by Rain, David
That night, as on many a night before, while guests mingled against walls hung with avant-garde posters and paintings, I guzzled gin, knowing I would regret it later, and was not sorry to be drunk by the time Blitzstein bashed out Sonata in No Key on the tuneless upright – and the saucepans on top of the piano, ranged in order of size.
I was wondering when it would be safe to slip away when Aunt Toolie appeared beside me and whispered beneath the cacophony, ‘Darling, I need your help. One word: Agnes.’
‘Not again!’ For months my aunt had been in one crisis or another over this runaway Catholic schoolgirl, a would-be actress of no discernible talent who gloried in the stage name of Agnes Day. Few of our circle had time for Miss Day; Aunt Toolie had all the time in the world.
‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘Another career debacle? So soon too! Or perhaps it’s love. Is Matterhorn still the one?’
‘If only! Matterhorn’ – Aunt Toolie’s name for a mountain-climber beau of Miss Day’s – ‘has gone, I fear, the way of all flesh.’ (Whether this meant he had fallen to his death or merely ended his tenure in the lady’s affections, I did not manage to ask.) ‘So many lovers, and all bagatelles – shallow diversions of restless girlhood! It’s time she was settled. You know what this means, darling? Copley Wedger. They’re both here tonight. I’m relying on you. Lead the horse to water. And this time, make her drink.’
‘Such confidence in my abilities!’
Wobblewood grew wilder as the evening wore on. By midnight, revellers from the speakeasy downstairs had joined us, presumably without being invited. Where Agnes Day had gone, I had no idea. For a time I talked to the Songbird Sisters, although this was difficult, as golden-haired Maisie leaped in to answer any remark addressed to Daisy, while copper-haired Daisy seemed always eager to leave, yet reluctant to do so without her sister. Later I succumbed to the attentions of a Spanish lady said – by Copley Wedger, an expert in such matters – to be a notorious prick-tease. The lady, known popularly as Conquistador, propelled me to the door of my room before turning abruptly, pecking me on the lips, and spiriting herself away. I was disappointed and relieved.
‘Limehouse Blues’ blared from the phonograph, and couples, trios, and blissful solitaries were stomping recklessly on the hazardous floor by the time Aunt Toolie, sober as always, demanded of me whether Miss Day had agreed yet to marry Copley Wedger.
‘What I can’t understand,’ I said, ‘is why you’re so keen for her to marry at all. What could be more bourgeois?’
Aunt Toolie pulled my nose and I howled.
Dutifully, I sidled off to look for Miss Day. I ended up in the annexe at the back of the apartment, a sort of boxroom on a grand scale, with paper peeling from the walls in strips and clutter heaped precariously in cobwebbed piles. My quarry, outlined by the moon through an open window, squatted on the fire escape. Awkwardly, ashplant slipping, I clambered out to join her. No rain fell any more, but the tiles and chimneys and well-like yard below were black mirrors, sleek with wetness.
I should have liked to sit with Miss Day, but my leg made it impossible. Sadly, I looked down at her. She was beautiful. That night she wore chunky costume jewellery and a yellow beret, beneath which she had swept up her long black hair. Her face was silvery in the pale light. And what did she see? A prim bookworm with a bad leg. I wore a spotted bow tie, a tweed jacket with leather-patched elbows, cord trousers, and argyle socks. There were cuts on my neck where my razor had slipped while negotiating the territory around my Adam’s apple.
My position with Miss Day was a peculiar one. We seldom spoke – I was shy around her – but Aunt Toolie had told me so much that I felt I knew her intimately. Her employment disasters formed a never-ending saga. Miss Day had adopted many careers while awaiting her Broadway break: stenographer, waitress, swimming-pool attendant, factory girl, bakery assistant. Each career ended ignominiously. The library at Columbia fired her for reading the novels she should have been putting on shelves. St Vincent’s Hospital let her go for talking to patients instead of mopping out the wards. Her days as an usherette at the Shubert Theatre ended when she was discovered in a compromising position with an audience member in the back row. Defensively, she had pointed out that the fellow was an old flame. Only yesterday a theatrical booking agency had fired her; it seemed she had got two of the acts mixed up. ‘A children’s pantomime,’ Aunt Toolie told me, ‘and a burlesque show. Dear Agnes! Was there ever such a girl?’
