Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

by Carson, Tom

  You probably know the look on Nick’s face, because the whole God damn country saw it plenty enough times afterward. It was that expression he got that said that no matter how hard he tried, and how good he was at anything, and whichever way he applied himself, and how hard he tried, someone else was going to get all the candy.

  And he didn’t know why.

  Noticing that I was watching, he smiled anxiously. Then, remembering that I had turned out to be one more of the people who spent their whole lives trying to figure out how to stick it to him, he frowned.

  A lot of people have asked me about it since, but I don’t think they ever met or spoke back then. If Nick had just felt some kind of inkling even so, all I can say is I sure hadn’t. You could have knocked me over with a coconut when the two of them ran against each other for president. I’d have put my money on McHale.

  Since he believed in nothing, he’s the one who might’ve convinced me there wasn’t a black dot in our wake.

  III

  Alger and Dean and My Son and I and Whatnot

  IT DID PAIN ME TO SEE MY ONETIME PROTÉGÉ LED OFF LIKE A COMmon criminal, when at the least—between us, be it said!—Alger was an uncommon one. Whatever confusions of Soviet personnel with Western Union may have blotted his copybook in a youth whose icy fervor nonetheless left me with fedora doffed, the man I still rejoice in calling my former chum had far more merit than the shifty-eyed, unpleasant junior Congressman from California who was to boast for decades, in an idiom that struck me as curiously sexual, of having “nailed” Alger Hiss, the spy. Perhaps it wasn’t said until much later, but it was true from the start: that other fellow was pure cancer.

  In the usual way of such things, my family knew the Hisses without quite knowing why, although my mother had been a Boo and I often thought this might have some bearing on the matter. Once I inherited, which couldn’t have come at a worse time—my father had just died—I removed my backgammon board and second-place trophy in the Groton javelin toss from the Fifth Avenue pile of my now suspended childhood’s parodie treasure hunts and solo games of hide-and-seek. These mementos of a youth as rich in confusion as everything else soon rested in my dear pater’s splendidly appointed suite at the center of our family’s business headquarters, now eddying like newspapers over several floors of the magnificent Woolworth Building down on good old lower Broadway.

  Early on, it did sometimes trouble me that I had no conception, be it worthy or woolly, of where our money came from. On my first visit to our offices in the role of overlord, only a buoyant predisposition against moodiness of any sort, the hale Howell strain having firmly gotten the upper hand over the neurasthenic Boo blood in my genetic makeup, held my ignorance back from making a terrorized leap, over an abatis of accusing abacuses, into the chasm of self-doubt. However, the various people I encountered telephoning and carrying papers to and fro on my fascinated daily strolls through the premises all seemed to have a reasonably sure grip on what they were about. It would have seemed disloyal to pater Walter’s memory had I boldly climbed atop a nearby desk or switchboard, firing a pistol ceilingward like Herr Hitler in his Bavarian beer cellar (I had always wondered why he hadn’t vanished in a shower of plaster), to announce that what had been good enough for him just wasn’t good enough for me.

  Alger was then a young associate in the progressive law firm of Crimson, Cerise, Ruby and Vermilion. Aside from a shared passion for ornithology, our paths had intersected very little. But then, one perfectly enchanting Manhattan afternoon (wild flocks of birds wafting through a windy Central Park down below, tumbling bursts of prothonotary warblers stunned to find themselves hurled up here from the Chesapeake marshes by an unexpected storm; home from the office at my usual one P.M., I delightedly placed an antique Royal Navy spyglass to watch the grand, mad scene through a plate-glass window), his secretary Rosa rang up with the message that her employer hoped I would consent to meet him in an hour at a restaurant on Carmine Street. This held a tang of adventure, as I was none too well posted on what lay between upper Fifth’s bulky comforts and the Gothic origami of lower Broadway and Wall. However, my chauffeur had never let me down yet. Clapping on the figurative pith helmet of my second-best bowler as my fingers seized the nonce machete of my brolly, I gaily set off for Gothamite Bohemia.

  Nonetheless, I must have been tardy. By the time my smoke-gray Rolls gave passersby a brief glimpse of its chamois innards outside a transposed Left Bank boîte by the quaint name of Le Perroquet de Moscou, impatience at my non-arrival had driven Alger, who normally retained a glacial reserve, to amuse himself by idly drawing a chalk mark on a trash receptacle. Tossing the chalk aside, he greeted me with an animation unique in my experience of him, and we exchanged hearty if, on his part, rather hectic witticisms about the unlikelihood of two experienced bird-watchers like ourselves taking an interest in the common pigeons and canaries waddling hereabouts. Despite an enjoyment of this sort of chaffing that has always been close to unslakable in my case, I had frankly begun to wonder why we weren’t going inside when an explanation turned up in the form of a startling individual with whom, doubling my astonishment, Alger appeared to conclude he was acquainted almost on the spur of the moment.

