High Cotton: A Novel

by Darryl Pinckney

  The home of this “genius with little talent,” as T. S. Eliot said of Miss Barnes, was brutally cramped—one tiny, robin’s egg—blue room with white molding. The kitchen was such a closet that the refrigerator hummed behind French doors in a little pantry packed with ironing board, vacuum, boxes of faded cartes d’identité, linen, and, so my covetousness led me to think, hoarded Tchelitchew costume sketches. Great adventures, I was sure, awaited me in the clutter—bibelots on the mantels and side tables, picture frames on the floor turned toward the wall, shoeboxes under the fat wing chair. On either side of the fireplace were bookcases. Her low, narrow bed was flush against one of them. Two plain wooden desks dominated the dark room. Stacks of letters and papers had accumulated on them like stalagmites. Meticulously labeled envelopes warning “Notes on Mr. Eliot,” “Notes on Mr. Joyce” rested near a portable typewriter. The blank page in the Olivetti manual had browned.

  The booming voice was deceptive. Miss Barnes was bent, frail. The lazy Susan of medicines on the night table was so large that there was scarcely room for the radio, spectacles, and telephone. Her introductory remarks were brief. She came down hard on the point of my being there. “See that you don’t grow old. The longer you’re around the more trouble you’re in.” Miss Barnes had been old for so long that she looked upon herself as a cautionary tale. The first day of my employ I was told to see to it that I never married, never went blind, was never operated on, never found myself forbidden salt, sugar, tea, or sherry, and above all, that I was never such a fool as to write a book.

  Yet there was a hypnotic liveliness to her, moments when the embers of flirtatiousness flared. The thin white hair was swept back and held together by two delicate combs. She wore a Moroccan robe trimmed in gold, white opaque stockings, and red patent-leather heels. Her eyes glistened like opals in a shallow pond and her skin was pale as moonlight. Her mouth was painted a moist pink, her jaw jutted forward; her bearing was defiant, angrily inquisitive. The tall, stylish eccentric of the Bernice Abbott and Man Ray photographs lived on somewhere inside the proud recluse who cursed her magnifying glass, her swollen ankles, overworked lungs, hardened arteries, and faulty short-term memory. “Damn, damn, damn,” she said.

  My inaugural chore was to refill the humidifier. Under her scrutiny this task was far from simple. Her hands flew to her ears. “That’s too much water. We can’t have that.” Next Miss Barnes wanted me to excavate an unmarked copy of “Creatures in an Alphabet.” Stray pages were tucked here and there, none clean enough for her. She settled on one version of the poem, retreated to the bed, and set about crossing out the dedication. “Can’t have that. He ruined my picture.” The explanation of how some well-meaning soul had smudged a portrait when he tried to wash it gave way abruptly to a denunciation of modern pens, how they were made not to last. I gave her my Bic, told her to keep it. “Why, thank you. Would you like to support me?” She sank into the pillows and laughed, dryly, ruefully, as you would at a private joke.

  By some sorcery the laugh became a racking cough. She clutched a wad of tissues and coughed, coughed. I tried to help—water? A pill? She held up her hand for silence. The barking subsided. She sat for some time with head lowered, fists in her lap. Then she looked around, as if disappointed to find herself still in the same place. Fearing dizziness, she asked me to fetch her black handbag. She found a leather coin purse, from which she slowly extracted five one-dollar bills. She laid them on the bed in a fan shape and commanded me to “run along.” She pushed the pages of “Creatures in an Alphabet” away, like a patient trying to shove a tray of Jell-O and thin sandwiches from view. Miss Barnes was tired. Asking for a fresh copy of that poem was a symbolic gesture—she was no longer a writer at work. At least she had an air conditioner, I thought, as I closed the warm gate to the street and put a match to the cigarette I was not permitted to smoke in her presence.

  I learned not to call and volunteer: Miss Barnes turned me aside with mandarin courtesy. I went when summoned, which was not often. If I arrived early she implied that the zeal of the young was inelegant, and if I came late, panting, she stated flatly that the young were hopelessly self-absorbed. Miss Barnes thought my given name, with its contemporary Dixie-cup quality, ridiculous, and my surname, with its antebellum echo, only barely acceptable. I had to admit that it had the goofiness of a made-up name. Delmore Schwartz, what a beautiful name! Delmore Schwartz is said to have exclaimed.

