Because the chair hurt my back, I soon developed the habit of sitting on the floor, leaning against an old mahogany hope chest, my eyes closed more often than not to the sight of him on his stupid little chair, all spidery angles with his overlong arms and legs and jutting knees, jotting God knew what on his yellow legal pad. Abigail appeared from time to time, bringing coffee in the morning, tea or beer in the afternoon, Calvados (of which Guy had laid in an inexhaustible supply) late into the night.
Guy and Hilda paid no attention to our project, so immersed were they in Guy’s ascendancy. Journalists from the Journal and the Globe and the Times traipsed in and out of Agincourt. Robert J. Lurtsema persuaded Guy to grant a live in-house sunrise interview for NPR, which the rest of us were invited to attend but didn’t. It wasn’t necessary to be in the room anyway, as their deep voices, especially Lurtsema’s, vibrated the walls and bed frame, and if it hadn’t been for Hilda’s punctuating giggles and lead-foot kitchen forays you could imagine a subtle musical performance, instead of the obsequy festival it actually was. “Robert J.,” Hilda reported with shining eyes, “says that Guy is the Berlioz of poetry.”
“Wasn’t Berlioz that idée fixe guy?” asked Conrad.
“Yes!” said Hilda. “That’s it exactly. Sex is Guy’s grand idée fixe!” She ran off to attend to Guy, leaving Conrad shaking his head.
“Lurtsema’s having fun with him,” Conrad said. “Berlioz was a hack.”
“Arguably,” I said, “but he was an intellectual hack.” See, we were sharing jokes.
It was a jolly time for all of us. Guy and Hilda, for obvious reasons, were delirious as clams, and Abigail was close to content, the closest she ever got in that marriage, because Conrad was treating her almost considerately. I even spied, on rare occasions, tiny gestures of affection; his hand resting lightly on her hip; an absent pat on her bottom as she poured us tea. Maybe he was placated by my presence there. And I think, too, that the DeVilbisses channeled whatever contempt he was still able, effortlessly, to muster. We were united as spectators and critics.
Our sleeping arrangements were odd. Conrad and Abigail moved out of the master bedroom, and of course I offered to vacate the guest room and use the convertible settee on the back porch, but Conrad insisted that Abigail move in with me. He wouldn’t hear of me sleeping on a couch, even though I protested that I could sleep anywhere. “So can I,” he said, and I never did figure out where he did sleep. The settee remained unrumpled, and there were no other sleepworthy surfaces in the cottage. Some nights I would come awake predawn and picture him hanging upside down from the rafters, like a giant bat.
Abigail didn’t mind sleeping with me. When it came down to it, neither did I. After the light went out the decades fell away and we were kids again. I’ve always liked to read myself to sleep, which habit had annoyed the young Abigail, even when I moved into my own room. She had then been passionate about sleep, throwing herself into it with her customary abandon, and the depths of her slumber had been legendary in our family. She slept through squealing brakes and thunderclaps. Her eyelids never even fluttered the night Hank McAdoo threw one of Father’s tomatoes at her bedroom window with undue force, so that it shattered and sprinkled little shards like fairy gems around her sprawled form. But now she was slow to doze off and slept fitfully, and seemed to welcome my reading light, the rhythmic scrape of pages.
Of course she never let me read for long, seducing me into reminiscence, and most nights we lay awake for an hour or two, rehashing the amorous adventures of her youth, which were much more interesting to me now than they had been at the time. I could not help but admit a certain heroic quality in my sister. She had been a jolly girl, wild and irresponsible, but courageous as hell. She had taken on the boys at their own game. Now I let her divulge all the details I had warded off thirty years before. Who was the worst lover (a tie between Frank Calef, no surprise, and Carmine Previte, whom everyone, even I, had called, with blundering accuracy, Carmine Perverty). Her most technically accomplished lover was Ob Minurka, the hairy dwarf.
One night, when the DeVilbisses had been home for three or four days, she asked me to explain myself. My constant celibacy. She had always deferred to me on this point. She had ridiculed me, and tried to win me over, but she had never once asked why. “Actually,” she said, in the dark, “I kind of got a kick out of it. It seemed so romantic.”
