The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “She’s going to have a child. Some man’s got her in trouble. Can you imagine that?”

  the MADHOUSE

  To write is always to rave a little—

  even if one did once know what one meant.

  ELIZABETH BOWEN: The Death of the Heart

  15

  “CALL that copy! Call that a story!” The Boss’s voice was like sailcloth ripping. His laugh was like canvas snapping in the wind, while his mouth itself was like a rent in the same fabric, or, when shut tight, like a seam in it. He didn’t have laughter in the sense of human mirth—he just had a laugh. It came across the desk now and stung Swallow’s cheek like a whip—which was where the simile fell down, as all similes, at some point, do. “I thought that approach rather a good one for my story,” Swallow said, standing at attention on the hooked rug. “The whole problem of sexual victimization from the male’s point of view, for once. It’s in the title itself: ‘I Was An Unwed Father.’ I thought it might make a good title for the whole series, and since I need the money right—”

  “Series!” the Boss laughed. His words were like a gust of sleet. “You think for a minute I’d run a whole series of these? ‘I Was An Unwed Father’! What a ridiculous business. Confession magazine stuff!” Swallow looked at the Boss’s tie. It depicted a mermaid of indeterminate age, sitting on a rock surf casting, or doing what looked like surf casting within the physical limitations of the art form. “You’re fired.”

  Swallow was aware, over the breakfast table of which he was oblivious, of his wife snapping her fingers under his nose, like a hypnotist bringing a subject out of a trance. “Hey, wake up. Some more coffee? Wake up. What kind of a Walter Mitty are you?”

  One who, instead of indulging in dreams of glory that offered escape from the harsh world, spun fantasies so nerve-wracking that it was a relief to get back to reality. They were supposed to make the facts of his existence, momentarily at least, more palatable by contrast. And indeed the kitchen seemed friendly now by contrast with the office from whose merciless imaginary developments he had been recalled; the sun streaming through the dotted Swiss curtains made everything seem all right again, the sleepless night and its tortured apprehensions an unreal dream. His wife, crisp and neat in the flowered housecoat, sat across from him, snapping her napkin out on her lap.

  “I was trying to tell you that Sweetie Appleyard is going to have this baby,” she said. “Somebody evidently has her in trouble. Imagine it! Taking advantage of a girl like that. What do you think of a man who’d do a thing like that?” Swallow was “fletcherizing” his food, as they had used to call it, after the nutritional expert who had advocated prolonged mastication, chewing it long past the point where there seemed to be any need, then chewing it some more, as he could remember his parents doing at the dining room table when the health measure had been in vogue. Swallow was fletcherizing his toast not out of partisan design but to postpone passing it along to a stomach at which he was already extremely sick. “Chick, for Pete’s sake, I’m talking to you. I said what do you think of a man who would do a thing like that?” “I’d like to wring somebody’s neck,” he muttered.

  … “ … is too good for him,” the attorney for the defense said in conclusion, and turned from the jury box and sat down. A stir ran through the spectators, many of whom glared at Swallow. He was sitting on a bench with an infant in his lap. He was feeding it a bottle, which, when the child had finished, Swallow handed to a bailiff. Now his own lawyer rose and called for Beth Appleyard. There was a stir of quite another sort as she twitched on high heels up to the witness stand. She was dressed in a fashionable suit of dark tweed and a cloche hat, and smoked a cigarette in a long holder. Swallow’s lawyer, a portly man in gray pinstripe, sauntered up in a leisurely way and said, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we shall prove to you that my client is not amiss in naming the woman on the stand in this maternity suit. She is not, at the moment, wearing what could precisely be called a ‘maternity suit,’ being one more adapted to the stylish literary bars and restaurants which she prefers to that Home which has been traditionally regarded as a woman’s place.” There was a courteous titter at the labored joke, whose author shot his cuffs and added, “Which she prefers, I might say more bluntly, to shouldering her share of the responsibility for bringing a new human being into the world. I will now ask my client to rise.” Swallow got to his feet, shifting the infant on his arm. “Miss Appleyard, will you now rise.” She did, drawing the collective gaze from the more pathetic pair. The lawyer then pointed to her and, turning to Swallow, said: “Charles Swallow, take a good look at the lady in the witness box. Now tell the court, is she or is she not the mother of your child?” Swallow declared in a clear and ringing voice: “She is.” The lawyer sat down and the counsel for the defense rose again. He was evidently very skilled at conducting bastardy cases, for he now cross-questioned his own client with devilish ingenuity. By a series of adroit leading questions and subtle time manipulations he made it appear that the accused could not be the mother of the child because she had spent the years in question on the French Riviera and touring Europe with Nicole and Dick Diver, Abe North and other friends of hers from the Fitzgerald era. Impressed, the judge rose and began to excoriate Swallow. His words were drowned in a roar from the spectators as they surged forward and flung themselves on Swallow in a welter of flying fists.

