The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel Read online

  “He’s hopeless,” said my sister as we sat in the Grotegut library that rotten night in June. “Not that you’re much better yourself, at times. ‘You hardly know him.’ God.”

  “I’ll stand by that remark,” I said. “Two people should know one another inside out, till they can see in a clear and charitable light what produces the frailties that produce the tensions, and what if anything can be done about them. Nickie’s tried, Lila—he has. He’s sworn off being a Restoration wit several times for your and the children’s sake, promised, like a drunkard taking the pledge, to come home and talk United States, only to go back to it each time, like a drunkard to drink. That should show you that, like drink, it springs from some inner conflict or problem that we evidently haven’t gotten to yet.”

  “I knew him better when I first met him than I do now.”

  “You’re a simple girl, without a bent for those paradoxes of his, the intellectual life and all, and I rather think that may be part of the rub. He seems affectionate enough, at parties and all, holding your hand and what not. The soul of domesticity.”

  “Shouldn’t that begin at home?”

  “It’s because you’re not up to the repartee that you say things like that, and are bitter. But try to understand what it means to him, what makes him tick, produces the particular esprit that is Nickie. Only when it’s certain nothing can be done, that the ride will never be worth the tolls, should two people throw up the sponge and call a marriage quits.”

  “I’ve had enough tolls, not to mention bumps and detours. No, I want out.”

  We sank into glum silence. Lila dug a cigarette from a pack, twirling it characteristically in her lips to wet the tip. She snapped at a pocket lighter which at first resisted ignition, then yielded a tongue of flame that lapped the length of the cigarette and half her nose: the fruit of repairs recently made to it by the glittering lad under discussion.

  I walked the width of the room, frowning in troubled thought. I gave my belt a hitch, and announced to her quietly: “Lila, Nickie has a touch of schizophrenia.”

  My sister laughed rather acidly through her burnt nose. “There’s a lot of that going around, isn’t there?”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do with you, Lila. I’m going to give this thing my full attention.”

  She looked up in alarm. She set her glass down, now almost empty, and said:

  “Chick. Chick, I’m going to tell you something straight from the shoulder. No holds barred, no punches pulled, no nothing.”

  She picked up her drink, but only to revolve its dregs in their ice a moment before setting it nervously down again.

  “People are talking about you. You’re the butt of a lot of—Now, wait. You run this column. Readers write you about their homey little problems—should they change jobs and how long ought a mother-in-law visit—and as long as it’s just that it’s fine. But when you bring them into your office and start messing around in their psyches—”

  “I seem to remember having helped your husband once. Case of amnesia, wasn’t it?”

  “Into which you drove him with your therapy.”

  I really could not let this pass.

  “I drove him into it?” I said, standing over her. “You did. By cracking that burglary case he couldn’t, thereby making yourself so intolerable to his ego he had to forget who you were. A fugue, we call that. Your marriage very nearly went on the rocks then, baby. I pulled it through.”

  “And here we are again. Which beings me to the second of the ways you’re playing with fire—marriage counselor. Now don’t flap your arms around like a windmill. Here are the facts. You take this intellectual, this Ivy Leaguer, and convince him he should be a cop—a dick—”

  “It was my considered opinion, based on a careful analysis of his aptitudes, that criminology was a good niche for him.”

  “That brings us to number three of the methods by which you spread confusion.”

  I stood at the window with my back to her, drawing patiently on a cigarette. I could hear, or perhaps just sense, her turning toward me in her chair.

  “Chick, do you know what people call you?”

  “What?”

  “A triple-threat man. Because what you don’t make worse with domestic relations or vocational guidance you use psychoanalysis on. Now don’t stand there snorting smoke. I hate to do this to you, but there’s a slogan going around about you. Betty Franz told me, not to be catty, but because she felt she owed it to us. And I owe it to you to tell you. Would you like to hear what it is?”

  “Not especially.”

