The Delectable Mountains

by Michael Malone

  “Devin, you cannot deny that you encouraged her to sneer and scoff at my values, to make fun of her own mother. I know that you took part in this because that child would come home and tell me to my face that I was an ig-nor-ant woman and had denied her op-por-tun-i-ties for culture. Now, Devin, everybody knows that you were always a bright boy, and now you have gone on to Harvard University, and I am sure your family is proud of you—but I have also attended college for four years and received my diploma, and I did not deserve to be mocked by you and by my own daughter. By my only child.”

  Actually I did remember having frequently remarked to Leila that her mother did not know her ass from a hole in the ground, and it may have been that Leila quoted this conjecture to Mrs. Thurston directly and cited her sources.

  At this point, it seemed incumbent on me to make some sort of reply. And I was also willing to let bygones be bygones. “Mrs. Thurston,” I said, “I hope you will believe me that I never encouraged Leila to say such things to you.”

  This at least partly mollified her. “Well, Devin, it may be that you did not in-tend for this to happen.”

  “No, ma’am, I certainly didn’t,” I nodded.

  She came ’round a little more. “You know, honey, that when things got to the point of her not respecting her own parent, why she left me no choice. Why, I had to send her off to St. Lucy’s for her own good.”

  I saw then that Mrs. Thurston was worried—either that the present marital difficulty stemmed from her parental decision years ago or that Leila would say it did. She wanted support for that decision to forestall either guilt or blame.

  “I understand, Mrs. Thurston. That was the only thing you could do. We were just too young to know what we were doing, both of us.” As I spoke, an image of Leila’s disgusted look flickered uneasily for a second inside my head.

  “That is exactly right,” she agreed. “And now that you are older, you can appreciate what you put your own mother and myself through in that awful year.”

  This double ad matrem argument was a little unfair to Mama. For what Mama had mainly objected to in my youthful romance (besides the volume at which Leila and I kept the record player going with my Rachmaninoff records, which jangled in Mama’s hearing aid) was not our going together, but the reverse—the sudden and, to her mind, ungentlemanly way I had broken up with Leila, of whom she had been, and continued to be, very fond.

  Mrs. Thurston hadn’t finished yet. “Of course, once she set herself against me, it was hard to keep any influence over her at all. Why, you remember how wild she acted when she came home from her senior year. Drinking. Being escorted to the door at insane hours of the night by total strangers to myself, and I actually sometimes believe, to her as well! Just like Esther! Just like her! Why nobody could talk sense to her!”

  Her mother snapped open her purse, took out her handkerchief, and stabbed at her mouth with it. “Then refusing to go get a college education and just packing up and coming out to Colorado, a thousand miles from home! To be an actress!”

  I kept nodding.

  “Why, she just went wild, Devin, as you yourself will acknowledge, until it got to the point that I did not even know my own daughter. Then getting married out of nowhere. At eighteen! Now I have come to love Mittie as though he were my own, and he knows that I love him, and no one could care more about those poor babies than their grandmother. But it is transparently clear from what is happening right here and now that Leila was not ready to take on the responsibilities of motherhood, as I could have told her if she had ever bothered to ask for my advice. Which the Lord knows, she never did. And then, and then, the minute she turned twenty-one, giving that entire inheritance from her grandfather Beaumont—who was a pure fool to have left that money to her that way—giving it all away to St. Lucy’s, when, Devin, she had children of her own to raise! Well, don’t ask me to explain it.”

  As Mrs. Thurston paused for breath, I pulled into the driveway and helped her out of the little car. We found Maisie and Davy asleep, seemingly unaffected by the disclosures at the boardinghouse dinner. I left them to the solicitude of their grandmother, and Sabby and I drove back to the theater, she in her Victorian bustle, me in my sheriff suit.

  “Oh, I hope everything’s going to be all right,” Sabby said, glancing back at our house, where on the front porch moths crashed into the bare electric light.

