I'm Dying Laughing

by Christina Stead

  ‘What request?’ said Vera.

  Godfrey explained patiently, ‘Isaiah Higham wrote to me and I saw Florence Baldwin a number of times. Mrs Howard Senior and Florence Baldwin want custody of Olivia. Stephen some years ago made them her guardians; then two years ago he took her back. Not only this but we have studied everything and reached a conclusion and we stand by our judgment that Emily Wilkes Howard shows an advanced and progressive case of mental confusion, a disordered psychism, though whether this is accidental or constitutional psychopathy, we cannot say.’

  Stephen, putting on his shoes, said, ‘Say those words again! Do you mean to say you put your name and Millian’s to this goddamn trash and sent it to the court? Who are you? Freud? Jones? How would you like to go where the good niggers go?’

  Godfrey drew back, appalled, ‘What did you say? What word did you use?’

  ‘Skip it. Forget it. Is there much more to your indictment?’

  ‘It is not an indictment. It is a conclusion, a series of observations.’

  He read from his papers, ‘A natural classification of universal application is really impossible at this moment. The unreasonable self-indulgence, the exploitation of her own personality for which Emily Howard is known, disturbs the nervous system, if it is not a result of a disturbed nervous system. We do not believe that such a person with no self-control and no self-criticism, a pronounced cult of her own individuality and of all or any circumstance connected with her life, acquaintances, name, pursuits, amounting almost to a delirium of self, can be a good guardian for any child, let alone such a child. In any case, the almost kidnapping that took place two years ago seems to show that Emily and Stephen themselves were aware of their real impropriety.’

  Emily put down her glass, got her strong bulging form off the sofa and said, ‘I’ve been thinking, Godfrey, what is behind all this. I like to let things sink in and then I see the basic reason. What I see is that you are an ally of the big money, the real big money, I mean the Howards’ and the Tanners’ money. They have got at you through your virtue. Money can always get at anybody through some damn thing. You adopted children; but you adopted poor children. We adopted rich ones. You’re probably jealous. I’m making more than ever you made and I’ve just come out here. But you have sense enough to prefer established money. Good man. What an instinct! You goddamn hypocrite you—what’s the name of that man, Stephen?—who crawled into a family and—’

  ‘Tartuffe,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Tartuffe,’ said Emily sinking back again. She was wearing a long silk dress of yellow with slanting stripes of purple and silver. She rolled over towards her neighbour, the man called Beauclerk, put her head on his shoulder and began to cry.

  Stephen said, ‘The man says. But I will get others to say different. Look at my wife sobbing her heart out. What would you think if I came to your house for dinner and started attacking your wife?’

  Godfrey said, ‘This is an interesting reaction. I am not attacking your wife.’

  Stephen said in a mean voice, ‘OK, it’s just a suppressed wish to attack my wife; on top, philanthropy.’

  Godfrey remarked, ‘It may be. But to the proof, this is a paper I prepared for the court. I thought it better to prepare you.’ He took another paper out of his pocket and read, ‘We knew the Howards well in New York. We did not see them for some time, since we had gone to Los Angeles to make a living; and during this time we ourselves had taken on the duties of parents and had adapted ourselves to the new social and family setting. Here, in California we met members of the Howard and Tanner families, who have their businesses and have made their fortunes in this state. (Excepting for recent acquisitions and accretions in Texas and Illinois to the large family estate.) In fact, we became friendly, even intimate with Florence Baldwin, Stephen’s sister, with others. Later, the Howards followed us to California.’

  ‘Followed you is not strictly true, merely coincidental,’ said Stephen.

  ‘We did not see them during this time of absence. When we met them again, after they had shown their customary instability by taking first one, then a second, then a third house in Los Angeles, we observed the signs in Emily Howard of a degenerating psychism, of intellectual lesions perhaps, perhaps even physical, though we are not competent to say. There were verbal incontinence, detailed recitals of insignificant events, a general excitement, incoherencies of speech, unsuitable confidences in public—’

  ‘By golly, what do you call this?’ interjected Emily.

