The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel Page 7

  “Precisely. Pete has a certain low cunning. That we must give him. Whether he has the talent to go on to something really first-rate remains to be seen.”

  I thought of hands enclosing his throat in an act of strangulation, the thumbs joined over the larynx, the fingers well down under the collar—all quite undetected. We’d had a schoolmate named Joe Bond who by bobbing his Adam’s apple up and down could agitate his necktie. He’d come to a bad end, driving while intoxicated on the Jersey Turnpike. In a restaurant across the street I could see a fat man at a window table eating Danish with a knife and fork. How could I be sure it was Danish, I wondered, at this distance? Because his movements had an element of surface absurdity, traceable only to some such source.

  My inner mind flowed on in its separate way, like an underground river. It was thinking not of Joe Bond or Nickie or the man in the other restaurant at all, but of an article I’d read in one of the psychiatric journals to which I subscribed. It related a fascinating case—or I should say a fascinating treatment—involving shock. Not the customary electric or drug shock, but a deliberately aimed emotional blow which had shaken the patient up in much the same sense. The subject had been a shipping clerk in late youth who displayed marked anxiety about marrying a girl to whom he had been engaged for nine years. Agitation and night sweats had followed each mention of “naming the day.” He was put under hypnosis, and on arousal confronted with data indicating latent criminal sexual tendencies. He promptly married, frightened out of his wits. The doctor had deliberately exaggerated, even fabricated, thus “shocking” him into the assumption of a normal bond for which, previously, there had been no alternative beside which it had seemed less appalling. He acted literally on the Pauline advice that it was better to marry than to burn—in the electric chair!

  Why should Nickums not be given a similar roughing up? Was not some extreme possible which, by holding up his life to him for the mare’s-nest it was, would administer a purging ridicule? A man needs his liver periodically cleaned out—why not his ego? The problem was to hit on some measure sufficiently drastic to drive home the parody I could not penetrate his vanity with by verbal chaffing. Some—some what? Wait a minute. I had it. Some hoax.

  What kind of hoax? I puzzled over that as we continued to dispute.

  “You know something?” I said. “You resent me. Oh, yes you do. And I’ll tell you why. You resent me because of all I’ve done for you. It’s human nature.”

  He nodded, tracing figures on the table with the base of his glass. He drew across it a design of continuous triangles of the sort that had become familiar in his pauses, and that are associated with Navajo blankets.

  “You have a point there, I’m afraid,” he said, again in the tone that warned you that your recent remark was about to be refined into an epigram. “It’s easy enough for a man to love his enemies. The question is whether he can forgive his benefactors.”

  “Horse manure,” I said. “I’m not going to sit here and listen to a lot of horse manure.” I plucked my derby from a chair and put it on. I did not yet rise. I finished a last trickle of whisky with it on. “If you knew what a figure you cut, sitting there. What an ass you are, in the main. I wish I could drive it home to you. You’ve got no gumption, no get-up-and-go, no nothing.”

  “I suppose not,” he sighed quite concurringly. “But then I have no ambition in the usual sense. Perhaps I was not meant to need it. I haven’t your reputation, but then I can do without that.”

  Something in the way he was striking a match to light a cigarette set me seething. I lashed out blindly.

  “Why does this dog have a cotter pin in his name?” I shouted, rising out of the chair. “Don’t you see how ridiculous it all is? O God in Heaven, it’s all too silly for words. Prud’homme!”

  The dog, hearing his name barked in what he took to be angry summons, leaped from his sleep and wagged his tail at me in confusion. I reached down and soothed him with a few discreet words. Nickie had waved the match out, holding a mouthful of smoke uninhaled as he watched me. I felt myself perspiring, and my smile came tautly as I added, “Is he named after the French painter, Nickie? I’ve often wondered. Is that who he’s named after?”

  “No, no. The painter is Prud’hon. You’re thinking of Pierre Prud’hon.”

  “Of course. How stupid of me.”

  I tried to summon the love necessary to go on with this, but it wouldn’t come. Hearing his name further bandied—or thinking he had—Prud’homme looked from one to the other of us with bright expectation, panting. He had that expression of doting regard we like to call “human,” though whether it is anything more than an echo of something canine in our own natures is a question.

