by Carson, Tom
“Well—but they were traitors, by Jove! Of course Alger and the Rosenbergs betrayed their country. That was their job—that’s what traitors do! If I could see that, I assumed anyone could. But these people,” I said, staring around my shelves, “call themselves the patriots—so what on earth is going on?”
“Nobody really knows,” my son said. “I’m not sure even they do.”
I sat back, feeling exhausted. “What would you like me to do with these?” I asked, waving my hand around the room.
“That’s up to you,” he said. “Some of the parents have gone on reading them, and thrown their kids out instead. But I’d like it if you burned them.”
“Done, my boy!” I said, with what his eyes told me on the instant was a sad remnant of his father’s hearty brio. A second earlier, lowering my hand, I had noticed it trembling. Now, although I’d planned to rise and hug my son before he took his leave, I found that my knees were advising—no, imploring—quite another plan, which was to stay put.
Though briefly mystified, I soon gathered what had happened: I was old. Well, here it was, with whatever experiences it would bring. I thought of Alger, still chipper and glacially reserved somewhere, and of virulent, raging Congressman Cancer. And even of Gliaglin, to whose fuzzy face, rescued from the brink of memory’s oblivion, I saw my son’s had a slight resemblance—at least in the boy’s goateed phase, which I believe this was. They all swam about, like the framed but bursting covers of the comic books on my den’s walls.
At the door, the only one of them who was present in the flesh had turned, and was hesitating: “Dad?”
“Yes, what is it?”
“Do you remember what you said earlier—about Jack Egan being my real father?”
“Who? Oh, Jack Egan … Did I say anything like that?” I asked, confused.
He paused.
“No,” he said. “Neither of us did.”
With some sheepishness, I will admit that I granted my comics collection several stays of execution from its fiery demise, and even considered an outright reprieve once the boy was back at Andover. But this was my son, so off to the incinerator the lot went one mild but windy day in April, in what year I don’t recall. While I found I had no real regrets, I also had nothing to replace Jack Egan and his cohorts with, certainly not in the now dismal den. Neither could I stir much desire in myself to resume getting the good old Times and WSJ, which I couldn’t help suspecting must have been somehow party to the whole enterprise.
In any case, the day’s main drama soon became the moment of exchanging a view from one window for a view from another, with fine shadings of indecision and remorse provided by a comedy duo of kneecaps whose long-stanched flair for vaudeville had come at last into its own. All that tepidly went on until, as I was breakfasting with L. one morning, an invisible hyena leapt out of the floral arrangement to bury its teeth and all four paws in my chest. As the self keeled carpetward, L. dropped her napkin, knelt with a small cry, and wondered in a voice that waltzed and tangoed quite alarmingly about the room which telephone number was the one that summoned ambulances.
They must have given me a dose of painkillers, for I was woozy in the gurney that wheeled me into exploratory surgery at top speed-”a mile a minute,” as we used to say in my youth, thinking that nothing could sound faster. Trotting alongside it, L. looked uncharacteristically distraught. But something else was pressing on her; apparently, she was worried—the things that women can dream up to divert their thoughts from the real danger!—that I might start babbling gibberish under the anesthetic.
“Just don’t bring up our son, that’s all,” I thought I heard her say.
“Wha’?” I managed to mumble, above the noise of jiggling wheels and below the fluorescent flash of a thousand passing lights. “Is he in trouble? I’ll-”
“Just don’t bring up the kid, all right?” she said in harsh tones that were most unlike her, jabbing an equally atypical forefinger at my horizontal, already much beleaguered bosom. I had no idea what she was talking about, although my last, vague thought before a rubber mask pressed down to cup my face from nose to chin was that the boy had been at Andover for an awfully long time.
Afterward, when the doctors told me what they’d found, I asked that L. not be informed. Then I was sent home to resume my game of windowed hopscotch with the sunset. Having shared this bit of private terminology with him some years before, I took what amusement I could in writing my son that I’d been diagnosed with terminal nixon.
