Little Casino (12 page)

When all is said and done—lovely phrase—it has to be acknowledged that Roman Catholicism is not a Christian religion; or, to put it better, the neurotically cheerful, doom-obsessed, you-can-take-it-with-you hysteria of eccentric American Christianity has little to do with Roman Catholicism, which is, essentially, a mystery religion. All those worldly priests who can chat about mundane problems are but masks and diversions to hide the center of the faith from the general, snarling populace, lest they should see it for what it is: magic.

The woman who wept herself into hysteria was Katie DeLeon. Two other women, who also wept so uncontrollably that they had to be helped out of the viewing room, were Anna Claves and Mary Filippo. He sat with each of them, individually, on a small love seat outside of the funeral director’s office, and each gripped his hand and held white handkerchiefs, sodden with tears, to their streaming, swollen eyes. The handkerchiefs had lace edgings.

“Anointing of the sick” has a more hopeful sound to it than “extreme unction.” As if “the sick” may perhaps recover.

“Shuffle Off to Buffalo” was published in 1932, words by Al Dubin, music by the wondrous Harry Warren. Ginger Rogers and Ruby Keeler sang this song, and, of course, danced to it, on a Hollywood back-lot version of the Niagara Limited. The film was
Forty-Second Street.

Al Dubin, Harry Warren, Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, and the Niagara Limited are all dead. Let perpetual light shine upon them.

This valley of tears

T
HE DAY HIS MOTHER DIED WAS A COLD DAY
. The day his mother died was a wet day. The day his mother died was a raw day, a snowy day. The day his mother died was a gray day, the gray of death.

The day his mother died was a dark day, a day of cheap chow mein, of Lucky Strikes, of somber faces, of silent relatives, of soothing clichés, a day of sadness.

The day his mother died was a day of revelations, bitterness, a day of sudden understanding, of ignorance, of mysteries and confessions, of trips and trips and trips through sleet and freezing rain in cars and cabs and subway trains, in the Hudson Tubes, in Public Service buses, on foot through slushy streets.

The day his mother died ended some things and initiated others.

The day his mother died was a day of memories, of old movies, of yellowing books and brittle pages and of bad poems, blurry television screens, of new kitchenware, of policemen anddoctors and oxygen and anesthesia, of stupid articles and vapid stories in tattered magazines.

The day his mother died was a day of copulation, fellatio, masturbation, cunnilingus, it was a day of girdles and hats with half-veils, of high heels and dinner rings.

The day his mother died was a day of insanity and hamburgers, of perversions, of good clothes and fur coats and bank accounts, of booze and quiet saloons, of surrogate court and legal forms and leaky ballpoint pens.

A day of undertakers and morgues, of helplessness, of sheer stockings, dresses cut on the bias, lipstick, perfume, mascara, eye shadow, of rouge and neckties and embarrassment. Of formaldehyde.

A day of children in patched clothes, windy empty lots, bad jobs, pitiful salaries, cruel and stupid bosses, of rickety furniture and basement apartments, of drunkenness and false friends, of hopeless misunderstandings. It was a day of coarse and vulgar infidelities, instant violence, reckless fucking, crazed parties, insincere smiles, of error and sin and betrayal. It was a day of unwanted confidences and cynicism.

The day his mother died: of death: a day of negation: of finality.

Mourning and weeping. In this valley of tears.

“The phrase, ‘the day his mother died,’ has an intentionally incantatory quality, of course, but may it not be considered self-indulgent?”

Death strolls down the road and asks if we might care to sit in the shade of a tree with him. An old elm, what else? A cool breeze blows across the overgrown churchyard and the old church is piercingly white in the bright sun. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” he says. He seems like a reasonable man, for a corporal. Of course, he’s got a job to do.

It is very difficult for a young man to select the clothes that his mother will be buried in. Let the women do it, for Christ’s sake, let the women do it.

He sits in the dim light of the shabby living room, watching the snow pile up against the badly seated windows. “I really
liked
her,” the woman says. “God, she was just here a month ago.” A marvel, a masterpiece, a chef d’oeuvre of cant.

He sees
her
clearly, ‘deed he do. “That’s a fucking jewel of fucking phoniness,” he says. “Do we have any whiskey in this fucking hateful dump?”

A day of bad movies, of the silver screen filled with the paralyzing stupidity of self-adoration. “These swine will never die!”

Snow snow. Snow.

She whom no one ever found, death found, in Jersey City.