  … “Good morning, Dr. Swallow. Dr. Swallow, I said good morning.” “Oh, good morning, Miss McConkey.” He gave her his hat to hang up, and stood contemplating the stack of letters on his desk. “The decline of the American male may be discerned in the increase in the American mail.” He seemed about to gather it all up in a lunge and hurl it out the window.

  “Dr. Swallow, I wish you’d tell a person what the matter was. You look just awful, and you’re a thousand miles away. Do you worry about your patients so? Is that it?”

  “I worry about them, yes. For instance I have a young lady who’s in trouble, as they used to say,” Swallow said, suddenly feeling he had to talk about it, treat it as an objective reality rather than something festering to twice its size in his mind. “Do they still use that expression, Miss McConkey? You’re of a later generation than I. Are they still treated as fallen women, or are they excused in our more liberal outlook?”

  “Not by me, they’re not! It’s just because of modern enlightenment that they have no business getting into such scrapes. I don’t know what gets into girls like that.” “You don’t?” he said, wearily. He dropped the subject. Miss McConkey would be no help. He sat down at his desk. “Any Urgents or Specials in these?”

  “Yes. There’s one from a woman in Brooklyn who’s hysterical. I’ll read it to you.”

  Swallow listened with elbow on chair-arm and knuckles to mouth, a pose which he unconsciously struck in her presence because it gave him professional substance, and justified the term Doctor with which she persisted in greeting him. Seated herself, she cleared her throat and read the letter:

  DEAR LAMPLIGHTER:

  I have just found out my husband is heterosexual—whatever that means. The way I found out about it, I happened to overhear some people talking at a cocktail party, and from a name they dropped I knew it was about my husband. One man laughed and said in a low voice, “There’s no doubt he’s heterosexual.”

  That was all, but oh the blow of finding it out this way. Everywhere you turn these days you hear of some new kind of perversion or abnormality. How can a person keep up with all these big words, the curse of our time? Homosexual, asexual, bisexual—now heterosexual. That’s a new one on me. What does it mean? It’s not in my dictionary. How serious is it, can anything be done for these people? What do they like to do? My husband never gave me any inkling, living a regular sex life with me to all intents and purposes, maybe a little more than average actually, but they say that’s often a cover-up, to hide something. Oh my God, that this could happen to me, could strike without warning, my whole life in ruins. Can you answer me ab
out this, also tell me how best to handle the situation in the home. We have eight children.

  Miss McConkey put the letter on the desk. “That’s all,” she said. “It’s signed Mrs. Rausch. Do you want to dictate a reply?”

  “Not now. I want to think about it a while,” I said. “There’s something else I have to attend to first. Would you go out and get me Mrs. Swallow on the phone?”

  “Okie doke.” She rose and walked to the door. “What is heterosexual, Doctor? Is it bad?”

  “It can be hell. Get me Mrs. Swallow.”

