middle-class mess in America is what Jack said. But that was fine if you had money and sense—enough money to feel special. Jack said his father had been about to be appointed secretary of state when he quarreled with John Hay and with Mark Hanna, with one over principle and with the other over a secret share of some boodle that was due him, and he lost both arguments—he lost out totally . . . Is any of it true?”
“Jack’s stories are good,” she said. “But frankly, Wiley, I’d rather talk about sex. I think my family’s awful. Jack tells good stories but they’re not exactly true . . . That’s what you want to know—postcoitally? Is there truth in what my father tells you? He may have told true stories once but he’s gotten ahead in the world—and he wants to impress you.”
“I think what I love about you, in part, is that you don’t want to come from an ideal line. You never do this my perfect father, my darling mother bit. Well, he’s usually drunk. They’re usually drunk . . . I suppose you get sophisticated that way?”
Silence.
She said, “He likes to fool people—it makes him feel good—he has to do it: it’s politics and psychology. You know about will and reality—have you read Ortega y Gasset?”
“Some.”
“He’s very good.” Then: “Jack does have some family standing, although he threw most of it away when he married my mother—you know?” Then: “Politically, Jack is very serious—sometimes. On the whole. He was very far left—now he’s very far right—he’s a logical cuss . . . I suppose it is some lost psychological truth. The terms alter but the basic setup doesn’t. And, anyway, Jack is first and foremost a certain sort of very able liar. Lying is second nature to him—mother’s milk—meat and drink. When you want to irritate him, what you do is say something outrageously truthful: it’s like slapping him in the mouth with a dead fish to do that. Sometimes he likes it.”
“I think so, too . . . Now tell me about your mom.”
“Millie.”
“Millicent ‘Millie’ Burywood Osterwald Hoffenburg Perkins.”
“She is very healthy; she’s n
ever sick; she’s very, very Republican; she has no taste in clothes; everyone agrees she’s fabulous-looking; and everyone thinks she’s a jackass. We sometimes have a lot of people over, and they talk politics and money, and no one will talk to her, she’s so silly. She told someone last winter, ‘That Ike Eisenhower is a drunken liar.’ Well, that person just moved away from her. Jack tells her she’s a jackass. She says she knows what’s what. They still have sex. Do families in life ever act like families in the movies? Millie is unreliable—she was never a good mother: everyone says so. I say so. She’s cold. Cold, cold, cold. She makes up stories and she believes them—she has entire imaginary feuds with people. I hate the way she waits for three-thirty to take her first drink. Have you seen that?”
Sitting, checking her watch, and then getting up from her chair and standing by the liquor cabinet and counting as if in a comic recitative. She was very like a soubrette in musical comedy.
“Are her stories mostly untrue?”
“You never know with her. She can be malicious, Wiley.”
“What do you dislike most about your mother?”
“The way she talks to animals when she’s drunk . . .”
“God . . . I’ve seen that.”
“She doesn’t like people . . .”
“Is that what you dislike, or does that stand for something else? I’m not trying to be clever . . .”
“Yes you are.”
“Well, is this literally what you dislike—or is it a symbol?”
“It is what I dislike. I don’t know. I like her wit; maybe it’s witty her talking to animals in baby talk. I hate it when she makes speeches about politics at dinner and she calls politicians names and she sneers . . . I just can’t stand it when she says someone is a pantywaist.”
“Do you prefer that to tragedy?”
“I don’t know. I think I prefer tragedy to that. I hate it when she talks to the animals, Wiley . . . She talks to bugs, even.”
“But she’s drunk, Ora—and people don’t want to talk to her.”
“It’s not something she does with any feeling. She doesn’t like animals. She killed a thrush once at pistol practice, with Jack and me.”
“I sort of like the pistol practice after dinner.”
“Momma and I don’t like each other . . . What do you like least about your mother?”
“Which one?”
“Lila.”
“She’s dead. Her death . . .” Then: “I wish she were alive—she’d be something for Millie to have to deal with.”
“I think Momma and I loathe each other . . . Millie feels I laugh at her, my politics are so different from hers. I do laugh at her. Of course. My mother is a cold rat. Was Lila noble? Did she have a noble soul?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. I don’t think so. What do you mean by noble soul? I respect your sense of reality. I haven’t really thought about this, Ora.”
“My sense of reality is spotty, Wiley. But somebody loved you; you manage quite well.”
“So do you. But there’s Millie . . .”
“Jack helped. And in some ways I’m special, Wiley. I wish we never saw my family. If you and I love one another, we don’t need anyone—” Then: “You want my family . . .”
“Not really. It would be odd to have a father-in-law with connections to the F.B.I. And the C.I.A.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You play him off against Uncle Peter . . .” Her Aunt Hilda’s third husband: a rich one, a vice president of the U.S. Resources Group, a big corporation.
“You know, Ora, I don’t feel I really know you. Why do you say from time to time that you miss your mother and want to see her?”
“I never had a mother.”
“But you miss her.”
“I do.” Then: “You like my family—you worry about them.”
“That isn’t necessarily liking . . . I’d hoped you’d have sweet parents—lovable—poor and noble and with clean houses.”
I’m a snob and the Perkinses’ houses, the farm in Maryland and the house in Philadelphia, were run-down.
