Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  I was still in a state of rigor mortis when Marion entered. I had had to call “Come in” twice in response to her knock. Speaking in anything above a whisper was like a hammerblow to my head. The vibrations set up by speech killed me; even moving my jaw was an ordeal, so that I lay with my mouth open and kind of breathed my end of the conversation in fragments of words.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Ango.”

  “Hangover? You must have tied on a real one.”

  “Ongona die.”

  “Have you had anything to eat?”

  I replied with a wincing twitch of my face and a recoiling gesture of my hand which said “Please!”

  “Nonsense. I think you’re giving in to it. When did you go on this bat?”

  “Ens.”

  “Wednesday? This is Saturday. Of course you’re giving in to it. Nobody’s hung over that long.”

  “No?”

  She turned away, as from the thought that must have struck her too, and drew a chair up to the bed. She sat down and said, “Did anything in particular happen? To send you off on one this size? Because it was obviously a lulu. You look green. But of course that’s partly you haven’t had anything to eat. Isn’t there something I can fix for you? Never mind that,” she said when I clapped my hand over my mouth with the seafarer’s groan. “You’ve got to get something into you, obviously. You can’t go on indefinitely without nourishment. It’s hunger that’s probably taken hold now, and you can’t tell the two apart. You’ve got to pull yourself together. Now what’ll it be? Soup, little cereal, warm milk? Well, if you’re going to lie there and make dying noises I’ll just have to take matters into my own hands. I heard of a good hangover remedy the other day and I’m going down in the kitchen and mix it for you. I won’t tell you what’s in it, because that’d be fatal. I’ll be back in two jerks. O.K.?”

  As she rose, smiling down, she laid a hand on my forehead. It felt so blessedly cool that I seized and kissed it. I wondered then why the idea of an icebag had not occurred to me. It was rather curious. Perhaps I had simply been too miserable for my mind to function along even the most primitive lines. I asked Marion to try to scare one up for me now, and if she was unable to do so, at least bring some ice back with her.

  She returned in about ten minutes with a glass of blood, or what looked like it to me, and a bowl of ice cubes. “I couldn’t get a bag,” she said cheerfully, “but I’ll go get one at the drugstore. But first drink this.”

  Somehow we got my head propped up, and with her steadying me I managed to gulp down the plasm she had mixed. As a veteran concocter of many another such potion, I thought I recognized some of its ingredients, but did not bother to taste it—being mainly concerned with curbing my revulsion enough to get it down as fast as possible and resume a lying position. Marion then knotted several of the ice cubes into a handkerchief and set it on my head. It was like a benediction. She chatted with me for a few minutes longer, then slipped out to the drugstore for the promised icebag, which she filled with the announcement that she had some work to do at home, but would return for lunch tomorrow. There was to be no nonsense. If I had not taken nourishment by then, she would see to it that I did. “And afterward,” she said, getting her coat and bag from a chair, “we’ll go for a ride.”

  She made good on what were, in effect, ultimatums. My resistance to the tray of light lunch she brought was met with cajolery, persuasion, and then a firm hand. But when I boggled at a ride in the car her manner became almost vehement.

  “Now look.” She stood over me with folded arms. “It’s now or never. If you don’t make an effort to get up, dressed and out, don’t ever expect to see me again. I mean that. You’re not going to parlay this into a nervous breakdown. You’re not going to keep this state of mind, or state of body or whatever you want to call it, going indefinitely as a way of running away from whatever you’re running away from. Life, you, me, us or what have you. Now it’s nice weather. The sun is shining. We can go for a ride with the top down. And then you can tell me what Miss Holroyd said.”

  Somehow, God knows how, I got out of bed, dressed, and down the stairs. I moved slowly, in gravitational chaos. The stairs seemed escalators moving upward while I descended them or vice versa. The floors swam up to meet me or dropped like trapdoors, with consequent illusory elongation or shrinkage of my legs. Sometimes they seemed stubs, sometimes stilts. I believe there is a medical distinction made between vertigo and dizziness, the one being objective, the other subjective. That is to say, in vertigo external objects seem to whirl about, in dizziness one’s own head. Perhaps it is the other way around. Both, at any rate, contributed heavily to my sensations. I took the distances to be traversed in visual gulps, opening my eyes long enough to see where I would be going for the next ten or a dozen steps before closing them again and thus temporarily shutting all this confusion from view.

