Earthly Powers (84 page)

       "God bless us every one," went Hortense. She was in midnight blue with a midnight blue eyeshade. She had got through a bottle and a half of Chambertin on her own. She had eaten little.

       "Tiny Tom," Ann said.

       "Tim," corrected Breslow, to whom, the Dickens specialist, we left the correction. Tom would be too rotund a name. Tim's kind of thin.

       "Timothy Breslow," and Ann tasted the name.

       "Felicia Breslow."

       "Nathaniel Breslow."

       "Penelope Antigone Persephone Breslow."

       "Oh shut up," Hortense said. "Counting your chickens. Pray to God that you'll get a kid you won't want the doctor to smother at birth. The next generation at Hiroshima's going to have three legs and four arms or none at all. So Time magazine says. Kids with one eye in the middle of the forehead. Proper little cyclones or whatever the hell they're called."

       "Cyclops," said the professor. "I think a lot of this speculation is exaggerated."

       "Quotha." And then, "For Christ's sake Ann lick that thing off your lip. No, the other side. Better."

       "Kind of grouchy, Mom."

       "I'll get the dessert," Dorothy said, getting up. "Annie's favourite." She went out.

       "Oh yum yum yum. I know what it's going to be."

       "Greedy child," Hortense said. "You're supposed to eat enough for two not three. I've been watching you, you gutsy horror."

       A very British locution," Breslow said.

       'Well, what's wrong with a British whateveritis? I am British. I'll show you ray passport if you like."

       Dorothy brought in the strawberry flan. Ann did her double Zulu click. "My my," her husband said deferentially. Hortense blew cigarette smoke over the dessert.

       "That's a dirty thing to do, Mom," Ann said. I smelt more than Hortense's cigarette smoke.

       Hortense said, "I'll have my brandy now. My gutsy daughter still has a lot of eating to do."

       "Oh honey," Dorothy wailed. But she made no additional protest when Hortense glided over to the bar to pour a large measure of Martell's Cordon Bleu into her wineglass. Ann and her husband both began to say something simultaneously. I heard the word Hollywood from Breslow and said over quickly: "They're going to take a few of my stories and make a kind of anthology film. With me saying a few words to link them. Should be rather fun."

       "Rather fun," Hortense mocked, coming back to the table with her spilling cognac. She blew more smoke over the dessert and said, "Dirty, Mom. Go on, shovel it down, you little gormandizer. You'll probably give birth to a Boston cream pie."

       "That's not nice. That's unkind. You're behaving like a real grouch, Mother. It's not fair to Uncle Ken." And with evident reluctance she pushed her still halffilled plate away.

       "Oh honey, eat it," Dorothy cried. "Don't listen to your mother. You know she's only having her little joke."

       "I get tired of her little jokes, Dotty. It's not my fault if—" She stopped and gulped and then pulled back her plate speedily.

       "If what, Ann?" Hortense said quietly.

       "Oh, you know." She ate sulkily.

       "Meaning that if that telegram had had a different name in it a certain event would not have transpired." She turned to me and said, "Quotha. Or should it be forsooth?"

       "Quotha," Breslow explained, "is really quoth he. Meaning said he. Forsooth means literally for truth."

       "Hortense," I said. "Please." And then the thing happened to me that had not happened for so long. I was aware of my heart as a sudden vacuum. Sensation evacuated my feet and my left arm. I bowed involuntarily as in prayer and then was aware of the comedy of my face approaching the almost untouched portion of strawberry flan before me. Before the squelch I passed out. I came to to hear voices of concern but to see Hortense draining her glass of cognac. Dorothy was wiping jammy mess off me with a napkin. "I'm okay," I said, "really and truly okay." But Dorothy and Ann, with Breslow hovering with professorial ineptness, were taking me to bed. "It sometimes happens," I protested. "A kind of fuseblow. I always feel just fine after." But they were taking me to bed. I smelt goo from Ann and from Dorothy something refined and Parisian. Hortense was at the bar getting herself more Cordon Bleu.

       The bedroom was, I presumed, John's. It had a no-nonsense young man's austerity about it. Out of the sack and up for chow. "Into that bed," Dorothy ordered and began to undress me as far as my shirt and shorts. "It's the aftermath, I know. The war. A lot of things." I said, "I love you, dear Dorothy. But really I'm fine. And I have this suite at the Algonquin." She fussed. "Get in there. Nice clean sheets." They were primrose and breathed lavender. "I'll go round myself and get your things. You're staying here, Ken. Home. I guess you know the word." I said, "I love you, Dorothy." And then I passed out again. I came to healthily tired. "I'll sleep a little," I said. I might as well be in bed as elsewhere. Sleep as well as anything else. Dorothy kissed my forehead with cool dry but generous lips. Ann, after hesitating, pressed thin wet ones on my cheek. The air conditioning was slow to dry the mark. I dropped off.

       I woke to find a dim lamp on on the table which had John's books on it supported by mahogany butting bison. The lamp was austerely shaded with a parchment cylinder on which the letters j o h n were disposed in arbitrary order and in various sizes. Hortense sat by the bedside in a cerise dressing gown, smoking a cigarette and looking at me. "Oh Christ," I said, "you've taken it off."

       "You said you wanted to see it." Smoke curled about the flat shut emptiness and the scars and then was sucked into the conditioning unit. She wore no wig: her greying honey-coloured hair was still short after the premedical shearing. The deformity was clear but in shadow. She put her head nearer the lamp. "Horrible, isn't it?" She sat on the edge of the bed. "Go on, take a good look." Overcome with pity and love I raised myself and kissed it. I put my arms about her and she suffered the embrace stiffly. I kept my lips pressed to the untenanted hollow; there was no flutter of eyelashes.

       "Lie down with me," I said, "just for a little while." I spoke to the butchered and mended cheek. "Lie down. With my arms round you."

       "What is this?" She was amused but spoke acutely. "Are you trying to make yourself normal? Through a different kind of abnormality? Dot would be very shocked."

       '(1       L        -uotiia, I said, since the context could be taken as Jacobean. Give me one of your cigarettes." The mood of tenderness was not really broken. She gave me an English Player from the crushed pack in her dressing-gown pocket; she even lighted it for me with a plain worn Zippo.

       "What are you talking about?"

       "Oh, my mind went back to Monte Carlo and the twenties and the great impotent sex man Havelock Ellis. He said something about the origins of homosexuality. And then talked at the next table in the Hotel de Paris about that incest play by John Ford. Jacobean. Do you remember the occasion? It was when your marriage was arranged."

       "I don't remember."

       "Not a thing you might want to. I was worried about my homosexuality then. We all want to be like the rest of the world. And then there was the Church and poor Mother. And then I discovered what I thought was a mode of transcendence. In Malaya. Carlo said I was being drawn to the love of Christ. A family of saints. I've no doubt that Tom's a saint. Carlo believes you're an angel."

       "How is it we can never talk about anything without bringing bloody Carlo into it?"

       "Why do you hate him?"

       "He means harm."

       "As a prince of the Church and loud-voiced bearer of its multifarious messages? Lie down here beside me. When I was fifteen and you were six you used to."

       "I was innocent then."

       "And now both your eyes are open. Oh Christ, what a stupid, what an unutterably inept and brutal—"

       "All right all right all right. Dot said something yesterday about me keeping my eyes skinned for something. She didn't even notice. Carlo means harm, I tell you. Carlo stands for innocence. He'd put a six-year-old kid in bed with a sex maniac and swear that sex mania didn't exist. Nobody can afford to be innocent any more. His Church isn't mine."

       "What is your Church?"

       "A thing that explains why we have to suffer. There's no such thing as a Jesus Christ triumphant. Christ didn't rise from the dead."

       "That means you're not a 'Christian. Rising from the dead is the whole bedrock. It strikes me you've been reading something. Or talking to somebody."

       "Dot. Dot's father was a preacher. In Georgia somewhere. One of the old Bible thumpers. He thumped the Bible into Dot. And into her kid brother Ralph so that it nearly drove him crazy. Dot's come through pretty sensible about religion. Very skeptical about pie in the sky. She agrees with me. Or I agree with her I guess, suppose. It's all about suffering."

       "Dorothy doesn't seem to me to be a great sufferer." And then I saw that I was wrong. "No, she suffers about you."

