An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  We exchanged a stare. When the silence which came off from me did not falter, he added, “You’re going of course.”

  “No.”

  “Is that what Deirdre was upset about?”

  “I would think that’s what it was.”

  “Well, I want you to be there. I can’t conceive of an explanation otherwise.”

  “You can tell people I’m too broken to show.”

  “I don’t intend to tell them anything. I want you to stop being a bloody fool. You and me are going to stand side by side at the funeral. Otherwise, it’s hopeless. Everyone will be convinced you’re a murderer.”

  “Can’t you understand,” I said, “that I really don’t care what people say. It’s gone a little too deep for that.” My hand was trembling. To steady myself, I said, “Besides, even if I go, they’ll still say I did it.”

  “Bother them all, there’s a critical difference in the way it’ll be said.” He was altogether calm as he spoke, but a vein in his forehead gave a jump and began to pulse. “I never thought I’d have to explain to you,” said Kelly, “that it doesn’t matter what is done in private. What is important is the public show—it must be flawless. Because public show is the language we use to tell our friends and enemies that we still have order enough to make a good display. That’s not so easy if you consider the general insanity of everything. You see, it doesn’t matter whether people think you killed Deborah, it matters only whether people are given the opportunity to recognize it’s been swept under the carpet, and you and I together are in control of the situation. If you don’t show, it will cause so much talk that you and me will never be able to get to the real thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “That we become friends.”

  “Kelly, I realize this has been quite a day for you …”

  “I have confidence. We’re closer than you expect.” He looked about. “Come, let’s go into the library.” It was the largest chamber in the suite and served as an omnibus bedroom, sitting room and antique gallery for Kelly. “Come on,” he said, “we can talk better there. It’s a better place for what I have to say. You see, I want to tell you a long story. A long Godawful story. And the library is the place for it. It may not be your favorite room, but it certainly is mine. It’s the only thing still belongs to me in New York.” He had in fact a town house in the East Sixties but never entered it. The house was occupied as a sort of hospital by Deborah’s mother who was bedridden, profoundly separated from Kelly, and had not spoken to Deborah since we were married.

  “Very well. We might as well go in,” I said. But I did not want to. The library was a poor room for tonight.

  In there, was a turn of mood as precise as the instant of entering a royal chapel, some dark chamber with reliquaries and monstrances; indeed, just as one went in, there was a silver monstrance before a screen, silver-gilt, set with stones, the screen a tapestry of women in Elizabethan dress talking to a deer while a squire was in the act of encountering a nude maid who grew out of the trunk of a tree. That was late sixteenth century. (Kelly, on one half-genial occasion, had spent an evening cataloguing the items for me—“Who knows, you may own them someday,” he had said. “Mustn’t sell them for too little.”) There was a harpsichord giving off the high patina of a snake; a carved and gilt side-table with four golden alligators for legs; a rug covered the floor with a purple-red landscape of trees and garden which glowed like a fire of permanganate. There was a looking-glass frame: ormolu cupids, scallop shells, wreaths, and pearls of flesh climbed up the sides of a pondlike mirror and formed a crest at the top. It was eight feet high. So might a mouse begin to study the privates of a queen.

  There was more: a Lucchese bed with a canopy encrusted in blood-velvet and gold; next to it, a Venetian throne. Golden mermaids twined up the arms to the shield at the head. The sculpture was delicate, but the throne seemed to grow as one regarded it for the sirens and cupids slithered from one to another like lizards on the vines of a tree: in the high silence of this room there was all but the sound of vegetation working in the night. Kelly sat down on the throne, leaving me to sit in some uncomfortable but exceptional antique of a chair, a small inlay table of Chinese ivory between us, and since there was almost no light in the room, just the small glow from the fire, and the illumination of a small lamp, I could see very little, the room was suspended about us like the interior of a cave. I was feeling wretched, twice wretched, in some rack of exhaustion between apathy and overstimulation. Nothing seemed here and present, not Deborah’s death, nor guilt, nor his suffering—if he felt any—nor mine: I did not know if I was real any longer, which is to say I did not feel connected to myself. My mind brought too much fever to each possibility. I felt once again as I had felt on entering the Waldorf, that I was in some antechamber of Hell where objects came alive and communicated with one another while I sank with each drink into a condition closer to the objects. There was a presence in the room like the command of a dead pharaoh. Aristocrats, slave owners, manufacturers and popes had coveted these furnishings until the beseechments of prayer had passed into their gold. Even as a magnet directs every iron particle in a crowd of filings, so a field of force was on me here, an air rich with surfeit and the long whisper of corridors, the echo of a banquet hall where red burgundy and wild boar went down. That same field of force had come on me as I left Deborah’s body on the floor and started down the stairs to the room where Ruta was waiting.

