The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Sure,” I laughed. “Put me down for half a dozen.”

  “You think I’m foolin you, man?”

  “Naps, you never fooled me in your life, did you?”

  “Not me,” he said.

  “All right. What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a book salesman,” he said, and I would, for a while, let it go at that. “How you doin back there, Nub?” he asked.

  “Just fine,” I said. “Just fine. I feel like Winthrop Rockefeller himself. All I need is a good fifty-cent cigar.”

  “Shoot, why didn’t you speak up?” he said, leaned over and drew a box out of the glove compartment. He flipped the lid open with one hand and held it back over the seat.

  “Aw, I don’t smoke,” I said.

  “Won’t kill yuh,” he said. “Go on. Hoo now, we gotta show um, boy! We puttin on airs.”

  “We really are,” I agreed, and selected a long stout Havana belvedere maduro.

  He giggled. “We tellin um!” he said. Then, “Lighter’s on your left back there. Got it?”

  “Got it.” I lit up. It might make me sick, but by God if I could be king for only one evening, I was going to do it in style.

  We were stopped at Third and Main by a red light. While we waited, the car purring soft and expectant beneath us, a couple I once knew came strolling up to the curb and also stopped to wait for the light to change. They turned their heads and gawked at me. The man was a tall, fat blond-haired television announcer named Hy Norden. The woman with him was a chic socialite named Marcia Paden Norden. From somewhere in the dim recesses of my memory of my impoverished past, I recalled having met them briefly. Slowly raising the hand which held the cigar, I condescended to acknowledge their presence with a stiff disdainful wave. Norden’s mouth fell open and he stretched his hand toward me and started to speak, but the light changed and my man drove me away from that ghastly rotter left standing all aghast.

  “Naps,” I called, a block later, “you just did me a great big favor.”

  “How’s that?” he asked.

  I explained.

  When I finished, he said, “I’ve seen him on the TV, that boy; he a high-up big-mouth keltch, so brassy, so snotty, he the kind of white makes me glad I’m a nigger.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “What for?” he said.

  “You’re a good old boy,” I said.

  “Go on, now,” he said, and we broke up into laughter.

  We turned up Markham once more. The sun was sinking into the pine hills of Perry County, far away. Dusk was setting in. We drove all the way out to the west end of town, exploring the vastness of the new housing developments: Briarwood, Leawood, Robinwood, Kingwood, Birchwood, Grandwood, Brookwood, Westwood, Coolwood, Point O’Woods, and others; the innumerable ranch-styles and split-levels, faceless in the dusk but not shapeless, swarming in the butchered pine woods like a herd of neoteric mammoths munching and masticating bushels of green trading stamps. “Don’t it make you wonder?” Naps said, getting us lost on some twisting, terraced drive dipping through the center of what once had been a pleasant woodland in Boyle Park but now was cancerously crowded with the bedrooms of subexecutive insurance men who had driven home from the Tower Building in Comets and Corvairs. “It makes me wonder,” I said, and we found our way out of there, getting on Twelfth Street and heading back toward town, past the less pretentious outpost houses of the early Eisenhower era, then past the outmoded ranch-types of the Truman years, the stuccoed duplexes of the Roosevelt reign, on past the symmetrical white clapboard bungalows of the Hoover bad times, until finally we were back among old and faded parts of the nineteenth century again, where a brilliant idea suddenly occurred to me.

  “Naps,” I called to my chauffeur, “could you do me just one more favor?”

  “Anything, any time, anywhere,” he sang back at me.

  I gave him Margaret’s address and explained what I wanted to do.

  We pulled up at the curb in front of her house, and Naps honked a melodious tattoo on the Lincoln’s horn. The front of the old house was dark, but lights went on in a front room almost immediately. We could see a fat face peering out through the window. Naps honked again, and then Mrs. Austin came out onto the porch and stood there straining her eyes at us. There was enough light from the street lamps to give her an impression of the Lincoln’s size and awesome beauty. Then Naps leaped out and raced around the car to hold my door open for me. He bowed as I exited the car and walked up to Mrs. Austin. “Good evening, madam,” I said in a genteel voice.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said, a bit frostily, but then she felt obliged to re-examine her opinion of me. “What a lovely automobile,” she said.

