Cast in Doubt

by Lynne Tillman

  I once was witness to a chain gang. A young child, I was traveling in the South with my parents. I couldn’t have been more than twelve. I remember the trip as both astonishing and dreadful, the winding roads frightening for what one couldn’t see behind the next bend. Gothic, truly. We came upon a chain gang, and I saw a man, a black man, a Negro. Actually he saw me. His eyes caught mine; the look was naked. His legs and hands were shackled. I was never more horrified. After that I began to imagine in the vivid way a child can the tortured life of a slave, the criminality of the white planters and their wives in regard to the treatment of these human beings. Since then, since that time, I have felt deeply that it was slavery that made my country the study in hypocrisy that it is. Reconstruction—! And what did Jefferson say to himself in the early enlightened days?

  I’ve just learned—and how did I not know this?—that Liberia was settled in 1822 by freed slaves. Roger, a Southerner of all things, told me this recently, and I must admit, scoundrel that I am, that I pretended already to know it. But in fact I was stunned at my ignorance and thought immediately to research it further, perhaps to base a novel on the fearless black men. But I don’t want to leave this island, and the truth is that some work I ought to be doing requires me to leave it, this glorious place. I cannot.

  Instead I tangle with a jumble of family material, letters, diaries, ledgers, all culled from brief homeside visits, all found in attics or seduced out of the houses of relatives whose guilt I fingered like the best pianist. It is my jungle, my undergrowth and overgrowth, and it cannot be clipped like a suburban lawn. It is uncontrollable, in a way. One’s ancestors oughtn’t to take one over, and yet they have me. I sit in my room, at my desk, in front of my typewriter, and see them. They are stern, foreboding figures. I don’t visualize them, precisely, but will them, will them into being, into a great chain of being, the way I once willed, when I was a small boy, American Indians—Apaches—to stand in my doorway.

  I have always been fascinated by my family’s history. As a boy I learned that one of my ancestors had ridden with John Brown, and that another, from the Dutch side, traded in slaves. Since that time I have discovered that the Brown story was apocryphal, but on my father’s side there were slave traders. Martha was definitely at Seneca Falls; her name is on a list. Martha noted in her journal that Seneca Falls was home to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, I think, was too radical for Martha. My father’s family is nowhere as worthy as my mother’s; Father’s was loathsome and evil, I believe. Evil is always fascinating, to me at least, and that side did make the family’s money.

  I am considered the weak link, but I am a moral man. Many would say I am not because of my love of men, but just as they who would condemn me could not choose anything but heterosexuality—and is that truly a choice?—I could not choose anything but homosexuality.

  I linger over lunch, a parsimonious affair. Closing my eyes I drift away for a bit, then focus on a few of the mementos from home that are displayed in my room. The letters and diaries I pirated away are enough; they do count as evidence. This is what I reiterate to myself sub rosa—or is it sotto voce? But I ought to have more material. Still, evidence of what? Lived lives. On bits of paper. Will I ever learn what Martha truly thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and why?

  Forget rigorous research, Horace. This is how I often remonstrate with myself—just do what you do, what you can, and make it new. Besides, I am outside the academy, and I am engaged in writing fiction. Fiction is true, of course, its own truth, not Truth; yet I believe one must always seek Truth, that is the ultimate quest. Were I to do a conventional history, traveling to Athens for books, perusing its English-language shops, or mailing away for material from the States, as I have on occasion, all this would be insufficient. Asking Gwen to find books for me in New York, that too is inadequate. She is bemused by my interest in slavery, I think, and has refused, in her elusive but deliberate way, to talk earnestly to me about it.

  I ought to be at Smith College, researching in its library among stacks of musty tomes and aging letters, sifting through diaries written by people like my ancestors. How far away a place like Smith seems. I knew an English professor there once, he was my lover. Then, after long service to the college, his homosexuality was discovered. He had lived quietly in Northampton for twenty-five years, teaching Milton, I believe, yet he was dishonorably dismissed. It was, it is a terrible thing, a hideous nightmare to live through, and for that I am glad to be here, in Greece, where I won’t be bothered. Where do morals lie? That man hurt no one.

