Moise and the World of Reason (15 page)

I did, indeed, go every evening to the Thelma public library and by the age of ten I had read all of Shakespeare, for instance, in preference to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzans and the Fu Manchu books.

“Good evening, little prodigy,” was the greeting which I received from the lady librarian, sarcastic, I suppose.

It may be pertinent to my character that I preferred
Titus Andronicus
to
Hamlet
, and almost to
Othello
and
Macbeth
.

Reading it, I had to laugh at the outrageous excess of the Queen of the Goths being served up a meat pie at a banquet, and the meat being the flesh of her two sons who had ravished Lavinia.

(I suppose that writers are predisposed to laugh at all excesses but their own.)

Then there were the retired minister and his wife, the Reverend and Mrs. Lakeland, who were trying to survive on a sub-subsistence level and yet who sat on their gray porch as tranquilly as if their lives contained no trials at all. And yet they sat there with their chair-arms touching, he in his rusty-looking clerical suit with freshly starched round collar and she in a clean white dress with yellow polka dots on it as faint as the dabs of color on Moise's final (?) canvas. And it was rumored, too, that she was wasting away from an internal illness of a painful nature but would take no morphine for it because morphine cost more than they could afford and they were too proud or something to accept it without charge.

“Good evening, Reverend Lakeland, how are you, Mrs. Lakeland?”

“Fine, thank you, were just fine. And how are you all doing?”

I would hear this periodically all late summer afternoons in Thelma since they lived in the house next door.

Their voices were lifted with a valiant effort.

Still they declined to accept, or rather to keep, the baskets of provisions that were sometimes placed anonymously at their door. The Reverend Lakeland would pass these charities along to a cotton-topped black man, even older than the Reverend, who would drop by now and then.

“Good evening, Mr. Lyndon.”

“Good evening, Reverend, how you, Mrs. Lakeland?”

“Oh, we re fine, just fine. Would you be good enough to remove this basket of”

By this time the cotton-topped black would be on the porch and their voices would drop to those inaudible whispers which they exchanged between themselves while looking out from their chairs at the approach of dark.

Sitting on our porch adjoining theirs one evening, I inquired of Mother,

“What are they like, Mother?”

“They're eccentric.”

My grandmother laughed, softly and mockingly.

“So's your son, that doesn't answer his question.

“Please, let's drop the subject.”

“When've you ever done anything else with a subject?” her mother muttered in a rebellious tone.

“Son, help your grandmother inside and make her some cocoa.”

“I don't need help inside or cocoa made for me. Listen, son. You know what an insult is and that's what they have received, they've received an intolerable insult from the Bishop of the Diocese and from the town of Thelma. Why else do you think they sit out there except in defiance of people passing by who delivered this intolerable insult to them and think they can rectify it with the baskets left at their door after they've gone inside, and him rejecting morphine for his wife's pain, intolerable as the insult from the church and town of Thelma?”

“Mother,”
said Mother, rising abruptly from her wicker rocker and jerking the screen door open.

My grandmother let her stand there while she studied the night sky for a minute or two, then rose indifferently to enter the house.

“Intolerable insult it was and you may not explain what it was concerning the Lakelands but he will discover the meaning concerning himself and I hope he responds to it as quietly and fiercely as they do.”

She entered the house then, grandly, an old tigress.

My interest in the Reverend and Mrs. Lakeland was now aroused to a point that demanded more complete information and I soon hit upon a likely source of it in the person of a dyed redhead named Pinkie Sales, a lady whose hair had been flaming in her youth and which remained flaming at sixty by benefit of bottled products from the drugstore.

She moved briskly about the block at practically the same blue hour of dusk every evening, talking to her chained companion, a poodle red-eyed as a drunk. Somehow the two of them had the theatrical effect of a parade with a band although the band was Pinkie's high-pitched whisper and an occasional little recalcitrant yap from the poodle.

“Will you come along now, quit sniffing and pissing, you're not going to promenade the streets all night.”

So I thought to myself, if she'll talk to that drunk-eyed poodle she will talk to me, so I fell in step with her one evening and after polite “Good evenings,” I said to her, “I wonder if you can tell me about the ex-Reverend that lives next door to us, Miss Pinkie.”

“Oh, sonny, I don't think I should discuss it, it's too awful and you're too young.”

“I just want to know if they received an intolerable insult from the Bishop and Thelma and what kind of insult it was.”

“All right, dear, help me get Belle to the drugstore and promise not to repeat a thing I say about the Reverend Lakeland and I'll tell what I know. They had a daughter, you know, that used to scream out the window and one time the Bishop was having dinner with them and the daughter appeared at the table, fetching a chair to the table directly across from him.”

“Oh. Did she scream?”

“No, but she threw the chicken in his face.”

“Just that?”

“Lord, sonny, that was sufficient on top of the Reverend Lakeland's heretical opinions of the Bible. He insisted that the Old Testament was a lot of fairy tales that contained too many characters engaged in incestuous relations, the congregation wasn't at all pleased by it and the Bishop wasn't either and the chicken was so tough he had trouble with it. Then the daughter screamed at him and threw a drumstick into his face which was dripping with gravy. Lah, lah, lah, said the Lakelands, trying to swab the gravy off him. But it did no good at all. ‘Put your daughter away and recant these heresies from the pulpit next Sunday or you will be removed without pension and God help your souls, good evening.' And the Bishop stalked out and that next Sunday the Reverend Mr. Lakeland made two sermons, one about the flight of his daughter to places unknown and the second about his confirmed opinion that the Old Testament was the most unbelievable document ever put in print. Well, that did it. Out without pension, and I hear without a trace of their wildcat daughter. How people go out in this world, well, here's the drugstore, good evening.”

