“Fulfilling?”
Walt nodded.
“That’s a word I don’t understand,” P.T. said.
Walt shrugged.
“I’m already thinking about retiring, y’know. Then you and your brother, you’ll have the whole business.”
“Arnold can manage alone. Happily.”
P.T. stood. “You never seen my garden.”
“Course I have.”
“Not at night. C’mon.” He walked out of the room, Walt right behind. “We’re gonna paint the walls of the number-three store,” P.T. said.
“Oh?”
“Crazy idea. Arnold just decided tonight. Called me and told me. He’s been studying the problem. There’s a connection between color and mood, Arnold says. Maybe if the walls are brightened up, people’ll buy more. Worth a try, Arnold says. We’ll do just the one store to start. Can’t cost too much.”
“Well,” Walt said, “since I’m quitting, that’s not my concern any more.”
“That Arnold is one smart kid.”
Walt opened the front door. “You ought to know.”
They moved into the night and as soon as the shadows had them P.T. grabbed Walt by the shoulders and shook him. “Like hell he’s smart. When Arnold starts talking about color and mood you think I don’t know he’s heard it someplace? Why don’t you toot your own horn once in a while? Aw nuts.” And he let Walt go, stood still a moment, breathing deep. Then he pointed through the darkness. “These here, they’re my roses.” P.T. gave a laugh. “You probably think I’m batty, huh, growing roses. All of a sudden. At my age.”
Walt shook his head.
“So if I made you head of the company, over Arnold—when I quit, I mean—what then? Would you stick around?”
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
“I’m trying to buy you. Yes or no?”
“No.”
P.T. shook his head. “Your trouble is you got too much money. I told your mother that. She was making out her will once and I told her not to leave you so much money. It’s a terrible thing when a father can’t buy his own son. These are my rhododendron.” P.T. laughed. “Pretty good word for a thirteenth-century mind, yes?”
“What are we doing? Can’t I be excused?”
“Sit down.” He pointed to an iron bench circling an oak tree in the middle of the lawn.
“Why?”
“Please.”
“Why?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“You don’t make it easy, I’ll say that. Please.”
Walt sat. “Talk.”
“I never showed you my petunias, did I? I mean—”
“What do we have to talk for? We never talk. Why do we have to talk now?”
P.T. sat down. “I guess we’ve never been what you might call close, have we, Walt? I’m not really what you might have chosen for a father.”
“Would you have picked me for a son?”
“No,” P.T. muttered. “I guess maybe not.”
Walt closed his eyes. “Isn’t it funny? That really upsets me.” He shook his head.
“Nuts,” P.T. said.
“Maybe you better tell me what you want to talk about.”
“Yeah-yeah-yeah, maybe I better.” He took a deep breath. “I want to talk about the divorce rate in California. It’s very high. I read all about it in an article.”
“What’s this got to do with anything, Father?”
P.T. fiddled with his red silk robe. “Well, like I said, they got this very high divorce rate. And this article, it told about why. There’s a lot of reasons but the one I remember is this: You see, lots of people, they got bad marriages, and they figure what they need is a new start in a new place to make it all right again. So they go to California. Except when they get there, nothing’s any different. So the marriage dies in California. It didn’t get sick there, it just dies there. That’s why the divorce rate’s so high.”
“So?”
“So if you’re gonna fuck up, kid, you’re gonna fuck up in New York the same as here.”
“No, I won’t. It’ll be different.”
“The only difference is that here at least the postman knows your name.”
“You’re such an expert on New York.”
“Who said? I go there every so often, I buy some stuff, I stay in some suite, I eat some French food, and I see the hit plays. I don’t care what they are just so they’re the hit plays. Then, when I come back here and people ask me what I did I say I saw the hit plays. That’s what I know about New York. Zilch.”
“Look, it’s not that I don’t appreciate your interest ...” Walt started to stand.
RT. held him. “But it’ll be different for you, right? Because it’s so fulfilling.”
“Maybe.”
“Kid, take some time. Go to Europe. Have yourself a little fun. Then, when you’re not so nervous anymore, come on back and—”
“No! I’ve thought about that. Going to Europe would be running away.”
“But going to New York isn’t.”
