The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  How did Beatrice come to San Francisco? I don’t know, but I am sure that the Virgin brought her. When she met the Queen at last, she closed her eyes but her heart felt as hot as Mexican light through varnished wooden Mexican blinds blinds drawn up as tight as they go for a Sunday afternoon lovemaking siesta which insistently admits wands of blinding brightness. Why? Because she had recognized that her Queen was the very same as that sad-eyed Virgin over the altar in that church in Merida.

  Sometimes in one of the stinking dawns, the Queen saw tears oozing from Beatrice’s dreaming eyes. When the other whores asked her to give Beatrice some remedy, some comfort, she shook her head, saying: What’s gonna take away all her sorrows? Do you know? Let her sleep. Let her suffer in her dreams. Go make yourselves be happy! —When Beatrice woke up, she never remembered that she’d been sad in her sleep, and came running, longing to be close to the Queen’s old, old face.

  The other whores said Maj. Beatrice said Mama.

  Of all her whores, the Queen loved Beatrice best excepting Sapphire alone. She often said to the others: Beatrice ain’t like us. She’s Christian. She don’t bear that Mark of Cain. Beatrice, now, she’s our special angel.

  We worship, we revere with what we have. Isn’t everything divine anyway? Just as in some Italian fishing town statues of the Blessed Virgin in their shrine-niches are framed by cockleshells, so in the Tenderloin I’ve seen crude drawings of the Queen framed by shards of broken glass.

  | 115 |

  The half-black girl with her blonde-dyed dreadlocks stood listlessly, pressing against the cool hotel window, her left cheek swollen and blistered and branded.

  Got a cigarette, Maj? she said dully.

  Martha, Martha, what happened to you?

  I was talkin’ to a friend while we was layin’ on the floor and I rolled over against a hot iron.

  Oh, shit, wept the Queen.

  Why you always cryin’, Maj? And now I’m waiting for my uncle to come pick me up and take me to the hospital but I guess he has some things to do . . .

  Uncle who?

  Uh—

  Hey, Domino! shouted the Queen. You been training this one? She be waitin’ on her old Uncle Crack!

  Martha turned her weary back and said with effort: Hey, Strawberry, you got any smokes?

  Just enough for my period, said Strawberry. Then she added gloatingly: And it’s nice greenbud, too.

  Martha went out onto Turk Street and stood against the wall that said:

  J RIDAH BITCH

  Hit me when your ready on the track

  HIT ME BITCH

  Two hours later she was still standing there, grinning frantically at men and cars. Meanwhile Strawberry, Chocolate, and Domino were all telling the Queen their woes. —My son’s only twenty-six years old and he just got twenty-five years, Chocolate wept, and when she wept drool dribbled out between her missing teeth. He went to the public defender but that guy was just the public pretender. And they said my son was a killer. He didn’t hit the other guy but once, and that guy went down and hit his head and died. Now he’s at High Desert. And I can’t see him. I got a letter from my parole officer and took it at the visitation hours but they said their regulations wouldn’t let me see my son, ’cause I have a record. And they took away my six-year-old grandson and put him in foster care. I know he keeps asking for me, but they won’t let me see him. —The Queen cried and kissed her . . . And Strawberry got drunk and read the Bible and told the others: Everything is everything.

  | 116 |

  Well, the Queen had said at the very beginning, some of you will follow me and some won’t. The ones that won’t, I won’t give you no trouble if you don’t give me no trouble. —Most followed her, proving the lie of the pimps who looked at streetgirls and laughed: They don’t know nothing about unity, man. —Each one of them attempted to respect the Queen’s silence. She lay there with her hair up in a massive bun intermixed with black yarn, her head sunken on her breast, long reddish beads around her arms, and around her neck a string of beads which the whores had given her, beads of colored glass from broken bottles. Every night they went out under their Queen’s protective spell, every dawn returning to the Queen’s lair in hopes of salvation and rest and even pleasure. Soon it seemed that they had always lived that way, for why shouldn’t it be the case for them as well as others that God had made an oasis?

  * * *

  •BOOK VII•

  * * *

  “Sometimes It Helps to Talk

  About These Things”

  •

  * * *

  You intended to add to your stockholdings today . . . But you got busy and before you knew it the market was closed. What can you do now?

  Quick Investors Quarterly (June 1998)

