“I’ll be with you in just a minute,” I said. “I can’t seem to get this air-conditioner to work.”
The “On” button seemed to be stuck, in fact, and I was busily tinkering with it.
While I worked on the air-conditioner switch—with my hat still on my head, I remember—the others circulated rather suspiciously around the room. I watched them out of the corner of one eye. The Lieutenant went over to the desk and stood looking up at the three or four square feet of wall directly above it, where my brother and I, for defiantly sentimental reasons, had tacked up a number of glossy eight-by-ten photographs. Mrs. Silsburn sat down—inevitably, I thought—in the one chair in the room that my deceased Boston bull used to enjoy sleeping in; its arms, upholstered in dirty corduroy, had been thoroughly slavered and chewed on in the course of many a nightmare. The bride’s father’s uncle—my great friend—seemed to have disappeared completely. The Matron of Honor, too, seemed suddenly to be somewhere else. “I’ll get you all something to drink in just a second,” I said uneasily, still trying to force the switch button on the air-conditioner.
“I could use something cold to drink,” said a very familiar voice. I turned completely around and saw that she had stretched herself out on the couch, which accounted for her noticeable vertical disappearance. “I’ll use your phone in just a second,” she advised me. “I couldn’t open my mouth anyway to talk on the phone, in this condition, I’m so parched. My tongue’s so dry.”
The air-conditioner abruptly whirred into operation, and I came over to the middle of the room, into the space between the couch and the chair where Mrs. Silsburn was sitting. “I don’t know what there is to drink,” I said. “I haven’t looked in the refrigerator, but I imagine—”
“Bring anything,” the eternal spokeswoman interrupted from the couch. “Just make it wet. And cold.” The heels of her shoes were resting on the sleeve of my sister’s jacket. Her hands were folded across her chest. A pillow was bunched up under her head. “Put ice in it, if you have any,” she said, and closed her eyes. I looked down at her for a brief but murderous instant, then bent over and, as tactfully as possible, eased Boo Boo’s jacket out from under her feet. I started to leave the room and go about my chores as host, but just as I took a step, the Lieutenant spoke up from over at the desk.
“Whereja get all these pictures?” he said.
I went directly over to him. I was still wearing my visored, oversize garrison cap. It hadn’t occurred to me to take it off. I stood beside him at the desk, and yet a trifle behind him, and looked up at the photographs on the wall. I said they were mostly old pictures of the children who had been on “It’s a Wise Child” in the days when Seymour and I had been on the show.
The Lieutenant turned to me. “What was it?” he said. “I never heard it. One of those kids’ quiz shows? Questions and answers, and like that?”
Unmistakably, a soupçon of Army rank had slipped unnoisily but insidiously into his voice. He also seemed to be looking at my hat.
I took off my hat, and said, “No, not exactly.” A certain amount of low family pride was suddenly evoked. “It was before my brother Seymour was on it. And it more or less got that way again after he went off the program. But he changed the whole format, really. He turned the program into a kind of children’s round-table discussion.”
The Lieutenant looked at me with, I thought, somewhat excessive interest. “Were you on it, too?” he said.
“Yes.”
The Matron of Honor spoke up from the other side of the room, from the invisible, dusty recesses of the couch. “I’d like to see a kid of mine get on one of those crazy programs,” she said. “Or act. Any of those things. I’d die, in fact, before I’d let any child of mine turn themself into a little exhibitionist before the public. It warps their whole entire lives. The publicity and all, if nothing else—ask any psychiatrist. I mean how can you have any kind of a normal childhood or anything?” Her head, crowned in a now lopsided circlet of flowers, suddenly popped into view. As though disembodied, it perched on the catwalk of the back of the couch, facing the Lieutenant and me. “That’s probably what’s the matter with that brother of yours,” the Head said. “I mean you lead an absolutely freakish life like that when you’re a kid, and so naturally you never learn to grow up. You never learn to relate to normal people or anything. That’s exactly what Mrs. Fedder was saying in that crazy bedroom a couple of hours ago. But exactly. Your brother’s never learned to relate to anybody. All he can do, apparently, is go around giving people a bunch of stitches in their faces. He’s absolutely unfit for marriage or anything halfway normal, for goodness’ sake. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what Mrs. Fedder said.” The Head then turned just enough to glare over at the Lieutenant. “Am I right, Bob? Did she or didn’t she say that? Tell the truth.”
