SECOND WOMAN
Stop your lip, woman, and leave the poetry to them as can moan it proper. Poets are born, not made.
FIRST WOMAN
Aye, but we know one was made, don’t we now? And proper too she was. She priapubly had them lined up waiting their turn. Had I the queue for passion she has I wouldn’t be doin’ meown washin’, let alone others’. There’s food for thought there—intravenus injection. Still ’twas she, not I, met with a foetal accident.
SECOND WOMAN
Ah, you’re a foul-mouthed sweet old soul. Yes, made she was I must admit—and made once, maid no more.
FIRST WOMAN
Stop grinning with them two remaining teeth. They remind me of cloves, which reminds me I’ve got to get home and fix a ham for the poor old clod I’ve remaining to me. An incurable rheumatic. Ah well I love him just the same, the same. He’s persona non Groton, but he’s mine, and he wouldn’t go cheatin’ on me even if he had the opportunity, like that other blatherskite.
SECOND WOMAN
Oh, let’s not blacken the lad to the point of using him as a sinonim for all ruttin’ off the reservation. I’ve heard rumors he was the one prevailed upon. The soft sell and then the hard sell, and him so young and rubicund. It’s the company he kept.
FIRST WOMAN
Kept is it now? He keep anyone, that cheapskate, at least to hear tell? He’d never get in that deep—he’d never get fiscally involved if he could help. Furs and flowers, and then Christmas coming round and she up there in the flat waiting over the eggnog, in hopes that St. Necklace soon would be there. And him with his Santa Claustrophobia. No, not him. Just once he slipped and now he’s slapped and that’s the long and the short of it. Slapped around just like that clothes behind the glass there. Did you ever hear the one about the woman who looked at one of these and said, ‘Well, if that’s television …’?
SECOND WOMAN
Oh, woman, if you can’t tell jokes at least no older than yourself, button up. Here comes the Spin-dry. Then you can spread your washin’ proper and get home to cook that ham. How do you cook a ham?
FIRST WOMAN
(Growing absent) So little thyme. Sanctuary much, he’ll say ironiclike. He was good for the jests he was, once and many a spare quid for a case of bottles. Remembrance of Things Pabst, that’s the story of our life, and ah, how we lay dreaming on the grass. Him reading to me books with plots. How Greene Was My Valley of Decision then. Yes right off, and him with the wherewithal to hitch us up straight off. Legal Tender Is the Night. Him laying in bed drunk singing as I dropped my shift on the cold hotel room floor, Sister Carrie Me Back to old Virginibus Puerisque. It’s all a welter mitty in my head, thinkin’ back so fondly. For the lad it’s Beth In the Afternoon. As I went walking down the street I metamorphosis. It’s like that Spin-dry in my head as it must be in his too. I hear he’s mental now, aw, let’s have a kind thought for the chap. This is the end for him: delirium: tear-a-lira-lirium: stream of conscience: you pays your money and you takes your joyce.
(His head spins furiously at top speed. Then something mercifully clicks the end of the cycle and the whirling slows. The spectral blur sorts itself out in a circle of faces wreathing the bed, into which he looks up. Dr. Bradshaw is there, then another physician, a nurse, and Crystal too, wiping his brow.)
DR. BRADSHAW
(Raking his boyish gray hair) It’s the most amazing case of auto-suggestion I’ve ever encountered in my thirty years as a family doctor in these parts. To think so strongly you’re a swine as to turn into one! Look at it. I mean the eyes. Like beads.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN
And the red along the face—not just around the eyes. If it isn’t arrested the whole skin surface will be covered with it, which might be fatal. The only case on record like it that I recall is in Tender Is the Night. The woman in Diver’s sanatorium there, remember? [Then this man isn’t a doctor but a critic, and the consultations are literary, not medical. Could it be Blackmur? Or Burke? One of the giants? One of the Symbol Simons of literature?] It was related to the blush. When guilt is so strong it has to be organically realized—
SWALLOW
(Resentfully) You mean this is derivative too? I tell you I won’t—
(Hands press him firmly back onto the bed)
PROBABLE CRITIC
He seems to take it so personally. But there, he’s dropped off again. He must be exhausted. But now to get back to what we were saying, there’s another way of analyzing this particular hysteria. The need to convert himself into a swine may be an indirect way of blaming the woman.