  Thank you,” I said. “May I speak with your daughter for a moment, if you please?”

  “She isn’t here,” Mrs. Austin said.

  “Really?” I said and sprinkled my cigar ashes on her weedy lawn. “May I ask where I might find her?”

  “She’s out at Mr. Slater’s house.”

  “Oh. Do you happen to know when she will return?”

  “Not until in the morning, I suppose.”

  “Do you mean to say that she’s going to spend the night with him?”

  “I believe so.”

  “You mean you don’t care whether she sleeps with him or not?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Are you telling me that you actually know that your daughter is keeping company with that man?”

  “Clifford!” she said, gasping, offended. Then she said, “Mr. and Mrs. Slater are one of the oldest and finest families, and I see nothing improper about my daughter being their house guest.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “What makes you think—?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just didn’t understand you the first time.” I turned to go, but turned back again. “Well, just tell her, when you see her, that I’d like to talk with her at her convenience. Thank you.”

  Driving me home, Naps asked, “Did she say Slater?” I told him that was right. “This girl,” he said. “She’s your girl friend?”

  In a way, I said. “Lordy,” he said. I asked him why he was saying Lordy. He said he had heard that Slater was keeping a mistress. I asked him how he had heard.

  “You remember that little colored boy that lived next door to me, when I lived up there in y’all’s part of Ringo Street? Feemy Bastrop he was called, and we used to all be such good friends. Well, he workin at the Slater place now, what Mr. Slater call his manservant. He the one tole me Mr. Slater had him a fine-lookin black-haired mistress.”

  Chapter nineteen

  Sleep that night was hopeless. I tried counting sheep, but was too weary to count, giving it up when I got the sixties and seventies hopelessly confused. I tried willing my body to sleep, piece by piece beginning with the toes, but got only as far as the privates before succumbing to exhaustion. I tried playing soporific melodies in the silent sounding chambers of my brain, but the thirteenth rendering of “Pop Goes the Weasel” drove me to the point of tears. I quit.

  Margaret Austin. Marguerite Margherita Margarete Austin. Meg. Mag Maggie Mamie Margie Marge Margot. Peg. Peggy Meta Maisie Margery Marjory Marge, meaning: A Pearl. Miss Margaret Rose Austin. Backwards: Ssim Teragram Esor Nitsau. Send a telegram to Teragram. Leave a margin for margarine and marjoram. Austin, Texas. Jane Austen. Austin-Healey.

  MAWR-GRIT AWS-TIN! My God, how all night that name and its forms, its deviates, they bumped restlessly from node to node, from adyt to adyt in the sweaty and tortuous windings of my intricate brains, until, in proliferating surplus, they surged downward into every passage of my vitals, permeating long-dormant saccules and ventricles, and setting the whole works ablaze with furor, with fidgety twitching that put sleep entirely out of the question.

  I might go on back to Boston tomorrow after all, I had told Daddy.

  What is Little Rock?

  Who is Margaret?

  Naps and I had driven past a
nother one of those large blue and-white signs which asked only: “Who’s Happy?” and I, thinking they had been planted all over town by some fairy spirit trying to remind me that I was not happy, had asked Naps what they meant. He had said they had been erected by the Little Rock Housing Authority, and the answer to the simple two-word question was: “He’s Mr. Happy Fixit! Helping Rebuild Neighborhoods!” Oh God, I had groaned.

  One Saturday afternoon of our teens I had taken Margaret into my room; my mother and father were both away; I had joked with her awhile and then playfully thrown her down on my bed and wrestled with her, but she had been terror-stricken at my innocent but tactless act and had pounded at my chest, crying, “What are you doing?” and continued that theme, like a repetitive motif in a fugue, all the way home, “What were you doing? Why were you doing that?” I remembered it, and I recalled my embarrassment on that occasion; I had done the same thing to Sarah Farnley not two weeks before, and old Sal hadn’t seemed to mind at all. I wondered: Could Margaret’s shock of outraged astonishment at my sportive, frisky gesture have confounded forevermore her dignity so that at a time ten years later there would not remain enough of it, that self-respecting dignity, to keep her from her own destruction? or out of the viceful vise of a lascivious old playwright?

  Is Margaret crazy?

