I'm Dying Laughing

by Christina Stead

  ‘Well, I know those, the mink coats torn in the rush for the caviar. And the caviar! Pyramids of the real McCoy piled in cutglass dishes the size of washbowls. They won’t leave till dawn. Ah, me. Gone are the days,’ said Emily.

  ‘Des? Is it Des Canby?’ said Stephen.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Des! Oh, marvellous,’ cried Emily, clapping her hands. ‘We haven’t seen Des Canby since the UNO meeting in 1945. Is he here? Why didn’t he call on us? Oh, he must come home and stay with us. He’ll tell us whether you can go to Europe and when.’

  ‘Lilias wants to meet you. She read Uncle Henry,’ said Maurice, politely, to Emily.

  ‘It gets me down the people who want to meet me because I’m selling stories by the piece or pound, like sausages. I’m always embarrassed with such people. I’m gladsome, I grin and all the time I’m thinking, I’d gladly choke you.’

  ‘Why should you feel that? Surely you like admiration,’ said Charlotte, the English cousin.

  ‘Now you help out in hospitals, voluntary work; why do you do that? Is it for admiration?’ said Emily.

  Charlotte indifferently was eating hors-d’oeuvre. She took a little white wine. A thin string of diamonds which she wore only in the family ran softly round her faded olive neck. Emily’s eyes gleamed. She began to laugh, slewing her eyes at Maurice, who was dressed, slim and neat, by a French tailor. She said, ‘Then Lilias does not care for you at all, Maurice? You haven’t had a single best seller. Only an honourable mention in scholarly papers. And footnotes in the standard works.’

  Maurice smiled and said in his discreet, chattering style, ‘Lilias asked me why I wasted my time on that old stuff. If I must write, why write about archaeology? Why not something modern? Something people are interested in, that would sell better. “Why don’t you write in the magazines, so that I can show my friends?” she said.’

  Dr Edward Tanner, a cousin, said, ‘Well, you know, there might be something for you to do Maurice, about our most recent ruins. All Europe’s a ruin now. And plenty buried, bones and jewels. They’re all antiques now.’

  Maurice did not like Edward Tanner. He said softly, ‘But surely, Tanner, Europe’s out of date, horse-and-buggy. You wouldn’t read about it.’

  Edward drank his second glass of white wine, ‘Oh, surely, that’s wrong. I go to Europe every year when there’s peace, we visit the medical congresses and the British Association. Surely you can’t claim they’re wholly behind the times. I would lay it down as a general rule that Europeans invent but we manufacture, use, develop and apply. Take penicillin and radar and DDT.’

  Emily objected, ‘Surely you can’t mean those has-beens invented penicillin and radar and DDT. Those are pure American inventions.’

  Edward laughed and said otherwise.

  Stephen said, ‘You read a Russian encyclopaedia and you’d find they invented them, no doubt.’

  Emily said, ‘I can’t believe it. They maybe got some little angle. But Ed, the diagram of a steam-engine isn’t a steam-engine and the fantasy of Odysseus flying through the air, I mean Briareus—’

  ‘Icarus,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Isn’t aviation.’

  But now Lilias and Desmond Canby appeared, and all began to rejoice.

  ‘Let’s have lobster mousse and more wine,’ said Maurice.

  ‘Oh, we have enough,’ objected Anna.

  ‘No, let’s have more.’

  Emily laughed, ‘Quite right, what’s the purpose in moderation? What shall it profit a man if he eat a sour crust and gain a long snout? Oh, I should love to be joyous. Bless you, Maurice. It’s so miserable to calculate, cut corners, suppress, deny and yawn. It fills me with fury. What I have to take in humility, I give out in pure fury, pure rabid hate. Let’s have everything in quantity. Maurice, you know communists believe in that. They think the world’s a granary and why shouldn’t we all eat?’

  Lilias, a big young woman dressed in white lace, said, ‘Like rats. They want to eat what doesn’t belong to them and what they didn’t grow.’

  Emily burst out laughing, ‘Well, doesn’t the world belong to the rats?’

  ‘Rats are rats,’ said Lilias.

  Emily said seriously, ‘Roaches are older than rats. I read somewhere that they are the oldest living things, ginkgo trees, too.’