  Bearded like a lion’s den and seemingly equipped with a dozen small facial variations on smiling and screwing up his eyes, the newcomer was rebuking our rather mild version of October with an overcoat of what I took to be poodle fur worn over square-toed but otherwise shapeless leather boots. Within, the poodle’s owner puffed like a bellows on a black and silver paper tube that I only gradually came to realize the poor fellow had mistaken for a cigarette. Its exotic reek took my breath away, leaving my dungeoned lungs to imagine as best they could what the fumes must be doing for his. Apparently even less close than my own eager but clumsy mental hounds to treeing Greenwich Village’s elusive sartorial comme il faut, he was also wearing a straw boater and nervously clutching a tennis racket by the neck and backwards.

  “Why, that’s no grip at all, old fellow!” I couldn’t stop myself exclaiming. “It’s not a, gun, you know. Here, let me show you,” as I helpfully reached for the racket.

  Twin trails of that dreadful smoke marking his cranium’s retrogressive jerk, he flinched back as if I’d lunged for his throat. What made him think I could have even estimated its probable location amid the mongrel merrymaking of poodle fur and human hirsutiae that hid his face from nostrils to tonsils and beyond, I can’t say. With a look of hatred and terror that I knew jolly well no action of mine since the day of my birth could possibly warrant, he jerked the racket-—still rather gauchely held, I noted with regret—aloft as if to strike, which was when Alger intervened.

  “Thurston,” he said, placing a restraining hand on the other fellow’s forearm, “this is an old friend of my mother’s family, Mr. Gulag Ivanovich Gliaglin. Of the, er, Baltimore Gliaglins. We were at Hopkins together. On behalf of the steering committee, he and I have been asked to invite you to consider a membership in the, ah, Explorers’ Club.”

  “A perfect pleasure, Gliaglin,” I cried. “And a fine institution. Do you know-”

  “No, no,” Gliaglin interrupted. “Explorers’ Club very strict rules has,” he explained to me. “Against many enemies we must protect—the Friars, Hasty Pudding. Password first,” he hissed at Alger.

  "‘I knew him, Horatio,’ “Alger hissed back.

  Visibly, or rather semi-visibly (his facial hair did take some getting used to, Wall Street and my other environs in 1933 being so universally clean-shaven that one often felt surrounded by thousands of mobile and talkative eggs), Gliaglin relaxed. “Good. We now go inside,” he said, ushering me through the door. “My God, who does not exist, I could devour prostitutes.”

  While I bow to no man in admiring candor, that did startle me. But after some sort of rushed conference with a whispering Alger at my back, I heard Gliaglin clear his throat and say, “Horse. I could eat horse.”

  Unluckily, none was on offer, so poor
Gliaglin had to content himself with tomato soup followed by a simple blood pudding. Prohibition having been repealed scant months before, Alger asked for a pink gin, a steak he wanted even pinker, and a side plate of beets. As for the third man at the table, having scanned the menu and always happy to try an unexpected dish, I ordered a soon delighted self a plate of moose-and-squirrel hash.

  As we ate, we talked of trivial things—the Russian Revolution, the plight of the working classes in industrial societies, the historical imperative our era faced of bringing forth a whole new type of man from a corrupt world’s charred guts (this last rather put me off requesting a wheel-by of the dessert cart, I must say!), and so on in the vein of amiable banter by which men of a certain standing like to demonstrate that they do scan the odd newspaper now and then. But I had a hunch we’d get down to brass tacks as soon as the plates were cleared, and right I was too.

  “Thurston,” said Alger abruptly, looking at the napkin wound up in his hands, “you told me once that your favorite birds were cardinals and robins, because of their beautiful coloring.”

  “So I did, by Jove,” I agreed, delighted that he remembered. “Hues seldom otherwise found in the animal kingdom, and all the more glorious for the contrast.”

  “Well,” Alger said, “I took that as a hint, to be candid.”

  “Only a hint? I’d have thought it was a fairly blunt statement, old fellow. Or did I err in thinking we two bird lovers spoke each other’s language, my dear chap?” I said, mystified.

