Principles, I said a minute ago. Values—a very unfashionable word, since to hold any you have to deny the validity of their contraries, and thus seem censorious. I honestly believe that the counsel I gave Curt was mainly sound, and I don’t think too much of it was holier-than-thou. After all, we lived in the world, not in a parsonage. I tried to give him a code to live by. He wanted not one scrap of it, he didn’t agree with a single value I held. I had got my values from wherever we do get them, out of the air or out of books or out of contact with people I had to admire, and he got his in exactly the same way except that he was immune to mine. Mine, say, were old-fashioned bacterial values. His were viral, and from my point of view virulent. He went absolutely unerringly to attitudes that he knew I disapproved or despised, and the only way to live with him in peace would have been to submit to his beliefs. Ruth was more willing than I was—after all he was her only child, and she loved him—but she liked the way he was going no better than I did.
I would not submit to his beliefs. I believed, and I still believe, that some periods of human history and some phases of human culture are better than others, and that it isn’t always the creeping toward perfection that I know you want to believe in. Some codes are better than the codes that displace them; and I believe this is a corrupt age because it accepts everything as equal to everything else, and because it values indulgence more than restraint. I guess I honor the Roman republic more than the empire. The one believed in austere virtue, and the other had bread and circuses, like ourselves.
There is a book of Ford Madox Ford’s, one of that fat tetralogy, that he called with characteristic ungrace Some Do Not. He was adenoidal, and they say he smelled like Jim Peck, but he had something. Some do not, if only to show that they can refrain. You don’t have to shoot yourself like a Dostoevski intellectual to assert the will. You don’t have to commit whimsical existential crimes to prove your freedom. You can take hold of yourself, like training a horse, and that is both pleasure and morality.
I never persuaded Curtis. I was neither a good enough teacher nor a good enough example. Train yourself for what? he would ask. To sell bonds? To be a good corporation man? To demonstrate shaving between the halves of televised football games? To make a lot of money? To contribute to this vulgarian’s nightmare they call a civilization? To acquire things? No, I would tell him, beginning, God help me, to roar. To be a man. Isn’t that enough? To be a man whose word is trusted and whose generosity can be depended on and who doesn’t demand something without giving something himself. Fair trade, he would answer me. Inviolability of contract. The morals of the stock exchange, which never cheats a customer but which goes up on every brush-fire war and skyrockets on every big one.
What should one do? If Ruth had had any better luck with him I would have thought that he simply had to attach himself to antifatherly gods until he proved himself a man in his own terms. Ruth was infallibly gentle with him, though tartness is more her natural style. She didn’t push him, she followed him clear to the bottom of his burrow, trying to understand, she forgave him incessantly, she was the pacifying force when he and I clashed. And he went out of his way to treat her with even greater impatience and contempt than he treated me. His wretched treatment of his mother was one of the commonest sources of our quarrels. Sometimes I wondered if he didn’t abuse her because she tended to take his side—he wanted no mediator between us.
It does me no good to reflect that filial rebellion is common. Mutual respect, though perhaps not common, is possible—I’ve seen it. It becomes impossible only when the value systems of the two antagonists are irreconcilable, as they seem to be between Fran LoPresti, who is conventional, and her daughter, who is hell-bent not to be.
Curtis could have disagreed with us incessantly if we had felt in him some integrity that gave his disagreement weight. We couldn’t. I have to blame myself for not finding any way of reaching him, but I can’t feel that either Ruth or I had anything much to do with his corruption. The twentieth century corrupted him, the America that he despised corrupted him, industrial civilization corrupted him with the very vices he thought he scorned in it. It encouraged him to hunt out the shoddy, the physical, the self-indulgent, the shrill, and the vulgar, and to call these things freedom, and put them above the Roman virtue that, so help me, is the only moral stance I can fully admire. And like Peck, he always had smoke screens, political or aesthetic, to hide his hypocrisy from others and perhaps from himself.
