The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “Either way, I can’t lose,” Nickie had observed to me the day before, when pride in the Burwash caper had made him suddenly put the cards on the table. “Or win,” I’d added, and he had nodded. “Yes, we shall see who’s the cleverer. I—or Me.”

  The footsteps in the kitchen came down the hall, through the dining room and into the living room where we sat waiting. There was no doubt who strolled in, the way our faces fell. Prud’homme waddled in his wake.

  “Hello, Nickie.”

  “Hello, Chick.” He stood there buttoning a shirt cuff. “You look a bit chewed up. What’s the matter?”

  “Maybe it’s the worries I take to bed with me.” I made a few remarks polished in advance on the subject, as a safeguard against being topped. It was actually a Proustian fragment left over from the Mme. Piquepuss days, which seemed halcyon by comparison now. “Slumber, as everyone who has suffered nervous ordeals knows, is no guarantee of refreshment. His henchman, bad dreams, can produce an exhaustion greater than wakefulness might have left us with. Eight hours of oblivion may be devoted by good spirits to the renewal of vitality, or by bad to a depletion compatible with, or even desired by, our subconscious.”

  “Yes. Nature gives us the gift of sleep. The rest is up to us.”

  “Cowplop. Well, have you heard about Cheshire?”

  “Yes. I was just on my way down to headquarters. I can’t let him take the rap for those burglaries, you know. It would be comic if it weren’t so pathetic. The poor fool doesn’t even know who Jackson Pollock is.”

  It was the credit, of course, not the rap he couldn’t let Cheshire take. The whole thing came to focus in a flash—a flash as instantaneous as those with which the photographer’s bulbs were exploding down at the headquarters to which Nickie must now hurry.

  The pleasures of retaliation had been, though massive, secret. Hence, self-defeating. No one knew it was Nickie who had been setting the town on its ear, so each addition to the cream of the jest was purchased with a corresponding loss of prestige—a vicious circle if I ever saw one. He was building up, under cover of night, a criminal whom by day he could not catch. A public laughingstock had been the price of his private relish. Hard as it was on the ego when there had been only the suspicion that it was Pete who was outsmarting him with the thefts, their public attribution to the goon was intolerable. The terrible psychic balance in which things had so long hung was broken when the goon stepped forward to claim authorship. His motive for doing so was presently learned. He had been jilted by a girl with the taunt that he was just that, and would “never amount to anything, even as a crook.” Lashed by the need to show her, and possibly sick of the whole scramble for status that life has become, he had cut his own Gordian knot by “confessing” the burglaries esteemed to be the work of a criminal genius, now capped by a malefaction with cultural overtones. For the Jackson Pollock job had made page one of the second section of the New York Times, where crimes of an intellectual nature are sometimes noted. The parallel of two men equally torn between the demands of vanity and respectability—and each choosing for the Ego—was to me an instructive one. Jail was the only place where either could hold his head up, now.

  The battle of wits, though, was far from over.

  “How can you prove you took the Jackson Pollock?” I asked Nickie. “Only yesterday you told me you didn’t know where you’d hid it.”

  “I don’t. Only Johnny Velours knows that, and he apparently isn’t telling.”

  “Then how can you solve it?” I asked with my head in my hands and the feeling that I was bleeding internally at several specifiable points. “Tell us that, Nickie.”

  “It hinges on the burglar alarm,” he said. “The fact that it never went off means only one thing: the power was disconnected. I knew that it would be, and when.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Going around with Mabel Apthorpe gave me a lot of inside dope about houses, what was for sale or rent, who got what for a song from the Thruway condemnations. She’s a regular chatterbox. Lots of people are getting those old Colonial houses for next to nothing from the state; the only expense is hauling them away from the highway route to sites of their own. Moving a house is a complicated business. Among other things you need a permit for special crews to take down power lines over intersections that you cross. Well, I knew from a remark Mabel Apthorpe dropped that a house the Barretts were moving to Taunton would cross Minute Man Road about five o’clock in the afternoon. By the way, they still haven’t arrived in Taunton. Halfway there, they turned a corner and by God if there wasn’t the Second Presbyterian Church coming up the road. That’s being moved. They’re probably still arguing about who’s going to back up.”

