Set This House on Fire (31 page)

“Cass!” he cried. “Come on up here! Come on up and have a drink!”

There was no movement from the figure below: only the steady, laborious breathing. Mason called again, still not harshly but with rising impatience and with a blunt imperative tone, like that of a military person to a slow-thinking or half-deaf subordinate.
“Sonofabitch,”
I heard him mutter fretfully. Then he turned abruptly and clattered down the stairway, taking the steps two at a time and landing flat-footedly in the courtyard, where he paused for an instant, arms flailing about as he regained his balance and then sprinted past all the movie machines across the tiles to Cass’ side. I heard them mumbling to one another, first Mason’s voice, affable and insincere, saying, “Come on up, pal, and join the fun,” then Cass’ mumbled unintelligible reply, and Mason’s voice again, growing more and more impatient but still under control as he gave Cass a big swat between the shoulder blades—"Don’t be a miserable spoilsport!” I heard him say, louder—and turned him around, half-supporting him about the waist, and led him slowly back across the courtyard to the stairway. Cass was drunker than he had been an hour before, if that was possible. He looked now like a man pitched on the edge of total ruin, his eyes making comic-strip X’s behind his glasses, his arms limp and powerless at his sides. At one point, as he climbed the stairs, I thought he was going to topple over the balustrade. Mason steadied him, grimly. Then when he finally lurched up to the balcony where I was standing, Cass’ eyes floated to a point several inches from my face, and I thought for an instant that he winked at me but because of the condition of his eyes I could not be sure.

Mason, panting and excited, released his hold around Cass’ waist. “Come on have a drink,” he said to him sharply. Then to me: “Cass is going to put on a little show. Cass is a real actor, when he’s had one or two under his belt. I might even get Alonzo to get him to turn professional. Is that O.K. with you, Cass?” He tried to smile.

Cass stood before us swaying, hair still in his face, grinning now—slackly and rather stupidly. “Sho’, boy, anything you say, anything you say.” A crazy, witless chuckle emanated from the back of his throat. “ ’M a real actor. Melpomene and Thalia. The sweet goddesses for which—for whom, I should say—old Unc Kinsolving would die. Willingly.” He paused and hiccupped. “Willingly. No bullshit, boy. Born to the buskin. Thespis me middle name. Unc’ll do anything for a drink.” Sweating wildly, he looked up at Mason through his befogged glasses. “Anything for a drink, man. None of this old cookin’ whiskey, either. None of this ol’ rotgut that’d burn the craw out of a turkey buzzard.
Sippin’
whiskey! That’s what Mason serves.
Gentry
whiskey! Good sour mash what never saw the light of day for eight whole years. Tell me, old Mason buddy,” he said, laying a big hand on Mason’s shoulder, hiccupping again, “tell me, boy, you got any that Jack Daniel’s we picked up at the PX today? Any left for old Unc Kinsolving?” From the eloquent, warm-natured, animated person I had encountered that afternoon he had changed into a played-out lush, wheedling and foolish. I felt undermined, disappointed. He was just another one of Mason’s sycophants.

“Sure, Cass,” said Mason. “You can have all you want. Soon as we put on our little show.” And he laughed as he once more grabbed Cass by the arm and propelled him toward the door, but there was a mean glint in his eye. The back of his neck was the color of a boiled lobster; he was seething, and I knew that I could expect the worst. “Come on, lover man,” he said sarcastically, pushing Cass along with soft pokes at his shoulder. “Come on, boy. Let’s show the folks some
real
entertainment.”

Just then—just as we were about to enter the foyer—I heard a small shrill cry from below and another patter of feet crossing the courtyard. I drew back several steps and looked down. It was Poppy. Dressed in a flowered kimono and socks, her yellow hair now most unbeautifully cemented to her head by curlers and bobby pins, she mounted the steps pell-mell, gasping, puffing as she reached the top, where, with small fists clenched and her face red with pouty outrage like a child’s, she fell on Mason and began to tug furiously at his arm. “Mason Flagg!” she yelled. “I heard you! I heard what you’re up to, you mean person! You let Cass
alone!
Do you hear me? You let him alone!” In her faded kimono, she looked worn and poor, but she was lovely.

Mason turned on her. “Go on away!” he snapped. Then he added more temperately, with his forced smile: “Take it easy, Poppy. We’re just going to have us a little fun. Isn’t that right, Cass?”

