The Loved One (7 page)

“Not yet.”

“The Cricket Club will be together, of course. Megalopolitan
will want the first four rows. Erikson is probably coming himself. Well, I can leave all that to you, can’t I?” As he left the mortuary he said: “I am sorry for young Barlow. He must feel all this terribly. The great thing is to give him plenty to do.”

Dennis presently drove to the University Church. It was a small, stone building whose square tower rose among immature holm-oaks on the summit of a knoll. The porch was equipped with an apparatus by which at will a lecture might be switched on to explain the peculiarities of the place. Dennis paused to listen.

The voice was a familiar one, that of the travel-film: “You are standing in the Church of St. Peter-without-the-walls, Oxford, one of England’s oldest and most venerable places of worship. Here generations of students have come from all over the world to dream the dreams of youth. Here scientists and statesmen still unknown dreamed of their future triumphs. Here Shelley planned his great career in poetry. From here young men set out hopefully on the paths of success and happiness. It is a symbol of the soul of the Loved One who starts from here on the greatest success story of all time. The success that waits for all of us whatever the disappointments of our earthly lives.

“This is more than a replica, it is a reconstruction. A building-again of what those old craftsmen sought to do with their rude implements of bygone ages. Time has worked its
mischief on the beautiful original. Here you see it as the first builders dreamed of it long ago.

“You will observe that the side aisles are constructed solely of glass and grade A steel. There is a beautiful anecdote connected with this beautiful feature. In 1935 Dr. Kenworthy was in Europe seeking in that treasure house of Art something worthy of Whispering Glades. His tour led him to Oxford and the famous Norman church of St. Peter. He found it dark. He found it full of conventional and depressing memorials. ‘Why,’ asked Dr. Kenworthy, ‘do you call it St. Peter-without-the-walls?’ and they told him it was because in the old days the city wall had stood between it and the business center. ‘
My
church,’ said Dr. Kenworthy, ‘shall have no walls.’ And so you see it today full of God’s sunshine and fresh air, bird-song and flowers…”

Dennis listened intently to the tones so often parodied yet never rendered more absurd or more hypnotic than the original. His interest was no longer purely technical nor purely satiric. Whispering Glades held him in thrall. In that zone of insecurity in the mind where none but the artist dare trespass, the tribes were mustering. Dennis, the frontier-man, could read the signs.

The voice ceased and after a pause began again: “You are standing in the Church of St. Peter-without-the-walls…” Dennis switched off the apparatus, re-entered the settled area and set about his prosaic task.

The secretariat had provided him with typewritten name-cards. It was a simple matter to deal them out on the benches. Under the organ was a private pew, separated from the nave by an iron grille and a gauze curtain. Here, when there was a need of it, the bereaved families sat in purdah, hidden from curious glances. This space Dennis devoted to the local gossip writers.

In half an hour his work was done and he stepped out into the gardens which were no brighter or more flowery or fuller of bird-song than the Norman church.

The ode lay heavy on him. Not a word was yet written and the languorous, odorous afternoon did not conduce to work. There was also another voice speaking faintly and persistently, calling him to a more strenuous task than Frank Hinsley’s obsequies. He left his car at the lych-gate and followed a gravel walk, which led downhill. The graves were barely visible, marked only by little bronze plaques, many of them as green as the surrounding turf. Water played everywhere from a buried network of pipes, making a glittering rain-belt waist-high out of which rose a host of bronze and Carrara statuary, allegorical, infantile or erotic. Here a bearded magician sought the future in the obscure depths of what seemed to be a plaster football. There a toddler clutched to its stony bosom a marble Mickey Mouse. A turn in the path disclosed Andromeda, naked and fettered in ribbons, gazing down her polished arm at a marble butterfly which had settled there. And all the
while his literary sense was alert, like a hunting hound. There was something in Whispering Glades that was necessary to him, that only he could find.

At length he found himself on the margin of a lake, full of lilies and water-fowl. A notice said: “Tickets here for the Lake Island of Innisfree” and three couples of young people stood at the foot of a rustic landing-stage. He took a ticket.

“Just the one?” asked the lady at the guichet.

