The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “What about Sweetie?”

  “Get the Faulknerian quality about this grandmother first, hon, and hence about that house from whose commingled bloods she, Sweetie, had been vatted out of all flesh and time; get what your correspondent saw in the grandmother in the very instant of her coming into the coalbin for us—the voluminous skirts imploding on our sight with the same violence as the imploding light when she pulled the string—that this was pure Faulkner: ornate, ramshackle, vertiginous and fine.”

  “What were you two doing in the coalbin?”

  “Wait. Because I want you to know everything, so you’ll know, no matter what anybody else may tell you or insinuate,” he said, again with that savage defunctive anger. He knew as he rolled his eyes away that they had that shabby vestigiality of gnawed olives. “Get the idea of what I may have divined in that instant of shocked cognition; that all this—the documents yellowing in the ginger cans among the rotting ancestral lace and the suffocating potpourri, together with the imploding light and the horrible dark brown fried bananas—would one day burst into flower to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. That maybe she knew it too, without knowing she knew. Not just he but both of them there, locked in coeval fear and trust in the violated gloom. Doing in the coalbin?” he called through the open door through which he could see her bent over the dictionary in the corner, the pages riffled in sibilant outrage or anyhow exasperation or maybe both. “Why, reciting poetry more than likely. What else would anybody be doing in there? Because you see, Sweetie was one of those for whom beauty burns like incense in a million urns. To quote Teasdale. Remember how I used to recite Sara Teasdale to you before we were married?”

  “Passing on to me what you had no doubt got from her. Whispering in my ear what she had in yours.”

  “Now you’re doing it! The Faulkner. Now you’re getting the hang of it. That repetition at once woozy and serene, sick with overimplication—”

  “Oh, stop this idiotic rubbish!” she said, turning around. “And stop trying to throw me off the scent with all this hanky-panky, Charles Swallow, the way you always do.” He loved her when she used both his names like that not only because it went with towns of from ten to twenty-five thousand, thereby draining off a lot of the nervous tension, but because it made her once again the girl next door. Not here. “At least in my house we recited poetry in the parlor. We didn’t go down in the coal cellar.”

  “You forget one thing,” he said. “You had oil heat.”

  He got to his knees and began lathering his midst with the same defunctive frenzy, thinking it’s all right to unearth mummies and maybe even haul them up into the light of day but not to unwind the cerements in which they have lain and in which could they but speak they might themselves prefer to lie. Thinking too, who thought all this, I have more to forgive than be forgiven for but I can never let her know it. Because the wallpaper was her idea. The wallpaper with the zoo switch. Whimsy, of all sins the most difficult of definition and the least susceptible to reform, was to be forgiven daily and thereby daily unforgettable. He took in a scene over the corner window in which an ape on a bench, wearing overalls and the blue cap of officialdom, was eating his lunch in the noonday sun, a detail on which the ache of allegory lay keenest. A simian dressed in blue flannels and Homburg was thrusting a banana at a caged executive type. Swallow gorged himself on grievance till she was hopelessly in his emotional debt. Then he said:

  “When I talk about when I ‘saw’ her last, I only mean visually. So let’s stop this bone-grinding. She may have been putting flowers in somebody’s mailbox, or shattering stars by walking through a rainpool. Because that was Sweetie Appleyard—loving Beauty every minute. If she had two loaves of bread she would sell one and buy a hyacinth. Her oranges were as sweet as the king’s, and so on. She’d phone to call your attention to the sunset, then when you called her back after stepping outside to look at it she wouldn’t come to the phone.”

  “Playing hard to get.”

  “Oh, my God.” He rolled his eyes to the ceiling, where at least there was no wallpaper. “She couldn’t come to the phone. It was more beauty than she could bear. Now do you understand it?” He squatted in the tub, reaching for the obscene sponge. “So the thing that’ll be interesting to see is whether she still is.”

  “Still is what?”

  “One of those for whom beauty burns like incense in a million urns.”

