He said, "How soon can you have a play for the Keepers ready?"
"Cuypers?"
"Tim, Rod and Alice Keeper, the intolerable trio."
"Oh, those." Two genuine brothers and a genuine sister of genuine original New Amsterdam stock who specialised in triangular drames or comedies specially commissioned. Noel Coward had written Liberty Measles for them and Willie Maugham A Pig in a Poke. The fact that the audience knew the Keepers were genuine sibs made their adulterous stage caperings both wholesome and alarming. All in the family meant this was really playacting, no offstage funny business, but it also carried a delicious whiff of incest.
"Strangely enough, I had an idea. I didn't have them specifically in mind, but, yes, I'll think about it."
"Don't think too long. I promised, you know how it is, no use half-promising, there'd be something for them by the end of April. Not necessarily you, you couldn't be found, where in hell have you been since Christmas, never mind, you're here now, get down to it. The Keepers close in Chicago in May, Lonsdale's Cash on Demand, go and see them, it's a riot. Do something with a lot of British style, you know wit, you can't lose. Big money."
"Talking about money," I said. My American earnings were all lodged with Joe, untouched by me as yet. He looked after my special account in his own bank, accumulating feebly at five percent. I suspected he cautiously played the market with it. I lived comfortably enough off my European and British Empire royalties. He said, without having to look it up: "Sixty-five thousand three hundred ninety-two dollars forty-one cents. It's a crying shame."
"What is?"
"Let me put all that in Haigh Purdue's hands. Old Tiger like me. He's on the Street, Gillespie Spurr and Purdue. He'll treble it in a year. Radio, for instance, Radio is going to be fireworks, they're only just lighting the fuse."
"Fireworks make a nice show, but not for long. Joe, I don't like the smell of this boom of yours. It's hysterical, just like Prohibition. Boom and bootleg aspects of the same disease. Stocks anyway are too much of an abstraction for my innocent brain. Leave the money where it is."
"Real estate," he said. "You can never go wrong on real estate. What do you say to a nice little piece of property in Manhattan, not three minutes' walk from here? Upper East Side, Seventy-sixth Street. Twenty thousand."
"An apartment?"
"Three bed, two bath, living room long as a rink. Tenth floor, spectacular view. It's Bernard Lamaria's, you know, the writer, Friends and Fiends and the other thing. He moved out last Thursday. He hasn't put it into a realtor's hands yet. Furniture still in, all good stuff, let that go for, say, another three thousand. His wife wanted to move to Great Neck, Long Island, mother left her a house, a bit Babbitty but nice. Great Neck's where they all are now, Lillian Russell, George M. Cohan, Flo Ziegfeld himself. A place for big parties. Can't see any big literature coming out of it. Still. Half an hour from Broadway by the Long Island Express. Anyhow, I'm not trying to sell you Great Neck. Not trying to sell you anything. Just saying it'd be nice for you to have a little place to come to when you come."
"I don't come often." I wondered how much this Lamaria was really asking. Land of the quick buck. "The Plaza suits me well enough."
"Buy, you can always sell, why let it lie idle? Real estate's a skyrocket. Anyhow, you have this play to write, right. Nice little bar Bernie made too, his own hands, maple, real leather on the stools. I saw some bareknuckle boxing prints in Stolz's, Forty-third Street, a dozen, going for a song. Look swell on the wall behind the bar. Can put you in touch with a very good bootlegger, the best." I could see in Joe's sloeginny eyes that he could already see this bar stocked and me installed, pie-eyed, writing. In his innocence he believed writers could only write drunk.
"I could at least take a look at it."
"Sure you could. We'll go for lunch now. Baxter's, real English steak and kidney pie, just like home for you. Then we can go round, I have the keys here. Get the whole thing tied up nice and legal with Max Lorimer, he's just around the corner. Yours in ten minutes, move in tomorrow. You won't regret it, Ken, believe me." How many bucks would this mean in Joe's pocket? You could never have too much.
