Comfort Me with Apples
A Novel
Peter De Vries
For Katinka
Stay me with flagons,
comfort me with apples:
for I am sick of love.
THE SONG OF SONGS
One
If an oracle told you you would be a shirtsleeve philosopher by the time you were thirty, that you would be caught in bed with a woman named Mrs. Thicknesse, have your letters used for blackmail and your wife threaten to bring suit for sixty-five dollars because that was all you were worth, you would tell him he was out of his mind. Yet that is what happened to me, and not because I was out of mine. We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating on one another, and mine played that role well in the rational and moral pinches I will try to recreate. What we do in the pinches depends on other equipment and on all that has gone before to make us what we are. The past is prologue. Right, and Man is not a donkey lured along by a carrot dangled in front of his nose, but a jet plane propelled by his exhaust. So perhaps a brief glance at my background is in order.
My sharpest early memory is of a summer-night storm during which we were sought out by lightning. Our family of four (I have a younger sister) were all in the parlor at the time, and saw something nibble the golden fringe of a scatter rug, run over my mother’s shoe buckle, lap at wall plugs (not looking for an outlet, just foraging for metal), rummage in an open sewing kit, and browse along a shelf of books, leaving the gilt in some of the titles illegible. I remember thinking that in its career across the living room it seemed to resemble some whimsical and very wicked marmalade. I’m not defending this comparison, merely reporting a childhood association itself lightning-swift. Anyway, it bounced off a pair of pinking shears on a table and shot out through the front door into the yard where it ended its call by splitting up a cord of wet kindling.
That was only preliminary to a hurricane, Clara, which howled out of the Atlantic and cut a wide swath which included our city of Decency, Connecticut. Several ships sank, millions of dollars’ worth of property lay strewn along the Eastern Seaboard, and the salt had to be humored. The wind and rain got almost everything along our municipal beach except a bronze statue of a Minute Man, which had however been battered into neurasthenia by a thousand predecessor storms and now wore a look of Byronic fatigue. “Now we know,” my father said unclearly. Suggesting that the current may have passed through other matter than I have enumerated.
Those meteorological twenty-four hours have always been to me symbolically like the Mrs. Thicknesse business which struck in later life, and not because her name was Clara, too. Near-calamity is never completely digested; that is, we keep thrilling ourselves with thoughts of what might have happened. The fascination of the narrow escape. Now I can never hear of an amorist being shot in the tabloids, or anywhere for that matter, without evoking, with a delicious shiver, that charged name by which my own and my children’s was so nearly riven. Just as I can never, at breakfast, put a knife to marmalade without spreading coagulated lightning on my toast. All connections are fused.
But to get back to my background.
I think I can say my childhood was as unhappy as the next braggart’s. I was read to sleep with the classics and spanked with obscure quarterlies. My father was anxious to have me follow in his footsteps—if that is a good metaphor for a man whose own imprints were largely sedentary—and he watched me closely for echoes of himself that were more felicitous than most. He advised people to have intellect, and to look beneath what he called “The epithelium of things,” though he did discourage scrutiny of his own motives.
Living on a little money my grandmother had left him, he spent his time exercising a talent which was more or less in his own mind. He wrote essays of a philosophical nature which he sent to those periodicals off which he tried to rub some of the bloom on me. They were all returned. This gave him a feeling of rejection (rather than one of submission) and he developed internal troubles. He went to a hospital for observation but they found nothing worse than what they called a sensitive colon, which is I suppose an apt enough ailment for a man as meticulous about punctuation as he was.
The hospital library was nothing to brighten his stay, and he rather truculently offered to “send over something decent” as soon as he could, a promise he set about fulfilling the minute he got home.
He drove back to the hospital two days after he was discharged, with a few cartons of selections from his own shelves. I rode along and helped carry them in, through the emergency ward, from which the basement room where the ladies’ auxiliary handled books was most conveniently accessible. It was an icy day in late winter, and I picked my way carefully behind my father with a small boxful—he toting a rather large packet on his shoulder, like a grocery boy with an order. The walk we traversed sloped upward across a short courtyard, and at a turn in it my father’s foot shot out from under him and, loudly exclaiming “Damnation!”, he went down, spilling culture in every direction and breaking a leg.
The bone was set free by the hospital, which also gave him a room without cost (“No it is not handsome of them to do this—it would be outrageous if they did not!”), and soon he was propped up in the same bed again dipping into his old copy of Plutarch, available to him from a trundled cart of books now noticeably enriched as to contents.
What displeased him constitute a history of our time. He could not abide typewritten correspondence or most people’s handwriting. He hated radio and couldn’t wait for television to be perfected so he could hate that too. The very word “psychosomatic” was enough to send him into symptoms for which no organic cause could be found; the decline of human teeth he laid to the door of toothpaste, “surely chief among the sweets properly arraigned as villains,” as he asserted through dentures which clacked corroboratively. He hated everything brewed in the vats of modernity. He hated music without melody, paintings without pictures, and novels without plots. In other words, a rich, well-rounded life.
