James Landesman Gatz was born in Kulm, North Dakota, in 1890. He was the son of poor farming people. Not much interested him except the thought of getting away, improving himself, being popular and successful. As a teenager, he set himself a schedule of exercise, work, reading and elocution. He resolved to keep out of saloons, take a bath every other day, save money and so on. He reckoned he could be a hero and a famous man. He saw his task as having to find his happiness and live with it. In America, the poor and the unknowns, some of them, quiver with impatience and humiliation.
When he was seventeen, he went off to St. Olaf’s College in southern Minnesota, but it didn’t work out and he took to beachcombing along the shore of Lake Superior. One day he saw a yacht at anchor, close to the land. The Tuolomee, it was called; its polished wood shone in the sun. There was a man on deck who saw Jim watching. He called out to him across the water, “What’s your name?”
“Jay Gatsby,” said Jim, just like that. He hadn’t known he would say it, but it was all his hoping. The man on the yacht was Dan Cody. He owned it. He was rich from the gold rush and he called Jay on board and asked him to stay.
From 1907 till 1912, Jay lived with Cody, sailing to the West Indies and the Barbary Coast, working the boat and talking to Cody. He learned about the world, because Cody had had it by the tail for years. Jay got off the boat another man, smooth if not quite sophisticated, knowledgeable, graceful, and inwardly as empty as an actor has to be.
He made his way and he joined the army, so in 1917 he was training at Camp Taylor, near Louisville. The officers could meet the best young ladies of the town, and so it was that Gatsby and Daisy Fay fell in love, in the acutely romantic way that suited a man with his hopes for himself and the world, and which occupied her intensely for the moment. But he went off to the war. He brought great honor to himself in the Argonne offensive. He won medals and was made a major. After the war, he took the opportunity, offered to officers, to study at Oxford. He was at Trinity College only five months, but it was in that time he learned Daisy had married Tom Buchanan.
When he came back in 1919, he got a job with Meyer Wolfsheim, the gambler, in New York. Why a gambler and a racketeer? Gatsby was nearly thirty. He had to put away his uniform and his medals, and he had lost Daisy. If he wasn’t to give up on his hopes he had to move fast. So he worked for Wolfsheim and happened to join him in the same year as Prohibition. In as hopeful and desirous a country as this there’s always profit in short supply.
Gatsby got rich and famous, but he stayed mysterious. That’s an actor’s way, for if everyone hails his Hamlet he doesn’t want to let on that only hours before “a little more than kin, a little less than kind” he was riding the subway to the theater. Gatsby bought a house in West Egg. From his terrace, he could look across the water at the green light on the dock of the Buchanan property.
He met Daisy again. He was sure they were still in love and she had been waiting to be reclaimed. A poor Midwestern boy who has waited that hard and long reckons the princess will be bound to recognize him. But Daisy was a coward. She couldn’t quite make the break, and she couldn’t own up that she had been driving Gatsby’s car when it hit and killed Myrtle Wilson. So Gatsby took the blame, and the East slapped him in the face with its cold, hard hand. For the one and only time in that summer of 1926 he tried floating on the air mattress in his pool at West Egg. That’s how George Wilson found him and shot him dead. Jim’s father came to the funeral, but that was about all. The great crowd from his fabulous parties had melted away, the poor son of a bitch.
NORMAN BATES
Anthony Perkins in Psycho, 1960,
directed by Alfred Hitchcock
This place where he lived was not a desert or a busy town. It was a small place, where at church, on Sunday, most of what had happened during the week was passed around. Life became plainer because of these dry accounts. People knew one another with the rather clinging loyalty of a community aggrieved by the building of a new highway. In its sudden obscurity, the place stuck together.