I did not regret it, not really. It was to be a slow business getting rid of the smell of this Lamaria, the writer: razamatazz wallpaper and imitation antiques and carpeting like a lake of oatmeal. Smell of his wife rather, and literally too: terpineol and cinnnamic aldehyde and chlorostyrolene strongly lingering after the death of the synthetic flower scent. I set up my typewriter and wrote my play, sustained by ham and eggs I cooked myself, real Booth's gin, Chesterfield cigarettes and views of the towery city. You will find the play in my collection Toomey's Theatre; it is entitled Double Bedlam. It is the first really experimental play I ever wrote, but the straightforward laughs were a sauce palatable enough for the audiences to swallow the tricks like oysters. Three characters and only three: Richard and Marion Trelawney, man and wife, and the amorous intruder John Strode. Four scenes, two acts. Scene 1 is Elizabethan, with the agony of cuckoldry; Scene is Restoration with the cuckold, who is about his own more ambitious cuckolding, complaisant. Long intermission. Scene 3 is Victorian-Shavian, with the characters prepared at length to establish a menage a trois on a purely rational basis, which, they eventually see, is only possible because all three have through Shavian rationality become sexless. In the final scene, Manhattan, 1925, the three are living together, but the wife is temporarily away, ostensibly with her mother. Trelawney and Strode receive a telegram to say she has been killed in a road accident. Husband and lover cry on each other's shoulder, united in a common devotion which, they start to realize, was always a little conventional, even insincere. They discover that it is really each other they love nothing homosexual, of course, purely a matter of compatible character and shared tastes, the shared taste for Marion being perhaps, after all these years, the least important. The telegram proves to be mistaken: other car, other people, same accident (collision). Marion arrives home very much alive. But she confesses, shaken, penitent through narrow escape from death, that she was with her lover of three years' standing. Never again, she says; she will be faithful ever after to Richard and Jack. But they say: Get out, we do not wish to forgive. Curtain on pipe-smoking sodality a deux.
It was in late May that I took my four typescript copies of the comedy in first draught form to Chicago. There was, as I have earlier recalled, an exhibition of the Monets and Manets and Renoirs of Mrs. Potter Palmer, but I was not there primarily to look at it. I did indeed stay at the Palmer House, a hotel with a vestibule like a cathedral though, then anyway, unlike a cathedral unlicensed for drink. The Keepers were there, we met on a Sunday. They were vigorous people who looked younger than they were, startlingly alike all three, their sexuality, I was nearly sure, turned in on each other, Dutchly blond, with large thirsts for the best bootleg scotch. I read my play to them and, with certain reservations, they approved. Alice's eyes, dollblue like her brothers', flashed onto the cornices of their drawing-room images of herself in a striking variety of decolletages. Trelawney, though, they didn't much like the name Trelawney. Cornish, wasn't it? It was an unnecessary and unpursued bit of regional color. And there was Trelawney of the Wells, wasn't there? Tim Keeper turned to the back pages of the Chicago Tribune, obituaries, in memoriams, your prayers are asked for (the Chicago newspapers were nearly all necrology in those gangster days), looking for a more plausible name. "Allenby, Aubrey, Bertorelli, Boehme, Brancati, Bucer, Caliente, Campanati, Campion, Ciano. How about Campion, that hits some kind of a note, Campion sounds fine."
"Did you say Campanati?" I asked.
"Campion. Poet, priest, musician, martyr, something." Searching for suitable vehicles they had become a pretty well-read family.
"Let me see." Your prayers are asked for the recovery of in critical condition at Chisholm General Hospital, Michigan Avenue. Now, having remembered so much, often accurately, but memory as a human faculty is subject to human limitations, we are condemned t
o invent so much of the past, I must prepare to remember, as accurately as is at all humanly possible, the thing I was enjoined by His Grace of Malta to remember.
CHAPTER 40
"How," I asked Carlo, "did you manage it? I mean, here you are."
"Here you are also." He looked quite the American priest in his celluloid dog collar, artificial silk black dickey, St. Louiscut clerical suit. We stood in the private room at the Chishohn, looking down from either side of the bed with pity and anger on bandaged and unconscious Raffaele. There was little to be seen of either face or body. The signs of breathing were barely visible. By grace of Captain Robertson and Drs. Rous and Turner blood in a 3.8 percent sodium citrate solution to prevent coagulation had been pumped into arteries of Raflaele; the Great War had, as Carlo was always ready to affirm, brought its blessings. But. "I," Carlo said, "was here already. At least in New York." Self-reproach, for the first time in my hearing, came into his voice. "Perhaps it would have been better if I had not been in America. We spoke on the telephone. I said perhaps what should not have been said."
