107
the checkered fritillary/monk rose
The Checkered Fritillary
Marvin Rose
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2009 Marvin Rose
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THE CHECKERED FRITILLARY
Thus only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men who never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought-- the subtle rapture of a postponed power which the world knows not, because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The Profession of the Law (1886)
PART I
BOONE HASTINGS IS A SON OF A BITCH
1
Boone Hastings, loved by no one, was ruefully tolerated by most who knew him. Several others made no effort to hide their loathing. These people said that he cared about nothing, accomplished nothing and respected nothing, and it was whispered by some that he had been seen standing breech to the sun on a bright day and had cast no shadow.
He had a reputation for meanness, made solid by his actions and advertised by his own broadcasting. At twelve, he said, he had killed thousands of fish by polluting an estuary with toxic chemicals.
In April, the robins returned to Ocean County, New Jersey, and catkins split their budcases, showering the beach willows with yellow haze. Boone Hastings pulled hard on the oars. The old lapstrake rowboat jumped, cut the ocean southward parallel to the shoreline. Opalescent bubbles seethed in its wake. A pleasant ache strung across his back and shoulders, ending with a quirk inside the deltoids. The hurt is your body’s profit, his father had told him. Don’t waste your time on easy work or you’ll find yourself in the sump. But there would be no hurt to profit him today, and what amount of work could cool his frightened heart? For Boone Hastings' birthright had taken a dive into the toilet.
It was morning on the pale sea. Sweat soaked him, and his legs trembled against the footbrace with each smooth stroke. Red-billed laughing gulls converged in a cube of sky fifty yards off his stern and jobbed neatly down to the chop, swooping at schools of swarming silversides.
He wondered if the current was swifter than he had calculated, and lifted the oars. At once, his momentum checked and the boat yawed slightly, drifting gently backward. He left-oared back to the parallel and dug in to his misery once again.
His father had run a string of eight dance studios franchised from a respected broker, paying in full for the first, mortgaging it to buy the second, mortgaging that to open the third, and repeating this program until he had five units in Philadelphia, two in North Jersey for the Manhattan bedroom communities, and another in Atlantic City's Grand Mariner Casino Resort. Holding onto the instructional staff had been difficult because of competing attractions in other vocational lines. His father had told him that people who teach dancing were easy prey to exploitation of their good looks and easy sociability. They were drawn into hospitality work--hosts and hostesses in resorts, glamorous dogwork in casinos and restaurants, point-of-contact jobs in faraway paradises that promised more money and opportunity for advancement. The dance studios closed one by one. For this, young Boone blamed mostly the women. It was the female instructors who were more easily lured away, usually for inconsequential reasons-- the studio was two flights up, the studio was not air conditioned, the studio restroom did not contain a bidet. Male instructors left only for higher income or better hours, real reasons. It was more or less at this point that the young man's disregard for women was crystalized.
The business was lost, and a year later Boone Hastings Sr. died in a tangle of worry and blamefulness. Before his father's death, the son had juggled his career choices. He never believed that the rewards of hard work justified its demands and had spent his post-adolescent years sampling the training programs for junior executives offered by most of the marketplace giants. This phase, underwritten by his indulgent father, had a longer life than many of the horses he supported through his local bookie. By the time he grew too weathered to qualify for further pursuit of the junior programs, he had accumulated a collection of minor skills and a vast range of undeveloped information that began well past the fundamentals of any subject and ended always short of usable conclusions. Later, he had become a dance instructor himself at a few of his father's franchises in Philadelphia, hoping to employ his charm and striking physicality in the cosmopolitan reaches of that city to nail a wealthy, suitably dense, wife. This too failed, and it was not until several jobs later, tending bar, that he found her.
Hastings tried to avoid introspection. He believed that it renewed obligations to self-concern and well-being and was damaging to peace of mind. He could not afford to be unhappy, sensing that unhappiness was a staple in the gene pool and lay dormant in everyone, and that it distressed those who saw it in him, as if its faded racial memory could be awakened in them by his empty face.
Too long bound to his father's side, he had sailed deafly through destiny's call to fortune, and kept his faith where he had begun. It was a futile faith, he knew, made emptier by events beyond his own birth and hammered thin by his father's enduring whine for what might have been. An irony-- Boone Hastings Sr.'s yearning for opportunity lost--forcing lost opportunity on Boone Hastings Jr. When the father had died in his sleep at home, the son sat by his bedside staring, the old man's body in an attitude shaped by life and confirmed by death in angles of lamentation and complaint as if death could harvest and refine the few unfocussed images loved ones are remembered by.
He recalled his mother clearly enough. She had not run away until young Boone was twelve years old. There had always been something remote about her. Her son clung to her amid the terrors of his early childhood, but she never seemed to care for him, and her indifference to his efforts to make her love him tore his heart at an age that children must be cherished or lose heart's ease forever. Then she found a lover and vanished.
Boone Hastings, in genteel poverty, now rowing his boat for the last time, looked toward the shore and the beach house--isolated at the tip of a small barrier island off the New Jersey coast-- all that remained of the family fortune. In a few hours, the house, the land, the boat, all artifacts and items to be considered part of the property-- everything inventoried and countersigned-- would belong to his creditors. Here he had idled with his youth, quarreled with the demands of his empty ambitions and brought, at last, his selected woman, met and married in the first summer of his cynical resolve to do so--to midnight swims and dancing, music in the air and pre-dawn barbecues. Varnished with romance, but heedless of the cracks in its fragile shell, he came to marriage from the dull hum of his spent youth.
A right-oared turn, then back, this time with the flowing current. Harder to control in a following sea, the boat required a higher cadence, greater strength on the pull. Now the ache was constant, reached into his biceps and calves. The boat cut water, foaming at the prow. A wake formed, rolled and congealed.
