Tornado Pratt

by Paul Ableman

  Sam Perkins had a quiff of white hair. It waved beside me in the train. It was my flag of surrender. Sam was six foot, six inches tall and he looked like a family doctor. He was pretty cute and knew I detested him. He kept Ulysses out of my way and talked to me firmly but deferentially. Until the corporation was humming along in top gear, he played me with great skill. But the Andes revenged themselves on their murdered son. One week after I’d sold the Perkins my shares for a million bucks, resigned and flown back to the States, Sam Perkins got drowned in a mountain lake. The Indian girl he was swimming with said she’d warned him it was treacherous but he just swam out into the middle and sank. It took them three days to dredge up his body. I bought some emeralds but I made a loss on those.

  When I got the horrors in the fifties, I knew it was connected with the kid. Everything is connected, Horace. That’s one of the things I’ve learned in this world. They say there are galaxies so far away that it takes their light as long to reach the earth as it would take for a snail to crawl to a star. Are they connected? They’re part of the same dream, Horace, the dream of time. You know Morton Fiedler? He doesn’t write a lot these days but he was top guru in the fifties which is when I went to see him. He said I’d never really faced what I’d done and never atoned. I got a mite excited about that and mentioned the feats of heroism I’d performed in the Pacific. He said that was just trying to ransom myself. The only response to guilt, he said, was change and that’s what I hadn’t faced. I asked: you mean I should have gone into a monastery? I also asked: you mean I should have become spiritual? He said: I don’t know what you should have done but if you’d faced it, you’d have known.

  MARTIAL PRATT

  I guess everyone’s twisted. Take Harvey—he’s a dignified old gentleman with his library—okay, he was hit by a truck but for a long time he was a dignified old gentleman with a library. Looking at him you might think: a noble presence. But that noble presence once sobbed in my hearing that he was a failure. My fair Nathalie had a powerful conviction she should have been a nurse. It’s as if we all live in the field of a powerful magnet. No matter how tough our steel it warps us in the end. We’re twisted things, Horace, on this crazy ball.

  So these were the thoughts I kept having as Hitler roared around in Germany. He seemed clean at first, something new, to untwist us and blow the fetid dust of ages from the world. I saw two niggers mug a housewife in Washington, DC and I thought: Hitler’s making a clean society. It wouldn’t happen there.

  They said he was clobbering the Jews but I had that down as propaganda. They said he was building an army. Brother, he was going to need an army. Why, the jealous, decadent, corrupt democracies weren’t going to tolerate political sanity and moral health. It was a cinch that sooner or later they’d get together and invade Germany. Hitler had to be prepared to defend his new Jerusalem.

  I read a lot about Germany. I built up a library of over a thousand books on Germany and housed them in a big, specially prepared room in my house in Georgetown. In that room were maps and also artefacts, coins, some moderately rare manuscripts, works of art and so on. It was a tiny German museum. I even, for a while, contemplated having a swastika emblazoned on the door and also growing one out of tulips or gladioli in the garden. One day I began to talk about this project to the gardener and it suddenly struck me that his name, Lasky, was probably a Jewish name. I certainly didn’t want to offend anyone and so I never did mention it to Mr Lasky, my gardener.

  I had a mental picture of Germany as the Happy Land. I saw it full of friendly, healthy people, working in harmony. No one gave anyone orders because things were done spontaneously as soon as the need became obvious. For instance, if a village needed a new road, all the villagers spent Saturday and Sunday building it. The road connected the village with the new autobahn which swept away over the horizon to the shining towers of the Just City. There, the sidewalks streamed with golden youth who were building the New Future. The old folk walked in superb public gardens and ate excellent food in comfortable restaurants. Tasteful new houses, schools and hospitals were erupting everywhere. In his chancellery, Hitler charted the new future that his youth was building. In the barracks, the fearless yet humane guard of the new regime drilled to preserve their heritage. Best of all there was sexual abundance. The golden frauleins gave themselves joyously to the eager laughing men, regarding the sexual act as the chief sacrament of their new religion and the generator of the New Future. Pinched puritanism had been vanquished.

  This was not as clear in my mind as I’ve put it to you, Horace, and maybe at the time I wanted to keep it vague. I was not a deadhead but a man endowed with a perceptive and schooled brain and, under ordinary circumstances, I’d have nosed that load as shit from the first whiff as it trundled past. The way I’ve just put it to you is the way I assembled it to myself after Alexandra Wilks forced me to confront the sick truth of my romantic idealizing of Hitler and his toxic regime.

  Alexandra Wilks was Greek. She was the ex-wife of a congressman. She was about forty when I first met her, two or three years older than me. I normally made passes at girls in their twenties but I was deeply attracted to Alexandra Wilks from the moment I set eyes on her. This was in the home of a Washington journalist during a party. Everyone was chattering and gulping cocktails and Alexandra Wilks was standing by a bookcase, reading a book. She wasn’t too attractive, dark and bony, and the horn-rimmed glasses didn’t help either. But as I moved about the room I kept glancing at her. So finally I drifted up beside her and asked:

  “Good book?”

