The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  Bill rose to announce his suggestion. “Let’s call Mary Troiseme. I hear she’s back at Rye.”

  Thus it was that I found myself in Danny’s station wagon, which reeked provocatively of horseflesh, speeding back in the direction I had just come. In thirty minutes I would be halfway home again. My bag was in the rear.

  “Sort of a Kafka nightmare,” said Ursula, between whom and Bill de Chavannes I was wedged in the back seat. We sipped highballs as we twitched through traffic on Riverside Drive. “The set in Rye is even more decadent,” Bill said. “They sit on the beach drinking Vichyssoise through a straw.”

  “The Gauls are at the gates,” Danny said at the wheel. It had the ring of a phrase he had picked up somewhere, but he looked at Sweetie beside him in a kind of plea for credit for his cleverness. She was apparently queen of this crowd, arbiter of a worldliness which I tried to calibrate by dropping the name of Westport into the discussion. It aroused gales of mirth. Sweetie turned to kneel on the front seat, facing us.

  “Have you ever read Kafka, Chick?” she asked. “Well, you must. Start with The Metamorphosis. It’s about a man who turns into a cockroach.”

  “Oh, let him alone, Beth,” Bill said. “He’s read archy and mehitabel. I sometimes wish that’s where I’d stopped.”

  At last we arrived in Rye. We swept up a drive whose gravel looked as though it bathed regularly and stopped before a broad stone house around whose veranda ran a balustrade capped with marble figures in reclining positions. On the porch a woman of no attributes, wearing a hat that looked like a dove put through a wringer, stood between two leashed wolfhounds.

  “I’m so glad you got here before I left because I can’t stay,” she said, showing neither surprise nor indifference at our arrival. “You’ll find food in the refrigerator, plenty of liquor in the cellarette, and Waldo in bed. I’m awfully sorry, but I have to go to New York.”

  An upper window slid open and a man’s face mangled with sleep was thrust out. “I’m glad I mistook the Worcestershire sauce for Angostura bitters,” he called down. “It’s what we all need. And I don’t take back what I said about shoofly pie. Hello, all.” The window slammed shut as the woman was drawn by the hounds toward a clump of rhododendrons where a taxicab was waiting in cover. “Good-by, Mary,” they all shouted. “Have fun.”

  “I told you the Gauls were at the gates.” Danny fell in beside me as we started for the house. He was shaking his head.

  “I know for a fact of people in Westport who roast marsh mallows on a Roto-Broil,” I offered out of a persisting chauvinism for my home state. He danced bitterly, punching the twilight.

  We climbed a flight of stairs like the bed of a dried cataract and trooped through a cathedral door held open for us by a white-jacketed Negro chewing a soda cracker. He showed us to our rooms by pointing at their approximate locations through the ceiling. I alone had luggage—toted in the suspicion that I might never check into the Algonquin at all but go right on home from here.

  My memory of the next twelve hours is a blur, like a spectrum spun at a rate too fast to distinguish separate colors. After a dinner of roast lamb at which Waldo appeared—a compactly portly man in a sleep-muffled rage—there was a round of parlor games and smoke-wreathed disputes through which Waldo also intermittently somnambulated. He grew more dangerously awake by the hour, however. Someone played a phonograph album given his absent wife by a previous guest, a symphony of a pioneering dissonance that made him stiffen in his chair like a convict through whom an electrical charge is being passed. Seeing this, Bill de Chavannes explained the composition’s merits. “The classical composers aren’t in it for tonal violence,” he said. “To approximate that, you’d have to play Beethoven and Brahms at the same time.” Waldo seized the album and thrust it into the annotator’s lap, in which remnants of dessert still lingered. “Take it! I insist—I’m giving it to you!”

  One of several newcomers was persuaded by a scrawny beauty in a sweater to read from his poems, a volume of which happened to be around. They weren’t too bad. I liked particularly “Fat-Rocked My West,” “Crating and Uncrating,” and “Mother, Walk with Me on State Highways.” “Take it,” Waldo said to the scrawny beauty who had been loudest in her praise. Beads of moisture stood on his brow. It seemed he was determined to break up housekeeping; that when he had distributed the furnishings he would begin on the house proper, tearing it stone from stone and handing them to passers-by. I remembered a cartoon with the caption “Don’t admire anything or he might give it to you,” and decided to keep my mouth shut. All the good it did me!

