Bullet Park (14 page)

“I think I have two hundred upstairs,” says Nailles, “if that would help.”

“Oh it would help.”

In the dark bedroom Nellie asks who is downstairs. “It’s Grace Harvey,” Nailles says. “I’ll tell you about it later.” When he opens the wall safe and takes out the money she asks: “Is the swami finished? Are you paying him?”

“No,” Nailles says. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Would you like me to write a receipt,” Grace asks.

“No. Of course not.”

“I’ve done the mutual fund for five years,” she says, “but I never thought I’d be going from door to door collecting bail for Dads.”

   By now Tony’s room smells strongly of sandalwood. “Ever since my experience in the station,” says the swami, “I have believed in prayer. As I am not a member of any organized religion you might well ask to whom it is that I pray and I would not be able to answer you. I believe in prayer as a force and not as a conversation with God and when my prayers are answered, as they sometimes are, I honestly do not know where to direct my expressions of gratitude. I have cured several cases of arthritis but my methods don’t always work. I pray they will work for you.

“Your mother has informed me that you were an athlete and played football. I would like you to think of me as a spiritual cheerleader. Cheers don’t make touchdowns, do they, but they sometimes help. I have all kinds of cheers. I have love cheers and compassionate cheers and hopeful cheers and then I have the cheers of place. In the place cheers I just think of someplace where I would like to be and then I keep repeating to myself a description of the place. For instance, in a place cheer I’ll say that I’m in a house by the sea. Then I pick the time of day and the weather I like. I’ll say that I’m in a house by the sea at four in the afternoon and it’s raining. Then I’ll
say that I’m sitting in a kind of chair, a ladderback chair, and I have a book in my lap. Then I’ll say that I have a girl I love who has gone on an errand but who will return. I say this all over and over again. I say that I’m in a house by the sea at four in the afternoon and it’s raining and I’m sitting in a ladderback chair with a book in my lap and I’m waiting for a girl I love who has gone on an errand but who will return. There are all kinds of place cheers. If you have a special city you like—I like Baltimore—then you pick the time of day and the weather and the circumstances and you repeat all of this. Now will you do what I say?”

“Yes,” says Tony, “I’ll do anything.”

“I want you to repeat after me whatever I say.”

“Sure,” says Tony.

“I am in a house by the sea.”

“I am in a house by the sea.”

“It is four o’clock and raining.”

“It is four o’clock and raining.”

“I am sitting in a ladderback chair with a book in my lap.”

“I am sitting in a ladderback chair with a book in my lap.”

“I have a girl I love who has gone on an errand but who will return.”

“I have a girl I love who has gone on an errand but who will return.”

“I am sitting under an apple tree in clean clothes. I am content.”

“I am sitting under an apple tree in clean clothes. I am content.”

“That was very good,” the swami says. “Now let’s try the love cheer. Repeat Love a hundred times. You don’t really have to count. Just say Love, Love, Love until you get tired of saying it. We’ll do it together.”

“Love, Love, Love, Love, Love …”

“That was fine,” the swami says. “That was very good. I could tell that you meant it. Let’s see if you can sit up.”

“It’s crazy,” Tony says, “I know it’s crazy but I do feel much better. I’d like to try another prayer.”

   When Nailles hears them chanting
HOPE, HOPE, HOPE
, he has another whiskey. Was he a voodoo priest? Would he put a spell over Tony? Since Nailles claimed not to believe in magic why should magic have the power to frighten him? Out of the window he can see his lawns in the starlight,
HOPE, HOPE, HOPE, HOPE
. Their voices sound like drums. His lawns and the incantations came from different kingdoms. Nothing made any sense.

“Now try and sit up,” the swami tells Tony. “Sit up and see if you can put your feet on the floor?”

Tony stands. He has lost all weight and muscle. His ribcage shows. His buttocks are wasted and there are red sores on his back.

“Take a few steps,” the swami says. “Not many. Just two or three.”

Tony does. Then he begins to laugh. “Oh I feel like
myself,” he says. “I feel like myself again. I’m weak of course but I’m not sad any more. That terrible feeling has gone.”

“Well why don’t you put on some clothes and we’ll go down and see your parents,” the swami says.

Tony dresses and they go down together. “I’m all better, Daddy,” Tony says. “I’m still weak but that terrible sadness has gone. I don’t feel sad any more and the house doesn’t seem to be made of cards. I feel as though I’d been dead and now I’m alive.”

