by Alan Isler
‘No need, no need,’ he said. ‘But if you can, if you feel calmer, tell me what happened. You told Robert about us. Then what?’
She looked at him, puzzled. ‘Told Robert what about us?’
‘About leaving him for me. Try to pull yourself together, darling. You remember, Friday morning, your decision to go upstairs and tell him?’
‘Oh God!’ Stella began to laugh, hysterically, grotesquely, her eyes still swollen with tears. Not knowing what else to do, he thumped her on the back. She stopped abruptly. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you? Oh Nicholas, whatever we mean to one another, and I don’t pretend to understand what, you couldn’t have supposed I’d leave Robert for you. When have you ever…? All right, I admit I’ve wanted you, ached for you. Even, damn it, wept for you. Perhaps I love you. But leave Robert for you? You didn’t actually believe, not really?’
‘No, no, of course not.’ And, as a gallant addition, he offered, ‘Wishful thinking. It’s just that you did say…’
‘Well, what was I to say? What would you have said if you’d come in like that, starko, and the room full of people, one of them a rabbi? I said whatever I thought would sound plausible.’
‘Quite.’
‘I’ve been so miserable, and I needed you so desperately. I don’t know what to do. I’ve been frantic.’
‘Didn’t Robert say anything?’
‘I never saw him. He must have slipped back to drop me the note on Thursday night, but of course I was down here by then. We were…’ She looked at him shyly. ‘It was good, though, wasn’t it, Nicholas?’
He would never understand her. ‘What note? Really Stella, you’re beginning to babble.’
‘The note he left on my pillow.’ She reached dramatically into her bosom and withdrew a crumpled piece of paper. ‘Here, read it, it concerns you too.’ Her eyes were filling with tears again. ‘I’ve got to find him, I can’t bear it.’
Kraven smoothed out the note.
Stella, my darling,
By the time you read these words, I will be far away. No, don’t try to find me. There’s no point. Meanwhile, your absence downstairs gives me the opportunity to write to you.
Do not be alarmed, or ashamed, or suppose that my leaving has anything to do with your charming little affair. You were always discreet and considerate. Indeed, I began my Thursday night trips to Westchester in order to give you a measure of certitude, a space of worry-free time, however brief. You are a young and vigorous woman. Because I have never doubted your love for me, I have never been troubled by jealousy.
But I am now 65, my dear, and my thoughts are turning inward. You know I have never been religious, certainly not in any formal or doctrinal sense. But as I enter my last years (months? days?), I find myself thinking more and more about that spark of life which animates our weak flesh. I cannot believe it extinguished when the flesh itself no longer can feed it.
‘Where’s the rest of it? There must be more.’
‘Oh yes, there is.’ Stella reached into her bosom once more, felt around, frowned, stood up and shook the skirt of her dress. Two crumpled pieces of paper fell to the floor. Kraven picked them up. God, even now, at such a moment, her every movement, her slightest gesture, aroused him. Stella sat down again. He turned from her ravaged face back to Poore-Moody’s maunderings.
Well, I grow philosophical and fear I bore you. Enough of that. Let it suffice to say I go to find a love greater even than ours, perhaps a metaphysical love, certainly a love that transcends the flesh and embraces the spirit, the source, as I think, of the spark. Yes, I go to seek peace and truth, and I trust that in the time left to me I shall find them. My search begins among the Cistercians. I pray that it may end there.
‘The silly old bleeder’s becoming a monk!’ The words leaped to Kraven’s lips unbidden and issued into the attentive air. Stella wailed. He comforted her, absentmindedly caressing her thigh, eager only to read on. ‘There, there.’ She quieted down.
My affairs, I think, are all in order. Blount, DeWinter and Grobstock have agreed to represent me. They will tell you that I have liquidated one quarter of my assets for my own use. The rest is to come to you as capital after the spark departs this flesh.
But now I must say goodbye. I think I love you more at this moment, if that be possible, than in all of our married life.
Robert
‘Incredible,’ said Kraven. ‘He’s clearly a nutcase.’
‘What am I to do? I’m at my wits’ end.’ And indeed, strained and blubbered as Stella was, her hair wild, even now wiping an errant tear from the tip of her nose, he could well believe her inability to cope.
