The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel Read online

  The Tents of Wickedness

  A Novel

  Peter De Vries

  To James and Helen Thurber

  You must not think me necessarily foolish because I am facetious, nor will I consider you necessarily wise because you are grave.

  SYDNEY SMITH: Letter to Bishop Blomfield

  the TREEHOUSE

  We can be nothing without playing at being.

  JEAN-PAUL SARTRE: Being and Nothingness

  1

  CHARLES SWALLOW was taking a bath, and as was his custom on such occasions, he had undressed before climbing into the tub. Man is a creature of habit, but there was more to it than that. Since most of the clothes he’d been wearing were of the newfangled wash ’n wear, or drip-dry, variety, and equally in need of laundering, he might perfectly well have left them on and killed two birds with one stone. But Charles liked doing things the old way, even when they took more time and though the march of events had rendered them obsolete. It gave you a sense of tradition, and that, Charles increasingly felt as the years mellowed him into middle age, was something we all sorely needed.

  He had lately been rereading the works of John P. Marquand, with enormous pleasure. In fact he had begun to fancy himself rather a Marquandian sort of hero. For one thing, he had this profound sense of the past. It more than greatly enriched his own life: to it he owed the fact that he was alive at all.

  He could remember the time when as a boy of six he had swallowed a pin, a small pearl-seeded brooch which he had taken from his mother’s dresser drawer on a rainy Sunday afternoon, and been rushed to the hospital for a bronchoscopy. They had engaged the most brilliant surgeon in the East to perform it. No expense had been spared for the recovery of the brooch, which had been in the family for generations and was regarded as priceless both as an heirloom and on its own account. Charles smiled as he recalled the incident, still vivid in his memory though blurred in outline.

  Suddenly the smile left his face as he heard his wife call something through the closed door. It sounded like “Have you finished The Late George Apley?”

  Now why in the world would she ask that just then? It was an absurd query to put in the flutter of dressing for dinner, especially dinner with the Groteguts. Yet it had caught him precisely in the shifting, prismatic rigmaroles of self-inventory (underlined with rueful irony) that are the hallmark of the Marquandian genre. So it must be more than coincidence—it must be mental telepathy. In some way, it seemed to substantiate his claim to status as a Marquand hero, for whom things were always coming out of the blue to start the narrative ball rolling and make the protagonist wonder what the meaning of his life was. They were like nudges of a kaleidoscope which jiggle it into slight changes of pattern for the hero to squint a mental eye at. Charles squinted an autobiographical eye down the barrel of himself to see if he rated membership in this breed.

  To begin with, Charles Swallow found scarcely anything in the world around him to approve of. The suit he had just pitched down the laundry chute was totally synthetic (were even the sheep any longer all-wool these days?) while his “hat” had been in reality derived from some legume grown in the Deep South (which perhaps made it edible in case he ever lost an election bet and were required to eat it). He had but to raise his eyes from the bath water to see the wallpaper, depicting people humorously caged in zoos of which the keepers were animals, that adorned the room. If standards were in visible decline on his own person and in his own house, they were in full rout in the world at large. The town rang with gimcrackery, human as well as material. There were the new owners of the old shore properties, people with allergies and two-toned cars, who had built swimming pools on the beaches. They sat around them eating frozen canapés and drinking gin-and-tonics with week-end guests who arrived on Thursday. The guests were those men from New York who ran things up the flagpole to see if anybody saluted, and their wives, metallic women with eyes like nickels who continually said “this.” This I like, this I understand, this I don’t get—surely one of the most irritating of locutions.

  Well, all this Charles Swallow deplored with a genteel scorn (which a few intimates thought of rather as a mildly dyspeptic charm). As for missing the metropolitan life himself, to lay that ghost he had but to run down to New York for a day and drink it in in its present pure form. The Ritz was gone and the old Lafayette was gone, and as for the Algonquin—give it back to the Algonquins. Not that his home town of Decency, Connecticut, wasn’t headed in the same direction. Gone from the local ice cream parlors were the nickelodeons that may not always have worked but which were better than the jukeboxes efficiently spewing their garbage into the streets till dawn. The trolleys that had once meandered leisurely around town were now buses that got you straight to your destination in five minutes or less.

