An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  She was an exquisite poet.

  “Do you remember anything from the poem?”

  “Just the last line now. ‘And share my fools for bread.’ That’s the last line.” A small look opened its arms to me. “Mummy doesn’t feel dead yet,” she said.

  “We’ve talked about that, haven’t we?”

  “Steve, I used to hate Mummy.”

  “Girls sometimes do hate their mothers.”

  “Certainly not!” She was directly offended by my remark. “I came to hate her because she was awful to you.”

  “We were awful each to the other.”

  “Mummy told me once that you were a young soul and she was an old one. There was the trouble.”

  “Do you know what she meant?”

  “I think she meant she had had other lives. Maybe she was there during the French Revolution and the Renaissance, or was even a Roman matron watching Christians be tortured. But you were a new soul, she said, and hadn’t had a life before this one. It was all-absorbing, but she had to go on to say you were a coward.”

  “I think I am.”

  “No. People with new souls have terror cause they can’t know if they’ll be born again.” She shivered. “I’m afraid of Mummy now.” she said. “When she was alive, I used to love her a little—once in a while when she chose to be nice, so nice. Still I was really terrified of her. When she separated from you, I told Mummy what I thought—we had a scene. She pulled open her negligee and showed me the place on her stomach where she had a scar.”

  “Yes, I know the scar.”

  “It was awful.”

  “Yes, it was very much there.”

  “She said, ‘I got this nifty little Caesar giving birth to you, pet, so don’t complain. Caesars always turn out to be more trouble than anybody. In your case, Deirdre, you have turned out a bat.’ And I said, ‘You have a cross on your belly.’ Which is true, Steve. She had a horizontal wrinkle in the middle of her belly, and the scar from the Caesar ran right across it.” Something strangled in her, some wistful desire to be less extraordinary. “Steve, those few minutes were disaster. Mummy had to say it again. She repeated, ‘I’m sorry, Deirdre, but you have turned out a bat.’ And I was very hurt—because it’s true, that’s what I look like. You know Mummy. Once she says something to people, you’re put away like an insect on a pin. You never escape. I knew for the rest of my life I would always see myself that way. Oh, Steve. I said to her, ‘If I’m a bat, you’re Dracula’s wife,’ which was fantastic to say because I wasn’t talking about you at all, it was Grandfather, and Mummy knew I meant him. Well, then she became very silent, and began to cry. I’d never seen her cry. She said our blood was all filled with vampires and saints. Then she said she had only a little while to live. She was sure of that. She said she really did love you. You were the love in her life, she said. We both began to cry. We were closer than we’d ever been. But of course she spoiled it. She said, ‘Well, after all, he’s virtually the real love in my life.’ ”

  “She said that?”

  “I told her she was a beast. She said, ‘Beware of beasts. There’s a species which stays alive three days after they die.’ ”

  “What?”

  “She said that, Steve.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I don’t feel as if she’s dead yet.”

  It was as if a door high above us had closed. I looked around the room. “I’m going to end as a lush, I swear, dear child.”

  “You can’t. Promise you won’t take a drink tonight.”

  It was an impossible request—I could not sit in wake on the liquor I had drunk already; yet I nodded.

  “It’s awful to break a vow,” she said seriously.

  “I’ll stay off the sauce. You get back to sleep.”

  She got into bed like a child. She was a child again.

  “Steve,” she asked, “can I come live with you?”

  “You mean, at once?”

  “Yes.”

  I was silent for a moment.

  “Do you know, Deirdre, it may take a while.”

  “Are you in love with a woman?”

  I hesitated. But one could tell Deirdre anything. “Yes,” I said.

  “What is she like?”

  “She’s kind of blonde and sort of beautiful. She has a funny sense of humor and she sings in nightclubs.”

  “She does?” Deirdre was enthralled. “Oh, Steve, a nightclub singer. It’s stellar to find a girl like that.” She was profoundly impressed. “I want to meet her. Can I?”

  “Maybe in a few months. You see, we just began last night.”

  She nodded her head wisely. “People want to make love after a death.”