  Whenever I begin to work and think that all this is inadequate and insufficient, and that I am not Gertrude Stein, or Virginia Woolf, or James Joyce, necessarily it makes it impossible for me to think, no less to write. I cycle like a rat in a maze. My mother thought me perfect and a perfectionist, but then I was her favorite child, for which my brother has never forgiven me. All seems futile—this frail, faded handwriting on a bit of yellow paper which may crumble at any moment and disappear. It might turn to dust, this fragment, this evidence of human life. It might disintegrate in my hot, puffy hands. My father thought me a dilettante, and perhaps I am, as I am one who’s not quite sure what he is looking for, or why he looks, unlike Stan Green, who knows exactly what he needs to find. But I think I would know the right thing, were I to come upon it.

  Stan Green wouldn’t for a second hesitate if he wanted to visit Helen’s John, which makes him, John, sound tawdry, like a bad pun, and this observation rouses me to action, the pun and Stan Green, along with my need for escape. I put on my sandals and find my blue cotton cap that I used to wear when sailing in Boston Harbor. The cotton is very soft now and the blue has faded to a powdery hue from repeated washings. Helen has returned to her chair on the terrace. I wave to her but she doesn’t see me, so engrossed is she in whatever she’s doing or thinking.

  Alas, alack, I am not Stan Green. When I think about that poor dear man, that lovely professor in Northampton, my will simply withers. I do intend to go to the hospital but not today. In a few days perhaps. I am tired just now. I sit down again and take out a novel, Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask. Now, there is daring! I pour myself some Scotch even though it’s early in the day. Yes, I’ll go soon, in a few days. There is no rush. Tomorrow or the next day. Gwen may have already received my letter, and I’m sure she’ll agree to come and will arrive here soon, bright and quirky. I will telephone her tonight. Who knows what the future has in store? Helen said the Gypsy woman was her age, just a girl, too. She read Helen’s hand but Helen will not reveal her fortune. I wouldn’t, either.

  Chapter 6

  The hospital is a small building, surrounded by flowering shrubs, in a quiet corner of town, a dusty corner, I might add, where the sun’s insistent rays parch everything in sight, except for these colorful plants that bloom against all odds, I should think. I suppose they might grow in the desert. How anything grows here is astonishing. I don’t want thoughts of Wallace and his idiotic irrigation idea to seep through just now, but they do, that nutty black rubber tube stretched across a vast expanse of desert, one end plugged into the sand, the other stuck in a huge pool. I can’t keep from chortling as I walk into the nearly empty clinic. Yá sou, I exude, smiling broadly at the receptionist. I tell her whom I want to see and she leads me down the hall to a room that is much too bright for suffering and disease, though it may cheer up the sick. It wouldn’t me were I sick.

  The young man I take to be John is asleep, his head turned toward the window, and there is a gash, still prominent and red, on his neck. But it’s not a very wide or long cut, so he must have given up rather quickly. Or perhaps he too becomes weak at the sight of blood and fainted straight away. Even thinking this produces dizziness; I feel as if I might throw up. I sit down and place my head between my knees to recover. I breathe deeply. It would be awful if I fainted. And just now, at this awkward moment, Alicia walks in with flowers in her arms, ruining everything and incriminating me in some way.

 
You? she inquires. Yes, I say, as if it were really necessary to affirm that it is I. I want to say, Who else do you think it is? Santa Claus? As usual I play for time and dissemble. What are you doing here, Horace? Alicia asks with some annoyance. She tucks John in. He stirs a bit. I am about to come face-to-face with Helen’s lover, or whoever he is. Helen asked me to come, I answer. I promptly make the corners of my mouth turn down when they really want to sit up, clownishly like Emmett Kelly’s. She did? Alicia asks. Usually, Alicia is not monosyllabic; and her cryptic questions give me hardly any time to concoct necessary lies, my cover story. Yes, Alicia, she did, I respond, giving as little as I am getting. Why do I have to explain myself anyway, I think, knowing full well I ought to. Yet I usually believe in my own fictions.

