The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  She raked him from head to foot in the darkening vestibule, taking in every detail of his appearance.

  “So they’ve done it to you,” she said. “They’ve put you in a blue serge suit and tie to match, and shiny shoes to go to work in. They’ve given you a swivel chair to sit in from nine to five, behind a desk piled with papers for you to do things with before they take them away again to other people.”

  Sweetie’s “they” had always referred to the forces of convention, the materialist hordes who ran the world and to whose gross standards finer spirits must ever, in the end, capitulate. It was paranoiac in nature but was applied on behalf of others as well as herself—all who combined to form a sort of beleaguered and perceptive Few. The powers in question had, in his case, it was clear, “won.”

  “Well, you haven’t changed, Sweetie.” He could not get over the dress, whose ill-fitting flamboyance recalled the shapeless folds in which Ophelia is depicted taking leave of her senses on the legitimate stage. It could all but have been a set of draperies plucked from a window in passing. Her face hadn’t aged a whit, but resembled still a nerve-gnawed doll. It was to the great length of her lashes that Sweetie had attributed her flunking science in high school, claiming they prevented her seeing anything in the microscope. However, they had probably aided her passage through many another course. She fluttered them now as she reached to shut off the Khatchaturian. He was about to repeat that it was late and suggest a speedy departure and a resumption of the discussion on the way when something struck him with the force of a hammer on an anvil.

  Behind such piping hot romanticism was all too often something stone-cold. What she had been lost in down the years was that lute-embodied, verse-bemused, high gutless swooning based on the illusion and maybe even belief that flesh could be reproduced without recourse to flesh; that you could multiply arms and legs and smiles and tears and hands and feet but without sex organs. Because now the Faulkner came roaring back with twice the fury, and who had been plucked out of New England and dumped clear in the middle of Yoknapatawpha County was now picked up out of nineteenth-century Surrey England and dumped in the middle of it. Not only because he had seen that she was not only not Austen but not even Bronte, but because he had simultaneously heard on the carpeted stair a tread that memory or instinct or maybe just fear identified even before his eyes turned to take it in, a step secretive and sibilant made by the polished shoes he probably remembered too, as he did the creased trousers, tweed coat and Ascot under the bland debonair face, a face that flashed from him to her a smile that moved so smoothly from courtesy to possession as to warn him of something in this house not just eccentric but worse. So is it Mississippi or Massachusetts incest I’m up against? The query roared along his bones, who reminded himself that there was Northern Decadence as well as Southern, the Puritan wintry hold-in as well as the semitropical let-go; so I still don’t know but what it’s Marquand after all—his mind swinging violently between the two extremes like the needle of a butcher’s scale on which a joint of meat has been flung for weighing.

  “Hello, Daddy. This is Charles Swallow. You remember him.”

  Appleyard was a man of light construction in his middle fifties. He combined what he himself obviously took to be a seasoned charm with a dryness of tone felt to be Anglo-Saxon. He lingered on the second stair to greet Swallow, perhaps for that interval to repair the disadvantage in height, extending one hand while the other remained in his coat pocket. The effect was a sinister geniality like that of those educated gangsters in bygone films, often depicted as emerging from book-lined hideaways to conduct, with as little loss of aplomb as possible, the necessary chores of violence. Sometimes the components of this blend in Appleyard were separately discernible; thus for minutes on end the learned charm would prevail in a smile turned up to full wattage, like Adlai Stevenson being acclaimed in distant lands; then that mask would drop and the smile turn taut, a secretive grin predicated on information about you which he happened to possess. In this constant shifting from one identity to the other he resembled those faces in drugstore windows which give the optical illusion of winking and scowling alternately at the passer-by, according to whether one has or has not taken the nostrum being advertised.

  It was at any rate as Adlai Stevenson that Appleyard led him by the arm into the living room, after Sweetie had scuttled off in some direction, presumably to put on shoes.

