“Relationships change, Godfather.”
“Stop that. What happened to Estelle?”
“It was tragic, Ben. It was the comeback.”
“What comeback? What are you talking about?”
“The comeback. After the sensational reception of No, No, Nanette, Mother—well everyone, really—saw the terrific potential in revivals. You know, nostalgia. Ruby Keeler’s reviews ate her heart out, Ben. She was Patsy Kelly’s pal but Kelly’s raves really got to her, I think. Well, we still have our contacts on Broadway and Mother learned that they’re planning to do a revival of Irene. She thought it could be her big chance. She hasn’t been the same since Father died. You know that, Ben. The musical theater is in our blood.”
Yes, Ben thought.
“Well, she found out where the auditions were to be held and she went down. She used her maiden name. She wasn’t looking for favors and figured that after all these years the Finsberg name packed more clout than the name she used to dance under, so she deliberately used her old stage name. These producers are young. They aren’t the old-timers.”
“Yes?” Ben said.
“So what can I tell you, Ben? They asked her to tap dance to ‘They Go Wild, Simply Wild over Me.’ She dropped dead. What can I tell you?”
“She dropped dead?”
“She was out of condition, Ben. She’d prepared ‘Alice Blue Gown.’ She never expected the other.”
“I’m sorry, Cole. I don’t know what to say.”
“So that’s the story. What can I tell you?”
“Gosh,” Ben said, “a heart attack.”
“Yeah,” Cole said dreamily, “that and stage fright. Comeback fever. It’s getting them all, the old-timers. It’s a terrible thing, Ben. These revivals are killing them all off. The ex-hoofers are dropping like flies. So how have you been?”
“Is the family together?”
“Until a few days ago. Most everyone’s gone off by now. Gertrude and Gus-Ira went back today. There’s just a few of us in Riverdale.”
“Who’s there now, Cole?”
“Oscar,” Cole said, “Noël, and myself.”
“What about the girls?”
“Patty, La Verne, and Maxene,” Cole said coolly.
“I’d like to speak to Patty, please, Cole.”
“Sure,” Cole said. “Sure you would.” He could hear Cole call out. They must all have been in the drawing room. “It’s himself. He wants to speak to you, Patty.” There was a pause. “She’ll take it upstairs—Godfather.”
He understood Cole’s feelings. He had slept with almost all the boys’ sisters by this time. “How are you, Cole?” he asked gently.
“Oh,” Cole said, “you know. The Japanese beetles have been pesky this summer, but aside from that I’m managing.”
“That’s good, Cole, I’m glad.”
“Hi, Ben, it’s Patty.”
“Hello, Maxene. I’m sorry to hear about your mother.”
“Darn it, Ben, we never could fool you.”
“No.”
“Hello, Ben.”
“Hello, Patty.”
“I’ll get off now, Ben.”
“Goodbye, Cole.”
“Goodbye, Ben.”
“Goodbye, Maxene.”
“Have you got to see me, Ben? Are you at a hotel now?”
“Patty, I’ve got to see you. I’m at a hotel in Colorado Springs. The Broadmoor. Get a plane to Denver, then fly down from there.”
“I’ll come out tomorrow,” Patty said. “I’ve been waiting for your call. I knew it would be you. I knew you would need me. That’s why I stayed on.”
“I know.” He did. Patty, who could not hear loud noises, was the one he needed.
She wired her arrival time and he met her plane. “I’m sorry about Estelle. I sent a contribution in Mom’s memory to the Riverdale Temple Sisterhood.” Patty nodded and opened her arms. They kissed. She flicked her tongue around inside his mouth, darting it like a mouse across the vault of his palate. “Woof,” he said, releasing her. “Woof.”
“The Black Studies Programs in the nation’s high schools and universities,” she said, “are racist in intent. They’re designed to induce in young colored people a pride of such fantasy dimensions that an entire generation of blacks will voluntarily return to Africa.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“I’m not the Insight Lady for nothing,” she said.