  In a sudden silence, Sweetie looked around and said, “Where’s Danny?”

  “On the veranda blowing up that rubber horse he left here last summer. He said he’s going for a swim.”

  “He’ll turn into a horse, like that man in Kafka who turned into a cockroach,” said Ursula, who was beside me on a couch. She slipped an arm through mine and scratched the back of my wrist, “Don’t feel too bad about the archy and mehitabel. It’s never clear in the story that it’s a roach the man turns into—just an insect. Waldo, don’t you have a collection of Kafka’s stories?”

  “Take it,” Waldo ordered me when he had found it. “Take it away, do you hear!” Instead of looking into it, however, Ursula and I got on the subject of sex.

  “Don’t you sleep with anybody beside your wife?” she asked me at last.

  “No.”

  “Just what are you trying to prove?”

  When she turned her back for a cigarette, I darted out the door and upstairs to my bedroom. I found I had the Kafka still in my hand. I lay down with my clothes on and read The Metamorphosis till I fell asleep. I dreamed that I was in the Hal Roach studios in Hollywood where a lot of people were throwing pie plates at me in which there were no pies. The flying tins were sharply metallic, and quite dangerous.

  I awoke to a gay commotion beneath my window. Someone had turned the garden fountain on and in the moonlight Sweetie could be seen advancing toward it with soap and towel.

  I strode out the front door past the balustrade on which the marble figures lay in their cool sleep and down the stairs to the lawn. I shouldered past a pair of youths who were arguing about whether Hemingway was yellow, a larger group watching the Nude Bathing with shouts of laughter, and fetched up on the other side of the fountain where there were no spectators.

  “Sweetie, you’re coming home with me,” I stated through the splash of water. “I speak as your editor as well as your friend. You can do some fine things in the light verse field, but you’ve got to get down out of there and dry yourself off first.”

  She made a face of comic surprise as she postured among the stone dolphins and the nymphs shouldering their tilted urns, lathering one or two along with herself. I turned my back, refusing to look.

  “Men are such pigs,” she said. She threw some water at me, and I edged out of range, where I stood with a foot on a white wrought-iron bench, waiting stoically—Pygmalion facing revisions. The frolic was over in a moment and I heard her approaching across the grass behind me, toweling herself.

  “You know something?” she said. “Ursula likes you. You can sleep with her if you want.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Men can be such swine. Still think the human form is wicked?” she taunted laughingly, belting up her own in any case in a terrycloth robe.

  I turned toward her.

  “Sweetie, if you knew what this is doing to your father. It’s killing him. He’s taken to his bed—sick at heart.”

  “Sick! He’s on his way to France right this very minute to see about those bauxite mines. In fact he’s making Granny fly with him, just to make sure everything is in order. He’s feeling no pain. Huh!”

  We moved as by unspoken consent toward the Sound, a hundred yards away. I followed her gaze upward. All the bees of heaven swarmed. The fountain plash faded into the gentler monody of the waves, curling like white feathers along the beach toward which we
tended.

  “Just what do you want of life?” I asked rather largely.

  She answered so instantly she must have been going to blurt it out without being asked:

  “I want a child.”

  We negotiated a sudden drop in the genially graded lawn that gained us the beach. The sand looked so clean it might have been packaged and sent out from town, like farina.

  “Why, that’s fine, Sweetie. A very normal wish,” I said, helping her down. “Whom are you going to marry?”

  “I didn’t say I wanted a husband, I said I wanted a child. I’ve had enough men now, Chick, all thanks to you for getting me unknotted, to know that’s not for me. Or I’m not for it—what’s the difference? That’s simply not an involvement I’d be good for, or at. But why should I go in for it? Why can’t a woman satisfy her maternal instinct without undertaking the institution society attaches as a condition? Why really?”

