by Paul Ableman
I hung the pictures in Nat’s room, overriding objections of the director, who claimed they’d trap dust, and that room was transformed. Drake’s crazy tumble of birds, fruit and faces licked the sterility. Nat loved the paintings. Often when I was reading to her, I’d see her studying one or other of them and smiling. After a few weeks, it became clear that Nat was not continuing to improve. Then she went through a bad patch. She became querulous. When Harvey visited her and asked how she was, she replied:
“Dying.”
And when poor Harvey tried to pass it off, she snapped:
“I am—of course, I am! Don’t bother to lie.”
She took to bossing me around. Get me some water! Stop that noise! Once she said to me:
“I want you to get me some pills.”
“Nat?”
“Oh, don’t pretend, Tornado. Sleeping pills or something. I want to get this over. I don’t honestly know why anyone bothers—to be born—”
Then she had the first haemorrhage. I was standing by the window talking to her and watching a couple of janitors shooting crap in the well below. I cracked a little joke. Nat didn’t respond and I was about to repeat it when I heard a kind of gulp. I turned with maybe a tremor of foreboding and saw Nat sitting up with her fingers pressed over her mouth. She looked just as if she was trying to suppress a laugh and I began to grin and say something else funny. But the next moment, with a thrill of horror, I saw fat red worms crawling out between her fingers. I yelled: oh no! I jumped towards her and then, realizing I could do nothing, turned and galloped out into the passage, hollering for a nurse.
Nat went on bleeding for twelve hours. The next day the chief physician sent for me and told me that he felt the treatment was too arduous to continue. He could no longer hold out any hope. Nat was in the terminal phase of her disease. I walked out and cabled her father in England.
Over the next few days, I realized it had been the goddamm drugs which they’d been giving her which had made Nat so tetchy. The doctors had, in fact, been poisoning her with their medicine and torturing her with their hot room. Later, I checked up on that hospital and found it was a phoney. The noble and brilliant Doctor Ledski was just another gallant officer in the screw-the-rich brigade. He had no higher cure rate than any other cancer hospital. I swore I’d break him but I never did anything about it.
Nat recovered her serenity. In fact, she acquired a kind of radiance. I couldn’t match it. I felt cold and I’d shiver. Often I’d cry. My shoulders would shake and great sobs would wrench my body. Then Nat would comfort me. Once I said:
“For God’s sake, it’s you that’s dying!”
Then I cursed myself through all the alleys of hell and made God a bid of twice my fortune to unsay what I’d just said. Nat felt me go rigid with horror.
“Darling, don’t reproach yourself. You’re quite right. I am the one that’s dying—but you’re the one that’s suffering.”
“How do you do it? Aren’t you scared?”
“No.”
I couldn’t understand that, Horace. At least, I guess I could understand not being scared but I couldn’t understand being calm. If my own body had mutinied and was murdering me I’d have been in a rage. I’d have wanted to shoot it out with God, to trade punches with the Devil. It was Nat’s tranquillity that was creepy. I just had to watch her ebb away.
Then her pa arrived.
I took comfort from his presence. We didn’t talk much but we often had dinner together in the hotel dining-room and I felt a kind of reassurance just from being near him. People glanced at us. There weren’t many millionaires, and probably not another single marquis, in Milwaukee at that time. I heard a kid ask his mother:
“How can you tell he’s a lord?”
At first Nat was delighted to have her father with her, and I left them alone for long periods but after about a week, she began to urge me:
“Don’t let him stay, Tornado.”
“How do you mean, honey?”
“Make him go home—to England. It may be a long time yet.”
“I think he aims to stay, Nat.”
It began to prey on her and that began to upset me. She asked:
“Did you talk to him again, Tornado?”
Fact is, Horace, I hadn’t talked to him at all. Leastwise not to suggest he go home. Didn’t seem to me I had any right. I asked Nat irritably:
“Why are you so keen on his going home, honey?”
“I don’t want him to suffer—watching me die.”
“He doesn’t seem to be suffering that much.”
Which was a bitchy thing to say, Horace, and I have to admit that I was feeling rivalry in suffering with the old nobleman. Nat said:
“You don’t know him the way I do.”