“Dammit, Father, there’s gotta be more than St. Louis, wouldn’t you say? There’s gotta be more than sitting on your duff letting your old man’s business run itself for you. In New York I’ll be a director. Maybe I’ll make it and maybe I won’t but at least I’ll have a little satisfaction—”
“I am P. T. Kirkaby! You make a list of the ten most successful businessmen in the city of St. Louis and you’ll have one bitch of a time leaving my name off.”
“No one’s arguing.”
“Hell. I made millions. I married millions. How’s that for fulfilling?”
“That’s great. You’ve had yours. Now I want mine.”
“You little fool! God damn dumb little stupid little fool! Don’t you know what I wanted to be? I wanted—son of a bitch, I got tears in my eyes.”
Walt chose not to look at them.
P.T. sat very still.
Walt realized how interesting the moon was if you just took the time to examine it.
“I wanted to be a soldier,” P.T. said then softly. “I wanted ribbons. I wanted my men to love me. I wanted your mother to love me too, and she did, until I whored her out of it. I whored on your mother.”
“Yes. I remember once, out by the pool, you hit her. I saw.”
“I have many regrets,” P.T. said.
“I’m sorry, Father.”
“I’m not interested in your sympathy. I have not exposed myself to you in order to gain that.”
“Look, we’re neither of us enjoying this. Can’t we stop?”
P.T. shook his head. “I am a success. Everyone believes that. I believe, as you now know, a little different. Who’s right?”
“I don’t know. I guess it depends.”
“Bullshit, it depends! It doesn’t matter. There’s only one thing that’s important and that’s this: I got through it. All this fulfilling stuff. Where’d you get that? Whoever told you it was supposed to be fulfilling? It’s not. All you kids think so and don’t ask me how I know: I play golf with them on weekends; I drink cocktails with their wives. And they don’t want to be housewives either, because that’s not fulfilling. Goddammit, it’s not supposed to be. You ... just ... get ... through ... it. That’s it. That’s all. That’s all and it’s what I want on my tombstone: P. T. KIRKABY. HE GOT THROUGH IT.”
“I’ll remember everything you’ve said.”
“Aw, Walt, come on, don’t bullshit me.”
“I’ll try to remember. How’s that?”
“It’s sad, y’ know?”
“What is?”
“You and me. I favored your brother. Arnold was the first. I liked that. Arnold’s big and strong. I liked that too.” P.T. closed his eyes. “I regret us, Walt.”
“You think I don’t?”
“I regret everything that’s passed between us.”
“You mean that hasn’t passed.”
“Yeah, that’s
what I mean.” P.T. opened his eyes and smiled. Then he stood up. “So now you’re off to the big city.”
Walt stood alongside his father. “Looks that way.”
“Follow me a sec.” The two of them paraded across the lawn. P.T. bent down, picked a flower. “Here,” he said. “A home-grown peony.”
“I’ll have it stuffed.”
P.T. laughed in the moonlight.
Walt looked up at the big man. “I’m glad you understand and everything.”
“Hell, kid, don’t worry about me. I’m not gonna waste my time worrying about you. You’ll do great.”
“You really think so?”
“Course I think so. Aren’t you your father’s son?”
XVI
AFTER SERVING ALMOST SIX months of a two-year hitch, Aaron said goodbye to the military under unusual but “honorable” (the Army’s word) circumstances. It was winter and Sergeant Terry saw him off on the train. In spite of everything, Terry saw him off. Somehow that was sad. Even sadder was Terry’s gift, a silver flask (engraved: To A from P: alas) filled to the lip with good Scotch. Aaron sat in the train, Terry watching through the window (would he never leave?), and that was saddest of all, the ape staring, smiling, close to tears. The train pulled out finally, Terry walking along outside, smiling, mouthing “goodbye” while Aaron smiled back and mouthed “screw” until Terry’s short legs proved unequal to the pace and he was gone. Aaron drank from the flask, finished it in less than an hour and (buzzed) tossed it into the snow at the first opportunity.
As the train journeyed east and north the snow deepened and Aaron sat shivering (God, he hated winter), trying to doze. Eventually he hurried from the train during a ten-minute layover, bought a pint of cheap Scotch, smuggled it back on board and within a half hour was sleeping blissfully enough, except once when he awoke shouting from a nightmare in which he was running naked through some jungle while a tribe of monkeys pulled him to pieces.
