The Delectable Mountains

by Michael Malone

  “Listen,” I protested. “I’ve been a jerk.”

  “Now, that,” she smiled, “may be the truth. I confess it crossed my mind once or twice over the summer. Tell the truth, didn’t you hate me for a while there? You even stayed away from Maisie and Davy, and I know that you care about them.”

  I flushed in the hurt of her condemnation. “I…I thought you were sleeping with, with Spur, and then Cal…”

  “How about Nate, and Gabe Booter? Jesus, no wonder you and that Dennis Reed got along so well! Oh, I see, and so you waltzed off to share your own purity with that fragrant lily, the chaste Tanya? Is that it?” She laughed, “Oh, Devin!”

  My face and ears tightened with the rush of blood.

  She stopped laughing. “Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be facetious. God knows I’ve screwed up enough myself.”

  “No, you haven’t. No.”

  The owner brought us more coffee.

  “But I do love you, Leila. I know you can’t believe me now. But someday you will. Even if it takes years. Someday. I promise you that.”

  She looked quietly at me. “All right,” she said.

  “You could make me be the best I can be.”

  Palm first, she pushed her hand out. “No, not that way.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s the one thing I’ve managed to learn this summer. You helped me learn it by what you said about Mittie. I did think if I just loved enough—Mittie, or Nate, everyone—I could make them be the best they were, hold them up so they could reach the dream.” She frowned. “And when they didn’t, I had failed. I had been too selfish, or impatient, or tired. I had failed in understanding to Mittie. Had failed in concern for Nate. I had forgotten to feel their pain for an instant, and in that instant, they had died. And so it was my fault, see? If I had loved them better, they would not have died. Talk about arrogance. Whew! Love is not enough. Like you said, you can’t make people be. You can only let them be. You can just hope.”

  “No, you can help.”

  “I have to help myself now.”

  “And Maisie and Davy?”

  “If I help myself, they will learn how. I hope.”

  The owner brought me the bill.

  “Can I still come home with you?”

  “With me, not for me.”

  “No, for me.”

  She smiled. “Okay.”

  We walked to the van. “I know that’s where I want to be,” I told her. “Home.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I think so.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to stay in a small place and teach a small thing. Teach children like Maisie and Davy. Not Verl’s teaching and preaching, but mine.”

  “You know what’s ironic? That’s what my mother told you you ought to be doing the first day she came out to Floren Park.” We both laughed and climbed in the van.

  “But you always said you didn’t think it would do any good to teach. I thought you said the craziness and the ugliness will never go away, will only change its clothes. You said the only thing to do is laugh and grow roses.”

  “I say a lot of things, don’t I?”

  “Let’s go home.”

  Chapter 32

  The Beginning of a Longer Journey

  “When did you decide?” Leila asked me.

  “I’ve been thinking about it for a while.”

  “Because of the play and Nate?”

  “Because of everything, I guess.”

  “Do you think it’s going to do any good, then?”

  “No, I don’t really think it will at all. But I hope it will. Verl told me Wednesday night that the only way he could be was to want change to happen. I do want it to happen.”

  We put the last armful of logs on the fire. Mrs. Thurston was in the kitchen sanitizing the plastic dishware that had come with the house because she believed that people should leave a place not like they found it, but better.

  I showed Leila the letter I’d gotten from Professor Aubrey on Wednesday, for it formed a part of my resolution.

  Dear Devin,

  As you see, my somewhat Nabokovian pilgrimage across this country of theirs is ended, and I’m home in Cambridge where I belong. Your friend, Ashton, left us after a week of traveling, having struck up acquaintanceship with a collective of young artisans near Santa Fe. Randolph, too, decided that he preferred San Francisco to puttering among the ruins of Aztec kingdoms, so I learned gradually to rely on my own tattered Spanish, and the rather greedy assistance of native guides. So much, I think, for field trips at my advanced years. For the rest, I will write of Mexico looking out over the Charles, as Gauguin painted Brittany cottages sweltering in Tahiti.

  I was delighted to find your letter waiting here on my return, and was particularly charmed by your description of the southern mythos and that long vainglorious line of artifice from Poe onward that so many of our expatriate boys have inherited. But Devin, your recent note distressed me. I am very sorry to hear you won’t be coming back to Harvard for graduate school. I urge you to reconsider. Let me put my slight leverage into the machine.

  Yes, I agree. Mankind is mad. The wonder is we all cling with such persistent desperation to even the paltriest of lives in this very mad and sad universe where Someone has so indifferently dropped us. Even those of us who should know better.

  But given that we do, to the last spasm, insist on life, why not—in the wait—choose what little of grace and beauty has been saved for sharing in the last few strongholds; cloisters, rather, where like can sit (hide, if you will) with like-minded men, to admire, to understand the best of this bloody world? To teach the brightest about the best is, Devin, a most appealing way to pass the time. Why not come back?

