Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

by Carson, Tom

  Then came days of racing home from school to see if they had replied to me—as I commenced to do the very next afternoon, although I knew this was unrealistic. After a week, I started cutting girls’ choir practices to get to the mailbox an hour earlier. On what turned out to be the day, I had just whizzed out the door of Russell High and was preparing to gather speed when I saw our County Attorney walking back to the courthouse from lunch. He had probably come from either Dawson Drug, where he had worked as a soda jerk back before I was born, or Maple Street, which was where his family’s house was.

  He was one of the men of Russell who had come back from the war my daddy hadn’t. But as he had been badly hurt in Italy, and even closer to the end of the war in Europe than Iwo Jima had been to VJ Day, I felt closer to him than I did to the veterans who had come back more or less intact, although like everyone in Russell I felt that none of them could do wrong in my eyes. In fact, almost my earliest memory was of being held up by my mother so that I could empty my piggy bank, which probably only had about twelve or fifteen pennies in it, into a cigar box that our Legion post was using to collect money for an operation that he needed in Chicago, not long after he came back from the war.

  In fact, I sometimes felt that if I got accepted to the Sorbonne and left Russell, I’d miss our County Attorney most of all.

  He had an interesting face, and sometimes it looked as if it caused him more pain than his right shoulder, which the operation hadn’t been able or intended to fix, just reorganize. I saw his mouth and eyes as betraying an acute curiosity about the expressions they might have if everyone in the world were merry and kind, and regretting their relatively scattered opportunities to explore this. But since I was only a senior in high school, and had been raised to be unfailingly pleasant, polite, and cheerful, I guess I was an opportunity.

  “Hello, Mary-Ann!” he barked. “You in a hurry to get somewhere, like always?”

  “Yes, sir; Mr. Dole,” I said back, giving him my best smile. “Just like always!”

  “Hope you get there soon, then!” he said, moving the pen that he kept gripped in his bad hand up and down like a baton. That was our standard conversation, which we both always enjoyed. But this time, as I waved and charged on, I felt as grateful as if our County Attorney had dropped twelve or fifteen pennies, of which he didn’t have that many to spare, into a box marked “Mary-Ann”; and suddenly I knew today was the day.

  Which it was—and as such, at least in the short run, a crushing disappointment. If the boggling sight and then the quaking touch of an envelope strange both in color (powder blue) and texture (crinklier than ours), and thrillingly addressed to “Mile. Mary-Ann Kilroy, Russell, Kansas, Etats-Unis d’Amerique,” almost burst my heart, the letter within, in what briefly struck me as amazingly good French until I remembered why, very nearly broke it. I read what the Sorbonne had to tell me several times, each time hoping against hope that my conceivably imperfect grasp of grammar and idiom had caused me to miss the tiny preposition, accent grave vs. circonflexe, or curlicue in the signature which would reveal that the letter said the exact opposite of what, each time, it did.

  Unless my conceivably imperfect grasp of human nature was making me miss the sarcasm, however, they were very solemn and nice about it. While properly admiring of the academic record I had compiled at Russell High and in no doubt of the school’s high standards, they regretted to inform me of their conclusion that four years there, even with the girls’ choir as evidence that I was outgoing as well as competent, did not in their view constitute sufficient preparation for matriculating at the Sorbonne. While equally commendatory of my grasp of French, they also felt obliged to note their concern that my vocabulary might not yet be equal to the studies in philosophy, history and political science in which I had expressed a breathless interest. In what proved to be the letter’s crucial passage, although at the time—desolate, in mental hock to youth’s abbreviated calendar, and having already waited just about my whole sentient life—I barely took it in, they advised that I should plan to enroll in their summer program for foreign students after two years of further seasoning at an institution of higher learning in the United States, a program to whose waiting list they would be glad to add my name in the absence of instructions to the contrary.

  In closing, they thanked me for my interest in their university, language, culture, city, country, and continent, and hoped it would continue. They also remembered the late Monsieur Kilroy, and begged his widow and daughter—which would be I, Mary-Ann—to please accept the expression of their most distinguished sentiments, whose warmth they were sure would not be diminished by the long trip from Paris to Russell, Kansas.

  Having glumly prepared a fallback choice at the double-barreled behest of my mother’s now bespectacled eyes, I soon found myself attending Ellfrank University in Topeka instead. There, amid the staircased new excitements of dorm life and more trees than I had ever seen, my youthful resiliency soon made me bounce back—and stay aloft, as I was naturally upbeat. Eagerly, I plunged into classes, cocoa, and pajama-clutching arguments about whether Dorothy Haze, who had joined me in the Ellfrank frosh, should join the cheerleading squad for the basketball team or play forward for the girls’ one, a debate she finally made moot by calmly announcing that her pre-med studies would leave her time for neither. That unexpected career choice, by the way, won Dottie a stunned tribute from our mutual friend Becky Baum: “Wow,” she said, wide-eyed and expertly licking a mini-marshmallow bit from the browned corona of her lips. “I guess your kids and husband’ll never get sick for long.”

