Maggie's Farm

by Sherry, John;

  We sailed for Naples a few weeks later.

  CHAPTER III

  By the time our boat arrived in New York, my brother and O’Hara had fulfilled their plan and had rented a house on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. It had been arranged that we would go there after our arrival and Dorothy and the baby would stay with them while I scoured my circumscribed area of the south looking for a job on a farm.

  We remained in the environs of New York City for a few days first, staying with my wife’s sister in New Jersey. There were a few pressing administrative problems to take care of, notably the purchase of an automobile. Trying as always to strike a balance between the demands of style and practicability, I bought a splendid Ford station wagon, one of the last if not the last, model to be made with a body of genuine wood. It antedated those steel monsters designed to appeal to the burgeoning rash of suburban euphoria and pleased me mightily. It was, alas, doomed to come to a grotesque, comedic end, but for the moment, we were content. Luckily—as I did not know a tappet from a piston—it was sound; its previous master seemingly having been a gentle one.

  I spent one rather dreamlike day in New York City. I went alone, Dorothy having elected to remain and gossip with her sister. I made arrangements to have lunch with my old friends, Pennebaker and Douglas Wood, at a restaurant in the West Fifties. But first I fulfilled the ostensible business reason for the day; to pay a call upon Hiram Haydn, the editor of my novel. He was still at Bobbs-Merrill then but would move shortly to Random House. He had brought on a star turn in William Styron’s first novel, “Lie Down in Darkness” and his publishing career was very much in the ascendant. Our meeting was not a success; I was truculent and unsure of myself as one is prone to be with a still-undigested failure under one’s belt. And, foolishly enough, I was somewhat prepared to blame Haydn for the failure of my book; one’s subjective essence is a treacherous quality. We parted uneasily, Haydn assuring me that anything I did in the future would receive total consideration. He was politely interested, no more, in my plan to be a farmer. It was, I had discovered by then, a quest too far removed from what passes as reality, to interest others much. I suffered then from a fallacy which has still not been entirely rooted out: that my life is as interesting to others as it is to me. “Don’t bother me,” Frank O’Connor had said once when I was pestering him about his hopes, beliefs and dreams, “The only thing I know about people is that they think they’re pretty good.”

  On the way to meet Penny and Douglas, I anticipated what would almost certainly be a bibulous luncheon by taking on a few drinks. I must confess that the city frightened and unnerved me. Its hardness and its frenetic energy had been forgotten during three years in Europe’s softer, more ambivalent psychological climate. I remember that day turning to look at a pretty girl as she passed and, as a result, caroming into a fellow pedestrian approaching from the opposite direction. As I turned instinctively to apologize, his lips bared themselves in a snarl. I felt a flash of anger which passed away as soon as I looked into his eyes. They were wide with terror. It reassured me somehow that the farming quest was right and proper.

  In that inhospitable frame of mind towards New York, I came to the restaurant where we had arranged to meet. It was dusty, empty, obviously defunct. Is this a joke, I wondered, have I got the place wrong? Then I saw with relief that there was a message to me inscribed in the dust of the window; come to G’s, same place uptown one block. I obeyed and found them gathered around a table. It was a happy reunion. With them was Douglas’ fianceé, a magazine editor with whom I was not acquainted. They would marry and then divorce. Douglas would die as would she. And Penny would achieve a portion of the stardom we all sought.

  Those things were far away and problematical that day. It was a long, wet and cheerful meal. Finally, Douglas and his girl went away. Penny, then working for an advertising agency and not taking it too seriously decided that a return to his office was unthinkable; the day was shot. We decided to visit our old friend, Barbara Hale, then convalescing from her second bout of TB in an uptown hospital. We took a case of beer with us, smuggling it up the back stairs. The visit was not a success. We were too loud and Barbara did not find me sufficiently vehement about Senator McCarthy. Eventually, we were asked to leave by a crisply starched nurse who found our boisterousness unsuitable to the sick room. On the way out, we stopped to see my friend Mac from Tangier. He was concealing his true nature and fearful that I would make some ribald reference to his pederasty. “They’re not on to me here,” he said glancing nervously around. (I could not help thinking of an afternoon he and I had once spent drinking together in the small Moroccan town of Berrechid—known as, Bearshit, of course, by all English speakers. Within an hour of sitting down at our cafe table, Mac had been surrounded by small Berber boys. “They were on to me in a matter of minutes,” he said, his eyes twinkling happily.)

  The next day we drove to Washington in our splendid wooden car, the baby cooing away happily in the back. Without too much difficulty, we found the house that O’Hara and my brother had rented. It was rather a charming house, located in Maryland on the periphery of suburbia not far from the banks of the old Cumberland Canal.

  The week I spent in that house before taking the road south was not what I would call a happy time. There was one fistfight of a rather half-assed variety from which I emerged with a black eye. Now, I believe the strife which came to the surface was territorial in origin; the presence of Dorothy and the baby excited it; particularly in O’Hara, for whom life without a woman was not only physically difficult but symbolic of defeat. It was not that O’Hara was bothered by any imperative need to possess Dorothy physically (although he certainly would not have been averse to such a thing). It was rather that the very trust she granted me filled him with despair; it was the one basic, all important gift which his various women had always withheld from him and which I believe it is safe to say they always will. I remember one brief interchange while we were staying with O’Hara in Maryland which threw a harsh light on his interior workings. He was attempting, with frequent success, to get at me through questions aimed at Dorothy and couched in tones of weary contempt. “What is it that you see in him?” he asked her one day. Her answer, given after due deliberation was: “He’s fun to sleep beside.” O’Hara grew silent and, a moment later, left the room. He was, above all things, precise in his use of the language. Had she said, “sleep with”, he would have hooted with laughter and considered his ploy to have been a total success. But in her use of the word “beside”, Dorothy reminded him that woman’s love is rooted in trust and, in doing so, laid bare the essential cancer of his being: the fear that he would never be loved by a woman. O’Hara was wise enough to know that a woman who does not rest easily by a man’s side is planning either her own escape or his destruction.

  Have I loved O’Hara? Perhaps it is one of the questions I am trying to answer in setting down this record. Shared experience is a strong glue and we have been through much together. He did not meet Dorothy until shortly after our marriage. We traveled then to San Francisco where O’Hara was living. It was our intention to settle in that city but somehow the chemistry was not right. One either believes in California or one does not. My own feelings about it have always been perfectly expressed by Darroch’s terse judgement: “It’s too far away”. Admittedly, we did not try terribly hard to find a foothold in San Francisco; when O’Hara (with whom we were staying) brought up the idea of going to Mexico, we fell in with it. We had wild plans of finding employment there and settling down. None of which worked out. It was a trip which ended up leading us far afield.

  O’Hara, Dorothy and I had set out for Mexico during midwinter of 1949. Our combined assets totalled about two hundred dollars plus the decrepit Ford convertible in which Dorothy and I had driven west. Mexico threw us off as definitely as had San Francisco. The letters to such dignitaries as Diego Rivera with which O’Hara had armed himself produced nothing beyond polite invitations to tea. After two weeks, ou
r money nearly gone, we streaked for the border, frightened lest we be stranded in that violent, colourful land whose language we did not understand.

