The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  So. So, dear Linda, your “favorite historian” is on the job. By the way, before I forget you [—that was a terrible sisterly slip; I meant before I forget it], if you have any particular questions you would like for me to ask him, about anything, just send them along, and I’ll ask, next chance I get. I do like the man, and I suspect he’s not going to be up and around for quite some time, so I’ll have plenty of chances to talk with him, especially since, as a result of the Grandson’s absorption with his miraculous discovery of the cure for cancer (as far as I can gather, it was a combined result of the Forest Ranger’s study of galls on trees and the Grandson’s study of the processes through which mushrooms grow so rapidly), I have little else to do, other than read First’s diaries, which goes slowly, as they can be cloying at one sitting.

  I wonder if you have received the right impression of the Grandson. I can imagine that unless you’ve met him (and he seems to be always offstage somewhere, or else half-hidden behind his powerful telescope), you could all too easily picture him as vain, arrogant, spoiled by his wealth, too sexy, and domineering. He isn’t any of these things (well, maybe he is too sexy, but it’s not his fault; I mean that while a woman could very easily be drawn to him, he isn’t looking for opportunities to hop into bed with anyone). Like all of his male forebears, for generations, all the way back to that fabulous Governor that I (or First) loved so profoundly, he is extremely shy of women. You know the story of what a great effort his cousin had to make in order to become his lover despite being his cousin. He doesn’t possess a smidgin of vanity, or, if he does, he carefully conceals it. I suppose he looks into the mirror every morning like everybody else, but he probably doesn’t sigh and groan over what a gorgeous hunk of man he is; he probably just shaves, and combs his hair. Although he’s owner and boss of the pork works, he’s never overbearing to his employees. They love him. His foreman, especially, although a much older man, is deeply devoted to him. His foreman once said to me, “If ever they was a saint on earth, it’s him.” His grandmother believes that he hung the moon…but that his Mistress was holding the ladder for him while he did it. He is more or less indifferent to his great wealth, feeling that it fortunately enables him to purchase the things that need to be purchased. He doesn’t throw his money around.

  Later. An hour later. Here’s a Canny Coincidence for you: While I’m writing about money, who should knock upon my door but the Forest Ranger’s Mistress? She’s doubly lonely tonight: on one hand her husband (another slip; I mean her lover) is off at the laboratory staying up all night working on the cancer cure; on the other hand, her very best and dearest friend, the closest friend she’d ever had in her life, the Grandson’s Mistress, has been out on the Coast for some time now, and she misses her in the extreme. We chatted. In that unfortunate way that some women have but most of we “sisters” try to avoid, we sized each other up, and no doubt the thought crossed her mind that I might become a “competitor” for the attentions of the Grandson, whom she loves (non-sexually) almost as much as she loves the Forest Ranger, and no doubt the thought crossed my mind that she, stunning blonde that she is, would be my competition with anyone, even the Dying Man, who, although he’s never met her, was observed by her while he was in his coma, and she is, and has been for quite some time, very much concerned about him. We know that he knows that the Forest Ranger took her halfway to meet him once, long ago, that she intended to discuss with him the possibility of restoring the town, and that she certainly has the money to pay for it. Her fabulous wealth was inherited, from both a grandfather and a father in the capital city, where she grew up. Hey! Speak of C.C.’s, or Canny Coincidences! I just realized that her home town is not only the same as that of the Dying Man, but also the same town where First was raised and educated and taught school and met the Governor! So the three of us have something in common: that town.

  I have a standing invitation to visit the Forest Ranger’s Mistress any time I feel like it, and I think I will drop in on her tomorrow. I don’t think I can replace the other Mistress as her best friend, though. I like her very much. I can see why the Forest Ranger worships her. But I am not the Forest Ranger, and I can’t get over her beauty. I’m told the other Mistress, the Grandson’s, is even more beautiful, but in a brunettish way, and tall. Oh, heck, I’m much too short for the Grandson. But he doesn’t seem to think so. He said it was “cute,” my being so tiny. Cute! But he isn’t very eloquent, not with words. His gestures are eloquent, his facial expressions are eloquent, the way he walks is eloquent, his dedication to the mysteries of the universe is eloquent. Do I sound like a woman in love? Give me some desperately needed sisterly advice, dear Linda. Should I devote my energies into finding out just where I stand, or might stand, vis a vis his relationship with his absent Mistress? Or should I throw my heart into persuading the Dying Man to “unload upon me your most intimate feelings and thoughts”?