The true ciphers at last

S
HE TOLD HIM THAT HIS FATHER WAS THE
greatest driver in the country, if not the world, and that LaSalles and Packards, DeSotos and Chryslers, Buicks and Cadillacs and Hudson Terraplanes had been designed and built especially for his pleasure; that he had suggested the wooden-spoked wheels for the Moon roadster and sold the specifications for another famous if overrated car to Herr Porsche, who then claimed it for his own; that dances had been created for him by Nijinsky, Ted Shawn, Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and Loie Fuller, that ballrooms had been named for him and luncheon dances under swirling colored lights suggested and popularized by him. The classic Savile Row suit? Designed by him. The Windsor knot? First tied by him and generously credited to the Duke, who, in actual fact, being something, he’d winked, of “a dim bulb,” couldn’t even tie his shoes. The silk scarf employed as a belt was one of his improvisatory whims. He had started all the major Hollywood studios, with Jack and Adolph and Harry and Louis as his assistants, but tired of their puerile minds, their lack of adventurous spirit, and their worship of the box office. She said that he’d opened a restaurant with Rudolph Valentino as a partner; that he’d been the first to wear a midnight-blue tuxedo; that before his arrival in Miami Beach, Lincoln and Collins Avenues had been not much more than skid rows; that he’d created whipped cream and the cheeseburger; that he’d not only bought, refurbished, and opened the Cotton Club, but that he’d booked into it Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Chick Webb, Sy Oliver, Benny Moten, Jay McShann, Fletcher Henderson, Jimmy Lunceford, Cab Calloway, and Andy Kirk and his Twelve Clouds of Joy; that he’d collaborated with Flo Ziegfeld on all the Follies, but grew restive at the successful but banal formula, and that, incidentally, he’d made love to each and every one of the famed Ziegfeld Girls; that he’d also had affairs with Pola Negri, Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, Mae Marsh, Vilma Banky, Paulette Goddard, Claudette Colbert, Dorothy Day, Lydia E. Pinkham, and Castoria Fletcher, all this before,
of course,
he’d met her; that he’d bought a Chinese restaurant, the Jade Mountain, with cash, because she liked the egg foo yung there, a dish, by the way, that he’d created of necessity on a chicken farm in the Gobi; that he’d almost managed to save Bix Beiderbecke from drinking himself to death, but was too busy advising the Army Air Corps on the design of a low-altitude fighter that eventually became the P-51 Mustang; that he’d caught the biggest sailfish, tuna, swordfish, and blue marlin that had ever been caught off the Florida Keys; that he’d advised James Joyce to drop the possessive apostrophe in the title of his last work; that he’d suggested to Scott Fitzgerald that he read the work of the virtually unknown Ernest Hemingway. He invented the pneumatic scaling tool and devised a method of cleaning double-bottomed boilers that would save workers’ sanity; he consistently bid lowest on re-rigging jobs for the Navy and just as consistently did excellent work; he could shovel snow for hours and then dance all night; make a marinara sauce and a bolognese sauce and a white-clam sauce that were miracles of superb flavor and subtle balance; he could teach anybody to drive and had, as a matter of fact, given the great Nuvolari some invaluable tips. She remarked that it was well known that he was a descendant of an aristocratic Italian family, descended from the Emperor Galerius, whose roots were deep in Sicily; that he was a remarkably attentive, adoring, dutiful yet strict father; that he had renamed Yellow Hook, Bay Ridge, for which the Brooklyn Borough President gave him the key to the borough and the Order of Chevalier of Kings County Arts and Letters; that he’d been the one to first spot George Herriman’s genius; that he’d suggested to Magritte that the title of a simple painting should be “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” rather than the painter’s “Une pipe”; that he could sing like Russ Columbo, only with greater range and better breath control; that he met regularly with Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, George Gershwin, Erik Satie, Alban Berg, and Arnold Schoenberg to discuss what he called “serial music” and “atonal music”; that he wrote the first lengthy critique of the new medium of television, calling it “the coming boon—or curse—of the century.” He had unofficially broken the world records for the giant slalom, the butterfly, the 100-meter dash, and the pole vault; he advised his close friends to buy up all the cheap land in and around a small, virtually abandoned one-time mining town in Colorado: Aspen; and he was the writer or co-writer of speeches given by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Father Divine, Al Smith, Fiorello H. LaGuardia, Huey Long, Eddie Cantor, Father Coughlin, Eugene V. Debs, and General Douglas MacArthur, the latter’s remarks those famous words delivered on the occasion of his being awarded his ninth Good Conduct Medal; he had, uncannily, predicted the popular musical expression that came to be called rock and roll. His heart had stopped beating for forty-seven minutes when his mother died, and he remarked, upon regaining life-functions, that “the other side” looked “like an enchanted Elizabeth Street”; he wrote all the jokes and comedy routines for W.C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, and the Marx Brothers; he was, perhaps, proudest of the humble sausage recipe that he gave, gratis, to Nathan Handwerker; and she said, too, that he was a lying, cheating, unfaithful, deceitful, and miserably cruel and thoughtless and selfish son of a fucking bitch bastard who should suffer and suffer for years and years and then die in agony and all alone and burn screaming in the torments of hell forever and ever and ever, may God forgive me! That’s what she told him.