DR. BRADSHAW
You mean the Biblical legend—?
PROBABLE CRITIC
I was thinking mainly of the Circe scene in The Odyssey, where she changes them all into pigs, remember? Thus it becomes, you see, the woman’s work, the woman who’s responsible.
(Swallow sits bolt upright, profoundly elated)
SWALLOW
We’ve done it! A Homeric parallel. This is it! We’ve made it! We’re in! Tell Cowley, tell Warren, get everybody on the wire, we’re in, do you hear! A Homeric parallel! At last! Get Wilson on the wire, get Hyman and Daiches and Jarrell! Shoot it to the newspapers and magazines. Wire Prescott and Rolo and Gissen and Hobson and Hutchens and Hicks—
VOICE
He’s really delirious now.
(The two washerwomen briefly reappear, keening and chanting “Dear a lear and leerious …”)
FIRST WOMAN
You need to cut it both ways now, with hidden meanings I’m afreud. You Rahv Pater to play ball, and a little Levin levineth the whole ump. Ah well, they were boobs in the wood, those two, like us all, beside this babbling book that has no end. My years ache with the melancholy plaint of footnotes, and my poor head rumbles when the Kazins go rolling along. And that other bunch washing their Lenin in public. Who will resolve all this and bring White peace again? Look look, the desk is groaning, and my poor chair’s gone ashen. What’s left for the likes of us but to draw up our chair to the fire of a night, and munch the tried old crusts again. What ails the new loaf I can tell you straight. It’s too inbread and lax—
SECOND WOMAN
Lacks what?
FIRST WOMAN
That good old William Butler Yeast.
SECOND WOMAN
That does it! I’m going home to Maugham.
(The two women fade, gently moaning
“Tear a leer a lirium … He’s a merewolf.”)
SWALLOW
Phone Fadiman—
VOICE
Shh …
(Another voice is heard offstage, growing louder. It is a Dutch accent of somebody obviously shouldering his way forward)
DR. BRADSHAW
Dr. Van Kuykens, thank God you’ve come. (There is a stir of handshaking all around, while a hand with a cool cloth continually soothes Swallow’s brow) This thing has gotten a little beyond me. I mean while we doctors like to keep abreast of psychosomatic medicine as the situation calls for these days, we’re not geared for anything like this. It’s an amazing case. Organically realized delusion. I’m sure you can tell by one look what he fancies himself to be.
(Dr. Van Kuykens wedges a round, smooth-shaven face into
the circle. He looks Swallow over, feeling his forehead
and taking his pulse. He lifts Swallow’s left eyelid and
lets it drop.)
DOCTOR VAN KUYKENS
I can certainly see what dis is at a glance. Dis man has got trichinosis!
OTHERS
Trichinosis! (They back sheepishly off) I never gave that a …
DR. VAN KUYKENS
Severe edema of the eyes. Bad enough to make dem almost disappear. Soreness of de muscles I’m sure from de vay he moofs on de bed … (He breaks off, open-mouthed a moment.) You mean I have come all de way from Rotterdam to diagnose an case of trichinosis? Och, God in hemel, wat is me dit? Ezels! (Going away) Give him aspirin, a mustard bath to bring de fever down, abso
lute rest and quiet. Plenty of nourishing food as soon as he can take it, and in a few days maybe a little light readink.
(Blackout)
18
I LAY back in the bath with my eyes closed, both to savor its warmth and to blot from view the humorous wallpaper, depicting children poring over textbooks while their parents sat slumped before television sets and reading comics, with which the room had been invested in my absence. As I paddled the lush suds, my senses flowering in the scented steam and my mind lolling among memories of corrupt aristocratic courts, I heard my wife call from the bedroom, “Don’t poke. You’ve a new sitter to pick up and she lives way over there in that new Hampton Common section. A Miss—” There was a pause while she deciphered her own handwriting on the telephone pad. “A Miss Charpentier. You may have trouble finding it, so allow for that.”
