The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel Page 10

  The house was of the contemporary order undoubtedly dear to glaziers, and was set in a most uneven terrain. The property totaled seven acres, which had seemed ample protection when bought in a bygone July, but with the first shedding of autumn foliage were discovered to be mostly vertical; so that in anything but dense summer the Flickendens found themselves sitting in a nude hollow ringed by neighbors watching from nearby porches of a more traditional cast, like spectators in an amphitheater. Even now, barefoot children could be seen stealing down the wooded slopes to witness the revels.

  “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw parties,” said a voice at my side.

  Nickie had on a tight salt-and-pepper coat, jodhpurs and leather puttees, and a tweed cap worn with the peak behind. I took this in uncertainly. “I thought you were coming as an ass,” I said. It wasn’t until Lila twitched up to us in a short flapper dress and rope pearls that the idea began to take shape, and then only partially. We guessed she was a star of the silent screen, but Nickie’s part in the gag wasn’t clear until he explained, “I’m her favorite cameraman,” executing a brief pantomime of cranking a handle. It was very cute, and one of the hits of the evening. Trust him to do something sweet and second-fiddlish just when you had your belly full of him.

  It would be a mistake, however, to think that there could be any mood between us when he hadn’t but to embrace an opinion for me to abandon it. To a knot of us forming there, I was expounding the position that women artists failed to equal the masterpieces of men because of an inability, or unwillingness, to plumb the dark side of life when I noted the nodding gleam which prefaced Nickie’s adoption of your opinion for more brilliant summation, and prepared to scrap it in mid-statement. So that by the time he opened his trap I had certain rebuttals ready.

  “Chick has a point there, definitely,” he said, speaking for the special benefit of a lovely girl in a Japanese kimono who had just joined the group. “Most women novelists, for instance, don’t really delineate good and evil, not by our standards anyway, but degrees of good. Take Jane Austen. A villain by her would pass comfortably for a stuffed shirt in the world of almost any contemporary writer.”

  “Oh, fiddlesticks,” I said, through the girl’s laughter. “You’re oversimplifying it.”

  “But isn’t that what you just …?”

  “Not at all. I was making a distinction between men and women, and you’ve twisted it into one between the past and present. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

  There was a confused lull. At which Nickie flung out his own topic for conversation.

  “Guess what,” he said, darting a malicious glance at me. “Pete Cheshire is out. Heard it on the radio a while ago. Let out for good behavior. Did only a couple years of his sentence, if that.”

  “Oh,” said the girl in the kimono, “isn’t that the jewel thief who called himself the Smoothie? And didn’t you put him away?”

  In addition to giving Nickie the spotlight as Cheshire’s adversary the news had for him the further value of irritating me. My ignorance of developments meant that Cheshire had been paroled to someone other than the Lamplighter, this time. Not that I wanted him in my hair again, God knew, but it injured one’s pride not to have been consulted. Nickie launched a profound analysis of Cheshire’s character that suddenly made me prick up my ears to the realization that it wasn’t in the Conan Doyle vein that he fancied himself at all, but something a cut subtler. What literary wave length was this? Tantalized, I listened.

  “All hopes of ‘reforming’ a bloke like that are futile because, while he has a morality, it’s turned inside out. You see, the sin was in getting caught, so the redemption can only be the perfect crime—not going straight.”

  “What were you saying a minute ago about a tortured psyche?” I said. “Would you develop that?” It was coming to me, the literary beat here. A little more of this and I would have it.

  “Morons, too, can be complex. I was trying to suggest that Pete’s rather involved make-up requires him to live down, not his crime, but his arrest. It’s almost a religious drive with him, this urge to meet all the clichés—you might even say the Ten Commandments—of his trade. He’s got to Strike When Least Expected, and all the rest of it. It wouldn’t surprise me if he pulled a job tonight—the day of his release. It’s a kind of inverted Ethic with him, pulling a baffler—the final expiation for past shortcomings.”