  “What they’re saying is, ‘When you think things can’t get any worse, see Chick Swallow.’”

  I had become aware, by gazing through two windows into a room at right angles to this one, of something that had vaguely been seeming to insist on my attention out there. The other room was a sort of lounge, or den, fully illuminated perhaps in expectation of spillover from the party, and in one corner stood a statue of Venus with a radio in her stomach. I smiled at this. I liked it. At that juncture of a really rather painful scene it not only drained off emotional pressure through the loving valve of humor, but, by its reminder of the plane on which after all most human judgment is pitched, offered a bridge to forgiveness as well as a call to patience. It said to me: “Little children, love one another.”

  Turning back into the room, I twisted out my cigarette and said gently, “It’s not just that he don’t plant taters, he don’t plant cotton. It’s a whole view of life that we’ve got to knock out of him. Leave this to me. If I can only—”

  She broke in with a shake of her head, looking into her lap.

  “I don’t want your advice, or anybody’s, any more. That isn’t what I called you in here for. All I want is your blessing, as my brother, before I go to Reno.”

  I stood watching her—watching what was an obvious struggle against tears. They would be damned up now, only to flow later, when she was alone.

  “I withhold that blessing, Lila,” I said, quietly. In the silence, the babel of voices could be heard like a surf beating monotonously against the closed door. “Instead I shall do everything in my power to get you two straightened out. I know that mostly means getting Nickie straightened around, but I mean to take that on again whether you want me to or no. But I must have this one last chance with him. It’s unlikely that I’ll run into him here tonight, and a few words at the buffet table isn’t the way to handle this anyway. I’ll go beard him in his den first thing tomorrow. I want you to promise me you won’t see any lawyers or go boarding any trains to Reno till I’ve had one more go at it. Will you promise?”

  She shrugged, which sufficed as consent.

  “What can I lose?” she said.

  “Just you wait and see!” I said, and, taking her affectionately by the arm, led her out the door and back to the party.

  6

  THE Greek himself was at first all that I saw in the Samothrace. He was behind the cash register, “prostrate on a chair,” as in his current self-pitying mood he called the sitting position when involving himself, turning the pages of an Athenian newspaper with a bored expression.

  His present concern was to “favor his feet,” which he had more than once described as on their last legs. He was forever going to chiropodists, meanwhile undermining what remained of them with health shoes, in which he cut gashes to relieve the pressure just as he would in any others, thus indicating to experts the futility of their measures. Nothing pleased the Greek more than the failure of any ministration or expedient, the mark of the true hypochondriac, and doubtless the chief satisfaction he derived from his visits to the podiatrists was that of regularly certifying their impotence. There was always some organ or area of his body in whose imperviousness to treatment he could take pride. A previous citadel which the specialists had been invited to storm had been his head, long the home of peculiar humming, or buzzing, noises; they had not, to my knowledge, ever been formally eradicated but they were no
longer mentioned, having supposedly served their psychological purpose. His system was like a symphony orchestra of which each instrument was permitted a term of solo self-expression, according to the whim of the conductor. Now it was the feet. When I had once told the Greek that he struck me as a bit hypochondriac, he had replied, “Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised I got that too.”

  After greeting him and dropping a word of commiseration, I became aware that the restaurant was not empty after all.

  Alone at a rear table, his back partly to the door, sat a figure in blue flannels reading a newspaper of his own, recognizable even from here as the London Times Literary Supplement. A cigarette burned in the fingers of one hand and a pony of something stood beside an empty coffee cup. At the sound of my voice Nickie dropped the Lit Sup, as he called it, and waved to me.

  “Well, well. Setzen Sie sich.”

