Set This House on Fire (34 page)

“What are these?” Cass inquired unhappily.

“Baby aspirin,” she said. “That’s all there is. It’s from that bottle Mason got us—Oh, that terrible person!”

“Lord God,” he said with a groan, thrusting his face into his hands. “Lord God, Poppy, why don’t you
minister
to me! I’ve got a headache!” He looked up at her briefly and dizzily; then he looked at me, as if calling upon me to witness his affliction. He shook his head and slurped noisily at the coffee. “It’s a trick on the menfolk,” he said sadly. “He filled us full of hormones and He made us commit the act of darkness and in the glory of our youth He struck us down with a blight of screeching tadpoles. An evil trick. Look around you, Leverett! Did you ever see such a misbegotten abomination of a draggle-assed quagmire? This is supposed to be my studio—pardon the pretension. I used to paint and things like that. Look at it, for Christ sake! Mickey Mouse. Diapers. Dolls. Old venerable anchovies underneath the couch; that’s that stench you smell, they’ve been there for months. Are you a single man, Leverett? Absorb if you will then this portrait of dosmes—excuse me, domesticity, and take heed. Marry a Catholic, and it’s like being retired to stud. Did you ever see anything like it? I’ll swear before Christ nothing exists like it west of the slums of Bangkok. Did you ever see its likes before? Lord, my head aches!”

“The place looks fine to me,” I said, lying extravagantly as I gazed up at Poppy.

“Well goodness, Cass,” she exclaimed, “it’s not as neat as it could be, but if you’re so smart why don’t
you
take care of four children and everything, and cook, and wash clothes and everything, with only a part-time girl to help, and then—”

“Go to bed, Poppy,” he cut her off abruptly, without emotion. “Just go to bed. I’ve got to go out.”

“Cass Kinsolving! You’ll do nothing of the—”

“Go to bed now!” he said. His voice was that of a father with a headstrong child, not unkindly but very firm. “Go the hell to bed.”

Her face blazed up and she tossed her head, but she gathered her kimono about her and swept in insult toward the door. “You just go to the dickens!” she said, with a catch in her voice, as she sashayed out, lyric and lovely and impossible. “Sometimes I think you’re absolutely
pazzo
in the head!”

“That’s two tonight who’ve pegged me for a loony—two besides myself,” he said morosely when she had gone.

I watched him as he sat there in gloomy silence, staring down into the dregs of his coffee. I didn’t see how he would be able to go on. Yet again I sensed the urgent interior struggle: out of sheer power of will, right before my eyes, he seemed to be casting off the layers of drunkenness and obfuscation that encompassed him, much in the manner of a dog, rising from the mud, who by successive violent shakes becomes purified and cleansed. It was as if he were actually thrashing about. Something held him in torment and in great and desperate need: I never saw anyone I wanted so to get sober.

All at once he rose to his feet. “Now you’ve got to be my will power, boy,” he muttered. “Come on.” I followed him down the steps into the dank darkness of the lower level of the house, puzzled by what he had just said, until he explained that he had to take a cold shower—in order to complete the process of purgation—but that he lacked the strength of character, at this point, to keep from turning the hot water on. He snapped on a light in the noxious bathroom, where more diapers lay in soggy disarray upon the floor. “Me, I’ve gotten used to it,” he said with a note of apology as he undressed. “I come in here and shave, and I pretend I’m on a hillside somewhere, smelling the pungent fern and the trailing arbutus. Now—” he exclaimed, climbing over the rim of the tub and standing rigidly with closed eyes beneath the shower. He thrust out his arm toward me. “Here, hold me glasses. Let her rip.” I turned on the cold water, frigid from mountain streams, full blast. He let out a yell. “That’s it!” he cried as the water splashed and cascaded over him. He shivered and trembled and held his breath, groaning, his lips working as if in prayer. “That’s it! Keep it up! Mother of Christ! … I’m a bleeding Spartan! … Keep it up, Leverett! …
Sacramento!
… I’m turning into a … bleeding stalagmite!” He howled and screamed there for five minutes beneath the driving spray but after a final whoop, like some crazed mystic announcing divine revelation, gasped that he was Methodist-sober, boy, and with his hair plastered down around his face clambered dripping from the tub.