I still haven’t told L. She is fragile, and—let me put this delicately—I fear that her fragility has made her all too resourceful in finding compensations for it. Having seen the results in our much younger years, I would rather be a memory than a temptation. However, I may have a few years left, and I’ve sometimes thought that she and I might yet sail away somewhere. Not that I’d really know the difference between here and elsewhere now!
Indeed, as I mentally palpate my nixon’s daily encroachments on my innards, I’m often not even sure which of us is the malignancy, which the comfortable old self. But all that will get settled with no need for help from my cerebellum.
Our son, of course, is made of sterner stuff than his mother. On his most recent visit from Andover, I had just asked after Suzanne when he blurted out his wish that he and not I were the one afflicted with nixonous insides. Putting aside my reading (The Man Who Was Thursday), I said, Tut-tut, my boy: you’ve got a future.
We were in the now empty den off the once more disused library, him crouched as before in front of my armchair—the only survivor of my old burrow’s trappings. He glanced around at the bare walls, where the patterns of lighter wallpaper left by the now absent frames still stood out, although faintly.
“Then fight, Daddy"—an unprecedented monicker in our relationship, may I say. He swallowed hard, looking most unlike himself; he’d shaved the goatee, I noticed. “Fight like you were still a Marine, and this was Iwo Jima.”
“What an odd thing to say!” I guffawed. “Me a Marine! That’s rich and so am I, as I always say. Unless Andover’s wasting your time and my money, you know very well that the proper phrase is ‘as if.’ And this is Fifth Avenue, not some Godforsaken tiny island out in the Pacific, and you also know that there’s no hope once you’ve got my kind of Nixon. So what are you asking me to do-’Rage against the dying of the light’? Whatever for? To please Dylan Thomas, a Welsh sot who once vomited, in my presence, into Margie Dumont’s best tureen, not long before making his own less than splendid goodnight? Did you know him—should I feel I owe him a personal favor of some sort? No, no, my darling child. There’s no real point. When I die, I plan to slide into it like a bath at the end of a lovely long day of hunting.”
IV
Sail Away
FOR THE LONGEST TIME, I DIDN’T KNOW DAISY BUCHANAN ALL THAT well. We knew of one another, of course; ours was a smaller world than you might guess from its equivalents in a later era’s wan salad of saucy fun, where every suburban “gang” in possession of a hi-fi and a blender could fancy itself le tout Levittown. We Twenties free spirits were more exclusive but also more publicized, by a press whose goggling readers knew their place too well to mistake a vicarious participation in our frolics for equality. As our case might have been described by Sir Winston Churchill, whom my dear bear of a father, then floating a loan in London, bucked up over brandy in 1916 after the pudgy young First Lord of the Admiralty had been sacked in the wake of the Dardanelles disaster: Never have so many been so entranced by so few.
Father had most of the raising of me. In the years when I grew from a mere slip of a girl into a modest minx of a maiden, and needed her help and guidance most, Mother had become an addled recruit to the cause of women’s suffrage instead. On the tiniest summons, she would duck down to Washington to parade unbecomingly before the White House with her fellow females, carrying wordy placards, while the poor, glowering man who put food on our table and paid for her train tickets took what comfort he could in laughin
g at my girlish pranks and teaching me my manners.
Even after Mother returned from one of her suffragette antics to breathlessly announce that she’d been knocked down by a pair of sailors while attempting to push a petition into President Wilson’s carriage in a place called Lafayette Square, and Father had joshingly retorted, to my own barely muffled titters, that he might well have given her a good kick himself had he been a witness to the scene, she wouldn’t abandon her mania. Increasingly, when Father brought his knife down with a crash at the dinner table to implore her once again to recognize how foolish and insulting to him her behavior was, she’d startle her daughter if not husband into silence by holding up her hand to stop his tongue, as if he were the butcher, and saying that she simply couldn’t bear another tirade.