  I went to the market—“What’s an old woman to eat, I ask you”—for bananas, ginger ale, coffee ice cream, hard rolls, and plums. “Not the red ones, the black ones. When they’re good, they’ve white specks on them.” I rushed out to the hardware store for pesticide and back again to exchange it for a brand to which she was not allergic. I went to the shoe repair and back again to have her black heels stretched even more. “I forgot. Don’t mind running up and down the steps, do you?” And, of course, I stood on line at the pharmacy.

  “I haven’t been out of this room in five years. You’d think I’d be climbing the walls, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am.”

  Miss Barnes was not above a little drama and I believed she exaggerated the extent of her isolation. She had a brother in Pennsylvania, a nephew or some such in Hoboken. Regularly, her devoted “boy,” a Pole in his sixties, came to wash the floors and walls. I had heard that two elderly gentlemen, her doctor and her lawyer, still climbed the stairs to pay their respects. There were romantic rumors—one had it that an heiress to the company that supplied paper to the U.S. Mint sometimes stepped from a great car to call on the friend of her expatriate youth. I hoped the radio was a comfort, that it filled her room with music, voices, but it was never on in my presence, during business hours, as it were.

  She was reasonably informed about large events, seemed up on literary gossip. The TLS was stored in a basket like kindling, the light blue wrapper unbroken. If she did not have much to say about the outside world, well, she had lived a long time. The ways in which most of us burned up daily life were, to her, pure folly. “What fools are the young.” I am sure Miss Barnes managed to do a great deal of wrangling by telephone. She had a combative, litigious streak, an outgrowth, perhaps, of the yearning to take hold, to fend for herself. Rights and permissions had become an obsession that filled the place once occupied by composition. She dismissed me before she dialed the number of some unsuspecting publisher.

  It was bad manners to be too curious. Many had been banished. She spoke of one former helper as being “stupid as a telephone pole.” She fumed against one enterprising character who had insinuated himself into her confidence, gotten into her will “with both feet,” and then packed up cartons of treasure. She claimed to have been relentlessly ripped off, down to the monogrammed spoons, but I wondered about that, since, evidently, she regarded the sale of her papers as a kind of theft.

  As for admirers, those pilgrims and would-be biographers who brought her “one bent rose from somebody’s grave,” she declared that they wanted her on Forty-second Street standing on her head with her underwear showing. Some acolytes, she said, had taken advantage of her failing eyesight to smuggle out a souvenir or two. She complained that a bookstore in the vicinity had, without her consent, used the name her father had conjured up for her, and that when she called to protest the manager hung up on her.

  Pessimism Miss Barnes wore as regally as a tweed suit, and perhaps an early career as a reporter had taught her not to expect too much of the “hard, capricious star.” Everything and everyone came down to the lowest common denominator in the end. “Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.” The one time I was foolish enough to quote from her work she looked at me as if I had lost my mind. “Am I hard-of-hearing,” she screamed, “or do you mumble?” That was a break, the possibility that she hadn’t heard. “You’re shy, aren’t you? Pretend that you aren’t.” I wanted to be different, to be one who did not ask about the cafés, the parties, Peggy Guggenheim, or her portrait of Alice Rohrer
over the fireplace.

  Her seclusion was a form of self-protection as much as it was a consequence of age. Even if she had been temperamentally capable of going off, like Mina Loy, and leaving everything to scavengers, it was too late. When Miss Barnes was on a roll, off on a tirade, her tiny figure seemed to expand and take up the whole room. The bold voice forced me into a corner, words came like darts. I had the feeling that the locksmith’s clumsy work stood for something larger, that it was simply an occasion for the release of fury. I nodded and nodded as she pointed to the scratches around the new cylinder in the door. “You mustn’t say ‘Oh really’ again.” Then the inevitable deflation, that rasping cough. I stood very still, like an animal waiting for a hunter to pass.

  The temper had its source in the underground fire of physical pain. Once I was sent away minutes after slipping through the door because clearly she was having a rough day. Though Miss Barnes, like most old people, talked of her ailments—“I can’t breathe and I’m going blind. Damn”—she did not want a stranger to witness her private struggles. She arranged five dollars on the bed and apologized for having ruined my Sunday.

