The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels

by De Vries, Peter

  The night came, as come it must, when the reassembled fragments of his manhood required their natural appeasement, and he did turn to her in the wakeful dark. The feel of his hand on her breast turned her to stone. When he tried, with a delicately graduated insistence, to draw her around, she said, “How can you think of that?” Pete crept downstairs to the recreation room where the television set was. He often drugged himself stupid till early morning there, watching old movies. He soaked himself in them, as people soak themselves in drink. Sometimes he went to bed early and then got up around midnight for the late shows, stealing back again at two and three o’clock, doped by the ham emotions and prohibited sentiments that are still bottled and bootlegged in the early films. He became an authority on camp, that pernickety little frill of taste that bored and irritated her. It was his companionship with Charlie that remained the one sustaining feature of their life together.

  That Charlie was Pete Seltzer all over again—or would have become so had he been let—was almost comically obvious. He looked, acted, thought like Pete. He had the same large, rather loose-jointed frame, the same long legs and arms that Pete had allowed to grow soft and flabby (except for the bursts of exercise inspired by a new attachment). He had the same bright blue eyes and the same wide mouth combined in the same rather shifty expression, though how much of that was heredity and how much imitation was a question, as it always is in familial resemblances. Pete was certainly his hero, and he a willing disciple. He laughed like a fool over all of Pete’s jokes. The recent thundershower had been the only relief in a drought now in its second year, and people were losing lawns, shrubs and valuable old trees right and left. Wells were going dry by the dozen. “Into each life some rain must fall,” Pete said philosophically, and they both guffawed like oafs, though it was doubtful whether Charlie really got the point. He laughed because his parents did, though his mother shook her head as she did so. He took all his cues from Pete. Left momentarily alone in the front office of a nursery where they had gone to buy a Christmas tree, Pete swiped a batch of invoice blanks he saw lying on the counter, and on these they typed out whopping bills for plants and landscaping service, in stitches as they imagined friends and neighbors, to whom they sent them, opening them and getting the nursery on the phone to raise hell and ask what this was all about. Gertrude and Burt Wilson were mailed a bill of eleven hundred dollars for the construction of a retaining wall. The “mistakes” were undoubtedly rectified, but identical statements went out the first of the next month, marked “Overdue” and “If remittance is not received within ten days we shall turn this over to a collection agency.”

  They invented nonsense products, like Pete’s reversible mayonnaise—things like collapsible popcorn, dehydrated water and what not. Charlie sought Pete’s approval more in matters relating to the antic world they now all inhabited than for school grades, for Charlie was an indifferent student at best. They let him do his homework in the living room, while they read and drank. He would sit at a table wearing some crazy headpiece or other garment remaining from the day’s play, as boys will, or with beer cans still clamped to his shoes. Once he sat with his feet hanging into an empty bushel basket. He would inevitably look up from the lessons that bored him, and offer a contribution to the swelling store of “end” products. “Hey, Pete, how about fireproof pickles? Pete?” Knowing what was up, his teachers gave him straight A’s and B’s.

  Tillie thought him rather like the boy leading the horse in the Picasso painting, not because there was that much physical resemblance, but because the boy in the picture was an idealization without sentiment or fakery—he was no Blue Boy—and, perhaps equally, because he was there to be relished in his nakedness, as she had so often cherished Charlie. She could remember the feel of him when she had bathed him as a baby, laughing as he tried to wriggle from her slippery grasp. He had more true zest than Pete, more quicksilver, more fire—what the doctor called a kinetic child. He sprang from bed every morning with an erection you could hang your hat on, eager for the day, washing and brushing without being told, neatly tucking into his briefcase the schoolbooks he did little justice to otherwise. His room was neat, all his treasures in their accustomed places, though taken down almost nightly for perusal. One of her most piercing memories would always be the night, toward the end of his remission, when she found him lying on his stomach on his bed, after his bath, poring over all his Scout patches and camp certificates and school citations. These had included a Physical Fitness Award. She could summon it up any time she wanted to skewer her heart, but for the most part she preferred to remember Charlie as he was before the suffering that defaced him: the naked lad leading the horse; the sweet, hard, still unopened bud of childhood; oh, my brave, bright, still seedless boy.

  He left them in the dead of winter. Snow was drifting down outside the hospital window where they sat beside his bed. Pete walked out, his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets, but she stayed to the end, like a sentry at his post, sparing herself nothing. No ghost would haunt her, bearing the prints of his needles, to say, “Could you not watch with me one hour?” She watched the last quivering breath drawn and then yielded up, the spirit with it. She stayed on even then, bending to kiss his cheek, to smooth back the hair from the battered face. She held him in her arms once yet before smoothing his pillow to lay him back. She was making the bed when a nurse came in and led her away, an arm around her shoulder. As though she needed support! She was perfectly in control of herself. Her heart was a hoard of unspoken curses. They would keep. She went calmly and efficiently through the red tape required by the hospital, before taking leave of it for her world of phantoms.