  “Do you mind if I get some drink?”

  “Please help yourself.”

  I was out of the room and to the bar in the next room, and having filled a tall glass with many cubes and several inches of gin, I drank deep, the gin going down like a cleansing fire. There was something wrong but I could not place it: I felt particularly unarmed. And then remembered. There was Shago’s umbrella. It was in a corner of the first closet I searched, and the handle came into my palm: grasping the umbrella I felt stronger now, like a derelict provided with a cigarette, a drink, and a knife. Thus braced, I went back. He saw me with the umbrella. I made no attempt to hide it, sitting with the stick laid over my knee.

  “Comfortable now?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  As though testing the plumps of a breast, he palmed both hands about the snifter; then looked off into the darkness. I became aware of a log still going in the fireplace, and Kelly got up this time and threw a new log on and poked the first with an intimate jab, as if he were waking an old stubborn hound.

  “Bess tell you about her romance with me?” he asked.

  “She said something about it.”

  “Due to Bess, I lost the upbringing of Deborah.”

  “Deborah never told me.”

  “I’ve never talked about myself to anyone,” Kelly said. “I detest that. It’s spilling the seed. But I have wanted to talk to you. You see Deborah used to give me a hint of your beliefs. I was taken with your declaration—did you really make it on television?—that God’s engaged in a war with the Devil, and God may lose.”

  Oppression stirred again. An idea came to get up, make farewells, and depart, simple as that. The room, however, was a weight on my will. “I’m not up to a discussion,” I said. And I wasn’t. Tonight I had a terror of offending God or the Devil.

  “Of course.” But there was contempt, as if the real mark was to chat at the cliffside of a disaster. “Well,” he sighed, “it’s all in curious taste, I know, but I like teasing the Jesuits with your idea. I get them to admit that the Devil in such a scheme has to have an even chance to defeat the Lord, or there’s no scheme to consider. Of course the off-shoot of this hypothesis, I point out, is that the Church is an agent of the Devil.”

  He looked up as if to call for a question and I, to be polite, answered, “Do I follow you?”

  “Since the Church refuses to admit the possible victory of Satan, man believes that God is all-powerful. So man also assumes God is prepared to forgive every last little betrayal. Which may not be the case. God mig
ht be having a very bad war with troops defecting everywhere. Who knows? Hell by now might be no worse than Las Vegas or Versailles.” He laughed. “Good Lord and gravy, does that put a Jesuit’s nose out of joint. I must say they can’t come back too hard with their legendary counterattack, because I have money to dangle. One of them, however, got brave enough to say, ‘If the Church is the agent of the Devil, Oswald, why in damnation do you donate so much?’ and of course I could not keep from replying, ‘Well, for all we know, I am a solicitor for the Devil.’ ”

  “But you really think so.”

  “On occasion, I’m vain enough.”

  We took a pause on this.

  “Do you never think of yourself as a good Catholic?” I asked.

  “Why should I? I’m a grand Catholic. Much more amusing. Then I’m hardly typical. My Kellys came from North Ireland. Oswald derives from Presbyterians. It wasn’t until the question of marrying Deborah’s mother came up that I decided Paris was worth a Mass. Certainly was. Kelly converted and climbed the stairs. Now, I’ve got stories,” he said. “Once you’re located where I am, there’s nothing left but to agitate the web. At my worst, I’m a spider. Have strings in everywhere from the Muslims to the New York Times. Just ask me. I’ve got it.”

  “Got the CIA?”

  Put a finger to his lips at the directness of the remark. “Threads.”