  Backstage, Joely was explaining to the company that the breach between Mr. and Mrs. Stark was only a minor misunderstanding. While no one really believed him, the assertion in itself was a relief. The company liked both Mittie and Leila; nobody wanted to choose sides. The villain was Spurgeon Debson, who, since his extemporaneous exhibitionism in the last act of Hedda Gabler and at the dinner, was pretty much persona non grata in the Red Lagoon Theatre.

  “Was Mittie at home?” Joely asked me.

  “No. Isn’t he here? I thought maybe you’d found him back in his office.”

  “No. I saw him down by the creek a while ago. Reading Othello.” Said he wanted to be alone. So I left him alone. I figured he’d come on inside after he cooled down. So now the curtain’s supposed to go up in five minutes, and Mittie’s supposed to be standing center stage when it does! And where in hell is he? Jesus!” Joely jerked his fingers through his hair ’til it stood out like a bright crimson sunset.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked him.

  “Well, Ashton’s been understudying. He says he knows all the lines. I guess he’ll be okay. Man, what a mess. You know, Mittie got a letter from his father last week telling him this was the last summer he was going to shell out for the stock company, and Mittie better resign himself to Portland and an office at the Metal Works. That’s what’s driven him nuts like this.”

  I thought it was Spur.

  After the show that must go on went on without Mittie, Joely and I left Marlin in charge of closing up, and we borrowed Wolfstein’s car to patrol the town. Neither Mittie, Spur, nor Leila had been seen for hours, and we weren’t sure who had the Red Bus as part of an impromptu property settlement. But if Spurgeon and Leila were in Floren Park together, I thought we ought to find them before Mittie did. I felt slightly melodramatic and a little excited. Joely said that the day before, he had seen Mittie setting fires behind the theater, throwing on them papers, books, even costumes. He had hidden Mittie’s sleeping pills. But there were other possibilities: he even had the Hedda Gabler gun.

  First we stopped next door at the Red Lagoon Bar. Lady Red told us that none of the three had been there and added that she didn’t want any trouble. Her husband stood behind her and nodded. Next we tried the other bars, the fairground, the dance hall, the arcade, the motels, hotels, hostels. I even called Verl. He said, “Well, if the guy was passing out, she probably took him to a doctor.” So we called Dr. Ferrell’s office and learned that Leila had, in fact, brought Spurgeon there, but they had left some time ago. We kept searching. Nothing. Finally we gave up and went back home.

  There we found the children still asleep and a bathrobed Mrs. Thurston inquiring of Wolfstein’s looked door whether he was certain he wouldn’t have a cup of hot cocoa. He was quite certain.

  We reported the failure of our mission to her, and she shook her head sorrowfully. Pulling a chair up beside the tidied fireplace, she sat down. “Why, Devin, I really do not know what to make of this situation, and no one has bothered to offer me an explanation that I can consider satisfactory at all. Just what is the matter with Leila? She was not brought up to act in this manner.”

  Joely and I stood in front of her looking at the absent fire.

  “Well,” she concluded, standing up, “I am obviously to be kept in ignorance by everyone, including my own son-in-law and my own daughter.”

  “Well, ma’am,” Joely offered, “I think Mittie is pretty upset.”

  “Joely, I re-a-lize he is upset. We are all upset. But we are not all simply
running off and neglecting our responsibilities to others.”

  We agreed. Then Joely and I left her to straighten up just a bit before she went to bed so that things wouldn’t go to pieces. She envisioned order unraveling in her hands like a ball of yarn jerked on by three wildcats.

  Down in the basement, we heard her plowing the vacuum cleaner in straight furrows back and forth, back and forth across the living room floor right over our heads. Slowly, like the sea, it hummed us to sleep.

  I dreamed that I was running after Jardin, running across a chasm over a maze of thin strips of pointed rock with jagged spears of glass protruding. On the other side, James Dexter sat at an enormous glass desk, signing papers with a gold pen. I tore a rock loose from my path and hurled it at him. Then shale gave way, my foot slipped, and I fell for hour after hour, turning in a circle, down to the floor of the chasm. It was dark and unbearably hot; the rocks were volcanic and seared my feet and hands. Then I looked up and far above me; I saw Verl leaning over the edge, passing down a rope. I leapt to catch it; my fingers scraped down the side of the chasm wall; hard lava broke off and crashed around me. I jumped again and sat up, awake.

