The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel Page 4

“We’ll have to catch her,” Appleyard said, for Sweetie had again glided from view.

  That rang a bell.

  For many years local artists had seen in her romantic possibilities as the Goose Girl or the Milkmaid, and thus it was that painters and illustrators, themselves representing versions of dishevelment, were often seen gesticulating down to the river shouting offers of employment, only to see her dive into the water and reappear, all Nereid, on the opposite bank to taunt them. Or clamber up the maple into the treehouse.

  “Let’s just forget it,” Charles said. “We can call the agency and get another—”

  “No,” said Appleyard, whose idea it had been that she try a bit of sitting. But it was not he who brought matters to a resolution.

  Mme. Piquepuss marched into the vestibule. Taking a position at the foot of the staircase up which Sweetie had whisked, she began flailing the newelpost with her stick in a manner that chilled Charles’s blood. She looked at the post she beat, as though it were a head out of which she were bashing the brains. It was clearly a tested means of bringing the girl round, for here she came down the stairs like a summoned child, pouting and smelling yet another rose.

  “She’s an Emily Dickinson without talent,” Appleyard declared. He grasped Swallow by the arm again and wheeled him back into the living room for a last word while the grandmother got Sweetie into some sort of sartorial shape.

  “Now don’t stay out too late,” he told Swallow, with the first show of authority the latter had seen him make. “Get back by eleven, or twelve at the latest.”

  “Yes, sir. And don’t worry, because the boys are reliable. They’ll get her out of the house in case of fire or anything.”

  “Good. And one more thing. Don’t let her make you pay her in things of the spirit, like books or flowers. Make her take money.”

  They stood watching the scene in the vestibule. Sweetie was seated on a Shaker chest while Mme. Piquepuss wedged high-heeled shoes on her feet. The elder stood with her back to Sweetie and Sweetie’s foot between her legs, like a blacksmith shoeing a horse, tugging and grunting in a determined fashion.

  “I’m most anxious to see how this sitting thing works out,” Appleyard said. “We must all work together to get Sweetie out of her shell.”

  “She needs some responsibility, is what she needs.”

  Appleyard suddenly transferred his scrutiny from the hall to Charles.

  “Say, this advice column you run in the Picayune Blade—what’s the name of it again?”

  “The Lamplighter. They won’t hear of changing the name, though of course the old-fashioned banalities are a thing of the past. We use the psychological attack today, and I’m trying to get subtlety O.K.’d by the front office—”

  “That’s just what I was thinking—the psychological. By George, you may be just the man to get Sweetie straightened around. I never thought till just now—helping people with their problems is your job.” He squeezed Charles’s arm in an access of optimism. “We’ll keep in touch.”

  Sweetie wobbled uncertainly on the high heels as, snatching up a beaded bag, she started for the door. Was it the same old beaded bag as always? Very possibly. A normal-looking flannel coat muffled the note of romanticism struck by the dress, though her unsteady legs—which necessitated Swallow taking her arm like a more experienced ice skater supporting a beginner with weak ankles—restored to their passage across the porch and down the stairs the element of the unusual. Sweetie looked more than ever like a girl playing grownup. A family watching from a porch across the street gave him the momentary feeling of “doing a fine thing,” though where they imagined he was taking her God only knew. They crossed the lawn and climbed into the car to additional shouts of encouragement from the elders. As they shut the doors he heard, in the depths of the house, a telephone begin insistently to ring.

  “Tell Mrs. Swallow we’re on our way!” he called as, slipping the car into gear, he shot off down the street like a madman.

  4

  SO we have the story of a man who wanted to settle down and be a comfortably-off Marquand character for the rest of his days but couldn’t because of something Faulknerian in his past. So far so good. Or bad. The problem was how to get back. Back to the literary key from which he had been so violently transposed, the world from which he had been so shatteringly dispossessed, or, failing that, the compromise world in which he might settle in between. Mme. Piquepuss was a formidable figure and a Proustian phase might be indicated for brief intervals and for the lubrication of such diplomacies as dealing with her might entail, but to crystallize permanently in such a form was unthinkable. Likewise sustaining the Faulknerian pitch for the rest of his days: he would rather end them now—removed, cauterized out of the old and tragic flank of the world.

