Somebody on that clipper ship is probably looking at him from its shuddering deck, yo-ho! He knows this to be a fact, oh Christ, yes, he knows many things, he does, except why he’s here with his drunken mother in dark and sleety Brooklyn, in the dark and iron world.
There has been a great deal written on clipper ships, and “the Age” of the clipper ship, none of which information is of any interest to this young man.
At the time of this particular New Year’s Eve, disco had not yet been invented. One less thing for white, middle-class, suburban heroes of irony to mock.
Speaking of hotels: The chances that a meat-cutting-machine salesman, let’s call him Lester Peck, in, say, a Binghamton cocktail lounge, might strike up a conversation with a comely middle-aged businesswoman, take her to his room in the local Sheraton, and there discover her to be wearing nothing beneath her tailored business suit, are so small as to be virtually nonexistent. As we speak, there sits Lester, at the Sheraton bar, talking man-talk with the bartender about, oh yes!, the heroic NFL.
It’s love, love, love, all right, but not for lonely Lester, the football enthusiast.
That the woman lying athwart the hotel bed is a bleached blonde is, all right, a cliché of sorts, but what is one to do?
What One Is To Do: “ … her face is attractive, though her hair is gray”; “… her face is attractive, though her hair needs a shampoo”; “… her face is attractive, though she is no longer the crack sales representative for Pfister & Sons Restaurant Products, Inc., that she once was.”
“Bright Night, I obey thee, and am come at thy call.”
Come, though, to what?
Shuffle off to Buffalo
WHEN HIS MOTHER DIED, HE WAS CIVIL, even somewhat friendly toward the handsome and correctly serious priest who had come to the hospital to administer extreme unction, which sacrament, he learned, was now called “anointing of the sick.” He was grateful, in his apostate’s ignorance, to be so enlightened. He had, after all, won, at the age of twelve, a certificate for Excellence in Religious Studies, signed by Monsignor Patrick J. O’Hara.
She was waked out of the same funeral home that had waked his grandmother, grandfather, and aunt. The mother of his closest boyhood friend came on the second night of the wake, embraced him, then knelt at the casket and wept more bitterly than he thought it possible for anyone to weep. He realized, not for the first time, that his mother had lived a life of her own, a life other than the one he recognized, a life wholly hidden from him, but known to others. He arranged for a High Requiem mass, and she was buried next to her mother in Holy Cross cemetery. He ordered a stone for her from Iavoni and Sons, to carry her name and dates of birth and death. After the stone had been finished and put in place, he learned that she was four years older than she had always claimed. Well, she had been a vain woman, proud of her looks and figure, meticulous in her dress, stiffnecked and vindictive yet “full of fun,” as she might say, and oddly puritanical and bawdy at once. She was perfectly willing to terminate friendships of years’ standing in an instant, and her overt sentimentalism was but a mask for her absolute toughness and contempt for most of the people she had to do with. She would have liked the mass, the black-and-silver vestments, the properly gloomy church, the singing and the candles: the works. That’s what she’d wanted, that’s what she got.
A month or so later, he went to the parish church she’d been buried out of and lighted a candle for her, but said no prayers. He sat in a pew, inhaling the coolly thin odor of wax and lingering incense in the air. He had spent years and years going to mass in this church, wherein he had been baptized, received his First Holy Communion, been confirmed. That he’d done his duty by his mother, relied on the church as she would have wanted him to, made him feel himself more remote than ever from this complex religion, more excluded from its enigmas and paradoxes. The abyss is just that, so he thought, and his mother was nowhere at all, gone, gone into the gloom of oblivion. He walked out into the familiar streets on which he had grown up into doubt and weakness and error. World without end? Shuffle off to Buffalo.
When all is said and done—lovely phrase—it has to be acknowledged that Roman Catholicism is not a Christian religion; or, to put it better, the neurotically cheerful, doom-obsessed, you-can-take-it-with-you hysteria of eccentric American Christianity has little to do with Roman Catholicism, which is, essentially, a mystery religion. All those worldly priests who can chat about mundane problems are but masks and diversions to hide the center of the faith from the general, snarling populace, lest they should see it for what it is: magic.
