Bech at Bay (8 page)

“It would be a scandal if he were,” said Aaron Fisch. “What about Andy Wyeth? He’s been coming along lately. Those Helga things weren’t as bad as people said.”

Limbaugh Seidensticker snorted. “Oh, all that
hu
man interest! All those half-rotting fenceposts and flowering weeds, stalk by stalk!
Yukk
, as the young people say.” Rage
was galvanizing his body, lifting his head into the declining light so that his rimless glasses formed ovals of blind brightness. “Next we’ll be entertaining purveyors of pictotrash like David Hare.”

“He’s dead,” someone in the chairs said.

“He was just a boy,” another softly exclaimed.

Edna cleared her throat and whispered something to Bech.

Bech said, “The directress informs me that Andrew Wyeth is already a member, though he rarely attends.”

“In that case,” Seidensticker rather boomingly announced, “I resign.” But he did not get up from his chair.

Bech asked the group, “Is there any more discussion of possible new members?”

Silence.

“Does anyone wish to second the nomination of Donald Judd?”

Again, silence.

“Mr. President.” Another old, especially dignified voice quavered into audibility, above the whir of Edna’s tape recorder and the muffled rumble of circumambient traffic.

“Yes, Mr. MacDeane?” Amory Henry MacDeane was a historian, an avid chronicler of the dowdy, unsatisfactory stretches of national government between Jackson and Lincoln, when the United States, its founding successfully consolidated, ineffectually sought a compromise that would hold the South in the Union without giving everything, including all the West, over to the fiery proponents of black slavery. MacDeane, the son of an Ohio Scots-Irish factory owner, had several times abandoned the halls of academe for those of Washington, where he had advised Democratic administrations in their own compromises as they sought to
contain Communism without engaging it in nuclear war. MacDeane knew Russian, French, German, and Italian, and had acted as ambassador to several ticklish, demonstration-prone countries; he wrote his histories and memoirs in elegiac Victorian periods imbued with the sadness of realpolitik, this consideration always balancing that. Bech admired him, as an intellectual who had willingly dirtied himself with decision-making in the realm of real, as opposed to coveted, power. Now he was old, over eighty, and scoop-faced, with a mustache the same faded tint as his gray skin, and lived in New York only because he had lost the way back to Ohio, the vanished Ohio of his youth. He spoke in quavery, fine-spun sentences. “The difficulty of obtaining nominations, so that the functioning membership of the so-called Forty is actually thirty-four, of whom the meagre quorum I count here as seven, eight with the president, leads me to wonder, Mr. President, if our beloved institution, so benignly conceived and pleasantly housed, is not perhaps destined to join those other institutions whose historical moment is past. One thinks, on a far larger scale of course, of the Grand Army of the Republic, so mighty and influential in its time, and the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies. There is no disgrace in death,” the old diplomat went on in his faint, husky, but still superbly controlled voice. “The disgrace comes in prolonging life with artificial and unseemly means.”

“I agree,” Isaiah Thornbush announced from the end of the row, with uncharacteristic brevity. His position surprised Bech. Izzy soaked up honors and loved clubs; Bech had always rather despised him for it.

Eric Von Klappenemner, tall and bald and with a piercing flutelike delivery, said, “Oh, all my friends, it’s so
bor
ing,
they say they don’t want this and they don’t want that, they don’t want oxygen and they don’t want electronic resuscitators or whatever they are; I say to them, Why not? I want it
all
! Oxygen and IVs and bloody livers and bone marrow and all of it! What’s the purpose of science, if not to prolong human life?”

“Klappy, you’re so
greedy
!” Amy deLessups flirted. How did so addictively heterosexual a woman, Bech wondered, view a homosexual like Von Klappenemner? Fondly, it seemed. As a fellow caster of the pearl of oneself before male swine.

“It’s not
me
, it’s not any senseless
hun
ger for my personal existence, there’s nothing I’d like better than a good long afternoon
nap
, a nap that never ends, it would be
splen
did. It’s what I can still
give
people, all that beauty and majesty still locked up in me—suppose Beethoven had thrown it all in after that rather piffling Eighth Symphony; we’d have never had the glorious
Ninth
!”

