Herman Wouk - Don't Stop The Carnival

by Don't Stop The Carnival(Lit)

  "I only have one daughter, Iris."

  "I know that."

  Norman drank and thought for a moment. "How is it? Well, I'll really try to tell you. Of all the years of my life, and I mean childhood, and then playing the field as a guy on the town with the show girls, and then marrying a woman I still love, and having a million laughs with some of the nicest and smartest people in New York-of all that time, what I liked most, what I can hardly bear to think about because it was so sweet and now it's all gone, was the years from the time Hazel was born until she was five. It was heaven, every moment of it. It was heaven just changing her wet pants. It was heaven making her laugh and telling her stories while I fed her pureed carrots. Even the pain when she would spike a fever, was all right, because it was about her. There's been nothing else like that love for me-not ever-and I don't even know if I'm peculiar or if it's common, because you don't read much about it. Maybe that's because there's no adventure in it. It's just pure whole love permeating your body, and I'll tell you something, I'm a very big fan of sex, but to me it's minor-league fun compared to that love. And that's all I can tell you about having kids. I'm not very experienced."

  Iris's eyes were glistening. "Well, that's quite a report. How do you feel about her now?"

  "Hazel? I still love her, naturally, though I don't idolize her in that way. She's half the reason I came to this lunatic island. Watching her grow up and throw herself away on a puking fat phony was unbearable. I cut and ran."

  "Well! How about that green flash? Worth the price of admission, hey? Only at Hogan's Fancy!" Mr. Collins bounced himself into the vacant chair, all swollen with gay excitement. "Yes siree Bob, I'm going to miss this place. I'm going to miss all of Kinja, but this little terrace at sunset I'll miss most of all."

  "Oh!" Norman said, as graciously as he could. "You're leaving?"

  "Well, Norman, frankly yes. I've been waiting for this opportunity for quite some time. It's just been a question of getting my capital out of Hogan's Fancy. We're moving to La Jolla, California. I mean this is the finest little island in the Caribbean, but there comes a time when you start thinking of those mainland amenities, you know? Like decent roads, movie houses with good movies and seats that don't tear up your fanny, shops with real food in them, courteous service, mechanics that can fix things, you know, I mean a plumber, an electrician, just normal workmen who show up on time and do things fast and right. You know? You simply start hankering after the good old U.S.A. And I also mean" -he winked-"seeing a few pale faces as well as sunburned ones now and then. Do you follow me? Don't misunderstand me, the Kinjans are marvelous people, but the five-hundredth time you can't get the telephone operator to answer up, the thousandth time a taxi driver mashes your fenders and the cop gives you the ticket, you get a wee bit fed up, you know?"

  Iris said, "Chunky, I thought you were this island's biggest booster, and the black man's friend."

  "Why, I am. I mean locals and continentals come and go in my house it doesn't mean a thing, and there isn't a white man on the island who can speak Calypso like me. Kinja is Paradise, but Iris, let's face it, here's Norman, and now Lionel's coming. New York has discovered Kinja. You know what that means. Oh, great for real estate prices, maybe, but the charm will go fast. In five years they'll be selling bagels and lox on Prince of Wales Street. No, I think I've had the best of it, and it's time to skedaddle."

  Collins went off to the bar.

  "There is only one word for Chunky Collins," said Iris, "and I overused it this morning."

  "Best lawyer on the island," said Norman. "Maybe we should eat somewhere else."

  "No, we're here now, and Bob raved about the new chef. Norman, you must stop Lionel from buying Hogan's Fancy."

  "Lionel is smarter than me about such things."

  "He has island fever. It's mentally disabling."

  They ordered sole bonne femme, the dish Cohn had praised, and Chablis. Twilight drew on fast. The clear orange glow in the west dimmed, lights blinked on all over Georgetown, and Gull Reef twinkled on the dark harbor. They talked, in the deepening shadows, of old times, of the show for Loyalist Spain in which Iris had performed, of their radical pasts. Norman had never joined the party-out of mere cautious instinct for self-preservation, he said-and he had held Henny back too, though she had argued that they were being soft cowards. She had almost won out. They had been on the verge of joining, when the Nazi-Soviet pact had disillusioned them.