But it took ten years for anyone to realize that Norman Bates, out at the motel, had kept a version of the mother they had buried in reverent distaste, or that a few people who stopped at the motel, and the somewhat fewer still who went on up the road, had seen her, a prim silhouette in the window, sitting in the glow of a lamp, asleep or thinking. When it all came out they recollected how little they had seen of Norman in those years. He had come into town twice a month, maybe, for provisions. Otherwise he had stayed with mother, running the deserted motel, and the community had thought of him as a crooked tree, always there whenever you passed. No one thought to marry him, or cheer him up; he was a closed-off man, circumscribed by the tragedy. They never dreamed anyone so unobtrusive, so courteous, could have been fermenting in such a passionately crazy existence, and still reply with his boyish uncertainty when spoken to. Everyone thought him straightforward and limited; then, afterward, they were merciless about his wickedness and dishonesty. Yet not to be open is not always lying; it can be no more or less than closed.
This was in Stanislaus County, east of where Route 5 now blasts along the San Joaquin Valley before it comes to Tracy, and the road goes right to Sacramento and left to Oakland or San Francisco. Modesto is the big city in Stanislaus County, but that’s in the east. The west is just the Stone Hills and the northern end of that valley, an irrigated furnace where so much of the country’s fruit and vegetables are grown. A mile or so to the east of 5 is the old 33, an important road in its day, but neglected now. Fairvale is maybe twenty miles from Crows Landing, and the Bates Motel was twelve miles from the town.
It’s strange country, flat but rumpled like an unmade bed, where orgy or listlessness have an equal chance. It is a small town of itinerant workers, mistrusted by the natives. It is the “Golden West,” yet so far still from San Francisco and the real flourish. There’s suspicion there and resentment, a lot of isolated houses built on elevated ground, as if the owners wanted to see anyone coming. Henry Bates put up his house in the late 1890s. He was a builder, and his own place was meant as his advertisement. It was an imposing two-story wooden house with attic rooms above, like hooded eyes, and a deep fruit cellar. It was on a knoll with steps leading up to it from the path that stopped at the wide verandah. There were bushes around the house and a tree at one rear corner, but it stood out against the sky like a mask watching the land.
Henry Bates took a wife in 1930. By that time he was fifty-four, and his wife, Norma Ray, from Turlock, was only twenty-eight. She moved into the house and, they say, made it brighter and more agreeable. In 1932, they had a son, Norman. The house was large enough for a big family; maybe that’s what Henry intended. But it had picked up an empty atmosphere from being the house of a single man, and not even the three of them could dispel the feeling of rattling in too spacious a box. The wide, steep staircases and the high-ceilinged rooms made Norman an anxious child, always on the edge of panic if out of sight of his mother.
In 1940, Henry built the motel. Twelve cabins on the flat ground between the house and the road. There was more and more touring then, but the war cut it back and Henry became depressed. He died in 1943 at the age of sixty-seven. The son was miserable, and it drew him and his mother even closer together. She often took him into her bed at night because he was nervous; she bought him records of the Beethoven symphonies to play in the evenings when the wind was beating against the exposed house.
Norman grew lean and tall, like his mother, a woman of nearly six feet. He helped a lot around the motel, because after 1945 its business picked up. Weekends they had all of the cabins taken sometimes, and Norman had charge of the laundry and the linen. He loved to help his mother; he hoped he was eclipsing the failure his father felt at the end. Norman got to be fifteen and sixteen, and sometimes his mother invited young people over to the house for a party. All the lights blazed and there was dance music on the phonograph. There were games of hide-and-seek, from the fruit cellar to th
e attic rooms, and post office on the dark stairs. But Norman never got fixed up, and after the parties he wanted to dance with his mother until she was tired. Norman sometimes watched her when she thought she was alone—in her bathroom, dressing, combing her long black hair. It’s not that strange in an out-of-the-way place, and maybe if no one knows or is hurt, then it’s not even so bad. But fathers push themselves on daughters and sons fall in calf-love with their mothers. Loneliness and need are the reasons and climate for it; and they are too strong to be denied. But sometimes they are forced into unexpected, alarming directions.
Then, in 1950, the work started on the new highway. A lot of men came into the area as labor, and there was a foreman, Juan Padilla, head of the Mexican crew, who used to call on Norma. He was younger than she, but he wanted an American woman. Norma was still handsome; perhaps romantic freshness had been kept alive by Norman’s fondness. Padilla lived in a trailer on the site, but he would visit and stay late and he got into the habit of sleeping over. He scarcely spoke to Norman, but he grinned at him and made little kissing noises when they were alone together. Norma didn’t seem to notice. Norman felt he was losing her just as the motel was losing its traffic.
