The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Finished with my first reading of Ekaterina’s manuscript, I was embarrassingly slow to ask myself the question that has already occurred to the intelligent reader of this memoir: How could Ekaterina have referred to the interview as a fait accompli in several earlier parts of her story? (Cf. pp. 264, 283, 292, and 296). In other words, if she actually died at the conclusion of the interview, how could she have referred back to the interview in the past tense in at least five earlier parts of the manuscript? Even given her flagrant toying and frolicking with time and grammatical tenses (an indulgent habit she picked up from her mentor “Ingraham”), wherein we are often lost in time between past and future, there is simply no way that she could have anticipated what happened to her during Barbara Phillips’s interview…unless she was planning it as part of the work of art’s creative structure.

  (Incidentally, in the history of American fiction there was a very minor writer, a dime-novelist named Prentiss Ingraham [1843–1904], who wrote over six hundred novels, two hundred of which were devoted to William “Buffalo Bill” Cody; but the “Ingraham” of Ekaterina can scarcely be considered even to allude to the actual writer Prentiss Ingraham.)

  When I returned to this country last summer (my sabbatical was ended and I had fall classes coming up), I had time only for a very hurried trip, my first, to the “Bodarks,” that lost secret heart of America. My ultimate goal was to find some concrete evidence, such as a tombstone, to prove that Ekaterina no longer exists. But I also wanted to see with my own eyes the “Halfmoon Hotel” in charming “Arcata Springs.” In fact, I spent a couple of nights in that limestone mountaintop lodge…and no ghosts walked. Through the unflagging courtesy of Jackie Randel (one of several people whose actual names Ekaterina does not conceal in her memoir), I was permitted to tour the late novelist’s spacious suite of rooms on the hotel’s top floors. The rooms are still awaiting a new tenant. There are the faintest ghosts of bloodstains on the carpet, but Jackie Randel herself was not certain whether the blood donor was Ekaterina, Barbara Phillips, “Ingraham,” Bolshakov…or all four. I asked her if she had herself seen Ekaterina’s dead body. She confessed to a certain squeamishness that had kept her outside the door while the officers, coroner, et al. were within.

  While I was viewing that penthouse with its stark confrontation by the gauche cement giant Christ of the Bodarks, I was gently accosted, or simply examined, by a slow, heavy yellow cat, whom I recognized at once and without much surprise. Morris, of course! Approaching twenty years of age, he was still the “General Manager” of the hotel, according to Jackie Randel. He was still the favorite of guests, who were asked not to fondle him because of his advanced arthritis. So I did not pick him up. But I returned his scrutiny of me sufficiently to convince myself that he was no longer—if he had ever been—inhabited by the spirit of Daniel Lyam Montross. Ekaterina really did possess, I need not tell the reader of this memoir, a fantastic imagination.

  But she often in her memoir is starkly truthful without embellishment, embroidery, or deception. As but one example, she does not exaggerate her own difficulties in reaching that mountain-locked, mysterious Arcadian ghost village that she, out of deference to her mentor “Ingraham,” has chosen to call here “Stick Around.” I had rented a self-drive car at the “Fateville” airport, which easily got me to “Arcata Springs” with time en route to admire the same scenery she had shown to the great Trevor Kola. But that car, a small Avis Chrysler, was not able to get me to Stick Around. Although I’d taken the trouble to reread the manuscript with special notice of the descriptions of the route southward from the still-living village of “Acropolis” (as she disguises it early on) or Parthenon (as it is actually called, and as she calls it toward the end, dropping her disguises), I became, as she had done, as “Ingraham” himself had done, hopelessly lost. After two hours of driving, or attempting to drive, that small Chrysler into the most nearly impassable byroads, I gave up, found a farmhouse where I inquired directions, and was informed that I was “way off.” The owners of the farmhouse, knew, however, the Ingledews, and they offered me their phone and the number of Sharon Ingledew Brace. Her husband, Lawrence Brace, answered and offered to drive over and get me in a vehicle that I recognized, as soon as I saw her, as Silvia, who, Brace said, Ekaterina had bequeathed to him. He became, for the rest of my brief stay in Bodarkadia, my invaluable escort, and his generous assistance made the balance of my visit worthwhile. I am very grateful.

  Subsequently, Lawrence Brace presented me with a copy of the still-unfinished typescript of the critical study he has been preparing for seven years, provisionally called Benedictions and Maledictions: The Life and Work of Daniel Lyam Montross, which, when it is published, may shed additional light on the mysterious relationship that existed between Ekaterina and the dead poet whom she never met.