“Well how about me?”
It was amazing, Horace. My eyes filled with tears and my voice came out husky. Part of me gaped in astonishment at myself. I was supposed to be Nat’s tower of strength and I was sulking because I wanted her to say that I was suffering more than her dad.
“Oh, I wouldn’t compare him with you, Titch. You do everything best.”
I swallowed and gazed down at her modestly and I swear, Horace, it took me a couple of seconds to see the twinkle in her eye. Then we both howled with laughter and then, towards the end, my laughter turned into a scream and I threw my arms around Nat and hugged her so fiercely it’s a wonder I didn’t finish her there and then.
“No!” I cried. “You’re not to! You’re not to die! You hear me, Nat? Nowhere—anywhere is there another like you and I won’t be parted from you. I won’t! I won’t!”
And I wept for a long time, Horace, shaking Nat’s bed with the shuddering anguish of my grief.
Late that night, I went out on to the balcony of my hotel room. I had the best suite in that hotel and the balcony was really a terrace about fifty feet long with potted shrubs. It was on the twenty-fifth floor and I could look down at the streets flecked with crawling lights and out at the other sky-scrapers. I couldn’t see the hospital because it was too low. I gazed about morosely at the city of Milwaukee. It was full of wraiths. The cubicles in the bright towers were the dens of cold wraiths and down at street level wraiths hovered behind the wheels of automobiles. There was no flesh in Milwaukee that night except for a forlorn shred of it in a hospital room. I stood powerless, Horace, my hands gripping the railings while the wind cut my neck. Every so often I moaned and the moan was not a response to anguish or pain but to the intolerable necessity to accept my own impotence. For thirty years I had been the storm and the whirlwind, harbinger of forces which, fully roused, could blow life into the shape I wanted. Limitations? None. What, the stars are far? I could hop to the furthest if there was something there I wanted. You say the world is thick? I could hammer it to a plate if my love needed one to eat from. Time is long and space is wide but with my thoughts and my endeavour I knit them into a cloak for Tornado Pratt!
But that bitter night, Horace, on the ledge above Milwaukee, I moved out of my omnipotent phase. I know, Horace, what Dr Sigmund Freud of Vienna said. He said the baby is omnipotent because it doesn’t know there is anything in the world outside itself. That’s how I’d been. If things had remained undone, it was because I hadn’t got around to doing them not because they were beyond me. For there was nothing in the world beyond the power of Tornado Pratt. But that night I dwindled, Horace, into the forlorn baby who knows he’s been kidding himself. He’s not the whole world or even a considerable part of it. Why he can’t even fill his belly without help. So it was with Tornado Pratt, builder of empires. Really he had no power to do anything that mattered Could he save his darling? Could he grant her one extra hour of life?
So then I looked upwards, Horace, at the deep dark and the stammering stars. And my glance moved about, picking out one point of light and then the next. Endless stars. And that canopy was just the fringe. A telescope would pour thousands more into my eye. And beyond that, the scientists said, were millio
ns and billions of them, stars without end. And in that cascade of energy, what was life? A feather in a tornado? A flake in a furnace? And the great city, Milwaukee, was it even as much as a twig tossed on an ocean of flame? I gazed at the cold spits of light which, an immensity away, were vast spheres of fire and I realized that although it looked still and passionless from my perspective, it was really an inferno frozen by my insect senses. And scared by this monstrous vision, I yearned for my own. If we humans were just motes without meaning, surely we deserved our own? Let me keep my bride and let us comfort each other in our twitch of life. And I howled with grief and anger at my impotence in the cosmos.
And that—was a long time ago, Horace. It was all gardens then. Moss and lichen on old stone walls and mellow sunlight. The sun was man’s friend in those days and what I wish to ask, Horace, is how do you come to be Japanese?
Now it is undeniable that I personally spent some time in the East, mainly during the war although after I’d finished weeding out yellow killers and trying to persuade the authorities to shoot them, I stayed on a while in Japan.