He had loved all the girl twins, all the girl triplets. From the time he was twenty-four until now they had been his collective type. All that could happen to married men had happened to him. He had courted them, loved them well, had affairs, been unfaithful, kissed, made up, moved in, moved out. He had loved and won, loved and lost, pined, mooned, yearned. He had had understandings, stood up at their weddings, given the brides away, proposed the toasts. He had flown in for their operations, collared the surgeons in the corridor, spitting his tears in their faces, thrown down his distraught warnings, pleading always his passionate sui generis priorities. Over the years his love letters to them would have made thick volumes. And though they were identical physically, he had loved each in her turn—achronologically—and despite the monolith of their triplet and twin characters, for different but not quite definable reasons.
“I don’t know,” Ethel had once said to him when he was falling in love with Mary, “what you see in her.”
“What,” Mary had asked when he was beginning to see Helen, “has she got that I haven’t got?”
And he could not have told her. Could not have told any of them. It was as if love were the most solipsistic of energies, spitting and writhing, convulsing on the ground like a live wire, uncoiling, striking at random.
“It’s—what?—a feeling, an emotion,” he told Kitty when he was starting to itch for balding Maxene, “like anger, something furious in feeling that will not listen to reason.”
“All us cats are gray at night, surely,” Lotte said when she learned he was seeing LaVerne. “Don’t you know that?”
And it was so. If he knew anything it was their replicate bodies, their assembly-line lives, their gynecological heads and hearts, informed about their insides as a mechanic. Which, for one, made him a great lover, the official cartographer of Finsberg feeling, expert as a pro at the free-throw line, precise as a placekicker. And lent something cumulative to love, some strontium ninetiness in his ardor, the deposits compounding, compounding, till the word got round, the sisters deferring after the third or fourth, hoping probably to be last, as heart patients, say, might want their surgeons to have performed an operation a thousand times before it was to be performed on them.
“Oh, God,” Gertrude screamed in orgasm, “the last shall be first!”
And for him cumulative, too. But if the sex was better each time for his practice, that did not mean it had ever been fumbling. No. Never. The kiss he had given Lotte beside the bus all those years before had had in it all the implications of his most recent fuck. And some increment of the social in his relations with the girls, of the historical. Because he had seen them through not only their own puberty but the century’s, had heavy-petted them in the fifties, taken them, stoned on liquor, in lovers’ lanes in the back of immense finned Cadillacs, like screwing in a giant fish, worrying with them through their periods, sometimes using rubbers, sometimes caught without—who knew when one would fall in love?—driving them in the late fifties to gynecologists in different boroughs and waiting for them in the car while they were fitted for diaphragms. And in the sixties going with them to the gynecologists’ offices while their coils were inserted. Discoursing about the naughty liberation of the Pill and, when, in the late sixties, the warnings and scares began to appear, going with them right up to the shelves in pharmacies where they picked out their foams. Something of the mores of the times associated with each act. Could he, then, have fallen in love with history, with modern times, the age’s solutions to its anxieties? Have had with each girl what other
men had never had—the possibility of a second chance, a third, of doing it all over again, only differently, only better? Sexually evolving with them during the sexual revolution.
But sentiment, too. That refractive as well as cumulative. Associating with each sister the song, the device, the clothing and underclothing peculiar to her incumbency. A living nostalgia, differentiated as height marks inked on a kitchen wall. An archaeology of sex, love, and memory.
And Patty was the last. (She was not the Insight Lady for nothing.)
They drove up to the Broadmoor, a pink Monaco castle at the foot of the Rockies, and he showed her the hotel in a proprietary way, taking her through the nifty Regency public rooms with their beautiful sofas, the striped, silken upholstery like tasteful flags. He showed her huge tiaras of chandelier, soft plush carpets.
“Yes,” she said, “carpets were our first floors, our first highways.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“We call the rug in the hall a ‘runner.’ It’s where the runners or messengers waited in the days of kings and emperors.”
“I never made the connection.”
“It’s an insight. Chandeliers must have come in with the development of lens astronomy at the beginning of the seventeenth century. I should think it was an attempt to mimic rather than parody the order of the heavens, to bring the solar system indoors.”
“Really?”
“Well, where, to simple people, would the universe seem to go during the daylight hours, Ben?”
“But chandeliers give light.”
“Not during the daytime. The chandelier is a complex invention—a sculpture of the invisible stars by day, a pragmatic mechanism by night. But a much less daring device finally than carpeting.”
“Why, Patty?”
