American Dreams
A Novel
Bruce Price
New York
In which the author speaks of everyday life
in the greatest country on earth.…
a simple little story concerning
a statue, three divorces, a heart
attack, several infidelities,
a burglary, some marriages, some
murders, a double suicide,
a $2 million scam, a hit play
and a man looking for God,
as aren’t we all.…
To my parents
Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands,
Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, customs, crimes, dissipate away from you …
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear.
WALT WHITMAN
Leaves of Grass
Chapter Zero
THE DREAMERS (more or less in the order you first meet them)
LAWRENCE GEORGES Much decorated soldier in the Korean War (three Bronze Stars, a Distinguished Service Medal and two Purple Hearts). Occasional partner in crime with Higgins. More or less disowned by his two grown sons, both of whom became accountants. Ends up rich.
MARY GEORGES Mahjong fanatic. Loved her husband with a sort of fatalistic despair which turns out to be justified.
BONNIE FLOYD A cheerleader in high school. Studied nursing for a year but gave it up to be married. Her goals in life were so ordinary she was sure she would reach them. Then, several years ago, the doctors said that she could not conceive.
JOE FLOYD Tried to be a good son, a good husband, a good salesman, even a good Kiwanian. Kept his temper under control because he wanted to be a good person. Ends up in California.
ROY and THELMA COMPTON A stockbroker with very white teeth and tired eyes. A housewife whose hobby was seducing repair men and such. (It is their house Lawrence Georges waits outside of in Chapter 2.)
RAPHAEL HIGGINS Born June 10, 1942. Astrologers would say he was an extreme example of the Gemini’s tendency toward multiple personalities. Appears to be the only PhD in Art History who helped build the U.S. base at Cam Rahm Bay, Vietnam, where he was considered a genius at driving heavy construction equipment. Killed by New York police.
DICK ROBERTSON Killed by an automobile at the instant we meet him. No point in saying anything further.
JANE ROBERTSON Life Master at bridge. Invented her own system of signals using both color and number (odd or even). Grew up in a small farm near Albany, New York. Joked about its stifling influence but never escaped its values nor wished to. Has an affair with Roger Freeman. Ends up remarried to a minister.
THE REVEREND MICHAELS Noted for his lovely and sometimes profound sermons. Hates himself for being a hypocrite, as he knew he radiated a confident faith which he did not feel in his heart. Thinking about God made him dizzy.
MRS. MICHAELS Daughter of the American Revolution. She actually knew the names of all her grandparents, great grandparents and great-great grandparents. Ends up in the Norwich Sanitorium.
ROGER FREEMAN (lover of Mrs. Morris, etc.) Looked and dressed like a prim matinee idol, the face even, attractive, devoid of character. Very high IQ never applied to anything useful. Entirely unconcerned with the approval of people generally, he pursued small private triumphs. A fastidious man, he bathed once or twice a day and his fingernails were always perfectly filed.
MRS. ADELE MORRIS Despised weakness; somehow made sure she was surrounded by it. Viewed life somewhat as German General Staff viewed France in 1940. In photographs, if she was smiling, she appeared quite handsome. In person, as she rarely smiled, you first noticed her haughty and scornful eyes.
BRADFORD MORRIS (Adele’s son) A leader of rebellious students in his college days; by the age of thirty he could hardly remember any of it. Best known for several very imaginative buildings he designed in downtown Chicago. Handsome in a brooding and neurotic manner.
FELICIA MORRIS (son’s wife) Publicly cheerful but privately morbid, even as a child. Came from a wealthy family which she would hardly talk to after the age of twenty. Had an early presentiment that she should not have children.
UNCLE HUGHIE A mongoloid and thus in some respects a pathetic person. But he did not perceive himself that way, nor did the people in the Morris family perceive him that way. He always smiled.
RANDOL CARLYLE Worth $30 million. Could have been Governor of Texas if he were less of a show-off. People he wanted to charm were invariably charmed; the rest were scandalized or frightened. Except Higgins.
