by John Wray
“You’ve been finished before,” she said.
“This time is different.”
“You’ve said that before, too.”
“I’m sending it off tomorrow. The whole manuscript.”
That got her attention. “Tomorrow? You’re sure?”
“Genny’s found me an agent, if you can believe it. Apparently he’s a bona fide piranha.”
“Is this a good thing, a piranha?”
“Depends on who gets bit.”
She was quiet a moment.
“Does Genny know what the book is about? Does Enzie know?”
He made a face at the ceiling.
“They’ll be furious, Orson.”
“They can see it when it’s published.”
“Orson—”
“I don’t want to talk about this, Ursula. Not now.”
Conversation lagged for a time.
“I found your deck of tarock cards yesterday,” Ursula said. “My mother used to play it with my father, you know. Actually, they met over a game.”
“Then thank Jehovah for tarock,” he said, pulling her closer.
“Let’s have a game tonight. Will you play it with me?”
“I don’t really know how.”
“Come now, Mr. Tolliver. You just wrote a novel about it!”
“I’ve written about telekenesis, too, and about astral projection and fencing. You see me doing any of that stuff?”
“You could learn, Mr. Tolliver. I could teach you.”
“Fräulein Kimmelmann! Do you know how to fence?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” he said, planting a kiss on her shoulder. “When this book is done—really and finally done, flushed out of my duration forever—I’m going to put those cards back in the cabinet, pull the sliding door shut, and spend whatever’s left of my duration sipping Gennesee Cream Ale.”
But as you and I both know, Mrs. Haven, that isn’t how the cards fell for my father.
* * *
Orson swore up down and crosswise, to the day of his death, that he’d had no idea of the significance of the Sküs to our family when he wrote The Excuse—and unlikely as it might sound, I believe him. The Gottfriedens Protocols wouldn’t be released to the public until the midseventies, and Kaspar had never talked much to his son about the past; it’s possible that not even Enzie and Genny knew about the Sküs before Waldemar’s writings finally came to light. But all mention of tarock aside, the comparison of the study of physics with the study of the black arts was more than enough to horrify his sisters. The book’s final section, with the benefit of thirty years’ hindsight, reads like nothing so much as a veiled declaration of war.
Ozymandias Urquhart’s vision in book III ends abruptly after eighty-four pages, as though somebody’s pulled the plug on the projector. He gets to his feet, more than a little woozy, and sets out for the desert. His psychotropic peregrinations through the timestream are behind him, and he feels no nostalgia for either the future or the past—the present is now the only tense that matters. He has come (to lift a phrase from a UCS prospectus) “to live in the moment.” He has a message to deliver to his brothers, after which he hopes to breed sheep at last, if possible on the family estate.
Word reaches Ozymandias, as he makes his way westward, that his brothers have “gone queer” during his absence. They’ve stopped shaving and bathing, he learns, and have boarded up the windows of Ouspensky Hall; they’re rumored to have constructed a device for traveling vast distances without the appearance of motion, by making infinitesimal alterations to the angle of the earth’s rotation. They’re said to have stopped speaking altogether, communicating exclusively by playing games of whist.
After a month of hard travel, most of it on foot, Ozymandias arrives at his birthplace. The once-proud estate now lies weed-choked and fallow, its front doors are missing, and the Greek-revival façade—Cassandra Urquhart’s pride—has vanished behind a shroud of Tasmanian ivy. A muffled droning draws him to the cellar, where he discovers Ralph and Gawain, barely recognizable under “Talmudic” beards, tampering with the pitch of the planet’s axis, exactly as rumored, by means of a network of magnets and tubes. It becomes clear to Ozymandias that the true purpose of this infernal machine is to travel through time; having given up on the future—to say nothing of the present—his brothers plan to subjugate the past.
The closing pages of The Excuse are devoted to what Orson’s more kindly disposed critics refer to as a “polemical dialogue,” but which is actually no better than a rant, a salvo fired at his sisters from point-blank range:
“In summation, you both have my pity,” Ozymandias ejaculated.
