American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  He picked her up at eight o’clock in a chauffeured Delage. Ramsey’s caplet-sleeved, town-tailored day dress was as disproportionate to Arthur’s bespoke dinner suit as a buffalo robe would be to a pair of plus fours. On a normal occasion the discrepancy would have bothered her. Tonight she wore her hair down to hide the bald spot she’d unconsciously worn into her scalp near the nape of her neck. The gun in her ivory satin clutch seemed to radiate like the warming pan her nanny used to insist she sleep with on the rare cold nights in Mississippi.

  “Jeffrey, take us to that speak I like. You know the one,” Arthur said to the driver.

  “At this time of night, sir, I believe we can catch it at One Hundred Twenty-Fifth.”

  “You’re a titan among mortals, Jeffrey. How would I get by without you?”

  The driver turned north onto Lexington Avenue. “The mind reels, sir.”

  Although she didn’t know what kind of speakeasy would need to be “caught,” Ramsey was comforted by the rapport between the driver and Arthur, as she had always believed the true nature of a person could be discerned in how he or she treats the help. But then again, she worried, perhaps the banter, which sounded suspiciously practiced, was all for show. Ramsey had no idea who or what or even how to trust anymore. She gripped her clutch.

  It took less than ten minutes to reach 125th Street, the scenes outside the car, ailanthuses next to park entrances and silhouettes behind bay windows, passing by as quickly as clips in a newsreel theater.

  “Careful of the curb,” Arthur said after exiting the car, strolling around its hood, opening Ramsey’s door, and offering the crook of his arm. Together they walked down the stairs into the subway station for the IRT East Side line. Over the years, Ramsey had heard of speakeasies hidden in secret, forgotten chambers of subway stations, a former control room that had become obsolete, an old platform that had closed because of underuse. Arthur guided Ramsey to the lower level of the bilevel station, its tiled walls echoing the rumble and screech of southbound local and express trains, gray-haired Italian men unabashedly singing as though they were wandering through a Neapolitan village, loaves of bread periscoping from grocery bags, the smell of olives, finocchio, razor clams, pomegranates, and cheese emanating from bins watched over by haggle-ready Sicilians.

  The best goddamn armor against the most dangerous folk, Ramsey thought, enjoying the reversion to the Mississippi vernacular of her youth, is a crowd of the most peaceful folk.

  At the north end of the station Arthur and Ramsey stopped in front of a closed door. It was nothing but a slab of black metal, no ornamentation or distinguishing marks, except for a tiny slot just above the knob. After looking around the platform, which was empty of people in that area, Arthur reached into his pocket, took out a small coin, and pushed it into the slot.

  The door opened and then, almost immediately, began to close again. Arthur slipped through the opening and with a snatch pulled Ramsey in. “Easy there, damn it,” she said, rubbing her forearm.

  On the other side of the door, they stood on a subway platform just like the one they’d been standing on, a single island buttressed by tracks to each side, and they were not alone. Throughout the roughly fifteen-yard-long section of the platform—apparently the true northern-most end of the lower level, hidden from public use by the wall with the slot and door—men in tuxedos and women in furs lingered near the edges and next to the pillars, drinking cocktails provided by a waiter with a small bar cart. “Why do people still come to speaks after the repeal?” Ramsey asked Arthur.

  “Suppose they like the secrecy. There’s just one thing, though.”

  “What?”

  Arthur smiled coyly. “The speakeasy isn’t here yet.”

  In 1902, after an explosion that damaged a great deal of expensive property, construction of the IRT subway was halted, due to safety concerns, public outcry, and, most important, a lack of funding. August Belmont Jr., primary financier of the project, decided to raise the needed funds privately, offering lifelong access, for a substantial, one-time fee, to a private subway car, the Mineola. After the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, membership in the Mineola Club, as it came to be known, was expanded, and use of its subway car was repurposed for the consumption and enjoyment, legality notwithstanding, of alcoholic beverages.

  “I’m just an annual member,” Arthur said as he and Ramsey stepped onto the recently arrived Mineola.