  "You were sissies," Iris said. "I joined. I hung on until after the war, too. What the hell else was there to believe in, then? In the long run it was the Russians who beat the Nazis. We sent them the stuff to do it with, and Normandy was a big help, but they lost twenty times as many lives as we did, and killed maybe twenty times as many Germans. You're still not supposed to say that out loud, but I don't give a good goddamn, it's the truth. I believed in the whole Communist thing for a very long time. Then I stopped believing in it. I realized it was just one more religion, and phonier than the rest, and that was that. Nobody scared or bullied me out of it."

  "What do you believe in now, Iris?"

  "Me? That I have a good dog. That I was young and enchanting, and am old and fat. That sitting opposite me is a lovable Jewish nitwit with handsome hair, and that his nice wife will be here tomorrow."

  The sole bonne femme came: leathery yellow slabs of dry thick fish, under a dump of lumpy flour paste. "My God!" Iris said, turning up her nose. "This is nothing but their old seafood special-jerked grouper, I think Bob calls it. But what's this white filth all over it? Sole bonne femme! Waiter! I want to speak to Mr. Collins."

  The lawyer appeared, rubbing his hands and grinning. "Hi, folks. Enjoying your din-din?"

  Iris said, "Chunky, is this the French chefs night off? Do you have a French chef?"

  Collins looked sad. "I had a wonderful one. He was from Panama. But he turned out to be a fugitive, some funny business about diamonds. The FBI in San Juan sent a man here to talk to him, and the next day Francois blew. He lasted five days."

  "God, that's short even for Kinja," Norman said.

  "Well, the felons usually don't stay long," said Collins. "The nuts do, sometimes. Some of them just settle down. But isn't the fish good? Francois did show my new cook just how to make sole bonne femme before he left."

  "It's divine. Is it too late to get a couple of steaks?" said Iris.

  "I guess not. You won't want Chablis with a steak." Collins cheerfully carried off the dripping bottle.

  "Well, so far today not one thing has gone right," Iris said. "Nothing. Don't you think we'd better call this date off and go our ways? I have a feeling you'll run your car off a cliff tonight if I stay with you."

  'We are going to have fun tonight," Norman said, "if we go over a cliff trying."

  "Okay. You're a brave man."

  "I hunt the red fox of remembered joy," Norman said.

  Iris's face lit up. " 'To tame or to destroy'-Norman were you a Millay man? I once knew whole volumes of Millay by heart. Let's go! 'Mine is a body that should die at sea-'"

  "No, no. I've forgotten it all, Iris. I haven't read a poem of Edna Millay in twenty-five years. I don't know where that line came from, suddenly. Henny didn't like Millay, she said it was slush. Henny was zealot. She read the New Masses, and novels about strikes in coal fields "

  "She doesn't seem like that now."

  "Well, until she met me, all mankind was Henny's personal problem. After that, I was."

  Iris began to recite.

  "Wine from these grapes I shall he treading surely Morning and noon and night until 1 die."

  She spoke the whole poem in a harsh even voice, looking out to sea, and glancing once or twice into Norman's eyes. A fragment of a poem came to him. When he had said as much as he knew, she picked it up and finished it. They began to toss off stanzas, tag lines, isolated couplets of Edna St. Vincent Millay, vying with each other. Norman was surprised at how much came back to him. They both avoided the threadbare vers
es: the ferry, the candle burning at both ends, the shining palace. The sweet pipings of the dead poetess of the twenties, her elegies over brief Village amours, her young defiance of convention and time, her nostalgia for nature, her dirges fluttering always between death and sex: these old words, dormant in Norman's memory for decades, awoke. The frail music wove a spell, a ghostly simulacrum, of young love. He had utterly forgotten what it was like to be in love at twenty-three. Now he remembered. The spell was on Iris Tramm too. She was looking at him the way a girl in love looked. And to him, Iris was Janet West again, the dazzling star he had hopelessly admired backstage at the Follies for Free Spain.