The woman who wept herself into hysteria was Katie DeLeon. Two other women, who also wept so uncontrollably that they had to be helped out of the viewing room, were Anna Claves and Mary Filippo. He sat with each of them, individually, on a small love seat outside of the funeral director’s office, and each gripped his hand and held white handkerchiefs, sodden with tears, to their streaming, swollen eyes. The handkerchiefs had lace edgings.
“Anointing of the sick” has a more hopeful sound to it than “extreme unction.” As if “the sick” may perhaps recover.
“Shuffle Off to Buffalo” was published in 1932, words by Al Dubin, music by the wondrous Harry Warren. Ginger Rogers and Ruby Keeler sang this song, and, of course, danced to it, on a Hollywood back-lot version of the Niagara Limited. The film was Forty-Second Street.
Al Dubin, Harry Warren, Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, and the Niagara Limited are all dead. Let perpetual light shine upon them.
This valley of tears
THE DAY HIS MOTHER DIED WAS A COLD DAY. The day his mother died was a wet day. The day his mother died was a raw day, a snowy day. The day his mother died was a gray day, the gray of death.
The day his mother died was a dark day, a day of cheap chow mein, of Lucky Strikes, of somber faces, of silent relatives, of soothing clichés, a day of sadness.
The day his mother died was a day of revelations, bitterness, a day of sudden understanding, of ignorance, of mysteries and confessions, of trips and trips and trips through sleet and freezing rain in cars and cabs and subway trains, in the Hudson Tubes, in Public Service buses, on foot through slushy streets.
The day his mother died ended some things and initiated others.
The day his mother died was a day of memories, of old movies, of yellowing books and brittle pages and of bad poems, blurry television screens, of new kitchenware, of policemen anddoctors and oxygen and anesthesia, of stupid articles and vapid stories in tattered magazines.
The day his mother died was a day of copulation, fellatio, masturbation, cunnilingus, it was a day of girdles and hats with half-veils, of high heels and dinner rings.
The day his mother died was a day of insanity and hamburgers, of perversions, of good clothes and fur coats and bank accounts, of booze and quiet saloons, of surrogate court and legal forms and leaky ballpoint pens.
A day of undertakers and morgues, of helplessness, of sheer stockings, dresses cut on the bias, lipstick, perfume, mascara, eye shadow, of rouge and neckties and embarrassment. Of formaldehyde.
A day of children in patched clothes, windy empty lots, bad jobs, pitiful salaries, cruel and stupid bosses, of rickety furniture and basement apartments, of drunkenness and false friends, of hopeless misunderstandings. It was a day of coarse and vulgar infidelities, instant violence, reckless fucking, crazed parties, insincere smiles, of error and sin and betrayal. It was a day of unwanted confidences and cynicism.
The day his mother died: of death: a day of negation: of finality.
Mourning and weeping. In this valley of tears.
“The phrase, ‘the day his mother died,’ has an intentionally incantatory quality, of course, but may it not be considered self-indulgent?”
Death strolls down the road and asks if we might care to sit in the shade of a tree with him. An old elm, what else? A cool breeze blows across the overgrown churchyard and the old church is piercingly white in the bright sun. “Smoke ’e
m if you got ’em,” he says. He seems like a reasonable man, for a corporal. Of course, he’s got a job to do.
It is very difficult for a young man to select the clothes that his mother will be buried in. Let the women do it, for Christ’s sake, let the women do it.
He sits in the dim light of the shabby living room, watching the snow pile up against the badly seated windows. “I really liked her,” the woman says. “God, she was just here a month ago.” A marvel, a masterpiece, a chef d’oeuvre of cant.
He sees her clearly, ‘deed he do. “That’s a fucking jewel of fucking phoniness,” he says. “Do we have any whiskey in this fucking hateful dump?”
A day of bad movies, of the silver screen filled with the paralyzing stupidity of self-adoration. “These swine will never die!”
Snow snow. Snow.
She whom no one ever found, death found, in Jersey City.