“Don’t say anything to him, Cass!” Poppy shrilled, in a frenzied, broken voice. “He’s going to mistreat you! He’s just going to shame and humiliate you like he did before!” She glared up at Mason—bristling with fury, her eyes brimful with tears and hugely round —still tugging at his arm. “Why
are
you such a mean, evil person!” she cried. “Why do you want to do this to him! Can’t you see the condition he’s in? Don’t you know he loses all
command
of himself when he’s like this? Oh please,” she wailed, with a despairing, imploring gaze, “please leave him alone and let me put him to bed! Don’t shame him any more!” She glared at me, pleading. “Please, Mr. Leverett, please make him stop. He’s so sick, Cass is! And now Mason wants to put him on
display!”
She wheeled again on Mason and stamped her foot. “You brute! It’s not
funny
any more, Mason! It’s horrible. Oh, I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” And she put her face in her hands and began to cry.

“Maybe you’d better let him alone like she says,” I suggested. “Maybe you’d better, Mason.”

“You keep out of this, Buster Brown,” he retorted, throwing me a look of contempt. I think it was at this moment (and it came with staggering belatedness, considering what had passed between us since I landed in Sambuco) that I realized for the first time that Mason, in the midst of all his gross and preposterous dissimulation, actually disliked me as much as I did him. Each of us had changed, at last, beyond recapture. His eyes lingered on me. “You keep out of this, hear?” he repeated, and he turned briefly to Poppy, casting her a look of amusement and disdain. Then, “Come on, Lochinvar,” he said brusquely to Cass, “in we go.”

Cass stumbled heavily against the door. “Thass all right, my girl, my little girl,” he said in a thick garbled voice to Poppy, regaining his balance. “Don’t you cry for me. Me an’ ol’ Mason gonna have us a ball, isn’t we, pal? Fun and games, like always. How’s about a little tiny nip of that Jack Daniel’s, Mason, just to start everything off right?”

Mason said nothing and pushed Cass forward. Poppy trailed in their wake, tears streaming down her face.

“Quiet, everybody! Quiet, please!” Mason clapped his hands, and his voice boomed through the huge room, bringing the music to a stop and causing the dancers to halt in their tracks. “Quiet, please!” Mason shouted again. He was grinning broadly but his jacket was drenched in sweat: he seemed eaten up by some furious inner agitation. “Quiet!” he cried. “Will the ladies and gentlemen present please gather around for the evening’s special attraction! Kindly step forward in this direction if you will!” Slowly the guests edged forward to the place where Mason and Cass were standing in the foyer. The party had thinned out considerably. It must have been close to two, and many of the people had retired, I supposed, to the Bella Vista or to their rooms in the palace. Alice Adair was gone, as were Morton Baer and Dawn O’Donnell, but I saw Gloria Mangiamele undulating toward us and, among the others, Rosemarie and the crew-cut young man, who had become cross-eyed drunk, and my other
bête-noire,
the assistant director Van Rensselaer Rappaport. In all, I imagine a dozen people were left, and while Mason shouted and clapped his hands they gathered in a cluster around him.

“Wot happen your pretty face, darlings?” said Gloria Mangiamele with a giggle, sidling up to Mason and putting an arm around him.

“I fell into a thicket,” he replied abstractedly. “Will all you people—”

“Ticket?” said Mangiamele, puzzled. “How can one fall into a ticket?” J glanced at Rosemarie: she was a pale portrait of misery.

“Will all you people please come closer? Thank you. Tonight we have for you a special surprise attraction,” he said, gesturing toward Cass. His voice had become rich and magniloquent, like that of a circus ringmaster, and his face still wore the stiff, absurd, almost painted smile. “I want to present to you ladies and gentle men Cass Kinsolving, the greatest personality, the greatest one-man show since the days of the great departed Jolson. Isn’t that right, Cass? Speak up, Cass. Let’s have your pedigree.”

For an instant in the background I saw Poppy, biting her lip and fighting back tears, reach out to clutch at Cass, but he was lurching forward now, grinning his foolish grin, and with lumbering steps he moved up and came to a standstill next to Mason, where he remained weaving and grinning like some shambling burly bear in the center, so to speak, of the stage. His T-shirt hung sloppily out around his hips, his pants were stained, his glasses askew upon his flushed and perspiring face; standing there yawing precariously he looked husky and vaguely professorial and afflicted by some profound, voiceless melancholy, despite his grin, like a lost and drunken scholar on a Bowery corner, contemplating his inward ruin. Among these suavely varnished people, he did indeed look as out of place as a Skid Row bum. I heard Mangiamele giggle, then someone else laughed. There was a stir of anticipation in the crowd, a rustle of dresses. “He’s simply priceless,” I heard a French accent murmur, and turned to see the neck of an elderly fairy craning over my shoulder. Rosemarie had pointed him out to me earlier: a celebrated couturier—Jacques Something-or-other—of whom I should have heard, but hadn’t. His neck was a pinkish neck, and wattled, like a vulture’s. “Where on earth did Mason find
him?”

