Changing the Past (29 page)

He wrote a note of seductive thanks to Nancy Parkman, with whom he was already in love, and received an answer from his ex-wife. It took him a while to digest her letter and then the review, reread in the light of this new information.

In the ensuing years, his ex-wife quickly rose from reviewer for the local paper in the college town where she lived (and had become a tenured professor of English) to a contributor to national periodicals and finally to write a tendentious, influential book of the feminist persuasion. Kellog never met her again nor exchanged another letter, but Daphne was frequently to be seen on television panel shows. She was better-looking now than she had ever been, at least to him, as a young woman, her features handsomely defined, the touch of gray just right for her somewhat wiry hair. As Daphne had never remarried, John found it easy to suppose that she was Sapphic—until she published an account, obviously autobiographical, of how a middle-aged woman can live successfully with a male lover half her age. This work sold extraordinarily well and was nationally praised for its “courage,” which Kellog bitterly recognized as the code-word used when something essentially obscene was meant.

Not only did he have his private motive in this judgment, but in general age had gradually turned his nose blue. He whose second novel had so reveled in graphic accounts of cunnilingus and fellatio now was revolted by movies in which those activities were so much as given their vulgar names, and when deviate sexuality became commonplace in TV discussions, and was not only sanctioned but even, except by illiterate fundamentalist Christians, admired, Kellog was first outraged and next, all of a sudden, rendered devoid of any energy whatever.

The culture had simply become alien to him. He had no place in it, and with
Canceled Male
, the sales of which, despite the several good notices, were meager, he had exhausted his supply of subjects. Trudy Bolger was no longer prompt to return his calls and when she did respond, it was often in the form of a noncommittal note. He had no friends both extant and usable. Perry Vole was dead (without the Nobel Prize), having been rather older than he had looked, and George Binson had married a wealthy woman and taken up the pursuits of her milieu, racehorses and entertaining America's Cup competitors, and was now too cynical, or genuinely too pompous, to remember he had once been a writer: in any event, he failed to answer Kellog's appeal.

After all the years that had gone by, Kellog believed it was likely that his caricature of Elaine Kissell in
Koenig's Ordeal
was no longer any more vivid to her than it was to its author, and he wrote her an affectionate old-times'-sake message, which he intended to be a prelude to returning to her as client. But her memory was long-lived and of an unwarranted bitterness. How, over the years, could she fail to see any humor in his depiction of her strenuous efforts to achieve vaginal orgasm or in quoting her literally on an uncomfortable interuterine device?

Finally he was so desperate as to contemplate offering himself belatedly to Jamie Quill, but no longer as young as he once had been, he could not have borne, at this stage of the game, to add that kind of rejection to the others he had accumulated.

He recognized, with a certain reluctance but little true regret, that the time had come when he should, in all decency, be expunged.

IV

“H
EAVENS
,” said the little man with mock dismay, “could it have happened that your life as an author wasn't to your satisfaction?”

Hunsicker was sheepish. “It's easy, once out of it, to see how awful Kellog was, how badly he treated Daphne. He couldn't be blamed for finding her unattractive, but it was contemptible of him, in view of that, to accept her help. Yet, having said as much, I must admit I find more embarrassing his addiction to Cissy Forrester.” He hesitated for a moment, and then added, “Maybe it's not to my credit, but I find it more humiliating to be the victim.”

“What an odd thing to be apologetic about,” the little man said. “I hope you're being hypocritical.” He rubbed his nose. “In any event, you have nothing to worry about: it never happened.”

“As a boy I had a crush on the first girl in class to develop visible breasts: that was in the later years of grade school. Like Cissy, she was blonde, but that was the only resemblance. She dropped out of high school as soon as she was sixteen, got married, and had many children in quick succession. By the time she was twenty, those to me famous breasts, once so high and firm, had fallen, her teeth were discolored, and the once golden hair was—well, it's cruel even to remember, especially since by then she had long since ceased to mean anything to me—if she ever did: I don't think I exchanged ten words with her in school. It was a big class, and anyway I was too shy…. I never knew anybody who could have been Daphne. I met Martha in college. She was really beautiful, with those big brown eyes and that hair, but at five feet ten and a half she scared off most guys. In heels she towered over the boys of that day. Even in flat shoes she was half an inch taller than I, but it never bothered me. She always made me feel like a man.”

“You had doubts?”

Hunsicker smiled. “No. I always liked girls. It was just that so many of them in those days were somewhat disagreeable in manner: snippy, if I might use an outmoded word. Maybe it was the style of the time. You can see it in old movies: at first the female acts as if she's offended by the most decent, respectful attention on the part of the man, and is positively nasty to him. Presumably this was part of a technique by which she could eventually lure or trick him into marriage—speaking from the man's point of view. On the woman's side—or so I'm told—the male's sole interest seemed to be in getting her into bed by any means, without assuming any obligation whatever. I always hated that game or war, and never played or waged it. And neither did Martha. I never made an actual pass at her, and for her part, after we had dated most of one whole term and I was a Thanksgiving-weekend guest at her parents' home, she crawled into bed with me one night—after all, I
was
sleeping in her room.”

“Very tender,” said the little man. “But it hasn't ended happily.”

Hunsicker cried, “Not because we did anything wrong! Not because we haven't cared for each other.” It was not something that should be argued about, though, whatever the provocation. It was clear enough why he had to do what he was doing. “But it's really hard to manage without her. I haven't been on my own for three decades. I have to be a man now without her help. That's why it's gone bad every time: I become a weakling in the absence of the right woman.”

“You're not accusing yourself of uxoriousness, I see,” the little man said. “Your phrasing is nicely done.” He leaned back in his complaining chair and shrugged. “It's your life, to make of it what you will.”