He was drunken, disorderly, and promiscuous from early adolescence. We might have thought those irregularities normal and exploratory if he had shown even temporary contrition about them; but he indulged them as if he must, to maintain his self-respect. Non serviam. All right, we could have taken that too, if we had found any fallen-angel grandeur of mind or spirit in him. But we had to observe that he was ungenerous, that he gave nothing and took all he could, that he felt responsibility for nothing, love for no one. He had such a gift for the wrong companions that it was fair to think of him, not them, as the bad influence. He had a good body that he abused, and a good mind that he used for nothing but searching out new forms of challenge and insubordination, new kicks, new ways to evade obligation. He sponged on people, especially women; he betrayed friends, especially women; and he fell for every crackbrained groupy arty-intellectual fad over a period of twenty years.
In his earlier teens he had a political phase, walked picket lines, attended meetings of the Young Communist League, collected money for the Spanish Loyalists. Fine. For a while, though he alarmed us, we were even rather proud: he showed signs at least of a compassionate social conscience. Actually, he had no more political interest than a snowshoe rabbit and no more economics than a grasshopper. He liked secrecy and rebellion and dusty basement meeting places, and emancipated girls in lisle stockings, and the sound of broken-down mimeograph machines cranking out insurrection and intransigence.
When the war came on, he was swept naturally into pacifism—his canoe was already on those waters, he didn’t even have to paddle. Later, when he spoke of his troubles in prep school, he liked to imply that he was thrown out for his pacifist beliefs, and it is true that he was one of a group that in 1941 marched in tin hats and gas masks, bearing scornful placards, outside the classroom windows of a master who was hot for war against Hitler. But Curt wasn’t thrown out for his conscientious beliefs, and he was thrown out more than once. One. school sent him home because he had been scraped up drunk off the lawn three weekends in a row, and was insolent to the masters who reprimanded him. The second fired him because he and two other boys smuggled a girl into the dorm and kept her there for three days. A master coming to remonstrate mildly about the pacifist picket line found her there, locked in the bedroom with a lot of girly magazines, a bag of caramels, and a bottle of sloe gin.
For a few months in 1944 Curt was in the army, but he came out quickly with a PN discharge—homosexuality. From what I hear of the army, it does not throw you out on those grounds unless you go out of your way to be challenging in your aberrations. I don’t think for a minute that Curt was a fairy. He wanted out of the army and he had no more self-respect than to get out that way.
It is a painful chronicle, and I gain nothing but renewed distress by writing it down. There were two cheap marriages and two cheap divorces. There was a banjo-picking phase and a barefoot-saint phase. He rode a motorcycle across the continent, he tried Zen and poetry, the Village and, Sausalito. I found him jobs and he lost them or quit them within weeks or months. Once he worked quite happily for half a year as a mechanic in a garage (was it dirty enough to suit him, or did he find some queer heartbreaking security in the un-taxing performance of a simple skill?). That ended in a traffic accident and a drunk-driving fine. Mainly he lived on us and on the little trust fund that Ruth’s mother had been so ill-advised as to settle on him before she died. It gave him just enough to leave him free. You asked me if I didn’t believe in freedom and I told you I didn’t, not much. Freedom was the
worst thing that could have happened to Curtis.
Once in a while, after he had passed his twenties and could no longer pretend that he was just postponing his life until he could “come to grips with reality” and “find himself”—my God the cant that apologists for these lost souls use!—he made half-meant, convulsive efforts to do or learn or be something. These fits came on him when, because he was ill or broke or at odds with some woman, he came back to the apartment for a spell of fatted calf. During those spasms he would be brisk and energetic; we heard him sing in the shower; he wore coat and tie when he went out on important errands. Heartbreaking, because we knew it was a false front, and yet it gave us glimpses of what it might be to have a son with whom we could get along.
