I'm Dying Laughing (8 page)

He did everything with such gaiety, such inner and outward grace, she felt like a pleased child and yet she did not quite like it.

‘It’s because I’m used to the battle of life,’ she said to herself. ‘I’m a bugbear at the feast of life, a spotted clown, Emily Homespun, unlicked; I suppose I must learn the bong tong, the
comme il faut.
Pish! Pshaw! Can you bedizen a dancing bear? Besides, he says we’ll have no children—but he hasn’t said he loves me.’

He hadn’t said so; and she thought to herself, astonished: ‘I have agreed to marry a stranger—H’m! OK. Well, we’ll see!’

But she continued thoughtful. She did not know him well enough to size up the reality of this shipboard acquaintance and this sudden projected marriage.

‘And your family, Stephen?’

‘I was an invalid once; I’ll get my way. Anna loves me.’ After a moment, he added, ‘And then, they’re not sure!’

‘Not sure of you?’

‘The way my mother and uncles, the Howards that is, look at it, is, You never know. They’re not taken in really by theories of sunspots and crop failures and business cycles. They know the USA started from nothing: it wasn’t a business cycle, but something new. They know that after the French Revolution the rich men came back, but not the kings. If the Commune had seized the banks, what would have happened? My people and their cousins are hoping for Russia, that some day they’ll have business cycles, but it looks bad at present. Europe and the USA are goggling after socialism—they’ve had too much of business cycles. Though, my respected family will do their best; and their best is good. But you never know. Paul Valéry wrote “The time of the world’s end begins”; only a pen-pusher, true. One of our congress people said, “Some few among the greatest have already said yes to the future—but all have felt it, that a time is passing that can never come back.”’

‘Hitler is trying to put the clock back.’

‘They’ll help him, for he’s our barricade against socialism; he even has to call his socialism, to fool all the people all the time.’

‘People have always believed in the apocalypse,’ she said slowly.

‘This vision shakes us all. But we have no right to romance. Someone said those who flatter the people with false revolutionary legends are like a cartographer who would give sailors lying maps. And the apocalypse is such a lying map.’

She said, ‘My God, what can we do—in the apocalypse? What an extraordinary race to belong to! Ants and bees have organised societies—so they say. It’s all nicely fixed up, mother to son; they don’t turn the anthill upside-down every twenty years. But we say, it’s a tenet, the tree of liberty must be watered every twenty years by the blood of martyrs. Why is it? What is the answer?’

‘The answer is, revolution is a necessity if we are not to be ants and bees.’

‘Brr! but it’s murder, it’s terrible.’

About that they talked for days. In the end Emily gave up her plans and returned on the boat with Stephen. They would come back to Europe some other year.

A
T THE DOCK THEY
met Stephen’s mother, Anna Howard, ‘dear Anna’ as Emily at once called her, a sallow, handsome, tall woman, with slender waist, long legs, broad shoulders. With her was a young woman, Adeline the heiress whom Stephen had thought about marrying. She was a dark, casually pretty girl, with large brown eyes and a hesitant manner, covering modest convictions. She was dressed in a dark material. Both greeted them friendly, but Mrs Howard kept Emily talking while Stephen spoke to Adeline and then Anna took Emily to her hotel, where she had a room for her, while Stephen, promising to see them later, went off in her car with Adeline to lunch.

Emily lunched with Anna Howard in a small cellar restaurant off Washington Square.

‘I know you like places like this; Arthur and I come here,’ said she. She did not explain that Arthur Winegarden was to be her husband: but Emily knew.

‘You don’t drink wine,’ said Anna with a smile, after Emily, following her lead, had chosen
osso buco
with rice.

Emily had meant to order veal cutlets with truffles; but she remembered what Stephen had said about ‘millionaire asceticism.’ Too bad, she thought; well, I must learn—let it be marrowbone and gravy. They had cheese and coffee and then went back to the hotel. Stephen returned, went to his mother and then called on Emily, who had a room across the hall from ‘dear Anna’.

‘It is all settled, Mother accepts my change of plans. What can she do? So there you are, you freak—engaged to me and we’ll be married right off. But do you mind going to Chicago? Anna has a summer shack the size of a department store, style cottage-baronial on the lake shore. We’ll be married there and then back to NY. I want to be near the New York party. I’ll work in New York. Mother wants us to live opposite her on East 75th Street; she’ll buy the house and rent it to us, or any arrangement. I don’t know how you feel about that? I’d say no.’

