I'm Dying Laughing (50 page)

Stephen said mechanically looking out the window, ‘Money is a sacred trust. If it isn’t, we give the envious ragged a reason for pinching it. You’ll hear Christy use that bright phrase one day. Watch and pray. Here I am, here we are, a couple of big-con men, trying to rob a rich boy by blood-ties and by the whore method or any method; we love you and we are your best friends. Don’t trust people who only want your money. Ha-ha. I call myself an economist. I can only bloodsuck. I can’t sell a pair of socks.’

‘You could sell socks or diamonds at Tiffany’s if you wanted to,’ said Emily.

‘I’m sick of being told I’m worthless and a parasite,’ shouted Stephen.

‘I’m sick of handing out a thousand dollars to entertain your family, just to be told how vulgar and coarse I am because I work for a living,’ shouted Emily.

‘A thousand? It’ll be two thousand by the time she goes back. She told us to cut down expenses, too.’

Stephen, going out, paused at the door, ‘But then—she does go to Egypt and boasts to Aunt Phillida about the receptions she’s had. For it always irked Ma that Phillida married ten times the money Mother had. I don’t know. Perhaps you’re right and it pays. Be—well, what’s the use. Go to hell. Go to work, goddamn you! Who makes the money round here? You or me? Go to work!’

‘Well, I’ll be floated on a sea of mud,’ said Emily, looking after him with her mouth open. Neither saw Christy, who had heard all of this on an upper stair. Stephen banged the door. She sat down and began to pencil their next guest-list. And the next thing she did was to write to her mother-in-law, Dear Anna, a tongue-in-cheek letter of grovelling flattery, which could hardly please Anna. Yet she did not mean it that way. Her outrageous humour, bad or good, knew no limits. She had little understanding of others, unless the electric discharges, negative and positive, were of a kind. Where her general and unspecific sympathy and affection did not guide her, she had no guide.

She wrote to the woman who regretted her being, ‘Ah, darling Anna, our little resources can’t nearly make up to you for the company you’re used to, but (woe’s me!) you enchanted us, you were so magnificently, superbly good to us, not showing your ennui, that I sigh with joy, with success. Woe’s me, so superficial the success; for you could not have been really thrilled, happy with our trivia of entertainment. But you said so! And we were touched. I almost wept with joy. Ah, Anna, veritably and really, I wish we were closer together; but when this necessary time of separation is over, we and our dear ones and your dear ones will no longer have to endure this bleeding agony of separation, this waste of time and space. Me, ah me! So many good days—lost, all lost! And I’m so backward, dear Anna, that though you are so dear to me and I feel all the agonies and miseries of my beloveds I can’t put a finger on it like you can. What do I need more than your advice and your caution and your experience? I sigh, I long. If only I were brighter! Still, dear Anna, when the long, weary, woeful time of our quarantine is over, we will move, we will be near you or you us, and we and our beloveds, and I mean you, too, our angels so bitterly separated will celebrate in a glorious, gorgeous, creamy, dreamy way the beginning of a new, totally, absolutely united life and we’ll be no more the disinherited Howards. Divine prospect! Endless, enchanting, blessed prospect! And to think I dream of it every time we have the happiness to have you with us, dear Anna! And it must take some time to come. With this awful, yet necessary, quarantine. When we are out of that and no longer lepers to our friends and foes, we’ll become private people and live the ordinary good life of the ordinary good American family. Oh, let it come soon. Oh, exquisite, magnificent hope of endless, daily, loving and tender relations between us all. I’m profoundly moved by your visit and your words to us, so wise, so impressive, to which dear Anna, we give fullest value. I’m depressed, passionately sorry that we can’t follow them now. But you can be sure that as soon as it’s possible we’ll be at your side and leave our shivering shocks and forget this grim reality which is no reality and live like ordinary, sober, sophisticated and loving people. Oh, dear Anna (long long sigh!) what pleasure you gave us—and what pain! My simple, sincere wish is to be at your knee like a child forever and to give you pleasure in everything. No matter what other success I have, what other successes I may have, that will be my superlative success. Alas! To have been born in a small town in a low rice-swamp in Arkansas and to be so low. But you, dear Anna, never sneered at me and my squalid origin; you were always so good, so loving. And it’s only through my own stupidity that I haven’t so far, with all my trying, been entirely successful in pleasing you. But I will. The thought torments me day and night. Your traditions, your intelligent, sensitive decisions, are what guide me. Believe me, Anna, the few weeks you spent near us in our new home were the most touching, the finest, the very ultimate pleasure in my life. Whoops! Joy! Ah, wonderful, you’re coming back to us. I have as a friend, an elegant, fine, tasteful and tender-hearted woman.