False starts, he made a dozen. Once he signed up for a writing course in Washington Square—did you ever notice how pitifully these people are converted into believers by the word “creative”?—but he found the instructor tedious and retired to somebody’s cottage up in the Housatonic valley to write on his own. He and his guests wrecked the place and cost us a friend. Once he was going to study architecture—this when he was past thirty—and talked his way into a job as a draftsman on the strength of his facility at free sketching. Two weeks that lasted; he said he couldn’t stand drawing other people’s lines. One year he spent a lot of time in the Village, painting he said, and taking some extension class or other. That too faded away. There was a long and relatively peaceful year when he was abroad, living in an unheated room on the Nyhavn in Copenhagen, a place he was drawn to because he had heard it was the toughest of Europe’s waterfronts. Yet I wonder. I had a Danish phase myself, I went back there too, looking for something and not finding it. I wonder if Curt was trying to follow some raveling thread back through his labyrinth? It saddens me to think so, for I’m sure it broke, he ended up lost in the same old mazes.
Every time he failed to perform, or lost his job, or lost interest, he fell back into the Village or wherever he happened to alight. Right back into his old galvanic-twitch life. His personal motives were freedom and pleasure, and he misread them both.
Then a little less than three years ago, thirty-seven years old, with not quite a prep-school education but with a record of scorn for practically everything the human race ever thought worthy, he had another of those painful spasms of the refurbished will. Because his aptitude scores were high and friends of mine would still write letters for him, he got himself admitted to San Diego State College. He expected us to applaud, and we did. After all, we were penitent, we were clearly not good for him and never had been. Any college reckless enough to admit him had our gratitude, any, move he made that looked serious stirred our hope.
In September he drove across with a friend. Contrary to custom, and promptly enough to encourage us, we had a letter. The school was O.K., better than he had expected. Freshman classes were infantile, but he had goofed off so long he had something coming. He thought he could take an overload and go to summer school and so crowd the degree into three years. He had an apartment over a garage, pleasant and quiet. The weather was as advertised, the beach marvelous. The big thing around there was surfing: decrepit as he was, he was giving it a try. Mother would probably raise a cheer on hearing he had shaved off his beard—it hadn’t seemed quite appropriate on the beach.
He exaggerated our concern with trivial stigmata. I am no lover of facial hair, but I would have applauded a beard as long as Rip Van Winkle’s if I could have been sure that Curt was finally, after so much disastrous self-waste, going to pull himself together into a package, even if the package turned out to be a Southern California Natural Man.
There were no more letters. In November a friend, asked to look him up, reported that Curtis had dropped school and given up his apartment. After some detective work, he had found him living in a trailer colony near the beach, with a girl and a surfboard. Our informant said it was not a very attractive colony, more a motorcycle bohemia than a surfer’s camp: plenty of black leather, greasy jeans, long hair, late parties, and raids by the narcotics squad hunting backyard and window-sill weeds.
Well, so the more he changed the more he was the same thing. We swallowed the news without real surprise. If he was indeed a custard pie, he was not going to stay nailed to any wall. I suppose we finally gave up on him then, though we had given up on him several times before, and though one night Ruth, reading a magazine article about surfing, looked up at me and said, “You know, surfing sounds like fun. And it isn’t only kicks, it’s a cult. You have to have real skill and nerve.” Yes, I said, so I had heard. “It ought to be a healthy life, hadn’t it?” she said. “Healthier than that zoo down in the Village, anyway?”
“Ah, Ruthie,” I said. “Ruthie, Ruthie, Ruthie!” But I had had the same sneaking thought myself. At least there was nothing false or contemptible about surfing, even if it didn’t seem quite the highest end to which a man might devote himself.
That would have been about Christmas time. In February we had a call from the La Jolla police. Curtis was dead, drowned in a surfing accident, his body recovered.
Ruth was getting over an operation. I persuaded her to stay with her sister in Bucks County and flew out to bring Curt back. I saw his girl—a trifle, a tanned gewgaw, string-haired, ready to be defiant if I gave her a bad time. But why should I give her a bad time? She cried, saying he was the greatest guy she ever knew, he wasn’t satisfied with anything but the very best out of life; and looking at me out of her wet slightly crossed eyes she whispered, “Sometimes I wonder if he really slipped and got hit. Sometimes I wonder if he didn’t let go. He was capable of it.”
