A Gay and Melancholy Sound (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) Read online

  I also decided last night to spend the remaining time putting on tape as many memories as I have time for during these final few days. I will put them down just as they come to me; Stendhal felt that out of such spontaneity came truth. We’ll see. I promise this. If I indulge myself in any second thoughts, I’ll label them as such. Second thoughts are what people have when the truth gets a little rough for their delicate stomachs.

  I am not one of those who think that by putting it all down they will find some meaning in their existence. No, I have read hundreds of such books, most of them written by senile old men of forty or thereabouts. Nothing written for a man searching for meaning in this time and this place is worth much. Here and now about all you can do is get through the day and hope that this won’t be the one when the aging delinquents who own us, body and soul, and who are in charge of the hydrogen tinker toys decide to let ’er rip.

  I came into the world in a disordered time and am leaving it at a moment when it is more disordered still. Out of disorder comes chaos, not meaning.

  Nor is what I have in mind a corrective punishment, though Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground impressed me in a way few books in my life have.

  No. My purpose is much simpler. By dictating these disjointed fragments of memory into this machine I am trying nothing more than to—let’s use the honest word here—stay safe until the end. Not sane, safe. Would a sane man have burned that canvas? For that matter, would a safe man?

  You see, the list I made yesterday was like so many lists I have made. Truthful as far as it went—but it didn’t go nearly far enough. Because I am by nature a coward, and by training and practice a liar, I left out the most important reason I cannot go on.

  I composed that item before I drifted into unconsciousness last night; it is this:

  Item Number Six. I have mentioned the headaches I have been having and euphemistically referred to the disintegration of my memory. The truth of the matter is I have been suffering from frequent blackouts recently, hours gone from my life, with no memory of where I have been or what I have been doing.

  And that’s not all. Several other small, familiar symptoms have returned, the ones I experienced before I was taken to the place in New Haven.

  Let me mention only one other. For weeks now I have been afraid of looking into a mirror.

  The last time, you see, at the end, I saw no reflection when I looked.

  I decided a long time ago that I would take my life rather than go back to New Haven.

  Oh, they are kind to you, and in the late afternoon a first-rate musician from the faculty at Yale plays the organ, and every cell in the place reverberates with the sound of the music—and sometimes, during the loud passages—of Bach, let us say—you cannot hear the screams at all. The women are the worst, really; they scream words that you have tried to blot out of your mind and words you never knew existed and didn’t want to know.

  No, I shall never return to the green couch in New Haven—or to the room with a death’s head on the wall.

  So much for Item Number Six.

  Last night, before the pills made me unconscious, I said this, aloud: “Oh God, help me stay—safe until the end. Help me get through the days; help me past the hour of five in the afternoon, and, oh especially, God, help me through the terrifying hours of the night. Help me not to be afraid in the dark, God. Help me bear with this awful loneliness. Help me believe, God. In something. Almost anything will do. Give me some small faith. In something. Anything will do. And, oh God, if you deny me all else, please let me hurt no other living thing before the end. That will do. Just that….”

  (5) Talk before you go!

  It is now ten-thirty. Since getting up this morning, I have dictated on tape the above account of yesterday’s and last night’s events.

  I haven’t been up so early in years, but the effect of the pills wore off shortly before six, and I did not take the usual two or three aspirins to prolong the unconsciousness.

  This morning I sat up in bed, opened the drawer of the night table, found some matches and some stale cigarettes, and lighted one.

  After I had finished the cigarette, I felt pleasantly drunk, and I thought that a shot would be nice. When I was on the sauce, the only part of my day that really lived up to expectation was that morning shot. The juice of four oranges and two jiggers of vodka. Nothing like it to start off a day.

  However, I am now sauceless, and for me there is no such thing as one drink. You see, I am now a member of The Brotherhood, and if I were just going to be around long enough, I would be eligible for an oak-leaf cluster for my merit badge.

  I stubbed out the cigarette and then showered and dressed. I am wearing the slacks and the sport shirt Charley bought me in London last spring.

  Could it have been last spring? Is it possible that such a short time ago she and I were eating fish and chips at a place within the sound of Bow bells and listening to an Irishman with one arm who sang for us?

  It’s seven-thirty in Las Vegas. Has Charley found peace, do you suppose?

  That last night she said there had not been a single day of peace in this house. “There’s been an hour of peace here and there,” she said, “but not one complete day or night of it.”

  As X drove up the long, tree-lined road leading into the enchanted forest, soft lights from the house of glass shone out over the trees and the hills, making of the house a bright island of promise and warmth.

  X went into the house and, as always, he called out her name—hopefully, fearfully, because even in the beginning X had known though not admitted that it would end and had known though not admitted how it would end.

  She was sitting on a yellow chair which reminded him of another yellow chair, and she was wearing the black dress they had bought at Harrod’s in London, and she had on the suggestion of a hat he had given her. A small black overnight case was on the carpet beside her, and her purse, nearly as large, was next to it.

  He leaned over to kiss her, but she avoided his touch. Then he asked a question which he hoped she would not answer.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “I’m leaving you,” she said.