  “Never mind that. What about the Pollock?”

  “Yes. I also knew the Burwashes were in the Caribbean. Those crews work fast, but the lines are down long enough for a man to break into a basement and shut off a burglar alarm, so it won’t ring at central headquarters.”

  “I see. But one thing puzzles me. You knew all this, but how did Johnny Velours know it? He did the job.”

  “The two personalities overlap at different points. They acquire new impressions together, accumulate certain memories in common, and so on,” he said, getting his hat from the hall closet. He stood a moment in thought. “I believe the two identities are beginning to fuse.”

  “Swell.” I rose, my voice shrill with apprehension. “Which will be dominant?”

  He shrugged, not as though he hadn’t his suspicions, but as though the subject were for the moment best put by. “I’ve got to get down to headquarters. I really feel I must do this. It’s the only honest thing I can do in the circumstances.”

  And off he went to recover the thunder a boob was trying to steal from him. This involved his being questioned, booked on suspicion, and held for observation. I was almost grateful for a call from Sweetie and its summons to my other problem.

  “I wanted to tell you,” she said, shining at me across the room. “I’m going to have a child.”

  “Really?” I said. “I’m so happy for you. Well, well, a child. How long have you known?”

  “Just today.” She smiled tremulously, standing in a corner, and rather shyly picked up a plate of food she’d been lunching on there in the living room. “Can I give you something to eat?”

  “No, thanks,” I said, upright in another corner. “I’m not hungry.”

  “Are you blushing? It’s hard to tell, your face is still pink.”

  “It’s peeling. Another week or two and I hope to look human again. Well, well, so it’s under way. Well, that’s that.” I glanced toward the door.

  She nibbled a sandwich, then thrust a fork into a heap of something on the plate. “I suppose everything will go all right?”

  “Of course. Why shouldn’t it?”

  “There’s nothing to be scared of.”

  “What’s there to be scared of? You’d think you were the first woman to have a child,” I laughed reassuringly. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “It’s perfectly natural. Woman is the Custodian of Life. Only by merging herself in its Continuity can she fully realize herself. That’s why you’re doing this. Remember?”

  “I hope you’ll stop by once in a while. Just to look in on Sweetie, who’s all alone, till she’s used to it.” There was about her a touch of dependency that was new, while at the same time her eyelids fluttered in an old way.

  “When will you be leaving for New Mexico?”

  She frowned into her plate, chewing. “Ik, I hate potato salad.” She returned the plate to the table and sat down in a deep chair, tucking her feet under her. “Well, I’m having a little trouble with the house, actually. I need a better agent. I gave Wood and Apthorpe an exclusive on it, you know, but they’re not getting anywhere for me. The thing to do is list it with the whole Real Estate Board. Then everybody’ll be in here poking into corners, won’t they?”

  “Haven’t you had any offers?�
�

  “Not a nibble.”

  “Oh?”

  “And now there aren’t even any lookers any more. Sweetie doesn’t understand it.”

  “I do. It’s that damned Thruway. I was against it from the beginning. It’s knocked the bottom out of the market in two ways. First, people don’t want to buy around here because of it; second, it’s flooding the market with houses you can pick up for nothing anyway, just haul them out of the way of the bulldozers! That’s progress?”

  “Don’t slice the air so. You make me nervous.” She clutched a strand of beads, some trinket of anthropological import from the Village days. “You mustn’t upset a woman at a time like this. Be nice to Sweetie. She’s not building the old Thruway. She’s bearing your child.”

  “I’m sorry. Everything is such a mess in this state. Well, I didn’t vote for that bunch in office.”

  She sat appraising the house with fresh affection, her eye clear and bright, like that of a nesting bird. “Ish kabibble if I don’t sell the house. It’s so snug in here.”

  I set down my briefcase which I had been holding all this time, and which was bursting with work, and took a stance squarely in front of her chair.