  My reasoning was that I was taking my predicament altogether too subjectively. In the objective environment of the office, I realized how undiplomatic I had been in avoiding the subject of Sweetie at breakfast. As with Bulwinkle, the thing to do was wade in, answer questions freely and ask them freely. I knew in my own mind I hadn’t done wrong—I had been wronged. All right then, get the aggressive before it’s too late. To appear on the defensive now might make impossible later that interpretation of events that should be the very least I ought to aim for: that I had been a boob, not a rat. Play the mouse now and I would be hanged for a rat. It was with the ideal of being thought a sap firmly in mind, therefore, that I spoke out clearly when I heard my wife’s voice on the wire and said, “Angel, I’m afraid I was purposefully vague about this Sweetie thing, because her father had sort of deputized me to play the, well, the Dutch uncle to her before he died. So I feel in a way responsible. I had her under my wing, you see, and that’s why I feel somewhat accountable now. It seems I made a botch of my job.”

  “I didn’t know you’d been seeing the Appleyards.”

  “I know how you hate it when I take on people that I know personally, or that we do. No lectures, please—you were right and this proves it. But there’s no use calling myself a damn fool. The thing is, what can I do now? How did you find out about it, by the way? That’s what I was curious about.”

  “Mabel Apthorpe told me.”

  “Ah, the news behind the news?”

  “She’s been in and out of the Appleyard house trying to sell it, you know. Nobody told her in so many words, but she caught on. You know how sharp Mabel is.”

  “Sharp as a tack.” I twisted the telephone cord in two fingers. “She say who the man is?”

  “No, but she does happen to know that he tried to put her away.”

  “Put who away?”

  “Sweetie. He clapped her into an institution of some kind in Chickenfoot. It’s a shelter that uses them to further some kind of psychological survey they’re making. Sort of guinea pig idea. Which is all right in itself, of course, except that they keep them under lock and key and pick their brains day and night, like the Communists in Darkness at Noon to hear her tell it—”

  “Wai—hait a minute! Hold on there. I happen to know about this place. They’re doing a bang-up job of work there in research. This shows you the evil of rumors. I took her there myself, to tell you the truth.”

  “You what? You knew about Sweetie all the time?”

  “I was the first to learn.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’ve told you why. You’d have lit into me, and right you’d have been, hon, but look. You say ‘to hear her tell it.’ To hear who tell what? If Sweetie’s under lock and key.”

  “She got away and ran home. She broke out the second-story window and slid down a rainpipe.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Home. That’s how Mabel learned the whole thing.”

  “I see.… Well, that’s the sort of thing I wanted to find out. I’ll go call at the Appleyards’. I suppose I ought to follow it up.”

  “You’ll no such thing. You stick to your work at the office. Now I mean it, Chick. I’m sick of these briefcases full of work you bring home. I’ll look in on her myself.”

  “Don’t. It’s my place to. I want to see the house anyway. It’s for sale. Remember I told you about that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  There was a silence.

  “So let me go.”

  “No. You look enough like something the cat dragged in. Do your work and that’s that. This calls for another woman anyhow, the way the poor thing sounds. Maybe I can worm the name of the man out of her. It seems to me he should be made to help. I’d like to get my hands on that swine anyway.”

  “You would?”

  “Yes I would.”

  “Is this the liberal I hear talking? The stormy petrel of the women’s club? Or do my ears deceive me? Let’s not forget what our friend Spinoza says—‘neither to weep nor to laugh, but to understand.’”

  “I understand plenty without Spinoza telling me. Anybody who’d do a thing like that to a girl like her.” Crystal’s words became deliberately spaced, as they often did when she was making a particularly portentous judgment, so that each one had the value of a separate sentence. “He’s an absolute. Utter. Unmitigated. Swine.”