  He had bought a very special book as a gift for her, but he let it fall to the floor, and he felt the sting of tears against his eyelids.

  He asked why, and she said, “I’ll try hard to make it clear and just for once listen to me. Just for once really hear me….

  “I love you, darling, and I pity you, but I don’t want to stay married to you. I’m too old and too tired and it’s too much work.”

  She walked to the naked wall of glass and looked out.

  “I thought maybe there’d be peace in this house,” she said, “but there hasn’t been. There’s been an hour of peace here and there but not one complete day or night of it.”

  She said, “It’s a beautiful house. The hills are beautiful, and the trees are beautiful, and there’s peace on every side of us, but there’s no peace here, and there never will be.”

  She said, “I know you tried, darling, as hard as you could, and I tried, too. I don’t know which of us tried more. It doesn’t matter. I just want out.”

  An eternity passed—or a moment or two.

  Finally, someone standing where X was standing, said, “I guess it wouldn’t do any good to say please don’t. Or that I’ll try harder. Or that I’ll go back to Dr. Baron. I’ll do anything you say. I’ll do—anything, darling.”

  And the tight, small voice that must have been his said, “Please don’t leave me.”

  The woman took X’s hand in hers, and she said, “I’ve been going over it all in my mind for weeks now. What you’d do and say and what I’d say. What I’d say if you were angry and what it would do to me if you—cried. Oh, darling, don’t turn your head from me and be ashamed. I’m sorry you never had a childhood. I’m sorry for all the hurts you felt and feel. I’m sorry that when somebody reaches out to caress you, you hit them before they can. I thought maybe I could help you, but I can’t. Nobody ever will. Maybe if I were twenty, but I’m not. I’m thirty-eight years old, and I haven’t got time.”

  X opened his mouth to speak, but the sound that emerged was half a moan and half a sob. Then X did manage to speak. “Are you sure?” he said.

  She nodded. “And I’m not going to cry,” she said, “not here and not later when I’m alone, not for the rest of my life, even if I’m always alone. I’m tired of crying, and, besides, I never cry at the big ones. I’m not going to get drunk either. This is drinking weather, but—I’m going to stay sober.”

  X said please, and he said that he loved her.

  She said, “Oh, no. You would if you could, but you can’t. You’ve tried, but you’re not up to love. The ability got left out of you—or crushed out. I don’t know…. Darling, you’re sometimes so sweet and so generous and so kind and amusing and fun to be with and, oh dear, just about everything in the world I could want…. Except loving. Never that…. And that awful self-hatred of yours. Hours of it, days of it. That awful black despair that no matter how hard I try always drags me into it. Maybe if I were—healthier, I could escape it, but I’m not. I’m sorry.”

  She kissed X’s hand, quite tenderly, and then she released it and picked up her bag and purse.

  “I’ll send for the rest of my things when I get settled,” she said, “and I’ll write when I get a permanent address. I’m going to stay with Maria and Wiz for the next few days.”

  “Is that—all?” asked X.

  “That’s all,” she said.

  She opened the black door; and X said, “Let me go. It’s your house, after all. I built it for you.”

  “No, you didn’t, darling,” she said. “You built it for you. Everything was always for you.”

  She closed the black door behind her, and that was the end.

  Later X burned the book he had bought for her, and he tried to burn the records they had bought together and listened to together. The records would not burn well, but for a while the fire in the woods lighted up the dark, despairing sky.

  More than an hour appears to have passed since I dictated that account of the end of my life. Because the night seven weeks ago when Charley left me was the end. No question of that.

  In the last hour I believe I have not moved from this chair. I believe I watched a blue jay—or else it was a robin; I believe the chipmunk came out of his home in the hollow log and looked for some of the sunflower seeds Charley used to leave for him and the birds. I believe a fawn came to the edge of the woods, stared curiously at me, and then ran off. I believe a cloud hid the sun for a while, but I cannot be sure.

  What matters is that the sun is shining now, and I shall begin at the beginning. I’ll get myself born.

  (6) I am born

  This will be a very short chapter, dealing only with three essentials—the place, the time, and the principals.

  The place was New Athens, Iowa, which was founded by one of a dozen “educational missionaries” who got to Iowa in 1843. All of them were recent graduates of Andover Theological Seminary.

  The founder was Robert Leith Kempton, my great-great-grandfather. He was a severe, scholarly man, and in the dark house in which I spent my childhood there was a dark portrait of him over the fireplace. He looked a little like Nathaniel Hawthorne—only not so handsome. I expect he cultivated that resemblance; he wore his hair long, and it was black, and so were his eyes. The way his eyes looked at you from that portrait—looked at me, anyway—you knew he knew everything.

  R.L.—apparently everybody called him that—hoped that some day the place he named New Athens would be the state capital and would have the state university as well. He was wrong on both counts. Des Moines got the state government and Iowa City got the university.

  At the time I was born, and still, the first sign you passed on the highway leading into town from the east said, “Welcome to New Athens, the Home of Twenty Thousand Friendly People.”

  There are two lies in that sentence. New Athens has never had a population of more than sixteen thousand, and few of those have ever been friendly.