J. B. Priestley. The aria da capo, or repeat, ending, where everything starts all over again to see if we have learned anything. No. Not in my present condition. I was old and tired and resembled a wirephoto of myself. So please: include me out. No need to waltz me around again anyway, not on my first day home from Round Hill and the two of us only wanting to go out for a quiet bite of dinner together. Rather let me just savor my narrow squeak by calling Crystal in to sit on the laundry hamper to file her nails instead of on the edge of the bed.
“I see you can scratch your nose without any trouble,” she said, entering. “Your nervous reflexes were so bad you couldn’t find the tip of it and so on with your eyes closed. I noticed you didn’t have any trouble just now, and your eyes are closed.”
“Maybe I’m some better.”
I watched her perch on the laundry hamper and, crossing her legs, bend intently over the emery stick as it rasped across her nails.
“Tell me about it again,” I said. “Go through it just once more, step for step, from where you took over. You say you got suspicious about Dr. Bradshaw knowing so much about the situation, just as I did, so you went to him point-blank and said, ‘Look, are you taking care of Miss Appleyard too? Is that it?’ And he finally broke down and said yes—”
“Chick, I don’t want to go over this any more. It’s too painful. He did say, ‘I know your husband well enough to know he wouldn’t do what this appears to be on the surface, so there must be more to it than meets the eye. More than Miss Appleyard is telling me.’ That’s what you want me to say again, isn’t it?”
“For your sake as much as mine. Didn’t he say about your husband, ‘He’s made of finer stuff’? Wasn’t that the phrase he used?”
She sighed. “He said he decided to dig for the facts it was obvious Sweetie wasn’t volunteering, till she finally broke down and admitted there had been more than one man. She didn’t want to know for absolute certain who the father was—that was part of the anonymity idea. She chose the candidates carefully, yes, letting each think he was the sole man, but there were more than one. The child’s father was to be the masculine sex as such, not any specific individual that she herself knew it to be. Doctor Bradshaw finally got her to show him a diary she’d been keeping, which was more articulate about the whole thing than she was at that frightened stage of the game.”
“Well, and then when she did panic, she had to do exactly what she had been trying to safeguard herself against—cling to one individual man after all. And to make him feel responsible, so he’d stick, and see her through. Also the shoulder to lean on must be that of someone she might begin to think of as a husband after all, which she now saw wasn’t such a bad idea at that. So she chose me because I was more the sucker type and, what’s more, because she had somehow picked up the notion that we had marital troubles. Which is a laugh in itself.”
“Don’t be too sure of yourself too soon,” Crystal said. “Because I haven’t told you everything. There’s one more thing I found out—that I don’t like.”
She blew on her nails and studied them rather unhappily. I plunged briskly about for the sponge and soap.
“What was that, sweets?”
“The sacrificial lamb part of your story. I asked Nickie about Beth Appleyard and he said he’d never met her. He knew about her from you, but they had never met.”
“He’s a liar.”
“No, he is not. He absolutely and positively was not lying. I could tell. You can tell when a person is lying, and he was too natural about the whole thing. There was no mistaking it. Anyhow, the way to lie about this would be to admit knowing her because that in itself was unimportant so why get tripped up over it, but just deny that you had ever been seeing her. That would be the clever way, and Nickie is nothing if not clever. No, I knew he was telling the truth. And I was sick about it, because there went your shabby little whitewash. I almost wish now you hadn’t tried to justify yourself in that way, because it now seems the one really cheap thing in the whole business. The one I can’t forgive.” Tears welled in her eyes as she rose and flung the emery stick into the medicine chest and slammed it shut. “I’m glad we’ve got you home again and that you didn’t die, Chick, but I don’t see how I can forgive you.” Her lip quivered. “Do you?” she added, and went out.
I sat in blank misery in the water. My mouth felt as though it had been stuffed with ashes and then gagged. My bram was a mass of maggots. After the first shock, it began to function again, enough at least to cope with the confusion that filled it.
