False Entry (55 page)

Is. These last days, I seem to be rushing toward the present, headlong.

Late last night, I came up here to Lasch’s. No one calls it that any more except old hands like me; it is a foundation now,
in memoriam
Albert Bernhard Chester Lasch—the initials were real. It is also the office of which I am head. He’d been right, in a way; I didn’t know that I had lost by coming in. After the war I had tried several things which, by dint of some stretching on my part, I had suited quite well, but had not suited me. Lasch had been after me to return ever since the day I had gone up there, still in uniform, for my trunk. “You belong here,” he said solemnly, over the drink we had that day in his office, in front of a coal fire like an English grate, in the smell of cut leather, book paste, the tonic rustle of paper everywhere. “You’re not built to serve just anything. I suppose you have to bat around some first; that’s it.” In the moldy December light, his cheek not as round as once, his upper lip long, he might have been my grandfather taking the liberty of lecturing one of his subalterns, and indeed I felt the deference toward him that one never loses for those with their
fanum
, their standard to serve. This was the very reason why I could not explain my refusal—because his temple seemed to me the epitome of those “side lines” I must stay away from, the very haunt and realm of the
embusqué.

“You have the talent for it,” he said again on the day several years later when, no longer so youthfully sure of where the front lines were, or even enamored of them, I returned. “You suit.”

“How’s that, sir?” I really wanted to know, and I knew he did not mean mere pliancy with paper and pen.

He put the tips of his fingers, slightly wasted and tremoring now together. “You see the cycle,” he said, looking at them, but would not go further, dryly turning to talk of salary, of the place’s vast expansion, for which the estate had grown too small. I had attributed the tremor of his hands to age. Not much later I knew better. He had been looking for an heir. During his year and a half in the sanitarium where he retreated with the disease that at the last allowed him to move only the eyes, I saw him almost daily. I do not think of doctors as heroes, as this age does, but rather of those of their unsung charges who round the clock make the least of their dying, and the most. Lasch made the happy end that we are taught all heroes make. He had been a boy from an outlying farm; for him, all his aromatic distances had been achieved. He bequeathed his “place” to me. It was not his fault that this is not a thing which one man can leave to another.

In my own way, though never with his single-mindedness, I filled the job. The war had given enormous impetus to all printed matter, and ours was the kind of matter which held, even for the peace. In supplement to conventional volumes of reference, we now engaged with the future and even compounded it, amassing compendia for sciences still in process, for languages whose full mode waited to be used by those still unborn. Although I was still in my early thirties when I took over, trained men were still scarce, and my appointment was readily ratified by a board of directors, of whom, I found to my surprise, Delphine, also come into her inheritance, made one. Apparently she had voted for me, whether a beneficent “pro” or merely an averted one, I never knew for sure, taking it as more likely to be some deep, ultrafeminine concoction of both. She and Schott live mostly in Europe now, or when in America on the high Alps of the very rich, where, except for that one dinner party, I have never again met them. Meanwhile, like any member of those spheres which revolve vaguely around print, I go to a great many parties myself, my name, in its professional capacity, often appearing modishly engraved on more serious rosters as well. On the surface, then, I wear as much chain mail as anybody. For, far from being on the side lines, our excellent organization, in the glory-jargon of the era, deals with the “frontiers” as their very aide-de-camp, and to the tune of a profit (in wordage
and
money) plural beyond Lasch’s dreams. It was not his fault if, with all this variorum at my back, I still favored the deep mystery of the one over the many, and by my poor devices kept lookout on my own. This has been my life, then, almost up to the present.

