by Paul Ableman
“Telephone call for you, sir—from the minister.”
And, promising to be back soon, Sir Vivian went puffing away with his secretary. I took another glum look at the marbles. They were mainly isolated legs, mostly of horses and the truth is, Horace, I got no kicks from contemplating them. During the next eight years, with Nathalie, I learned to savour the beauty of the spun imagination and I became a collector of note but at that time I was still a goon about art. Anyhow, Sir Vivian not returning, I drifted out of that hall, thinking to follow him back to his office. In the next hall was a glass case and, for some reason, I paused to look in it. There were a lot of little bitty things inside, many made of ivory, things like needles, fish-hooks, crude forks and combs. I gazed at one rough needle and shook my head ironically at the thought of preserving such a thing in a glass case. I read the notice propped near it and learned that this stuff was all Norwegian and dated back to the eighth century. Then I eyed that deformed needle again and I got a shock like a steer’s hoof on the shin! Eighth century! This needle! More than a thousand years ago—a thousand years!—a woman had been sewing with that home-made needle. In Norway, a thousand years ago—dark and cold, glacier, pine, log cabin, primitive family—and through the long, dark winter that unknown woman had stitched together the life-giving furs for her man and her kids with—that very needle! I kept gazing at it, almost seeing the ghostly scene of that oh distant! winter wavering into vision, imagining somehow that the life which had once moved that needle still adhered to it. A little later, Sir Vivian taps me on the back and leads me to his office to sign the contract at last.
But the next day, Horace, I went back to the museum. This time I got hooked on an early Christian drinking glass made of slightly greenish glass. This item was more than twelve hundred years old and had been found in Cyprus. Who had drunk out of that glass and what had they drunk? More important, what had they thought and felt and done in that summer world? I gazed at that glass, Horace, and at two or three items in the case and when I looked up, damn near an hour had passed. It made me shiver with the realization of how the past, and dreaming of the past, could swallow up the present. Nevertheless, Horace, I found that I was trapped. I cancelled my boat ticket and every day for three weeks I went to the British Museum. After that, I got a little alarmed and I took out a few doxies I’d found wandering about the corridors of the Ritz where I had a suite. The idea was to shake off the glamour of that museum but it didn’t work, Horace. While we dined in classy restaurants and danced in sophisticated nightclubs, I kept thinking about some crumbling bit of wood that was just recognizable as the ruins of a doll or of a little stone lamp that had feebly lit a hovel full of brutish ancestors. And the next day I’d be back in that terrible, passion-wracked theatre of time until:
“Isn’t it—Tornado Pratt?”
I looked round, Horace, and saw a sweet and diffident smile. I nodded and muttered:
“At your service, ma’am.”
But she was faint behind the roar of the past. Faintly, through that roar, I heard her murmur:
“Well, I won’t spoil your concentration.”
A dim memory glowed. I’d met her before—in Scotland—amongst a large party feasting beside a lake and noted then the sweetness of her smile. But now my mind was in ancient Crete. My heart was beating in jagged spikes and each spike was a barbaric pin stuck through the oiled locks of a Cretan princess. I saw Nathalie’s smile, rebuffed, contract slightly and then, with a little, self-deprecating quirk of her mouth, she strolled on and I turned back to my showcase. A minute later I was flying down the aisle after her and when I caught up, beside a canoe, I burst out:
“Ma’am, get me out of here!”
“You are impetuous, Mr Pratt. I’ve never known an American before.”
“Take me live, and rescue me from the dead. We’ll honeymoon in Wyoming because there are no relics there.”
“Are you proposing to me, Mr Pratt?”
“It appears so, ma’am.”
“Very well, Mr Pratt.”