  ‘—a wish to dominate the scene, a refusal to let anyone intervene, an irresistible urge to talk, shouting and ill-temper, public quarrelling with Stephen, an inability to report faithfully events she witnessed, false and ridiculous ideas. Examples: Emily calls all birds, even swans, “snakes” because she thinks they have descended from snakes; she says that men descended from monkeys because monkeys had to climb out of trees to retrieve the coconuts they threw at snakes and tigers.’

  Stephen said, ‘That idea was in the New York Times and how do you know it’s not true?’

  Godfrey went on reading. ‘The temperament was the same, though exaggerated, the grasp of reality feebler; though no doubt all this is a monstrous growth of inborn characteristics.’

  Stephen thoughtfully took off his shoes. Godfrey remarked, ‘I see you recognize this?’

  Stephen said, ‘When a first-rate psychologist hands down an opinion, one listens respectfully.’

  Godfrey read on with more calm: ‘During this time of absence, America had entered a fatal struggle against fascism, and our own lives had been knit with that of the nation. During that time Emily Howard had made much money and become known throughout the progressive world; one might say, a satisfying, contenting, a healthy factor. During that time Emily Howard had had the joy of motherhood, given birth to a boy and had the other joy of giving a home to a lonely child, her adopted son Lennie. To become a mother, surely for a woman is the solution of many conflicts. But it had not sufficed. Her conflicts were deeper still; the subconscious itself seemed to us to be rising to the surface through a profound cleavage.’

  ‘Well, what do you know about that? I’m amazed,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Surely worldly success and the satisfaction of a woman’s deepest instincts should give equilibrium; it has cured many a woman.’

  Stephen, listening, dropped his head, became reflective, then said, ‘I want a copy of this.’

  Godfrey replied, ‘I have one for you.’

  ‘We’re not going to trial without a knowledge of the indictment, at any rate.’

  Godfrey continued, ‘Yet where were the signs of this happiness, this security, this health? Instead we saw signs of a marked insecurity, one might say, hints of an internal terror. Where was this adjustment and clearer perception of the real world? We failed to see it. We were shocked and upset. Here was a person whom one might call a success in the best sense of the word. But we saw unhappiness, distress, insecurity and at moments, something approaching the psychopathic, horror in every trait, in every inflection. This is not going too far. Surely before, she had had a lively good humour, a natural comic spirit, a broad general wit, an almost gargantuan perception, an unrepressed genial flow of animal spirits distilled upwards into true wit—’

  ‘Golly, thank you, Godfrey,’ said Emily, her fat, mottled red face laughing, though it was set in seriousness.

  ‘—observation, reflection, something unique, the word is not too much. And what is there now? She stammered, stuttered, emitted long parade speeches turned on instantly as if prepared long before; and yet, how could they have been, unless prepared in the unconscious, and rising to the surface, the necessary and healthy inhibitions having melted in the fire and disappeared, as is seen only in the unstable.’

  Emily seemed torn between anger and hilarity.

  Stephen said, ‘I’ll say one thing for you, God: you’ll never be unstable.’

  Godfrey said he hoped not; and continued, ‘There were coarse, hasty bla
ndishments, and arguments whose strong, greedy intention immediately crudely appeared: a verbosity approaching surely morbid conditions, a repetition, excitements false and real, frenzy, and almost delirious monologues as if the words came out without any censorship.’

  ‘It’s like Shakespeare,’ said Emily.

  ‘In the meantime, two of the children under her care have developed marked speech defects, lowness of response and bashfulness and this no doubt is due to the neighbourhood of this chronic verbal excitement which arises apropos almost of the feeblest immediate cause.’

  Stephen rose and walked about in his socks.

  ‘Godfrey, Godfrey, don’t. Don’t say you wrote this dreadful and partly true story to the lawyers! Is this your idea of truth and the role the friend and the writer plays in human life? You’re asked for an opinion and you get up like Life the Prosecutor itself, like a prosecutor in a reign of terror, like—oh, hell. Is that your role? Your duty? What sort of heart have you? Stone, engraved stone and on it engraved: To the glory of Godfrey.’