  She drove as they made their way home through whirls of thinning snow. It was early afternoon. Pete sat slumped in his seat, looking out the window. To a casual observer he would have seemed listless. Their voices, when they spoke to one another, were flat, reflecting little more of emotion than its exhaustion; at most, the inevitable relief at suffering ended. The grief itself was an old story. Death had, if anything, put an end to that too.

  It was only when they got home and had to discuss some kind of service with the local Congregationalist minister that they came to life. They had only attended his church twice, when Tillie’s mother was visiting them, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was willing not only to officiate, but to do anything they wished. He was fully prepared to intermingle his more or less standard readings from Scripture with poems of a secular nature, for people of a less believing turn of mind than his own. The verses from Edna St. Vincent Millay and Wallace Stevens which Tillie handed him somewhat strained this liberality, but he did not balk. He incorporated into his service also the prayer by Robert Louis Stevenson of which she was fond, because it appeared in a notebook that was a keepsake from her schooldays, and pressed on the good man as an example of the petitions that might validly be uttered by people who didn’t really think anyone was listening.

  “Purge out of every heart the lurking grudge,” it ran. “Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare us to our friends, soften us to our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavours. If it may not be, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another.”

  After that they filed quietly out, the thirty or forty of them, climbed into their cars, and, behind a motorcycle escort furnished by the town police, took Prince Charlie to his rest among the whispering pines at Evergreen.

  Six

  Tillie Seltzer had ordered a reluctant and somewhat bewildered minister to pray for gaiety and the quiet mind at her son’s funeral, simply because the words graced her favorite prayer. Yet when she saw the boy’s father managing slowly to recover that ideal, she felt her heart harden.

  Friends in time had coaxed them out to a party. She knew “periods of mourning” were a thing of the past, and
often hypocritical enough formalities, but the evening was a trial. She found herself mentally talking to Charlie while trying to hold up her end of actual conversations. “Darling, the tree deserts the leaf, not the leaf the tree, I know, I know. But I’m here with you. A scar forms, they say, and the leaf is abandoned, left to flutter to the earth, and to winter. But I’ll never abandon you. I’m with you always. This means nothing to me.” She felt sorry for those who were stuck with her, and really tried to pull herself together and weave her thread into the evening’s fabric. Pete seemed to have no trouble doing so, especially after getting himself knit up with a redheaded woman in a corner, with whom at one point she overheard him exchanging a joke. The president of Anaconda Copper heard about Tijuana Brass and wanted to take it over. Why resist life’s remorseless resumptions, or begrudge another’s living as he must? Why doubt Pete was feeling the same pain as hers, since she presented the same exterior as his?

  What went through his mind as he slipped into bed beside her that night? He saw that she was crying, and retreated. She was certainly far less to be wooed than comforted. Putting forth the claims of the flesh seemed to her that much more forgetful; making love the final betrayal of Charlie. She flinched at the thought, steeled herself against it, as against another kind of defloration. It would be letting the dead bury their dead, at last and in truth, something against which her whole being rebelled. But neither could one forever deny her husband.

  Her dialogues with Pete were full of the futile “Why’s?” of parental sorrow. “Do you think there’s any point to the whole thing?” she would say, knowing she was boring everyone, almost bored herself. She hardly expected answers from Pete, knowing the absurdity of trying to make a philosopher of him. But he knew she was shopping for comfort, and did his best to deliver the merchandise.

  “Of course there’s point. Look all around you, the patterns,” he said. “It’s the words we try to do the thinking with that gum the thinking up. Would you think whether life had any meaning if it wasn’t for the word meaning? It would never occur to anybody. So try to forget it. Think of other words. Any words. Make some up.”

  “Then you’re an Existentialist,” she said, as though accusing him of intelligence heretofore kept concealed from her.

  “Ah, I think it’s the name of an insurance company.”

  “Promise me?” She smiled like a child, trying to recover some of their lost playfulness, even as she batted tearful eyes.

  “Cross my heart.”

  “Will I see Charlie again?”

  “Of course you will. There’s a lot of new evidence about that. That the societies for psychical research and all are getting. You never know. We don’t know anything. I was reading the other day where astronomers have discovered some strange blue particles in the Milky Way they didn’t know were there. So cheer up.”

  He yawned over his breakfast coffee, snapping his mouth shut with a groggy shake of his head.

  “I mean if nothing is certain, then everything is possible,” he went on. “The whole universe is mysteries to be unlocked, if we can swing it, and I think we can. It’s like a great heartbeat, is the latest thinking on that. It expands and contracts at intervals of eighty-two billion years. Isn’t that terrific? So buck up. What the hell.”

  He went to get his shoes out of the refrigerator. They were a new pair slightly too large, and he thought chilling them overnight made them fit a little more snugly.

  “I expect I’ll be home late again tonight,” he said, bending over to tie them. “Some reports suddenly to rush through to some poop in South Jesus, Idaho, or somewhere. If we don’t get them to the firm by Friday, our names will be Rosenstern and Guildencrantz.”

  “Stay in town all night if you want,” she said, looking at her fun-house reflection in the coffee pot. “I mean I don’t mind.” She poured herself some more coffee. “Even if you’ve got somebody. You’ve got to live, I know. I’ve no right to starve you just because I’ve lost my appetite.”