“Pity?” Ralph sneered, breaking his silence at last. “We’ll see who pities whom, little brother, when Gawain and myself are Masters of the Kronoverse!”
“Have you not understood?” Ozymandias answered sadly. “We travel through time all our lives—into the future at the speed at which we age, and into the past each time that we remember. There is only the brain, after all; however we choose to employ it, we have no other device. But the brain, my dear brothers, is more than enough. Our consciousness is all the time machine we need.”
The Excuse was published on December 1, 1969, in a clothbound edition by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. In a more conservative age—in other words, at practically any other time in human history—the book would have been a hard sell; but this was the final year of the sixties, the year the grown-ups started taking what the kids had been taking, and phantasmagoria was all the rage. Orson’s novel was hailed as a bulletin from the front lines of the soft revolution, a late mid-twentieth-century Pilgrim’s Progress, a lysergic bugle call to self-expression. All of which was annoying—to put it mildly—to its author, given the message that he’d actually intended. CONSCIOUSNESS IS A TIME MACHINE began turning up on T-shirts nationwide, but they were being worn by dopers, not by astrophysicists or heads of state. More perturbingly still, the book would go on to outsell the rest of my father’s oeuvre combined, though it’s about as erotic as a dental questionnaire.
The full-page review in Life was Ursula’s favorite:
“The Excuse” is not simply an improbable bestseller; it is an improbable book, from an equally improbable man.
Orson Card Tolliver—twenty-seven years of age, veteran of Greenwich Village’s beat catacombs—was heretofore known, if he was known at all, as a writer of speculative pornography for the pulps. His new novel, however, is a horse of a rather different phenotype.
“The Excuse” is the record—in grotesque, quasi-allegorical guise—of one individual’s rejection of all received truth; of the shackles of familial precedent; even of the precepts of chronology itself. Isaac Newton counts for nothing in this brave new cosmos, and neither does Albert Einstein, or the Buddha, or even Jesus Christ. This novel demands to be interpreted as a ragged, desperate yawp of celebration: a shout from the trenches of tomorrow’s youth culture to all of us still lollygagging back in the supply tents. There is a wild, wicked music throughout these pages. America could do worse than lend an ear.
“‘A ragged, desperate yawp of celebration?’” Orson muttered after she’d read it aloud. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that we can get our gutters fixed,” Ursula answered. “The leak in the pantry has started again.”
“The leak in the pantry? Mein Gott!” he shouted, mimicking her Oxbridge-by-way-of-the-Vaterland accent. “Whatever will become of the bratwurst?”
“You’re a celebrity now, Mr. Tolliver. A big shot. Be happy you can keep your bratwurst dry.”
“I don’t mean to complain. I realize that would be stupid.”
“Well! As long as you realize that,” she said brightly. “I’ll have somebody look at the gutters tomorrow.”
The connubial turn in their relationship had come on so gradually, with so little fuss, that he’d barely taken note of the shift. She’s adopted m
e, my father would say to himself, on those rare occasions when it crossed his mind. She’s taken me in. Until the day I was born, Mrs. Haven—and for quite some time thereafter, to be honest—Orson thought of himself less as Ursula’s lover than as a prematurely aged foster child.
“Bratwursts or no bratwursts, Ursula, something needs to be done. About this review, I mean. About all the reviews.”
Ursula sighed to herself.
“I’ll add a fourth book,” said Orson. “An appendix, for the paperback edition. To make my meaning absolutely clear.”
“You can’t explain your own novel, Orson. That’s a terrible idea.”
“Why?”
She shook her curls at him. “Artists do not explain.”
“You may not have noticed, Fräulein Kimmelmann, but I’m not in the art business. I write ‘speculative pornography for the pulps.’”
“You’ll end up making a philosophy out of this, if you’re not careful.” She gave a small, involuntary shudder. “Or even a religion.”
“There’s always room for one more religion in this country, sweetheart.” He caught her by the waist. “That’s why the devil made America so big.”