  “There’s no reason I suppose, intellectually speaking,” I said. “Still, a man around the house …”

  “I’ll have money enough, so that’s not a factor. In fact, a man might wish to marry me for mine.”

  “Money, money, money! Is that all I’m to hear? Legal Tender Is the Night!”

  “I can be completely free about this. I’ve thought about it for some time. Why run the risk of marriage if there’s no economic need to? Half of them fold, and the rest aren’t worth a damn either, most of them. You know that.”

  “Do I?”

  “So why should I miss out on the one experience I want now, for conventional reasons?”

  We strolled side by side along the beach, our feet whispering in the sand. Ephemeral liquid hands sifted the moon’s casual silver.

  “All right, let’s accept this Free Spirit theory of yours,” I said. “I know it’s been respectably put in many quarters, not the least a play of Shaw’s. But you’d still have to choose a father for your child. How would you go about that?”

  We paused for her to light a cigarette from a match in my cupped hands. She glanced at me, drawing on it. “That is a problem. Whom would you suggest?”

  “Danny Dolan’s a fine sort, and seems to like you.”

  “Like me, he’s in love with me. That’s the trouble with that. Don’t go trying to get me married, Uncle Chick, that’s out. And above all get the right slant on this. I don’t want a love child—I want a child I can love!”

  You thought this a strange end to frivolity till, looking at her more closely, you realized it was the beginning of sobriety: the high purpose of one striking out for moral frontiers.

  “I’ve refused to marry Danny a dozen times because I don’t want to get involved, and each time he gets more depressed. The last time he threatened—well, never mind that. The thing is he’s so bourgeois he’d expect me to marry him because I was the mother of his child. So I’d almost sooner it were a married man, just to keep it clean. Just to keep it objective.” She gave me another sidelong glance. “I’ve even thought of you.”

  “Oh, I think not,” I said. “Thanks just the same though. I’m flattered. How about Dylan?”

  “I don’t want anyone who’d be only too willing. Your refusing shows a kind of character I’d like my son to inherit. Or daughter.”

  “For the child really to have it to inherit I’d have to pass up fathering it. How do we get around that?”

  “No, seriously. It’s just the old l’homme moyen sensuel, man as a sensual means, that I’m proposing. There’d be nothing personal in it.”

  Romance on short notice. Isadora Duncan on the beach imploring a favor of her rescuer, and a child anonymously begotten on a warm Italian night. These waves plashed on a tame Westchester shore, endless little gasps of amazement. I looked up at the stars—consulted, always, as a gauge of the emotional temperature we were running. They had been rivets and bees, oats for Pegasus and intolerably twisted tuning pegs. From a radio came the strains of Charmaine, like scraps of silk fluttered on the spring night. We didn’t know it, but just about then a radio sputtered out on a plane winging into the tinted east over the Atlantic, the last ever seen or heard of it, and Sweetie’s only living relatives disappeared between two continents. The bulletins next day gave no time, but I often wonder if it wasn’t just then, as we stood together in our velvet night, that their motors plunged into the sea, churning the blood of the dawn.

  Sweetie sighed, stooping to fondle a stone. “Well, if you’re going to be stuffy I suppose it’ll have to be Danny. Because I suddenly feel time slipping. Every birthday is like a chill draft from a door somebody’s left open. Oh, Chick,” she cried in a whisper like the waves’, and with that high dexterity of heart that was at long last hers, “I do so want a child!”

  I didn’t answer. Two figures in borrowed bathing suits were stumbling toward us over the sand. The first was Bill.

  “It’s Danny—” he exclaimed as Ursula overtook him. They stood panting side by side. Their pallor was absolute—like that of cheesecake. “Somebody saw him go out on that damned rubber thing and then when nobody saw him again for an hour—Was he despondent?”

  “What are you talking about?” Sweetie faltered.

  Poor Danny. Had he been out of his depth all along with those companions? Had the impossible yearning to Belong sent him to the horizon at last? Had he been infected by the same lyric dream we were all in fear of flunking, that dream thanks to whose inherent irony it was best realized by being brought down in a heap? There had been a pneumatic horse in Tender Is the Night. Or had he been drunk on the vision of Gatsby bobbing, sad and laudable, on his inflated raft?