  “And Mr. Ganucci’s friends?”

  “Lots of knots,” said Kelly.

  The fire blazed in a back-draft, and he looked at me. “Ever realize how carnivorous the winds get here? Mountain winds.” I made no answer. I was thinking of the parapet. It was conceivable he was thinking of it as well. “Rojack, I’m not as powerful as you think,” said Kelly. “I dabble. It’s the hardworking fellow at the desk who has the real power. The career man.” He said this with easy candor, ready to laugh at me, but whether for believing him, or whether for not believing him, was precisely the little difference I could not detect.

  “Are you altogether comfortable?” he asked.

  I shifted in my seat.

  “Not much of my story is pretty,” he said. “But then I’ve warned you. Look,” he added, “it’s a full warning. I’m putting a weight on you. I think everyone must tell his real little buried story sooner or later. He must pick out somebody to tell it to. But I didn’t know who to tell it to. Tonight, as you came in the room, I knew. Suddenly I knew. You’re the one.” He looked at me. A hint of gray ice in a river came out of the core of his heartiness. “With your permission.”

  I nodded. I had become aware again of the darkness. We sat like two hunters in the midnight of a jungle. Kelly’s voice, however, was genial. “You know I was a simple young man when I was young,” he said. “Grew up in Minnesota, youngest child in a large family, worked on farms, grocery store after school, all of that. Deborah ever tell you?”

  “Others have.”

  “They couldn’t know the details. We were poor as rats. But my father had pretensions, North Irish Kellys, after all. We even had a coat of arms, hurrah. Gules, a child proper. Can you conceive of a shield with nothing but a naked babe in it? That was us. I managed to take the child and slip it into the mouth of the Mangaravidi’s serpent when I decided to consolidate the arms. Leonora was ready to have a fit. She tried to fight it clear across the seas to the College of Arms. But then of course by that time Leonora and I had been at war for years.”

  “Deborah never talked about any of this.”

  “Well. I won’t bore you too much. I’ll just say I had three thousand dollars in capital after World War One—the savings of my entire family. My father used to keep his green in an old cheesebox in a locked drawer. I got hold of that package and went to Philadelphia, hopped all over the place in Army Surplus. Blew up the three thousand dollars to one hundred thousand dollars in one year, not saying how. Gave my family five thousand back since they’d been nice enough not to scream for the sheriff. Then in two years on the market, I poked the ninety-five thousand up to one million. Explode a miser like my father and you get a mad genius like me. No explanation for my gift, my investments weren’t brilliant, you see, they just kept winning. Scared me stiff. I was just a poor hick Presbyterian.”

  A change had come over him. It was obvious he loved to tell a story. His voice rounded into humors, his manner became embracing yet impersonal as if he were the master of an exceptional treat which soon would be offered you.

  “Well, then I met Leonora. I was set up in business in Kansas City. Grain futures, owned divvies on a movie theatre, put up money with a bully who was starting an interstate trucking concern, and still kept running a wild streak on the market, skipping from one teeter-totter of margin to another. Got into something with Leonora’s father. There was a gent! Sicilian aristocrat, raised in Paris. Now marooned in Kansas City. Poor bastard had been penniless, you gather, when he married into the bullion. So even though he was just about the grandest item in the Gotha, the Caughlins shipped him out to K. C. to run their meat-packings, British money in Midwestern meat then—well, this may be going on, I know, but I can’t dive at once into the center of this little tale—it’s too rough.” He threw me a quick hard look. “At any rate, Signor and I got along very well, thank you, and he came up with the idea of marrying me to Leonora, a great surprise, for he was ferociously snob, but it was his revenge, I would bet, on the Caughlins. They looked for nothing but the grandest with their granddaughter. So, too, I’m sure, did Mangaravidi, but he was able to convince himself that Oswald’s Kellys were grafted stock of the Windsor vine. I didn’t try to unconvince him that I was no royal bastard.

