Bech (20 page)

Bech looked around; the stage was filling. He seemed to see, down front, where the stage light was most intense, the oft-photographed (by Steichen, by Karsh, by Cartier-Bresson) profile and vivid cornsilk hair of—it couldn’t be—Emil Nordquist. The Bard of the Prairie still lived! He must be a hundred. No, well, if in the mid-Thirties he was in his mid-forties, he would be only eighty now. While Bech, that pre-adolescent, was approaching fifty: time had treated him far more cruelly.

And now, through the other wing of the stage, from the elevator side, moving with the agonized shuffle-step of a semiparalytic but still sartorially formidable in double-breasted chalkstripes and a high starched collar, entered John Kingsgrant Forbes, whose last perceptive and urbane examination of Beacon Hill mores had appeared in World War II, during the paper shortage. Had Bech merely imagined his obituary?

“Arriveth our queen,” Mildred Belloussovsky-Dommergues sardonically murmured on his left, with that ambiguous trace of a foreign accent, the silted residue of her several husbands. And to Bech’s astonishment in came, supported on the courtly arm of Jason Honeygale, whose epic bulk had shriveled to folds of veined hide draped over stegosaurian bones, the tiny tottering figure of Fenella Anne Collins, wearing the startled facial expression of the blind. She was led down front, where the gaunt figure of Torquemada Langguth, his spine bent nearly double, his falconine crest now white as an egret’s, rose to greet her and feebly to adjust her chair.

Bech murmured leftwards, “I thought they were all dead.”

Mildred airily answered, “We find it better, not to die.”

A shadow plumped brusquely down in the chair on Bech’s right; it was—O, monstrous!—Josh Glazer. His proximity seemed to be a patron’s, for he told Bech windily, “Jesus Christ, Bech, I’ve been plugging you for years up here, but the bastards always said, ‘Let’s wait until he writes another book, that last one was such a flop.’ Finally I say to them, ‘Look. The son of a bitch, he’s
never
going to write another book,’ so they say, ‘O.K., let’s let him the hell in.’ Welcome aboard, Bech. Christ I’ve been a raving fan of yours since the Year One. When’re you gonna try a comedy, Broadway’s dead on its feet.” He was deaf, his hair was dyed black, and his teeth
were false too, for his blasts of breath carried with them a fetid smell of trapped alcohol and of a terrible organic something that suggested to Bech—touching a peculiar fastidiousness that was all that remained of his ancestors’ orthodoxy—the stench of decayed shellfish. Bech looked away and saw everywhere on this stage dissolution and riot. The furrowed skulls of philosophers lolled in a Bacchic stupor. Wicked smirks flickered back and forth among faces enshrined in textbooks. Eustace Chubb, America’s poetic conscience throughout the Cold War, had holes in his socks and mechanically chafed a purple sore on his shin. Anatole Husac, the Father of Neo-Figurism, was sweating out a drug high, his hands twitching like suffocating fish. As the ceremony proceeded, not a classroom of trade-school dropouts could have been more impudently inattentive. Mildred Belloussovsky-Dommergues persistently tickled the hairs on Bech’s wrist with the edge of her program; Josh Glazer offered him a sip from a silver flask signed by the Gershwin brothers. The leonine head—that of a great lexicographer—directly in front of Bech drifted sideways and emitted illegible snores. The Medal for Modern Fiction was being awarded to Kingsgrant Forbes; the cello-shaped presenter (best known for his scrupulous editorship of the six volumes of Hamlin Garland’s correspondence) began his speech, “In these sorry days of so-called Black Humor, of the fictional apotheosis of the underdeveloped,” and a tall black man in the middle of Bech’s row stood, spoke a single expletive, and, with much scraping of chairs, made his way from the stage. A series of grants was bestowed. One of the recipients, a tiptoeing fellow in a mauve jump suit, hurled paper streamers toward the audience and bared his chest to reveal painted there a psychedelic pig labeled Milhaus; at this, several old men, an Arizona naturalist and a New Deal muralist, stamped off, and for a long time could be heard buzzing
for the elevator. The sardonic hubbub waxed louder. Impatience set in. “Goddammit,” Josh Glazer breathed to Bech, “I’m paying a limousine by the hour downstairs, and I’ve got a helluva cute little fox waiting for me at the Plaza.”

