A Book of Common Prayer (15 page)

“Warren doesn’t show his best side as a houseguest, Charlotte, you recognize that. If Warren has to leave us, I want to recall his many virtues only.”

“What do you mean, leave us.”

“About time he came home, stopped catting around New York. ‘Dying Is But Going Home,’ am I right? Ever hear that?”

“What are you talking about, dying.”

“Used to see it on gravestones. ‘Dying Is But Going Home.’ ‘The Angels Called Him,’ that was popular too. At least around here it was popular. I don’t know about out there.”

“You said if Warren ‘has to leave us,’ Porter, what did you mean?”

“Don’t bother yourself, Charlotte. I’m going to persuade Warren to let Ping Walker have a look, you remember Ping, Lady Duvall’s boy? Lived up east a while? Came back down home around the time Lady married her fancy man?”

“I don’t know any Ping Walker and I don’t know any Lady Duvall and I don’t see what they’ve got to do with Warren.”

“Don’t raise your voice, Charlotte, your husband out there allow you to converse like a fishwife? Ping is a specialist. I should say, a specialist. Very fine training. Tulane, Hopkins, Harvard. His father didn’t pay for it, old Judge Duvall did.”

“
A specialist in what?
”

“Bad blood,” Warren said from the stairway, and both he and Porter laughed.

“Bad blood between Warren here and Lady’s fancy man, if memory serves.”

“Watch your mouth,” Warren said.

“Porter said you were sick.”

She was standing at the window in the room at the Pontchartrain watching the first light on the windows of the houses across the avenue. She did not have a bag, she did not have an aspirin, she did not have a toothbrush. The skirt she had put on the morning before in Hollister was wrinkled from the long drive to the San Francisco airport and the long flight to New Orleans and the long night watching Warren and Porter drink in Metairie. In a few hours she could go out and buy what she needed. She tried to concentrate on what she needed and did not think about what she was doing in a room at the Pontchartrain Hotel on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. In the empty house on California Street in San Francisco it would be three o’clock in the morning. The night light in Marin’s bathroom would be burning just as she had left it. The crossed spots on the Pollock in the dining room would be burning just as she had left them. Leonard would have gone on by now from Miami to Havana via Mexico City. Leonard was in Havana and Marin was gone. Warren was either dying or not dying and Marin was gone.

“Porter said you were sick and he wasn’t. At all.”

“Porter’s an ass, don’t you be one.” Warren lay on the bed and unbuttoned his shirt. “You got it wrong. As usual. Shut those curtains and come here.”

We could have been doing this all our lives, Warren said.

We should be doing this all our lives, Warren said.

We should have done this all our lives, we should do this all our lives.

The verb form made a difference and she could not get it straight what Warren had said. She could not remember. She could remember the New Orleans airport and she could remember the Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham but she could not remember too much in between. There must have been about five months in between, about twenty weeks, about 140 days, simple arithmetic told her how many days there must have been between the New Orleans airport and the Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham, but someone had shuffled them. Everywhere she had been with him he wanted the curtains shut in the daylight, she did remember that. She remembered darkened rooms with the light cracking through where the curtains were skimpy and all she could not remember was where those rooms were, or why she and Warren had been in them.

“You wanted to bring me home with you,” she remembered saying in one of them. “Didn’t you. You wanted to come home again.”

“No,” Warren had said. “I just wanted to fuck you again.”

Sometimes those months in the South seemed so shattered that she suspected the Ochsner Clinic of having administered electroshock while she was under the anaesthesia for delivery. This suspicion was unfounded.

2

I
SAID BEFORE HE HAD THE LOOK OF A MAN WHO COULD
drive a woman like Charlotte right off her head.

His face had been coarsened by contempt.

His mind had been coarsened by self-pity.

As it happened he was quite often “right” to hold other people in contempt, and he was also “right” to regard himself with pity, but allow a dying woman a maxim or two.

I have noticed that it is never enough to be right.

I have noticed that it is necessary to be better.

His favorite hand was outrageousness; in a fluid world like Leonard Douglas’s where no one could be outraged Warren Bogart was dimmed, confused, unable to operate. He could operate marginally in academe, and he maintained vague academic connections: a week at Yale, three days at Harvard, guest privileges at a number of Faculty Clubs where he never paid his bar bill. He could operate marginally on the Upper East Side of New York. He could operate very well in the South. Like many Southerners and like some Catholics and unlike Charlotte he was raised to believe not in “hard work” or “self-reliance” but in the infinite power of the personal appeal, the request for a favor, the intervention of one or another merciful Virgin. He had an inchoate but definite conviction that access to the mysteries of good fortune was arranged in the same way as access to the Boston Club, a New Orleans institution to which he did not belong but always had a guest card.

He belonged to nothing.

He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.

His final hold on Charlotte was that he recognized in himself everything I have just told you about him, and said
mea culpa
.

As another outsider I recognized that hand too.

Outsider.
De afuera
.

We were both
de afuera
, Warren Bogart and I. At the time I met him we were also both dying of cancer, Warren Bogart and I, which perhaps made us even more
de afuera
than usual, but that was a detail Charlotte had never made entirely clear.

Charlotte had trouble with the word.

Not the word “cancer.”

The word “dying.”

I met him only once, one evening in New Orleans four or five months after Charlotte first came to Boca Grande, one evening in the Garden District at the house of one of the fat brothers in white suits who factor our copra. I had flown to New Orleans that morning to receive cobalt and to renegotiate the copra contracts with Morgan Fayard; I was due to have dinner with Morgan and his wife and sister and to fly back to Boca Grande the next morning. I had not been invited to dinner to meet Warren Bogart, nor had Warren Bogart been invited at all. He was just there in Morgan and Lucy Fayard’s living room when I arrived. He was a visible thorn in Lucy Fayard’s plan for the evening. He seemed bent on embarrassing both Lucy and her sister-in-law Adele, as well as on humiliating the girl he had with him, but the central thrust of his visit seemed to be to see me. This girl he had with him was referred to as “Chrissie,” or “Miss Bailey,” or “our unexpected guest’s little friend from Tupelo,” depending on who referred to her, and she was thin and pale and spoke, when prodded, in sporadic and obscurely startling monologues. In fact she was not unlike Charlotte Douglas, give or take twenty years and the distinctions in cultural conditioning between Tupelo, Mississippi, and Hollister, California. Still I watched the two of them in the Fayards’ living room for several minutes before I understood that this “Warren” who had arrived uninvited for drinks and would stay unasked through dinner and who studied my every reaction was the Warren who figured in what I had come to regard as Charlotte Douglas’s hallucinations.

“Just so thoughtful of you to drop by, Warren.” Lucy Fayard’s voice carried clear and thin as glass. “Morgan and I long to have you for a whole evening one time soon. You and your friend. You’re most definitely included, Miss Bailey.”

The girl from Tupelo smiled wanly and tied on a scarf as if instructed to make her goodbyes.

“Here’s-your-hat-what’s-your-hurry.” Warren Bogart held out his glass to be filled. “Take that bandana off, Chrissie, don’t mind your hostess. Mrs. Fayard’s been learning West Texas manners.”

“Just shush about that,” Lucy Fayard said.

“Just don’t start about that,” Adele Fayard said.

“Lucy doesn’t associate with West Texas trash,” Morgan Fayard said. “I don’t allow Adele to filthy this house with him. Grace doesn’t know what we’re talking about and it’s rude to continue, in fact I forbid it.”

As a matter of fact I knew precisely what they were talking about, because the last evening I had spent with the Fayards had been devoted exclusively to a heated discussion of this same “West Texas trash.” It had appeared then that Adele Fayard was seeing a man from Midland of whom her brother did not approve. It appeared now that Lucy Fayard was seeing him as well, and that Morgan did not yet know it. Very soon now either Lucy or Adele would allude to one of Morgan’s own indiscretions. All evenings with the Fayards were essentially Caribbean, volatile with conflicting pieties and intimations of sexual perfidy, and in that context were neither very difficult to understand nor, in the end, very engaging.

“That West Texas trash doesn’t enter this house,” Morgan Fayard said, ignoring his own injunction.

“My mistake then,” Warren Bogart said. “I thought I met him here.”

“I should say, your mistake,” Lucy Fayard said.

“You are certainly set on making it difficult, Warren.” Adele Fayard smiled. “Just as difficult as can be?”

“Set on making what difficult, Adele.”

“You know perfectly well what’s difficult, Warren.”

“Difficult for you and your discourteous sister-in-law to continue to extend me your famous hospitality during my dying days? That about it, Adele? Or is it my mistake again.”

“What dying days you talking about,” Morgan Fayard said. “Nobody dying here.”

“You’re all dying. You’re dying, your wife and sister are dying, your little children are dying, Chrissie here is dying, even Miss Tabor there is dying.”

Warren Bogart watched me as he lit a cigar. I had not been introduced to him as Grace Tabor.

“But not one of you is dying as fast as I’m dying.” Warren Bogart smiled. “Which I believe allows me certain privileges.”

“Frankly he didn’t behave any better when he wasn’t dying,” Adele Fayard said.

“Frankly it’s not ennobling him one bit,” Lucy Fayard said.

The girl from Tupelo laughed nervously.

“ ‘
Sunset and evening star and one clear call for me!
’ ” Morgan Fayard cried suddenly. “ ‘
And let there be no mourning at the bar when I put out to sea.
’ Learned that at Charlottesville.”

“Not any too well,” Warren Bogart said.

“No mourning at the bar, Warren. Lesson there for all of us.”

“It’s ‘moaning of’ the bar, Morgan. Not ‘mourning at’ the bar. It’s not a wake in one of those gin mills you frequent.”

“I don’t guess George Gordon Lord Byron is going to object.”

“Wrong again, Morgan. You don’t guess Alfred Lord Tennyson is going to object. You recite it, Chrissie. Stand up and recite. Recite that and ‘Thanatopsis’ both.”

The girl looked at him pleadingly.

“Stand up,” Warren Bogart said.

“I must say,” Lucy Fayard said.

“Shut up, Lucy. I said stand up, Chrissie.”

The girl from Tupelo stood up and gazed miserably at the floor.

“Speak up now, or I’ll make you do ‘Evangeline’ too.”

“ ‘
Sunset and evening star—And one clear call for me—And may there be no—
’ ”

The girl’s voice was low and wretched.

Warren Bogart picked up his drink and walked over to me.

“It is Miss Tabor, isn’t it?”

“ ‘
Twilight and evening bell—And after that the dark—
’ ”

The girl was speaking with her eyes shut. All three Fayards sat as if frozen.

“It was,” I said finally.

“I believe you did research of some sort with my old friend Mr. McKay. In Peru.”

“In Brazil.” At the end of each line the girl would open her eyes and look at Warren Bogart’s back as if he alone could save her. “If you’re talking about Claude McKay it was Brazil.”

“Somewhere down there, you may be right.”

“I am right. I was there. What exactly are you doing to that child.”

“Chrissie? Chrissie’s brilliant, you should talk to her, she’s very interested in anthropology, took some courses in it at Newcomb. Does some homework before she speaks. Mr. McKay would have been devoted to her. He had a place in Maryland, you probably know it, I used to drink with him there before he died.” He glanced across the room at the girl, who had fallen silent. “Straighten those shoulders, Chrissie, don’t slouch. ‘Thanatopsis’ now.”

“ ‘
To him who in the love of nature holds—Communion with her visible forms—
’ ”

The girl’s voice was so low as to be inaudible.

“Would have been devoted to her,” Warren Bogart repeated. “May he rest in peace. An American aristocrat, Claude McKay. One of the last. Gentleman. Well-born, well-bred.”

The evening was hot. I was tired. When I am tired I remember what I was taught in Colorado. When I remember what I was taught in Colorado certain words set my teeth on edge. “Aristocrat” is one of those words. “Gentleman” is another. They remind me of that strain I dislike in Gerardo. As a child Gerardo once described the father of a classmate as “in trade” and I slapped his face.

“Last of a breed,” Warren Bogart said, watching my face. “Used to speak about you. You should meet my good friend Miss Tabor, he’d say.”

The last time I could recall seeing Claude McKay I had accused him of publishing my work under his name. I wondered when Warren Bogart would get around to Charlotte.

“I never thought I’d run into you here at Lucy’s,” he said.

I have never had patience with games.

“I expect you did,” I said.