The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  They “rowed along” for a while, Charles watching her tug obediently, trustingly at the oars. Oh, God, where would it all end? The Thurber was only a stall, a finger in a dike against which the heavy seas of that other monstrously pounded. Better to withdraw the finger and get the inevitable over with.

  “Have you ever read Dreiser?” he asked.

  “A little. I managed to avoid it in high school, even the American Tragedy. That’s the classic, isn’t it?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I did see the last movie version of it. I believe it was Montgomery Clift who went to the chair that time. Chick—”

  “Row.”

  Now it swept over him in a rushing billow of raw emotion that caused him to thrash on his seat what he wanted to do. He pretended to be gazing across the water, even shading his eyes to sustain the fiction, but it was mainly to shield his face from her, because in suddenly placing the style that had been weighing so heavily on his spirit—it hit him like a ton of bricks!—he also apprehended the temptation its recognition was whispering to him—thoughts so diabolic he was sure she must read them in his face, which was fulvous. Yet how innocently she sat there! So suffused with the dawn tints of her maidenhood, that he continued to see her in the light of, for hadn’t she her purity still as far as he was concerned? He had not possessed her in the orthodoxly carnal sense, only lent his flesh objectively to her special purpose. How he longed to be free of her! He would do anything to end this nightmare.

  Anything?

  No!

  And yet …

  God!

  “My arms are getting tired,” she said.

  “We’re almost there.” He pointed behind him while with the other hand still shading his eyes, almost believing chimerically the pretense he was trying to sustain. “Head for that island. We’ll have a picnic in a secluded spot there I know about.”

  “But my arms are coming out of their sockets,” she protested. “Here, you take the oars. You need the exercise more than I do. You look awful. Are you worried about something?”

  He uttered a hollow laugh, more like an animal cry that was torn from him. “Of course not. What would I have to be worried about?”

  She paused to rest on the oars a moment. They drifted as among water lilies, into which she smiled faintly, her long lashes tending downward in an expression of maidenly modesty. “Chick, is it true you’re having marital troubles? I hear rumors to that effect.”

  He leaned forward, and there was again the rain of blows on his knees which he presently discovered to be himself like a lunatic rapping for order in a dream.

  “You’re not getting me, cookie, even if I am junked by my wife over this. So get it through your head once and for all, and if you can’t I’ll have to drive it through with a hammer and chisel: I’m not available. I’m not getting a divorce, and even if I did I wouldn’t marry you. So put it out of your mind. If you think there’s the remotest chance of it, you’re wrong—dead wrong.”

  The insinuation in his tone appalled him. Was it her he was trying to scare or himself? Could he really go ahead with this black thing? No! The incredible thoughts in his mind were unbelievable.

  And yet …

  God!

  “It’s so cozy, together down here, just you and I, talking about books. We have a lot in common.” She let her hand down, trailing it in the imaginary water. “We could make a go of it.”

  Oh, how he longed to go mad. To be clean out of it on some island all his own. Some delusive refuge on which he could sink to peace, his mind a blessed blank, knowing from nothing, as they said these days, remembering from nothing. Rocked in that Lethean rest, not tossed on these detestable waters into which he had inexplicably, weirdly, blundered, thanks to the writers to whom he had gone for inspiration. Well, maybe this one could get him out of it—maybe this idiom would see him through … somehow … he knew not how. Not much style, to be sure, but that was not important. It was after all the fashionable romantics, the masters of preciosity, who had got him into the mess; maybe the grim realists could get him out.

  How?

  Something lit inside him like a flare—a red flame ignited in his solar plexus—his very gut. The memory of something Sweetie herself had once said when he was grooming her to be a Scott Fitzgerald character: “Oh, Chick, I’m going to live if it kills me!”

  Why was he recalling that just then? As a cue to what he himself was secretly …? No!

  And yet …

  God!

  “Why are we doing this?” she was asking rather plaintively.

