by John Hersey
The reason the Topic throws me into such anger is that life has been so good to me. There’s a certain kind of hairy velvety weed on Long Island, with light green leaves and a big phallic something or other it erects in August, monstrous, whew; I sat down in a meadow and studied one of those, one summer—oh, it was after my drinking period but still a long time ago, God! But the point is, when you looked at it closely, it was so intricate, so cleverly done, really just as astonishing in its way as my expensive Shiro-fugen cherry tree when it gets all dressed up in its pink housecoat in the spring. A lousy weed. Manuel! I love you. I didn’t mean that. I don’t know what I’m saying when I swear in a foreign language.
“No, darling, what I mean about Meredith, he’s a Good Soldier, he had a fine career in the war, all those ribbons, and there weren’t many of his classmates who made chicken colonel, I hate that expression, but Philip, why did he stay in the Army? That was such a cautious outcome, such a mild thing to do. He’s so mild, Philip. You’re a slam-bang man, and I’m pretty keen on life, too, even if I have that tentative thing you’re always talking about, but what happened with our boy? What do you think happened?”
“Drua happened.”
Drua is now my maid. No one can pack a better bag, but I’m so blind without my glasses that I can’t see what she’s put in. I’ve been wearing this black sweater and these black slacks this whole trip; I don’t dare dig in because I can never find my glasses the first thing in the morning. Philip finds them for me. For years Drua was Meredith’s nurserynanny. I think Philip means not Drua affirmatively but that I neglected my son. Would that make him mild?
“Drua is a living angel. Don’t you try again to talk me into firing her. What have you got against her? Is she blackmailing you? Did you tweak her behind the pantry door?”
Drua is one of the coloreds, and she is also one of the few Good Guys that are left. No bitterness in her. Except lately she’s been having opinions about elections, she wouldn’t have dreamed of having opinions in the old days. You see. It’s beginning. They’re whispering. They’ve even gotten to my Drua, who adores me.
Somebody on some ship on some crossing quoted Horace to us—why does this come to me now?—Drua packing me off?—to the effect that “he who hurries across a sea changes only the sky, not his own mind.” I am afraid of this little river we are going to cross tonight. Oh, yes, and I remember now who said it, the great pianist, maestro of the ego, Anton Antonin, white lion’s mane and tipping forehead and knobby hammer hands with fingers like Jerusalem-artichoke roots. Maiden voyage of the Lizzy. Outwardly cynical, but what did he play best? Chopin ballades. He had a Grand Marnier soufflé for a heart and an athlete’s frame: fiercely sentimental. He spoke nine languages but hated “foreigners”—meaning anyone wherever he was—and was full of warnings about going abroad. I was young, and he took me on the deck tennis court between dances, it was my everybody-lies-down-with-everybody phase. One night in the salon he spoke of an Indian sage—was it Sardi?—who warned, “If you travel abroad, oh brother, carry your own stones, for there are dogs in every town. Do not suffer the anguish of the traveler who, arriving at a village, was greeted by barking dogs, and he reached down for a stone and discovered one, but to his dismay he found it fastened to a rock by a chain, and he cursed a village where fierce dogs run free and stones are chained.” I remember this warning more vividly than my unfaithfulness to Philip on the deck tennis court. I was unfaithful often.
And now I am unarmed with stones. I hear barking.
Philip is after me about our son, and I feel that I must think about Meredith.
* * *
—
“It’s normal for people Meredith’s age to be mild,” Philip is saying. “All of the middle generation now are mild. We older people are eccentrics, we are real, and the young ones have this Beat thing they don’t know what to do with—they’re unreal. But the in-between ones—they’re bland, Venus, they’re skimmed milk. Why do you worry so about Merri?”
“When I said ‘mild,’ I didn’t mean colorless, I meant unfeeling.”
“Don’t you think that might be control? Maybe there’s too much feeling rattling around inside there.”
