by Rain, David
That was the beginning of an odyssey that lasted until after midnight. Trouble took charge. At the Captain’s Log he bounded up to the door, rapping confidently; inside, he greeted the barman with a hail-fellow-well-met air and turned to us, beaming, to ask what we wanted.
The place was packed. I craned my neck through the gloom. In one corner, jammed on a narrow podium, a college-boy band – slickers in white ducks – blared out ‘Riverboat Shuffle’. Couples stomped in time; others huddled in booths; many embraced; the air was dark and smoky. Uneasily, I inspected the nautical decor: the nets that hung from the ceiling, the snaking hawsers, the ships’ helms, the foxed engravings of Cunard liners. Aunt Toolie, shouting in my ear, said that Agnes could not be here yet; Trouble balanced four elaborate cocktails on his way back from the bar, whipped them past obstructing shoulders, and deposited them into our hands. Dutifully I tried to talk to my aunt about Agnes, but before I could get far she was hugging a party of flapper girls she knew from God-knows-where: uptown tourists in spangly gowns. For a time Trouble expatiated to me on the subject of my aunt (‘Why can’t she be my aunt? She’s wasted on you’), before skittering off, leaving Le Vol to launch into fresh rhapsodies about Wyoming until Trouble returned, dragged Aunt Toolie back into our clench, and declared that the lady (he had it on the best authority) had left earlier, bound for the Plaza.
Through gathering snow we hauled ourselves towards Sixth, where a cab, flagged by Trouble, swept us uptown.
‘The Plaza?’ I said to Aunt Toolie. ‘The new fellow can’t be quite the lowlife you thought.’
At the Plaza I feared the doormen would turn us back, but all that came were acknowledging nods for Trouble, who made his way around the Palm Court with the efficiency of a minesweeper before informing us, in a bemused voice, that the young lady and the gentleman had finished their meal and taken themselves off to a certain coloured establishment.
Of the club in Harlem I remember little, only jostling elbows and shiny dark faces whirling in a raucous subterranean haze; then we were in the night again, piling into a flivver driven by one of Trouble’s pals, our destination a roadhouse on the city limits, where the young lady and the gentleman had, apparently, said they were headed. Blearily, I thought we should let Miss Day be. What were we doing, chasing this silly girl? We were on a fairground ride, whirling faster and faster. Speed was all that mattered; the speed was too much, but we couldn’t stop. All we could do was go round and round.
The roadhouse was a dive more disreputable than the last, but Trouble, after abandoning us with a party of pinstriped gangsters, informed us after an hour or so that we’d made a little mistake. The lady and the gentleman were in Manhattan after all, at a party on the Upper East Side.
‘What? You’re crazy! You’re as bad as you were at Blaze!’ Le Vol, enraged, flung himself at Trouble, but I calmed him, saying that we were all overwrought. Trouble brushed aside the incident (‘Hot-tempered, aren’t they, the redheads?’) and the next thing I knew we were standing on the highway, hitching our way back into Manhattan.
Trouble picked up a ride for us soon enough.
When it ended, we stood before a vast, imposing apartment building that soared above Park Avenue. We crossed a marble lobby; we rode in an elevator – a universe of its own, bright as summer, all mirrors and gold and engraved floral curlicues – ascending dreamily as if towards the heavens. Gates opened, disgorging us into a glittering panorama. An orchestra sounded; there was the plash of a fountain; laughter rippled, civilized, urbane.
Bedazzled, we wandered through this palace of mahogany and gold, one magnificent chamber opening into another, miles above the darkened city. Oil paintings, sumptuous portrayals of Christian and classical themes (a Titian? – a Rubens? – a Raphael?), flared gorgeously from each panelled wall; ceilings, pendulous with chandeliers, seethed with gilt and mouldings thirty feet above; drawn-back curtains of red velvet framed in what looked like proscenium arches the spangled geometry of the city at night.
Dominating a central chamber was a broad imperial staircase of marble and gold, sweeping up towards mysterious higher reaches of the penthouse. The place might have been a Renaissance palazzo, spirited to the heights of a Manhattan skyscraper. When Le Vol asked me what prince this palazzo might belong to, I could only shake my head. Trouble exclaimed delightedly. I asked Aunt Toolie if we could still be in the same city of Wobblewood and ‘Eggs’ and the Captain’s Log, but her attention remained fixed on the object of our odyssey.