  “You must go to New Mexico,” I said quite calmly. “The climate is ideal, perfect for expectant mothers. Artists colonies there offer a milieu tolerant of the sort of thing you’re trying to do. Oh, the Southwest is wonderful! Now, you go there, do you hear? I’ll look after the house for you. I’ll sell it if I have to—if I have to buy it!”

  She came over and put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re so strong. You give a woman courage. The kind she needs at a time like this.”

  “This isn’t like you. I thought you set such great store by your independenre.”

  “Oh, I do. I do. But this is a new feeling along with it. A kind of dreamy sense of being a complete woman at last. I’m so alive.”

  I had a sense of something rather to the contrary, the slightest regression into the girlhood from which we had at such cost only just rescued her, but I said nothing. I had, for example, not heard her refer to herself in the third person since the intermediate Fitzgerald period of half-girl half-woman affectations that preceded her emergence into the adult world. I laid its revival to the first tremors of discovery, and trusted she would steady down in time. Every woman had qualms at first.

  “I must run along now,” I said, getting my briefcase. “Remember the owner of a house doesn’t have to be around to sell it, in fact I’ve heard it helps to be away. Just turn it all over to your agent and go. Free as a bird. The best of luck with it, and with the baby,” I said, backing toward the door, “and your new life in New Mexico. Good-by, Sweetie. Good-by, good-by, good-by.”

  “Hello, Chick?”

  “Why do you phone me here at the office? You know you mustn’t.”

  “I just wanted you to know. I’ve had an offer on the house.”

  “Wonderful! Getting your price?”

  “Twenty-five hundred less, but I’ve instructed my agent to take it.”

  “That Miss Apthorpe?”

  “Well, Mr. Wood is handling it.”

  “That’s great. I’m delighted for you.”

  “I wanted you to know. Will you drop by and celebrate before I go?”

  “Oh, sure. Little drink on it, before you’re off to the great Southwest—for good. Good luck with the closing and all.”

  It was an evening bathed, for me, in that relief from anxiety which I sometimes think must be the keenest of human joys. I rough-housed with the children, joshed with my wife, ate like a horse. I picknicked in bed with crackers and cheese, then a poppyseed Danish and a second glass of milk. Books to catch up on strewed the counterpane. Fillmore walked in wearing a ten-gallon hat tipped slightly forward, like a stranger entering a saloon in a manner calculated to arouse curiosity.

  “Why do you follow me wherever I go?” I said. “Can’t you see I’ve made a new life for myself out here? Why do you hound me?”

  “Harry wants to know about the Wells, Fargo money. He’s coming on the noon train tomorrow, Murton.”

  I laughed at the ceiling, wriggling among the bedclothes. Fillmore went out, passing his mother coming in. I smiled innocently over as she regarded the Danish I was eating. “Just having a roll in the hay,” I said.

  She sat on her side of the bed, with a book of her own in which she was underlining passages heavily with a pencil. I drew her skirt up and pressed a cheek to her thighs, murmuring a declaration in her favor.

  “That whinnying noise,” she said. “And how about putting your shoes in the closet? You’ve got five pairs lined up in the corner there.… Chick, I think it would be nice too, but I’ve got to go out tonight.”

  “Lambswool, where?”

  “Mabel Apthorpe’s. We’ve got to prepare for this panel discussion we’re giving at the Club. She won’t be home till ten, but it shouldn’t be more than an hour. Maybe when I come back if you’re awake …”

  “What’s the panel discussion about?”

  “The Ordeal of Modern Woman is the subject.”

  “You mean those two cars, automatic dishwasher, beautiful house in the suburbs but Something’s Missing? That ordeal?”

  “The fact that she has all that after being educated for something else—ignoring your sarcasm.” Crystal tapped the open page with her pencil. “There’s some statistics in here that would raise your hair. The number of women who have all you say—who are supposed to Have it Made—and who end up in nervous breakdowns, alcoholism, affairs they don’t want and what not. There’s a case a thousand feet up your own road. Have you heard about Alice Drury? She’s turned Lesbian. It’s a fact. She’s left Frank and is living with that woman who opened up the boutique. Why do things like that happen?”