  “You can’t eat a thing?” he said gently, holding up his coat and using the other hand as a whisk broom to brush it with. “Well, not that it’s my night to howl, or anything, but it might be best to stay in rather than take the milk train. That wakes you up too.”

  He stayed in three or four times, and then came home one night to say he’d heard of a two-room apartment they could sublet from an office colleague bound for a temporary post abroad. “I think you should get out of here and into town more again. We’ll see some shows. Or just shop. But get out of here.”

  They took it, and she joined him a few times. But as she lay in bed listening to the traffic in the streets she was haunted by the thought of her empty house, no one in it at all now, none there to hear the laughter and the footsteps echoing through it that she could, or the child’s voice crying to be remembered. Pete would find her weeping silently into her pillow, but there was nothing he could do. His hand on her shoulder meant nothing, save as a touch subtly threatening a caress, a caress an overture. Grief was indivisible. It could not be shared. She had nothing to say. Fairly, she did not complain when he returned late even to that bed. She never asked for an explanation. She went back to the country, leaving him his pied-à-terre.

  It was when she was finally alone, not just alone in the house, but alone, that she discovered the ability of grief to accommodate gaiety, or at least to alternate with it, a contradiction that distinguishes it from depression. Merely gloomy people don’t laugh, but sorrowing ones can, and often do. Depression is not an emotion, grief is, and one that can sting all the rest into new life. Tillie would drink to numb her mind a little, then suddenly find her spirits rising as she resumed the conversation with Charlie, often with her favorite symphonies going full-blast on the phonograph.

  “The first time I laid eyes on your father I knew he was something,” she told him aloud as she went about her chores, “but what, remained to be seen. He’s probably a bastard with a heart of gold, may be as good a way of putting it as any. You remember what I said about the way he ridicules everything, and nobody. Here’s another case in point. One evening when Reverend Pangborn called on Grandma when she was sick, you may remember it, we sat in the parlor where we could overhear the conversation between them in the bedroom. They were talking about the mice we had, and after a few minutes it penetrated us that Grandma was saying something that could only mean she thought mice were baby rats. I can still see the look that came into Pete’s eye as he put the newspaper down. It meant that he hoped it was so. And it was. We talked about it. But amused as he was, he didn’t laugh at her. He simply relished another of the absurdities in which life happily abounds, and of which it may in fact be made. To be enjoyed. He sort of pans the river of life for such nuggets. He would tell them on himself too. There was this secretary he had who called him Pete. Then suddenly after a couple of lunches she began calling him Mr. Seltzer. He said, ‘But you used to call me Pete.’ And she said, ‘That was before I got to know you.’”

  It would be wrong to say she was depressed at such times. Her spirit was never more in flight. She would turn off the phonograph, lock up the house and set out for dinner in some restaurant where she could sit alone in a corner and watch the others as she nursed a drink and dawdled over her food. She was particularly aware of the tone set by any family party. Parents bored or impatient with their children made her want to go over and shake them by the shoulders, and ask them how long they thought they had together. She could imagine what she’d say. “We’re all on loan to one another, you know, the whole thing can be foreclosed without a moment’s notice.” Yet once when she saw a family happy with an idiot in its midst, her feelings suddenly reversed themselves—she wanted to rebuke their seemingly mindless oblivion to the outrage perpetrated upon them. But when she walked out she gave the poor thing a smile and a pat on the head, receiving a smile from the parents in return. What a mysterious gift was life in any form, even that lashed by loss into new intensities. When, however, she heard se
ntimentalists talking about “the precious gift of life” she wanted to say, “This life is no gift. It is a purchase, paid for as we go, at prices often scandalous.” Perhaps her dissatisfaction with the banality of the words drove her thoughts back out of the Yea column into the Nay. She usually found herself better at saying Nay: “Don’t try to buy me off with spring flowers, or falling snow, or young May moons. I want to stay mad.”

  It was Gertrude Wilson who got her out of the dumps and the clouds between which she knew she rather precariously alternated, and back onto something like solid ground. She did so by reinvolving her in the petty nuisances of everyday life. Good old Gertrude! There are things for which the cares that infest the day are better than nights filled with music.

  She phoned to invite Tillie to lunch, after a long silence during which she had been vaguely reported as “away somewhere.” Even as Tillie caught sight of her across the restaurant she knew she’d had her face lifted. She certainly looked under forty now, though suspected to be past fifty. “How much?” Tillie wondered again, with a spasm of envy. No one knew. No one had ever been able to get to the bottom of Gertrude’s age. No catch questions, such as are craftily framed to make you spill the beans inadvertently, or extract the truth by indirection, ever tripped her up. She could smell a mile off those queries about the first President you voted for, or whether you were in school when so-and-so taught English there, or such-and-such a song was popular, and parried them with the most incredible ease and the nimblest footwork. She was a match for any woman Tillie knew, and Tillie had overheard and participated in some catty discussions on the subject. “I’m younger but I look older. Certainly now, God knows,” she thought.