‘You have two options. Have him committed on the strength of this letter or let him become a monk. In either case he’s institutionalized and out of harm’s way.’ What Kraven saw was the extension of Thursday night into the rest of the week.
‘Oh Nicholas, how can you be so callous? We’re talking about Robert. Please, it breaks my heart.’
‘What would you say was a quarter of his total assets? More than a million?’
‘How can you be so crass?’
‘You want him back, you’ll have him back. From this moment forward I’ll devote myself to it.’
‘I knew I could rely on you.’ She sniffed fetchingly. ‘Thank you, darling.’
He was touched by her simple gratitude, touched and aroused. In removing the letter from its hiding place she had accidentally opened the top buttons of her dress. Her glorious bosom rose and fell. The declivity beckoned. But Kraven had a strong sense of occasion. Not for him the route of the cad.
‘But my dear, it’s Sunday afternoon. Absolutely nothing can be done on a Sunday. Tomorrow morning, first thing, I’ll begin to make enquiries. Meanwhile, my love, it’s pretty plain you haven’t slept much since Thursday night. You’re exhausted, you need rest. What good will you be to Robert if you make yourself ill?’
‘How can I sleep? It’s impossible.’
‘But you can, of course you can. I’m looking after things now. Be a good girl and do as you’re told.’
‘All right, Nicholas.’
‘Go upstairs and take a warm bath. Have some Ovaltine or hot milk. Remember, I’ll be on it first thing in the morning.’
‘Yes, Nicholas.’ Stella rose, obedient, prepared to go. ‘Only, do you think I could perhaps stay down here? At least until the waiting’s over? The apartment’s so empty without him.’
Kraven gave her request a moment’s serious thought. But no, no, he would not take advantage of her in her weakened state. He needed time to work out his feelings for this woman. Why had he felt so devastated, for example, by the sudden non-existence of their engagement? Could his Stella ever feel for him what Robert’s Stella felt for Robert?
‘There’s nothing I’d like more. How can I let you go? But you should stay by your phone. He might try to get in touch, you never know.’
‘Oh yes, you’re right, I’ll go now.’ And she ran from the room. He followed her to the door. She turned and took a step towards him. ‘Thank you, darling. Without you, I’d be totally lost, ready for the nuthouse myself.’
So she had accepted her husband’s insanity. He held her in his arms, felt a familiar stirring, kissed her, but let her go. Kraven had much to think about.
* * *
HE BEGAN HIS THINKING almost immediately, over a very late lunch, the sight of his table laden with delicacies awakening a sudden appetite. Happily, Nimuë was already almost interred, buried under a new understanding of events. She, poor child, still wallowing in the swamp of her humid adolescence, had mistaken his kindly interest in her creative strivings for the bellowings of male lust. Kraven had half-convinced himself of this. Biting into a buttered bagel heaped with chopped herring, he shook his head with mature understanding. A self-centred generation, hers.
But Stella was another matter, Stella, who only moments before had clung to him, looked up at him with her tortured eyes. Her image danced and swayed before
him. His groin ached. He yearned towards her. She loved him, she had said, or had come closer to saying so than at any time in their stormy affair. And he? Poore-Moody was gone. Kraven began to reconstruct the hopes and feelings she had once so wantonly smashed with her brash laughter.
When the telephone rang he supposed it was Stella and ran lightly to answer. If she was to be confined to her apartment, could he not join her there? Yes, my darling, yes!
‘Ah, Nickolevio, Ari here. Not torn you from your typewriter, I trust?’
‘As a matter of fact, you have.’
‘Sorry to bother you on a Sunday, Nicko, but I’ve got a favour to ask.’
‘Splendid party, Ari. Had a wonderful time.’
‘Yes, it went rather well, I think. Got some good vibes. You made quite an impression on Diotima, you rascal. Saw her at the Prez’s levee yesterday. You were all she could talk about, so handsome, so aristocratic, so sympatisch. Kept calling you Nobby, for some reason. I didn’t know whom she was talking about until she said she was in on the joke, knew all about the Old Nick, and there you stood revealed in all your known splendour. Obviously some Krautish error in translation, hardly worth correcting, so I didn’t. Knew you wouldn’t mind, fella. A Kraven by any other name, and so on.’