They went uptown to look at the four-storey building which had a gable, tiles, an attic balcony; ‘a certain air of Montmartre,’ said Emily.

‘Yes, but good God, look at the place next door, gilded iron and heavy lace curtains, looks like a fine Paris brothel; and besides, Mother has only to look out of any front window from her house opposite to see our curtains, our car, our shared janitor and me at work in my study. One of her private ambitions is slowly to buy up four or five houses in this street and plant us all opposite, Florence, Olivia: “Howard Village”.’

‘No, no.’

‘Yes, no-no.’

They came back, went to the bar downstairs to frame their answer to Anna’s offer.

‘Golly, Stephen, I can’t get over the idea that because I went red, I married into the social register. I can’t take it in. I know it’s so, but it is just like a story by a dimwit, that any editor would reject.’

‘America the Golden,’ said Stephen, ‘and what about me? The effete scion finally inducing some honest red blood to mingle with the watery anil in his veins?’

They were married at City Hall, with only brother Arnold and Anna to witness; and then spent a few days on the lake at Oak Park.

The Chicago country house was entered by a paved courtyard behind stronghold walls; over them, tiled roofs, below dressed stone archways. There was plenty of room inside: guestrooms, halls, flights of stairs, unexpected turns looking through long windows on to parts of the grounds and a weed-grown private pond, on which was a rowboat and in it a man hauling out weed. These glimpses were disheartening. Perhaps the landscape and thick bit of woodland could not be fitted into these long but too narrow windows—something of the air of a citadel hung about the place.

‘A nice little shack situated in its thousand-acre backyard,’ said Emily.

‘Three hundred acres,’ said Stephen, ‘unless you’re counting the lake, not ours yet! Actually Anna is thinking of selling off twenty acres so that neighbours, the Littles, can get to their stables from the road.’

‘I’m simply not telling my folks anything about this. They wouldn’t believe it. Not for Flop-eared Emily, the family white elephant. Supposing I told them that this slum was occupied by a red, someone with his name at the masthead of the leading conspiratorial weekly, an agitator mumbling slogans to truck drivers, taking down in shorthand the beefs of striking seamen about pork chops—that’s what you do, isn’t it? Clasping the horny hands of the sons of Casey Jones, pulling the forelock to the Central Committee—they know I’m a liar, but they’d think I was mad. For journalism is one thing, but reality—no.’

‘Well, we will manage without troubling their dreams.’

‘Yes—but Stephen, listen, last night I had an idea! About Lennie.’

‘Who’s Lennie? Oh, yes, the Irish lad, possible nephew.’

‘Well, we’ll see if he exists. We’ll ask him over. They haven’t room. He can stay with us. It will cost less, too. He won’t take up room. He’s only four.’

‘H’m. Wait a bit.’

They got an apartment on Twelfth Street, three rooms in a row, bath at the side, kitchen at the back. They divided the big front room with a large steel Venetian blind; they furnished the place and bought a Chinese carpet which Emily called ‘tray raffeenay,’ and went to work. Emily joined the Communist Party, went to classes for new members, stifled what she called her ‘ignoramus objections,’ read serious books, sold newspapers, and attended meetings; a very serious learner.

Stephen even tried to restrain her. But she was in a fever. ‘I must learn all, everything—for the truth will make us free.’

‘We will see what the truth will do to us,’ grumbled Stephen.

Stephen had first married Caroline, a young heiress. Her will left everything to her daughter, Olivia, now aged two. Part was to come to her on her sixteenth birthday, the rest at twenty-five. Meanwhile, the trustee, Anna, paid out of the estate all her expenses. Caroline, knowing her death to be near, had also asked Florence, Stephen’s sister, to take care of the baby girl; for Stephen, she said, did not understand children and had an indecisive nature.

‘Why did Caroline disinherit you?’ asked Emily, ‘disregarding the gracious words about understanding children, for the moment.’