  ‘Ugh’, said Anna.

  They were serving out the lobster mousse. Maurice said, ‘Let’s see how you like this, Emily. I thought of you! Stephen, I never count on. He always has something wrong with him, but you’re the dream of a man who wants to give a banquet. Lobster mousse; later you’ll have chicken. I know you’ll stay the courses.’

  ‘And there’s the champagne,’ said Lilias.

  Emily kept giving out creamy laughs, ‘Oh, I know I shall go out looping the loop. But I shall do justice to your splendid, poetic, wonderful banquet, Maurice. I love you, Maurice: you’re appreciated in this quarter. Oh, dear, if I am a sort of candidate for the tumbrils in the end, still it is worth it. I can see why they did it.’

  ‘Why are you a candidate for the tumbrils?’ enquired Charlotte.

  ‘Oh, dear, the company I keep. You dear people, in fact; and the things I eat. The workers will get me yet.’

  ‘You are a donkey, Emily,’ said Stephen, beginning to laugh.

  ‘Why, what are you laughing at?’

  ‘At the way you see an ordinary birthday party.’

  ‘Lobster and champagne. There was a time when I had them every night; but that was when I was working the fashionable restaurants. I see behind the scenes. Why shouldn’t I see both sides? Tumbrils coming and going.’

  Emily began to laugh heartily, the three other women seemed less amused, and Lilias said angrily, ‘The workers in America are really just capable of anything, of any crime, to be greedy and lazy and I don’t believe you know what you’re talking about. I do. They’re vicious and dangerous and I think you’re crazy to go to these meetings and even go anywhere near them. I told Des so. You’re just children playing with fire.’

  Edward Tanner said, ‘No, writers see, but they can’t do anything about it; so they fret about it more. We’re professionals, or people running businesses; we govern workers and it’s a practical problem every day.’

  Emily said with admiration, ‘How ingenious! There’s a lot in that.’

  Lilias said, ‘Well, take my opinion. I’ve met official Reds and people who know them. I know the embassy crowd in Paris and what they tell me would make your eyebrows turn purple. And Americans are bad enough but when it comes to Europe, especially the French, what they need is discipline, hard treatment. As soon as the Germans quit, the French start rioting again. They’re monsters and you’ve no idea of what goes on over there, in Belgium and France.’

  ‘She hears the tumbrils, too,’ said Emily grinning.

  Charlotte said, ‘I don’t believe in tumbrils. The French had them but no one else will. I really see the people, more than you do, Lilias. I went all round England in wartime and for the most part, they’re quiet, too quiet and easy to deal with. Well, I mean the English people. I think it’s a question of dealing with them. They do anything we tell them to, in the main.’

  Edward said, ‘The trouble is there are too many of them. It would not be a bad idea to spread a few biological diseases that would gradually weed out the weak ones. We need strong workers. Take places like South America, Puerto Rico. Get rid of them and start again. They are such poor stock, if all the money in the USA were turned to treating them, you’d get nowhere. With the US counselling and aiding, we should start again there. We could even send our own Negroes who have been reared here in the United States’ conditions and plant them there. We’d get rid of our problems and make South America healthier and easier to deal with. They’d understand us. Instead of sending all the State Department health visitors, the journalists and professors. They just get infected with the moral diseases down there. I’ve been down there with a medical party and I assure you there’
s nothing to be done except to treat them as a museum of pathology. Apart from their clinical value for us, they have no reason for living. It’s not worth all the time it takes to go through medical school and all these years of experience to make a slight improvement in a case of yaws. It’s a waste of medicine and men. Let’s bomb them out with some germ easy to die with and restock the place. We can do it.’

  ‘By golly, Ed, I call you a regular Nazi,’ said Emily.

  Charlotte wagged her head and fixed Edward with her deep, tired eyes. ‘I grant this biological warfare has its uses. Why not wipe out all the germs that are no good, that our children can catch, infantile paralysis and diphtheria and whooping cough, lice and roaches. Why I think it’s degrading for us to let them live. You could wipe out the ants and bugs, but other people, Edward, I wouldn’t subscribe to that. Even the Nazis didn’t do that; well, not entirely.’