  As if the green campus had been tipping to spill them gently out, two years slid by—and, to my instantly blinking shock and despite my continuing study of French, I had all but forgotten about the Sorbonne, having let Topeka turn my head, when a familiarly blue and crinklier-than-ours envelope was slipped under my dorm-room door, the forwarding address from Russell scrawled in an all-caps hand to which my mother had been unable to forbear adding a pair of exclamation points. After offering good wishes for my health and politely inquiring about my current academic pursuits, the letter asked if I still cared to attend the Sorbonne’s summer program, for which a place had been held open for me should my scholastic record prove adequate.

  Once it had, the true magnitude of the journey I was to undertake sank in. You have to understand that up to now I’d never seen an ocean, much less crossed one. While it was possible to fly to Paris, and apparently done often, anyone who’s ever spent a day in Russell—the most that any of you can, of course—will doubtless understand my murky sense that such swift, sleek transportation, crammed with people in posh clothes, might well be barred to the likes of me. Not caring to suffer a public rejection at TWA’s hands, I took a train to New York City, whose dizzying stone ladders and glass crossword puzzles my eyes had only a single afternoon to scale and no time at all to read the clues to before, third-class ticket firmly in hand, I trotted up a gangplank. Which was hoisted soon afterward, amid tugboat toots and hurled paper ribbons. Then, hands to the railing and hearing the goodbye cries of the seagulls who were the last Americans we saw, on a sea that was a gifted child’s pretty watercolor of the sunset above it, I was on my way to Le Havre aboard the S.S. United States.

  Five days of shuffleboard, private conjugations of irregular verbs in the past and future perfect, and meals full of fascination later—and peeved only at the fat American kid who’d come across Richard New-comb’s Iwo Jima in the shipboard library and was reading it there, thick glasses perched above two unknuckled hands, when I turned from the gap in the shelf—I stood on French soil, or at least French concrete under an audibly, from the flurry of fluid cursing overhead, French derrick. Worn out with excitement, I napped on the boat train to Paris, and even dozed, despite my neck’s protesting jerks, in the undersized taxi that took me to my small hotel in the narrow Rue de Lille on the Left Bank. But then, checked in and my stunned-looking suitcase hoisted in a tiny elevator to an only sligh
tly larger room, I dashed back down the stairs, became an urgent compass for a second, rounded a corner and trotted a block. From across the Seine, which had always been and always would be a river, I was looking at the Louvre.

  It was so enormous that at first my eyes had room for nothing else. But then, like a huge but toothless gray medieval dog, Notre Dame nudged them on my right. A barge was going under a bridge, and I, Mary-Ann, spoke words I did not flatter myself were original.

  “My God,” I gasped. “It’s all real”

  “Every day” I marveled. “Every last day of the year.”

  It’s also fortunate that, as a result, life in Paris demands some attention to practicalities even for those not, such as I was, in town to attend the Sorbonne. Otherwise, the most famous local statuary would be the clumps of foreigners rooted to whatever spot they happened to be standing on when they first grasped this was Paris and they in it, and goggling with increasingly glazed eyes until starvation or Peugeots keeled them over. The best food in the world, and you can still forget you’re hungry—for food, at any rate.

  But I had the Sorbonne to locate, and classes to register for and then begin. Retracing Sukey Santoit’s footsteps until I’d done the one, and letting a pencil tickle my lips and briefly go spelunking in my ear until I had a head start on the other, I realized that all this was the barest prologue to the dozens of other interesting decisions I now had to make and re-make, such as which kitten-and-wool route to take from the Rue de Lille to the Boulevard St. Michel each morning, which café to stop in for a chicoried and crumby breakfast en route to what in three days had become Boul’ Mich’, which museum or landmark to hasten off to after class with which guidebook under my arm, and which small piece of blue twilight to pick out for my special own before, clambering up the stairs or hoisted in the tiny elevator, I went back to do my nightly class reading and homework assignments in my not much larger room, whose single casement window’s view of a sky stitched with entangled rooftops had shown me the origins of Cubism back on the very first day that I woke up in Paris, Paris, Paris, and went in my jammies to throw it open.

  It was perfection cut in half by a river, and marred only by the intermittent sound of explosions whose reports were seemingly slowed but not stilled by the muggy summer sky. These, I soon discovered—having just stopped at a newspaper kiosk to buy a stack of undated newspapers, which for some reason almost all of them were, and now making my way through Le Monde with some difficulty—were the work of something called the Organisation Armée Secrète, or O.A.S., whose members were disaffected but still serving French Army officers and others who were bitterly opposed to granting independence or even limited autonomy to France’s colony Algeria. These folks were currently attempting to win ordinary Parisians over to their point of view, the survivors anyway, by setting off bombs at random in public places.

  They were also bitterly opposed to Charles de Gaulle, who they felt had betrayed their cause after a coup in Algiers had brought him back to power here—by this point, I was on my second café crème, and struggling through Combat—by occasionally letting drop gnomic but nonetheless lucid remarks to the effect that it might be best, or possibly just interesting, if the French war against the rebels in Algeria didn’t drag on until the end of time. As the O.A.S. disagreed, they kept trying to assassinate him, meanwhile growing more and more enraged as he either foiled or flat-out ignored the coups they went on staging every few months in Algiers, apparently hoping that the seventeenth plan, or whichever, would be the charm.