  Graham Greene. Of course. Pinkie and Brighton Rock and all that tortured religiosity. I might have known Nickie didn’t fancy himself anything so old hat as Sherlock Holmes. He wasn’t just a connoisseur of crime—he was a student of sin.

  “I see what you mean,” I said as the others, out of their depth or distracted by newly arriving friends, wandered off one by one till Nickie and I were alone. “Vanity is often at odds with self-interest, and that’s why we sometimes fail to recognize it. But it’s there, operating in the other fellow when we least expect it.”

  I gritted my teeth, waiting for the transformation of this dross into gold.

  “The Ego,” Nickie said at last, nodding agreement, “is the conscience of the psyche.”

  “Cowplop,” I said and, turning on my heel in time to see him in a wall mirror shaking his head after me, flounced out of the room. Area rather, for the house was of the one-vast-space variety in which rooms derive their identity solely from the arrangement of the furniture. Having flounced out of the living area into the dining, I got myself a drink at the bar there and sat down in a corner to get myself in a Graham Greene frame of mind. If that was the way he was playing it, that was the way I would have to play it—if I was to handle him intelligently and properly conclude what I had begun. I could look into the kitchen area and see the telephone—a stick of dynamite timed to go off at twelve. Two hours and a half to establish the evening firmly on Graham Greene lines.

  Decency was for a Eastern city remarkable in the number of people who refused to be converted. They continued to burn coal. Old houses were the rule, Colonial cottages whose owners felt the purr of oil furnaces at odds with original floors buckled into precarious angles and beams on which heads were struck. These hazards had an obscure hilarity, as of New England consciences uneasily appeased, Puritan ancestors from whom the properties had been unworthily inherited permitted to rest in peace for another generation. Sleekly contemporary homes like the Flickendens’ were still comfortably the exception; perhaps the suburban element they augured could yet be held at bay; the commuters stopped at the gates.

  For this Decency was in a favored pocket of Connecticut. Beyond the commuting limits, it was outside suburbia, exurbia, and all the rest. But briefly during the summer there was a scattering of New Yorkers who week-ended at the waterside cottages. The Cape was too far for them, Westport not far enough. They were professional people mostly, and a handful of British UN personnel. There was a growing clique of the last whom American hostesses like Helen Flickenden yearned to mix with the local residents, in vain. The elements kept separating as inevitably as cream and milk in a bottle.

  It was simple to tell the British from the Americans, even without the clues of speech and through the dense thickets of disguise. The English ate as they talked; the Americans merely talked while they ate. It was churlish to note the trick of style—there was a thousand years of history behind the one; no doubt a millennium would suffice for the raw young country straining in its materialist traces, sweating to produce more air conditioners, more snorkels and ballpoint pens than any other, while its parent would go on from prime to senility, dribbling her gruel and owing all the world. Meanwhile the hog bestrode the world, scattering its billions to all who wanted. It had not yet learned the civilized knack of the French to nick you for just what the traffic will bear.

  Swallow felt an old pain beginning to throb. One couldn’t help preferring the English as one’s spiritual sort, yet the betrayal always exacted its price. Nothing so intimately bound Swallow to his own kind as the pathos with which he viewed their unwort
hiness. He sat with eyes hooded and finger tips grazing the green shag rug that lay like an indoor turf in half the American homes, while the cock crew and crew. The difference in the costumes crucified him. Contrasted with the quiet originality of the Englishmen’s was the strident banality of the natives’. There were three or four pirates, a few skeletons, another troglodyte to keep the house guest company. A rangy man wandered by in a checked shirt and black string bowtie; leaving unclear whether he was a Bohemian artist or a cattleman of the olden time. A human fish swam into view, enigmatically flourishing a tuning fork. Its wife pointed to it and said “Don’t you get it? Al’s a tuna—a piano tuna.” The lash of pity came down. Swallow closed his eyes. He heard the fish say, making off, “Got to practice my scales.” When he opened his eyes again it was to see Bulwinkle standing in front of him. Across his middle was a canvas vendor’s apron, in the pockets of which he kneaded fistfuls of change. “Extra peebah!” he was saying. “Read all about it. Extra!” His fly was open, adding a fathom to Swallow’s despair.

  When Swallow dared to open his eyes again it was to see another chap from the Pick office, an advertising space salesman. Dressed as Satan, he shyly fingered a trident.

  “You look like the devil in that, Art,” Swallow joked.

  Guilt demanded that he acknowledge his citizenship by calling out vacuities in the manner of Americans. That brought the knout down with twice its sting. The pain was an anodyne to guilt. He squirmed till a loose spring in his chair was wedged more uncomfortably against his haunch. The need to expiate never ended. He was glad to see a dead bug in his drink. When there was nothing else to wince under, he winced under the need to wince. He glanced at the telephone, braced for that anguish. A stick of dynamite timed to go off at twelve …

  A couple entered of whom the man looked familiar. He wore a sort of dual costume. In faultless evening dress above the waist, he was in tramp’s rags below. On his arm was a slender ash-blonde woman of forty, draped as Guinevere. “Charles has come as a schizophrenic,” she laughed, and Swallow put his hands to his face.

  He had recognized Appleyard in the tails and baggy pants. The latter’s plot was laid bare in a flash, which also clarified to Swallow his own role as its butt. Appleyard wanted to marry again, and for that had to get his daughter off his hands. What woman, least of all this Arthurian beauty, would put up with the likes of Sweetie? Was this to be a fresh voice in the chorus demanding miracles of Swallow while they heaped him with slurs?

  Appleyard had spotted him and was piloting his prize over. An introduction was impossible to avoid. Swallow experienced the wave of nausea we feel in the presence of superlative beauty. He rose, steeling himself to meet her. She was a seaboard type he certainly knew: the women with eyes like coins in whose metallic laughter lurked the ghost of girlish mirth, the years of Vassar or Wellesley, of autographed raincoats and furtive snacks after Lights Out; the love of boys so quickly hardened into competition for men, the husband who could give them what their mothers had scrupulously taught them to forage for: the fifty thousand a year and the house in Rye with the turf of rug like this, the servant and a half and the wine-colored Cadillac. And daughters to train to avoid what their mothers had them: the cottage in Tenafly with a man who left his spoon in his coffee when he drank, hooking his thumb around it, and children with allergies who played pieces; the winters of “activities” in the Godforsaken Methodist church and the stinking summers on the back porch with root beer and cookies and a neighbor baritone singing “Shipmates o’ Mine.” She would have buried or shed a husband or two already, and Appleyard would not be the last. But Swallow wanted her because her lipstick was ragged.

  “Hello, hello.” Appleyard smelled of some costly concentrate for men. Was this just the upper half of him, while he reeked of some abomination below? “I’d like to present Mrs. Bickerstaffe. Eve, this is Mr. Swallow, the chap I was telling you about.”

  A pair of pruned eyebrows rose in greeting. “Oh, yes. Of course. Delighted.” The accent wasn’t Eastern at all, but English. “We must have a little chat. Charles, do get us drinks.”

  She was unmistakably British. In her voice rustled the thin paper on which the air editions of the better English journals are printed, in America used for wiping eyeglasses and binding cigarettes. Perhaps the Americans saw too clearly to have vision? They lacked the touch of fog responsible for the mysticism that made English poetry great. Swallow saw her nose was irregular; he looked for more of the flaws that breed desire through pity. Her hair was darker at the roots … he felt the bowels of mercy stir. If her stocking seams were crooked, he would want her then and there.

  He threw a stricken look at the terrace door, a thousand miles away. Through it swept a bell-shaped woman in dense veils who bore mercifully down on Mrs. Bickerstaffe and began a story about a waxwing in her yard that had built its nest of coleslaw strands. With the instinctive courtesy of the British, Mrs. Bickerstaffe turned her back on Swallow, no doubt sensing his embarrassment. Over his shoulder he saw the back of Appleyard’s tailcoat. “I must tell Charles something,” he murmured, and chased it toward the bar.