  ‘If you wipe out people where do you stop?’ enquired Emily loudly.

  ‘What I like about you communists is you’re such romantics, it’s the human race first last and always, even criminals and diseased natives,’ said Lilias furiously. ‘And then you parlour reds, like Des and you and Stephen, you make things worse by letting them think they have friends among decent people; that gives them encouragement. I don’t know what the FBI is doing. I don’t sleep at night. I wake up, get into a sweat and walk up and down. I wonder what the hell it’s all about. I wonder if I’m crazy or you are. Look, you kids don’t know, that’s all, what the workers are like. They like the way they live. You give them more money, they spend it on drink and joy-rides. They don’t want to live decently like us; it would kill them.’

  Stephen said, ‘Me, too. It kills me. It’s all wrong.’

  Lilias looked at her cousin and said, ‘Frankly, Stephen, you make me sick. One whiff of those gentry and you’d fall right over backwards. Why don’t you pick out a nice cellar in Chinatown and go and make love to gun-molls with lice in their hair? I know a man from Poland whose brother was carried off in the middle of the night and no one has heard of him since. This man from Warsaw introduced me to a lot of people who were over there and know. This Mr—I can’t pronounce his name—said he saw the reds put out a man’s eyes and left him to stagger through the street with bleeding eyes. No one would feed him, because they were afraid. At last someone in the middle of the night led him across the frontier and now he weaves baskets as a blind weaver in Vienna. One of his friends was kept in jail for five months and questioned every day. They patiently tortured him trying to get him to confess that he’d sabotaged by working for the Germans as a spy.’

  ‘Well, did he?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Stephen. How do I know? And I wouldn’t blame him. I would do anything myself to get them.’

  ‘So you mean he was a spy?’ said Stephen.

  ‘I mean you don’t know what they’re capable of. You never listen to my stories, for instance. I was told at the Ruritanian Embassy the other night—you don’t know what crimes the French underground are committing. The Germans are justified in what they’re doing. A man absolutely above suspicion, was taking a night walk and a German sentry was found in the Seine. The Resistance was guilty but that man and fifty others, innocent, good citizens were taken. The Resistance were simply provocateurs. I call that mass murder. And then three ladies, I actually heard of, were taken in a car across the Finland border and were stripped and murdered in cold blood, for no other reason but that they lived in a private house and had two servants. That’s a crime according to your famous reds.’

  Stephen laughed wildly, ‘Oh, really, Lilias, you don’t sincerely believe that these ladies were dragged about naked and then shot.’

  ‘I know for certain they were dragged screaming from their houses and their servants shot as collaborators because they were working for the rich; they were all taken, servants and ladies and stripped for jewels and shot.’

  Stephen laughed.

  ‘Do you really think it’s funny?’

  ‘Look at my fangs dripping with ladies’ blood,’ said Stephen.

  Lilias said, ‘You’re kidding? Well, don’t kid so fast. I’ll live to hear you goddamning the day you ever knew one of them.’

  ‘Listen, Lilias, a little reason. Here we all live, automobiles and fur coats and orange-juicers and servants and the workers don’t have that. Maybe they want pediatricians for their children; they don’t want to drink blood.’

  Lilias said, ‘All that is no excuse for killing people in cold blood. There are a lot of things I want but I don’t hold up people in the street. I’m astonished at you, Stephen, defending muggers and knifers.’

  Stephen said angrily, ‘If you need a job at any time, Lilias, you (can probably get one as a reporter in the yellow press; only I warn you there’s a lot of competition in your line of political romance.’

  ‘Stephen,’ said Emily.

  ‘It’s my own lousy family, I don’t have to take it,’ said Stephen.

  Charlotte was not talking. She was bent over her plate of roast chicken, which she was deftly and rapidly consuming. She finished it long before the others and sat there self-contained as always with her brilliant, still, nervous look. Adeline was fond of Stephen and there had been talk of a marriage. She smiled at him; Lilias was truculent.

  ‘If it were not for your labour unions, Steve, we would not have to have spies and security police and goons and strike-breakers. Look at the extra expense for industry! In the USA people are happy unless someone makes trouble. There’s enough for anyone if we have industrial peace. I know the men in our own business. We have to have company police and they have to be armed; it’s a kind of private army, and there’s an arsenal, guns, gas. That’s all your fault, Stephen. People are working and you make them greedy. You can make anyone want what isn’t theirs with your kind of hot air.’

