The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “Hemingway, for my money.”

  “Of course,” the Colonel said, with an expression I cannot report on as I looked away just then to avoid her seeing mine. “Flaubert threw just enough of it away to make what remains last, and the authors of the Gospels did it just right too, and that’s true of all of Huckleberry Finn but not of Twain, and you find it in some O’Hara and the best of Pogo. Nowhere else.”

  “Throwing it away wrong can be just as bad as chewing the scenery,” I said. I looked at my watch—three-thirty. I put back the fine. I let its warm glow spread around through my insides a minute, then I twitched my chair around to the table. “What’ll we do? About the kid I mean.”

  “You mean the one you’ve got in your hair or the one she’s got in her stomach?”

  “Cut it out. Both. You’ve taught me to be hardboiled about the thing, to take it all on a plane of pure physical sensation and phenomenon, which I have every right to since it’s a web I’m caught in, not one I spun. But I’m still human and want to do what’s right. Everything I can, within reason, and without throwing my private life up for grabs. I don’t want the pool of blood in my own house because it wouldn’t be fair to my wife. It was good of your sister-in-law to turn over the five thousand pending the probate of the will, when she learned about the circumstances. But what’ll we do with Sweetie? I make it plural as you so kindly invited me to while you’re here. But your three-day pass has already run for two. When will you go back to Philadelphia?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “All right. So what would you do if you were me? She won’t be any help, as you can see. She didn’t even get you right. I could tell right away you weren’t Eve’s brother, and now you’re not even her sister, but an in-law. Let’s see again, you’re Eve’s second husband’s sister. Right? Well then, what would you do?”

  “Turn her over to a good case worker. What else? What the hell are you bleeding and dying for. You were only the best available substitute for artificial insemination.”

  “Where’s a good case worker?”

  “There’s supposed to be a good new agency in Chickenfoot for what they used to call fallen girls. I remember it now because my superior officer had a friend who got in trouble. She held her hand going through there. You take this girl there, who’s had her way with you and got you in such a jam.”

  “Now let’s lay off that,” I laughed, “and about the reversal of the sexes in our time, too. And especially about the Decline of the Male. All that. Tell me some more about this agency. Will she be able to stay there too? I mean later?”

  “I think they have rooms. Go and find out. Lay it on the line to them. They’re human, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Would you come along? I don’t think I could face it alone? Will you run over to Chickenfoot with me, if I made it, say, tomorrow morning?”

  “Why not?” the Colonel said firmly, taking a compact out of her shoulder bag and powdering her nose with a series of violent slaps that left her in a white cloud. “The thing looks to me as though it needs a woman’s touch.”

  We went out the next morning about ten o’clock. The Colonel had phoned Philadelphia the night before and got the dope about the agency from her superior officer, a General Winrod. Sweetie sat in the back seat eating chocolate-covered peanuts and reciting poetry. She had come willingly enough and was in good spirits. That’s all there was to say about her, except that her color was fine and her skin seemed to fit tighter over her flesh than usual.

  “What about Willa Cather?” I asked the Colonel, resuming a discussion we had going in the front seat, when there was a lull in the recitations from Sweetie, whom of course we had to humor. “What do you give her?”

  “B-plus,” the Colonel said, doing it like a schoolteacher giving out grades—doing it that way this time. We made a game of it all the way to Chickenfoot, driving in a steady drizzle. “Her style was pure. I mean pure. And the stuff is still there.”

  “Fitzgerald,” I said, steering around a small crater in the Post Road.

  “A-minus, the minus for the touch of elegance you can’t get away from. But one book has lasted and will last, and maybe two.”

  We drove along in the drizzle, keeping discussing good writing. When we got on the subject of the lyric note, where it had been missing and why in modern letters, and where it had been and was struck, I couldn’t help reciting a pastiche of Millay Sweetie had done. I did it because it was apropos, but also to show that the girl I had let myself get involved with had been a person of some parts, not what the Colonel saw eating Goobers in the back seat; to give her an idea of the iconoclast before she had folded on me, so the Colonel wouldn’t think I was a complete knucklehead.

