The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  I was in my study the next afternoon, a Saturday, when the delivery truck drove up on the gravel drive outside. I heard the front door open, then a pause as the flowers were signed for. The door closed and there was another pause, broken by the rustle of tissue paper. Then another long pause, followed by a faint sniffling sound. I shot back to my chair as footsteps approached my closed door. I was sitting in the chair with my head bowed in my hand when the knob turned slowly and the door opened. I rose and we stumbled into one another’s arms with tears in our eyes, one another’s tears on our cheeks …

  That brought the story to an end, that scrap of Frank L. Stanton (1857–1927) flapping like a torn flag above the shambles.

  Other private resolutions in our joint complications I cannot vouch for in detail, but, from the short distance in which I am compelled to report, it looks as though Nickie (who of course has a B.A. degree) will soon get his teacher’s certificate. I shall miss both him and Lila as well as their kids when they move to Nickie’s first post, but I know that when the time comes I shall with a steady heart surrender him to Bennington or Antioch or whatever. Meanwhile on his holidays home from school I get along with him a good deal better than formerly. He’s learned a lot. By and large he keeps his promise not to be needlessly adroit, in deference to my condition, but occasionally his tongue runs away with him in the childish need to create an effect.

  Sweetie has had her child, a boy, and has moved to San Francisco, which has since, of course, superseded New Mexico as The Place To Go. Crystal helped see her through it all, which she was able to do in good part when it became fairly certain that I was not vitally involved. Too, she wanted to make sure I never saw the woman again, as, indeed, I never have to this day. I hear bits of news about her now and then, and learn she has enough money to get by, the will having been broken on the evidence that Appleyard probably pre-deceased Mme. Piquepuss in the plane accident, if only by a split second, and thus did not live to inherit the money to pass on to his wife. It all went in a direct line to Sweetie after all. Eve Bickerstaffe yielded, I am told, with good grace, but then she probably has enough harvested from previous husbands to live on in her house in Chelsea.

  Recently in a dentist’s reception office the name Beth Appleyard popped out at me from a page of a well-regarded magazine. It was signed to a poem entitled Theme and Variation, of which I instantly recognized the first stanza, as you will too. It was the stanza that had provoked the argument between us. Since then she had obviously had a great deal of time and reason to think about the subject of the poem, and seriously. In its final and published form it goes:

  Coleridge caused his wife unrest,

  Liking other company best;

  Dickens, never quite enthralled,

  Sent his packing when she palled;

  Gauguin broke the marriage vow

  In quest of Paradise enow.

  These things attest in monochrome:

  Genius is the scourge of home.

  Lady Nelson made the best of

  What another got the rest of;

  Wagner had, in middle life,

  Three children by another’s wife;

  Whitman liked to play the dastard,

  Leaving here and there a bastard.

  Lives of great men all remind us

  Not to let their labors blind us.

  Each helped to give an age its tone,

  Though never acting quite his own.

  Will of neither wax nor iron

  Could have made a go with Byron.

  Flaubert, to prove he was above

  Bourgeois criteria of love,

  Once took a courtesan to bed

  Keeping his hat upon his head.

  But mine is off to Johann Bach,

  For whom my sentiment is “Ach!”

  Not once, but twice, a model spouse,

  With twenty children in the house.

  Some fathers would have walked away

  In what they call a fugue today.

  But he left no one in the lurch,

  And played the stuff he wrote in church.

  At last she had written a poem that was not derivative—not technically, that is. This time it was the idea that carried a vague echo of something I had heard before. No, I hadn’t heard it—I had said it. She had appropriated my side of the argument for a finish, or switch. At first I could think only of the snideness of creative talent, which steals from wherever and whomever it can. Then, behaving rather less childishly myself, I was able to see the growth represented in Sweetie’s viewpoint. The task of rearing a child must have taught her a lot. Taught her that the conformity we often glibly equate with mediocrity isn’t something free spirits “transcend” as much as something they’re not quite up to. That convention calls for broader shoulders—and, for all I know, more imagination—than revolt. Yes, the job of bringing up a child must always be considerable, even without the added burden of a man around the house. Though I must in all fairness to Sweetie add that she hasn’t married—so far, anyway. I understand she has a man hanging around her in San Francisco, a poet who reads from his works in night clubs, but she’s still single. And, I am sure, to the best of her lights, singular. Still I was glad to see that rhymed salute from a free spirit to those of us who pitch our tents, as most of us, in the end, must, on more or less conventional terrain.

  Which is where I close with the declaration of being content to remain. Crystal’s emotions were shaken and her temper was really inflamed, for a good while there. But passions have cooled now, and we are again sleeping together in the great double bed which is also an heirloom of mine. I have had, for the record, one clear-cut instance of physical temptation since the events put down here. I don’t imagine I need add that I resisted it. It concerned a woman I have known for years, freshly divorced when I came across her in a New York bar one night when I was staying in town. “Thanks just the same,” I told her, “but I don’t want any pleasures interfering with my happiness.”

  APPENDIX

  NOTE: Since the preceding events, Beth Appleyard did marry. She married the West Coast sales manager of a retail shoe corporation, and has moved to the suburbs of Los Angeles. Her husband, whose name is Hubert T. Hanley, has two children by a previous marriage, so that Mrs. Hanley now has three lovely youngsters. Despite her household chores and the pressures of suburban social life, however, she still manages to find time for her writing, and recently had a new volume of poems published under the title Omens and Amens. A representative sampling from it appears in the following pages.

  BACCHANAL

  “Come live with me and be my love,”

  He said, in substance. “There’s no vine

  We will not pluck the clusters of,

  Or grape we will not turn to wine.”