I said, “I do and I don’t like them.” Then: “Millie’s a terrible housekeeper and Jack is dirty—like a little boy.”
“He is actually a dirty boy at heart . . . His parents wouldn’t let him go to Annapolis.”
“I suppose that follows. If he didn’t get to wear dress whites, he gets to be unclean.”
Ora said, “He’s a dowager’s son . . .” Then: “You’re a Jewish snob.”
“I know. But the houses are dirty . . .”
“I always clean up for us.” She did. She and the servants would set to and would make some part of the large houses habitable. “For you. For me.”
“A taut-nerved, middle-class Jew—and an impossible daughter. Jack told me it always irritated the shit out of Millie, you doing that, cleaning up the house—you’ve done it, bossily, since you were ten years old, Jack says.”
“Jack likes to talk. I don’t want to talk about my family. Did you masturbate a lot when you were young?”
“You are really odd. Your enunciation, your profile, your mind—you’re odd.”
“I’m a bit Hollywood,” she said.
“Created by studio heads? Self-chosen? Nothing created by heredity?”
“You guessed it,” she said admiringly. “You understand: I’m not something made by heredity.”
“You don’t seem like Jack’s daughter—he’s physically ugly, sloppy-faced . . . And then there’s him saying, We weren’t as rich as the Joneses”—Edith Wharton’s people—“but we were in a position to make them fidget a bit. Ora, how come you’re not like that?”
“The past is the past.” Then: “I hate all those people—they laughed at my mother. Who the fuck were they, anyway? A bunch of sexless creeps with crooks for ancestors. I’m Faustian . . .”
“Oh? Well, why not? Why, when we met, did you say, My people are poor: they’re nowhere people from nowheresville . . .”
Silence. Then: “Well, it’s true . . .”
“They’re dirt farmers?”
“They’re not that nowhere.” She was being foolish—she grew haughty to cover up.
I knew she was making conversation. This wasn’t real talk exactly—it was an imitation of book talk, talk in a book. But what her purpose was in doing this was obscure to me.
“When we’re older we won’t have the energy to amuse each other in the middle of the night . . . courtship energy,” I said. She was silent. “Ora . . .”
“I’m a comedian—a buffoon . . . I always was.” Then: “I’m more undercover than you are.” She said it whisperingly and she lifted the sheet I had drawn over us and she looked underneath at our naked bodies there—it wasn’t a strongly dirty action.
I ignored the risqué do-jigger. “Have you ever succeeded in seeing yourself as no one?”
“When I’m sick. When I run a fever . . .”
“With a high temperature you become a girl of the people?”
She blinked. Then: “One touch of nature, Wiley.”
“I suppose that’s true . . .” Did she want an interrogation?
Did she want to come?
Did she want me to come again? What did she WANT?
“I’m mere flesh and bones anyway,” she said. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—God, that always gives me a chill . . .” Then: “I have been bored for the last time. I have you . . .”
“Bored by Jack, too?”
“He’s not as boring as some men. But he bores me.” Then: “Jack is a compulsive Protestant liar.” She said this coldly. “He is a brilliant man but he is A Disappointed Man . . . That’s why he won’t let you go once he starts to talk . . . he’s the Old Man of the Mountain.”
“I thought it was his ego as a seducer—he’s the Great Charmer of the family . . . Isn’t he? Men often want to have the power of beautiful women without their saying that is what they want. They want to command lives and deaths—i
n the real world. He’s the master of adult corruptions—not all adult corruptions—but it’s funny how Hitlerlike most people are. In some ways. One night I said to him, ‘Tell me about your disappointments’—he’d been saying he was a disappointed man. It was quite a list: he was not a figure in world diplomacy; he was not one of the richest men in the world. He was not an inventor of any importance; he was not one of the members of the shadow cabinet; women disappointed him—sexuality had—modern comedy was not good, modern death; your mother; you disappointed him; the American navy and American foreign policy and the history and current state of American intelligence operations and of American intelligence, the mind of the country, had disappointed him; and his parents had disappointed him; the last machine lathe he stole from his corporation was lousy: a lousy piece of equipment: so was the Colt .45—the Luger: now THERE was a gun. The culture and politics and sociology and social shenanigans of his time were repulsive: automobile design; American education; American manners; movies: it was most impressive—and a little funny—this off-the-cuff immense lament, reverse Hitlerian and then Hitlerlike, wanting a complete reform and complete power to carry it out.”
“He gets a lot of it from Schopenhauer.”
“There was more: American journalism; contemporary conceptions of power, Hitler was a shabby squirt—even modern corruption disappointed him. ‘I am like Candide: I cultivate my garden,’ he said in that accent he gets at one in the morning.”
“I know. It’s Choate.”
“But he went to Exeter.”
“But his accent comes from Choate—he likes the Choate accent better. He doesn’t use it often—he likes you.”
I imitated it: “‘No good, all of it, it’s all no good . . .’ I’m too nasal . . .”
“Yes . . .”
“I like him, too. A lot . . . really.”
“He’s sly, Wiley—don’t trust him, promise me—he wants to be dangerous—he’s very proud.”
“And you?”
“I’m not proud . . . I would die rather than be like Jack.”
“I would rather die than be like S.L.—but if I were like him I would die anyway . . . You are dangerous. You have a terrible inner temper. It’s not smart to disappoint you . . .”
The Runaway Soul Page 31