  Whether the steaks were good or bad, whether the wine was mediocre or passable, he could not tell. He was on a date with a beautiful actress and he was twenty-three, and everything tasted marvelous. They exhausted Millay, laughing. They talked about old shows, about the actors and actresses of the thirties, the duets of Ethel Merman and Bert Lahr in Du Barry Was a Lady, Ed Wynn's crazy inventions in Hooray for What?, Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest. Night fell. A crooked late moon came up red.

  3

  The blank-faced waiter was clattering down coffee between them. Iris scooped her purse from the table. "Norm, let's have our coffee somewhere else."

  "Sure. Where?"

  "Come. I'll drive. It's a birthday party down in town. I said I'd look in for a minute and bring you."

  "People I know?"

  Iris shook her head. "Locals-as Chunky calls them. They know who you are. You're a curiosity in Kinja."

  Paperman was willing, indeed interested, to visit a party in a native Georgetown house. Iris drove the Rover through the sloping maze of lamplit streets and alleys, downhill at first and then up again. A policeman stood in the middle of one cobbled lane, and here Iris stopped. "Hello, Ray. Is there any parking space left up there?"

  The policeman touched his gold-crusted tan cap. "I tink so, Miss Tramm. A car just come dung."

  "Lovely."

  She turned the Rover into a stucco gateway and drove up a very steep cement alley, lined all the way with canted cars, to a round driveway before a big white building, square as a blockhouse. Norman recognized it. From the Gull Reef Club this house stood out on Sugar Hill, halfway up, dominating it as Government House did the higher hill.

  "Who lives in this place, Iris, for crying out loud?"

  "The Turnbulls. Old family."

  Norman heard music-not a steel band, but a good jazz ensemble- and the voices of a crowd. Large doors with ornate bronze grillwork stood open, and they passed into and through gigantic rooms with marble floors, furnished in a mixture of colorful modern mail-order things, and heavy dark Victorian pieces. It was not artfully done-as the New York decorators touch contemporary with Victorian-but in a jumbled Way. Still, the effect was lively and opulent. There were many people in these rooms, nearly all Negro, with a few whites here and there, whites

  Norman had not seen before. The band was playing in an archway leading to a vast terrace strung with colored lights. Dozens of couples danced in the inside foyer and on the terrace.

  Iris led Norman to a very fat black woman in orange satin, with a complicated high coiffure of iron-gray hair, sitting in a redwood armchair on the terrace, leaning on a cane and surveying the dancers. The woman smiled at them. "Hello, Iris."

  "Happy birthday, Mrs. Turnbull. This is Norman Paperman."

  "Oh, yes. The gentleman from New York. Welcome." Norman, not knowing what the manners were in this group, awkwardly put out a hand, and Mrs. Turnbull gave him the limp brief clasp of an islander. She was happy to meet a Broadway producer, she said, and proud that he had chosen this little island as a place to live. Norman didn't contradict her. The two misconceptions-that he was a producer, and that Atlas had been on the cover of Time-were imbedded beyond recall in Kinja folklore.

  While he and Iris were having coffee and luscious coconut layer cake at a little table in the foyer, Norman saw and waved to several Negroes he knew-the banker Llewellyn, Anatone, the accountant Wills, the doctor and the dentist who treated ailing Reef guests. Others came drifting past, obviously wanting to meet the Broadway producer; not thrusting themselves forward, but waiting until Iris caught their eye and beckoned. Norman shook hands with the Commissioner of Education, the Director of the Budget, the editor of the Amerigo Citizen, lawyers and bank executives, shop owners, and more "old family." He was struck by the calm good humor of these upper-class colored people, some black, some yellow-light; a friendliness tinged with reserve, but free of subservience, or arrogance, or hostility. They made him feel, most of them, that great warmth was there, waiting and wanting to break through, but held back for age-old reasons. He had never known such Negroes. In their assurance, ease, fine dress, and old-fashioned manners they were a dark mirror image of the hill crowd at Broadstairs, but there were differences. They were not supercilious, and they were all sober-though they were drinking-and they gave him no unease at being either Jewish or white.