  New York Times columnist Meyer Berger would, many years later, describe the interior of the subway car: “mulberry silk drapes, knee-deep carpeting, sliding leatherette curtains, a kitchenette with kerosene stove and old-fashioned icebox, special subway-pattern china and glassware, overstuffed reclining couch, swivel chair and rolltop desk.” Although, for the most part, Berger was accurate in his description, he failed to mention, being a former member himself, the features specific to the era of Prohibition, such as the Philippine mahogany bar stocked with a daily-newspaperman’s best friend.

  Sitting in leather chairs, Ramsey and Arthur were served a bourbon neat and vodka rocks, respectively. The train was passing 116th Street when Ramsey said, “Show-off.”

  Arthur sipped his drink. “I’m in pictures. It’s my business to show off.”

  Until this moment, Ramsey realized, she had never really looked at Arthur, instead registering him like one is supposed to a solar eclipse, through the pinhole that her mind’s perception of the world had become. He was handsome in the way men who are confident are handsome, and he was confident in the way men who have money are confident. His eyes were as murkily green as pot liquor. In the subway car, as the lights of the 110th and 103rd Street stations glided by, Arthur, with his pomaded black hair and his skin made ecru by the sun, turned into a constant for Ramsey, a fixed point where her gaze could settle as the train carried them toward lower Manhattan.

  She could already feel her first drink. The past week of no alcohol and very little food had crippled her once impressive, if alarming, tolerance. She slowed down on the second.

  “I’ve always wanted to meet a film mogul,” said Ramsey.

  “I’ve always wanted to meet a soda heiress.”

  From Ninety-Sixth Street onward, interrupted by the occasional stop to pick up waiting club members, Ramsey and Arthur discussed Vantage Pictures’ upcoming films in 1934, the rumors of a shadow economy created by the robber barons at the turn of the century, how they both hated supper dancing, how they both loved miniature golf, and that Panola Cola maybe should consider signing an exclusive distribution contract with the Wichita Amusement Company, the country’s fifth largest theater chain and a recently acquired, wholly owned subsidiary of Arthur’s studio.

  “Gripes. Is this Thirty-Third?” Arthur said as the train pulled into a station. “We missed our stop.”

  Ramsey drank the last sip of her third bourbon before following Arthur out of the upholstered confines of the Mineola, through the sepulchral walls of the station, and into the brick and metal and glass world of midtown Manhattan. A crumpled slip of paper doddered on the breeze down the sidewalk like a wounded bird. “Jeffrey always picks me up at Grand Central. I’ll get us a taxicab.” Arthur began to look north and south along Park Avenue.

  “Don’t be silly. What is it, nine blocks? Let’s walk.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Even though she told him, “Of course!” Ramsey was the opposite of sure. This was the first time in over a week she had been below Forty-Second Street. Staying above that imaginary line of demarcation had somehow made her feel safe. As she walked along the East Thirties, though, passing office buildings and the professional clubs attended by men who worked in those office buildings, passing residential homes and the social clubs attended by women who lived in those residential homes, Ramsey felt safe with Arthur, not because he could protect her, but rather because of something far more damaging to her self-respect. He seemed kind.

  Forty-foot-high statues of Mercury, Hercules, and Minerva looked down on Arthur and
Ramsey in their approach to Grand Central. A massive clock beneath the statues read the time as 9:55. Near Forty-Second Street and Vanderbilt, where Arthur said Jeffrey would be, Ramsey became, with each step, increasingly drawn to Grand Central, as though it exerted a force of gravity. Even shadows seemed to be stretching toward the building. Ramsey was musing about how the stars painted on the ceiling of the terminal could be the cause of the gravitational pull when one of the shadows that seemed to be subject to it changed shape.

  “Your wallet, your watch. Her necklace. The rings, too.”

  In one hand the man who had stepped out of the alley held a flick blade. In the other hand, clinching it by the front brim as though he were greeting a society member, he held a hat. Sweat stippled his cheeks despite the cold. A widow’s peak accentuated his raised eyebrows. “Okay, easy now,” Arthur was saying as he took his wallet out of his pocket.

  The loud pop had three effects on the man with the knife. First, his eyebrows grew even more raised, etching concentric wrinkles in his brow, like a drawing of radio waves. Second, he dropped his hat on the ground, where it wobbled for a moment and then stopped upside down, grimed with dirt from the sidewalk and marred on each side with a perfectly round bullet hole. Third, he screamed, “Jesus Christ, lady! You’re a goddamn lunatic!”