So one night he got a bottle of cheap red wine for Padilla, and he put strychnine in it. His mother never touched liquor, so he thought it would be safe. Padilla would drink and she would stay sober. But he misjudged the strength of their love, and her wish to do foolish things for the Mexican. Padilla teased her, sang to her, and cajoled; he told her she would be crazy with love if she took some of the wine. So he taught her to drink and they both died, side by side in the old bed with the satin coverlet.
Norman wrote out a letter in the red pencil that Padilla used on his work dockets, telling Norma he didn’t want her anymore. He was thoughtful enough to add misspellings that might help identify the Mexican. But Norman was helpless with tears at the same time; he could not understand the overlap of cunning and disintegration in himself. When Sheriff Chambers got there Norman was incoherent. The sheriff had never had a case like it, but he worked it out that Norma had killed Padilla and then killed herself in what he regarded as the torment of a spurned lover. Looking at the naked Mexican’s corpse, Chambers easily imagined melodrama. He felt a great pity for Norman, who had probably never in his life spent a night out of that house. He was really not fit to look after himself, least of all in that house. But he was eighteen, and it would be up to him.
For a time, Sheriff Chambers and his wife would call on Norman, but he seemed happier on his own. He stayed on the desolate premises; he went on changing the sheets on the motel beds and he cleaned the house so thoroughly that Mrs. Chambers always knew it by that sweet carbolicky odor. “What cleanser do you use, Norman?” she asked him, but he smiled and said, “Lord, I don’t know,” just like a man who didn’t consider housework seriously.
What he had done, he had gone to the mortician’s the night before the mother’s funeral, and taken away the body in its periwinkle blue dress. He’d put rocks in the coffin, rocks and pillows so there was no rattling. That’s what they buried. He’d kept the body at home and he’d done what he learned from a book on taxidermy to pump chemicals into it to preserve it. He invented a hobby for himself, stuffing birds, to explain the packages of chemicals he received from Toledo. Now, he was self-trained, and no book on preserving advises about human bodies. The corpse lingered; its perishing was too slow for Norman to notice. In love with someone, seeing them every day, you do not notice them growing older. And Norman talked to his mother as if she were alive still; as these monologues went on so, in his solitude, her answers crept into his head. Over the years, he became her: that’s what the psychiatrist said later. But he had loved his mother so much that, once he had re-created her, she became stronger. There were times when the mother was more real than Norman, for instance on November 28, her birthday, when he celebrated the anniversary, alone, with Beethoven and an ordinary Californian wine.
And if those times of feminine arousal ever coincided with a single young woman staying at the motel, and thinking, Well, there’s a kind man, so that she smiled at Norman’s hollow, empty-eyed charm, Mother’s eyes saw and they came back later with a kitchen knife. A woman knows where her sharpest tools are kept.
Life can feel the same day after day, so monotonous it could crush you. Yet life, truly, is inoffensive; we feel ourselves collapsing. So people must make it different, if they are not to be depressed. Sometimes those who dread the steady state pick on death as a way out, and the deaths can be as unusual as the most unlikely murders in history. It’s never too wise to linger with those humdrum smilers in country places. They give you the shivers, and they can be stranger than any city, professional crazy, without a hair out of place or a blown bulb in a motel sign, so that it still burns VACANCIES on stormy nights when the family that owns the place has had a row and would be best left alone.
Haven’t you thought of murder, looked at the kitchen knives or the power sockets and wondered how you could inveigle your dearest to try them? It is one invention to think of murder, and another—far larger—to find a stranger for it. So we murder those we know, and justify our laziness with the purgatory it is to live with those we never quite reach, wondering who will die first if nature has its way, and which fool will be stranded.