  A relatively long silence is broken by John’s opening his surprisingly violet eyes, eyes like Liz Taylor’s or those of the teen idol Ricky Nelson, whom Gwen adored years ago, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, except that he was, according to her, the perfect white boy, the kind of boy she’d love to spoil and ruin, who would have bored her to death, but she could have embraced him and imagined “Ozzie and Harriet.” And like the television program, which Gwen told me about, based on the wholly wholesome American family, Ricky exuded a false but beguiling innocence. Gwen would have loved to mess him up, as she put it. I might want to adopt him rather than mess him up.

  Horace, Horace, Alicia says, repeating my name several times, I believe, because I am absorbed in remembering Gwen and me at a Cambridge tea, where she announced to a frail, terribly white woman that she, Gwen, was the product of rape, of miscegenation—Gwen and I were drinking not tea but martinis, in teacups. Gwen hardly ever mentioned her race, so it was amusing and startling, and she was a mere slip of a girl then.

  Horace, Alicia says, this is John.

  John languidly waves to me and does so with such sweetness that I am instantly under his spell. His thick long lashes fairly sweep the soft skin under his violet eyes. I can see why Helen loved him, if she ever did. There’s something wicked and winsome about him. An Irish beauty, I should think, Catholic, unalterably opposed to abortion, I surmise, as if I were my detective Stan Green. John’s smile is akin to Vivien Leigh’s. I am the frog prince, I want to say, and you are Prince Charming. Instead I say, Helen asked me to come see you, to see how you were doing. At this he grins and Alicia stamps her foot, a short but vivid thump. She did? John asks. I nod several times, my head rolling on its base. I’m very tired, he says. Tell her to come herself, man, okay? He adds, Tell her she can have my ax. John points to the opposite side of the room where a long black case with stickers on it is leaning against a not very antiseptic white wall. Helen can have his ax; I make a mental note of this. From the shape of the case and some of its stickers—New York Dolls; Live Fast, Die Young—it appears that an ax is a guitar, and John must be a rock and roller, perhaps a punk. All quite in keeping with Helen. She may have met him at a bar, Max’s perhaps, when he was playing. She may even have been a groupie. Gwen once wrote me a long letter about several she knew who were fascinated with her. They were wild girls, she wrote, who thought she could instruct them in mischief.

  John stirs again. His startling eyes gaze on me with an intensity that might consume all of me. I return his look and wonder, Why not take all of me? He marshals his strength and rests on his elbows. Then he speaks quite deliberately. Tell her I’m okay. Not like her sister, man.

  After this rather compelling confession, he closes his eyes and shakes his head from side to side. His eyes still closed, he is about to speak again. Alicia and I are literally hanging, suspended, on his every word. I watch his eyes, hoping they’ll open again, as a curtain might for the second act of a play. I’m not sure what Alicia is watching, perhaps his soft wet mouth. He speaks: Nah, it’s not like that. Don’t tell her anything. Just tell her I’m okay. That’s all. She can visit if she wants. It’s cool.

  Alicia fusses over him, making cooing noises. She smoothes John’s hair, then turns to me and peremptorily commands, Horace, you’d better leave now, which I do, as if being dismissed by a disapproving teacher. I can see before me Mrs. Wheeler, my fourth-grade teacher, who did disapprove of me. She is starched and bent over, the weight of her grand bosom too much for her body to hold; it seems to tip her toward the floor. Her pearl-handled cane taps the floor just next to my nine-year-old feet. It’s a distinctly unpleasant and memorable sound. “Horace, you may go. Let us hope this never happens again.” Will she tell my father? I wondered fearfully. What did I do, what was I, what am I, guilty of? I used to be able to see Mrs. Wheeler’s face clearly, but now Alicia’s fills that vague space. Alicia’s bosom is of an average size, and she stands straight as a board, being, in addition to an opera singer and reasonably accomplished pianist, a practitioner of yoga.

  I float away from the room, exiting a dream. I float out the hospital entranceway, past the clerk to whom I gaily, if not idiotically, call out Yá sou, then pass by once more the flowering shrubs, their pink blossoms an incitement to the heat that means to kill them. But to me they are a natural déjà vu.

  Not like her sister, John said. He delivered a mixed message, and an extremely provocative one. Her sister, not like her sister. Helen has never mentioned a sister. And he is not like her, not like that. Does this mean that Helen’s sister tried to kill herself? Or did she succeed?