“But it really is life, once I begin to live it, and what I want to make of it is not a thing of my will: I can't create to order the people with whom I come in contact. They're all excruciatingly real, and therefore independent, pursuing their own destinies. They're not the marionettes of wish-fulfillment fantasies.”

“You've had such?”

“I'm still capable of them at this late date, and they're easier to manage nowadays, in the degree to which they have become unlikely of achievement, in fact, impossible…. My idea of a desirable girl has not changed in forty years, though the girls certainly have. So what I lust for I suppose is still Ruthie Bréese, that little blonde from my adolescence, just as she was then, just as I was then.”

The little man spun his chair around and fetched the piece of paper from the cubbyhole. With the stub of a pencil he blackened out the words that presumably had sanctioned John Kellog's authorial career.

“I take it you want to try again?”

“If I haven't been morally acceptable as yet, at least I have acquired experience as what not to be and do. Jack, Jackie, and John were so horribly selfish. I hope I've got that out of the way by now. I want an opportunity to redress the balance.”

The other sighed.

“All right,” Hunsicker said. “I know that sounds facile. But I'm serious.”

“What is it to be, then? Doctor?” The little man grinned. “Don't tell me clergyman!”

“I'm scared that I'd be one of those clerical frauds, shaking down his congregation to buy whores. Or the kind of doctor whose specialty is annually exchanging last year's Bentley for a new one, while fending off dying paupers.”

“You're becoming cynical.”

“For good reason,” said Hunsicker. “There is some perversity to this process that I can't quite figure out. The best of intentions get twisted…as I suppose they always are in danger of doing in life.” He raised his chin. “Nevertheless I am convinced that I can do better.”

“In doing good,” said the little man in his flattest voice, and prepared to scrawl a notation on the paper.

T
HE
CALLS
that came in to the radio station were first “screened” by the producer, a young woman who took the first name and a statement of intent from each caller and sent the information along to Kellog's computer terminal, with the number of the button he must push on the telephone console to bring the person's voice into his headset and also onto the air.

He now activated Line 3 and spoke into the little mouthpiece that curved around from the earphone. “Jonathan Kellog. Good morning, Harriet. How may I help you?”

“Oh, Doctor…” Harriet wept awhile in a muffled way that seemed authentic. After years of experience, the phonies, the jokers, making too much of their bogus distress, could usually be recognized for what they were and terminated. But it sounded as though Harriet was genuine.

“Now, Harriet,” said he in the deeper-pitched, more deliberate voice he had developed for radio use, “nobody's listening but me, and you know I'm sympathetic…. Harriet?”

“Yes, Doctor.” She cleared her throat. “Okay, my daughter always was a fine, moral girl, a fine student. We couldn't of been closer all the while she was growing up. Doctor, we never even argued about anything!”

“What's wrong now?”

“Two years ago she married out of our faith. Well, I didn't like that exactly but didn't make any trouble about it even when the wedding was held in this other place of worship, you see, with everything so different than how I was brought up, and my daughter too. Next I'm told the children have to be brought up in this other religion. Well, I didn't like that much, either, but what could I—”

Time being always of the essence of radio, as was maintaining the listeners' interest, Kellog interrupted here. “So these things that hurt you continued to accumulate?”

“Yes they did, Doctor, on and on, but not a word of complaint came from me.”

“What was the straw that broke the camel's back?”

“Now she wants me to—” Harriet's voice broke before she could complete the incredulous expression—
“convert!”
She wept again.

“Harriet,” Kellog asked. “Tell me this: you're a devoutly religious person?”

After a moment she replied, in a low voice, “Not exactly.”

“You make some observance at major holidays?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“But you still want to call yourself a member of the faith into which you were born. It's the way most people are. But zealots find it hard to understand, especially those who have themselves recently converted, and all the more so when they're young. You'll just have to talk turkey to your daughter. Put the case to her as you've put it to me: you've never criticized her for what she did. Now it's her turn to be fair. Maybe relations between the two of you will be strained for a while. But eventually, I'm sure, she'll see you're right. What does your husband think?”

“He passed away nine years ago.”

“Standing up for what's right can be a lonely thing, but in the end it's always worth it.”

“He'd turn over in his grave if I ever became a dirty Catholic!” cried Harriet.

The program as aired was broadcast from tape played seven seconds after the recording of the live conversation: sufficient time in which to delete indecencies and other unacceptable expressions such as Harriet's. So far as the listeners knew now, the current colloquy ended with Kellog's homily on the inevitable success of moral courage, in delivering which he was by no means being hypocritical. One of his strengths as a broadcaster in a cynical era was that he actually believed in most of what he told those who applied for his advice. He personally embraced no organized faith but generally approved of all religions that did not call for the destruction of nonbelievers. With obvious exceptions—to spare pain, to save lives—he disapproved of mendacity and celebrated the telling of literal truth, encouraged the exercise of forgiveness, urged people to be kind and generous and try at least, hard as it was, to rise above envy and to resist the spiteful impulses to which all human beings are sometimes given. To the young he advocated respect for elders, but ever counseled the latter to be receptive to the energy and yea-saying of youth. As to sex he could be either blue-nosed or permissive, according to the caller. If a mother was in anguish over the possibility that her college-aged daughter intended to sleep with the boy invited as weekend house-guest, Kellog disparaged her fears, reminding her of prevailing mores, pointing out that the girl would do better at home than in a motel or, worse, the rear of a van. But if it was rather the daughter who phoned him, he would take the avuncular opposition: “Put yourself in
her
place. Even if she accepts the fact you sleep with him somewhere else, that's quite different from having it go on under her own roof. There are all sorts of rights. As you say, if you're old enough to vote, you're old enough to choose to go to bed with someone: that's your right. But your mother has a right to say what goes on in her home.”