It’s perfectly true that I didn’t know anything about being a mother. When Meredith was small he had a cloth bear with a painted clowny face, and it got too ratty for words, and I sent it to the cleaners, and it came back blank, so I got Tilman Furness, he did those smashingly clever illustrations for children’s books, he was a bit of a flit but he was the absolute tops in his line, to paint a new face on it, and what he did was so original, so sophisticated, as if a bear could be a sort of lech, raffish and sexy, and when I presented it to Meredith he screamed for three hours and promptly got croup that night. I was furious with him. After all, you didn’t get Tilman Furness for peanuts.
Why shouldn’t I have left most things to Drua? She was—she is—the salt of the earth. Meredith would lie with his cheek on that bosom of hers, an expanse of June, a bank whereon a wild thyme blew, and I just knew he was blissful, and it terrified me. Once on her day off I tried putting on her uniform, to see if he’d put his cheek where he could hear the pounding of my anxious heart, but it was bags too big for me, and anyway Meredith was always able to see through deceptions, even at two years old. He laughed as hard as if I were a Punch-and-Judy show.
“The mildness of the in-betweens,” Philip says, “comes from their hopelessness, I guess. They see that money isn’t it, after all. Whereas the young ones, the Beats and the off-Beats—”
“The whoozis?”
“As off-Broadway is to Broadway. Not the real thing but more interesting. I mean the talented upper-upper ones, good colleges. They just can’t believe everything is hopeless, and still they don’t know what to hope for.”
“And what, pray, does that have to do with poor Meredith?”
“I was thinking of Chum. I know you don’t like thinking about being a grandmama, Venus.”
Charles, called Chum, the youngest of Meredith and Sally’s three, got into Yale on the basis of the legacy, everyone says. His principal extracurricular activity is getting filthy. Fingernails like auto drippings on the garage floor. Never any shoes or socks, his big smelly feet propped up on Sally’s cloisonné cigarette box on the coffee table, reciting Rimbaud and Baudelaire by the measured mile. But Chum smiles at me over his lurid toenails. I’m onto him. His trouble is simple. He’s too much older than his years. Young people start everything so early now that they’re not nearly so young as parents treat them, as Meredith treats him. After all, African girls—I’m onto the coloreds again, they’re like ads, you can’t dodge them—get married when they’re twelve, thirteen. Our young ones could do that. Know what Chum wants? He wants a job: oh, he doesn’t want to be an enforced patriot sent to the Cameroons on a bloody lying Truth Mission in place of military duty; no, he wants to be given credit for being what he really is, a middle-aged square masquerading as a nineteen-year-old off-Beat, as our Philip calls him. Chum grins at me over his cruddy tootsies because he knows I know.
My complaint about Meredith is that he pussyfoots right down the middle. He’s neither Democrat nor Republican. Look at the ones he’s voted for—each time, as he said, “with misgivings”: Roosevelt over Landon, Willkie over Roosevelt, Dewey over Truman, Stevenson over Ike, Ike over Stevenson, and this last time Jack over who was that loathsome character? Cautious and doubtful every time. I like some violent zigzag in a man, I like extremes. Passion. The want of caution that results in discoveries, assignations, vivid Toulouse-Lautrec stuff, bouts of disgusting temper, sprees, big trombone passages, too much Peking duck, bankruptcy, divorce—don’t you dare, Philip—juicy headlines of all sorts. I like a man. Meredith reads the Times and Trib; Philip reads the News and Journal-American. You should see Philip reading the paper: he reacts like a tyke in the Fun House, bounces, cackles, roars with anger at Booby Sokolsky’s column,
reads out loud: “Listen to this: ‘GIRL ELEVEN HAS BABY IN CLASSROOM—Little Schoolmates Assist in Delivery.’ ” He’s so rough and ready. And yet he’s so so tender with me; my Nurserynanny Philip.
“I just wish Meredith wouldn’t put on his rubbers every time a cloud appears.”
“Drua taught him that. Her wetness madness. Drua grew up on the edge of a cypress swamp. Bayou or something.”
“Wet didies. Do you think that pursy look around his mouth comes from toilet training? Maybe I can blame Drua. Wouldn’t that be nice?” I am now able to dismiss the subject.