* * *
The Excuse sold fifty thousand copies in its first six weeks of publication, and Orson bought a Buick hardtop with the money. He also bought a color TV in a tropical hardwood cabinet, twelve identical herringbone suits, and a dozen turtlenecks in varying shades of blue, from powder to navy to midnight. The suits became my father’s uniform, his protest against being cast as a hippie, disdain for his fanbase expressed in brushed cotton and tweed. The rest of the money went to Ursula, to spend or squirrel away or set on fire, as she saw fit.
They were married before a justice of the peace in a joyless little courthouse in Niagara Falls, with Uncle Wilhelm and one of Ursula’s former classmates as witnesses. There was no time for a honeymoon, since Orson was struggling with the postscript for the paperback edition of The Excuse—the explanation Ursula was so opposed to—which was already months overdue. His new bride pursed her lips and closed her eyes and smoothed down her dress to hide her disappointment. (I know she did all these things, Mrs. Haven, because I saw her do them at regular intervals throughout my youth.) She’d been hoping they might travel to Vienna, to visit her mother; it had been almost two years since she’d seen her. Orson promised they’d go in the spring.
Enzian and Gentian sent a box of calla lilies to the ceremony but declined to attend. They’d divined The Excuse’s true message, unlike everyone else, and the result was exactly as their sister-in-law had predicted. For seventeen months they sent no word at all, not even a Hanukkah card. It was only a year and a half later, once perfunctory contact had been restored—due entirely to Ursula’s efforts—that the full extent of the damage became clear.
Orson had known from the start that his book would seem a willful perversion of Enzie’s ambitions for him: instead of using his talent to disseminate her ideas (however cunningly camouflaged) among the masses, he’d made a travesty of her life’s work, to say nothing of her beliefs, and encouraged the masses to laugh. He’d tried to free himself once before, by escaping to New York; this time there would be no miscalculation, no variable left unaccounted for. He’d made a deliberate decision to cut the cord between them permanently.
Nevertheless, perverse as it might seem, his sisters’ silence left him at a loss. Orson could easily imagine Enzie resolving to blacklist him, but he couldn’t see Genny agreeing—not without considerable pain. He’d somehow never asked himself what Genny’s reaction to the novel might be, only Enzie’s; and the lack of contact with her gnawed at the root of his well-being. In spite of his presence on various bestseller lists (thirty weeks in The New York Times Book Review; top slot: #3), he felt trivial and neglected and alone. The only evidence that his sisters were still alive came via Smith Copley-Sexton, the CFO of Warranted Tolliver Timepieces. Their checks, Sexton assured him, were still being cashed.
* * *
If my father had known the details of his sisters’ lives at the time, Mrs. Haven, he might not have taken things so personally, though he’d probably have been a great deal more concerned. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the publication of The Excuse ushered in the third and closing act of Enzie and Genny’s opera for two voices, the act that established its genre—which until then had been anybody’s guess—as tabloid tragedy.
The final Wednesday dinner was held on May 10, 1970, six months before I was born. Eighty-eight guests attended, including Julius Erving, Susan Sarandon, Klaus Nomi and Marianne Moore. It had become tradition for a lecture to be given between the dessert and the digestif, and on this occasion—which none among the revelers guessed would be their last—it was delivered by a young dermatologist, Jonathan P. Zizmor, on the use of fruit acids in cleansing the skin. The dishes included, but were not limited to: smoked bluepoint oysters, chicken liver pâté, french fries, sauerkraut, Waldorf salad, blackened red snapper, pickled hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, stuffed grape leaves, lasagna, garlic bread, tapioca pudding, mint Girl Scout cookies and chocolate mousse. When questioned about the meal—which was a bit on the showy side, even by their standards—Genny admitted, blushingly, that it was in honor of Enzie’s birthday, a claim Enzie neither confirmed nor denied.
Enzie’s health was duly toasted, then Genny’s own, since they’d been born within an hour of each other. The meal lasted until 03:00 or 03:30 EST, depending on accounts, at which point Enzie announced that she and her sister needed to retire. After the eighty-eighth guest—a Dominican client liaison for the Monsanto Fruit Corporation—had been shown to the door, my aunts pushed it shut together (with a quiet flourish, I like to imagine) and turned to regard the sea of dirty china. Genny heaved a theatrical sigh.