I recall the occupation troops talked real tough at first: “We’ll kill all the yellow bastards. Except the dames. We’ll kill all the guys, tear off their yellow cocks and then shoot off their heads.” I would listen to this kind of talk, Horace, in officers’ messes in Guam and finally on the Japanese mainland and although some of it made me faintly want to puke I could understand it because I’d seen the spiders limp home from the Burma railway, the men-spiders who’d been systematically starved and beaten out of humanity until they were just twitching bone bags. I figured our guys would want to take legitimate vengeance on the most savage war machine the human race ever evolved: the Japanese army of the second world war. But they only shot a handful. That’s straight, Horace. For instance, they shot a few on the island of Tikon where, one balmy evening, I happened to be changing planes.
From back in the coconut grove beyond the airfield, I heard shots. What’s that, I asked. That, Colonel? Yeah, that. I guess someone’s doing a little target practice. Big grin. So I moseyed over, Horace, and there wasn’t anyone there—alive. But the red, dilated disk of the sun was sinking over the calm Pacific, thickening dark shadows at the base of the trees and those shadows resolved themselves, as I got nearer, into frowning Japanese officers bound upright to the trunks and glaring hatred in death. And one of them—who must have got a burst of automatic fire smack in his chest—seemed patriotically to display his emperor’s standard for the red disk of the sun sinking behind him was matched by the torn red disk of his wound.
But they didn’t shoot many, Horace, because political and diplomatic considerations began to intervene. You see, what people fail to understand, Horace, is how the time-lag changes everything. This means that everything is something else. Nothing is what it is but includes other things that are different. If you call something one thing it will begin to swirl into a different thing before your eyes. It’s not really the time-lag, Horace. It’s more the overlap of the time function or projection which—yi!—what was that? You feel that sharp twinge, Horace, in my cock? Tell me if it happens again. So when the Japs turned into something else which—yee!—in my dick, Horace! Something’s—yee!—stop them, Horace! They’re shoving hot needles up my dick. It’s the wrong treatment, Horace. Son, don’t let them—rck!—torture me! Has it—stopped? Have you fixed it, Horace? Can’t feel—feel better. Yes, now what I was saying, Horace, is the time-lag which lags all time and changes all things into their opposite so that I, Tornado Pratt, the most alive thing in the universe will be clay before the day—before the sun—is black—and—and—Nat? Is she there, Horace? Could you fetch her? Could you do that for me, son?
Nat? Say, honey, how about tonight we leave the car and take a little stroll down to the bay? Right, we could shuck our clothes and have a swim. Honey, you remember that time in Mexico we—honey? Nat? Are you there, Nat? I’d like to see you, honey. I’d like to touch your at least hand and—Nat? Please visit me, honey. Nat, sometimes I don’t think you quite realize how I miss you—every day, honey, deep in my guts—every day for so many long years—so, honey, couldn’t you just come to me now—just for a few minutes—just—
PRATT PENITENT
What I can’t figure out, Horace, is what happened to all that money. Must have had enough to reach to the moon and back. Mountains of cash. Yeah, the depression—but Harvey anticipated that. He made sure the bulk of our reserves was secured by gold and—Harvey? Did he go rotten and take off with—did he hell! Harvey was loyal until he drove his automobile into that truck when he was—how old was Harvey when he snuffed it? I can see him a bit wrinkled but ginger hair like—no! Now I see his old face—Harvey! Harvey, dear! Old face—like old Seminole chief—and fluffy white hair. Was going on seventy—nineteen—forty—forty—five—six—Harvey slammed into that truck in England—somewhere—at eighty miles an hour and turned himself into hamburger.
About Nat what I remember is how I felt. I felt bitterness and I felt rage. And I used these to ward off grief. But sometimes it would catch me. Once I was sitting in a viewing theatre in Hollywood watching a movie about a girl that raised ducks because I was beginning to dabble with movies—when grief shot through me like a bullet and I gasped so loud the producer tapped me on the shoulder and asked:
“Anything wrong, Tornado?”
I couldn’t talk and I could feel the sobs accumulating inside me like puffs of breath in a balloon so I just leapt to my feet and zipped out. In the street, the pressure reached bursting point and I staggered along the boulevard, heaving with sobs like San Francisco with earthquakes.