“Romantic?”
“Yeah. Like a nun. Romantic and mysterious, and something I could always count on. I felt like you were keeping something for me. You know. Like Catholics.”
No non sequitur, but shorthand to me. She was thinking of meatless Fridays and magical beads and how comforted we Protestants are, in our irrational heart of hearts, that somebody somewhere is out on a limb, observing the invisible. My virginity was to Abigail a ritualized, idealistic thing. That she valued my choice would seem to imply that on some level she regretted her own.
“Hell, no,” she said. “I just mean it was interesting. I loved it that you could live in your head.”
This was exasperating. “Now I’m some exotic animal, like a winged hedgehog. Anyone can live in his head. If you were in an iron lung—”
“Yeah, but that’d be a whatsit. A deal. Begins with A.”
“Accommodation. Adaptation. Appomattox.”
“Adaptation. With you it’s different.”
Is it? Was it? “Maybe,” I said, “I adapted to you.”
“No, absolutely not. You were never not this way. You were always this neat little package. You had everything you wanted tucked inside.”
“Now I’m an earthworm.”
“Did I ever tell you about Mel Brezniak, and his amazing—”
“Good night, Abigail.”
“Lord, I’m hungry. I’m so hungry.”
“Eat something.”
“Good night, Dorcas.”
So I was Sister Dorcas of Frome, and some day my dessicated, indestructible hymen would be a holy relic, but for now I haunted the temporal plane, restless and prone to giggling fits. Conrad made me laugh before my morning coffee, sometimes just by appearing, slumped and rumpled and snide, in a doorframe. I could not sit still, except in our “office,” and once found myself drying dishes with Hilda and commiserating with her over the impossibility of concocting a decent poulet vent vert without estragon, which is apparently the French word for “tarragon,” but which I assumed for a hilarious quarter-hour was capitalized and Hilda’s wonderfully subversive pet name for Guy, who no doubt saw himself as the Vladimir type. Existential chicken!
At Guy’s prodding she was working her way through the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. The “Murder in the Kitchen” chapter had turned into an operatic tragedy, on which topic Hilda was unusually candid. Some months before Guy had brought home two live pigeons for Hilda to smother, then rabbited, pausing in the kitchen door for a final admonition: “Memorize every detail.” She couldn’t bring herself to use her hands, and it turns out that you can’t smother pigeons with a feather pillow; they just keep dozing off. In the end one died much harder than it had to, and the other she released into the Camembert streets. That evening, she presented Guy with the mangled, uncooked body of her victim, nestled, with Shakespearean cunning, beneath a domed tin lid. If this was a revolutionary act it was undercut by Hilda’s ruminant silence. “I didn’t need to say a word,” she crowed, “and of course we never spoke of it again.” No, she needed to ram the feathered corpse down his throat, but no matter.
At the time I was conscious only of my own strangeness; I was at ease not just with my brother-in-law, but with a small houseful of people, two of whom were idiots. This was not like me. I should have longed for solitude. I kept one bag packed against just this eventuality, and I never even opened it. Looking back, I can see it was like summer camp, except that I was buoyed, not by rustic novelty, but by the bracing unpredictability of my own moral character. Who knew what was going to come out of my mouth next, or whom I’d see in the bathroom
mirror? Not me.
Guy and Hilda stayed for three weeks, during which time there were book signings, forays to Harvard and Brown, and a winter clambake sponsored by the Frome Literary Society. On that occasion our poetess laureate, Shirley Joe Birdwell, schlepped all the way down to Watch Hill to terrorize Guy with a thirty-stanza encomium, upon which the heavens commented with cascades of icy rain, and the fire could be restarted only with gasoline, which pretty much ruined the clams.
The evening before their return to France was devoted, at Guy and Hilda’s insistence, to the DeVilbiss Circle. Hilda and Abigail did most of the cooking, and Conrad and I, armed with a generous check from Guy, went out and bought enough wine, almost, to replenish the reserves of well-aged Médoc and Côtes du Rhône Guy was about to render up from his cellar. It was an Occasion. I got as drunk as I had at the Rational Tap with Conrad (we all did) but what remain in my mind aren’t snapshots or slides but paintings, oils, deep-hued and tactile and candlelit. Caravaggio maybe.
