by Rain, David
I braced myself. Trouble, I assumed, was just around the corner.
But not yet. The senator sighed. His eyes grew fond. ‘Good place for a convention, Atlantic City. My favourite. One summer when I was on leave from the Navy, they had every Democrat in the country there. Quarter century back, I suppose. The Excelsior was full to the rafters. Bunting, rosettes, Old Glory: you couldn’t move for the red, white and blue! I met my wife at that convention. A brilliant afternoon. There I was in my lieutenant’s uniform. She wore a white dress. Trailed after her down the boardwalk. Carried a parasol, she did. White parasol. Turned to me and said nothing. Just looked. Smiled. So I smiled back and said to myself, “That girl will do. Yes, decidedly, that girl will do.”
‘After that, we used to go for long walks together, all the way down the beach, until the town was far behind us. I’d tell her about places I’d been – Lisbon, Tripoli, Montevideo... She loved to hear about my journeys. Only later did I find out that her father was Senator Manville. The old bastard offered me money to take myself off, but I told him I wasn’t to be bought. Told him I loved his daughter. Old Cassius respected that. Eventually.’
‘So he didn’t hate you, really? Not once he knew you.’
‘He made the best of things. A pragmatist, as I said! Whatever I am today, I owe to that man. I said so at his funeral and I meant it. He was a great man. One of the great American statesmen.’
I wondered what Le Vol would say to that.
Trouble seemed no closer as the senator urged on me another Scotch and began a disquisition on Calvin Coolidge. To my surprise, his speech was temperate. The senator might almost have been sorry for that fatuous Republican; but never mind, he seemed to say – soon, under President Pinkerton, all America’s wrongs would be put triumphantly right.
By the time we moved into the dining room, I was drunk, and glad that I seemed called upon to say so little. The senator ordered a bottle of burgundy to accompany our ox-tail soup (he said he always had the ox-tail soup) and saddle of lamb. When a group of men in expensive suits stopped briefly at our table, he engaged them in lively banter. One was a celebrated industrialist: I had seen his picture in the New York Times.
‘You won’t know Mr Sharpless,’ said the senator. ‘But you will. One of the coming men.’ And he winked at me.
The meal had progressed to brandy and cigars when he remarked casually, ‘Your father, he was in the consular service.’
I nodded, as if to confirm this, but could tell he already knew.
‘That walking stick of yours, it belonged to him. He was a fine man, Mr Sharpless.’
‘You knew him.’ It seemed inevitable.
‘In Nagasaki. Good old Addison Sharpless – there was a man a fellow could rely on. And you, my boy, were just an infant in your cradle.’ An edge came into the senator’s voice: a curiosity that seemed more than idle. ‘You remember nothing, I suppose? About Nagasaki.’
I shook my head.
‘Me, I was a young lieutenant in those days, on the USS Abraham Lincoln. I remember the boats in that long harbour. I remember the hills that rose behind it. I remember the houses with paper walls.’ Big eyes fixed me squarely. ‘I dare say he talked about that time. Your father.’
‘I asked him about it – Japan, I mean. But he said nothing. I don’t think he was interested in the past.’
‘No? Hmm. Maybe he was too interested in it.’
A dulled oil painting of George Washington loomed behind the senator’s head. He gestured to it. ‘You know I’m seeking nomination again,’ he said, and I felt bereft: I wanted to go on talking about my father. ‘What’s your view, Mr Sharpless? Do I stand a chance this time?’
Naturally, I said he did. President Pinkerton!
‘Soon I’ll be assembling my team around me. The faces won’t be the same. Young men, that’s what I want. Young men with a future. Fund-raisers. Campaign organizers. Writers. Press officers.’
Yes, I nodded. Yes, yes.
Then came the part I had not expected: ‘You’ve a growing reputation, Mr Sharpless.’
‘Me?’ I had no reputation at all.
‘Don’t think I haven’t had my eye on you, my boy! I can spot talent from a mile off. I can see what it is. And what it could become. You’re too good for those rags you write for, and you can tell them Senator B. F. Pinkerton said so! Tell them when you quit, and come to work for me.’
I looked down, confused. Were we going to talk about Trouble? Blunderingly, I said I planned to go to Paris.
The senator smiled. ‘No hurry. Think about it, my boy.’
‘Trouble.’ I lowered my book.
