“Two of the most amazing women I know,” Glenway said, a little carried away by the occasion. “Cleo Birdwell, this is Randall Leeds Packer.”
She was about seventy-seven years old, standing straight and tall and white. She wore a white caftan and had short, white, slicked-back hair, cropped to the nape. All in all, an impressive, spooky sight. She stood with her right arm fully extended as though taking aim with a pearl-handled Colt. All she wanted to do was shake hands, I luckily saw.
“You must call me Randall,” she said.
I knew she was going to say that. What else could she say in this kind of setting? Her voice was strong, very Southern, with a raspy twang to it.
“I understand you know the works of our dear Wadi Assad,” she said.
“I’ve read his stuff.”
“A major influence on the latter part of my life, those books. They are ageless, I think.”
“We hate the New South,” Glenway said, which may or may not have belonged in this conversation.
“Wadi Assad makes us reflect,” she said. “There is so little that makes us reflect. Each of his tales has a theme. It is all so beautifully worked out. We find the meaning and the moral we all crave but so seldom find in our own lives. There is a pattern, a plan, a design, a lesson, a principle, a truth.”
The Great Dane got off the floor, in sections, and came over to nuzzle my crotch.
“Above all, there is an inner calm,” Randall said. “We are never anxious or adrift when we read these tales. We are comforted, reassured, quietly invigorated. The appeal is spiritual.”
The dog lumbered out finally and Randall took me over to a lovely old wicker table, near the still squawking parrot, to show me her morocco-bound collection of Wadi Assad books. The whole room had so much character I wanted to move in with a hammock and do nothing but sway back and forth, drinking tall, frosted, minty bourbons.
It was decided Glenway would show me the grounds. Randall told him to keep an eye out for Maudie, his half sister, who had a music lesson in an hour.
On a quick tour of the lower floor, Glenway pointed out architectural details, giving me a brief history of things and telling me what was original and what was lovingly restored.
All I can say about the rest of Shalizar is that it’s the closest thing I’ve seen in my own life to a straight torkle. This is saying a lot, but it’s the most romantic, mysterious place you could ever imagine—the gardens, the arbors, the lily ponds, the gazebo, the water mill, the Civil War cemetery, and the mossy old trees and hidden paths and dusky marshes full of wildfowl. There were secret bowers, and ancient, wooden bridges, and half-ruined buildings, sometimes just a couple of walls still standing in the woods, all overgrown with vegetation, birds screeching out as we approached.
“You see what we’re after,” he said. “A rampant, extravagant, natural quality. We encourage decay. We want something just short of buzzards on the portico picking apart the carcasses of baby deer.”
Glenway said this was all lush bottomland. I don’t know what lush bottomland is, but whenever I see the word bottomland it is preceded by the word lush. They never talk about scraggly bottomland or barren bottomland. Bottomland, apparently, is something you don’t eke out a living on, like a hardscrabble farm. I don’t know what hardscrabble is, either, except it’s something you don’t want your farm to be. I used to think hardscrabble was a crop, like rutabaga or zucchini.
We saw Glenway’s half sister Maudie walking through a field picking flowers. Glenway said she was a child-woman. Beautiful, delicate, vulnerable, innocent. She wore something gauzy and wind-whipped.
“Maudie is thirty-seven,” he said, “although she’s been taken for half that age by the few people who’ve seen her. We hide her from people. She is simply too delicate. The world devours souls like Maudie. She has a lovely, fragile, dreamlike quality about her.”
“She’s not allowed out?”
“Into the Sun Belt? Lord, it would kill her in minutes. We don’t even have newspapers at Shalizar. No television, no radio.”
The Old South was one thing. The Middle Ages were another. But I didn’t want to lecture the man on how to treat his own half sister. Maybe she was better off sticking to the plantation. I had the feeling Glen way enjoyed having a child-woman around. He and Randall probably sat in the parlor smoking opium as Maudie went drifting through the house, wearing ballet slippers and a dreamlike, gauzy dress.
