Expensive People Page 5

  The oddest thing of all was that while I loved Father I did not really believe he was my father. All my life I had visions of another man, my true father, and while he might appear in the body of the father I had been stuck with, his voice, his personality, and his soul were entirely different. For instance, my father was always happy. What can you do with a father who is always—nearly always—happy? He was happy putting up with Nada's boorish intellectual friends, he was happy with me when I failed him as a son (when I tried out for sixth-grade baseball at Wells Lorraine Boys' School my glasses were broken in the first fifteen minutes), he was happy when around him everyone was miserable, in bad weather, in stock-market declines, national emergencies. Listen to him come into a room, carrying his drink, and declare in a loud nostalgic voice:

  “What good does it do, eh? What good does it ever do? You give your best and you drop dead like Arnold did. My God, what a shame. What a shame. He was what? Only forty-five? When I think of what he had to offer! What that man had to give! Right? You know … well, I mean … I mean all the potential that man had to give, it's a goddam shame.” And he would shake his large head slowly and stare at the tip of his shoe and after a philosophical moment in which he let his ice clink he would start to nod his head, as if making his way up from the bottom of a dreary sea of sorrow. And his shoulders would make an attempt at straightening, one maybe a little higher than the other, and by the time he raised his glass to his mouth he would have “come out of it.” “But you know life's got to go on and nobody realized that more than Arnold. If anybody knew that, he knew it. I think … I think maybe I'm crazy, but I think that we owe it to him to keep going, keep his memory going, you know, and keep thinking about him while we go on living. He would have wanted it that way. Wouldn't he? Yes, that man would have imirted we be happy right now no matter how miserable we felt because life has to go on and nobody knew it more than Arnold …” (I used to spy on their cocktail parties all the time.)

  But just the same, though I knew him so well, I somehow didn't think he was my real father. I thought that another father might be waiting somewhere off in the wings and that at the next cocktail party, if I listened hard and crept as close to the living room as I dared, I might hear the strong, hard, even brutal voice of my true father.

  6

  On our way back from that walk, heading into the wind, we were just passing the house Nada believed Edward Griggs lived in when the man himself turned in to his driveway. He was driving a car I didn't recognize. Nada seized Father's wrist in that urgent, melodramatic way she had and said, “What did I tell you? Look!” We were blocking his driveway, and the gentleman in the car nodded at us and smiled uncertainly. Father, a little confused, nodded energetically and smiled back. But he neglected to move out of the way, so the man in the car— should I call him Griggs?—sat for a moment without moving. His smile gradually faded.

  Finally he did the only right thing: he lowered his window and leaned head and shoulder out. Father approached with a step bouncier than usual. Nada did not budge.

  “I believe you're our new neighbors. Just moved in, haven't you?” the man said.

  “Yes, just moved in!” Father cried cheerfully.

  This was the moment for them to admit knowing each other or to puzzle out identities, but, for some strange reason, they did no more than stare worriedly at each other.

  “Nice house down there,” the man said.

  “Nice, very nice! Nice neighborhood also,” Father said. “Nice town!”

  “It is nice, yes,” the man said slowly. He was looking at Father in a reluctant, perplexed way. “I have always thought so, in the short time I've lived here in Fernwood.”

  “Is this Fernwood?” Father said. But he recovered at once, laughed, reddened, and launched off on another enthusiastic speech. “We've just moved in too, but of course you know that, haha! You just mentioned that, or did I mention it? No, you mentioned that you have been here only a short time. We've been here a week now. How long have you been here?”

  “About a week.”

  The man who might have been Griggs was trying not to look at Nada, who was staring gloomily at him. A few awkward seconds passed. I stamped on the sidewalk, letting my weight fall on one foot, then the other. Nada put her arms around me and kissed my ear. “Poor little boy, freezing out here while that idiot in the car pretends not to recognize us. How stupid! And that bigger idiot pretends not to recognize him?

  “We'll have to get together sometime,” Father said.

  “That's an excellent idea,” the man said. He smiled shakily at Father, as if Father represented something terrifying he did not want to concede. Or perhaps he could not believe that Father really stood there, El-wood Everett himself. I thought it was strange that they did not introduce themselves and shake hands, the way adults always do, as if they'd at last met the one person in the world they had been aching to meet. Father and this man did not behave in the usual way and being so rude made them uneasy. Father chattered nervously about the good healthy air, about the state of the economy, about skiing conditions somewhere, until Nada told me to go get him. So I went and tugged at his arm. The man in the car—even I was not sure any longer if he was Griggs or not—had to look at me and his eyes moved upon me reluctantly. I thought I saw a look of muted, uneasy recognition, but it faded at once.

  “My son Dickie,” Father said.

  “Yes, Dickie. Richard.”

  “You know him?” Father cried.

  The two adults looked at each other with reddening faces. There was a moment when they might have asked whether they'd known each other in another life, just a week past, but the moment went by and they were left stubborn and miserable in silence. They could think of nothing to say.