  But the O.A.S. wasnt the only outfit setting off explosions that summer. Adding to all the confusion in Paris, apparently from pure whimsy, were the mysterious operations of the Lili Gang, a pack of elusive safecrackers whose mastery of disguise had so far stymied all attempts to apprehend them. The major difference between the O.A.S. and them—as I had just informed myself, humming my way through Le Figaro—was that the Lili Gang’s bombs were much smaller and somewhat more artistically placed, and despite the minor damage that they might occasionally wreak on some ornate facade here or there, nobody had actually gotten killed or more than had their hair mussed as a result of them. If anything, going by the cryptic hints they dropped into their communications on unrelated matters, they also seemed to rather admire Charles de Gaulle, or at any rate to approve of his policies in Algeria.

  In my whole time at the Sorbonne, I never saw de Gaulle in the flesh—not exactly. But once, on the Champs-Elysées, I did see a limousine that had him in it, or so I gathered from the excited or jittery mutter ings of nearby bystanders, making its long-nosed way up the avenue from the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe. Even the loud American girl hawking the International Herald Tribune in front of the Seberg Jeans boutique stopped to watch what happened next.

  As the limousine passed the Avenue de Marigny, a man dashed out of a nearby park and began spraying it with a machine gun. His own bullets came ricocheting back at him off its door, and he had to dive inside a handily placed temporary pissoir to take cover.

  At the Rond Point, two black sedans of different makes and years came tearing out from opposite directions, one from the Avenue Matignon and one from the Avenue Montaigne. As they reached the spot where the limousine should have been crushed between them, it vanished, and they collided instead as their target serenely reappeared some thirty feet away.

  At the Rue Washington, which is where I was, a man hurled himself from a tall building and plunged toward the limousine’s roof, brandishing a knife in one hand and a can opener in the other. As the limousine briefly picked up speed, he smacked into the street, picking himself up with an expression of disgusted resignation.

  Resuming its stately pace, the limousine rolled past me, its horn gravely sounding a basso “Mip-mip.” Then it was gone, heading toward the Etoile—if that’s still its name today, anyhow. Not being in any position to go back, I wouldn’t know.

  “Wow,” the Herald Tribune chick called to me, giggling and running a hand through her closely cropped blonde hair. “What do you suppose all that was about? Like I keep telling everybody back in Iowa, things can just get kooky here!”

  I had no idea how she knew I was from the States too, but I wasn’t surprised to be hailed in English. If my perfect Paris had a drawback other than the occasional explosions, it was a shortage of Parisians—ones I knew and could talk to about things more prolonged and vivid than our coinciding interests, respectively gustatory and financial, in cafés crème. The other students in my program at the Sorbonne were all either American or from foreign countries, and while it was interesting to meet my first Englishmen and stare at my first Germans, there were limits to both the appeal and use of practicing one’s French on people who were practicing it too. At the hotel in the Rue de Lille, the whole roster of both short- and long-term guests was international, from the precious young Vogue model with the funny face who had the room down the hall from mine to superannuated old Lady Ashley up on the attic floor.

  Along with this generalized shortage of actual French people to have prolonged and vivid dealings with, a more specific pinch of painful absence rode my other shoulder as I hurried to the Sorbonne each day. No lower than my shoulder did I ever let it travel, for in Russell I’d never gone past second, and even in college I only went to third once, briefly. In other words, I, Mary-Ann, was most definitely a good girl, and meant to remain one. But I also feared that I might never get back here, and I couldn’t bear to miss out on being half of, rather than merely observing, a sight lovelier than the Louvre—and more famous, too. If the true test of a dream’s beauty is its ability to withstand clichés, cartoons, and ten thousand bad songs all featuring accordions—although most people who have been on the spot would agree that car horns playing nothing but sharps would be a good deal more accurate, and not noticeably less musical or magical—then kissing someone with the Seine for a backdrop must be this planet’s most beautiful dream, and so it certainly seemed to me. If I sailed for home without any
thing of the kind occurring—so I fretted in my tiny room in the hotel on the Rue de Lille, although more often and achingly at night than in the morning—I might well end up inside the withered flesh of an old age equipped with little more than a dim memory that I, Mary-Ann, had once attended the Sorbonne in Toledo, Ohio.

  However, this was not to be the case. Killing two frogs with one stone, so to speak—if I may briefly resurrect the ugly tone of the all but forgotten professor who wrote Vie! Je te haïs!—someone soon came into my summer, if not precisely life. An utterly unheralded tribune, he promptly started judging my life if not summer. When he wasn’t doing that, he wrote about movies, although he hoped to make them himself someday.

  His name was Jean-Luc something. It’s sad, but all these years later, I

  can’t even remember the first initial of his surname.

  “Gee,” I realized I’d said aloud, attracting the attention of a previously unnoticed figure standing next to me as I stared at the movie poster outside a Left Bank revival house. Feeling a need to explain myself that somehow doubled as my first impression of Jean-Luc, I shrugged.