Money, money, money.
Out of the little that was left. The scrapings of the barrel. The remnants of ancient investments. Retirement funds. With insane inflation to contend with. And my wife’s lingering death. And that bloodsucking Bulanga resort next door to maintain and pay taxes on. And this house, this family home, to keep in the condition it requires.
And yet the money, money, money draining into that fine room in the Sutton Falls Memorial Home, and into all those diamond-studded medical services needed to keep the old bitch alive and whining.
If
Yes, a coward and a liar. But not any more.
If I had it to do over, I’d take whatever oath my grandfather asked of me and as soon as he drew his last breath I’d put it right out of my mind. Turn the goddamned case over to the County, where it belonged. Because this Charles Witter Kirwan is no longer bound by the social graces of cowardice and deception.
Shocking, isn’t it?
Is it?
Listen, I want to read you something I have right here before me. One line from Pasternak’s Zhivago, courtesy of critic V. S. Pritchett. Right here. Listen.
“Health is ruined by the systemic duplicity forced on people if you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.”
There it is. One line.
Systemic duplicity.
Oh dear, the roaches are on my plate eating my hard-earned dinner. I will let them eat all they want and when they are done I will thankfully finish what they leave.
Love thy neighbor.
Love thy roaches.
One line. Systemic sweetscented liberal duplicity.
And systemic duplicity means sickness and rot. Cancer. As long as society demands that duplicity. As long as in its craven fears, its political opportunism it has us meet the Bulanga with hypocritical welcoming smiles on our whitey faces?
A coincidence that my love-thy-neighbor smiling wife, inwardly terrified to walk outside her own home, was cancerous?
That I am cancerous?
Let me put it this way.
Already, when I was given the news of my aunt’s death, when I drove up to Sutton Falls to attend the services and the burial, I had glimmerings of the truth about my condition. Pains, persistent cough, loss of weight – glimmerings of the bitter truth. And I don’t think you can live close to cancer as I had in Florence’s case – my wife’s case – without being traumatized by it.
But I’m not one to go looking for trouble. No, it was my aunt’s doctor who insisted on the examination. And turned it into an exploratory operation and a death warrant.
Two weeks in that hospital. Two weeks at the bottom of the pit. Nagged by those solemn salesmen with their M.D. degrees to buy further operations, to buy futile nauseating treatments. No guarantees of success, naturally. Oh no. No easing of pain promised. Just a profitable experiment in the raising of the dead.
Charles Witter Kirwan, invited to be a second Lazarus.
If we could speak to some member of your immediate family, Mr. Kirwan.
Doctor, I just buried my last relative. You were there at the services, remember?
Nightmares – wide-awake nightmares – of my home and what happens to it now. Flawless. Pristine. And then the Bulanga occupation. The last outpost fallen.
The racketing of the Bulanga stereos in the night announcing the triumph.
Right now coming across the courtyard from 409.
Tum-tum-tum and tum-tum. And tum-tum-tum and tum-tum.
No Lazarus for me, thank you. Better to be the sick old hound who drags himself home and dies on the familiar doorstep.
That was my emotional state when I started to drive back to New York from the hospital. Not the Street called Straight although a miracle was waiting for me on it, but that twisting road – McClain Road – which follows close beside the river a couple of miles then enters Route 32 below Saugerties.
Miracles may be announced in strange ways. For example, a man with a warning sign holding up the few cars that made up traffic at that moment. Trotting up to me. Cut your motor, please, they’re setting off some charges over there.
Over there on the river’s edge was the McClain brickyard, long abandoned. Sheds fallen down exposing rows of huge kilns. Five minutes went by with the miracle waiting to happen. Then a sudden flash of red and orange light along a row of kilns, a thundering reverberation. Smoke and dust billowing up. And through that cloud the sight of the kilns dissolving into rubble.
That was it.
The miracle.
The revelation.
In my mind the image of Witter Street struck by that flash and reverberation, crumbling in on itself. Under the smoke and dust only the house remains. Only the house. Nothing more.
Silence.
Then a Bulanga voice crying out from under the destruction. “Oowah oowah oowah, whitey? Ooowah?”
Why did you do it, whitey? Why?
I would be glad to explain.
The sign along McClain Road said Passarini Demolition Company, and the company plainly had its work cut out for it. Those other rows of kilns. Windowless, roofless office buildings to dispose of. Passarini would be here for awhile.
How did I understand my mission? No, not as an attempt on a whole block of housing, but only one building of it, a building I own and am free to deal with. How did I understand my mission? I’ll put it this way. One instant I was a pain-racked, despairing, dying lump. The next instant I was, incredibly, in an ecstatic state, sweating with excitement, my mind blazing with the creative impulse, my emotions centered only on the need to live just long enough to answer that impulse.
Yes, yes, yes.
All despair gone, ideas raced through my mind like pieces of a puzzle being locked into place at lightning speed.
The grand event.
Not an act of nihilistic destruction. Not a mystery to be wondered about afterward and theorized over.
None of that.
A lesson. A guide. A warning. If – if its explanation in full was there and waiting.
More.