  "I don't know anything about this island," he said to Iris. "I'm just realizing that. I've been a prisoner on the Reef since the moment I came here. That hotel is a loony bin with a steel band. This is Kinja."

  She smiled. "This is the best of Kinja. These are the ones who keep it going somehow despite all the low slapstick. Of course the hill crowd helps with its income taxes. I'm glad you got to see this. There's more to see. Game? This seems to be our night out."

  "Lead on."

  Iris took him on a round of Kinja's night spots. They were few: a shabby undecorated hall at the top of the Thousand Steps, full of gay young Negroes dancing under blazing electric lights, or drinking beer or soda pop; a dark pseudo-Greenwich Village dive on Prince of Wales Street lit by kerosene lanterns, offering the usual noisy espresso machine and girl folk singer using foul words, sparsely peopled by bearded barefoot white boys and stringy-haired girls with huge backsides bursting out of dirty pants, also a few black youngsters, and white women with black men; next a roadhouse far out in the sugar-cane fields, with one dusty disused bowling alley, a shrouded piano, an empty dance floor, and some middle-aged whites drunkenly muttering and cackling around a red-lit bar; and out beyond the airport the Frenchmen's place, a yellow shack called Montmartre, where blue bulbs dangled on long electric cords, a jukebox played, and a nightmare group of Hippolytes gathered: fat, thin, tall, short, young, and old Hippolytes: with some blatant white and Negro whores in cotton dresses and gaudy city hats.

  "That's about it," Iris said as they left this den after merely tasting their beers. "You've seen the night life of Kinja. Gull Reefs much the best, that's why you do all the business. Some of the guest houses have bars, but the whole island closes up like a cemetery at half-past ten. Except for Casa Encantada, of course."

  "What happens there?"

  "Oh, that sort of hells along all night. But it's solid fags, Norm."

  "We're on our way."

  A piano bar, surrounded three deep by men, stood in a wide curved bay window in the shabby mountaintop guest house called Casa Encantada. The view was a thrilling one of crags and sea in moonlight, but the room was so jammed and smoky that Norman caught only a glimpse of it. Cries of friendly greetings to Iris rose from the men around the bar. A lean handsome white lad, hardly twenty years old, was at the piano, playing the score of a new musical with nervous skill. He wore a buttoned-down tieless pink shirt and tight chino trousers, and he had an intense, troubled look. A paunchy barefoot man in sagging shorts, with a gross red face, bulging bloodshot eyes, and an absurd flat-top haircut, emerged from a knot of men and embraced Iris. "Hello love. Where's your UDT boy?"

  "On duty, Felix. This is Norman Paperman."

  "Oh my gawd. The competition! Well, a belated welcome to paradise! How long has it been? Three weeks? Being measured for your strait jacket yet? Ha ha ha! Isn't it a gas, playing mine host in the glamorous Caribbean? Isn't it heaven! Everyman's dream come true."

  "When are y
ou going to play, Felix?" Iris said. "We can't stay long."

  "Oh, soon, poopsie. I just got off. Isn't he good? That's Arthur, from Minneapolis. Just loaded with talent, and his folks want him to run an electric-appliance wholesale business. Ain't it awful? Sit down here, Iris. Sit ye down, Norm."

  He ordered drinks for them and a double brandy for himself.

  Iris said, "Well! And when did you fall from grace?"

  "Why, about four days ago, love, when that butch lawyer of mine, Chunky Collins, gave me the shaft. I thought he was selling the Casa to Norman's friend Mr. Williams from New York, and what do you know? By some silly accident he sold him Hogan's Fancy instead!" Felix giggled, showing large yellow buck teeth. "Of course, it's a mistake anybody could have made. But me, I was all set for the health kick, can you bear it? I was going to go home to Toledo, dry out, lose eighty pounds, get my old job back, yes sir, my poor old mother had my room all fixed up, she's always kept the candle burning in the window-ah me! But it's just as well, dearie. It gets damn cold in Toledo, and let's face it, the health bit is so dull, you know? I mean for me, honey, at this point, health would be a sort of neurosis."