  Not aware, or only half aware, that he had risen, trembling, to his feet, he sat down again. Not aware that he had sat down, he rose again. He kept this up, as if in a dream, as if now quite insanely engaged in the setting up exercises for which they had descended to these quarters. At last he settled himself, and frowned thoughtfully into the water, on which they might now be considered bobbing momentarily at anchor.

  “The whole thing is a social document,” he said, puzzling his way through it as he went along. “Yes, that’s what it must be, what we’ve blundered into—a social document. We’re the product of cultural forces molding us without our knowledge, and often against our will.”

  “We are?” she asked delightedly, as though they were being distributed roles to play in a game.

  “Of course. You know that. Civilization—that is to say, a world we never made—has held up shibboleths for us to pattern our lives after: bugbears for us to avoid as well as ideals for us to strive after. Being products of our environment, we are pawns in the hands of fate. Is that clear?”

  She nodded a little too readily. “Yes, but—”

  “Row. Goddam it, row, pull as though your life depended on it.”

  Now she rose to her feet, with that expression of vague inquiry that he had hated always. “I know why you want me to overexert myself,” she said. “I see it all now.”

  “Don’t be so damned winsome. The alternative would be a miscarriage of justice, and that’s a hell of a lot worse. Life is too full of it, as our best writers have been telling us. There’s no rational explanation to any of it, we’re all puppets of a blind fate, chips bobbing on a meaningless sea. So what difference does it make if we prevent another cipher in the human swarm …? Sweetie, what is the matter with you? What’s the trouble?” he said, the horror of the suspicion of his guilt dissolving in the bliss of the realization of his own worth implied again in the chivalrous solicitude with which he took her shoulders and pressed her back down on the seat. “Sit down. Are you all right? You’ve got to be careful at a time like this, girl. Shall I get you a glass of water?”

  “No, I—” He had been startled by the way her eyes had fluttered upward in their sweet shutters, almost like Mr. Hickett’s whom they had tormented in the old days.

  “Then what …?”

  She pointed up. “I thought I heard someone in the house. Yes,” she whispered, “there is somebody.”

  He stood listening and, sure enough, the floorboards creaked under a cautious tread as a muffled voice was heard, “Is anybody home?”

  “I thought I heard the knocker,” Sweetie whispered. “Who can it be?”

  “I don’t know, but I know one thing—I can’t be seen here,” he whispered back, in that ferocious generation not of panic so much as outrage, in which in one instant he not only heard the footsteps moving toward and then down the stairs and turning saw the coalbin door suggestively ajar but also, whispering, “Shh!” half-helped, half-hauled her out of the rowing machine toward it, the door; hearing also in that split second the old weary shifting of gears again; thinking as they shot on tiptoe to and then through the door Here we go again back to Yoknapatawpha County.

