Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

by Carson, Tom

  At the same time, may I say, I can put two and two together as expeditiously as any man. Once I have, two and two may well simply stare up like the urchins Ignorance and Want emerging from the Ghost of Christmas Present’s cloak in Dickens, but there they are side by side just the same. In particular, a newsreel glimpse of a tobacco-less and thus twice tortured Gliaglin in the prisoners’ dock at one of the Moscow show trials did make me sit bolt upright next to a snoozing L. in our private theater, not least with surprise that Stalin, notoriously mistrustful xenophobe that he was, had ever risked including a Baltimorean in his entourage to begin with. A later newsreel’s glimpses of a Soviet flag fluttering madly alongside an equally energetic swastika at the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact also jolted recollection’s ever idling engine into a belated recognition of the hammer-and-sickle symbol Alger had been tracing in chalk on the trash bin when I alighted outside Le Perroquet de Moscou that day in long-gone ‘33.

  Wondering where my duty lay and whether I ought to get it to its feet, I asked myself if I should contact someone in authority. But a dread dating back to Groton days of simply advertising my status as the last to catch on, just as I had always been the first to stand a round of cocoa after intramurals, made the prospect too daunting for this old boy’s hand to find either telephone receiver or quill.

  In any case, Pearl Harbor soon made allies of the Soviet Union and ourselves and, in the March of Time, great pals out of Uncle Joe and my father’s old chum Franklin (had he broken a leg? He was really much too old for skiing, particularly with the nation in crisis). With some relief, my memory revised the curious affair in which I’d played a none too nimble part into a privileged glimpse of my friend’s political prescience—the very quality, so I assumed, that made him valuable in Washington.

  Within three years, our country’s great crusade was in sight of its dark, crook-mapped Jerusalem. I gathered victory was in the air on one of my periodic guided tours of the Stock Exchange, where that piratical parvenu Joseph P. Kennedy, glasses and choppers flashing in their perennial duel for his nose’s rather modest favors, buttonholed me to crow about the return of his malarially frail second son from the rigors of the South Pacific. The bespoke, so to speak, issue of Reader’s Digest detailing the lad’s exploits that old Joe had thrust on me was still nestled between pin-striped arm and mildly bruised rib cage when I returned to the office via my private elevator. As I settled into an armchair for whose leather the bulls of half an Argentinian herd had been beheaded on the pampas, my secretary promptly buzzed me: “Mr. Acheson is on the line from Washington, sir.”

  The then Under Secretary of State and I had been at school together. “Dean!” I cried as Reader’s Digest plopped softly carpetward, unread and unretrieved. “How goes the battle?”

  “Well, I’m on my way out to Topeka and Santa Fe for some speeches, so I both would and will say ‘Reasonably well’—not to put you on the same footing with hoi polloi,” he answered in his usual tone, which was that of Mowgli’s friend Bagheera in a good humor. “But something here can’t wait till I get back. See here, Thurston: you’ve known Alger Hiss a long time, haven’t you?”

  “Indeed I have. Can’t say I’ve seen much of him since Roosevelt came in, though—you fellows keep him too busy for more than the occasional Christmas card.”

  “He’s still finding time to send those? We’ll have to do something about that. In fact, we are, and that’s the reason I’m calling. We’re considering having him chair the organizing meeting of the United Nations next spring in San Francisco.”

  “Sounds impressive. What is it?”

  “It’s a mid-sized, rather lovely city on the West Coast of the United States,” my caller retorted briskly. Dean, may I say, had been one of the least cruel of my Groton classmates, but the bent was pandemic. With a chipper apology for his lack of willpower, he gave me a quick rub-down—no, it’s “rundown,” isn’t it?—on the nature and purpose of the world body at whose founding Alger was indeed to play concierge if not midwife come 1945.

  “It’s damned important, like every other job aside from the Vice Presidency these days,” Dean said, “and once Alger’s name came up, some of the lower orders here at State raised allegations that I must say I think are pure horse hockey. But I thought I’d better check in with you, since you were his first sponsor over at the Agriculture Department.”