  I told her that I admired her work, that coming to see her was one of my few joys. “You’re mad. You’re absolutely mad. Well, there’s nothing we can do about that.” I refused the money. Miss Barnes did not part with cash easily. In her life she had been broke and stranded more than once. My wage she regarded as wildly generous, a gift to, say, the United Negro College Fund, because she thought of dollars in terms of a prewar exchange rate.

  She insisted, gave me a bill to mail so that I would feel I had earned my pay. “I used to be like you. Not taking the money. It didn’t matter.” She wagged an index finger. “Make money. Stuff it in your boots, as Shakespeare said.” Behind me I heard the bolts slide across her door.

  The summer unfolded like a soggy sheet, and except for Miss Barnes, my clients casually drifted away. I lived on an early birthday present from home, but somehow I managed to get behind in the rent. I assured my parents that I was knocking on doors, sending out resumes, proving once again that if you nag your children they will lie to you. Days evaporated like spilled water on sizzling pavement. Rock bottom was not so bad, and if sinking had not turned out to be as liberating as I had hoped, it was not without some consolations. The afternoons I traveled in humid subway cars from Pomander Walk to Patchin Place lifted me out of my torpor. The chance to see Miss Barnes struck me as an omen—but of what?

  Fame was not much of a consolation to her. She was not rich, could not trade her name for much, and so reputation she treated as a joke—on herself mostly. “You may like the book but not the old girl.” Being a character, a survivor, made her one who had evacuated a large portion of her life, mindful of the clues carelessly left behind for detectives. “Would you believe I lived in Paris nine years and never learned a word of French?” Her memories, those she shared, had the quality of set pieces. Even when she talked of intimate matters there was something impersonal about it, and I wondered how many visitors had heard her say that she was never a lesbian, could never abide “those wet muscles” you had to love to love women; or that she was too much of a coward to take her own life.

  A joke, yes, but not entirely. “No, don’t move those. I’m a vain woman. I want them near me.” Miss Barnes meant the translations, the various editions of Nightwood and Ryder. I was putting the bookshelf in order, not that it was needed. She was resistant to change: an autographed copy of Dag Hammarskjold’s Markings had to remain where it had been for ages, a red pocket edition of Dante was also happy where it was. “Mr. Eliot learned Italian just to read this poem. He must have liked it, don’t you think?”

  I extracted a paperback, a biography of Natalie Barney, from under the bed. “Let me see that. Remy de Gourmont called her ‘the Amazon of love’ and she never got over it. That’s what you get, that’s what you end up looking like,” she, peering through her magnifying glass, told a photograph showing Barney in later life. I broke my promise to myself and asked about Colette. “Yes, I knew that silly, blue-haired lady.”

  I got carried away and told Miss Barnes about a night at the opera when I, an undergraduate, just off the boat, was introduced to Janet Flanner. I mentioned to Miss Flanner that I, too, was from Indiana and she, taking in my tan polyester suit, red, shiny tie, and platform shoes, said, “I haven’t been back since 1921—and I would advise you to do the same.”

  Miss Barnes didn’t crack a smile. “Often she knew whereof she spoke.” I found yet another copy of Nightwood. “Sometimes I wonder, Did I write this? How did I do it? Do it while you’re young. Put all of your passion into it.” She smiled.

  But that was enough, not a syllable more. The shelves had to be scrubbed down, and then the windows. So there I was, clinging to the fire escape, with Miss Barnes telling me over and over what a mess I was making. She leaned on the windowsill, handed out bouquets of paper towels, pointed to the lint and suds left in the corners. She absolutely refused to hear my thoughts on investing in a sponge. “Don’t tumble into that Judas tree.” She groped her way back to the bed to prepare for another onslaught of coughing.

  In the shelves of the bookcase were mysterious little phials solemn as votive candles. She said that they contained oxygen. They looked like cloudy empty bottles to me. I had to wash them, all twenty-four of them. One lid got trapped in the drain. “Now you’ve done it.” I worked with a pair of scissors to pull it out. “Oh, you’ve done it now,” she repeated, swaying against the bathroom door, fretting with the collar of a pink, satin-like dressing gown. “Take down the trash and you may go.” The sad thing was realizing that there was really nothing I could do for her.

