The Grotesque

by McGrath, Patrick

  ORSOLYÁNAK

  (FOR ORSOLYA)

  Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

  —Baudelaire

  I have had much leisure in the past months to reflect on my first encounter with Fledge, and why he formed such an immediate and intense antipathy toward me. Butlers, I think, are born, not made; the qualities of a good butler—deference, capability, a sort of dignified servility—are qualities of character that arise in cultures where a stable social hierarchy has existed, essentially undisturbed, for centuries. One rarely encounters a good butler in France, for instance, and a good American butler is a contradiction in terms. Fledge is not a born butler; he does not, by nature, defer, nor does he naturally serve. There is in him, at a quite deep level, I believe, a furious resentment that he should be doing this work. Not that one can detect it in the man’s behavior, but it’s there all the same. It has become apparent to me not only that he felt humiliated by what he was doing, but that he bore toward me a fierce antagonism for being the instrument of it. I was not particularly sympathetic; if he enters my house as a butler, I thought, then I shall treat him as a butler. How could I have guessed the lengths to which his ambition would drive him?

  All this I have reconstructed since being confined to a wheelchair. At the time I was aware only of a certain emanation from the man, and I remember thinking that though he was a bit bloody-minded, a bit bolshie, if he made Harriet happy then I could quite easily put up with a spot of subdued rancor, as long, of course, as it stayed subdued. After all, I thought, what truck did I have with the man? To a large extent I lived in the barn with my bones, and when in the house I needed him only to put plates of food and glasses of drink under my nose. Let him be bolshie, I thought (by no means selflessly), if he keeps Harriet happy. As a connoisseur of ironies, I cannot, now, help recognizing just how rich this one is.

  Since the onset of paralysis I have lost weight, and my tweeds these days hang limp and baggy from my stick-thin frame. My face, too, has changed, as I have ascertained from those fleeting glimpses I catch of it while being wheeled past a mirror. I am humped and cadaverous; my hands lie clawlike on the arms of the wheelchair, and my eyes gaze blankly from a bony, sunken head whose jaw has come permanently to rest upon my clavicle. But in the days of which I speak I held my head upright, and from my steel-gray eyes there leaped sparks of fierce intelligence, no less fierce, in fact, than the barbs of wit that rose constantly to my rather thin and mocking lips. I had a sharp and aquiline nose (I still do), a patrician nose, I always thought it, and atop a clear and lofty brow my thick black hair sprang sideways with oily, crinkly, irrepressibly shaggy energy.

  This, then, is what I looked like as I strode briskly into the drawing room that fateful morning last autumn, to find Sidney Giblet leaning against the mantelpiece with a glass of my sherry in his hand, while Harriet and Cleo, also drinking sherry, were sprawled in armchairs, and popular music of some sort came out of the gramophone. “Here you are, darling,” said Harriet. “What about some sherry? Sidney has been telling us about the death of Rupert Brooke.”

  I snorted inwardly. The death of Rupert Brooke—this was quintessential Sidney. On the far side of the room, over by the drinks cabinet, I noticed the new butler. I remember feeling, even then, a twinge of unease. Dome, you see, had been so old and helpless, much of the time we had had to wait on him! “I believe he was assaulted by a mosquito,” I said dryly, “and died of his wounds.”

  “Oh Daddy,” cried Cleo, “don’t be so horrid.”

  “It’s true,” said Sidney, who was clearly in truckling mood, and eager to avoid conflict. “He saw no action, and died in bed of an infection.”

  “An infection,” said Cleo, sadly. “And him so keen on cleanness.”

  I grinned wolfishly at this rich irony, and Sidney glanced at me uneasily. I think what irritated me most about Sidney, apart from his shrill laughter and his vegetarianism, was his pipe. He smoked a little pipe with a slender reddish rosewood stem and a petite bowl that took no more than a pinch or two of delicately scented herb tobacco—I am not making this up, he smoked herb tobacco! It may, in fact, it now occurs to me, have been his very daintiness, his weediness, that attracted Cleo to him; have you noticed how often vivacious women are attracted to spineless types of men? It’s a phenomenon one frequently observes in Nature, particularly among the insects. For weeks now Sidney had been fluttering about the dark-paneled rooms of Crook like some rare and exotic butterfly, trailing his delicate pipe fumes behind him and generally being a pest. I should have liked to throw him out, but of course I couldn’t, for Cleo apparently had feelings for the creature. “Tell us more,” I said, as the new butler appeared at my elbow with a silver tray upon which stood an infinitesimal glass of sherry, “about Rupert’s infection. You,” I said, turning to the butler, “must be Fledge.”

