The Delectable Mountains

by Michael Malone

  Next, in Act II, Hedda attempted to walk through the French doors out into her garden, where it was her custom to get in some morning target practice with her dueling pistols. By arbitrary mischance, I had hinged these doors so that they opened inward rather than outward. However, they did not, when pulled upon, open inward either, because of the curtain rod, from which the handsome handsewn drapes were hanging: it was in the way. After tugging at the doorknobs long enough to give the audience a clear sense of her passionate nature, Leila/Hedda exited through the rear sitting room and appeared in the garden, allowing the viewer to deduce that there were simply other legitimate ways of getting there.

  We raised the curtain rod during the next intermission and felt safe, for we knew the other double doors, those upstage center, would not jam in that way. They didn’t. In fact, so far from jamming were these particular doors that when Hedda’s husband (played with his mellerdrammer sneer by Mittie) swept them open, they came flying off in his hands and sent him bottom first over the sofa, upon which he executed a brisk back flip, to the applause of our now most enthusiastic audience.

  In Act III, Hedda pulled back the drapes to let in the morning light from her garden, but let in instead the sight of Sabby Norah (still dressed as the elderly aunt except that she was barefoot) lying on her stomach on the bench reading Rosemary’s Baby. Hedda’s reputation for heartlessness was presumably enhanced by this intimation that she was callous enough to leave her aged, coatless, and shoeless relative outside for the night like the family cat.

  But the worst climaxed, as all good dramas should, in the final act. About five minutes before the play’s conclusion, Joely ran into the lighting booth to get Seymour to take over for him as stage manager because his own energies had to go into an effort to control Spurgeon Debson, who had shown up backstage, high, as Joely said, on something heavy. He was clearly upsetting the company, particularly Mittie, who had to deal tonight with playing Leila’s husband onstage as well as off.

  My reaction when told to take care of the lights by myself was self-effacing terror. Seymour patted me on the shoulder and quickly whispered his instructions.

  “Look,” he assured me, “it’s simple. You don’t have anything to do ’til the end. Then it’s a full blackout. Just jerk down the master switch. The signal light will go on. That’s your ready sign. When it goes off, pull the switch. On again, get ready. Off, push the switch up for the curtain calls. Got it? On, standby. Off, go.”

  And he was gone. I stared intently at the signal light for two minutes, but then the stage began to compel my attention. As the drama drew to its exciting close, a voice, not originally written into the script, could be indistinctly heard from the wings, chanting in a distant crescendo that I seemed to recognize.

  “Bloodsucking… lishment! … ilitary.. . dustrial… plex! ill! Kill! KILL!!!”

  Obviously, Joely and Seymour had not completely succeeded in controlling Spur’s rhetorical fervor. But (as though oblivious to what might be taken as the cries of a disgruntled mob of Scandinavian proletarians outside the windows of the wealthy) the actors onstage ignored these intrusive remarks, raised their own voices, and persisted in their own world.

  Hedda, profoundly disappointed by the imperfections of life (and there had been even more than she had counted on this evening), took one of her father’s dueling pistols, went into the rear sitting room, and shut the rehinged doors behind her. At this point, a shot was supposed to ring out, the sound of suicide. It didn’t.

  Sabby Norah, who was designated to fire the fatal blank, had retired to her dressing room in tears following her mortifications on the bench in Act III. So after an uncomfortably silent wait, the three characters onstage waiting for the “BANG” jumped to their feet anyway and rushed the sitting room. Leila just had time to throw herself lifelessly into a chair as Mittie screamed, “Shot herself! Shot herself in the temple!”

  At that instant, Sabby (rushing back from her hiding place to perform her duty) fired off the belated shot, and at the same instant, my signal light came on. The combination of sight and sound unnerved me, and I pulled the master switch. The theater went abruptly and completely black.

  “For Christ’s sake!” the apparently resurrected Hedda Gabler yelled.