BRUNO ANTHONY
Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train, 1951,
directed by Alfred Hitchcock
What is that Tolstoy saying about families? I think it’s the opening to one of his novels. Something about all happy families being alike, but every unhappy family finds a misery of its own. It always sounds so true; it’s like the echo of a fatal shot at the start of a novel. An aphorism needs that air of encompassing wisdom in a few words, and the respectful silence that comes after a gunshot. But once, I remember, Mary Frances misquoted it, all askew in her helpless fury. It was in one of those day-long arguments, all over the house and on into the evening, desultory but still hunting for a way to wound. It was the way of our Sundays. She said—or rather she announced, letting the line spiral down from the top of the stairs, her voice so fine, quiet but penetrating, a voice in keeping with the day’s gloom: “Happy families all go their own way, always valuable and personal; no one else could understand their pleasure. But unhappy families all act out the same tragedy.”
Her error was poignant. It stilled all the bitter talk. I did not dare correct her; she would have lashed at me for pettiness, for always being right. And after all, she was right; there is that script in acrimony, that habit of walking in wounded steps. Then I thought about what she had said and it seemed just as true as Tolstoy’s opposite conclusion. Was that just the resonance of an orderly sentence, or the grave voice of a former actress who has kept tragedy for home use?
I have another motto: all families seek to give the same image of health to the outside world, and yet all of them, alone in their own houses, exist in intimate, unspoken competition that would look like frenzy to outsiders. The Anthonys were once held up to the world as an example. There was a picture of the four of them in a 1933 Vanity Fair: Jonathan and Marion, and their two children, Bruno and Julia, nine and seven then. They were in the garden of the East Hampton house, enjoying a picnic, a god and his goddess, with two attendant fairies. There was a white tablecloth spread on the grass, with bowls of strawberries and champagne, and four thrilled smiles, the same defiant gaiety breaking out where four mouths opened to say “cheese.”
In Vanity Fair it was a way of keeping faith with the idea of blissful summer, even in 1933. At the Anthony Agency, the company Jonathan had founded, one of his young managers saw the picture and said, why not? it has such real warmth, it’s the very illustration we want for the life-insurance campaign. And so, for three full years, that lawn brimming with happiness was the emblem of prudent coverage for life, home and assets.
But in those same years, if you had come unannounced into their house on a Sunday morning—of course, t
his was scarcely possible to any invaders except readers, for they had solicitous servants—you might have found Marion in the drawing room sobbing incontinently over a painting she was unable to finish, Jonathan in his darkened room, stunned by his depression, Bruno spying on the servants, trying to lure them into his intricate booby traps, and Julia writhing and frothing on the stairs in a fit no one cared to notice.
There was a crack in the genetic structure of the Anthonys. Jonathan’s father had killed himself, drowning in his own bath, sinking under the weight of despair. Jonathan had lived all his life under the same load. Marion had had seizures in her childhood that her parents had denied. It had been no more than childish excitement, they said. But Julia was an epileptic with fits once a week. Bruno did not show any such symptoms. But he survived in this household only by an obsessive attention to his own malicious plans. It was his way of not noticing the sister he loved. In a large house, he told himself, it is easy to miss those eruptions and instead find your sister so still and drained that she must be comforted. “Julia is not strong, like the rest of us,” said Bruno.
Bruno in his teens seethed with clever ways to destroy the entire family. His own devout trait of speculation and the family’s wretchedness came together in his mind as a subject for mass murder. He wondered how to arrange the four deaths so that the legend of the Anthonys’ perfection would not be dented. He considered the car, with all of them in it, going over a cliff; he could see the front-page picture of the wreckage, and four overlapping bodies. Or a poisonous vapor to choke all of them in their separate bedrooms. Or lightning that hit the choppy blue surface of their pool while all of them were engaged in water polo.
But as the boy became the young man, such ideal dramas fractured in his head like the pieces of a broken plate, glued for a while, but then quietly freeing themselves in the hot washing-up water. Bruno was twenty and Julia seventeen: this was 1944, a year for invasion and liberation. Like prisoners, the two children had fallen into a pact against their parents in which their love for each other became confused with loathing of the elders. They did things to aid both causes. They would kiss and cuddle, sitting on the stairs, when their parents passed by—to be caught, to make their parents’ lives and their own impossible. Every illicit caress was a stroke upon a genie’s lamp called murder. They held their breath in the delicious, red-handed peak of danger and arousal.
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