“Twelve minutes exact,” he said triumphantly and tapped a watch that could have doubled for a chronometer on a navy vessel. He slid the battered sedan onto one such driveway in front of one such house, and fiercely wrenched up the car’s brake. He jumped out, opened the back passenger doors and then slammed them shut just as sharply, so that Mary Ellen and Bernard had to skip to one side. Kellerman made a wide circle with his arms again, and said, “Okay then. Home fuckin’ sweet home, kids. Welcome to Chez Kellerman. Come on in, come on in,” and he strode a pace or two in front of his guests into his house.
Bernard Jenkins had never previously been inside, or indeed outside, an open plan house. At home the concept of a knock-through from front room to back room or kitchen was in its infancy in terraced houses entered by the corridor of a hall, or passageway as his parents would say. In the newest of New Worlds he paused at the edge of a house-wide glass wall which led into an atrium filled with plants, their broad green leaves and palpitating fronds set to one side of a stone path laid over a channel of murmuring water, and which led on after a few yards to more sliding glass doors. Then through them into a floor to ceiling space which ran all the way to the back of the house where a final set of glass doors revealed an outside patio with low field-stone walls and some steps down to a shaved lawn stretching into a distant prospect of deciduous trees, some still gaudy with colour in their defiantly late fall glad rags.
Once inside the house, Bernard took in the rooms-within-rooms, each effortlessly interlocked seamlessly without any separating walls. There were sitting areas, two of them, with brown leather club chairs around a low walnut table in one, and in the other, a larger space, there was a more elaborate set of sofas and chairs in a block buttercup-yellow fabric, and occasional glass-topped, coffee tables with burnished steel tubular legs set on bright Navajo zig-zag rugs. In the far right-hand corner were packed book shelves. Spiralling oak-stepped stairs rose to a wrap-around gallery with doors leading off its corridor into bedroom spaces under the roof. On the left-hand side, beyond the living spaces and behind a maple-wood dividing counter, were high-backed dining chairs and a long rectangular cherry-wood table. The kitchen area, at the very back of the whole space, had a wood and marble topped stand-alone unit inset with electric hobs, two ceramic sinks, chopping boards and hooks to hold a battery of culinary instruments. Someone, somehow, had made it all come together as a whole.
Sat on the buttercup- yellow couch, a thick glass tumbler of ice and liquor in her hand, was an unsmiling, dark-haired woman whom Kellerman airily introduced by another expansive wave of his hand.
“Oh, yeah. Kids. Meet the wife. Mrs Kellerman. The First. The Last. And Only. Rachie, meet the kids.”
Rachel Kellerman stood. She put her drink down onto a glass table with a clunk as it slipped slightly from her grasp. “Hi, I’m Rachel. He hasn’t asked you your names yet, has he? So, ‘kids’, welcome and may I ask your names.”
Saul Kellerman had moved on to a drinks cabinet with a drop-down shelf. He was unabashed. He was unrestrained. He shouted across the room.
“Kids! Whaddya’l take? Bourbon, ok? Wild Turkey or Jack’s? Or a beer if you like. Miller or Schlitz, I think. There’s wine with the food, I guess. I hope!”
Rachel Kellerman, in her turn, ignored her husband. The First. The Last. The Only. She took a couple of steps across a waxed pine floor towards the ‘kids’ and extended her hand. First, to Mary Ellen who shook it, too hard, and gulped.
“I’m Mary Ellen, Mrs Kellerman. Mary Ellen Robinson, that is.” Then the hand, a single gold band on her third finger, was in Bernard’s and rested there a little longer. “So you must be the English guy.”
Bernard nodded. Her hand remained in his, soft and quite still. Rachel Kellerman was not as tall as Mary Ellen but, in her kitten heeled leopard-print shoes, a little taller than Bernard who looked up into the appraisal of her opaque brown eyes. The gold wedding ring was the only jewellery she wore. Bernard could feel its smooth, rounded bump nestling in his hand. She was without make-up except for a vivid scarlet lipstick. She was dressed with an elegance accentuated by its casualness: dark-grey slacks with the new permanent crease and a see-through long-sleeved black chiffon blouse with small stand-out lime green polka dots. Bernard knew he was staring. Bernard could not stop staring. The forty-something Rachel Kellerman tilted her head and gave him an inquisitive smile.
“This is Burr-naard Jenkins,” he stuttered. She took her hand away at last. She said, “And what will you have to drink, Burr-naaard?”
“I’ll, uh, have, uh, Wild Turkey, please,” he said, and added, as if he’d always had it that way. “On the rocks, please.”
