“You are beyond doubt…” Raleigh gave up.
“Mais, oui, mon frère,” laughed Gates.
“I want you to know that last night was one of the most mortifying experiences of my entire life.”
“Really? Sorry, Raleigh. I honestly thought you were having fun.” Why in God’s name did everyone keep accusing him of having fun? Frankly, Hayes was even relieved (if surprised) to learn that
Mingo Sheffield was also planning to stay another day at “Wild Oaks,” then to take the Trailways bus to Charleston on Tuesday. He’d promised Lady Bug to go fabric shopping with her in order to make a dent in those eight empty rooms and he’d promised to take a jeep ride with Crystal, and, besides, he’d never had very many chances to travel on a long-distance bus and wanted to add that experience to his Life on the Road. And, besides, he was too hungover to get out of his quilted bed, where he now wallowed, still in his tuxedo, with a bag of ice over his fat face.
Raleigh counseled him seriously. “Mingo, you can’t keep up this charade. You’re going to get yourself exposed and humiliated. You don’t know a, excuse me, but goddamn thing about designing movie sets.”
Sheffield groaned, “Oh, why do you always have to be so critical? I know everything about the movies. I’ve seen just about every movie ever made about a dozen times.”
“Seeing is not making.” Raleigh delivered this aphorism while neatly folding the formal wear Mrs. Wetherell had rented for him. “I absolutely cannot even fathom where you found the unmitigated nerve to go around last night telling all those people you designed the costumes for The Sound of Music. They’re going to find out, don’t you know that?”
“How?” Sheffield raised the ice bag from one eye. “And anyhow I did have the whole Trapp Family Singers in my window once. They were cross-country skiing in loden jackets and White Stag parkas.”
“Good-bye, Mingo. I’ll reserve you a room at the Ambrose Inn for Tuesday. Your own room. Because frankly I’d enjoy sleeping alone for a change. You snore.”
“I do?”
“Frankly, yes. Like an elephant.”
“Gollee, Vera never mentioned it.”
“Perhaps she had her ears wired shut.”
Early that afternoon, Raleigh (ostensibly off to scout battle locations for Spare Me the Magnolias Please) nodded his farewells at the steps of the “Wild Oaks” portico, where Lady Wetherell—the only person on the grounds not hungover—sat in a brass-colored caftan, knocking back Bloody Marys, yelling at Ethan to stop throwing the champagne glasses in the plastic bags with the empty bottles, and laughing richly over the discomfiture of Mrs. Gervais Lancaster, who’d claimed to have been to France three times, and then couldn’t even understand half of what Monsieur Jean Claude Claudel was saying! Crystal was already back in the dogshed, and Payne was already up on the balcony trying to fix the dome of Sacre Coeur; but the mistress of “Wild Oaks” knew she could speak for them all in saying, “COME ON BACK, NOW,” to Raleighkov and The Other One.
It was with some trepidation that Hayes found the blind writer ensconced with his fiddle in the backseat of the Cadillac, looking a bit bulkier in his old gray uniform than he had the day before (as well as a bit chillier—for he had a shawl over his head). Berg had privately confessed that he preferred to keep on the move, and not by means of public transportation, since the police had in all likelihood “plastered his mug all over Dixie.” Mrs. Wetherell was worried for different reasons. “Jean Claude, I swear I feel funny letting Mr. Raleighkov and The Other One go off on their own like this, when he doesn’t speak our lingo, and The Other One, you know, has those fits. I feel real funny. Maybe we ought to send Crystal with them. CRYSTAL! Where is she?! Is she off in the woods with those goddamn dogs again? Let me get her. CRYSTAL!”
Raleigh drove away, spraying gravel over the beautiful lawn, before Gates could finish murmuring, “Ce n’est pas necessaire, chère Laddeee.”
Lady Bug might have felt even funnier if she’d seen Weeper Berg twisting in the back seat to shuck off the shawl, revealing a head of slick black hair, to shuck off the Gray and the Gold, revealing beneath it the thirty-four short tuxedo that she’d rented for him; to shuck off his white mustache, applying in its place, with one of her eyebrow pencils, a tiny black one. She might have felt funnier still if she’d seen him (which Raleigh did not—for he was busy buying gasoline, checking tires, battery, radiator, and so on down his mental checklist) rip open the back of Mingo’s giant pink teddy bear, disembowel it, and stuff into its cavity her new diamond watch, her antique Dresden milkmaid, six of her sterling place settings, and her tiny Frederick Remington drawing in a Tiffany frame.
