Maggie's Farm

by Sherry, John;

  From the outset, my instincts instructed me not to take Darroch seriously. Then, after the war, I denied my instincts and took him seriously only to find, after watching his hands become more and more heavily coated with blood, that my instincts had been right from the beginning; He had, I suppose, more chances than any of us. The world, we are told, is for the very rich, the very pretty and the very witty. Darroch was certainly the second and capable of the third when he chose. Which is not often; he is a heavy man.

  As Kate stood out from the others that first day, so did Darroch. He was a startlingly handsome boy and would become, in time, an equally handsome man. He was, from the first, secretive and deceptive; I was not really aware of the quality of his mind until after the war when, drawn together by common experience in different parts of the world, we would attend the post-war debutante parties together. The extent of his secretive turn of mind is indicated by the fact that I did not know until then that Darroch and Kate had begun sleeping together during our ninth grade year, and had continued to do so for many, many years thereafter.

  I was expelled from John Burroughs at the end of the ninth grade for general unruliness and Darroch was dropped at the end of the following year for roughly the same reasons. He subsequently attended a Connecticut prep school not far from mine and we would make the journey from St. Louis to the East together. Only O’Hara and Kate remained to the end and graduated from John Burroughs. They were not close there; but they were intensely aware of each other.

  O’Hara and Kate did not actually meet, in fact, between 1941, the year of their graduation from Burroughs, and 1954, shortly after I had paid my brief visit to St. Louis. During those years I was always in close contact with O’Hara. Frequently during the war, for example, I would spend my leaves with him in Carmel, California. He had escaped the draft and lived there throughout the war with a rather pleasant woman by whom he had two children. Whenever I visited O’Hara he would always be curious about Kate. And, after 1949 when my wife and I were close friends with Kate, she always expressed a reciprocal curiosity regarding O’Hara.

  Kate’s hard knocks began almost immediately after her graduation from Burroughs. To everyone’s surprise, she married almost immediately. I knew her husband, Sam, and liked him very much. He was a grandee, a huge, impeccably tailored man whose handsome bulk contained an extremely gentle heart. I do not think Sam inquired too closely into the relationship between Kate and Darroch. Like most aristocrats, he operated from the fundamental assumption that his life would proceed along an ordered path. He was aware of Darroch however. I remember seeing Sam in a bar in St. Louis a few months before I entered the Army Air Corps as a cadet. He had just graduated from Princeton and was off to active duty with his R.O.T.C. commission. “What about this Darroch?,” he asked me. I told him what little I knew, for Darroch and I were not then yet close friends. “Christ,” Sam said with puzzlement in his terribly elegant accent, “he sounds like a man who doesn’t even like shoes.” It was impossible to dislike Sam. He was straight from the pages of Ford Madox Ford—like Tietjens, a personality out of place in time. From the first, the marriage of Sam and Kate showed portents of disaster. And yet their union seemed somehow perfect, both blue-eyed, both blond, both handsome and rich—splendid symbols of the Nordic, upper middle-class dream. Beneath the surface there were tensions. For openers, Kate’s doting, gentlemanly father chose to die with fine Freudian fury an hour before her wedding at the Army post where Sam was then stationed. Within two years, Sam was dead from cannon fire in the Ardennes. Kate was left with a daughter and enough money to be more or less self-sufficient.

  As soon as Darroch returned from his service with the Marines, he and Kate took up where they had left off before the war. They seemed to me to represent a true workability; both of Scots descent, both obdurate and both courageous. But the cocksman’s virus was already gnawing at Darroch’s vitals; it is a slow but virtually certain prescription for the death of a man’s possibility. Did he really have possibility? I will never know, I suppose. But surely all of us must have possibility until the moment we choose to abandon it. Kate left no stone unturned, no card unplayed in her efforts to bring him to heel with life. She was at her finest then and, at her finest, she was one of the most courageous human beings I have ever known. To be trite, I honestly believe that Darroch was always her man.