  And the town—is it sane at all?

  Two Little Rocks: one a slow, easy old Southern town of old bricks and boards and friendly sidewalks where walking unfolds, block after block, new quaintnesses; the other, a sprawling side-walkless jungle of ticky-tacky suburbs where walking seems prohibited by law or at least impossible.

  Sleep. Oh, sleep!

  Two Dalls: one sitting beside a pond on the capitol grounds in the early morning darkness, holding a sleeping girl against his breast; the other, stripped to the waist and sweating, brandishing a whip over the prostrate bodies of Negroes.

  The common herd values friendships only for their usefulness.

  Two Margarets: one very shy and sad-eyed, cool and mute, strolling hand-in-hand with me through night-fragrant tunnels of blossoming shrubs; the other, a bold loquacious actress, wild and open, romping in sin with a nasty old playwright.

  I have been meeting her in dreams all these years.

  Two Cliffords: one scholarly and staid, aloof in a tower of dispassionate contemplation, impotent, dusty, and nervous; the other, a chummy pint-size ex-boxer stalking through a dull hometown in search of…what? Yes: sex, adventure, friends, and the lost, lost past.

  Why have we come here to this water?

  Naps had talked about this man Slater, had even attempted to describe him to me, and now a spectral image of the aging playwright seemed to hobble to and fro through the eerie illumination of my sleepless consciousness.

  He sho aint no looker. No more tall than you or me, but bout twice as big around. Face kind of like a fish. Fish mouth. Big pop eyes. Lumpy cheeks. Not much hair, and what there is of it all glued down with vaseline. Nose looks like he was smellin somethin bad all the time, you know what I mean. No neck atall; his head just sits there on his body like a punkin on a stump. Wears fine clothes, though. Yeah, real fine clothes: silk shirts, Harris tweeds, all that. Country squire type of fellow. See him trottin around on one of them Morgan horses of his, he look like a million dollars, but he aint got a cent to his name. Everything he got, his wife owns it. He never earned a dollar in his life. She in a wheelchair, been in a wheelchair for a long time and caint get out of it, but, man, I’m tellin you, she’s runnin the whole show. The whole show.

  I had told Naps that if Margaret was involved with Slater, I didn’t want to intrude. I had told him I thought I would just go on back to Boston. We had stopped in front of my house and I had thanked him for the ride. There, before I got out of the car, he had asked, “Is you sho you wanter go?” and I settled his doubts on that score. Then he had said, uncertainly, “Me and you couldub been good friends.” Me and you are good friends, I had assured him, and then I had shaken his hand. “Well,” he had concluded as I got out of the car, “good luck to you, Nub.” Then he had made me a present of a fine parting aphorism: “If you obliged to eat dirt, eat clean dirt.” Touched at this gift of what probably had been his personal motto, I had choked up and could only mutter “Thank you” before I had turned and walked to the house.

  Now I turned on the bed lamp and lifted my watch from the night table to see what time it was. Fifteen after four. Then I lifted my billfold and took out the card that Naps had given me. “Case you ever come back, or case you don’t even go,” he had said, “here’s my cod.” As such cards go, it was rather fancy: raised letters, elegant type, fine heavy white stock.

  N. LEON HOWARD

  Books, Religious and Otherwise

  Agitating, Non-Violent and Otherwise

  Lunch Counters a Specialty

  3700 Ringo Street

  Little Rock, Arkansa

  Franklin 8-9635

  I put it in my wallet, reflecting upon his name. Obviously “Naps” was only a nickname, but what did it shorten? Naphthalene? Napkin? Napalm, as in the bomb? I was too tired to speculate. I put out the light again.

  But I didn’t sleep.

  She is a witch who haunts, who shamanizes me, preying on my skittish nerves, violating the chastity of my scholarship with the vulgarity of her animate being, who will not ever let me alone.

  Dawn came anon. I watched as the back-yard buildings, the toolsheds and garages and doghouses, took on blear cold coronas of early yellow sunlight. Even then she would not let me alone.

  Now I suppose it was only what they said of her, and not what I had learned from her myself, which did this to me. Fortunately I have always been one to bank upon my own senses, my own discernment, before swallowing the views of others, and because of this laissez-faireism I stuck adamantly to my original conception of Margaret the provocative and unfallen goddess. I was on her side, come what may, or went what did. Poor kid.