       "I'll give up the drink, I will, really. It's just the aftermath." Dorothy's word to me. "She suffers about other things. Who the hell can help suffering these days? And it's hardly begun, the suffering. The Germans tried to wipe out a whole race. And now we've found a quicker way of doing it than gas ovens. Who's the enemy? There's no enemy except the big bad father you can't get back at. Christ was his son all right. You can tell that by the way he treated A him. The Promised Land across the Jordan. Dot's father, who faced up to the nightriders, believed in that even more when they'd got the whip to him. If we suffer enough here we'll kindly be allowed to sleep. Christ at least wrung that out of the father."

       "You're not making much sense, dearest."

       "More sense than Carlo. It's a horrible thing to be flung into the hands of the living God. Or words to that effect. Carlo shakes God by the hand. The innocence of a child trying to stroke a tiger. I bet I believe more than Carlo does in what happens at the altar. I get Christ all right, moaning in my mouth but saying it's all right I'm with you. The inventor of love."

       "Does Dorothy go to mass with you?"

       "Oh no, the Church of Rome is still the Whore of Babylon to her. She's Baptist way deep down. Suffering and love. The big solace you've always got to be scared of losing. We have that, I think. I'd better get back to her. She puts her hand out in her sleep and if I'm not there she wakes up and cries. She thinks this time I've gone for good. But then I'm back and everything's all right again. Believe it or not, I got up to take some Alka-Seltzer. Drink gives me heartburn. And then I felt remorse and came in to see my brother. After all, he had what looked like a heart attack during dinner and I just sat there swigging."

       "Do you sleep without that thing on?"

       "Yes. Dot kisses it better too. It doesn't put her off either. Wasn't there some saint who went round licking sores?" And then, "You love who you want and how you want. God's the big biology professor. Christ just taught love." And then, "Are you tied up with anyone at the moment?"

       "Alone on a wide wide sea."

       "I wish you'd do something about Ralph. You know, Dot's brother. He's only a kid, product of aging loins, quotha forsooth. Like John the Baptist. Brought up Baptist like Dot, Bible for every meal, not that they had many meals. About twenty-five. He reads. He tries to write. He wants to be the big black T. S. Eliot but he has no talent. He's not so stupid as to say that that's all the fault of the white oppressor. He'd make an acceptable companion-type secretary. He'd love to travel."

       "Does he talk much about white oppressors?"

       'A question of which is the real oppressed minority. His friends in adversity have been black, brown, white, yellow, heliotrope for all I know. The cops say you fucking fag before they say you fucking nigger. You see what I mean."

       "Where is he flow?"

       "He's just stopped trying to run what he calls a minority theatre in Brownsville. That's in Brooklyn, the filthy pestridden asshole of the borough as they call it—There's a derelict store he tried to fit up as a playhouse. Not much of an audience to see plays about black and brown and heliotrope and fag suffering. It's gin they want. Some of them even want jobs. Now Ralph's holed up with a friend somewhere in a tenement trying to write a kind of fag Waste Land. He's all right. We give him a big dinner on Sundays."

       "I'll think about it. If he has any of Dorothy's qualities he has to be all right."

       "Dot got a cab and brought your bags over. She unpacked them quiet as a little mouse. The things are in that wardrobe there. Your shaving stuff's all laid out in the bathroom. Dot is like that."

       "I'd love to stay."

       "Come back to us when you've finished this stupid job in Hollywood."

       "You mean that?"

       "And find out how Domenico's getting on with his fourth or fifth wife. Woman's curiosity. Oh, I know I bitch at people but it's only a façade. I don't really blame anybody for anything. All the blame of the world lies in one place."

       "So none of us are free?"

       "Sister Gertrude at school used to quote Die Meistersinger at us. You know, Hans Sachs: Wir sind em wenig frei. A little bit free. I'm free now to go back to bed and find Dot there. But I wouldn't put it past the great eternal swine to whisk her out of it and make her dissolve into thin air." She bent and gave me a full kiss on the lips. Then she left. I couldn't sleep. It was getting on for dawn. I found a volume by Anatole France among John's few books. It had on the flyleaf the name Dorothy Alethea Pembroke—aristocratic, as all slave names had to be. The story was the one about Saint Nicholas and his resurrection of the three young clerks from the innkeeper's pickling tub. He adopted them and brought them up holily but they all behaved in a most villainous manner. One of them even denounced him to the Vatican for all kinds of fictitious sins. Saint Nicholas acknowledged God's greatness but found it hard to believe in his goodness. Jesus Christ, of course, was a very different proposition.