With love, love, love, my dear good adored Anna,

Your woeful (because I didn’t entirely please you),

EMILY’

Emily was very pleased with this but hastened to the post with it before Stephen could see it. And now that that had gone and her mother-in-law perhaps struck by it (for she believed firmly that you can never flatter enough) she turned to work. She had two days’ work on an article for
American Summer.

A
NNA, ‘THAT INCUBUS’ WAS
to leave the next day. As soon as they were free they had decided to have another private party to take the taste out of their mouths, and to look for new subjects for Emily to write about.

The Trefougars came to their house that week for cocktails with Mernie Wauters (Fleur was ill again), Suzanne and, in spite of Stephen’s objections, some more Resistants who had been in concentration camp. Emily, stimulated by Suzanne, had it now in mind to write for Americans a terrifying book of the concentration camps, the occupation and, in simple terms, to describe the tendencies that led to and away from the capitulation to fascism, and that might lead in those directions again in other countries.

She said at night, drumming her fork on the table, with Christy there, Suzanne gone now, indignantly, ‘How can I serve America better? If my countrymen don’t realize it or even seem to hanker after the Germans as the papers say, it’s because of the way the things are written up, either as horrrr (horror) stories, gruesome incidents which beat the cheap shock thrillers, blood-thirsty descriptions which arouse a thirst for them—we all have evil passions. Or it is so weightily and accusingly written as to make people resent your righteousness. But it ought to be put humanly and with a certain amount of humour. So that people don’t feel the writer is getting at you, that he wants you to suffer and drop maudlin tears. That’s all wrong.’

Suzanne therefore had introduced some ‘Resistance types’. Violet Trefougar, consulted, said she’d love to meet them. She was lonely, bored; a friend in Paris was like a loaf of bread on a desert island and she didn’t care what Johnny (Mr Trefougar) thought. It was good for Johnny, he moved in a rotten, gilded set, all Jew-hating, pro-Nazi, pansy-cultivating, ‘a marijuana set of rotten, twopenny hotspurs.’ Emily was electrified to hear this. ‘How little I know, I thought them devoted,’ she cried to Stephen.

Stephen said, ‘Oh, they’re devoted, but she’s bored. Well, bring them along. A gilded, rotten, pansy-loving hotspur will be a relief from your historic heroes. Next year you’ll have the salon full of cripples and lepers. It reminds me of Hollywood when it was full of exiles from Nazism. Punks. So kind and so helpless, mental basket-cases, morally in oilbaths. Well, wheel them in.’

‘Stephen, you’re really mean.’

‘You know the chronic sick are not sorry for the others. But what do I care? Why grouse? I’m merely the accountant and see we’re headed for bankruptcy courts. As long as you can canoodle with every police spy in Paris.’

‘Police spy! Oh, Jeehosaphat! I don’t know one.’

‘We will, Oscar, we will.’

They had the party as soon as Anna had landed in Egypt. Mrs Trefougar had a smooth, French dress. She was a handsome, blonde woman, with large lean bones; hollow-eyed, young and nervous. She was nervous, thinner than ever, drinking and smoking excitedly. She followed Mernie Wauters into a corner and listened to him hungrily. Vittorio was invited, but put them off at the last moment. Axel Oates had been visiting Marshal Tito and was there, full of enthusiasm for the socialist possibilities in Yugoslavia. The two Resistants were friends of Wauters, a Jewish merchant from Brussels, who had just returned from a visit to the United States—and a young, strikingly attractive man called Clapas, dark, small-headed, with nervous tics, his hands and head moving, who had spent several months in Dachau, escaped, been a commando, been sent to Buchenwald for resistance work.

‘And you lived through that and came back,’ said Emily, avid for news.

‘To get the better of them. They were my enemies. I’d do the same for any enemy.’

‘Over the Nazis, you mean?’

‘Over men.’

‘I thought you were a communist,’ said Emily.

‘Certainly. I loathe and despise—capitalists. The rich. The poor things they have made out of the others. The men they made and the woman they made. The officials I have to talk to, the society women—all I’ve come back to as well as all I’ve left.’

‘You’re a cynic and nihilist then?’