  He tapped Appleyard on the shoulder.

  “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, old man.”

  “What?”

  “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. It slipped both our minds. The individual relives the history of the race. Boys enact the hunting and fishing era, children naturally seek out caves, corners below stairs, any dark hole. That’s ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Ask anybody.”

  Appleyard chewed a canapé plucked from a passing tray, wiping a finger across his brow like a squeegee across a pane of glass.

  “Eve’s crazy about you.”

  “But we’ve only just met!”

  “I’ve told her all about you. She’s delightful, with that charm that—understands. She wants to know you better.”

  “And how is Sweetie?”

  “Granny told me she gave you her poems to read. Have you thought any more about it? I mean, really, what are your plans?”

  “Why, to get her poems printed,” Swallow heard himself say.

  “You forget one thing. They’re not publishable.” Appleyard was picking a flaw in his logic politely, as one picks a bit of cork from a guest’s wineglass. “I’ve read them. They’re like parodies of everybody since ‘The Man with the Hoe.’”

  “That’s how we’ll publish them. As a volume of parodies.”

  Almost peacefully Swallow listened to himself go mad. Were he told it was on the strength of the nonsense he was jabbering that he would have to stand and deliver, he would have gone out and thrown himself into the Sound. Why not? The Atlantic deeps were more a home than this. He was thinking of those serious dramas that are so ludicrous out of town as to be hastily rewritten for the laughs they unintentionally provoked, and brought into New York as successful farces. But that only happened in plays themselves.

  “They’ll have to be completely reworked, of course. Beginning with a whole new viewpoint, a sophistication about herself and what she’s been doing, that we’ll have to develop first. Old man.”

  Appleyard nodded, pursing his lips. “It might just be worth a try. Beerbohm …” he babbled.

  Why must we bleed at every pore for one another, Swallow thought. He said: “I’ll help all I can, of course.”

  “And I’ll see that you’re left alone together, you two.”

  Swallow stumbled across the turf to a divan where he sank between a knave of hearts and a man with his head in a scarf and gold bands hanging from his ears, from which hairs also verdantly sprang. The latter turned, smiling. “I’m a third of a gypsy esemble.”

  “Where are the other two?”

  “They couldn’t come.”

  There was no mistaking the stiff upper lip, the long Anglo-Saxon face. He was English all right, Seeing It Through. English to the marrow of his bones.

  “My name is Gluckstern.”

  Mumbling that he had troubles
of his own, Swallow apologetically rose and staggered back to where Eve Bickerstaffe was still standing, free of the birdlore woman and looking for Appleyard. Swallow had to know what she knew, quickly, before his nerves went.

  When he gained her side, they stood grinning at one another. She tapped the front if his paint-spattered overalls and said, “Heil.”

  “Have you known Charles long?”

  “Oh, yes. Some months.”

  “Then you know the others. Quite a household. I take it you’ve met Mme. Piquepuss.”

  “Rather!”

  “And Sweetie?”

  “Ah.” Appleyard’s arm thrust a drink toward her. He didn’t join them, being occupied with someone else a few feet away. “Strange case.” Eve Bickerstaffe drank, after a gesture to his health. She watched him as she sipped, as though waiting for him to speak.

  “Yes, she is a strange case. No one quite knows what she’s thinking. Of course I’ve been rather close to her—closer than anyone in some ways—and the family sort of expect me to—pull her out of it. Appleyard—Charles had told you some version of something, away back, I suppose?”

  “It’s too bad, of course. Yes, some brouhaha down cellar or something. I’m not quite sure I … What happened exactly?”

  “I know now what it was.”

  Swallow drew a deep breath, taking care not to inhale the crumbs of a canapé, and looked over her head, analytically squinting one eye.

  “You see, Sweetie always roused in you the protective instinct. That appealing helplessness …” he said. “You wanted to shield her, put an arm around her and … reach out, um …”

  “I understand.”

  Eve Bickerstaffe drank again, watching him with a gentle gravity.