  Perhaps a subtler gauge of deterioration lay in the decline of reminiscence as such. He could remember a seagoing grandfather with a wooden leg, of the best teakwood, who had endowed the local marine museum. He died in a burst of nautical jargon, having beheld the dawn of the psychiatric. On hearing the term “autointoxication” for the first time, he had snapped, “I can hold with a lot of these newfangled notions, but drunk driving, no.”

  But this was really his father’s memory; his own was merely his father himself, a man picturesque only in the number of magazines that had rejected his articles, substantial only for the philosophers from whom he had cribbed to write them. Once his father had taken him to New York to the theater. After the entertainment they had gone to an uptown restaurant where his father had grown expansive about the play, an old-fashioned drawing room piece which he had liked. “That was a real comedy of manners, without any funny business,” he had said, blowing cigar smoke in the boy’s face. Charles had never forgotten it. There are few smells more delightful than the rich, full-bodied aroma of a fine Havana cigar provided someone else is smoking it. Puffing one personally only resulted in nausea for Charles, but he still liked the fragrance secondhand. The first thing he was going to do when his ship came in was not buy a boat, as so many of the fellows he knew did, but hire somebody to puff Havana cigars for him and blow the smoke in his direction.

  As much more vivid as his father’s recollections were than his own, his grandfather’s had been than that. He could remember a father who ran a chandler’s store on a waterfront still far from being improved by swimming pools, a pious figure with a gold toothpick in his pocket who quoted a brief portion of Scripture with every purchase of twenty cents or more. What, to complete the sorry cycle, would Charles’s own two sons have to look back on? A man in a Brooks Brothers shirt mildly cursing chip shots on the living room floor.

  No. Nostalgia, as his Uncle Joshua had said, ain’t what it used to be.

  Which made it pretty complete. Nothing was what it used to be—not even nostalgia.

  Yet there were corners of his beloved Decency on which the blight of progress had blessedly not yet fallen. He loved to visit, each Saturday morning at ten, Matt Curtis; to ramble with Matt among the rooms of his old Colonial house, bumping his head on the original beams and smelling Matt’s first editions; or over the grounds, to savor the sights and scents of long-established verdure, grounds kept at least semiformal by Tony the gardener and his idiot son Bonaventura, who grinned obliquely at you as he dug up weeds with his bare toes. There were still, too, the Irish and Italian quarters of town into which the marauding antiquarians had not yet swept, whose residents, still reasonably benighted, compounded from herbs with names like oregano and life everlasting nostrums of a charming uncertainty, and whose sons still ate yeast for their pimples. They always would. And there would always be Hallburton Hill, where folk of gentle birth still w
et their finger before turning a page, a custom that has all but vanished from the human scene. He could no longer bear to look in on them: it was, as old Demosthenes had said, too high a price to pay for regret.

  Professionally, he felt his life closing—not ending, closing—gently, like a bivalve, with the knowledge that he would live it to its end a newspaperman. There had been in youth a time when he had expected rather more from his typewriter, but he had settled for the realities—which was one way of propitiating the Furies. He ran a question and answer column. That was, simply, that. He did not yield to this destiny grudgingly but with a will; since we must all fall into a category it might as well be head first. All in all, it was a good life. His lines were laid in pleasant places and his heritage was fair. Life now had a felicitous monotony, bland as poundcake, of which the featureless days were the slices dropping with soothing regularity from the loaf of Time.