  Cordially, D.C. Aubrey.

  “Did you answer him?” Leila asked me.

  I folded the letter and returned it to my pocket. “Yes. Yesterday.”

  “Well, what did you say? No, I hope.”

  “No.”

  “I’m glad. I don’t think it’s enough to pass the time, even gracefully.”

  “I told him I was going to work for a certificate to teach in the elementary schools at home. I told him that I wanted to start a lot younger.”

  “Good,” she asked, rising from the fire to pour more Chablis in her old coffee mug.

  These were really the reasons why.

  In 1968, which was the final year of my Harvard education, the North Koreans took the spy ship, USS Pueblo, which was not supposed to happen, and the North Vietnamese took the Tet offensive, which was not supposed to happen either. We let them keep the Pueblo; it was not supposed to be a spy ship.

  In early April, which was when a nervous policeman gave me a glancing blow on the side of my head in a Harvard hallway and Professor Aubrey told me to stay out of politics, we had our twelfth major political assassination since 1963, when Verl and Leila and I graduated from high school and President Kennedy was shot. The one in April of my senior year was Dr. King. This one, the magazines said, was with a 30.06 caliber Remington pump rifle on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel. And so, in 125 cities across the land, there were riots “because,” as one looter said, “they killed what’s-his-name.” Then, while my classmates and I studied for exams in the library, 46 people were killed and 2,600 people were wounded, while 155,000 people (and the 55,000 people sent to stop, or shoot to kill, maim, or cripple them), destroyed, the magazines said, several hundred million dollars’ worth of private property and free enterprise. After which, all the politicians and presidential aspirants, and their wives, went to Dr. King’s funeral, where they jostled for seats with all the famous athletes, and all the famous movie stars, all of whom we got to see together on our television in my Harvard dormitory. If the assassins had been better organized, as Joely said later, they could have flown over the church wi
th a bomb and put an end to America as we knew it. But they didn’t.

  And so, while I fell in love with Jardin while she fell in love with my older brother, George Romney stopped running, and Reagan and Rockefeller couldn’t decide, and Eugene McCarthy ran and Johnson quit and Robert Kennedy ran and McGovern ran and Kennedy got shot and Nixon won.

  Governor Wallace’s wife, Lurleen, who was also the governor, died. Then Governor Wallace ran again. He said he was after all the overeducated ivory-tower folks with pointed heads looking down their noses at the people. He was right. Professor Aubrey was. James Dexter was. I was.

  Robert Kennedy said, “Men are not made for safe harbors.” And he was right, too.

  That summer, while I ran out of schedule and took a long time to find something better, Robert Kennedy died, and Mittie died and Wolfstein died, and Leila’s Aunt Nadine, and the Buddy who had never come to Floren Park because he had been drafted died too. And over five hundred American soldiers in one week of May died because the peace talks in April in Paris had nothing to do with it since, Leila’s radio said, in the next three months we dropped 670,000 tons of bombs on our enemies anyhow, the ones we were having the peace talks with.

  And in the one week of June after Robert Kennedy died, while the Shriners met in Floren Park, over two hundred American civilians died because they shot each other, because there were across the land two hundred million mortars, revolvers, shotguns, rifles, machine guns, bazookas, derringers, hand grenades, and pistols (one was Mittie’s), with which we had killed seven thousand of us on purpose, and three thousand by accident, and almost killed one hundred thousand more, while ten thousand of us (like Aunt Nadine) just killed themselves. So really Buddy’d been safer in Da Nang, Wolfstein’d been safer in the Pacific, because in the past century we had killed two hundred thousand more of us with private guns at home than in all our shoot-outs overseas, where that summer on the shores of Vietnam, U.S. F-4 Phantom jets bombed the USS Boston.

  And that summer, the Dow Jones Industrial Average told us on the radio it was 923.72 in the July heat. And Fitzgerald told us that the IBM quarterly profits were 213 million dollars. And Joely told him that our National Defense Budget profits, though, were in the billions, so that we could give 39 percent away to private corporations where they worked in metals like Mittie’s father did. Because, while we had already spent eighty-five billion dollars on the war, we had a lot more money left.