  After throwing up (do you think the stomach will not mind what the mind will not stomach?) I clapped my hat on and hurried out through Miss McConkey’s again baffled importunities into the street. Crossing which I was narrowly missed by two honking motorists. I bought a pocket tin of aspirin in a drugstore and took two at the soda fountain. I headed on in the general direction of Beacon Street and then up that toward the Appleyard place, with no actually clear idea whether I would go in or not. I was riding a new busline to work these days, leaving Crystal the car, so its presence in front of the house would tell me if she was inside. It wasn’t there now, in any case. I stood looking at the house from across the street half a block down. The door was shut and the curtains drawn. I went to Mr. Hickett’s drugstore and asked him for a sleeping pill, which he refused without a prescription. I reminded him that I had got some about a year before with a prescription that could be renewed once. I remembered the date closely enough for him to be able to look it up, which he did, and which satisfied him.

  “I’m going to deliver a lecture this afternoon, and I like to take one to calm my nerves before I go on,” I said. His eyes went, and were not clearly seen again till he made change for my five-dollar bill. While waiting for it, my eye fell on a stack of display pistols in the toy section and I bought one, moved by an impulse obscure to me. While he waited at the cash register for the financial fluctuations to subside, I browsed further. Humming, I reached up to a row of Frankenstein monsters on an upper shelf and wound one up. I smiled as it marched across the counter for me, swinging from side to side with that mechanical lope made familiar by horror movies. I returned it to the shelf, though, and went back to the cash register. As Mr. Hickett was counting the change into my hand, a whirring sound drew our attention back to the toy section. Some evidently unused tension in the windup spring of the monster sent it marching to the edge of the shelf, where it toppled over and landed on something fragile on the floor, judging from the tinkle of broken glass that followed its plunge.

  “How much does that make it?” I asked, extending the money back in my outstretched palm for him to take more of. He shook his head, growing rigid, as if pleading the speedy curtailment of this unendurable moment in human relations. I gathered up the sleeping pills and the revolver with the change and fled.

  I went down the street in an aimless frenzy, hoping for some program of action to emerge. I walked under a ladder propped against a building; another honking motorist met my crossing on a red light; I fondled the phial of sedatives in my pocket, realizing also the idea I was toying with. Mightn’t it be the best way out, for myself and those dependent on me?

  But before such resorts were reached perhaps I could frighten Sweetie into keeping her mouth shut, or even scare her out of town. I had been walking in the direction of her house again. This time I would go in, thrust the pistol at her and say point-blank, “Look. One word out of you and it’ll be your last. This is what you’ll get.” Such a threat should by all means be tried. But as I approached the house, my blood froze at the sight of my c
ar parked in front of it. I wheeled abruptly around and started back.

  I wandered into a small school supply store with a candy and soda counter. There I ordered a Coke, to take a sleeping pill with. I realized that I could never eat a fistful of those capsules without some previous sedation, but one or two taken first might calm my nerves enough for me to go on with the rest. The owner, a shuffling old woman in a soiled Mother Hubbard, said she was out of Coke, so I settled for a grape soda pop which she served in the bottle. When she had shuffled off again to resume unpacking merchandise at the back of the store, I took a capsule, washing it down with a gulp of the grape pop. I sat for a bit, loitering over the bottle.

  Of all the pleasures of the dentist’s chair the best, I think, is that little nozzled hose that squirts a thin stream of liquid over your teeth between more basic procedures. An adequate substitute is to shake a bottle of soda pop you might be drinking, holding your thumb over the top to build up a head of pressure, then aim it into your mouth and move your thumb, or let an edge of it up, just enough to release the charge of soda, which will come out in a jet as fine as any dentist’s. The charge will be even stronger than his, due to the carbonation. I often drink a good part of a bottle this way, playing the stream around my teeth and gums and even down my throat. I suppose it’s a rather special, even decadent, pleasure, but a pleasure nevertheless.

  I had agitated the grape soda a few times and fired it into my mouth in this way when I became aware of a pungent silence back where the old woman was stacking things away. Moving my eye to the left, I saw her watching me from behind the toppling ramparts of educational supplies. I swung away, and sat gazing idly out the window. “Getting hot,” I said. The silence continued. I tipped back what there was in the bottle and got up. “How much is that?” “Seven cents.” I had even change, and, dropping it on the counter, went out.