  By which, I mean that together, they would have represented a standard of excellence to which each would have been driven to conform; together each would have been more than he or she was alone. From some mysterious center of female wisdom, Kate knew this; could they have dealt honestly and generously with each other, they could have dealt more honestly and generously with their lives. Certainly, Kate was proud but, in my lexicon, pride can be made into a virtue if one is willing to undergo and recover from the fall which follows it, Had her first husband, Sam lived, I suspect that Kate would now be a reasonably contented society matron of the sort who appears occasionally in Vogue. But such was not to be the case and her preoccupation with Darroch was to lead her far afield from any preordained paths.

  Inevitably, she became pregnant. Darroch agreed without fuss to marry her, giving due notice that he would leave her as soon as the child was born. As a point of abstract morality, I believe that Darroch had a certain right on his side; no man or woman should be forced permanently into marriage because of a biological accident. But children are not abstractions; they are flesh and blood who grow up and stand as symbols of things left undone. For better or for worse, their nurturing remains the basic matrix of human purpose.

  Accordingly, Darroch and Kate were married. They moved to Woodstock, N. Y. and in that tolerant, bohemian place, the child—a second daughter—was born. At that time, I was working in New York for an advertising agency and I paid them a brief visit shortly after the child was born. True to his word, Darroch was preparing to depart.

  He left almost immediately thereafter and returned to St. Louis. His father, a splendid, kind man, and probably the one human being Darroch came closest to loving in his life, was dying there of a particularly brutal, lingering disease. Darroch undertook a sustained death watch and, I believe, paid over the few remnants of his faith during it. Like Gautama, he emerged with an underlying conviction that life consists of sickness, old age and death; unlike Gautama, he neither had nor could he formulate a basis of faith to contain such terrible knowledge.

  Between my childhood friend, O’Hara and Darroch, there was no contact during the years between 1941 and 1952. They met then in Rome and seemingly hit it off from the first. However, theirs was an exceedingly complex relationship. Years later, O’Hara published a rather odd and dreadfully boring novel whose central figure was a peculiar melange of the personalities of each. It was as if, from the moment of their meeting in Rome, each indulged himself with fantasies of what it would be like to be a composite of both. With O’Hara particularly it was a preoccupation of dangerous depth and complexity. There were elements of vicariousness in O’Hara’s fascination with Darroch. And elements of jealousy. Jealousy certainly because of Darroch’s longstanding relationship with Kate, who, throughout the years, had never ceased to be an element in O’Hara’s total calculus despite the fact that neither jot nor tittle of concourse had passed between them. But there was jealousy present also of a more dangerous and schizophrenic variety. Both men were caught up in the fundamental fallacy of believing that the world could be tricked into giving them what they wanted. Loosely stated, what each wanted was stardom; to occupy a position where people would think about him and so grant him power. However, the rewards each expected from his dangerous dream were vastly different. O’Hara saw power as an aspect of function while Darroch, I now believe, only wanted from power such tangible things as money, women and drink. Paradoxically enough, each went out of his way to give the opposite impression; the intellectual proclivities displayed by Darroch were unremittingly metaphysical; he eschewed all advertent signs of dandyism. O’Hara on the othe
r hand, was greatly concerned with style and trappings. Wanting more, O’Hara’s motivations were more complex. His jealous envy of Darroch’s physical stature and extraordinary nervous system drove him to toy with the idea that Darroch could perhaps be made to function as an extension of himself. But this was a mistake. Darroch was never malleable; his own appetites dwarfed any other reality. O’Hara’s weapons against Darroch were basically irony and scorn and he was frequently terribly funny. No one enjoyed this more than Darroch who called O’Hara’s sallies against him “fleabites” and chuckled at them with contemptuous pleasure. “The leader of the people” was one of O’Hara’s sobriquets for Darroch. He was also fond of observing that Darroch “was the man who had invented the bad fuck”. And I remember one day when they both had come to the small village in Spain where my wife and I were then living: We were all sitting on the beach chatting, except for Darroch, who was swimming about a hundred yards offshore. He swam, as he played games, with an indolent magnificence, a perfection of cordination which almost seemed to flaunt itself. I looked up that day to find O’Hara watching him with fierce concentration. “Look at the son-of-a-bitch.” he said, “he talks nothing but spirit and he won’t move an inch for anything he can’t eat, drink or fuck.” Darroch’s attitude towards O’Hara can be reported more simply. When I visited Kate in St. Louis in 1954, she showed me a letter she had received from Darroch written from Rome shortly after his encounter with O’Hara. It said: “I have run into our old classmate, O’Hara. He is a pale-faced, tricky bastard and I am a big red-faced, tricky bastard; we get along very well together.”