  “I remember you now, knocking about Granny’s house as kids,” he said, withdrawing the hand from the pocket to reveal in its grasp nothing more lethal than a pipe. “And then doing ‘parlor duty’ as I think you young bloods called it then.”

  “Not me.”

  “But somehow my most vivid memories are those when you were kids. Always racketing about, here or in Sweetie’s grandmother’s house. I was at Granny’s one summer trying to get a book done in the attic. Vain dreams! I could hear you clear down cellar. By the way, wasn’t there a bit of a ruckus down there one day?” he said, his grip tightening perceptibly on the other’s tensed biceps. “What was that? Something out of Krafft-Ebing to hear Granny tell it.”

  “No-o,” he answered modestly, smiling at the floor. “Nothing like that.”

  Things were falling into place at the same time that they were going utterly to hell.

  He remembered clearly now the fiasco on which Appleyard had been engaged in the attic, a life of Woodrow Wilson that had come to naught. Then he had run for mayor of Decency, waging a “literate” campaign. However, the application of Wilsonian idealism to the problems of garbage removal and road repair had struck few voters as possessing any great relevance, and he was defeated. Then for a while he owned a local movie house where he had gone bankrupt showing photoplays of distinction. A string of such misfires had no doubt done much to develop his acrid strain. He finally took some money settled on him by the grandmother and put it in, of all things, a bauxite mine in France, where the grandmother had come from. (What was her name? “Cinquefoil” kept coming to mind.) The investment had prospered, permitting Appleyard the life of cultivated leisure to which he felt by nature entitled. He spent a great deal on his wardrobe, in which the pitiless recurrence of checks proclaimed him the man about town.

  “What, exactly, happened down cellar?” Appleyard asked, straightening with his heel a rucked rug.

  “Well, the thing was, Granny was a terrifying figure to us kids, but amusing nonetheless. There’s a kind of grim humor in what I’m going to tell you.”

  Appleyard’s face set itself into an exemplification of the former half of this quality, leaving the other to illustrate the latter. He chewed the cold pipe in his bright teeth, and sucking on it in that state drew from it an occasional death rattle.

  “She’d go around the kitchen with a fly swatter swatting flies, and when we kids did something to annoy her, she’d reach over and swat us with the swy flotter too. I mean the fly swatter. I mean get the picture. She swinging that thing right and left at the flies, then with no warning giving one of us a flick on the hand, and going on swatting flies. She had a kind of authority. Call it an imperial something, that went out with her era. Everything she knew died with her. We shall not see her like again.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that,” Appleyard told him. “She’s still alive.”

  “Alive! Where?”

  He jerked a thumb at the ceiling. “Upstairs.”

  “But I thought … That funeral here some years ago …”

  “Mrs. Appleyard,” Appleyard said with lowered eyes. “Her mother is still very much with us.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I mean about Mrs. Appleyard. So her mother is still with us. My, my. How old is Granny now?”

  “Ninety-three.”

  He whistled his appreciation, though the sense of eerie convergences, of accumulations and assumptions menacing to himself, continued to pluck his nerves. It was the sense of a plot, ten years in the hatching, to hold him answerable, who at the same time thought: What is it they thin
k they’re saying, that it’s my skeleton in their closet or theirs in mine?.…

  Appleyard made a sudden nervous movement to the vestibule to make sure they weren’t being eavesdropped on, there in the gloom, and returned, and straightening now a rug that needed no straightening, said, “I’m sure she’d love to see you again. She has all her wits about her, never fear.” His smile was momentarily maniacal, and the presence in his get-up of the Ascot added to rather than subtracted from the effect of menace confronting Swallow; which was in part that of being up against someone “weak” who might by wildly misplacing responsibility get things out of hand. “As you can see, our Sweetie has never grown up past a certain point,” he resumed with a smile of which the impression created was at once piratical and spineless. “Why? Did something happen to her, once, that frightened her permanently back into herself? A sexual scare thrown into her at an early age? Granny thinks now the incident in the coalbin may have had something to do with it.”