  Now I must go to bed. Oh, forgive me, a woman of First’s time would never speak of “going to bed,” with its even faintly erotic suggestion. She would say “I must retire” or even “I must lay down”! So I must lie down. But before I turn down the wick of my brass-and-glass reading lamp, I shall read for a while in The Book of Kind, that loose-leaf bound anthology which, although I’ve read and reread my Xerox copy of it, I now possess in the original, lent to me by the Forest Ranger’s Mistress, the holograph original, in the handwritings of, variously, the Grandson and his Mistress, the Forest Ranger and his Mistress, the grandmother and late grandfather, the moonshiner (yes, he’s literate), the foreman, various others, and, now, myself. I can’t wait for the Dying Man to add to it.

  I send you, as a goodnight gift, a page taken at random from it, which is not from any of the above persons (although it’s in the Grandson’s script) but is from Aldous Huxley in his last days on earth, toward the end in response to a question as Frost responding toward the end to a question, the answer to which forms our epigraph: “It’s a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘Try to be a little Kinder.’”

  Love,

  Liz

  Chapter twenty-eight

  Thursday

  Dear Linda,

  “Smug?” What do you mean, smug? Is that akin to the Woman’s calling me “conceited”? Well, smug, schmug. Why shouldn’t I be complacent, contented to a fault, to be involved in this adventure? Forgive me, dear friend, but do I detect a note of envy in your response? But I said in my previous letter that if you concentrated well enough, the reflection would allow you to trade places with me, so I hope you can share all of this vicariously with me, and enjoy it, and refrain from using epithets such as “smug.”

  But if you think I’m contented to a fault, then consider this: the Dying Man has been moved to my house. I’m not sure whose idea it was. Possibly his own. Everybody around here offered to “put him up” after he left the hospital. I didn’t. I was simply asked by the Woman, whose motherly offer of the opposite wing of her dogtrot he had declined, if I minded if he were put into any one of the several vacant bedrooms in this house, and I could not very well be rude enough to refuse, so they put him in the back room of the ground floor of this “hotel.” It’s not even close to my room, but still I can hear him snoring at night. And I have to be his nurse: I have to watch my watch closely (a precise chronometer lent me by the Grandson) and take him his pills at certain hours-on-the-hour, and empty his horrible bedpan, and clean it, and feed his damned dog who sits on the porch scratching at the door (you should have seen the way the dog almost destroyed him with affection when they brought him out of the hospital). I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said “damned” dog. I like the dog, and I think he likes me. Once when I was sitting in the rocker on the porch, the dog came up and put his paw into my lap, and his eyes said, I swear, “Thank you ever so much for being willing to take such good care of my master.” The word isn’t “smug,” Linda, it’s “nuts.
” I’m going crazy in this situation and who can blame me for believing that dogs speak to me only with their eyes? The Grandson was rather annoyed that the Dying Man was going to share my house with me; after all, he owns the house and everything else in the town, and who could blame him that nobody even asked his permission for the Dying Man to stay here? It just happened, let’s say, like everything else just “happens.” Once when I took him his pills, the Dying Man requested, “Could you just lie down beside me and let me hold you for about five minutes?” And I had to say, “And be your doll?” That was cruel of me, of course. But could you have done it, Linda? Oh, yeah, sure, I know you, you could have. You would have taken a flying leap into his bed. But not me. Not then.