That object came upon us like a vision, as if, in the culmination of a quest, we had penetrated to the heart of the world. In the middle of Manhattan was a penthouse; in the middle of the penthouse was a dance floor; and in the middle of the dance floor, on slick parquet, a creature of jewels and silver, too radiant to be real, circled in the arms of a darkly handsome man.
Aunt Toolie gasped: ‘Agnes... Copley!’
Trouble turned and laughed at us. He sounded crazy.
‘I knew! I knew all along! They told me at the Captain’s Log! I’ve led you all on a wild goose chase!’
Champagne floated by, borne on sparkling salvers; Trouble – ready, it seemed, for fresh pleasures – slipped into the party; Le Vol, a shabby scarecrow, moved as if to pursue him, perhaps to strike him down, but guests in tuxedoes, furs, and spangly gowns milled too thickly to let him pass. Aunt Toolie, beside me, choked back a sob, thinking, no doubt, of those six floors of luxury shopping; I put an arm around her, said, ‘All’s well that ends well!’ and she rested her head against my shoulder, watching in wonderment as her protégée circled in the arms of Copley Wedger. We could forgive Trouble’s joke. ‘Sometimes, darling,’ Aunt Toolie said, ‘the world is a well-ordered place.’
I agreed. The evening was over: the curtain, at that point, should have fallen on the comedy.
But more was to come.
Le Vol fought his way back to the elevators. Alarmed, I called his name and struggled after him. Oh, but I was drunk, drunk! Pain throbbed in my damaged leg, but I flung myself into his way, cutting off his path, just before he could slip through the elevator door.
‘Come back to Wobblewood. I’m sorry about tonight.’
‘Me too. I told you about Wyoming and you weren’t even listening.’
‘I was.’ I had heard some of it.
‘And I thought you could come with me! We could be a team: Le Vol, the man who does the pictures; Sharpless, the man who does the words. Why not? You want to be a writer.’
‘I am a writer,’ I said, too loudly.
Le Vol laughed. ‘You have to write about something, Sharpless. What have you written, since we left school?’
‘I’m working on a sonnet sequence.’
‘Sonnets? Didn’t anybody tell you this is 1927?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I said. I would have added that several editors were eager to print my work, but at that moment my attention was diverted by passers-by: a band of Orientals, three in a row, dressed identically in funereal suits. Something about them intrigued me, and I realized I had seen them, or others like them, before: already, through the shimmery haze of this party, I had seen them many times, arms upraised with trays, backs bent to bow, heads nodding solemnly to others of their kind. They were servants: a private army of sleek, slender young men with gleaming oiled hair and sallow, mask-like faces. The prince of this palazzo, it appeared, was a man of distinctive tastes.
When I turned back to Le Vol, he was gone.
And where might I find Trouble? It was useless. Bodies pressed hotly against me from all directions. An Oriental appeared at my side, proffering a champagne glass. I glugged from it gratefully.
Hours later, or perhaps only minutes, I found myself in a plush armchair, gazing at the dance floor. The lights had dimmed; the orchestra, behind music stands like monogrammed shields, played one of the hits of those years in a languorously slow arrangement. Who... stole my heart away? Who... makes me dream all day? Stars blurred in my eyes: fro
m the champagne, from the chandeliers, from the lovely gowns. Brilliantine, diamonds, and blue driftings of smoke flared and died away in the elegant gloom. Gentlemanly hands, banded at the wrists in cuffs crisp as paper, smoothed the naked backs of girls with shingled hair. Dreamy solemn faces turned in my direction, then turned away. Like a spectre, my spirit moved between the dancers.
Far off I thought I saw Aunt Toolie towering over a portly, bald gentleman as she circled in his arms. Hardly handsome, but undoubtedly top drawer. Good old Aunt Toolie! I would always love her.
The band slipped seamlessly into another slow number.