At last the time came to introduce the new members. The citations were read by a farsighted landscape painter who had trouble bringing his papers, the lectern light, and his reading glasses into mutual adjustment at such short focus. “Henry Bech,” he read, pronouncing it “Betch,” and Bech obediently stood. The spotlights dazzled him; he had the sensation of being microscopically examined, and of being strangely small. When he stood, he had expected to rear into a man’s height, and instead rose no taller than a child.

“A native New Yorker,” the citation began, “who has chosen to sing of the continental distances—”

Bech wondered why writers in official positions were always supposed to “sing”; he couldn’t remember the last time he had even hummed.

“—a son of Israel loyal to Melville’s romanticism—”

He went around telling interviewers Melville was his favorite author, but he hadn’t gotten a third of the way through
Pierre
.

“—a poet in prose whose polish precludes pre- —pro- —pardon me, these are new bifocals—”

Laughter from the audience. Who was out there in that audience?

“—let me try again: whose polish precludes prolificacy—”

His mother was out there in that audience!

“—a magician of metaphor—”

She was there, right down front, basking in the reflected stagelight, an orchid corsage pinned to her bosom.

“—and a friend of the human heart.”

But she had died after the war, in Brooklyn’s Interfaith
Medical Center. As the applause washed in, Bech saw that the old lady with the corsage was applauding only politely, she was not his mother but somebody else’s, maybe of the boy with the pig on his stomach, though for a moment, a trick of the light, something determined and expectant in the tilt of her head, something hopeful … The light in his eyes turned to warm water. His applause ebbed away. He sat down. Mildred nudged him. Josh Glazer shook his hand, too violently. Bech tried to clear his vision by contemplating the backs of the heads. They were blank: blank shabby backs of a cardboard tableau lent substance only by the credulous, by hopeful mothers and their children. His knees trembled, as if after an arduous climb. He had made it, he was here, in Heaven. Now what?

We are grateful for permission to reprint corroborating excerpts from the unpublished Russian journal of Henry Bech. The journal, physically, is a faded red Expenses diary, measuring 7⅜″ by 4¼″, stained by Moscow brandy and warped by Caucasian dew. The entries, of which the latter are kept in red ballpoint pen, run from October 20, 1964, to December 6, 1964. The earliest are the fullest
.

O
CT. 20
. Flight from NY at midnight, no sleep, Pan Am kept feeding me. Beating against the sun, soon dawn. Paris strange passing through by bus, tattered tired sepia sets of second-rate opera being wheeled through, false cheer of café awnings, waiting for chorus of lamplighters. Orly to Le Bourget. Moscow plane a new world. Men in dark coats waiting bunched. Solemn as gangsters. Overhead first understood Russian word,
Americanski
, pronounced with wink toward me by snaggle-toothed gent putting bulky black coat in overhead rack. Rack netted cord, inside ribs of plane show, no capitalist plastic. Stewardesses not our smoothly extruded tarts but hefty flesh; served us real potatoes, beef sausage, borsch.
Aeroflot a feast afloat. Crowded happy stable smell, animal heat in cold stable, five miles up. Uncles’ back rooms in Wmsburg. Babble around me, foreign languages strangely soothing, at home in Babel. Fell asleep on bosom of void, grateful to be alive, home. Woke in dark again. Earth’s revolution full in my face. Moscow dim on ocean of blackness, delicate torn veil, shy of electricity, not New York, that rude splash. Premonition: no one will meet. Author Disappears Behind Iron Curtain. Bech Best Remembered for Early Work. A delegation with roses waiting for me on other side of glass pen, wait for hours, on verge of Russia, decompressing. Time different here, steppes of time, long dully lit terminal, empty of ads. Limousine driven by voiceless back of head, sleigh driver in Tolstoy, long haul to Moscow, a wealth of darkness, gray birches, slim, young, far from gnarled American woods. In hotel spelled out
waiting for elevator, French hidden beneath the Cyrillic. Everywhere, secrets.

O
CT. 23
. Met Sobaka, head of Writers’ U. Building Tolstoy’s old manse, dining room baronial oak. Litterateurs live like aristocrats. Sobaka has lipless mouth, wild bark, must have strangled men with bare hands. Tells me long story of love of his poetry expressed by coalminers in the Urals. Skip translating: “… then, here in … the deepest part of the mine … by only the light of, uh, carbon lights in the miners’ caps … for three hours I recited … from the works of my youth, lyrics of the fields and forests of Byelorussia. Never have I known such enthusiasm. Never have I possessed such inspiration, such, ah, powers of memory. At the end … they wept to see me
depart … these simple miners … their coal-blackened faces streaked, ah, veined with the silver of tears.”