  These then were my “friends” and the friends of my wife also, because she had married me in the good old fashioned spirit of total acceptance and loyalty, not only to me, but to my associations. These were my friends and one other of whom I shall never be able to speak with objectivity because blood is a thick substance and he is my brother. Older than the rest of us by four years, he had nevertheless chosen some years before to cast his lot in with us and so, he too, was enmeshed in our Laocoon-like entanglement with each other. As I sat in Tangier trying to devise some intention for the future, they were all in London. O’Hara and Darroch figuring out their next moves in their quest for power, their attempt to trick the universe. Only Kate had remained at home, waiting for her life to begin again. Soon, we would all go home. I must confess that I longed to be cavorting in London also. But I was not; I was in Tangier and I was the father of a child and I was faced with a question—no, the question—I could not answer.

  The best immediate plan I could muster was movement. And movement is, at best, only a substitute for action. But Tangier, as the readers of Mr. Paul Bowles know, offers no hope of any sort; it is one of those places which is a final repository of inertia and despair. Where then? Rome, perhaps? Yes, Rome. It had fed us before and just might do so again. For the moment, it was still a waiting game.

  CHAPTER II

  We returned to Rome in autumn of 1953. Because Rome has been for me a city of such incomparable magic, I find there is a disinclination, a lack of longing to go there now; I have loved it so much in the past; I do not want that love lessened by the present. Prior to our return in 1953, my wife and I had lived there for close to two years. And they were, in the main, two very happy, carefree pre-parental years without undue financial strain or worry about the future. However, during our second residence, those murderers stalked my mind, knives drawn.

  As it does sometimes during a time of tension, the mechanics, the administrative side of life which I hate and fear so bitterly, went surprisingly smoothly. My Italian was by then fluent if somewhat erratic, which helped. An advertisement in Il MESSAGERO led us to a first-rate furnished flat at a rental we could manage. Its location could not have been better, off the Via Flaminia on a lovely winding street called Viale Delle Belle Arti quite near the Villa Giulia and the Museum of Modern Art. From our windows, we could look out across the Borghese Park. On this visit, we were too broke and our tenure too temporary to afford an automobile, which was fine since the flat was a perfect starting point for walks. To penetrate old Rome, one simply walked down the die-straight Via Flaminia to the Piazza del Popolo and thence along the Corso, turning right at the Piazza Colonna into the past. If one wanted Via Venctoand its cafes, one climbed through the Borghese gardens past the splendid Renaissance elegance of the Piazza Siena and so to the Porta Pinciana. It was the first of these routes which beckoned most frequently; the cafes of Via Veneto seemed a doubtful source of response to my question of what to do.

  It was a time of rigid economy; every Puritan edge of my character was, for the moment, honed sharp. While my wife and my mother (who was then with us) celebrated female mysteries with the baby, I would shut myself in the dining room in the mornings where I made a stab at writing a play much under the influence of Mr. Tennessee Williams. It was not bad but it was soon clear that I could not beat him at his own game and the project languished. In the afternoons, I walked and stewed, taking along, most days, our goofy Boxer dog and a hundred lire—enough to buy the Rome Daily American and a cup of coffee at some cafe. Socially, life was totally barren. O’Hara, Darroch and my brother were, as I have said, in London. Our other close Roman friends, Bill and Doris Murray, had returned to New York. A big day’s social excitement would be to return to the flat to find my mother entertaining the local Episcopalian vicar at tea. Since dead, he was a likable man clearly under a certain amount of strain in mustering continued belief in the mysteries he promulgated. My mother gave him a copy of my late, ill-fated novel, which he read with enough interest to inspire him to dwell upon it, some weeks later, in one of his sermons. The gist of his remarks as reported to me was: the fellow who wrote this book is not as bad as he appears. I hope so.