The young people were as abstracted as he, each pair lapped in an almost visible miasma of adolescent love. Dennis stood unregarded until at length an electric launch drew out of the opposing shore and came silently to its mooring. They embarked together and after a brief passage the couples slipped away into the gardens. Dennis stood irresolutely on the bank.

The coxswain said: “Expecting someone to meet you here, bud?”

“No.”

“There’ve been no single dames all afternoon. I’d have noticed if there had been. Mostly folk comes in couples. Once in a while a guy has a date here and then more often than not the dame never shows up. Better get the dame before you get the ticket, I guess.”

“No,” said Dennis. “I have merely come to write a poem. Would this be a good place?”

“I wouldn’t know, bud. I never wrote a poem. But they’ve certainly got it fixed up poetic. It’s named after a very fancy
poem. They got beehives. Once they had bees, too, but folks was always getting stung so now it’s done mechanical and scientific; no sore fannies and plenty of poetry.

“It certainly is a poetic place to be planted in. Costs round about a thousand bucks. The poeticest place in the whole darn park. I was here when they made it. They figured the Irish would come but it seems the Irish are just naturally poetic and won’t pay that much for plantings. Besides they’ve got a low-down kind of cemetery of their own downtown, being Catholic. It’s mostly the good-style Jews we get here. They appreciate the privacy. It’s the water you see keeps out the animals. Animals are a headache in cemeteries. Dr. Kenworthy made a crack about that one Annual. Most cemeteries, he says, provide a dog’s toilet and a cat’s motel. Pretty smart, huh? Dr. Kenworthy is a regular guy when it comes to the Annual.

“No trouble with dogs and cats on the island. Dames is our headache, dames and guys in very considerable numbers come here to neck. I reckon they appreciate the privacy, too, same as cats.”

While he spoke some young people had emerged from the bosky and stood waiting his summons to embark; oblivious Paolas and Francescas emerging from their nether world in an incandescent envelope of love. One girl blew bubbles of gum like a rutting camel but her eyes were wide and soft with remembered pleasure.

In contrast to the ample sweep of surrounding parkland,
the Lake Island was cozy. An almost continuous fringe of shrub screened its shores from observation. Paths of mown grass wandered between leafy clumps, opened out into enclosed funerary glades, and converged on a central space, where stood a wattle cabin, nine rows of haricots (which by a system of judicious transplantation were kept in perpetual scarlet flower) and some wicker hives. Here the sound of bees was like a dynamo, but elsewhere in the island it came as a gentle murmur hardly distinguishable from the genuine article.

The graves nearest to the apiary were the most costly of all but no more conspicuous than those elsewhere in the park; simple bronze plaques, flush with the turf, bore the most august names in the commercial life of Los Angeles. Dennis looked into the hut and withdrew apologizing to the disturbed occupants. He looked into the hives and saw in the depths of each a tiny red eye which told that the sound-apparatus was working in good order.

It was a warm afternoon; no breeze stirred the evergreens; peace came dropping slow, too slow for Dennis.

He followed a divergent path and presently came to a little green cul-de-sac, the family burial plot, a plaque informed him, of a great fruiterer. Kaiser’s Stoneless Peaches raised their rosy flock cheeks from every greengrocer’s window in the land. Kaiser’s radio half-hour brought Wagner into every kitchen. Here already lay two Kaisers, wife and aunt. Here in the fullness of time would lie Kaiser himself. A gunnera
spread a wide lowly shelter over the place. Dennis lay down in its dense shade. The apiary, at this distance, came near to verisimilitude. Peace came dropping rather more quickly.

He had brought pencil and notebook with him. It was not thus that he wrote the poems which brought him fame and his present peculiar fortune. They had taken their shapes in frigid war-time railway journeys—the racks piled high with equipment, the dimmed lights falling on a dozen laps, the faces above invisible, cigarette-smoke mixing with frosty breath; the unexplained stops, the stations dark as the empty footways. He had written them in Nissen huts and in spring evenings, on a bare heath, a mile from the airfield, and on the metal benches of transport planes. It was not thus that one day he would write what had to be written; not here that the spirit would be appeased which now more faintly pressed its mysterious claim. This high hot afternoon was given for reminiscence rather than for composition. Rhythms from the anthologies moved softly through his mind.