“If Maudie is thirty-seven,” I said, “Randall must have been quite, quite mature for someone giving birth.”
“She’s a remarkable woman, my mother.”
“I’ll say.”
“She knew Hemingway and Picasso, she did a striptease for trappers in the Klondike, she lived in a mud hut with headhunters in New Guinea, she helped Hermann Goering resolve his Oedipal conflict, she knew Einstein and Mao, she rode an Arabian stallion under a full moon in the Sahara with a band of marauding tribesmen.”
“In the nude?”
Glen way threw back his head and laughed—that clear, gay, metallic sound.
“None of the half siblings knows his or her father. If you have Randall for a mother, a father is superfluous, I think we agree.”
“How many are you? I thought there was just you and Maudie.”
“There is Manley, the youngest. The baby, as it were. Mother was fifty when Manley was born.”
“Wow.”
“We think his father was a former count or baron, but Mother isn’t letting on, assuming she even knows.”
Glen way laughed attractively.
“If Maudie is beautiful, delicate, and dreamlike, what is Manley?”
“Handsome, cynical, and suicidal,” he said.
We walked through fields of flowers to talk to Maudie. She was everything Glen way had said. Quite, quite lovely, sort of enchanted looking or spellbound. Her hair was cut even shorter than Randall’s, but she had the small-boned look to bring it off. It was very, very short, almost down to bristles, with soft, little, tousled bangs up front. With Glenway’s shaved head, Randall’s cropped look, and Maudie’s marine-recruit, minimalist bristles, I was beginning to think there was some sort of family rule or tradition concerning hair.
“You have a music lesson,” Glenway told her. “Mustn’t forget.”
“Yes, I know.”
“What kind of instrument do you play?” I said.
She smiled at me.
“Castanets.”
I let the word hang there in the slanting sun.
“Oh, the little clicky things,” I said.
Well, I had to say something. Castanets. Who teaches castanets?
We headed back toward the house. Maudie walked just ahead of us, sort of sweeping her hand through the high grass. Glenway said dinner would be served shortly. He was disappointed to hear I wouldn’t be spending the night at Shalizar. I explained the team had suspended all such privileges. On the road, everybody had to sleep at the hotel.
Glenway showed me to the rosewood bedroom. The fireplace was big enough to take a shower in, and the paneling and sconces and so forth were all pretty stunning.
With his customary beautiful manners, he said it might be pleasant for me to rest here before dinner. He went softly out on his white espadrilles, closing the door soundlessly as he left.
The bed had a goose-down comforter. I flopped right down and closed my eyes, feeling I needed sleep almost as much as Shaver did, and for almost as long. I pictured us in twin Kramers, millions of years after the Great Population Explosion (a tremendous blast caused by the heat of so many bodies). We are discovered by aborigines when Australia and North America collide. They climb aboard, so to speak, and head east with their boomerangs to my apartment, where Shaver and I are asleep in matching striped pajamas.
This half-waking fantasy was too dumb and flimsy to survive the clacking sound that came from across the hall. It was Maudie’s castanets lesson. It didn’t sound as though she
had much of an ear, or very nimble fingers either. I didn’t hear any stamping feet, so I guess she was doing a strict instrumental thing with no dancing.
I tried to come up with a more plausible fantasy than the aborigines, but the clacking sound was just too much. I got up. There was an early American pitcher on a table near the bed. I poured some water into the basin and splashed it on my face as I imagine people did in the great days of Shalizar, before decay became an art form.
We were three for dinner, Glen way, Randall and I, and we sat at an oak table that looked sturdy enough to support the Harlem Globetrotters on a fast break. Dinner, by candlelight, was baked red snapper with corn bread and about seven fresh vegetables, served by a West Indian woman named Sammy, who had a wet cigarette hanging from her mouth.
Randall entertained us with tales of playing gin rummy with Dietrich and Mah-Jongg with Garbo, plus teaching Howard Hughes how to roll a joint one night in his wooden plane. Glen way fed her straight lines and generally showered her with urbane affection. You don’t find too many middle-aged men who get along this well with their moms.
