Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003

by Howard Waldrop

  But they no longer connected to the person he was. Phrases, words, sentences, sometimes whole pages spoke out to him; but they did so as to a reader, not as to the man who wrote them. It was like some other guy, with the same name, had written these works, and then taken off on a long vacation while Wolfe was sick, leaving only the words behind, like some jumbled private code. It had been up to Wolfe to discover who this person was, decipher the mystery. He had failed.

  He’d gone through the long manuscript he and Perkins had broken off from Time and the River in ’34, and that he had, evidently, later divided into The Lost Helen and The October Fair, both of which he had been adding and splicing to just before his illness.

  There was an aborted, limited-third-person manuscript Perkins told him was the “Doakesology”—about a guy named Joe Doakes. In other places he was named Paul Spangler. Sometimes they were Eugene Gant, in other places it was “I,” in other places George Webber.

  Wolfe had read the whole jumble over in two years. They were mostly full of great ringing apostrophes to night and America and food and trains. There was some good writing in them, lots of bad, too much of the mediocre. Mainly, they didn’t interest him at all, because he no longer recalled the emotions that had made the Other Wolfe, as he referred to him sometimes, write them.

  One chunk of manuscript from the two three-feet-by-four-feet pine packing crates full of them at the Scribner’s office did interest him. It was a history, spare, told in the third person about (as Perkins and his mother told him) his North Carolina hill-country ancestors, called here the Pentlands and the Joyners. It was funny. It was exciting. It told a story. It wasn’t like any of the other manuscripts that surrounded it.

  It was this piece he had taken in the summer of ’39, fleshed out and finished, and which Scribner’s had published early this year as The Hills Beyond Pentland.

  The reviewers, most of them, had gone crazy, taking it as a sign that a new, mature Thomas Wolfe was walking the field of letters, a writer more in control, one interested in narrative, who could write about people other than himself. (The entire narrative took place twenty years before he had been born.) That, they said, was worth the price of the book.

  Others of course bemoaned the loss of the Wolfe who used to howl at the moon, the ones who wanted him to continue writing stories so that, as one of them said, “You couldn’t tell if he was sitting down to a Thanks-giving dinner, or about to have sexual relations.” (A line he would cherish forever.)

  What neither set of critics knew was that some of the material had been written as far back as 1933. Most of it was in manuscript before the hospital stay. All he’d had to do was finish it just as he had started it; he had been capable of this book seven years before. As to the ones who wanted the Other Wolfe back, he was gone. He had disappeared into a hospital, and another writer, wearing his clothes and face, had come out. That man could no longer churn out dithyrambs at blinding speed, no longer overflowed with words like torrents of hot lava, was not a floodgate waiting to be opened by the business end of a stub pencil.

  After the illness Wolfe found that sometimes the writing of a postcard could be an onerous chore. His work, his writing, now came slowly, slower than a mason with his bricks or a cabinetmaker with a piece of cedar. There were times when it did flow—a sentence, paragraphs, two, three: once a whole page. When it happened it left him feeling like he had been touched by the gods. But when it went away, there was nothing to do but go back to words, phrases, a sentence at a time. His manuscripts were now full of crossouts, big and little xxx’s, six, seven, eight wrong word choices scratched through.

  He asked Maxwell Perkins about it. He paused, in his Connecticut way, and then said:

  “You used to write faster than any human being, Tom, but I had to have you take it out by the bucketfuls, whole chapters at a time. The stuff you’re doing now is the best you’ve ever done. Don’t worry. Just do it as it comes. You’ve got all the time in the world now, which you didn’t used to think you had, which was what made you write too fast.”

  It was the longest speech he’d ever heard Perkins make.