Nellie comes down the stairs in a wrapper and stands in the hall. She is crying.

“How can we thank you,” Nailles asks. “Can we get you a drink?”

“Oh no thank you,” says the swami in his thin singsong voice. “I have something within me that is much more stimulating than alcohol.”

“You must let me pay you.”

“Oh no thank you,” the swami says. “You see whatever I have is a gift and I must give it away. You can however drive me home. It is sometimes most difficult to get a taxicab.”

So that was it. Tony went back to school ten days later and everything was as wonderful as it had been, although Nailles, each Monday morning, continued to meet his pusher in the supermarket parking lot, the public toilet, the laundromat, and a variety of cemeteries.

M
y first knowledge of Nailles (Hammer wrote) was in a dentist’s anteroom in Ashburnham. There was a photograph and a brief article about his promotion to head of the Mouthwash Division at Saffron. The article mentioned his years in Rome and that he was a member of the Bullet Park Volunteer Fire Department and the Gorey Brook Country Club. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now why I singled him out for my attentions. There was the coincidence of our names and I liked his looks. It wasn’t until some months later that I made my decision. I was sitting on a beach. I had been swimming and was reading a book.

I was alone and it was at a time when the regard for domesticity had gotten so intense that the natural condition of singleness had become a sore point of suspicion. One appeared on the beach perforce with one’s wife, one’s children, sometimes one’s parents or a brace of
house guests. One seldom saw a lonely man. It was a beautiful beach and I remember it clearly. We traditionally associate nakedness with judgments and eternity and so on those beaches where we are mostly naked the scene seems apocalyptic. Standing at the surf line we seem, quite innocently, to have strayed into a timeless moral vortex. The judgment that afternoon seemed to have been evangelical and the only sound of sadness was the wailing of some child who was afraid of the waves. Presently a faggot came along the strand and stopped about ten feet from where I lay. This was a direct consequence of my being alone. His walk was not incriminating but it was definitely smug. His body was comely and tanned and his trunks were exceedingly scant. He gave me an amorous and slightly cross-eyed gaze and then hooked his thumbs into his trunks and lowered them to show an inch or two of backside. At the same time another man appeared on the scene. He was a good deal older than the faggot—forty perhaps—and had the bright sunburn of someone whose days or hours on the beach were numbered. He was in no way muscular or comely—a conscientious desk worker with a natural stoop and a backside broadened by years of honest toil. With him were his wife and two children and he was trying to fly a kite. He was standing leeward on the dunes, the kite wouldn’t rise and the line was snarled. The faggot threw me another sidelong glance, gazed out to sea and gave another absentminded pull at his trunks. I got to my feet and joined the man with the kite. I explained that if he stood
on the crown of the beach the kite would likely fly and I helped him to unsnarl the line. At this the faggot sighed, hitched up his trunks and wandered off as I had intended that he should, but the filament of kite line in my fingers, both tough and fine, that had quite succinctly declared my intentions to the faggot seemed for a moment to possess some extraordinary moral force as if the world I had declared to live in was bound together by just such a length of string—cheap, durable and colorless. When the line was cleared I carried the kite to the crown of the beach and, holding it up, watched the wind lift it straight into the blue sky. The children were delighted. The stranger and his wife thanked me for my assistance. I returned to my book. The faggot had vanished but I longed then for a moral creation whose mandates were heftier than the delight of children, the trusting smiles of strangers and a length of kite string.