  When I got the bright idea of devising a chart for her flotilla of pills—often she had complained of headaches, of not knowing what to take when—she was offended. I argued that many of the prescriptions had been voided, that some of the tubes were empty, that it was amazing she could find anything in the jumble. We had a tug-of-war over a box of opium suppositories on which she depended for whatever peace she had. I made a little speech on obstruction, in the way you sometimes talk down to the elderly, on not being able to help if she didn’t let me. “I know what I’m about, thank you very much, Mr. D.”

  Miss Barnes ordered me to wash out a silk blouse in the sink. I said no. She started to say that she didn’t understand why blacks had become so touchy, caught herself, and said she didn’t know why young men had such silly notions about what they considered women’s work. But I knew what she meant, knew it from the way she swallowed the “knee” of “Negroes,” that despised word of recent generations, knew it from the soft blush that spread like ink across the folds of her face. I don’t remember what I said, but I can still see the five dollars on the blue coverlet, Miss Barnes hunched over, her dressing gown slightly hitched up, she hitting her palms together slowly. I paused at the door —for an apology?—but she was too old to take anything back. She met my gaze with a look of her own, a flicker of bewilderment, then hard as a stone tablet. I walked out.

  I went back to living in steerage at the edge of Pomander Walk. Families were staking out territory along the masculine river to watch ships, couples were hiking with blankets and beer to fireworks, but I had other things on my mind. By nightfall, when bagpipes started up within Pomander Walk to commemorate the Queen’s walk down Wall Street to Trinity Church, the misunderstanding with Miss Barnes had assumed, to me, the magnitude of an incident.

  In a punitive, self-righteous mood, I decided to “get” them all, to expose, as I termed it, the sins of Western literature. I set out the pens dipped in venom, the crisp, militant index cards. I turned up the flame under the pot of bitter Bustelo and started off, like a vigilante or a bounty hunter, in search of them. I was going to make Hemingway pay for the nigger boxer in Vienna in The Sun Also Rises, for the nigger this and the nigger that of To Have and Have Not. Fitzgerald was going to be called out for the Cadillac of niggers who rolled their
eyes when they pulled up on the highway next to Gatsby.

  I was going to get Dashiell Hammett for “darkie town,” and Evelyn Waugh, Ronald Firbank, even Carl Van Vechten. This was serious—no Julia Peterkin, Fannie Hurst, or Dubose Heyward. I was going to stick to the Dilseys and Joe Christmases. If Conrad had to go, so be it, Celine too, for his scenes in Little Togo. Lady Chatterley’s lover conceded that a black woman might be able to have an orgasm, but that would be like sleeping with mud. Sweat dripped from my nose onto the index cards. The laughter boiling in the streets added to my sense of lonely mission.

  I woke in my clothes determined to beat up Stephen Crane, and poor Hart Crane for “Black Tambourine.” Not even Berryman or William Carlos Williams was going to get off easy. The jig was up for Rimbaud’s sham niggers. Sins were everywhere. Poe, Defoe. Katherine Mansfield in a letter spoke of one woman as “the sort to go with negroes.” I was going to let Shaw and Genet have it, show Sartre a thing or two about the aura of the text of Black Orpheus. How dare Daniel Deronda condescend to defend Caliban.

  But, by noon, thanks to hypoglycemia, I wasn’t sure it mattered that in 1925 Virginia Woolf had come across a black man, spiffy in swallowtail and bowler, whose hand reminded her of a monkey’s. How to bring down Whittier? Or Katherine Anne Porter’s “Uncle Jimbilly” and Kate Chopin’s “Aunt Peggy”? And to what purpose? How far back would I have to go, to Pushkin’s Ibrahim or to the black ram tupping the white ewe? Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique didn’t even take place on earth, not really. Dinesen’s farm was real, but so what? What was done was done, though most of the “gothic horror” was far from over. “Let them talk. You know your name,” Grandfather had said. I threw out the cards. The motive for my pedantic note-taking was pretty sorry: after leaving Miss Barnes I had fallen into the pit of trying to prove that there was more to me than she thought.