She tugged at Belle, who yapped, and went clicking on her spike heels to the cosmetics counter and said loudly to the clerk, “Henna, please, and Shalimar perfume, will you shut up, Belle?”

A few days before I left Thelma, Alabama, Mrs. Lakeland at last succumbed to her illness, and that night their house went up in flames, cremating them both: a pair of old human boards, dove-jointed, on which perched love and madness as two inseparable specters. The hoses of the fire department were mostly turned on our house to protect it from the contagion of flame and heresies, and the scandal of the fugitive daughter. The fugitive impulse ran very strong in the sons and daughters of Thelma, just as strongly as the hanging-on impulse ran in the slowed-down blood of their fathers and mothers.

So many
good evenings
in Thelma.

And here the cat-pack kisses and the
Bon soir, Désespoir
, in so many hearts at this hour, oh, but on we go with it to the end of our Blue Jays, except for those having the valor of the Reverend Mr. Lakeland the night that he was alone and driven to arson and the final heresy of self-destruction.

(Their bodies were committed to unhallowed ground.)

And I think it is time now for me to write “quoth the raven” or to slip through the corner crevice of the plywood enclosure to see how the long night continues.

What I actually did was to go into the bathroom to look at my face in the small, square mirror attached with adhesive tape to the wall above the washbasin, a thing that I do at times when I have a feeling of being unreal:
not
to assure myself that, unlike a vampire, I am reflected by glass: and while I was in there trying to face myself as a visible and believable creature, I heard footsteps on the staircase from West Eleventh. Naturally I assumed that it was Charlie returning. My heart did things in my chest like a waking bird. I leaned very close to the bit of mirror to see if my face could be suitably prepared to face my wayward lover, but what I saw was a face that suggested that of a character in a silent film revival, frothing and spitting with rage, a close-up that belonged over a caption such as: “How dare you face me again?” I stood there counting to ten and attempting to erase these facial contortions and replace them with a look of haughty indifference, if such a look exists in the range of expressions, when the person who had trudged stumblingly up the staircase spoke out in a voice that was husky with drink and much lower pitched than Charlie's could ever be. The voice was familiar to me, not from long acquaintance but from very recent encounter: still I couldn't place it.

“So you're a writer, too,” was what the voice said.

Then I knew who it was and I came out of the bathroom and there, indeed, was the freakish old playwright attempting a comeback at the Truck and Warehouse Theater by the Bowery. He was seated on the bed leafing through the last of my Blue Jays. He must have known that I was observing this outrageous invasion of
my—
about writing, can you say privacy? No, but still, to root through a writer's work without invitation is the height of insolence. He laid the Blue Jay aside, still not looking up at me, and squinted his good eye at an Oriental cardboard and at a large rejection envelope. He looked sad but unembarrassed. I cleared my throat. I shifted my weight from one foot to another. He continued squinting and reading.

At last I broke the silence with something verbal.

“Is it your custom to go through the unpublished writings of strangers without permission? And is it your custom to invade their bedrooms at any hour of night simply because”

“Because of what?” he asked in that voice which was nearly as ravaged as his vision.

“Because they don't have a door locked against intruders?”

“Proprieties are properties I've forgotten through”

“Through what?”

“Through desperation, which is a product of time you haven't had time to explore.”

“How would you know I haven't?”

“I don't see well. Anyway, to have mentioned desperation would have been a tasteless appeal for sympathy
which—
I was about to say I don't want, and that would be shit, too.”

“Well, you've said it, by intention or not. You know, under some conditions I might feel sympathy for you but they're not conditions that prevail on me now. You look to me like an old con man, playing words instead of the pigeon drop or poker with a stacked deck.”

“That's very odd what you said, the pigeon drop. You know, a couple of years ago I was sailing for Europe because at the time I thought a transatlantic plane flight would give me another coronary, and the day before sailing I'd had a furious confrontation with my publishers' secretary over the phone. I'd learned they were planning to bring out several volumes of my plays under the title
The Collected Works of
. So I called them up and got this secretary and I told her that I would not accept that title,
Collected Works
, since I was not yet certain my work was finished and I said to her, ‘Tell them that I suggest this alternate title,
The Pigeon Drop,'
and I told her what it was, that it was a con game which is played on a senile mark with savings in the bank. Won't bore you with the details, perhaps you know them. But at dinner the first night out I received a ship-to-shore call from one of the publishers and he assured me that they didn't regard my work as a con game and that if I objected to
The Collected Works
, how about using
The Theater of
instead.”

He fell silent then.

“Is that all?”

“Well, I believe in peaceful concessions, so I settled for
The Theater of
, although it struck me as pretentious and”

“You believe in unfinished sentences, too.”

“You don't sound like you want me to go on.”

“No, I got the point. Would you mind moving over on the bed.”

He moved over slightly.

“A little more than that slightly.”

“Do you think I've come here with seduction in mind?”

“In a world of infinite jeopardy, why take chances you can avoid?”

“Can you?”