Wrong Information Is Being Given Out at Princeton

by J. P. Donleavy

  Resurrecting myself from dejection in the late afternoon I took the radio with me under an arm and unstrapping my watch from my wrist, pawned them both on Ninth Avenue. Collected a total of nine dollars and fifty cents. The watch alone cost sixty-one dollars, bought at a reduction in a naval commissary store. I walked off some of the misery and gloom going uptown and crosstown to the Biltmore. The blind musician who could see was not to be seen. Had a beer in the “Men Only” bar. Angelo the bartender said hello. Every tiny word of greeting comfort is hard earned in this city. Especially when it prevails against the cruel indifference of the infidel hordes. Then went to Grand Central, stood on the balcony looking out over this vast temple of travel. Where I try to distract my mind. And can’t. Away from pain. From all that would be death. And listen to life, the sound of voices as a pair of guys go by.

  “So Christ, there she is. After all the goddamn hoopla, I finally meet her. Has a face looks like it came out of a truck transmission shop. Only she thinks she’s God’s gift to mankind.”

  With just enough money again jingling in my pocket, I telephoned Amy at the Pennsylvania Hotel but she was out. Left a message that I would telephone again. Walking down the slipway to the lower level, I stared into the Oyster Bar. Customers hunched over their martinis and shellfish, scoffing away. And here I am hungry but frightened to go in and spend any money. When the woman whose flesh I last touched could buy the whole world. Or at least a few dozen oyster bars. If only I could hear her sweet voice again. Instead of cold vowels. Her face, that of a goddess. Instead of coming out of a truck transmission shop, could only have come out of the most wonderful heavenly dream. But who in our brief romance had abruptly taken out and put on a pair of glasses I’d never seen her wear before. Changing her face and demeanor like a nightmare into the face and countenance of a schoolmarm staring at me. As if I’d committed every classroom misdemeanor in history. Her voice penetrating my ear as hard as her diamonds around her wrists and neck.

  “Although if I ever care to, I’ll throw away all the money I want to throw away. But while I have what I have, I want to be charged the same price that everyone else is charged for the same thing.”

  I thought, Holy cow honey, hell I’m not selling you anything you’re paying for. Or charging you. Therefore and wherefore please don’t look at me like that through those eyeglasses with those suddenly gimlet eyes. And I remembered leaving the restaurant where we had first dined and she had no money with her and wanted to tip a waiter and hatcheck girl and asked me if I had some change. And my wallet produced, her two fingers came like a flashing white shark in between the black leather folds and expertly tweezed out a searing sheaf of my last dollar bills. Made worse by the wallet being a present from my parents on graduation from prep school, which only my favorite sister attended and could conspicuously be heard clapping for me. Although I can’t afford to throw away an old shoelace I feel the same way you do, Dru, about price. Only worse. The vanishing little sheaf of dollars leaving a vast meteorite hole in my spirit as big as the hole rumored to have wiped out the dinosaurs. Right now I worry about what I might be charged in the garage for Max’s Bentley. The leviathan sitting there alone, waiting for him alive or his ghost. Its great engine ready to throbbingly burst into life. The brake unleashed and the accelerator slammed down. Would go again like a bat out of purgatory out into the city of New York, endangering lives on the streets. Or even in here in the middle vastness of this great room. Stars painted on the ceiling. Twinkling above. Which as I look up still make me wonder if Max was really in that box. Even attending as I had upon the incontrovertible fact. As was his secret girlfriend from Knoxville. But also remembering words he said of the law that I wondered if he could get around. And he said no. “Because, pal, it states that in all cases a decree awarding alimony is issued to the husband personally and failure constitutes contempt of court.” And here I am, possessed of his beloved Bentley. Even his driving gloves so neatly folded in the dashboard compartment. Yet hoping to be able to say, as I was saying it, that Max is still alive. I know where he is. On the high seas. Pulled out of Pier 52 on the Hudson. Dressing for dinner aboard a transatlantic liner. Going to hole up in a London hostelry while he’s fitted for suits and shotguns and getting his horse fit to hunt with the Quorn. And ole Max if he did throw a seven, at least did leave a legacy of laughter, which I found myself even enjoying in the bad doom hours of dawn. When the soul is reeling on the ropes. And I could recall his description of the day catching his wife in flagrante delicto and prodding his naked victim down that Houston suburban street where it went past one of the closer houses to the road in which lived a gentleman who sat almost all day drinking beer in the middle of a front room and endlessly reading detective stories out of magazines he kept piled up by his chair while his ex-beauty queen wife shopped for baubles and had facials on the proceeds her husband enjoyed from one of the biggest oil finds in Oklahoma. And as the man heard the singing approaching and the words “The eyes of Texas are upon you. All the live long day,” he thought he was somehow being serenaded and that it was his moment in the limelight as a Texas patriot and a devout believer in the biggest and the best. Whereupon he got up from his chair to go to his window and as the procession of the naked man at the business end of a shotgun came into sight and began to pass by his front lawn, he began to laugh until convulsed in mirth, grasping his stomach with both hands and teetering backwards he fell over a cocktail table, cracking his pelvis in a couple of places. Even on the ambulance stretcher as they took him to the hospital he still could not stop laughing. It turned out he knew all about the affair Max’s wife was having and had as a result, long ago assigned a detective to follow his own wife while he went on, otherwise undisturbed, reading his detective stories. But now I don’t even know why I’m here in Grand Central Station halfway across this vast floor, amid all the traffic of rush-hour people hurrying in all their directions. All seeming to head toward the information booth center floor, with its clock on top, asking about trains to anywhere or somewhere. And suddenly stop in my tracks. Standing rigid. As if an arrow had just plunged between my shoulder blades and deeply into my back. A strange foreboding enveloping. Something dreadful has happened. Making me immediately go into the subway and back to Pell Street. And I found the arrow. Stuck in my mailbox. A telegram. Addressed to Alfonso Stephen O’Kelly’O.

  URGENT YOU TELEPHONE THE ADIRONDACKS.

  DRUSILLA

  I went out to the nearest local Bowery bar, where no one was usually wasting nickels on phone calls when it could buy beer instead. And stared at the bleakness of the telegram again. All except for a cheerful label attached, exhorting use of telegrams for distinctive socially correct modern correspondence. I dialed the operator to get long distance who tried as the minutes passed to obtain the number, and the number engaged. And as the call was attempted again and again, new nightmares taking wing. Something somehow more than dreadful had happened. When at last I got through, person-to-person, Dru was unavailable. And Parker, the butler, was on the phone who seemed to be crying but agreed to speak as the operator waited for me to plunge in quarter after quarter, clanking and chiming. To then hear his sobbing voice.

  “They both got burned up in the fire, sir.”

  “Who.”

  “Our Sylvia and Mr. Triumphington. They’re gone. I can’t say any more, sir. I can’t. Good-bye.”

  I telephoned Sutton Place. No one answering at that socially acceptable telephone exchange, Butterfield 8, I walked away across this socially unacceptable barroom floor where the toes of my shoes were disturbing the sawdust. Dark figures hunched on their stools, coughing in the stink of smoke and sound of spit landing in a spittoon. And the bird that seems in every bar dipping its beak amid the bottles. Two habitués drunkenly declaring their lifelong friendship with each other. “You take care of me, buddy, and I’ll take care of you.” And neither by the look of them, could take care of anybody. And do I now wait to go back to the phone and try again. Order
a beer. Stand at the bar. Watch once more the little bird dipping its beak. Up and down. Like the words I hear over and over. They both went up in fire. Means flames. Immolation, as women do in India. They’re gone. Means both are dead. Only Dru left to speak to. And until I do, there is now no way of knowing if maybe wrong information is being given out in the Adirondacks.