  In one movement she laid down the book, swept off her glasses and bowed her head in a humourous gesture. At the same time she smiled. I was impressed, particularly by the fact that she didn’t even glance at me. She was like a social machine recalled to its function. She began speaking even before she’d raised her head to see who’d intruded.

  “No, it is a bad book. But compulsive. Who are you?”

  “Tornado Pratt.”

  “Ah,” she nodded, “I’ve heard of you. Alexandra Wilks.”

  She was wearing a green, velvet dress with a plunging neckline. She was small and I could see a good way down that cleavage and tell she had good breasts, low but good. Her body was rangy but exciting. But the crazy thing is, I always saw Alexandra Wilks, when I was with her, in a kind of haze. When I was away from her, I’d conjure her up in my mind and dwell appreciatively on her slim, but voluptuous, body, and her attractive face with dense black locks cascading to her shoulders. But as soon as we were together a kind of electric current of talk and ideas started flowing and I could no longer appreciate her physically. I never did get laid by Alexandra Wilks but I’m pretty sure she would have done. She liked me a lot. She said so. But on the first evening it was supposed to happen, Germany sundered us.

  The evening started real good. I was a few minutes early arriving and Alexandra Wilks was still dressing. She came to the door with tumbled hair and a Japanese silk robe clutched around her.

  “Oh, you traitor,” she exclaimed. “I’m too old to be caught like this.”

  “You look wonderful,” I insisted, strangely stirred by her lithe, mature looks.

  She flashed me a brief smile, seized my arm, guided me to a leather chair and planted me down. Then, just as it was parting disastrously, she snatched her robe together again. She exclaimed:

  “Wow. You sit here. You read this and you wait five minutes.”

  She dumped Time magazine in my lap and flashed out again like a kingfisher. Everything she did was swift and glinting and inspired confidence.

  So I sat with Time magazine but studied instead her living-room. It was large but far from ostentatious. I’d learned that Alexandra had received a divorce settlement of a quarter of a million bucks. This room suggested a professional woman doing pretty well, not a rich lady. It was brave with wood and books and it scintillated with colour. Many of her things were like humming-birds and opals; their hues were iridescent rather than pigmente
d and stable. But she herself, within the glinting, rainbow box, was hard and true as teak or geometry.

  I was glad we’d had a good, brisk, intimate start. Almost at once it got better. She called from the bedroom which was adjoining:

  “Are you a boozer? Of course, you are. Drinks on the trolley, behind the door.”

  I searched and then called:

  “No trolley.”

  “What?”

  She appeared at the bedroom door and my heart clenched in the old, thrilling, almost vertiginous shudder of desire. She was in her slip, white and short and diaphanous enough to reveal her panties and bra beneath. She stepped swiftly, like a trotter, to the door and confirmed my allegation.

  “Where can it be—ah.”

  She peeped behind a gaudy screen and immediately turned and tripped back to her bedroom, calling over her shoulder.

  “It’s there—help yourself—nothing for me. I’ll be three more minutes.”

  I fixed myself a scotch and soda against a mental frieze of Alexandra, nut-brown Mediterranean skin darkened by the dazzling white of her slip, in various frames of frozen motion. As I sipped the drink the warming nudge of alcohol reinforced my feeling of intimacy. It seemed already I belonged with her, maybe not as a husband but as a treasured guest who’d always be welcome in Alexandra’s living-room, bedroom, body.

  Then—they are rare but they do happen, evenings, days, magic afternoons by the river, lyrical hikes in the forest, spells which are flawless, which, if you’d designed them yourself, couldn’t have been improved. So it was that first evening, or so it was almost to the end of that first evening, spent in the company of my dear friend and mentor, Alexandra Wilks of the Hellenes.

  It was late spring and what I get is the whiff of magnolia on the deep lawns and the emerald of the young woods. And what I get is the couple in the foyer of the restaurant who turned from tuxedoed stone to merry flesh and laughed with us over cocktails for quarter of an hour before we were seated. And what I get is one of those rare meals in which every course, from mousse to sherbert is delicate and rich and the claret is dense and fragrant. And what I hear, murmuring still in my brain which has cupped it for forty years, is the lilt and crackle of the talk that bound Alexandra Wilks and me that evening. We found that in many things we were twin facets of the same mind. We agreed, but with our own original, complementary perspective, about almost everything, and when we disagreed it was only to find a new and henceforth shared understanding. I felt that I had never really met another intellect before. Her laughter and applause were the stimulus I’d always instinctively sought. So, hand in hand, we danced across the lawn of the Cambridge Inn, at that time the finest restaurant in the vicinity of Washington. In her faint Greek accent, harshly aspirated, she proposed:

  “Tell me everything.”

  And I tried. I wanted her to inspect and approve all the elements of my being. Suddenly, in the shared glow of her interest, all my loves and achievements and friends and adventures shone fresh and new. It seemed to me that she would both understand what I had made of the past and clarify the things that puzzled me about the present, that she would approve or disparage in the same frame of reference as myself. And, just as urgently, I wanted to explore her past and reality and so, for the next three hours, in various parts of the city we presented to each other fragments of our lives. Even the interruptions were benign. We looked in at a party and everyone there who knew me was cordial in a flattering way and a female friend of Alexandra’s said:

  “He suits you, darling.”