  A second sign says, “The Home of Uncle George’s Kidney Beans. They Will Like You, and You Will Like Them.” The truth of that depends on who you are. A third, “New Athens is the Headquarters of Radio Station KNAI. Two Hundred and Fifty Powerful Watts.” I cannot deny it.

  Finally, a fourth sign, “New Athens is the Home of Pegasus College. The Parthenon of the Prairies. A Very Special College for Very Special Young Men and Women.”

  When I was back in New Athens last year for the funeral of my Aunt Mettabel, the town seemed to me to have gone down hill, but then so had I. There is now an eleven-story King Korn Hotel named after a statewide contest in which out of more than eleven thousand entries that was the winning suggestion. There is a new J. C. Penney, two stories, and a new Monkey Ward, three. The young people who in my youth would have belonged to the Country Club have moved into a new development east of Pegasus, overpriced houses of poor design, Utrillo reproductions on the walls and hidden hi-fi, largely Sinatra and Sibelius. In my youth, the reproductions were usually “The Song of the Lark,” and Humoresque was a favorite Victrola record for those not lucky enough to have a player piano. Lots of the folks on West Main Street had Caruso regretting he was a clown. Whether Sibelius is an improvement on Humoresque I wouldn’t care to say. As for the hi-fi as a cultural institution versus the player piano, that’s a whole evening’s discussion right there.

  The Country Club is still there, but it’s mostly for the aging. I never had much truck with the Country Club anyway. The only time in my youth that I was there, I was on exhibition the whole time. I do know that when I was fourteen and the biggest and also the smallest student at Pegasus I read John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, and I was convinced things at our country club were just the way he described them, though his was Pennsylvania and ours Iowa.

  I never knew for sure, though. I do know this. Now the people in their late twenties, thirties, and early forties have barbecue pits in their back yards, and the one night I attended a get-together last year, there was lots of acrimony, lots of drunkenness, and enough adultery to go around. Whether nature copies art or it’s the other way ’round is one of my many arguments I will no longer be able to participate in.

  In my youth, West Main was where you lived if you were anybody in New Athens; now it’s light-housekeeping rooms and doctors’ offices, although the Lavendar place is still there, as forbidding as ever. The Lavendars still own Midwest Canning, where the likable kidney beans are put up; they own the New Athens Times-Dispatch, the city council, the school board, and the county’s two state legislators. No change there.

  That will be enough for now on New Athens and the Lavendars.

  The time. I was born in 1921, the year after Main Street was published. I don’t mean that the appearances of Sinclair Lewis’s novel and me are of equal importance, but they are related.

  If it hadn’t been for Main Street, my mother might never have decided to produce a child. However, that novel made a profound impression on her. She was convinced that it was she who had inspired Mr. Lewis to create Carol Kennicott. True, she had never met him, but, “He certainly knows all about me. He may very well have observed me from afar.”

  She really talked like that—all the time, too.

  Mr. Lewis’s irony about Carol was lost on mother. To her, “Carol Kennicott represents the finer things in life, no if’s, and’s, and but’s about it.” (And by the way, in case these notes are ever transcribed—and that’s up to Dr. Baron—this is one of the house rules for any printer or typist: upper case for Negro, lower case for mother.)

  My Aunt Mettabel, a woman of great gentleness who also hated my mother’s guts, once told me that not long before mother became pregnant, she said, “Where Miss Kennicott made her big mistake was in not having a baby. A baby would have demonstrated her defiance of the Philistinians.”

  I am one of the world’s leading authorities on insomnia, and during many sleepless nights I have tried to picture the scene in which my mother let my father in on the fact that she wanted a baby.

  I could be wrong, but I picture her as saying something like, “Kendall, I have decided on a child.”

  I imagine my father protesting—slightly; he was a slight man. Perhaps he suggested that considering the strained relationship between him and my mother a child might not be desirable.

  I know pretty well what Mother said back. “Kendall, in matters like this your position and my position always have been and always will be diabolically opposed.”

  And then she said, “I’ll have a baby the like of which this town has never laid eyes on.”

  As was so often the case, she was right. She did just that.

  No more than a few weeks after Old Doctor Llewellyn had confirmed her happy suspicions about the pregnancy, mother announced to the members of the New Athens Artsy-Craftsy Club that she was going to produce a genius.

  “Jessica will be one of the most extraordinary women of her age,” mother said.

  One of the more courageous sisters then asked (my Aunt Mettabel told me this years later), “Celeste [that’s Mummy], how can you be sure it’ll be a girl?”

  “Because I want a girl. I am concentrating on a girl. I do not like boys. It will be a girl. Moreover, I plan that Jessica will have the career I mistakenly gave up for marriage.”

  Mother went on to say, “Jessica will be musical, of course. My own voice is intact, as is my talent. My tones are fresh and clear. I shall simply teach Jessica what I know. She will sing, dance, and play, and unless I miss my guess and I won’t she will be on the concert stage before she reaches her teens.”

  Why Jessica?

  “It means Grace of God,” said mother, “and rich. Jessica will be her mother’s daughter, and she will be rich. You can bet your bottom dollar on that.”