City on Fire (97 page)

The King of Siam

Is all that I am

Is all that I am, and ever will be.

Then the window where Amory stood thumped, as if hit by an errant softball. Daddy turned toward it, straining to become that man again, surging back toward him. Everything else went quiet. “Perhaps we should postpone our trip for a day or two, Amory, while we get this sorted out.” And there was just enough time to register relief on Regan’s face and shock on the Demon Brother’s—surely some kind of first—before the room and the window and the lit buildings outside disappeared. A car screeched somewhere. Glass shattered. But all around, the city had dropped into darkness: the world they’d always known, just like that, blacked out.

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Sidewalk Closed Use Other Side. Purveyors of the Finest Quality Meats. No Parking or Standing. No Turns. Don’t Walk. Buses Only. Off Duty. Off Duty. Walk. Use Crosswalk. Use Snow Route. Red Zone. Salt Zone Begins Here. Pour Popcorn Only Here. Now finally serving warmed food! Follow This Truck to New York’s Most Delicious Chopped Liver. A Taste That’s All It’s Own. The Outside Service Are Needs Waitting Every 20 Minutes, With the Smile. Neither Snow Nor Rain Nor Heat Nor Gloom Of Night Stays These Couriers From The Swift Completion Of Their Appointed Rounds. Express Lube. Discreet Massage. Siamese Connection. Alive With Pleasure! Truly Aaaah-inspiring. No Unaccompanied Minors. We Are Happy to Serve You.… There Are Many More Flowers Inside. No Inappropriate Sexual Touching. Unpurchased Merchandise May Not Be Taken Into The Restroom Thank You. Read the Bible God’s Word Daily. Chance of a Lifetime Jackpot Now 08 Million. Want to Know How to Prevent HEAD LICE???????? Come Inside and ASK. House of Orthodontia. House of Watch. The Bleach House. Last Wash 8 p.m. 3 Days Left! Last Chance! Be Wise and Repent. The Time is at Hand. The End is Fulfilled. Wise Men Still Seek Him. Uncle Sam Wants You … To Get CASH! CAN’T HOLD MONEY, WANT LUCK, WANT YOUR LOVED ONES BACK, WANT TO STOP NATURE PROBLEMS or WANT TO GET RID OF STRANGE SICKNESS? If you are seeking a surefire woman to do the things that are needed or WISH TO GAIN FINANCIAL AID or PEACE, LOVE, and PROSPERITY, there is a WOMAN WHO WILL DO IT FOR YOU IN A HURRY. SHE TELLS YOU ALL BEFORE YOU UTTER A WORD. SHE brings the SPIRIT OF RELEASE and CONTROL to your every dealing. Don’t Walk. Stand behind yellow line. Do Not Leave Your Trash in the Hallway, It Stinks, and Attracts Roaches. The Rats are Looking for their Winter Homes. No Feeding Pigeons. No Turns New. Post No Bills. Seriously: No Park Car. Walk Don’t Walk. Risk of Shock, Do Not Cross Tracks. No Honking Except For Danger. Wait Until The Moving Platform Stops Moving. Violators of this Sign will be Persecuted. All Visitors Must Be Announced. Please the bathroom is ONLY for use of Customers and personel. It is NOT for doing ANYTHING ELSE in there. If we find something strange going on, we are going to ask the person to leave and not use the restroom again. Off Duty. Waste. No Radio. Out of Order. Out of Work. 126 … We Mean It! Your Dog Belongs To You, So Does What Comes Out of Your Dog. I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Scream. Hotel Avantgarde. Guido Funeral Home. Cremation Consultants. Do To A Small Fire, We Will Be Closed. Don’t Walk. To hot—to cold—to dry—to damp—or just plain uncomfortable? THIS IS THE DOOR TO NOWHERE. Warning: Look Out for the Stars.

THREE KINDS OF DESPAIR

[ 1960–1977 ]

A student came to a Zen master and said, “In what state of mind should I train myself, so as to find the truth?”

Said the master, “There is no mind, so you cannot put it in any state. There is no truth, so you cannot train yourself for it.”

“If there is no mind to train, and no truth to find,” said the student, “why do these monks gather before you every day to study?”

“But I haven’t an inch of room here,” said the master, “so how could the monks gather? I have no tongue, so how could I teach them?”

“Oh, how can you lie like this?” asked the student.

“But if I have no tongue to talk to others, how can I lie to you?” asked the master.

The student said sadly, “I cannot follow you. I cannot understand you.”

“I cannot understand myself,” said the master.

—ZEN KOAN

87

THEY WAITED UNTIL FOUNDER’S DAY to tell William Hamilton-Sweeney he wasn’t invited back for senior year. He was sitting in an office with his school tie wadded in his pocket, his packed bag already on the rug beside him. The rector, a gray eminence with a face like a tombstone, apparently expected a reaction, and, as it would have been impolite not to give him one, William struggled to look grave himself. Not invited back was, of course, a euphemism for kicked out. By that point, he’d heard them all: academic hiatus, indefinite leave, not the right fit … His surname, with its intimations of largesse, encouraged each new school in the delusion that it might succeed where the others had failed. A few months of missed mattress-checks and scuffles with other students and drunkenness at chapel, however, tended to alter the calculus. The latest last straw was an unauthorized absence. He’d been caught sneaking back onto campus before sunrise the night of Bruno Augenblick’s going-away party. Having wobbled the last four miles from Boston on foot, he’d been too tired to offer any account of himself, or any explanation for how he came to be carrying a silver flask monogrammed with initials not his own. Nor did he intend to present a defense even now, notwithstanding the rector’s hints that it might lead to a lighter sentence. At this very moment, Daddy’s friend Arthur Trumbull was speeding north to collect William for what he thought was just summer vacation; were William to leave any wiggle-room at all, Trumbull would push for him to be readmitted. And the truth was, William had no intention of returning to New England in the fall. He observed what he thought was a seemly period of silence, as if weighing his options. Light from the varsity ballfields coaxed oaky fire from the bottles on the sideboard. Then he snatched up the flask that was Exhibit A and thrust a hand toward the baffled rector. “Well, Chuck, let no one say you didn’t try your very best with me.” Already gliding up the long drive outside was the chauffeured black towncar that was to carry him back to New York.

THUS BEGAN THE SUMMER OF 1960. Regan was still traipsing around Italy, and Daddy hardly seemed to notice that William had returned. The firm’s recent absorption of its largest competitor had made all sorts of extra work, and after long days at the office, he often ate dinner at Felicia’s new penthouse across the park. William got the feeling from certain silences among the domestic help that his father might even be sleeping there, but he couldn’t prove it; when he came downstairs in the a.m., Daddy was always in his customary spot at the breakfast table. Which is not to say that this, their only real time together, was free from Felicia’s encroachments. She would arrive halfway through the meal, not to eat (she never ate), but to natter at Daddy about wedding plans while he receded behind the Times. William tried to scare her off with dirty looks, but Felicia Gould was to all appearances unscareable.

His last stand came in mid-July. Regan was supposed to be returning from Italy that day, and William was determined to drive Felicia off for at least an afternoon. He came to breakfast in a loosely belted kimono he’d found at a secondhand shop downtown and a pair of bright white briefs. He sat back from the table, crossed and uncrossed his legs, let his thighs flash suggestively. This old routine had never failed when he wanted to outrage a schoolmate. (Nancy? He’d give them nancy.) But all he got now was Daddy glancing over the top of the business section, like an ornithologist at some mildly diverting bird. “What you need is a good suit.”

William had heard this before—the virtues of formalwear being one of roughly six things Daddy could talk to him about—but what the subject recalled for them both was the child-sized black suit still hanging in the closet, the long-dead lilies he’d pocketed rather than toss, and Daddy had eventually let it drop. Now that it had become apparent that William’s first big growth spurt, a year earlier, would also be his last—that he had topped out at five foot six—Daddy must have felt it was time to try again. Or was he just showing off for his intended? “I’ll give you the number of my tailor. You could take care of it this afternoon.”

“What do I need a suit for?” William asked. “I don’t need a suit.”

Daddy looked meaningfully at Felicia. “And we should get you a dinner jacket while we’re at it. You’re going to want one for the wedding.” Ah. Here it was. William having completed fifth form, the World’s Longest Engagement had become a finite quantity.

“I’m busy this afternoon.”

“I can imagine,” Daddy said, and began to refold his paper the way he always did—meticulously, so that there was no evidence of his having read it.

“Don’t you remember? Regan gets into Idlewild at one.”

“Is that right?” Felicia trilled. “Bill, darling, why didn’t you tell me? You should take the afternoon off. We could all drive out to meet Regan—” And then, as if the mere mention of her name had magical properties, his sister’s voice was out in the foyer. Before William could push back his chair, Daddy was hurrying toward the door.