She wasn’t really forward, Horace, my Nathalie. In fact, she was an old-fashioned girl in many ways. She was kind and didn’t feel any need to wrap it in irony. She had values—like nature and art and loyalty—that she would defend. She—but what I want to project, Horace, is how we clicked. I can’t remember when I really proposed, the second day, third day, but we walked out of that museum, gazing into each other’s eyes and transmitting a current of love and already with the yearning for marriage in our hearts. She looked at me like that for years, Horace, eight years if you want to know, before the great amoeba grew round her liver and shrank my Nathalie into a husk. When I’d turn on the swivel of my drive and glance at her standing behind me on the green, I’d quicken to that lamp of love. When I came home, when she came home, when we flew together in the Starlight Room an eighth of a mile above Manhattan, at any level, at any latitude of earth, the air turned to musk and filled with petals when my Nathalie and I came together.
PRATT AND PEER’S DAUGHTER—JUST FRIENDS? NO, GODDAMM IT!
We’re not just friends. How would you describe your relationship, Mr Pratt? Mighty fine. What I was seeking to discover, Mr Pratt, was whether you and Lady Nathalie are contemplating marriage? Is that right? Is what right, Mr Pratt? Is that what you were seeking to discover? Precisely, Mr Pratt, or are you just good friends? No, goddamm it. No? No, goddamm it, we’re not just friends—hey, you dropped your pencil.
Then, when he stooped to look for it, Horace, why I gave him a spin and a shove that sent the poor old geezer flying across the lawn. Hell, Horace, I couldn’t take a piss in a public John without finding a reporter in the next bay. I was used to having the press on my tail from Chicago but this was like Niagara to a shower compared to that. Little men in bowler hats scurrying along rooftops, popping up outside windows, busting through hedges. I got as nervous as a bootlegger, figuring everyone was patting his pocket meaningfully. Only what he’d got in there was not a gun but a notebook and pencil. And what was it all about?
It was all about a guy called Hugh Perry who’d been a blacksmith back in the seventeenth or eighteenth century—yeah, it would have been the seventeenth. And when Cromwell started ripping up the Royalists all over England, Hugh followed after and shoed the General’s horses with the special portable forge which he’d invented. And Cromwell was so tickled with the good state of his cavalry’s hooves that he gave this Perry guy a big estate that had belonged to a cavalier and after the Restoration, for some reason I haven’t got straight at this very moment, Horace, after the Restoration, James the—or was it Charles? Some king anyhow made Perry into a marquis.
And all the Perrys after him were decent guys who lived on the estate that Oliver had given Hugh and were well liked in the neighbourhood but none of them could have invented a hangover. Nathalie’s pa was a bee-loving old fellow, who could recite everything that the poet Donne ever wrote but he was about as much use to society as a stray dog. But because he was called the fourteenth Marquis, England, much of the continent of Europe and practically the whole of the United States of America went crazy because his daughter was marrying a Chicago meat-packer.
No, not that time, Horace. I can recognize it when it’s beamed at me. It was Nathalie the fuss was about. Tornado Pratt was just a little whirlwind, just a light zephyr, in that hullabaloo. Yeah, and maybe you’re right. Maybe that is what irked me. Maybe that is what got under my skin. I’d been kind of used to getting the maximum attention for a number of years now and, even though I kidded myself it was the infringement of privacy and the goddamm nuisance of these snooping dummies that was getting me wild, maybe it was really having to play second fiddle. At one point, I came at Nat with:
“Baby, do you want to marry me?”
“Of course I want to marry you, Tornado.”
“It just sometimes seems to me, Nathalie, just recently, that maybe you were fixing to marry your hairdresser instead.”
“Why do you say
that, Tornado?”
“Because when I ask you to lunch, or to walk in the park with me, or to visit me in my suite, you say that you have a date with your hairdresser.”
“But, darling, I have to make preparations. There’s so much to do.”
“Why is there so much to do, Nathalie? My ma and pa were married with just a hired man for witness and no goddamm hairdressers.”
“You’re being deliberately naive, Tornado. Our’s is a society wedding.”
“Is it me, you want, Nathalie, or the society wedding?”
“Why the society wedding, of course, Tornado. Any old husband would do.”
You see, Horace, she always turned my anger and made me laugh. But I stuck to my guns:
“Don’t try to bullshit me, my lady, that you’re not enjoying this shindig.”
“It would be silly not to enjoy it, Tornado, since we have to go through with it. But I’d marry you, my love, in a shack on the prairie.”