  There had been the time, just before he’d left on the western trip that made him sick, that he had almost broken with Scribner’s. That terrible review by de Voto (rereading it lately, Wolfe could dispassionately see the places where it was right, the places where it was wrong) of the small book he did about the struggle to write Time and the River. Something about lawsuits they had settled out of court. Something that had gone on for months about a dentist’s bill. (Wolfe had used Scribner’s as a bank, drawing off his royalties ten and fifteen dollars at a time.) All those things meant zip now: Wolfe had found nothing as revealing as the ten-, twenty-, thirty-page letters the Other Wolfe had written in the heat of rage, sealed in envelopes, but fortunately never mailed.

  The Other Wolfe had been a bitter man in 1937 and ’38.

  But Maxwell Perkins had stuck with him. His had been the first face he’d seen at Johns Hopkins as he came out from under the sedative; it had been the last in New York when he set out on this journey that led to this dirigible over the South China Sea.

  It was very late. Wolfe was tired (he was always tired these days—how had the Other Wolfe denied that body sleep and rest for so long without wearing it completely out?), but he wanted to hear more Fats Waller. If the man were as tired as Wolfe was, he would sleep for the rest of the flight once he quit.

  Your Feet’s Too Big

  The band kept up as best it could.

  Fats slammed down on the last notes of “One O’Clock Jump.” The sound was still holding in the air when he trilled his way up the scales in the opening to “Christopher Columbus.” He sang, and the band joined in the vocals over the chorus. Waller went into the falsetto for the crewman’s voice, and Columbus’ basso, and then they went into an extended jam in the middle.

  The ballroom was still two-thirds full, with other passengers coming in and going out continually. Crewmen, not allowed there except on duty, stood in the rear doorway that led to the kitchen; some danced in there, dimly seen through the cigarette smoke from the passenger tables.

  The song kept growing and expanding; the bandleader took a kazoo from his breast pocket, blew it into the mike while continuing to slam-pick his banjo. He and Fats put their heads close together at the microphone, singing in good harmony.

  The song rattled to its noisy close.

  “Wowee!” said Fats. “Talk about a rumpus! My old heart can’t take much of that. Let’s see if we can’t slow it down a little bit. Lessee, maybe I can think of something. Here’s a thing we wrote for a Broadway revue, well, fewer years ago than it seems like. At least on the law books, this stuff don’t cut it in the good old U. S. of A. any more. Believe me, this song’s still true.”

  The bandleader was looking at him expectantly, as if, for once, he knew what Waller was going to play. He whispered to the cornet player, who stood up. Fats had just finished speaking when the horn man blew the two-bar introduction, just like on Fats’ recording, in front of Waller’s slow piano notes. Fats smiled for a second at the horn man, before his face went back thoughtful, and he began to sing, in the smokiest, slowest voice of the night, his song “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?”

  The noise level in the salon dropped, then stopped completely. There was only Fats’ voice, a few piano notes, the quiet accompaniment of the band, the muted cornet, slow violin, occasional tum from the banjo.

  When he finished, there was no sound at all in the place. Then there was an explosion of applause and yells.

  “Thank you, thank you,” he said, picking up the gin bottle. He leaned over and said something to the violin player, who put his instrument down on the edge of the aluminum piano.

  Then he spun around on the piano bench, propped his immense feet up toward the audience. “You ever tri
ed to buy a pair of Size Fifteen Torpedo Boats in Japan?” he asked. He saw, through the crowd, the big guy who’d been watching him all night from the bar suddenly break into a smile. “You saw these things coming at you on a dark night, you’d run screaming for the police.” Then he looked down at himself. “’Course, on me, they look positively dainty.” He stood and struck a cupid pose. “But they’re big, no doubt about it.” He sat down and hit the opening clump-clumps of “Your Feet’s Too Big,” the song getting louder and more insistent as he played. Then, on the beginning of the chorus, he hit a note on the piano, stood up, missing two beats, picked up the violin and bow, and continued playing, pulling long vibrating sounds out of the strings, fingering rapidly. The violin looked like a toy in his huge hands, but the music from it filled the ballroom. The passengers yelled. Waller stopped, said: “It’s easy, if you just know how,” in a mellifluous voice, finished the chorus on the violin, sat back down, again losing two beats, and ended the song on the piano.