  Yet there came to him sudden, inexplicable forebodings—hunches that Life might not yet have made its peace with him. That there might lurk somewhere yet a still unsettled account. He had it now in the bath, an intimation of—call it unfinished business, that seemed to chill the water in which he sat. He quickly nudged over the “hot” tap with his great toe. Which corrected the liquid temperature but not yet the freezing intimation with which he had been mysteriously struck. The premonition of events about to catapult him into another literary key, the fear that Something was going to Happen, was so overpowering that it routed out all his other thoughts. It invaded, like the thunder of an approaching tidal wave, the pleasant plash of reminiscence. What key?

  As the water drummed into the tub he quickly and rather frantically reviewed the rules and unities of this Marquandian world into which he had so easily issued himself a life membership, as in one of the better clubs, to check once more his qualifications for it. What was it?

  It could be defined as a Paradise without a serpent. But there was always, in the Marquandian apple, a worm. Be it a secret concealed in the rosy pulps of respectability or merely a gnawing discontent, or that social bête noire of larger scale, the Cost of Success (the price of money)—it was always there. What in God’s name could it possibly be in his case? He had no money, so no one could be sending him a bill for that; and since he was only a peripheral success (as he was a peripheral New Englander) he need fear no moral duns on that account. A gnawing discontent everyone had—even the dull clods in the novels of Knut Hamsun. Then it must be some secret come to haunt him from his past.

  But what?

  Could it be something connected with what his wife had shouted, and was now shouting again through the closed door and the running water both, and that he had deliberately misheard the first time?

  He heard it clearly enough now. Crystal opened the door and called into the clouds of steam: “Don’t dawdle, for heaven’s sake. You’re late for Miss Appleyard already.”

  “Miss Appleyard?”

  “The new sitter, the new sitter. You’ve got to pick her up. What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you? You may have trouble finding her house because it’s way across town, so allow for that. Shake a leg, Chick.”

  The name, penetrating his thoughts at last, scattered them like a truncheon dispersing a host of idlers. The wheels of memory spun; whirled to a stop. He sat erect in the tub.

  “Sweetie Appleyard?” he said. “Surely not her. Surely not Sweetie.”

  “Miss Appleyard is all the name the agency gave me. And the address.” Crystal opened the medicine chest and unscrewed the cap from a jar of cream. “Seven something Beacon Street. I’ve got it jotted down there. I think it’s seven-eighteen.”

  “That’s her. That’s Sweetie.”

  He laughed—a chuckle of relief as well as of recall. Then that was all there was going to be to it. A flashback. He was going to be treated to a flashback. And what was more Marquandian than that?

  Yet as he squeezed out the lathered sponge and felt the suds trickle down his back, he wasn’t so sure he was sure …

  Not all flashbacks are Marquandian, and this might be not the present flashing back at all but the past bolting forward, a missile held in long suspension and now shot from the abruptly let-go spring of time to meet you as you flew in antic retrograde to meet it, that name plucked out of all happenstance to exact not contemplation but its opposite, the reluctant recapitulation of all lost years, yourself a target with no less velocity than the arrow streaking toward it in bland outrage even though you knew it was already quivering in its mark, coming in monstrous javelinlike amplification both of speed and size through the clearing chiaroscuro of vapor billowing in violent dispersal through the open door, scattering now. and possibly forever the ephemeral scented soaps and steams of old assumptions—

  My God, what kind of stuff was this! He sat up in the tub now in genuine alarm. This wasn’t Marquand at all! Then what was it? he asked himself shakily. What ominous vein was this in which his mind was running, in which it had galloped off of itself? He could place it vaguely but—

  Could the Marquandian device of recapitulation misfire and, like a bungled rocket take-off or a bit of magic gone awry, land you in another world? Clear in that of, for instance …

  No. He couldn’t say it. It would be too awful. He wanted to stay in this world he knew, that enveloped him like this warm bath. The worm was serpent enough for him!

  Yet he knew very well how plainly he was thinking it, the name he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say, even to himself.