I must thrash these facts out again, I thought to myself. There is something wrong here. If Nickie didn’t know Beth Appleyard, then who did I see her get into a cab with that afternoon when I was having my shoes shined on a street corner? I could have sworn it was Nickie. I may have seen him only from the back, but you can recognize somebody you know from the back. It must have been he. The same erect shoulders and boyishly hollowed neck between the fresh haircut and the tweed coat collar. Perhaps the gait and manner had had a dash more of surface swagger than was usual with Nickie Sherman, but that …
I sat bolt upright. It hit me like a rock. I sprang to my feet and, clutching a towel from the rack, ran dripping into the bedroom where Crystal was sitting on the bed doing nothing.
“I’ve got it!” I said. “It was Johnny Velours she got mixed up with—or who got mixed up with her! Don’t you see? That was why Nickie didn’t remember—he couldn’t. That’s it, it must be. That’s who I saw getting into a cab with her that time. It is, it is, I wouldn’t lie to you about a thing like that! I knew at the time that’s how it was, but completely forgot it.”
The face she turned under the flowing tears was one that hungered to believe. And just as she knew Nickie hadn’t lied then she knew I wasn’t now.
“Dr. Bradshaw said she told him there was one man in particular she liked and who was single, but he never came back again,” she said.
“He was scared away. Back into Nickie Sherman for keeps. Of course. It fits—it must. Two free spirits both running full tilt from the gaff they couldn’t take. Here all the while I thought it was my psychology at work, and it was only a male scuttling for cover from a dizzy woman. That’s what cured Johnny Velours out of existence. And makes the child truly anonymous, since it must be Johnny’s because he was the first.” I raced on in rapture, drying myself with the same furious speed at which I talked. “And so it ends as it began after all, resolved in that rich obfuscation from which it burgeoned, the father not only nobody we any of us really know but nobody we will ever see again. Because just as the whilom bones and blood and breath are gone of which the new was sprung—O inconceivable conception—so the new will on the instant of its materialization be the very seal and avatar of that Father obliteration. More. Will by its very deed of expungement perpetuate the Not-being, by the very apparition bland fortuitous and insolent of all Birth declare and embody that Anonymity of all flesh of which it is both apotheosis and usufruct, and thus by the infinitely subtractable tissues of human substance levels our little trouble till it is lost from sight in the eternal pattern woven out of all teeming random bonded sentient dust.
—What are you getting that fresh linen out for? The bed is made.”
“So I’ll have the couch in your study ready when we get home.” She shifted the sheets on her arm as she wiped away the truly last of her tears. She drew a long, quivering sigh of relief, but that was all. “You can take your things and move in there. Or you can sleep here and I’ll go in the study. Whichever you prefer. You can have your choice. Because I don’t want to upset you.”
Four or five days later, I sat brooding in the study. How could I resolve my problem? On what note could I make the story play itself out? How, in other words, to get back from exile?
Would my writers be any help in tidying up the muddle? No! only in compounding it. Each had passed me on to the next in a worse state than he had got me from his predecessor. Our authors, the good ones anyway, are no guide to life—and the better they are the worse they are. And the poets, could one go to them for inspiration? Not the ones you can bear to read, today. Still, poetry …
One rainy evening when, alone still in my study, I was browsing among the bookshelves, I came across several old volumes that had been handed down in my family for generations. They included the Home Book of Verse, one of those unutterable anthologies of which the contents are classified under categories of human sentiment such as Love, Patriotism, Sorrow, the Home, and so on. In a section entitled “The Parted Lovers” I stumbled on the poem, Jest a-wearyin’ fer you. It plucked my heartstrings. Sobs caught in my throat as, seated in my lonely chair, I read the lines so familiar as those of a song selection with which parlor and church audiences were favored by sopranos of yesteryear. I squeezed the volume back onto the shelf with eyes that saw not. Yet I knew a great peace. I knew the inscription I would put on a card to accompany a gift of a dozen roses tomorrow. The roses would be red, and the white card would say, simply, “Jest a-wearyin’ fer you.”
The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel Page 24