  I bought a pizza to bring back to eat in the apartment in Pell Street. Gave one of my quarters for the phone to a vagrant who stepped up from the gutter and silently held out his hand. His tired worn face like the paintings Catholics have on their walls of Jesus Christ. My good mother always said to her children, “Always wait on bad news and hear it in the morning when, if it’s bad, it will always be better to cope with after a good night’s sleep.” But my restless slumber was riddled by a nightmare of rattlesnakes coming from under the seats of the Bentley, beady eyes and forked tongues and rattles rattling, coiled to strike. And Max with his shotgun suddenly appearing out of a coffin alongside the Bentley, shooting their heads off one by one. I then suddenly found myself sitting up in the broken bed, sweat pouring from every pore, listening to the strange silence of Oriental nighttime out on the street and that refrain with a drumbeat marching through my brain, “The eyes of Texas are upon you.”

  The rest of the night I sat frozen awake, wrapped in a blanket till dawn. Knowing that the bleak light of the sun would first cast upon the tip-top towers of the tallest buildings as they became gleaming spires in the sky. And I would have to further wait until the sun came lower down, glinting on the millions of windows and to finally light up this edge of Chinatown and the world here of our little lives cheek by jowl. The tenant upstairs who burned incense and occasionally played what sounded like an Indian tom-tom, which rhythm I adapted for a passage in my minuet. And the guy who lived beneath who you never saw but who never complained about the piano sounds and drove a taxi by night and studied acting by day. Rip back the covers. Get out of bed. Fight. Fight the world. Fight death. Sit to the piano. Imagine as I always do an audience chattering. Its perfume. The glittering diamonds agleam on women’s wrists, necks and ears. And then the conductor steps up on his podium. Bows to applause. Turns to his orchestra. Nods to the performer. His baton raised and brought down. As I play my minuet that took weeks to score for orchestra. In the hope that someday it would be heard. And is here now before me renamed.

  Adagio for Sylvia.

  Slow the movement. My fingers possessed by sorrow pass over the keys. Each note so touched to softly sound this threnody. Asking her forgiveness. For whatever trespass upon her I might have done. And who was never as cold and hard as could be her adoptive mother. But Sylvia did not as I can remember, ever cook one single meal. Or put her hand to my brow and say, You poor boy, do you suffer. Yet ask her. Still stay with me. Even in death. That our bones can one day lie melded together in the same grave. So that she would not be nor ever be unwanted. For I could remember another story she once told me of when she was a little girl all dressed up for her seventh birthday party. She’d gone to a new school and had brand-new playmates. Dru and her adoptive father away at polo matches in England, her English governess had organized the little “get-together,” as she called it, by sending engraved invitations whose printed bumps she said Sylvia could run her thumbnail over and always know when she herself got one that the invitation was top-drawer from top-drawer people. The dining room table festive, set for thirty. Surprise presents for each welcome little guest. A conjurer, circus clown and quartet of musicians. Fire-eaters and a man nine foot high on stilts. And when a handful fewer came than were invited, two little girls who did come said the others stayed away because Sylvia had no real mother or father.

  Stephen O’Kelly’O in tattered crimson dressing gown. Of which Sylvia always said, “Why don’t you throw that rag away.” Horns blowing down in the streets. Day’s first traffic jam. Wait till it’s over. And it is. Dress and go out. Get something like a bun and a roll for breakfast and buy the paper. Look now out the window and up and down the street to make sure the coast is clear. Chill-enough day for a sweater. Get my mind to remember to buy a can of tomatoes and pound of onions and be able when I need to, to cook up a spaghetti meal.

  Stephen O’Kelly’O in the candy store. Reminders of youth. Of jelly beans, fudge and bubble gum. Reach down to take up a newspaper. An argument in progress as two customers say they were there first to be served. And now I am served. I hand over a coin for a paper. Move outside slowly back into the street. And stare down. And there it is. The bottom of the front page of the newspaper. Under a photograph of the charred remains of Sylvia’s doll’s house in the woods. Special to the Herald Tribune and all the news that they think is fit to print in such a conspicuous headline.