  The scratchy, ripping noise went on. Groggy, I thought of a bear outside the window; the screen was being torn open. But as my vision cleared, I could see that the blurred shape now crawling through the window opening was definitely human. It was cursing too. It was Mittie.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “Go to hell,” he replied.

  He jerked his torn pants loose from the screen, jumped to the floor, and then headed quickly out of the room and up the stairs to the first floor. Joely had also been awakened by the noise of the break-in. He pawed for his glasses. We flung out of our beds and chased up the steps after Mittie.

  Upstairs in the living room, we saw Spurgeon Debson rising barefoot, but otherwise clothed, from the couch. A towel fell from his forehead. Mittie stood across from him with Hedda Gabler’s pistol in his hand. Leila was nowhere to be seen. Presumably she was (once again) in bed asleep. I took a second to note this further evidence of her egalitarianism: apparently she went to bed not with, but, so to speak, on just about everyone.

  Just as this thought was taking shape, Mittie raised his arm and fired. This time, as if to make up for the embarrassment it had caused in the finale of Ibsen’s play, the pistol did go off. And neatly blew away one of Aunt Nadine’s pink flowered glass globes from the mantelpiece.

  Spurgeon’s body froze. His mouth, as I expected, opened. He didn’t, however, bother to phrase his remarks with their usual periodic eloquence.

  “Mother fuck! Are you crazy, man?” was all he had to say.

  Mittie stared at him.

  Spur stared at the gun. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m going to kill you,” Mittie replied.

  Spur closed out the colloquy, flung the manuscript he was holding (a copy of his latest play, Napalm U.S.A.) at Mittie’s gun arm. It hit him instead on the temple and momentarily stunned him. Spur did not pause to pursue the matter or even to retrieve his opus; he sprinted agilely to the porch, unlocked the front door, and went through the screen door without even bothering to unlock it. The broken latch hung limply off the wall.

  Mittie was on his way to the bedroom.

  “Hey, Mittie! Hey! Come on now, Mittie!” Joely and I both yelled as we stumbled over each other to get to the bedroom door.

  But Mittie swept us aside and stepped into the bedroom, where Leila sat up in her bed, naked in the blue silk sheets like Aphrodite waist-high in sea foam, awakened by the shot. I edged past him toward the bed. “Look here, Mittie,” Joely said hoarsely.

  Mittie stared at Leila, his face as still as madness. “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,” he quoted at her in a strangely horrifying deadpan whisper. Then, “Put out the light,” and he shot the bedside lamp off the table. Crawling quickly, I scrambled under the bed, frozen in darkness.

  A third shot was fired. Above me the mattress bounced. From my seclusion behind the bedspread, I saw Leila’s feet hit the floor with a sharp pat. They walked over to Mittie’s feet.

  “Give me that stupid thing, and get the hell out of here, you idiot,” we heard her say.

  A thick silence followed, broken only by the rasp of Mittie’s breathing. Pressed around my face and arms, objects grew distinct. A suitcase, a white boot, a dusty copy of The Pearl, a crumpled cigarette pack, a peach core, a doll without arms in a white dress. I waited for a fourth shot to send yet another of the Sluford heirs violently heavenward.

  Instead, Mittie’s loafers slowly turned and left the room. Leila’s bare feet followed.

  Chapter 13

  A Greater Loss

  Roused by the shots, Nathan Wolfstein and Mrs. Thurston had both come out of their rooms to investigate. By 3 A.M., Wolfstein looked like Ray Milland at the end of Lost Weekend, while Mrs. Thurston’s face recaptured the precise expression it had worn at the climax of A Daughter’s Ruin and a Mother’s Prayer. She clutched the neck of her violet quilted bathrobe with one hand and Wolfstein’s thin upper arm with the other. Seeing her there, I concluded that Mrs. Thurston must sleep sitting up at her dressing table, for she was as immaculately made up at 3 A.M. as she was when she appeared to set the breakfast table at 6:30—which she always did, despite the fact that no one else ate breakfast until eleven. Her hair was lacquered into its faded blond French bun, slicked into place like Dolores del Rio’s, for one of her preoccupations was applying hair spray to her coiffure. She aerosoled her head at least a dozen times a day and kept six spray cans on her bureau for that purpose. If anyone had ever lit a match in her room, the whole house would have gone up like Valhalla. Only later did I learn that she also had two wigs—each one exactly duplicating her hairdo. She slept in one of them every night, presumably for just such emergencies as the one she was now trying to assimilate.

