Plexus (47 page)

“Henry,” said Karen. “I'm just beginning to know you. I had you all wrong. We've got to talk some more—another time.”

With this he excused himself and retired to his study. I sat there for a while, in a semitrance, mulling over the shreds of our conversation. After a time, I absent-mindedly reached for the book which he had put down. As absentmindedly
I picked it up and read: “For the divine works, which are absolutely universal, God will complete; those which are contingent, or medial, the good angels direct; and the third sort come under the evil angels.” (From the Preface for Caesar Nostradamus, his son.) These few lines kept singing in my head for days. I had a vague hope that Karen would appear for another closed session in which we might discuss the probable task of the good angels. But on the third day thereafter his mother arrived with a friend of long standing. Our conversations took quite another turn.

Karen's mother! A majestic creature in whose person were combined the diverse qualities of matriarch, hetaera and goddess. She was everything that Karen was not. No matter what she was doing she radiated warmth; her ringing laugh dissolved all problems, assured one of her confidence, trust, benevolence. She was positive through and through, yet never arrogant or aggressive. Divining instantly what you were endeavoring to say, she gave her approval before the words were out of your mouth. She was a pure, radiant spirit in a most enchantingly carnal form.

The man she had brought along was a mellow sort of individual, of idealistic temperament, who ran for Governor now and then and was always defeated. He talked of world affairs with knowledge and insight, always in a dispassionate way and with sly humor. He had been in Wilson's entourage at Versailles, he knew Smuts of South Africa, and he had been an intimate friend of Eugene V. Debs. He had translated obscure works of the pre-Socratic Greeks, was an expert chess player, and had written a book on the origins and evolution of the game. The more he talked the more I was impressed by the multitudinous facets of his personality. The places he had been to!—Tibet, Arabia, Easter Island, Tierra del Fuego, Lake Titicaca, Greenland, Mongolia. And what friends he had made—of the most diverse sort—during the course of his travels! I recalled these: Kipling, Marcel Proust, Maeterlinck,
Rabindranath Tagore, Alexander Berkman, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Count Keyserling, Henry Rousseau, Max Jacob, Aristide Briand, Thomas Edison, Isadora Duncan, Charlie Chaplin, Eleanora Duse.…

To sit down to table with him was like attending a banquet given by Socrates. Among other things he was a connoisseur of wines. He made sure that we ate well and drank well, larding the dinner talk with such comestible delicacies as the great plagues, the hidden meanings of the Aztec alphabet, the military strategy of Attila, the miracles of Apollonius of Tyana, the life of Sadakichi Hartman, the magic lore of the Druids, the inner workings of the financial clique which rules the world, the visions of William Blake, and so on. He spoke of the dead with the same intimate tenderness as of the living. He was at home in all climes, all epochs of mankind. He knew the habits of birds and snakes, he was an expert on constitutional law, he invented chess problems, he had written treatises on the drift of the continents, on international law, on ballistics, on the art of healing.

Karen's mother provided the spice. She had a ringing laugh which was infectious. No matter what the subject under discussion, she could make it appetizing by her comments. Her learning seemed almost as prodigious as her consort's, but she carried it lightly. Karen suddenly seemed like an adolescent who had not yet begun to live his own life. His mother treated him like an overgrown child. Now and then she told him plainly that he was just a fool. “You need a vacation,” she would say. “You ought to have had five children by now.” Or—“Why don't you go to Mexico for a few months, you're getting stale.”

As for herself, she was getting ready to make a trip to India. The year before she had been to Africa, not big game hunting either, but as an ethnologist. She had penetrated to regions where no white woman had ever set foot. She was fearless but not reckless. She could adapt herself to any circumstances, enduring hardships which made
even the stronger sex flinch. She had a faith and a trust which were invincible. No one could come into her presence without being enriched. At times she reminded me of those Polynesian women of royal lineage who preserved, in the far Pacific, the last vestiges of an earthly Paradise. Here was the mother I should like to have chosen before entering the womb. Here was the mother who personified the primal elements of our being, in whom earth, sea and sky were harmonized. She was a natural descendant of the great Sybilline figures, embodying the texture of myth, fable and legend. Terrestrial to the core, she nevertheless lived in a realm of superdimensions. Her consciousness seemed to expand or contract at will. For the greatest tasks she made no more effort than for the humblest. She was equipped with wings, fins, tail, feet, claws and gills. She was aeronautic and amphibious. She understood all languages yet spoke as a child. Nothing could dampen her ardor or mutilate her irrepressible joy. Just to look at her was to take courage. Problems became nonexistent. She was anchored in reality, but a reality which was divine.