“Because carpeting—think of Oriental rugs—was always primarily ornamental and decorative. It was a deliberate expression of what ground—our first flooring, remember, and incidentally we have to regard tile, too, as a type of carpeting—ought to be in a perfect world. Order, symmetry, design. And since rugs came in before lens telescopy, how could they know? Oh, carpeting’s much more daring. A leap of will.”
“Of will?”
“Men will the laws of nature.”
“I’m glad you came, Patty.”
“Oh, look,” she said, “just look.” They had stepped through the great French doors onto the broad cement patio behind the hotel where small wrought-iron tables and chairs had been set up. People chatted, sipped drinks, and watched the promenade of guests as they moved across the patio and onto the smooth, flower-bordered paths that circled the man-made lake. Cheyenne Mountain and Pikes Peak rose unobstructed behind the lake.
“It’s very beautiful, isn’t it?” Ben asked.
“It’s so sad,” Patty said.
“Sad?”
“Look,” she said, “look at the arrangement of the chairs. Look at the round tables.”
“So?”
“Ringside seats, Ben. It’s a play. They’ve pettied the mountains, turned them into a kind of nightclub act. They’ve made them a spectacle. Our rooms,” she said, “they’re rooms with a view, I suppose.”
“Yes,” Ben said, “we have a suite in the new building.”
“How European!”
Ben agreed, though he had never been to Europe. There was a Marienbad quality to the place, a sense of spa. It wasn’t what she meant. She meant that the idea of rooms with views was European, that the practice of pegging rates to one’s proximity to a mountain, or, as in the case of hotels and apartments lining Central Park, was, not so much a matter of commerce—surely hotels could fix the price of their rooms and suites so that they could make just as much money without charging extra for a view—as a throwback to an aristocratic principle that had, she supposed, its source in some notion of succession, a crown prince higher than a duke, a duke higher than a count.
“Certainly,” she declared. “Now I see! It comes from the Court and the seating arrangements at table. The greater the revenues one could provide the royal treasuries, the closer one got to the king.”
“Gee,” Ben said.
“But it’s all so unnecessary. With the advances of architecture all rooms could have views. Rectangles are the enemy of democracy, concavity is its best friend.”
“I’m sick,” Ben said.
“What a lovely tie, Ben.”
“They told me I have multiple sclerosis. I got into my car and just started driving.”
“Men’s ties are a sort of male brassiere, of course. In the phallic sense of straightening the chest. I don’t go much for the plumage theory. What’s more interesting is that ties complete the circle of the throat, much as a priest’s collar does. Shirts, open at the throat, are arrows to the genitals. Do you suppose there can be a correspondence between the tie and the hangman’s noose? Idiom says ‘necktie party,’ but the operative word is ‘party,’ I should think, with its comic insistence on the collaboration between the celebrational formality and seriousness of death. Then there’s the notion of the knot, a clear adumbration of the Adam’s apple. But overriding all is the tie’s tattoo symbolism.”
“Overriding all, yes,” Ben said.
“To suggest the throat’s tattoo. Marvelous. And to do it in silk, wools, the softer cottons. Pleasure/pain. Velvet bondage. God!”
“Maybe we’d better go up.”
“When they told you,” she said, turning to him, “did you ask, ‘Why me?’ ”
“No.”
“Listen,” she said, “this is important. Later, during your mad dash about the country, did you say it? Did you ever think it?”
“No,” he said, “not once.”
“Good for you, Ben,” she said. “Let’s go up. I want to make love.”
“Why me?”
As she unpacked, hanging her pantsuits so they would not wrinkle, carefully arranging her blouses and dresses on the hangers as one might tug and fluff clothing on a dressmaker’s form, making a chorus line of her shoes in the closet, setting out her lotions and creams on the counter, her combs and her brushes, like one setting out plants in a garden, putting her jewelry in the drawer like a shopkeeper seeding his cash register in the morning, Ben lay in the center of the king-size bed and watched her, another’s chores tranquillizing to him, soothing, seductive. The FM played softly and the insights poured from her as she moved about the room.