I was about to venture a remark on Arnold Blitzstein, and whether Miss Day thought he was the saviour of Western music, when a voice startled me: ‘Sharpless! It is you, isn’t it?’
At the end of the balcony, hunched over the balustrade, was a small man in evening dress with long, pale hair. A cigarette glowed in his hand. He had turned to me, and his eyes glittered.
Of course, I knew him at once.
Not since the night he knocked out Eddie Scranway had I seen Trouble. That victory had seemed at the time a new start, a marvellous beginning. In truth, it was an end. Next term, Trouble was gone from Blaze. Scranway’s father, the head of the Board of Trustees, had taken up the matter, demanding expulsion. Trouble was sent to a day school on Long Island. It’s ever so progressive, he wrote to me. Boys and girls are mixed, and we have swimming lessons in the nude. For a few months we exchanged letters, but, as is the way with prep school boys, neither of us kept it up. But I thought of Trouble often and wondered what had become of him.
Eagerly, I moved forward to shake his hand. How diminutive he was! He had barely grown since Blaze. Next to him I felt lumbering, absurd. When he asked me why I was at this party, I explained that the hostess was my aunt. ‘Don’t tell me you know Aunt Toolie too.’
‘Oh, I came up with some fellows from the place downstairs. Not sure where they’ve gone. That apparition’s your aunt? Quite a legend, it seems.’
‘I didn’t know you were in New York,’ I said.
‘I’ve been abroad. I’ve been all over. I’m just back from Europe.’
Only after some moments did I realize that Agnes Day had gone. She must have slipped back inside while Trouble and I were talking.
Our old intimacy might never have been broken. He suggested we needed a drink. That night, in an apartment swirling with smoke and chatter and squawking jazz, huddled on one of my aunt’s shabby sofas, we learned about our lives since we had last seen each other. Swiftly, I passed over my days at Yale – my scholarly career had been less than glorious – and announced, with a firmness that surprised me, my ambitions as a poet. Did I reveal, that night, that it had been Trouble, and the strange magic he created around him at Blaze, that first had stirred me to write? I suppose not. I was more interested in him: in the many schools and several colleges from which he had been ejected; in the weeks with a singing teacher in Vienna, which ended his ambitions for an operatic career; in the months on a ranch in Montana, where the senator had hoped that his son would learn at last to be a man; in the career as a travelling salesman, Trouble’s bid for independence, which had ended with his return home after only two weeks on the road. His latest travels – he grimaced – had been with an elderly professor from Columbia, an old friend of his mother’s. The professor sought to introduce his pupil to the art treasures of Europe; the pupil (so he claimed) took it upon himself to explore more worldly matters.
Trouble narrated all this with delightful drollery, and I was longing to hear more when he glanced at his watch, sprang up, and said, ‘Christ! I’m taking Mama to church in the morning.’
I thought he was joking, but he pushed his way through the crowd, calling back to me above the clamour: ‘Come to tea one afternoon! At Mama’s. She likes to meet my friends.’
Trouble had sent me an address in Gramercy Park. The sky gleamed softly there, a yellowish haze above barren trees, as I stood fearfully before great double doors. Brass glowed against black. Gas, like a captive star, flared in a cage above my head. I stepped into the hall, and, as the butler helped me out of m
y coat, my eyes darted, almost suspiciously, over the chequerboard floor, the gesturing palm fronds, the broad red-carpeted staircase cascading around mahogany bends of banister. Teacups tinkled in a chamber close by.
When we meet those who are to be important in our lives, first impressions often carry no clue of what will come. With each of the Pinkertons, on the contrary, I recognized at once that something fundamental, an epoch in my life, had begun. Kate Pinkerton was not a large woman, but as she presided over the tea things, stiff-backed beneath metallic heapings of hair, she had about her something as immemorial as the grand house that enclosed her like a shell. She was the daughter of a great political family. A Manville had been Attorney General under James K. Polk; Secretary of War under Ulysses S. Grant; Secretary of State under Grover Cleveland.