  “Well, it was several years ago,” Alger said casually, tossing aside the napkin and closing his eyes as if in thought. “Why, let me see—yes, it was just after Herbert Hoover became President.”

  He opened his eyes, which looked directly at me with an intensity I found disconcerting. Had I been a rare variety of thrush, or perhaps the last dodo, his gaze would have made more sense. “Hoover had no use for birds,” Alger informed me. “But Roosevelt does—although he prefers a blue eagle to either cardinals or robins. And you? Do you still make the same choice?”

  “Of course I do,” I said. “When it comes to what matters most to him, a man doesn’t change his opinions simply because of a headline or two,” although I felt rather sorry to have missed the one about the new President’s ornithological interests. I had never even heard of the blue eagle, but then my pater Walter’s friend Franklin had always been whimsical. Not having seen him in many years, I wondered if he still leapt about while playing badminton as I remembered him doing in one flower-fleecy upstate summer of my boyhood, while fat bumblebees slowly ferried bits of sunlight to a meadow and L., my earliest and only love without feathers, began to wave her arms gravely as if to conduct their flight, in a broad-brimmed hat and a white dress with a sailor collar. Gradually, as an Abelard-ish young Thurston’s springy steps across a variety of local flora—all made of air, all air!—brought me bounding nearer my hintless Heloise, I became aware that she was in a rowboat which had begun to sink, fortunately in a pond not more than two feet deep at its most menacing.

  “I’m sorry?” I said, as the restaurant staff, whose waiters could have competed in the shot put at any track and field event on earth and indeed seemed disconsolate that attending to diners like ourselves had interrupted their practice, thoughtfully brought me back to Manhattan with a smashing of crockery.

  “I was just saying,” Alger informed me, “how glad Mr. Gliaglin and I both are to hear that you haven’t changed your views.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re glad,” I said, perhaps a bit tartly. “I hope the cardinals are glad, too.”

  Gliaglin had lit another of those foul tubes of his. “Indeed they are, Gospodin Howell,” he told me, with a luxurious exhalation of its noxious fumes. “I can say with authority the cardinals are glad.”

  “As are the robins, Gulag Ivanovich,” Alger seconded him, his glacial reserve thawing noticeably.

  In fact, Gliaglin was growing frankly if not rankly genial, so far as I could make out through the underbrush. “I think maybe you are understanding pretty quick how Explorers’ Club can hang itself with rope I buy from it,” he told me with what I could only assume, from a brief but newly friendly gleam of gray dentition amid the smoke and poodle fur, was a roguish grin. “I think maybe you are knowing before we meet that there is also politics here.”

  “Well, Mr. Gliaglin, it’s not so easy as all that to pull the wool over my eyes,” I said, I trust smoothly. “You’re Democrats, aren’t you?”

  The look that flickered in Gliaglin’s eye bore an uncanny resemblance to the expression that had passed across my old Latin tutor’s face when I’d avowed my passionate desire to read Gibbon in the original. A moment later, however, he had emitted a laugh that crashed like surf, and was clapping me uproariously on the back with a hand whose hairy knuckles and slatelike nails the old Boo blood, making a rare cameo appearance in my jugular, would have voted to greet with a shudder had not that cowardly impulse been vetoed by the ruddier paternal corpuscles.

  “Da!” Gliaglin cried. “As we all must be these days, if we wish to participate in the great events now ongoing in Washingtonograd. Nothing to fear we have but fear, plus FBI and Menshevik provocateurs—your worry, eh, Tovarich?” He turned and spoke rapidly to Alger in what I took to be some gurgling sort of Baltimorean patois, at whose audible note of reproof Alger bristled.

  “Priscilla is not indiscreet,” he said stiffly—instantly winning my own warm endorsement. Whatever the facts of the case, in my world no man lets his wife’s character be impugned in public, even in an indecipherable Maryland dialect in a restaurant on Carmine Street. “I assure you, Gulag Ivanovich, none of the women at that flower show would have had the faintest idea whose nickname ‘Koba’ is. In any case, her rose won—and was the General Secretary so displeased about thaū Honestly?”

  “We never told him.”

  “You never told him?” Alger looked genuinely stunned; indeed, if only for Priscilla’s sake, hurt.

  “Be glad we never told him. You would have shared fate of rose. Head on display for few days until smell gets bad. Then ash-heap of history along with Kulaks and Zinoviev. Other roses,” he said in a newly loud voice, addressing neither of us so far as I could see.

