Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

by Carson, Tom

  “Go-” But I’d already said “Go on” twice; I’d counted. “Go to hell” I told her, which was a first and so felt marvelously emancipating. Swinging the chewing-gum around in front of me like a carrot on a stick, I hauled flask, pumps, beaded bag, stockinged feet, and ciggie back into the hallway. But I hadn’t been able to close the door with either hand or foot, which is why I heard Mother call gently after me, “I’m there, dear. But we did.”

  Ohh—let the old loony think anything she likes, I thought once I was back in my room, had found the electric light-switch, and could start strewing things about. She might depart the upstairs drawing room for the—attic, soon, at the fast clip she was fading. But she’d just better never bother me about it again, I thought, at the same time I discovered that I had made a sudden decision to fall into bed with one stocking on, while three or four of my Cuban-heeled pumps scuttled about the floor in the dark like friendly crabs.

  She never did. Soon afterward, she began sending grotesque Lil Gagni, who had dusting and all sorts of better things to do, clumping off to the public library to obtain bound volumes of old newspapers from 1917 and 1918, which Mother kept as the fines mounted, writing gracious notes of apology instead of returning them. Her correspondence also grew more voluminous, and the letters that came in reply from Alice Paul and all those dreadful women she was so proud of having known in prison were sometimes so bulky that they would stay wedged in the mail slot of our front door, like the tongue of some atrocious dog, instead of dropping through to the carpet. Even if the light from her brocaded lamp still showed beneath the drawing room’s door, I no longer had to worry about making noise when I went past it at ungodly hours, for I knew I wouldn’t hear her voice; only, if I listened closely, the faint sound of Mother’s pen going scratch-scratch, like a mouse’s claws, across vellum.

  Still, I felt it was my daughterly duty to look in on her once or twice a day. When I presented myself, she’d ask about my plans and friends, carefully keeping her voice and face clear of everything but a maddening gentleness so as to indicate in advance that no aspersions, or indeed opinion of any sort, would be forthcoming. Nonetheless, I was always relieved when my visit found her dozing in her wheelchair, her face cast up and blind in sleep and her mouth open like a sore. “It’s nice to see you, Mother,” I would murmur, “you’re looking well. I’ll just be going now.”

  Otherwise, I went on enjoying my new life. But not until Grace Scape, now Grace Foulard, made a slighting reference at a garden party to “your ratty old Hispano-Suiza” did I realize that it had become my old one. After finding a pretext to discharge Cheng, whose imperturbable face I now saw had always masked a critical attitude, I bought a Duesenberg, having startled Cheng into an actual widening of the eyes by telling him to take the Hispano-Suiza with him. Later, that led to his arrest, and all sorts of nonsense with beefy police detectives from Connecticut; I believe he was finally deported.

  As his English was somewhat better and his racial stock less exotic, I was sure that Bruno, who had come with the Duesenberg, would be far more likely to talk himself out of that kind of trouble. All the same, as I came down for breakfast one afternoon, I did overhear him telling Lil Gagni in the kitchen dat onda day da Fraulein vired him he vud chust as sun valk.

  Da Fraulein, as it happened, found it faintly disorienting to hear herself called that, as I had just turned twenty-six. Fortunately, we girls of the golden Twenties were under a good deal less pressure than the previous generation to get married immediately to whatever suitable man came knocking. I put this down to the fact that we were so much better at having fun than our dreary mothers had been, and also that now there was so much more fun to be had.

  Not that there weren’t risks involved, and penalties to pay. After one frankly rather sordid episode on a balcony of the Biltmore Hotel, of which I remembered very little except the spiky leaves of an inconveniently placed potted plant pricking the undersides of the bare thighs under my hoisted skirt, I had to ask Grace—who didn’t know it had been Dicky—for help in finding a doctor, since I suspicioned I knew better than her hard-drinking husband why the Foulards had stayed childless. She took me to a dreadful man above a dreadful dive in dreadful Jersey City, and held my hand as he did horrid scraping and then plopping things to a distant continent of me and I thought Oh Mother Mother why didn’t you chain yourself to a hospital instead. With Grace’s help, I made my tottering way back to the Duesenberg, and from the flick of Bruno’s eyes beneath his cap, I knew I’d have to count on his discretion. Had it still been Cheng under the visor, I could have just counted on his unintelligibility.