  “She apparently hasn’t married, if it’s ‘Miss’ Appleyard.” Crystal stooped to retrieve a bobby pin. “Was there anything, I mean has she ever been disappointed in love, as they say?”

  “Our good friend Nickie Sherman would say you had to be married to be that, now, wouldn’t he?” he said, smiling affectionately upward.

  “You’re as slippery as that bar of soap, aren’t you? But I think I may have you figured out by this time.” She bent down and kissed him. “You tell me a story about a coalbin that’s so ridiculous I couldn’t possibly believe it, in hopes that I’ll think there wasn’t anything to it at all and not believe what there may be. Isn’t that right?”

  “You’re pretty sharp yourself, and moreover your breasts are like two doves nesting in quiet places. Stay bending over me a minute—it looks like mighty pretty country down there. Why do we have to go out tonight? The question is rhetorical—a mating cry.”

  “Well, there won’t be any place to go but bed when we get home, now, will there. That’s rhetorical too.”

  “Is that a promise?”

  “More or less. But the Groteguts said eight, and we’re supposed to pick up Nickie and Lila on the way, so hurry.” She rose and bustled into the bedroom.

  “Right. But as for broken hearts for Sweetie, she had them every day, is what I’m trying to say. So don’t pay no mind. A drifting leaf could shatter her into a thousand bits. They don’t make them like that any more.”

  “Yes, well, you really must get a move on. It’s after seven now, and if I have a new sitter to brief and all … Would you rather I went for this Miss Apple Strudel?”

  “No,” he said, springing quickly out of the tub. He drew the plug from the belching drain with his toe as he reached for a towel, recovering his balance with one foot on the mat. “I think maybe it’ll be best if I do that,” he added, and began to dry himself briskly.

  3

  AS set forth with all speed to Beth’s house, Charles bethought himself of the works of Jane Austen, in which he had by felicitous chance been but recently refreshing himself, as was his wont once in a twelvemonth. His purpose in so doing was more than to clear his mind and restore his sanity, urgent as these motives were. He wished to expand a certain recollection with which he had been visited, of Beth and himself dallying under the summer boughs with a volume of this author. The picture, if but sedulously dwelt on, must surely expunge from their bond all implication of guile! In a larger sense, Charles was striving to put Beth herself into focus as a Jane Austen heroine, or at least a girl who might since last seen conceivably have flowered into one. Imputing to her such wholesomeness must definitively exorcise all taint of blame, from which he likewise ardently longed to purge himself of any connection.

  There were some small means in the Appleyard family, flowing largely from the grandmother, on her fair portion of which Beth might reasonably presume, and any young man of amorous intent reckon with in turn. Her reappearance as a sitter became therefore doubly an enigma. Of that alloy of human emotions, gold, however, our young friends were as yet blessedly unaware in the years when their companionship began. Those were childhood days, when they had scooped polliwogs from the millpond or picked berries on the hill, returning home with buckets heaped with sunkissed fruit or tadpoles congregated in obscene educational sacs, depending on the season. What sport they’d had in the orchard! Charles remembered arriving with a baseball bat one Saturday afternoon in autumn, and their going wild among the windfalls, smiting apples in all directions till the trunks were spattered with pulp. Beth had flung the bat into the lad
en boughs at last and run for the river that coiled away behind the house, screaming with pleasure.

  Childhood ecstasies gave way to the more complex and literary ones of adolescence, embodied in images of Beth reading Shelley on the riverbank, or in the treehouse in the maple that spread its leaves over the gurgling stream, or pinking off unsteadily the nocturnes of Chopin at their parlor “grand.” Once she threw herself into the open piano and embraced its strings. Though an “aesthete,” in the mode of those days, and committed to beauty in all its forms, he had felt this to be a trifle overshot, the hum of the ravished wires unsettling. Urbanity had begun, in his case, to set in, and his tastes to shift rather toward those that would bear the scrutiny of the boulevards. There was also the other misgiving, which not even the most avowed flâneur could dismiss: whether a girl who habitually pitched herself into musical instruments would make a good wife and mother, let alone housekeeper. Her father once protested the presence of marigolds in his salad, though in all fairness to our heroine it was a question whether they represented a literal obedience on her part to the E. E. Cummings injunction to “eat flowers and not be afraid” or whether those poor blooms had merely depended onto his plate from one of the rather disheveled centerpieces with which his daughter was wont to garnish the familial board.