  “I’m so sorry, darling,” cried Harriet, rising to her feet, “how silly I am! Of course he is; and Fledge, this is Sir Hugo.”

  He bowed.

  “Now Fledge,” I said, “you will have to learn about sherry. One does not drink it from a thimble. Bring me a glass of sherry, please.”

  He made another bow and returned to the drinks cabinet. Harriet, who clearly intended that the man’s initiation to life at Crook should be a happy one, joined him there, and began whispering, doubtless instructing him in the alcoholic idiosyncrasies of the master.

  “Oh, I know very little about it,” said Sidney, with a sigh. “I believe the doctors were to blame—they misdiagnosed him, or some such thing. I believe it was very painful at the end.”

  I beamed at Cleo, who shivered quite dramatically, her girlish imagination having already transported her to the hero’s deathbed, out there in the barbarous Aegean. Then Fledge reappeared with a proper glass of sherry, and before insisting that the gramophone be turned off I proposed a toast to mosquitoes everywhere.

  Sidney seemed unwilling, at lunch, to talk more about the nature of Rupert Brooke’s infection, probably out of consideration to Cleo. I don’t go for this, myself; I always think it’s a mistake to pander to the squeamishness of women. Disease, infection, rot, filth, feces, maggots—they’re all part of life’s rich weft and woof, and anyone with a properly scientific outlook should welcome such phenomena as facets of Nature every bit as wonderful as golden eagles and oak trees and great rift valleys and the like. I think the family of a scientist, particularly, should not be permitted to discriminate among Nature’s variety, and to press home this point it was in those days my habit over coffee to send for Herbert.

  Herbert was a toad, and I kept him in a glass tank in my study. Because I fed him well, and he did not take much exercise, he was extremely large. I did not find him monstrous, however, nor was there anything revolting to me in the spectacle of a toad eating maggots at the dinner table. These maggots (which are produced by the eggs of the cheese-fly, Piophila casei) George Lecky, my gardener, collected for me on the pig farm down in Ceck’s Bottom. I would spill a few of them onto my plate and watch Herbert set to. Harriet and Cleo had long ago learned to ignore this ritual, and Sidney, whom I generally took the opportunity of instructing in the reproductive and other habits of the species, never knew quite where to look, or how much enthusiasm he had to affect to keep me happy. I do admit that Harriet’s distaste for the toad was not altogether groundless. Her father, the colonel, you see, was called Herbert, and I had somewhat mischievously suggested to her on an earlier occasion that my little beast bore a passing resemblance to the old man, who was, in point of fact, remarkable for his warts. Somehow, and to Harriet’s chagrin, the name had stuck.

  So it was, then, tha
t after Fledge had poured and served the coffee I told him to bring Herbert to the table.

  “Sir?” he said. Harriet, clearly, had not mentioned Herbert when she outlined the man’s duties to him.

  “Oh no, Hugo, please,” she said.

  “My dear,” I said, “didn’t you tell Fledge about Herbert? Come, Fledge,” I said, rising to my feet and dabbing at my lips with a starched white napkin, “and meet Herbert.”

  Fledge was soon instructed in the proper method of extracting Herbert from his tank, and bringing him to the dining room; and though I could tell the man had no natural feeling for toads, he showed not a flicker of distaste at performing the, to him, disgusting task. Soon Herbert was established on the table, with a big plateful of squirmy white maggots in front of him. I told Sidney that it was once thought that toads were poisonous, but the secretion in question was in fact merely a sort of defensive slime that is highly unpleasant to predators. “Really?’ said Sidney, and set down his coffee untasted. It was at that point that I noticed the butler’s eyes upon me, glinting, for the first time, from beneath hooded lids, with unmistakable hostility; but no sooner had I apprehended the fact than he shifted his glance and continued about his duties.