The house on the outskirts of Decency we lived in was built around a silo, which became my father’s library. Swiss cheese, except for the silo, comprised the principal masonry, as the dank airs which continually stirred the draperies attested; the wiring was, to put it no lower, shocking; the fireplace drew briskly but in the wrong direction, sending out ashes which settled like a light snow on our family and on the strangers within our gates, for in those years my parents loved to entertain. They had lived originally in a dinette apartment in town but had begun to drift apart and needed more room. The capacious new house did in fact ease their relations, getting them out of one another’s pockets I suppose, and I can still hear my mother wailing over some new kitchen crisis, “Oh, God,” and my father answering cozily from the silo, “Were you calling me, dear?”
He believed that the art of conversation was dead. His own small talk, at any rate, was bigger than most people’s large. “I believe it was Hegel who defined love as the ideality of the relativity of the reality of an infinitesimal portion of the absolute totality of the Infinite Being” he would chat at dinner.
It was my father’s example which, more than any other single factor in my life, inspired in me my own conversational preference: the light aphorism.
I belonged in adolescence to a clique of pimpled boulevardiers who met at a place called the Samothrace, a restaurant and ice-cream parlor run by a Greek who let us pull tables out on the sidewalk and talk funny. The Greek’s name was Andropoulos but he had Americanized it to Nachtgeborn, which blended in better with the heavy German population that dominated that end of town, and which he therefore thought better for business reasons. He was a prickly sort who was always complaining that this country was commercial, e
specially when trade was slack and he was more irritable than usual. We expatriates, be that as it may, could be seen there every evening loitering over coffee and pastry, or maybe toying with a little of what the Greek called fruit compost. I often wore my topcoat with the sleeves hanging loose, so that the effect was like an Inverness cape, when it was not like that of two broken arms. An earnest youth on the high-school debating squad, who got in with our set by mistake one soir, tried to interest me in politics by speaking of the alarming layoffs then occurring in the Department of Agriculture.
“I had thought,” I said, smiling round at my disciples as I tapped a Melachrino on the lid of its box, “that the Department of Agriculture slaughtered its surplus employees.”
This attitude grew into a fin-de-siècle one of cultivated fatigue and bored estheticism, marked by amusement with the colloquial mainstream. I would lie full-length around the house and with a limp hand wave life away. My mother took this as an indication that I had “no pep,” and urged a good tonic to fix me up.
“No, no, no!” my Father said. “This is what they call Decadence. It’s an attitude toward life.” He turned and looked down at the horizontal product of their union, disposed on the sofa with a cigarette. “He’ll come to his senses.”
“Instead of coming to one’s senses,” I airily returned, “how much more delightful to let one’s senses come to one.”
My mother, a thin, sentimental woman who often broke up funerals with her weeping, tried to get me interested in “healthy” books like the jumbo three-generation novels she herself couldn’t put down.
“The books Mother cannot put down,” I said, “are the ones I cannot pick up.”
“He is run-down. Now I don’t care.”
Seventeen. Slightly above medium height, slender, with clothes either too casual or too studied—it makes no difference now. I had a pinched-in, pendulous underlip, like the pouring lip on a pitcher, which must have conferred an air of jocularity somewhat at odds with my intention to be “dry.” Anyhow, to sit and say “Thomas Wolfe is a genius without talent” was a lot less trouble than was gone to by my contemporaries, who got their effects by riding around in old Fords on the sides of which were painted SEVEN DAYS IN THIS MAKE ONE WEAK.
My best friend was a schoolmate named Nickie Sherman, and he needed a good tonic too. Between the two of us we wrote a junior college class play that realized far more fully than anything Oscar Wilde ever did the Wilde ideal for a perfect act as one in which there was no action whatever. Ours was laid in the drawing room of an English country house known as Wise Acres, where fabulous wits foregathered and paradox was so far the order of the day that the cook complained the upside-down cakes came out right-side-up. Often seen at Wise Acres, which gave the play its name, was a celebrated detective named Inspector Vermouth. Our one concession to occurrence was in the form of a murder which, however, Vermouth forewent solving because he admired the malefaction so.
A man at the piano entertaining the week-end guests was shot by a pistol secreted within the instrument and wired to go off when a certain chord was struck, a combination of notes so avant-garde as to be likely to appear only in the music of Villa-Lobos, which the murderer knew only that guest was likely to perform. Inspector Vermouth declined to seek out the perpetrator on the ground that he might find him. “And it would be a shame to send him to the gallows,” he said. “It was a capital crime.”
That our pursuit of nuance was causing even greater strain under Nickie’s roof than under my own was brought home to me when his father phoned me, one morning when Nickie was in New York, and asked me to come over—he wanted to talk to me. Mr. Sherman owned a tailor shop a mile from our place where he pressed people’s pants while they waited. It being a slow morning with no customers, he was pressing his own pants, while he waited. He stood at the steam iron in his shirttails and shook his head as he told me how Nickie had been worrying him lately.
“Ecks all the time tired and listless—and talks odd,” he added through a cloud of steam as he bore down on the press. With his foot on the pedal he regarded me over a pair of half-specs, like those worn by the man on the Old Grand Dad whisky label.