For the first time in my life, I had the privilege of gazing upon a Mother. Images of the Madonna had never meant anything to me: they were too bright, too translucent, too remote, too ethereal. I had formed an image of my own—darker, more substantial, more mysterious, more potent. I had never expected to see it concretized. I had imagined such types to exist, but only in the remote places of this world. I had sensed their existence in previous times; in Etruria, in ancient Persia, in the golden days of China, in the Malay archipelago, in legendary Ireland, in the Iberian peninsula, in far off Polynesia. But to come upon one in the flesh, in everyday surroundings, to be eating, talking, laughing with her—no, that I had never believed possible. Every day I studied her anew. Every day I expected the veil to fall away. But no, each day she grew in stature, ever more wondrous, ever more real, as only dreams become when we sink deeper and deeper into their meshes.
What I had understood heretofore to be human, all too human, became magnified to an inexhaustible degree. It was no longer necessary to await the coming of a superman. The boundaries of the human world suddenly became limitless, everything has been given, we are told again and again. All that is demanded of us, I saw it now clearly, is to realize our own nature. One speaks of man's potential nature as though it were a contradiction of the one he reveals. In Karen's mother I saw the potential being flourish, I observed it expropriating the crude, external shell in which it is encased. I understood that metamorphosis is present and actual, the very sign of vitality. I saw the feminine principle usurped by the human. I understood that a greater endowment of the human element awakened a greater sense of reality. I understood that, in augmenting the life force, the being incarnating it grows ever closer to us, ever more tender, ever more indispensable. The superior being is not, as I once supposed, more remote, more detached, more abstract. Quite the contrary. Only the superior being can arouse in us the hunger which is justifiable, the hunger to surpass ourselves by becoming what we truly are. In the presence of the superior being we recognize our own majestic powers; we do not long to be that person, we merely thirst to demonstrate to ourselves that we are indeed of that same pith and substance. We rush forward to greet our brothers and sisters, knowing beyond all doubt that we are all kin.…

The visit of his mother and her companion, lasted only a few days, alas. They had hardly gone when Karen decided that we should all go back to town, where he had some matters to attend to. He thought it might do us all good to go to the theater, hear a concert or two, and then return to the beach to work in earnest. I realized that his mother's visit had completely derailed him.

The town flat, as he called it, was one unholy mess. God knows when a broom had last been put to it. The kitchen was strewn with garbage which had lain there for
weeks. Mice, ants, cockroaches, bedbugs, every sort of vermin infested the place. The tables, beds, chairs, divans, commodes were littered with papers, with open fileboxes, with cards, graphs, statistical tables, instruments of all kinds. There were at least five ink bottles uncorked. Partly eaten sandwiches lay among the heaps of letters. Cigarette butts were there by the hundreds.

The place was so filthy, indeed, that Karen and his wife decided to go to a hotel for the night. They would return the next evening after we had tidied the place up as best we could. I was to do what I could with his files.

We were so glad to be alone for a change that we didn't mind the imposition. I had borrowed a ten-spot from Karen so that we could get some food. As soon as they had left we went out to eat, and we ate well. An Italian dinner with some good red wine.

Returning to the flat we noticed the odor as we ascended the stairs. “We're not going to touch a thing,” I said to Mona. “Let's get to bed and clear out in the morning. I'm fed up.”

“Don't you think we ought to see them at least and tell them we're quitting?”

“I'll leave a note,” I said. “I'm too disgusted to prolong matters. I don't feel that we owe them a thing.”

It took us an hour to clean the bedroom sufficiently to be comfortable for the night. At that we had to sleep between soiled sheets. No matter what one touched, it was out of order. To pull the shade down was like working out a mathematical problem. I came to the conclusion that the two of them were suffering from a mild case of dementia. Just as I was about to turn in I noticed on the shelf above the bed a row of hat boxes and shoe boxes. On each one was written an index number, indicating the size, color and condition of the hat or shoes. I opened them to see if they really contained hats and shoes. They did. None of them were in a condition to be worn by anyone but a panhandler. This was the last straw for me.