  “Hush, gros garçon.”

  “I’ll never be able to live with you, Steve. I know that now.”

  A cloud of sorrow concentrated itself into a tear, one pure tear which passed on the mood from her narrow chest into mine. I was in love with Cherry again. “Bless you, pet,” I said, and then to my surprise I began to cry. I cried for Deborah for a little while, and Deirdre cried with me.

  “It’s going to take years before it feels the least bit real,” said Deirdre. She gave a wet adolescent kiss to my ear.” ‘Forests are conceived in sorrow,’ ” she said. “That’s the first line of my poem about fools and bread.”

  “Good night, Deirdre baby.”

  “Call me tomorrow.” She sat up in sudden agony. “No, tomorrow’s the funeral. Will you be there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Grandfather will be in a fury.”

  “Angel, trust me on this. I don’t think I can go to that funeral. I won’t drink tonight, but don’t expect me at the funeral.”

  She lay back and closed her eyes with a tense flutter of her lids.

  “I don’t think your mother would want me there. I think she would rather I thought about her in my head. That’s better, I think.”

  “All right, Steve.”

  It was the way I left her.

  Ruta was waiting. “Well,” she said, “was it very bad?”

  I nodded.

  “You should not go around killing mothers,” said Ruta.

  I made no answer. I was a fighter who had taken too many. The smile was on my face but the end of the round would be welcome, and a drink for the next round.

  “Listen,” Ruta murmured, “you and me, we will talk later. He’s getting impatient.”

  We went down the hall of the suite to a sitting room. Kelly was there and an old woman I recognized. She had the reputation of being the most evil woman ever to live on the Riviera, no small reputation. And Eddie Ganucci was there. But I had no more than taken them in when Kelly was on me. He put out his arms and gave an embrace, a powerful bewildering embrace, for he had never done more than shake my hand all the years I had been married, but now he held me with some deep authority of feeling. There had been times when Deborah greeted me this way, invariably when I arrived alone and late at a cocktail party and she was drunk. She would hug me then with gravity, her body immobile for many long seconds as if she had been guilty that afternoon of filthy infidelities and was expiating them now by a show of devotion. But there had always been a hint of mockery in the depth of the gravity she assumed, as if standing before a dozen or a hundred people she promised an allegiance I would never find at other times. On rare moments when the icy treacherous tone I heard in so many of our fornications had worn to the distaste of final exhaustion there would come again a moment when to make love to Deborah was like a procession through a palace, each stroke a step upon a purple walk. I was trapped in such an embrace now, I could feel the beating of Kelly’s heart, some mighty sense of the powers in a cavern, and then—precisely as I used to feel with Deborah—there was an intimation of treachery one could recover only in a dream as if alone in a room, windows shut, a paper had blown from the table. Beneath a toilet water of punctilio and restraint (a mixture of cologne and limewater which Deborah liked to borrow) a deep smell came off Ke
lly, a hint of a big foul cat, carnal as the meat on a butcher’s block, and something else, some whiff of the icy rot and iodine in a piece of marine nerve left to bleach on the sand. With it all was that congregated odor of the wealthy, a mood within the nose of face powder, of perfumes which leave the turpentine of a witch’s curse, the taste of pennies in the mouth, a whiff of the tomb. It was all of Deborah for me.

