Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  When I got to my feet, Rosen looked miserable. That may have been what I needed. Irony is the armature to keep one erect when everything within is falling. I held fast to the irony that Rosen, who had wanted me to fetch Kittredge, could not now bear to be left alone. I saw the fear in his eyes.

  On the pad, I wrote, “Are you expecting Dix Butler tonight?”

  “I can’t be certain,” he managed to say.

  “Will your three men prove enough?”

  “I can’t be certain of that either.”

  I nodded. I pointed upstairs.

  “I’d like you to remain in earshot,” Reed Rosen said.

  “If Kittredge is feeling well enough, I’ll come down with her.”

  “Please.”

  I left him by the fire, climbed the stairs to our bedroom, and took out my key. When I reached for the knob, it turned freely in my hand, and so I was not caught completely by surprise that Kittredge was neither in bed nor in the bedroom.

  OMEGA–12

  LOOKING AT THE LONG, LIGHT HOLLOW WHERE SHE HAD LAIN ON THE coverlet, I knew where she had gone. Once Kittredge gave me a great start by confessing she would, on occasion, visit the Vault.

  “I detest the place,” I told her.

  “No, when I’m alone in the house and begin to wonder if I can’t possibly become any more lonely, I go there,” she said.

  “Tell me why.”

  “I used to be so afraid of what is in this house. But now I’m not. When I go down to the Vault I feel as if I’ve gotten to the center of my loneliness, as if there’s a bit of land, after all, in the midst of absolutely endless seas. Then, when I come up, Harry, the rest of the house seems less unpeopled.”

  “Nothing bothers you down there?”

  “Well, I suppose if I allowed myself,” Kittredge said, “I could hear Augustus Farr rattling his chains, but, no, Harry, I feel no vengeance in that place.”

  “You really are a lovely girl,” I replied.

  Now, I was obliged to remind myself how near I had come this night to carrying her down to the Vault. It gave me a sudden glimpse of myself—one of those rare views returned by the mirror when we are not in any degree loyal to ourselves and so pass cruel and immediate judgment on the apparition in the glass only to realize in the next instant that it is our own face we are condemning. Drunk, miserable, hollow as a gourd, I could hear the silences where unseen judges gather.

  The cry of an animal came through the night. It was no ordinary sound. I could not tell from how far away, but the howl came to my ear like the lonely moan of a wolf. There are few wolves in these parts. The cry came again. Now it was as full of suffering and horror as a lacerated bear. There are no bears near. The cry had to have been stirred by my commotion.

  Twenty-one years ago, on the dirt road leading from the highway to our back shore, a tramp had been found, partially devoured, in the thicket near Gilley Butler’s house. I am told he lay there with the most frightful expression of fear on what was left of his mouth. Could the shriek of the animal I had just heard be equal to the mutilated silence of the tramp? Who could know? Twenty-one years ago came down to early spring of 1962, a time when some of us were looking to locate a plane to spray poison on Cuban sugar fields. Had there been a year of my working life that had not offered one smothered howl?

  Standing in our empty bedroom, my thoughts collided face to face with Damon Butler, the long-dead relative of Gilley Butler—Damon Butler, first mate to Augustus Farr, two and a half centuries dead. This unholy surprise visited me at this moment neither as a ghost nor a voice, but as an image so deep within my mind that for an instant I felt occupied by another presence: I saw what he had seen.

  I made prodigious efforts not to see anything at all. I stood in the middle of the bedroom, and made—yes, I call them prodigious efforts although I did not move—made a most fervid attempt to decide that what I now saw in my imagination was neither a gift nor an invasion, but the simple delayed result of an afternoon I had spent ten years ago in the Bar Harbor Library reading Damon Butler’s ship journal, an honored artifact among local library treasures. So, I tried to tell myself that the vision before me now had been put together from no more than the first mate’s papers: bills of lading, shoals negotiated, sloops for sale. The execution of the French commodore that I was witnessing was but the gory essence of Butler’s journal; it was just that I had not allowed it to come back to my thoughts until now. What a formidable incarceration of memory! It all came back. Like a knock on the door before the door flies open.

  His ship gone, his men butchered, the French commodore was stripped of his uniform. Naked, arms pinioned, the victim spit, nonetheless, into his captor’s face. In reply, Farr raised his cutlass. The blade was sharp. The commodore’s head flew off like a cabbage. Like the thump of a cabbage striking the deck—so goes Damon’s account. Other crew members were to swear that the corpse, neck spurting, bound limbs straining, sought to rise to its knees until Farr, in a frenzy, kicked it over. There the body lay on the deck, feet twitching. But the head, off to the side, kept moving its mouth. All agreed its mouth was moving. To that, adds Damon Butler, he heard speech issue from those bloody lips. To Farr was said: Si tu non veneris ad me, ego veniam ad te.

  On that night, years ago, when I followed whatever or whoever was in my dream all the way down to the Vault, I did not think of the speech that came forth from the decapitated head. Now I did. The Latin was clear: “If you do not come to me, I will come to thee.” An intimate curse!

  To be out of earshot of Rosen, I took the back stairway. In the cellar, one of the casement windows showed a small pane broken. Through the gap came night air, and its odor was not native to the island. If the nose is a link to memory, then I was sniffing the stale waters of a canal off the Potomac; the muggy fens of the old Georgetown swamps were redolent on the Maine air. I thought of Polly Galen Smith and her attacker; I shuddered. I had just brushed into a cobweb, and its touch, sticky and intimate, remained in my hair. Now I was less certain of what I breathed. Was it the effluvia of the mud flats on the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal? Even as the whoops and cries of a drinking party can travel immaculately through a fog, to be heard a league away on a stranger’s porch, so I wondered if the bay marsh that had witnessed the death of the man who might or might not be Harlot could be dispatching its scent hundreds of miles north to me. In what a malodorous place had the body first washed ashore! The dank smell I used to fear at the bottom of the Keep must have been the first herald of such a horror. Now the wooden steps to the Vault were rotted and loose. It was so long since I had used them that I had forgotten how they could cry out. I might as well have been walking into a ward of men maimed by war. Each step had its own bottomless lament.

  There were no lights in the Vault. The bulbs, as I recounted, were long burned out. Only the open door provided a shaft of illumination. My shadow preceding me, I worked my way down, feeling as if I pushed my limbs through palisades of oppression merely to reach the cubicle where Kittredge slept. It was only when I stood in the near-to-complete darkness of the inner room, light from the cellar above much reduced by the right-angle turn off the entrance, that I could dare to recognize it had been years since I ventured here. How decomposed were the bunks when I touched them.

  One foam mattress had gone to powder less than the others, and, on it, Kittredge was lying. There was almost no light in the Vault, but by reflection, her pale skin was white. I could see that her eyes were open, and when I approached, she turned her head ever so slightly to indicate that she was aware of me. Neither of us spoke, not at first. I thought again of that moment years ago when the full moon rose over the horizon from the bottom of the notch between two black hills, and the surface of the dark pond on which my canoe floated was alive with a pagan light.

  “Harry,” she said, “there’s something for you to know.”

  “I expect there is,” I said gently. The anticipation of what she would say reverberated in my head before her words.
I experienced that pang one feels so rarely but so precisely in marriage—alarm in advance of the next irremediable step. I did not want her to go on.

  “I’ve been unfaithful,” she said.

  In every death is a celebration; in every ecstasy, one little death. It was as if the two halves of my soul had just exchanged their places. My guilt for every moment spent with Chloe was, on the instant, relieved of weight; my woe at the new space opened between Kittredge and me rushed in on a flood. The hurricane I had been awaiting in the Tropic of Cerebrum was here. Its first blow to my head came down with the long sullen smash of an ugly swell against an old wooden hull.

  “With whom?” I asked. “With whom were you unfaithful?” and the royal observer in myself, untouched by hurricane, earthquake, fire, or storms at sea, had time to notice the rectitude of my grammar—what a peculiar fellow was I!

  “There was an afternoon with Harlot,” she said, “but it wasn’t quite an affair, although it was—awful.” She stopped. “Harry, there’s someone else.”

  “Is it Dix Butler?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “Dix Butler. I fear I’m in love with him. I hate the very thought of it, but, Harry, I may be in love with that man.”

  “No,” I said, “don’t say that. You must not say that.”

  “It is,” she said, “a different feeling.”

  “He’s a bold man, but not a good one,” I told her, and my voice came out like a verdict rendered from the center of me. No, he was not a good man.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m not a good woman. No more than you are really a good man. It is not what we are,” she said. “I think it is what we inspire. Do you know,” she added gently, “I like to believe that God is present when we make love. It was certainly true with Gobby, and just as true with you. It was just that God was there in the guise of Jehovah. He was over us, and full of judgment. So harsh. But with Dix Butler, I can’t explain why, I feel very close to Christ. Dix is far away from any kind of compassion, but Christ chooses to come close to me then. I have not felt such tenderness since Christopher died. Do you see, I no longer care about myself.” She took my hand. “That was always my dungeon—to live entirely within myself. Now I think of how beautiful it would be if I could give Dix some conception of the compassion I feel. So, you see, it just doesn’t concern me whether Dix, by your lights or anyone else’s, is deserving or not deserving.”

  As I stood before her, one awful image came near. It was myself in my car, a livid vision: I had crashed against a tree. My face looked out at me from the back of the head of the man who was smashed. Was it only an illusion that I had driven away from that endlessly long skid?

  Then the bottom fell away. I plunged into my true fear. With the force of an infection that bursts an organ wall to race through the body, had the haunting of this Vault broken out?

  “No,” I said, “I will not give you up.” As if I were in a trance where one climbs higher and higher into the rigging of one’s soul in order to dare the leap down, I said, “Dix is on his way here, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” she said, “he will be here, and you must leave. I cannot let you be here.” Tears were just visible in this light. She wept silently. “That would be as awful as the day you and I told Hugh that he must give me a divorce.”

  “No,” I said again, “I have been afraid of Dix Butler since the day I met him, and that is why I am obliged to remain. I want to face him. For myself.”

  “No,” she said. She sat up. “It has all gone wrong, it is all a mess, and Hugh is dead. It is hopeless for you to remain. But if you go away and are not here to be found, then Dix can take care of me. I think he will be able to. Harry, I tell you, there is no way to measure how many ways it will go wrong if you are still here.”

  I was no longer certain whether she spoke of love, or of peril, but then she answered the question.

  “Harry,” she said, “it will be a disaster. I know what you have been doing for Hugh. I was working with some of that myself.”

  “And Dix?”

  “Dix knows enough to keep a lot of people in place. That is why you have to leave. Otherwise, I will be pulled down with you. We will both be destroyed.”

  I embraced her, I kissed her with that whole mixture of love and desperation that is the only force available to ignite the cold engine of matrimony when passion is lost. “It is all right,” I said. “I will leave if you think it is necessary. But you must leave with me. I know that you do not love Dix. It is just an affair.”

  That was when she broke my heart altogether. “No,” she said, “I want to be alone with him.”

  We have come to the last moment of this night that I can recount as a witness. I have some recollection of picking up my heavy manuscript of The Game and making my exit by the pantry door to take a silent promenade in the darkness down Long Doane. I passed around one of the guards, and I recall putting the boat back into the channel, but the tide was low and I crossed without difficulty to a neighbor’s camp a quarter of a mile south of where I parked my car. I remember driving to Portland, and emptying our bank account in the morning, per Kittredge’s suggestion, as if, our marriage gone, the umbilical of property still existed. “Harry,” she had said at the end, “take the money that’s in Portland. It’s twenty thousand and more. You’ll need it, and I have the other account.” So I emptied what was there, and flew to New York, and here I do not know if I can go on with even this much summary, for as I learned a day and a half later (in the full seizure that accompanies personal and unendurable news when it comes to you by way of the media) our Keep had burned at dawn and the body of Reed Arnold Rosen had been found. There was no word in any of those reports of Kittredge, Dix, or the guards outside.

  That night now exists for me in a darkness equal to the void which comes over a cinema palace when the film is savaged by the claw in the gate and tears, the last image dying with a groan as the sound rolls off the sprocket. A wall arises within my memory as black as our incapacity to know where death will lead us. I see the Keep in flames.

  For the next months in New York, I obliged myself to give an account of my last night at the Keep. It was an act, as you may expect, of no ordinary difficulty, and there were days and nights when I could not write a word. I believe that I clung to sanity by an expedition into madness. I found that I kept returning to the moment when my car was turning through its skid and time seemed to divide as neatly as a deck of cards cut in two. I began to have the certainty that if I returned to that hairpin turn where the wheel whipped out of my hands, why then I would not see an empty road, but an automobile smashed against a tree, and behind the windshield would be my shattered person. I saw this mangled presence with such clarity that I was convinced: I had gone over. The idea that I was still alive was an illusion. The rest of that night had taken place in no larger theater than the small part of the mind that survives as a guide over the first roads chosen by the dead. All recollection of myself driving a car, headlights prancing forward like the luminous forelegs of a great steed, was no more than the unwinding of such expectations. I was merely in the first hour of my death. It was part of the balance and the blessing of death that all uncompleted thoughts existing in our mind at a moment of sudden extinction would continue to uncoil. If I had been feeling a touch unreal on my return to Doane, why, that might be the only clue that I was on the pathways of the dead. In the beginning, such roads might hardly diverge from all one knew. If the night had ended with the disappearance of my wife, had it really been my own end that I was mourning? Was Kittredge still waiting for me to return to the Keep on this stormy night? By such means did I keep my sanity through a year in New York. A dead man has less reason to go mad.

  IT IS A MEASURE of the life I led in hiding through that year that I did not do anything about the peculiar condition of my passport. Out of the question was any attempt to replace it. Looking like a small layered pastry, this passport was now being held aloft by the Soviet guard in the glass bo
oth, and he had an incredulous look on his face. Was I proposing to enter the U.S.S.R. by way of Sheremetyevo International Airport, Moscow, holding such water-soaked credentials? Worse. He did not yet know that the name of William Holding Libby referred to an imaginary life which would not bear up under serious interrogation.

  “Passport,” said the fellow out of his glass cage, “this passport! . . . Why?”

  His English was going to prove no more useful than my Russian.

  “River,” I tried to say in his tongue, helping to suggest that one had fallen into the river with the passport. I was not about to admit I had consigned the document to a laundry room dryer. “River,” I thought I was saying, but later, studying phrases for tourists in my guidebook, I came to recognize that I had used the words for arm and rib and fish (respectively ruka, rebro, and ryba). Doubtless I was telling him that I had stuck my passport up my rib and lost my arm to the fish—God knows it was enough to leave my Sovietsky critically befuddled. Like a good stubborn dog, he kept saying, “Passport—no good. Why?” After which he would draw himself to full height and eyeball me—they were obviously groomed to do that. I was perspiring as profusely as if I were wholly innocent, which in some degree I was. How, I kept asking myself, could I have failed to anticipate the consternation this puffed-up torte of a passport would arouse under examination?

  “Not good,” he said. “Expired.”

  I could feel the line of passengers waiting behind me.