As it was, Mrs. Wetherell didn’t see Mr. Berg. And so, over the next week, she drew the following conclusions: the tuxedo had been misplaced in the madhouse of cleaning up, and, what the hell, she’d just pay for it. She must have lost her watch again, and what the hell, she’d just buy another one. Ethan must have broken her Dresden milkmaid and there was no sense even asking him about it because he would naturally lie. As for that little bitty cowboy picture that had belonged to Payne’s grandmother, she’d never liked it, which was why she’d put it in the guest cottage over on a corner wall, and why she never noticed it was gone, until years later, when she happened to see an article in a magazine about Tiffany collections, and that funny colored glass looked familiar. As for the silverware, some of the settings did seem to be gone, which suggested that the guests must have stolen them for souvenirs, and that only proved what a grand success Crystal’s Coming Out had undoubtedly been. What the hell, they had so much money anyhow, they didn’t know what to do with it. She’d just get some more sterling. Or better yet, gold-plate.
Nothing happened to our hero on the way to Charleston, except he had to listen to Weeper Berg complain about God, and how unjustly God had tortured his bowels, despite his (Berg’s) hundred-percent lack of culpability for his own birth, and his subsequent hundred-percent abjuring of spicy food, whether Spic, Wop, or Chink. “God’s had His teeth in me long enough. And I have personally in my life known the guy to be a welsher. As per example, when Tampa Freddie danced, after he never laid a mitt on the Pazzo brothers and was in Havana running hash at the specified time in question, which likewise he could have proved if he had ratted on certain parties, which he didn’t. When they strung up Tampa Freddie, a man like an angel, may he rest in peace, I said to God, ‘God, that was a lousy s.o.b. thing to do.’ And I tell you, Hayes, I’ve been running to the john with these bowels from that day to this. So, okay, I say to God, God, the same to you, and contemporaneous with that…”
By the time they reached the Charleston peninsular, Raleigh had vowed never to complain of, or to, the Deity again; a vow he forgot within two days.
Mr. Berg appeared to know Charleston; at any rate, he led Raleigh into Old Town and down Church Street to the brick alley of boutiques still called Cabbage Row, where he wished to be let out. Here, he informed Raleigh, Porgy and Bess took place. His eyes moist, Berg added, as he ducked when a police car maundered past, “On the lam is not what Jews do. Jews write musical comedies. So I’ll be in touch.” Off he hurried, looking, in his tuxedo and trim black mustache, rather like Adolphe Menjou—if it were possible to imagine Adolphe Menjou playing bass fiddle in a nice nightclub, and wrestling a huge pink bear on the way to work.
The first thing Raleigh did was to hide everything in the Cadillac either under clothes or in the trunk, and then to entrust the locked car to a safe garage, whose attendant boasted that he guarded some of the best automobiles in Charleston, and that Raleigh’s Cadillac was in the finest company it was likely to know. Then he checked with some misgivings into the Ambrose Inn. It proved to be one of the beautiful pale houses looking over the Charleston Harbor, now obliged (like many fallen aristocrats) to take in guests to keep up appearances. Raleigh was surprised by the grandeur of his balconied room, as well as by its cost. Either his father hadn’t known much about the Ambrose Inn. Or he had. The son
took out his notebook and jotted down the figures. He’d been embarrassed to have come into this mansion with no luggage, particularly as his white suit was by now looking a little the worse for a lot of wear; particularly as his host (for Hayes couldn’t think of this elegant-voiced gentleman, inviting him to take a—Chippendale—seat, as the “night clerk”) so charmingly pretended to believe him when he said his bags had been stolen earlier that afternoon. Nevertheless, Raleigh could not bring himself to ask this man for directions to a place called the Bayou Lounge (which for all he knew might be a topless bar), and, finding no such place listed in the phone directory, nor any such person as Jubal Rogers, Hayes took to the streets.