“Come on,” Mason repeated impatiently, “come on, Cass. Let’s have the old pedigree.”

Cass hesitated for a second, scratching his head. “In answer to your application, my parentage and age, et cetera,” he said finally, in a thick voice, “my mother was a bus horse … my father a cab driver … my sister a rough rider over the arctic regions … and my brothers were all gallant sailors on a steamroller.” It took no time at all to say. He said it mechanically, dreamily, as if by rote, and when he had finished he grinned again at Mason, in search of approval. It was a look that seemed so automatic, so predetermined, that I almost expected Mason to throw him a fish, or a hunk of meat. For a moment there was a complete silence—a silence you could touch, fraught with an overwhelming, general bafflement and uneasiness. I felt myself tensing up and sweating. No one uttered a sound. And then as Mason, still smiling, fixed upon Cass his intense, magisterial gaze, someone on the other side of me laughed. It was a hoarse, masculine laugh—raw and sidesplitting—and it had the instant quality of contagion: someone next to me began to guffaw, then another, then another, until the whole crowd was let loose upon a flood of whooping, hysterical laughter which rebounded from the ceiling and the walls and washed around us in wave on senseless wave. They laughed and laughed; and they laughed, I suppose, because they were at that stage in drunkenness, or inertia, or boredom, where they were ready to laugh at anything. In the midst of it all Cass stood with the sweat glistening from the bristles of a stubbly beard, dreamy and remote, oblivious of the racket, grinning and swaying as if upon his far-off and desolate street corner. There was a quality about him so totally spent, so defeated, that it was almost repellent. All of his vigor and manhood seemed drained away, and his big muscular hands fell limp and flaccid at his sides; he grinned, giggled a bit, gave a sudden lurch sideways, righted himself. Then finally the laughter diminished, died. Mangiamele, who I was sure had not understood half of Cass’ brief speech, still wheezed and trembled with convulsive laughter, breasts heaving, hands upthrust in helpless mirth to her lovely empurpled face. Between spasms she paused to stare at Cass with a look of simple idiocy, and I suddenly realized that she had no more of a brain than a gnat. Mason disengaged her arm from his waist, stepping forward.

“Well done, Cass boy,” he said. “Now how about the Honest Abe bit?”

“Sho’, man,” Cass replied sluggishly. “Sho’. Anything you say.”

“Billy,” Mason said to the colored piano player, “how about a few bars of ‘Old Black Joe’?” He turned and addressed the gathering. “This, good people, is a song about Honest Abe Lincoln. For the benefit of the non-Americans present, Lincoln was a president of the U.S.A., the Great Emancipator, also something of a liar and a slob, though you’d never know it.” There was an appropriate titter as Mason once again retired, pushing Cass forward, and the piano, maestoso, set loose the first chords of “Old Black Joe.” Cass sang, in a thick glutinous voice.

“I’m Honest Abe,

With whiskers on my chin …

I freed the slabe,

My face is … on … the … fin …”

The tempo was excruciatingly slow. I thought he would never get the words out. Worse, he had no voice at all, so that as he stood there with his eyes squinted shut and strove to track the gentle melody down its labyrinthine way, he hit no note at all on key but hoarsely blurted out each word almost at random, and was several beats behind everywhere. His voice was almost drowned out in the hoots and wails of merriment.

“I nev-er tole

No-thin but … the … truth …

Howcome you pulled the trigger on me,

John … Wilkes … Booth?”

The laughter showered around him, wave on wave. He stood with his eyes closed, as if dreaming, grinning his sleepy grin, deaf to all. “Now the Rebel yell!” Mason shouted above the uproar. “Don’t forget the Rebel yell!” And at this Cass, much as if he had been shocked out of some profound and amnesic sleep, came suddenly alive. He threw back his head and cupped his hands around his mouth and let out an ear-splitting, screeching noise which sent shivers running up and down my back.