The next voice to speak up was not the Lieutenant’s but mine. My mouth was dry, and my groin felt damp. I said I didn’t give a good God damn what Mrs. Fedder had to say on the subject of Seymour. Or, for that matter, what any professional dilettante or amateur bitch had to say. I said that from the time Seymour was ten years old, every summa-cum-laude Thinker and intellectual men’s-room attendant in the country had been having a go at him. I said it might be different if Seymour had just been some nasty little high-I.Q. showoff. I said he hadn’t ever been an exhibitionist. He went down to the broadcast every Wednesday night as though he were going to his own funeral. He didn’t even talk to you, for God’s sake, the whole way down on the bus or subway. I said that not one God-damn person, of all the patronizing, fourth-rate critics and column writers, had ever seen him for what he really was. A poet, for God’s sake. And I meant a poet. If he never wrote a line of poetry, he could still flash what he had at you with the back of his ear if he wanted to.
I stopped right there, thank God. My heart was banging away something terrible, and, like most hypochondriacs, I had a little passing, intimidating notion that such speeches were the stuff that heart attacks are made of. To this day, I have no idea at all how my guests reacted to my outbreak, the polluted little stream of invective I’d loosed on them. The first real exterior detail that I was aware of was the universally familiar sound of plumbing. It came from another part of the apartment. I looked around the room suddenly, between and through and past the immediate faces of my guests. “Where’s the old man?” I asked. “The little old man?” Butter wouldn’t have melted in my mouth.
Oddly enough, when an answer came, it came from the Lieutenant, not the Matron of Honor. “I believe he’s in the bathroom,” he said. The statement was issued with a special forthrightness, proclaiming the speaker to be one of those who don’t mince everyday hygienic facts.
“Oh,” I said. I looked rather absently around the room again. Whether or not I deliberately avoided meeting the Matron of Honor’s terrible eye, I don’t remember, or don’t care to remember. I spotted the bride’s father’s uncle’s silk hat on the seat of a straight chair, across the room. I had an impulse to say hello, aloud, to it. “I’ll get some cold drinks,” I said. “I’ll just be a minute.”
“May I use your phone?” the Matron of Honor suddenly said to me as I passed by the couch. She swung her feet to the floor.
“Yes—yes, of course,” I said. I looked at Mrs. Silsburn and the Lieutenant. “I thought I’d make some Tom Collinses, if there are any lemons or limes. Will that be all right?”
The Lieutenant’s answer startled me by its sudden conviviality. “Bring ’em on,” he said, and rubbed his hands together, like a hearty drinking man.
Mrs. Silsburn left off studying the photographs over the desk to advise me, “If you’re going to make Tom Collinses—please, just a teentsy, teentsy little bit of gin in mine. Almost none at all, if it isn’t too much trouble.” She was beginning to look a bit recuperated, even in just the short time since we’d got off the street. Perhaps, for one reason, because she was standing within a few feet of the air-conditioner I’d tur
ned on and some cool air was coming her way. I said I’d look out for her drink, and then left her among the minor radio “celebrities” of the early thirties and the late twenties, the many passé little faces of Seymour’s and my boyhood. The Lieutenant seemed well able to shift for himself in my absence, too; he was already moving, hands joined behind his back, like a lone connoisseur, toward the bookshelves. The Matron of Honor followed me out of the room, yawning as she did—a cavernous, audible yawn that she made no effort to suppress or obstruct from view.