  What happened next was recounted to me later that evening by Joely Finn. As he’d been chanting his sermon, Spurgeon Debson had been absently unwinding some rope that connected the sections of my set together. When the lights went out, he let go, and so did my sets.

  So when I jerked the lights back on, which regrettably I did before Joely could get the main curtain down, the stage was set not for the curtain calls, but for the finale of Samson and Delilah. Mittie was holding the back wall up over his head as though he were posing for a statue of Atlas. Leila was laughing on a chair in the sitting room, the ineffective pistol in her hand. Margery Dosk and Ronny Tiorino, the other two actors onstage, were crawling about under the side walls. Perhaps most fitting of all, my two sets of double doors still stood, tall and glorious as Victor Mature in the midst of a world in ruin.

  Spurgeon, finding himself for the first time in his life with a sizable audience before him, seized the opportunity by running center stage, unzipping his pants, and defiantly exposing himself, as he screamed to the now screaming audience, “Can you take reality, you rich bastards, you corpses, you gassers of genius, you BABYBUTCHERERS?”

  Mittie dropped the back wall down on Spur’s head and silenced him.

  There was one more line in the play, the final one. It was Ronny’s, and he was determined to get it in. The line was, “Good God! People don’t do such things!”

  And that brought down the other house.

  Chapter 9

  Somebody Turns Up

  Leila drove Spurgeon to Dr. Ferrell’s office. Suzanne Steinitz was sympathetic enough to attend Hedda Gabler’s wake with me in the Red Lagoon Bar. But it was so crowded that I was eventually squeezed into the narrow tip of a conch shell by others rudely joining us. Pinned, I was subjected to the hollow mirth of Joely Finn and his following among the apprentices—Ronny, Pete, Jennifer.

  “They jest in bars that never smelt a wound,” I told them. Suzanne patted my arm.

  As yet I wasn’t prepared to laugh at the way somebody had turned the wine of my set designing into the brackish water of defeat.

  “We sure smelt that bomb next door,” Joely unfeelingly persisted. “Oh, boy. If you’re gonna build Rome in a day, you know. Oh, boy, why didn’t I have a camera? What a decline and fall was there! Oh, boy!” and so on.

  His jocular hoard japed with him until, during a brief lull in the laughter, Sabby came by and asked me if I had picked up my mail. Usually the mail delivery figured with eager preeminence in my morning schedule. In fact, I was so often on hand for its arrival that the postman and I had developed a chatty familiarity with each other, and were accustomed to exchange weather predictions the way people do who have no basis for relationship except encounter. This postman had an apocalyptic hunger, which was continually frustrated by the mild climate of Floren Park. For as he only worked summers, he never had an opportunity to complete his rounds through rain, sleet, snow, nor dark of night, and felt misled by the job’s promise of such adventure.

  But my infatuation with the postal service—which is really a passion for possibility—had been superseded on that particular day by the building of a temple for Hedda Gabler. Now that Spurgeon, himself the vociferous jawbone of an ass, had brought the house down around everyone’s head in his fury against the Philistines, I could turn my attention back to the possible arrival of messengers with news of home. For though I was certain that Jardin had no intention of writing to me, I insisted every day on confirming my chagrined hypothesis at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile, I had unilaterally written to her once since coming to Colorado, just to assure her that her actions had been forgiven and forgotten.

 
So, extricating myself from our conch shell, I walked next door to the theater. Late-leavers were still standing about, still laughing. In the box office mail basket, three letters and a package lay waiting for me, imperturbable and composed. Nothing from Jardin, but still the best day I had had all month. The package contained four pairs of socks and a dozen very dry brownies from Mama, who never got the aluminum foil around anything properly. She had also written a long letter.