  It’s autumn of their second year.

  Now he, in seasonal pursuit,

  With rich and modulated cheer,

  Brings home the festive purple fruit;

  And she, by passion once demented

  —That woman out of Botticelli—

  She brews and bottles, unfermented,

  The stupid and abiding jelly.

  CHRISTMAS FAMILY REUNION

  Since last the tutelary hearth

  Has seen this bursting pod of kin,

  I’ve thought how good the family mold,

  How solid and how genuine.

  Now once again the aunts are here,

  The uncles, sisters, brothers,

  With candy in the children’s hair,

  The grownups in each other’s.

  There’s talk of saving room for pie;

  Grandma discusses her neuralgia.

  I long for time to pass, so I

  Can think of all this with nostalgia.

  SAVAGE

  Back in the primitive past,

  He had a grape in his mouth,

  I had a flower in mine.

  It was deep in the dulcet south.

  Now he has seeds in his hand,
>
  I have a rake in mine,

  Gathering twigs that are oak,

  Dreaming of leaves that are vine.

  Our Paradise had a snake

  Who appeared in the grass and was gone,

  Or rather turned into a hose

  For sprinkling the garden lawn.

  When once its innocuous hiss

  Was plaguing the Protestant night,

  I took an impromptu kiss

  From a swain who strayed into sight.

  Then I knew that the primitive man

  Is something you cannot subdue—

  From my sudden corroborative pang

  When the neighbors protested “Taboo!”

  SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE, OR, THERE’S NOTHING NEW UNDER THE MOON EITHER

  When bored by the drone of the wedlocked pair,

  When bromides of marriage have started to wear,

  Contemplate those of the crimson affair:

  “I had to see you,” and “Tonight belongs to us.”

  Skewered on bliss of a dubious sort

  Are all adventurers moved to consort

  With others inspiring this hackneyed retort:

  “I can’t fight you any longer.”

  Some with such wheezes have gone to the dead,

  Oblivious that Liebestod lurked up ahead,

  That pistols would perforate them as they said:

  “This thing is bigger than both of us.”

  Experimentation in matters of sin

  Pales on the instant it’s destined to win;

  Paramours end as conformers begin:

  “I don’t want just this—I want you.”

  Explorers are highly unlikely to hear

  Novelties murmured into their ear;

  Checkered with such is the checkered career:

  “It’s not you I’m afraid of, it’s myself.”

  Such liturgies standardize lovers in league

  That someone will cry in the midst of intrigue,

  And someone will hear in the midst of fatigue:

  “You don’t want me—you just want sex!”

  Strait is the gate and narrow the way

  Closing at last on the ranging roué;

  Who plucks a primrose plants a cliché:

  “We’re married in the eyes of Heaven.”

  The dangerous life is so swiftly prosaic

  You might as well marry and live in Passaic;

  It ends and begins in established mosaic:

  “I’m all mixed up.”

  The lexicon’s written for groom and for rake.

  Liaisons are always a give-and-take.

  Disillusionment’s certain to follow a break.

  “For God’s sake be careful or someone will hear you!”

  PSYCHIATRIST

  His role is to invert the fairy tale;

  To give the wakeful Beauty sleep,

  Change back the charming Prince into a frog,

  Or unmask him as the chimney sweep.

  To him at last dear Cinderella,

  And not Rapunzel, must let down her hair,

  Yield up the hopeless fetish of the shoe

  And much of what was dreamt below the stair.

  Don’t ask him tritely can he heal himself.

  Hope rather that his private dream

  For living happily forever after

  Be not the fantasy that it may seem:

  A village where the hunter’s evening stride

  Betrays no more of strutter than of hobbler;

  And Cinderella sleeps content beside

  The kind and well-adjusted cobbler.

  STRATEGIC RETREAT

  The blossoms that besot the bee

  Once quite intoxicated me.

  But that was in my squandered youth

  (That still unopened bud of Truth).

  Now, for the fairly simple reason

  That foliage endures a season,

  While days may bring a flower to grief,

  I have begun to praise the leaf.

  That thief and donor Time, who taught

  Me thus to sing as sing I ought,

  Shall bring me to the winter’s kiss

  As once he did from spring to this.

  As one who from relinquished bloom

  Has settled for each plainer plume,

  I trust that then I shall not blanch,

  But steadfastly extoll the branch.

  About the Author

  Peter De Vries (1910–1993) was born in Chicago to Dutch immigrant parents. His father wanted him to join the clergy, but after attending Calvin College and Northwestern University, De Vries found work as a vending-machine operator, a toffee-apple salesman, a radio actor, and an editor at Poetry magazine. His friend and mentor James Thurber brought him to the attention of the New Yorker, and in 1944 De Vries moved to New York to become a regular staff contributor to the magazine, where he worked for the next forty years.

  A prolific author of novels, short stories, parodies, poetry, and essays, he published twenty-seven books during his lifetime and was heralded by Kingsley Amis as the “funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic.” De Vries was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983, taking his place alongside Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, and S. J. Perelman as one of the nation’s greatest wits.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The poems appearing on pages 122, 141–142, 151, 266–267, 270, 271, 272, 275, and 276 originally appeared in the New Yorker.

  The poem on pages 273 and 274 originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine.

  The quotation on page 88 (of which the last word is parodied) is from “The Hollow Men,” in Collected Poems 1909–1935 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936, by Harcourt, Brace, and Company, Inc.

  Lines from “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” in New Hampshire by Robert Frost. Copyright 1923 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc. Copyright 1951 by Robert Frost. By permission of the publishers.

  Copyright © 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1959 by Peter De Vries

  Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-6966-6

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10014

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