Sweetie flung her arms out at an angle slightly acute to that of crucifixion and exclaimed, “The Riviera!”
“The Palm Beach of the old country,” I smiled at my pupil, wiping at a stain of claret on my hatband. I shifted on my haunch, half-crazed by a night so drenched in implication.
“I had an idea about your Frost,” I said. “Put back even the little you’ve changed of the original. Leave the title and the entire first stanza exactly as he has them—
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow …
—only capitalize ‘village’ to make it Greenwich Village the owner lives in—”
“—and the poem a satire on the city man dabbling in bucolics! The whole suburbanite thing!” She gave the editorial hand a grateful squeeze as Appleyard fluttered into view around the side of the house. He made apologetically for the glider from which he plucked a magazine and as hurriedly vanished, darting us a smile of discreet excitement, a kind of deferential frenzy.
“I’ll get her between covers yet,” I called.
“I know.”
In addition to whipping half the old poems into shape according to the agreed-on plan, Sweetie wrote several new ones for the book-length manuscript at which we now drove, all in the course of the next few weeks. She worked at the same fever pitch as that in which A Shropshire Lad was forged by A. E. Housman, who was, as a matter of fact, represented in the new crop:
Loveliest of pies, the cherry now
Completes a fine repast;
’Tis not the first I’ve ordered, lads,
But it will be the last.
For soon they’ll slit my trouser-legs
And shave my head, and then
They’ll sit me in the chair from which
I’ll never rise again.
The lengthy error known as Life
Began in a single cell,
And that is where for luckless lads
It sometimes ends as well.
And so it’s down the row I go
With my eternal curse.
And that’s what comes of reading
Pessimistic verse.
My own favorite was one that took off from Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty,” probably because I relished being in the know as to its private origins (how we love to have literature reduced to gossip!). For it projected perfectly at last that fear of the Chintz Prison that haunted Sweetie, as it may well haunt every woman:
She walks in beauty like the night
Watchman on appointed rounds,
In the nursery, checking children’s
Winter respiratory sounds.
Robed in flannel she comes hither,
Shod in slippers she goes hence,
Sits behind the desk and reckons
Up the measure of their pence.
Bedded late, she rises early,
And swings before his sallow nose
The coffeepot, her morning censer,
Which is better than the rose.
Before the leaves fell we had a book together, and before the snow flew, published—under the name of Beth Appleyard. I knew a Bridgeport printer of trashy comics who did occasional art books for a hobby. He brought out The Mocking Bird in a brochure on deckle-edged paper bound in maroon vellum, selling at two dollars. It didn’t set the world on fire but it did Sweetie, who packed up and lit out for the Village, among whose espresso shops and walk-up apartments she found enough kindred spirits, liberally enough sprinkled with admirers, to make her stay on. Rumors of how the Mocking Bird Girl was carrying on down there boomed like breakers up the dull shores of Decency. And before the buds were out I was called on the carpet again at the vine-choked cottage on Beacon Street.
“What have you done to her now?”
A prostrate Appleyard put the query this time. He lay on a mound of pillows, a medicated sock of a tasteful pattern pinned around his neck, and a crick in his back. The latter was an injury sustained, according to the attendant Eve Bickerstaffe who had done the phoning in terms of asking me to tea, from too much exercise in a rowing machine he had in the basement. But basically he was a man stricken by news of a wayward daughter. The effigy of Adlai Stevenson dissolved into that of an old woman in a nightgown which I was a moment in placing. Thomas Wolfe’s mother on the publication of Look Homeward, Angel. Had it not put her to bed, pale, the model of familial slaughter in our time? If Appleyard was going to be derivative too …
“You’ve heard about Sweetie?” he whispered, fingering the sock in a way that subtly shifted our problem onto a new plane.
“I hear from her now and again. Why?”
“Not from her—about her. They’re not the same thing at all.”
There was the groan of a bedspring followed by a human one—or perhaps the other way around—as Appleyard sat up a little on his pillows, dealing them a series of blows. An electric cord led to a heating pad under his back. The box the pad had come in was on the counterpane. On its cover was a picture of a beautiful woman lying in bed with the same product, voluptuously fingering the thermostat.
“Just what do you want of me?” I asked.
“A balance between what she once was and what she is now. Something in between. A little sense of proportion, please!”
“I’ll get it right yet,” I said from the foot end of the bed. “I’ll get her right yet. But I think I ought to have a clearer picture of how things stand at the moment. What exactly have you heard? If you can give me some idea.”
He laughed and fell back among the pillows, as if the sight of parental collapse were description enough of the sins being committed under my auspices. Eve Bickerstaffe leaned down and touched his brow with a damp handkerchief. “He’s weak,” she said.
“We’re none of us a tower of strength,” I answered charitably. Her glare told me how I had mistaken her meaning, on which I murmured a word of apology with some despairing of the hands. “He has fever—this isn’t like him. Please sit down,” she said, noting my quest for a chair not too discourteously far from the sickbed. I settled on a wicker hassock shaped like an hourglass which creaked furiously under my weight. I noted among the medicine bottles the consoling presence of a pint of Four Roses, and licked my lips. Curiosity was the one bearable ingredient in my emotions, and I was resolved not to have it short-changed.