The true ciphers at last
SHE TOLD HIM THAT HIS FATHER WAS THE greatest driver in the country, if not the world, and that LaSalles and Packards, DeSotos and Chryslers, Buicks and Cadillacs and Hudson Terraplanes had been designed and built especially for his pleasure; that he had suggested the wooden-spoked wheels for the Moon roadster and sold the specifications for another famous if overrated car to Herr Porsche, who then claimed it for his own; that dances had been created for him by Nijinsky, Ted Shawn, Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and Loie Fuller, that ballrooms had been named for him and luncheon dances under swirling colored lights suggested and popularized by him. The classic Savile Row suit? Designed by him. The Windsor knot? First tied by him and generously credited to the Duke, who, in actual fact, being something, he’d winked, of “a dim bulb,” couldn’t even tie his shoes. The silk scarf employed as a belt was one of his improvisatory whims. He had started all the major Hollywood studios, with Jack and Adolph and Harry and Louis as his assistants, but tired of their puerile minds, their lack of adventurous spirit, and their worship of the box office. She said that he’d opened a restaurant with Rudolph Valentino as a partner; that he’d been the first to wear a midnight-blue tuxedo; that before his arrival in Miami Beach, Lincoln and Collins Avenues had been not much more than skid rows; that he’d created whipped cream and the cheeseburger; that he’d not only bought, refurbished, and opened the Cotton Club, but that he’d booked into it Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Chick Webb, Sy Oliver, Benny Moten, Jay McShann, Fletcher Henderson, Jimmy Lunceford, Cab Calloway, and Andy Kirk and his Twelve Clouds of Joy; that he’d collaborated with Flo Ziegfeld on all the Follies, but grew restive at the successful but banal formula, and that, incidentally, he’d made love to each and every one of the famed Ziegfeld Girls; that he’d also had affairs with Pola Negri, Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, Mae Marsh, Vilma Banky, Paulette Goddard, Claudette Colbert, Dorothy Day, Lydia E. Pinkham, and Castoria Fletcher, all this before, of course, he’d met her; that he’d bought a Chinese restaurant, the Jade Mountain, with cash, because she liked the egg foo yung there, a dish, by the way, that he’d created of necessity on a chicken farm in the Gobi; that he’d almost managed to save Bix Beiderbecke from drinking himself to death, but was too busy advising the Army Air Corps on the design of a low-altitude fighter that eventually became the P-51 Mustang; that he’d caught the biggest sailfish, tuna, swordfish, and blue marlin that had ever been caught off the Florida Keys; that he’d advised James Joyce to drop the possessive apostrophe in the title of his last work; that he’d suggested to Scott Fitzgerald that he read the work of the virtually unknown Ernest Hemingway. He invented the pneumatic scaling tool and devised a method of cleaning double-bottomed boilers that would save workers’ sanity; he consistently bid lowest on re-rigging jobs for the Navy and just as consistently did excellent work; he could shovel snow for hours and then dance all night; make a marinara sauce and a bolognese sauce and a white-clam sauce that were miracles of superb flavor and subtle balance; he could teach anybody to drive and had, as a matter of fact, given the great Nuvolari some invaluable tips. She remarked that it was well known that he was a descendant of an aristocratic Italian family, descended from the Emperor Galerius, whose roots were deep in Sicily; that he was a remarkably attentive, adoring, dutiful yet strict father; that he had renamed Yellow Hook, Bay Ridge, for which the Brooklyn Borough President gave him the key to the borough and the Order of Chevalier of Kings County Arts and Letters; that he’d been the one to first spot George Herriman’s genius; that he’d suggested to Magritte that the title of a simple painting should be “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” rather than the painter’s “Une pipe”; that he could sing like Russ Columbo, only with greater range and better breath control; that he met regularly with Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, George Gershwin, Erik Satie, Alban Berg, and Arnold Schoenberg to discuss what he called “serial music” and “atonal music”; that he wrote the first lengthy critique of the new medium of television, calling it “the coming boon—or curse—of the century.” He had unofficially broken the world records for the giant slalom, the butterfly, the 100-meter dash, and the pole vault; he advised his close friends to buy up all the cheap land in and around a small, virtually abandoned one-time mining town in Colorado: Aspen; and he was the writer or co-writer of speeches given by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Father Divine, Al Smith, Fiorello H. LaGuardia, Huey Long, Eddie Cantor, Father Coughlin, Eugene V. Debs, and General Douglas MacArthur, the latter’s remarks those famous words delivered on the occasion of his being awarded his ninth Good Conduct Medal; he had, uncannily, predicted the popular musical expression that came to be called rock and roll. His heart had stopped beating for forty-seven minutes when his mother died, and he remarked, upon regaining life-functions, that “the other side” looked “like an enchanted Elizabeth Street”; he wrote all the jokes and comedy routines for W.C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, and the Marx Brothers; he was, perhaps, proudest of the humble sausage recipe that he gave, gratis, to Nathan Handwerker; and she said, too, that he was a lying, cheating, unfaithful, deceitful, and miserably cruel and thoughtless and selfish son of a fucking bitch bastard who should suffer and suffer for years and years and then die in agony and all alone and burn screaming in the torments of hell forever and ever and ever, may God forgive me! That’s what she told him.
