Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  Oh that the hiccups had carried me off! Then would I sleep in the merciful dust. And the doctors as they go away shaking their heads, what shall we say of them now? What good all their learning, their degrees, their Fie Beta Kappa keys? All as nothing, nothing, before a soul in hell.

  TOM

  nine

  WHEN I WAS twenty and a senior at Polycarp I rather fancied one of the many fetching motorists to be seen driving about the campus and the town, often in convertibles. Such was the blue Buick that nearly ran me down as I walked across the gravel drive near the Administration Building, brushing my coattails as I sprang to safety on the wet winter sod. The incident ended a long period as a pedestrian, wandering about in a fume of provincial resentments and unaudited sorrows. The driver was a good sport about it, leaning from the car like a nymph in a cigarette commercial and offering me a lift. She was a senior too but new here, having switched to Polycarp because the philosophy head was an idealist and the climate here more congenial to her interest in comparative religion. That was her major. She was an ash blonde of medium height, with a small waist and haunches that turned observers ill with longing. Hysterical welts appeared on the palms of the Dean’s hands in his sleep, I believe. Need I no longer moan license numbers into my pillow?

  I am a prey to fantasies. I imagine that there are people on this planet named Max Planck. I imagine that all matter is reducible to units of energy whirling in submicroscopic orbit, of which balls of roaring gas form the delirious counterpart in outer space. I must curb these delusions or see a doctor. I sometimes fancy that I am supported on a jointed improvisation of Tinker Toy called “bones,” and then must pause and pass a hand across my brow till the conviction subsides. Where will it all end? Now I imagine that I am riding with an Evanston girl of good family in a contrivance propelled by the measured explosion of vaporized gasoline. Overhead cloacally powered jets streak across the continent in five hours while around us clothed mammals alternately lose and recover their balance in a regulated error known as “walking.” Ought I to seek professional help? Only a moment ago I was myself a pedestrian, who had thought the girl the property of a sculptor recently in residence at the college, a young Italian held to be already enormously gifted in the art of twisting metal into disagreeable shapes. A great future is envisioned for him. Dark-eyed, with glossy waves of black hair, he has that animal magnetism that can be so repellent, especially to another man. Who am I? A student without a car, let alone a chosen career. I was about to call my father a humble piano mover until I remembered the arrogance with which he practiced that occupation, which he could make sound as arcane as that of a concert pianist.

  “You mean. To sit there. And tell me,” the motorist is saying a few days later, her tongue sensuously coated with ice cream, for we have stopped in at Tony’s after a movie, “you mean to tell me that your mother picked up this candlestick from the table—”

  “Where my father was eating in his undershirt.”

  “I understand. And carried it to the sink to do the dishes?”

  “By its romantic light.”

  I had launched a series of questionings aimed at extracting as intimate details about her private life as possible—with this result. I was spilling my guts. I had ashamedly tried to hide my past, till I realized that nothing in her own Chicago Gold Coast childhood could begin to match it. She was absolutely fascinated. I was dining out on every gamey morsel of a heritage hitherto cloaked from snobs not secure enough in their own standing to dispense with the outward symbols of appearance. I appealed to her in a way that a prune-eyed wop with an acetylene torch never could. I dated other motorists, keeping one or two on the string, but this could be It. For me she was a kind of security, or anchor, or toggle. I got carried away with my subject.

  “My mother once said she was going to complain to the President about something—I forget what—and if that didn’t do any good she was going to write to Uncle Sam.” But the motorist, while not underestimating such a nugget, remains mesmerized by the preceding, the haunting tableau of the candlelight dinner.

  “Was she trying to be funny?”

  “That’s the thing. How will we ever know?”

  “Didn’t you ask her? I mean weren’t you curious?”

  “I was only eleven at the time. Twelve at the most. Oh. I forgot. My father once gave my mother a complete medical checkup for Christmas.”

  “Your mother’s still alive. Why don’t you ask her?”

  “You can’t go home again.”

  “But you still live there!”

  “What’s that got to do with it? Emotionally you can’t return to something. I have that truth rubbed into me every day precisely because I’m on the scene.”

  “Because if she was being funny, then there is a woman with a gift of irony second to none. If not …” The lovely motorist sighed. “Then life is too sad.”

  It is the latter note that now dominates my memory of exactly how my mother carried the candlestick to the sink, the put-upon note. Yes, I remember now the characteristic single sniff with which she set it down, the isolated snuffle so much more wearing to my father than outright tears would of been. Would have been. Living with unripened hysteria drove my father crazy. “Why don’t she break down and bawl for God’s sake, like any other woman. Have a good cry and get it over. No, she has to be a martyr, make me feel guilty. They’re all alike,” he would say, contradicting himself. “Make their husbands blow a gasket, like it stands in a lot of magazines, then wonder why they die young,” he went on, graphically warning that his own veins lacked the resilience for domestic life, and that she would one day wake up to find herself taking in washing.

