Sleepless Nights (3 page)

Lexington, the Bluegrass. Man o’ War on view. His large melancholy skull only dimly remembered his celebrated stands as stud. As a sight, this great horse had some of the blank statistical superiority of the Pyramids. Horses. Their images everywhere, on calendars, on ashtrays. The paddock narratives on the walls of saloons. Wrinkled, broken jockeys with faces like the shell of a nut. Luckless bettors, flamboyant afternoons of the spring and fall meets.

1940

Dear Mama: I love Columbia. Of course I do. The best people here are all Jews—what you call “Hebrews.” There is a not very interesting young man from Harvard who wears a lot of gray, a heavy, pedantic Middle Westerner, a disappointing star from Vassar. They are all very much admired by the faculty because they aren’t too smart...

Mother and father are soon dead. That is what it all comes to, but do they see their own death as the loss of mother and father? I remember our resistant garden, planted with the recalcitrant, stupidly demanding gladiolus which, after terrible spoiling, yield their pinkish-orange goblets; and the retarded dahlia, forever procrastinating, finally blooming in its liverish purples.

Seasons of nature and seasons of experience that appear as a surprise but are merely the arrival of the calendar’s predictions. Thus the full moon of excited churchgoing days and the frost of apostasy as fourteen arrives. One climbs on the weather vane and looks at the heavens and then, pausing for a moment, falls off.

The Presbyterian church was agreeable in winter, with its damp cloakrooms and its snowy-haired superintendents, its subdued hymnal and discreet baptism. More memorable and disturbing were surreptitious visits to itinerant evangelical tent meetings. There it was possible to be saved more than once, saved again and again. Yes, I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Savior on the west side of town in June, accept Christ once more in the scorched field in the North End in July, and then again on the campgrounds to the south in August. Lots of the saved ones, weaving up to the front, gathered under the rhythmical arms and gold cuff links of the preacher, have just come out of the penitentiary.

Under the string of light bulbs in the humid tents, the desperate and unsteady human wills struggle for a night against the fierce pessimism of experience and the root empiricism of every troubled loser. The hour of tranquillity seems so near to the balm of the vices that propel the needy through the open canvas flaps of conversion. Careworn spirits with faces hard to love: dry, curled, brown-gray hair caught up in nets, eyeglasses serviceable and pasted early on young faces; posture slumped, rounded, the flesh and bone thrown out of line by diffidence, failure, and the blank glare of square bungalows without shade.

Perhaps here began a prying sympathy for the victims of sloth and recurrent mistakes, sympathy for the tendency of lives to obey the laws of gravity and to sink downward, falling as gently and slowly as a kite, or violently breaking, smashing.

The apotheosis of a local teaching certificate, a celestial and long-delayed reward for girls. To become a sacerdotal offering, very much like those pale schoolteachers in Latin America, men from the poor villages, sweating in their black suits and white shirts, receiving and giving a peculiar list of punishments in their visionary calling.

There was a man who brought me my first pair of reading glasses, which I did not need. He was a romantic figure, mostly because he had studied French and adored the difficult
r
’s of that language. He was tall and good-looking and not very truthful. He was corrupted by an uncertain nature and no one understood his fits of self-expansion or his disappearances into torpor and melancholy. And yet a vanity and rather pleasant carelessness seemed to survive in all his moods.

This man spoke of his attraction to “experience” and I gathered that what is meant is an attraction to something contrary to oneself, usually a being or habit lower, more dangerous, risky. His experience included a forgotten marriage, entanglements with waitresses, hairdressers, women who sold tobacco at the hotel, drifting, pretty women, all losers. One of his passions was for educating women, and he spoke to them of his interests at that time—James Branch Cabell and the poems of Verlaine. He bore a great name whose dignity extended throughout our county. The members of his family were alarmed by his pretensions. Strolling about Main Street, blond and tall and coarse as a Goth, he presented himself as a sensual aesthete, Southern, intellectual in the University of Virginia manner. His hunger for experience was not so much deep as wide. Like an actor he created spaces around himself, and when others were talking there was an arranged, dramatic silence drawn across his face.