DAPHNE CARLYLE She was raised in the prescribed manner—in the company of race horses, sports cars, swimming pools, expensive resorts, show biz celebrities, and politicians—and still turns out wrong.
HAROLD MORGAN Gangster would be too grandiose a term for him.
MAC SAMSON One of the most brilliant students ever to graduate from the Chicago University Law School. Almost made the Olympic wrestling team. He also boxed and shot and pole-vaulted. When he had to give up most of the athletics, in his mid-thirties, he took up with other men’s wives and the Mafia.
RACHEL SMITHERS Voted in high school Most Likely To Be A Perfect Homemaker, a dubious prediction. She was a good cook but an incompetent murderer. Genetically, she was an unwieldy mixture—having a German, Irish, Scottish and Yugoslavian grandparent—which may explain something.
DR. JAMES SMITHERS Looked as if he might have the best bedside manner in three counties and did. Had an almost complete collection of U.S. stamps. His passion was the variations in the 1908 2¢.
ELOISE SAMSON Dazzled at first sight by her husband. A precise, orderly woman persistently frustrated by the disorderliness of the people in her life. How she comes to live in Seattle is one of the major threads herein.
SONIA Higgin’s girlfriend. Over her head.
GEORGIAANNE CARLYLE At eighteen her largest ambition was to be a stewardess with TWA; she was disqualified on the grounds that she would have been a “distracting influence”—i.e., too sexy. Her mother made her promise to read the Bible every day; and she did. Carlyle’s fourth wife.
HARRIS (a parrot) Had a vocabulary of several hundred words and often seemed to make sense. Was known to have influenced some of Carlyle’s major business decisions.
PHILLIP DONALDSON As a boy he woke up each morning to find Christ staring down at him (in the form of a brass crucifix). Donaldson always hoped that Christ would say something but He never did.
SUSANNE SANBORN Registered Nurse. Saintly in a small way, confused in a large way. A student of Transcendental Meditation, est, astrology, various mystical religions and Dear Abby. The person you would most like to see get her act together.
CHARLIE SANBORN A self-centered man who wore shirts made of shiny fabrics. Liked to think of himself as the Aristotle Onassis of Broadway. Almost nothing in common with his wife Susanne; how they got married is a mystery.
SAM T. (Tecumseh) JONES A six-time loser in various political campaigns, probably the California record. Once ran with the slogan: You Know In Your Bones You Want Jones. Always drove an Oldsmobile, the car he thought would impress the largest number of people while offending the least.
MRS. CHARLOTTE JONES A very sweet person and consequently a near-alcoholic during most of her marriage to Sam Jones. A voracious reader of romantic novels and ultimately the heroine of one.
HARRY BENTON A Godfather of sorts. Not a nice man. But efficient, a good leader, rich, successful, respected. The closest to a tragic hero we have here.
CAPTAIN WITTERS A stray from
the past. Expert at chess and military strategy (although never a soldier). Qualified to captain ships up to 100,000 tons. Ends up in real estate.
CHRISSIE CARLYLE Carlyle’s second wife and a whorey, opportunistic woman—there being a connection. Could be photographed to look exactly like Mae West. Most memorable remark, made when she was much younger: “If it shaves, run it by me.”
* All of these names and a few other details, geographical mostly, have been changed to protect the innocent (and to avoid lawsuits). Otherwise, this is what happened, last year, in America.
PART I
He dreamed of a job so pretty
he could live through it each day
until he pissed his last and say,
thanks, God, thanks for the memories.
1
Lawrence Georges decided to make a full disclosure: The trip up to the lake. The woman named Bonnie.
The first time she took off her clothes—he would always remember how the light fell on her body. He had previously thought she was desirable, a good figure, still he was surprised. He had imagined for a moment that he loved her. If only there had been the same nobility in her face. It was unsettling to him that she could be so special in one aspect. Well, he no longer wanted to think about it. Now Bonnie was back with her husband. He was with his wife. Maybe yes, maybe no.
