by Carson, Tom
Her collar has stayed on the marble-topped endtable since Andy brought me back here from the last trip I’ll take to any vet’s. Perhaps it’s obvious why your mind will fix on oddities, but I remember thinking so at the time, glancing around the exam room as Kelquen got vaguely interested in a bird outside the window and Dr. Miranda explained their eyes don’t close. After decades of bringing pets to animal hospitals, I’d just realized I’d have no further use for an entire profession.
That list has gotten considerably longer since dawn. No more Hardy Boys doctors, never again a Popular Mechanics dentist or voluptuous or frowning-lipped lab assistant hunting for a vein in my arm’s tapioca and balsa. No ninepin waiters (“More wine!,” or maybe more kuala tea) at La Chaumière. No more grandfatherly photographers on holiday from teaching others the craft producing exquisite images of bikini girls.
As of today, the only two helpmeets of any use or consequence to me are a White House operator and the President of the United States. And now I think of it, not without amusement, you could call mine an assisted suicide. Potus opposes helping folks turn up their toes-es, adding a bonus to Pam’s intent to draft him as my Kervorkian.
Afterward—just so long as it isn’t beforehand, Cadwaller’s gun!—there’ll be police. An undertaker: Gawler’s, most likely, pretty much the Foreign Service’s belly-up answer to Grand Central Station. Cleaning lady: I’d better make sure to leave a note to Andy and write an extra-hefty check as her bonus for wiping up the last of Pink Thing and Gray Thing. Will any of me hit the wall, I wonder? Except on television, I haven’t seen anybody shot in the head since 1945.
Kelquen’s collar is where it is only because depositing it in the Paris footlocker would be too hard a farewell. In the two years since, I’ve occasionally caught Andy eyeing that circlet of name-tagged turquoise leather as he considers and then cancels a suggestion. That he always checks to see if it’s still there is why I’m gambling my 72-point boldface shriek will stop him before he steps into the living room.
As a further tipoff, I thought of leaving my wedding ring there too. Unless he’s really slipped a few cogs, to Andy that would be the difference between guessing and knowing. But trying to work it off my finger would deter the average graverobber, let alone tapioca-and-balsa me. Kelquen’s collar will have to do.
Yes, Andy: like my last cat, I’ll soon be nowhere and nothing. (Good God! Why don’t those stupid, lazy bastards call? Who’s running things down there today, FEMA?) Please, though, the rest of you, even if you’re children: no sentimentality about the old bag’s imminent reunion with Kelquen. I promise she and I would race to see which of us could cough up a bigger furball. When you call animals dumb, remember that they make themselves fewer illusions than we do about death.
Posted by: P.B.
As anyone who owns The Mountain and the Stream knows, my guardian, once my parents’ closest friend in East Egg and later St. Dorothy of the Depression’s Scarecrow, passed away in 1968 in a hospital in Davenport, Iowa. He was a few months short of turning seventy-six and had led a full if, to mimsies with as much appetite for the world as Pam’s, bewilderingly renunciatory life. I still regret how a nurse’s thoughtlessness flooded his own eyes with misery during his final afternoon of breathing this planet’s air. Hospital-canned, but breath’s breath and air’s air.
His week as a terminal heart patient was the only time in twenty-one years Brother Nicholas, as he’d been known since 1947, had left the grounds of Nenuphar, the monastery between Davenport and Iowa City where he’d spent what must be one of the longest novitiates in the order’s history. He’d always refused ordination; I may be the only one who knows why. I’m proud that Letter 86, the fullest of several explanations of his decision to become a monk, is addressed to “P.B.,” the maximum extent to which any of us recipients are identified in print. Like the others, it makes no mention of his lone qualm about Christian doctrine, a secret he shared with me just hours before the end.
As I think I’ve mentioned, he’d parted ways with Dorothy over her unrevised pacifism after December 7th, 1941. Letter 45, which is the final one to “D.D.” and was written soon after Hiroshima, expresses his regret at his short-sightedness: “I didn’t know it would come to this, that’s all. What I think you saw long ago is that it doesn’t need to come to this to teach us there’s no middle way.” His view, not mine, but his former ward can understand his horror.