  It was during those days and the days which lay ahead that I took my first fumbling steps towards being married. The ceremony had taken place two months before, but that formality is, at best, only a symbolic beginning. I marvel still at the faith which could lead my wife to place her life in the hands of a man whose nearest approach to an intellectual position was anarchy and whose announced determination was never to work another day at a steady job. I had told her of my desire to be some kind of a writer of books and, in all honesty, I felt a strong measure of confidence in my ability to do so. The specific evidence of such a bent, however, was lacking. But my wife’s childhood—so awful to me that I still stand in awe of it—had provided her with a lodestone of character which has brought me back from many wrong turnings. Her mother dead when she was nine, her father a hopeless drunken derelict, she had been wholly on her own since she was sixteen, earning her way through the small Lutheran college she attended, with jobs as a waitress. That strange place (attended also by Fitzgerald’s Gatsby) attempted to inculcate a standard of moral rigidity so high as to be almost abstract. (Girls—and I do not joke about this—were earnestly enjoined by the Dean of Women to turn all photographs of their boyfriends to the wall while undressing.) At the time when O’Hara and Dorothy and I set out upon our travels, she was a human being whose potentialities were greatly obscured by prejudices and rigidity. O’Hara, nihilistic by nature and anarchistic by design, had been palling around with people like Henry Miller when my wife was toting in the blue-plate special. Being a beautiful girl and aware of it, she was beyond any real harm from him, but, from the first, he poked constant and merciless fun at her. Frequently angry with him to a point of violence, she nevertheless used his knowledge and intelligence as a grindstone to whet her own. As he became aware of her ability to keep the gold and throw away the dross of their conflict, a respect for her was born which rapidly became friendship. By the time we reached New Orleans on our feckless flight from Mexico, both solidarity and cameraderie existed among us. It was a good thing, for some terribly hard and terribly funny times lay ahead of us.

  I fear that the impression I am giving of us is that of Jack Kerouac people; pre-beat, stone-age hippies. Nothing could be further from the truth; there was not a bohemian bone in any of our bodies. The area of unreality in which we operated was more dangerous than that. And yet, I am still somehow sympathetic to it. Like so many of my immediate generation, we were all Ernest Hemingway’s children. We wanted the festival at Pamplona for the first course and the Nobel prize for the second. We didn’t know yet that dessert would be the business end of a shotgun shoved into the mouth, but I imagine we would have shrugged it off if we had. Our desire to escape the strait-jacket of our middle-class past was so desperate that we had stopped to formulate no values for the future. That, I now believe, was the process in which we were engaged; the process in which all mankind is engaged. Blake’s axiom, “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise,” may contain the kernel of the only truth there is.

  Penniless when we reached New Orleans, we did a thing which now seems totally lacking in common sense but which, according to the peculiar arithmetic we were then employing, did not seem remarkable. We sold the car for 175 dollars and paid one month’s rent on a magnificent flat in the Quarter. Since the monthly rent was also 175 dollars, this left us with nothing but the sparse gleanings of pockets and pocketbooks, with which to eat. We began a search for work but it was not forthcoming. An appeal to my family brought only a stony rejection; the fecklessness of the preceding few months had been remarked. My stock in that direction, never more than moderately high, had sunk out of sight. O’Hara had had no concourse with his family for many years. Dorothy had only one tappable aunt who alas, had been tapped already from San Francisco.

  O’Hara and I turned out to be pitiful failures at finding work. My wife, more adept at survival by far, eventually found a dreadful job whose precise details I have always held at arm’s length. It had something to do with selling coffee or tea. While we waited out her first paycheck, I experienced real hunger for the first time in my life. It was while I was seeking work, and I became faint on a street in downtown New Orleans; faint and so dizzy that I had to sit down on a fireplug. When it happened, I was laughing at myself but the situation nevertheless seemed so desperate that I left my fireplug and went to the nearest Air Force recruiting office to inquire into the possibility of getting my commission back. A year later, the Korean war would have begun, and such a request would have been granted with celerity and dispatch; for the moment, thank God, I was rejected.

  O’Hara had convinced me that, barring all else, we would be able to get work as longshoremen, a calling he had followed sporadically in San Francisco. But we were not in San Francisco; we were in the South and in the South, nothing is more suspicious than a white man with the wrong accent and a troublesome veneer of cultural pretension. As longshoremen, we were a total bust.

  The hilarious evening of my wife’s first payday arrived. We were a long way from starving but we were dammed hungry. With great anticipation, we bought a huge package of stewing meat and vegetables. O’Hara, who fancied himself as something of a cook, volunteered to cook the stew; Dorothy and I breathed over his shoulder with jealous anxiety. At a crucial moment, O’Hara fumbled the salt cannister into the stew pot. Momentary rage and sadness swept over us all. We were on the brink of mutual recriminations when the humor of the situation struck home. Under normal conditions, the stew would have been so salty as to be uneatable; as things were, we wolfed it down, returning to the pot for thirds and fourths.