  “On the other hand, I didn’t take altogether to Leonora. She was a devout. Pretty girl, but completely spooked. Used to wear a perfume made, I swear, of linseed oil and camphor balls. Kept a saint in every pocket. A bacchanal for a young man, wasn’t she just! But I had learned the first thing about mazuma. There are dollars which buy a million’s worth of groceries, and dollars which have influence. The Caughlins had the second kind of grabbings, I had the first. So I paid court to Leonora for a year, and captured her with my conversion. In marrying me, she felt she was bringing a soul to the Church. Her little view of marriage. We did it. And I discovered myself up to here in a dank tank. I didn’t know marbles about sex, I just knew something was damn bloody wrong. Why, we hadn’t been married a year before our mutual antipathy was so perfect a room was spoiled if the other had been in it five minutes before. On top of that, Leonora could not conceive, so it seemed—I had nightmares the Romans would give her an annulment. No need to polish the details, you must appreciate a few yourself; I needed to be married to her long enough to lay out a thorough circuit of connections. Without her, I was upstart, whereas with her—I adored the life she opened, Leonora’s friends were the patch for me. Money which cannot buy into the most amusing world is cabbage, stinking stifling cabbage, that much I knew at twenty-three.” He took another sip. “Well, B. Oswald Kelly said to himself, ‘Napoleon, the armies must occupy the womb.’ And we did. My troops made one do-johnny of a march. On a given night, in an absolute eczema of flesh, whipping myself up with the fancy I was giving a poke to some poor flunky, I drilled my salt into her, I took a dive deep down into a vow, I said in my mind; ‘Satan, if it takes your pitchfork up my gut, let me blast a child into this bitch!’ And something happened, no sulphur, no brimstone, but Leonora and I met way down there in some bog, some place awful, and I felt something take hold in her. Some sick breath came right back out of her pious little mouth. ‘What the hell have you done?’ she screamed at me, which was the only time Leonora ever swore. That was it. Deborah was conceived.”

  There was no answer I could give. I knew his story was true. The umbrella lay like a sleeping snake across my thighs.

  “I’ve read a bit about the saints,” said Kelly, “you’d be surprised. If a saint has his vision, he is next bothered with devils. The Devil’s first joy is to pick up a saint—at least that’s what I would do. And the ret
urn payment, I expect, is that the Lord’s first attention is toward us little devils. I can only testify that I was never so fond of Leonora as during that pregnancy. ‘Oh, God,’ I used to pray before sleep, ‘have mercy on this child growing in her womb, for I have damned the creature before it began.’ And there would be times when I would put my hand on Leonora’s belly, and feel everything which was best in me pass through my fingers into that creature sleeping in her mother’s waters. What do you think came out? An absolute marvel of an infant. Almost died in birth. They had to slice Leonora nearly in half to spring the baby, but Deborah had eyes which took you on a trip through real estate!”—he laughed—“right through glens and dells her eyes took you, and a corps de ballet of elves and spirits to take nips of your vision as you went in. That child would laugh like a fifty-year-old beer drinker, brawny little thing, laugh the devil right back at you for trying to see into her. I never adored anything as I adored that infant. Excuse me,” he said, “for not obeying the pact,” and began to weep. I all but reached over to touch his arm, but he got up as though to avoid such a gesture and moved toward the fire. A minute went by.

  “Well,” he said over his shoulder, “you strike a bargain with the Devil, the Devil will collect. That’s where Mephisto is found. In the art of collection. Trust me: Leonora was in bad shape after the birth, gutted, all of that. I didn’t care, I had the infant—that was my connection to good luck. But we thought we might go to the Riviera while she mended, and I had friends enough I wanted to make on that glorious piece of coast. So I tidied up my affairs in Kansas City, took a back seat in the trucking firm—which incidentally I’ve still got; it became an enormous firm, thanks to the bully—sold for a loss here, grabbed a profit there, and we were off. I knew enough to know the pots to be investigated. And I made a piece of that, yes, I did, first time I ever did business with blue water and smell of sun in the nose. Tastes pop up in you on that Mediterranean. Everybody is looking for their very special little pleasure and I wasn’t ready to find all my joys in the infant, I wanted a bit more, damn sure I was entitled to more. Then along came Bess, the Devil’s little gift. She was in from New York to spend a season in her villa—at the time I thought it was the most stunning house I’d ever seen—she owned a Raphael, that sort of nonsense.