His world had turned decisively inward during the war years. In Letter 22, which was also to P.B. and came mud-scuffed to the correspondents’ villa at Nettuno on the Anzio beachhead, he writes, “I’ll always stick by anyone trying to alleviate suffering. But it’ll never go away, and I guess not so deep down I’m one of the ones stuck trying to understand why that’s our condition and not, as D_ believes, a temporary obstruction to achieving it.”
The list of recommended reading he’d enclosed got whisked to shout-filled oblivion when a couple of Messerschmitts dropped out of the sky and we had to make a run for it to the dugout. It vanished along with my Anzio Bobbsey twin Bill M.’s unfinished sketch of Pam, GI-shoed and fist to chin, reading the letter from her former guardian. Since the names of the authors who’d most shaped his evolving thinking pack The Mountain and the Stream’s typo-riddled index (thank you, Vaughn Trapp & Co.: how did Donne turn into “Doremi”?), I doubt anything invaluable was lost. Brother, do I rue that lost sketch, though, even if Bill made up for it by doing Nothing Like a Dame’s jacket art three years later.
One letter his abbot returned, requesting I never make it public, was his answer to my long-brewed question—these things can be easier to bring up once there’s an ocean between you—about why he’d never gotten married again. It made me laugh in a Normandy orchard, since I could practically hear his voice and see the smile creasing his face: “Pammie, what can I say? Emily Dickinson wouldn’t have me.”
Posted by: P.A.
In terms of his character, my guardian becoming a monk wasn’t unduly hard for me to get my head around. As a social encounter, though, it was a little fidgety—for me, of course, not Brother Nicholas. The rules of his order allowed the novice no visitors at all for the first three years, then went all slack and sybaritic and let him choose one per annum. I was gratified when a letter to Mrs. Noah Gerson of Beverly Hills, California, invited me to be his first P.A.: that is, the one for 1950.
Isn’t there something in the Book of Ruth about the alien corn? It was wheat and rye at Nenuphar, but the effect was similar even if they’d already harvested it. Under November’s chilblained mix of cindery and violet stains, a roughly hewn bell tower reminded me of some I’d seen in Italy.
This one was whole, though: not even bullet-pocked. A man in a robe was herding a few white and auburn cattle along a rutted path. I’d been in Iowa City an hour ago, and behind my back it was sprouting nightclubs, George Groszian traffic, big-breasted hootchy-kootchy dancers now startlingly including the staid small-breasted chambermaid at my respectable downtown hotel, neon martini glasses the size of the Statue of Liberty’s torch, skyscrapers, and general depravity at a dizzying clip. Then my guardian came toward me, also in a robe.
The big adjustment wasn’t theological but sartorial. When a man you’ve known since girlhood as a reasonably snappy dresser appears before you in a roughly woven brown robe that reaches his ankles, no jury is going to convict you for feeling awkward, at least given that it’s 1950. Then again, every other man in sight was dressed the same way, and my dull gray skirt was down to my ankles too: it had been fun to shop for that on Rodeo Drive. Kerchief over my head. You may not believe it, but the abbot’s letter of instructions had included a discreet but unmistakable request to stay away if it was my time of the month.
Considering my overlapping confusions, it may be no wonder I scored a gaffe with my first salvo. The cabbie and I had kept the radio on the whole way out. “My Gawd, Nick!” I greete
d him. “Can you believe the Chinese came in in Korea? I knew that idiot MacArthur would—”
“Pam, please,” he stopped me very gently. “Didn’t you get the abbot’s letter? You must’ve, from how strangely you’re dressed. We don’t see newspapers here. No telephone, no radio. Or that odd new contraption Brother Howdy Doody had to go and spill the beans about last year,” he added, his amusement indicating that some word of our diversions did slip through. “We caned him, of course.”
I was still in too many places. The 38th Parallel, debauched—you wish, as Panama would say—Iowa City. Chicago, 1934; Italy. Here. “You didn’t,” I blurted.
“Oh, Pam! Come on, I’ll show you around.”
