Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  “It was recent enough.” He smiled guiltily. “Look, I just want us to be okay, you and me. That’s all. I’d like it if you weren’t thinking bad things about me. About the—the movie, well, I had a little boy’s interest, for fun, for laughs, and it got twisted out of proportion. Really. Let me, for instance, let me tell you how this all figures into my life. I come from Biloxi. You know where that is?”

  “You don’t have to explain anything.”

  “No, now really. I want to explain this. You know where Biloxi is?”

  “It’s south. I saw signs for it when Tyler and I went to New Orleans that time.”

  “Biloxi is on the Gulf of Mexico. There’s an air force base there—Keesler. Nice place. I grew up in that town. An—an only child. My parents—well, my parents. Hmmm. My parents are two of the most repressed, closed, unhappy people you ever saw. Closed and shut. You name it in culture and in life—they’ve shut it off. They don’t even own a damn television. They never have owned one. They gave me a—shall we say—sheltered existence, growing up, and it took me a little while to realize that they were, and are, afraid. Deeply, spiritually, physically terrified of everything. And they don’t even know it. They think the rest of the world is nuts—you know? And every last thing made by God or man was made to thwart their efforts to make me into a perfect sexless human being. Now the sexless part—that’s Mom’s thing. She’s what you’d call, ah, prudish. I call her Medusa. And Dad, well, Dad just takes punishment. It’s incredible. The two of them were awful when Sheri and I got married. This is Sheri we’re talking about. Cheerleader, good grades, good home life. Nice girl from a good family. A little spoiled, but good-hearted, you know? They acted like she was Eva Braun. It was the goddamnedest thing you ever saw. And so ever since then, well, I’ve sometimes done things, you know, I’m sure, just to foil them. Piss them off. I mean, I certainly learned to look for ways of increasing their sense of the collapsing immoral world they live in, if you know what I’m getting at. I took to exploring things like that just to torment them. And I don’t mean to say that my interest in the—uh, well, that particular movie—was entirely from that, or that it necessarily had anything directly to do with them. Though it did—Lily, it just did. And it wasn’t really as pornographic as all that. It was a freaking Playboy video and I meant it as a joke and I was a little drunk and I thought, you know, what a good idea, Sheri and I can watch it, for laughs, and then we can talk about it in front of Medusa and Daddy. Only Sheri got nearly as upset as they would have, and that worried me a little bit and it got out of hand, because some part of me kept saying, ‘Well, yeah, why not. Why should we be sexless?,’ you know, and Sheri acted as if I’d asked her to perform in a video. And I’m still paying for it with her and that isn’t what I deserve. Not that, I don’t think. I mean I’m not as bad a guy as she—as she thinks I am. As she must have said I was. Because Sheri has a way of exaggerating.”

  Lily sought for something to say, and could only nod.

  “You’ve noticed it.” He thought a moment, then shook his head with what looked like appreciation. “She’s something.”

  Lily nodded again.

  “Anyway, the whole thing’s ridiculous, because my quietly hopeless, sad parents and I aren’t even on speaking terms now.” He paused once more, then seemed to sigh some doubt away. “Look, I know I’ve teased a lot about you and your—your writing. And you deserve the truth. The thing is, I wanted to write. I did. And I think maybe a little bit of me might’ve wanted to discourage you.” He folded his hands and looked at them. “No, I know it. I did.”

  She said, “Nick, what’s going on, anyway?”

  “I think Sheri’s—I think my wife may be growing weary of me.” His smile was pained, and sad. He looked at the floor, and then at his own hands again. “I was wondering if you’d noticed.”

  “No,” Lily said, meaning that she did not wish to be put in the middle. But she left it there, understanding that he had taken it as a direct response to his question.

  “Anyway, I’d like to see whatever you’re working on—when you’re ready to show it. I don’t have much talent, but I am a pretty sharp reader. And I promise to be sympathetic.”

  “I would think sympathy’s what’s needed.” She hadn’t meant it as glibly as it sounded; she’d intended it as self-deprecating sarcasm. Reaching across the small space between them, she touched his wrist. “Joke,” she added.

  “Oh, right.” He shook his head. “That’s me, you know. Always with the jokes.”

  “I’d be happy for you to read it,” she said. “If it ever gets close to being finished.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “I know it’s hard to find time to work in this house. I’m thinking of writing letters to Miss Kingsley myself.”

  She laughed. “It is batty, isn’t it? But at the very least it helps me remember what I’ve read. She wrote some letters to somebody, an anybody in the future, that are in some ways more revealing than her other letters, even to friends. So I thought I’d—” She paused, and shrugged. “Write back.”

  “This is nice,” he said. “I like this. Talking to you.”

  “Nick,” she said, “why haven’t you and Sheri looked for a place of your own?”

  He put his hands on the table, and then took them off again, and folded his arms. “Good question. But you see how it is, here. It’s a big house and there’s so many good things about being here. The fact is, Sheri doesn’t want to move. And—and, well, we are saving for a place. I’ve been cut off, remember? We don’t have a lot to show for my years in the oil magnate’s sad house.”

  “I think we’ll all remember these months as a sweet time,” Lily told him. “Years from now. Don’t you?”

  He nodded. They were both silent. She rinsed the glass and put it in the dishwasher.

  “I hope we can be good friends,” he said.

  “I’d like that,” said Lily.

  He stood. “And I don’t mean this just as a ploy to help me with Sheri, either.”

  She couldn’t help but think of people who unwittingly explained their own motives by denying them. But Nick was not so transparent as all that. There was a malleable light in his eyes, a kind of admission of need, that struck her. “There’s not much I’d be able to do with Sheri, anyway,” she told him.

  “Oh, Sheri thinks the world of you, you know.”

  “I wonder what she’s thinking, sometimes,” said Lily. “But that’s true of everybody, isn’t it? Is there anything more mysterious than another person?”

  “The feeling I get from her is—well, it’s as if she doesn’t respect or like me very much, and I wondered if it wasn’t because I’m selling cars instead of writing poems or acting or something, I don’t know. Writing for a newspaper maybe.”

  “You said you wanted to write.”

  He shrugged. “Well. I didn’t know.” Then he gave forth a little huffing laugh. “Still don’t. I was always—from the time I was a little, little boy—always more in favor of just, you know, having a ball.” Now she thought she saw something of the familiar self-mockery in his expression. She took her gaze away, out the window, and saw brightness on all the metal surfaces—the fence, the railing, the supporting braces on the side ladder—of the swimming pool. The reflected sun glittered in the little breeze-disturbed eddies of water there. “I don’t mean to bother you with this,” he went on. “It’s just that you do spend a little time with her and—and she talks to you.”

  “She doesn’t say all that much to me. Have you spoken to Millicent about it?”

  “Oh, no. Oh, hell no. Are you kidding? According to Millicent that girl can do no wrong. If she thought there was anything—that I had anything less than slavish devotion—no, you don’t really know Millicent.”

  “Millicent’s been great to me,” Lily said.

  “Oh, she is,” he hurried to say. “Of course that. But don’t get in the way of her and Sheri. I’ll tell you, I like it here, as I said, but sometimes I can’t
wait until we can move out. It’s like I can’t really get near her, here.”

  Lily couldn’t help blurting out, “Well, Nick, you drink so much.”

  He left a pause. Then: “Yeah.”

  “I know she does, too.”

  “Everybody,” he said, leaning on the counter and shaking his head.

  “Everybody what?”

  “Hmm?” He looked at her. “Oh—nothing.” He sighed and ran one hand through his hair. “You know what? A part of me knows quite well that we haven’t moved out of here because I don’t want to let go of the nice life it affords us. The—the nice things and the drinks and the freedom from certain kinds of worry.”

  “Listen to what you just said,” Lily told him. “Listen to what you’re saying about yourself.”

  “That’s what Sheri says. You sound a little like her now.”

  “It’ll be all right,” said Lily.

  “Your hands are shaking,” he said.

  “I’m tired.”

  “Well, you should try and get some rest.” He grinned, turning from her, shoving his hands down in his pockets. The sardonic demeanor and tone seemed to have come back, as if someone had flipped a switch. But as he left the room she realized that it wasn’t irony, particularly, but discouragement that sounded in his voice and determined his expression. He walked through the other room and up the stairs, hands in his pockets, head down.

  3

  February 1893

  Language is useless as bleating. This awful morning, after weeks of worrying about him, and tending to him, and withstanding his bad temper and his guilty sorrow over it all, I woke from a dream of him, an apologizing figure I didn’t recognize but who, in the logic of the dream, was my father. I washed and dressed, feeling a terrible sense of foreboding, looking out at the gray light of the day, with its cold wind and its flattened columns of coal smoke over the trees, and wishing for summer. Later, walking upstairs in the silent house, I felt the weight of the silence, and I believe I knew full well what I would find. I had letters for him, and I knocked, and there was no answer. I had spent the night in Mother’s room, reading by candlelight because of course I couldn’t sleep. Before he went to bed he said that he felt better than he had in a long while. A shadow crossed in my mind as he spoke, a feeling that in some circles, I suppose, travels under the name of premonition. I put it down in myself, chided myself for my morbidity. And now there was this freighted morning, with its dimness and its gloomy thoughts. I was bringing the mail to him, trying to act as though nothing but my mind was amiss. I knocked on the door and, receiving no answer, I knew. I opened it with that feeling of breaking in on a profound privacy. There he lay, as still as any object in the gloom. I put my hand on his shoulder. His eyes were partly open, but they often were when he only slept. I shook him, saying his name, and that vibrant man who survived so many close scrapes and wandered the world on high seas and among primitives and in wilderness and hunting dangerous creatures, was gone to that bourn from which—oh, God! One knows the words! One bloody well knows the bloody sodding words! That wasn’t my father there in the bed, that ghastly thing was not him, now, and it hardly needs repeating and rehearsing! As I have had to do over the past two days, with members of the family who would scarcely have anything to do with him, or us, when he was alive.

  He went peacefully in his sleep. At least there is that.

  I have had to tell Mother, who has lived all these years in dread of this very thing. She took it better than I supposed she would—almost fatalistically, though she hasn’t stopped her crying since, and is so down that I fear for her, too. I fear for her anyhow, since she can have no part in the estate, and it all goes to Charley, who is not nearly capable of handling it and who is so grief struck that twice I have had to come near scolding him, reminding him of the responsibility that devolves on him now. There are acceptances Father gave out, charges for moneys he needed in his travels, and there is a small inheritance, and these must be balanced and settled immediately.

  Today, the ladies from the Kingsley side of the family came, all in crepe and bombazine, to pay their respects—and the passing bells rang, though it is an accomplished thing. They sat in our parlor with their little black kerchiefs held in their laps, and spoke in low tones, an official condolence the likes of which I can’t bear for wanting to tell them exactly what I think of all of them. Having taken it upon myself to arrange things, since Charley is like a little lost boy, I have come upon letters of Father’s, and encountered his hardened feelings toward some of these people, who shut him out of their circle because of his choice of a wife. Mother, for all her weakness and her failing health, was faultlessly gracious to them. But she stood out so—as I stand out—as soon as she opened her mouth to speak. They exchanged glances; they are all so pious, and they were busy congratulating themselves inwardly for being kind to her. It was in their faces, that damned satisfaction in one’s good deeds, the complacency, the confidence that the Lord approves, and that they are safe from reproach….

  The talk wanders far afield. Mary watches the men—all of them from her father’s sphere of associations in the world: medical men, and scientists, and the one adventurer, Mr. Ploworth, whom she has never seen. He says he remembers her as a little girl, and her mother, in her flush-faced, glaze-eyed grief, seems to recall him. He talks of the islands, and of the plentiful game in the North American woods. He’s a big, red-haired man with a large, bushy mustache and a very heavy neck, on which a close-trimmed beard seems merely to delineate the lower aspect of his round chin; the beard stops, and the neck flesh goes on into the collar of his shirt. He dips snuff, and sneezes, and his stubby hands manipulate the snuff box with some difficulty. The cigar between his fingers appears small and slender, for their roundness and size. Yet for all this, he looks more large than fat—a solid wall of man, with powerful shoulders and the florid face of a baker in a hot kitchen.

  —I first met your father in the Canaries, you know, he says. Wonderful chap. Quite oblivious to danger. We shot buffalo in America.

  Mary serves tea, and is gracious. Charley hides his fear in brave talk of making his own explorations, and writing his own books.

  Cousin Lucy’s talking about Tennyson, because someone else mentioned Gladstone, that horrible man. These remarks seem so casual and cruel, as though there is not a living, breathing someone named Gladstone who desires, as does everyone, a decent life, and happiness for his loved ones. It is all such drivel, this talk, and she wants to scream, resisting the urge with a little twinge of horror at herself. People have to observe the rituals.

  Her mother sits so far down in her chair that it looks as if she’s dissolving under the heavy black dress. People speak to her only briefly, and it’s just as well, since she isn’t capable of a conversation. But the way the other women of the family avoid her is hard to ignore. Charley elicits more stories from Mr. Ploworth, who is happy to oblige. They are smoking cigars, now, and two other men have joined them. Mr. Ploworth talks about being with George when he encountered his brother in the city of Chicago, in America. It seemed to him at the time that there had been some ill will between the brothers, but in Chicago, he says now, they made up.

  —It did me such good to see how they were together, like old friends. I never had any brothers. He goes on, attending to Mary, watching her, and abruptly—she realizes it with a start—speaking directly to her.

  —You ought to come riding with me, Miss Kingsley, I have an excellent pair of new horses I just bought at market. Arabians—very well trained. I have a wonderful mare for you. Fifteen hands high.

  —I don’t ride, says Mary.

  —Oh, but surely you would want to learn. I understand that you’ve been very active in this business of educating yourself.

  —Sir, I beg your pardon. I can’t think of it. Thank you anyway.

  —I had heard you were an intellectual adventurer. It doesn’t extend to the physical?

  He drew on his cigar and blew out the smoke.r />
  —Not when it comes to riding, Mary says.

  —Not afraid of gamecocks, though, I’m led to understand.

  Mary turns to Charley, who can’t return her gaze.

  —I’m sorry to disappoint, sir. But I do not ride.

  —Well, I should love the opportunity of teaching you.

  —I don’t wish to offend, Mary tells him. But I do not wish to ride your bleeding ’orse, Arabian or no. And there’s an end to it.

  Later, when everyone has gone, and she and Charley have put their mother to bed, they sit in the library among their father’s things, and try to talk. Minutes pass in silence. They’re tense with each other, and the silence seems to contain the terrible absence, his very voice, stilled forever. Yet here are his things, his papers and books, and letters—packets of his letters, which, over the past few days, Mary has read and reread.

  —You know, Charley says abruptly, Ploworth was interested in you.

  —Oh, she says. Please.

  —He spoke to me. As head of the family now. He would like to know if he can call on you. He might even make an offer.

  She opens an envelope and finds an acceptance her father had made out at some point during the past ten years of borrowing in order to travel. It’s a canceled one—has been paid. She puts it back.

  —Of course, the devil knows if he’ll call after that squelching you gave him.

  —I’m not interested, Charley. Please tell ’im, if my telling ’im didn’t make it clear.

  —An offer from a man like that is nothing to take lightly, sister.

  She sits behind her father’s desk and opens another envelope, which contains a blank sheet of paper and a ticket stub from some London show. She throws this away.

  —Are you hearing me? Charley asks.

  —I will not entertain a call from that man, or any man, Charley.

  —You’re already past the age…

  She stands.

  —Either go see to Mother, or go tend to your own affairs or remain where you are and I’ll go, but do please leave off this plaguing of me.