"What happened?" I could see something terrible had happened. Head, chest, belly, surely one leg was shorter than... "Who did it?"
"The Chicago police say he was suspended in some place of frozen meat storage with a meat hook under his chin. That was after he had been hit many times on the head and brought back to consciousness again. He was struck in the body with an axe used for breaking ice. His left foot and ankle were chopped off with a different kind of axe. It is bloodier than what happened to your friend in Malaya but it is the same devils. I am, you see, no more able to do anything for my brother than I was for your friend."
"Good God," I said, seeing it all. Fellow Italians, the language of contempt Italian, though a southern dialect, Neapolitan, the tongue of the guapi or wops. Fine teeth and animal eyes, the muscles of brainless immigrants, instruments of a brain at the top, the Big Head.
"You say good God but you do not mean it. You think we have a bad God who allows things like this to be done to the innocent."
"Where was he found?"
"At the corner of a street where there was a big store of frozen meat. There is a lot of frozen meat in this city. Wind and slaughterhouses. He did what he thought was right. You did not help and I tried to make him a hero. But it would have happened anyway."
"I did not--" Of course, I had not used such writing skill and popular authority as I had in the showing up of evil, even at a safe distance. It had been Raffaele's own fault that I had not helped, his righteousness had found too easy a target in myself: it had smelt too much of sanctimony. "You tried to make him--"
"Oh, Raffaele was hesitating about giving to the Federal Bureau some information that he had. I said he must never be afraid. Some man in that Bureau has been corrupt, that is sure, but who will be hard to discover. He has destroyed that information for gangster money, he has said where the information came from. It was about the death of a mother and child. Even corrupt Chicago and the corrupt Bureau must take notice of that kind of information, so one would think. Raffaele was dining with another man in a restaurant. He was dragged out, nobody prevented it, they would all go on eating I should suppose. I am inclined to go to the Big Head or the Castrated Chicken and speak the words of commination. Whether I go or not, he is hard to find, he will get the words. They are all very superstitious."
"That won't help Raffaele." I spoke with bitterness, and Carlo could tell I was not thinking of Raffaele. "What do the doctors say?"
"There is a condition of brain damage. There is a condition of cancrena."
"Gangrene?" The ghastliest word, I had often thought, in the English language; it insolently connoted life.
"They do not give him much more time. I have prayed, yesterday I gave him extreme unction. We can still pray, but it must be only for his soul." Carlo's heavy shoulders moved as though he were about to sob, but his eyes were dry and hard. His body seemed to be trying to initiate a human act which his head rejected. He would not weep at the prospect of bereavement; he would merely stiffen himself in the continued fight against the dark powers. But he said, "Poor Mother. In less than six months. First Father, then her eldest son. You must go and see her. I believe she has confidence in you. You will find things to say to her that Domenico is too selfish or stupid to think of. He is only a musician." Carlo was always full of surprises. He was planting me confidently into the family. Why, there was not even a term in the languages of the West which expressed my relationship to the Campanati. I was nobody's brother-in-law. Carlo was turning me into a son of his mother, a very Christlike act. "I," he said, "cannot go back yet to Italy. There are things to do in America."
"You surely haven't finished your world tour?"
"Oh, it is all a matter of money. You cannot propagate the faith without money. The Vatican has much to learn about the power of money." I stared at him: was he perhaps, the lucky gambler, playing the stock markets with the scanty papal funds? "There are other things too, one other thing. I have meetings, here, in Boston, in St. Louis. Some day you will hear of it, there is no hurry." He did not seem to wonder what I was doing here in Chicago. It was just an aspect of my writer's freedom.
I said, "I'm going back to Europe next week. I've been writing a play. I was asked to stay to discuss changes. I think it's best to go back to Paris and stay away from actors and producers. One final version, let them take it or leave it. Quod scripsi scripsi."