  This is the way the sonnet went:

  I’m sick, my Lord, of doing things by halves.

  Let’s either be completely good and moral

  Or frankly bend the knee to golden calves.

  Let’s pick a fight, but not another quarrel!

  I will not perch again upon this hassock

  While you in half-length silken smoking coat

  Sit down and play me one more semiclassic.

  Instead let’s seize each other by the throat.

  Death hot or cold, but not this tepid life!

  Half-measures, hemi-quavers, pseudo-urges—

  I was not meant to be that kind of wife!

  I am by nature meant to live in splurges.

  Cup running over, when will you come to pass?

  Oh, Christ, here comes another demitasse.

  “Pretty good,” said the Colonel, whom I had given a copy of The Mocking Bird with the aim of building myself up as noted, which she had apparently not read. “Do you know any others?”

  I recited one of Cummings which we had finally included:

  The agency when we got to it was in a pretentiously simple building, modern and new on a square of lawn on the outskirts of town. It looked endowed. It was near a motel, in the parking lot of which we had to leave the car, the street being crowded.

  The woman at the desk was a brunette with blue eyes who interviewed Sweetie first, in another room. She let the Colonel and me cool our heels in the waiting room, though as she went out the door she and the Colonel exchanged a glance that I didn’t have much trouble identifying. The Colonel touched the coiled bullwhip in a way she hadn’t for me and dug the compact out of her shoulder bag.

  I sat there hearing a faint murmur beyond the door which presently swelled to an extent requiring more than two people to make it. Sweetie’s audience was widening. I tried to wait faster, as it were, trying not to look at the clock and not to listen. I heard the term “boiled in oil” bandied out there anyhow. When the brunette came back I saw Sweetie in the distance behind her, sitting on a chair and eating a box of Cracker-jack which she must have had in her handbag all the time, though it looked given to her, two or three agency people standing around her like policemen around a lost child in a precinct station. The handbag was one of those wicker cases out of which when opened you expect to see a carrier pigeon fly. I tried to work up some resentment, which somehow fell flat inside me like an omelet all the time, and was trying to get it up, saying “Hey, get your dander up,” to myself, when I again saw the look pass between the brunette and the Colonel, and then I just laughed and lay down, mentally speaking. They seemed to have come to an understanding.

  “I have nothing to do with this, you understand,” the Colonel said to her. “I’m just along.”

  “I understand,” said the brunette, like someone reassuring another that they knew the other was “finer” than that, and wouldn’t knock a poor kid like that up. Then the brunette looked me over. “Would you step inside, please? Miss Appleyard will wait with your friend here.”

  I went in and sat down on a straightback chair beside a desk that the brunette sat behind. It was like asking for a loan at a bank.

  “Now, then, you are the putative father?” she said, pen poised over a fresh blank, or a fresh sid
e of the same one she had put Sweetie’s information on.

  “I don’t know what that means, but if it’ll make you feel any better to put it down, by all means do so,” I said. “I just want to make it clear that I am not—”

  “We don’t ask questions here,” she answered with cool charity. “Not about the emotional aspects of the case, just a short formal questionnaire. First, can you contribute anything to her care?”

  “I’m willing to give a little, though only as a fr—”

  “Just how much?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll think of a number in a minute. You see, this must be made plain. The whole thing was an iconoclastic experiment, somewhat derivative of Isadora Duncan, while leaning heavily on Shaw, that misfired—”

  “What is your name?”

  “Nick Steele.”

  She wrote down something that seemed to take a couple more letters than that. She had probably profited enormously from her interview with Sweetie, at any rate writing without hesitation.

  “We’d like to know something about both parents, for the sake of the adopting parents. They like to know something about the nature of the father and mother, though of course we never disclose identities. May I ask what your profession is?”