I knew I wouldn’t get to see his cell. Or the rectory, for that matter. Women were allowed on the grounds if foreseen and accompanied, but not inside any of the buildings. Unornamented, as bluntly chopped in stone as if God’s architect had been using his butter knife that day, they stood around me against vast backdrops of stubbled yellow. Only the grain silo behind the rectory had its familiar Iowa helmet on.
One monk walked by with a wheel of cheese, calling “Brother Nicholas” in greeting but ignoring me. Two more were sifting flour—outside, in November. Red hands. “Getting ready for Thanksgiving, I see,” I said warily, to say something.
He laughed after looking confounded. “Did I really raise you? It isn’t a religious holiday.”
Why that broke the ice, I can’t say—no, I can. He’d never claimed he’d raised me before.
“So what do you really do?” I asked. More cattle had just gone by.
“Oh, I’ve written you. Morning prayers, crack of dawn—we do tend to rattle them off a bit faster in February. Then we novices confer with our priests; I wish I could introduce you to mine. Then meditation and, in my case, correspondence. Manual labor in the afternoon.”
“Doing what?”
“We make a pretty good cheese for a bunch of eremites, if I say so myself. It’s sold commercially—not in California, though. Sorry. But our bread, Pam! We’ll have it for lunch if you don’t mind eating outdoors. I’d be baking soon if you weren’t my P.A.”
“And then?”
“Oh, we all go into Davenport and take in a show. No, no. In the evenings, Mass and our Office, followed by sleep and, believe me, pleasant dreams. After the first year, anyhow. The imagery changes after a while on our diet.”
“Do you like it?” I asked bluntly. He was still Nick, after all.
“At my age—” he was fifty-eight that year—“it’s nice to be a novice in just about any context. But let’s hear about you. Who played you in the movie, anyone I’d remember? It must’ve come out by now.”
“It did, and let’s not talk about it. Rodgers and Hammerstein wouldn’t let us use Nothing Like a Dame as the title, did I write you about that? So help me, it ended up being called The Gal I Left Behind Me. Whatever you do, please don’t see it.”
“Pammie, believe me. Whatever I do, I can’t.”
Posted by: Pam
The next time I was invited to be Brother Nicholas’s P.A. was in 1955. I was so locked into Glory Be that I doubt I’d have heeded a king’s summons—in fact, especially not a king’s summons, given my democratic theme. One from Nick was different, and I realized I could move up my next trip in search of Virginia’s Martha Shelton (b. 1707, d. 1745, and one of my real finds) and spend a night in Iowa City on the way.
I don’t know who his annual guests were otherwise, but that was the same autumn I finally watched The Wizard of Oz, the black-and-white TV transmission turning the Munchkins into squeaky extras in a pygmy The Grapes of Wrath. Your Gramela does like to imagine the old Scarecrow creaking a Nenuphar gate open at dusk sometime in Ike’s first term and saying, “Hello, Dorothy.”
Anyhow, the picture that sobers the back cover of The Mountain and the Stream—believe me, “adorns” wouldn’t be the right word—must’ve been taken around the year of my return visit. Flaked with motes by inept processing and badly underexposed, it shows him ladling bread into Nenuphar’s oven with a long-handled baker’s peel.
By then, the folds of his face had settled into their coiled life around the landlocked anchor formed by his eyes and mouth. His close-cropped gray hair was an element monkhood couldn’t claim credit for, not unless it had his number long before he’d had its. He’d been wearing it that way when he’d met me at the boat.
This time the rough brown robe looked natural, of course, and Nenuphar had gone from an odd hacking of instant venerability in the Iowan landscape to a place reassuringly unchanged: a rarity in those years’ hurry-up, Interstate-building America. In her latest hallucinatory incarnation as I faced the monastery, my demure Iowa City chambermaid—not even seen this trip, just recalled for her constrained manner from the previous one—had become a tight-sweatered, bosomy motorcycle moll, chewing gum as if she meant to introduce it to her newly dyed hair and clutching Marlon Brando’s leather-clad back on smoky roads.
In front of me, another monk or perhaps the same one was herding different cattle, unless they were the same ones too. I had and have no idea how long cows live, and obviously none were ever slaughtered there.