‘I had my allowance. She was afraid I would become a drone, an idler, a rich louse and she had an ambitious conscience. She wanted to do me good; she wanted me to have a clean name. Even at noonday she saw the red muckraker in the shadows. You must understand that we, the Howards, are mentioned in
The Jungle,
under another name of course; but every social-minded citizen knows. And we all know. I think she married me to keep me straight. She didn’t want a servant, a class enemy in the house. She wouldn’t cook or clean for me, because I didn’t do the same for her. I pointed out that we would be in each other’s way dusting; but she thought I was unserious. She threw herself into social work to forget the misfit at home; she got her MA, studied law, to fight class injustice. We lived in a California bohemia, marched for causes with placards, threw parties for Negroes, Mexicans and others who had no reverence for our coronets and kind hearts; they simply drank up the hooch, went away and forgot our names.’

‘I can’t understand,’ said Emily, ‘why you rich are all such do-gooders. Not one in my bailiwick. Arnold’s just a Village Pink. The rest discuss the baseball scores over the dividing fence and a whisky and soda in the evening, and neck over a banana split at the drugstore, Saturday.’

He said, ‘It’s because our money isn’t old enough. It hadn’t been wrung from the backs of analphabetic, godfearing peasants for centuries, but from fighting bums who yelled every time we snatched a drop of sweat, the ungrateful hoods. Didn’t we build up the country, as Anna says? We dream at night that they are turning round to wring it all back and build up the country on their own. Well, Caroline thought I should get a job like her, to show the world I was a man; and I guess she thought I’d get hold of another heiress anyhow, with my effete personality and my emaciated comeliness; such a change from the sportive jack-puddings of our set, who smash up their cars and forge Mother’s signature and go periodically into psychiatric care or jail.’

‘I wouldn’t do that to my husband.’ said Emily.

‘But that, my dear, is how it is I am an honest man.’

‘You’re better than you say. She must have been bad for you. If you had her money you could go right into politics, not just hire a room and a secretary in Washington and attend press conferences at the White House. You could at least be a private secretary, an adviser. Think of all that money going to Olivia, a baby.’

‘Let’s be realists. There are political possibilities. The New Deal is in. I don’t see us going back to rough-and-ready vandal capitalism. I’m actually indignant that my family, the Howards, the Tanners and the Drovers have organised the country so well that what we see out of the pullman window is Hoovervilles and one-third of a nation bone idle and suffering from beriberi and malnutrition. We did this, I said to Anna; are you proud of that? Anna said nothing. Anna is only a nice schoolgirl who knows nothing but triple-entry bookkeeping.’

‘In a way you really are responsible—food for nightmares,’ said Emily.

Emily went through her course in Marxism under Party auspices, still scrupulously studied the textbooks and held her tongue when officials came to dinner; at these times she looked younger, like a freshman. A trained journalist, she intended to write articles for the Party press. She earned a living with what she called her Toonerville tales, short amusing anecdotes, in simple language, recollections, stories about uncles, parents, cousins, grocers, mailmen, townspeople of the small towns; a doctor on the wrong side of the tracks who was always drunk but a loved, reliable bone-setter; a woman with one tooth who won the corn-on-the-cob eating contests every year, drilling her way furiously along the rows; an uncle who stewed cheese-rind with anchovies, the first eater of yogurt in Toonerville.

She sold these to big-city magazines and began work on a comedy for Broadway, called
Henry There’s An Angel.
She also struggled again with her historical piece
The Bridge of Centralia,
‘Because I want to write it out of my system. That incident shows us what we can do when we’re minded to. I know every detail. The worst was the dreadful shock of fear and recognition, “like us, like me”. It went heart home and stayed. I know it is so. I’m afraid of America; I’m afraid of myself.’

Stephen said the title was wrong to begin with, ‘They’d think of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
and expect an appetising joggle of events of that sort, a who-knows who’s-who slice of apple pie. In any case, goddamn it, why write something that will make the hackles rise? Do you want to be run out of town?’

‘It’s for the cause,’ said Emily.

‘Let me look after the cause and you do what you’re good at—the uncle-grandpa comic cuts.’

‘That’s an insult,’ said Emily and sulked. Later, she told him he was right. She was wasting her time. She had always wanted to write a great thing, truth with a bang, thrust out bricks from the wall and make a window on the world. ‘I must do it sometime. I’m angry with that in me.’ Then she said, ‘How wonderful it is to be with you, Stephen. Right or wrong, such an idea would be quite totally impossible to me in my little Tacoma shack. They don’t know what a writer is. They don’t even known what a bestseller is. Think of such a sink of humbleness.’