“I tell you,” I groaned, “that guy's batty. Crazy as a loon.”

We rose early, unable to sleep because of the bedbugs. We took a quick shower, examined our clothes thoroughly to make sure they were not infested, and prepared to decamp. I was just in the mood to write a note. I decided it should be a good one, because I intended never to see the two of them again. I looked around for a suitable piece of paper. Catching sight of a big map on the wall, I ripped it down and, using the end of a broom handle which I dipped in a pot of paint, I scrawled a farewell in hieroglyphics tall enough to be read thirty yards away. With the back of my hand I shoved the things on the big work-table on to the floor. I placed the map on the table and in the center of it I dumped a pile of the most ancient, the most reeking, garbage. I was sure he wouldn't miss that. I took a final look about, so as to retain a lasting impression of the scene. I walked to the door, then suddenly turned back. One more thing was needed—a postscriptum to the note. Choosing a sharp-pointed pencil I wrote in a microscopic hand: “To be filed under C, for catarrh, cleanliness, cantharides, cowbells, Chihuahua, Cochin-China, constipation, curlicues, crinology, cacchination, coterminous, cow-flop, cicerone, cockroaches, cimex lectularius, cemeteries, crêpes Suzette, corn-fed hogs, citrate of magnesia, cowries, cornucopia, castration, crotchets, cuneiform, cistern, cognomen, Cockaigne, concertina, cotyledons, crapulated, cosine, creosote, crupper, copulation, Clytemnestra, Czolgosz—and Blue Label catsup.”

My one regret, as we descended the stairs, was that I couldn't leave my calling card on the table too.

We had a jolly little breakfast in a lunch wagon opposite the Tombs during which we discussed our future, which was a complete blank.

“Why don't you go to a movie this afternoon?” said Mona. “I'll run over to Hoboken or somewhere and see
what I can scrape up. Let's meet at Ulric's for dinner—how's that?”

“Fine,” I said, “but what will I do this morning? Do you realize it's only eight o'clock?”

“Why don't you go to the Zoo? Take a bus. The ride will do you good.”

She couldn't have made a better suggestion. I was in the proper mood to look at the creature world. Being footloose and free at that ungodly hour of the morning gave me a sense of superiority. I would sit on the upper deck and watch the busy toilers scurrying to their appointed tasks. I wondered for a moment what my mission in life might be. I had almost forgotten that I had intended to be a writer. I knew only one thing—I was not cut out to be a scavenger. Nor a drudge. Nor an amanuensis.

At the corner I parted with Mona. At Fifth Avenue I hopped a bus going north and clambered up to the top deck. Free again! I inhaled a few deep draughts of ozone. As we came alongside Central Park I took a good look at the fading mansions which flank the Fifth Avenue side. Many of them I knew from having entered through the servants' or tradesmen's door. Yes, there was the Roosevelt home where, as a boy of fourteen, I delivered cutaway suits, tuxedos, alpaca jackets for the old man. I wondered if the elder Mr. Roosevelt, the banker, that is, and his four giant sons still walked five abreast to their office in Wall Street each morning—after having taken a gallop through the park,
bien entendu
. A little farther along I recognized old man Bendix's mansion. The brother, who had a penchant for fancy vest buttons, was dead a long time. But H. W. was probably still alive and probably still grousing over the fact that his tailor had forgotten that he dressed on the right side. How I loathed that man! I smiled to think of the anger I had vented on him in days gone by. He was probably a very lonely, feeble old man now, attended by a faithful servant, a cook, a butler, a chauffeur and so on.
How busy he always managed to keep himself! Truly, the rich are to be pitied.

So it went.… Reminiscence upon reminiscence. Suddenly I thought of Rothermel. I could just picture him getting out of bed with a hangover, tripping over his own pisspot, fuming, fussing, hopping around like a crow on one leg. Well, it would be a red-letter day for him, seeing Mona again. (I was sure she was headed in his direction.)