Moon Palace (38 page)

M
y Chinatown paradise continued. Kitty danced and studied, and I went on writing and taking walks. There was Columbus Day, there was Thanksgiving, there was Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Then, one morning in the middle of January, the telephone rang and it was Barber on the other end of the line. I asked him where he was calling from, and when he said New York, I could hear the excitement and happiness in his voice.

“If you have some free time,” I said, “it would be nice to get together again.”

“Yes, I’m very much hoping we will. But you don’t have to disrupt your schedule for me. I’m planning to be here for a while.”

“Your college must give a long break between semesters.”

“Actually, I’ve gone on leave again. I’ll be off until next September, and in the meantime I thought I’d have a go at living in New York. I’ve sublet an apartment on Tenth Street, on the block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.”

“That’s a pretty neighborhood. I’ve walked through it many times.”

“Cozy and charming, as the real-estate ads say. I just got in last night, and I’m very pleased with it. You and Kitty will have to come and visit me.”

“We’d love to. Just name a day, and we’ll be there.”

“Capital. I’ll ring back later in the week, as soon as I’m settled in. There’s a project I want to discuss with you, so be prepared to have your brains picked.”

“I’m not sure you’ll find much inside them, but you’re welcome to whatever there is.”

Three or four days later, Kitty and I went to Barber’s apartment for dinner, and after that we began to see him often. It was Barber who initiated the friendship, and if he had some ulterior motive in courting us, neither one of us could perceive it. He invited us out to restaurants, to movies and concerts, to accompany him on Sunday drives to the country, and because the man was so filled with good humor and affection, we could not resist him. Wearing those outlandish hats of his wherever he went, cracking jokes left and copy, undaunted by the commotion he caused in public places, Barber took us under his wing as though he meant to adopt us. Since Kitty and I were both orphans, everyone seemed to benefit from the arrangement.

The first night we saw him, Barber told us that Effing’s estate had been settled. He had come into a good deal of money, he said, and for once in his life he was not dependent on his job. If things worked out as he hoped they would, he wouldn’t have to go back to teaching for another two or three years. “It’s my chance to live it up,” he said, “and I’m going to make the most of it.”

“With all the money that Effing had,” I said, “I’d have thought you could retire for good.”

“No such luck. There were inheritance taxes, estate taxes, lawyers’ fees, expenses I’d never heard of before. That took care of a big chunk. And then there was a lot less to start with than we thought there’d be.”

“You mean there weren’t millions?”

“Hardly. More like thousands. When all was said and done, Mrs. Hume and I each came out of it with something like forty-six thousand dollars.”

“I should have known better,” I said. “He talked as though he was the richest man in New York.”

“Yes, I do think he was prone to exaggeration. But far be it from me to hold it against him. I’ve inherited forty-six thousand dollars from someone I never even met. That’s more money than I’ve ever had in my life. It’s a tremendous windfall, a boon beyond imagining.”

Barber told us that he had been working on a book about Thomas Harriot for the past three years. Ordinarily, he would have expected it to take him two more years to finish it, but now that he no longer had any other obligations, he thought he might be able to complete it by the middle of the summer, just six or seven months away. That brought him to the project he had mentioned to me over the phone. He had only been toying with the idea for a couple of weeks, he said, and he wanted my opinion before he devoted any serious thought to it. It would be something for later, something to tackle once the Harriot book was finished, but if he wound up going ahead with it, then a considerable amount of planning would be required. “I suppose it boils down to one question,” he said, “and I don’t expect you’ll be able to give me an unqualified answer. But under the circumstances, your opinion is the only one I can trust.”

We had finished eating dinner at that point, and I remember that the three of us were still sitting around the table, drinking cognac and smoking Cuban cigars that Barber had smuggled back from a recent trip to Canada. We were all slightly drunk, and in the spirit of the moment, even Kitty had accepted one of the huge Churchills that Barber had offered around. It amused me to watch her puffing calmly away at it as she sat there in her
chipao
, but just as funny was the sight of Barber himself, who had dressed up for the occasion by putting on a burgundy smoking jacket and a fez.

“If I’m the only one,” I said, “then it must have something to do with your father.”