  Marion helped steady me out of the building and into the car, clapping the door shut and springing in behind the wheel with a cheerful “There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” I nearly answered by hanging my head over the side of the door, like an ocean-goer again, but the crisis passed. I closed my eyes and off we went, slowly at first, like two figures floating away in a Ferris wheel.

  For it is that sensation by which the ride was characterized in my mind. The conviction that we were describing wide vertical rotations through space was so vivid that I was sure that if I opened my eyes I could look down over the side of the open convertible and see the houses and streets below in that faintly delirious perspective in which fairground rides put things.

  “Now then, tell me about your binge. Where did you go? What did you do?”

  It was a story soon enough told, and I told it without either omissions or embellishments. It was one of those sacred-and-profane cycles with which Marion was familiar as typical of me, though hitherto embracing much longer intervals (like those of a manic-depressive), and not compressed into so brief a span as this. That was the alarming part of it. It was indeed like a disease of which the time pendulums were shortening.

  “If there were only some reasonable middle ground combining both sides in some kind of synthesis. Like the Existentialist Christians of today, or the atheist Catholics Robert Frost said there are. Maybe he was twitting, maybe not. You never know. Maybe we know some ourselves without knowing it. Anyhow, some kind of synthesis where you could be reasonably happy. But no. With me it’s in-again-out-again-Finnegan. Because, as Miss Holroyd—and everybody else—says, I have this unresolved hatred of both my parents.”

  Marion was curiously quiet for some time. I sensed the car making two turns, then slowing to a stop. When I opened my eyes we were parked at the river’s edge.

  “Hatred of your parents? Is that what they tell you? Is that what you think? Why hatred? Why not affection?”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “You never thought of it. Nobody ever does any more. But why does it always have to be hostility at the bottom of everything? Why does that always have to be the explanation, for Christ’s sweet sake?”

  There is such fire in her voice, even for one given to controversial outbursts at the drop of a hat, that I turn to look at her. Her flashing eyes convey the same sense of moral anger.

  “We know too much. We’ve gotten so used to assuming that the cynical interpretation is necessarily the right one that we automatically think the worst of everybody and everything in order not to be considered naïve. But the analytical clichés get to be naïve too. So you go to the mission and sing hymns to hit back at your father, and get drunk and blaspheme as an outlet for the same antipathy toward your mother. Why not the other way around—the simple explanation? That you do each to satisfy some basic affection for them? And why do I have to pussyfoot with a word like affection? Why not come out and say love?”

  I embrace her without any nausea whatsoever. These epiphanies are so simple. The obvious is always under our nose, and therefore often unseen, but
the minute it is pointed out we knew it was there all the time. It becomes our property, appropriated like a good joke we could never have thought of ourselves but ours to repeat as though we have; or a good melody, inevitable once somebody has composed it, and ours to whistle at will.

  Now for the third time I sing that the burden of my heart has rolled away, but this time I know it is true. It will stick.

  “This bind we’ve gotten ourselves into,” I say. “Thinking that the less we think of one another, and ourselves, the more acute we’re being. This rotten age!”

  “Sure we hate. Sure there’s hostility, open and buried, everywhere. But that’s not the whole story, and I doubt it’s as much as half of it. That’s the point. I think people love each other a little more than they hate each other, and that’s why we can go on. In pairs and in families and in multitudes. Love has a slim hold on the human corporation, like fifty-one per cent, but it’s enough. Enough for human beings to stay in business with one another.”

  “Then marry me. After all, you owe me something. You saved my life, and the least you can do is help me live it.”

  “Maybe. Why not? It’s as good a beginning as any.”

  “I’m an ass,” I remind her. “But we could fight that together.”