  Her letters had always been long, but up in Cambridge, I had enjoyed getting them, even the ones without checks, because they were like reading books, not at all like the letters the other guys got from their parents, and that made me proud of her. Jane Austen, I would boast, could have written those letters. Typically, the news came in the first few pages; the next ten or so were observations and speculations. In this one I learned that baby Harnley was walking again (flatfooted); that Detroit might take the pennant, but not the series; that Colum had met a nurse in physical therapy who had come over for dinner and was very pleasant, despite holding rather vigorously to a “postural” view of salvation: the slumped would be damned; that having just reread Jude the Obscure, she thought it should be more so; that she herself was feeling intermezzo; that in regard to the awful grief of Robert Kennedy’s death, America took a smug satisfaction in the way its great symbols graciously fulfilled their myths by dying off in sudden, Greek-like fashion so that they could be indulgently mourned over rather than dealt with or tired of; that Fitzgerald, who had been visiting friends in Laramie since his convention, would be arriving in Floren Park on June 25th (at Leila’s invitation) and that I was to keep an eye on him to prevent him from selling uranium stock to the tourists or getting elected to some city office that would prevent his getting back to Earlsford by early August; that with regard to the pain of loss that I was feeling about Jardin…and here followed five pages of hypotheses on the attainment of personal peace.

  Next I opened a letter from Verl, wishing I had him there to talk to instead. He wrote, in part: “I know you’re upset about this thing with Jardin. Nobody’s denying how you feel. It’s just that (mind if I preach?) I think there’s probably an awful lot of complicated and very ambivalent emotional motives going on in all of us, and sometimes we don’t pay enough attention to parts of it. Are too lazy. I wish there were something I could do to make you feel better. Meanwhile, be glad at least to offer an ear. Be back over in a couple of days. Take it easy, okay? And you know, there’s no good reason why you can’t come down to Boulder one of these days. Catch a breath of serenity.”

  This letter was a comfort. Also a surprise, as it had since slipped my mind that in a moment of depression the previous week, I had written him a rather gloomy appraisal of my misunderstood emotional state. But now, what with the play and everything, I was depressed again, so Verl’s response was a timely succour. I thought for a minute about why I didn’t want to go to Boulder, didn’t want to leave Floren Park; it wasn’t just that there was enough new in it to last me a while; it was like a ritual. I had this almost mystic feeling that by staying, something was going to be figured out.

  Verl and Mama had cheered me up enough so I could open the other letter. It was a brief note from my older brother and had his name engraved across the top of the page all in little blue letters: “james dexter donahue,” with an address under it so that anybody who cared to could get right back in touch with him.

  I looked it over; the message was typed, and it was signed in black ink with a bunch of thin loops and gyres. In the first paragraph, he advised me to grow up. In the second, he suggested that I was inconsiderate and selfish. In the third, he mentioned that if I wrote to Jardin again, the letter would be returned to me unopened. In the last, he assured me that the above three paragraphs should not be taken harshly, but in the spirit in which they were intended, with everyone’s best interests at heart.

  I decided to keep J.D.’s memo; it would be handy to have around as documentation of his character if Jardin ever came to her senses.

  Feeling better, I went back to the Red Lagoon Bar. It was still crowded inside. A large-boned woman with copper hair loosely twisted up on top of her head was ringing the cash register behind the bar. Joely told me that she was the manager’s wife, Lady Red. So she had come back to claim her estate, as Mittie and I had been gloomily warned. There were rumors she was going to change the place, maybe put in a dance floor; she liked things lively. Suzanne was gone; I sat down and watched the manager watch his wife. Menelade was right about his weakness; he looked moist with a sort of doting pleasure he seemed to take just in her simple physical reality. I watched him keep staring at her as though she might stop being, like one of Bishop Berkeley’s trees, if he ever took his eyes off her. Then he walked past her from behind and floated his hand across her rear as he went by. She tucked in her buttocks by tightening the muscles and went on punching more buttons on the register. I recalled seeing Mittie try to touch Leila in that unacknowledging, and unacknowledged, way.