It was almost dawn when I drove in here. I watched that neglected spectacle, the gradual creation of the universe, then fell asleep here on the couch in front of the dead grate. No one lives here now and it is Sunday-quiet. We keep this building mainly for library purposes now; the main offices are in New York. Ten years ago we bought for “protection” an adjoining tract eighty years ago planted over with pines by a merchant overlord and entailed to his heirs forever as the ultimate luxury to come—uninhabited land. We are his heirs now, and those trees of his are “organizational” trees—almost again, as in the infancy of the earth, belonging to no particular man. I came up here partly to see them, for my bit of “the country” too. Here on this side the grounds show the fresh black humus, clever absence of gardeners, of the impersonal public preserve, but beyond it, at its civilized edge, those trees, rising vast and unpruned, the harsh blue behind them not Cézanne’s or any mortal’s, have a look of the old terrestrial realm, of that childhood of the earth to which we can no more return than we can to our own. Each of us, unable to shake the flame of consciousness from his head, maintains a green guilt for that green world. We can no more be natural there now than a man can stretch out in a cradle. Perhaps we must no longer try.

On a clear day like this, one can see New York from here, a long gray skyline, bubbled and squared. It seems to me that I can almost see myself there somewhere in its flat center, my old
Doppelgänger
, still working away as he has been these past weeks. I came up here partly too to get away from him. Up here, the present burning quietly in my nostrils, I have never felt more alive. About an hour ago, I reached Ruth, down there with her piece of nature, the sea. They’d been out sailing; she’d just come in. There were people in the room from which she was speaking—perhaps better so, because of all the time that had lapsed between us. Yet even in our few words there was a pressure between us, like that of kind hands gently dooming us toward each other. She will meet me at the flat the day after tomorrow. Will I give her this? She has never been there. It seems to me that when I see her there, then I shall know. Before then, I must affix
her
in the narrative, in her proper place:—

It has not escaped me that, intending all these years, perhaps hoping all along, to give my story to someone, at the breaking point I reached out for her only as the nearest to hand—and in the last defeat of subtlety made her the bogey that required it. One is taught—by its enemies, the hearty boys who never look behind—always to suspect the memoir. Or do I believe, by the Athanasian creed of memory, that however the choice is made one does choose? Out of the tangled scents of my beginnings, haply I think on thee?

Beginnings are not endings. If standing there with her, holding this account in my hand—to be withheld or given—I could arrive at that moment sure for once that I knew
everything—
?

Herewith, the account of my last device:

With my “entry” into the Mannix household, there came a difference in the scheme, a change in quality of which, like a man alerted to a new thrumming in a motor, I was partially aware. For some time my excursions had been of the mildest, even approaching the shallow level of those social lies, pretenses, charms and cabals aimed at one another now and then by all but the most ingenuous—for a lark, for a “lift” or a climb—for a change. One might have thought my habit almost ready to disappear, or at least merge with the general. I knew otherwise, by the degree of premeditation I still bent on the milieu to be studied, and by the familiar intensity of feeling when I rose there from some spot in its center, like a genie who, pretending to be ordinary, gave nothing—and gave nothing away. Mostly the people I chose to enter upon were still ordinary enough, though less and less often those known to me in my private Morse as “the people down there.” It was complication that I craved now, and the warmth once so admired from the window frame, seen now from the intellectual distance, no longer satisfied. I still did no tangible harm to anyone. The alien’s drum sounds from farther below. My connection with them—I see it now—was rather the harm I withheld. But I never thought now of Tuscana. I had reached that point of safety where my only emotions were my tastes. So it was. With the Mannixes, I approached my own kind.

