An American Dream (30 page)

“Do you mind if I get some drink?”

“Please help yourself.”

I was out of the room and to the bar in the next room, and having filled a tall glass with many cubes and several inches of gin, I drank deep, the gin going down like a cleansing fire. There was something wrong but I could not place it: I felt particularly unarmed. And then remembered. There was Shago’s umbrella. It was in a corner of the first closet I searched, and the handle came into my palm: grasping the umbrella I felt stronger now, like a derelict provided with a cigarette, a drink, and a knife. Thus braced, I went back. He saw me with the umbrella. I made no attempt to hide it, sitting with the stick laid over my knee.

“Comfortable now?” he asked.

I nodded.

As though testing the plumps of a breast, he palmed both hands about the snifter; then looked off into the darkness. I became aware of a log still going in the fireplace, and Kelly got up this time and threw a new log on and poked the first with an intimate jab, as if he were waking an old stubborn hound.

“Bess tell you about her romance with me?” he asked.

“She said something about it.”

“Due to Bess, I lost the upbringing of Deborah.”

“Deborah never told me.”

“I’ve never talked about myself to anyone,” Kelly said. “I detest that. It’s spilling the seed. But I have wanted to talk to you. You see Deborah used to give me a hint of your beliefs. I was taken with your declaration—did you really make it on television?—that God’s engaged in a war with the Devil, and God may lose.”

Oppression stirred again. An idea came to get up, make farewells, and depart, simple as that. The room, however, was a weight on my will. “I’m not up to a discussion,” I said. And I wasn’t. Tonight I had a terror of offending God
or
the Devil.

“Of course.” But there was contempt, as if the real mark was to chat at the cliffside of a disaster. “Well,” he sighed, “it’s all in curious taste, I know, but I like teasing the Jesuits with your idea. I get them to admit that the Devil in such a scheme has to have an even chance to defeat the Lord, or there’s no scheme to consider. Of course the off-shoot of this hypothesis, I point out, is that the Church is an agent of the Devil.”

He looked up as if to call for a question and I, to be polite, answered, “Do I follow you?”

“Since the Church refuses to admit the possible victory of Satan, man believes that God is all-powerful. So man also assumes God is prepared to forgive every last little betrayal. Which may not be the case. God might be having a very bad war with troops defecting everywhere. Who knows? Hell by now might be no worse than Las Vegas or Versailles.” He laughed. “Good Lord and gravy, does that put a Jesuit’s nose out of joint. I must say they can’t come back too hard with their legendary counterattack, because I have money to dangle. One of them, however, got brave enough to say, ‘If the Church is the agent of the Devil, Oswald, why in damnation do you donate so much?’ and of course I could not keep from replying, ‘Well, for all we know, I am a solicitor for the Devil.’ ”

“But you really think so.”

“On occasion, I’m vain enough.”

We took a pause on this.

“Do you never think of yourself as a good Catholic?” I asked.

“Why should I? I’m a
grand
Catholic. Much more amusing. Then I’m hardly typical. My Kellys came from North Ireland. Oswald derives from Presbyterians. It wasn’t until the question of marrying Deborah’s mother came up that I decided Paris was worth a Mass. Certainly was. Kelly converted and climbed the stairs. Now, I’ve got stories,” he said. “Once you’re located where I am, there’s nothing left but to agitate the web. At my worst, I’m a spider. Have strings in everywhere from the Muslims to the
New York Times
. Just ask me. I’ve got it.”

“Got the CIA?”

Put a finger to his lips at the directness of the remark. “Threads.”

“And Mr. Ganucci’s friends?”

“Lots of knots,” said Kelly.

The fire blazed in a back-draft, and he looked at me. “Ever realize how carnivorous the winds get here? Mountain winds.” I made no answer. I was thinking of the parapet. It was conceivable he was thinking of it as well. “Rojack, I’m not as powerful as you think,” said Kelly. “I dabble. It’s the hardworking fellow at the desk who has the real power. The career man.” He said this with easy candor, ready to laugh at me, but whether for believing him, or whether for not believing him, was precisely the little difference I could not detect.