  “And a proud one,” I said.

  “Well, just to reassure me, then. Look, as one haberdasher’s favorite customer to another, or possibly the same haberdasher’s favorite customer to another—hang it, Anglomane to Anglomane, old Grotonian to old Grotonian: is the fellow reliable?”

  “Absolutely! He’s a dedicated Communist. You know how disciplined they are.”

  Chuckling, Dean thanked me and rang off. Only some years later did it pop to my mind that he might well have thought I was joking.

  Dean, of course, later famously said, “I will not turn my back on Alger Hiss.” Fond as I was of Alger, I had to admit that I wouldn’t have risked it either. Not that the self was required to do so microphonically before the committee of which surly, sweaty young Congressman Cancer was such an indefatigable member, busying himself in pursuit of Alger as urgently as if he feared that he too would turn into a pumpkin like the one in which had been hidden those ridiculous microfilms. Depriving me of the chance to hire a lawyer with whom I might later have played backgammon as we reminisced about the odd ordeal that had made us pals, they didn’t call me as a witness, and indeed I can’t fathom how my testimony would have done Alger any good.

  Nor was I summoned at the perjury trial that eventually sent my old friend to the hoosegow, for which he departed from the steps of the Foley Square courthouse on a blustery March day whose hurrying clouds seemed to augur the future Senator Tumor and Vice President Malignancy. Having turned up with a few other well-wishers to provide what flimsy good cheer we could, I saw that Alger’s handcuffs prevented a farewell handshake, and called his name instead. For the last time, my beclouded eyes met his glacial reserve. Then he was off to the pen, and I back to the penthouse.

  As the postwar Cadillac that had replaced the Rolls purred us back to Central Park past streets shot from cannon, I saw that L.’s gaze was fogged too. But not, I’m afraid, noticeably more so than usual, although I took her gloved hand in my ungloved one nonetheless.

  Yes—she was my earliest and only love. That’s why I hope I’ll be forgiven for not having plucked up the courage from the proverbial rag-and-bone shop until now to admit that I wasn’t hers, and never had been. Ever since our pre- Titanic to-and-fros in Mamzel Coudepiay’s dancing class—the sacred, resin-squeaky spot where I first laid eyes on L., amid peers of both sexes for whom adolescence described a more or less lamentable condition, rather than the state of grace she made of it—I had been the besotted, madly volunteering partner, she the reluctant, easily distracted one. Although I don’t mean to fault her dancing, for once in my devoted arms she’d swirl like caramel, her neck cast back in utter indifference to the goggling, boyish phiz ardent to nibble it—a heedlessness whose only interruptions were brief stares whenever one of my all but forgotten left feet would land with a thud in the wrong place, something she knew from the vibration alone.

  From shared summer jaunts upstate to exclamatory au hasard encounters on European tours, our moneyed families’ long friendship kept putting me in her path throughout our teens, just as our shared social set would once we became adults. Yet candy-backed child or grown-up sylph, she’d drift toward me without the faintest worry that she’d bump into anything much. As I hardly cared to risk turning her obliviousness into active ill will by forcing her to think about my presence, all I could do was lift my cap and later skimmer with a smile as I stepped off into the poison ivy.

  I also knew I had no hope of altering her nonexistent feelings, since I lacked the prerequisite that permits a wooer to sit down at the heart-shaped baccarat table in Cupid’s Monte Carlo—whether he be flush or
bankrupt when he stands and lights his final cigarette, tux wilted from the strain. Simply put, as we both knew, I utterly failed to interest her, and love without interest is as impossible as, in quite another realm, is interest without capital.