  Joely was talking about the problems of being his father’s only son; there were five girls in his family. And suddenly, Nathan Wolfstein sat up from the corner of the booth. He had been so slumped into his seat that I hadn’t noticed him there before then. It looked as though he might have drunk quite a bit of bourbon, but because of his shakes, only about half of each of his drinks got to his mouth, so you really couldn’t judge his condition from the number of accumulated glasses.

  “I have a son too,” Wolfstein said. “I never met him. He doesn’t know who I am.”

  We were surprised when Wolfstein said he would tell us the story. Twenty-seven years ago, he had had an affair with a Hollywood script girl. Though she became pregnant, she had declined to marry him. He was Jewish and she was Catholic, or maybe she simply didn’t like him. His son was now Calhoun Grange, the cowboy star. Five years ago, this information had been given to him by Calhoun’s mother (whom he had traced down), but she had told him only under pressure and with his promise that he would never make himself known to the boy. He didn’t explain to us why he had agreed to this promise.

  “I’m glad I know, though. Otherwise I wouldn’t know if he were dead or alive. A child dead or living.” He shook a drink over his suit and to his lips and was finished.

  I wasn’t sure whether I believed him or not. There had been a picture of Calhoun Grange in a magazine in the bathroom at the house. In the article he said that if his draft number had been chosen, he would have been proud to go to Vietnam; maybe that put the name in Wolfstein’s head. Maybe it was true, maybe reading that would make a father want to talk to someone about his son. I supposed my knowledge of what fathers might do had always been rather limited.

  Wolfstein knocked a drink over, and Joely asked him if he didn’t want us to drive him home. He dropped his cigarette on the table, and I stuck it back between his fingers. After staring at each of us in turn, as if he were deciding whether or not to trust us, he finally nodded yes. We slid him out of the booth, walked him to the door, and he pointed us in the direction of his battered sports car.

  Back at the house, we found Sabby Norah at her baby-sitting post again, finishing up the book she had started on Hedda Gabler’s garden bench.

  “Where’re Leila and Mittie?” I asked her.

  “Oh, didn’t they tell you? They went to Denver. Leila’s mother’s come to visit.”

  “Leila’s mother?”

  “Leila’ mother. I think it was unexpected.” She went back to her book.

  “Now, that ought to be something,” Joely smiled.

  “More than you know,” I said. “We don’t like each other.” Leila’s mother. Amanda Sluford Beaumont Thurston. I told him the story.

  Then we went downstairs to our room and talked of America until we fell asleep.

  Chapter 10

  A Retrospect: The Story I Told Him

  Leila’s mother.

  To explain L
eila, just to talk about her at all, means going back beyond my own knowledge, even beyond that mother, for Leila had a past, as Southerners can and Westerners cannot. But Leila, even more than most of us.

  Leila Dolores Beaumont Thurston Stark. Born of her mother’s line to a repeatedly vanquished heritage, Leila’s family was the paradigm (to my firsthand knowledge) of Gothic ancestry. For I knew, in synoptic telling form, the sequential defeats of her perishable forebears; nor ever thought to question them, though outlanders (I realized) suspected the stories were only anecdotes told to comply with their preconceptions about crazy Southerners.

  These were Slufords.

  Arvid Andrew Sluford. Her great-great-grandfather. The first, to our factual certainty, of her traceable ancestors. Mistakenly shot for a Union scout while, without prior announcement or permission, borrowing C.S.A. rations from a neighbor’s tent outside Manassas.

  His son Buford (Buford Sluford, out of his father’s rhythmic instinct). Who drowned in the big pond in which he was convinced (by his careful reading of the one letter his father, Private A.A. Sluford, sent home—in which he emphasized wishing he could see the old pond again) that, before his departure for the War of the Confederacy, his father had sunk his mother’s silver candlesticks and some ready cash in gold.

  Buford had been right, not about the whereabouts of the cache, but about the impulse to conceal treasure. For they found, while digging his (the son’s) grave—having, the next morning, fished him out of the pond where he had drowned while seeking the gold—a buried burlap sack, repository of more valuables than even Buford had predicted.