Von Klappenemner had reached that stage of mental deterioration when verbal inhibitions lift, though the old habits of syntax are still intact. He had been, with his gleaming head and those curling Nordic lips spouting wicked drolleries from beneath his Saracen curve of a nose, a universal charmer; now the dimming solarium held, like a sound-swallowing baffle of nippled black foam rubber, the hush of his charm falling on deaf ears. The melody was still there, but the body’s aged instrument could no longer play it. Bech felt he was coming to the babbling composer’s rescue, saying, “Perhaps we’re straying from the topic.”

“What is the topic?” Aaron Fisch unabashedly asked.

“Isn’t it time for cocktails?” J. Edward Jamison seconded.

“The topic is the dearth of new members,” Bech told one, and then the other: “It is only ten minutes to six, Mr.
Jamison. Let me say, before we proceed to the last item of the agenda”—Edna had cleared her throat and placed, suppressing a stab of impatience, a supremely sharp pencilpoint upon the item still to be discussed—“that I am surprised to hear talk of dissolution, if that is what I have just heard. The purposes for which Miss Baines made her generous bequests are still valid. American society has not been so transformed since 1902 that the arts need no longer be honored, nor is there, to my knowledge, any other organization quite like ours—so purely and disinterestedly honorary. Are any of you suggesting that the artistic spirit—the appetite for truth and beauty—has suddenly died? If so, I missed the obituary in the
Times.
Many worthy prospective members exist, to fill up the spaces in our ranks; a meeting such as this serves, primarily, as an occasion to vent our views. Nominations should be submitted in writing, with the signature of one other member as a second. Then, in due course, we will vote, as our predecessors always have and our successors always will.”

“Well said, Henry,” Edna murmured at his side.

Indeed, his firmness in defending an organization he once viewed as superfluous surprised him. The words came out of him as crisply as if teletyped; the president within, whom he had never suspected was there, had spoken. And the elderly bodies seated before him—inspiration-scarred warriors in the battle for precision and harmony, for order in a world where the concept of divine order had become an obscene joke—fell silent under his conservative barrage, his rattling salute to continuity. “The last item on the agenda,” Bech announced, his eyes bent on Edna’s pencilpoint, “is less existential and more practical. Gabriel Mendez, who, as you all know, lives in our basement as caretaker and watchman, has told Edna that he and his
family must have more nearly adequate health benefits. Their youngest child evidently needs a great deal of specialized care.”

Once it was ascertained that the endowment, benefitting from the steady rise in stock prices since the crash of October ’87, could foot the bill, the benefits were voted, eight to none. A good deed done, with money not theirs. Yet, rising from his heady session of presiding, Bech felt the floor under him tip, the long dark desktop curve downward at both edges, and the emptying wing chairs defy perspective. The president was somehow on a slippery slope. Wasn’t the Forty from its turn-of-the-century founding based on a false belief that art naturally kept company with gentility, both gracefully attendant on money—that money and power could be easily transmuted into truth and beauty, and that a club of the favored could exist, ten brownstone steps up from the pitted, filthy, sorely trafficked street? What was he doing here, presiding?

He lived on the west side of Crosby Street, that especially grim cobbled canyon of old iron-façaded industrial structures running south from Houston, one block east of lower Broadway. He occupied a loft so vast he had been able, finally, to get his books into a single set of shelves, a ramshackle rampart of pine planks on cinder blocks, Marx next to Marvell, Freud in all his frowning paperbacks between the slim poems of Philip Freneau and the leather-swaddled chronicles of Jean Froissart—picked up for four dollars when Bech was a GI-Bill student at NYU.