In a spasm of self pity, he had cast off the past that clamped him to his memory's trace, to the feeble compassion of his childhood, his love for a weak father. Think now, think today he told himself.
Pull, pull for pain. Canescent rollers, sunshined, walloped the boat's side.
I’m Boone Hastings.
Who?
Hastings. Name’s Hastings. Don’t fuck with me.
On the beach, he hoisted the big sledge hammer he had left there and stove in the boat's side below the water line. He viewed the wreckage with satisfaction and a kind of pleasure touched by arrogance. The smashing of boats was a point scored against pussies, an instance of masculine will and strength that had no equivalent among the actions of women. Maybe they could cry a boat smashed, he snorted. He thought of his wife and shook his head which contained the entirety of her, the absolute idea of her sloth and gluttony, and knew that any female's wholeness could be taken into the mind of any man and still leave an acre or two to spare. His wife was away on a visit with her mother in Florida. Enjoying her absence, he made a crooked Errol Flynn smile.
He held the smile as he entered the house and stopped in front of the foyer mirror. There he was, a square foot of Handsome. Boone Hastings made some facial adjustments, turning slowly to gain the most pleasing effect. He believed that physical beauty conferred a social obligation directed to its public display and did his utmost to allow others the fulfillment of beholding him. The attractions of art, music, politics, literature and sports did not hold him. It was his experience that these were the pursuits of homely people. Physical beauty opened all the doors he needed. Screwing women and getting his hands on money took most of his thought and labor, and he recognized their often reciprocal nature. They were cause and effect, the chicken and the egg tumbling over each other from Time's beginning. This vaguely cosmic paradigm sobered him. He sat on the edge of the bed-- for the last time in this house, he told himself--and clipped his toenails straight across, as recommended in the ladies' magazines, to reduce the risk of ingrowing.
Boone Hastings, Jr. had been raised from birth on Addison Street in West Philadelphia. A clotted vein of rowhouses that separated the arterial traffic of a large avenue on each side, Addison Street chattered with the forces of human congestion. Whites who had declined evacuation to the suburbs shared backyard fences with blacks and latinos who rushed to inhabit the houses of departed neighbors. An only child, young Boone thrived in the hustling daily commerce of street-smart families all around him. They did not like the crusty boy as they liked his dreaming father. They did not like the way he seemed to stick out in any crowd, the way he forgot the name of each person and discounted his particular trouble. They did not like the way he laughed with such gusto at their accents and manners and the way he took care to measure out meanness and spite.
Among the lessons of his earlier childhood was one that introduced him to the pleasure/pain principle. He took to wiggling his loosening baby teeth with his tongue, discovering that the ache and its odd reward could be intensified by gripping a tooth with his fingers. Nurturing a tendency to even more direct action, he would sometimes pluck one like a radish from his gums. When all his permanent teeth grew in, he searched for other means to gratify this now habitual preference. After trying and rejecting creative variations of self-abuse that employed poking, scratching, pulling and pounding on himself, he discovered the destructive delight of attaching a springclip clothespin to one earlobe. This action tested his ability to endure pain. The enduring of it gave him pleasure, and although not as intimate a solipsism as toothwiggling, it was quite good enough and, in moments of stress, stayed with him till adulthood.
He was disliked by his teachers and earned passing grades with a minimum of effort. The yearbook voted him Laziest Boy and in a section entitled The Devil's Forecast, he was named Most Likely To Exceed. He was a five letter man--specified by those who envied him as P-U-S-S-Y-- because he dated a different girl every weeknight, chosen from the clamoring clutter that busied his telephone. Though he rarely touched them, he was careless about impugning a girl's reputation. He could not control the gossip that was generated by such unexpected restraint, and titillating rumors soon gathered around all the things Boone Hastings, Jr. himself left unsaid. The myth grew, embellished by each tattler's inner fantasy, until stories of his prodigious adventuring spread from the school into surrounding neighborhoods. Adults shook their heads, and some kept a tighter rein on their daughters.
But the girls he dated knew the truth of it--that long, tall Boone Hastings was content to allow them the luxury of his presence, and never made a move on them until they first made a move on him. It was as if his contained Self were too elevated to volunteer for carnal exchange, but would answer requests. Each girl had her own opinion of his character-- he was nice, brutal, thoughtful, selfish, sweet, crude, refined, demanding, shy-- and each was surprised to find these conflicting appraisals as staunchly proclaimed as was her own. It soon became clear that young Hastings could be all of these things, a creature who was handy with the camoflage of ready adaptation.
Repeat performances were granted only to those girls who had substantial allowances or independent access to money through afterschool jobs. Before long, most of these found themselves paying for the evenings out, and the more resourceful among them added a little something extra for Boone's pocket.
Meanwhile, his father's dance studios flourished. After graduation, he began his Junior Executive researches, claiming in each case to have been promised favorable consideration at program's end. This also allowed him to declare that he was employed, and enhanced his notoriety. In the end, his exploits-- these corporate tryouts and the alternating periods of dance instruction at one or another of his father's outlets--provided a conversion factor, and that was all. Now well seasoned, notoriety was a currency that increased his value to others like money in the bank. He saved it like money and spent only what was necessary.
Observing this wasting of life, his father induced him--with implied threats of disownership-- to sign up for a hitch in the airborne infantry, hoping that such harrowing toil would make a man of him. But Boone, after many jumps and an earned paratrooper certification, was dishonorably discharged for moral turpitude in an action brought by seven raped female clerks at the flight center's post exchange. Ten months after his induc- tion, he was back where he had started, refreshed and emboldened by his experiences.