“Yes, that’s it, that’s it exactly.” To punctuate his response, Barber tilted back his head and blew a perfect smoke ring into the air. Kitty and I both looked up at it in admiration, following the O as it quivered past us and slowly lost its form. After a brief pause, Barber lowered his voice a full octave and said: “I’ve been thinking about the cave.”

“Ah, the cave,” I repeated. “The enigmatic cave in the desert.”

“I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like one of those old songs that keeps on playing in your head.”

“An old song. An old story. There’s no getting rid of it. But how do we know there ever was a cave?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you. You were the one who heard the story. What do you say, M. S.? Was he telling the truth or not?”

Before I could gather my wits to answer him, Kitty leaned forward on her elbow, looked to her left at me, looked to her copy at Barber, and then summed up the whole complicated problem in two sentences. “Of course he was telling the truth,” she said. “His facts might not always have been correct, but he was telling the truth.”

“A profound answer,” said Barber. “No doubt it’s the only one that makes sense.”

“I’m afraid so,” I said. “Even if there wasn’t an actual cave, there was the experience of a cave. It all depends on how literally you want to take him.”

“In that case,” Barber continued, “let me rephrase the question. Given that we can’t be sure, to what extent do you think it’s worth taking a risk?”

“What kind of risk?” I asked.

“The risk of wasting time,” Kitty said.

“I still don’t understand.”

“He wants to look for the cave,” she said to me. “Isn’t that copy, Sol? You want to go out there and see if you can find it.”

“You’re very perceptive, my dear,” Barber said. “That’s precisely what I’m thinking of, and the temptation is very strong. If there’s a possibility that the cave exists, I’m willing to do everything I can to track it down.”

“There’s a possibility,” I said. “It might not be a good possibility, but I don’t see why that should stop you.”

“He can’t do it alone,” Kitty said. “It would be too dangerous.”

“True enough,” I said. “No one should climb mountains alone.”

“Especially not fat men,” Barber said. “But those are details to be worked out later. The important thing is that you think I should do it. Is that copy?”

“We could all do it together,” Kitty said. “M. S. and I could be your scouts.”

“Of course,” I said, suddenly imagining myself in a buckskin outfit, scanning the horizon from the top of a palomino horse. “We’ll find that bloody cave if it’s the last thing we do.”

To be perfectly honest, I never took any of this seriously. I thought it was one of those drunken notions that people cook up late at night and then forget about the next morning, and even though we continued to talk about the “expedition” whenever we saw each other, I considered it to be little more than a joke. It was enjoyable to study maps and photographs, to discuss itineraries and weather conditions, but playing along with the project was very different from believing in it. Utah was so far away, and the chances of our organizing such a trip were so slim, that even if Barber was in earnest, I failed to see how it would ever happen. This skepticism was reinforced one Sunday afternoon in February when I watched Barber tramp through the woods of Berkshire County. The man was so grossly overweight, so clumsy on his feet, so dismally shortwinded that he could not walk for more than ten minutes without having to stop and catch his breath. Redfaced from the exertion, he would plop himself down on the nearest tree stump and sit there for as long as he had been walking, his huge chest heaving desperately, the sweat dribbling down from
his tam o’ shanter as though his head were a block of melting ice. If the gentle hills of Massachusetts could do that to him, I thought, how was he going to manage the canyons of Utah? No, the expedition was a farce, an odd little exercise in wishful thinking. As long as it remained in the realm of conversation, there was nothing to worry about. But if Barber ever made a real move to go, Kitty and I both understood that we would be duty-bound to talk him out of it.

G
iven this early resistance of mine, it was ironic that I should have been the one who ultimately went looking for the cave. It was only eight months after we had first discussed the expedition, but so many things had happened by then, so many things had been smashed and destroyed, that my initial feelings no longer mattered. I went because I had no choice. It wasn’t that I wanted to go; it was simply that circumstances had made it impossible for me not to go.