I was born out of wedlock—the son of Franklin Pierce Taylor and Gretchen Shurz Oxencroft, his one-time secretary. I have not met my mother for several years but I can see her now—her gray hair flying and her fierce blue eyes set plainly in her face like the waterholes in a prairie. She was born in an Indiana quarry town, the fourth and by far the plainest of four daughters. Neither of her parents had more than a high-school education. The hardships and boredom of the provincial Middle West forced them into an uncompromising and nearly liturgical regard for the escape routes of learning. They kept a volume of the complete works of Shakespeare on
their parlor table like a sort of mace. Her father was a Yorkshireman with thick light-brown hair and large features. He was slender and wiry and was discovered, in his forties, to have tuberculosis. He began as a quarry worker, was promoted to quarry foreman and then, during a drop in the limestone market, was unemployed. In the house where she was raised there was a gilt mirror, a horsehair sofa and some china and silver that her mother had brought from Philadelphia. None of this was claimed to prove lost grandeur or even lost comfort, but Philadelphia! Philadelphia!—how like a city of light it must have seemed in the limestone flats. Gretchen detested her name and claimed at one time or another to be named Grace, Gladys, Gwendolyn, Gertrude, Gabriella, Giselle and Gloria. In her adolescence a public library was opened in the village where she lived and through some accident or misdirection she absorbed the complete works of John Galsworthy. This left her with a slight English accent and an immutable clash between the world of her reveries and the limestone country. Going home from the library one winter afternoon on a trolley car she saw her father standing under a street lamp with his lunch pail. The driver did not stop for him and Gretchen turned to a woman beside her and exclaimed: “Did you
see
that poor creature! He signaled for the tram to stop but the driver
quite
overlooked him.” These were the accents of Galsworthy in which she had been immersed all afternoon, and how could she fit her father into this landscape? He would have failed as a servant or gardener.
He might have passed as a groom although the only horses he knew were the wheel horses at the quarry. She knew what a decent, courageous and cleanly man he was and it was the intolerable sense of his aloneness that had forced her, in a contemptible way, to disclaim him. Gretchen—or Gwendolyn as she then called herself—graduated from high school with honors and was given a scholarship at the university in Bloomington. A week or so after her graduation from the university she left the limestone country to make her fortune in New York. Her parents came down to the station to see her off. Her father was wasted. Her mother’s coat was threadbare. As they waved goodbye another traveler asked if they were her parents. It was still in her to explain in the accents of Galsworthy that they were merely some poor people she had visited but instead she exclaimed: “Oh yes, yes, they are my mother and father.”

There is some mysterious, genetic principality where the children of anarchy and change are raised and Gretchen (now Gloria) carried this passport. She had become a socialist in her last year at the university and the ills, injustices, imperfections, inequities and indecencies of the world made her smart. She more or less hurled herself at the city of New York and was hired shortly as a secretary for Franklin Pierce Taylor. He was a wealthy and visionary young man and a member of the Socialist Party. Gretchen became his secretary and presently his lover. They were by all accounts very happy together. What came between them—or so my father claimed—
was that at this point her revolutionary ardor took the form of theft or kleptomania. They traveled a great deal and whenever they checked out of a hotel she always packed the towels, the table silver, the dish covers and the pillow cases. The idea was that she would distribute them among the poor although he never saw this happen. “Someone
needs
these things,” she would exclaim, stuffing their suitcases with what did not belong to her. Coming into the Hay-Adams in Washington one afternoon he found her standing on a chair, removing the crystals from the chandelier. “Someone can
use
these,” she said. At the Commodore Perry in Toledo she packed the bathroom scales but he refused to close the suitcase until she returned them. She stole a radio in Cleveland and a painting from the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. This incurable habit of thieving—or so he claimed—led them to bitter quarrels and they parted in New York. In the use of any utensils—toasters, irons and automobiles—Gretchen had been dogged by bad luck, and while she had been well equipped with birth-control material her bad luck overtook her again. She discovered soon after the separation that she was pregnant.

Taylor did not mean to marry her. He paid the costs of her accouchement and gave her an income and she took a small apartment on the West Side. She always introduced herself as Miss Oxencroft. She meant to be disconcerting. I suppose she saw some originality in our mutual illegitimacy. When I was three years old I was visited by my father’s mother. She was delighted by the fact that I
had a head of yellow curls. She offered to adopt me. After a month’s deliberation my mother—who was never very consistent—agreed to this. She felt that it was her privilege, practically her vocation, to travel around the world and improve her mind. A nursemaid was gotten for me and I went to live in the country with Grandmother. My hair began to turn brown. By the time I was eight my hair was quite dark. My grandmother was neither bitter nor eccentric and she never actually reproached me for this but she often said that it had come to her as a surprise. I was called Paul Oxencroft on my birth certificate but this was thought unsatisfactory and a lawyer came to the house one afternoon to settle it. While they were discussing what to call me a gardener passed the window, carrying a hammer, and so I was named. A trust had been established to provide Gretchen with a decent income and she took off for Europe. This ended her imposture as Gloria. Her checks, endorsements and travel papers insisted that she be Gretchen and so she was.