Snow flurried at the window. The afternoon was dark and I had switched on the lamp beside my bed. Often that winter I spent whole days in bed, huddled thickly like a caterpillar in its cocoon. Trouble, smiling faintly, leaned against the doorjamb. He had crossed his arms over his chest.
‘Shall I join you?’ He flung out splayed hands, Nijinsky-like, or that was the intention, and leaped, and landed on my covers. I cried out. ‘Aunt Toolie’s had the most marvellous idea,’ he said, rolling over and crushing me. ‘The ponds in the park are frozen. A skating party – what do you think?’
‘I think you’re heavier than you look, little boy.’ I struggled out from under him. If his intimacy with Aunt Toolie filled me with envy, I did not want him to know it. Hour after hour she hooted at his jokes, urged him to sing, told him he should go on the stage, and shimmied with him to ‘Tiger Rag’ on the phonograph. That morning I had come across her sobbing in his arms; quickly I withdrew, but found later, crumpled on the bumpy living-room floor, the letter that had caused her distress: a love letter from her girlhood in which a fellow called Colby Something, Jr declared he adored her passionately. Would she be his bride? The date was twenty years ago. She had never shown the letter to me.
Trouble plucked the book from my hands. ‘What’s this rubbish?’
‘Tolstoy.’ I plucked it back. It was one of the Graustark books by George Barr McCutcheon. I had loved them as a boy. ‘Trouble, we’ve got to talk. What are you going to do?’
‘Do? What do you mean?’
‘You came here just after the holidays. It’s February now.’
‘So you’ve got a calendar.’ He bounded up and ranged my room, inspecting books, pictures, knickknacks. The room, mean as it was, was my haven, my retreat. I wanted to tell him to get out.
Instead, I said, ‘You’re not going back to Gramercy Park, are you?’
‘Aunt Toolie says I can stay here while I work things out.’
‘She’s my aunt, not yours.’ My words sounded harsher than I had intended.
‘You want to come skating, don’t you?’
‘Yes, and cross-country running. Who’s got skates anyway?’
‘You rent them, idiot. But Aunt Toolie remembered there are some old ones in the annexe. I said I’d look. Help me.’
I pushed back the covers. How I longed for warm days! Even in my cocoon I had been wearing my overcoat. With ill grace, I followed Trouble to the back of the apartment. His only concession to the cold was a scarf, shoplifted (I had seen him do it) from Wedger’s department store. That day he wore a Fair Isle pullover, Oxford bags, and two-tone shoes.
‘You look like the Prince of Wales,’ I said.
In those days, the young David Windsor was an idol in America, the world’s most eligible bachelor. Trouble laughed and I flushed, remembering a drunken Englishman at one of Aunt Toolie’s parties, who bellowed uproariously the refrain: I’ve tossed off a chap, who’s tossed off a chap, who’s tossed off the Prince of Wales! Trouble thought it frightfully droll.
In the annexe the light was a seeping pallor and the cold so bitter that my teeth chattered. Quietly, as if clutter were reason for reverence, we prodded here and there, moving willow-pattern plates, a family of marionettes, and waterlogged heaps of sheet music: Stephen Foster, Chas. K. Harris. Something dreamy filled the scene, something strange. Trouble tilted a
rocking horse, pressing down its head, but halted it when the rockers squeaked too loudly. A banjo clanged as I knocked it. Why had Aunt Toolie kept all this junk? She must have brought it from the old Sharpless house in Savannah.
I wondered why she had never married Colby Something, Jr. Perhaps Trouble could tell me, but I was never at ease with him now. Since my lunch with the senator, I felt I had betrayed him. Yet what had I done? I had no intention of taking up the offer. For a man determined to be president, a son like Trouble was a liability. Working for the senator, I would be on his side. My job, nominally, might be speech-writer or researcher; in truth, I would be Trouble’s minder. The idea was monstrous. It also filled me with a certain base excitement.
A cheval glass shuddered in its frame as we passed.
‘Where are these skates?’ I said, as if I cared.
‘Aunt Toolie said they’d be in a chest.’ Trouble, moving a rack of gowns, exposed a cabin trunk in a corner. Across the lid were stickers, plastered askew: SHANGHAI, HONOLULU, NAGASAKI. A name was visible on the side, the letters flaking: B. A. SHARPLESS. Beasley Addison. The trunk had been my father’s. It must have been shipped back from France, along with me.