That explanation would not be a kindly gift to the public. Why should it be when it would make a document worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? Millions of dollars. The best-seller lists are waiting for it. So-called newspapers – I exclude the Times, a monument itself to a dead and decent past – are slavering for such documents. A movie production. A television showing. Money from all sides.
And out of this, the salvation of the house.
The Witter Foundation. Well-endowed. Luxuriously endowed. Providing for proper maintenance. Providing for a handpicked couple in residence. Caretakers of the property, guides for the curious public.
The Witter Foundation.
The following is addressed directly to my lawyer, my friend George Grant Davis – no less my friend because I have not lately been open to his kind invitations – who will attend to my estate.
Dear friend, in our last phone conversation you expressed puzzlement as to where the money would come from for any such Foundation. And I’m afraid my evasiveness led you to believe the worst: that I was distrustful of you and was concealing information from you about my finances.
Now that you’re hearing this – reading it – you’ll see why I couldn’t let you know my secret.
As you will find out in handling the estate, there is very little cash left in it. But this taped record will be worth a great deal – I estimate in the millions – and my sealed instructions left with you explain the administration of that money by the Witter Foundation.
Of which you are designated pro tem director.
I also rely on you in all dealings with the authorities and the press to make plain to them that I am – was – emotionally stable, mentally sound, through our entire acquaintance.
Also
Also I can only hope you won’t be shocked by the frank discussions of my sexuality in this record. I know you always felt
that Florence and I had made an ideal marriage, and in some ways we had. Please consider that no hurt can be inflicted on her by anything I choose to reveal after her death.
You must understand.
John Milano
A PLEASANT RAMBLE UP BROADWAY FROM Columbus Circle to Lincoln Center brought Milano to the library of theater arts, that haven for the show biz freak, and not unknown here he was soon provided with the material he sought. There turned out to be very little of it. Three skimpy reviews of Pearl Byum’s play Two Stops Before The End of The Line, directed by Lenardo Hanna, presented by The Birdbath Theater Company. And a single-page program which listed, besides this information, its cast of four.
The reviews – from Variety, Village Voice, and New York magazine – were uniformly negative, indicating that what we have here is a muddled exploration of lesbian attachments, with the issues of racism and feminism tossed in for good measure and contributing to the muddle. All, however, commended a Tamar McBride for the skilful handling of her supporting role. And one added the information that lead performer Christine Bailey was dazzling to behold, but …
Back at the apartment Milano kept half an eye on the time until sure enough at about twelve-thirty Shirley Glass phoned to say that a Christine Bailey had just dropped in to ask some questions about him and had been given the full treatment. A tribute to John Anthony Milano whose word was his bond.
“Did she get a look at my office?” Milano asked.
“She did. I’d say your credit rating with her is triple-A right now. And considering this is one gorgeous schvartzeh, Johnny, I trust you’re all strictly business?”
“Strictly. How’s Hy Greenwald making out? Steering clear of Willie?”
“No,” said Shirley, rounding the word out, drawing it out. “More like cozying up to him. Listening to every word with his mouth open, you know what I mean? Willie seems to like it.”
“And Hy’s getting paid way below scale too,” said Milano. “Obviously the boy’s got everything going for him.”
He put in the rest of the afternoon at the Midtown Athletic Club, this time eschewing any basketball game. Near eight o’clock, curtain time, he presented himself at the box office of the Birdbath Theater, a battered kitchen table with an open cash box on it, and bought a ticket for the evening’s performance.
Seating here, he was informed by the wraithlike, foggy-eyed lassie who took his money, was a matter of first come, first served. Since seating consisted of about a dozen rows of slatbacked wooden folding chairs, maybe half of them occupied, he readily located a place with a fair sight line behind this sparse audience. From what he had put together about the play, the nature of the audience was no surprise. Predominantly female, it appeared to be all thrift shop chic and hardbreathing intensity.
But just as the Diamond Horseshoe – name your opera house – provided the necessary ambience for bejeweled and perfumed lovelies, so the Birdbath Theater provided the necessary ambience for these cases. A long, narrow room with a jerrybuilt stage at its far end exposing a set obviously furnished by the Salvation Army. Cracked and flaking walls. Worn linoleum underfoot. And overhead, dependent from a ceiling which looked dangerously unable to sustain it, a complex of track lighting. Dressing rooms – more likely dressing space – had to be behind that flat at stage rear on which was sketchily painted the suggestion of a couple of windowframes.
Never mind those reviews, Two Stops Before The End of The Line had its moments. A garrulous replay of an increasingly popular theme – boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl gets girl – it presented a black couple, united in unwedded bliss, acquainted with a white couple, in this case both female, whose dominant partner smitten by the beautiful black lady sets out to seduce her and for the big finish of the first act succeeds in doing so.
In act two, the black beauty, however beset by the chauvinistic threats of her erstwhile male lover, enters more and more spiritedly into this new affair, discovering along the way not only a sexual gratification she had hitherto been deprived of but an innate racial superiority to her fairskinned seductress. For the climactic scene she contemptuously dismisses both male and female from her life forever and lets it be known that somewhere out there must be a woman of her color and nature fit to be her true mate.
Somewhere waiting.