  After lunch I returned to the barn and had, I seem to remember, rather a good afternoon with the leg.

  The brain is poorly comprehended by our doctors, though none of course care to admit just how profound is their ignorance. They prefer to gloss over the gulfs in their knowledge with jargon —screeds of verbiage that never explain, only occasionally describe, and generally obfuscate. Take this, for instance: “Damage to the posterior sectors of the inferior frontal convolution of the patient’s left hemisphere may have been the cause of the disintegration of his capacity for speech.” It was my damaged convolution they were referring to here, but could any of them explain to me (even if they thought it worth the effort, which they didn’t) why certain mental faculties were spared, and the rest frozen? Why am I able to see, know, and evaluate the world, yet lift not a finger, nor even blink at will? They don’t know. In fact, they don’t even know that I am capable of experience. Only Cleo does; and possibly Fledge.

  Consciousness can be inferred only from behavior, and as I produced no behavior after my “cerebral accident” (about which more in due course), I remained to all intents and purposes a vegetable. No one ever actually called me a vegetable, not within my hearing; but there are other ways of saying it. Toward the end of my hospitalization I remember being wheeled out in front of a group of medical students in order that certain points about catalepsy could be made. It was remarked by a neurologist called Dendrite, who took an occasional interest in me, that I lacked “mental presence,” that I was “ontologically dead.” He went on to describe what he called the “clinical picture.” He referred to my “severe masking,” to my “cataleptic fixity of posture,” to my compulsive grimace, my grinding teeth, my stertorous breathing, accompanied, he said, by “guttural phonation not unlike the grunting of a pig.” Mortified as I was by this last remark, it did not cut me as had the reference to my ontological deadness. What torture, after all, could compare to an experience of isolation like mine? I, ontologically dead? I was, I believe, the most ontologically alive person in that room.

  This, then, is the “I” who speaks: cocooned in bone, I pupate behind a blank and lizardlike stare, as my body is slowly consumed by its own metabolism. “He is a pitiful, motionless, misshapen man, unwholesome in appearance and destined to vegetate for the rest of his days.” My neurologist never actually said this, but he might as well have. As for destiny, I have come to believe that to be a grotesque is my destiny. For a man who turns into a vegetable —isn’t that a grotesque?

  I seem to remember I was out in the barn the morning the Fledges arrived. I still had the use of my body in those days, I was an active man doing hard intellectual work, not so young that I took for granted my own health and vitality, nor old enough to have become preoccupied with them. I was middle-aged, a middle-aged scientist, in fact a paleontologist, an expert on the great carnosaurs of the late Mesozoic era. I was extremely busy at the time, for I had an important lecture to deliver to the Royal Society; this partly explains why I had no part in the hiring of the Fledges. Harriet saw to all that.

  Harriet is my wife. I will not pretend that ours has been a happy marriage, and now that I am paralyzed I find myself saddened at what we wasted. The fault is largely mine. Harriet believes the doctors when they tell her I am a vegetable, she has no reason to think otherwise. We created no strong spiritual bond, nothing that might enable us to transcend my paralysis and maintain contact. With Cleo this is possible, but not with Harriet. She makes sure that I am properly attended to by Mrs. Fledge, but except in one important regard her life has not changed dramatically with my condition; you see, from Harriet’s point of view I have always in a sense been paralyzed. What has changed is that for the first time since our marriage she has become interested in another man. The new man in her life is Fledge.

  It was Harriet, as I say, who hired the Fledges. She went up to London and interviewed them, and came back very impressed. She engaged them on the spot, and I was not very happy about that, as there seemed to be some difficulty with their papers. They’d been in the employ of a coffee planter in Kenya, a man who apparently was trampled by an ox and expired without writing them references. But Harriet was sure there wouldn’t be a problem. She had a “feeling” about them, she said. And since the servants’ wages come out of her money, not mine, I merely registered an objection and left it at that.

