The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel Read online

  “Now then, have you given any more thought to Sweetie?” Appleyard asked, unctuously enough, as he sat down on the glider. He was wearing freshly pressed denim slacks and a Basque shirt of red and white plaid, open at the throat; just what an astute stage director would have chosen for a weak character given to buck passing.

  “May I answer that by asking another question?” I remained standing, holding to one of the metal uprights of the glider as I crossed one foot over the other and looked down at him. He was wiping his brow with a clean white handkerchief. “Would you say she’s had a parental guidance that took account of her needs? Particularly, a strong father image in her formative years? Can you honestly say she’s had that, Appleyard?”

  “Shh!” Appleyard said. He pointed a thumb in the direction of the tree, from where we might be overheard. “Yes,” he whispered, “I think I can say that, in all conscience. I was always good to her, and stern when the situation called for that.”

  “Who is the real authority in this house?” I asked, seeing another face at a house window, this one like a withered gourd.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “What steps have you taken to mature that girl?”

  “For one thing, we’ve had a telephone installed in the tree-house.”

  “An extension?”

  “Certainly not! Her own private phone, where she can be reached. We thought it might encourage her to keep in touch.” He sighed and looked toward the house. “Let’s go inside for a breath of air. It’s awful out here. And these damned gnats.” He smote himself in the face.

  “Just what did you expect me to do?”

  Appleyard was uncertain; at least he hesitated. The light was draining away, and I could see the horn of the moon over the woodlot. After a moment he said:

  “I was thinking if you were to begin all over again … I mean, take it from the scene in the coalbin where it all went wrong, somehow, and this time get it right … Do it finely, so to speak, and thus lead her out into normal daylight, like other girls … I think you know what I mean. You frightened her—all right, It frightened her—into this Lady of Shalott character she’s become. Who better than you to coax her out of her ivory tower, off that island, down to Camelot? Show her sex is beautiful rather than beastly.”

  There seemed now no mistaking his meaning.

  “You mean make love to her?”

  Appleyard had been a bit ruffled in stating his plan, but his composure returned now that the words were out and had not frozen us to stone.

  “She’s a ‘good’ girl for bad reasons, where the reverse might have some virtue to it. My daughter is ruined far worse than if she had been ruined! I make no bones about saying that only by proper—by someone not bungling, but rather—Where are you going?”

  “Home. I’ll have no part of this. I want out.” I strode toward the porch.

  “You’re in it up to your neck whether you like it or no.”

  Appleyard’s voice was so low as to be barely audible, yet it arrested me with one foot on the bottom step. I turned back to hear him out in this position. My coat was over my arm.

  “You take a conventional point of view just where it serves no purpose. Do you call that”—he jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the darkening tree again—“purity? Is that what you want to perpetuate? A virgin locked in amber? Do you think a moral quibble quite the manly thing? I don’t. Not when you’re probably the only man alive who can unscramble the mess we’ve got on our hands.”

  “You keep forgetting one thing. I’m not to blame for it. I thought I made that quite clear.”

  “All right, you’re not. The accusations are withdrawn. Now will you see what you can do to help us? Or will you skedaddle like the frightened rabbit that I think you are? Or are you a coward clean through?”

  I sighed irresolutely. “The situation is fraught with danger,” I said. “You speak of the Lady of Shalott, and a neat comparison it is. But do you remember what happened to her, when she finally did go down to Camelot? It killed her. She had been too long in the world of Illusion.”

  “I’ll take that risk. Things couldn’t be any worse than they are now. That’s why I’m calling on you.”

  Here was an unpleasant echo of what my sister had told me they were saying about old Chick Swallow, around town—and a moment’s inkling of how they might have it all hurled back in their teeth. The most delicate piece of surgery one had yet been called upon to perform …

  Appleyard crossed the grass to my side. He looked down, walking with that thoughtful tread with which people try out a new pair of shoes in a store.

  “I’ve given this considerable, and very earnest, thought, and I believe it makes sense. Take up where you left off, and get it right. I’m a father asking you to seduce his daughter. Is that such an unreasonable request? It happens every day,” he went on, backing me up the stairs and against the porch wall while in the wood the centaurs and the fauns were buying up stock like mad by the light of the moon. A faint wind stirred the leaves among which, over the chuckling river, Daphne hung between heaven and earth. Things were in a kind of unbearable balance, half real, half mythological, with myself planted with a foot in either kingdom. I stood woodenly, as if turned to a tree. “In baseball parlance, you once muffed a fly,” Appleyard murmured gently. “Now I’m asking you to chase the ball.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  He took my arm and steered me toward the kitchen door. “In that case,” he answered with what I will call extreme unction, “I shall have to turn you over to Mme. Piquepuss.”

  Mme. Piquepuss sat in the cool gloom of the parlor drinking beer from a cup. I thought it was coffee she was sipping till I saw her go into the kitchen, later, and refill the cup from a large bottle of Budweiser. Her stick was propped against her chair, a high wingback embroidered with peacocks. She looked up when I entered, nudged forward encouragingly by Appleyard like a child pushed onstage, and said, “Can I give you something to drink?”

  “No, thank you,” I said, resisting all obligations here, even of ceremony. Appleyard gave a last glance over his shoulder into the room as he fled up the stairs, his footsteps swift and decisive as befit a man taking a firm line.

  Dressed again in dark hues, Mme. Piquepuss was but meagerly perceptible in the half-light, except for her hands and the cup and saucer which caught a gleam of light from a street lamp, just turned on. I sat in a draw-up chair opposite her from where, without seeing her head, I could make out the white antimacassar it partially obliterated. The cup floated upward, lurked a moment out of sight, and returned to the saucer. I reached out and drew the tasseled cord of a floor lamp. “Do you mind?” I said as Mme. Piquepuss sprang, blinking, into view.

  She set the cup and saucer on a table which also had one of those white tidies on it—they were everywhere. On the table I noticed something else. It was a sheaf of frayed foolscap, rolled up and secured with a fat rubber band. She touched the corners of her mouth with a square of cambric and said, “People don’t like to sit in the dark any more. Is it because they’re afraid of their own thoughts?”

  “Twilight is more appreciated in rural communities than urban, and more in foreign lands than this, where we are a young and vigorous people eager to snap the switches and get on with the evening,” I said. “And I’m not at all well. I had a restless night.”

  “Not sleeping any too well?”

  Her voice was low and—“throaty” is not the word that comes to me so much as “furry.” It reminded me of soft caterpillars and things proceeding cautiously in deep shade; it was something traveling up my spine as much as heard in my ear. The ghost of an accent came and went, subtly changeable, like the nap on her velvet dress, worn in defiance of the heat, or in observance of propriety to callers. She had emigrated from the Touraine in the 1880s. I noted again the twitching play of Mme. Piquepuss’s lips, like the flickering origins of smiles that came to naught. As she spoke she tapped her right foot gently on the rug, as though
somewhere she heard a melody being faintly fiddled; or as though—the notion thrust itself grotesquely in—she were one of those rare people who obtain radio broadcasts on their dental fillings—though this may have been the result of a jumble of musical impressions Mme. Piquepuss herself conveyed, and that may be analyzed in this wise: The color of her velvet dress was a deep purplish blue, like that with which the carrying cases of musical instruments are lined. Perhaps it was this association that made her thin arms, for the moment angularly at rest in her lap, remind me of a disjointed clarinet, and all of these thoughts together foster the illusion that she was humming under her breath.

  “No, I couldn’t sleep,” I said, and added with a smile, “except when it was time for the alarm to go off. For just as Proust was awakened by the thought that it was time to go to sleep, so most of the rest of us are, I judge, rather lulled into slumber by the realization that it is time to get up. He was a special case.”

  “We are all necessarily troubled about Sweetie, and all most anxious to get on with this matter,” Mme. Piquepuss returned. “I almost thrashed her to make her talk about the Experience, but she would not. The alternative is to make you do so.” She reached out to steady the stick, which was slipping along the flank of her chair. “It is naturally very difficult for her to speak of what occurred Down There, but she did tell me one thing.”

  “Go on.”

  “Please do not interrupt. There was evidently some sort of commotion, or scuffle, she said, during which you reached over and tried to touch something.”

  There was a rain of blows on my legs. Pummeling my knees, I leaned out of my chair and said, “Now this has gone far enough! I will not have any more of this absolutely ridiculous kind of talk. I say that too many people are paying too much attention to the fantasies of a hysterical girl—yes!—suffering from repression, who wishes some of the things she accuses others of had happened. What we call in psychology projection. So there you have it!”

  “It’s what she said happened.”

  “What does she say I was trying to touch? May I ask that we be specific? Shall we lay it on the line, please?”

  Mme. Piquepuss gave an uneasy shrug, and glanced speculatively toward the back door.

  “Oh, don’t call her in, for heaven’s sake. She doesn’t even know what she’s got there, for a man to go after,” I said. “But if you could give me a rough idea where it was located, and perhaps a word as to its function, I’d appreciate it.” Mme. Pique-puss’s head lay back on the tidy, on which it rolled from side to side, the eyes closed, while she raised a hand in a plea to desist. “What was your understanding about that? Is—well, let me put it this way. Are there one or two of them?”

  “Please.”

  “I think I have a right to ask that. Are there one or two?”

  “One or two of what?” she brought out weakly.

  “Of what I was trying to touch. For on whether singular or plural depends the gravity of the charge. If we are asked to consider someone reaching down a dress, with the query ‘Are they beginning to sprout yet, girlie? Let’s see. Are they, eh?’ uttered in all good humor, that’s one thing. If reaching up from underneath—”

  Mme. Piquepuss was leaning over the side of the chair, in an ominous suggestion of someone two days at sea. The strain was too great for her. She could not finish what she had begun. I relented, and went on more charitably:

  “My own guess is that the first, or milder, alternative was meant. I say this for reasons that may at first appear occult, but are based on what can be demonstrated as a mysterious sensory connection in things. What has broken my slumbers, my dear Mme. Piquepuss, is a recurring nightmare that I cannot divest myself of the hunch is related to the Experience in some subterranean way, though my conscious memory yields no account of what you say. Related to it because the feature of this nightmare is a double image—the idea of two. In my sleep, I keep dreaming that I am on a motorcycle, speeding down a dark road toward a pair of approaching headlights, between which it is my intention to steer my flying course, supposing them to be two other motorcycles, one at either side of the road. However, at each meeting the pair of headlights prove to be not two motorcycles but one truck, hurtling me awake among the disheveled bedclothes. The dream is repeated, like that of the woman I believe M. Verdurin kept seeing in Swann’s Way, the evil woman whose hand, holding a cloth, would reappear before his face each time he dozed off and wipe him awake.”

  “No, I think it was Bergotte who had that dream,” said Mme. Piquepuss, quite herself again and sitting erect. “Yes, it was Bergotte, in The Captive.”

  “You read Proust?” I said. “Why, what a pleasant surprise! I’ve been dipping into him again of late. Well, well! So we have something in common. A strong bond, wouldn’t you say?”

  Mme. Piquepuss was looking toward the bay window in which I sat. There were several wasps in the room, some of which had settled on the curtain there. She rose, glancing up at the ceiling as for some opening in the wall through which they might have made their entry. Picking up an enormous pair of shears from a table, she stole over to the curtain without disturbing the insects. Deftly, she slipped one of the blades under a wasp and cut it in two. She did this with a couple of others before the remaining few took wing and dispersed.

  “I can’t stand to swat things any more,” she said, returning to her chair. “I suppose we mellow as we get older.”

  I stared at the halved wasps.

  “They have spray bombs for these things now,” I said. “Slug-a-Bug is a good one. They’ve perfected them so they’re non-toxic to people, and can be used anywhere.”

  “This is nontoxic,” she said, clacking the shears a time or two before laying them by. She settled herself again among the flaming peacocks. “Now then, where were we?”

  “Sweetie, and these fibs of hers. ‘Mythomania’ is the term we have for the compulsion to tell stories. We’ll get her through this, never fear! But now, Mme. Piquepuss,” I said, “here’s a curious thing that must have struck you too. How can anyone, so shy of the outside world, in her one sortie into it pull a stunt so brazen? I mean of course that oratorical contest she went into with a speech stolen bodily from Daniel Webster.”

  “Yes? Go on.” Mme. Piquepuss took her cup to the kitchen, where I saw her reach into the icebox and refill it from the half-gallon Budweiser. I hurled myself woozily into some more Proust.

  “How can a shrinking violet do anything so unlike her—so publicly? That is what we say. Till we remember that the trait most likely to accompany an extreme is its opposite. For just as artists are found to be serving on town schoolboards while businessmen collect rare editions; just as we find the local clergyman conducting a liaison with a barmaid and the prostitute a devout observer of religious forms; just as the skinflint—following the principle of contrariety which decrees that to every action there be an equal and opposite reaction—dispenses lavish tips to waiters, and the son long remarked as ‘Mama’s Boy’ is discovered, one morning, to have dismembered his mother with an ax—so it is precisely the nervous girl—shy, ethereal, cloistered—who must at least once in her life blaze a trail across the national skies.”

  “Why just once?”

  Having leaned back with my own eyes closed, not in agony but the better to spin a sample of that erectile grammar which I had once observed to be the proxy pleasure of a man doomed to invirility—this in high-school days when I had used to read of Combray in bed long after my light was ordered out, so that mingled with the narrator’s fears that his Mama would not come to his bedroom to say good night were mine that my Papa would show up in mine (a visit ill-mitigated by my humorously remarking, as I did one night, of the writer in which he found me immersed, that, once arrested by this author, we may expect long sentences)—but of which in this brief oral espousal I had! suddenly another intimation vouchsafed me, a flash of insight so inebriating that I regretted not being able to share it with Mme. Piquepuss (under pain of prejudicing my status wi
th her), namely that this labyrinthine syntax called for feats of respiration to which an asthmatic might in his desolation aspire rather than anything to which normal breathing is even remotely geared—having been thus disposed in my chair, I had not seen Mme. Piquepuss return to the parlor. She had walked so softly. When I opened one eye it was to find her standing over me, the roll of foolscap in her hand. She was tapping it suggestively in her palm, like a truncheon.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, sitting bolt upright and uncrossing my legs. At the same time I instinctively put out both hands in a reflex of self-defense—in time to catch the roll as it dropped into my lap.

  “Read these,” she said.

  I removed the rubber band, unfurled the manuscript and began to read—for the surprise of my life.

  7

  THE first of Sweetie’s poems that I read was executed in telegraphic quatrains reminiscent of Emily Dickinson, in form if not altogether in spirit:

  The cock that splits my slumber

  Is a very raffish bird

  Who has had my number

  Ever since he heard

  That I would rather be,

  By a lengthy sight,

  Ravished into morning

  Than jilted out of night.

  The lord of light is brazen;

  I see his lance come nigh

  When at last I open