  “Leila, darling! Your clothes!” she squawked at her daughter.

  Leila stood, fully naked, her hands on her hips, staring at Mittie, who, fully clothed, stood staring slightly to the right of the top of her head.

  “No one would blame me for killing you,” Mittie said in a slurred drunken voice. “You’d deserve it for what you’ve done to me!”

  Leila spoke intently, “And what have I done to you, Mittie? He slept here, okay? He had no place to go. Try getting outside your own needs for once.”

  “YOU’VE FUCKED HIM!” Mittie screamed.

  “Oh, my God” moaned Mrs. Thurston and swayed into Nathan Wolfstein.

  “Oh, my God,” Leila softly echoed her mother. And added slowly, “And if I had, would that really make you feel like this? Would it make you less? Oh, Mittie, what’s—”

  “YES,” he yelled. “Yes, it DOES. You have no right! NO RIGHT.”

  “Crap,” she said. “Rights. Do you want to talk about rights, or do you want to talk about us? Oh, Mittie, Mittie, it’s not Spur. Spur is not the problem. Mittie, what’s really wrong? Tell me—”

  She put her hand to his cheek, and he knocked it away. “Don’t touch me! Just shut up!” he screamed. Leila stepped back, but he grabbed her arm, spun her around. Twice his hand came up, then fell to his side. His face tightened, distorted, froze in a twisted grimace.

  Then he hit her. Hard across the face. Long streaks of his fingers reddened over Leila’s cheek. The side of her mouth began to bleed. She didn’t touch it.

  “You poor schmuck,” she said softly. Then she walked back toward her room.

  “Leila!” her mother called.

  Leila shut the door behind her. For a long time, Mittie looked at the closed door, then at his hands. The finality of what had happened took shape and filled his eyes. Stepping forward quietly, Joely reached his arm out to Mittie, who was staring at the picture of Leila over the mantel.

  “Hey, man,” he murmured.
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  Mittie’s eyes jerked into focus. He saw us all carefully poised around him; maybe it was the first time he noticed us there. Before Joely could touch him, he twisted around, ran out of the house, and down the walk. We heard the Red Bus rev, choke, and then accelerate with jerked coughs.

  Mrs. Thurston looked at us all as though our presence implied our participation in, perhaps our instigation of, what had happened. “The children?” she asked. “And where are the children?”

  “They’re asleep,” I assured her. “They’re still downstairs asleep.” Fortunately, Maisie and Davy had been bred on noise and could have slept beatifically through the Götterdämmerung.

  “Well, we can be grateful at least for that mercy,” she said. “We can thank the Lord that they were spared this sorrow for now. Though what explanation is to be made to those poor babies, I honestly do not know.”

  Wolfstein sighed and sank into the armchair. “I don’t think anyone need say anything to them, Amanda. Mittie and Leila will work this out. It doesn’t really involve us.”

  She gathered her robe around her chin. “Do not,” she said, “advise me that I am not involved in the affairs” (she faltered at the word) “at the misfortunes of my own family.”

  And with a clean sweep, she cleared the corner and retired to her room. Wolfstein shrugged, took a cigarette from his bathrobe pocket, lit it. Heading for his bedroom, he called back, “If you want the keys to my car, they’re on the mantel.”

  I wanted to go in to talk to Leila, but I didn’t know what I could say. Instead, I helped Joely pick up the pieces of the glass globe lamp from the hearth. We talked it over, and I decided there was no point in looking for Mittie in the middle of the night. Maybe everything would be over by tomorrow.