‘I must have you and Liz over here one of these days. It’s a bit difficult for a bachelor, of course. But the pressure’s beginning to build towards a Kraven cocktail party. Next month, perhaps. Well, I’d better be getting back to work.’
‘Hey, hold it, wait a minute, man.’ Papa Doc chuckled. ‘You’re pretty slick, I’ll grant you that. Hell, it’s not that big a favour, y’might even enjoy it. You’re a Clerihew man, right? Wrote your dissertation for Cecil Quimby? Well, guess who’s flying in from Merry Old in a couple days. Yup, your good buddy from London U, Ceece himself.’
The back of Kraven’s neck prickled.
‘You’re strangely silent, guy.’
‘Bit of a surprise. I thought he was dead. I know he retired. What brings him here?’ Kraven saw on the horizon a little cloud.
‘Pio Nono.’ Pio Nono was Papa Doc’s pet name for Malcolm Pioggi, Dean of Faculty and Humanities. ‘The lecture series. Quimby has the same deal Di von Hoden got last week. Three public lectures, we wine ’em and dine ’em, then we pour ’em back into their jets, a cool three thou ahead. Jesus, those guys’ve really got it knocked! Anyway, you and Ceece will have a lot to talk about, old times and so on, how you’re coming along, star pupil of the bush league makes it in the big time, crap like that. Pio Nono thinks you should go out to the airport and pick him up. I volunteered you to make the opening remarks at the first lecture, introduce your good buddy to the attentive throng.’
Kraven was aghast. It was all beginning to unravel. He stood trembling and at bay, staring about him for some starting hole, some temporary refuge. He and Quimby must not meet. For him that would mean disaster, the end of everything. Equally obviously, Dillinger had not yet been in touch with Dean Pioggi. Papa Doc, at any rate, knew nothing of the conference in Los Angeles. Was there hope then?
‘What d’ya say, Nick?’
‘My pleasure.’ The problem was how to prevent his name from coming up during his absence.
‘Right on. Come in and see me tomorrow morning. We’ll work on the logistics, plan a strategy.’
‘Um, Ari, I ought to warn you. The old boy’s frightfully forgetful. Must be pushing eighty. Even when I knew him he’d begun dribbling down his chin. I’m surprised he’s on the lecture circuit. Even in his glory days he was no great shakes. But the point is, chances are, he won’t remember me at all.’
‘Come off it.’ Papa Doc chuckled deep in his throat. ‘Modesty doesn’t suit ya, fella.’
‘No, honestly. At my orals, for example, he turned up late, looked about, said excuse me, sorry to disturb, and was about to take off again. They had to haul him back and explain to him what he was supposed to be doing there.’
‘See me tomorrow, Nick. Meanwhile, get back to your typewriter. Oh, and thanks.’
God, what a day! He was a simple enough man, demanding little, expecting less, wanting only to be allowed to go his own way in peace. And now Quimby! The Kraven curse, the familial demons, were in hot pursuit. He would have to get out for a while, if only to safeguard his sanity, if only because Stella might in fact call. What he desperately needed was quality time. But his apartment was under attack from all points of the compass.
SEVEN
KRAVEN SAT ALONE at one end of the long bar in Donovan’s Amsterdam, brooding over a whisky and soda. Near the windows at the other end, but behind the bar, stood Donovan himself, short, mean eyed, his shirt sleeves rolled, idly turning the pages of Midstream. There were no other customers.
Kraven liked Donovan’s. He liked its appalling seediness, the dull khaki linoleum on the floor, pitted and rent, the soot-soiled peeling wallpaper, the gloom – above all, the gloom. Donovan never switched on his lights before what he called ‘lighting-up time’ in the late afternoon. As a consequence, the room’s only illumination was furnished by whatever daylight could fight its way through the top half of the grimy street windows. The lower half was masked by an emerald green curtain strung on a brass rail. Still, the daylight bounced gaily enough off the nicks and scars of the polished long bar, it winked and gleamed on the rows of bottles along the bar wall, it shone dully on Donovan’s bald pate. There was light and enough. The room exhaled a sour smell of stale beer, disinfectant and sawdust.
Stuck to the mirror above the bar a year-old poster advised that only two weeks remained in which to catch Dolly Divine and her Erotic Ensemble, a Smash-Hit, at Spinoza’s World-Famous Burlesque, ‘Come One, Come All!’ Kraven squinted at the photo of Dolly Divine on the poster.