It is getting dimmer in the bar, perhaps the sun has gone behind a building. Manuel is rattling and banging. Lemon squeezer, heavy soda-split cap remover, that nice spiral wiry thing that keeps the ice in the shaker when he’s pouring out marts, whankety-whank—he’s washing his implements, throwing them down. He has the Latin temper. He’s furious about what I said.
“Manuel!” I call.
“Essame all aroun’?”
“No. Ven acá, amigo. I want to talk to you.”
He looks doubtful but comes over.
“Listen, sweetie,” I say, “you mustn’t let an old old bad-tempered woman throw you.” I want to say, How breathtaking you are, you beautiful intricate hairy weed.
“Un Granddath, un esscotch,” he says, and turns away.
Philip puts his hand on mine. Philip always understands.
* * *
—
I was unfaithful often, and yet the thought of Sylvia, the one woman I’m fairly sure Philip didn’t cheat on me with, in the flesh anyway, still throws me into a loop-de-loop. The way they used to whisper to each other. On that Sewanahaka schooner, Frick Miller’s boat. There were five of us that time—à cinq, that’s where you get really complicated, there’s always a floater, so to speak. Frickie, Sue-Sue, Philip, Syllie, and Venus Surprised. We’d come along the Elizabeth Islands from Quisset. It had been so quiet in that snug little bay overnight except for Frick and Susan bickering; the bickers flew ashore from us like flocks of gulls. Anyway, the idea was to picnic and swim in Quicks’s Hole and then go around to Tarpaulin Cove for the night. I think the basic trouble was that Frick was making a halfhearted play for me; he didn’t mean anything personal, it was just a habit. Frickie was handsome in a pretty-boy way—dark hair that was perfect for cruising, it got sort of packaged in the wind, over a noble shrine of a forehead, peeky eyes, and a spoiled mouth. I forget his nose. There were no stinkpots in Quicks’s for once, and of course we swam in our skin-and-bones; we’d done this so much we knew each other’s bodies all too well—the big mole on Sue-Sue’s rib cage, Frickie uncircumsised and rather astonishing—so that on the rare occasions when for some reason modesty was enforced, it was rippingly sexy to see each other in bathing suits. Really sort of aphrodisiac. Clothes make sense. The human body is a bumpy, pale, hair-blotched affair under an August sun on a scimitar beach a few miles off Cape Cod. But oh, it was good to be young. Frick put up the awning. We had rum, the drink that’s so melty in the sun that you always brought the limit home from the West Indies, or especially from Cuba when you still could go to Varadero, and then you could never bear to touch it in New York; rum and March slush don’t mix. Sue-Sue made sandwiches, popping an ugly swift little gull out of her mouth every few seconds. After lunch, Sylvia—she was wearing, with her usual just-opened effect, a Basque thing and a big incongruous floppy garden-party straw hat because her skin was made of rolled-out candles—said to our Philip, “Darling, let’s go forward and take a nap.” It turned out she meant not the foredeck but the fore cabin. They disappeared down the forward hatch. I knew nothing could happen with her, but after half an hour, with Frick nuzzling me in a yawny way, I thought I’d scream with fear for my beloved Philip, so I pretended I had to go to the head, and there they were, lying crown to crown in the separate pipe bunks which made a V in the slice-of-pie crew’s cabin, just abaft the chain locker, whispering. Not touching, except for the fingertips of their maddening secrets. I went in the head and threw up, my cheeks crimson in the knowledge that that susurrating pair, veed together out there, could hear my retches. Then that damnable crapper pump, with its invalves and out-valves; I was in there half an hour sweating tanks and tanks, and they were out there softly whispering—about what?
“Darling, what did you and Sylvia use to whisper about?”
“Don’t think about Sylvia, Venus. Please. It gives you a headache.”
“I already have a headache.”
“About perfect you. We whispered about how perfect you were.”
“You make me sick to my stomach.”
“No, really, Venus. We did. I never told you this. Syllie had a little problem. She was in love with you.”
“Look,” I say sharply, “we came down to this sand-trap countryside to see Acoma. You’ve pushed me far enough.”
“It’s true, Venus.”
In all these years he has not given me this bulletin. I think I want to kill Philip. “You miserable pimp,” I say; and at once I am sorry.