  Finally Nada said, “Elwood, are you coming? We must go home.”

  “Wife's calling,” Father said with a fast small grin.

  The man raised his eyebrows in a fake perfunctory look of surprise and saw Nada, who was standing a few yards away, as if he had truly not noticed her before. He made a slight bowing motion with his head which Nada did not acknowledge.

  She and I were halfway back to our house by the time Father caught up to us.

  “So?” Father said.

  “Was it him or not?” I asked.

  “Was it?” said Father.

  Nada said nothing.

  “So? What did that prove? Did he know me? Did I know him?” Father said.

  “I think that was him,” I said.

  “How would you know?” Father cried with a hearty fake laugh. “You don't know Griggs. You'd be the last person to recognize him.”

  “I think it was him.”

  “But he didn't know me.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “No, he didn't.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  Nada made a snorting sound. “The bastard was just as terrified at seeing us as we were at seeing him. None of us can ever escape.”

  “No, I don't think it was him,” Father said.

  “Think it was he” said Nada.

  7

  Fernwood was an expensive, innocent town, but it was there that all my troubles began. It was in Fernwood that I began to disintegrate as a child. You people who have survived childhood don't remember any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy ax there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else—an adult, an animal. Do I sound too earnest and knowing? Too intense? Indeed I am intense, yes. Earnest also, because who else would stay laboring over this miserable typewriter (if only I could afford an electric typewriter!), dripping lardy sweat onto the keys, for no reward? And knowing, yes indeed. Knowing. In another chapter I'll tell you about my IQ^so your faith in me will be strengthened.
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br />   So it was in Fernwood that it began. It accelerated. Any reader could tell, however, that the seeds had been sown much earlier. For instance:

  8

  MY EARLIEST MEMORY

  I am a small child, perhaps an infant. I am a creature warm and cozy in a soft woolen outfit, wrapped in a blanket. I am sitting in a rocking chair just my size and Nada (she taught me to call her “Na-da” before any other word) is reading to me. I do not know what she is reading. I do not understand the words, but they are wonderful, like music. The cover of her book is shiny and the light from the table by the bed strikes it, making the cover glow so that I can't see what picture is on it—maybe that picture of the rabbit in dungarees. Nada is reading in a fast, excited voice. I am happy here with her because I haven't seen her for a while, this warm, soft person with the dark hair lying loose on her shoulders; when Nada is gone off somewhere a woman with dark, dark skin and a white outfit takes care of me, pushing me out for endless walks in the sun or letting me sit wretchedly in the sun while she chatters shrilly with other dark-skinned women in white, yellow, or light blue outfits.

  But now Nada is back and I can see that she loves me. She is reading me a story. As she reads her eyes keep jumping up and behind me, as if she is waiting for something. She is wearing a pink nightgown just like mine, the same color, with a silky ribbon tied at her throat. Over this she has a flowered robe. She is so pretty, this Nada, with her loose hair and her shiny, smooth face, and suddenly there is a noise outside. On the stairs. Her eyes glow up from the book and catch the light the way the book cover does, and her words stop at once, and outside there is the thud of running feet and a sudden louder thud and the sound of wood splintering, and Nada and I both look up to see a strange man crashing through the door, the door flying back and slamming into the wall, and a blinding exploding flash of light, and then everything is still again and there, behind him, stands Father.

  The strange man has a black instrument with a light bulb on it. He pauses and stares at us. Father, entering the room slowly through the smashed door, stares at us. Father wears a soiled coat and he is wet. The strange man is wet too. That is because it is raining out. The man checks something on his instrument and turns and hurries out, bumping into Father. Father seizes him in a kind of embrace and lifts him aside, without looking at him, and the man leaves. Father is still staring at us. He is staring at Nada. I cannot hear what they are saying to each other in this silence, but the room is filled with their screams and their cries of hatred and rage and triumph. The room is filled with it, and I could drown in its very silence.*

  *As I read this over, this rendition of infant impressions strikes me as very bad, but let it stand. The experience is there, the reality is there, but how to get at it? Everything I type out turns into a lie simply because it is not the truth.

  9

  One detail about someone in Nada's family an uncle or bizarre distant cousin: he committed suicide by overeating. He decided to kill himself by forcing food down his throat and into his bursting stomach, eating his way through a roomful of food. Admirable man! I can almost see him, can't you? Some dismal, philosophical-faced, hawk-nosed, masculine version of Nada, lost in the gloom she too sometimes fell into, and, unable to rise out of it again, deciding on this only half-serious method of committing suicide. The word “committing” necessitates a certain amount of judicious consideration, and it has always seemed to me idiotic that a madman can “commit” murder or indeed anything. He does it, that's all. Or rather it gets done somehow, with or without his volition. But when you set forth to “commit” a crime you do it with your heels springing off the ground with glee, your brain cells whirling and popping with energy, and, I think, a certain air of magnanimity toward the world. After all, you are leaving it. Whether you kill yourself or someone else you are leaving the world, and if any of my readers succumb to the enchanting music that so cruelly deafened me, they will know just what I mean. The rest of you are in no position to judge.