As the Matron of Honor followed me toward the bedroom, where the phone was, the bride’s father’s uncle came toward us from the far end of the hall. His face was in the ferocious repose that had fooled me during most of the car ride, but as he came closer to us in the hall, the mask reversed itself; he pantomimed to us both the very highest salutations and greetings, and I found myself grinning and nodding immoderately in return. His sparse white hair looked freshly combed—almost freshly washed, as though he might have discovered a tiny barbershop cached away at the other end of the apartment. When he’d passed us, I felt a compulsion to look back over my shoulder, and when I did, he waved to me, vigorously—a great, bon-voyage, come-back-soon wave. It picked me up no end. “What is he? Crazy?” the Matron of Honor said. I said I hoped so, and opened the door of the bedroom.
She sat down heavily on one of the twin beds—Seymour’s, as a matter of fact. The phone was on the night table within easy reach. I said I’d bring her a drink right away. “Don’t bother—I’ll be right out,” she said. “Just close the door, if you don’t mind. . . . I don’t mean it that way, but I can never talk on the phone unless the door’s closed.” I told her I was the exact same way, and started to leave. But just as I’d turned to come out of the space between the two beds, I noticed a small collapsible canvas valise over on the window seat. At first glance, I thought it was mine, miraculously arrived at the apartment, all the way from Penn Station, under its own steam. My second thought was that it must be Boo Boo’s. I walked over to it. It was unzipped, and just one look at the top layer of its contents told me who the real owner was. With another, more inclusive look, I saw something lying on top of two laundered Army suntan shirts that I thought ought not to be left alone in the room with the Matron of Honor. I picked it out of the bag, slipped it under one arm, waved fraternally to the Matron of Honor, who had already inserted a finger into the first hole of the number she intended to dial, and was waiting for me to clear out, and then I closed the door behind me. I stood for some little time outside the bedroom, in the gracious solitude of the hall, wondering what to do with Seymour’s diary, which, I ought to rush to say, was the object I’d picked out of the top of the canvas bag. My first constructive thought was to hide it till my guests had left. It seemed to me a good idea to take it into the bathroom and drop it into the laundry hamper. However, on a second and much more involved train of thought, I decided to take it into the bathroom and read parts of it and then drop it into the laundry hamper.
It was a day, God knows, not only of rampant signs and symbols but of wildly extensive communication via the written word. If you jumped into crowded cars, Fate took circuitous pains, before you did any jumping, that you had a pad and pencil with you, just in case one of your fellow-passengers was a deaf-mute. If you slipped into bathrooms, you did well to look up to see if there were any little messages, faintly apocalyptical or otherwise, posted high over the washbowl.
For years, among the seven children in our one-bathroom family, it was our perhaps cloying but serviceable custom to leave messages for one another on the medicine cabinet mirror, using a moist sliver of soap to write with. The general theme of our messages usually ran to excessively strong admonitions and, not infrequently, undisguised threats. “Boo Boo, pick up your washcloth when you’re done with it. Don’t leave it on the floor. Love, Seymour.” “Walt, your turn to take Z. and F. to the park. I did it yesterday. Guess who.” “Wednesday is their anniversary. Don’t go to movies or hang around studio after broadcast or pay forfeit. This means you, too, Buddy.” “Mother said Zooey nearly ate the Feenolax. Don’t leave slightly poisonous objects on the sink that he can reach and eat.” These, of course, are samples straight out of our childhood, but years later, when, in the name of independence or what-have-you, Seymour and I branched out and took an apartment of our own, he and I had not more than nominally departed from the old family custom. That is, we didn’t just throw away our old soap fragments.