  Friends and family by no means exhausted the range of those who had their lives enriched by Beth against their wills. In summer, she would climb into the elms that shaded the city streets and from there drop, one by one, upon dismayed pedestrians below, pages torn from the book of verses with which she had ensconced herself among the upper boughs. She did this not only with school anthologies but also with volumes drawn from the public library, on the ground that showering the citizenry with beauty outweighed the mutilation of public property entailed thereby. However, the librarians failed to appreciate this reasoning and eventually revoked her card and even barred her from the building. She was usually barefoot, and usually clutching an old beaded bag apt as not to contain a spray of laurel or pink, or a night moth, or a soft caressable gopher, rather than the keys and coins carried by the less imaginative for opening doors and paying fines.

  It is a question whether her love for all living creatures extended to her mother, a gaunt pale woman who was generally to be seen bent over a sinkful of dishes or a steaming kettle in canning time. She was preserving the family fortune, she would have explained in that famously humorless tone of hers. When asked to lend a hand, Beth would answer with a vague shake of her head that pleaded impalement on some sensation too exquisite to deny and too far advanced to interrupt. “Humperdinck,” she would say with a helpless gesture, if it were a record she was listening to, or “Millay” if a cloud of poetry in which her spirit was afloat, a cloud far more impenetrable than the kitchen steam that wreathed her mother’s fading form, though not physically discernible. That was the idea. What effect all this had on Mrs. Appleyard is not known to man: she kept her counsel. But it got to be a nuisance to a young blade bent, as Charles was in the years of which we are now speaking, on the normal perquisites and pastimes of “dates.” Love verses and erotic operatic duets were not, in however glutting quantities, enough.

  It was their custom to go to Hickett’s apothecary for sodas, and once when Christmas was approaching Beth asked what he should have liked in his stocking. “I want what’s in yours,” he told her with all the worldliness of sixteen. Mr. Hickett, a short nerve-ridden man who always looked as though he were trying to swallow his eyeballs, gave, on hearing this, a specially deploring, suffering version of this feat. Wiping fixtures behind the soda fountain at which they tarried, he rolled his eyes up till they seemed to vanish in his skull, fluttering his lids the while and twisting his mouth in a kind of outraged astonishment that such conversation could be held at all, let alone in his store. Nevertheless he hovered in their vicinity, powerless not to eavesdrop for more of what repelled him.

  “Charles, you’re so physical,” Beth averred, poking her soda with her straws.

  “For a girl who likes love poetry,” he said, groping toward some fresh outrage for Mr. Hickett, for to épater le bourgeois was then the order of the day, “you certainly shy away from the subject. You fancy yourself some kind of Aphrodite sprite, so why all this skittishness when it comes down to brass tacks?”

  “Aphrodite never married,” was the terse reply.

  “She had a lover. Vulcan.”

  It seemed Mr. Hickett’s eyes were watching him intently, but it was hard to tell, for they were far from lined up. One was always applying to the other for counsel. Charles enjoyed tormenting him in the same way he had his father, whom his epigrams and paradoxes drove to distraction.

  “I may be old-fashioned, but I still like the phrase ‘pure as the driven snow,’” Beth went on. “ I like being pure as the driven snow.”

  “Where would you like to be driven tonight?” our swain asked, and snickered.

  “Oh, Charles, don’t be so absurd! You’re a sensitive person. You have standards. Why do you always have to espalier the bourgeois, or whatever you call it? Why exaggerate the physical in this immature way?”

  “It’s not we who exaggerate the physical, it’s you Puritans. For what is chastity,” he said, pushing his soda aside and tapping a Melachrino cigarette on the lid of its box, for he now saw an epigram within his grasp, “what is chastity but an overemphasis on sex?”

  Mr. Hickett’s eyeballs disappeared. And the contortion was followed by his slamming the wadded washcloth down on the counter as hard as he could and walking to the back of the store, where he vanished in the depths of the prescription department, presumably to take something for his stomach or head.

  Charles’s “paradox” had been, of course, in the then burgeoning boulevardier tradition aforementioned, which had its headquarters on quite other premises than Mr. Hickett’s. It was at the Greek’s that the cafe-minded set foregathered. It was to the Greek’s that Mr. Hickett’s fit of temper had implied the youth should take his custom. He was right. And Charles saw something else as made incontrovertibly plain: that if he hesitated to take this girl to the Samothrace (the Greek’s) for fear of ridicule by his more worldly friends, why, then she was not his “speed” nor he hers, and their relationship were best terminated. Before Christmas, to avoid the ritual of exchanged presents so indicative of a congealing bond. Besides, he was seeing another girl named Crystal Chickering.

  Charles had a date with Beth the next evening, in the course of which she made a mysterious statement. “You ought to know why I’m skittish about sex,” she said. He thought nothing of it at the time because she was forever talking in riddles; besides, she herself hastily dug out a record album and set Tristan and Isolde spinning on the gramophone. She hovered near it, refusing to come nigh the settle on which he lurked, both arms spread along its back whilst the smoke of successive Melachrinos issued from his nostrils. After an hour of this he simply rose, got his hat and walked out of that house. She did not even sense his departure. He left her standing beside the ever-grinding machine, reverently murmuring “Wagner …” That was the last he ever saw of her.

  Until tonight, when he was doomed to confront her again in the unexpected role of sitter.

  What on earth would he find?

  The house at any rate was unchanged. It was the white cottage with the listing porch choked with wistaria that he had always remembered though never seen since, it being in a part of town into which neither business nor private purpose took him. One can live and die in a city of a hundred thousand and not see more than a handful of its streets.

  A sound of eccentric but skillful piano music drifted through the open door as he mounted the three porch stairs, causing him to reflect that Sweetie had at least notably improved her playing in the interval. (Had a dream of the concert stage all the while been secretly inflaming her?) But when he reached the screen door and looked inside, he saw that the music was issuing from the same old phonograph, or a successor, before which she
stood listening in the same attitude. He raised a hand to the brass knocker also remembered of old, thus reassembling a familiar tableau. He let the screen door swing to again after opening it to rap.

  She gave no sign of having heard. She had her back to the door. He opened the screen door and rapped again, more loudly.

  “Khatchaturian.”

  Whether this was progress remained to be seen. Certainly headway had been made in the matter of taste, of modernity, but she was rooted in the exact same spot in which he had left her more than a decade before, as though she had spent the interval neither eating nor drinking but only imbibing ethereal impressions. Even the dress she had on was the same, though that may have been an illusion cast by an old and apparently incorrigible addiction to white, and a way of always managing to look like a child playing grownup, with frocks of excessive length and chaotic fit that appeared to have been delved from attic trunks. She was barefoot.

  “Sweetie?” He peered through the screen door, shading his eyes.

  She turned. She turned by degrees, like those actresses who expose the secrets of their craft. Then she floated toward him in the half-light with an air at once intent and uncomprehending.

  “It’s me,” he said. “Chick Swallow.”

  The process of recognition was, for Sweetie, one with the strain of incredulity, as well as of eviction from a trance. A smile dawned across her face as she pushed the screen door open with one hand and with the other drew him in.

  “So you’ve come back.”

  A slight chill went up his spine as the screen door twanged shut behind him. “You’re our sitter for tonight,” he said.

  “Oh, yes. Father said something about giving my name to an agency.”

  “It’s kind of late. So if you want to pop into a coat …”