  On reflection this strikes me as fairly typical of my involvement in the running of the house—I occasionally registered an objection and left it at that. You see, I had for so long been preoccupied with my bones that I was oblivious to the domestic arrangements that formed the grounds, so to speak, of my existence. I ate, I drank, and I slept in the house, but my passion, my vitality— that was exercised only in the barn. I lived in the barn, I merely existed in the house. This is not to say that I bear no responsibility for what followed. On the contrary, I was derelict, I see that now, in letting Harriet have a completely free hand to staff the house as she saw fit. Though I must say in my own defense that I had never had reason to doubt her judgment; there was never a problem with the Domes.

  I was in the barn, then, when the Fledges arrived. I can imagine only too well what happened: Harriet came to the front door and exclaimed: “Mr. and Mrs. Fledge!”—then opened her arms in a brief ceremonial gesture of welcome. She has a way of doing this, a way of greeting visitors, that implies that with their arrival all, at last, is well. It’s an endearing trait, and but one manifestation of Harriet’s “warmth.” Harriet herself, I should perhaps tell you, is small, plump, and fifty, dresses in trim and comfortable tweeds, and her crowning glory is a magnificent head of coppery tresses which she coils in a bun at the back of her skull and fastens with a sort of knitting needle. Her complexion is pink and unblemished, and she has little, nibbling teeth, like a hamster’s. Cleo does not take after Harriet at all; Cleo is a true Coal, she takes after me.

  Do you detect bitterness here? Am I displaying the suppressed rage that simmers constantly in this dying heart of mine? I cannot deny it; if Harriet had kept her wits about her, if her intuitive faculties had not been dulled long ago by a compulsion to observe what she calls “the proprieties,” she would never have brought the diabolical man under my roof, and I would not be in this wheelchair today. But this is wishful thinking. It is not my intention to whine, merely to describe what I have suffered at the hands of a treacherous servant and a faithless wife. You may, when you have heard me out, bestow upon me your sympathy, and then again you may not. It hardly matters; when my story is over I shall be dead.

  So. I have told you what Harriet did on the doorstep that morning last autumn; but what sort of a spectacle did the Fledges present, standing there in their long dark overcoats, among their black suitcases? I will tell you: they were l
ike a pair of gaunt and leafless trees.

  Fledge himself is difficult to describe. Indeterminacy clings to the man like a mist. He has for so long concealed his true feelings that whatever core of real self yet glows within him, it is invisible to the naked eye. He is neat, of course, in fact he is impeccable, as befits a butler. Slim, slightly over medium height, with reddish-brown hair oiled back at a sleek angle from a peak dead in the middle of his forehead, he could be anything; but the presence at his side of Mrs. Fledge—Doris—situates and defines the man. For Doris is unmistakably a servant. As tall as her husband (and thus a clear head taller than me), thin as a rake, with a sharp, pinched face and black hair scraped back off her forehead and threaded with iron-gray wires, her being is indelibly stamped with the mark of domestic toil. Her nose is prominent and beaky, and her eyes are very dark, iris and pupil both so black they seem fused in a single orb with the merest pinprick of light dead in the center. Those black eyes lend to her face a rather opaque, birdlike quality, and though the simplicity of the woman’s nature very soon becomes apparent, at first sight she gives the appearance of a large crow, an unblinking alien to human affairs, a corvine transmigrated into woman’s form. Only the tip of her nose, enlivened by a network of tiny broken blood vessels, lends color and humanity to her face. And thus they presented themselves, the ghoul and the crow, and then they were over the threshold and under my roof.

  It occurs to me that you may be wondering why we need a butler at all, so I should perhaps explain that this was, for Harriet, an indispensable part of “observing the proprieties.” She was brought up in the belief that a house was not a house without some sort of manservant in it. Not that she’s a snob, but she so totally assimilated the outlook of her father, the colonel, that she finds it impossible, in some respects, to adapt to changing social and economic conditions. Failure to adapt, I would tell her, leads to extinction; but she never cared. “Let us die out then,” she blithely replied, “but let us at least do it comfortably.” Hence the butler. We’ve always had one, but the last, an ancient fossil called Dome, died of old age in the summer, and his wife followed him to the grave within a fortnight.