“ ‘La la la’ in songs is code for ‘love.’ Music is missionary. The church has its hymns, nations their anthems, every song is a serenade. Don’t kid yourself. Every song. And I’m not talking sombreros now, or greasers beneath the baked brick or near the stucco. What, you never heard the expression ‘They’re playing our song’? Music is primal salesmanship, Ben. Its most basic terms—‘note’ and ‘scales’—can be traced back to banking and commerce. What’s the commonest word in a lyric? ‘Gold.’ Consider musical comedy, Ben. The kind of song that made the Finsberg fortune. ‘I Found a Million Dollar Baby in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store’; ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business.’ ‘There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow, there’s a bright golden haze on the meadow.’ (And a gold record, incidentally.) Or”—here she broke into song—“ ‘Longing to tell you but afraid and shy, I’d let my golden chances pass me by.’ And ‘by,’ incidentally, is a play on words. ‘I’ll get by as long as I have you.’ By—buy.”
Bye-bye, Ben thought.
“And ‘have,’ Ben, ‘have.’ Good Lord, Ben, wake up. Think things through. ‘Pennies from Heaven.’ ”
“ ‘He’s just my Bill,’ ” Ben said.
“That’s it, that’s it. You’re making fun, of course, but subliminally that’s precisely what’s going on in that song. Remember, Showboat wasn’t written until America went off the gold standard and paper money came in. ‘I bought you violets for your furs.’ ‘A kiss on the lips can be quite sentimental, but diamonds are a girl’s best friend.’ ”
“You know a lot of songs,” he said
.
“Oh, Ben,” she said, “I know everything.”
They made love. Her cries during orgasm were insights.
“I wonder,” she moaned, “why the group photograph has always been a convention? It must be because the group is aware that the next minute one of them could be dead. We are good. We are.”
“Oh. Oh,” Ben cried.
“Have you ever noticed,” she squealed, “how bottles of salad dressing are all the same shape, tall necks and wide, bell-shaped t-t-torsos?”
“Oh, God,” Ben shivered. “Oh, God.”
“And how,” she panted, “the la-labels are the-these little co-collars at the neck, and the-these sh-shield shapes on the front and back, and how there’s al-always a r-recipe?”
“Oh oh,” Ben raptured.
“That’s,” she groaned, “so they can all be sh-shelved to-together, so they may com-com-compete oh oh openly on the oh oh open market.”
“Uhnn. Oooh. Ahnn,” Ben whined.
“State capitols are legislative surrogates for the church architecture of Europe,” she keened.
Afterward they smoked some marijuana Patty had brought with her from New York. They passed it back and forth wordlessly. Ben was grateful for the silence.
“You know,” she said after a while, “you have this amazing insight into our bodies.” She meant hers and her sisters’.
“Yes,” he said, “by now I know exactly what you’ll do if I do this or that.”
“Why are you so stuck on us, Ben? Why are we so stuck on you?”
“You’re the Insight Lady.”
“The greatest neologism in the history of the English language is Tarzan’s cry when he’s swinging on vines—‘Awawawawawaw!’ What else could Burroughs have put in his mouth? ‘Gee!’? Believe me, it was a stroke of genius, Ben. You can demonstrate the reactionariness of reactionaries by showing how liberal they are about the distant. Policies that have them up in arms in their own country are a matter of indifference to them in underdeveloped nations. This is also true, incidentally, of people’s attitudes toward death. The best sentence is made out of the best combination of tenses, not out of the best words. Likewise the great work is the great action. Plots are more important than language. Plot is the language of time. How pompous pomp in a new country! The aristocracy, the army, and the pecking order in General Motors are all alike. All organizations equal all other organizations. Parliament and Barnum and Bailey. A Harvard professor I once saw on the Today show showed me that genius seems to have thought about what it has only just now been asked and, speaking beautifully about a subject, is actually inventing what it seems merely to be remembering. Other people’s lives are art. That’s why there’s a Broadway and a West End, why there’s literature. Spartacus was an antipacifist preaching exactly what Martin Luther King preached, but in reverse. Thus, ends are justified by means, since all means, if they work, are ultimately equal, that is, efficient. It is only ends which are unequal. We would both agree that some ends are nobler than others. Since means are interchangeable then, it is only ends which ever need to be justified. Oh, Ben,” she cried passionately, “I’m only this archaeologist of the daily. I read the quotidian is all. To me today’s newspaper is already nostalgia. Don’t look to me for the secret of your life!”
The Franchiser Page 20