  “Why do they? I was only being facetious a minute ago. Of course it’s a problem we all worry about. Why is it?”

  “There’s no simple answer, but one thing is that the whole lifeline of woman today is ridiculous, in an awful sort of way. A woman today is educated to be an intellectual companion for a man, a creative mother to her children, and a cultural force in the community,” Crystal said, rising and thoughtfully lighting a cigarette, “and after getting her degree, or even degrees, wakes up one morning and finds herself a housemaid to a stockbroker and a chauffeur for three kids. She spends four years at Bennington in a leotard, and there she is, stuck in a—a—”

  “Chintz Prison?” I said, going over for my glass of milk.

  “Say, that’s good. I like that. ‘The Chintz Prison.’” She gave me a smack. “Thanks. That’ll make a wonderful title for the symposium.”

  I was glad in any case that my darling was out of her own Chintz Prison when the phone rang, because it was Sweetie’s voice at the other end, “Chick? Can you talk?”

  “You’re damn right I can, and this is what I have to say,” I answered in low tones. “If you telephone me here one more time I’ll come and strangle you to death with the cord. Is that clear?”

  “I’m sorry, and I wouldn’t have spoken up if it weren’t O.K. But look, have you any idea where I can get some raspberries?”

  “Raspberries! At the store of course. Can’t you just go to the store and get some? Is oo completely helpless? Why do you bother me?”

  “It isn’t just that. Chick, something’s happened. Could you possibly stop over for a second? Don’t if you can’t, but oh, I wish you could. I’m frightened.”

  “What about the deal? Did you get a binder?”

  “What’s a blinder? Tell Sweetie what a blinder is. Oh, hurry.”

  “A binder. That’s a down payment on a house. Did you get yours?”

  “That all fell through. They withdrew their offer. But that isn’t what I have to see you about. This is something serious.”

  “I’ll look in tomorrow.”

  “Tonight?”

  “All right. It just happens to be convenient. But I’ve no sitter so I’ll only be in and out.
”

  “And as long as you’re coming, would you pick up those raspberries on the way? You’re so sweet.”

  Because I knew of no grocery store on the way that would be open, and to save time, I got a package out of our own freezer. It was of course still frozen when I arrived at Sweetie’s. I dropped it on the table with a graceless clunk. “Now this terminates my connection with this matter. Is that clear? All right. Now what’s your news?”

  “I think you’d better have a drink first. How about a beef bouillon and vodka?”

  “A what?”

  “You mean you’ve never heard of beef bouillon and vodka?” she said, indicating her own drink, which I had thought a very stiff whisky. “Where have you been? It was all the rage in the Village. It’s called a bullshot.”

  “I’ll just have some Scotch. Go on talk while I mix myself one.”

  “After I thaw these raspberries.” By the time I had poured my drink she had set the package in a pan of hot water, and returned from the kitchen chafing her folded arms through the sleeves of a feathered silk robe.

  “Chick, there’s no money.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just that. Father’s will is meaningless. A later one’s turned up leaving everything to Eve Bickerstaffe. Or Mrs. Appleyard rather. Chick, they were married all along. They kept it a secret because they thought Granny would disapprove. I suppose that’s why they did.”

  “And maybe to keep a couple of other husbands she’s collecting alimony from from hearing about it. Where is she?” I demanded.

  Eve had instantly flown to France after the mishap, to be on hand for identifications when the victims were brought into Le Havre, and had stayed on to help resolve the family’s financial affairs, which still revolved around those bauxite mines in southern France. After the success of his own little flyer in them, Appleyard had persuaded Mme. Piquepuss to repose her fortune there. Eve was being helpful for good reasons! Next there had been a letter from her saying she was going to settle down in her native London, to forget. So my “Where is she?” was rhetorical. I knew very well she was out of the country or I’d never have lent myself to Sweetie’s personal scheme. My question had been an angry outburst at Eve’s own programs, now seen in their perspective. God knew she was the last woman I wanted around, but I resented her snug position as contrasted with Sweetie’s (and my) dire one.