“How is your, uh, Gerson?” Even if someone who went around saying Brother This and Brother That all day couldn’t really complain about it, he’d always been left blank by my habit of calling my husbands by last name.
“Good,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true. Gerson’d long since left Metro to work for Rik-Kuk Productions, and Gene Rickey—that’s Mr. Fran Kukla to you, Tim—was no boss for an intelligent man to suffer under. Since the likes of Gene Rickey were what Nenuphar was designed to cancel, Nick had no need to hear about that.
The bakery doors were open, at least letting me glimpse the self-same kiln that’s on The Mountain and the Stream’s back cover. A rural gal I’ve never been except by necessity in the ETO, but the smells of turned earth, that morning’s bread, still warm unpasteurized milk, and cowflop around us were nice.
“You know, you never told me,” he said. “Did you convert?”
“To Judaism? Lord, no. We were married at City Hall.”
Given the how and where of Gerson’s and my parting, his next question is in boldface in Pink Thing’s archives. “Does he ever regret that?”
“Why, no. I don’t think so. He’s never said he does.”
“I know I’m prejudiced—no, Pam, not that way. Around here, we don’t really think of volubility as a decisive benchmark.”
Remembering he didn’t know Gerson—lack of talkativeness was never a problem in our marriage, neither on his side nor mine—I smiled. “Well! I guess I don’t need to ask what you’ve been up to, though. Everything looks exactly the same.”
“It isn’t. And I’m not sure I like it,” he answered with surprising grimness. “Let’s say a couple of my recent conversations with our abbot have been tense.”
“You aren’t thinking of leaving?”
He was astonished. “Oh, never. Trust me, I’ll die here. And with no complaints. I just want us to stay true to our principles. As the abbot does too, of course,” he added quickly. “We only disagree—have, discussions—about how.”
“What how? I mean, which? More pebbles in the sandals?”
“The long and the short of it is our cheese is getting popular. Bread too, you may have seen the brand: Flour of the Lily.”
“Isn’t that good, though? I do realize it’s not for profit, but…”
“It does bring a lot of income for the order’s other work, yes. The issue is how much of our time we’ve started devoting to selling the stuff. Naturally, I’m playing my part—not at liberty to refuse. You get one guess what my duty is, Pammie. Formerly a specialty.”
I stared. “Oh, no,” I said.
“Oh, yes!” he
whooped, his eyes glistening with merriment. Seizing both my hands in his—a first since he’d taken his vows—he moved his elderly haunches around in a sort of caper under his brown robe. “Ad copy. Oh, Pam! For my sake, don’t ever forget that this is a world of wonders.”
Posted by: Pam
The next and last time I saw him was in the Davenport hospital. Barred from using the telephone even outside the monastery’s grounds, he’d asked the staff to contact me. That took some doing.
Pam Cadwaller by then in my everyday life, I was on tour to promote by Pamela Buchanan’s third and last appearance on a dust jacket. I’m still fond of the book even though Lucky for the Sun came a cropper next to Glory Be in reputation and sales. The spring of ’68 had other plans; more than once, a local radio or TV interviewer had to interrupt Pam’s chat about Parisian charms to cut away to news of the latest death or riot. I only turned out to be helpful when riots erupted in Paris itself, but by then even my agent agreed poor Lucky was a goner.
Flown into from habit, even Iowa City now had a Groszian undertow for real. Cars had cracked windshields and bedraggled kids sat on stoops like unemployed wig salesmen wearing the stock. Pam Cadwaller was writing checks to Gene McCarthy’s campaign and I was fond of the Beatles, but neither the former nor—more remarkably—the latter seemed to have the thing under control anymore.
I didn’t even need Nenuphar for contrast. While I was still there, my staid chambermaid mutated into a hairy-crotched gargantuess, pushing wan little daffodil junkies down onto her mound’s swamp in exchange for a shot in a neighborhood I didn’t know. Wondering why I hadn’t just had the sense to go directly to Davenport, since in real life I’d obviously never see her again, I was relieved when Pam’s rental car put open country in front of my now almost forty-eight-year-old nose on Route 80.