  For the moment, why not put the problem out of mind? Its other principal was for the moment herself quiescent in the front seat beside me. I figured that I might as well improve the interlude—to drop the third-person guise assumed in order to objectify as much as possible the inauguration of events relating all too dismally to myself—I figured I might as well take advantage of the ten minutes’ ride to my house by studying my burden.

  Sweetie sat huddled against the door of the front seat as though on guard against unfriendly blows. Her great chocolate eyes, which watched me in silence as I drove, had the mute reproach of a street dog confident of its breeding in the face of widespread public disapproval, or hostility. Now and then she drew a gold locket back and forth across its chain with something of the apathy of the mad. I was glad to see her stop this and dig out of the beaded bag a comb and mirror with which she began to tidy her hair.

  “Isn’t that the rear-view mirror from an automobile you’ve got there?” I had noted a knob, as for a swivel joint, on its back surface.

  She stowed the paraphernalia back without answering my question, and settled over again in her corner.

  “I used to sing for you.” She spoke with a rueful air, leaving unclear whether what was to be regretted was the time when all this had occurred or the fact that it had. “I have awful pitch.”

  “That’s all right. I’m tone-deaf. So that was always all right, Beth.”

  “Shall I sing something now?”

  “No, don’t do that.”

  “Because we can’t recall the past?”

  I bore down on the accelerator, gnashing my teeth as we cut through traffic.

  “Whom did you marry, finally?”

  Finally. Dear God, must the assumption that there’d been a “triangle,” that I might still not have her “out of my system” and all the silly rest of it, add its weight to the sum of nuisances flapping like vultures about my head?

  “I don’t know whether you ever knew a girl named Crystal Chickering,” I said. “Her father was an advice columnist on the Pick. I married her, and I now conduct the column.”

  “I don’t place the girl but I remember the column now. Of course! You’re the Muffin Man, or something like that.”

  She raised an arm to ward off my upraised hand, which I reached behind her to make sure the door against which she leaned was locked, as I often do with children riding in the front seat. “No, I’m the Lamplighter,” I said. I mused rather sourly on my solicitude for one destined to do me harm—probably—a hunch that I now felt I had instantly had on hearing the name of the sitter in my bath. Sweetie took me in again with that air of evaluating not just myself but all life’s unabating dismal developments.

  “So they’ve put you in a tweed cap with little teensy checks and set you behind the wheel of a Buick and said, ‘Be one of us. Conform.’ They’ve given you a house to keep up the payments on and an office with a typewriter to sit behind—you, Charles Swallow, who used to read Shelley to me—and set you to work turning out platitudes for morons.”

  “Odd as it may seem, a good many people are helped by these platitudes,” I answered. “They write me telling me so, and thanking me for my advice. I’ve even straightened a few
lives out. How do you like that? I could show you letters.”

  “What are some of the letters? Not those you get thanking you, but the ones asking for help.”

  “Don’t you ever read the column?”

  “I never read newspapers. What are some of the problems people have?”

  “Well, today, for instance, I got a letter beginning, ‘Dear Lamplighter: I know I can make my marriage work if I can only find my husband.’ Another went, ‘My daughter has become engaged to three chaps. For years I’ve been after her to get a boy friend, like other girls, and get married. Now lo and behold she gets three, making the situation hopeless. Where do we go from here? Is this what I deserve as a mother?’ and so on. Cries of pain, pleas from the depths. Trying to help is a responsibility I take seriously.”

  “What will you write these people?”

  “The first I’ll probably refer to the Bureau of Missing Persons, and then when she’s found her husband, most likely have them both in for a talk. The other woman is a different kettle of fish. I shall tell her quite frankly ‘Madam, what prompts your daughter to acquire three fiancés is a fear of marriage. She wants the situation to be hopeless, because as long as it is she’s free of the clutches of an institution you’ve discredited for her as something to be nagged and chivvied into, rather than a beautiful human relationship. Your daughter may be undersexed—I would have to see her to find out. Please feel free to phone my office and make a date any time.’ So sneer all you want. I at least do my bit to try to relieve suffering humanity. You don’t know what goes on in the world, up there in your treehouse, Sweetie.”

  She tucked up the collar of her coat and shivered a little. “Maybe I know only too well,” she said.

  In the interval of silence in which we again drove, I felt I might have been a bit harsh with Sweetie; to repair the mood that had fallen between us I resumed chattily in the vein of old-school-friend reminiscence that her query about my marriage had in a sense generated.

  “Do you remember a girl named Elsie something? Elsie Wayne I believe it was,” I said. “She took ballet lessons every Saturday morning at Mrs. Meyer’s. What ever happened to her?”

  “They’ve put her in a frilly apron and locked her up in a chintz prison. A little jail with pretty chintz curtains on the kitchen windows, and there they keep her very well. They’ve put a broom in her hand and the last I heard she had four children. That was several years ago. Didn’t you have a sister named Lila? What’s become of her?”

  “Nothing’s ‘become’ of her, Sweetie. Get over the idea that something ‘becomes’ of all of us. Lila married Nickie Sherman, my old sidekick.”

  “Are they happy?”

  “Very.”

  This was not true. But all truth is relative, and I felt that what was called for here was a corrective to Sweetie’s warped view of life, not an answer to her question. The problem was not whether the Shermans were happy but how to get Sweetie down out of the treehouse. I might as well begin on that now. It had been put on my docket. Urgency justified a false answer, one as false as I had given in reply to her estimate of the idiocy of my work, though that estimate was precisely one I had made that afternoon to my wife when she had taken, against me, the line I had just taken against Sweetie. Unable to bear Crystal’s insinuations that I had a good job and ought to be grateful, I had flung my shirt and tie across the bedroom and declared that I could no longer go on pumping out bilge for morons. Just as, when next I encountered the amused smile with which Nickie Sherman habitually greeted mention of my employment, I would defend its value against the vacuity of wastrels like himself. Fidelity to large truths often requires betrayal of small ones.

  “Do you know Nickie Sherman?” I asked, suddenly seeming to remember Nickie’s having once described Sweetie as “the barefoot bluestocking.” But it must have been someone else, because she shook her head and said, “No, I don’t know him.”

  “Well, anyway, here we are at my house,” I said, with no great stomach for that development.

  Crystal was waiting for us under the porch light. Its rays cast a shimmer into her cropped hair and along the brown silk of her dress. She looked extraordinarily fresh and electric, up there, and I rejoiced in her appearance though it was one to which anger may have lent an additional sparkle. Overhead dangled a set of wind chimes we’d picked up on a “second honeymoon,” motionless now in the numb June air but soon enough to be plucked loose and swept away by a hurricane. Crystal clattered down the wooden stairs to greet us, the racket she made excessive, I thought, punitive. I opened the car door for Sweetie and we repeated our impression of two ice skaters one of whom was teaching the other. Her ankles buckled violently as she clutched my arm.

  “This is our sitter, dear, Miss Appleyard. My wife.”

  Slipping a pale hand into Crystal’s hospitable grasp, Sweetie conferred upon her mistress that measuring gaze which was both shy and presumptuous. The scrutiny was prolonged to a full notation of the other’s fine points, the felicities of face and form by dint of which “they” had been able to snatch me from freedom into bondage, to translate me from the intellectual anarchies of Shelley to that class of men who seriously purchase souvenirs like wind chimes for attachment to the front porch. Crystal sized Sweetie up in shorter order. Singularity is more easily pegged than normality, it being cloudless natures and clear façades that excite us to remarks like “I can’t figure him out” or “She throws me,” while devious and even dastardly behavior we take in stride as understandable in the face of life’s complexity. Crystal had long ago ticketed the newcomer as a Nervous Girl while that girl was still imbibing the wonder of one able to look so spruce after a day in the Chintz Prison and to stand so affably poised on heels as high as her own.