  Charlotte said, ‘Well, I don’t see it that way. They have rights, the workers, I mean. I’m really on their side. I’m really with Stephen.’

  Lilias said, ‘Then you’re a pair of nitwits or hypocrites or traitors, or all that.’

  Stephen turned pale. Emily began to laugh and glitter, in a hurry. ‘I was with the police once! Yes. I was out with the state police on a story in the San Bernardino. They let me ride in their car. I was alone, I had to get the story. There was a packers’ strike, oakies were in it and oakies were news as well; goons were roaming round the orchards and the packing plants, getting in the way of strike-breakers and strike-breakers getting in the way of the cops. No one knew who anyone was. I shrank literally from going on the story; but I had to get inside and find out what was going on; so I went with the cops.’

  ‘But your sympathies were with the strikers,’ said Charlotte simply.

  Emily laughed with unsteady heartiness, ‘Oh, I don’t know what I was then. I was just a working stiff, a crazy, knight-errant reporter, seeing life in the raw, scraping the seamy side, getting material for the Great American Novel. I had to do something like that. I was working my way through college.’

  ‘I didn’t know you did that. Edward did that,’ said Lilias.

  Emily continued with frenzied jollity, ‘Yes, yes, yes! Naturally a journalist’s sympathies are with the victims, not the oppressors, more with the corpse than the murderer, the sidewalk Venus than the man who picks her up. He’s got a safe job, she hasn’t. It’s a romantic viewpoint, the mysteries of the underworld, sorrows of the underdog.’

  Anna said, ‘Yes, I can understand that—in young people.’

  Stephen looked down at his plate. Emily said hurriedly, ‘Well I was looking down one of the apple-chutes and I slipped and rolled all the way down the chute with the apples! The cops had a gala day. Something funny happened! Put out the flags! I was their favourite girlfriend. Ha-ha-ha.’

  They laughed at this, except Anna who said, ‘There might have been a pulper or a parer at the bottom.’

  Emily laughed heartily, ‘Yes, there might have been: that’s the joke. Ther
e was some kind of chute leading somewhere, but I was too fat to go through.’

  Stephen laughed. He laughed and laughed.

  ‘You are laughing at me, Stephen!’

  ‘Because I love you.’

  He got up and went round the table to kiss the hair that curled round her ear. He said, ‘She’s such a fool, that’s why I love her. I’m behaving like a schoolboy, Mother, but that makes me well. Makes me laugh.’

  ‘You laugh?’ said his mother, not understanding.

  Edward said, ‘We need the cops, I don’t care how many J. Edgar Hoovers there are in the world. We need protection. We’re producing enormously and the world needs production. Look at Europe now. They need everything we can give them. All strikes should be stopped. We’re just encouraging greedy, inefficient people to think they can benefit themselves by halting production.’

  ‘I’ll say for you, Edward, you never stop, you’re never diverted,’ said Stephen. Lilias was well ahead of the others in her drinks, flushed and confident.

  ‘I can pay for what I want, for everything I want. So I’ve got no questions to answer to anyone. I didn’t steal it. I’m not in debt. I’ve never been in debt. If I didn’t work, my grandfather and my father and my brothers and my husband worked and they made enough to keep me. Out of their honest labour, I’m honest. I don’t fall for that honest sweat line. The reds don’t want anyone to benefit from work; and that’s the story streamlined without a lot of talk. I get by. I’ve always done every damn thing I wanted; but I never ran into the law. If you do that, it’s because you want to.’

  Anna said to Stephen, ‘But Lilias is right. You must have aspiration.’

  Lilias said indistinctly, ‘These damn unionists with their reds come along and want to take my father’s and my grandfather’s and my husband’s hard-earned cash. I stand by them even if my husband left me, the schwanz.’

  ‘Wanze is the word you want,’ said Stephen.

  Lilias giggled, ‘OK, I got the wrong number. Castration was a slip of the tongue, doctor.’

  Anna blushed. Charlotte looked with an enquiring smile, ‘Is that a joke I don’t know?’