  “Bricklayer,” I said, making a mental association with the object I longed most to have in my hand at that moment. “A good solid profession, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I’m sorry you feel a tone of sarcasm is necessary.”

  “This is as good a time for it as any. The whole thing was just a gesture on the side of feminine independence, a blow struck for freedom, you understand,” I said looking at her hard.

  “You didn’t seem to have much trouble gaining her confidence,” she answered. “I suppose you gave her the impression you were of a wealthy family—”

  “I didn’t tell her any such thing. I said I had a rich background. That’s something else altogether. She knew me well enough, and this was all her doing. She’s made free with the facts if she left you with any other impression, because I wanted, and want, no part of it. I’m sure I’ve left her in capable hands as far as carrying on the noble Experiment is concerned. I’ll leave you a thousand dollars in unmarked bills under any tree you name, but for the rest, include me out.”

  There were more dirty looks as I went out, though they were clean, antiseptic looks, and I could feel them behind my head. When I got to the outer office the Colonel greeted me with a smile, though it went over my left shoulder to the brunette it was intended for. Sweetie had disappeared into some farther recesses of this institution. The brunette must have made some sign to the Colonel, who went in to see her, only briefly, returning to call me to the doorway and say, “I think I’ll stay a bit. You just go on back. I’ll stay, and don’t worry about Sweetie. They’ll look after her here. I’ll phone you when I get back to Decency and tell you about anything of Sweetie’s they may want sent out. Forget about it. I mean put your mind at ease. I’ll arrange the whole thing as best I can. I’ll probably take this young lady out to lunch, so don’t worry.”

  I walked past the motel to a nearby bar to have a drink on it, but it was no good. I tried to curry favor with myself but I didn’t want any part of me. I wasn’t going to give myself house room. My disapproval wasn’t moral, since I hadn’t done anything Wrong in the technically ethical sense, but intellectual—call it that. I mean now that the relief was here I saw myself in perspective as a goddam fool. Not just with this but with other things. I reviewed my life, as from a mountaintop, and every dramatic peak (or valley, whichever way you want to look at it) was the action of a goddam fool. For a man not to be able to abide himself in the essentials is a sorry thing—not sad, which has dignity, but sorry, which hasn’t. I wanted to kick myself. I couldn’t stand me. It’s been like that all along. I’m just not my sort.

  So I sat there thinking the relief as I nursed my beer in the bar but not being able to taste it. It was like a check I couldn’t cash. A check for a million bucks too, I told myself, because here you’re off the hook you ninny but not able to enjoy it because you don’t deserve it. I sat there so long it got to be lunch-time, the bar turning out to be a grill filling up with local businessmen and office girls. Two of the girls coming in together looked familiar. They were the Colonel and the brunette of the Inquisition. They had made even more progress with one another than I had suspected. They were quarreling.

  Christ but the war between the sexes is complex, I said to myself. I finished my beer and left my table to some people who felt like eating. Then I paid and went out and walked back to the motel in the rain.

  14

  I AWOKE from a curious dream in which I was incompetent. With that odd unreality we experience in dreams, I seemed unable to do anything right, but bungled whatever I put my hand to.

  I had been demoted to the composing room where with a pair of tweezers I was trying to pick the apostrophe out of Prud’homme’s name. Bulwinkle entered and the tweezers became a mallet which I seized and began to thump his backside, no doubt inspired by his pictorial frontage to think of him as a bass drum.

  I lay awake for some time after in full daylight. Blitzstein barked under the window. My head shook a demurrer on the pillow: I could not, this morning, march around the post. Rising itself seemed a feat too Herculean to ask. My skin would fall off my face under human gazes; their eyes would melt mine into soft rosin blisters. As often when in need of encouragement to vacate the placental warmth of bedclothes, I selected some stirring instance of human accomplishment, of obstacles overcome, and by this means hauled myself out of bed as by a system of moral weights and pulleys. This morning I chose Walter Gieseking’s hands. “Those thick German fingers playing Debussy,” I said to myself. “Opalescent impossibilities like Reflets dans L’Eau and the second Arabesque. If he can do that, the least you can do is get up!”