  “You’re so absurd a person can’t help liking you. I suppose there’s some challenge in any hookup any woman makes with any man, and vice versa. Taking it on makes a woman a woman.”

  “And a man a man.”

  “How do you think we could stand you if compassion and humor weren’t in us? Our feminine job. Only a woman would marry you! Of course we have our own piece of the human folly. You’ll learn that in time. But we’re not asses. You’re asses. We’re something else.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll find out. But, Tom, you’ll simply have to. Stop. Behaving. The way you do. No running off to church one day and spouting Nietzsche the next. Praying and scoffing till they run together till you can’t tell which is which. And joining different organizations and talking out of both sides of your mouth. You’ve got to stop taking both sides of every question.”

  “I will. That’s all a thing of the past. I know why I’ve been doing it now, and it’s no longer necessary. I’m free. I’m cured.”

  “Because I can’t live with a man who’s blowing hot and cold on basic issues. You know what I believe, what I have to believe to live. I’m not bigoted, but it’s my faith. I belong to the Episcopal Church, and you have to let me go, without any of these endless and inconclusive arguments.”

  “I’ll even go with you, some of the time.”

  The whole thing was like a transfiguration, a resurrection. I rested up that day, and the next evening we drove to Chicago for dinner. It was one of those dim restaurants, vaguely Oriental in feeling, of which the walls are covered with floor matting, and where brands of beer one has never heard of before and never hears of again are available. A hint of incense hangs in the air.

  Afterward we go to a party given by a young North Shore couple Marion knows. The woman is a classmate of hers from days at Mrs. Drew’s. He’s a young stockbroker on the rise. I have one highball, two, but that’s enough. No need now for the cup that inebriates but never cheers. I’m drunk enough with happiness. In such raptures I can hardly contain myself. My mood expands, and I find myself speaking well to a group collecting in the kitchen, holding forth fluently in a friendly argument that develops on the subject of the Church. I tell them all that Christianity is a mass of plagiarisms from pagan cults anyone with half a mind can see through, and that anyone who believes in God believes in Santa Claus—proudly recalling my father in his prime when I do so. Oh, how different it all is now! What a change there’s going to be. Later I will get down on my knees and thank God for the gift of reason that makes such thinking possible. Perhaps next Sunday I will remember my well-meaning mother and go to church. Yes, that Presbyterian limestone on the north end of town nobody goes to any more. Literally nobody. The minister reputedly preaches to empty pews. He is said to mount the pulpit nonetheless and stoutly declare the Gospel to empty air. I will be the entire congregation, and he will proclaim the message of salvation to me alone. If a hymn is announced, I will rise and sing a solo. After the service the man of God will hurry out ahead of me to a squall of organ music and be standing on the porch steps, waiting to shake hands with me as I pour out of church …

  These are some of the things I will do in the days ahead, which I secretly hoard and ecstatically think about, on this night that I wish would never end.

  nineteen

  WHEN THE DORMITORY had been rebuilt, a three-room apartment had been provided for a married housemaster. Into this Marion and I now moved. I was trying to return by degrees to something like my previous schedule, no easy matter. President Bagley had been, as feared at the time he had designated me acting head of the school, suffering from nervous disorder. When he was removed to Nestle Down for an indefinite rest, colleagues who had openly regarded his deputization of myself as proof positive that he was certifiable claimed to find something odd in my occupying his chair more firmly than ever as a result. Some went so far as to say I had sent him round the bend. I thus conceivably had a grudge, which, however, I did not bear them. I had no wish to occupy the chair. Far from it. But I pretended that I intended to remain there—and could not be dislodged except by forcible measures highly embarrassing to the college—only long enough to relish a bit the discomfiture of my enemies, before plunging wholeheartedly into the effort to find a successor. We had by now found one for Norm Littlefield, a fortunate catch we all thought. The new head of the English Department was a thirty-five-year-old-man named Inskip, who had taught at Middlebury. Harvard was his alma mater. A Matthew Arnold man, a much-needed exponent of criticism as it was just prior to the reign of Eliot and Company. Then suddenly we had a president too, a dean of admissions at an Eastern college who agreed to come on at Polycarp at the end of the first semester of the new year. Until then, in addition to teaching one class, I discharged the routine affairs of the president’s office, more or less under Dean Shaftoe’s guidance. He made the speeches for which I had no stomach in any event, while I “did the dirty work,” as poor dear Bagley had accurately warned.

  Since this consisted in little more than writing letters beginning “Pursuant to our conversation of the fifteenth,” I spent most of the day behind a dictaphone. I continued very conscious of the signature I put to these letters, developing at last one that seemed to me a happy blend of feeling and intellect, imagination and discipline. What do we strive for but these? My t-bars were streaks of bird flight, far above the main body of the letter, which itself, however, indicated both feet on the ground. These marks of a model adult were evident also in the way I sprang to my feet to greet callers of whatever rank, and in the warmth and duration of my handshake, calculated to the point held by most experts to express also this harmonious balance of opposites; likewise borne in mind in matters of posture and bearing and socks. When I had nothing else to do I practiced my script, devoting particular attention to the “z,” a slimy cipher at best, letting slip all sort of secrets if not watched, especially those relating to irregularities in the downward loops indicative of disturbance on the animal level.

  So matters sorted themselves out, for the time being at least. Hodges! appeared to be out of our lives for good, though one can never tell about such things. All I knew was that Marion seemed to have him out of her system. Quincy had kept his promise not to send any pictures to the local papers, despite the impossibility of my delivering my end of the bargain. Where else they might have appeared I never knew. I certainly never went out of my way to find them. The prize-winning check I endorsed to a charity—Norm’s favorite, as I went to some effort to find out. Angela had presumably enrolled in a college somewhere else.

  Next to my marriage, the happiest development by far in those days was the apparent emergence of my father. He rose phoenix-like from the ashes of that hangov
er. He refused to come to the wedding, a small reception at the Chicago North Shore home of Marion’s parents, and tried to keep my mother away too (unsuccessfully), but the instant we were settled down he came out of his shell. My mother then at last hinted that his years of burial alive were the result of something he had done, long ago, that he feared would cast a shadow over my life. She refused to say what, and I never learned. But now that I had married “a nice cultured girl” he considered me safe from harm on that score, and snapped out of it. I took him out for his first ride. He dressed slowly, in his best suit, appraising himself in a bureau mirror tilted so as to behead himself, so he wouldn’t see his face but only the old brown suit encasing the muscles in which he had once taken such pride, grown flabby with disuse now. So he went out of the house, and eventually back to the office, but never again back on the truck. He visited my office once, just to see what it looked like, before “skedaddling” in fear that his presence would embarrass me—as indeed it did. The turmoil of emotions prompted by this experience were destined to precipitate the next crisis in my own life.

  His visit, or rather his uncontested flight, had reminded me of the sob ballad in my record collection, “Just Plain Folks,” and as I walked across campus for a cup of tea in Hamley Hall, my dormitory, I found myself ruefully humming and then singing the words:

  We are just plain folks, your mother and me,

  We are just plain folks like our own folks used to be.

  As our presence seems to grieve you,

  We will go away and leave you,

  For we’re sadly out of place here,

  ’Cause we’re just plain folks.

  Inskip was sitting at a table in the lounge with Pilbeam, who taught in the Philosophy Department, and Fangle, a resident composer. All Harvard alumni, they were known as the Harvard Group, or, by me at least, the Three Little Prigs. They roused the divided feelings always generated in the breast of the bohunk by the presence of worldly company: that of wanting to belong while simultaneously resenting such a group. There are people who eternally feel themselves the butt of snobbery, real or imagined. I sometimes think this kind of exile worse than sexual rejection, for that can be repaired by “the next girl.” In the case of myself and the Three Little Prigs, at any rate, I was sure the snobbery was real. Inskip, the suavest of the lot, and now, of course, my departmental head, glanced at the empty fourth chair at their table, in apprehension I was sure, but there was nothing in the circumstances for him to do but convert this expression into one of invitation. So I sat down.