“Well,” he said, stamping around with his eyes closed. “Now I can get down to business.” He groped for a towel, but there was none to be had, so he slapped off the water and slithered wetly into his pants. As he dressed he kept up a steady monologue. “No, that’s a lie,” he said while hopping around on one foot, trying without sitting down to put on a shoe, “I’m not that sober. But I’m sober enough to commit this—this most necessary larceny. Larceny! You know, I haven’t stolen anything since the war. I was on this island and I swiped a gallon and a half of grain alcohol from sick bay and I never got over being guilty about it. What a party we threw, though. What a marvelous party! Whenever I think of that party it plain long eradicates all my sense of sin. Sitting down there on the palmy beach with sand between your toes, looking at the moon, downing all that booze. Triple bleeding God! Did you ever drink grain alcohol? You know, you can hardly taste it. And my God, what a thirst I had! Now hand me that comb, will you?” He began to comb his hair at the mirror; his eyes were brighter, his hands steady now. He seemed to be finally in some command of himself, capable of most anything. “A proper thief’s got to be well groomed. Whoever heard of a second-story man who wasn’t the nattiest thing around? Besides, this is going to be the cleanest wholesome-like little piece of burglary you ever heard about. No grubby old automobile tires or greasy money from a cash register or common degrading articles of merchandise—cigarettes or cameras or fountain pens or anything like that. My God, no! This is going to be
special
But look!” he exclaimed, staring down at his feet. “I can’t wear these clodhoppers. They’d wake up the dead. A proper thief, you know—above all—has to be quietly accoutered around his foots. Else he’ll bump up against a prie-dieu or a taboret or a trundle bed or something, or set the joists and beams snapping with his clumsiness, and the whole household in their nightshirts will be down on him like a bunch of hawks. No, my friend. He’s got to be shod like a bleeding elf.” And, taking off his shoes, he padded across the darkened hallway, where, in a cluttered wardrobe or trunk, I heard him rummaging about, breathing heavily. After a moment he came padding softly back, wearing a pair of sneakers. His expression was tense and solemn. “It suddenly occurred to me,” he said, “in my great self-preoccupation, that I might be boring you out of your head. I’m sorry, Leverett. I haven’t meant to. Please just say kiss my ass, and get out of here, if you want to. God knows, that’s what I’d do if I were you. I—I don’t know. It was very decent of you to—to intercede for me up there.”

“Mason’s a
swine!”
I blurted. “Tell me, Cass, did you—”

He cut me off with a bitter, ugly look. “Don’t talk about it,” he said. “Just don’t talk about it, please. I’m going to do a little burglarizing, that’s all, and I don’t want to forget myself and foul up. Look—” he said after a pause, “look, as plastered and fried and piggish as I’ve been today, there are a few cracks of light I remember. One was you, down on the road this afternoon. I don’t know why, but I have the feeling I insulted you. I’m sorry if I did, and I’d like to apologize. I guess I thought you were another one of Mason’s tiresome shitheads—”

“You don’t have to apologize,” I put in. “I was beat, and you were, well—”

“Boiled. Anyway, that’s beside the point. What I’m getting at is this: that somehow through all the evil red haze I remember beating your ears off about Tramonti—this little town back in the valley. I didn’t mean to be trying to give you a message or anything. I only meant—” He turned away and moved slowly down the hall. “You’ve been a fine guy, Leverett, and I hope I see some more of you. Soon as I relieve Mason of one of his treasures I’m going to light out down into the valley. It’s quite a place to see, even at night, this place I’m going. If you want to hang around, I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.” He disappeared without another word into the shadows, where I heard his feet sneak away, soft and stealthy as they climbed the stairs.