  Drawing out a chair for myself here was no longer a natural act, though a familiar one. I had outlived the period it characterized. These were the same tables at which, suave and heathen, destinationless and suave, we had squandered the golden afternoons of youth, but I was no longer that youth. (To the resolute Proustian, steeped in that genius’s time chemistry, I suppose they were not the same tables either.) Nothing is so alien as the once intimate, once we are parted from it. So that the Samothrace worked in my heart a reverse magic: it was not a cafe in which to partake of food so much as a museum of my lost self, reminding me—but without evoking it—of a past in whose fantastic spirit I had once broken bread. It had not the power to haunt me—I haunted it.

  Seeing His Nibs still at home in the place did me no good either. His blackthorn was on another chair and under the table dozed his dog, a wire-haired Griffon known as Prud’homme. That Nickie saw the name as spelled that way, with the apostrophe, there was now no longer any doubt. A card from Majorca mentioning the animal had confirmed suspicions. The detail made my teeth ache, and injected an added hazard into a name I already had trouble saying, fond as I was of the creature that bore it. The Griffon is a medium-sized dog of great strength and vigor, with a harsh coat like the bristles of a wild boar, into which it is pleasant to rummage down to the relatively silky undercoat. Prud’homme was steel-gray, with splashes of chestnut, and had a very intelligent air.

  “Well so! To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

  “Pause in the day’s occupation,” I answered drily, sitting down. “How did you like the party?”

  “Bore.”

  “Why wasn’t everyone else bored?”

  “They may have lacked the discernment.” Nickie twisted round in his chair and called the Greek. “How about a little drink for our friend?”

  This was going to be worse than I’d thought. I had appraised his habits as a return to dilettantism, but nothing in the vein of the old days quite matched the sort of thing he was doing now. Boredom was a matter of discernment! I said I’d have a straight Bourbon, which the Greek affected not to have heard. He was always pretending not to hear orders, especially those from remote corners of the store, preferring to hug his own corner, and resisting to the last all attempts to dislodge and set him in motion. However, by dint of prolonged insistence on our part, bolstered by allusions to the Bill of Rights and threats of reprisal, we managed to establish our claim to service, and he shambled over with the whisky, with the customary show of pain and mumbling about his shoes.

  “The Greek has a pedal obsession,” Nickie twitted, jerking his head at him.

  “Pedal my foot,” the Greek said, and toiled away to his nook.

  I tipped back half my whisky while Nickie sipped at his brandy.

  “You were talking to Steve Coote at the party,” I chatted.

  “For my sins.”

  “Oh, now, I don’t think Steve is fair game. It’s all very well to poke fun at him, but those humorous sketches of his do bring pleasure to a good many people. He’s going to leave the world a better place to live in.”

  “Yes, but when?”

  “We could all take a lesson from him—hard-working, producing for his family. People like him are the backbone of this country, and they make up 99 per cent of it.”

  “I suppose it takes all kinds.”

  This was incredible. I was like a physician who having come to treat a simple relapse encounters at the bedside an altogether new strain of the virus in question, against which previous measures are no guarantee. By way of acquiring a more substantial “specimen” of the germ for study, as it were, I drew further samplings from quarters of the conversational bloodstream where it might be presumed most to be multiplying—the literary.

  “What’s new in the Lit Sup?” I asked, picking up that organ and opening it.

  “Swell article on contemporary style,” Nickie said. “The American novel is a fat slob, and as for the mot juste, that went out with Wolfe. Why bother with one word when three will do?”

  “Here’s a review of the Darrow biography,” I said, my hackles rising. “Favorable, too. I’m surprised to find a character so American-grain so appreciated abroad.”

  “Well, by and large, Darrow is the kind of genius that crosses borders fairly easily. Like Lincoln. The appeal is universal.”

  “And have you noticed something else about figures with the tragic sense? They’re the ones who buck the race up. Not the twitterers.”

  Here I sensed Nickie mulling an old gambit, that of agreeing with you by saying what you’d just said only better, which was more irritating than rebuttal.