  Godfrey was hurt: ‘I am thinking of the child, the little girl.’

  ‘The little golden girl.’

  Stephen came to a chair, turned it to face Godfrey and sat down, ‘Don’t you feel how horrible all this is, Godfrey?’

  ‘Of course I feel it: I wrote it. Why did I write it? Because I deeply felt it.’

  ‘Yes, a true writer.’

  Godfrey continued reading, ‘But now though her ideas are still often sequent, they are no longer fertile; they are second-hand. She may not recognise their source.’

  Stephen said loudly, ‘I won’t allow it. I won’t allow Emily to have these things said about her, and particularly in court where her enemies are and particularly in the presence of my family. My sister Florence comes home or sits at home every night drunk. I suppose she has sequent and precise ideas?’

  Godfrey said, ‘Poor woman, drunkenness, as we all know nowadays, is a substitution for and indicative of other lacks, such as sexual satisfaction.’

  ‘Oh, I see, poor Florence. But not poor Emily.’

  ‘My letter deals with that immediately. We remarked that Emily Howard was repeatedly ill, given to hysterical fits of weeping, bitter moments when she condemns her husband, whom she considers parasitic—’

  The husband said, ‘Oh, heavens, yes, she does; and so I am. And that’s not a poor Emily to you?’

  ‘Only her high intelligence and strong will managed to conceal thinly these fits of despair and fear and misery.’

  Stephen said, ‘You saw all this and you have no pity? Because, it’s true, of course. And that I suppose will appear in your next report to the court, that I said so.’

  Godfrey said, ‘Please, Stephen. In one or two years, she has had repeated colds, rheumatic conditions, aches and pains, to us psychogenic, stomach upsets, sore feet, swollen legs, headaches, eye operations, a motor accident, abdominal surgery, all, for us, resulting from abnormal psychic conditions and possibly with no physical cause.’

  ‘And not resulting from the goddamn high-minded, supercilious, dollar-crazy doctors? Any Hollywood person is just a dollar-bearing animal to the average specialist.’

  Godfrey said, ‘Let’s not indict American medicine, admittedly in advance of the world. Let’s grant that others, especially the Soviet Union, what you will, are good, but Americans are surely world leaders in certain things and medicine is one. If some things are discovered abroad, it is only like the principle of the pump being accidentally stumbled upon by an ingenious farmer’s boy—’

  ‘Like Leonardo da Vinci,’ said Emily.

  Godfrey held up his hand ‘—the applications, the deductions from this lucky guess are made by organized American science.’

  ‘Like the atom bomb, America’s gift to the world,’ said Emily.

  Godfrey became solemn, ‘The atom bomb may prove to be America’s greatest gift to peace.’

  Someone, who? Beauclerk? said, ‘Are the dead at peace I wonder?’

  Godfrey’s eyes were on the paper, ‘Let us go on. Let us comment for control, upon Florence Howard Baldwin’s psychic and mental growth in the last few years; this is something we have been privileged to watch and understand, with wonder, with delight. She was timid, broken by an unhappy marriage, by the complete failure of her first husband in his duties as a husband, and she had been several times under treatment for nervous diseases, a result of her long tribulations and unhappy youth. She is a very attractive woman; beautiful, but she was an unwanted and neglected child, though living in luxury, ridiculed by her mother, given into the care of nurses and maids, and a child who, in spite of the great fortune she expected, had been told she was too unattractive to marry.