  During the brief tour that Larry (in Silvia) gave me of what little remains of the village of “Stick Around,” not even a conventional ghost town of the sort one pictures in western mining operations or cowboy sagas, I was especially cognizant of the restoration that had recently been performed on the verandahed two-story Victorian that had been the Governor Jacob Ingledew House and later the little village’s one sleepy hotel. I asked Larry to stop. I asked him who lived there now. No one, he said, although he himself had lived there for a couple of years before he married Sharon. But obviously, I pointed out, somebody has fixed it up carefully. Who owns it? I asked. Vernon Ingledew, Larry informed me. A line of Ekaterina’s text came back to me: Vernon alone knows the identity of the new owner of the house, who bought what’s left of it from him for, if not a song, a promise not to sing. Where can I find him? I asked. Larry replied, with a condescending smile for my ignorance, “In the governor’s mansion, of course.” I studied the house carefully but in vain for any signs that its occupant, if it was occupied, might be a woman. I asked if I could go in, but Larry told me Vernon had the only key. “Is there anything else you’d like to see?” he asked, and I replied that I’d hoped to be shown Ekaterina’s final resting place.

  Larry drove me up the mountain as far as Silvia could reach. Then we walked for perhaps a quarter of a mile through weeds and woods in the late-afternoon heat of August, I carrying in my arms a green-wax-paper-wrapped bundle of three dozen red roses that I had purchased at a florist’s in “Harriman” in good faith, having persuaded myself, at that point, that I conceivably might come to believe that Ekaterina was dead. We came to a sloping forest glade in a grove of red cedars where there was a single tombstone.

  “That’s Montross,” Larry said, gazing upon the lone memorial with the sad affection of a scholar who has devoted seven years of his life to one man’s story. There was no tombstone for Ekaterina.

  “Where is hers?” I asked.

  He pointed toward the deep woods. “Farther along,” he said. He said, or rather, asked rhetorically, “Don’t you know that she really had no claim to be buried beside him?”

  We went deeper into the woods up the mountain, and came in time to, sure enough, a modest marble marker beside a cairn of stones, freshly stacked. Bodark people are not buried beneath cairns; Svanetians are. The small tombstone bore the engraved letters of her name, dates, and the simple inscription, nobody has to die in THE END OF ONE’S OWN PICTURE, which, I realized after only a moment’s thought, was a direct quotation from Ekaterina, spoken to Trevor Kola when she was attempting to reassure him that there was nothing wrong with keeping Georgie alive in the end of the film Georgie Boy.

  Smiling, I asked Larry, “Who chose to put these words on the stone?”

  “Why, she did, of course,” he replied. And then he, noticing the way I was looking around as if searching for something or someone, asked, “What are you looking for?”

  “Where is ‘Ingraham’?”

  Larry gestured, sweeping his arm as if to encompass all the woods, or all the world. “Oh, he’s buried much farther up the mountain, in a remote glen by a waterfall. I’ve never been there myself, so I c
ouldn’t take you to it.”

  “Ah yes,” I said, and said nothing more. I unwrapped my three dozen red roses and arranged them carefully upon Ekaterina’s cairn. Red roses are of course the expression of love, and Larry understood without my telling him the essential reason for my love, which, I hope, has found its way into the heart of every male reader of her memoir: We want to believe, all of us men, that we are grown-up and manly, but the simple, sometimes embarrassing truth is that none of us have ever stopped being twelve years old.

  I am always twelve. And Ekaterina always lives. You who want to believe that Ekaterina did not die, forgive me my tears, and join in them.

  It has been my privilege, and my pleasure, to prepare this work for publication. My job has not been an unmitigated joy: I had to fight with Ekaterina’s publisher to preserve her desired title, which they felt was too allusive and punning (and they proposed such alternatives as Princess with a Pen or Good-bye to the Old World or the direct and colorless My Story: The Life of V. Kelian). I had to resist their determined efforts to remove all of her references to the whole vast and sometimes corrupt machinery of the “publishing world.” Their argument that this was “inside stuff” of little interest to the general reader struck me as transparently self-protective and overly sensitive. My obligation has been to be as faithful as possible to the spirit of Ekaterina…wherever it is.