  “I’ll introduce you to the children, and then we really must be off,” said Crystal and trotted toward the house, again with a clatter aimed at meting out rebuke. I moved at moderate speed, not to be on anybody’s “side.” Sweetie wobbled up the stairs behind us, holding to the banister and developing a smile of anticipation for the adventure. I held the door open for her while Crystal galloped ahead and set up a shouting for the boys. Mike and Fillmore appeared and were introduced, then Crystal took Sweetie into the kitchen for the usual sitter’s briefing—phone numbers, where things were, and so on. Acting unhesitatingly on her title, Sweetie sat. She opened her coat and asked, “What about antidotes? I heard of a …” I herded the boys into the nearby bedroom and gave them a few last-minute instructions.

  “Fix her a bite of supper,” I told Mike, who was just short of ten. “A sandwich will do and I think there’s some potato salad in the icebox. By no means let her turn the stove on or anything of that sort. If you want to call us, we’ll be at the Groteguts’. See that Fillmore is bathed and in bed by nine-thirty. Fill, see that Mike turns in by ten. Make sure Blitzstein has water. All this will give you ninety units for the week.”

  “This one doesn’t seem very reliable,” Mike said, peering worriedly down the corridor toward the kitchen. “She’s funny.”

  “Read to her. Gain her confidence. We’ll keep in touch—and we’ll be back early.”

  I had a hurried drink in the living room, where, having finished with Sweetie, Crystal found me. Her mouth tight as a seam, she beckoned me off with a jerk of her head that drew a flash of fire from her earrings. I marched behind her toward the front door. From the depths of the hall closet I felt a hand clutch my coat sleeve as I passed, and Sweetie whispered, “She’s right for you.”

  I drew her out and, shaking her roughly by the shoulders, said, “Stop talking nonsense! I must insist that you stop all this twaddle right away. Now there’s an end of it!”

  Crystal was kissing the boys good-by on the porch, taking care not to soil herself. She spread a hand across a large bow at the neck of her dress. She looked like someone bending over a water fountain to drink. Sweetie watched through the screen door with that smile which found the occult in everyday things. Behind the hous
e Blitzstein could be heard baying at the end of his chain—dragging his house another inch or two across the yard with each leap into the air. Irked by the error of his acquisition, I turned on the boys and said: “Don’t leave any telephones off the hook now, for heaven’s sake. If you do, I don’t know how many units I’ll take away.” We had extensions everywhere, including the laundry, which often resulted in people forgetting to cradle phones after passing a call on to someone elsewhere in the house, by means of a lot of co-operative yelling, or after taking their own calls to other rooms for privacy, etc. So that, though we had five telephones, we could rarely be reached.

  I sped toward the Groteguts’ with the same distraught haste as I’d driven home in, though I dreaded getting there. Nickie had described the Groteguts’ dinners as food for thought; big and boring and symptomatic of the divorce between social life and friendship. Crystal had called the Shermans, canceling the plan for us to pick them up, as a result of my delay in fetching the sitter.

  “What took you so long?” They were her first words in the car.

  “We were talking about old times.”

  “How old?”

  I reaffirmed my plan to check irrelevancies and all snowballing damned nonsense, from whatever quarter, and to give clear notice of this. On the seat between us was a novel Crystal had borrowed from a woman who would also be at the party. Briefly waggling which, I said:

  “How did you like this?”

  “Oh, all right. But why must novelists keep romanticizing prostitutes? I mean must we still have that? And the way they keep referring to it as a profession. Marriage is regarded as a trade.”

  “Wonderful,” I said, taking honest pride in the quip. Was this the girl I married? No, thank God! She had come a long way from the provincial innocent I’d courted to the rather waspish woman of the world which a decade of marriage to me had made of her—no point in being modest about that. Of course her verbal humor was at its best when her mental humor was not, but that is the nature of wit, is it not? “What else? About the book. I know the man has a style as heavy as lead, but what else? Pour it on, ducks.”