“Of course the one great figure of this century I’ve always regretted not meeting is Wadi Assad,” she said. “Little is known of his death except that it occurred in 1924, a tedious year in every other respect. Manley thinks he is pseudo profound, pseudo this, pseudo that. But isn’t pseudo profundity exactly what we need in these terrible times? Don’t all our problems arise from true profundity? Isn’t the failure of our age a failure of profound men with profound ideas? What was Marx if not profound? Or Freud or Gandhi or Bertie Russell. Yet all we have to do is look around us to discover the fruits of this deep, true, genuine profundity.”
Randall’s strong blue eyes flickered in the candlelight and her white hair shone a little, as if professionally backlit.
Near her was a huge cage full of parakeets and finches and other birds, hopping about, flapping a little.
“What was Chairman Mao if not profound when I flew in from Tibet to talk to him? I piloted an old mail plane and put it down in a pasture in Hunan Province, slick as a berry. With me was a Belgian Jesuit who couldn’t make up his mind whether he wanted to convert me or sleep with me.”
Glen way stopped chewing to laugh. With food in his mouth, he couldn’t throw back his head, so he laughed a little Frankensteinlike, terribly, terribly stiff, his mouth barely open.
“We desperately need pseudo profundity,” Randall said. “Much, much more of it. Beg, borrow, or steal. It’s the only comfort left to us.”
Maudie came in, sort of daydreaming along, all spacey and small-boned. She talked to the birds for a while, quietly, in English, with a little bit of twittering mixed in. I think the word for her is fey.
Over coffee, Glenway talked about retiring to Shalizar to read and think. Randall sat there smoking a cheroot. I was relieved to hear no mention of the Amazons fiasco in Los Angeles. I was afraid Floss might have called Glenway. I would have to sit and listen to him tell me that I was misusing my stupid, that my stupid deserved a chance to flourish just like other people’s stupids.
Later, Randall and I sat on the veranda. Night had fallen on Shalizar. We watched a small glow in the distance, a soft, unsteady light. Glenway was upstairs putting Maudie to bed.
“I think you and I are alike,” Randall said. “I have always seized life by the short hairs. I tried to surround myself with people who seized life. I found early in the game that pseudo profound people are more apt to seize life than any other type of person. And so we all lived life to the hilt, in garrets and country houses, on the Normandie and the Hindenburg and the Orient Express, being pseudo profound together. We were all of us in a mad rush to live, to live, to live. It was worthwhile but tiring. I was tired all the time. Thank God for World War II. Things slowed down considerably.”
The moon was full and Randall seemed very chalky on the un-lighted veranda. Her face and hands were almost as white as her hair, and her caftan practically gleamed. She was powdery and chalky, like a wind-sculptured mineral, maybe the most striking person I’ve ever seen, and I loved the little rasp in her drawl, even if she thought I was pseudo profound.
“Seizing life is hard work,” she said. “We all worked at it all the time. You must be willing to sacrifice, to give up things that are very important to you. Home and family, peace of mind, and so forth. When you see that light burning in the distance, you know nothing can stop you from running toward it, the wind in your hair, the grass beneath your bare feet, on and on through the darkness, to seize what is there.”
Here she did something dramatic. She lifted that long, right arm of hers and pointed toward the soft glow off in the woods. That little, wavering light we’d seen when we stepped onto the veranda. It was like a scene from ancient theater. The moon shone on her chalky fingers. Her profile was nothing short of heroic. I waited for her to drop the arm and say something else. But it stayed up there, pointing.
Was she saying I was supposed to get up and run toward the light, the wind in my hair, the grass beneath my bare feet?
She turned and looked at me, without dropping the white arm. It was true. There was some kind of life out there she wanted me to seize.
“What about Glenway?” I said.
“He is putting Maudie to bed. He always puts her to bed when he’s here. They dote on each other.”
“I know, but how long will it take? I wouldn’t want to wander off. That woman is coming with the car to take me back.”
She was still pointing. Terrific steadiness for a seventy-seven-year-old arm.