“Fantastic,” I say.

“
Fantastichni
,” Skip translates.

Sobaka makes Skip ask me if I like the image, their faces of coal veined with silver.

“It’s good,” say I.

“
Korosho
,” says Skip.

“The earth weeps precious metal,” I say. “The world’s working people weep at the tyranny of capital.”

Skip guffaws but translates, and Sobaka reaches under table and seizes my thigh in murderous pinch of conspiracy.

N
OV. 12
. Back in Moscow, lunch at W.U. Sobaka in fine form, must have chopped off somebody’s index finger this morning. Says trip to Irkutsk hazardous, airport might get snowed in. Hee hee hee. Suggests Kazakhstan instead, I say why not?—
nichyvo
. Eyeball to eyeball. He toasts Jack London, I toast Pushkin. He does Hemingway, I do Turgenev. I do Nabokov, he counters with John Reed. His mouth engulfs the glass and crunches. I think of what my dentist would say, my beautiful gold caps.…

N
OV. 19
.… I ask Kate where Sobaka is, she pretends not to hear. Skip tells me later he was friend of Khrush., hung on for while, now non-person. I miss him. My strange weakness for cops and assassins: their sense of craftsmanship?

N
OV. 1
. Off to Caucasus with Skip, Mrs. R., Kate. Fog, no planes for twenty-four hours. Airport crammed with hordes
of sleeping. Soldiers, peasants, an epic patience. Sleeping on clothy heaps of each other, no noise of complaint. Many types of soldier uniform, long coats. Kate after twelve hours bullies way onto plane, pointing to me as Guest of the State, fierce performance. Engines screaming, officials screaming, she screaming. Get on plane at 2
A.M.
, amid bundles, chickens, gypsies, sit opposite pair of plump fortune tellers who groan and (very discreetly) throw up all the way to Tbilisi. Ears ache in descent; no pressurization. Birds in airport, in and out, remind me of San Juan. Happy, sleepless. Sun on hills, flowers like oleanders. Hotel as in Florida Keys in Bogart movies, sour early morning service, a bracing sense of the sinister. Great fist-shaking Lenin statue in traffic circle. Flies buzz in room.

N
OV. 2
. Slept till noon. Reynolds wakes with phone call. He and Mrs. caught later plane. Cowboys and Indians, even my escorts have escorts. We go in two cars to Pantheon on hill, Georgian escort lantern-jawed professor of aesthetics. Cemetery full of funny alphabet, big stone he says with almost tear in eye called simply “Mother.” Reynolds clues me sotto voce it’s Stalin’s mother. Had been statue of S. here so big it killed two workmen when they pulled it down. Supper with many Georgian poets, toasts in white wine, my own toasts keep calling them “Russians” which Kate corrects in translation to “Georgians.” Author of epic infatuated with Mrs. R., strawberry blonde from Wisconsin. Puts hands on thighs, kisses throat, Skip grins sheepishly, what he’s here for, to improve relations. Cable car down the mountain, Tbilisi a-spangle under us, all drunk, singing done in pit of throat, many vibrations, hillbilly mournfulness, back to bed. Same flies buzz.

N
OV. 3
. Car ride to Muxtyeta, oldest church in Christendom, professor of aesthetics ridicules God, chastity, everybody winces. Scaldingly clear blue sky, church a ruddy octagonal ruin with something ancient and pagan in the center. Went to lunch with snowy-haired painter of breasts. These painters of a sleazy ethnic softness, of flesh like pastel landscapes, landscapes like pastel flesh. Where are the real artists, the cartoonists who fill
Krokodil
with fanged bankers and cadaverous Adenauers, the anonymous Chardins of industrial detail? Hidden from me, like missile sites and working ports. Of the Russian cake they give me only frosting. By train to Armenia. We all share a four-bunk sleeper. Ladies undress below me, see Kate’s hand dislodge beige buttoned canvasy thing, see circlet of lace flick past Ellen Reynolds’s pale round knee. Closeted with female flesh and Skip’s supercilious snore expect to stay awake, but fall asleep in top bunk like child among nurses. Yerevan station at dawn. The women, puffy-eyed and mussed, claim night of total insomnia. Difficulty of women sleeping on trains, boats, where men are soothed. Distrust of machinery? Sexual stimulation, Claire saying she used to come just from sitting on vibrating subway seat, never the IRT, only the IND. Took at least five stops.