“Are you altogether comfortable?” he asked.

I shifted in my seat.

“Not much of my story is pretty,” he said. “But then I’ve warned you. Look,” he added, “it’s a full warning. I’m putting a weight on you. I think everyone must tell his real little buried story sooner or later. He must pick out somebody to tell it to. But I didn’t know who to tell it to. Tonight, as you came in the room, I knew. Suddenly I knew. You’re the one.” He looked at me. A hint of gray ice in a river came out of the core of his heartiness. “With your permission.”

I nodded. I had become aware again of the darkness. We sat like two hunters in the midnight of a jungle. Kelly’s voice, however, was genial. “You know I was a simple young man when I was young,” he said. “Grew up in Minnesota, youngest child in a large family, worked on farms, grocery store after school, all of that. Deborah ever tell you?”

“Others have.”

“They couldn’t know the details. We were poor as rats. But my father had pretensions,
North
Irish Kellys, after all. We even had a coat of arms, hurrah. Gules, a child proper. Can you conceive of a shield with nothing but a naked babe in it? That was us. I managed to take the child and slip it into the mouth of the Mangaravidi’s serpent when I decided to consolidate the arms. Leonora was ready to have a fit. She tried to fight it clear across the seas to the College of Arms. But then of course by that time Leonora and I had been at war for years.”

“Deborah never talked about any of this.”

“Well. I won’t bore you too much. I’ll just say I had three thousand dollars in capital after World War One—the savings of my entire family. My father used to keep his green in an old cheesebox in a locked drawer. I got hold of that package and went to Philadelphia, hopped all over the place in Army Surplus. Blew up the three thousand dollars to one hundred thousand dollars in one year, not saying how. Gave my family five thousand back since they’d been nice enough not to scream for the sheriff. Then in two years on the market, I poked the ninety-five thousand up to one million. Explode a miser like my father and you get a mad genius like me. No explanation for my gift, my investments weren’t brilliant, you see, they just kept winning. Scared me stiff. I was just a poor hick Presbyterian.”

A change had come over him. It was obvious he loved to tell a story. His voice rounded into humors, his manner became embracing
yet impersonal as if he were the master of an exceptional treat which soon would be offered you.

“Well, then I met Leonora. I was set up in business in Kansas City. Grain futures, owned divvies on a movie theatre, put up money with a bully who was starting an interstate trucking concern, and still kept running a wild streak on the market, skipping from one teeter-totter of margin to another. Got into something with Leonora’s father. There was a gent! Sicilian aristocrat, raised in Paris. Now marooned in Kansas City. Poor bastard had been penniless, you gather, when he married into the bullion. So even though he was just about the grandest item in the Gotha, the Caughlins shipped him out to K. C. to run their meat-packings, British money in Midwestern meat then—well, this may be going on, I know, but I can’t dive at once into the center of this little tale—it’s too rough.” He threw me a quick hard look. “At any rate, Signor and I got along very well, thank you, and he came up with the idea of marrying me to Leonora, a great surprise, for he was ferociously snob, but it was his revenge, I would bet, on the Caughlins. They looked for nothing but the grandest with their granddaughter. So, too, I’m sure, did Mangaravidi, but he was able to convince himself that Oswald’s Kellys were grafted stock of the Windsor vine. I didn’t try to unconvince him that I was no royal bastard.

“On the other hand, I didn’t take altogether to Leonora. She was a devout. Pretty girl, but completely spooked. Used to wear a perfume made, I swear, of linseed oil and camphor balls. Kept a saint in every pocket. A bacchanal for a young man, wasn’t she just! But I had learned the first thing about mazuma. There are dollars which buy a million’s worth of groceries, and dollars which have influence. The Caughlins had the second kind of grabbings, I had the first. So I paid court to Leonora for a year, and captured her with my conversion. In marrying me, she felt she was bringing a soul to the Church. Her little view of marriage. We did it. And I discovered
myself up to here in a dank tank. I didn’t know marbles about sex, I just knew something was damn bloody wrong. Why, we hadn’t been married a year before our mutual antipathy was so perfect a room was spoiled if the other had been in it five minutes before. On top of that, Leonora could not conceive, so it seemed—I had nightmares the Romans would give her an annulment. No need to polish the details, you must appreciate a few yourself; I needed to be married to her long enough to lay out a thorough circuit of connections. Without her, I was upstart, whereas with her—I adored the life she opened, Leonora’s friends were the patch for me. Money which cannot buy into the most amusing world is cabbage, stinking stifling cabbage, that much I knew at twenty-three.” He took another sip. “Well, B. Oswald Kelly said to himself, ‘Napoleon, the armies must occupy the womb.’ And we did. My troops made one do-johnny of a march. On a given night, in an absolute eczema of flesh, whipping myself up with the fancy I was giving a poke to some poor flunky, I drilled my salt into her, I took a dive deep down into a vow, I said in my mind; ‘Satan, if it takes your pitchfork up my gut, let me blast a child into this bitch!’ And something happened, no sulphur, no brimstone, but Leonora and I met way down there in some bog, some place awful, and I felt something take hold in her. Some sick breath came right back out of her pious little mouth. ‘What the
hell
have you done?’ she screamed at me, which was the only time Leonora ever swore. That was it. Deborah was conceived.”

There was no answer I could give. I knew his story was true. The umbrella lay like a sleeping snake across my thighs.

“I’ve read a bit about the saints,” said Kelly, “you’d be surprised. If a saint has his vision, he is next bothered with devils. The Devil’s first joy is to pick up a saint—at least that’s what I would do. And the return payment, I expect, is that the Lord’s first attention is toward us little devils. I can only testify that I was never so fond of Leonora as during that pregnancy. ‘Oh, God,’ I used to pray before sleep,
‘have mercy on this child growing in her womb, for I have damned the creature before it began.’ And there would be times when I would put my hand on Leonora’s belly, and feel everything which was best in me pass through my fingers into that creature sleeping in her mother’s waters. What do you think came out? An absolute marvel of an infant. Almost died in birth. They had to slice Leonora nearly in half to spring the baby, but Deborah had eyes which took you on a trip through real estate!”—he laughed—“right through glens and dells her eyes took you, and a corps de ballet of elves and spirits to take nips of your vision as you went in. That child would laugh like a fifty-year-old beer drinker, brawny little thing, laugh the devil right back at you for trying to see into her. I never adored anything as I adored that infant. Excuse me,” he said, “for not obeying the pact,” and began to weep. I all but reached over to touch his arm, but he got up as though to avoid such a gesture and moved toward the fire. A minute went by.

“Well,” he said over his shoulder, “you strike a bargain with the Devil, the Devil will collect. That’s where Mephisto is found. In the art of collection. Trust me: Leonora was in bad shape after the birth, gutted, all of that. I didn’t care, I had the infant—that was my connection to good luck. But we thought we might go to the Riviera while she mended, and I had friends enough I wanted to make on that glorious piece of coast. So I tidied up my affairs in Kansas City, took a back seat in the trucking firm—which incidentally I’ve still got; it became an enormous firm, thanks to the bully—sold for a loss here, grabbed a profit there, and we were off. I knew enough to know the pots to be investigated. And I made a piece of that, yes, I did, first time I ever did business with blue water and smell of sun in the nose. Tastes pop up in you on that Mediterranean. Everybody is looking for their very special little pleasure and I wasn’t ready to find all my joys in the infant, I wanted a bit more, damn sure I was entitled to more. Then along came Bess, the Devil’s little gift. She
was in from New York to spend a season in her villa—at the time I thought it was the most stunning house I’d ever seen—she owned a Raphael, that sort of nonsense.

“Actually the house was a groaning display, too many floors put down in marble, Burne-Joneses lit with candles, homosexual sculpture—fat little cupids with pointy little pricks and bottoms like a chorus girl—froufrou in her bedroom, lily pads in the pond, obscene rubber trees. Even a scorpion she kept in a glass cage. She had no taste. But she was grand, grander than anything I’d ever seen, and I was petrified of her. She was all of forty, though she didn’t look it a bit, and I wasn’t twenty-five. She had an awful reputation, four marriages, three children, lovers in every corner, anything you wanted, from an Egyptian with a cellar full of whips to a young American racing car specialist. And unbelievable stories about her, way off my spectrum, for Bess was petite, just as lovely as an orchid. Very elusive of course, you could turn to get a drink and she’d disappeared from the room, but her air was exquisite. She had a delicate humor. I couldn’t digest the awful stories about her, but I had to swallow some part of them, because Bess was in communion with something. You didn’t have amour with her, you had some species of interplay. Messages went back and forth—it was the first time I ever understood there is a hocus-pocus of the cells. Something astral in her, or whatever, was avid to snatch up bits of me. I couldn’t stop the process. She kept stealing my pigeons, so to speak. Then afterwards she’d fly them back—the loan was returned—but something had been added, something foreign. I felt as if I now too was in touch with forces I would just as soon have left alone. Mangaravidi had a bit of that—I always believed he was a hussar of the ghosts, but Bess was queen of the spooks. Never met anyone so telepathic. If there hadn’t been Marconi she would have been the one to dream up the radio. I remember one time we were in her garden and she asked for a five-franc piece. Soon as I gave it to her she zipped into her bag, pulled out a nail scissors, and clipped a couple of hairs from
my head. Then she bent down, scooped up a stone from the bottom of a rubber tree, set the five-francker on top of the hairs and put back the stone. ‘Squeaks,’ she said, ‘I might be able to hear you.’ Well, I tried to be ha-ha about it, but it wasn’t that funny—the tree stood there like a statue. And now Bess began to have a way of telling me all about private conversations I’d had with Leonora, or worse: she’d tell me some of my own little thoughts. Given that damn tree, I was directly in her power. I thought myself a competitive fellow, just consider—I had to be nearly as supersensational with sex as I was with
dinero
, and Bess and I gave each other some glorious good times in a row; up would climb the male ego; applause from Bess was accolade from Cleopatra; then swish! she’d vanish. Gone for a day or week. ‘Had to, darling,’ she’d say on her return, ‘he was irresistible.’ Only to tickle my ego up again by confessing I was
more
irresistible, ergo she was back. Or to the contrary, she’d leave me pulp; she’d say, ‘Well, he’s gone, but
he’s
unforgettable.’ I was like a hound halfway through a steak, have it snatched from him. She got me to the point where I could be in the middle of doing my work and all of a sudden I’d think, ‘Bess is off with somebody.’ My brain would scoot out of me just as fast as feeder ants from a piece of carrion that’s just been kicked. I
was
carrion. I was in her damn grip. Intolerable. I was afraid of her. More afraid of her than I’d been of anybody. Each time we got together I felt as if I were an open piggy-bank: had to take whatever she would drop into me; her coin was powers. My nose for the market turned infallible. Lying in bed I could feel the potential of a given stock as much as if I were bathing in the thoughts of a thousand key investors. I could almost hear the sound of the mother factory. It was like soaking up a view. Then I would be left with the final impression, ‘Artichokes is going up tomorrow, Beethoven is going down.’ Whatever! I was spoon-fed on expert opinion, of course, I was just about a clearinghouse for tips, but this went a distance beyond that, I promise you. And there were other spookeries. One time a bugger
started to give me a hard time, pompous little promoter. As he was walking away, I said to myself, ‘Drop, you bugger,’ and he had epilepsy right at my door. Wondrous sort of power.