Mary was so emotional. He had lied steadily for that precise reason. She was as relentless as emotional. That was the trouble. It wasn’t clear how she knew, but she was confident when she confronted him. He forced memories through his brain, wondering what clues he had betrayed. Not to leave a trace, that was the hard part.
He wondered what Bonnie thought of him now, she with her perfect body and her husband who sold insurance and her face which reminded him of a billboard, large and unsubtle. He was not himself delicate but sometimes he liked delicate things. He would pick a flower and study it and feel refreshed and astonished. If Bonnie had been more like a flower, he would have left his wife.
He looked into his wife’s eyes.
Her eyes changed his mind. He would disclose nothing.
“Mary,” he said gravely, “I’ll say this for the last time. And then we’re going to have a fight if you bring it up again. I haven’t been unfaithful to you. I love you and I wouldn’t do such a thing.”
He saw the disbelief … and the relief. His wife was too much like a flower. A strong wind might blow her away. He watched her mind struggling and he didn’t like it. Watching somebody struggle with a private defeat was embarrasing. He did not want to touch her, but he knew that he had to, to finish this business. He put his arms around her fleshy shoulders and pressed her to him, hugged her for a full minute, a lie on top of a lie.
So many lies … Lawrence Georges had been a soldier in the Korean War, had earned medals and been called a hero, and he had killed people. When he was leaving Korea, he thought, so much killing. Now the two thoughts, about killing and lying, pressed on his mind in the same way and made him uncomfortable with his fate.
So much of life was an accommodation to things you could not be proud of, of things you would not wish to mention to your children, of things you would not tell your best friend. His own children, two grown sons, both accountants, had more or less disowned him because he was not respectable. He suspected that he deserved to be disowned but he also suspected that his boys had picked the wrong reasons.
He thought of Bonnie, standing naked in the light of a window. He wondered if her husband appreciated what he had. He doubted it. Bonnie’s husband seemed to have no poetry in him. A funny way to put that, he thought. He himself hadn’t read a poem since the eleventh grade, but certain scenes, certain small events, could unsettle his mind, could stir his rage or his restlessness. He wished this were not true. Even a small vein of poetry is a curse. How can you grapple with a day, make it turn to your hand, if you are stopped in your place sometimes by a wisp of hair or the sound of a door opening?
As he hugged his wife, Georges realized that he could kill her if the right conditions happened to intersect. It was not a truth he enjoyed. Giving in to his emotions, even his hard rage, was not manly. Relishing the shadows on the body of somebody else’s wife was at least manly. It was wrong but he did not lose his own respect in doing it. The truth was, he wished he were hugging the other woman now.
Lawrence released his wife. He knew that he must look into her eyes as sincerely as was possible for him. She smiled warily. He could see she had almost persuaded herself to make this particular leap of faith. He disgusted himself. And yet he was doing the right thing, wasn’t he?
He gripped her arms. “I wouldn’t do such a thing,” he said again.
“I’m glad,” Mary said.
2
The problem was whom to wait on, what truths to wait on. Lawrence Georges had always hated to wait on anything. He saw this as a weakness. He supposed that a braver man or a tougher man could wait for days or weeks, patient as the desert, simply watchful, waiting a passionate occupation in itself.
He saw the stars climb up the night sky. Indians had watched the stars as they waited. It had been a fantasy when he was a young man that he was an Indian, a war chief, but that he knew the military tactics that a modern American knows from watching cowboy and Indian movies. Indians were always throwing their naked bodies against rifles, against circles of wagons or forts with high sharpened walls. If he were their leader, they would have survived. There would have been no need for whisky or oratory or their insane bravery. The Indians had stood on ceremony, that was their undoing. The white people did not win, as history books suggested, because of a superior technology or historical inevitability. None of that. We were smarter in the sense that we did what we had to do in order to have our way. We made peace when that was useful. We broke treaties when they were a nuisance. We sent in soldiers when killing would help. Indians were like rabbits, sometimes elusive but easy to slaughter all in all. Once soldiers infected blankets with small pox and presented them to Indians as gifts of friendship. The epidemic was slow but successful. It was easy for us, because we were Christians and knew that we were superior.
Georges leaned forward to stare at the house. All the windows were black. He had already waited for two hours. He looked at his watch. After three. The street was quiet. A car had passed more than an hour before. Nothing had moved since then. Tension rose in him like the clatter of crickets on a summer night. He would feel better when he moved outside the car. He wished that he were cold and clear, devoid of all feeling. He thought that surgeons must be like that. How else could you cut into someone’s heart?
A siren seemed to wail remotely in his head, the whine of nerves pulled tight. Still, he could do it, could sit there hour after hour, waiting. Maybe the surgeon was also tense. Georges had known a man who took three straight whiskeys before pulling a job. He distrusted liquor. What he finally trusted was his own body, his senses as attuned as any zebra’s to a rustle in the grass, his muscles ready like a runner on the starting block.
When he entered the house, he felt better. He had proved himself again. People thought that technology counted for so much, alarms and wires and electronics, when finally what counted was a passionate sensitivity to each home and the people who lived in it. In this home, for example, lived a stock broker. Georges had studied him, learned his mind.
The most honor among thieves goes to cat burglars, second-story men, because they go in clean, don’t hurt people, beat law and order where it hurt most, mind to mind.
An hour later he was done. He had the statue of the girl.
The tension bled out of him, a sort of death. It was almost like coming, you wanted to but you didn’t. To be crazy with desire, that was also a pleasure, almost the equal of not being crazy with desire. He sat in the car and shook. Sweat stood out on his face. He had not sweated until now. It is like coming, he thought.
He started the engine with the least pump of the gas. The roar sounded tremendous. He waited for a
dog to bark but he didn’t hear one. He eased the lever into low and the car rolled along the street. He kept it under 5 on the speedometer for two blocks.
3
The statue was the finest thing of its kind. A Greek beauty that nobody had been able to produce after the 6th centruy B.C. A genius had evaporated. Ex-professor Raphael Higgins, once of Douglass College, did not like the thought that something so grand could pass forever. Lives, yes—they were not much.
Higgins envied the man who had made the statue. It was most of a girl, enough of a girl. The head and shoulders, small breasts, the upper arms, some of the rib cage. A chunk missing from the back of the head. Higgins thought that the girl herself would make him swoon. So much of her was in the statue, he could stare at it for long intent minutes. She seemed grave and whimsical. A woman at fifteen or sixteen. Higgins held the last inch of a cigar with his lips. Smoke rose before his eyes. It was not likely that he would ever have a woman that young. He would like to.
Higgins stood up, stretched his already taut body. The cigar smouldered in an ash tray. He tilted his head back and pulled tight the muscles of his throat. He was not happy. He wondered what people meant when they said they were happy. When a woman hasn’t had an orgasm and hears other women talk about it, he felt like that. In his life a light rain always fell, there was a gray mist hovering on the windows.
Higgins, occasional partner in crime with Lawrence Georges, was perplexed and annoyed that the other man often seemed content, even happy. And why? Because he had scored the statue and made 25 thou? What shit. Higgins knew money didn’t count; for sure, he didn’t count his. No, happiness was that heaven they told the slaves about. Higgins scorned this non-existent paradise but wanted in.
Higgins went to his refrigerator and took out a container of orange juice. He unflexed the spout and poured the liquid into his wide mouth. It was almost time. The statue had to be in Texas by the next afternoon. He liked this city, Chicago, as well as he could like any particular place. It added to his unhappiness that he would have to leave. Nonsense. He knew he would forget Chicago as soon as he reached the airport. He had addresses in five cities. Often he forgot which one he was in.
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