* * *
—
Because Philip always understands. And because Philip is, and especially was, so beautiful—man-beautiful, Hermes-of-Praxiteles beautiful, you beautiful dog of a Michelangelic man. Sometimes I say, “You dog, Philip,” but what I mean is not a big hairy Irish wolfhound but a dog of kings, a runner, with a big but delicate nose, a bounding white streak on the acres of a royal park. And how he wags his tail!
Golly, I’m a little tiddly.
Beautiful Philip. On the grass court at the casino that summer, in white flannels—whatever became of the prettiest trousers men ever wore?—and a white shirt with long sleeves, and tennis shoes chalky with that stuff out of a tube that one put on (he, Philip, put on every day) with a tiny sponge, a real sponge out of the Mediterranean Sea, and brand-new white tennis balls, and point-winning cloudlets of lime flying up when he uncurled his back and got away one of those spinning parabolic services of his with the high, kicking bounce; and rushing the net, bending for a low volley, legs calipered, and his hair still in place without a lick of bear fat or axle grease or whatever those gigolos use.
“Why do they say ‘love’ when you have no points in tennis? What kind of love is that?”
“Search me why, darling.”
“I’d hate to think that I get no points for what I feel about Meredith.” It wasn’t Drua’s fault. It was our Philip’s fault—your fault, darling. Meredith is mild because he had a fool for a father. Yes, Philip. They all said it. Skilly said it. Frickie said it. They said everyone knew you were a damned fool at the office, and a person who managed the extraordinary feat of being a fool at Peters, Silliman must have been a fool across the board. They said that at the office someone always had to come along behind you and tidy up the mess you’d made of things: like those London street sweepers—remember that time?—following behind the procession with the maharajahs riding in the little houses on the backs of elephants, and do you remember the expression on the sweepers’ faces when they saw what the collapse of the British Empire was depositing on Regent Street? Oh, God, I’m on the coloreds again. Did we see that thing of the elephants, or was that in a movie? That’s the trouble with remembering, Philip: one can’t tell anymore what was real in the past. It has all changed so much. Look at this New Type, Pretz, who’s actually running things at Peters, Silliman nowadays.
“Philip, they’ll certify you and lock you up if you propose our Pretzel for the Links Club.”
“I don’t know, Venus. If he pulls off this merger he’s working on, they might consider changing the rules.”
“You’re a fool.”
“Venus!”
* * *
—
Where do I get such evil thoughts? I was always a good girl. Even by then—that summer—that tennis summer—I was still an innocent child. My mother and father had
rented a house in Middletown, Rhode Island. Inasmuch as Philip’s parents were in the Social Register, my parents thought it would be all right for him to visit us for a whole month. He had just graduated from New Haven, his job as a runner wouldn’t start until the fall. Perhaps they—the old crusts in the big stone mansions—thought us fast. We stayed up “late,” we sometimes made a noise driving through town as late as nine at night, but we were pure in heart. Hurt no living creature! Unlike our off-Beat grandson Chum today—a premature adult masquerading as a child—we then were children pretending to be adults. We belonged to Bailey’s Beach, but we thought it very superior to swim instead by ourselves on Third Beach, which was deserted. We lolled there looking across at the Sakonnet lighthouse. We were much too modest to skinny-dip. I wore wool bathing suits with legs reaching nearly to my knees. Philip almost never touched me—a few sweet stolen kisses—because we lived by the code of the time. Necking wasn’t even invented until a decade later. We wouldn’t have dreamed of sleeping with people unless we married them. Our libidos blew a hot smoke through our bodies, which sometimes came billowing out of our mouths in the form of quarrels.
Oh, now a sickening thought: Philip was the one who wanted to swim on Third Beach. Was it really to “get away from all those Groton meatballs,” or did he know, somewhere in his mind, that all those others at Bailey’s Beach thought him, even then, a fool? I remember whispers, snickers. At the time I was somehow able to construe them as the sounds of envy and admiration. Poor Philip! Poor Philip!
“Remember Third Beach?”
As so often, our responsive Philip answers a question with a one-upping question. “Remember the telephone pole with a wagon wheel on top of it, and an osprey nest built there?”