  Our search for employment finally led O’Hara and me to the nadir of experience: door-to-door salesman. Can anyone really call himself an American, I wonder, who has not dipped into that grotesque world? Deciding to take this momentous step, O’Hara and I dressed ourselves carefully in our best suits and reported to the place indicated in the newspaper advertisement. During the walk there, we laughed and joked with sardonic bravado but each, deep in his heart, felt that he was taking a definitive downward step on the scale of human value. Our firm was called The Realsilk Corporation; our wares: ladies stockings. The assembled applicants were a seedy lot—many, I am sure, driven there by complex sexual fantasies of favors casually bestowed by randy housewives. I myself confess to having allowed my mind such salacious play. About twenty of us assembled in a sort of classroom, the air thick with fear. Each face wore the studied unconcern of a man in the waiting room of a whorehouse; each pair of shifty eyes betrayed the knowledge that their owner’s present position was somewhere near the bottom of the heap. Embarrassingly enough, our jocularity dried up; I felt my own eyes grow shifty and looked over to find O’Hara licking his lips apprehensively. The strange virus of competition infected the room. Would we be chosen? Or would we be rejected and so know that we had been beaten by better men? A rapid, cursory screening process ensued. We all breathed more easily as a few obvious derelicts were sent away, reassured in the human way because we were not at the very bottom of the heap. We were to undergo three days of intensive training in the peddling of our wares. Our mentor now entered, confident and assured—a man who clearly knew the secrets of the universe. A slight sigh of awe swept across the room; men reduced to such a position as ours can believe in anything.

  And, in truth, those fellows who muster the beaten and the botched to move their wares are not without interest. Terrible top sergeants of a nether world, masters of certain rude psychological techniques, they know how to instill a spurious hope, fan the coals of dying avarice and generally foment a highly temporary Kamikaze spirit of do or die. Generic descendants of W. C. Fields and the snake oil pitchman, they are American to the core. Our man spent the balance of the day painting a rosy picture of our futures; the sky, he frequently told us, is the limit. In spite of any particle of comm
on sense that I possessed, I found myself tempted to believe. As we walked home that afternoon, O’Hara and I were subdued and spoke of other things, each nurturing his own private Horatio Alger dream. Many great men had, after all, begun at the bottom.

  Our training proceeded and our euphoric glow continued warm; we rose early and shaved carefully anxious lest we miss a single particle of the wisdom being proffered us. Much reference was made to our “sales kits” which we would receive on the final day of our training. With the aid of such a magic box of tricks, it was intimated, no housewife’s door would be proof against our assault. Certain fundamental techniques were covered: the foot in the door, the pearly white smile which melts the heart. On several occasions, I surprised a fellow trainee as he practiced a sickly grin. The virus of competition was carefully nurtured by our instructor; vague, rather sinister references were made to fundamental inequalities of talent and determination which existed among us. These, we were warned, would determine the apportionment of “territories;” a good man would get a good territory, an average man an average territory; the dregs (among which I hoped desperately I would not be listed) would receive territories spoken of in such terms of gloom that one could only imagine some terrible slum wrapped in penury, vice and violence. One frequently heard such remarks as, “God,” I hope I get a good territory,” during the hourly breaks in which we smoked a cigarette. Hope filled the room along with a certain miasma of suspicion; we were, after all, men who were preparing to vie for prizes. That dank sea of McGuffey’s Reader cliches which exists in the subconscious of every American, rose to engulf us; all early birds got every worm; for the rest, defeat, despair and deserved oblivion. O’Hara and I were cool towards each other; we might turn out to be men of differing caliber—in which case, of course, an adjustment in our mutual regard would have to be effected. Each night, as we crept off to study our instruction manuals, my wife examined us with an air of wonderment.