  He knew all too well, now, what was happening to him.

  2

  “SO you say you knew this girl in school?” Crystal said, kneading her hands with the cream as she stood watching him bathe twice as fast as before, the water agitated as though by the same prose that was churning his head.

  “Yes. Well, I’ll be damned. Sweetie Appleyard turning up after all these years as a sitter for my children.” He shook his head with that readiness for trite philosophy that the slightest sign of rhythm of pattern in our lives inspires. “It’ll be like old times.”

  “How old?”

  She flipped an electric switch with that effect of languor in which women cage their howling curiosities, letting in light as she had air, dispersing the gloom along with the steam in which he might for the moment have preferred to remain wreathed, the light imploding on his senses as the name had upon his memory. He averted his head long enough to gnash his teeth for this as for all human bother, softening it into a smile as he said, “Well now, I can’t have seen her since … let me see … She used to visit a grandmother who lived on our street, and as children we played among the flowers and trees. At Sweetie’s own house we’d climb the orchard boughs and all that jazz. Time passed. We found ourselves in the same grade for one year when they rearranged the school districts. Perhaps it was the eighth. Queer sort of girl, always running off into the woods and reading poetry. It must be ten years since I’ve seen her. Doesn’t she ring any kind of bell, lambswool? Beth Appleyard! That was her name.”

  “Wait a minute. Isn’t that the girl there was some scandal about in high school? Don’t tell me.” She put her hand to her brow like a medium in a trance, the light catching her bracelet, which had that look serene benedictive and forlorn that inherited jewelry has. The hand came down. “She cheated in an oratorical contest.”

  “You’re right! I forgot about that. She got clear to the national finals with a speech lifted bodily from Daniel Webster. Horrible embarrassment in Washington, finals were to be in the Senate. But there she was in the papers, waving like a fool from the train platform with her arms full of flowers and her straw hat over her eyes. She hadn’t known ‘entries should be original and not assembled from available material.’ How the principal must have slaved over that statement. That was our district champ. That was our Sweetie.”

  “Wouldn’t it be a lot later than eighth grade? Yes, the contest was high school. And if you saw her ten years ago, it’d be even after that. When we were going togeth
er.”

  “Her grandmother hovers over my memory like a particular phantom,” he said with that anger savage and defunctive of a cornered rat, thinking I don’t mind being the rat driven through numberless doors behind one of which lies food, but I’ll be damned if I’ll be the food too. “The Appleyards and the grandmother were always exchanging visits, in those far-off childhood days, so we got to know the old woman too, God rest her. Well, she had a dog that chewed gum … Why do you look at me like that? Why should I lie to you?”

  “I don’t know, but every time you do you start this nervous gibbering.” Crystal stood wringing her buttered hands with the most ludicrous air of portent, as though minding the theft, abduction, lust and murder with which the term “sitter” is latterly encrusted. The sitter is our latest American folklore, he told himself, who told himself also don’t holler till you’re hurt, but whose foreknowledge that he was going to be hurt was the same as being hurt already, the wound and the wretched wriggling to elude it one. “And you couldn’t possibly have forgotten that oratorical scandal. Why did you pretend to? Changing the subject instead to those densely wooded areas you say she went to read poetry in—”

  “I didn’t say densely wooded areas—I said in the woods. Densely wooded areas is a tabloid cliché for where girls’ bodies oh never mind.”

  “I know. But why did you omit that oratorical scandal? Some impulse to shield this Lovey as you call her?”

  “Sweetie. It was her nickname. Her name was Elizabeth, I imagine. Her grandmother’s name was Rodriguez or Bonheur or something like that, which was typical of the baroque strain that ran rather deeply in that family. So get ready. You know writers tell us that children’s perceptions are the purest? Well, the first glimpse I got of the grandmother, it struck me that her fingers were like fried bananas. And I knew that if she had any legal documents they would be upstairs in ginger cans. That sort of thing.”