Rachel glanced at Mary Ellen who said she’d have the same. Rachel half-turned to her husband who’d already busied himself fixing a stiff Jack Daniels straight, with water back, for himself. His wife told him, “Mary Ellen will have a Wild Turkey, and so will Burrn-aard from England. Both with ice, honey.” Saul Kellerman reached out to pluck a different bottle from the shelves of bottles to his front. He chunked ice cubes out of a stainless steel tray and clunked them into two glasses. He poured the bourbon whisky onto the ice without measuring it. He carried the drinks over to the ‘kids’ and handed them one each. He retrieved his own glass and joined the now seated company where his guests were on the sofa which Rachel had indicated, and herself back on her chosen chair. She lit an untipped cigarette and blew smoke her husband’s way. Wispy twists of smoke drifted through his wild hair and on into the beams of sunlight with which his halo was backlit. He stood, he hovered, above the ‘kids’. He made a puzzled move, with a downturned jut of his lip.
“Burrn-aard,” he said. “That’s American, kid. You cannot, be really called Burrn-aard, can you? What’s your real name, buddy?”
“Well” said Bernard Jenkins to the prosecuting counsel, “Well, Mr Kellerman. I do, you see, call myself that now. For convenience sake, I mean. Here, I call myself, Burr-naard. Here in America, I mean. People, uh, seem to understand that pronunciation, without explanation.”
“People are dumb,” said Saul Kellerman. “I’ll call you Bernard, and you can call me Saul, eh kid?”
His wife blew anther cloud of cigarette smoke at him. “And you, kid,” he said to Mary Ellen. “Any trouble with your name?”
“No, Mr Kellerman. No. I’m just plain Mary Ellen Robinson”.
Kellerman opened up his arms, pleading his case before any so assembled. He leaned over her as if he might scoop her up into them, as predator or prosecutor, or both at once.
“Plain, you’re not, sister,” he said “Don’t ever call yourself plain. We’re all beautiful. In and for ourselves, aren’t we Rachie?” he asked his wife in mock appeal.
Rachel Kellerman slurped a large mouthful of bourbon. She kept her glass in her hand. She did not reply. Her husband, his eyes never leaving Mary Ellen’s up-turned face, said, in a softer tone of enquiry.
“Where y’all from, then, Mary Ellen? The South, I can tell. I’m guessing the Deep South, I’d guess, Mississippi. Good Ole Mississippi. Though Alabama’d be worse!”
“I’m from Baton Rouge. The state capital of Louisiana,” Mary Ellen rapped out.
“Baton Rouge, huh? Say, that’s not so bad. Not sure about the bayou-dwellers of that ridiculously called Pelican State of yours, but you got some brains left in Baton Rouge, for sure. And some bright sparks in New Orleans too – Noo Orlins, pardon me. I’ve even got a soft spot in me, old Leftie as I was, for that wild man from the Thirties, that you once had there. At least he had a social conscience did Governor Huey P. Long, huh?”. Saul Kellerman swivelled apologetically towards Bernard. “Oh, excuse me, Bernard. American history, and all that. You ever hear of The Kingfish, Bernard?”
“Oh come on Saul” said his wife. “It’s Thanksgiving. A holiday. No lectures today, puh-lease!”
“Thanksgiving for some, for sure” went on Kellerman, no diversions allowed to re-direct him once in full-flow. “Thanksgiving, f
or sure. I know. But for what? For why? And since us folks giving the thanks are New York Jews we can afford to share a little intellectual meatiness with our Columbia graduate students, can’t we kids? And besides the Kingfish is very relevant to Thanksgiving.”
Rachel Kellerman stubbed out the cigarette in a mottled green onyx ashtray. She stood up. She said, looking at her husband, that it was time to freshen her glass. Bernard loved the phrase. It spoke to him of new beginnings, new continuities, re-calibrated narratives. Not of old stories, backstories, she might have heard before. Over and over. Kellerman called out to her retreating, arched back,to remember not to forget the troops.
“Share the wealth, baby,” he said, “just like ‘ole Kingfish told us, every man’s a king, huh?” He reached across Bernard and patted Mary Ellen’s hand. She jumped, startled, pleased.
“Bernard,” said Saul Kellerman, “this young lady, from Loo-ees-ee-ana, is neglecting your education if she fails to inform you of her state’s greatest, most deplorable, politician of this century. The Kingfish. Governor Huey Long.” Saul Kellerman paused. He assumed his adversarial pose. “You do know about him, don’t you, kid?” he asked. “And I’m guessing, too, that even now, what thirty one years near enough to the day, your family, your folks in Baton Rouge, are not exactly, strictly, enamoured of that rascal, are they?”