  My private sufferings, the insect pests that reminded me that not only death but ticks too are in Bodarkadia, should not be anybody’s concern, but I cite them as part of the price of bringing this task to completion: My legs were covered with chigger bites before I could leave “Stick Around,” and I lost the first two weeks of the fall semester bedridden with Lyme disease, the ravages of the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi infested in me by the bite of a tiny tick who was waiting for me in the woods or weeds near Ekaterina’s grave or that of—I think of the punning irony of his middle name—Daniel Lyam Montross.

  In the silence of the forest that hot, still August afternoon (there was not a mushroom anywhere in sight), with dusk falling and Larry urging that we should start back, I sought to catch any sound of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, any portion of the strains of the elegiac, haunting mood of that musical trail through an uncharted pastoral woodland. Larry mentioned that indeed the burial of Ekaterina had included the playing, on a portable battery-operated phonograph, of the RCA Victor record of Van Cliburn performing that work for the piano, with orchestra. I had been mildly disappointed to discover that the concluding pages of Louder, Engram!, unlike the magnificent finale of Georgie Boy, were not written in prose that paralleled the Tchaikovsky concerto. Or, if they were, I realized, I had better try again to “hear” them. There are no orgasms in the end of this work…unless, as Montross expresses it himself on the last page of his Dream of a Small but Unlost Town, the supreme orgasm, unknown and unimagined by us still living, is the moment of death. “I’m singing the short song of my last instant’s ecstasy.”

  Frivolity and ecstasy are the twin poles between which we humans play, said Huizinga in his Homo Ludens, “Playful Man,” and the elusive Tchaikovsky I was trying so hard to hear in that moment at Ekaterina’s grave was not “playing,” but it was there as certainly as Ekaterina herself was, and I realized that perhaps I could hear at least some of those snatches of the old folk tunes and popular waltzes rearranged for the keyboard and orchestra that had left poor Peter Ilyich open to charges of plagiarism as surely as Yekaterina Vladimirovna will be open, with this book, to charges of having borrowed too freely from Nabokov and from “Ingraham” and from who-knows-what hoards of Georgian and Svanetian folklore, ritual, and custom. I began to understand something very important about Ekaterina’s favorite music as well as Ekaterina’s final book: Both have as their true subject not frivolity, not ecstasy, not the yearnings and seekings, the losings and findings, of the human spirit, but art itself. “Art is, after all, more real than life,” said V. Kelian. The Tchaikovsky is about music, about the making of music, about the possibilities and the limitations of the piano in relation to the other instruments of the orchestra; it is, to use the jargon of contemporary criticism, “self-referential,” “self-conscious,” or “self-reflexive” music. It is involuted around itself.

  And so, of course, is Louder, Engram! It exists to remind us that our Ekaterina was, she certainly was, and she was not at all.

  For Larry Vonalt

  All lies and fantasy, but true as God’s gospel.

  —Vance Randolph on The Architecture of the

  Arkansas Ozarks, in his Ozark Folklore, Volume II

  To him the men of Stay More are still gods.

  —Martha Duffy on Lightning Bug in Time

  Give a cock to Asclepius.

  —Socrates, last words

  Contents

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

  Chapter one

  Good of you to drop by again. Pull you up a chair, sit on your fist, and lean back on your thumb—but I see you’re already seated. Can you hear me? I may mispronounce a few words, and the way I pronounce others may strike you as mispronunciation. I’ve had all of my teeth taken out, not like the old codger who could boast, “I never had no trouble with my teeth. They just rotted out naturally.” What with my missing choppers and the stroke I had a while back, not to mention my chronic stammer, it’s a wonder I can still hear myself talk. Yes, I may misunderstand myself now and again. So don’t hesitate to ask me to try to repeat myself if you don’t catch it the first time. Now if you’ll be so kind as to reach down beneath my cot and feel around, you’ll find a near-full bottle of Chivas Regal, the last of a whole case of the stuff that Gershon Legman—you know the great bawdy bibliophile?—arranged to have sent to me last Christmas. Fetch it up here and we’ll have us a snort. I’m a badly backslid alcoholic, you know. But I can tell you, I don’t never consume more than a half a pint a day. I’m not one of these fellers who just can’t stop once he gets started. I was sorry I couldn’t offer you a shot or two when you came to visit me last, that winter I was in the VA hospital—when was it? two years ago?—but the VA people are really tight-assed and by the book, unlike these here rest homes where they look the other way or pretend the janitor’s broom didn’t mean to knock over your bottles a-cleaning under the bed. But that visit you paid me to the Veterans hospital, you must’ve already had a lot to drink, a whole bladderful: I haven’t forgot how you went outside on the hospital grounds and there in a snowbank took out your tool and urinated the letters V-A-N-C-E into the snow. I couldn’t see it, but a nurse told me about it; she told as how that hard January cold kept the snow on the ground for weeks more, and those letters stayed there, yellow on white! You know, there’s been some talk, probably just a joke, about the University is going to build me a monument and put up a statue in front of Old Main: a heap of white marble imitating a snowbank, with a bronze figure of me a-hunching over it with one hand aiming my tool. But back to that VA visit, before you went out and pissed my name in the snow, you told me your dad had just passed on, and you said to me, “Vance, I’ve just lost my actual father, so you’d better get yourself well, because if I was to lose my spiritual father too, it would just finish me off.” And you recall what I said to that? All I could think of at the time to say to that, choked up as I was? All I could say was, “Bless you, my boy, I aint about to cash in, just yet.”