New York was braced for Christmas, and Aaron toured the streets, his return to civilization almost joyous. Saks Fifth Avenue was making with the carols and on alternate corners spindly Santas endlessly rang their bells. The skaters on the rink in Rockefeller Center were back (they were the same people every year, Equity members most likely, but where, Aaron wondered, did they go in the summertime?), and after he tired of watching them circle and swirl he (because it was a corny thing to do) elevatored up to the Rainbow Room and had a drink. As he sat by the window looking north at Central Park and the rest, at rich Fifth and, beside it, struggling Madison, at the west side, ugly, old (she’s dead but she won’t lie down), at black Harlem and the golden spire of Riverside Church, as his eyes toured east and north and all around the town, Aaron inhaled and then nodded and then smiled and then his right hand reached out, bony fingers stretched wide for just an instant before suddenly they doubled up and he had it all, the whole shooting match, safe in the palm of his hand.
His mother met him at the Princeton station. It was the last weekend before Christmas vacation and Aaron left the train in the company of twenty nervous-sweet-maybe-I-will-this-weekend young things, seasoned representatives of Radcliffe and Vassar and Barnard, clad in tweed and camel’s hair and dainty galoshes with fur around the top, and even before the train had fully stopped they streamed around him, a platoon of potential flesh, to be met by twenty eager Princetonians and Charlotte. Aaron had to laugh. Twenty girls, twenty boys, me and my mother. A symbol maybe?
“What’s so funny, Aaron?” after the ritual kiss.
“Just glad to be home, Mother. Just happy to be home.”
“I’ve missed you, Aaron.”
“I’ve missed you too, Mother.” More ritual, performed with polish, and it carried them to the car and up the hill to Nassau Street and finally to the first floor of the yellow frame. His sister, Deborah, was waiting for him, along with her dark husband, Dominic, and their child, Christina, now six. (They had been trying to have more children for a long time, but nothing. Somehow that was funny.) Christina was a pretty little girl who loved Aaron, and he, although not ever certain what he felt for her, returned her warmth. Deborah talked a great deal (she was losing her looks already; hardly twenty-four and already lines were cutting in her skin. Aaron smiled) and Christina showed him her tricks, ball-bouncing and jack-grabbing, and she shrieked aloud at Aaron’s praise. Charlotte hovered over it all, filling and refilling coffee cups, emptying ashtrays, talking when Deborah stopped for breath, her accent as Southern as ever.
“How come they let you out?” This suddenly from Dominic, his big hands clapping softly.
“I won a raffle.”
“I mean it, how come they let you out?”
Aaron indicated his legs.
“You had that when they took you, so all of a sudden they change their minds? Doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t huh? What does?” Aaron stared at the other man. Go on, say it. Say what you’re thinking, you wop son of a bitch. With a smile Aaron let a wrist go limp. Then, still smiling, he raised one eyebrow. Say it!
“Well, you’re sure lucky,” Dominic muttered finally, retreating.
Aaron laughed out loud.
“Food,” Charlotte called, and they all trooped in to dinner. They fussed and fluttered around him, the conqueror returned, Charlotte heaping his plate high with sweet potatoes (where did she ever get the idea he liked sweet potatoes?), cutting him slice after slice of turkey breast (he preferred dark meat), and Deborah lied about how well Dominic was doing and Dominic bolted his food in rude silence and little Christina talked with her mouth full while Charlotte gave Aaron more sweet potatoes, so all in all it was a typical evening with the family, unbearable, but Aaron bore it well enough because he knew that soon it would all be a part of his past, soon he would be sipping Drambuie in the Oak Room of the Plaza, discoursing brilliantly on everything, while these creatures (were they people?) would rapidly become little more than figments of his exquisite imagination. So Aaron bore them well enough, and, though they were not aware, he studied them each, fixed them, mentally marked their boundaries. They were saying hello; he was saying goodbye.
Besides, he had his book to think about.