  My father took a special interest in his bodily organs, and considered detailed accounts of their behavior and function to be equally fascinating to others. Apparently his food entered his stomach after being swallowed, where it was worked over by digestive juices and chemically altered for transmission to the intestines (of which he had several yards) and ultimate absorption into the bloodstream, for use as energy. It was a cycle in which he took pride, perhaps justly. He would invite us to watch him hold up half an orange and squeeze it dry in one fist, an act made possible, he explained, by the metamorphosis into energy of fruit and other foodstuffs assimilated in days gone by. His reproductive and urinary systems were entangled in an arrangement that taxed credulity.

  “Then why don’t you get down on your knees and thank the God who made you?” my mother would put in. “If you’re so wonderful. I should think you’d worship your Maker instead of sitting in taverns abusing the body he give you.”

  Later that month I was crossing the bridle path in the town park when a horse galloped into view without a word of warning and nearly ran me down. I wheeled about after leaping to safety and recognized the woman astride him. It was the motorist. There was no doubt about the tweed figure bent dramatically over the flying mane. Gaining the sidewalk after a plunge through some intervening shrubbery, I sprinted on through dense traffic to the security of the other side, where I fetched up before the window of an automobile agency. I wistfully took in the glimmering models, the hope of one day owning one a kind of fixed point of reference, or toggle. Something drew my attention from them. It was my own reflection in the glass. A dopey elongation of my face told me I was in love. Even the prospect of one day owning something out of which you could get no more than ten miles a gallon faded beside it.

  My hallucinations continued unabated, if not more feverishly than ever. One of the most overwrought of them I experienced the next evening at a violin concert. I had this weird idea that sounds felicitous to the human ear could be produced by a man trained to draw tautened strands of horsetail hair across the dried entrails of cats, arranged in groups of four on fluted wood. This is crazy, I said to myself. This has got to stop. But not even closing my eyes and giving myself to the strains of Mendelssohn could dispel the insane chimera. I gave my head a slight shake to rid myself of it, drawing a worried
glance from my friend in the seat beside me. The motorist again, as I knew without looking.

  Now an unnerving thing happened. Instead of being calmed by the hand laid on my arm my fantasies took on an even wilder tone. I imagined that her father had mounted her mother to produce her. That this was the manner in which the world was replenished. I had seen her parents, and these thoughts had got to stop. They were rum notions and no good would come of them. They were patently the product of a morbid mind. Nor were they the limits to the riot of fancy to which I was now subject. That invisible organisms infested the palm of my hand, that people joined mouths in unlighted places preparatory to exchanging lavish tributes to one another’s appearance, indeed protestations that they could not live without each other, these were among the other figments of my imagination. I am a sick man. I must make a genuine effort to return to reality.

  Afterward at Tony’s I remark, “How delightful for two people to break bread together, once in a while.”

  “They can do it every night.”

  “It’s not the same thing. We have it on the best authority.” Now I crane across the booth table and kiss the motorist, one of those long, eviscerating kisses from which I draw back and say, retrieving my necktie from the coleslaw, “It’s no good.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve told you how pious my mother was, and how I was dragged to those ghastly revivals that have so turned me against religion that I could never possibly be happy with anyone who believed in a supreme being, my dear Marion, as you do. Or make such a person happy. You’re Episcopalian I know, and while it is admittedly a pallid sect, nothing to it, and you’re not hidebound, I am. I should always be mocking and ridiculing something sacred to you, so that inside of six months …” With a gesture I evoke marriages demolished in that time by discordant intellectual outlooks. “Not that I don’t get a bang out of Jesus …”

  “That’s very interesting. Because the story is that you broke up with Sarah Feldman for the opposite reason. You could never marry an unbeliever, somebody from a freethinking family like hers, because you’re rebelling against a father who was a bigoted atheist.”

  “That is correct. I’m rebelling against both parents.”

  “In other words you have two upbringings.”

  “These two backgrounds, that I’m in revolt against.”

  There is more to it than the niggling matter of personal adjustment. There is the underlying reality of Everything As Such. The difference between a major truth and a minor one is after all simple enough. A major truth can be contradicted, while a minor one cannot. With trivial statements of fact such as “It’s raining out,” or “She’s taking a bath,” there can be no quarrel. But the large verities, like God is love, Life is good and Honor above all, stand each in the shadow of its opposite: there isn’t any, all is vanity, and honor is a word. Thus there are two sides to any question of any importance, and the only thing for an honest man to do is take both of them.

  “What about a middle course?”

  “Laodiceanism? That I particularly abhor. To the angel of the church of Laodicea write, ‘Because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth.’ No, don’t come to me with your tepid accommodators, committing themselves to nothing, willing to come to grips with nothing. Perhaps you’d better take me home.”

  The motorist sits back with the last of her glass of milk in her hand, to watch me. She drinks, her gray eyes never leaving my face, no change in her expression of thoughtful regard as she gulps the milk. She sets her empty glass down. “In other words, you’re a mess.”

  Tony’s is jumping tonight, and smilingly I watch a group dancing near the jukebox, the dregs of my coffee at lip. I drift to a particular aspect of the subject and talk about my father, filling the time while she eats the ice cream on which she again insists.

  “Why don’t you ask me in to meet your family?” she says. I stiffen against the back of the booth, like a condemned man through whom a current of electricity is being passed, my eyes shut. After a moment I resume the narrative on which I have embarked, and am not far along in it when I sense that I have again passed the point where I am documenting our incompatibility, and am once more kindling her fascination.

  “Wait. Hold on there a second. Let me get this straight.” She shoves dishes aside and leans forward with her arms on the table. “Do I understand you. To be telling me. That your father has been laid up with this hangover for nine years?” For dramatic emphasis she draws not only on this habit of spaced deliberation, which gives phrases and even single words the value of entire sentences, but also on an exaggerated enunciation, of a kind that makes “nine” come out something like a telephone operator’s: “niyun.” At crucial conversational junctures like this she talks as though we are communicating through a thick pane of glass and she has to make herself understood without being heard. “The same. Identical. Hangover?”

  “We’ve tried everything. Prairie oysters, massive injections of vitamin B, hair of the dog of course,” I answer offhandedly, modestly disclaiming that we Waltzes are all that special, “but to no avail. His condition remains unchanged. It is the same to this day.”

  She indulges in the average girl’s habit of sitting on her heels with her legs tucked under her, but in the process of shifting about she seems like some highly intelligent momentarily distracted young puppy, crawling about in search of a comfortable position. “And he has never left the house in all that time?”

  “That is correct. People are kind, and for a long while offered to take him for rides or sit with him and play cards, but eventually they forget. They have their own problems, and he says he can’t do any of those things, though you do see him read. And now I really think you ought to take me home.”

  “The symptoms stay exactly the same?” she says softly, as though a word too much, a single overemphasis will blow the wonder clean away.

  “The symptoms classic to hangover persist. Dizziness, nausea, headache—you know that katzenjammer just above the eyes.”

  “Yes of course, but I mean now wait.” She is now the intellectually kindled college senior. “You surely must have explored the possibility that it’s emotional. That he’s punishing somebody, or himself. Is he atoning for something?”

  “He’s too hung over. Waiter. Check.”

  “Now Tom, let’s stop this foolishness right away. When do I get to meet your parents? I introduced you to mine. I know they happened to be visiting the campus, it’s not quite the same thing. Still in all. Now when?”

  I lean my head against the wall, which is made of tin and painted the color of Pepto-Bismol. “How’s Saturday morning? I’ll give you a ring or something.”

  ten

  THE MOTORIST SPRANG up the cottage stairs two at a time, her head down and laughing to herself as though in anticipation of something. Where did I ever get the idea she was patrician? Perhaps from snapshots of her father’s horses. I had been watching for her at the front door, which I now rather testily opened by way of welcome. Grabowitzes, Wishnotskis and Yablonickies have come through this door in quantities, but never a Wellington. “Can’t you see we’re Poles apart?”

  “You wait here. I’ll bring him down. But first a few rules. Don’t ask him about himself—especially none of this atonement stuff—and don’t look at him directly, or do anything to make him self-conscious.”

  We descend the stairs at about the pace of a bridal party. My father staggers down them with his feet apart, as an aid to equilibrium, clinging to the bannister with one hand while steadying the icebag on his head with the other. I shall watch to see whether he doffs it at the sight of the caller, for doubts about his sanity are beginning to creep in. If I keep imagining that the light by which we now see Aldebaran left it at the time of Nebuchadnezzar, then I shall be ready for the cuckoo hatchery myself. No doubt about that. I am not pulling myself together at all. Yesterday I saw a man in the street trying to put out an umbrella that had caught fire. That
part was all right. Nothing unusual about that. But for a moment I thought that these details were being photographically registered on some kind of aspic embedded in two sockets in my head and transformed into comprehension by a scoop of albumin directly behind them, and that was scary. I had had to wait till the sensation passed.

  My father progresses by careful stages, making the necessary turns without turning his head, for vertigo is still his chief morning-after symptom. He sways against the wall of the living room along which he gropes, pausing occasionally to grasp an object of furniture. I hold his elbow lightly, my hand in readiness to do so more firmly if need arises. He doesn’t see the motorist, who stands at a table with her gaze bent over a magazine, idly letting the pages fall, her hair hanging along one side of her face. I adopt the shuffling rhythm of infirmity myself as we creep at snail’s pace toward my father’s chair, a wide armchair near the window which he backs painstakingly around to before plopping himself into it with a hideous grimace.

  “Pa, I’d like to present Miss Wellington. She’s sophisticated without being stuck-up.”

  He smiles wanly in response to a greeting from the slender young woman in the blue serge suit, settling the icebag on his head with the familiar rustle of cold cubes but not, thank God, tipping it. I draw up a chair for the motorist to sit in facing him squarely, their knees almost touching, like two passengers in a railway coach. He must not be required to turn his head, and so it is in this attitude that she must adhere as best she can to my warning not to look at him too directly.