Perturbed, I told Trouble that this was not the place. He paid me no heed. Perhaps I should have asked him to leave the trunk alone, but I saw his fascination with it and could not intervene. He broke the rusted locks. He lifted the lid. Rushing up at us came the scent of incense. Marvelling, Trouble reeled out a length of fabric, embroidered brightly: flowers, peacocks, dragons. A kimono. He slipped his arms through the sleeves and tied the sash. In the grey light, the silk glowed with inner fire. Excitedly, he plunged into the trunk again. He drew out a fan and flicked it open, revealing a painted butterfly.
‘Mirror, mirror!’ He swivelled towards the cheval glass and posed, head back, fluttering his eyelashes, half-concealing his face with the fan. I should have laughed, but in this strange garb Trouble might have been alien, a creature of a reality quite different from my own.
‘Did I ever tell you,’ he said, as if it followed, ‘about the face I imagine? It’s a woman’s face, and she’s looking at me with eyes as black as night – Oriental eyes. She stares and stares and I think she’s going to cry. But there’s something too brave in her, something too strong. Sometimes I see her face before I sleep, hanging like a mask before my eyes.’
‘I’m sorry, Trouble – I’m sorry.’ I was barely aware that I spoke, or why. I moved towards him. I touched him. He moaned and stumbled against me. I cradled his head against my heart. I told myself this could not happen: this could never happen. Time distended, stopped, and I thought of other lives I had not known, other people I might have been. If, in the universe, there were infinite worlds, why should I live in this world? Boundaries rose high around all my desires. I wanted to pass through them easily, freely. I ran my hand through Trouble’s hair. I touched his bent neck: just touched it, held fingertips to the delicate, pale skin.
We might have remained like this for hours, days, but now the voice came: ‘Benjy, where are you?’
We sprang apart. Rounding a corner of the clutter, Aunt Toolie laughed. Smoke curled from her cigarette holder and she huddled in a much-burned dressing gown. ‘Oh, it’s vile in here. Let’s just rent skates.’
Trouble removed the kimono and flung it back in to the trunk.
I have always hated the New York subway. I hate the concrete, the metal, the glaring electric light, the tracks beneath their treacherous drop. I hate it when it is crowded and I fear I shall be crushed in the press of bodies; I hate it when it is quiet and every echoing footstep makes my heart jump. I hate it when it is hot. I hate it when it is cold. I hate the shriek of the incoming trains.
Trouble loved the subway. On our way uptown I watched him, as if he were a stranger, shuddering in the streaky black mirrors of the windows. Often his smile flashed. His hands gestured expansively. Wearing a red deerstalker that Aunt Toolie had presented to him, he chattered too loudly about Louise Brooks, King Oliver, cocktail cigarettes, and how much he wanted to go back to France. Several times he ridiculed the senator, agreeing with a recent Republican smear, even adding an anecdote of his own. Aunt Toolie, in moth-eaten mink, watched me with an expression I could not make out.
By the time we reached Central Park, the light was failing already. Only the hardiest skaters remained on the ice; I, of course, could never have joined them, but my companions were determined. Like a fool I kept up a commentary of sorts – ‘Brrr! Isn’t it cold?’ and ‘I don’t know how you can do it,’ and ‘To think, I could be in bed now’ – as they donned their skates.
Trouble took charge of Aunt Toolie, hustling her out on the ice before she was ready. Their voices drifted back to me. Aunt Toolie fell several times, squealing in delight; Trouble, who skated with superior grace, laughed at her immoderately, but kept close watch on her. When, far out on the ice, she was about to fall and teetered, flinging out her arms, he swooped towards her, grabbed her hand, and swept her back on course. For a time she accepted his guidance, looping this way and that with him, cutting a figure of eight; then, growing confident, she broke free. He skated around her in circles, then Aunt Toolie circled him.
The sun, diffuse and orange, burned low through a wintry mist. I sat on a bench. Gripping my ashplant between my knees, I rested my chin on its knobbly top and stared across the frozen lake. Score marks gleamed on the grey-white surface like the cat’s-cradle trace of a dance of knives; black trees, gaunt as pylons, rose around the shore. I heard the laughter. I heard the cries. The skaters grew unreal to me, phantoms circling in the declining day.