  Not that there was not, among the Puritan quills I was then extending, a deep longing for relaxation among the fleshpots. Unfortunately neither the money nor the personnel for such pursuits was available. I longed to have the telephone ring and hear the voice of our well-loved and frivolous friend, Frank O’Connor, blown in from God knows where, invite Dorothy and me out to do the town. I must digress now to give some slight flavor of O’Connor for he will serve as a frame of reference at certain moments in this chronicle:

  It is strange that three of the four men I have loved most in my life have all been Jesuit-trained and Irish by blood. And, perhaps more important, apostates from their religion, to a man. Of the three, Frank’s apostasy is the least formal and binding; he is likely to call for shriving upon his death bed. His view of life was essentially absurdist; he saw it as a voyage of brief duration and dubious value; don’t be a fool, he would advise his assembled drinking companions, take the one with the big teats; or: it only hurts for a second. Terribly generous, there was also a quality of fundamental decency about him. Once, in Tangier, he announced to my wife and me that he was going to give a brilliant luncheon party for us. He did so, too, assembling at one of the odd, out of the way hotels he was in the habit of frequenting, as exquisite a combination of the refined and the raffish as I have ever encountered. That the company emitted a common aura of damnation lent spice to the lengthy, beautifully-cooked meal. To all except my wife and me, it was clear that a certain segment of those present harbored orgiastic intentions for the balance of the afternoon. Two limousines had been laid on to carry the guests away after lunch. The orgiastically inclined among us climbed into one, the remainder into the other. Not knowing whether we were afoot or on horseback, my wife and I climbed into the wrong car. Like a scene from an old Marx Brothers film, Frank climbed right in behind us and with consummate aplomb shepherded us through the limousine and out of the opposite door into the non-orgiastic car. I do not believe any human being is corrupt who goes out of his way to prevent corruption in others. But perhaps, after all, his intentions were selfishly motivated. A pair of innocents can pretty well put the skids under an orgy.

  Oddly enough, the very thing I hoped for would occur. Frank w
ould turn up in Rome within a very few weeks. By that time, I would have hit upon the answer to our future and would be trembling on the brink of commitment to it. The rounds of gaiety with Frank and his debauched circus would have a beneficial effect upon pushing me to a decision. But, for the moment, the social pickings were slim and unrewarding. I continued to walk and ponder.

  The dilemma was this: I was completely without training in any crafts except writing and the operation of a Norden bombsight. There was slight market for the latter certainly. The market for the former, however—if one were not too choosy—was practically limitless. Advertising, public relations, radio, TV—all those segments of what is loosely known as the communications industry—beckoned to any aspirant who could provide even a semblance of talent. I wish to make it clear at the outset that I do not carp at these pursuits; lengthy discussions of the moral dilemma they present are a terrible bore and generally lead nowhere. My hesitancy about trying to re-enter that world stemmed less from a distaste for it than from a fundamentally healthy fear of extending my energies to reach for rewards I did not really want. The payoff in that world, it seems to me, is iron-bound membership in the great American middle-class—St. Paul’s for the sons and Farmington for the daughters; a great circle course back to the point where one began. Traveling in circles offers only a limited amount of experience and experience is the real clay from which one is fashioned. To be lucky enough not to be born in a ghetto or a jungle and then merely to concentrate on staying even is not much of a game. Life without the embellishment of some creative admixture is a pretty boring business. And I knew myself well enough to be chary of my ability to retain balance in any situation which did not provide a rich tapestry of experience. My Scots-Irish heritage provides vast reservoirs of rage and spleen and drunkenness; the quickest way to open their floodgates is to embrace a course of action which is neither believed in nor desired. Yet the first rule even for a tentative aspirant to manhood is: fulfill your responsibilities to those you love. I have never known a man who funked that one to survive. And my time was running low; unless I could contrive or encounter a more peculiar and rewarding plan, my destination was pretty well going to have to be Madison Avenue with all its real or imagined dangers.