Here we all are, arrayed around the oak table, holding hands and swaying to one side. Not saying grace, of course, though Guy did say something about the Muse of Invention, the “mother of us all.” Guy looks, as he says this, not at his dutifully barren wife, but at my sister, who yawns, great-throated. Conrad looks arrows at me. Tim’s carefully built fire throws our shadows on the ceiling. There ought to be an exquisite rat off in a corner sniffing the air.
In this small masterpiece, all of us but one incline solicitously toward Tim, who has sloshed burgundy all over his shirtfront and regards himself with comical alarm, his cheeks and nose ruddy with booze. Hilda’s white arm extends toward him with a proffered napkin, neatly triangulating the central image, whatever that means. At the far left, in deep shadow, Conrad contemplates his ragged fingernails.
Here’s the sofa-size one, or it would be if the table were long instead of round, with Guy standing in the center, a beatific smile on his face, arms outstretched, palms up, to formalize our fellowship. Apparently he’s making a speech, although judging from the glazed upturned faces of his disciples not much of it is sinking in. Dorcas and Tim, from opposite sides of the table, spoon-launch croutons at the head of Our Blessed Lord.
Guy had Hilda print up a formal menu, which I still have, here, under the blotter on my desk.
During the interminable hors d’oeuvres section, Tim and I went out to the kitchen and attempted spontaneous Quahogs Étouffées, which spontaneously flambéed when Tim dropped his cigarette in a puddle of apple brandy. The flames were blue and quite beautiful, and cold, it seemed to us, or it must have, because after some experimentation we each dipped all ten fingertips in Calvados and lit them, then raced back into the dining room with our hands outstretched, shouting “Voilà!” We achieved a nice scream from Hilda, but by the time Guy turned to see our spectacle the flames had gone out, so we had to run back to the kitchen to try again. My sister came in and stopped us, actually calling me, for the one and only time in our lives, childish.
What she said was, “Grow up, Dorcas.” I, who had done nothing but Grow Up for thirty-eight straitlaced years. “Oh ho,” I said, drawing ineptly on four years of high school French, “Comme le ver de terre a revolvé!” and Tim told her to “Get bent,” although only after she had left the kitchen. We cooled our fingertips, which we had in fact slightly burned, under the kitchen tap, and then trooped back to the table like chastened kids.
I remember that part clearly, the part when I played with matches. The rest of it, until we went outside, is pretty much lost to me, although I have the impression that by the time we reached Normandy Apple Tart with Calvados Crème Fraiche my ridiculous behavior had brought Abigail and Conrad closer together. I don’t think he approved of my antics.
* * *
Hors d’oeuvres
Portuguese Artichoke Crowns with Crab Pepper Mousse
Asparagus de Ruffey in Fontina Phyllo Tartlets
Fritatta Niçoise DeVilbiss
Soup
Potage Dieppoise with Narragansett Bay mussels
Salad
Champignons en Salade de Guy
Dual Entrée
Poulet Normand
Carpaccio of Normandy Beef with Basil and Garlic Sauce
Baked Potatoes Abigail
Bread Basket
Dessert
Normandy Apple Tart with Calvados Crème Fraiche
* * *
I do seem to recall him advising Pilar to “rein in” her husband. Today that strikes me as jarringly strange, but at the time I didn’t care. I was AWOL and enjoying myself; I was little and quicksilver among the Big People; I was not responsible. Let someone else clean up the mess. Let Abigail clean up the mess. Get bent!
One last painting. The viewer looks down from, say, a forty-five-degree angle at a round table artfully strewn with knocked-over goblets and crumpled serviettes, white linen blotched with grease and wine. The diners lean back, sated, porcine, their hands and faces shiny in candlelight, except the far center two, the artist’s focus. Abigail and Conrad sit tall, backs straight, shadowed faces inclined toward each other, well-matched. It looks like some kind of goddamn allegory, with a one-word title, some abstract noun. Fellowship. Gathering. Family. Damned if I know. Envy. Avarice. Gluttony. I should probably mention, just in case it matters, ha ha, that I didn’t see Abigail take a single bite all evening.