  When he had drawn the door softly shut again, the latch chuckling softly into place, they stood in total darkness, one which was not only the absence of light but the obliteration of the twenty years and more since which they had last stood here, now as then, then a
s now, waiting in the still unblasted dark while the footsteps came down the stair in trancelike recapitulation of those other footsteps linked forever in his mind with the smell of anthracite; that anthracite of which there were now only a few lumps left, the furnace having been converted to oil, as he either knew from hearsay or maybe sensed in some quantitive modification of the probably thirty cubic feet of blackness in which they stood—always had stood and maybe always quintessentially would, locked in some eternal obfuscation which neither reason nor morality could unlock. So it isn’t just being flipped back into that other literary key, he thought with clenched teeth (the teeth doing the clenching (yes, that too) ) it’s being flipped back in Time itself. Thinking while the teeth transposed themselves into a smile, “This is it. At last I’m going mad, thank God.” Not resisting but welcoming the hallucination that it was Granny coming once again as in that other time whose very seconds were impacted in his bones; greeting with a foretaste apparitionlike and serene the conviction that he could even hear commingled with the footsteps the light tap of the cane. Well, he thought, this does it: I am about to see a ghost. This is where it all started and this is where it will end: in a phantom come to avenge that seed which the unlawful conjuncture of mine and this girl’s has dishonored, whose outrage to that ancestral pride and principality of blood from which at least hers has flowed is enough to wake from its Atlantic sleep this ghost astride the very apotheosis of Pride, like a witch astride a broom. It is here to take issue with issue still unborn. More. To deny with some Authority wombed and suckled out of the very Absolute itself—the ultimate and unassailable Du Sollst—this tampering with the ancient pomp-entrusted taboo-hedged tribe-hallowed immemorial mammalian meat. She has come from a watery grave to police that seed. “Thou shalt not go hence till thou hast paid the last farthing,” will say that voice which is no voice, with a last imperial gesture of a hand that is no hand though it is at this moment fumbling at the latch, seaweed draping the whilom bones, the whilom eyes adream with that old philoprogenitive reproach, all come to ask account for this ancestral blood they at least—the whilom eyes hands bones voice—had for their allotted years held in sacred usufruct. Thinking, too, who thought all this, maybe now I can get this bastard out of my own system, him with his apotheosis and usufruct and God knows what all. Maybe this will do it. Because I am going to crawl out of Yoknapatawpha County if I have to do it on my belly, and make my peace in bedlam rather than New England. Maybe if instead of apotheosis and usufruct I say usutheosis and apofruct it will all go away. “Usutheosis and apofruct.”

  The footsteps whispered closer, stopped. In an instant of suspended outrage he felt, sensed, dreamed, the seachanged arm and the whilom bones lifted to the latch; saw, felt, smelt and tasted the chuckling latch pressed and the door swing open.

  The upraised arm didn’t remember the bulb in the bin, but only poised apparitionlike and bemused in the pale broth of light falling from behind it through the soiled window and frayed lace curtain. The figure stood like ectoplasm, the two pairs of eyes in the coalbin blinking out at it, its own eyes blinking in. The voice that attached itself to the figure was firmer and more masculine than his thoughts had led him to expect.

  “Is there anybody in there?” it said. “I’m Colonel Bickerstaffe. Miss Appleyard? Don’t be afraid. I believe my sister-in-law told you I would look in on you.… No one answered, and I mean when I heard noises down here—Hello! What in God’s name have we here?”

  13

  THE Colonel and I were sitting on the sidewalk at the Samothrace having a fine. It was warm outside and even more pleasant and warm inside where the brandy trickled down our throats. The Colonel smacked appreciatively, holding the glass up to the light.

  “This is good brandy. How come he serves it instead of Metaxas? He’s Greek.”

  “He’s a Greek but he’s not Greek. He doesn’t care. It’s an oversight when he gets good stuff. We used to tell him what to get in the old days when we sat out here like this a lot. He doesn’t know anything about brandy. He just sleeps over the cash register, like an old hound dog told to stay there.”

  “This is just like the real old days. That chestnut tree across the street with the high school kids walking under it holding hands, and the way the light strikes the briefcases. It reminds me of a little section in Montparnasse.” We watched a couple of couples cross the street and become lost in the swirling crowds.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said.

  “What?”

  “What’s in the briefcases. Who they read nowadays. Who’s surviving. And whether he’ll still be read when you get through with your thesis.”

  “Cut it out about the thesis. I wish I hadn’t told you about it. I’ll finish it when I get out of this—Army, and he’ll still be read, or if he isn’t the books’ll be mellowing on the shelves till people get around to him again, like wine in the bin. It’ll be down there getting better and better, like a Chambertin ’37, or maybe even a Lafite ’28, at least the war books and the Spain.” The Colonel laughed, showing an octave of good teeth. “You don’t like to talk about bins, do you?”

  “Cut it out about bins all the time,” I said, only half kidding. “I’ve told you the whole story, I’ve spilled as many guts about it as you have about the thesis, and I was just thinking how nice it is to get it off my chest with somebody who understands. So let’s lay off the bins.” Then I grinned, and said, “You were very brave to go down there. You were all right in there. How did you know what you’d find? There might have been a rat.”