  “Rubbish,” he said, feeling a firm line was called for here. “I don’t even know what happened down there. I’ve forgotten the incident completely. What more proof do you want it was insignificant?”

  “Insignificant for you, yes. But for a nervous, sensitive girl with a tendency to asthma—”

  “Now look here. It was her grandmother that frightened both of us. Because I suddenly remember it all very clearly now. She who scared the holy bejesus out of us. So if you’re looking for a villain, how about thinking of her? Has that been given any thought?”

  “So you do remember the incident after all.”

  “That of being frightened, yes. Because we weren’t allowed to go into the coalbin, so being caught there was in itself traumatic. We were forbidden to go in there because of all the coal.”

  “What was the matter with the coal?”

  “It was dirty. So get the picture. Those two in trembling complicity locked, clutching one another in the still unblasted dark—You’ve read Faulkner, I presume?”

  “Of course.”

  Because he suddenly thought now how he might get out of it. Not the thing’s being Faulkner—he couldn’t change that now, he was in too deep—but his taking the rap for it. Thinking: I’ve got it now. It’ll be what it is only turned around: I won’t let them hang it on me, I’ll hang it on them.

  “Because the thing has a kind of Gothic, Faulknerian quality. So all right then—here we go. The children locked in that conspiratorial dark while overhead and then outside the coal-bin door the footsteps come, and the hand that had wielded the fly swatter and might wield worse reaches for the latch, the feet and hands blended in that amalgam of familial power, that matriarchial Menace of which this is the one single feared avatar; and then the door swinging slowly open and for that suspended second the two still quivering in the still unblasted dark; and then the detonating light, revealing the shocked materialized old face beneath the upraised arm and the fingers like fried bananas still fumbling the light cord though the light cord has been pulled, the bulb itself dancing in frantic antic something-or-other overhead, disclosing, for her, the shocked one, the two innocents naked where they stand.”

  “Naked?”

  “Not in the physical sense, but those clothes that covered them being themselves covered with dirt from playing in the hole so sternly disallowed them, naked the more to accusation and punishment.” He drew a deep breath and continued. “So that they know, those two, that the same hand that pulled the light string will on the instant draw them by the ear and, the girl anyway, the tender floral She anyway, upstairs and into the bathtub. And more. Because this may be the point, so get this if you get nothing else: By cackling insinuations about what that boy as ambassador of and from all dirty boys had intended should be done in that coalbin whether it had been done or no convincing the girl that dirt and the act adumbrated are forever one. Thus grinding into her mind what she was simultaneously scrubbing from her flesh—Filth. The old and primordial thought-muck. And locking her forever in that cloistral dream from which that sex who alone must waken her must by the same token be the one most powerless to deliver her.”

  He sank into a chair, breathing heavily. Appleyard dropped into another, likewise greatly agitated. He packed his pipe with tobacco now, but then set it thoughtfully on the arm of his chair.

  “It may not be all that simple.”

  “Aye-yi-yi!” said the other, slapping his brow. “How can I make it any plainer? What are you people trying to do to me? Get the picture again. That burgeoning and still unblackened trust—”

  “No, no, please.” Appleyard cut in with a wave of his hand. “Let’s not go into all that again. Let’s try to look at it from another point of view—Granny’s. I’m afraid she won’t know what you’re talking about if you take this line. She doesn’t know Faulkner. Granny,” he said, a faint smile playing across his lips, “reads Dickens.”

  “God.”

  The youth rose and gazed out the window. A weight descended on his spirit, settling like an incubus there whose force could not yet be judged and whose tenure none could tell. Half an hour ago he was a free man. Now …

  “I see. So now it’s Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, a jilted virgin living out her days in a house where all the clocks stopped on the day the bridegroom never showed. Miss Havisham going slowly mad at the long table to which no guests will ever come; fingering the dusty goblets and the tarnished flatware; putting on her bridal robes never to be removed for any lover; watching the cobwebs gather on the tall tiered cake rotting in its frosting, in that shut-off room which is for her a tomb of memories. Is that what Granny sees? Is that the way it reads for Granny? Is that what Sweetie is—or may become—and I the culprit? Is that the way it is?”