‘In the civilization that produced and tolerated, and is trying to put cosmetics on and forget, the concentration camps, and meanwhile is preparing more—let me destroy it with my own hands, as they tried to tear me apart with their teeth, their nails—their hands! They were men … And women.’ He laughed.

Emily backed away, ‘No, no. Not men, not women. Fascists, brutes, unhuman. In socialism such people, if they exist, will be put away. Be injected with something to make them better. With a brotherhood serum, eh?’

He laughed insultingly, ‘I don’t care whether you or I or the rest here or the rest of the world lives or dies. What does it matter: tell me? Let your freedom-loving nation atom bomb. We all thought such things hadn’t occurred since the ages of the pig, the Inquisition; since the medieval burning of Jews and Protestants and Negroes—and the jails in India and the jails in South Africa—and the chain-gangs and the Chinese tortures—’ he laughed excitedly, ‘and now—I didn’t know, I never saw it, say the good Germans—too goddamn good for them, say the Americans—and they’re taking hints. And what is modern war? War dogs tearing men to pieces? Flame-throwers burning men to cinders or burning them so deep that if they live it’s in agony, threats of dysgenic warfare, killing, maiming, starving and scorching, stamping out ordinary men and even burning the tender, rich, maternal breasts of the earth, scorching, burning, plunging in deeper to make sure it can’t produce any more plants or children—bah! It was because I despise all men—that I agreed to exterminate one small part—the Nazis. And when they caught me, because I despised them, I told nothing; but I laughed along their lines and jeered along their lines. They weren’t sure. And you see here what we are. Your Madame Suzanne! What an idiot! Do you know what she is! And Monsieur Wauters! A weak, sliding fool! Monsieur Jeepers, a businessman only caught because he was a Jew, not because he had done anything good. Such are Resistants. And now everyone is struggling to get into their ranks. Yes, those who would have given them up without a flutter. The excuse—you mustn’t make the innocent suffer! Such people! And now we are all Resistants! So don’t make me a Resistant … But you know! Everyone like you knows about the United States, their gaols and chain-gangs. Do you care? You live well. You live on that, don’t you? On that. So did we, only more so, because there was more of it and time was shorter and it was more concentrated. Listen, see! Why are we alive?’

‘Luck,’ said Emily.

‘No luck. Arrangement. Madame Suzanne had done good service and her life was bought by heavy bribes. She told you they were lined up each day and the heads counted and the names called and she never was called. It’s true. She was bought. She knows it. Bribes, money taken by the Resistance from the poor and hunted, taken from communists and Jews and given to corrupt Nazis. They were bribed, the payments came in each week—for some, only for some; and in the end the Americans came in time. Meantime, hundreds, thousands of women and children from that camp went to the gas chambers because no one bought them; and all the money taken from their friends, relatives, sympathizers, was given to save Madame Suzanne. See, there’s a pillar of blood-money. See there! She let burn hundreds of babies, hundreds of women were mangled and tortured and buried alive and—for her one life. All blood, all blood, she’s only a human blood bank!’

Emily stared fearfully at him. ‘Don’t! How can you say such things!’ I am the same. I was chosen to survive because of my services! Darwinism! The fittest! Not most horrible, cruel, beastly. Here I stand a pillar of blood and there she moves and talks, a fountain of blood, without thinking of all who died in her place, every day.’

‘But if she’d died too? It would only have been one more. And through her hundreds of children were saved, the lives of over a thousand children,’ said Emily emotionally.

‘What sickening claptrap such talk is!’ said Clapas.

‘You don’t care if the children were saved?’ cried Emily.

‘I care. But only because I’m sentimental; there’s a trace of it left in me. Yes, I am glad they were saved. Perhaps they’ll be better than we are. But look at them. They’re already half grown up. And their world is worse than ours. They will perhaps be worse and create more camps. Perhaps everyone here will become an informer, a torturer, a guard in a concentration camp later on.’

‘Oh, this is too dreadful to think or say,’ said Emily, staring at the man.

He laughed scornfully. ‘But not too dreadful to be true. You who did not see it are living in a dream-world. And some of those who were in the thick of it continue to live in dream. Like your Madame Suzanne. She saved lives of the innocents. She loved it. She walked in blood and a fiery storm and an iron hail and she loved it. She was calm, collected, true, loyal! How beautiful! How stupid! One can save but not with emotion. One can save and resist only with cynicism. Mankind believes in the good and glorious and see!’