Books, actually, for he had two in mind (both novels; short stories bored him; he was a big boy now) and was undecided which to conquer first. The one was a comic novel, savage, to be sure, biting and pertinent, a modern-day retelling of Le Cid by Corneille, in which the hero was an account executive in an advertising agency, the heroine a gym teacher at Brearley, the enemy J. Walter Thompson, who was trying to steal the Buick account. Aaron was confident that Commentary and the Partisan Review would justly hail him and that Mary McCarthy, Dwight MacDonald and Edmund Wilson (three little maids from school) would outdo each other in affixing superlatives alongside his name.
But would it sell?
A little highbrow acclaim was warming to the soul, but a little Harris tweed was warming to the body, and you couldn’t invade Brooks Brothers with clippings from the Transatlantic Review. Aaron wanted the clippings, sure, but he had been poor for a long time.
And Autumn Wells, he knew, would make him rich.
Autumn Wells was a romance (women buy books) that Aaron had constructed during his last days in the Army, cribbed equally from Rebecca, The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye. A slight but winning narrative, it concerned Autumn Wells (Aaron was genuinely proud of the name, easily the best since Thackeray’s Becky), a willowy creature, eerie, vague, troubled, passionate on occasion, and possessed of an altogether breath-catching beauty.
Undecided, torn between the twin clichés of wealth and fame, Aaron wandered the streets of Princeton the next few days, making up his mind. It was remarkable how the place had changed. The Army had deprived him of but six months, and yet the difference. His sexual blossoming was the key. Suddenly he knew such things. The man who ran the interior-decorating place—he was one. And the young druggist with the bad smile who was always so friendly—he was another. And
the man who ran the Browse-Around, his mother’s own employer—how could Aaron not have guessed before? And the students. Those seemingly proper young men who bunched together in corners of the music room, who whispered and laughed softly while he had waited on them at the Nassau Food Shoppe, he knew about them now.
And, as he walked by them on the chill streets, Aaron realized that they knew about him too. A quick glance, a stare held too long, and suddenly everything was clear. He knew about them; they knew about him. Everybody relax, we’ve all got blackmail on each other. Once or twice he almost tried to strike up an acquaintance (where would you go? Someplace), for they were tempting, these young men; the standard of male beauty in Princeton is surpassingly high. But he bested the temptation and then they were gone, off for the Christmas holidays. Aaron relaxed and set to work.
On Autumn Wells. It was the right choice; no question. The important work would come later, when the belly was properly full. Aaron arose each morning at seven, drank coffee for an hour, showered and cleaned his nails and then, with Charlotte finally gone to the Browse-Around, set to work. He wrote directly on the typewriter (if he had genuinely cared, he would have caressed a pencil during the first draft), demanding of himself a minimum of five hundred words a day (he counted them precisely), but the work went so simply that most times he doubled the minimum. The plot he kept purposely simple. The narrator, a prep-school teacher (the first chapters took place at prep school), was a young man, Willis Mumford, ugly but kind, an extraordinarily gifted painter who, one spring, took his paints and went off by himself to a desolate section of New England. There, by a swift river, he camped and painted, alone and away (he thought) from civilization. But one morning as he followed the river he saw, set deep in the woods, a great bleak castle of a house, seemingly deserted. That day he met Autumn, or saw her rather, briefly, standing in a clearing, watching him paint. When he realized her presence he started to wave but was unable to move, so did her beauty petrify him (Aaron chuckled), and when he was finally able to shout
“Wait!” she was gone. But the next day she was back, closer to him, and finally the day after that they met. Her eyes danced and his breath came hard, but he asked could he paint her and when she assented he did, falling in love with her as the portrait grew. She lived in the castle-house with her father, a cruel man, given to flights of sadism, a hunter who chose only to wound, never to kill (Willis remembered a bird he had seen, crippled and dying, crying out pitifully in lingering pain), and she made Willis promise that never, under any circumstances, would he come to her dwelling place. But even as he promised, Willis doubted his capacity to keep the pledge, for the picture was coming to completion and so was his love. And she loved him too! He knew that. For suddenly, late one perfect day, they kissed and touched, lying together by the rushing stream, and that night, when Willis was close to sleep, she returned to him, tumbling into his arms, and Willis, as the strange wonderful creature quivered beneath him, hesitated a moment before ... (Aaron dragged on his cigarette. Should they go all the way or not? Would McCall’s serialize it if they went all the way? Why not? Why not? What the hell!) ... before sating his desires ...
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