Bech could be said to be both a keen reader and the opposite; he nervously plucked at any journal or newspaper within reach of his hand, often leafing through back to
front, a habit left over from his childhood, when mass magazines ran their cartoons toward the back. He pulled books from his shelves fitfully, quickly pleased or bored by a page, but he rarely settled to read a book through. This browsing was selfish and superstitious: he was looking for clues that would help him turn his own peculiar world into words, and he resisted submitting for long to another author’s spell. After half an hour of reposing in his antique beanbag chair, in the carpeted island in the center of his single great room furnished in scattered islands, he would need to go outside, where the dour but populated streets fed another kind of scanning. Running-shoe-shod tourists cruising the galleries; art salesmen lugging wrapped rectangles; a fork-bearded, red-shirted geezer fresh, it seemed, from the hills of Kentucky; a young man with bleached-blond ponytail flying by on an absurdly small motorized scooter; a pair of young women totally in black prolongedly embracing, either in passionate reunion or determined demonstration of gay pride, the shorter of them wearing thrillingly brutal square-heeled black boots dotted with silver studs; a plump social worker leading on a knotted cord a quartet of the blind, with their sunken sockets and undirected smiles—all such bits of street theatre excited Bech with a sense of human life, a vast inchoate atmosphere waiting, like the gray sky seen through the fire escapes overhead, to be condensed and experienced as drops of rain or as letters of type.

For years he had lived at 99th Street and Riverside Drive, before a romantic excursion into marriage had taken him to a Westchester suburb and another excursion (into the body of his wife’s sister) had brought him ingloriously back to the city. Within its confines, he had headed south, off the numbered grid. Here in S0H0 the flash and
glitter of youthful aspiration mingled with the clangor of old warehouse enterprise. There were cobblestones and elaborate dirty ironwork; there were still greasy bicycle shops and men in bloody butchers’ aprons. The area below Houston—that light-filled slash in Manhattan’s close-woven fabric—had once been known as Hell’s Hundred Acres, because of its infernal sweatshops and frequent fires. Long black limousines out of Little Italy prowled between aisles of graffiti-sprayed metal shutters. Signs in Chinese popped up on its southeastern edge. From spots on Broome and Spring Streets Bech could see both the gleaming needle of the Chrysler Building and the looming outcrop of the financial district, topped by the twin spireless World Trade towers, box cathedrals. In the lowlands of SoHo Bech experienced an oddly big sky and a sensation—important, he felt, for an artist—of the disreputable, if not (there were too many art galleries and cappuccino joints) of the proletarian.

Martina earnestly considered his confessed queasiness in regard to the Forty. She brought to every issue he raised an intent, unsmiling consideration he associated with Communist peace conferences, of which he had attended a few. “What is the point, again,” she asked, “of the Forty?”

“To exist, simply. A city on a hill, sort of. A mountain seen from the plain. This woman, Lucinda
Baines
, left her dandy townhouse and a lot of ill-gotten
gains
for a kind of French Academy, though we have none of their responsibilities. They keep working away at a French dictionary, for one thing, and have braided uniforms.”

The long-dead Lucinda, he realized, had become one of his love objects, and little efficient Edna another. His imagination bred a needy flock he lived to serve and placate—ewes
who gave him an identity as shepherd. He was an old-fashioned gallant, Henry Bech; in all the women of his life he was seeking truth and goodness. A great reservoir of both must lie, he reasoned, with an entity able to take his sexual agitation and turn it into a limpid, postcoital peace. Martina moved around the carpeted island, set in a sea of boards splintered by vanished industrial machinery, on solid bare feet, in a white terrycloth robe that an inamorata of Bech’s, the volatile Claire Hoagland, had stolen long ago from their room in the Plaza, in one of her caprices. There was little capriciousness in Martina; she took literary giants seriously, even in their underwear.

“I wonder,” she mused, “if it wasn’t a dead idea even then. I mean, old guys sitting around drinking port and smoking cigars and telling each other what fine fellows they are—how William Dean Howells can you get?”

“Poor Howells,” Bech said. “Everybody thinks of him as a toastmaster. In fact, the older he got, the more radical he became. I can’t say the same for myself. You should have seen Edna’s face when I defended the Forty so stoutly—her jaw dropped nearly back to Alice Springs.”

It was charming when Martina laughed, the cautious dimpling and half-smothered eruption, her Socialist conscience checking her acquired American freedom to mock. “It is unlike you,” she said. “You usually scoff at pomp and pretension.”

“But the Forty is not pompous, it’s
touch
ing. Almost nobody comes. Those that do are deaf or senile. The place has paintings on the wall we can’t afford the insurance on. Everything inside is so exquisite and Grecian—high sculpted plaster ceilings and no two fireplaces carved alike—and across the street squats this huge uncaring flank
of some building where dozens of trailer trucks seem to live.”