I shrugged and walked out onto the lawn, looking back at her to make sure I was doing what I was supposed to do.
The night was bright and sweet smelling, full of the sound of insects. I walked through a patch of woods, keeping the flickering light in the plainest view possible. The ground began to get squishy. Fortunately I stepped right onto a narrow wooden walkway that sort of meandered through the swamps. I could see that the light I’d been following was coming from a building, or what was left of one. I heard a sound above the chatter of the insects. A rapid, whippy thing. Five minutes later, I was standing outside the building. It was an old church, sunken and bent in the moonlight.
Again, that lightning hum, that rapid, swishing sound.
I peered in a window. The interior was lighted by giant torches set into the walls. Someone in a tight-fitting white suit, wearing a mask, was slashing the air with a sword. That’s the sound I’d heard.
I watched as the person made some fancy, high-stepping moves, rotating the sword slowly and menacingly, then lunging at an imaginary opponent. This went on for a few minutes. Bullfrogs were croaking and a night bird went screeching overhead.
The person put down the sword and took off the mask. This had to be Manley. A handsome, cynical face, with dark, hooded, tired eyes, and what looked like a dueling scar on one cheek.
After the shaved head and cropped hair of the other Packers, Manley was a revelation. He had a mane of beautiful auburn hair. It flowed over his ears and down around his neck. Romantic hair. The kind of hair that suited a place like Shalizar.
I watched him take off his gloves and the jacket part of his outfit, which left him in long white stockings and a pair of knee breeches. Auburn hair curled lightly over his pectorals. He had one of those bronze tans you see advertised in magazines but rarely glimpse on living people.
To think that Randall at the age of fifty could have delivered something that turned out this well was pretty dumfounding.
He spotted me and smiled. The smile of a handsome stranger. His flesh rippled in the torchlight.
“It isn’t often we have visitors to our little chapel in the swamps.”
“Randall suggested I drop by.”
“She’s a sweet old thing. They’re all sweet old things.”
I found the entrance and went in. Parts of a pulpit and a few church pews still remained. Grass was growing betwe
en the blocks of stone that constituted the floor. The torches cast a deep, mellow, mysterious light.
Manley picked up a sword and extended it to me handle-first.
“This is a foil,” he said. “Fencing is a conversation between weapons. The foils talk to each other. They whisper, they threaten, they entice, they seduce.”
He had a kind of sawed-off drawl. It was a voice that made me think of a military academy, somehow, or some secret society where men gather at dawn on alternate Thursdays to fire antique pistols at each other or duel to the death with foils. Not that I disliked his voice. I liked his voice. But I thought Manley might be bored by anything short of death-defying adventure.
I whipped the foil back and forth. That lightning hum. He showed me how to hold it. Then he demonstrated the en garde position, left arm curled way up, right knee bent, and so forth. We did a little advancing and retiring. He showed me how to lunge and gave me a rough idea of some simple parries.
“Fencing is complex as hell,” he said. “The mind never rests. It’s like mind-and-body chess. I’d call it chess to the death, but that’s a bit rich, even for my blood.”
He explained about targets and hits.
“It was Mother’s idea, my fencing. She thinks I lack discipline and concentration. For years she’s been saying the only thing that gets my eyes to focus is death.”
“What makes her say that?”
“I used to hang-glide in thunderstorms off Big Sur. Then all the tacky people started doing it.”
He suggested we engage, since I seemed to be learning quickly. I made a clothes-wearing gesture. I was wearing a tawny-port pants suit and didn’t want it punctured.
Manley pointed to a uniform draped over one of the pews. Then he turned his back and began doing different kinds of lunges. I took off my clothes and put on the breeches, jacket, stockings, and gloves. He came over and fitted a mask on me.
He showed me what the line of engagement was, and how to engage, and so on. As he explained things, we began to fence, more or less in slow motion. I found I liked it. The clothes were fun, for one thing, and I enjoyed the classic, formal nature of the thing. It was all rules and tradition and areas of attack and correct cadences and rhythms.
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