  “It isn’t that I don’t have faith in you,” I said to Nickie. “I do. That’s why I holler at you sometimes. I think you’re worth saving.” He nodded, breathing smoke as he consulted a wall clock. “Because you can amount to something. You have the stuff …”

  I let the conversation coast to a stop, content to leave it so. Because the idea for the hoax had struck me all of a heap. It had sprung into my mind full-fledged, as the plot for Uncle Tom’s Cabin is said to have sprung into Harriet Beecher Stowe’s while she was sitting in church. This was my “plot,” as indeed I might call it:

  Saturday night would find us both at another party, the Flickendens’. Along toward the middle of the evening, there would be a phone call for Nickie. At the other end of the wire would be an overwrought woman’s voice reporting that her husband had been murdered, and would Nickie Sherman please come as soon as possible. Nickie would high-tail it over to the address given, that of a former bit actress named Susan Markey whom I knew but Nickie didn’t, and whose husband was an inveterate prankster. He, the husband, would be lying face down on the bedroom floor, clad only in pajamas, a lamp cord twisted round his neck and his tongue lolling out in a horrible fashion. Nickie would get to work gathering clues (in anticipation of the thick-fingered police), in the midst of which the corpse would rise and dust himself off. Everyone would get a good laugh, including the party guests, who would have piled into their cars and followed in the excitement. Nickie would put a good face on it, enjoying the fun at his own expense, but once home would take the lesson to heart. He would have been made to see himself as others saw him—at last! The jape would rock him to his roots at first, but then, his ego cauterized, stripped of his folly, he would come down to earth and maybe start a new life on terms with reality. Whether he would learn I was behind it was unimportant; if he did, he would live to thank me for it.

  That was the plan.

  “I must be off,” I said, eager to get back to the office and look up the article again. “See you at the Flickendens’ on Saturday?”

  “For my sins.”

  I hurried from the reception room to my private office with my secretary at my heels, reading messages aloud as we flew.

  “Mrs. Cherne called again to say that her husband now sleeps with a chest protector on. There’s a letter from the Women’s Club thanking you for your splendid talk on “The Problem of the Only Child.” They want to know if you’ll address them next month on “The Problem of the Only Parent.” Like when the father and mother are divorced and the children live with one or the other,” Miss McConkey reported as we trotted on through, the swinging door flapping in our wake. “Here, I’ll take your hat, Dr. Swallow. A Mr. Appleyard phoned. He said you’d know what it was about and for you to please call him back without fail. Oh, and Dr. Swallow.” Her habit of addressing me that way was a persistent one which I had decided simply to ignore since its correction would have entailed the removal of props vital to her ego. The reverse of Nickie, she needed building up, and nothing built her up so much as bustling importantly about calling me “Doctor.” Now her voice dropped a tone to register the sense of portent which accompanied all her references to the Boss. “Mr. Bulwinkle has been trying to reach you all afternoon. He wonders where you go. He wonders what you do. Shall I get him
now and let him know you’re in?”

  “Put him on,” I ordered slavishly, “this very minute!”

  “Right, Doctor.”

  She went out with her gelatinous walk, her flesh setting up within mine a useless contrapuntal greed, leaving in my mind a familiar mixture of tenderness and filth. If without preamble I raised her skirts and likened her limbs to marble seen by moonlight, would I be accused of Neoclassicism? It was painful to recall that the one time I had taken her to lunch, at a neighborhood restaurant, she had looked at the menu and exclaimed, “Ah, they have soup du jour today. I love that.”