  He had been there a long time. Waller had taken off his vest and tie, rolled up his shirtsleeves. Someone brought him a garter, and someone else found a derby hat. He put both on, and posed while the ship’s photographer snapped a picture.

  “Boy, does this take me back!” he said. “Whoever thought when they was playing this music in the back parlors of sportin’—’scuse my Anglo-Saxonism—houses, we’d end up playin’ it in the clouds over China? That’s the charm of music, the Hegemony of Harmony, the Triumph of Terpsic-chore, and other melodious metaphors. Right now, you listen to the Band in the Stars, while ol’ Fats has to visit the Necessary Room, or whatever they call the head on this gasbag. I’ll be right back.”

  “No, no!” yelled the passengers.

  “You wanta see a big fat man explode all over a piano, or what?” he asked as he walked out the door, waving the derby.

  The Band in the Stars played “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”

  In three minutes, Waller was back.

  Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter

  Try as he would, Wolfe could hardly keep his eyes open, even standing against the bar. The drinks had worked on him, the smoke from the cigarettes and pipes scratched at his eyes. He could no longer drink like the Other Wolfe had. Coffee, which he’d been drinking since he was a child, now made him jumpy; it used to have a wakeful but calming effect on him. He had never really gotten his strength back after the operation.

  The two men, Norway and Ross, had come into the ballroom at some point. They seemed to be enjoying Waller’s antics as much as his musicianship, laughing quietly along with the rest of the crowd. At one time or another, every single person on the airship must have watched, crew included. The captain was at a corner table for a while—when he left, the second officer came back. Most of the crew Wolfe saw looked Old Navy, like the social director had said.

  Fats and the band plunged ahead on “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” which Wolfe knew had other lyrics than the ones usually sung in public. He was sure Waller knew them; maybe the violin player too: he had that seedy white musician look of a guy who spends his off-hours (back on the ground) at places where liquor (no matter how illegal) and other, stronger things always flow.

  The passengers clapped along, faster on the climbing notes, slower on the descending ones, joining in on the chorus. Wolfe wished he felt as good as the audience sounded. He waved away the barman coming toward him, nodded goodnight to Sergeant Ross, who happened to be looking his way, stepped through the perrspex doorway with its stamped aluminum palm trees, and headed down the corridor.

  He thought of looking at the stars one more time, maybe from the lower deck platform, but decided that if he were too tired for Waller, he was too tired for the most glorious night that ever was. There would be nothing to see; the little airship on the big map in the companionway was still over water.

  He turned toward his cabin. Partway down the hall (outside half the doors people had set pairs of shoes to be shined by the steward) a woman in evening dress came out into the hall, Jerry behind her. She was newly made-up and looked like a million dollars. The social director was readjusting his tie.

  “Ah-mmmm,” said Wolfe, pointing his right index finger at them, rubbing back and forth across it with his left index finger. The woman stepped back, looking up at him, and blushed. Jerry turned his head.

  “Oh, Mr. Wolfe! Still want the tour tomorrow?”

  “The late one, Jerry, please,” he said, holding his head, feigning drunkenness.

  “Sure thing! He still playing?”

  “They’ll have to beat him absolutely to death with a crowbar before he’ll quit,” said Wolfe.

  The social director laughed. “We’re on our way there now,” he said.

  “Have a good time. You won’t be able to help yourselves. Good night.”

  He went to his cabin, opened the door, watched Jerry and the woman turn the corner, the guy slipping his arm around her waist in the instant just before they turned the corner, disappearing toward the far sound of music.

  The steward had been in and folded the back of the couch up onto its chains for the upper, and pulled the cushions out on the lower. A two-foot-long ottoman formed an extension of the bottom bunk—one of the things Wolfe had requested when he’d booked the airship. (One thing Aline had done for him was to have him a long bed built for his apartment in those days in Brooklyn—the first he’d ever had in his life that his feet didn’t hang off of.)

  Wolfe undressed down to his undershirt and pants, took off his shoes (not quite Waller’s size fifteens, but big enough) and socks. He hung up his other clothes on the open rack opposite the window. He went to it, and something out toward the horizon caught his eye.

  It was a ship. He’d been on many ships before, but none like this one. It was huge, even at this distance, this far up from the ocean. It looked like a floating city, all lights and curves; unlike most steamships it was not open-decked, but streamlined, closed in, like it was a smooth, rounded battleship. There was deck upon deck, row upon row of lighted portholes, all the way down to the waterline. It must have been ten storeys tall above the first deck, with five more below that. The funnels looked like double shark fins, silhouetted in their own pools of light.

  As he watched, the ship sent a hoot of greeting to the Ticonderoga, a long high blast that barely carried across the miles. There was a sudden pale light somewhere beneath Wolfe’s vantage point. It revolved, red white blue, red white blue, then went off. One U.S.A. Incorporated vessel greeting another. Then the ship was gone, leaving a line of swirling phosphorescence to each side of the sea to mark where it had been. The Ticonderoga was going ninety miles an hour; the other ship must have been making fifty knots.

  It had to be the Columbiad, bel Geddes-designed, commissioned last year. Like the Ticonderoga, it went anywhere it was needed, plied all the lanes, showed the flag in every port; anything from a Caribbean cruise to an around-the-world marathon.

  A thin line glowing pale green was the only thing to look at out there on the dark. Wolfe closed his window, cranked it down; the air up here was a little chilly late at night.

  His tiredness had lifted for a short while—either seeing Jerry and the woman, or the liner, or both, had taken some of his bone-weariness and drink fumes away.

  He sat down at the writing desk, pulled up the folding backless stool, took out a sheet of paper. Of course he could wait to write anything until the night before he got off in Germany—nothing would get to New York faster than the Ticonderoga itself; it would drop off its mail sacks in New Jersey nine days from now. But he had many letters to write.

  There was a light above the desk but Wolfe kept it off. He reached down inside one of the pockets in his huge travelling briefcase and came up with a box nine inches by four. As he lifted it, one of the flaps on the bottom came open and two c-cell batteries fell
out and rolled across the decking. “Damn!” he said, getting down and crawling after them, bringing them back. Then one of the spare bulbs fell out of the box. He caught it on the first bounce.

  From inside its box he pulled a child’s nightlight. It was a figure of Mickey Mouse, made out of tin, leaning against a fake red candle at the top of which was a bulb shaped like a flame. Mickey was in his usual shorts with the two big buttons, he wore the shapeless bread-dough shoes, one white-gloved hand was waving, the other cupped around the candle, supporting his weight as he leaned against it like a lamppost. On his face was a confident grin.

  Wolfe turned it on, then the light above the desk.

  The nightlight had been the second thing he saw in the hospital—first Max’s concerned face, then the beaming face of Mickey Mouse.

  He’d found that his sister had bought it in those weeks of incoherence out west, before they brought him to Baltimore for the operation. She’d gone down the street from the apartment next to the Seattle hospital and had bought the first battery-powered nightlight she had found, since they knew they would be moving him cross-country on a train soon. She had bought it because Tom had seemed, while irrational, to be afraid of the dark.

  He hadn’t slept a night in the two years without Mickey being on.

  He smiled, took hold of Mickey’s outstretched hand.

  “Hello, Mickey,” he said. Then he answered in a falsetto, as close to Walt Disney’s as he could get, “Hello, Tom!”

  He laughed in spite of himself. Then he took out his old Parker pen, unscrewed the cap, and got his reading glasses from his jacket pocket.

  The stationery was official U.S.A. Incorporated Airship Service letterhead, with the embossed dirigible Ticonderoga.