He could not remember ever having seen anyone seated at one of the booths in the rear of the long room or at any of the little square tables scattered untidily about the floor. In fact, in all the years he had been coming to Donovan’s, admittedly infrequently and always of an afternoon, inevitably when the world pressed a trifle too heavily upon him, he could not recall another customer. Donovan himself was no genial mine-host-of-the-tavern. He served Kraven with surly reluctance, carefully moving the bowl of pretzels out of convenient reach. Street sounds barely penetrated Donovan’s, and then they lost all distinction, automobile horns, pneumatic drills, insane laughter or cries for help all reduced to a uniform ‘Bummm-m’.
Kraven took a sip of his drink, moved over to the next stool, and reached for a pretzel. Donovan rattled his pages angrily. What was to be done about Princip? Princip was an explosive mine that must be deactivated. He was a destroyer, a tearer-down, an avatar of unreason, who mocked with every action of his being the symbols of peace that he flaunted. What, Kraven wondered, would the Divine Sarah have had to say to a Princip? What had Art to say in the face of Chaos? Opa liked to quote an aphorism remembered from the days when he still read books: History is merely the record of satin slippers descending the stairs as hobnail boots go up. The Gabe Princips of the world were ascending, their victorious banners unfurled. A Kraven could hope to win only an occasional skirmish or remain in place on the staircase for no more than a very short while. Was he doomed meekly to give the vile Princip his Pass? There was that within him that whispered no. But how, how?
And what of Nimuë, whom he had innocently sought to help? He knew her now to be in league with that very Princip. No, it was not a matter of her having misconstrued his intentions. That was mere bluff. It was clear enough now – one had only to think of Princip’s phone call – that she had been a plant. By now she must have described to Princip the supposed lurid happenings on Opa’s great bed. Princip had his ammunition all right. He had already shot across Kraven’s bows; he stood ready now to hit him broadside. Could Kraven, his pinnace in direst jeopardy, do other than surrender?
It passed belief. To think of Nimuë coming out of his bedroom this afternoon waving – by God, actually waving! – her panties
at Stella and him! To think of her actually stepping into those panties in Stella’s presence! What had happened to young womanhood in this dreadful age? Whither had fled discretion, the maidenly blush? There was no instinctive feeling among them that virginity was itself a virtue; or if indeed it was not, then that at least the appearance of innocence should be the face a young girl presented to the world. They did not scruple to share the shameful secrets of their most intimate activities with whoever would offer a willing ear. ‘When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly’ was a poem it was impossible to teach them nowadays. They simply couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. No wonder, then, that Nimuë had fallen in with Princip’s plan, the common moll of Princip and his gang of louts.
Another sip, another pretzel, another angry rattling of Midstream’s pages. Donovan listened in on Kraven’s privacy. Indeed, he looked at Kraven with deep suspicion.
And now C.U.T. Quimby, Cecil, the Rouged Roué of Clerihew. The image of that thin, stooped figure, lips pursed around the point of his acidic tongue, white hair hanging in greasy locks over his threadbare gown, fingertips drumming together as if in nervous prayer, was sharply etched in Kraven’s inner vision. Quimby posed a threat to peace beside which the practices of a Princip were little more than gnat bites. He could reveal all. Kraven sipped his drink and peeped furtively at Donovan. There might be a prison term for that.
* * *
AFTER KOKO HAD FALLEN VICTIM, just short of Goodge Street, to anti-Kraven forces, it was discovered to everyone’s surprise that that ordinarily improvident charmer had possessed a life insurance policy. His beneficiaries, naturally, were his children, Tillie and Marko. But Tillie, taking only her manicure kit and a small bag of needments, had eloped immediately after VE Day with an American soldier, a Corporal Minelli, and disappeared into the vastnesses of the New World, another Kraven pioneer to have felt the Drang nach Westen. Inquiries undertaken by the insurance company produced shocking news. Not three months into her adventure and driving with neither licence nor skill, she had got the worst of an encounter with a steel pillar on the Queens side of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. The car had sustained little damage, the pillar none at all. But Tillie had broken her neck and died on the instant, another Kraven victim. As a result, Marko, then a boy of fourteen, became the sole beneficiary of his father’s surprising foresight.