“All right?” Enzie asked.
Genny nodded. “It’s all right, Enzie. It’s enough.”
“I’m happy to hear it.” She smiled. “It’s almost time for us to go to Znojmo.”
“Goodness!” said Genny. “Is it May already?”
“It is, Schätzchen. We have an appointment to keep.”
Incredibly, my aunts did travel to Znojmo the following month, for what they described to Ursula—in a characteristically oblique postcard—as a “sentimental spree.” They spent less than two days in Moravia, according to their itinerary, followed by a single afternoon in the city of their birth. Then they boarded Pan Am 225 from Vienna to New York, returned to their apartment in the General Lee, and pushed all seven deadbolts closed behind them. Orson would eventually be drawn back into their orbit, but no one else—with one exception—would cross their threshold for the whole of the next decade. And that exception, Mrs. Haven, was me.
* * *
On May 10, 1970—the same day, as chance and fate and Providence would have it, as the Tolliver Sisters’ last supper—the bell rang just as Ursula was pulling a tray of Topfenstrudel out of the oven. Orson was in the kitchen as well, staring at the back of his wife’s head with his mouth hanging open. He’d just received some unexpected news.
The bell rang again.
“Ursula—”
“The bell, Orson.”
He passed a hand over his face. “Probably somebody’s at the door.”
“That seems likely.”
He crossed the parlor weavingly, his cerebellum buzzing, and yanked the front door open without looking who it was. A man and a woman and a teenager stood on the stoop: all three were wearing Western-style pearl-button shirts and immaculate blue jeans and sneakers. They’d have made a nice family, of a certain sort, if the teenager hadn’t been chewing on an unlit meerschaum pipe. The same pipe that I smoke, Orson thought, feeling his scalp start to prickle.
“Can I help you?”
“You already have,” said the woman. “So much more than you know.”
“Mr. Orson Card Tolliver?” said the teenager gravely.
“Of course it’s him,” the man mumbled.
“Mr. Orso
n Card Tolliver?”
Orson nodded. “What is this?”
“This,” the teenager said, “is a momentous occasion. Could we, uh, impinge on you briefly?”
If Orson hadn’t been reeling from what his wife had just told him, he might have been slightly quicker on his feet. His callers were past him by the time he’d recovered, inside the house already, waiting respectfully at the entrance to the parlor. He could think of no response, at that point, but to ask them if they’d like a cup of coffee. The adults hesitated, looking curiously startled; the teenager said he’d like one very much. He seemed in a position of authority over the others, who spoke—when they dared speak at all—in timid, obseqious chirps.
Ursula, unflappable as always, brought out coffee and strudel, which everyone agreed was very tasty. The woman said something too quietly to hear—to Ursula, apparently—and Ursula asked her to repeat it.
“This coffee,” said the woman.
“Do you like it? It’s Venezuelan.”
“I’ve had this coffee before.” Her eyes fluttered closed. “This coffee exactly.”
“Yes, you have,” said the teenager. “And you’ll have it again.” He gave Orson a wink. “Am I right, Mr. Tolliver?”
“She’ll have it again right now,” Ursula said, refilling her cup.
Orson shot his wife a look of mute appeal, which she ignored.
* * *
We now reach the point in this history, Mrs. Haven, when I begin to feel us rushing toward each other. We’re still far apart, you and I—very nearly a decade, and five hundred miles—but our trajectories are starting to converge. The inevitability of it makes my mouth go dry.
* * *
The teenager was called Haven, the man’s name was Johnson, and the woman was referred to as “Miss M.” No first names were mentioned. They obviously belonged to a cult of some kind, though they passed out no literature; there was an odd air of leisure about them, or at least about Haven, as though they’d come to town to see the sights. My father decided they were trying to convert him, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses who rang the doorbell once a year, and he felt more at ease right away. It always relaxed him to talk to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. What they wanted was so easy to refuse.