  Aside from such escapades, which you’d be wrong to suppose were that numerous, I did have proper suitors. The blond scion of a meat fortune took me for a weekend to his parents’ estate in Pennsylvania, where to my relief I saw that neither Ma nor Pa was wearing bloody aprons; nevertheless, on my return, I went on picturing them that way. The glib young heir to a drug-store chain soon began giving me headaches, and I broke off our brief engagement. And always, as a sort of human caesura between attachments, there was beaming, imbecilic, doggily doting Thurston, his face still crammed with earnest vouchers of a reverence I knew to be unalterable by any behavior of mine.

  It had been so since our dancing-school days—when the blissful silliness of those keen eyes above that longing nose used to force me to tilt my head ceilingward on my neck, like a nodding rose at the end of its stem, for fear that gazing back would make me burst out laughing. Once or twice, in fact, it naughtily crossed my mind to drag him to some balcony, just to see if his adoration could survive hiked skirts, scraping brick, martini breath and a crushed corsage. But the burst-out-laughing problem swiftly reared its head again, and then I sobered up.

  There were others, too. But promising, handsome, or simply well tailored, none of the boys I toyed with marrying could pass the test set by my memories of a bald head I could sneak up on to kiss, a lap large as a throne that I could sit on to tug a watch chain from its fob pocket, and a lingering odor of cigar smoke. Of course, my chums knew exactly what the problem was, the world being giddy with Freud in those days. Wafting onyx cigarette holders in patterns like a Cubist’s paintbrushes, they’d tease me about having predictably chosen the simplest complex I could find, all of us delighted with our sophistication—which was never more delightful than it was in the Twenties, when the very idea of sophistication was new and daring in itself, and hadn’t yet been vulgarized by its availability to any member of the boobish masses who could afford a paperback or the down payment for a television on the installment plan.

  As time went on, however, fewer and fewer of the people in my circle went back far enough with me to have known Father, the friends I had retained from childhood having largely drifted off to matrimony, Boston, or both. Increasingly, I found myself instead playing the doyenne of a set whose other members were my juniors by too wide a margin for the thought that I’d ever had parents to spring very readily to their minds. I missed the teasing then; in a way, it had kept Father close.

  He wasn’t dead, of course. But his letters, largely about household matters, had dwindled to two or three per year, and as they often seemed written by no one at all to no one at all, I felt that there was no one to reply to them. He was more vivid to me incommunicado, as I forlornly hoped I was to him; that would explain why the letters came so seldom. By now, his Los Angeles oil wells having come in spectacularly, he was establishing himself in the motion-picture business, and at the cinema I would sometimes lose track of the story as a result of being distracted—for this was still in silent days—by the sight of his name inscribed in decorative curlicues along the lower border of the titles. He was prominent enough in the movie industry for his doings to be reported with some regularity in the newspapers; prominent enough, too, for a perfect stranger’s voice to crash in like a bowling ball from the next table as Grace and I had tea at the Plaza one day in December of ‘26, repeating the ribald gossip that Father wa
s now living openly with an Irish woman at his house in the Hollywood Hills, and had introduced her to the Governor of California as his daughter.

  As Grace’s hand pressed a handkerchief into my curled palm on the banquette in the powder room, I felt her other arm go around my shoulder. Managing to control my sobs, I choked out the whole story. “He wouldn’t take me with him—wouldn’t even let me visit,” I wept. “It’s such a lie—he’d never have let me live there, never.”

  When my tears had dwindled to sniffles and a final blink let me look at her directly, her expression was thoughtful. “But you’ve got plenty of money, you know,” Grace said. “More than you know what to do with, and you’re more than of age. In all these years, didn’t it ever once occur to you that you could have gone out there anytime—without waiting for his permission? Your father might have felt differently when he saw you standing in front of him.”

  I stared at her. The thought had never crossed my mind.

  I never spoke to her again.