Mary Ellen recognised the question to be a statement. She was not sure if it entailed an answer. In any case, Saul Kellerman did not wait for one. He half-turned to Bernard as his wife brought a tray of fresh whiskies for them, and a refreshed one for herself. Kellerman took a swallow and wiped his expansive mouth with the back of his left hand.
“In the thirties, Bernard, America was in the shit. I mean deep-shit. No, I’ll re-phrase that. Capitalism was our sewer and it was drowning Americans in its shit. And in the sewer were the rats. The rich. The big corporations. Swimming in the sewer. Heads above all the little guys. All washed up. Unemployment in double digits across the nation. Poverty. Dirt poverty. Depression.The Great Depression. And in Louisiana, worse than that, on top of all that, decades of subservience. A feudal system, Bernard, in twentieth-century America. Dirt-poor tenant farmers. White. Sharecroppers. Black. Illiteracy. Non-voter registration. Shit schools. Shit roads. Shit jobs. Or no jobs. And a cabal of southern gentlemen sucking on their mint-juleps, avoiding tax revenue on their oil fields and riding, high and mighty, roughshod over a whole state. The nineteen thirties? Shit. Louisiana was still in the eighteen thirties! Then Huey P. Long. The ‘P’ stands for Pierce by the way. Huey P Long stormed in, on a wave of indignation, to become Governor in 1928. The Kingfish. No one wears a crown, said the king. This king soaked the rich. This king built roads. This king built bridges. This king gave the rural and the urban poor a chance, in unity. This king built hospitals. With tax-raised revenue. This king built schools. This king built state capital buildings in your Baton Rouge, Mary Ellen. They tried to stop him. So he beat them up, he humiliated them, he scorned them. He built up the state militia, the police, a personal cohort of body guards. In America. If he was hated, and he was, so he was loved, and he was. They tried to stop him, any way they could Bernard. He was unstoppable.”
Saul Kellerman finished his drink. Rachel Kellerman had given up trying to stop him. Her husband was unstoppable.
“What happened is” he said, “that the Governor now ran for Senator. And won again. In Washington he was, as Roosevelt’s so-called New Deal crept along,way to the left of that patrician phoney and, maybe, just maybe, setting to run for President himself, in 1936 or 1940, on a Share the Wealth ticket. Who knows, he could’ve won. If he had I wouldn’t have been trailing my GI Jewish butt around Europe.”
“Unstoppable. Until they stopped him. Stopped him dead. In his tracks. Shot him. Killed Huey. Assassinated the Kingfish. Some well-connected patsy called Carl Weiss put a bullet in the Governor’s stomach in the marble halls of the Baton Rouge State Capitol building. In 1935. Huey Long was forty two years old. Convenient, for some, huh, Bernard?”
Mary Ellen flushed at the base of her throat as if she had, personally, done something reprehensible. She could see her father, a Baton Rouge medical practitioner, slapping their dining table with glee every time he recalled, and it was often enough when she was growing up, where he was the day that evil man was shot dead. Mary Ellen loved her daddy. Mary Ellen said that she was sure there were good things to say about Huey Long but that, surely, he was also very corrupt, lined his own pockets. Made people he’d put on the public pay roll, pay him back in percentages. Had his thugs beat up his respectable opponents. That the Long family became a dynasty, too, and erected a huge statue to their founding figure outside the State Capitol building. That he stole from people’s legitimate, inherited wealth, making him, some thought she had said, no better than a communist. Mary Ellen then said that she could see maybe older people back home, not her generation, might not see things quite the way Mr Kellerman had put it.
Saul Kellerman sat back in his armchair. He smiled at Mary Ellen and nodded. “You’re right about that, kiddo. But, you know, he wasn’t a Commie. And he wasn’t, despite Rooseveltian slurs in the Press ,any kind of a Fascist. He was much more dangerous than that. He was American through-and-through. A good old, old fashioned Southern Populist, brought bang-up-to-date. That’s what he was. Oh, unscrupulous. Unworthy. Undignified. Yes. A rabble-rouser. Yes. A demagogue. Yes. And, just maybe, in a corrupt world, he was corruptible enough to be a game-changer. All from, Lou-ee-zee-anna, like your girl friend Mary Ellen, huh, Bernard? What a story, huh?”
Rachel Kellerman intervened sharply. “Are we finished, Saul?” she asked. “Truly, are we finished? Or are we going to do a tour of the history of radicalism and its failure in every fucking state of the Union?”