Passing my bench came a curious group. All were Orientals. At their head, striding forward, was a slender youth, aged perhaps fourteen or fifteen; behind him, struggling to keep up, were three little men, none of them more than five feet high. Each had dressed with elaborate neatness, as if from a Wedger’s winter-wear display; but while the boy’s coat, hat, and gloves were of bright yellow, the three men wore black. Only the boy had rented skates. Perching on a bench some way around the lake, he donned them with quick, capable hands.
A little comedy played itself out. Exuberantly, the boy gestured to the ice, while the attendants, standing about the bench, remained solemn, as if to dissuade him from a course so risky. One shook his head. One flung up his hands. One might have been about to restrain the boy, but seemed abashed and drew back. The boy, it seemed, was an object of peculiar respect. He had none for his attendants. Laughing at them, he launched himself on to the ice.
When he fell, almost at once, the attendants gasped; one covered his eyes and I thought of the Three Wise Monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The boy scrambled up; within moments, he cut a remarkably graceful figure. The attendants, like palace guards, remained by the bench. Curious, I watched the boy vanish into the distance.
Aunt Toolie hobbled over to join me. I lit her a cigarette.
‘Our friend Benjy’ – she blew out a long stream of smoke – ‘is too small. I never feel he’s quite anchored to the earth. Now take Copley Wedger: a girl could feel safe with a man like that.’
‘I thought you and Benjy were getting on rather well.’
‘Darling, you’re not going to resent me, are you?’
‘Who’s resenting?’ But I did. At a party at Wobblewood two nights before, Aunt Toolie had been unusually silly. Dressed, at ‘Benjy’s’ insistence, in flapper-girl garb, she paraded haughtily amongst the guests, cigarette holder jutting just so, and I felt an impulse to slap her. Worse still was her skittishness with ‘Benjy’. He had slicked his hair and wore white tie and tails; both of them mocked the guests, and their mockery grew worse as the evening wore on. Interrupting Arnold Blitzstein at the piano, Aunt Toolie demanded that they put ‘Fidgety Feet’ on the phonograph; she shimmied to it flamboyantly, all by herself. Later, ‘Benjy’ played at being a dog, crouching on hind legs with hands curled like paws, while Aunt Toolie held crackers above his head
and snatched them away as he lunged up for them, yowling. In the end, she pelted the crackers at him in handfuls until he chased her down the stairs, caught her, and kissed her.
‘I know you’ve been miserable since Agnes,’ I said.
‘Agnes! Ancient history.’ I supposed she was: not once, despite promises, had the new Mrs Copley Wedger descended to her old haunts. But what did Aunt Toolie expect? Secretly, I had always hated her protégés. What was I to feel though, when her protégé was ‘Benjy’? Eagerly, she began saying what a tonic he was, what a broth of a boy: Benjy this, Benjy that.
I snapped: ‘Do you have to call him Benjy?’
‘It’s his name: Benjamin. No need to be lugubrious.’
‘I’m not lugubrious,’ I said.
‘You are. You’re Mr Lugubrious.’ Aunt Toolie pouted and patted my head. ‘Don’t you know you’re first on my list? My special charge. My sacred trust. My dear, dear boy.’
‘You packed me off to Blaze as soon as I arrived.’
‘It wasn’t all up to me. Provisions had been made.’
‘Oh, provisions!’
She stiffened. ‘Darling, you must admit you were difficult. Christ, you were impossible! You’d just tried to kill yourself.’
‘I didn’t!’ But what had I done? I thought of the automobile that had shattered my right leg. How many times had I played that scene over? Each time it felt real, as if the accident were happening again: the green boxy sedan ramming into me, sending me sprawling, while the driver, too late, blared his horn, as if to silence the crunch of bone. The moment, I thought sometimes, had been the greatest of my life: the time I stopped traffic in the Champs-Elysées.
Wildly, I had run from the honey-coloured house that meant only a coffin in the front parlour, and silent servants, and the concerned lady from the consulate, and the weeping Latin Quarter mistress, who had to be asked to leave. As I ran, tears blinded my eyes, but I needed no eyes; if I ran fast enough I could fly: fly faster than time. And I flew, only to be snatched back suddenly to earth. In my shock I felt no pain, not at first, only bewilderment that I didn’t, that I couldn’t, rise up and keep flying, outstripping the leaden chronology that said only, in its remorseless drumming march, that my father was dead... that he was dead... that he was dead.