  Well, first things first, as the guillotinist said to Marie Antoinette. Your list of five questions. I asked him all of them, pretending, naturally, that they were my questions, and phrasing them in First’s language, which I continue to use with him, holding up the pretense that I am First, in First’s house and rooms, where he is “our honored guest.” (“Where’s the Governor?” he asked me, upon waking one morning. “He is away on business and shall shortly return,” I answered.) Well, here you are:

  1. Why hadn’t he left a suicide note, as the celebrated playwright he once had known (or known about) in his hometown had done? I phrased this as: “In all likelihood, considering that you anticipated, or even desired, that your immoderate consumption of potent spirits might lead to an untimely demise, why did you not leave behind some valedictory in the form of a screed explaining your motivations for your self-murder?” His all-too-immediate response, “How do you know that I didn’t?” My blushing rejoinder: “I took the liberty of inspecting your habitation in search of same.” His answer: “In that case, you came across my notebooks. Those, hundreds of them, are my suicide note.”

  2. Does he still view his hometown as feminine and especially as “his real mother,” and, if so, why has he utterly abandoned her? I pointed out to him that it was also my (First’s) hometown and that I had often thought of it (her, the town) as my grandmother, which gave us some common ground. His reply: “That city has changed so much, I would not know her. I still love what’s left of her, but there’s so little left. It’s a spreading cancer. There’s absolutely nothing remaining of the town you knew, except possibly the Territorial Restoration, and it’s a fake.”

  3. Speaking of restorations, has he given much thought, farther along, to the restoration of this town? That was untimely of you, Linda. But I asked it of him, and he said, “You won’t even let me go out and sit on the porch and think about it.” So I got him out of his bed and into one of the Governor’s smoking jackets, and took him out on the porch, and we sat for an hour looking at what remained of the town, and I said, “Well?” and he said, “I am thinking about it.” Progress?

  4. Is all of this a fairy tale? Is that why, as in fairy tales, nobody has any names? “You have a name,” he almost snapped at me, accusingly. “If I had one, other than the ludicrous ‘Dying Man,’ I might recuperate more quickly, to the point of trying to seduce you.”

  5. Speaking of which, he has been known to boast, or at least to remark, that he is oversexed. Is he? And if so, how could he have lived in his cave for six years without it? Did he masturbate? For Kind’s sake, Linda, how was I supposed to ask him that question? But I put on a properly Victorian expression, fanning myself all the while, with my white China silk fan, and phrased it this way, “Dying Man, permit me to arouse a most indelicate topic of inquiry. You have given the impression of having larger-than-customary sensual appetites. By implication, you consider yourself to desire carnal knowledge more frequently and more intensely than the average man. If this be so, and Kindly forgive me if I have obtained an erroneous impression of you, how can you explain your half-dozen years of celibacy? Or did you sometimes, or frequently, resort to self-gratification?” You should have seen his blush, and if you’d had the time I did, you could have counted all the beads of sweat on his brow. I send them to you, as pearls: 836. At least that’s as far as I counted, before his answer: “There’s a tremendous difference between a satyr and a rake. The former can think of nothing else; the latter is sometimes capable of thinking of other things, for instance: is this town worth restoring? Shall we go inside and lie down? No? Well, in answer to the second half of your question, yes, I must go inside alone and lie down. See you later.”

  Are you satisfied? I retract my offer to ask him any more of your questions. I picture you alone in the cozy confines of your little office in the Humanities Building, at a safe distance, distanced one might say, trying to become intimate with this poor Dying Man, or trying to encourage me to get up my nerve to give him some release from his urges, so that you can experience it vicariously, since you have waited so long. Here we are on page 184 and not a single act of “realistic erotic lyricism” has occurred so far. Patience, dear friend. At least you don’t have to listen to him snoring, not to mention listen to him grinding and gnashing his teeth in his sleep. Nor do you have to listen to his incessant begging for “just one drop” of wine or beer or rubbing alcohol. I have to be careful about the latter. I do give him backrubs, of which he is extravagantly, preposterously grateful, kissing my hands profusely afterwards, but I have to remind myself to take the bottle of rubbing alcohol with me when I leave, or else he will drink it. Then there is another problem: as you know, for a number of years I’ve enjoyed a gin and tonic before supper and a bit of Scotch before bedtime, and I refuse to discontinue these comforts out of consideration for the Dying Man, but whenever he catches me glass in hand, as he often does, he will ask for “a tiny taste,” and I have to refuse him. Once he grabbed the glass out of my hand and took much more than “a tiny taste” before I could retrieve it. Fortunately, it didn’t cause a relapse, but it was enough to intoxicate him to the point of taking liberties with my dignity.