  So this man committed suicide by eating. I had overheard Nada tell this grisly anecdote more than once, but never when Father was around. She told it once to a good friend of hers, a man with a skimpy, sandy beard who kept staring down at the floor and breathing harshly and sympathetically through his beard. He kept saying, “Yes, yes,” while she told the story of this uncle or cousin (I forget which) who locked himself up in his room and ate until the lining of his stomach burst. Did he die in agony? I don't like to think of that. I like to think of that supreme moment when he broke through the slippery, stubborn wall of his own stomach and entered eternity at once—I don't like to think of lesser details. He did it, Nada said, to rob his family of dignity and to make fun of the way they gorged themselves. They were such gluttons—she laughed—and they had to move away from that city out of shame, though they did not stop being gluttons as far as she knew. Behind all her mysterious, melodramatic contempt she was proud of that family of hers.

  The anecdote always inspired in those who heard it, and in me, a strange jealousy along with our natural admiration. I suspect we are all very suspicious and jealous of those who commit suicide, anxious to prove that it was “cowardly” or “painless,” we could do better, indeed we will do better, wait and see.

  10

  And so we came to Fernwood, the town of my disintegration. There I bade farewell to myself as a child. Should I bother to describe Fern-wood, or can you imagine it? Fernwood and Brookfield and Cedar Grove and Charlotte Pointe are always the suburbs farthest out, but don't confuse yourself by thinking they are the newest. No, they are the oldest. They are the “country,” where the country houses of the past had been built for the wealthy of the city many horse-drawn miles away. Now, of course, in between these suburbs and the city are those absurd new towns and villages, row after row of clean, respectable houses and maze after maze of buff-brick housing developments, all overpriced and treeless, the slums of tomorrow. The hell with them. The “country” was where Father always took us, sure in his instincts and surer still in his bank account, for nothing more was demanded of one than money in this world. There was a jolly camaraderie because of this fact. Fine. Great. Fernwood had been the site of these old country estates, and enormous estates they had been too; it would make your heart swell to the danger point to see one of them. A few were left, but most of the land had been divided up into, say, three-acre plots for other houses, and in the more citified part of the village plots as small as two acres. Our Fernwood house, on a winding street called Burning Bush Way, was one of these lesser homes, of course.

  Imagine Fernwood like this: an odor of grass, leaves, a domesticated river (with ducks, geese, and swans provided by the village, and giant goldfish swimming gracefully), blue skies, thousands of acres of faultless green grass, not Merion Blue but the low creeping type used on golf courses, and an avalanche of trees everywhere!—and enormous stone houses, brick houses, fake Scandinavian houses, English, French, Southwest, Northeast houses, a sprinkling of “modern” architecture that never manages to look more than nervously aggressive in this conservative environment. And mixed in with the odor of lawns being sprinkled automatically on warm spring mornings is the odor of money cash. Fresh, crisp cash. Bills you could stuff in your mouth and chew away at. My mouth is watering at the thought of that tart, fine blue-green ink, the mellow aroma of the paper!

  Should I digress and tell you a strange little incomplete tale about cash? Bills? Raw money? One morning back in Brookfield, my eight-year-old self was dawdling on the way to school when I happened to see one of Nada's friends drive up. I could tell by the way she braked her car and slid into one of our evergreens that she was distracted, and when she jumped out of the car she left the door swinging ponderously. So I followed her quietly back to our house. She burst in the back door without knocking, into the kitchen, and cried, “Natashya! Natashya!” I peeked in through a window, inclining my ear to the screen. The gauzy kitchen curtain hid me perfectly. Nada came in, and the woman said,
before my mother had a chance to show surprise, “You'll never guess what I have in this!” A moment of silence, then Nada's hesitant murmur, which I couldn't hear. Then the woman cried out with a horrible, ugly triumph I can still remember, “Look at this! I found where that bastard has been hiding it all!”

  And I took every chance and looked up. Yes, entranced by her frenzy, I raised my head to peer through the window, to see the woman holding open a brown leather ice container stuffed with bills.

  “Thousands! Thousands! A million maybe!” she said, panting.

  Some of the bills spilled onto the floor. I could see the woman's saliva in the bright morning sunshine, and the sight so unnerved me I lost my balance and fell a yard or two to the ground.

  So you see? Cash like that. And other forms too, in tiny books and stamped on pieces of paper. Oh, it was wonderful, wonderful, and in a way I wish I still had access to it. If I wanted to stuff myself with money and die in that unique way I couldn't; I don't have enough cash. But I want to tell the story of Fernwood, and cash is only part of it. It is the foundation of it, yes, but we like to rise above our foundations, our muddy beginnings. We like to rise without looking back because that is perhaps declasse, and when there are no true classes, what greater horror than becoming declasse, unfit for even the classless society?