I had wondered the same myself, but I didn’t feel like joining in her speculations. When I left her she probably went off with one of the other great guys who lived in the clutter of trailers, campers, and converted delivery trucks scattered along that scabby little ravine. Or maybe she stayed on in Curt’s, which I sold on the spot to a couple of motorcyclists with sideburns clear to their jawbones.
They didn’t show me Curtis there. I saw him only back in Bucks County, at the funeral. It seemed I looked through a scald of tears at the total failure of his life and mine. I thought he had a manly face. Without the beard he had worn ever since beards emerged as part of the uniform of alienation, he reminded me of the bronze charioteer in Delphi. The beach life had been good for him. He looked fit and young, and his brown hair was streaked. Sun or peroxide? Inescapable as it was, the question shamed me. After all, he was thirty-seven years old.
I still can’t think of his face composed on the final satin without a clutch in my chest. The hair might have been as false an emblem as the beard had been, but the face had given up all its poses and looked merely young, incredibly young, far younger than it had any right to look, the very face of kicks-crazy America, unlined by thinking, unmarked by pain, unshadowed even by years of scrupulous dissoluteness, untouched by life—or by death either—except for a slight discontented droop at the corners of the lips. I could not answer the suggestion of resentment and dissatisfaction in it. Maybe, if the girl’s suspicion had any basis, he had sidled into death as he had taken up every job and project of his life, and then found that he couldn’t quit it as he had quit everything else.
Somehow Ruth and I had always had some groundless faith that he would come around. The boy having trouble becoming a man would eventually, perhaps late but eventually, overcome his trouble. These oats would be sown, he would get over having to sniff at every post where some existential junky or disengaged beat or criminal saint had lifted his leg. There would come a time when he wouldn’t have to snarl at his gentle humorous mother, and when he and I might talk, go to a ballgame, have a drink, discuss a book, without that miserable stiff-legged father-son suspicion and that un-sleeping awareness of our differences. Without admitting it to each other, we had counted on time, and now time was run out. Never never never never never. If Lear was an old fool, and he was, he was by the end a contrite and suffering fool. So w
as I, for I could not put aside the thought that perhaps, out in those glassy rollers inside the violet band of the kelp beds, Curt had looked it all in the face, himself in the face, and let go the board. There had been no wounds or signs of injury on his body. Most suicides, I believe, are spiteful. If Curt was really a suicide, did he go hating, or did he go hopeless? Either way, it meant he couldn’t bear any more. Neither, thinking about it, could I.
Sometime after the funeral, the girl—there was something human and touching about her little act of responsibility—sent on a box of Curt’s personal effects, including his books. I could have listed them without opening the box: Miller, Albee, Kerouac, Sartre, Genet, the Marquis de Sade, Ginsberg, Burroughs—a poison garland from the Grove. I could not have told you then, and I can’t tell you now, whether those books really corrupted him. I think they only corroborated him, without quite giving him the confidence of his convictions.
That ends Curt’s story. I think I must go on a little with my own. I felt that I had to be steady for Ruth’s sake, and for a while I seemed to be. But in the end she bore it better than I, for no amount of thinking could reconcile me to the way our only son had died, irresponsibly and frivolously, incongruously uniting in himself a sun-worshiper and a nauseast; and if unhappy, as he surely was, unhappy by his own asserted will. I judged him, yes I did, even in death and even while I was stricken with the sense of his unhappiness, and I judged myself for judging him, and could find no way of avoiding judging him.
February and March were a dull sad endless time for us both. I wasn’t sleeping, but when Ruth tried giving me sleeping pills I made a virtue of an old prejudice against tranquilizers. Probably I was punishing myself. I have already admitted that I believe in guilt, not as an indulgence but as an essential cautery of the soul. One of my troubles was that I felt guilty without being able to persuade myself intellectually that I could have acted any other way.
All the Little Live Things Page 16