This is, without a doubt, faintly absurd, but one may read it with Beckett in mind, who remarks that one may “puzzle over it endlessly without the least risk. For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker. It is then that the true division begins, of twenty-two by seven, for example, and the pages fill with the true ciphers at last.”
Samuel Beckett, it may be recalled, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. So were many, many other people.
This woman, vexed and exasperated by life, is, in effect, saying, “I won’t cry anymore, and I wish you were here,” or “I wish you were here, but I won’t cry anymore.”
“Maybe, I mean just maybe, she’s really saying, ‘Come to the Mardi Gras!’”
Oh, for Christ’s sweet sake, don’t be so literary.
Speaking of literary, a list of selected, judiciously selected, Nobel Prize laureates in Literature, might be thought of as “the true ciphers at last.”
Four soldiers
HE WAS ONE OF FOUR SOLDIERS IN A SALOON somewhere, after so many years, it’s hard to remember. That’s what he says, in any event, probably a dodge. The others cannot be located, or accounted for, or so he says. A saloon in maybe Baltimore, or Blackstone, maybe Glen Burnie or San Antonio. This was another world, existent before probably three-quarters of the people presently dwelling, as best they can upon this earth, were born. There was a dance floor, big enough for three couples, just off the end of the long bar and near the two booths at the back of the room. The usual jukebox, some of the songs that year were “And So to Sleep Again,” “I Won’t Cry Anymore,” “Mixed Emot
ions,” and “Unforgettable,” the last cited the only one to have survived. A blonde. A pale-blue dress. Reminiscent of something that he could not quite place, but it may well have been important. He was giving this blonde some story about being shipped out in a week to FECOM, la-la, la-la, la-la. Then the pale-blue dress presented him with another image of another girl at another bar, OK, FECOM, oh yeah. The dress might have been a uniform, white, or an elegant sweater with tiny faux pearls in a fleur-de-lis pattern on the bosom. The feel of ice-cold fur with a hint of clean, fresh perfume.
Now, how to get this blond girl with her small breasts and lovely hips away from the other girls and his three pals, Privates E-2 Blank, Blank, and Blank? She was a little drunk and he was telling her a lot of lies, and her pale-blue dress was somehow responsible for the smell of ether and hospital meat loaf and cold, soggy carrots and peas. What the hell?
Yeah, they’ll be cutting our orders for Fort Ord in a couple of days, damn it. What a sorry-looking soldier he was, his khakis disgracefully wrinkled and stained with beer and whiskey and ketchup, his low-quarters scuffed, his brass dull, his tie missing, his cap in his back pocket. He looked at her, his face suitably and bravely stricken. Honor first, yet—apprehension. And love! Love! He slid his dirty hand down the smooth fabric of her dress till it rested between the small of her back and her buttocks, and she tentatively pushed her thighs against him. But where could they go, for God’s sake? A walk, a cup of coffee, a movie, bowling? Then, maybe, maybe what?
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