I found this most unjust, since she was causing all the trouble and wouldn’t even hear him out. Instead, when Father then brought his fork down with another crash and continued straight on just like Admiral Farragut, as he invariably did, she’d flee to her upstairs drawing room in tears, babbling about headaches, exhaustion, and letters to write. Minutes later, nervously fingering her apron, Lii Gagni, the newest of our maids—a horrid young creature, from Denver by way of Sheboygan, on whom Mother had taken pity; her eyes poking out of her face like toes from a sprung shoe, she was as out of place under a white cap as was Mr. Twain’s hero in that odd chapter where, to gather information, Huck dresses up in calico and sunbonnet—would come in to ask if it would be all right to take a tray up to the missus.
Eventually, the scandal that listening to Father had taught me to fear most occurred, and Mother was arrested with some other women after chaining herself to the White House gates one foggy dawn. Nor was this any mere formality, as Father learned to his considerable indignation when, already in a rage at having to set aside his business for the day, he bustled down to Washington himself. Mother had already been sent to the notorious Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, where she and several dozen other suffragettes were incarcerated alongside women of the street and diseased Negresses. On his return, Father declared that, if nothing else, this ordeal was sure to make Mother finally see the light, and took me to Delmonico’s for pastry.
Instead, within a few days, we heard with horror that she and the others had made things even worse by going on what they called a hunger strike for the right to be treated as “political prisoners,” which made no sense to me whatsoever. As Father said, they could have called themselves petunia prisoners, and the noun rather than the adjective would still determine their situation. Mother spent thirteen days being led out of her cell and force-fed with some sort of horrible device pushed up her nose or down her throat by cursing prison guards, who after all were only concerned about her health.
When she was finally released and came back to New York, she took me to her drawing room, murmuring in a voice I’d come to dread that all she asked of me was to always remember this sight. I could have told her on the spot that doing so wouldn’t be any problem, since I had nightmares for a week. It was the dingy prison shift she’d worn in Occoquan, which was of a dreadfully inelegant cut, had probably been touched by one or more of the diseased Negresses, and was also covered with perfectly repulsive bloodstains and food stains from when they had had to force-feed her. Father told Lii Gagni to burn it.
Particularly as she hadn’t had a robust constitution to begin with, Mother’s health never really recovered from her time in jail, and since the reason was so embarrassing, her friends and family seldom spoke of it. In fact, on Election Day in 1920, she was so ill that she couldn’t even go out to the polling place and vote, which did strike both Father and me as some sort of poetic justice after all her carrying on.
Not long after that, Father made a killing on an investment in some oil wells in Oklahoma, and went out to Los Angeles to drill for more. It must have been a month or two before I understood he wasn’t coming back, although Mother may have known this earlier than I. Once she had what she wanted outside the house and he had what he wanted in it, it was as if he had decided they no longer had a topic; without the distraction of disgust to beguile him, he simply lost interest in her. And in me too, now that I had stopped being the female in the family who wasn’t Mother and was just someone else who wanted more of his time, as if I had been stupid Lil Gagni coming to bother him with stammered questions about the pantry keys.
In tearful letters, I begged to at least be allowed to visit him in California, if not come live in the marvelous Moorish-looking house that he’d had built for himself up in some hills there, of which he sent me a framed photograph for my birthday. But his replies to me were terse, and as I was no longer in reach of a tie whose knot I could playfully unravel with tongue pressed between my teeth, a gold watch chain that I could gigglingly tug out of its fob pocket, or a bald head I could kiss by surprising it in an armchair from behind, I had no means of changing his attitude. At twenty years old, I found myself trapped in a vast, gloomy brownstone from which the smell of cigar smoke had faded, with no company but a melancholy semi-invalid in an upstairs drawing room and some increasingly impertinent servants.