"Has it ever struck you," he asked, "that Pilate has the lines that people remember best? You must write a play about him sometime. Everything he says and does is for the theatre. There is one sect of the Eastern Church which believes he was converted to Christ and they revere him as a saint. A character of extreme interest. Do not forget to go to see Mother as soon as you get to Europe. I shall have to write, but I do not really know how to. You must talk to her, tell her all. Poor Mother. I do not think she will be much longer in that big house. There is much selling to do. I must see to the selling." Our eyes had hardly moved once during these exchanges from Raffaele stretched and bandaged on that narrow bed of enamelled metal, the enamel chipped here and there to blackness as by agonised fingers of previous occupants. A nurse came in, a sturdy girl with a complexion from the Illinois wheatlands.
"You have to go now, Father. There's things to be done to the patient."
"There is nothing more any of you can do except fight for your city and your country. To kill the madness. There is no point in cleaning him and changing his dressings. But thank you for everything you have done."
"You're welcome." Madness? City? Country? She frowned, puzzled.
"Tonight," he said. "We will come back tonight." We left the little room as the nurse began to uncover sheeted Raflaele. Carlo's ear caught something as soon as we opened the door. "Do you hear?" he said. "A scream of pain. Do not blame that on God." We were in the cheerless vestibule outside the doors of the public ward to which Raffaele's room was an annex. The doors were kneed open by a nurse carrying a covered kidney bowl and at the same time blowing blond hair from her eyes. The cry came out loudly now. Carlo pushed into the public ward with his nose pointed forward as on the scent of pain. I followed doubtfully, ready to say "Let's go, Carlo, none of this is our business." The anonymous sick who filled the ward stared at the bulky frowning priest striding in, the elegant layman in summer pearl grey following, smiling in embarrassment and apology. They stared with the dull hope of diversion or with weak fear (perhaps an end coming not previously intimated) or with feeble resentment of our health or of our appearance of official standing undefined and suspicious. There was a flowered bedscreen at the end of the ward. The cry was renewed piercingly from behind it. Carlo thrust his way into the screened space from the end wall side. I followed reluctant, though seeing it as a way of hiding from the eyes of the watching wardful of sick.
The child was about six years old, a boy, Caucasian as they said here. His eyes were open and the pupils dilated, but he did not
seem to see anything or take in even the light that came through the breeze-made gaps at the sides of the brown blind on the partly open window behind him. His head with its rumpled black hair rolled on a sweaty pillow and he picked at his face with idiot fingers. I saw, remembering Kuala Kangsar, the depressive stage of tuberculous meningitis. The child screamed again, but the scream could mean nothing since there was no pain in this phase of the disease. The lungs and larynx still remembered the former paroxysms of skull-splitting headache, however, and screamed at the truth that such pain, though past, should be possible. The third stage would bring coma, convulsions, blindness and deafness, emaciation, death in a fit or death from exhaustion but certainly death. "Poverino," Carlo muttered and touched the child's forehead. Then he touched temple and temple in a kind of rhythm that matched the pulse of the words his lips nearly soundlessly formed. The child's eyes shut in great weariness and his arms slowly fell to his sides in the boneless languor of fatigue. Carlo touched with his own spittle the child's forehead and sternum and shoulders. The cry stopped now. Carlo looked at me fiercely though said softly, "We must do what we can where we can." And then again, "Poverino."
I was the only witness of this act. For the moment the act meant nothing.
Carlo seemed to bring sleep to an ailing child through the fierce gentle compassion of his presence, the compassion itself perhaps no more than a desperate nervous response to two epiphanies of priestly impotence, devils uncast out, devils permitted to encompass two innocent deaths. We must do what we can where we can. He had given the sleepless sleep. The noise of pain had been stopped.
We came out of the screened space to see a ward sister approaching in a sort of guilty anger. The ward had been left untended a while and she knew it. Patients had said two guys in there, a priest one of them sister, you better get up there see what's going on. Behind the sister came clattering food trolleys wheeled in by ward maids, a couple of nurses checking diet sheets: this explained the untendedness. The sister was fiftyish and tough, Scandinavian cheeks and a stocky body. "You a relative of that patient?" she said to me. Carlo gave me no chance to answer.
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