  I sighed heavily and turned to the mountain of human documents awaiting reply on my desk. It seemed to me that the problems lost quality with each new paper added to the syndicate we fed, which now numbered eleven dailies in almost as many states. The first letter was from a woman who wrote:

  I’ve been married seventeen years and never had an organism. What are those? I read in articles and my friends tell me I am missing something, but don’t know how to go about changing my ways. My husband refuses to discuss it with me …

  I threw the letter in the wastebasket (all that could be done with queries bearing no return address and not suitable for published reply) and picked up another. It was a complaint from a woman who had originally written in asking how to get rid of moles. Since we’d had no garden editor, I simply had Miss McConkey phone a drugstore for the name of a reliable mole poison and recommended it in turn to the reader. It was a pellet-form toxic called, I believe, Mole-Slay, which are put down into mole runs. The woman had purchased a package and swallowed one or two with a glass of water, necessitating her being rushed to the hospital to have her stomach pumped out. Which was the first inkling I’d had that she had meant not lawn pests but face blemishes, and that her letter should have been referred to our Beauty Hints expert. Now she was sending notes threatening legal action, which it was a simple matter to keep from the higher-ups by putting them into the wastebasket also.

  I rose and went to a refectory table on which were kept all my magazines, laid out by Miss McConkey in neat rows like those in clubs frequented by men of parts. I easily found the issue of the Psychiatric Quarterly I wanted, and sat down in an armchair to reread the article which so excited me.

  It had originally been a paper read at a psychiatric convention in Lisbon, by a Dutch practitioner named Van Kuykens, and ran:

  There are times when the quickest way to bring a man down to earth is to blow him sky-high. Blasting is often preliminary to construction. Of course such a measure is precisely the matter of delicacy that it does not sound, and should be undertaken in only the most skilled hands, by someone with the fullest possible knowledge of what he is doing.

  I raised my eyes to pause in reflection. I guessed I knew Nickie all right enough, inside and out, to gauge the degree of embarrassment that might prove stunning. I read on:

  For what we are talking about here is a kind of fission, if you will, a momentary furious splitting of the atom of Pride (of which let us remember that the notorious Ego is only the nucleus). Or to use a cruder metaphor, it is like one of these calculated kicks we deal a piece of broken machinery, which will make it work again if it does not destroy it utterly …

  My phone was being buzzed and I rose to answer it.

  “Mr. Bulwinkle will see you now, Doctor,” Miss McConkey said, “without delay.”

  I galloped derisively into Bulwinkle’s office and came to a running stop on an island of coagulated stockings known as a hooked rug six feet from his desk. There I stood at a caricature of attention for some seconds.

  “Yes, sir?” I said in a timorous squeal which took courage, lifting our relationship as it did into the realm of pure satire.

  Bulwinkle shifted from ham to ham, like Sweeney in his bath. He sat in shirtsleeves because he was the Boss, while I had on a coat, being a shirtsleeve philosopher with some standing in the community. His tie hung on a rack as well as his coat; it depicted a girl manipulating a canoe in bright sunlight. He clenched in his teeth an expired cigar, which helped him strike the note of ferocity which he tended to confuse with high standards.

  Bulwinkle had only recently taken over the Picayune Blade, which he edited as well as published. He modeled himself on the prevailing idea of the truculent, though inwardly sensitive, city-desk man, snapping, “Why can’t I get decent reporters?” and “Call that a story?” in persecuted soliloquy. He fomented bedlam in both office and pressroom and tried to convey the impression, though there was always plenty of time to get the paper out, that we were operating under intolerable pressure. He cultivated chaos on his desk, among whose effects were the black coffee, aspirin and stale pie associated with the ruthless metropolitan dailies. On his assumption of ownership, he had summoned the entire staff to a lecture in which he told them bluntly that newspaper work was a brutal profession and that he could promise them nothing but long marches and hard bivouacs, which came as a surprise to numerous veteran employees accustomed to the leisurely, even apathetic, tempo under his predecessor, but who, however, obligingly broke into a trot when Bulwinkle came into view, pecked out copy with their hats on, had sandwiches and coffee sent in, and spoke of “getting the rag to bed.”

  “Look, Swallow,” he said, relighting the cigar butt, “goddamn it, with Melton leaving we won’t have anybody to handle Today’s Chuckle. I was wondering if you’d care to take it on. It’s open.”

  “I think not,” I said. “Thanks though.”

  “You’d do a bang-up job.”

  I resented that. To be judged capable of turning out: “Waiter, do you serve crabs?” “Yes, what’ll you have?”—to be regarded as just the man to beg, borrow, steal or fabricate a wheeze like that every day—filled me with rage. By way of panning for a gleam of self-respect in all this muck I said, “It’s not for me. Besides, my column takes all my time.”

  “It pays fifty bucks a week extra. We’re going to run it boxed, on the lower front page, from now on. Just a two-line joke a day. You have a sense of humor.”

  It was what saw me through many such a scene as this, did he but know, and saw me through now. I smiled and said, “Thanks just the same.”

  “Okie doke.” He shrugged and looked down at his desk. I sensed that he had something more on his mind—that the problem of succession to Today’s Chuckle was the least of it.

  “Swallow,” he said, rising, “you have a hell of a lot of people come to your office. I see them in the waiting room when I go by. Just a minute. I know it’s always been policy for the Lamplighter to be available to people in need as well as to answer their letters. But I’ve been told that you get some of them in there and psychoanalyze them. Is that true?”

  “I wouldn’t call it that,” I said. “If you mean do I handle their problems in a psychological light, of course—that’s the way they come in. It’s the way people think these days.”

  “But do you represent yourself as a psychiatrist?”

  “Certainly not.”

  He fiddled worriedly with a file of papers on his desk, behind which he remained standing. I noticed that he had only one sleeve rolled up, as though in the frenzies of journalism there had been no time to do the other.

  “Your secretary calls you ‘Doctor.’”

  “It’s a little notion she’s picked up. I’ll speak to her about it.”

  “See that you do. You’re a newspaperman—not a headshrinker.”

  I thought that ended the matter. Bulwinkle appeared to wish it might, too. But he hesitated again, then asked with visible reluctance:

  “I understand there was some hullabaloo a few years ago, before my time, about you practising psychiatry on a girl. Lawsuit, wasn’t it?”

  I laughed, though my disrelish at the phrase “on a girl” was keen. “Oh, sir, it was nothing. The whole thing was a frame-up from the start, and I knew it. You see, I deliberately walked into the trap in order to get a case for my brother-in-law, a kind of amateur sleuth. I though
t he needed building up then, but I know better now.”

  “The story is that this brother-in-law went into amnesia as a result of your treatment.”

  “That’s a lie! It was a result of his wife’s solving a case that had him stumped, involving a small-time grifter name Pete Cheshire, known as the Smoothie—”

  “Another ward of yours, wasn’t he?” said Bulwinkle, reading what appeared to be a full dossier.

  “He was paroled to me, yes. My position in the community gives me lots of these extra responsibilities. We all went pretty much through hell on it, but I think we’ve won through. We’re in the clear now.”

  “Is your brother-in-law all better?”

  “Oh, absolutely. He doesn’t even remember he had amnesia.”

  “Well, watch your step. We don’t want the paper sued, you know.”

  Appleyard said: “Let’s go sit in the garden. Though it’s probably cooler here in the house. Stone foundation helps that much. The muggy days are here again.”

  I was glad to leave a house which I found oppressive not for reasons of humidity but because of what is called in journalism an unfavorable climate of opinion.

  He led the way out the back and into a dooryard long remembered. The arbor sagged under wistaria denser than that which choked the front porch; the vines now supported in their clutch the crumbling latticework, rather than the other way around. I have always thought wistaria a disagreeable bloom. It lay in obscene bloated clusters at our feet as we made for a glider, scarcely less decayed than the arbor, at the edge of the orchard. Sweet trees of my childhood, standing suddenly in your flower like lathered shaving brushes; cool stream that rippled through the hot afternoons, beneath the sheltering maple in days long past. The treehouse, constructed of odd lumber and the sides of commercial packing cartons, was deep in the obscuring boughs, but I made out a patch of faded letters reading KELLOGG’S CORN FLA, and a face peering from that green lair: the Nereid was watching. In the astigmatic dusk, I had a sense of mythology encroaching on us, enveloping events. As if reality were still in control but only by a narrow margin, like the 51 per cent by which conservative businessmen struggle to retain possession of corporations threatened by unstable elements buying up securities on the sly. I had, indeed, the picture of sprites and goblins abroad, now that the sun had set and the moon risen, purchasing shares at a rate that might turn the tables against us if we did not watch out. How long would we be able to keep even our fragile hold on sanity?