  And finally we sat in my car, outside a tavern, in the velvet, musky night and she asked:

  “Where to now?”

  And I said, still, in spite of our burgeoning rapport, with a faint tremor of dread at the possibility of demur:

  “Back to my place, I guess. Suit you?”

  “Of course.”

  Filled with the electric joy of anticipation, I drove us home. A sudden spring shower exploded and we went whistling through a tunnel of water, laughing in delight. We hissed into my drive. My man opened the door and I dismissed him for the night. And then, stupidly, I showed her round the house. And inevitably we came to the German room.

  Now that room wasn’t ostentatiously corrupt. It wasn’t pasted up with big posters and slogans. At first glance it just looked like a small library. It had a pile carpet and a few leather armchairs. The pictures were mainly historical scenes. I flipped on the light by the door and we entered. When we’d about reached the middle of the room, Alexandra, who’d been glancing about, nodded appreciatively at what she saw. She reacted pretty negligently because we were in deep discussion about some thing. I can’t remember what but I remember that I suddenly realized it was very important to pursue that discussion. This was because, in a wretched flash of insight, I perceived how Alexandra would react to that room if she discovered its real meaning. And a profound feeling of humiliation swept over me. All my obsession of the past year with Germany and German matters suddenly seemed to me neurotic and despicable.

  I didn’t give anything away but, just as naturally as before, I took Alexandra’s arm and, with an indifferent glance about, turned her gently back towards the door, murmuring:

  “Well, that’s the downstairs. Now there’s the upstairs.”

  And I gave her arm a squeeze of complicity which, by that stage, was expected, and strolled with her back towards the door. She was still talking and my hand was reaching up to flick the switch back into merciful darkness when she abruptly stopped talking and walking and looked about attentively. She said:

  “But what do you read?”

  “Well—”

  But it was too late. She sprang forward to the nearest shelf and pulled out The Soul of Fascism or something. She wrinkled her nose, pushed it back, looked along the shelves. Soon she asked, in a faintly puzzled voice:

  “Are they all about Germany—Fascism?”

  “No—not all. A good many—”

  But now she was on the scent and it didn’t take her long to sniff out the secret of that base temple. She asked:

  “What is this? You’re not a Fascist, are you?”

  “I’m not a Fascist—but I recognize its importance.”

  “Importance?”

  It was partly the incredulous way she echoed the word, but also my own stubborn egotism, that launched me. Patronize me? Imply, by a raised syllable, that Tornado Pratt was a brute or an idiot or both? I felt my mind revving up and soon I was snarling out an indictment. Democracy? The rule of the weak over the strong, of the life-deniers over the life-enhancers. It was an obsolete political concept that had no more relevance to the twentieth century than sacrificial slaughter and oracles. Happiness did not come from eliminating sources of misery. It was not a negative but a positive thing that united men in a goal that transcended their own mean lives. In such an exalted mental state it would be an honour to suffer for the community and a privilege to die for it. The rule of law in fact meant the rule of lawyers and thus the rule of deceit and venality. Why should five hundred weak and stupid leaders be superior to one prophetic, strong one? Where, in contemporary America, could one discern the spirit of joy, of poetry, of humanity which was erupting in Italy and Germany? What right had a gangster society, riddled with corruption, to sneer at a nation undergoing a spiritual renaissance? Government by parliament was government by talkers. What we needed was government by doers. Our constitution and vaunted freedoms conferred only the right to rot in tenements and be tyrannized by small-time crooks. Our rulers were predatory and the people gullible.

  Oh, I got fiercer and fiercer, Horace, and while uttering that fierce speech I understood how a man can feel raw power flowing out of the air into his mind and body. I sensed the intoxication of leadership. I guess for a few minutes, I just about became Hitler. But there was no real impetus to it. It was retrospective, harnessing only the memory of a fire that had, in truth, gone out a few minutes before. While ranting, a part of my mind was mi
serably analysing the truth I’d suddenly seen.

  It was the kid. I’d projected on to America, Democracy, the West, my disillusion with myself. The corruption I’d perceived in my countrymen had been a displacement of the corruption I knew that I contained. So all the while I was haranguing a frowning Alexandra, I was inwardly battling with an honest, agonized self who wanted to confess, to purge himself by proclaiming his guilt. But I couldn’t do it, not then, not ever and so, although we ultimately became very close friends and remained so until Alexandra Wilks died of emphysemic heart failure just seven years ago, we never quite regained the peak of mental union we scaled that first evening before Hitler hurled us down.

  When I’d run down, I snarled, self-protectively:

  “So that’s it. So now do you want I should drive you home?”

  She shook her head, chewed her lip for a moment and then fumbled for and lit a cigarette. She glanced about balefully and said:

  “I’d like to get out of this room.”

  “Okay—let’s try the lounge. Can I get you a drink?”

  We moved across the hall into the lounge. She stood by the mantelpiece while I fixed her a drink. I still wanted her and her strange silence encouraged me to think it might still be possible. I handed her her drink and slipped my arm round her waist. She didn’t remove it but said: