Earthly Powers (83 page)

       "I have to know. You know I have to know."

       "In the studio," she said, and coughed. She detached a tobacco fibre from her lower lip. "In the Village. I was shearing aluminium, what they call aluminium here. A heraldic lion, commissioned. Then the girl who used to work with me rushed in. She had the cold water flat at the top. She'd been out for lunch and she met the telegraph boy in the street. She ran in yelling He's dead, John's dead. Then my hand slipped. There wasn't any pain, just blood. And before I passed out I realised it was her husband, not my son. John's a common name."

       "Christ," I said.

       "She's dead," Hortense went on. "I don't think she meant it, but she's dead. Drink and barbiturates. I'm still alive. And my John's still alive. Or was when he telephoned from Chicago an hour ago. And if he dies now I'll never again have any way of reacting. I've done my reacting. But if he got through wartime Europe he'll survive peacetime Chicago."

       Chicago, town of the lengthy necrologies. I was blushing with helpless fury. Somebody had to be blamed. "The stupid silly little bitch," I said.

       "Oh, you and your bloody wetness. I should have taken a deep breath and remembered that there's more than one John in the world. Her John shouldn't have been killed. She shouldn't have been stricken to death. There shouldn't have been any war. People shouldn't be killed in air crashes and road accidents and by choking on peach stones. Hands shouldn't slip. Everything should be different. The world's been made wrong." And then, fiercely, "Bloody stupid Carlo."

       "What's Carlo done to you?"

       "He doesn't believe the world was made wrong. He wrote me a smarmy religious letter about sacrificing my beauty to God. Who told him, anyway?"

       "John may have written. I didn't. You know he's an archbishop now?"

       "Oh yes, he was bound to be. Some day he'll be a bloody saint. It's his job to smarm about God's will and leave the suffering to others."

       "If only it could have been me." I tried to embrace her again but she held me off with her cigarette.

       "There's nothing to stop you stabbing your eye with a fountain pen. You'll be all right, you'll always be all right. I'm all right too. I can work well enough the way I am. Not metal any more, though. I could work totally blind with clay or stone. Sculpture's a matter of touch. Like love."

       She'd never mentioned physical love to me before. I said, "Money."

       "I'm all right for money. I get commissions. I get alimony. I'm all right for everything. I even have faith still. I accept Christian logic. But I don't want to be smarmed over by an Italian bishop. Archbishop," she emended.

       Dorothy or Dotty came in rattling and radiant with a tea tray which she set down with great grace on the marble slab. "Dorothy," I said, "accept a brother's grateful thanks."

       Hortense wailed. "Listen to him, Dot. He talks like Shakespeare. Pity he doesn't write like him. Brother's grateful thanks quotha or forsooth or whatever it is."

       "It's nice to be called Dorothy again," Dorothy said. "I get tired of being Dotty or Dot. Too big for a dot and too sane to be dotty. I hope this is how you like it, Ken." And she poured black tea into big cups, no delicate china non sense. She had made tiny sandwiches in the British manner. There was a dish of the cake called devil's food.

       "Fine, perfect," having sipped. "However ineptly I put it I mean what I say.

       Dorothy was seated on the carpet beyond the marble disclosing long bare legs of a strong but exquisite moulding. "Hortense," she said, "looked after me in a bad time and still does in a good." And she fired love at my sister with a directness that would have been impossible in a white woman schooled to the deviousness of the long European tradition. Her purple lips that gleamed with tea glowed with love as much as her great eyes, the fine wide nostrils dilated with it. I felt a prick of complicated emotions. It was evident they went to bed together. I saw them an instant writhing on crimson sheets and felt a sharp aesthetic joy, like the joy of imagining incest. All beauty hath a strangeness in it, or an element of the forbidden. In a sense my own more than brotherly love for Hortense was sanctified by the vision. And of course one of the emotions was jealousy. There were also rage and frustration though damped or much muted.

       Dorothy said, "There's a room all ready for you, Ken. I hope you'll be staying a good long time."

       "Alas, I have to fly to Los Angeles the day after tomorrow. And I, well, I didn't want to presume. I booked in at the Algonquin."

       "But why?" Dorothy looked operatically hurt, prolonging the vowel operatically. "This is your place."

       "Yours, yours. Where shall I take you for dinner?"

       "We don't go out for dinner," Hortense said quickly. Yes. Stupid drunks going yo-ho-ho at the pirate eyemask. "Besides, you've got to see Ann. Mrs Breslow. And Professor. Dot bought a big turkey. With all the fixings. Like Thanksgiving." She gulped at that and Dorothy got in quickly with: "Well, there's a lot to give thanks for, isn't that the truth? The war's over and we're all alive and families aren't separated any more. Thanksgiving, right, why not?"

       "I think I'd like a drink now," Hortense said.

       "Oh, honey, no." I could tell this was a regular, almost ritual, cry of distress. "Isn't tea a drink, good, strong, hot, crammed with stimulating tannin?" It was a desperate mockery of some unctuous radio commercial voice. "Give it another hour, okay? Soon as I put the turkey in the oven we'll all sit at the bar and have a nice long cool highball, okay?"

       "Not too long not too cool," Hortense said. "Sing us something, Dot. Ken's never heard you sing."

       "Well, sure I'll sing," and Dorothy looked at me in a way that seemed to signify: don't let her nip over to the bar while my back's to her at the piano she's clever at grabbing a quick one. So she got up with wonderful grace and went over and sat and struck some blue chords and began to sing: "Ich nehm' em' Zigarett' (md ich fŸhl' du liebst mich nicht mehr Und ich weiss es ist aus Und da maclit mein Herz so schwer."

       She paused to smile at me, expecting some comment. I knew the song: I'd heard it in Berlin in 1935.

       I said, "Where on earth did you—I mean, such a perfect German accent." Such a rich terra-cotta voice too, like a meat extract that was also an aphrodisiac.

       "I've been around," Dorothy said. "That's my Dietrich style. Now I'll do it in English." And she did, right to the end: "Yet With my cigarette Though I give no more than I get There's no sigh of regret At the end of my cigarette."

       During the song Hortense made a move to get up, but I held her hand tight.

       I said to Dorothy, "You fire me with a desire to get back to the musical stage again. It's a long time since I did book and lyrics. God." And I saw it: Cleopatra. "Cleopatra, with you in the lead."

       "Cleopatra was white, wasn't she? Greek. I'm black, brother, all black."

       "Cleopatra was what you are. To hell with the facts of history."

       "I'll get that turkey started," Dorothy said. "Good little Hausfrau, that's me, right, Hortense honey? With a little French literature on the side."

       "You're wonderful," I said. "What stage work have you done?"

       She did a mock or genuine curtsy to my compliment, saying: "I was in Porgy and Bess in Atlanta, but it's not really my style. I'm a gal strictly on her own, me and my lii' piano. I did nightclubs. Now I stay in nights. I'll see about dinner." And with great humour she danced her way to the kitchen, doing another curtsy at the door. I clapped.

       "I'll have that drink now," Hortense said.

       "No, you heard. We all have a nice long cool highball together."

       "I want a quick sharp neat gin. And I want it now." She was quick in getting up. I was quick enough to grab her and hold her halfway to the bar. "Let me go, bloody Ken Toomey."

       "How much are you drinking?"

       "None of your bloody business." We stood there in the conventional posture of struggling woman and importunate man.

       "No, but apparently it's Dorothy's business. Take it that I'm just standing in for her." She relaxed in my hold. I let go. There was probably another reason for their not going out in the evenings: Hortense's intake not easy to control in public, people seeing at once why she drank and saying poor bitch no wonder. "Perhaps we ought to go and help her get that turkey in the oven," I said.

CHAPTER 59

My niece Ann, whom her husband called Annie or Annikins or Roo for Little Annie Rooney, had grown into a rather stupid though undoubtedly voluptuous young woman. She had been led to the marriage bed, no question of it, too early. The warm wet brown eyes of Professor Michael Breslow could not leave her alone, even at the dinner table. He was over ten years her senior. They had met in no context of higher education, unless the term could be applied to the readings by distinguished writers held at the Poetry Centre on Lexington Avenue. Ann had been taken by a girl friend to hear a very drunk American poet of the Black Mountain school slobber unintelligible verses, and, taking coffee after, she had met Professor Breslow. Breslow had taken her to the cinemas near Columbia University which specialised in foreign or American classic films. Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he had sought the lineaments of gratified desire in a prospective bride rather than the prospects of intellectual companionship. On the other hand, little Ann Campanati was very well connected in terms of the arts. Breslow knew my name and even some of my works, but he taught none of them in his Comparative Literature courses. He knew the artefacts of Ann's mother and had heard subliminally the croons and crashes invented by her father for films sometimes seen at the Thalia cinema. He understood there was a distinguished Roman Catholic ecclesiastical connection, but that was a long way off and not in his line of interests. He was a freethinker and disclaimed as far as he could his Ashkenazi ancestry, but he had suffered vicariously with the victims of Hitler. He had not himself served in the armed forces against the Jewkillers: he had a number of small disqualificatory physical disabilities of kinds not well known or, if known, taken with the right clinical seriousness in Europe. He had graduated at City College but taken his doctorate at Columbia. His thesis had been on Symbols of Decay in Bleak House. Ann's twinhood with John was proclaimed in colouring, admirable physique (though now distorted by pregnancy), and shape of nose and chin, both masterful. Her face, though, lacked the seriousness of John's: its features were not well employed in discourse. She twisted her lovely mouth in comic gestures learned from Abbott and Costello films, she crossed her eyes and rolled them. She wolf-whistled at Dorothy's evening frock of deep purple. She performed a double Zulu click of pleasure at the sight of the strawberry flan dessert. She had inherited the slight venerean strabismus which her poor mother had now lost, but on her it looked not good but a disability. She used expressions of enthusiasm like wow and this I like. Her greeting to me after long years had been "Hi." She wanted a boy. Her husband wanted a girl. They performed to weariness a crosstalk naming act. Ann's blondness was streaked, as though she had tried to dye it mouse and then lost heart. She had been educated at the Bodmer School in Connecticut where the male instructors had not taken their charges seriously, except when they reached the seducible phase. There had been courses in witchcraft and astrology. A few plays of Shakespeare had been taught in a modernised version devised by one Con Roebuck, a young heavily bearded instructor now understood to be in jail, though not for turning Hamlet's chief soliloquy into "To live or to die—that's the choice, I guess," and the rest in the same style. A girl's cleverness had been privately judged on her capacity to avoid seduction by the faculty or, if not to avoid it, use it for purposes of blackmail or marriage. By the first alternative of this standard Ann had to be adjudged clever; it was her only cleverness. Over the dinner table there were jokes about Ann's raw turkeys and charred chops: Dorothy's feast was, as was to be expected, delicious. Ann had, before her early marriage, done such war work as a girl of her age and educational attainments might be expected to do: blowing up the coffee urn in a services canteen, being dismissed from an aircraft factory as a liability, packaging parachutes with a potential lethality soon fortunately detected by her overseer. She was a happy girl. Her husband was happy too. He said to me over the turkey and sausages and chestnut stuffing and cranberries: "I heard about what you did, sir, for Jakob Strehler. We brought in Strehler for the first time this semester. Just started. The Mann Strehier Hesse course. What you did was heroic."

       "My gesture was not well appreciated in wartime Britain," I said. "For your appreciation, my heartiest thanks."

       "Quotha," said Hortense.

       "You might like to know, sir, that your name came up for possible inclusion in a Contemporary British Fiction course. Along with Somerset Maugham and Compton Mackenzie."

       "All three of us were thrown out, I suppose?"

       "Well, yes, sir. It's not a question of readability or enjoyment, Professor Eckhart said, chairman of the department, it's a question of what you can get your critical teeth into."

       "Flawed greatness, you mean."

       "Well, yes, sir, it's only the great that have the interesting flaws, practically Eckhart's own words."

       "Oh, I've never had pretensions to greatness."

       "I read one of your books, Uncle Ken," Ann said. There was a single cranberry like a blister on her lip. "And I thought it was just great. The one where this girl falls in love with this older man."

       "A lot of them are about that," I said. "The Daddy Longlegs syndrome."

       "More turkey, Ken?" Dorothy said.

       I passed my plate; I said, "This is not flattery, my dear. I've not—had a meal like this in six years. God bless America. God bless you."