“I must know what you hear about Sweetie, in order intelligently to proceed with this thing. Can you be specific?”
“Oh.” He gave a deprecatory wave, and a bit of the old Appleyard returned in the will to disapprove on intellectual rather than moral grounds. “The usual kind of Girl Cutting Loose the Minute She Gets Away from Her Family. Isn’t the Jazz Age supposed to have gone out with Fitzgerald?”
“There’s a new Jazz Age,” I said, “and a Fitzgerald revival in full swing. This time it’s all more casual, therefore probably deeper.”
“Well, I’m not casual! Wait till you have daughters dancing on the table in their shift!” Appleyard summoned his polemic resources for a last heave onto his elbow as he fixed me with a sharp eye. “You realize it would kill her grandmother to hear about this. Of course we’re doing our best to keep it from her. So shh! Here she comes now.”
Mme. Piquepuss looked anything but distraught, whatever she may have overheard. Spruce in green taffeta, and only a little bent under ancestral jewelry, she nodded to me as she crossed the room to a window chair. It had been otherwise at our last meeting, when I’d reported on the poems she had stolen for me to read. When Mme. Piquepuss learned they were derivative she was fit to be tied. She thumped her cane, snatched up knickknacks and flung them to the floor, in a rage at having this bridge to the world for her grand-daughter blown up in her face. She had given the impression not of a vestigial human being so much as an incipient poltergeist. I forewent any actual exegesis of the text. Accusing her of having an heir who dealt in
double entendre would have meant gewgaws flying in my own direction, while detailed analysis of symbolisms might have put me in receipt of more than bric-a-brac. It was enough to have to explain to Sweetie the sort of thing she was trying to do—where she was infusing her work with Freudian elements, where Marxist. Now, as I say, it was happily otherwise. Mme. Piquepuss laid a hand on my shoulder as she passed: blessings on a friend who, by alchemies and devices themselves of no interest to her, had set her child on the road to the world at last.
But the other two went on about getting Sweetie home. I sensed between Appleyard and La Bickerstaffe a nervous conspiracy. The latter kept depositing finger tips on the buttons of her blouse, as on the stops of a flute.
“So we were hoping you’d care to try again with Sweetie—run down to New York and look in on her in the Village,” she said.
“What! Like Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors sent to spy on What’s-his-name in Paris?” I saw the miles of relentlessly combed Jamesian syntactical fleece stretching away into a dubious future, and rejected it out of hand; unwisely perhaps, since I was groping for a literary formula that would get us all out of this mess, some mystique as potent to stop the spell as the Faulkner had been to start it. But I did not see this as Henry James. I saw us as long out of those drawing rooms slogging steadily across the Waste Land we had blundered into in search of the Other Side. God only knew what was on the Other Side, but we had to cross the Waste Land to see.
I was glad at any rate to hear Appleyard croak from the hill of pillows: “Oh, nothing like that, old man. Just tell her we still love her and want her to come home.”
Mme. Piquepuss’s voice rang unexpectedly from the window seat. “But she is having fun. Let her have her fling.”
Appleyard hitched himself up again. “I don’t want to have to cut her off with a penny!”
As though he were dying in a great Galsworthian bed!
Fever or no fever I sensed something fishy here. The room was swelling with hypocrisy. Then in an instant it was all clear.
It was when the old beldame, in response to that Galsworthian death rattle, coughed into her fist and said, “I send her checks enough to live on. Let her have her fling. This way she will meet some nice yunk man, n’est-ce pas?” A startled glance between Appleyard and his bride-elect as she fled for the kitchen teapot told me the story.
The old woman was living her life over again in the young. The candles had been snuffed on her parties long ago, but she remembered the waltzes in vanished gardens, the lovers swirling in the soft French nights, the champagne and the stars, the kisses and the grieving violins. Her beloved Proust reminds us that when aged people seem to sit with their dim eyes fixed at a point in space six feet in front of them, they are actually looking at something sixty years behind … Dream away, Mme. Piquepuss, I get the whole thing now. It is the middle-aged plotters we have on our hands now. They’re scared stiff that in a burst of senility you’ll cut them off with a penny, leaving everything to that girl who has found the road to the world at last … How I had misjudged the woman, as menace! She wasn’t the American Puritan at all, only the Gallic grandmère bent on seeing the Dance of Life go on. Her skittishness about any irregularities in the order of events was understandable enough. There was a story that a sister of hers, on a long-ago railway journey to Petrograd aimed at healing a romantic sorrow, had been ravished by Rasputin.
A silence fell among the rattle of crockery in the kitchen—a listening silence. Why did Eve Bickerstaffe want money? Because she had some. Money mates with money. The two lie down together and breed themselves endlessly upon one another …
“I don’t sleep for worrying about it,” Appleyard whispered. “I want my girl home. Where a man can keep an eye on things. I don’t sleep any more.”