Raleigh did not know Charleston. He was surprised to find that it was the beautiful city he’d expected New Orleans to be. It was one of those rare cities that was vain enough to define itself, and fortunate enough to be worth defining. The city of Charleston was exactly what she claimed she was: a great beauty faded to an elegant charm; exquisitely hospitable, outrageously nostalgic, unabashedly parochial, as indolent and smug and perfectly beautiful as a cat. She was proud—proud even of the defeat she refused to acknowledge— but her pride was willowy, and swayed in a dance with her visitors. She was past her prime, sea-spoiled, assaulted by pirates, Redcoats, and Yankees, by hurricanes, by earthquake; long ago passed over by the skyscraping world; and she thought herself forever the belle of the cotillion ball, and she made Raleigh Hayes think so too. As he curved along the crescent seawall of the Battery, where old women threw lazy fishing lines into the soft waves; as he looked out over the slow-rocking crescents of harbor boats under the crescent moon; as he looked back, past palmetto fronds and Spanish moss stirred by Southern breeze, and saw the lights of the great shapely houses, with all their patched French windows opened on all their mended laceiron balconies, and all their lace-white curtains billowing out like handkerchiefs waving to lovers bravely guarding the fort in the bay; when he stopped and looked at Charleston, Raleigh faltered, and then fell. He wandered in and out of the dark brick streets, breathing over the vine-laced garden walls the city’s scent of azalea and camellia and rhododendron and the sea, and he fell to thinking that he had never before understood why they called cities “she,” but that Charleston was, beyond doubt, a woman. And thinking of this, Raleigh began to think of Aura, and to think back to how he’d felt all those years ago, wandering with Aura the clean narrow gray streets of German villages, when falling in love was as physical and irresistible as any other great illness; when he’d walked around tingly and flushed and restive and dizzy and distractedly thinking every street as magically beautiful as the woman walking beside him. Maybe…Yes, maybe, this summer, he ought to take a trip with Aura. Maybe come here to Charleston. Maybe even go to other cities, like Paris and Venice, that he had never seen. Maybe they should not go once again for two weeks in August to the beach for the sake of the twins (whom, last summer he’d had to force, sulking, anyhow, into the station wagon). Maybe just he and Aura could fly to…maybe…maybe…
And so Charleston languidly waved her faded coquette’s perfumed fan at Raleigh Hayes, and he fell dizzily in love again with his wife.
Of course, Raleigh did have a “real reason” for his evening stroll. He was, after all, still Raleigh. He was looking the whole time for the Bayou Lounge, the place where Flonnie Rogers had told him Jubal still played. The first few people he asked had never heard of the Bayou Lounge. He was beginning to suspect that he’d been led astray by Flonnie’s strange, timeless anecdotage, but, then, at a restaurant, where he’d been eating as much she-crab soup as if he’d turned into Mingo Sheffield, his waitress, a middle-aged black woman, told him that there had been, not far from here, a jazz club called the Bayou Lounge. But it had been torn down in the 1960s, just a decade too soon to be saved by Historical Preservation. She then brought over an older waiter; he told Raleigh that he knew a man who had once played the saxophone at the Bayou. No, not a man named Jubal Rogers. Someone else, maybe Kingsley, who now sometimes played to pass the hat, right across the street there in the old open market. Hayes, a frugal man who calculated his fifteen-percent tips to the nickel, left this waitress a ten-dollar bill.
He walked the long cobbled blocks of the market arcade, down the rows of worn brick columns where once cotton and indigo and rice and tobacco and black people had gone to the highest bidder. Now the place was empty, except for a small crowd milling around, or perching on long trestle tables, to listen to a street musician perform “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?” This performer was not the man Raleigh was looking for. He was young and white, and he was working in a cheerful sweaty frenzy to play musical instruments with every possible part of his body. He had a banjo in his arms, tambourines strapped to his knees, a cymbal foot pedal by his right toes, a bass drum pedal by his left toes, a harmonica wired in front of his mouth, and a cowbell around his neck, which he would shake whenever anyone sneaked forward to drop a quarter in the Greek fisherman’s hat lying conspicuously beside a sign that said, “TRYING TO GET HOME. THANK YOU.” For a dollar, the young man shook the tambourines with his legs. For five dollars, he told Raleigh where the saxophonist Toutant Kingstree could be reached tomorrow morning.