“How, odd?” I asked, drawing up a chair. “Can you give me some examples?”
Mr. Sherman turned a pants-leg over and ruminated. “Oh, he’s loving life far too much to take part in it, there’s too much nature obscurink the billboards … I don’t know. He’s always been a bright boy, but now that he’s educated, half of what he says sounds fibble-minded.”
I explained perversity and paradox to him—without recourse to Wise Acres, which Mr. Sherman hadn’t seen. Fortunately the illness of his wife, a woman of Spanish-Irish extraction, had kept them both home the night of the production.
“Paradoxes are where everything sounds the opposite of what it should,” I discoursed. “You’re not supposed to take them too seriously. That business about loving life far too well to participate in it—Nickie means that he wants to be an observer of the passing scene so he can enjoy it more. They call that esthetic. Nickie’s precious.”
“He’s dollink. Always was dollink boy. But what’s going to hepp’m should he stay in the anesthetic? I want he should snap out of it.”
“He will, Mr. Sherman.”
“I hope so.” Drawing on his now crisp trousers, Mr. Sherman ran a critical eye over mine. “Take off your pants and I’ll press them so it shouldn’t be a total loss you came down here.”
I demurred but he insisted. And while he gave my trousers the hot sandwich, I strolled about in shirttails elucidating further what I could of the attitude he had encountered in his son. “It’s what they call fin-de-siècle. That means the end of the century,” I said.
“Dot’s how menkind will talk in de future?” he asked, peering at me over the half-glasses.
“No, no, the end of the last century, not this one. But it is modern in the sense of the way he says things. That’s known as ‘understatement.’”
“He shouldn’t lay it on so thick.”
As Mr. Sherman overturned my trousers on the iron he seemed also, in his mind, to be revolving the phenomenon just touched on, as the symptom of a larger and more far-reaching decay in human sensibility.
“Poems got no rhyme, books got no stories,” he mused in a sudden uncanny echo of my own father’s pet peeves, “and now jokes got no point. I was riddink in a magazine about the latest, those hairy-dog stories. Dot’s high-class? Phooey!” He gestured at my trousers on the iron. “‘When they saw how tight his pants were they thought they’d split.’ That’s by me humor. I think jokes and stories used to be funnier in my time,” he finished with a considered terseness.
“Can you remember some others?” I asked, sitting down again.
Mr. Sherman accepted the challenge. He lit himself a cigar and then immediately set it down in an ashtray nearby.
“There was this fellow from the old country. Immigrant,” he began. “He did his best to learn the customs here. But he says to his friend one day, says, ‘I don’t know. One minute they tell you do one thing and the next something else.’ Friend says, ‘How do you mean?’ Fellow says, ‘Well, the other day I’m sitting in church and they all sing, ‘Stand up, stand up for Jesus.’ The next day I go to the ball park and behind me everybody is yellink as loud as they can, ‘For Christ’s sake, sit down!’”
I ran all the way home as from a revelation still bursting volcanically behind me, and for days was shaken by the glimpse of a humor more visceral than any I had dreamed had existed since the cave-man days. At the same time my father cracked down on the offbeat as represented in my nuances, on the ground that they were disrespectful to my mother who could never possibly hope to understand them. I was finally punished for epigrams and paradoxes by being sent to my room. Here is the way that worked.
One evening at dinner, my younger sister Lila and my mother were teasing me about a girl named Crystal Chickering whom I had been dating. My mother remarked she’d have gu
essed I’d have preferred Jessie Smithers because “Jessie laughs at absolutely everything a person says.”
“That is because she has no sense of humor,” I said, buttering a roll.
My father stiffened in his chair. “I’ll ask you to apologize to your mother for that.”
I think that behind this, more than a chivalrous regard for her capacities, was a sense of compunction he himself felt over having neglected her all these years, leaving her to what he eruditely called her “needlepwah” while he sat with his nose in Goethe or went off on vacations by himself.
“If I’d made a fool of the mother who bore me, my father would have given me short shrift. Explain to your mother what that last so-called paradox means. I think I’ll insist on that.”
The fact was that he didn’t understand it himself, and so, while pretending to be indifferently worrying a fishbone out of his mouth, he listened alertly to the exegesis I was glad to give.
“I simply meant that a sense of humor implies discrimination, selection,” I said. “So laughing at everything, as Jessie Smithers does, isn’t the same as having a sense of humor.”
“That clear it up for you, dear?” On receiving an affirmative nod, my father returned to his food.
But my mother went on:
“You mustn’t think I mind not understanding what the boy says, Roebuck. Goodness gracious, let him talk over my head the same as I talked over my mother’s. That’s progress.”
Feeling perfidy in the form of aphorisms to be uncoiling everywhere about him, my father came to dinner in a Norfolk jacket. We had a dog, Pavlov, who lived for our table scraps: I mean those mealtime squabbles to which he listened with soft thuds of his tail and a look of seeming comprehension. One evening as we sipped our coffee in the living room, I crossed my legs and remarked in regard to poise: “There are only three women in Decency who know how to enter a restaurant.”
My father made a truncheon of his Yale Review. “Is your mother one?”
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