  I turned toward the mansion behind one of whose uncountable windows Waldo could be seen trying to give somebody something—liquidating our dream with all speed. As exponent of a militant provincialism I had only two allies—and one was mad and the other was dead, and as for myself …? Perhaps a little of both.

  “What makes you think—How do you—”

  Bill turned and pointed up the beach along whose receding rim the pure white plumes forever waved. “His horse came back without him,” the couriers panted in unison.

  My eyes turning upward sought the stars one last time. They looked to me like brass tacks.

  10

  HERE occurred an unexpected merger of my two problems. It was lucky or unlucky depending on how you looked at it.

  I had one of my charges on her feet. I was to see the other at our usual haunt after a call on Sweetie, who, alone now in the cottage on Beacon Street, was if anything more urgent in her desire for a child, a venture on which, under the sobering elms of home, I was by contrast the firmer in my resolve not to collaborate.

  “I’m going to sell this place and move to New Mexico. I can write there. You’ll never see me again,” she argued.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I admire your spunk, but that’s as far as it goes. Good-by, Sweetie, and good luck. I’ll be watching for those poems. Good-by, good-by.”

  At the Greek’s there was the preliminary chat with Nickie before the stern periodic inventory. A book of prints he had with him prompted me to remark that a good artist can get more out of a minor subject than a poor one can get out of a major.

  “You’re absolutely right,” Nickie said. “Sargent gives us still lifes of people. Cézanne gives us portraits of apples.”

  “Cowplop. When are you going to nail the Smoothie? Or Johnny Velours, as he now calls himself? Three more jobs since the Flickendens’ and you’re still no closer to a solution. You realize you’re on a kind of probation. Your dream was validated in the sense that there is an adversary, but he’s making more of a fool of you than we did! Lila’s cooling off too. I don’t know how much longer I can keep her from Reno. You can, by getting a job. I’ve been thinking.” I began my walk on eggs again. “Why don’t you work for a teaching certificate and then get a post at some first-rate university?”

  He was lost in that dense thought into which it was so hard to pursue him.

  “I’ve been
thinking. It may not be Pete Cheshire at all. This looks like the work of a far more brilliant criminal.”

  “Two crooks in a town this size? Oh, come now, isn’t that asking too much of Providence? Pete’s using the Johnny Velours name to throw suspicion off himself, but leaving it on a calling card with each job is clue enough. It’s Pete’s trade mark. Let’s not change the subject. Now I’ve taken the liberty of getting some catalogues of normal colleges … Please take them. I insist!”

  Nickie stirred, another hue coming to the surface like that of a turning fish. “A college professor. Why not?” he said with that ominous compliance I had learned to watch out for. He had readily agreed to “look into” real estate brokering by accompanying an agent named Mrs. Apthorpe on her tours with clients. He was supposed to be exploring the possibilities of part-time employment but all it came to was some pleasant countryside rambles with a woman he found amusing, and a chance to see some local houses about which he had always been curious. “Why not indeed? One is so many things, even at once. What is a man? What is Man? Oh, who am I!”

  Camus and the problem of identity. Sartre and the blown leaves of self—the whole Existentialist express streaking through a night as black as the pit. I will try again, Lord. I will lie down between the tracks for yet this train to pass over me, its successive axles grazing the tip of my nose, no real damage let’s hope …

  I saw Nickie three days later, under the rather jolting circumstances I’ve intimated.

  I was leaning faintly against the wall of a building, in which position I had suffered a bootblack to nudge his apparatus meekly under one foot, when I noticed two backs that looked familiar. As they got into a cab I recognized Nickie and Sweetie Appleyard.

  When I swept into the vine-choked cottage the minute my work permitted it that afternoon, it was to find Sweetie under a sunlamp on the living room floor. The days were cloudy and she was trying to keep up with a tan she had begun. She lay on her stomach, gnawing a pencil, a notebook on the carpet.