And so she would have done, Horace, because there was an affinity of the bone between my Nat and me. From the moment we met in the museum until I held her chilling hand in the blind hospital in Milwaukee, choking in the abysm of my immeasureable grief, we interlocked like wing and air in this world.
PERFECT YEARS FOR PRATT
We had three regular homes, the ranch in Colorado, the mansion in Chicago and our favourite: a one-room log cabin in Carolina where our only close neighbours were a family of chipmunks. Within visiting distance were bears and beavers and a wide range of other dumb critters but there wasn’t a human for miles. Don’t get the idea we were misanthropic. Not at all. In Chicago, likewise in Europe where we were frequent guests and visitors, we revelled in good company but no matter how good the company the best for both of us was each other’s and so it was always with delight that we headed out into the Carolina wilderness.
We’d live there, self-sufficient, for weeks at a time. Maybe we’d take with us, in the big limousine, some canned food and a selection of drinks but mostly we’d drink water from our own well, eat vegetables from out own patch, which I set in every year and weeded and looked after with some help from a ranger, and meat that I shot. And Nathalie would cook it. And days we’d canoe on the lake and streams, or walk the pine trails with or without guns, or, if it was very warm, splash the beavers out of the lake with our huge competition and evenings we’d build a log fire of red, chunky pine and we’d light the oil lamps and what we liked doing best of all was—reading to each other.
In that way, we read long classical novels from England, Russia and France. Personally, I did not appreciate Flaubert but was attracted to Tolstoy and Stendhal. Nat disliked Dickens but I thought he was fine. The tar bubbling out of the pine logs and Nat’s hoity-toity English voice clearly speaking out the words of Thackeray or, in translation naturally, Turgenev and you’d think the bears might crowd to our windows to get an earful. And late in the night, but early by city standards, we’d get bare-ass into our big timber-frame bed, under the skins, and I’d try and squeeze Nat through my breast bone into my bowels while love sounds creaked in my throat.
You ever see that film Walker’s Claim? It was a crap film but the girl in it was a dead ringer for Nat. Can’t even remember what she was called. She was only the second lead and I don’t recollect ever seeing her again in a movie but she was what Nat looked like. Nat came up to my chest and she’d lay her face on my chest and smile up at me and she had the most beautiful face that existed and you know what—I couldn’t for sure—not absolutely for sure tell you the colour of her eyes. I could tell you how her lips pursed to blow me a kiss and I can see now that trick she had of swinging her head from side to side like a wilful kid but I wouldn’t swear to her eyes. Hell, yes I would! Just as I said I wouldn’t, Horace, I saw them, clear and bright. They were green flecked with gold, Nat’s eyes, and the moment in which my memory just flashed them on to the screen of my mind was that moment when, sitting on a little bluff above our beaver lake, I glanced round and caught Nat inspecting me with a questioning look that sent thrills rippling through my body. For I understood the question she was asking herself and it was: how could she love me so much?
As for Manuel—that was crazy! I can see now how crazy it was. Sure, I’ll tell you exactly what happened.
I was ahead of Nat in sport. I was only a few seconds behind Olympic time in the crawl, a rodeo-calibre horseman, a scratch golfer but I was a bit heavy for tennis. I could give anyone a good game but I could see I’d never have made a pro. Well now, Nat also played a little tennis and we decided we’d improve our game some. So we joined a club just outside Chicago. We joined this particular club because it was owned and run by Manuel Carmine, who, in those years, was always one of the top seeds at Wimbledon. He ran a businesslike and elegant club and I never thought of Manual as anything but a tennis pro.
About this time, I got involved in planning and running new airmail routes. It was chicken feed but I could see that airplanes weren’t going to remain the same shape like elephants but would get sleeker and bigger and I predicted within thirty years the sky would be black with them. So I figured Pratt should have a piece of the air. The consequence was, I had to ease off on the sporting activities and so Nat more or less carried on the tennis alone.