  PROMINENT SOCIETY FIGURE

  IN DOLL’S HOUSE FIRE

  WHICH TAKES TWO LIVES

  What has been regarded by some as a family jinx has again befallen the socially prominent family of the heiress, the former Drusilla Guenevere Marchantiere, wife of Jonathan Triumphington, who died with their adopted daughter in a fire Thursday that occurred in a small cottage building called the Doll’s House located in isolated woods not far from the family mansion on the Triumphington family estate in the Adirondacks. The tragedy occurred when Mrs. Sylvia O’Kelly’O, the twenty-eight-year-old adopted daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Triumphington and married to an out-of-work composer, had noticed a fire that had started in the building where her playthings and dolls were kept from childhood.

  According to a witness, an estate workman, Mrs. O’Kelly’O was seen leaving the Doll’s House and had already walked some distance on the front drive by which the Doll’s House is approached, when, it is believed, in stopping to look back, it was as if Mrs. O’Kelly’O had forgotten something and it was then she must have noticed the fire. In returning and reentering the house, it is thought she did so in an attempt to rescue some very valuable antique dolls kept there. She ignored shouts from the estate gamekeeper not to enter. He described that she seemed oblivious to the fierce flames which had already extensively engulfed the building.

  Meanwhile, another workman had gone to raise the alarm and seek help finding Mr. Triumphington, who was at the time at his stables visiting his horses. Mr. Triumphington, upon reaching the Doll’s House, now a raging inferno, soaked himself and his jacket in a nearby rain barrel and put the jacket over his head, then, according to the estate gamekeeper, who attempted to stop him, entered the building, in spite of the intense blaze, to rescue his adopted daughter.

  Summoned from seven miles away, the local volunteer fire department, having to traverse the winding and hilly rural roads, arrived at the scene, only to find the small cottage-style building, already with its roof collapsed, beyond saving. The victims’ remains were identified by Mrs. Triumphington, adding yet another tragedy to the long history of misfortune to haunt the Marchantiere family.

  Walk along seeing nothing but my feet stepping one in front of the other. The tears chill in the breeze as they roll down my face. And now all over my body I suffer your pain of burning. Unable to stand your being hurt, driven away as you were by my unfaithfulness. Spat upon by your mother. Haunted now by what drove you most to death. We could have had little children with beautiful limbs like yours who at birthdays played games and had treasure hunts in gardens and gathered around a Christmas tree, opening presents at Christmastime. Amid your dolls. Your elegant limbs charred black. Like those conflagrated aboard ship and roasted alive belowdecks after the blast of an enemy shell. Skin melted. Your hair burned off. Lids of your eyes gone. Left staring out of the bone holes in your head. Lips seared, to stretch in a grin of death over your teeth. Triumphington no phony poseur, as I had christened him. Nor was my wife his adopted daughter without principle and dignity. Who unlike Max’s alimony-grasping, greedy helpmates, only said she would give me the cheapest divorce it is possible to get. She intended to die. Walked deliberately into the Doll’s House. On her own exquisite long legs. And now so
weary and worn, force my own legs to go back into this Bowery saloon where the bartender has got to know me because I’ve been here twice before. He returned to me quarters in change from my dollar bills, wiping the bar and placing my glass of beer in front of me.

  “You must like us in here. And hey, this one is on the house.”

  Under the roar of the elevated train, step over five prostrate bodies to get here. Crumpled figures in the doorways. Those still sitting up sat with a bottle clutched in the hand, staring out into the shadowy gloom under the elevated train and mumbling to themselves. Either someone’s son or someone’s father. Then in this bar a brief friendliness comes from out of the bowels of all this dereliction. The long-distance operator’s voice sounding familiar, and I finally get through to the Adirondacks and Dru on the other end of the line. Long silences between her words. Her voice less cold than it was with that inference that I was trying to get something out of her. And now she asks if I agree that Sylvia’s sealed coffin be brought down to New York with her husband’s. A funeral service at St. Bartholomew’s prior to the interment and burial in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. And did I agree that Sylvia would be buried beside the Triumphington family mausoleum. Then she said that we shouldn’t be seen together but that she was being driven down to the city and we could meet if there was somewhere ultradiscreet, as the newspapers were looking for stories. I suggested the counter selling coffee and hot dogs down in the subway at Lexington and Fifty-ninth Street, as it was unlikely anyone in the Social Register would ever be seen congregating there and where she would be safe from recognition or photographers.