I thought about Le Vol. Naturally, I rejected his view of my life. But Greenwich Village was closing on me like a trap. Many a college crony had made his way to Paris and sent back ecstatic reports about life on the Left Bank. Why languish in America, this puritanical backwater where money was all that mattered, where progress was measured in automobiles rolling off assembly lines, and alcohol was illegal? ‘The business of America is business,’ said President Coolidge, but it was no business of mine. I asked myself if I had ever really been American: I was an observer of Americans, that was all, tethered to their gravity but not of their world. Life beckoned – and where was life but Paris? In Paris, my talents would mature. I would master the contemporary idiom. I would strike out on radical paths. I would sail away, gripping the railings of a Cunard liner, as the Statue of Liberty, and all its false promises, filled less and less of the sky.
Even then, I knew I would never go.
From close by came a flurry of voices. Behind a potted palm a young man-about-town with copious coppery hair thrust aloft a glass and clashed it against those of his companions. Their conversation, or rather his, was all gossip, and gossip about only the best people. Had they heard, cried the young man, that a certain heiress had whitewashed the wainscoting in her Connecticut country house and replaced the priceless colonial furniture with pieces très moderne, made from glass and steel? And what of a certain young gentleman? Oh, it was too much! A subway bathroom! His disgrace was complete. But Miss Something-or-Other! Could she really be holed up at the Waldorf-Astoria, after that dreadful business with...? They must investigate! They must stake out the place!
The coppery hair, curled tortuously, shimmered and flashed.
‘And then,’ he declared, ‘there’s Yamadori.’
‘Yama-what?’ said a girl, and giggled.
‘My dear, I’m speaking of our host. What, you didn’t know we had one? Surely you didn’t assume this prestigious event, this lavish offering of hospitality of which we are all partaking so fulsomely, simply sprang into being by magic? Did you suspect that no presiding intelligence had conjured it into life? Why, Yamadori’s a legend, a mystery – an enigma, that’s the word! A prince of Japan. See his servants with their yellow, blank faces, gliding here and there! Decorative, aren’t they? But where’s their master? They say he hasn’t lived in Japan for years. Tangier, Cairo, Monte Carlo... he’s an international playboy. Everywhere he plants himself, his soirées are endless. Now this palazzo! Shipped from Venice, every brick and tile, and rebuilt in the sky! How long he’ll be in New York nobody knows, but one thing’s for certain: he’ll have this town at his feet.’
‘A Jap?’ said a hulking fellow. ‘Not sure I’d like a Jap.’ ‘You will! Parties every week, and every season a masked ball – the Blood Red Ball, that’s the next one. Yamadori’s winter bash. We’ll all dress in red. We’ll drink red sparkling wine. We’ll smoke red cocktail cigarettes. There’ll be red fireworks at midnight. Even the invitations will be written in red. They say the ink will be his own blood.’
‘Goodness!’ said an old woman. ‘So what’s he like, this fellow?’
‘Yamadori? Let’s see. Some say he’s a prince among men, and among princes too. They’re the ones they scoop off the floor at six in the morning, with many an empty Vecchia Romagna bottle rolling beside them. Some say he’s the vilest of snobs. They’re the ones who never get invited. To some, he’s worse still: curse of whatever town he lands in, foreign interloper, villain of the blackest dye. Who’s to say? Is he even here tonight? Maybe he’s watching us, concealed behind the walls. See that painting? Maybe he’s cut out holes in the eyes.’
‘The guy sounds like a nut.’
‘A nut who could eat John D. Rockefeller for breakfast.’
Applause rippled across the dance floor; at the podium, Paul Whiteman whisked his baton like a magic wand, grinned plumply, and propelled his famous orchestra into a jazzy cacophony.
‘The chugalug! The chugalug!’ came excited cries. It was the dance craze of the moment. A trombonist flared out his slide; cymbals simmered, a snare drum snapped; as if by magic, fashionable persons in dishevelled evening dress turned themselves into a twisting train, doubling over, one hand hooked to the hand in front, one to the hand behind. I expected only to watch, but no one was exempt; with a laugh, a girl darted towards me, wrenched me up from my chair, and I found myself enfolded in the heaving dance. A chugalug choo-choo running around the track, we curled our way about the mighty palazzo, in and out of the Renaissance rooms, watched by holy men, nymphs, cherubs – and, perhaps, Prince Yamadori.
Heels in the hundreds stamped on parquet. Voices whooped woo-woo! and everyone bobbed up, miming the vigorous tugging of a cord. I became one with the rhythm. On and on went the sinuous dance; whose hands I held, I had no idea, only that one was the girl’s, one a boy’s; together they pulled and pushed me along.