  The following spring was when Daisy B. and I became inseparable. As I’ve said, we had hardly been unaware of each other before that, in the way that a champion at tennis might keep track of a champion at golf. But the young-marrieds crowd where she set the pace only overlapped with the single-folk regatta to which I was a similar pennant at mobbed affairs where conversation that was either protracted or private was impossible, though we might smile a smile denied to lesser lights as we clutched each other’s hands and talked about trifles. Even the whispers about the bootlegger who’d supposedly been having some sort of dalliance with her just before his murder had only reached my circle as the dimmest and sketchiest sort of gossip—the kind that starts everyone bringing up similar stories about other people they know better.

  After Tom Buchanan’s startling, ghastly death on the polo field, however—they said the crack of his neck as his shying horse trod on it was as loud as a pistol shot, just like the one that killed the dying rider’s former mount two minutes later—his beautiful young widow began to frequent the same gaudy speaks and jammed house-parties where I was accustomed to ruling the roost. Instantly, it was clear to us both that if we didn’t want to be enemies, we had better become intimates.

  On the neutral ground of the wedding reception of some Midwestern second cousin of Daisy’s—-I knew the bride, an aviatrix, slightly—I sat down in a vacant chair next to hers. Not the least of my motives was to forestall Thurston, who was heeling toward me like a spaniel from the far side of the room, wearing that depressingly heartened expression he got whenever he spied me without a man inc on trover tibly in evidence. Daisy greeted me with a splay of golden fingers on my forearm and an exclamation of genuine delight, and we started gabbing away like reunited sisters under a banner reading NICK AND AMELIA: MANY YEARS OF HAPPINESS.

  After an hour of enchanted bavardage, she put her fingers on my neck to bring my ear close to her champagned mouth, although she’d had enough to drink that it took her a few giggly seconds to decide whether my right or left one was preferable. “I know where there’s a better party than this one,” she confided once that was settled, “only it hasn’t started yet.”

  “Where?” I asked, a newly atomized earlobe still tingling.

  “My house in East Egg. Do you have a car outside? I want to leave before the bore who brought me finishes his cigar, because that’s when he’ll remember that I was here, too.”

  Even so, as we sneaked doorward with the exaggerated footsteps of comedians in a Ziegfeld revue, Daisy whispered that we’d need supplies for the drive out to Long Island, and so we altered our escape route to go past the array of champagne bottles just behind Mr. Cigar’s oblivious, smoke-wreathed head. Seizing two each, we spilled out onto the street with fur coats flying and elbows bump-a-bump and scrambled into the waiting Duesenberg together just as one of Daisy’s champagnes slipped and went smash on the sidewalk.

  That briefly stupefied us both, since we hadn’t thought champagne bottles could break. Then Bruno clapped the door shut and got back in up front, I shrieked at him to drive, drive, the police were on our heels, and Daisy and I both fell back laughing as he gravely put the car in gear and she popped the cork on her remaining bottle.

  Between the two of us, that one was empty by the time we started over the Williamsburg Bridge. Slipping as she did so, Daisy hiked herself over the sill that separated the front seat from ours.

  “Bruno,” she said idly. Then she crooned it: “Broooo-no and giggled. “What sort of name is that, Bruno?”

  “Mine, Miss,” Bruno said, driving. I could see his gloved hands, driving. “I have no other information.”

  “Broon-o. What’s your last name, Bruno?”

  He told her—something like Hoekman or Hopman. How strange it is to hear him speaking German, I thought. But I was puzzled, too, and it took me a moment to understand why: “Isn’t that funny,” I remarked to a seagull over Brooklyn who seemed interested. “I’ve just realized that I always thought it was ‘Duesenberg.’ But that would certainly be a coincidence, wouldn’t it?” As if to signal that it was one too, the seagull dipped its wings and dove away.

  “And what sort of name is that, Broono?” Daisy was asking with mock sternness, meaning his real one.

  “In my native language it means ‘captain,’ Miss,” Bruno said.

  “Oh, nol” Daisy cried, sitting back. “Bruno, you’ve been demotedl I think that’s just terrible. We should treat you with more respect here in America. How do you say ‘chauffeur’ in German, Bruno?”