  Since, with modest luck, L. and I will soon mark—although, to my undimmed regret, not celebrate; not with songs—an anniversary that Titania and Oberon might envy, I suppose the vulgar guess most likely to spring to mind, though I’d advise against lips if you value my indulgence, is that her people lost their loot in the Crash, making me the nearest sled in the blizzard if not the only boat in the storm. Port, whatever. In any case, chronology alone refutes that arid speculation, as we were married during the Boom.

  Whatever prompted her to board the small craft of my love and push off from her mind’s dark shore with a satin-slippered, trembling, but irreducibly graceful foot, material fears had nothing to do with it—as I can testify, since the fortune she came into upon her father’s later death of apoplexy in California, in the midst of indelicate exertions, was to almost double my own. As to the actual reason that she wed the long rejected self, L. has never told me in the several decades since—and as it can plainly be no very happy story, I feel that only a bully, which I decline to be under any circumstances, would badger her to divulge it.

  For some months, however, it had been apparent to me that what I saw as the tour deforce social occasions of the merrymaking Manhattan we shared—banquets, avant-garde charity balls, and now more and more often weddings, as one after another couple first paired at Mamzel Coudepiay’s went Charlestoning into madcap matrimony—were for L. respites from other, visibly more exhausting amusements, at least when she even put in an appearance to raise dizzy dollars for lynched Negroes or watch the Carraways get hitched. As the twilight beneath her eyes turned to night, she developed modest eccentricities, as for instance her refusal to doff her fur coat amid her friends’ evening gowns, brief and accidental views of one bare shoulder or the other now the closest one came to glimpsing her pale, delicately veined arms.

  In a harsh voice, she’d speak of authors and vagabond artistic personalities unknown to the rest of us, not that their alien names would necessarily have been obscure outside a crowd whose members, the self fondly included, would as a rule experience an almost unbearable intellectual stimulus simply from being forced to read the coupons they clipped. At a farewell dinner for young Lindbergh, I watched in dismay as L. moodily set her place card on fire, dropping it into her finger bowl a moment before her own dear digits would have been burnt, then watched the charred remnants swirl until, to her surprise, her tiara suddenly fell forward over her eyes, like an encrusted blindfold.

  Then she vanished to Provincetown for a week with one of her vivacious friends, a wealthy widow with a young child. On her return, L. found her invalid mother dead; it had long been expected, but the timing was obviously dreadful. That same day, she came to see me in my old Fifth Avenue pile. In terms that brooked no sentimental interpretation of her decision—although her swain’s heart dove off a cliff for the pearl of its result as eagerly as any loinclothed Polynesian teen—she accepted my long-standing offer of marriage: a lamp long left in a window on no road she’d ever taken, and that no phaeton she’d ever thumbed a lift on had passed by.

  Dazed to tears by the special sorrow of the happiness that was mine, I pressed her to announce our nuptials as speedily as possible. I was unsure if I played the role of question or answer to the urgency in her bruised eyes—which incidentally grew, to my bewilderment, downright haggard when, hoping to amuse an obviously disconsolate L., I sportively told her, “Well, my dear—if nothing else, I can afford a carriage! And the bicycle. And, by God, a zeppelin built for two, if you say the word.” That sweetest of America’s old songs had long held a special charm for me, but as it seemed to disturb her I never once hummed it again, and had my housekeeper remove its sheet music from the rack atop our Steinway.

  Still, I won’t have you think her behavior in all the years since has ever given me cause for reproach. A search of my brain more thorough than a burglar’s, which is more or less how I feel when I set figurative and stealthy foot inside those curtained, gray-and-pink precincts, yields only one smudged memory. One desolate afternoon in the early Forties, coming home to tell L. of some terrible news in the war, I found her in a bower with our son’s tutor, whose name eluded me even then. Her makeup was disarranged, and the silver pot and china cups on the white-linened table beneath the trellis had been untouched at my arrival, despite the frantic tone in which she asked the fellow, “Won’t you have some more Maxwell House, Mr. X? There’s always time for one more cup.” Yet the recollection itself is so flimsy and inconclusive—and the dialogue so odd, not least since L. favored espresso; besides, our son would have been a toddler—that I often lean toward calling this vivid but elusive tidbit of reality a dream, or perhaps a story I heard about another sad couple that lodged itself in an autobiographical cupboard by mistake. I rather fear my inner life is something of a grand hotel in the off season, with far too many vacancies despite its first-rate restaurant.