The line broke up, giving way to wild, free dancing.
Where was my ashplant? Trouble, far from me, pirouetted from one lovely girl to another; at last, solitary, he flung out his arms and whirled in a circle like a spinning top. Onlookers cheered.
Beyond the bandstand, a half-open doorway beckoned to me. Groping, almost slithering to my knees, I found my way to a bathroom, where I pissed, swaying dangerously, half into a urinal, half on the floor. The bathroom, startling in its modernity, dazzled with whiteness.
I leaned against a sink, feeling sick.
A voice came: ‘I brought you this.’
Le Vol stood behind me. He held my ashplant.
‘Didn’t you leave? You left hours ago,’ I said.
‘What, and miss the free champagne?’
‘Why did you come tonight?’ My voice was bitter. ‘You didn’t have to come.’
‘Shouldn’t I see how the other half lives? Well, now I’ve seen it.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I wanted to see what you preferred. Or whom.’ Le Vol stepped towards me. Smiling, almost fatherly, he pressed my ashplant into my hand. ‘I meant it about Wyoming,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’
‘Me, out west? I’d better find Aunt Toolie.’
‘Or Trouble?’ said Le Vol. Then he was gone.
‘Mr Sharpless! Good of you to come.’
The senator struggled up from a capacious armchair. In one hand he held a burning cigar; the other he stretched towards me, and my own hand, as it sank into his, felt like a sculpture made of chicken bones and wire. His eyes, huge behind his pince-nez, fixed mine intently.
‘Drink!’ he boomed (a command, not a question), winked at a waiter, and indicated to me the chair beside his own.
Carefully, I descended into slithery ancient leather. Light, weak with winter, fell through mullioned windows, glinting on the axes, maces, and shields that lined the walls. Flames roared in an immense stony fireplace. I might have been on the stage set of a play, a murder mystery set in a Scottish castle. Faintly, sounds of traffic drifted up from West 44th Street. The doorman, I had feared, would never let me in. That I, Woodley Sharpless, should be lunching with the man almost certain to be our next president seemed scarcely credible.
The waiter supplied me with a Scotch and soda, and I noted without surprise that alcohol, Prohibition or no Prohibition, should be served freely in this bastion of the American elite.
‘Your health, my boy,’ said the senato
r, and told me, as his wife had done, how much he liked to meet his son’s friends. ‘You’ve become important to him, Mr Sharpless. That means you’re important to me.’
From the first, he assumed a conspiratorial air, determined, no doubt, to get me on his side. He was likely to succeed. Had I considered refusing this invitation? Never. Not for a moment.
‘Quite a place, eh?’ He gestured around the lounge. ‘You realize, of course, that I’ve no right to be here?’
‘I was thinking that.’ I flushed. ‘About myself, I mean.’
‘No, no! You’re a college man! I’m no alumnus. From the age of fourteen I sailed the seven seas. My father-in-law got me my membership. Pulled strings. He was good at that.’ Luxuriantly, the senator drew back on his cigar – unconcerned, it seemed, by the ash that fell on his paunch.
‘Oh, some might object,’ he mused. ‘They objected to a lot about Senator Manville. Pork-barrelling. Logrolling. One rule for the rich. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Mud was flung, but none of it stuck. Or not for long. He was a pragmatist, my wife’s father. Everything I know about the art of politics, that man taught me. He hated my guts, of course.’
‘Oh?’ I had read many a Pinkerton profile. His father-in-law, it was said, treated the young B. F. Pinkerton as a son.
Nervously, I sipped my Scotch. I had come to talk about Trouble and wondered when we would start. Weeks had passed since the party in the penthouse, weeks in which Trouble had holed up at Wobblewood, never going home to Gramercy Park. He said he never would.
‘Hated me, yes,’ the senator continued. ‘Who was I to pay court to a Manville girl? Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t as lowly as they say. Perhaps you’ve heard of my father’s little empire: the Excelsior, finest hotel in Atlantic City. But I was hardly cut out for the family firm. Restless boy, I was. That’s why I went to sea. But I was looking for my true calling. Isn’t that the problem a lot of young fellows have? Thrashing about. Trying to find your way. Before you do, it’s hard. I know: it was hard for me.’