  After the man ran away, turning down the nearest cross street, Ramsey put the gun back in her clutch and turned to look at Arthur. “You should see your face,” she said, unable to hold back an enormous grin.

  3.4

  The History of Narrative—The Soap Opera Diatribe

  Narrative weds individuals to history. On March 12, 1985, his twenty-third birthday, Robert Vaughn repeated those words in his head as he waited outside Leopold Marunga’s office. They were as far as he had gotten in formulating how to express what he wanted to convey in his thesis. Narrative weds individuals to history. Pretty damn thin, he had to admit. If he wanted to avoid upsetting Marunga, whose fuse was not known for its ample length, Robert would have to lay the jargon on thick, intercutting references to McLaren and Spinetti with the occasional “dialectic,” “gestalt,” and “paradigm,” all of which he would conclude were “in flux.”

  The door to Professor Marunga’s office opened. Through it walked a girl who, with a pencil stuck in her Chrissie Hynde–style haircut and with a tattoo of Karl Marx jutting from her T-shirt sleeve, was a rarity not only for Millsaps but also for the entire state, an academic punk. She glared at Robert for a moment. Instead of meeting her gaze he felt an urgent need to check his watch. He wiped his hands against his pants, unsure if they were sweating because of his thesis meeting or because, since his senior year of high school, he’d had a crush on Chrissie Hynde.

  “Get in here, Vaughn,” called Professor Marunga.

  Robert did as ordered. “Good to see you, sir.”

  A former renegade of the philosophy department who, after his insouciance had been mistaken for chutzpah once too often, not only received tenure but was also appointed chair, Leopold Marunga, Ph.D., was as eccentric as his own name, a collector of vintage golf clubs, frequent reciter of 1950s commercial jingles, and contributor, albeit indirectly, to the retirement funds of various farmers in Humboldt County. That day it seemed clear he had partaken on his ride to work.

  “For Christ’s sake, Vaughn, I know you’re not the astrological type, but call me Leo already.”

  “Sorry, Leo.” Robert took a seat across from Marunga. “How’s Jane?”

  “Upset she didn’t get into the Junior Auxiliary. Auxiliary to what, you might ask. I’ve no clue.”

  “They’re sort of a charity org—”

  “Let me rephrase: I don’t care.”

  Professor Marunga placed two sockless but shoed feet on his cluttered desk. The effect of mentioning the professor’s wife, Robert knew, tended to be hit or miss for his mood, depending on what Marunga often euphemized as “cultural differences.” Most people called them fights. On his arrival in Jackson, Mississippi, as an assistant professor, Leo Marunga of Christchurch, New Zealand, quickly met and fell for one Jane Gregory, debutante, belle, and daughter of the South. They liked each other’s accents a great deal. Soon after their wedding it became apparent that was all they liked. Robert could tell as much the first time he met Jane, at a department mixer, when she introduced herself as Mrs. Cowabunga.

  “Let’s get down to it then. What, vis-à-vis a topic, do you have for me, thesis advisee? I’m in a rhyming mood today.”

  Robert’s father used to say, “And remember, when you roll, roll high,” a statement Robert would have considered somewhat profound if its author weren’t a gambling addict. With that advice in mind, sitting across from Professor Marunga and surrounded by stacks of newspapers, obscure comp-lit texts, hardcover comic books, and issues of Philosophia and People magazine, Robert began what he would later think of as his “soap-opera diatribe.” He started his argument with Theodor von Hedt’s concept of external intratextuality. Then he began to riff. Aware of Marunga’s penchant for invented terminology, lowbrow pop culture, and broad generalizations, Robert described the “will to narrative” found in The Young and the Restless, how Days of Our Lives could be described as a “dramopticon.” He expounded on those concepts, applying them to society at large. “With this thesis I’d make the argument,” he concluded, “that storytelling is the basis of all logic.”

  Marunga steepled his fingers. “Would you do me a favor? Go outside and check the sign out front. Does it still say ‘Philosophy Department’?”

  “I know it’s a bit of a reach.”

  “Reach-around, more like.”

  “But I think I can pull it off.”