  “Now, fellows,” I made haste to interpose, not liking to see Alger less than spruce. “Keep in mind, I’m not even in the Explorers’ Club yet! I’m sure your General Secretary wouldn’t be happy to hear that you’ve been gossiping about club business in front of me.” At this, Gliaglin looked at me with new respect, at least if I wasn’t misconstruing the other facial elements in play as he blanched.

  “Do tell me!” an eager self continued. “What do I need to do to join—is there some sort of hazing involved? Can’t say I’d look forward to that much, but I’ve been upside down on the wrong end of a cricket bat before, and…”

  “No, no, nothing like that,” Alger said. “Just a trifle, really. Do you recall your old friend Henry Wallace?”

  To be honest, when one boasts the scads and squads of acquaintances I was handed along with my name, address, future college, and stock portfolio—at birth, is what I mean—then combing through them on the sort of short notice Alger’s eyes gave me can seem like the task of Rapunzel. But memory soon groped its way westward, found itself looking up at the gates of Colonel Wild Hiram Jones’s New Mexico Ranch for Privileged Boys, slipped into the rustic dormitory on Mnemnesia’s silent, limber feet, and stopped at an audibly buncombial bunk near my own. Thence—as the muscles of my now youthful frame began to ache from the unexpectedly spirited pony I’d been given that morning, temporarily dashing my plans to write an excited, pining letter to my beloved L. back East—a fatiguingly voluble voice was droning.

  “Hankie!” I cried exultantly. “Three-Hankie Wallace. Of course I do.”

  “Are you aware that Roosevelt has named him Secretary of Agriculture?”

  “Didn’t altogether know the post existed, to be utterly candid with you. But I must write
him my congratulations.”

  “Exactly,” Alger said. “And when you do, Thurston, I’d like you to recommend me for a job.”

  “In the Department of Algerculture, Agri—Er, Agriculture, Alger? Whatever for? Isn’t it a lot of … well, crops, and so on? Grim reapers, ordure, sleepily grappling with unknown udders at dawn and whatnot? I wouldn’t have thought it was your sort of thing at all.”

  “I feel a vocation.”

  “Well! I can see you don’t call it the Explorers’ Club for nothing,” I said.

  “Neither does Tovarich Wallace,” Gliaglin explained—that is, his tone was explanatory. “But a recommendation from you places the whole matter above suspicion.”

  “Well, that’s flattering, Gliaglin. Many thanks,” I beamed. “I do like the sound of that. That’s me all over, I must say! ‘Above suspicion’—and Forty-second Street, too!”

  Despite my offer, heartily repeated amid our curbside adieux before Rolls and I became one once more, of assistance with his tennis game, I never saw Gliaglin again. Shortly after I had written my letter to Wallace, Alger informed me that our mutual friend had been called home to Baltimore after a bout of scarlet fever, and that our chapter of the Explorers’ Club was being summarily disbanded. But I learned that only from a postcard, for Alger himself was already in Washington, making a brilliant career as one of the vibrant young minds whose suave zeal was to propel a confused nation—the self most patriotically included-—through first the New Deal and then the war as dashingly as the wind making sense of the clatter of masts and rival rudders off Newport at the start of the America’s Cup.

  The higher his star climbed, the more I felt warmed by it, if you’ll indulge what I don’t doubt must be some fairly dubious physics. You see, I had often marked life’s milestones by fretting, on one occasion aloud to L., that my own stint on the planet wasn’t amounting to much, except in cash and securities. (Obeying her newly ringed hand’s suggestion that boredom might reasonably flee a rampart only pity’s sepoys could defend, my love’s vague eyes drifted like paired starlings toward the passing night outside the clacking window, as pater Walter’s private railway car hurled us toward a Palm Beach honeymoon.) But knowing that I was the man who’d gotten Alger Hiss his first job in Washington did brighten the otherwise muddled tableau with some sense of having contributed a small rocket to the universal fireworks display. Despite having long since exchanged a thrilled crouch on a parquet floor for somnolent recumbence in an armchair, in a progress whose one constant had been the voices of a succession of housekeepers politely requesting me to briefly agitate both feet in the air, I followed my protege’s ascent quite as avidly as I had the exploits of my favorite heroes of the Sunday funnies as a child, at that fist-to-nose age when one is still under a lovely impression, perhaps more easily retained in my case than most, that only one copy of the newspaper has been printed.