  Inside of an hour I had come to a running stop on that island of coagulated stockings we know to be the hooked rug in front of Bulwinkle’s desk.

  “Sir,” I squeaked with that high derision that would never be seen through by those mindless eyes, “I’m ready to take on Today’s Chuckle, as you asked. I believe you said it paid fifty dollars extra a week, was it? And since it so happens I can use the money just now, why, here are some samples I’ve done …”

  I set on his desk a page of typewritten specimens of the genre which I had stolen from the fronts of gas stations, dredged up out of memory or manufactured on my own. One went:

  “Aunt Hilda, make a noise like a frog.”

  “Why do you want me to make a noise like a frog,

  Willie?”

  “Because Daddy says we’ll all be rich when you croak.”

  I relaxed my at-attention stance to one more or less at ease.

  “Are you still planning to run them boxed on the lower front page, Mr. Bulwinkle?” I asked.

  He emitted a sound that may have been a grunt of affirmation or an unwilled digestive adjustment. He was reading the second Chuckle. It ran:

  She: “Am I the first girl you ever kissed?”

  He: “You do look familiar.”

  As Bulwinkle read these and companion specimens, I absorbed the art matter on Today’s Tie. It showed an Indian brave, in the prime of life, spearing fish from a canoe in primeval woodland. I’m sure it was an Indian though his face was obscured by one of my employer’s chins. The scene was the sort often depicted on barbershop calendars with a caption like “Many Moons Ago.” There were never any captions on Bulwinkle’s ties, though. His taste was too restrained for that.

  He had finished perusing the samples. He picked up a cigar that had been smoldering on the rim of an ashtray.

  “I’m glad you came in to see me, Swallow,” he said, “because I was just going to call you in. Not only can we not give you Today’s Chuckle, I’m afraid—we’ll have to ask for your resignation as the Lamplighter too.”

  “Oh?” I said. “How is that?”

  “You�
��ve been practicing psychiatry again, against my express orders. I’ve explained to you, you don’t have a license to practice it, and the first thing we know we won’t have any to publish a paper if we don’t let you go.”

  “May I ask for a fuller explanation?”

  “Fuller! You know what I mean. Your brother-in-law again. I’ve kept it all out of the Pick because you’re mixed up in it, but now that he’s coming up for trial it’s getting into other papers and even on the AP wire. The thing will be a national subject any day now.”

  “Not just national. International,” I said, dropping something else on his desk. It was a cable from Van Kuykens, my hero, and read: EXCITED HEAR BONA FIDE DUAL PERSONALITY UNDER YOUR CARE STOP MOST RARE OF COURSE STOP WANT VERY MUCH SEE HIM AND YOU IF I MAY STOP BUSY ROTTERDAM CONVENTION NOW BUT HOPE FLY AMERICA THE TWENTIETH PLEASE WIRE REPLY.

  Bulwinkle read that over twice, and was a good deal longer in coming to a conclusion than on the Chuckle thing.

  “Who is this Van Kuykens?” he asked.

  “An eminent Dutch psychiatrist of whom I happen to be a disciple. I’ve been modeling some of my therapies on his discoveries,” I went on, feeling the moment had come to shoot the works and strike out boldly. Pussyfooting was a thing of the past, and even a tone of apology would hinder rather than aid my cause.

  “What we have is a full-fledged Jekyll-and-Hyde case,” I continued impressively. “You can take a timid approach and fire me like a scared rabbit, or you can back me up with the full force of the paper and see me through, with possible eventual honors for everybody.”

  “Or the hoosegow.”

  “Which reminds me that I must visit my patient,” I said glancing at the clock. “My first duty is to him. It always was and always will be.”