He wrote:

Bury the great Knight

With the studio’s valediction,

Let us bury the great Knight

Who was once the arbiter of popular fiction.

And

They told me, Francis Hinsley, they told me you were hung

With red protruding eye-balls and black protruding tongue.

I wept as I remembered how often you and I

Had laughed about Los Angeles and now ’tis here you’ll lie;

Here pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore,

Shrimp-pink incorruptible, not lost nor gone before.

He gazed up into the rhubarb roof. A peach without a stone. That was the metaphor for Frank Hinsley. Dennis recalled that he had once tried to eat one of Mr. Kaiser’s much advertised products and had discovered a ball of damp, sweet cotton-wool. Poor Frank Hinsley, it was very like him.

This was no time for writing. The voice of inspiration was silent; the voice of duty muffled. The night would come when all men could work. Now was the time to watch the flamingoes and meditate on the life of Mr. Kaiser. Dennis turned on his face and studied on the bronze plaques the counterfeit handwriting of the women of the house. Not forceful characters it seemed. Kaiser owed nothing to women. The stoneless peach was his alone.

Presently he heard steps approach and, without moving, could see that they were a woman’s. Feet, ankles, calves came progressively into view. Like every pair in the country they were slim and neatly covered. Which came first in this strange civilization, he wondered, the foot or the shoe, the leg or the
nylon stocking? Or were these uniform elegant limbs, from the stocking-top down, marketed in one cellophane envelope at the neighborhood store? Did they clip by some labor-saving device to the sterilized rubber privacies above? Did they come from the same department as the light irrefragable plastic head? Did the entire article come off the assembly lines ready for immediate home-service?

Dennis lay quite still and the girl came within a yard, knelt down in the same shade and prepared to recline beside him before she said, “Oh.”

Dennis sat up and turning saw the girl from the mortuary. She was wearing very large, elliptical violet sunglasses which she now removed to stare the closer and recognize him.

“Oh,” she said. “Pardon me. Aren’t you the friend of the strangulated Loved One in the Orchid Room? My memory’s very bad for live faces. You did startle me. I didn’t expect to find anyone here.”

“Have I taken your place?”

“Not really. I mean it’s Mr. Kaiser’s place, not mine or yours. But it’s usually deserted at this time so I’ve taken to coming here after work and I suppose I began to think of it as mine. I’ll go some other place.”

“Certainly not. I’ll go. I only came here to write a poem.”

“A poem?”

He had said something. Until then she had treated him
with that impersonal insensitive friendliness which takes the place of ceremony in that land of waifs and strays. Now her eyes widened. “Did you say a
poem?”

“Yes. I am a poet, you see.”

“Why, but I think that’s wonderful. I’ve never seen a live poet before. Did you know Sophie Dalmeyer Krump?”

“No.”

“She’s in Poets’ Corner now. She came during my first month when I was only a novice cosmetician, so of course I wasn’t allowed to work on her. Besides, she passed on in a street-car accident and needed special treatment. But I took the chance to study her. She had very marked Soul. You might say I learned Soul from studying Sophie Dalmeyer Krump. Now whenever we have a treatment needing special Soul, Mr. Joyboy gives it to me.”

“Would you have me, if I passed on?”

“You’d be difficult,” she said, examining him with a professional eye. “You’re the wrong age for Soul. It seems to come more naturally in the very young or the very old. But I’d certainly do my best. I think it’s a very, very wonderful thing to be a poet.”

“But you have a very poetic occupation here.”

He spoke lightly, teasing, but she answered with great gravity. “Yes, I know. I know I have really. Only sometimes at the end of a day when I’m tired I feel as if it was all rather ephemeral. I mean you and Sophie Dalmeyer Krump write a
poem and it’s printed and maybe read on the radio and millions of people hear it and maybe they’ll still be reading it in hundreds of years’ time. While my work is burned sometimes within a few hours. At the best it’s put in the mausoleum and even there it deteriorates, you know. I’ve seen painting there not ten years old that’s completely lost tonality. Do you think anything can be a great art which is so impermanent?”