When I’d checked into the bathroom with Seymour’s diary under my arm, and had carefully secured the door behind me, I spotted a message almost immediately. It was not, however, in Seymour’s handwriting but, unmistakably, in my sister Boo Boo’s. With or without soap, her handwriting was always almost indecipherably minute, and she had easily managed to post the following message up on the mirror: “Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man. Love, Irving Sappho, formerly under contract to Elysium Studios Ltd. Please be happy happy happy with your beautiful Muriel. This is an order. I outrank everybody on this block.” The contract writer quoted in the text, I might mention, has always been a great favorite—at appropriately staggered time intervals—with all the children in our family, largely through the immeasurable impact of Seymour’s taste in poetry on all of us. I read and reread the quotation, and then I sat down on the edge of the bathtub and opened Seymour’s diary.
WHAT FOLLOWS is an exact reproduction of the pages from Seymour’s diary that I read while I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub. It seems perfectly orderly to me to leave out individual datelines. Suffice it to say, I think, all these entries were made while he was stationed at Fort Monmouth, in late 1941 and early 1942, some several months before the wedding date was set.
“IT WAS freezing cold at retreat parade this evening, and yet about six men from our platoon alone fainted during the endless playing of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ I suppose if your blood circulation is normal, you can’t take the unnatural military position of attention. Especially if you’re holding a leaden rifle up at Present Arms. I have no circulation, no pulse. Immobility is my home. The tempo of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and I are in perfect understanding. To me, its rhythm is a romantic waltz.
“We got passes till midnight, after the parade. I met Muriel at the Biltmore at seven. Two drinks, two drugstore tuna-fish sandwiches, then a movie she wanted to see, something with Greer Garson in it. I looked at her several times in the dark when Greer Garson’s son’s plane was missing in action. Her mouth was open. Absorbed, worried. The identification with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer tragedy complete. I felt awe and happiness. How I love and need her undiscriminating heart. She looked over at me when the children in the picture brought in the kitten to show to their mother. M. loved the kitten and wanted me to love it. Even in the dark, I could sense that she felt the usual estrangement from me when I don’t automatically love what she loves. Later, when we were having a drink at the station, she asked me if I didn’t think that kitten was ‘rather nice.’ She doesn’t use the word ‘cute’ any more. When did I ever frighten her out of her normal vocabulary? Bore that I am, I mentioned R. H. Blyth’s definition of sentimentality: that we are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it. I said (sententiously?) that God undoubtedly loves kittens, but not, in all probability, with Technicolor bootees on their paws. He leaves that creative touch to script writers. M. thought this over, seemed to agree with me, but the ‘knowledge’ wasn’t too very welcome. She sat stirring her drink and feeling unclose to me. She worries over the way her love for me comes and goes, appears and disappears. She doubts its reality simply because it isn’t as steadily pleasurable as a kitten. God knows it is sad. The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth.”
“Dinner tonight at the Fedders’. Very good. Veal, mashed potatoes, lima beans, a beautiful oil-and-vinegar green salad. For dessert there was something Muriel made herself
: a kind of frozen cream-cheese affair, with raspberries on it. It made tears come to my eyes. (Saigyo says, ‘What it is I know not/But with the gratitude/My tears fall.’) A bottle of ketchup was placed on the table near me. Muriel apparently told Mrs. Fedder that I put ketchup on everything. I’d give the world to have seen M. telling her mother defensively that I put ketchup even on string beans. My precious girl.
“After dinner Mrs. Fedder suggested we listen to the program. Her enthusiasm, her nostalgia for the program, especially for the old days when Buddy and I were on it, makes me uneasy. Tonight it was broadcast from some naval airbase, of all places, near San Diego. Much too many pedantic questions and answers. Franny sounded as though she had a head cold. Zooey was in dreamy top form. The announcer had them off on the subject of housing developments, and the little Burke girl said she hated houses that all look alike—meaning a long row of identical ‘development’ houses. Zooey said they were ‘nice.’ He said it would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody goodbye in the morning thinking they were your own family. He said he even wished everybody in the world looked exactly alike. He said you’d keep thinking everybody you met was your wife or your mother or father, and people would always be throwing their arms around each other wherever they went, and it would look ‘very nice.’
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction Page 5