It brought him into a lifeguard's job at the pool in the Crowne Regency, a swanky center city hotel where he entertained the concupiscent wives and daughters of visiting convention delegates. It helped him to leapfrog the linen service department and to escape a waiter's uniform in which, although he might earn good money in tips, he would have fewer opportunities to cultivate rich girls. Waiters were supposed to be courteous, efficient and silent. The intensity of pointed conversation was frowned upon by management.
He told his family and friends that he was in the hotel business. An assignment as restaurant host allowed him much broader contacts, but these proved useless to him because of their superficiality. It was not until he was transferred to the lounge bar that he found the vocation best shaped to his goals. Here, he could cozen in depth the powerful men and friendly women who stopped by for a recharge while he searched among them for some combination of forces that would accord a comfortable living to him without the requirement to work for it. Miles of happy adventure soon followed as he extended to full expression the tools of his gratification. His gonads purred. He learned to change himself at will, instantly, and to shape his malleable personality into a seamless facade that reformed itself effortlessly at each barstool.
One day he made the acquaintance of Lisle Beaufort Beam who had stopped into the lounge for a cocktail with her recently widowed mother. The girl, who Boone Hastings thought was smart, pretty, friendly, but a bit on the chunky side, confided that they needed a pick-me-up after a trip downtown to settle her patrimony. As she sipped her drink and stuffed down the lunch she had ordered, she whispered her troubles. The lawyer had passed along some bad news-- Daddy had squandered lots of money in pursuit of a good time in the casinos of Atlantic City, and little was left now besides their estimable name and the family home on the Main Line in Paoli, Pa. The family business, Beam Distillers, a small but profitable riverfront operation, would have to be sold to cover his debts-- Daddy was a bit of a jerkwho wouldn’t know a really good time if it bit him on the ass. John Jack Beam, you must’ve heard of him?--what's more, Beam Distillers, a local business altogether unconnected to the famous bourbon of the same name, but everywhere mistakenly graced by it, had never quieted her father's blue collar klaxon. Only now had death done it for him, and his wife and daughter concentrated on the upside, their genteel ancestral pretense no longer threatened by his callused pedigree. They were accepted as the gentry they claimed to be.
However, Mrs. Beam, a grand lady with flaring nostrils, was frazzled by the specter of penury, and she knocked down three quick Tanqueray Gibsons before resuming her disapproval of her late husband's profligate ways. And as if she hadn't enough misfortune, her free-spirited daughter seemed actually to be enjoying the attentions of a bartender!
Lisle Beaufort Beam was spellbound on the spot, and in three weeks persuaded a vacillating Boone Hastings to marry her. A few years her junior, the bartender at last reckoned that a merger with the Beam family would confer immediate respectability upon him and accelerate a young man's passage through the crowd of common hustlers that sprang from the gate as each new genera-
tion came of age. He judged these fellows to lack principle. For his part, he would marry Lisle Beam now and marry a rich girl later. He would move into the big family house and, without urgency, find his way to money.
After a year of his wife's burgeoning sexual selfhood, Hastings had not yet devised a test for the cash value of her hot pants. After strenuous maneuvering, which caused him much anxiety and stress, he was close to settling for her signature on an unsecured loan when he felt the early but unmistakable signs of chronic mucous colitis. The symptoms took the form of adamant cramps and constipation. One doctor recommended a high-fiber diet, another prescribed bland foods. A third touted mild laxatives and stool softeners. Hastings tried them all, then, disgusted with their failure, he instituted a regimen of colonic irrigation without consulting his doctors. He gave himself per-
fumed soap enemas every other day which his distressed wife, concerned for the regularity of her own coital infusions, prepared for him.
At these times, in the privacy of his bathroom refuge, Hastings would attach a springclip clothespin to the lobe of one ear, finding in this indulgence a familiar measure of relief from the embarrassment now brought by so common a disorder. Enemas had no class. He thought that their ordinariness was suited to other, homely, people. Besides, the combination of rectal insertion and self-induced pleasure produced by the earpinch caused him some vaguely masturbatory misgivings. He took care to avoid touching his genitals.
After filing the burrs from his neatly clipped toenails, Hastings showered and dressed, hoisted to one shoulder the strap of a heavy valise and locked the front door before he left the beach house. He did not look back, having few fond thoughts of his life there. He had intended to hit the road directly from this place, to start his life again in the anonymous grey redundancy of Philadelphia, a city that repeated itself in neighborhoods, mile after mile. But he decided to return to the big house in Paoli, to pack a few valued belongings from the home he shared with his wife and her snowbird mother. First though, he rummaged around in the tool shed at the rear of the summer house and found a dozen old cans of paint. These he emptied into a small brackish estuary behind the shed. The narrow stream fed itself into a bay that formed part of the east coast's inland waterway. Remembering a similar youthful caper, he did it to poison the site for those who would follow him there.
On the way to his car, he wondered about Lisle Hastings' reaction to the note he had left for her in that Main Line house--the Beam House, the house of esteem and high regard, the house of history, the house he now believed had given him its shine. He almost wished that he could hang around for another week till she returned from her trip.
The late sun slanted low, orange. Overhead, two gulls called sharply.
2
As the windshield wipers clicked rhythmically, Lisle Hastings hummed a tune to their beat. Her spirit was light because she was returning home after an unsatisfactory visit with her mother. Almost anything was better than a visit with her mother. Cutting her trip short by a week was better. The flight back was better; better also was the way her car had started instantly on the airport parking lot after ten days' storage. Commanding her own vehicle was better, never mind the downpour that smothered her now. Ten days in the sunshine of Boca Raton, Florida was not a wonderful thing if the sunshine was poisoned by her mother's acid rain.
She drove carefully, leaning forward to control her line of vision through the smeared arc of the wipers. She checked the side mirrors and the rear view mirror often to watch out for speeders and tailgaters, taking the opportunity on each pass to observe the regularity of her features and the effect of their skillful enhancement by cosmetics. At twenty-nine, and still fighting a lifelong battle against overweight, she indulged an increasing dependency on her facial beauty. She had moved without a ripple from the Chubbies department of adolescence to the Full Figured salons of adulthood, never acknowledging to herself the armature that underlay these marketing euphemisms--I am a fat lady with a pretty face. Fad diets and formal programs had not helped. She tried doctors and hypnotists, all of them disappointments, and decided that bodyweight was an internal matter to be influenced only through a balance of will against desire, the dialogue between order and anarchy. She wanted her life to be full of good times, but good times shied from fat girls.
She turned the radio on and sang a duet with Stevie Wonder. Between phrases, rising like apples in a tub, her mother's familiar words bobbed, You married beneath you--don’t say I didn’t You think he is charming and attentive, but I know he will betray you and break your heart. His kind are enemies of fidelity, it frightens them. They exist on wit, survive on falsehood and thrive on the goodwill of innocents like you. Four years of marriage had not dimmed the glow for Lisle Hastings. Her heart lifted when she thought of Boone. Boone was tender. Boone was good. Boone was square as hickory wood. Boone was the most desirable man God had ever created. Boone was tall as a poplar, with a face as handsome as any one of six movie stars-- as handsome as all six rolled together. Lean and lithe, he blossomed in the knowledge of his attractiveness, of the sheltered stares directed his way by adoring women. He was a sexual Titan--"with mighty thews," said Lisle Hastings out loud, "and alabaster brow." She shifted uneasily on the seat cushions, feeling an arousal of her heat and the lubricity that slicked her thighs. Quite without conscious intent, she picked up speed, in a hurry to get home and tear her clothes off. She would tame her magic stud where he lay stiff with lust.
Dear Lisle:
By the time you read this, I'll be gone. I
have tried to make a go of it but the future
was looking dark. Now that my beach house (and
everything in it) is going to my father's cred-
itors, I am flat busted. Also, the banker told
me that your mother's house is up for repo.
See, I told him to check on your equity in case
your mother would agree to a loan so I could
save my place. But your father was as much a
ditz as mine was. Everything is gone on both
sides now, or will be soon. I have to start
over someplace else, and since our marriage
is about played out anyway, I am going to do
it alone. When I say "played out", what I'm
really saying is, take a good look at your-
self in the mirror. You're oversexed and
overweight. You are to blame. You had
plenty time to shape up, but you let me
down. Now do something right for once.
You get the divorce.
"Lisle-isle-wiley-iley. Muzzy-wuzzy-uzzy-buzzy. Muzzy-gravy-avey-wavey-iley-wiley-isle-Lisle."
She rolled the syllables over and over, sometimes growling, sometimes singing, over and over until the sounds seemed to tumble out by themselves, tiny strangers with all the meaning worked out of them.
Lisle Hastings had always believed in the separateness of words. She knew in her heart that words, once spoken or written down, were instantly freed from their makers' motive or intent. Little engines of meaning, they lurked in memos, personal letters, magazines and newspapers, conversations, classrooms, political bodies, courtrooms-- she happily judged the list to be endless-- and when chanced upon, when opened unexpectedly to the light of day or to a passing human ear, they gabbed and barked with independent life. How she loved them!
So it was with dulled heart, in the late afternoon of the day she returned from Florida to find her husband's farewell note, that Lisle Hastings at last forced herself to kill words.
Important words. Or, more in the flavor of her resolute avowal, formerly important words, words that were part of the cramping inner struggle--of her life before Boone Hastings. Ten years' worth.
She stood in the West bath among her gleaming designer fixtures, squinting slightly as the falling sun washed the room with lovely rusted orange. Her rusted orange, familiar as old afternoons in the bittersweet Paoli summers of her childhood, all spent in this great Main Line house. It was a visual echo that called up memories too sharp with youthful loneliness. Except for the company of the very words she had decided to kill, Lisle Hastings concluded in the tilted perspective of aftersight that she had always been lonely, even while warming in the leftover crumbs of himself that her husband had tossed her way.
She felt something like a current sparking up her spine. Although unrelated to lust, it signalled marginally sexual processes, and she found herself lubricating. Aware that sensory squeezes, regardless of their origin, tend to generalize an involuntary stimulation, she recalled her first unsolicited orgasm, experienced while sleeping, at the age of sixteen. Awakened violently, she had at once felt her body in atomic disarray only to reform itself with the parts slightly displaced. Through the new seams that appeared, a stupendous creation surged, a quality that applied itself and instantly vanished, leaving behind a young girl so reshaped that she thought of herself thereafter in a different way. The thrill of orgasm, so flavored with the heavenly luster of girls-room warranty, had arrived by dung cart instead of jewelled howdah. At sixteen, a sexless orgasm lacked the Good Housekeeping Seal and could not be accepted as authentic. The feeling, as quick, cheerless and dismaying as a dropped egg, had left only the minute trail of faintly corrosive destruction she would come to recognize as the dark leavings of all sexual promise.
Before she pushed the flush handle, she allowed herself to look into the commode. Crowded in the sump, the love letters--ripped feverishly to tatters--banked upon themselves and rose around the conical sides of the bowl. With her chest tight and hurting, pierced by a shaft of remorse, she wrenched the silver handle violently. Water cascaded from hidden channels under the rim and the commode seemed to groan as its sucking throat choked with sodden paper.
She dropped to her knees, plunged an arm elbow-deep into the chilly water and tore at the obstinate clot as the bowl back-filled, surrounding her upper arm with dancing chips of colored paper. Horrified, she jumped to her feet, swiped at her arm, squeegied down its length with a palm trying to loosen the flakes of stationery now glued flat to her skin.
God, oh God, they’re fighting for their lives! They bleed, they bleed!
For the water, now quiet, was tinted blue. The essence of themselves, the ink, the very stuff that made them was dissolving, leaching their lives away. Fragments scrawled in the easy flow of a lovesick college beau, others crowded with the measured strokes of a thoughtful professional man, another, the passionate verticality of a poet. Thick curves oozed from one Disco dandy, flooding a triangular wedge that carried a spidery quaver sent by a storklike, endomorphic CPA. Two soldiers-- one east coast and one west-- shed their miles and joined in the toilet bowl their conscripted sentiments. A high school senior, her prom date, leaked his vainglorious ambition and undying pledge in the soupy mocha of a brown-ink middle aged philanderer. Ten years' worth.
One by one, Lisle Hastings peeled the patches from her arm, nudging up a corner with a fingernail, then pinching between thumb and forefinger. She dropped them into the commode. Like childhood decalcomanias, a few made faint wormy prints on her skin. Flushing the bowl again, she left the bubbling soup and ran water into the wash basin, cupping handfuls to her arm and rubbing with wet fingers. She caught sight of herself in the medicine cabinet mirror and saw one print, nearest her shoulder, now re-reversed. It looped firmly, boldly, and said delicatessen. Lisle remembered the boy, a once-only date infatuated with his potency, who had in this note tried to amplify a single cozy deli snack into an unchaste parlay. His words had passed through the years freed from circumstance, valued by Lisle Hastings for their ripe promise and carnally tinted invitation. She patted dry, letting that one live because it had fought so hard against dying.
She flushed again and the bowl cleared. Yet here came another, a single inch-square fragment jerking free of the gulping gorge. It flurried underwater and sideslipped, edge to edge, until it rose to the surface. Lisle Hastings plucked it out and shook it daintily, placing it at last on a square of tissue to dry. The fake linen notepaper said can’t take. The words were underlined. She remembered Joe DeAngelis, third chair French horn with the Philadelphia Orchestra, who had despairingly asserted I can’t take it anymore, and fled to a second chair opening in the Oregon Symphony. She decided that these spirited words deserved to live, for they signified not only the vigor of their declaration, but also her own tacit power, once large enough to change a man's life, though she couldn't remember what it was that caused the French horn player's grief.
The huge old house depressed her. It was true that it was up for sale to pay off her father's debts. Empty and hollow, it had been declared a Historical Site by the Pennsylvania Cultural Commission following validation of documents related to previous ownership by General Anthony Wayne.
As a little girl, Lisle had probed every corner of the great house in search of a word or two dropped by Mad Anthony and over-looked by the dredge of time. She was certain they were there because words lived forever if they weren't tampered with. But she had grown up without finding them and had moved reluctantly into the life that was waiting out there to happen to her. Her father had died, and now she had killed the love letters, closing--except for her mother--the last running wounds of her youth. She decided to leave this house forever in the morning.
That night, her suitcases still unpacked and standing inside the foyer, Lisle Hastings took a pair of her husband's pajamas from his dresser, climbed into them and lay down to sleep for the last time in the home of her childhood. She liked wearing her husband's pajamas now because of their gentle symbolism, their sexed strength, the security they imparted as her body lay enveloped by the tissue of this husbandly thing.
Sometime during the night, her sleeping movements exposed the shoulder that said delicatessen. Occasionally the lights of an automobile passing on Lancaster Pike would slice across the ceiling, down the wall and over the word. No one was there to see it; the boy who had written it had forgotten it, had forgotten the girl, and those who had known the boy then had forgotten him too. But the word lived in its inverted incarna- tion with the force of its own being, a force endowed by Lisle Hastings' memory of it, and it would live as long as she believed it lived.
She awoke in darkness to profane yowling. After the first fright, she knew the voice, but moments passed before all of its current history seeped, then flooded her wakefulness. She tore from her bed onto the balcony and sang down into the darkness, "Boone! Boone, it was a joke! You played a joke--oh, you bad, bad mans!"
There was no answer, then she thought to press the upstairs switch. A light went on in the foyer below and she saw her hus- band righting himself among her luggage, holding one shoulder as he rotated the arm in its socket.
He looked up at her, grimacing, "What're you doing home? You aren't supposed to be back for another week."
She skipped down the curving sweep of stairs, crying as she ran, "I couldn't stand another minute of Mama. Why did you leave such a cruel note?"
Boone Hastings held his good arm out straight, palm raised at the stop-right-there angle to void his wife's embrace. "It's no joke; I am leaving. You nearly broke my damn arm." He resumed his massaging and rotating. "I can't stand another minute of this place." He stepped free of the tumbled suitcases and set himself at a distance from her.
"Oh, my darling, what is this place anyway," cried Lisle Hastings, drawing her hand through the air, "but rooms to let love fly in?"
Her husband followed the sweep of her arm. The place had been more than that to him-- full of ceramic bric-a-brac and porcelain knickknacks, polished Hepplewhite, odd pieces of Jacobean, Georgean and Edwardian furniture. All that was left from the Beam storehouse of better times, they had made the place echo with rumors of aristocracy. The windows, thickly draped from ceiling to floor, looked out on an acre of landscaped terrace and a lake. He imagined the tall maples and tailored walks. No, this had been a lot more than love's airport. "I hurt my shoulder," he said.
Uttering muted exclamations of concern, Lisle rushed to her husband's side. Without warning, she thrust her hand between his legs. It was, she knew, his ultimate and eternal fail-safe region.
"Holy shit, Lisle!" he yelped, flinching and swallowing hard. As always, his brains turned instantly priapal.
Lisle panted, "You be China and I'll be America and we'll make an arms reduction treaty. I want to see your heat-seeking missile."
Boone squirmed, "My shoulder-- "
"Let's get something straight between us. Let's go upstairs and get our things together." It was their litany.
He dragged up the stairs after her, playing the reluctant, pouting game she loved, allowed her to shove him onto the bed where she wriggled heavily onto him and lodged herself in his groin, drooling, her body trembling out of control.
Boone watched her dreamily as he let her have her fill of him. The Blob, he thought, I married The Blob.
Lisle Hastings, jarred from a gully of sleep by the ringing telephone, yawned noisily as she rolled across the bed to arm's reach of her husband's night table. She pulled the phone to her side.
"Hello--oh, oh excuse me, I didn't mean to yawn in your face--hello, what? Mother, it's you? Mother? For Heaven's sake, what--what're you calling for? Are you all right? Is everything all right? Oh, thank God, you gave me a start. I only just got back here a few hours ago. What time is it--I've been dozing off and on. Oh no, never mind, don't get up, I--I have a clock on the dresser, uh-huh, wait-- oh dear, I think I'm going to need glasses soon, Mother. I can't see what the clock says. D'you think glasses will spoil my looks? Of course, I could get contact lenses, but I don't like the idea of putting my fingers in my eyes. Doesn't the thought of it make your skin crawl? Huh, what? Boone? Certainly he's here. He's in the bathroom or somewhere--yes, I can hear him in the bathroom down-stairs. What? Yes, downstairs. What are you saying? I should go check and see he's not stealing anything? We're married, Mother, in case you forgot, and what's mine is his-- huh? You're saying what's his is yours? That's a strange thing to say, Mother-- have you been taking your Prednazone? Yes, I know the lawyers have counted every piece of silver. Yes, right, I know you're the one they'll come after if anything's missing. You don't want to go to jail--I know that too, Mother. He's sweet; you don't know him; you've never given yourself the chance to know him. Yes, yes, you keep saying that--I heard you, you don't want to know him. Mother, he is a gentleman. He's kind and loyal and dependable. No Mother, he doesn't have an empty head. He is quite well informed about the things that interest him. Mother! Bite your tongue-- how can you say such a nasty thing? How can you have such evil thoughts? What? No, there are no other women-- I already told you he's loyal and dependable. You have nothing to worry about. Oh! That is entirely out of line and I won't listen to another word of it. What? You'll what? You'll kill him? That's it, Mother, I'm hanging up the phone this second."
Lisle Hastings did not actively hate her mother, but her disposition was one that traded in absolutes. When her days were tranquil, no unpleasantness was permitted to intrude. When trouble stormed her heart, nothing could mollify her. She was all blaze or all ice. Surface tensions caused flash fires that burned hot, but only skin deep, so it was not uncommon for her to abuse those she loved while still loving them. Likewise, she sometimes tolerated mistreatment at the hands of others, indif- ferent to provocation that was obvious to all who witnessed it. These qualities were nurtured at her mother's breast and were on full display whenever life brought them together.
She made a half-yawn, half-sigh as she pushed herself up from the bed. She thought she heard movement down in the kitchen. That will be Boone getting breakfast, she smiled. In the bath that opened brightly from the main bedroom, she studied with a full heart and loving eyes her husband's white enameled enema carafe where it hung from the ornamental brass hook she had bought for it, and alongside, the amber gargle that sparkled in its special cut crystal decanter that Boone had received for his last birthday. Lisle Hastings filled with pleasure at sight of the sleek AM/FM/MPX stereo radio that sat snugly against the tiled wall on its gleaming walnut shelf next to the decanter. Set above the bathtub, the shelf was held fast to the tile by two wrought iron filigree brackets she had found in a flea market one day. She bought them for Boone, all for Boone, everything for Boone, easy for Boone. The enema carafe, decanter and radio were placed together because Boone liked to bathe, listen to the stereo, gargle and take his colonic irrigation all at once. Lisle thought this an idiosyncracy to be tolerated in so joyful a man.
Later, she found that the noises she had heard downstairs were only the creaks of an old house. She searched every room for her husband, calling his name, but he had gone. Nothing had changed but that, and as if her desire had turned on her and stunned her, when she stirred it was suddenly in a grey world; she had forgotten what she lived for. She grew weak and had a pale memory of things. Her parts were the same, everything surrounding her was the same. She looked out on the old blue hills, the distant tilled fields, the lake and the woods. She knew them, but they seemed to have lost their connection to her. Something had struck her and left her aimless, untethered. She was aware of the world's beauty and was pained that she could not answer it, for every sense of gratitude and joy had strangely gone. What was lost she couldn't tell. She felt weary and useless. In place of the blazing love for her husband, she now carried a dull and continual ache that made her sigh over and over again to disperse it. The ache, however, cleared her eye and cocked her for action.
She neatened up the place, made sure all windows and doors were locked, then loaded her suitcases into the car and headed for the Jersey shore.
3
Faith Fitzgerald Beam bobbed aqueously on the springsteel cantilevers of a porch rocker and watched a breeze ruffle the leaves of a coconut palm. She silently thanked her Maker for letting her be born white and Protestant. Who could have known that Florida would come to this? Coal-black islanders speaking English as if it were a language to be sung instead of spoken; Cubans quarreling and multiplying like fruit flies; docile Haitians crowding the streets instead of staying where God had put them and fighting for their land. And what wasn't black was Jewish. Her gorge swelled with regret.
Hers had been a life refined in childhood by summers on the Riviera at Cap d'Antibes among the Hemingways, the Cole Porters, Archibald MacLeish, Benchley and Woolcott and the Philip Barrys. Mums and Poppa Beaufort had given her Scott and Zelda Fitzger- ald's name as her own middle one. Once, in 1923 when she was six, Mums and Poppa had taken her to the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet Les Noces by the Diaghilev company. To this day she could recall what the dazzling women wore that night. How gay life was then! Always a new exhibition or a recital of the new music of Les Six-- hadn't she sat on the knee of Erik Satie himself-- or a Dadaist manifestation, or a costume ball in Montparnasse, or a premiere of a new play, or one of Etienne de Beaumont's fantastic "Soirees de Paris" in Montmartre. There were songfests at the Paris home of Mrs. Winthrop Chanler and beach games with Gerald Murphy, whose children called him Dow-Dow. Valentino and Picasso were sometimes there.
Alone on her balcony, overlooking jutted humps of cubelike condominiums as far as her eye could see, Faith Fitzgerald Beam turned her face to the Florida sun. The chair she sat in was crude and uncomfortable, a far cry from the pliable cane rattan rockers of her youth that she could settle into and control with her toes on each forward roll, like those on the porticos of Alpine chalets. As she phrased the memory to herself, she said 'rockers that one could settle into and control with one’s toes'. Verbal gentility such as this had been reduced to an internal exercise, she lamented, to be savored privately much as brushing and flossing one's teeth with great care. A matter of pride, personal pride with little social currency, and of no value what-ever among Jamaicans, Cubans, Haitians and Hebrews. When pressed, she would concede that Hebrews probably knew better, being as aggressive about education as they were. But even they missed the point about education. They were always wanting to do something with it. Education was supposed to be like an extra suitcase full of spare personality parts--one opened it at precisely appropriate moments, never ostentatiously, never gratuitously. She blamed the horrid wars of recent history for all this-- the democratizing of men in moments of extreme violence. The wars had all but eliminated class distinctions. It was her main argument against war.
She belched, startling herself, said 'Excuse me,' though no one else was present, and patted her lips. She tasted the morning's kippers. Her chair, triggered into action by her movement, began to sink, then rise, then sink again. Although her feet were squarely on the floor, she could not control it. She was cradled inside the frame of a single band of steel that ran behind her head, under both forearms and down to the balcony floor where they bent sharply back to form the twin spars on which the whole structure flexed. It was a chair that surged erratically on its vertical axis, very different from the measured pendular sweep of a real rocker. The chair was just one more instance of the trashing that life now had in store for her.
I am the widow, Faith Fitzgerald Beam, nee Beaufort,, she recited silently, where is my husband now. Where is J.J. Beam? All that was left to her was her beautiful daughter, Lisle, who had married a bartender. Her ribcage shrank when she thought of it. She shook her head and ground her teeth. If that scavenger ever did anything to harm her daughter, she would--she would kill him.
Lisle pulled to a stop in the gravel driveway and paused to watch the rollers for a few minutes. The morning had turned breezy, and whitecaps were kicking up, dotting the flat water all the way out to the horizon. A pale sun brightened the ocean with haze. Then she turned to study the old beach house from where she sat, and at last, with a peculier excitement, noticed the crushed side of her husband's rowboat. Pure Boone Hastings, she thought, understanding immediately his malice and the wordless justification he had given himself to do it. In a way, it made her own plan more reasonable, as if she were simply to finish what he had started.
She got out of the car and stretched, aware that no hauntings of love, of flashing sunlit days and sexed nights pulled at her. It was only an old house now, and like her own, lost to its history. Besides the tinkling wind chimes that hung from a bracket next to the front door, there were no sounds but the rolling surf and a few peeping seabirds.
Inside, the rooms were dim, everything in its place. A grandfather's clock ticked softly. Lisle Hastings took her time salvaging the valuables she was able to carry out to her car--china, crystal, porcelain, stemware-- first wrapping the pieces in pillow cases and sheets. She made several trips, the last one to take all the portable artwork in brass, ebony and ivory. Then she opened all the windows and set fire to the place, igniting the upstairs curtains first and carefully touching flame to everything else that was instantly combustible. She did it without elation or regret.
Outside, she pulled her car to the road and stopped to look back. Flames were beginning to appear in the windows. The old house was tinder, and so isolated was the property that she knew it would be an hour or more before anyone could pinpoint the smoke, and longer still to get a fire company from the mainland.
The plane banked smoothly over the translucent teal ocean and slowed as it began its descent. Lisle Hastings stared out of the window as the scrubby landscape of Fort Lauderdale rushed to meet her, again regretting the need to stay with her mother until she could get a place of her own. The terminal was crowded, and she welcomed the jam, the delay, the shoulder-to-shoulder grind down to the luggage carousels. When she reached the lower level, she took refuge in the ladies' room, prying an extra few minutes for herself between the limbo of her husband's faithlessness and the hell of her mother's reproach. Oddly, she remembered her Classics and pictured herself about to face the frightful Polyphemus who would dismember and skewer her as he had the companions of Odysseus. She locked the door of her stall and wept, certain that she was alone and adrift in the world. Then she scolded herself for betraying her determination to be resolute.
Outside again, she found her mother waiting near the luggage pickup. The old lady wore a dress of pale lavender with a brightly flowered Tahitian pareo around her shoulders. Her gaze seemed to penetrate the hurried lower masses with disdain.
"Hello Mother."
"Oh, Lisle-- you frightened me. For Heaven's sake, you've been crying."
"No, no, it's my allergies."
"Crying in public?" The widow Faith Fitzgerald Beam flared her nostrils.
"Wherever." Lisle kissed her mother lightly on the cheek as the old lady grudgingly kissed her.
"Get your bags, please. I don't like it here."
In the cab, they each sank into the thoughts that had occupied them before this meeting. It was a soup of random memories, feelings and regrets.
Lisle said, "I put a lot of things from the beach house in storage, Mother."
Sex had always been the ticket. Long before her father died, Lisle Beaufort Beam made that discovery. Doing kinder- garten through twelfth grade in private schools, starched into uniforms and rules of deportment, she learned to tag along with the pretty and desirable cheerleaders because that is where the boys were. At Wayne Academy, she discovered that these beauties, the homecoming queens and prom favorites, liked to carry extra baggage--another girl, an inferior person, one with acne or knock-knees. Or a fat girl. It was an odd-couple game, done for generations worldwide. Lisle played the butt, the empty chair, the zero on whom smart remarks were dumped which served to elevate and enhance the exquisite loveliness, the ultimate inaccessibility of the star act.
Although the true reasons for her willing abasement were not yet clear to her, she trusted her instincts and the heat in her belly when boys were around. She pledged for the best sorority, and as time passed she grew to like her role as second to the prime duelists, happy to be allowed into life's inner circle.
Her self-esteem rose. Some of the boys noticed that she was pretty. She gained in confidence and began to offer witty comebacks to their dull insults. Gradually, other girls turned to her for support, and it wasn't long before she considered herself the commanding predator, and the beauty queens the bait. In the library one day, she discovered several manuals on human sexual- ity, self-help erotica, and instructional pamphlets on the tech- niques of foreplay and intercourse. At last, her aimless yearn- ings took focus.
Then Dr. Tom Slade made his move.
Tom Slade, a large goatlike instructor with an unctuous manner, was low man on the Humanities faculty. He had already proven to be quick with sexually loaded drollery and was known to the girls as an adept fondler. A first-year teacher in exile from the public schools of several urban systems, his presence at Wayne Academy had generated much speculation. Had he really been caught in the act with two senior girls in Philadelphia? Was the beautiful valedictorian of Camden High pregnant by Dr. Tom? Did the yellow pages actually list his number under Pubescent Passions?
It was the custom at Wayne Academy to administer examinations individually in the office of the instructor. A tattered European affectation, this method was intended to assume the luster of venerated tradition and demonstrate the faculty's commitment to proven educational values. Tom Slade was already breathing heavily when he opened the door for Lisle Beam and told her to sit down and relax in an overstuffed recliner. He locked the door behind her. "You look good enough to eat," he said, and moved to an arch of windows that looked out on a sunny courtyard, setting himself so that the light played attractively on his angular face. He pretended interest in the disordered artillary of lounging students far below.
As she watched with fascination and desire, fearing but hoping for a sign in him of sexual torment, Lisle had to study him in divisions because of his great size. His large florid face, capped by wild sandy hair, seemed to be stuck on a body that was mostly elbows and knees. When he moved, it was in sections. Without turning to her, he said, "Tell me about your studies and your reading."
Unprepared for this, but equal to the game, Lisle talked about American proletarian literature and her courses in urban enfranchisement and counseling the disaffected felon. She was surprised that Tom Slade listened to her as if she were a grownup
and did not challenge her few unsupported opinions.
When he turned to face her, he said, "Well stated, Miss Beam. What you've been describing is politics, isn't it? At it's heart, it's politics." Then he went on to speak with respect and sophisticated familiarity about Shakespeare, as if Shakespeare were an ordinary working man like himself, an equal. He spoke of Shakespeare's encompassing understanding of politics and of the everyman characters, the universal heart of his historical plays. He spoke as if Shakespeare had the same sort of reality and was part of the same world as Lisle Beam, her country, her state, her school; as if he, Tom Slade, belonged to the same world of history and literature as William Shakespeare.
He spoke as if he took it for granted that Lisle Beam, since he talked to her as an equal, shared the same world as he and Shakespeare did, and she began to sense that reality. It was formed of the common, condensed experience of sight, sound and information-- she filled with elation and freedom-- that finally grows to a connection between personal emotions and thoughts, and the untouchable legends of youth; names in books.
Overcome with novelty and shining understanding, Lisle sank into the recliner, aroused. But Tom Slade was not finished.
"Now," he said, "what parallels can you draw between Coriolanus and Benedict Arnold?"
Lisle gathered herself slowly and twisted together the threads of her coursework. After twenty minutes, Tom Slade said, "That's enough, thank you, I admire extemporizing. You want to remember that the miseries and manias of life--take Dostoevsky, for example, his discords, sufferings and anomalies--that these can seem to be mitigated by idealism and moral passion. I say seem to be, because we humans must believe that the treachery, barbarism and frustration in our nature are somehow redeemed by imagination. Art is not life."
The instructor studied his examinee closely, shook his head approvingly. "Now before we get to the question of Spinoza and his conception of God and the processes of Nature-- are they Unity or Duality-- before we get to that, please tell me if you remember the reference to him as God-intoxicated?”
"Yes, Dr. Slade."
"What does intoxication mean to you?"
Lisle chuckled nervously, "Why--why, it means blurred vision and weak knees." She had been warned that he despised pedantic humbug and hoped that her jest would be taken in the right spirit.
"That's good," he said with the touch of a smile. "Have you ever seen the cock crow?"
"Uh, no, no," she answered, wary of his verbal tricks, a semantic trap, "but I've heard one, I think. I-- "
"Then look at this and tell me if your vision blurs and your knees go weak." He turned, and she saw that he had exposed himself. His penis, huge, startlingly puce and stiff as a lamppost bobbed before her astonished eyes. The drawings in her manuals had not given her an idea of its relative size although she had no trouble identifying it.