As it turned out, Hilda cleaned up the mess. Sober, cheerful, and bustling, she threw the rest of us out of the house, into the mild November night, to walk it off. “Also,” she shouted after us, “Guy has a wonderful surprise for all of you!” We shuffled forward in the dark, arms outstretched against unseen obstacles, single- and double-file (I was single), with Conrad and Abigail in the lead, until they insisted that Guy go first, since, Conrad said, “Apparently you know where we’re going.”
“I can’t wait,” I told the person in front of me, who I assumed was Tim but turned out to be Tansy, “for the wonderful surprise.” Tansy had been as subdued as Pilar all evening. She said she was going to vomit soon, which didn’t sound too wonderful, plus she was ruining the surprise. I think her private life had gone seriously awry, and I had no interest in learning about it.
There are few streetlights in Watch Hill, and it took a while for my eyes to become accustomed to the dark. When I could see the sidewalk I ran ahead and tapped on Guy’s shoulder, demanding to know what the deal was. I was starting to sober up, which wasn’t good. “I have been given,” said Guy, “the keys to the city.”
“Are we going to loot the joint, or what?”
“They’ve opened up the carousel for me,” Guy said.
And sure enough, we were at the end of Bay Street, in front of the Flying Horse Carousel. I could tell it by its squat cylindrical shape.
“In theory the switch is back here someplace,” I heard Guy say, shuffling off, and in a short time we were assaulted by multicolored incandescent light.
“Wow,” said my sister.
The Flying Horse Carousel is supposed to be the oldest carousel in the United States. According to legend, it arrived at its permanent resting place in Watch Hill purely by accident, abandoned there by traveling carnies in 1879. Tansy, roused from her secret sorrow, got very excited. “It came in on a wagon,” she said, “drawn by one dray horse. That horse was so faithful that it refused to abandon the carousel. When it died, they attached its tail to one of the wooden horses. I wonder which.” She began to examine each painted rump. It didn’t take much to restore Tansy’s equilibrium.
Each horse was carved from a single block of basswood and suspended by chain from a center frame. When the carousel ran, the horses flew out centrifugally, over the dirt floor. They were smaller than most merry-go-round horses, and, in fact, no one over the age of twelve was allowed to ride them. The safest maximum limit, Tansy said, was one hundred pounds.
“Dorcas,” said my sister. “Do you remember this place?” I remembered reading about it, but that was all. “Reading a
bout it? Jeez, you’re amazing. You rode on it, for God’s sake. Father took us here one summer, when we were eleven. I didn’t get to ride. I was too big.”
“That’s too bad,” I said, “since obviously you wanted to, and I didn’t. That’s why I don’t remember. They were always making me look out the car window, and go to the circus, whereas all I ever truly wanted—”
“That’s terrible,” Guy said. “You were under twelve. They should have let you on.”
“It’s a national monument,” Tansy said, reprovingly.
“So is my wife,” said Conrad.
“I’m thinner now,” said Abigail, “than I was then.”
I was startled to realize that this was true. She wasn’t even plump anymore, really. Not thin, but this only because her skin hadn’t tightened up. She looked drained, depleted, and small. I am taller than my twin by a good inch, but until this night had never been able, literally, to look down on her. She had been larger than life. But no more.
“This brings us,” said Guy, “to the surprise. They’re letting us turn it on. Just for a few minutes.”
“What’s the point?” I asked. “We still can’t ride it. We’re not—”
“We can if we choose to,” Guy said. “I’ve been assured that a couple of minutes won’t damage anything.”
“Since when,” asked Conrad, who looked terrifically annoyed, “have you given a shit about Americana, you Bicentennial-hating, frog-fucking snob? This isn’t your speed, and it sure as hell isn’t mine. I’m going to bed.”
“And I am getting on one of these horses,” said Abigail.
Conrad laughed an ugly laugh. “Well, I’ll stick around for that. Tomorrow the Chamber of Commerce is going to get the big surprise.”
“You’ll just have to bear with me on this,” said Guy. “It has to do with a work in progress.”
Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather Page 21