  Appleyard sighed unhappily into his interlaced fingers. There was a whisk of white on the edge of their vision, a pale streak running through the vestibule, a ghostlike fluttering of folds that was gone before they could turn their heads. All that remained was a cloud of smoke from a cigarette—which he suddenly remembered she’d smoked then, each one as though it were her first.

  “She does seem to be, well, frozen in time, like the Miss Havisham to which you so quickly made comparison,” Appleyard said. “Sweetie isn’t very communicative—though she talks a lot—but she may very well have had Great Expectations of her own which—”

  “But she was undersexed! She was against it, man!”

  “Because of something that happened away back—”

  “Oh, poppycock!” he said, pacing the room. “Why wasn’t this put up to me before? I mean you sure waited a long time!”

  “You know how those things are. What you see every day you don’t see at all, till one day—And what could we …? You were married and—”

  “If it hadn’t been for this sitter business we might never have met again for you to lay it in my lap.”

  “That’s rather Dickensian itself. He creaked with coincidence.”

  “Just let me say this, apropos of Mrs.—of Sweetie’s grandmother.” He stood making a gesture which consisted in bringing the tip of a forefinger down into the other palm, like lost outdoorsmen letting which way spit goes decide what direction they will take. “You say she’s ninety-three. Well, she’s probably addled. Remember how old people distort their memories.”

  “I wouldn’t tell her that to her face,” Appleyard advised urbanely. “When you see her, as you certainly now shall—”

  He broke off and craned forward in his chair to look into the dark vestibule. A sound on the stair arrested them both. Swallow listened to it stockstill, steeling himself for a Victorian beldame in black bombazine whose Dickensian world of black and white excluded any question of moral grays.

  “Quick, does she have any other favorites? I’ll never butter her up on Dickens. It’ll never wash. Does she read any others? Quick!”

  “She is passionately devoted to Proust.”

  “Sweet Christ in the morning.”

  There was a rustle of
purple-black silk and a tiny woman clutching a massive cane appeared from the shadows. She seemed at first a mere solidification of the gloom from which she emerged, but as she acquired definition in the parlor light she was seen to possess a clear particularity, hatchetlike, with a face of the sort known as aquiline—though this derived from an incisive gaze more than from any cast of feature.

  “I think you remember Mme. Piquepuss,” Appleyard said. “Granny, this is that Charles Swallow.”

  She extended a thin claw which he took while trying to place her, for he did not think now that he remembered her at all. He would certainly not have recognized her on the street, or tumbled to her name. Perhaps he had never clearly heard that. She stood scrutinizing him also for memorable detail, and seeming to find none, said with a faint twitch of her lips: “So.”

  “You’re still the same,” he answered with the shred of a smile. “I remember you always had such sensitive hands. I was recalling to Mr. Appleyard how you’d smack us with the fly swatter,” he continued with a glance at the stick on which she was nervously readjusting her grip. “Do you remember that?”

  “You must come and see us again very soon,” Mme. Pique-puss said with an abruptness suggesting that he had succeeded in definitively boring her in twelve seconds and was being sped on his way, until another rustle in the hallway made him divine her deeper purpose: that she wished all too firmly to see him on matters best discussed out of earshot of their subject, who now materialized with the wraithlike quality typical of this house. All the huggermugger was getting on his nerves.

  “We really must go,” he said to Sweetie, who had slipped, still barefoot, up to her father and handed him a rose. He put it in his trouser-pocket. “You’ve got to get a move on,” Appleyard said. “Have you had anything to eat?”

  “I have a hunger food is gall to,” said Sweetie, who always quoted from the best. Appleyard sighed.

  “She can have a bite at my house,” Swallow said. “The children will fix her something.”