Deadeye Dick (6 page)

That should have been enough for Felix. He should have gotten her out of there. As she would say in a few minutes, she hadn’t even wanted to go to the prom, but her parents had told her she had to, and she hated her dress and was ashamed to have anybody see her in it, and she didn’t understand rich people, and didn’t want to, and she was happiest when she was all alone and nobody could
stare at her, and nobody could say things to her that she was supposed to reply to in some fancy, ladylike way—and so on.

Felix used to say that he didn’t get her out of there because he wanted to show Father that he could keep a promise, even if Father couldn’t. He admits now, though, that he forgot her entirely. He got out of the car, but he didn’t go to Celia’s side, to open her door for her and offer his arm.

All alone, he walked to the center of the great new doorway, and he stopped there, and he put his hands on his hips, and he looked all around at the galaxy of tiny conflagrations.

He should have been angry, and he would get angry later. He would be like a dog with rabies later on. But, at that moment, he could only acknowledge that his father, after years of embarrassing enthusiasms and ornate irrelevancies, had produced an artistic masterpiece.

Never before had there been such beauty in Midland City.

•   •   •

And then Father stepped out from behind a vertical timber, the very one which had mashed his left foot so long ago. He was only a yard or two from Felix, and he held an apple in his hand. Celia could see him through the windshield of the Keedsler. He called out, with our house as an echo chamber, “Let Helen of Troy come forward—to claim this apple, if she dare!”

Celia stayed right where she was. She was petrified.

And Felix, having allowed things to go this far, was fool enough to think that maybe she could get out of the car and accept the apple, even though there was no way she could have any idea what was going on.

What did she know of Helen of Troy and apples? For that matter, what did Father know? He had the legend all garbled, as I now realize. Nobody ever gave Helen of Troy an apple—not as a prize, anyway.

It was the goddess Aphrodite who was given a golden apple in the legend—as a prize for being the most beautiful of all the goddesses. A young prince, named Paris, a mortal, chose her over the other two finalists in the contest— Athena and Hera.

So, as though it would have made the least bit of difference on that spring night in 1943, Father should have said, “Let Aphrodite come forward—to claim this apple, if she dare!”

It would have been better still, of course, if he had had himself bound and gagged in the gun room on the night of the senior prom.

As for Helen of Troy, and how she fitted into the legend, not that Celia Hildreth had ever heard of her: She was the most beautiful mortal woman on earth, and Aphrodite donated her to Paris in exchange for the apple.

There was just one trouble with Helen. She was already married to the king of Sparta, so that Paris, a Trojan, had to kidnap her.

Thus began the Trojan War.

•   •   •

So Celia got out of the car, all right, but she never went to get the apple. As Felix approached her, she tore off her corsage and she kicked off her high-heeled golden dancing shoes, bought, no doubt, like her white dress and maybe her underwear, at prodigious financial sacrifice. And fear and anger and stocking feet, and that magnificent face, made her as astonishing as anyone I have ever encountered in a legend from any culture.

Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own.

This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there.

•   •   •

I reconstruct all the things that Celia said that night as Felix and I sit side by side here in Haiti, next to our swimming pool.

She said, we both remember, that black people were kinder and knew more about life than white people did.
She hated the rich. She said that rich people ought to be shot for living the way we did, with a war going on.

And then, leaving her shoes and corsage behind her, she struck out on foot for home.

•   •   •

She only had about fourteen blocks to go. Felix went after her in the Keedsler, creeping along beside her, begging her to get in. But she ditched him by cutting through a block where the Keedsler couldn’t go. And he never found out what happened to her after that. They didn’t meet again until 1970, twenty-seven years later. She was then married to Dwayne Hoover, the Pontiac dealer, and Felix had just been fired as president of the National Broadcasting Company.

He had come home to find his roots.

M
Y DOUBLE MURDER
went like this:

In the spring of 1944, Felix was ordered to active duty in the United States Army. He had just finished up his second semester in the liberal arts at Ohio State. Because of his voice, he had become a very important man on the student radio station, and was also elected vice-president
of
the freshman class.

He was sworn in at Columbus, but was allowed to spend one more night at home, and part of the next morning, which was Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May.

There were no tears, nor should there have been any, since the Army was going to use him as a radio announcer. But we could have not known that, so we did not cry because Father said that our ancestors had always been proud and happy to serve their country in time of war.

Marco Maritimo, I remember, who by then, in partnership with his brother Gino, had become the biggest building contractor in town, had a son who was drafted at the very same time. And Marco and his wife brought their
son over to our house on the night before Mother’s Day, and the whole family cried like babies. They didn’t care who saw them do it.

They were right to cry, too, as things turned out. Their son Julio would be killed in Germany.

•   •   •

At dawn on Mother’s Day, while Mother was still asleep, Father and Felix and I went out to the rifle range of the Midland County Rod and Gun Club, as we had done at least a hundred times before. It was a Sunday-morning ritual, this discharging of firearms. Although I was only twelve, I had fired rifles and pistols and shotguns of every kind. And there were plenty of other fathers and sons, blazing away and blazing away.

Police Chief Francis X. Morissey was there, I remember, with Bucky, his son. Morissey was one of the bunch who had been goose-hunting with Father and John Fortune back in 1916, when old August Gunther disappeared. Only recently have I learned that it was Morissey who killed old Gunther. He accidentally discharged a ten-gauge shotgun about a foot from Gunther’s head.

There was no head left.

So Father and the rest, in order to keep Morissey’s life from being ruined by an accident that could have happened to anyone, launched Gunther’s body for a voyage down Sugar Creek.

•   •   •

On the morning of Mother’s Day, Father and Felix and I didn’t have any exotic weapons along. Since Felix was headed for battle, seemingly, we brought only the Springfield .30-06. The Springfield was no longer the standard American infantry weapon. It had been replaced by the Garand, by the M-l. But it was still used by snipers, because of its superb accuracy.

We all shot well that morning, but I shot better than anybody, which was much commented upon. But only after I had shot a pregnant housewife that afternoon would anybody think to award me my unshakable nickname, Deadeye Dick.

•   •   •

I got one trophy out on the range that morning, though. When we were through firing, Father said to Felix, “Give your brother Rudy the key.”

Felix was puzzled. “What key is that?” he said.

And Father named the Holy of Holies, as far as I was concerned. Felix himself hadn’t come into possession of it until he was fifteen years old, and I had never even touched it. “Give him,” said Father, “the key to the gun-room door.”

•   •   •

I was certainly very young to receive the key to the gun room. At fifteen, Felix had probably been too young, and I was only twelve. And after I shot the pregnant housewife, it turned out that Father had only the vaguest idea
how old I was. When the police came, I heard him say that I was sixteen or so.

There was this: I was tall for my age. I was tall for any age, since the general population is well under six feet tall, and I was six feet tall. I suppose my pituitary gland was out of kilter for a little while, and then it straightened itself out. I did not become a freakish adult, except for my record as a double murderer, as other people my age more or less caught up with me.

But I was abnormally tall and weak for a time there. I may have been trying to evolve into a superman, and then gave it up in the face of community disapproval.

•   •   •

So after we got home from the Rod and Gun Club, and I could feel the key to the gun room burning a hole in my pocket, there was yet another proof that I had to be a man now, because Felix was leaving. I had to chop the heads off two chickens for supper that night. This was another privilege which had been accorded Felix, who used to make me watch him.

The place of execution was the stump of the walnut tree, under which Father and old August Gunther had been lunching when the Marítimo brothers arrived in Midland City so long ago. There was a marble bust on a pedestal, which also had to watch. It was another piece of loot from the von Furstenberg estate in Austria. It was a bust of Voltaire.

And Felix used to play God to the chickens, saying in
that voice of his, “If you have any last words to say, now is the time to say them,” or “Take your last look at the world,” and so on. We didn’t raise chickens. A farmer brought in two chickens every Sunday morning, and they had their peepholes closed by a machete in Felix’s right hand almost immediately.

Now, with Felix watching, and about to catch a train for Columbus and then a bus for Fort Benning, Georgia, it was up to me to do.

So I grabbed a chicken by its legs, and I flopped it down on the stump, and I said in a voice like a penny whistle, “Take your last look at the world.”

Off came its head.

•   •   •

Felix kissed Mother, and he shook Father’s hand, and he boarded the train at the train station. And then Mother and Father and I had to hurry on home, because we were expecting a very important guest for lunch. She was none other than Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the President of the United States. She was visiting war plants in the boondocks to raise morale.

Whenever a famous visitor came to Midland City, he or she was usually brought to Father’s studio at one point or another, since there was so little else to see. Usually, they were in Midland City to lecture or sing or play some instrument, or whatever, at the YMCA. That was how I got to meet Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, when I was a boy—and Alexander
Woollcott, the wit and writer and broadcaster, and Cornelia Otis Skinner, the monologist, and Gregor Piatigor-sky, the cellist, and on and on.

They all said what Mrs. Roosevelt was about to say: “It’s hard to believe I’m in Midland City, Ohio.”

Father used to sprinkle a few drops of turpentine and linseed oil on the hot-air registers, so the place would smell like an active studio. When a guest walked in, there was always some classical record on the phonograph, but never German music after Father decided that being a Nazi wasn’t such a good idea after all. There was always imported wine, even during the war. There was always Liederkranz cheese, and Father would tell the story of its invention.

And the food was excellent, even when war came and there was strict rationing of meat, since Mary Hoobler was so resourceful with catfish and crayfish from Sugar Creek, and with unrationed parts of animals which other people didn’t consider edible.

•   •   •

Mary Hoobler’s chitlins: Take the small intestine of a pig, cut it up into two-inch sections, and wash and wash them, changing the water often, until no fatty particles remain.

Boil them for three or four hours with onions, herbs, and garlic. Serve with greens and grits.

•   •   •

That is what we served Eleanor Roosevelt for lunch on Mother’s Day in 1944—Mary Hoobler’s chitlins. She was most appreciative, and she was very democratic, too. She went out into the kitchen and talked to Mary and the other servants there. She had Secret Service agents along, of course, and one of them said to Father, I remember, “I hear you have quite a collection of guns.”

So the Secret Service had checked us out. They surely knew, too, that Father had been an admirer of Hitler, but was now reformed, supposedly.

The same man asked what music was playing on the phonograph.

“Chopin,” said Father. And then, when the agent appeared to have another question, Father guessed it and answered it: “A Pole,” he said. “A Pole, a Pole, a Pole.”

And Felix and I, comparing notes here in Haiti, now realize that all our distinguished visitors from out of town had been tipped off that Father was a phony as a painter. Not one of them ever asked to see examples of Father’s work.

•   •   •

If somebody had been ignorant enough or rude enough to ask, he would have shown them, I suppose, a small canvas clamped into the rugged framework of his easel. His easel was capable of holding a canvas eight feet high and twelve feet wide, I would guess. As I have already said, and particularly in view of the room’s other decorations, it was easily mistaken for a guillotine.

The small canvas, whose back was turned toward visitors, was where a guillotine’s fallen blade might be. It was the only picture I ever saw on the easel, as long as Father and I were on the same planet together, and some of our guests must have gone to the trouble of looking at its face. I think Mrs. Roosevelt did. I am sure the Secret Service agents did. They wanted to see everything.