When I think back, he is wearing brown. Coming toward me. We are near the library, in the shade of old trees, near a peaceful house with a walled garden. Gothic revival, white columns in the distance. Everything washed in a harsh, hard light. He is thirty and I am eighteen. No power of mind can decipher why the difference in our ages defined everything to me, cast over every clarity a dark and sinister puzzle. There in the light, his exorbitant desire to please. Large, square teeth and something of the useless energy of a large, affectionate dog. The leap and lunge of his greeting.

His curiosity flamed over a word, an adjective, over the seductiveness of the fact that I was taking down a volume of Thomas Mann from the library shelves. Eros has a thousand friends.

His car was beautiful, black, with a canvas top and sides. From our first meeting he would drive me home and drop me at the corner of our street, a block or so from my house. The action signaled his love of the illicit, his need to infect the scene with the fumes of a mésalliance. Throw out a corrupting ambiguity, also.

He took me on a Saturday afternoon soon after to a sodden, threatening part of town, under the railroad tracks, a sullen little settlement beside a viaduct. A treeless, almost outlawed part of town I scarcely knew the name of. Old cats, lazing in the sun, misbegotten dogs; in the midst of it a new, square white church, like a garage. Outside suspicious-looking women were laying out picnic tables for a gathering the next day. He smiled at the women with hungry interest. Smiling, bowing, the car shining in the sun, his face alive with glee as if he had come upon precious material, material of life. Daring, greedy smile.

The church women, hunched with the weight of their aberrant, consuming sectarianism, looked back at him, eyes dead, Pentecostal fires banked. Didactic downturn of the religious mouth. And yet the brown suit, the large, lapping dog face, impressed for a moment. Suspicion returned as we went into a house across the road.

It had two rooms. I stepped into them with the feeling of falling into a well of disgrace. That tender, warning word
disgrace
I carried about with me for years and years; it has its reasonable, scolding power over me still. It freezes the radical heart with lashing whispers. Someone lived in the little house. A woman. Scents and powders and in the corner a pair of quilted slippers.

I did not struggle. I did not ask questions. Moral unease hurt, but the pain was the pain of eternity and not to be made too much of. He came down on top of me, smiling, courteous, determined. When he let me out at the corner I raced home to a house filled with people near to desperation.

For him, some years later he went with a girl to a lake in eastern Kentucky and there suddenly jumped off a high bridge. I inquired. No, he was not depressed. Rather, the opposite. He jumped to his death on the high, as it were, filled with a brave elation, a genuine, rare carelessness.

Sometimes the rain was beautiful. The lavender and silver streaks, gleaming in the mud, seek to be honored, to receive some word of gratitude. The kindness of damp afternoons, the solace of opening the door and finding everyone there.

What next? Where to? Even in the midst of it all, in the devoted warmth, the well-disposed threat of familiarity, the cemetery waits to be desecrated.

Farewell to Kentucky and our agreeable vices. We go to bed early, but because of whiskey seldom with a clear head. We are fond of string beans and thin slices of salty ham. When I left home my brother said: It will be wonderful if you make a success of life, then you can follow the races.

Farewell to the precious limestone, to the dynasties of swift horse bones. But it was a long, drawn-out parting. I was bewitched by my mother and would wake up on 116th Street in New York longing for the sight of her round, soft curves, her hair twisted into limp curls at the temples, her weight on the stepladder washing windows, her roasts and potatoes and fat yeast rolls; and her patient breathing in the back room as she lay sleeping in a lumpy old feather bed.

In graduate school at Columbia I met a girl who had grown up on a rich person’s estate on Long Island, a place owned by lazy, fashionable people. My friend’s father was a gardener and her mother was a cook. It seemed to me that this condition was rich with interest, that the girl inhabited a lighthouse from which could be seen a great deal that was meant to be hidden, hidden at least from clever, critical, and bookish girls. She was certainly not inclined to a hopeless emulation nor easily moved to admiration. Her eyes, suspicious as the cool glance of a detective, would be quick to find hypocrisy, bizarre inclinations. No, this girl’s whole life was scarred by her residential fate; her brilliance was unaccommodating and she was bitter, wild with rage and, alas, a dour envy.