  “Yes,” he said, moving his glass about on the tabletop, “it’s interesting to note how much of our faith is derived from skeptics. Having squarely faced an empty universe, they are best bent on cultivating our poor corner of it. Having most nakedly glimpsed eternal snow and ice, they themselves most radiate warmth and light. No, you’re right. It is not from optimists that we derive the courage to go on.”

  “Bunk,” I said. “This all seems to me tenuous and farfetched.”

  I closed the paper and set it aside.

  Nickie sat appraising me over his glass as he sipped.

  “Why do you always get sore when I agree with you? It’s a curious habit.”

  I leaned forward and smacked the table with both hands.

  “Where will you get the money to have Francie’s teeth straightened?” I demanded.

  “Where would I get it if I were working?” he answered, alertly. “If that’s what you’re leading up to. You needn’t start another lecture. I’m perfectly aware of the needs of my children and perfectly capable of taking care of them myself. These orthodontists are all brigands! Dr. Quentin quoted a price of three thousand dollars for this job. I’d have to borrow it if I were still working, just as I would now.”

  “Why do you say ‘would’? Aren’t you going to get my niece’s mouth fixed up?”

  “Oh, my God,” said Nickie, writhing into a fresh position. He spoke with an emphasis ill suited to the role of bon vivant, spreading his arms as he expounded some ideas, like a rug merchant extolling dubious goods. “Look, I don’t hold with this current fad of running off to the orthodontist with every little thing, if that’s what you mean. They’ve created malocclusion just as the psychoanalysts have created neuroses, by getting the term about. Every child in Decency has its mouth wired up like a bale of hay. Of course these men recommend braces. It’s their living.”

  “Francie has an overbite.”

  “So does Ingrid Bergman. So does Loretta Young. I wonder where they’d be without them.”

  “It suits your purpose to wonder,” I retorted, reaching across the table to tap his chest, a measure to which I had hoped I’d not be forced. “Bozo! You’re just rationalizing your failure to discharge your obligations as a parent, such as correcting Francie’s buck.”

  Nickie sighed and shook his head. “Oh, my dear boy.”

  He had spoken in a tone that was almost paternal. Now he screwed round in his chair in the manner of clubmen summoning waiters, and by flourishi
ng our empty glasses in an authoritative manner very nearly succeeded in fetching the Greek. The latter grunted noncommitally, like a sleeper refusing to acknowledge he has awakened, and sat with folded arms and closed eyes. We returned to our ruckus.

  “I could kill that aunt of yours,” I said through my own teeth.

  “That will hardly be necessary, will it?” Nickie answered with a laugh.

  “All the trouble that legacy has caused. Ninety bucks a week! You had a hard enough time making ends meet when you were drawing a paycheck, but now—is there a merchant in town who doesn’t have you on his Bills Outstanding?”

  “All my bills are outstanding,” said Nickie, leveling into his role again.

  “The trouble with you, lad, is you want the privileges of marriage without the obligations, and that’s not mature. Marriage is, after all, a give-and-take.”

  “I’ve never thought of it in quite that way. That’s interesting. I must try to remember it.”

  “Don’t you see you’re living a romance far more moonstruck than any shopgirl fiction?” I said, striking the table with my fist this time. “When you pounded a beat you at least had your feet on the ground, but now! What are you waiting for? Pete Cheshire to get out of jail? Your Moriarty free again to challenge your wits?”

  “There were things in his early work that I admired very much,” said my prince. “The question is whether he’ll fulfill that early promise. There’s so little creative talent coming along these days. He is due to get out soon, isn’t he?”

  I fell back like a collapsed puppet, unable to believe my ears. How could he have missed my satire? No intellectual is without his blind spots, where humor fails him, I reminded myself. Sophistication of the extreme sort always seems to carry a kind of built-in naïveté, as any café-society column shows.

  I gave the screw of travesty another turn.

  “Most criminals lack the imagination that excites a man’s wit, you mean,” I said, to see just how far I could go without his perceiving the mockery. “What one wants is an adversary worthy of his steel.”