Blackout. Except for the red glow of the emergency Exit sign at one side of the stage which spectrally illuminated Christine Bailey’s crouching departure behind the flat.
A round of applause, a curtain call, house-lights up. The audience moved toward the street door, and Milano, holding his seat, had a feeling that as the well-dressed, over-aged embodiment of the oppressor male he was getting the icy eye from quite a few. Or maybe he was being evaluated as one of those uptown voyeur types who gets his jollies from very brief theatrical displays of full frontal nudity. Because two such displays had been offered during the show, both times involving Christine Bailey who succeeded in looking even better unclothed than clothed. No use denying the charge in this case because get his jollies he did at each exposure, until those unveiled wonders were quickly veiled by the embrace of the tall, blonde, handsome Tamar McBride, a powerful stage presence. The embrace each time had Milano’s hackles rising, but what the hell, he assured himself, it was all make-believe, wasn’t it?
Most likely.
But most likely didn’t seem altogether satisfactory.
He made his way behind the stage which turned out to be, as he had estimated, a dressing area. Once a kitchen, it was now the beat-up remnant of a kitchen, rust, dust, and cracked wall tiles predominating. Most of it was occupied by a couple of spraddle-legged bridge tables placed together in the middle of the room and buckling under the weight of several face mirrors and an immense disorder of makeup tubes, bottles, and jars.
The cast, each with a well-smeared towel over the shoulders, was seated at the mirrors working off greasepaint. A couple of supernumeraries, black male, black female – the director and the playwright? – were dipping into yogurt containers by a museum piece of a refrigerator in a corner, the refrigerator rattling away merrily.
Milano leaned over Christina Bailey’s mirror, and she said to it accusingly, “I saw you out there,” all the while applying a wad of tissues to forehead and cheeks.
“I paid my way in,” said Milano. He held up his watch to the mirror. “Ten o’clock. Matter of fact, five after ten.”
“Sure it is,” said Christine Bailey. “So you just back off a little, and I’ll be right there.” She didn’t seem called on to offer introductions to the others, who were now giving him the once-over. The voluptuous Tamar McBride, topless except for the towel, smiled at him, and Milano, gratified by what might be evidence of heterosexuality and courteously trying not to goggle at the view – it was an exceedingly skimpy towel – smiled back at her, and that was as far as the socializing went. Not that the lady’s smile and exposure really guaranteed anything, so he reflected following Christine Bailey out to the street. Not with the tangle western civilization, God bless it, had lately gotten itself into in sorting out the sexes.
They wound up in a cafe off Sheridan Square, a room apparently dedicated to the breeding of spider plants which overflowed pots dangling everywhere from the ceiling and brushed green tentacles over passing scalps. Christine ordered a cappuccino, Milano ordered an Irish coffee and, on being informed that the house did not purvey distilled liquors, settled for a cappuccino. It had its own magic when if finally arrived. Somehow, while the cup itself was blistering hot to the touch its contents were tepid.
So far Christine hadn’t spoken a word since their departure from the theater. Sullen, troubled, reflective, that was about how it shaped up. Now, slowly weaving a mound of whipped cream into her coffee with rhythmic figure-eights of her spoon, she looked at him squarely. She said, “You know I was in your office today, don’t you? That I talked to the woman there about you?”
“Yes.”
“You’re full of surprises, aren’t
you?”
“Well,” said Milano, “not quite as much, let’s say, as some very dignified young lady who keeps a very dignified shop daytimes, and then nighttime pops up on a stage down in the Village stripped to the buff.”
“I see. That bother you any? That stripped to the buff part?”
“No. What bothers me is the way your director screwed things up. It’s supposed to be your show, but it’s been handed over to that big Tamar girl. Now it’s her show. Which throws it all out of kilter.”
“I don’t think that you—”
“Look. She steps on your lines, she upstages you so half the time you’re talking to the backdrop, she does everything but wave a hanky at the customers when you’re into one of those heavy speeches. Isn’t that so?”
Eyes veiled, Christine appeared to consider this. Milano considered that face and decided that on any scale from Warhol up to Vermeer it had to rate Vermeer. At last, after due consideration, she came out with it. “Maybe,” she said.
“No maybe. The only question is why it’s so. You’re no amateur. You don’t move like one on the stage, you don’t sound like one. So why give Tamar a free ride?”
“You looking to be my agent, mister, along with your other line of work?”
“You’re ducking the question. Is it possible that Tamar really is Papa Bear when you two are away from the footlights?”
Christine gaped at him. “Man, you are pushy, aren’t you? I mean total bulldozer.”
“You’re still ducking the question.”
“All right, my tastes don’t run that way, if you’re so fucking curious about it. Not that those bare-ass scenes on stage don’t get both of us heated up some, because we are nice, normal, healthy people. But Tamar’s daddy is McBride of McBride and Wheelock, the ad agency. Ever hear of it?”
“Yes.”
“Yes. So daddy is very big money. And what money it took to get this show on the road and keep it there is mostly his. So Nardo – Lenardo Hanna’s the director – knows which side his bread is buttered on because Tamara told him which side was which. Happy, now that you know all about life behind the footlights?”
The Dark Fantastic Page 7