  “Bless, bless,” said Kelly in a muffled voice. And released me with the deft little push of a banker sending you ahead of him through a door. There were tears in his eyes, and looking at him, there were tears in mine, for he had some of Deborah’s face, the wide curved mouth, the green eyes with a needle’s point of light—some of the love I had never been able to give to her came rising up in me now, so that our embrace done, I had a desire to hug him again and truly, as if there were a comfort to be found in his flesh, as if indeed it was Deborah and me on one of those rare occasions when having fought to a bruised exhaustion we would grasp each other in a kind of sorrow, my sense of myself as a man all gone, her sense of herself as a woman equally gone, both of us reduced to the state of children in a tearful misery, in that soreness of the heart which looks for balm and makes the flesh of man and woman equal for a moment. And in that way, the embrace finished, I could have hugged him for a moment, his presence more real to me as an embodiment of Deborah than of himself. But my emotions were like Deirdre’s I realized suddenly—their continuation was shattered—if it was grief I felt, it had gone off like a small bomb. I was stiff and cold in the next moment, and wary of him, for the tears wiped from his face with one elegant pass of his handkerchief, he put one look into my eyes, like a tracer of light it leaped into me, and he had the secret—if there had been a doubt in his head, there was none now: he knew what I had done to Deborah. “Well,” he said, “oh good God, well, what a ghastly hour this is for all of us.” And I could feel his emotion retreat. Like a bull I had charged into the warm billow of a cape, and now was wrenched about to find nothing but the air.

  “Forgive me,” he said to the guests.

  “Oswald, of course not,” said the lady. “I know I’m about to leave. You want to talk to your son-in-law. Naturally.”

  “No, I won’t hear of leaving,” said Kelly. “Not for a little while. Let’s have one drink.” And he made the introductions. “You met Mr. Ganucci—he was telling me how the two of you were thrown together. That must have been fun. And Bessie—you know Bess?”

  I bowed my head. Her name was Consuelo Carruthers von Zegraide Trelawne and she was a distant cousin of Deborah’s mother. She had been a great beauty once—she was still a great beauty. There was a grand profile, and violet-blue eyes, a hair tinted in balance between mercury and bronze. Her skin was the color of cream and there was a flush of strawberry make-up on her cheek. But her voice cracked.

  “Deborah and I visited you once,” I said.

  “Of course, I was telling Oswald about it tonight. Oswald, if I’m going to drink, give me more of the Louis Treize.” Ruta got up immediately and went to the table to make her a drink. Bess turned to me. “You’ve improved since I saw you.”

  “Better a little, worse a little,” I said. I was trying to remember what Bess had done: there was an episode in her legend which was notorious—it was one of the worst stories I had ever heard—but my memory would not produce it.

  “Oh, bother, don’t try to talk,” she said.

  “Watch the brandy on your heart,” Kelly murmured.

  “I don’t want to hear about brandy,” Bess said. “I drink Scotch with bores, coke with great-grandchildren, and save brandy for ghastly hours.”

  “Please stop it, Bess,” said Kelly.

  “No. Weep, both of you. Scream your heads off. The most heavenly girl in the whole glorious world has been plucked from us. I can’t keep it in.”

  “She was a peach,” Ganucci said in his hoarse voice.

  “You hear,” said Bess, “even this old wop can tell you.”

  Kelly put his head in his hands for a moment, and then raised his face. He was a big man with a smooth body and very white skin, not pale but white, a full buttermilk white with shadings of pink, all flesh. One had the impression he was a bit wide in the middle, but the transition was so smooth his body looked to have a perfect shape for his head. He had a large head which began with a small pointed chin, went up to an urbane button of a nose, and on to a broad forehead. Since he was half bald, the length of his forehead seemed equal to the distance from his eyes to his chin. He looked at times like one of those very handsome babies who at the age of three months come out a stout hearty fifty-five years old. Actually he was sixty-five, and physically impressive, for he gave off the fortified good humor which is to be found in the company of generals, tycoons, politicians, admirals, newspaper publishers, presidents, and prime ministers. He had in fact a pronounced resemblance to a particular president and particular prime minister, but then for fact Kelly had two separate manners, one, British; the other, American; you had to learn to distinguish. The British was clipped, jolly, full of tycoon; he might have you knifed but dependably you would receive a full twinkle as the order went down. The American was hard in the eyes—they turned from green to gray, and his face went cold—those eyes would buy you, sell you, close you out, walk past your widow; they measured you face to face, they were dirty Irish—they would put dirty sand in your concrete.

  His voice, however, was rich, an instrument; it purred with good fun. Only at the end of a sentence would he give a turn to the meaning and put you away. I had heard people say he had the charm to capture anything alive if he liked it—he had never liked me. “Have some brandy, Stephen,” he said now.