  “Wasn’t there?”

  “Cut it out.”

  “It was nothing,” the Colonel shrugged, doing it well, a thing not really usually done well at all, but a thing easy to do with a pair of shoulders like those, I thought. The Colonel was looking at something else across the street, watching the way the light fell on it or appreciating the way a pair of legs moved rhythmically under a skirt. I myself took the opportunity to note again the Colonel’s scrupulously pressed uniform, polished shoes and gleaming silver leaf. I was going to ask something about the Army when I was asked instead, “Did she hang around here too? The girl who got you in trouble? Did she hang around here with you punks then reading Dowson and Wilde, for Chrissake?”

  I shook my head. “She was not of our generation. I don’t mean that chronologically, I mean spiritually.”

  “Jesus, what a word.”

  “Forgive me for offending you with such a—word as that. But here’s something for you. What generation were we? I mean if yours was the Lost and the one coming up is the Beat.”

  “What do you mean, Lost? How old do I look?”

  “Again I mean spiritually, to use the word that offends you. You’re obviously in your thirties,” I said, lying by maybe a decade, “just like me. So what generation was ours?”

  “The Spontaneous Generation,” the Colonel laughed, “judging by that girl’s condition.”

  “Cut it out about her. There’ll be time enough to get down to the brass tacks when we’ve finished this fine, but while there’s a little in the glass let’s talk about style some more. Who else do you like? What do you think about Faulkner?”

  “He has a style which is a dust-catcher.”

  “Proust.”

  “A swell trip if you like detours.”

  “What about Wolfe? Do you think he’ll live?”

  “I didn’t know he was sick.”

  “Let’s talk about some poets,” I said, wanting it to be staccato but not that staccato. “Where would you place E. E. Cummings?”

  “Somewhere between the Elizabethan lyric and bubble gum. He’s fun—an important element in art. Hamlet is fun, so are two, no three, Goyas, and most of Ecclesiastes.”

  “Now there’s Dylan Thomas. Are you familiar with his work?”

  “It’s nice work if you can get it. But I don’t get it.”

  We sat with our brandies, keeping talking about style. The whole high school let out nearby, not j
ust a few kids at a time, and as the boys and girls poured by across the street we watched the way they walked, recalling how Havelock Ellis defined walking as regulated error, a kind of systematic falling forward and catching yourself, and seeing if the definition held up against the data going by over there. We watched the way the light fell on the figures in motion and on the flanks of a fire engine rushing by on its way to a house which eventually burned down, wiping out a family of five. I turned my head and snuck another look at the Colonel, watching the way she watched these things.

  After a minute I said, “How long have you been in the WACs?”

  “It’s actually the WAC, since the ‘C’ stands for ‘Corps.’ Two years during the war, then a few years at Columbia, then when the thesis wasn’t going well, back into the WAC for another hitch. I expected to be in New York again, on this public relations job they’ve given me, but instead they shot me out to Philadelphia. What a town. But I’m getting a little research done even there. I expect to finish the thesis in another year, and hope it’s good enough to become a book.”

  “It will,” I said, “and I’ll look forward to reading it.”

  The Colonel seemed to lose interest in the subject, or at least in talking about it any more, and turned to look up the street. I saw the well-molded back of her head, and the brown hair gathered there like a coiled bullwhip.

  “I can see where this girl is something of a pain in the ass,” she said.

  “You sure like understatement,” I said. I didn’t want to get around to that quite yet, but to finish in peace the fine left in my glass. “Who else has got it? Who else is good?”

  “Some authors lay it on with a trowel, and that is not a good thing to do with understatement,” she said.

  “No, it is not. Does Compton-Burnett do that with hers? Lay it on with a trowel?”

  “Yes. She is an example of the dangers of that. It looks bone-bare on the printed page, but when you get to reading it you see it’s as drawn out as Henry James. Throwing it away is as difficult an art on the printed page as it is in the theater. Who else can throw it all away?”