“You slept last night,” Mme. Piquepuss offered encouragingly. “I looked in a few times.” She sat tranquilly, the eagle eyes in repose, the chocolate fingers on the table-edge before her. They looked like a row of eclairs which a butler might presently serve us in silver tongs with our tea. But when tea came we had sponge cake augmented by certain gray strawberries.
“Well, I don’t rest when I sleep,” Appleyard resumed. “Anyone knows that when you’re worried about something you can sleep eight hours or even ten and wake up feeling just as tired as when you lay down.”
“Or even tireder,” I said, inclined to be cheerful now that the miscreants had been unmasked and we knew where we stood. The ass in bed had forfeited my sympathy but I felt guilty at the rather notorious Freudianism that came to mind: how offspring out to set the world on fire often want only to burn the old man up. Well, he had missed the boat on her poetry. He had thought the stuff hopeless.
I did not begrudge the losers my good offices for that one last trip to New York they asked of me. After all, my aim was to extricate myself from l’affaire Appleyard as gracefully as possible, and a graceful exit usually means a leisurely one. My father gave me one good piece of advice in his lifetime. “Never slam a swinging door,” he said. I had had too much kickback as it was. So I took the tea and ate the cake and walked out of that house with a kind of gingerly tact. Which was just how, two Saturdays later, I walked into Sweetie’s.
At least into the apartment at the Bleecker Street address I had for her. I began to wonder whose it was soon after she admitted me.
“Chickie! Come in, come in.”
She sang to the tune of camel bells, or some local silversmith’s equivalent dangling from her wrist. The clatter of wooden sandals on the bare floor was intermittently muffled on the archipelago of small rugs we crossed to reach the living room. Her nails were a pale green now, and her lipstick seemed brown, though that may have been a trick of the light. I became aware of conversation other than ours. A young man with pink hair was sitting on a carousel horse in a corner and telling a girl parked on a rattan stool, “You can’t say that about Bea Lillie. I won’t let you.” The girl had wheat-colored hair hanging over one eye, which made her seem to be watching you from behind a curtain. Sweetie introduced them as Bill de Chavannes and Ursula Thorpe, and hurried off to get us drinks.
I stood at an open window while Bill de Chavannes finished his findings for Bea Lillie, whom he described as a masculine Oscar Wilde. The window gave on a tiny courtyard in which more children than there are in Decency were playing at more games than I had known existed. “Sort of a Breughel effect,” said Ursula, who had drifted to my side.
Sweetie returned with highballs and the remark that she still didn’t know “where he keeps everything.” From which provocative clue flowered the facts of her present life. “When Danny talked about his convertible,” Bill laughed, “Beth thought he meant a Cadillac or at least a Lincoln, and went home with him.”
“What kind of convertible did he have?” I asked.
“Castro,” Bill said, indicating the davenport on which I sat.
From this and other Restoration exchanges I gathered that there was a bon mot circulating in the Village that went, “I have a rendezvous with Beth.” It was said to have originated with Dylan Thomas—whom there was now a prolonged attempt to locate. It consisted of telephoning, asking droppers-in if they’d seen him, and even yelling out the window. “It’s no use,” said Bill at last, dismounting the horse. “He’s reading this week end at Bennington or a Welsh workmen’s local or something like that. Danny!” he finished as the master of the house strode in.
I saw a baked face with handsome features which included the diamond-shaped eyes of the Irish. Danny Dolan carried himself with a scrupulous erectness, as though he had once encountered the phrase, “the lean, clean breed,” and vowed to live up to it. But he was clearly out of his element in this flat of his. His father owned a steel mill which enabled him to own some racing horses—the carousel steed wasn’t the only sign of his passion in the room. He was just back from Philadelphia where a three-year-old of his had been operated on at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine for th
e removal of a chip from one of the sesamoid bones in his right foreleg, fractured during the running of the Belmont stakes.
“He was all right in there,” he told us, accepting Sweetie’s own highball. “I knew he was a smart horse, but the way he cooperated when they gave him the anesthetic was wonderful.”
“Sort of a Hemingway hero,” Ursula murmured, lip at glass.
Danny roamed from seat to seat like a man trying out chairs in a furniture store. “Where shall we eat?” he asked with a kind of truculent hospitality, the sense of strain put on limited emotions by playing host to a constant flow of superiors.
Beth removed from the refrigerator a gory butcher’s parcel which she opened for our inspection on a stack of magazines. “I bought this meat, and got to thinking I might cook it. But what is it? I forget what the butcher said.”
We studied the bloody still life from our respective distances, without profit, yet as though it rang a bell. Ursula succeeded in identifying it.
“Sort of a Chardin quality,” she said.
Danny rose and gave his belt a hitch. “We’re a rotten set,” he said with some smugness, or at least the wistful hope that he “belonged.” He glared at the window and then around to the rest of us, his diamond eyes glittering.
“Let’s go to the Aching Joint,” somebody said.
“Let’s go to the Onomatopoeia,” somebody else said. “There’s a new comedian there with a death wish, who gets his head out of a noose just in time.”
The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel Page 12