In her twisted little heart the blood beat with hatred when the cars drove up the drive. She, with her passionate reading of Proust and James, nevertheless hated the very smell of the rich evening air, loathed the unsettling drawl of debutantes. But her deepest resentment beat down upon her family, upon the humbling thought of her father’s gardening shears at the hedge. Tragedy for her in the swish, swish of her mother in her rubber-soled nurses’ shoes, bending forward with a bowl of vegetables resting expertly on her open palm. In truth here was a great spirit destroyed by Long Island feudalism; a knotty, angry peasant reared in a Southampton cottage.

I tried to make her a radical, but there was no mercy in her. Instead, grinding away in rage for her Ph.D., she became or decided that she was a lesbian.

In a frightened, angry plunge, she fell into a desperate affair with a handsome older woman from England. And what did she find there? Happiness, consolation? No, she found, with her ineluctable ill-luck, a nightmare of betrayals, lies, deceits, shocks, infidelities, dismissals. All the rusty arrows hit their mark. And she gave forth again her sad and piercing cry—
ah, perfido!

E
VERYTHING
groans under treachery. The yellow, thirsting grass when the rain betrays it day after day without mercy, and the sun all the while smiling away in the sky for brown legs and warm water for ungrateful swimmers. At times, thinking of the unfortunate ones I have known, it seems to me that they live surrounded by their kind. The windows resent their curtains, the light its woven shade, the door its lock, the coffin its loathsome, suffocating pile of dirt. But what can they do? The grass shrugs, the windows grow sullen, the light gives out a sardonic glow, the door swells and requires a shoulder to push it open, the coffin hibernates in a long, not displeasing slumber.

Anyway at that time I loved to go back and forth between New York and home—to see what I knew was there. A cold snap in the winter, redbud in the spring, teeth of so many pulled out just after childhood. The mysterious nuns at the old St. Joseph hospital taking temperatures. My mind is shaken by the memory of early deaths, boys from high school, girls also.
Drinking himself to death:
I could name many who did not reach twenty-five.

Other deaths. A neighborhood girl or young woman, for whom we all felt an intense pity and wonder, a shiver of symbolism, as if she were one who in a peculiar, blighted way suffered for many. She represented the fallen state too vividly and fortuitously to be endured. This girl became a prostitute and without any clear economic necessity. But reason not the need.

She spent her nights in the most sordid and degrading dumps and rooming houses. She wandered around raw saloons near the old railroad station. She was the much-loved daughter of a railroad worker who wore his blue-and-white denim cap and took the union newspaper. Her mother was large, tall, hardworking; her grandmother was fair, tall, and smoked a corncob pipe. Juanita! Juanita! they sang out to her, their only child, calling her to lunch, to rest. When she was still in high school, before her “career” began, she stood around in the yard a lot, pulling on the thick, kinky curls that nestled near the collar of her freshly ironed dress.

She grew tall and rather nondescript. She developed a refusal to meet your glance and therefore a striking, not unattractive, awkwardness overcame her when she met someone from the neighborhood. She drank, she aged, she suffered terribly from her dissipations. Throughout all her tears and pains she was carefully, patiently nursed by her family.

After midnight we could hear a car door slam on the street behind us. Sometimes Juanita was brought home by the decrepit taxis that stood all night in their place downtown. The yellow lights would shine out in the darkness as the car slowly crept homeward. Or walking alone, down the narrow, dark, moon-shadowed lane she moved swiftly, her heels clicking on the pavement, her cough quick and shallow. At last the screen door of Juanita’s house slammed gently. No doubt the old people turned in their beds with relief. Home at last was the tall, curly-haired, curious voluptuary; asleep once more the swollen and coarsened daughter. It all had to be paid for by Juanita, every penny of the cost. She wept from hangovers, from misery, from confusion, the terrible confusion of a distorted world that was darkening around her. And finally she wept from venereal disease. Sympathy and bewilderment among all the women in her house. Juanita is not feeling well today, her raw-boned mother, large and neat in a long, full housedress, would say. Maybe she’s catching a little cold. Scornfully the neighbors would say: She’s caught more than a little cold this time.