  By the way Professor Marunga rubbed his eyes, irritated but resigned, as though a film director had said, “This time, play it begrudgingly,” Robert could tell he had him. “Okay,” his thesis adviser said, “write one chapter and then we’ll see. But remember, you have to take this seriously, understood? This isn’t some Intro to Lit Theory paper, five hundred words on how ‘peanut butter and jelly sandwich’ is a semiotic construction.”

  “Understood.” Robert got up to leave. “Thank you.”

  “Just one suggestion. Cool it on the soap operas. Life’s not like that.”

  Robert thanked him for the note, unable to look into those dilated pupils, before walking out of the office. His slowing pulse matched the reverb of his footsteps as he walked down the hallway. He was in the clear for now. Thank God. On the building’s ground floor, Robert went into a wooden pay phone booth, called the woman he’d been seeing, and asked if they were still on for dinner. Jane Marunga told him she would rather they met for lunch.

  3.5

  Reflections of the Soda Business—Penelope the Friendly Ghost—The Magnolia Flower of Cambridge—Meditations in an Emergency

  “Getting rich changes people,” said one notable writer, an American in a Paris bar, to which another responded, “Sure. It makes them assholes.”

  Although that exchange would later be modified in various accounts, the character of men such as Nicholas Forster has proven that neither writer, Fitzgerald nor Hemingway, was correct in his assessment. People become assholes more often when they are born with rather than achieve wealth.

  Throughout the entirety of his life Nicholas wanted for nothing but want itself. His spoilage began in the cradle. A beautiful child, with brown locks and the greenest eyes, he was given lenience by his mother, indulgence by his grandfather, and tolerance by his sister. It is his sister, in fact, whom we owe for the most personal information about Nicholas’s early years, those details that led one person, arguably, to ruin a whole family.

  “My brother’s life began with the death of our father. That shadow hung over him from the day he was born,” Imogene Forster writes in her internationally best-selling autobiography, Ms. Panola Cola: Reflections of the Soda Business. “Or so we would like to think. The truth is my brother would have been born rotten even if our father had lived.”<
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  One incident in particular illustrates the animosity between the two siblings.

  In October 1949, a cold snap came to Panola County, rendering The Sweetest Thing an echo chamber of faucets dripping, dripping, dripping, as protection for its pipes. That year Imogene was sixteen, eleven years older than Nicholas. Following what was referred to among the family as “the accident,” Houghton had insisted that the two children and their mother, Sarah, move into the house, where, he said, they wouldn’t have to dwell on who was not there. Despite such good intentions, “who was not there” was very much there, hanging on a wall in the stairwell, framed in walnut on top of the Pleyel piano. The smell of his cologne seemed to linger around certain rooms. Yet, instead of upsetting Imogene and Nicholas, the presence of Montgomery comforted the two children. He served as a source of warmth, whether captured in oil paint or in sepia-toned photography, even when the temperature dropped to zero, as it did the night of October 22, 1949.

  The two of them had separate rooms in the large house. Earlier that fall day, however, the fireplace in Nicholas’s bedroom had begun belching soot into The Sweetest Thing’s second floor, leaving its boiseries a fine mess. A chimney sweep couldn’t stop by until the next day. So that evening the boy was set up on a spare bed in the room that belonged to his teenage sister. Their mother had thought nothing of the situation. To Sarah Forster, her daughter, perpetually four feet tall in her wheelchair, never grew older. To Sarah Forster, her daughter would always be the age, three years old, when she’d contracted polio.

  “Just keep quiet, you little booger,” Imogene said to Nicholas, both of them tucked in beds on opposite sides of the room.

  “You’re the only one talking.”

  Years had passed since the last time Imogene had someone’s company as she tried to fall asleep. Penelope had first appeared, sitting on Imogene’s thighs, one morning when Imogene was three years old. “Don’t bother trying to get up, sleepyhead.” After that day, the little girl was the only explanation Imogene could fathom for why she could no longer move her legs. Even when the doctors explained to her the medical cause, she clung to the notion of Penelope the ghost whenever people treated her like a pitiful child who would never walk again. “You’re bothering Penelope,” Imogene, in her wheelchair, would say to anyone who sympathetically touched her thigh during a conversation.