Saul Kellerman grinned and opened up his hands, palms out, like a supplicant for mercy. Bernard squirmed in the silence that had fallen. He looked at Mary Ellen, who looked away from all of them.
“No, really” said Bernard, “I didn’t know any of that. Really. That’s interesting. For me. Really, uh, interesting Mr Kellerman.”
“Saul, Bernard. Call me Saul, Bernard,” said Saul Kellerman, avuncular and warm.
“Yeah, call him Saul, Burrn-aard,” said Rachel Kellerman, cold and disdainful.
“Call him Saul, like he says. Maybe you’ll get him further along the road to Damascus. He’s already started out, haven’t you, sweetie?”
The silence that fell over them reproached any well-meant attempt at conciliatory small talk. That would have only sunk them deeper into a disarray no conventional conversation could make cohere. Bernard looked, in a glance, at Mary Ellen who was stareing resolutely at a far wall splattered with unframed canvasses, four large Abstract works in oil, their glaring primary colours warding each other off in a pattern of triangles, squares and circles. Rachel Kellerman sat stock still except for a finger which wiggled around inside her empty glass where the ice cubes had dwindled to melt-water. Saul Kellerman had groaned out loud the moment she had stopped speaking. He stretched to his full, domineering height. Silently, sulkily, he began to stride across the room to the drinks cabinet. The unexpected silence was so strained it was almost unbearable. At least, it was so far as Bernard was concerned. He heard himself say:
“I think I know what you mean, though, Mr Kellerman. Saul, I mean. From where I come from, it’s, in some ways anyway, not dis-similar. I mean, you see, I’m not from England. I’m not English. I’m from Wales. Welsh. From the valleys. South Wales. My father used to say that Aneurin Bevan, Nye, a socialist politician, from our South was attacked like that. Viciously. Called names. Like the Kingfish, perhaps.”
The silence shifted a gear. It settled into a space open for negotiation. Kellerman stopped in full flight. He turned.
“Bev-anne,” he said. “I know about him, for sure –National Health Service after the war. Time magazine put a likeness of him on its front cover at the time, with a scalpel in his mouth. An
enemy of the Luce Foundation, and all its nefarious works, so one of the good guys. So, Bernard, you’re from Wales. Why didn’t you say?”
There came via Rachel Kellerman, the relief of laughter, inexplicable in origin except for its need, and it was gratefully taken up by a smiling Mary Ellen and a nodding Bernard who just repeated that indeed he was. Saul Kellerman cocked his head to his left and surveyed Bernard Jenkins anew.
“The South. That, then, Bernard, would be coal-mining country, wouldn’t it? When I was in England in ‘44, waiting to ship out, we didn’t get to see the sights, visit the country I mean, outside of London and, for me, Oxford once, but we knew, I knew, and some of my buddies, where you guys were. In Wales. Shit you guys even went on strike in the mines, didn’t you, just before D-day. I remember that. You knew your rights, huh? Christ! I remember hoping they’d call the whole fuckin’ thing off because of you guys. You Reds! You Commies!”
Saul Kellerman was delighted the way the talking between them was now going. Bonding. Communicating. Solidarity. His eyes urged Bernard on, so the Welshman said, “Saul, my own father was a coal miner actually. He was, uh, a striker, a communist, uh sympathiser.”
“Fuckin’ ace,” said Kellerman. “This calls for a drink”.
“Whooppee-do,” said his wife and waggled her empty glass at him. Mary Ellen stirred, wanting to be part of the good news.
“You never told me that, Burr-naard,” she said. “That you were from Way-uhls, yes. But not about the communism, no. Really?”
Bernard had become, in this company, suddenly of interest. He felt it. He liked it. He was, here and now, an exotic. He was the catalyst able to effect change. In mood. In understanding. In relationships. His backstory was extracted from him piece by previous piece, gently in case the thread would snap and their fascinated interest would not be able to spool on into sympathy, assurance, support. Mary Ellen decided she was supporter-in-chief by original claim to the territory marked Bernard Jenkins so that, by proxy, she could be an ersatz adjunct, a satellite to the dangerous cosmos of Kellerman ,with the suffocation of her genteel and purblind ancestry left in the wake of her daring. Daring to be there. With Jewish radicals. Daring to think for herself. Wrongs to be righted. Omigod, a Commie, too. Well sort of. Mary Ellen tried to look serious and to glow with an unknowing pridefulness, all at the same time. If she was with Bernard Jenkins she was, she must be, of interest to Saul Kellerman.
All That Lies Beneath Page 2