  Helen’s sister may have been or was a suicide. Perhaps Helen’s twin sister was a suicide. Helen doubled. There may have been two just like her, sharing a psyche. Two Helens and one John. How differently I am drawn to these young people, these children. They are children but children are not innocent. John, I could mother and father, could imagine stroking and petting, even kissing—yes, that soft mouth, Gwen’s perfect boring white boy. But Helen—I love her at a distance, love her platonically. I dare not fondle even her abstraction. My interest is, how shall I put it, more scientific, perhaps. She is of a different tribe and immensely attractive, and it’s true that once or twice I imagined kissing her, but only on her forehead. I am avuncular with her. Or try to be. She is like me, I suspect or want to believe, somewhere deep inside her, but her resemblance to me exists below the level of my consciousness and hers. Thoughts like these are why Roger thinks I’m getting senile.

  How shall I tell Helen about John’s ax? I don’t see that I can even mention visiting John, unless I lay the blame entirely upon Alicia. It’s always wonderful that what first appears to be a liability—such as Alicia’s presence in the hospital—can be turned, in a nonce, to an advantage. It’s the obvious course. I’ll mention to Helen that Alicia and I went for a walk, and she invited me with her to see a friend in the hospital. John. I had no idea what she was up to, or who he was, and then, when I found myself in his hospital room, in the natural course of things it came out that I was Helen’s friend, and so on. It all just came out—and John said what he did about the ax, and her sister; but ought I venture to bring her sister into the first conversation I hold with Helen about John? Tricky. It’s Alicia’s fault, I’ll insist to her like a schoolboy. Helen must know Alicia dislikes her. She doesn’t care a jot for Alicia, I’m certain of that, and Helen knows she can depend upon me. I care about her.

  Frankly, I don’t want to tell Helen any of this, as I am vulnerable to the worst sort of silly charge—being a busybody and a snoop, as well as disregarding the terms of our relationship which I tacitly agreed to that day in my car. In my defense I don’t know why I felt compelled to visit John, except that I am often a trifle bored, and I try, in my own way, to make life a bit more interesting, more inventive, more like fiction than it might otherwise be—that is, I consciously do something that a character in one of my stories might, to entertain myself and my readers. It is, one might respond, my rationale. With age I do this rather more frequently.

  I’d like to think this is what makes me a storyteller. My mother was a wonderful fabulist and even today I miss the sound of her voice as she turned one of Aunt Grace�
�s visits with her into an intriguing and fantastic event, one full of danger and diversion. As when she told the story of one of her sisters visiting Boston when automobiles were still new to the metropolis. I ought not to have turned against my mother, especially when I remember those bedtime tales that were, in a way, our secret bond. I’m sure my father remained unaware of his wife’s late-night confabulations. Sometimes I could barely fall asleep, thinking about all the many exciting events my mother had related. It was she who told me the stories of our family’s history, which I know now were part fact, part imagination or desire. She ought to have been a writer. But unlike Jane Austen she didn’t put pen to paper after her father and sisters left the room or after she finished her housework, when then, and then only, she had a moment of solitude, a moment to herself.

  Instead of being a secret writer, Mother spoke in private to me, and only with me did she abandon her daily life and duties to enter into a world of her own making, an intriguing world. This must have been what impelled me to become a writer, to enter into a world of my own making, a world of literature. I ought not to have turned against her, but then I was a teenager, not much younger than Helen is now. I’m sure Helen has turned against her mother too, though mothers are different for boys and girls, I should think.

  I am utterly susceptible to intrigue, my own and others. It relieves my boredom and fills my mind with puzzles and problems that I must solve. I play games, one would say in the current lingo that Helen uses, but I do not want ever to hurt anyone. When I am drunk, it is a different matter. Drinking releases both the worst and the best in me. It heightens ordinary perceptions, dulls my sense of existence as sheer repetition, and alleviates a growing and gnawing ennui, though only temporarily. Sometimes, and it’s a feeling I can barely describe, sometimes I am at a table and someone begins to speak and I feel, oh no, not this, oh, not this, not again; and inside me, in the pit of my stomach, I sense I am dying, that the words being spoken by the other are in fact drawing my life from me, bleeding me. At other times I feel I cannot breathe, that I am being suffocated, that the breath of life itself is being stolen from me and I am being buried alive.