  * * *

  •

  | 117 |

  At four-thirty, suddenly the stream of bending knees, clicking high heels, straining sweaty throat-tendons began to increase, which is to say that it actually became a stream instead of a collection of episodes. Tired secretaries finishing the early shift, a few with shopping bags as well as briefcases (they must have gotten out even earlier, and run to a department store, a health food store or a record outlet—or had they done the deed at lunch hour?), were now reinforced by plump men with belt pouches, dependable beetle types. But as late as a quarter to five, the newspaper vendor was still basking against his kiosk, drumming his pallid fingers, resting his feet upon a plastic crate. Then the next wave of homegoers, more dense and urgent than the first, formed from everywhere, like scattered raindrops from the skyscrapers on high, joining together according to a single law even though each drop strove to be blind to all the others. They were all bipeds; their internal organs were similar, and they were going the same way. Yet they insisted on their uniquenesses and specificities. And in this I think they were correct even as they flowed together, some of them even running to join the mass, running down the clanking metalled stairs. But still the old newspaper vendor only grinned and gaped and wisely picked his fingernails. His hair was as blindingly white as the metal temples of his spectacles. He understood very well that this was just the beginning, that his time was not yet. Sour-breathed office workers descended, then came the first bigshot, a suit man, a necktie man. He was a man with a comfortable leather briefcase which exhaled the smell of mild nonconformity. I pegged him for either a lawyer or a high-priced psychiatrist (post-Freudian). Seeing him, the newspaper vendor got to his feet. He cleared his throat and began to cry out the headlines just as the next wave came upon him, a torrent as of glossy beetles. I was once one of these. I remember being tired, hoping for a seat on the streetcar, wanting to get home, dreading the effort of making dinner, knowing that the day was already gone because there was not much left in me, so I’d have to sleep early; maybe I’d read a page or two, or make a phone call; then I’d lie down “for a minute” and at seven in the morning the alarm would buzz in the harsh insect language which ruled me because I must now become a beetle again. Why must one be ruled? Because in the morning and at night, the financial district expands in all directions, following municipal routes. The intersection of Church and Duboce streets, for instance, which at other hours belongs to another neighborhood, suddenly becomes one of the financial district’s vacuum cleaner hoses, which sucks up busloads of beetles into its darkness. At night it becomes one of many gas-jets discharging sweating, burning beetle-atoms all over the city. For this is the entrance to the subterranean realm, whose walls are now graffiti’d much more than I remember them to have been when I myself was a reinsurance drone rushing anxiously toward the financial district every morning, hoping that my streetcar would not stall in the tunnel and make me late. I was a beetle, and how could I not be? If I were late, I would be in trouble. If the streetcar stopped, or if, already overloaded with beetles, it passed me by without opening its doors for me, I began to worry and seek my watch, calculating that if help, movement, came within seven minutes I still had a chance of not being late.
I could not think of anything else. I was afraid to lose my job. The evening rush hour, even if still subjecting its participants to the laws of beetledom, was less harsh. Among the beetles I saw women wearing name tags and blood-red blazers, secretaries in black miniskirts, an ambiguous-status man in a loud tie, and they were tired; duties awaited them at home, but home was not work. If they lagged a little, or went twenty paces out of their way to buy a newspaper from the old vendor, they would not be burned for heretics. Now the five o’clock wave had struck, and its emerald dresses, its blowdry hair, and its neckties with diagonal grey stripes like subway tracks created a more formal impression. This wave took substance from the salaried workers. By five-thirty, business suits positively set the tone, and instead of beetles I spied many elegant benevolences chatting with the newspaper vendor, who, pop-up oracle, was explaining to them all the secrets of life, interspersed with horse-racing tips. (You want my tip? Don’t bet on the horses.) Meanwhile, of course, the rush went on, and among its foaming vectors I began to glimpse recurrent subspecies: executive secretaries in goggle-like Italian sunglasses, misfortunately ill-timed tourists trying to unfurl their maps, friends and lovers (some of these comprising the adulterers whom Tyler stalked) touching shoulders, office-gossipers telling secrets, glasses-polishers who vaguely smiled, their neckties themselves as wide as smiles, and, darting among them, the bicycle messengers who kept the world running. There they all were on that bright and slanting artery, Market Street, with its buses, streetcars, and museum-escapee trolleys red and green humming through the web of blue-grey tracks. And then, just as I noticed an elegant businessman in a white shirt and shiny shiny shoes who was smoking in time with the beeping of a bus, I realized that it was six o’clock and that the seashell roar of departing humanity had dwindled; the tide was running out. The newspaper vendor sat back down on his crate, silent now, his face as blank as the file cabinets behind the dark green windowpane of Olde Discount Stockbrokers.

  | 118 |

  John had not yet departed the office. What use for him to hurry home? What use had there ever been, indeed? The bitterness of returning to an empty place did not perhaps greatly exceed the prior bitterness of entering a loveless one. He had always worked late in any event. When Joy and all his colleagues left, it was as if a certain banked and gentle flame within him suddenly brightened, warming, almost gilding his solitude. Every task became facile—or so it seemed while the hours flashed unobservedly by. Meanwhile, neither insults nor sorrows wrung his heart. A vague recognition of Celia struggled up to the surface of his mind, but she never expected him until late, and then only if he telephoned first. Hating crowds, longing to be the nucleus of a well-ordered zone, he worked comfortably all through rush hour, with brass-locked dark attaché cases bobbing past his window. Cigar smoke blandly perfumed the street. Mr. Singer, that solitary old law-tycoon with bald head bent, had long since stalked toward the Muni stop. Mr. Rapp’s wife had picked him up just as Irene used to do for John. At seven, wanting to stretch his legs, John wandered down to look at the green quotation numbers jaggedly positioned, crawling leftward above the world in the open door of the Pacific Stock Exchange. Catching a blue glimpse of the security guard’s belly protruding from behind a pillar, he smiled scornfully, then retraced his steps past the lovely honeycomb-reflections of tawny skyscrapers in the polished bays of other giants. —Working late, Mr. Tyler! observed the doorman cheerily. John tried to smile at the man. He needed to review Brady’s documents on consolidated leverage. He also meant to phone Celia.