Luckily, besides paying for the help and all our other necessities, Father allowed us to charge whatever we liked to him, and also sent us a huge monthly allowance. If nothing else, that did give me a reason to be grateful that the Nineteenth Amendment had passed, since if it hadn’t and her health had been better I was sure Mother would have promptly poured every extra cent we got from Father right down her favorite rat-hole. As it was, nowadays she hardly cared about the necessities, often sending trays of food back down the stairs untouched. So I had all the say in how we spent our loot, and the Hispano-Suiza barely made a dent in it. Although soon enough there was more than one dent in the Hispano-Suiza, after one of my new girl chums, shrilly exclaiming, “I don’t care about the vote, what I want is the wheel,” had playfully wrestled the latter item out of our chauffeur’s hands, Cheng not having access to the former in any case, on a wild ride back from West Egg one night.
It was sometime in that same spring of ‘21 that, tiptoeing at two A.M. past Mother’s drawing room in my stocking feet, my shoes held in my hand, I heard her voice call faintly, “My dear, is that you?” My already practiced custom was to just keep going until either she stopped calling or I stopped hearing her, but as luck and a beaker of bathtub gin would have it, I lost my balance just then and slipped against the door, which had swung open before I could quite sort out which of my hands was free, though the answer proved to be neither, and stop it.
Under a brocaded lamp, Mother was at her escritoire in one of those starched white high-necked blouses that, along with her old-fashioned, high-piled chignon, made her look rather amusingly like a superannuated Gibson girl in a wheelchair. “It’s so late, I was concerned for you,” she started to say, to which I might have answered that it was much too late for that. But then she got a good look at me, and stopped saying anything.
Even I had to admit to a silent doubt that I was looking my best. Although my hair was bobbed too short by now to ever really look disarranged, except for Grace Scape’s chewing-gum in my bangs, my white crepe gown with the scalloped hemline was practically off one shoulder, and one of my two Cuban-heeled pumps (I felt almost positive there had been two in all, back when I and they had first met) had just thudded to the floor from my hand. I also probably still had a big streak of soot on my face, left over from when drunken Dicky Foulard had started playing Jack the Ripper with the coal scuttle. One of our favorite games at parties was to pretend we were all murderers and then, surveying the room’s available implements, announce what we would use to do each other in. The best weapon—which was always the unlikeliest, of course—won the match.
Not without a tingle of triumph, my other hand now informed me that it held Dicky’s silver flask, from which, having dropped the other pump to the floor at some point in the recent present, I’d now concluded I could use a snort. As Mother went on staring, hands to
her wheelchair’s armrests, I felt the need for a ciggie to follow up the gin, and fished one from the beaded bag I’d found hanging from my not yet gown-free shoulder. “What?” I finally demanded, lighting it and blowing out smoke, some of which seemed to get stuck in the chewing-gum in my bangs.
That was when I heard a sound no one had in years, which was the tinkling little hiccup noises that Mother made when she laughed. It seemed to catch her by surprise as well, as if her throat was so long out of the habit that it had gotten giggling all mixed up with vomiting. Softly, she laughed in her wheelchair, and looked at me standing there, and blinked back lustrous tiny tears from her dark eyes.
“For this,” she said. I wondered if her mind had finally gone off to join her health, wherever it was—still chained to the White House gates, I supposed. “For this,” she said again. With an amused smile, she glanced down at the half-finished letter on the escritoire. “Dear Alice,” she said, “wonderful news! It was for this.”
That was when I finally understood what she was saying. “Oh, go on,” I said scornfully, reaching down to collect my pumps and almost going head first into the escritoire. Once I straightened up, feeling that I had never understood the intricacy of that procedure in as much detail as I should and blowing disquietingly gum-weighted bangs out of my eyes, I thought that I had better start over. “Go on,” I said, even more scornfully. “You and your silly suffragettes didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Oh, but we did, my dear,” Mother said. “We didn’t know it, and Alice Paul and Lucy Burns and I probably all hoped for better—or let’s be kind, and just say different. But we did,” and she laughed quietly again. “You—you—are our monument, not the one they still won’t have put up at Occoquan eighty years from now, for all that my friends and I know it was our Valley Forge; where we suffered, where we won. The fact that you don’t think we had anything to do with it is what proves that we did.”