Crazy Salad (23 page)

“No,” said Cousin Arthur.

“I think you should,” I said. “I think what all this is really about is that you wish you’d done the commercial yourself.”

“I do wish I’d done it,” said Cousin Arthur. “I can’t get angry at anyone about it, though. I could have done it. It was my fault I didn’t. But you want to know a thing I really regret? I had a chance to be head of a giant record company once. That I really regret. For five hundred dollars I could have owned twenty-five percent of Elektra Records. You know why I didn’t?”

“Why?”

“My father talked me out of it.”

That didn’t surprise me. Thirty years ago Cousin Arthur’s father, who you may recall is my uncle Charlie, told my parents it was a good thing they were selling their house on Turtle Bay in Manhattan, because the United Nations was being built and property values in the neighborhood were going to drop.

Cousin Arthur shook his head. “I should have done the ad,” he said. “It would have been a thrill to see myself on television. Let’s be honest about it. Everyone wants to be recognized.”

“But you
are
recognized,” I said.

“Only by family and friends,” said Cousin Arthur.

“That’s not true,” I said. “My sister Delia’s cabdriver recognized you.”

“What did he say?” said Cousin Arthur.

“He said, ‘Isn’t that guy on TV?’ ”

“That’s what I mean,” said Cousin Arthur. “That’s not really being recognized.”

May, 1976

My friend Kenny does not feel as bad about the death of Hazel as I do. My friend Ann has been upset about it for days. My friend Martha is actually glad Hazel is dead. I cried when Hazel died, but only for a few seconds, partly because I wasn’t at all surprised. About three months ago, someone told me she was going to die, and since then I have watched every show expecting it to be her last. Once she stuck her head into a dumbwaiter to get some food for James, who had finally recovered enough from his war injuries to have an appetite, and I was certain the dumbwaiter was going to crash onto her head and kill her instantly. Another time, when she and Lord Bellamy went to fetch James from a hospital in France (and Hazel and Georgina had a fight over whether he should be moved), I was sure the ambulance would crash on the way back. Hazel lived on, though, show after show, until there came the thirteenth episode. As soon as they mentioned the plague, I knew that would be it. It was. The particular plague Hazel died of was the Spanish influenza, which, according to Alistair Cooke, was the last true pandemic. I was sorry that Alistair Cooke had so much more
to say about the plague than he did about the death of Hazel, but perhaps he has become wary of commenting on the show itself after everyone (including me) took offense at some of the things he had to say about George Sand.

Of course, Hazel should never have married James Bellamy in the first place. James is a big baby. Hazel should have married Lord Bellamy, which was impossible since Lady Marjorie had just gone down on the
Titanic
. Or she should have run off with the upwardly mobile air ace, which was impossible since he was killed on the very next show after she met him, along with Rose’s fiancé, Gregory. (I never laid eyes on Gregory, but Kenny tells me he was a very interesting man, a natural radical, who met Rose by sitting on her cake.) Hazel’s finest moment was the show when she met the ace, and they went dancing, and she wore a dress with tiny, delicate beaded straps, and turned out to have the most beautiful back I have ever seen. But other than her back, and her fling with the ace, and her occasional success in telling Hudson off, and her premature death, Hazel left something to be desired. Not as far as Ann is concerned, but certainly as far as Martha is concerned. “Let’s face it,” said Martha. “Hazel was a pill.” In fairness, we might all be pills if we had had to spend our lives sitting on a chesterfield couch pouring tea, but that’s no excuse, I suppose. Hazel
was
a pill (though not nearly as terrible a pill as Abigail Adams and her entire family), and she really ought to have married an older man who wanted nothing more than to go to bed early. Still, James had no cause to treat her so badly. Kenny is the only person I know who has a kind word to say for James, and here it is: “Somewhere there must be something good about him that we’ll find out about eventually.” Actually, James did have a couple of good weeks there, when he returned from the front to report the army was dropping like flies, but I am told by a reliable source that his behavior was
derivative of Siegfried Sassoon, and in any case, he shortly thereafter reverted to type. The worst James ever treated Hazel—aside from when she was sick and dying of the plague and he was playing rummy with his father’s new fiancée, the Scottish widow—was when she had her miscarriage, and he totally ignored her, and went off dancing with Cousin Georgina.

Which brings us to Cousin Georgina. Martha doesn’t much like Georgina either. This puzzles me. I can understand not liking Hazel and liking Georgina, or not liking Georgina and liking Hazel, but not liking both of them? Georgina was a true ninny when she arrived in the Bellamy household, and she hung around with Daisy, who is the most unrelenting ninny in television history. (For example, when Rose found out that Gregory had left her twelve hundred pounds, Daisy said: “Some people have all the luck.” I rest my case.) But Georgina has become a wonderful nurse, and I’m proud of her. Also, her face is even more beautiful than Hazel’s back. As for the burning question preoccupying us all—will Georgina marry James now that Hazel is dead?—I say no. (Martha says yes.) Georgina sees through James. I know it. I see her marrying the one-armed officer she went off to Paris with, if only because she is the only person on the show saintly enough to marry a man with one arm. Ann, on the other hand, does not trust Georgina as far as she can spit. “I know she was a great nurse,” says Ann, “but she reminds me of those bitchy women you went to college with who were great biology students. She has no heart.” There is indeed some recent evidence pointing to Georgina’s heartlessness: when Hazel died, she went off to a party. But the war was over, and who could blame her? I was far more shocked at the la-di-da way Lord Bellamy behaved; he got off an Alastair Cooke–like remark about the plague itself, and that was that. Only Rose was magnificent about it. Ann thinks the reason everyone (except
Rose) behaved so unemotionally about Hazel’s death was that she was a petit bourgeois and they had never accepted her. I disagree. I think it’s possible that the same person who tipped me off about Hazel’s death tipped off the Bellamy household, and they just weren’t all that surprised when it finally happened.

Even Martha loves Rose. Rose reminds me, in some metaphysical way, of Loretta Haggers. She is so good, so honest, so pure, so straight and so plucky. Kenny worries that Rose is going to leave the show now that she has come into all this money, but I say she’ll never leave: the actress who plays Rose created the show itself, so she’ll never be got rid of. I sometimes wonder how they do get rid of people at that show. They sank Lady Marjorie, I read somewhere, because the actress playing her wanted to take a vacation in Europe. But what about Hazel? Did they know all along? Did they hire her in the beginning and say, “Look here, Hazel, we’ll carry you through World War One, but then you’re through”? Or did they hire her planning to use her straight through the Depression? Did she do something to antagonize them? Did she know she was going to die, and if so, when?

We all know that Mrs. Bridges and Hudson are going to get married at the end of the next batch of episodes, which have already been shown in England. The reason we all know this is that the information was mentioned in the obituary of the actress who played Mrs. Bridges, who died of the flu in real life in Essex a couple of weeks before Hazel died of the flu on television in America. Was this planned too? Did they say to her, “Well, Mrs. Bridges, we’ll give you a nice fat part for the entire series and marry you off to the butler in the end, but shortly thereafter you’ll have to die”? I wonder. I also wonder how I’m going to feel about Mrs. Bridges and Hudson getting married. There’s something a little too neat about it. Besides, Mrs. Bridges is a much better person than Hudson,
who has become a mealy-mouthed hypocrite as well as a staunch defender of the British class system. All this would probably be all right and deliciously in character except that it is beginning to look as if Hudson is going to personify, in microcosm, the entire rise of Fascism in Europe. Ann is more concerned on this point than I am.

As for Edward and Daisy, they talk a lot about leaving the Bellamy household, but it is Kenny’s theory that they are beginning to sound more and more like the three sisters and Moscow. Which is a shame, because I wish they would leave.

Here are some things we all agree on:

We are all terribly worried that Rose will never find a man.

We all miss Lady Marjorie a lot more than the Bellamys do, and are extremely apprehensive about meeting the Scottish widow’s children.

We all think the best show of the year was the one with the scene in the train station with the dying and wounded soldiers. The second-best show was the one in which Gregory and the ace died.

We would all like to know some of the technical details of the show—how the writers are picked, how much of the plot is planned ahead of time—but it is too dangerous to find out. Someone, in the course of giving out the information, might let slip a crucial turn of the plot. We would all rather die than know what is going to happen.

Mostly, we all wish
Upstairs, Downstairs
would last forever.

July, 1976

Porter checked into his hotel on Sunday night and went to Madison Square Garden to pick up his credentials. He wasn’t sure what he was going to need them for, since his story had fallen through. Porter was a reporter for the
Tulark Morning Herald
of Tulark, Idaho, and his editor had sent him to the Democratic convention to cover the mayor of Tulark, J. Neal Dudley, who was a delegate. “Just follow him around,” said the editor. Porter had had big plans. He would follow Dudley to the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. He would follow him into a taxi and they would have a funny experience with a New York cabdriver. He would follow him to Eighth Avenue, where J. Neal Dudley would be mugged while Porter looked on helplessly, taking notes. He would follow him to dinner at Windows on the World, where with any luck Dudley would be thrown out for wearing a leisure suit.

Porter had begun by following Dudley to the Boise airport and onto the plane to New York. After a couple of drinks, he asked Dudley what he planned to do at the convention.

“Fuck my eyes out,” said Dudley, “and if I catch you within twenty feet of my room I’ll kill you.”

“I’m supposed to follow you around,” said Porter.

“Make it up,” said J. Neal Dudley.

Dudley got into a cab at Kennedy airport and vanished. Porter got onto the bus and rode to his hotel. It occurred to him that if he could just find J. Neal Dudley fucking his eyes out, he could bring down the administration of Tulark, Idaho, such as it was.

On the other hand, Porter had read enough articles in journalism reviews to realize that he would have to find J. Neal Dudley in flagrante with a secretary who could not take shorthand and who had been flown into town on a ticket paid for with the proceeds from a secret sale of Tulark municipal bonds. Otherwise, his editor would refuse to print the story on the grounds that it was an invasion of J. Neal Dudley’s privacy and a surefire way for the paper to lose the advertising from J. Neal Dudley’s appliance dealership.

Porter decided to forget it. He would make the story up. He could always talk to enough delegates to put something together about what J. Neal Dudley would have done at the convention had he actually attended it.

So after getting his credentials, Porter set out to find a delegate. He went to the Statler Hilton lobby and spotted a large man wearing a ridiculous hat. Porter approached him.

“Porter of the
Tulark Morning Herald
,” he said.

“Ken Franklin of
Newsday
,” said the man in the hat. “Can I interview you?”

“I beg your pardon?” said Porter.

Franklin explained that he was the media reporter for
Newsday
and he just wanted to ask Porter the questions he’d been asking other reporters.

“Sure,” said Porter. “Shoot.”

“What are you planning to write about?” asked Franklin.

“I don’t know,” said Porter.

“That’s what they all say,” said Franklin. “There are twice as many media people here as delegates, and there’s no story.”

“There’s no story?” said Porter.

“That’s what they all say,” said Franklin.

“What else do they all say?” said Porter.

“They all say that because there’s no news story, there are no feature stories either.”

“What about the hookers?” said Porter.

“All the hookers are taken,” said Franklin. “The
New York Post
signed them all to exclusive contracts last week.”

Porter bought himself a beer in the bar and looked around. He spotted a man wearing delegate’s credentials and went over to him.

“Porter of the
Tulark Morning Herald
,” he said.

“Suzanne Cox of the
Chicago Tribune
,” said the woman sitting next to the delegate. “Get lost. This one’s mine for the week.”

“Could I ask
you
a question?” Porter said to Suzanne Cox.

“No, you can’t,” said a small boy next to Miss Cox.

“Who are you?” asked Porter.

“Brian Finley,” said the boy. “I’m a reporter from
Children’s Express
, and
I’m
covering
her
.”

“Who’s covering you?” asked Porter.

“Scotty Reston,” said Brian Finley, “but he’s gone to the men’s room.”

“I see,” said Porter and went back to the bar.