That night Raleigh slept not only in peace and quiet, but in a high, carved, canopied bed whose sheer curtains, stirred by the warm spring wind, fluttered against his face like an old kiss.
Chapter 23
The Very Extraordinary Adventures Which Ensued at the Inn OUR HERO WOKE UP a new man. This was instantly proved by the fact that he immediately went on a spending spree. He, who according to Aura wore his clothes “to a nub” before he’d replace them, and then would only buy whatever Mingo had on sale that was “decent” and “not flashy,” now purchased in less than an hour a pinstriped summer suit, a blue blazer, tan slacks, two dress shirts, two polo shirts, socks, boxer shorts (the bikini jockey shorts that Mingo had given him had been driving him crazy), pajamas, a robe, a sweater with two different colors in it, and a gleaming pair of brown tasseled loafers (which he’d always wanted, and always denied himself as too frivolous for good value). He bought a suitcase and put them all in it. He told himself, when he saw the total of his neatly added figures in his small notebook, “I can’t keep traveling all over the country without a change of clothes, I can’t bear to face that hotelkeeper without a change of clothes, I need new clothes, I didn’t buy anything I didn’t need; why, I only owned two lightweight suits, and my seersucker was ruined in the sewer pipe, and my gabardine destroyed by Hell’s Angels, swamps, and Captain Nemo’s. Aura always begged me to get some new clothes. These will last me for years.”
Then, in the following hour, he, who gave presents only on Christmas and birthdays (and only then to his immediate family, and only to them because he kept a calendar with posted reminders), bought a jade bracelet for Aura, the color of her eyes. Bought Holly a crash helmet for her races, since if she was going to insist on risking her neck, she might as well try to protect her brains. Having made this purchase, he of course had to buy something for Caroline, and after a considerable argument with himself, he finally bought the bottle of cologne he’d twice told the pleading Caroline it was preposterous for a child her age to think of wearing, given its outlandish price, not to mention scent. Then, because Mingo Sheffield had given him the very clothes on his back (however inappropriate they were), he bought Mingo a giant picture book about the Civil War; having bought something for a neighbor, it seemed unjust to exclude his own kin, so he bought Gates a watch, with which Gates could, if he would, get control of his life.
Yes, there was no question about it, he was completely off the deep end. “Ha ha,” said Raleigh. “Mama, what am I doing?” She didn’t answer, doubtless too stunned to reply.
Soon looking like a new man as well, in his pale blue pin-striped suit and dark blue silk tie, Raleigh walked back down the curved staircase from his room to the chandeliered foyer of the Ambrose Inn, where he had the satisfaction o
f seeing the proprietor silently decide that his guest now made sense. “Very good, Mr. Hayes. I see they were able to find your luggage for you.”
Raleigh had a long delicious lunch, over which he searched a newspaper in vain for some mention of Aura’s college debate with Congressman Lukes (surprised to find himself inconsistently both relieved and disappointed that her fame had not spread beyond the borders of North Carolina). Two other articles caught his attention. To one, he said, “That’s ridiculous.” It reported that Simon “Weeper” Berg, still missing, was armed and believed dangerous. To the other article, he said, “That’s got to be a coincidence.” It reported that a man had been found dead in a BMW parked in a drive-in theater outside North Myrtle Beach.
After lunch, Hayes took his white suit to be cleaned; he’d keep it for (as Mingo would say) a souvenir. When he went to pick up his white Cadillac, he found that it now had a green sticker on its rear bumper that said, “READY OR NOT, JESUS IS COMING.” The garage attendant apologized, and wanted Raleigh to know he was thinking of calling the police. He waved his arm around the concrete landing. All the best cars in Charleston had green stickers warning, “READY OR NOT, JESUS IS COMING.” There was also one on the attendant’s office door. “Some joker or Jehovah’s Witness or some nut,” the angry man said. “Must have sneaked in here last night. It’s gonna take me hours to scrape those damn things off. No respect for private property. I mean, maybe somebody like you doesn’t mind, I mean, you’ve got that Jesus statue on your dash and all, but some people have really strong negative feelings about this kind of stuff. I’m not kidding, I’m thinking of calling the police.” Hayes told him not to worry about the Cadillac, then asked directions to the address that the one-man band had given him last night.
Handling Sin Page 37