  “Fahrer;” he said, which did sound so German I sat up, gathering my mink around me. “And I have so far found the respect I am given more than adequate. I can think of no reason why this should not continue, Miss.”

  “That’s nice” Daisy sighed, settling back. “Drive on, Brooono. Far’rer an’ far’rer. Why have you kidnapped us, Broooono?” As I opened the first of my two bottles, I felt a new respect for her, since it had never crossed my mind to flirt with him. Then again, of course, he wasn’t her chauffeur. And I too had flirted with other people’s chauffeurs, when they weren’t Asiatics. So she and I had something in common, I thought, a little driftily.

  Compared to some of the inordinate heaps of ornamented and luminous slag already familiar to me in that part of Long Island, Daisy’s place was architecturally rather sober. But its current character was quite at odds with its design. As we drove up to the main house, I was startled out of a demi-stupor by the sight of two or three fine horses loping or grazing contentedly on the lawn, now unmown to the point of having become a meadow, that spilled down to the Sound. From their opened gates to the tack left at the mercy of the elements, the stables we had just driven past were plainly long out of use.

  “Oh, I gave them all their freedom, after-” Daisy’s careless voice let a rag doll at the end of her wrist silently finish the sentence, and I knew that she meant her husband’s death. “You see, I couldn’t help but think it might have been revenge, and … well, why shouldn’t it have been? I even let ‘em come in the house if they like, although they don’t, much. I think the smells there bother them. Every so often, one of them will clip-clop off to one of the other estates, and the neighbors complain to the police. I always say virtuously that I know nothing about it. Maybe someday they’ll be completely wild again—the wild horses of East Egg!—and the Shinnecock Indians can ride them bareback over the Brooklyn Bridge to reconquer Manhattan at last.” As my glance told Bruno to wait—and his nod said that no other scheme, however attractive or superficially plausible, could tempt him to do otherwise—she smilingly took me into the house.

  There was no sunlight in it. The curtains of the living room’s French windows were drawn, and the contents of Grant’s Tomb had probably been aired more recently. As we entered, a white dog with enraged pink eyes was relieving itself on the carpet in the middle of the floor, quite visibly not for the first time.

  “SooSoo!” Daisy exclaimed, going to pick it up. “Did oo ma
ke another mess? Will the Swede have to clean up? But you know the Swede doesn’t like to clean up—no, SooSoo,” looking it solemnly in the eye. “Bad SooSoo!” Yet she seemed delighted, not chagrined.

  “I let all the servants go, too,” she murmured as the dog hopped out of her arms, “except for my daughter’s nanny. She’s straight off the boat—speaks six words of English, all grumpy—and has absolutely no idea that all rich Americans don’t live this way.”

  Now that my eyes were growing used to the gloom, I could see that a nearby coffee table and the sofa behind it were both piled high with books. Some were in French, and by authors with preposterous pseudonyms, like Tristan Tzara. Because of their peculiar design, the ones in English looked almost more foreign than the French ones, and came from publishers with names like the Three Mountains Press. Deciding that an attempt to palm off three stories and ten poems as a book was certainly the lazy man’s way of joining the literary caravan, I tossed one near-pamphlet aside. In front of a large fireplace for which Daisy clearly had no other use was propped a large, framed black-and-white photograph of a seated woman in dorsal view, her lower back bizarrely transformed into the contours of a violin.

  “It just came from P-P-Paris,” Daisy said beside me, sounding as oddly out of breath as if she had somehow contrived to race through every room in the house in the last ten seconds. “Isn’t it heavenly?” Taking the bottle of champagne from my hand, she tilted it and her throat back before wiping her mouth and turning away.

  As I wandered, taking care where I stepped and also not entirely sure if Daisy was following or guiding me, I found myself in front of a table on which were laid out both a Ouija board and a Tarot deck, along with a few mah-jongg tiles that had evidently wandered into the party by accident. Under an almost spent candle was a copy of Madame Blavatsky or some other spiritualist manual, laid open to a chapter on séances.