  Whatever may be missing when I look into her eyes—a temporary blurring of life’s solitude in an exchange of glances, a tender ardor that, in any case, I know only in imagination, though I am sure I’d recognize it in an instant were L.’s face ever, miraculously or merely by accident, to offer it to me—we have grown comfortable with each other. Given longevity, almost any marriage, I suppose, eventually evolves into the cozy story of Mr. and Mrs. Crusoe, who have always built the signal fire in the same place, share pleasure in the promontories they have named together and the birds that they call pets, and know the offshore shipwreck’s skeleton in their sleep. Together, as we watch sunset coming on from atop our hefty heap of the GNP, which gives us a view of the emblazoned western sky far more magnificent than most, we are decorous, mildly addled, considerate, even fond. I try not to think of what might have been, and hope against hope that L. doesn’t dwell on it either—aware as I so painfully am that in her case no Thurston would appear in the picture, unless it were as a gamboling clown juggling stocks and bonds to amuse children on the street below her clouds. Next to the heroes of star-crossed romances, for whom the sand in the awful hourglass always sprints, I know I’m blessed. I’ve been allowed to spend a long, long life next to my love, for all that she feels none for me.

  Her presence is my consolation for my inconsolability in her presence. If that’s the best deal life could offer me, I’d still call it a bargain—a better one than any I ever encountered in the stock market, even during the Boom.

  The son she bore me in September ’39 may have bored, or rather disconcerted, her. But from where I sat—beside her bed, sporting a grin both grander and more grateful than any Roosevelt ever tossed the voters, and babbling more noticeably like an idiot than usual—he was the great proof that a marriage need not be a success to have one. On him I lavished the adoration that L.’s grimaces of distress forbade me to drown her in, giving him all that money could buy and love break its aortal bank to provide.

  As he grew, I was delighted by his emerging bent for literature and sensitive but manly interest in the arts. And moved in other ways he didn’t know, because of how those predilections mirrored his now indifferent mother’s old pursuits. At his encouragement, I began to sample the dusty volumes he’d de-cobwebbed and the new ones he was adding to the shelves in the Fifth Avenue pile’s long disused library, and found the experience unexpectedly congenial. The pinings I discovered could be soothed by poetry and fiction felt oddly familiar, and it did cross my mind that they might have been gratified with less anguish under a reading lamp all along.

  Well, too late now, I told myself. But not for our son, who in any case had far less trouble than had Dad in getting the fairer sex to find him worth consideration. Suzanne, the French-Canadian girl he brought down from Andover for a few weekends one year, was a beauty from her parabolic hipbones to the light brown hair
that flowed in two long waves from a central part on her high forehead. She was also as charming as Joan must have been to the dauphin, and utterly devoted to my boy.

  The daughter, so he told me, of a fine old Montreal family called the Cohen-Chansons, she made a hobby of the second half of the name by singing artless but beguiling ditties of her own composition, accompanying herself on the guitar. As the fog of old age grounds more and more flights from this particular airport, I find that I can only remember part of one: “Mes yeux sont verts, mes lèvres sont roses / En te donnant un baiser avec mes yeux, ne puis-je pas te regarder avec mes lèvres? / Non, je ne te trahiras jamais / Avec not’ / professeur d’histoire / Pendant que ton père il meurt…". In all honesty, it was breathtaking to see the loving intensity in the girl’s green eyes as she crooned those lines—some puppy-love promise whose bone largely eluded me, since I can never venture onto the unfamiliar golf course of a foreign tongue without a hefty stock of mulligans—and gather that one’s own flesh and blood had inspired it.