Graciously, barely moving, Kate Pinkerton inclined her head towards me. Her gown, of a green so dark it was almost black, was a fussy, Edwardian affair of trailing skirts, lacy ruffs and a bodice upholstered in ridged, scalloped patterns. Fixed at her neck was a dark brooch that flashed a reddish gleam.
To my embarrassment, I had been the last to arrive. Trouble, immaculate as ever, sat close to his mother’s sofa in a spindly Georgian chair. Catching my eye, he winked at me and smirked. Four others took tea with us that afternoon: an ancient lady with a wattled neck, who represented a charity for unwed mothers; a little balding gentleman from the Audubon Society, who pecked his teacake like one of the less compelling common or garden birds and straightened, too often, the creases of his trousers; an artistic lady, whose views on a new production of Manon Lescaut would be sought with assiduity by her hostess; and a shabby, sack-like old fellow who was, I learned, the professor who had endeavoured to show Trouble the art treasures of Europe. As I took my place the professor was speaking in a low, rumbling baritone about some dreary academic controversy at Columbia. I could not envy Trouble such a companion.
I was sitting uncertainly, resenting the frail tea things, when Kate Pinkerton asked me, ‘You’re a college man, Mr... Sharpless?’ She pronounced my name with a curious precision, as if she thought it odd.
Trouble leaped in: ‘Woodley’s frightfully clever, Mama. He’s a writer. He’ll win the Pulitzer one day, mark my words.’
The great lady eyed me appraisingly. ‘I trust you shall be a good influence on Trouble. You know we call him Trouble? Our little jest.’ She went on, ‘I’m afraid the poor boy’s not forgiven us for summoning him back from the Old World.’
‘Might he not resent such barbarism?’ The professor, it seemed, was fond of being contrary. ‘Why, we should have chirruped our way across the world like cicadas, restlessly in quest of new aesthetic pleasures. But lo! Shades of the prison-house close upon the growing boy.’
Kate Pinkerton said, ‘You refer, I take it, to my husband’s office?’
Trouble twisted his mouth as I learned of his new engagement: a position on the senator’s staff. This, I supposed, like the ranch in Montana, represented an attempt to tame the feckless son; yet each time Kate Pinkerton looked at him, her breast swelled and something softened in her eyes.
Talk turned to the Administration of President Coolidge. Kate Pinkerton held forth without interruption, and though I understood little, I did not repine; I wanted not so much to listen to her as to bathe, indeed luxuriate, in her patrician waters. A remarkable woman!
I had not expected the senator to appear that afternoon, but just as the tea party was breaking up, there was a commotion in the hall and a round of cursing: ‘Gad! Gad!’
Alarmed, I glanced at Kate Pinkerton, but – as if with equilibrium born of much experience – she rose smoothly in her long, rustling gown and made her way to the hall. Her calm tones could be heard assuring her husband that no inducement to rage, no, not the worst that smug little shopkeeper (she meant Calvin Coolidge) could do, was worth this fuss.
The elderly lady pursed her lips; the Audubon Society gentleman trilled that, alas, he really had to go; the artistic lady tittered; and the professor smiled for the first time that afternoon.
The emergency was brief. Kate Pinkerton, bearing her husband like a trophy won in war, floated back towards us over seas of Turkey carpet. The great man, pince-nez glinting, acknowledged his guests. His head, I observed, seemed too large for his body. From his centre parting, thinning hair splayed in grey grooves, plastered to a pinkish skull; his waistcoat, hung with a fob, strained across his belly like a sausage skin with buttons.
‘And this,’ declaimed Kate Pinkerton, propelling him towards me, ‘is Mr... Sharpless.’
Something passed across the senator’s face: a look that for an instant I thought was fear. He exchanged glances with his wife. I could not imagine what blunder I had committed. I was about to stammer out some apology when the cloud, all at once, was gone, and he gripped my hand, twinkled behind his pince-nez, and boomed, with the politician’s practised bonhomie: ‘Mr Sharpless! Pleased to meet you, young fellow!’
Gratefully, I fell back into Trouble’s orbit. That year, as fall turned to winter, I lived for his invitations. How I relished the jangle of the telephone; the postcards with their cryptic clues; his grinning face appearing above the desk where, escaping Wobblewood, I read in the New York Public Library.