  If that sounds smug or prim, I can only protest that my dignity, or what’s left of it, is all that stands between me and the brink. I think, no, I know, that First possessed the same kind of dignity, Kind of dignity, how else could she have endured her situation here, knowing that the Governor’s heart belonged primarily to his wife and only secondarily to her? How does it feel to be always Second? I have been Second all my life. Even when I was First. Whenever there are Two, one must always be Second. Who’s on First? Remember the Abbott and Costello routine? I’m not even Second to First. I’m Second to her.

  She comes every day, the Woman, she “comes” every day, and sits beside his bed and tells him the story of the rest of her life, the rest of the Hermit’s life too, and they hold hands, and he looks into her eyes most worshipfully, and I go into my room and pound on my dulcimer to drown out the sound of her ceaseless harmonica. Right now, in fact, she’s in there telling him the story of how the Hermit happened to be both the grandfather and the father of the Forest Ranger’s Mistress. It’s titillating as all get-out, but I don’t want to hear it. Do you hear it? That harmonica is supposed to be part of this Trio, but not if I can help it.

  He has played his hair-comb-and-tissue for me. It’s awful. He played “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Beautiful Dreamer” and “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life,” and “Kiss Me Again.” I said, “According to Harrington, the Bluff-dweller played a kind of primitive flute. Why did you not do that, instead of your artificial hair comber and posterior-wiper?”

  He said, “Where did you see Harrington?”

  I said, “I took the liberty of borrowing him from your cavern.”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s a matter of embouchure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s the difference between the way I press my lips to this comb-and-tissue, and the way you would blow the flute?”

  “I?” But I think I got his point. I must have blushed, for I had just been reading a passage of First’s diaries in which she described the first time that she had—how shall I say it? “performed fellatio on the Governor”�
��how did she say it? it goes on for pages and pages. Here’s the first one: “I never tired of merely sitting and contemplating his bared member when it was in a state of readiness and thus full and completed in its true resplendent form, a work of nature that fascinated me with its design and coloration and suggestiveness, and it seemed to flatter him that a gentlewoman could be so endlessly consumed by her attention upon that which he was customarily obliged to keep concealed, therefore it surprised neither of us when, upon one such occasion, I was moved, of some ineffable impulse, to bestow a kiss upon it, an act that I had never heard nor dreamt of, and to discover, to my astonishment as well as his, how pleasant it was, so that neither of us was contented with a mere kiss, but that I was compelled to give it a more resounding kiss, and another, and several, all about it and up and down it, and then to open wide my lips and receive His Excellency’s excellency deep within my mouth, which caused the most unusual sounds to issue from both our throats.”

  There! You knew that if you waited long enough, this might have some “redeeming value.” I have, of course, read My Secret Life, but so have you, so you know that this hasn’t been plagiarized from it. Would I stoop to plagiarism, I who had three students expelled from the University last semester for plagiarizing in their term papers? When the Woman leaves, if she leaves (I think he’s trying to get up his nerve to ask her to spend the night with him), I think I’ll ask him if he would like for me to read to him any of about 2,378 similar erotic passages from “my” diaries. I have to own up to the fact that reading First’s diaries often gets me terribly aroused. If she wasn’t a feminist, because there was no such thing at the time, she was at least that rare breed of woman who could never allow herself to feel exploited or used, but always feel that whatever she did was for her own pleasure as well as for her paramour’s. Who’s on First? First was on Third, or rather, behind The Third Door of The House, which did not mean, as you suggested in your letter, that she “was only for exercising the Governor’s peculiar proclivities.” Peculiar proclivities, Linda? Is that your expression, or one of one of those harridans down the hall? The Third Door, please believe me, carries no allusion to anal intercourse, although that was, not a “peculiar proclivity” of either of them, but merely something that they occasionally enjoyed. Now Second’s on Third, but I’ve never tried that, and don’t honestly feel that I ever could. Another good friend of mine tried it, and said it hurt. There must be more. I mean, more to life than that.