  | 119 |

  On Steiner and Jackson by the park, there rose a small yellow three-storey house the foliage of whose trees had been lovingly pruned into compact green balls like certain fireworks at the initial stage of the burst when the green dazzle (which appears so unwholesome by day and so eerie, even sinister by night) was at its maximum, having not yet converted its fuzzy edges into full-scale rays. This was the steep sunny windy place. This was Pacific Heights with its trembling dandelions and sidewalk moving sales. Celia lived here. On week days she was there almost infallibly by six-thirty every evening. Her business card offered her name and telephone extension in small black capitals beneath the name of the firm, which marched in immense gold letters across a zone of regal purple. The first time he saw it, John pitied her. She was, however, considered a competent broker. Her policies, which, like John’s literary efforts for Rapp and Singer, were scarcely meant to be read by human beings, nonetheless seemed to renew themselves on time, and to be neat and somehow easy, because most of Celia’s clients liked her. Her voice, friendly, yet modulated by the requirements of her impersonal epoch, could often be heard emanating from her cubicle in a steady telephone warble. No one had any real fault to find with Celia, as we have already seen from her personnel file, but at a quarter past five she was rising, wishing her colleagues goodnight, that trademark scarlet purse hanging from her left shoulder. At five-twenty she was waiting at the bus stop for the number 1 California. (Unlike Irene, who’d been at least in part a southern California girl, Celia did not drive everywhere.) Although she had never articulated her sentiments even to herself, she felt somewhere deep within her that whatever forces controlled her place of business did not regard her life or happiness to be of the slightest importance. They could, if they chose, demand that she relocate to Minneapolis, or they could close down her division at half a day’s notice. Her father treasured up several such experiences, and her brother seemed to lose his job every two or three years. Granted that neither her father nor her brother had anything to do with the insurance business, Celia nonetheless believed that all such disappointments were of a piece. To her, and perhaps to many others in her generation, it seemed that the future would be worse than the present, that “stability” was a fantasy, and therefore that the proper way to live was to work decently and inconspicuously, for good compensation, and, while not foregoing retirement funds, to spend as much as possible of that compensation on movies, restaurants, “fun” clothes, nice furniture, a good view, and such indulgences. (I don’t want to be inspired by pain, she said to her friend Heidi. I want to be inspired by love.) If John’s self-distracting industriousness meant little to her, so did intellectual or spiritual seeking of any kind. It was not that she was incapable, only disinterested. Heaps of possessions and vacations adorned her life, and she went on toward the grave, neither happy nor sad. Credit card companies, mortgage brokers, long-distance telephone salespeople and resort profiteers continually solicited her. While she did not like them, they partially satisfied her anxious desire to be acknowledged. Every now and then she used her credit cards to buy things she could not really afford, and throughout the first or even second payment the satisfaction she experienced was almost sexual. Everyone she knew lived similarly.

  She was a tall, pleasant-looking person with long reddish-blonde hair. She remembered Irene as wearing round glasses which made her look old, with her hair up. Irene had never liked to do anything with John. Celia suffered few doubts that she was prettier and more agreeable than Irene.

  She had enrolled in the paralegal course less out of any interest in John’s profession than to prove to both John and herself that she was not one of those hapless easy girls who wait around by telephones. Another thing she did to fill the time was keep lists, the latest of which went:

  apologize to CCK

  apologize to Dean and Stacey

  call Ellen to link template to Dean

  get Sandy out of the loop?

  finish first memo to Jerry

  call John and ask him The Question

  set up tutorial

  When Irene died, she began to suffer from terrible nightly headaches which impaired her studies, so she ended them. She believed that she had a great deal to reproach John for; however, now was not the time to air her grudges, but to deposit them in her mental vault where they could earn compound interest. It had become her intention to marry John even though she had no faith that he or any man could be
“right” for her. When she thought of him, she thought of compatibility, security, stylishness. Sometimes she thought of having a baby. All these supposed motives helped to conceal that brutishly simple craving for companionship which draws widowers to street whores, crowds to dictators, monks to God.

  I can’t believe that Cardinal O’Connor, her brother Donald was saying on the phone. I detest that Cardinal O’Connor. He’s exerting control and that’s what I hate in religion. If you really look at him he’s a revolutionary. He wants to throw out ideas to change people and he wants to tell people how to do things. Give the mother the ultimate choice.

  Just a second, Donny, she said. There’s a call on my other line. I think it’s John.

  Well, what do you think about what I said?

  Just a minute, Donny. I’ll be right back. Hello?

  You’re busy, said John.

  Are you coming over?

  No fear of that for at least two hours, he said. Can you wait up?

  I was going to make dinner for you. I guess I can eat alone . . .

  Well, you’d better get back to your other call, he said. Who is it?

  It’s my brother.

  Tell him I can’t stand the ties he wears. Tell him I’ll take him to Donatello’s and show him how it’s done.