One mistake I didn’t make. I didn’t try and drown Nat’s memory in bourbon or blot out her body with other bodies. I went on the wagon and lived as chaste as a monk. The anaesthetic I used was work. I bought into whales and movies. At two-three a.m. I might be perusing a report on fruit prospects in Columbia, or spawning a new subsidiary to bulk purchase manganese. Kept working like a beaver.
I remember just when it hit. It was one morning when I was driving to work, down the Loop, around Connaught Street and just at the junction with Ninth Avenue, I saw a big, new poster that said: WISE GUYS BUYS GINSBURG’S CARS.
Maybe it wasn’t Ginsburg although there was definitely a Ginsburg that sold old jalopies around at that time. Anyhow the sign said: wise guys buys somebody’s cars.
Just as I saw that sign, I remembered my pledge to Dr Curtheim. I’d told him that if he’d fly to Chicago and operate on Nat I’d give away my whole fortune. He hadn’t put any pressure on me and I’d paid him a double fee but I’d made a pledge. And what was I doing? Spinning bucks at a faster rate than ever. I kept looking at that sign: WISE GUYS BUYS GINSBURG’S CARS and I began to see the pits of hell.
I could see the devils with forked tails prancing about. Then I heard Parson Dugdale, who spoke the sermons when I was a boy, saying:
“If you was to think of hell as a place like Hugget’s Round or Everston, you’d be wrong. But you’d be even more wrong if you was to think of it as just a way of talking. Nothing is more sure than that sinners will scorch in the fires of hell for all eternity.”
I didn’t really believe that, Horace. I knew the world was made of dirt and water and that above my head were the moon and stars—other worlds. I didn’t believe there was any room for hell—a place where sinners were whisked away to suffer, but I couldn’t be sure. The superstition of my boyhood, and my dad frowning into the Black Book and the amazingness of death in any case—of how a person comes and goes—of how you could switch Nat off like a light—swept over me and made me gasp.
After that, naturally, there was no way of getting rid of that thought. It kept me company just about everywhere for the next couple of months until I walked away from my fortune the way a hobo walks away from his camp-fire.
That was the end of my first phase, Horace, the end of the innocence of Tornado Pratt. For the next twenty years I felt guilty
. What of? Maybe it really started with the death of Pony Roach.
MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF RAT
It was before I met Nat. One night I was searching Chicago for someone—yeah, a girl called Lotte—something—and I was under the impression that Lotte was having an affair with a bootlegger called—think of it in a minute—anyhow, this liquor dealer had a number of hoods on his payroll, one of whom was a little Irishman called Pony Roach. Sometimes I shot pool with this same killer. He fascinated me—like the silken, slow-gliding snakes behind glass—hard to believe that anything as languid, elegant and mindless could deal instant death. I’d watch Pony fit a cigarette into a gold and ivory holder, stoop to plot the deflection of a pool ball and I’d imagine the thuds and muffled shrieks on some vacant lot as his big automatic hurled lead into an enemy of Jay Vasari. That’s the guy, Vasari, that Lotte was linked with—Vasari, who ended up himself shot to pieces on a street corner.
Now Roach was the only lead I had on Vasari and so I went found to his place. This was about three in the morning. I was full of whisky and recklessness. I’d never been to Roach’s place before and I was astonished at how opulent it was. There was a marquee over the sidewalk with a liveried doorman under it. Inside the hall was a pile of carpet with a very attractive tortoise-shell pattern. The elevator shot up like a tame shell and deposited me at Roach’s door. I rang the bell. A reasonable pause and then a faint shadow over the peep-hole. The sound of a chain withdrawn, the door opened and Pony, grinning but nerved up, stood there. He was surprised:
“Tornado? How’d you find me?”
“I’ve got your address.”
“How come?”
“Because you gave it to me. You wrote it yourself in my book. See?”
I held out my address book for him. He’d been pretty lushed when he’d written it and I wanted the sight of his own handwriting to reassure him. I didn’t think he’d suspect that I’d come in a hostile capacity. Tornado Pratt would hardly be suspected of being a hired strong-arm but I knew that guys like Roach like to know exactly why everything is happening the way it is. It wasn’t unknown for Chicago hoods to snap-shoot their friends if accosted by them unexpectedly.