Often our expeditions were disreputable. With Trouble I found myself in Negro haunts in Harlem, thrilling to the shriek of brassy horns; in speakeasies with mobsters; in brothels, where even the most hardened ladies exclaimed over his charms. Many a time we reeled down dark roads with a couple of girls in his rattling jalopy. Many were the mornings when I woke, head pounding, uncertain where I might be. At a stranger’s house? Wobblewood? Sharing Trouble’s bed at Gramercy Park? Sometimes our pleasures were calmer: at movie houses, where Trouble gazed worshipfully at Louise Brooks (he liked to say she was the girl for him); in the bleachers at the Polo Grounds; in the YMCA gym on Seventh Avenue where again I was his second, loyally on hand as he pounded at a punching bag, stripped to the waist in shimmery flapping shorts.
Kate Pinkerton invited me to tea again. On the appointed day, I groomed myself with especial care. My hair sparkled with brilliantine and my suit, fresh from the cleaner’s, creaked like cardboard as I ascended the tall steps in Gramercy Park one dark afternoon in December.
Through the drawing-room curtains shone a burnished glow.
I was surprised to find no other guests: I had expected Trouble, at least, and I quailed as Kate Pinkerton, like the figurehead of a stately ship, crested up to greet me from her stiff-backed sofa.
In a voice I had to strain to hear, she said, ‘So kind of you to come, Mr Sharpless, so kind. I do like to keep up with Trouble’s friends’ – then added, as if sensing my unease, ‘I’m afraid it’s just you and me this afternoon. You don’t mind putting up with an old woman?’
My teacup, when I took it, trembled in my hands. I glanced at the fire, the books, the paintings, lighting seldom on Kate Pinkerton’s face, imperturbable beneath her metallic hair. At her neck, like a fastener holding her head to her body, glowed the dark brooch.
‘Forgive me, Mr Sharpless, but you don’t sound American.’
I explained that I had grown up in France, and other places besides, with a father who had been in the consular service. When Kate Pinkerton raised an eyebrow questioningly at the past tense, I told her that my father was dead, and she said that she was sorry, so sorry, and sounded as if she were. She adjusted the brooch, insisted I have some seedcake, and asked me brightly where else my father had been stationed. Her interest, I assumed, was feigned, mere politeness, but the performance was smooth as any politician’s.
‘Turkey?’ She nodded. ‘Well, well... Ceylon? So useful an island.’ She gestured to the teapot. ‘Indochine? Mmm... And Japan? Fascinating. Tell me, what do you recall of Japan?’
‘Nothing. I was a baby.’ But an image came to me: a hillside, studded with boxy houses; a harbour, with water blue and glittering; boats, rocking hypnotically; and a sense of sadness as
a large hand led me from my vantage point, drawing me back into a shadowy house. Strange, these deepest recesses of childhood: days we have lived through that leave so little residue – only shards of feeling and image, such as remain from a dream mostly forgotten.
‘Nothing?’ Kate Pinkerton, smiling, might have been relieved, and I could not think why. ‘I should have liked to travel,’ she mused. ‘Can’t you picture me as some heroine of Mr James, urbanely conducting romantic negotiations in a stately Parisian ballroom?’
Jamesian heroine? Never! I could see her only as the distinguished political wife, a personification of the ship of state. Clumsily I applied my cake fork to my cake, which was delicious.
‘But we Manvilles were never ones for Europe,’ she went on. ‘Nor anywhere foreign. Daddy’ – the word surprised me, coming from Kate Pinkerton – ‘liked to say that America was a world unto itself. A continent stretches before us! Its riches, ours to reap! God has given bounty enough in these United States to build heaven on earth! Why look beyond our shores? Perhaps he was right. Poor Daddy! The outbreak of the Spanish–American War was a blow to him. I think our victory shocked him even more. What, he cried, do we want with Puerto Rico, with Guam? What do we want with the Philippines? What have we done but acquire an empire, just like the British we rebelled against? My brother died in the Cuban campaign. Daddy never got over that. James was to have succeeded to Daddy’s senatorial seat – and, we hoped, to become president one day.’