  And that summer, while Leila put on her play and Mr. Nixon said he would bring us together, while Dr. Spock, my sister’s guide, who had raised us all, and Father Berrigan, and Reverend Coffin, and Verl, and many of my classmates went on trial for objecting to the war, while Margery decided to have her baby in Canada, while in Miami, the week that Bruno Stark’s helicopter came down on us, a five-hundred-foot-long elephant waved above Convention Hall, where the Secret Service, the Border Patrol, the F.B.I., the I.R.S., the F.A.A., Military Intelligence, the Bureau of Narcotics, Army Demolition, the City Police, the Highway Patrol, the County Public Safety Board, the Conservation Patrol, the State Beverage Department, the Marines, and the USS Fremont protected Mr. Nixon (in a former men’s sauna atop the Hilton Plaza) and Mr. Rockefeller (in 720 rooms of the Americana) from a mild delegation of Cubans, a mild delegation of Elder Citizens, and from an elephant in a purple tutu dancing through the streets—until Senator Hatfield could endorse Mr. Nixon (whom Calhoun Grange had endorsed for Ed Hade), and Mayor Lindsay could second the nomination of Mr. Agnew. And across the land, Marcuse taught the new philosophy at San Diego, and Verl and Joely didn’t believe we had already lost, while in Joely’s hometown, Chicago, below the windows of the Conrad Hilton, where Mr. Humphrey promised to bring us together, the army and the national guard and twelve thousand policemen, who were there to preserve order, clubbed, beat, and gassed hippies, yippies, anarchists, Maoists, New Leftists, runaways, Black Panthers, dissident Democrats, delegates, campaign workers, newsmen, photographers, passers-by, clergymen, Abbie Hoffman, a member of Parliament, a cripple, Hugh Hefner, and each other; while Senator Ribicoff and Mrs. Thurston couldn’t believe it was happening. And while Spurgeon Debson became a celebrity, and Sabby told us Richard Burton gave Elizabeth Taylor a $305,000-ring, I decided to go home.

  Chapter 33

  A Light Shines on My Way

  “Leila Stark, I certainly hope I am not going to have to resign myself to your driving down the public highways all across America with a cigarette hanging out of your mouth and a bottle of wine stuck between your legs,” called Mrs. Thurston from the back seat of the Red Bus where she sat in her travel suit and white gloves surrounded by suitcases, boxes, clothes, records, toys, a poster of Robert Kennedy, and Wolfstein’s golden Oscar we had found in the back of a dresser drawer.

  “I’m not sure this junk heap is going to make it all the way across America,” Leila laughed. “But if it does, yes, Mama, you’re going to have to resign yourself.”

  “Well, I frankly doubt a soul would believe so, but I honestly did make an effort to raise you right. But, of course, people are going to Think the Worst. They always do.”

  We jostled down the gravel road and turned onto the street toward town.

  “Look and see if the gypsy wagon’s still there,” Leila called to Davy.

  “It’s still there!” he squealed delightedly from the mattress on which he and Maisie sat in their pajamas looking out the back window at the bouncing wooden trailer hooked behind us.

  “And why in the Good Lord’s name we are choosing to begin a journey of this nature on a Sunday, in the dark of night, instead of at a decent hour, is more than I could tell anyone who asked me. But naturally it is not surprising because you can be sure the stranger a thing is, all the more likely to look for us there.”

  “We’re leaving because, Mama, today is September the first. And on the first, our leases all ran out. So we’re going home. And get some new leases. Aren’t we, babies?”

  “Yes, Mama,” they yelled.

  “Aren’t we, Devin?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I yelled.

  “Aren’t we, Mama?”

  “Oh, Leila, Leila, honey, you are a pure and unadulterated fool. Why, you could be sitting in a house of your own and attending college in Portland, Oregon, this very minute.” Mrs. Thurston snapped her door locked, leaned forward to snap down Leila’s. “Well,” she added, “at least somebody had the sense to fry up some chicken and make some hard-boiled eggs, and I’ve also got some potato salad here, if anybody wants it, so at least we’ll be able to eat like rational human beings, even if every last one of us ought to be committed to a lunatic asylum…”

  “Lock, stock, and barrel, Mama! Lock, stock, and barrel.”

  The first night of a cold, quick fall rose up behind the mountains and pulled the sun down with it as we drove in the chill out of Floren Park along Main Street past Navajo jewelry next to Western Outfits next to Hade’s Buick next to the Nixon headquarters, next to the Memorial Shoppers’ Mall, next to whatever would be next.

  Above Main Street a bright new banner was fluttering.

  FLOREN PARK WELCOMES VETERANS OF FOREIGN WARS

  SEPTEMBER 4–8

  So they would be back. Sam Midpath and the fat Bobby. And their friend Artie. Maybe Jerry Thurston would be there. And Brian Beaumont. And Bruno Stark. Maybe Marlin’s father would be there. And mine. Jostled in the crowded streets with Sheriff Booter and his deputy. All our fathers. And maybe it would make sense to them.

  We’d be home by then.

  Night took Floren Park, hidden safe in its low valley, as Leila’s old school bus wound around the road circling the bright ring of mountains that climbed up to see the stars.

  About the Author

  Michael Malone is the author of ten works of fiction and two works of nonfiction. The Delectable Mountains is one of his earliest novels. Educated at Carolina and at Harvard, he has taught at Yale, a
t the University of Pennsylvania, and at Swarthmore. Among his prizes are the Edgar, the O.Henry, the Writers Guild Award, and the Emmy. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with his wife, Maureen Quilligan, chair of the English department at Duke University.