Certainly the accident which made me choose them wasn’t portentous. About twice a year, until his departure for South Africa, I used to spend an evening with one of our staff, a man of considerable education gone to no seed, whose elaborate after-dinner talk (his term for it “postprandial”) had, for the limits of an evening, the attractive bitterness of the disappointed. In my trade I’d known many nonwriting “writers,” but Norman Schreiber was the only one who, selecting his nom de plume while still in college, had hung on to it as the “first step” ever since, taking it out from cotton wool on occasion to examine its mint shine. He’d a store of wild, full-blown anecdotes also, each told according to an ancient convention, studded with names and dates, as if it had happened to him, most of them with a fancy pornography that belonged more to literature than life. Since I could never quite recognize their sources, I concluded that Norm was his own fantasist, and it sometimes amused me to think of us together. Despite the heavy circumstantiality of his stories, it had never occurred to me to follow any of them up, until the day, about eighteen months ago, shortly after his arrival in the Union. Gaby & Cohn, Ltd., he wrote, the relatives he had gone out to see on his own, hoping to charm them into taking him into the business, had turned out to be not diamond merchants but tailors. This was not unreasonable, since, with his usual bravura, taking their letterhead on assumption, he had not asked. He would be returning shortly.
Meanwhile
, he wrote,
would you do me a favor
?
Take a hundred bucks from the pay I have coming and send it to Carleen Jones. She won’t be in the book but the madame is
,
Pontina Sims
,
a Seventh Avenue address and I don’t seem to have it. There’s not likely to be more than one as you’ll agree
,
knowing the story. I sort of promised it to little C.
It didn’t wholly surprise me that some of Norm’s exploits had their poor, faded antecedents in actuality, but of the lot I should never have taken this as the likely one—one of his most farfetched, containing several classic gambits of sexual adventure—nudes in fur coats on windy street corners, the very young and phthisic, the very grateful prostitute—and over all, like a whiff of anisette from the corner liquor store, a distinct flavor of
The Girl with the Golden Eyes.
The address was in the book well enough, on Sugar Hill in Harlem. Half annoyed with Norm’s pretensions—he’d signed the letter with his nom de plume—I checked up on him one afternoon.

The house, its octoroon magnificence just as described, was no great surprise either; such places as I’ve seen seem to me already to have one foot in bookshop erotica. I was more astounded to find that the embellishments I’d marked down as Norm’s were real also, including not only Madame Pontina’s staidly excellent collection of paintings and the very circumstantial sister who was a buyer at Macy’s, but even the girl, the little tan Mimi herself, out of a One Hundred Thirty-fifth Street
Bohème.
Not until I was back home, about to send off the note she’d given me for him, did the full significance strike me, coming to me over all the seas between us like his breath, choked now with mocking laughter, which had always seemed to me faintly carious with lies. It was all true then—one of his wildest. Then all the stories which, supercilious confidant, I had listened to, might well be. Even poor Norm. Even Norm’s excursions were real. The only phoniness about him might be the one thing which still linked us as brothers—that name. A sense, not of sadness, but of the nadir, whelmed me as I looked down at it. “Walter Diabolus.” It had always tickled me, this mildly collegiate satyriasis appended, most probably from what I knew of Norm, to the mild tinkler, Walter Pater. Walter was a common enough name still, of course, but in all my wanderings I had only known one. I’d not thought of him for some time, a man whose confidences I had always kept honorably apart from my eccentricities, for reasons which I had not cared to phrase. Standing there in my cell, I re-created all that Walter had told me. I remember how I suddenly spoke aloud—the old paneling giving the warning back to me. “No!” This was how the accident occurred. Not many hours later I was already at my researches, to the strumming, from a deeper register, that said “Yes.”

If a physical deformity doesn’t sour or sharpen a man, the excess sometimes goes the other way, giving him a goodness, choired by all his friends as “not of this world,” which, when it is truly unaffected as it was with Walter Stern, makes him one of the rare seraphs they can bear to tolerate “in it.” In 1954, when he and I were among half a dozen patients who took their daily sunning on a porch off the orthopedic wing of Lenox Hill Hospital, it was Walter, then awaiting the operation which would at best lessen the pain he lived with, at worst bring the death it did to his frailly caged heart, who would stand, most attentive of any of us, listening to some disc case tell about his “spasm,” his own wastedly aquiline hunchback’s face hung like a plaque between his shoulder blades, at the angle of a crow’s. Mornings he would go down to the brace shop, chatting with the children there like someone their own size out of Oz, and after my ski-twisted leg had been set in traction, he was forever hopping in and out of the room we shared, busy with the small attentions a man still ambulatory could bring the immobilized. His sympathy was chronic; it was the palely shining aura of his disease. I should have realized that it was somehow involved even with his feeling for David Mannix, had I not been so reverently intent, during our night-light exchanges—and for once with no thought of storing any of this away—on Walter himself. I knew my privilege. I was listening to that goodness which speaks gratuitously, as it can only, to one’s own.