Then one afternoon, in fall, I looked out of my office window, forty-six floors above Chicago, and decided I wanted to be away out of the city and with my love. I phoned down for my car and half an hour later I was swerving out through the red and gold towards Manuel’s club. Just about the first thing I saw when I got there was Nat and Manuel, in tennis white, heading out for the the courts. So I swung out of my drop-head and chased after them. They hadn’t seen or heard me arrive because the car park was about twenty feet below the club-house, with some fancy terraces and rock gardens in between. I went bounding up the steps like an antelope and then paused to admire Nat from behind. Tennis skirts and panties weren’t as revealing then as they are now but my Nat’s firm little butt and lithe carriage impressed me. I was running my eyes up and down her body, happy as a kid with a cone, when I saw Manuel’s left hand swing over slightly, take Nat’s right hand, squeeze it briefly and release it again. I was so euphoric I just went on dancing after them, chuckling to myself. And then suddenly it hit me and I stopped short and shivered. What the hell! What did that dago think he was doing? Handling my Nat! A huge rage, like the belch of a volcano, swelled up in me. Tennis pro? I’d cut off his balls and volley them at him! And how about Nat? She’d let him! Permitted it—permitted—what? Now take hold, Tornado! What’s she permitted? Just a little brush of the hand—that’s nothing—sure as hell nothing.
Well, I turned about, Horace, and I went back to the car. Correction, I sneaked back to the car. Suddenly I didn’t want anyone to see me. I wanted to be alone and secret.
However, by the time I got home that night, I’d laughed the whole thing off. We had a delightful evening. We ate Maine oysters, flown in on one of my new mail planes, with a bottle of fine German hock. As a matter of fact, I think we drank three bottles of that good hock. It slipped down like spring water when you’re really bushed in high summer. I kept calling for another bottle, filling Harvey’s glass and Nat’s glass and then, I confess, just about finishing the bottle myself. They cheered me on and laughed. They both loved to see me expanding into delight. I told wild stories of alarm and triumph. I got Harvey reciting ballads which he only did when he caught some excitement buzzing around. He loved reciting ballads but it never happened but four or five times all the years I knew him. Now, as we headed for the drawing-room for coffee, Harvey was moaning out:
“Oh, Helen fair, beyond compare,
I’ll weave a garland from thy hair—”
And I scooped Nat up in my arms and rocked her like she was on a fair-ground swing, compelling her to scream in alarm, and then just chucked her gently onto the great leather sofa.
Then things quieted down and we talked, mainly Harvey and me, about the St L
ouis run which was giving us problems because there was one stretch where there weren’t enough emergency fields and we’d nearly lost a plane the week before. After we’d been at it awhile, I suddenly turned to Nat and, to my own surprise and distress, asked:
“How’d the tennis go?”
You must understand, Horace, that I thought I’d put the whole thing out of my mind. So what the hell did I mean by betraying my resolve and asking Nat that question? What’s more, why did I ask it in that somewhat grim tone of voice? She replied lightly:
“I did rather well. I took a set.”
“From Manuel?”
“Oh, Titch! Of course not! I took a set from Dina Paradine. You know I couldn’t take a game from Manuel.”
“Is that right, Nat?”
“Well, of course it is. You know it is!”
“Maybe I wasn’t thinking about tennis, Nat.”
“Not thinking about tennis? I don’t play any other games with Manuel.”
“Sure about that, Nat?”
“Well, of course—now wait a minute. There’s more to this than meets the ear. Why is his face darkening into a crude resemblance of Othello’s? Tornado, you’re jealous!”
But I was in no laughing mood, Horace! I went bounding over, grabbed Nat’s wrist so that she flinched, tugged her to her feet and then forced her to the ground. It was the only time I ever laid violent hands on her, Horace, and whenever I remember it steel tongs grip my heart. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Harvey wince and double-shame filled my gullet for I saw that I was humiliating him too. But I couldn’t stop. It was as if there was a machine inside me moving my body.
“Before you say any more, Nat, I was there.”
“Could you let go of my arm, Tornado?”
“I’m—sorry. I don’t want to hurt you. But I was there. I saw what happened.”
Nat stood up, rubbing her wrist because my grip in anger was mighty, and then reseated herself on the sofa. She asked calmly: