I'm Dying Laughing (32 page)

Stephen said, ‘Me, too. It kills me. It’s all wrong.’

Lilias looked at her cousin and said, ‘Frankly, Stephen, you make me sick. One whiff of those gentry and you’d fall right over backwards. Why don’t you pick out a nice cellar in Chinatown and go and make love to gun-molls with lice in their hair? I know a man from Poland whose brother was carried off in the middle of the night and no one has heard of him since. This man from Warsaw introduced me to a lot of people who were over there and know. This Mr—I can’t pronounce his name—said he saw the reds put out a man’s eyes and left him to stagger through the street with bleeding eyes. No one would feed him, because they were afraid. At last someone in the middle of the night led him across the frontier and now he weaves baskets as a blind weaver in Vienna. One of his friends was kept in jail for five months and questioned every day. They patiently tortured him trying to get him to confess that he’d sabotaged by working for the Germans as a spy.’

‘Well, did he?’

‘Don’t be silly, Stephen. How do I know? And I wouldn’t blame him. I would do anything myself to get them.’

‘So you mean he was a spy?’ said Stephen.

‘I mean you don’t know what they’re capable of. You never listen to my stories, for instance. I was told at the Ruritanian Embassy the other night—you don’t know what crimes the French underground are committing. The Germans are justified in what they’re doing. A man absolutely above suspicion, was taking a night walk and a German sentry was found in the Seine. The Resistance was guilty but that man and fifty others, innocent, good citizens were taken. The Resistance were simply provocateurs. I call that mass murder. And then three ladies, I actually heard of, were taken in a car across the Finland border and were stripped and murdered in cold blood, for no other reason but that they lived in a private house and had two servants. That’s a crime according to your famous reds.’

Stephen laughed wildly, ‘Oh, really, Lilias, you don’t sincerely believe that these ladies were dragged about naked and then shot.’

‘I know for certain they were dragged screaming from their houses and their servants shot as collaborators because they were working for the rich; they were all taken, servants and ladies and stripped for jewels and shot.’

Stephen laughed.

‘Do you really think it’s funny?’

‘Look at my fangs dripping with ladies’ blood,’ said Stephen.

Lilias said, ‘You’re kidding? Well, don’t kid so fast. I’ll live to hear you goddamning the day you ever knew one of them.’

‘Listen, Lilias, a little reason. Here we all live, automobiles and fur coats and orange-juicers and servants and the workers don’t have that. Maybe they want pediatricians for their children; they don’t want to drink blood.’

Lilias said, ‘All that is no excuse for killing people in cold blood. There are a lot of things I want but I don’t hold up people in the street. I’m astonished at you, Stephen, defending muggers and knifers.’

Stephen said angrily, ‘If you need a job at any time, Lilias, you
₍
can probably get one as a reporter in the yellow press; only I warn you there’s a lot of competition in your line of political romance.’

‘Stephen,’ said Emily.

‘It’s my own lousy family, I don’t have to take it,’ said Stephen.

Charlotte was not talking. She was bent over her plate of roast chicken, which she was deftly and rapidly consuming. She finished it long before the others and sat there self-contained as always with her brilliant, still, nervous look. Adeline was fond of Stephen and there had been talk of a marriage. She smiled at him; Lilias was truculent.

‘If it were not for your labour unions, Steve, we would not have to have spies and security police and goons and strike-breakers. Look at the extra expense for industry! In the USA people are happy unless someone makes trouble. There’s enough for anyone if we have industrial peace. I know the men in our own business. We have to have company police and they have to be armed; it’s a kind of private army, and there’s an arsenal, guns, gas. That’s all your fault, Stephen. People are working and you make them greedy. You can make anyone want what isn’t theirs with your kind of hot air.’

Charlotte said, ‘Well, I don’t see it that way. They have rights, the workers, I mean. I’m really on their side. I’m really with Stephen.’

Lilias said, ‘Then you’re a pair of nitwits or hypocrites or traitors, or all that.’

Stephen turned pale. Emily began to laugh and glitter, in a hurry. ‘I was with the police once! Yes. I was out with the state police on a story in the San Bernardino. They let me ride in their car. I was alone, I had to get the story. There was a packers’ strike, oakies were in it and oakies were news as well; goons were roaming round the orchards and the packing plants, getting in the way of strike-breakers and strike-breakers getting in the way of the cops. No one knew who anyone was. I shrank literally from going on the story; but I had to get inside and find out what was going on; so I went with the cops.’

‘But your sympathies were with the strikers,’ said Charlotte simply.

Emily laughed with unsteady heartiness, ‘Oh, I don’t know what I was then. I was just a working stiff, a crazy, knight-errant reporter, seeing life in the raw, scraping the seamy side, getting material for the Great American Novel. I had to do something like that. I was working my way through college.’

‘I didn’t know you did that. Edward did that,’ said Lilias.

Emily continued with frenzied jollity, ‘Yes, yes, yes! Naturally a journalist’s sympathies are with the victims, not the oppressors, more with the corpse than the murderer, the sidewalk Venus than the man who picks her up. He’s got a safe job, she hasn’t. It’s a romantic viewpoint, the mysteries of the underworld, sorrows of the underdog.’

Anna said, ‘Yes, I can understand that—in young people.’

Stephen looked down at his plate. Emily said hurriedly, ‘Well I was looking down one of the apple-chutes and I slipped and rolled all the way down the chute with the apples! The cops had a gala day. Something funny happened! Put out the flags! I was their favourite girlfriend. Ha-ha-ha.’

They laughed at this, except Anna who said, ‘There might have been a pulper or a parer at the bottom.’

Emily laughed heartily, ‘Yes, there might have been: that’s the joke. There was some kind of chute leading somewhere, but I was too fat to go through.’

Stephen laughed. He laughed and laughed.

‘You are laughing at me, Stephen!’

‘Because I love you.’

He got up and went round the table to kiss the hair that curled round her ear. He said, ‘She’s such a fool, that’s why I love her. I’m behaving like a schoolboy, Mother, but that makes me well. Makes me laugh.’

‘You laugh?’ said his mother, not understanding.

Edward said, ‘We need the cops, I don’t care how many J. Edgar Hoovers there are in the world. We need protection. We’re producing enormously and the world needs production. Look at Europe now. They need everything we can give them. All strikes should be stopped. We’re just encouraging greedy, inefficient people to think they can benefit themselves by halting production.’

‘I’ll say for you, Edward, you never stop, you’re never diverted,’ said Stephen. Lilias was well ahead of the others in her drinks, flushed and confident.

‘I can
pay
for what I want, for everything I want. So I’ve got no questions to answer to anyone. I didn’t steal it. I’m not in debt. I’ve never been in debt. If I didn’t work, my grandfather and my father and my brothers and my husband worked and they made enough to keep me. Out of their honest labour, I’m honest. I don’t fall for that honest sweat line. The reds don’t want anyone to benefit from work; and that’s the story streamlined without a lot of talk. I get by. I’ve always done every damn thing I wanted; but I never ran into the law. If you do that, it’s because you want to.’

Anna said to Stephen, ‘But Lilias is right. You must have aspiration.’

Lilias said indistinctly, ‘These damn unionists with their reds come along and want to take my father’s and my grandfather’s and my husband’s hard-earned cash. I stand by them even if my husband left me, the
schwanz
.’

‘
Wanze
is the word you want,’ said Stephen.

Lilias giggled, ‘OK, I got the wrong number. Castration was a slip of the tongue, doctor.’

Anna blushed. Charlotte looked with an enquiring smile, ‘Is that a joke I don’t know?’

Edward laughed. Maurice said, ‘This is a very boisterous party, isn’t it? I never thought with Anna here we’d become so suggestive.’

‘We’re not suggestive, hardly the word, we’re frank,’ said Emily.

Lilias said, ‘I’m not going to be side-tracked. The workers here are vicious, really vicious. I know from a man I know that Edgar Hoover’s got everything organized to take over, and I hope he wins. He’s all we’ve got. Hats off. I’m drinking to the best man. To J. Edgar Hoover. Now come on, you parlour pinks over there, and you, Des, I don’t think it’s fair to eat with us and drink with us and all the time conspire behind our backs; so drink—’

‘You’re right,’ said Stephen, very pale now and rising from his seat.

‘Sit down, Stephen,’ said Emily.

Anna looked at them both with hollow eyes.

Maurice said, ‘Lilias, you oughtn’t to make trouble. We all believe in freedom of opinion. You know this is Anna’s birthday party.’

Anna said, ‘Poor Lilias is sad now. She’s just lost her husband and she’s drinking too much. We mustn’t upset her. Let her feel she’s got friends.’

Lilias said, ‘You don’t
know.
I heard them once in Paris in 1936. I was at school there then. Singing the “Marseillaise”. You know I understand French. It says, “Drag them away from their homes, drag them in gutters of blood and hang them to the lampposts.” Now by them they mean us. Drown in blood the enemies of the people and the damn aristocrats and the people with money; that’s us.’

‘A spirited bit of verse, if that’s what it says,’ said Emily.

Stephen said, ‘Now listen, Lilias, you’re drunk but not stupid. Supposing you had to live on $200 a month—’

Lilias broke in firmly, ‘I’d hate us. And I’d try to take it away from us. But I wouldn’t join any union. I’d be either a movie star or a best seller or an oil millionaire like I am now, or I’d marry a million. If you think I don’t understand the proletariat, I do. I came from there. I know the road. So does Emily. But she got herself all balled-up in some screwy ideas. The workers are gorillas.’

Everyone laughed and the discussion broke up. Anna was taking Lilias home; and the Howards asked Des Canby to come home and stay with them. Their old friends Axel and Ruth Oates, also old friends of Des, were visiting them over the weekend and this was a great chance to ‘talk over everything from every point of view’.

Stephen said, ‘God, what an ugly life! I’m sick of it. We want to start again somewhere else. But can we?’

Emily said, ‘I always had a theory that people get what they want; and here we are—what about that? That’s what worries me. That we’ll always get what we want.’

When they were getting ready for bed, Emily said, ‘Stephen, I was really celebrating for myself, for ourselves tonight. Didn’t you notice?’

‘I noticed something. I thought you were sky-high.’

‘Oh, it didn’t matter. I know nothing will dislodge this one. I feel so safe, so sure. This will be a girl and my own darling daughter, just as I want.’

‘What?’

‘Yes, I’m pregnant. Oh, it’s so fine. It’s what I want. I always know because of this splendid rich full feeling, this wholesome creating feeling. Stephen, perhaps we will be happy with this one. Do you know a woman feels different each time she’s pregnant? I suppose that is the basis of personality; or it’s connected—well, this time, I feel as if I’m swimming in a bed of lilies, like those floating islands in Mexico.’

‘Oh, this is terrible,’ said Stephen.

‘Wonderful! Be happy with me.’

In the morning, Des Canby, the Oateses, Porrez, Paolo and Maria-Gloria, the butcher, the greengrocer and the policeman on point duty congratulated Stephen. Emily, passing in her car on her way to school with the children, had told them all.

‘Renounce, renounce, on every side, I hear’

(
Faust
, Goethe)

D
ES CANBY WAS A
British reporter, who attended wars, revolutions and congresses and was famous in many countries for his reports and scoops. His grandfather was Lord Cockaigne, a Victorian Queen’s Counsel, his father was once a Tory cabinet minister and Des had been educated at Oxford. He knew everyone at home and abroad. He had met the Howards at the UNO conference in San Francisco in 1945 and was now highly pleased to meet them again in such good society.

‘Of course, I remembered you from San Francisco, Emily. Brockhurst and I were sitting at a table and you were crossing the courtyard below, laughing, with a round face and round straw hat with poppies on it, your head nodding and the poppies nodding, and you nodding on your high heels.’

They asked him where he was staying and he said, in a dull, dear, dubious, midtown hotel. His paper didn’t give him expenses; he was freelancing.

‘The reason I know everyone, my dears, is that I can get into embassy parties on both sides and have a free meal.’

They begged him to come and stay with them. They wanted to discuss so many things; they were at a moment of great decision. They needed his advice.

Said Stephen, ‘We’re standing now where you stood a few months ago.’

‘Where?’

‘When you left the Party but left the door ajar to get back if need be. How neatly you did it.’

Emily said, ‘You know how to survive. The British do, we don’t—an American failing.’

Des said, in the delightful, asinine, British manner he thought would most captivate Americans, ‘Oh, I was hoping to sponge on you, stay with you for a night or two. I was fascinated when I found out Lilias was your relation, and it was sweet of her to bring me to your party. I must tell you about my new wife, not the one you met in San Francisco. You know I’ve had three; not my fault. Number One wrote fantasy stories and so we parted amiably. Then I met a girl on a plane; trouble was, I had only a Mexican divorce, it didn’t work. We married but how could I get divorced? I don’t think we’ve divorced legally yet. I do wish you could meet Manthea though. She’s a darling. An Honourable, she’s a blue-blood, darling girl, beautiful long hair, very impractical, our house is a pigsty. But she’s perfectly right always. How can she run a house in London? And we can’t get a maid. They’re all undernourished, or see ghosts—yes, I assure you, there is a ghost in our house, well, it’s a mansion flat—or they get pregnant. Manthea is wonderfully good at managing maids: but she cannot stand second sight or pregnancy or malnutrition.’