  “I’ve been doing little but drink.”

  “Shouldn’t wonder. I’ve had a quantity myself.”

  In the silence which followed he waved Ruta aside, went to the bar, put a little Rémy Martin into a large snifter and passed it to me. As he did, his nail gave a glancing tick off mine, and left an electric sense of loss much as if a beauty had brushed my hand and delivered a message to my back of fine mysteries yet to discover. I held the glass, but the promise to Deirdre was on me; I took no sip. Now, another small silence developed. So I sat there holding my glass, living in the pall which comes the moment there is silence at a wake; that happiness which arrived for a while talking to Deirdre now disappeared.

  “You know, Mr. Kelly,” said Ganucci, his voice whispering over its way like a fist rubbed down the bark of a tree, “I started as a poor man.”

  “By God, so did I,” said Kelly out of a reverie.

  “And I’ve always felt like a poor man,” said Ganucci.

  “Don’t know that I have,” said Kelly.

  “I still feel like a poor man in this regard—I love class. Your daughter had the class of the angels. She could treat you as an equal, simple as that. That’s why I came to pay my respects tonight.”

  “I’m honored that you’re here, Mr. Ganucci,” said Kelly.

  “That’s nice of you to say. I know there’ve been all kinds of people here this afternoon and this evening, and you must be tired, but I came here to tell you this: I’m a big man in certain people’s eyes, only I don’t kid myself, you’re a bigger man, you’re a very big man. I came to pay my respects. I’m your friend. I would do anything for you.”

  “Darling,” said Bess to Ganucci, “you’ve written your letter. Now mail it.”

  “Darling,” said Kelly, “is this the night to be rude to Mr. Ganucci?”

  “I’m ready to explode,” said Bess.

  The telephone rang. Ruta got up again to answer. “It’s Washington,” she said.

  “I’ll take it in the other room.”

  The moment Kelly was gone, Ganucci said, “I’m not even rude to the little colored fellow who shines my shoes.”

  “Well, he’s the future, darling,” said Bess.

  “That’s right,” said Ganucci, “and you and me are dead.”

  “Some of us
are more dead than others, pet. There are weeds and roses through all the world.”

  “No,” said Ganucci again to Bess, “you and me are dead.”

  “Weeds and roses,” Bess replied.

  “You know what the dead are,” said Ganucci. “They’re concrete. You’ll make a good bump on Route 4 in New Jersey.”

  “Is that the one which starts to go to Tuxedo Park?” asked Bess.

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  “Dreadful road,” said Bess.

  Ganucci started coughing again. “Listen, please don’t call me a wop.”

  “You are.”

  Kelly returned. “It was Jack,” he said to me. “He said to send you his regards and commiserations. He also said it was an awful shock to him, and he knows you must be feeling awful. I didn’t know you knew him.”

  “We met in Congress,” I said.

  “Of course,” said Kelly.

  “As a matter of fact, I met Deborah because of him.”

  “Yes, yes, now it’s back to me. I remember she even said something to me about you then. She said, ‘You better watch out—there’s a half-Jewish fellow I’m crazy about.’ ‘More power to you,’ I said. Would you believe it—I was opposed to Jack at the time. I was wrong. I was so damn wrong. And wrong about Deborah. Oh, Christ,” he bellowed suddenly, in a shock of sound, like an animal receiving the blow of a bullet. “Excuse me,” he said, and left the room once more.

  “Well, now we’d better be going,” said Bess.

  “No,” said Ruta, “he’ll be very upset if you’re not here when he comes back.”

  “You know him well, do you, dear?”

  Ruta smiled. “Nobody knows Mr. Kelly well,” she said.

  “Nonsense,” said Bess. “I know him inside out.”

  “Is that so, Mrs. Trelawne?” Ruta asked.

  “Darling, I was his first big fling. He was only twenty-four, but a treasure chest. I got to know him. How I got to know him. Inside out. I’ll tell you, my dear,” she said to Ruta, “he won’t marry you.”