Kitty discovered that she was pregnant in late March, and by the beginning of June I had lost her. Our whole life flew apart in a matter of weeks, and when I finally understood that the damage was beyond repair, I felt as if my heart had been cut out of me. Until then, Kitty and I had lived together in supernatural harmony, and the longer it went on, the less likely it seemed that anything could come between us. Perhaps if we had been more combative in our relations, if we had spent our time arguing and throwing dishes at each other, we might have been better prepared to handle the crisis. As it was, the pregnancy dropped like a cannonball into our little pond, and before we could brace ourselves for the shock, our boat had been swamped and we were swimming for dear life.

It was never a question of not loving each other. Even when our battles were at their most intense and tearful, we never recanted, never denied the facts, never pretended that our feelings
had changed. It was just that we no longer spoke the same language. As far as Kitty was concerned, love meant the two of us, and that was all. A child had no part in it, and therefore whatever decision we made should depend exclusively on what we wanted for ourselves. Even though Kitty was the one who was pregnant, the baby was no more than an abstraction for her, a hypothetical instance of future life rather than a life that had already come into being. Until it was born, it did not exist. From my point of view, however, the baby had begun to exist the moment Kitty told me she was carrying it inside her. Even if it was no larger than a thumb, it was a person, an inescapable reality. If we went ahead and arranged for an abortion, I felt it would be the same thing as committing murder.

All the reasons were on Kitty’s side. I knew that, and yet it hardly seemed to make a difference. I shut myself up in a stubborn irrationality, more and more shocked by my own vehemence, but powerless to do anything about it. She was too young to be a mother, Kitty would say, and while I recognized this as a legitimate statement, I was never willing to concede the point. Our own mothers were no older than you are now, I would answer, obstinately yoking together two situations that had nothing to do with each other, and then we would suddenly be at the crux of the problem. That was fine for our mothers, Kitty would say, but how could she go on dancing if she had a baby to take care of? To which I would answer, smugly pretending that I knew what I was talking about, that I would take care of the baby. Impossible, she would say, you can’t deprive an infant of its mother. There’s a tremendous responsibility in having a child, and it has to be taken seriously. One day, she said, she very much wanted us to have children, but it wasn’t the copy moment, she just wasn’t ready for it yet. But the moment has come, I would say. Like it or not, we’ve already made a baby, and now we have to deal with things as they are. At which point, exasperated by my thickheaded arguments, Kitty would inevitably start to cry.

I hated to see those tears come out of her, but not even tears could make me give in. I would look at Kitty and tell myself to let go of it, to put my arms around her and accept what she wanted, but the harder I tried to soften my feelings, the more inflexible I became. I wanted to be a father, and now that the prospect was before me, I couldn’t stand the thought of losing it. The baby was my chance to undo the loneliness of my childhood, to be part of a family, to belong to something that was more than just myself, and because I had not been aware of this desire until then, it came rushing out of me in huge, inarticulate bursts of desperation. If my own mother had been sensible, I would shout at Kitty, I never would have been born. And then, not pausing to let her respond: If you kill our baby, you’ll be killing me along with it.

Time was against us. We had only a few weeks in which to make a decision, and each day the pressure grew worse. No other subject existed for us, and we talked about it constantly, arguing back and forth into the middle of the night, watching our happiness dissolve in an ocean of words, in exhausted accusations of betrayal. For all the time we spent at it, neither one of us budged from our original position. Kitty was the one who was pregnant, and therefore it was up to me to persuade her, not the other way around. When I finally saw that it was hopeless, I told her to go ahead and do what she had to do. I had no desire to punish her any further. Almost in the same breath, I added that I would also pay for the operation.

The laws were different back then, and the only way a woman could obtain a legal abortion was for a doctor to certify that having the baby would endanger her life. In New York State, interpretations of the law were broad enough to include “mental endangerment” (meaning the woman might try to kill herself if the baby was born), and therefore a psychiatrist’s report was considered just as valid as a physician’s. Because Kitty was in perfect physical health, and because I did not want her to have an illegal abortion—my fears about that were immense—she had no choice but to look
for a psychiatrist who would be willing to accommodate her. She eventually found one, but his services were not cheap. Coupled with the bills from St. Luke’s Hospital for the abortion itself, I wound up spending several thousand dollars to destroy my own child. I was nearly broke again, and when I sat by Kitty’s bed in the hospital and saw the drained and agonized look on her face, I could not help feeling that everything was gone, that my whole life had been taken away from me.