  But I’ve thought a lot about that. Me, who never had a son, who never fathered a child, leastways not that I know of. There’s not much I can give you in return for those kind words. This here scotch won’t even repay you for that splendid review you wrote of Pissing in the Snow for the local underground paper. I won’t pretend that anything I could say, running on at t
he mouth the way I do, could scratch your back the way you’ve scratched mine. No. But I’ve thought a lot about it, and I’ve decided that one little thing I could do for you would be to confess to you that I’ve actually been to your Stay More myself, once, a long time ago, and I could tell you the story about it, if you’d care to hear it. Might be you could even make a novel out of it, for it concerns your Doc Swain, God rest his soul. I haven’t told anybody this, not even Herb Halpert, my diligent annotator, but Doc Swain is the model, or simply the source, for “Doc Holton,” who appears in so many of my folktale collections, particularly Sticks in the Knapsack and The Devil’s Pretty Daughter, to name just two. I reckon you know, though you hardly gave a clue in those novels of yours in which he briefly, all too briefly appears, that Doc Swain was quite the raconteur! He believed in the power of laughter to help the healing processes, and he rarely visited a patient—and I suppose you know, or ought to, that in those days he always went to the patients instead of having them come to him—he rarely visited a patient without telling a good joke or a real funny story, which helped many a nervous patient to relax and feel good enough to start getting well. Why, I myself was present once during a difficult childbirth, what they call a breech delivery I believe, when Doc Swain told the mother such a hilarious yarn that her shudders of laughter helped expel the baby! But I’m getting ahead of my story, which begins not with Doc Swain but with myself and how I happened to find myself in Stay More in the first place.

  Mary Celestia hasn’t heard this story herself, have you, Mary? No, all these years she’s been obliged to hear me rambling on, sometimes just a-talking to myself, sometimes telling her stories, sometimes just arguing the damn fool things that show up on TV or in the papers. She just sits there sweetly on her own cot, or lays on it, and she doesn’t interrupt me except when I’ve got my facts badly wrong, as occasionally I do. She’s blind now, you know, so I have to describe to her what’s showing up on the TV or what the papers say, and I have to read her mail to her. Hers is not the blindness of Homer or Milton—though she could tell you some tales of her own—but of Tiresias, who accidentally gazed upon the naked beauty of wisdom and lost his eyes for it, but had the power of soothsaying in recompense. Oh yes, Mary Celestia could tell you everything that’s going to happen. She could even tell me, if I asked her, how much longer she and I will have to live in this miserable little room before we move on, or pass on, or whatever. Mary. Mary Celestia! Now listen, love, I’m a-fixin to tell a story to this clever novelist, and you aint never heard it afore yourself! It is a story about myself when I was about this gentleman’s age, about half of what I am now, long before you met me, but I’ve told you how I was one for drinking all the time in those days, and I wasn’t too happily married to Marie, my first wife, and used ever excuse I could think of to get away from her. This is the story of how I got away from her one summer and wandered around the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, looking for the wildest parts of the country where progress was still unknown and I might find and collect some rare old folkways and stories and superstitions and sayings that I hadn’t never heard before. This is the story of how I come to find myself in a lost, lost place called Stay More, which happens to be the name of the village that this gentleman has written so much about. But this is mainly the story of a strange, remarkable backcountry physician named Colvin Swain, and how he come to hide his heart from the world, but finally revealed it to me. I ought to have written this into a book myself, but now it’s too late for that. So, Mary, listen in, if you’ve a mind to, but some of it aint pretty, at all, and some of it may make you think I’m just sawing off a bunch of whoppers to see if I still know how to lie convincingly, but I swear, if there’s any lies in this story, I didn’t make ’em up myself.