  But what the hell is going on?

  This question is what kept me awake, kept me aflicker like an all-night candle, afflicted. It gave me a feeling of helplessness, of paralysis, isolated exclusion, of being an interloper unable to do anything but stand in the midst of it and watch, an impotent spectator, or, in the word of those darky caddies, a horror.

  When I see her again I will have much to discuss with her.

  The kitchenward voice of Sybil, cockcrowing the morn with a flat but spirited rendition of “You Are My Sunshine,” accompanied by the banging of skillets and pots, roused me out of what had not been even a shadow of slumber. Staggering up out of one of the godawfulest nights I have ever endured, I let Sybil saturate me with black coffee; the eggs wouldn’t go down. Even she, thickly simple and ungifted, perceived my haggard fever and asked me what kind of powder keg I was sitting on. I couldn’t tell her, beyond explaining that I hadn’t been getting enough sleep. After my father had gone away to work, she rubbed the back of my neck for a while, and that helped some.

  After breakfast I received a surprise phone call. Hy Norden himself called to say that he had been trying to get in touch with me and that it had just occurred to him to try my father’s number, but, well, anyway, he had seen me in my car (“That’s truly a swell-looking piece of transportation you’ve got there, Cliff, man”) and, well, anyway, he and Marcia were throwing a little patio party Saturday night out at their place after the opening of Slater’s play, and he and Marcia would be damn pleased if I would honor them with my presence. I told him I wasn’t positive yet that I would still be in town on Saturday, but that if I was, I would try to make it. He thanked me profusely and I hung up, laughing to myself.

  I showered, put on my seersucker suit, girded up my loins, and walked on over to Margaret’s house.

  Chapter twenty

  At the curb where the walk to her house meets the street is, I noticed again, that stone carriage-stoop which we had sat upon the other night, one of those obsolete hunks of pale granite that disencumbered
the high-buttoned lady’s exit from the four-in-hand or the cabriolet or even the buckboard in the days when the streets were still dirt and the twin giant catalpas in front of that house were only ornamental shrubs of modest size. On the street side of the carriage-stoop were six letters sepulchrally engraved: Austin. It was oddly incongruous, considering the present poverty of the house and neighborhood.

  Mrs. Austin met me at the door. “Where’s your car and show-foor this morning?” she asked. I told her I always gave my chauffeur Thursday mornings off so that he could polish the car. Mrs. Austin moved her great bulk out of the way so that I could enter the house, then she led me into the parlor, where we sat down in a couple of threadbare balloon-backed chairs of cherry-red button-tufted velvet, amidst a flock of similar side chairs, marble-topped rosewood tables and taborets with bracketed feet, veneered chiffoniers and étagères, a white marble rococo fireplace beneath a huge oval mirror with a winged gilt frame about to soar off through the air of the room like an overgrown parakeet. Beneath my feet was a luxuriant profusion of huge roses, scarlet and sulphur, burgeoning out of the rank verdure of the well-worn rug. Above my head was an obese cluster of dusty milk-glass bubbles and crystal spangles and pendants in what is without question one of the largest lighting fixtures in town. Somehow I felt very small, yet this parlor furniture was the only thing of value in the whole house, and I also felt embarrassed by this false front. “How good to see you again, Clifford,” said big Mrs. Austin affectedly, crossing her hands wrist over wrist on her lap. Margaret, she said, was upstairs dressing and would be down any minute. Make myself at home. “I understand you live in Boston now,” she said. “What are you doing way off up there?” In short sentences, struggling to keep my voice from imitating the flighty trill of her own, I explained how I worked for the Cabot Foundation in a curatorial capacity. “How fascinating!” she falsely remarked, giving her mealy mouth some exaggerated exercise. Then she paused, and, after a moment, asked me, “What’s a curatorial capacity?” I explained that it had to do with the evaluation and maintenance of valuable old works of art, craft objects, and so forth. She asked if I would care to have a look at some of her figurines; she was making plaster figurines of children in charming postures, all lively colored by hand. Gingerly I suggested that my rather limited province of connoisseurship would not qualify me to pass judgment on items of that particular nature.