I wandered back upstairs into the littered, rancid living room. Night-dwelling flies bumbled and buzzed in the stillness. It was a sad place I beheld, this room: chaotic, unkempt, stinking, it reminded me of nothing more than some of the living rooms I had seen at home during the weary thirties, when poverty was more than a lack of money and seemed to display itself, as in this room, by a simple bedragglement of spirit. A cheap plaster Madonna ogled me from the wall with dreamy, credulous eyes; nearby a calendar marking the days of all the saints advertised the blood-red word
MarzOy
the month already half a year gone. A sardine can lay open on the table, filled with chartreuse-yellow grease. On an artist’s sketch pad flung out beside it were these words, with a pen frantically gouged, as if in splinters, and in a crazy, drunken scrawl:
I
hold to my Dear ones and now should I die I were not wholly wretched since ye have come to me Press close to me on either side Children cleave to your sire and repose from this late roaming so Forlorn so grievous!!!
The pen had been laid aside after the first words of another phrase, unintelligible, below it—thrust aside with its nib punched in one violent jab through the paper, as if in sudden fury. Beneath all of this there was an impossible jerry-built child’s house with a chimney, in red crayon, a flight of prehistoric-looking birds, a spindly horse with ears like mammoth swollen carrots, also in red crayon, and the notation below in enormous red letters: AMƎRiCA GO*HOMƎ!! MARGARƎT KiNSOLViNG AGƎ 8 POO. I thought I heard a mouse or rat stir in a far corner of the room, and I looked up with a start; then with a shiver, feeling as if the decrepitude and inanition of the room had stolen into my very bones, I moved out onto the balcony. The starry lights on the water had not moved or altered, resting upon the sea like some untroubled constellation in the serene dark reaches of the firmament. There was not a sound anywhere. Closer, the swimming pool lay blue and trembling, abandoned of all save the incessant crowd of moths which like windblown petals fluttered and danced around the garish floodlamps.
I
hold to my Dear ones and now should I die
… I could not get rid of the chill I felt in my heart and bones. I was touched all over by a clammy, insubstantial dread; if I had been a woman, I think I might have had trouble suppressing a scream.

The door slammed open behind me, turning my flesh, momentarily, to jelly. I wheeled around, beholding Cass, who in a great flurry and agitation went to a mountainous pile of junk in the corner of the room and began to rummage about, pitching socks and shoes and belts into the air behind him. “Where’s that miserable sack?” he said. “It was as easy as pie, Leverett! I could have walked in there in chain mail, rattling like a bagful of clamshells. The Hollywood riffraff were still whooping it up and so I snuck in there as pretty as you please and copped it. It was like hooking candy.”

“Copped
what?”
I said.

He didn’t seem to notice. “Funny thing,” he went on. “Some big oaf of a Roman movie type met me just as I was coming out the bathroom with the goods in my hand. I never saw him before and he knew I was up to no good. He just stood there with his big lower lip drooping and said,
‘Che vuole lei?’
And, says I, thinking rapidly, ‘Up yours, gorgeous, I work here,’ in my best English, and breezed on past him beaming like a friar. It takes a lot of brass and cunning to be a proper thief.”

“What
goods?” I demanded.

“Oh,” he said, looking up casually. “I quite forgot. Thoughtless of me. This.” As I approached he held out a bottle, and when I bent down to peer at it I saw that it contained pharmaceutical capsules. The label read:
PARA-AMINO SALICYLIC ACID LEDERLE U.S.A.
The bottle glowed opulently in the dull light. “Pure magic,” he said, softly now and rather wryly. “A hundred capsules. Enough to cure half a dozen romantic poets. What they do, they use it along with this streptomycin to cure T.B. Now if we’d had this back in the thirties my dear old cousin Eunice Kinsolving would still be alive and kicking up in Colfax, Virginia.”

“Where did Mason get it?” I asked.

“Ah now,” he said evasively, “he brought it forth from the clear and shining air.”

“But—” I persisted, “but just what would he want with a hundred capsules of that stuff?”

“Ha!” he said, without much humor. “Well, that’s quite a long story. That there is a story, my boy, that would make your toes curl up.”

“But he couldn’t have gotten it without a prescription, could he?”

He stared at me. “Why, man, I thought you
knew
Mason. Didn’t you know that when it comes to worldly goods that boy can get
anything?
Anything!” He paused, regarding the bottle soberly. “The point is that you don’t hardly see any of this stuff in this benighted country. Oh, it’s here, all right. They’ve gotten around to making it, just like in the good old U.S. and A. But try to get your hands on any of it. Why, for the price of this bottle you could ransom a whole clutch of Christian-Democrat senators.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

For a long moment he was silent. “I don’t know,” he said, in a voice that was like a small cry. “Jesus Christ, I don’t know! The doctor—Caltroni—this misery of a Sambuco doctor … To hell with that! Anyway, it’s supposed to work all sorts of wonders. I think it’s going to be too late in this case, but there’s an outside chance. But why in God’s name are we standing here talking like this! Come on, let’s go.” Into a dirty knapsack he dropped the bottle, along with several cans of sardines, half a loaf of bread, and three or four bruised apples long past their prime. Then together we plunged out into the night.