Regan had always been his favorite, and William had long suspected Felicia of being jealous. If only she would confirm it now through some nervous adjustment to her silverware, or one of her unfunny jokes, it might compensate him, somehow, for the omnidirectional jealousy he was feeling himself. Instead, she leaned forward. Her only visible flaws were cracks in the foundation around the mouth. (This much he remembered about his mom’s face: smiling had never caused a crisis there.) “What your father was trying to tell you, William, is that we’ve finally set a date. It’ll be next June, as soon as you graduate.” That was just the thing, he wanted to say; he wasn’t going to graduate. But whatever he may have mumbled was quickly forgotten as Daddy led Regan in.

She glanced nervously around from behind dark glasses. “We landed early. I took a cab.”

She looked at once thinner than William remembered and slacker, like a deflated balloon, though maybe that was her cardigan. Still, when he hugged her, she smelled pristine—bath salts and sweet white flowers and something else he couldn’t place. He let his head rest in the hollow where her slightly damp hair met her shoulder, while Daddy fetched the camera. “Take off your sunglasses, honey, so we can see your eyes.” They were bloodshot, but wasn’t that why it was called a redeye?

After stopping the butler from taking her luggage upstairs, she brought out gifts. For Daddy, there was a briefcase, a little à la mode for his taste but made of leather soft as caramel. Felicia voiced actual oohs and aahs as it got passed around the table. For William, there was a Spanish guitar and a heavy, cloth-bound book on Michelangelo. He was disappointed the plates weren’t in color (and noticed that the price-tag, weirdly, was in U.S. dollars) but he would keep it in his lap for the rest of breakfast, prompting Felicia to warn him about getting coffee on it. Finally, it was her turn.

“For me? You shouldn’t have,” Felicia said, as her hungry hands plucked a small package from the table. She was one of those people who actually unties the ribbon, slides her finger under the flaps to avoid tearing. From a narrow box came a tube that said Italia on the side. “A pen,” she said. In other words, the crummiest gift imaginable, drained of the thought that counted. “It was duty-free,” Regan said. And silently, William cheered: all was not lost! Then his sister excused herself; there was a lot of unpacking to do.

REGAN STRUCK ANOTHER BLOW FOR THE RESISTANCE that weekend, when she informed Daddy she wouldn’t be joining him on Block Island, where he planned to repair with the Goulds for the month of August. “But when else would we see you, darling?” he said. “You hardly got back, and you’ll be at school again after Labor Day.”

“I thought I wrote you about this.”

“Wrote me about what?”

“Did I not mention this? The internship I applied for starts Monday. It’s at a little theater down in the Village.”

Here Felicia, who’d been touching up her lipstick in the hall mirror, turned. “But what ever will you do there?”

“Whatever they ask me to do, Felicia, that’s what ‘internship’ means.” To Daddy, she said, “I can’t back out now; people wrote me recommendations.”

Daddy just repeated the word, internship. As an alibi, it was a thing of beauty: its overtones of responsibility, of upward aspiration, were perfectly calculated to jam his circuits. Well, you know, we’ve already booked you a seat on the first manned spaceflight, but I suppose if you have an internship …

On the other hand, it threatened to blow William’s plans all to hell. Amory Gould had driven up a week ago to open the summer house, and waited there now. Which meant that, unless Regan reconsidered, it would be father, son, and the two Ghouls alone. He heard himself blurt, “I’ll stay, too.”

“And what, exactly, do you propose to do with yourself for the rest of the summer?”

“I don’t know, Daddy. Walk. Think. Be a human being.”

“This is absurd. I’ve given the staff vacation. Who would feed you two? Who would do your laundry?” But Regan had already annexed William’s cause to her own.

“Daddy, he’s seventeen years old. He can do his own laundry.”

“Bill,” Felicia said, with a hand on his arm. “If it would make you more comfortable, the kids could stay over on Central Park West. As a kind of test-run for next year, when we combine the households. The new place is too big to just abandon for the month, anyway.”

Regan looked skeptical. “Who else is going to be there?”

“Just my maid, Lizaveta. I dare say she’s as much of a cook as your Doonie ever was.”

Daddy was doomed, and knew it, but made one last attempt; if you didn’t know better, you’d have thought he wanted his son by his side. “Regan I understand, but if William’s going to persist in doing nothing useful with himself, he might as well do it at the shore.”

“Maybe I won’t do nothing, though,” William said. “Maybe I’ll follow Big Sister’s example. Look for some kind of …” What was that word again? “Internship.”