  ‘Probably because of this fear, she made one disastrous marriage after another; and from them, one child, only one, a girl, Augusta, who by the court’s action was taken from her, because of her alleged behaviour at the time. She was even characterized in public before the world, since a multimillionaire is a public character and allowed no privacy—as libidinous, dissolute and a disgrace to her family. This young woman, Florence Howard, has striven for and succeeded in achieving maturity. We have known much of her struggle and triumph; we have been the privileged confidantes of this growing psyche and mind. She has always had a simple, almost childlike health and clarity in dealing with her own and family problems, even in her understanding of Stephen’s and Emily’s viewpoints, which we found simply delightful. Her life is calm, pleasant and, if marked still by some deviations, it shows a growth, a progression which is utterly lacking in the other household. She has voluntarily returned Olivia to her brother Stephen, an act of conscience; though she longed to take Olivia, to replace her own child. Some wild parties were given by Florence, an accepted thing in her set and there was some outside attachment, a natural thing upon which a scandalous construction was put. This has all changed. Florence has developed new qualities. Her life is orderly. She is a normal, sensitive, intelligent woman, if more delightful, more humble than most.’

  Emily said, ‘Well, we say that a woman who was living openly with a Mexican political leader has no business adopting an innocent little golden girl, as you put it. We said that to the court.’

  ‘It is just four years since she was in a—a rest house,’ said Stephen.

  ‘I don’t think we need take notice of these damaging and unnecessarily spiteful comments.’ said Godfrey.

  ‘All right, all right, I’m not to tell you, oh, fair and impartial judge, what I think about this,’ said Stephen chewing his lip. He got up and went to the drinks table. He looked through the bottles, and around.

  ‘Goddamn it, Katsuri, don’t stand in the shadows listening like Mephisto. Where is the whisky? Bring me a drink, please. I don’t care what happens to me. I want to have a highball and exhibit a degenerating psychism. But when it comes to court, I’ll say God made me do it.’

  When the butler came back with a new bottle of whisky, Godfrey said, ‘I’ll have some now, Katsuri, if you don’t mind. I don’t mind having whisky at this time of night, just once.’

  He continued to read. Stephen turned round in amazement.

  ‘This young woman, Florence Howard, has developed into a mature, thoughtful, studious and, we should like to say, good woman. We have seen her with Olivia, when she was allowed to see her—it was a happy moment, a happy weekend, for it was a weekend; and we were there to see it. This was our own witnessing. It is true that we have never spent a weekend with Olivia and her father Stephen and Emily. We cannot comment upon their actual relations. We all know well what the companionship of other children can mean to a child. Nevertheless we feel that though Florence Howard is still in the process of formation as a character, she can provide a simple, tender, human, unaffected and normal home for the girl Olivia, her niece; whereas those in whose charge she is at present, exhausted and distracted by financial and personal troubles, cannot possibly avoid affecting, even wounding permanently the psyches of the c
hildren, we mean their own child too. Though Stephen may preserve a certain emotional measure, is in some sort, a man of the world, Emily, in her intolerant, wild, irresistible self-obsession, in her near-manic states of excitement and depression—we do not attempt a psychological or medical analysis—in her struggle and in her cries of dismay or shrieks of pleasure in the various currents which at one time and another bear her off in all directions without compass and without destination—cannot possibly guide the destinies of children, more particularly one which has just emerged from the larval state of helpless childhood and is about to cope with the outside world; whatever may be, in parenthesis, her earnest desire to do all she can and her natural female love of children.

  ‘To conclude, Mr Referee, this was written at your request and instigation and has caused us much heart-burning, much sincere pain; for though written without partiality and putting first the good of all concerned, it does incline to one litigant more than the other; and to found our reasons well, we have had to invade private lives, which are not fit for discussion, except in private circles. What profit do we get from it all, will undoubtedly be asked. None at all. This letter will poison our relationships with some people, alienate some we are fond of and even will perhaps be misunderstood by Emily and Stephen Howard. About Florence, we have no doubt, because of her humane sophistication and the kindly philosophy with which she regards all dilemmas, all problems. But this is a situation where one must take a stand; and personal considerations are nonsuited. The future of a girl, an important girl, a girl who will take her place in society, is concerned, and so we have put aside our personal feelings. We have tried to abstract from all this personal matter the essence of the situation. Yours sincerely, Millian Bowles, Godfrey Bowles, Los Angeles, 1945.’