Earthly Powers (100 page)

       "What are you going to see, dear?"

       "On the Beach. At the Symphony. It's Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. About the end of the world in nineteen sixty-two."

       The father and husband was away in Denver, Colorado. There was a weekend Comparative Literature conference, and he was reading a paper on Strehler's Debt to Kafka. I remember distinctly Strehier's telling me, the day before the Gestapo arrived, that he had not read Kafka, or rather that he had started to read Der Schloss but had been so appalled by the quality of the German that he had been unable to go on. Still, I had no doubt that Professor Michael Breslow would make, or had already made, a very plausible case for the alleged debt. You could prove anything in literary scholarship. Why, somebody had somewhere read a paper on my indebtedness to Sir Hugh Walpole.

       So I drank my caffeineless coffee unmitigated by smoke while Eve, my fourteen-year-old great- or grandniece, ground at her second portion of banana cake. I could hear her little teeth engaging the thin ice of its surfaces. What can I say about her except that she was doomed? She was emptily pretty like her mother, with a firm little bosom upheld by a Maidenform brassiere. She wore an off the peg dirndl dress, not every young person at that time wearing jeans, and on her long American legs were lime woollen stockings. Her pretty little feet were in scuffed black ballet slippers. Her squeaky clean yellow hair was caught just beyond the crown in an elastic band and it wagged behind in a ponytail. She had delicate little pink ears and a charming piggy nose. Her brain was furnished with all the rubbish that the earnest promoters of American values, comforts and stimulants could provide. She was indeed one of the inheritors or inheritrices. While Nevil Shute's vision of the end coming to South Australia was being rerun at the Symphony Cinema on Broadway, Eve's other great-uncle was telling, in Madison Square Garden, of a new beginning coming to everybody. Eve was the inheritrix of a joy and a despair which were somehow cognate.

       While she was scraping up the last of her Sara Lee the doorbell did a jaunty eyetidJlyeyetje and, a second later, porn porn. "It's Bob," she said. Chewing she ran to the door and let Bob in. Bob was another of the inheritors. He was six and a half feet tall but had not yet put on the mature flesh that his skeleton demanded. He gangled. He wore glasses. My idle brain wondered a moment why the cartoon American male had always worn glasses. A stronger sighted race had never before existed. It was something to do with the consumer philosophy, perhaps. If there was a space, you filled it. Pangloss had praised God for providing nose and ears for the fitting of spectacles. Carlo, man of many voices, probably approved of Pangloss. I had never asked him if he read Voltaire, and it was too late now. On the other hand, I did not deem it too late to make a more urgent communication. I had that afternoon sent off a note to him care of the Archbishop of New York: the reader will know what was in that note. I had no hope of a response.

       "This is Tunc," Eve said. "Mr Toomey the great writer. This is Bob."

       A long thin cordial arm shot out. "Hi, Mr Toomey. What kinda things do you write?" He was in endlessly long fawn trousers and an acidgreen windjammer. In the young face there was a whole continent of innocent benevolence.

       "Novels. Like Nevil Shute. Well, not quite like Nevil Shute. He's an engineer, you know. He helped build the R-1O1."

       "Is that so?" He had never heard of Nevil Shute. "I don't read much, Mr Toomey. Eve and I go to the movies a lot. Sooner or later you get all the books in the movies. Just a matter of waiting."

       "On the Beach is by Nevil Shute."

       "Is that so? Well, like I say, all you got to do is wait," with a most charming intonation. "You ready, Evie?"

       And off they went, inheritors of movies with popcorn and Coke machines in the vestibule. And also, though some place else, mushroom clouds and starvation. I was permitted to smoke now. Ann left the dishes till later. We sat in a pair of rocking chairs in the long drawing room that was really Professor Breslow's Comparative Literature library. It was a fine spring evening. The window looked onto West Ninety-first Street and, if you opened it and craned left, Riverside Drive and a fine chemical sunset over the Hudson. Well-fixed, this family, a decent future to anticipate. My niece Ann, in her ipiddle thirties, was as sweet and innutritious as a Hershey bar. Teeth good, complexion radiant, plumping figure well contained.

       "I was just thinking," I said, "that those two kids prefer to go and see the end of the world through the southward drift of toxic atomic dust than to hear the new word of the Lord in Madison Square Garden."

       "Bob's a Baptist," she said. "Eve just doesn't care much for religion. Don't tell Mother that, though." Mother? Of course, Mother was Hortense. "Mike had this idea that kids ought to choose what to believe in when they get old enough to understand what it's all about. He didn't want a repetition of his own childhood."

       "Ironic. There's Eve's other great-or granduncle as head of the faith, and she prefers atomic fallout."

       "I told Mike that you've got to start them off early. He insisted she went to schools where they didn't teach religion. What she's never had she doesn't miss. I told her about Our Lord dying on the cross and she said 'Poor guy. Did it hurt much?' She'll come to it when she needs it." And then, "He's not really any relation, is he? I can hardly remember Father, and then he ran off and said we weren't his children. And Mother said nothing."

       "Legally," I said. "Legally." I said, "Your mother got a telephone call from your legal father. Did she tell you?"

       "She tells me nothing. I don't see much of her. She doesn't like me. Never did. It was always John John John. What did he say?"

       "He wants to come back to her. Catholic law and Catholic guilt are nagging him in his old age. Indissoluble bonds. She won't have him, of course. He'll probably drink himself to death."

       "Would you like some homemade lemonade?"

       "I'd prefer brandy." She went to a cupboard underneath shelves full of Comparative Literature and a photograph of Thomas Mann as a disdainful Hamburg industrialist. She had her mother's elegant legs. She brought out a bottle of Christian Brothers. She said, pouring, myself saying enough very soon: "You had time for a talk with Eve. What do you think of her?"

       "Too soon to say. A nice child, but for God's sake what do they teach them these days? Her mythology's the Saturday morning TV show of kids' cartoons. She started to read The Catcher in the Rye but couldn't get on with it, found it kind of hard going. It's difficult for someone of my generation to converse about Superman and Donald Duck and Debbie Reynolds. God, you were brought up on French and Italian, but she knows no languages. They read twenty lines of Virgil at school in bad English prose. She saw a movie about Helen of Troy. The past is dead and the world outside the United States doesn't exist. Haven't you even taken her to Europe?"

       "We went to France but the food made her sick."

       "I fear," I said prophetically, "the great vacuum. You can fill it for a time with Walt Disney but some big wind is going to blow that fluff away. Stronger anodynes. She tells me that one of her instructors was onto drugs. He'd read a book by some guy, she said, I might know him, it turned out to be my old friend Aldous Huxley. All about visions and reality and you got the truth the easy way, like switching on the TV."

       "Yeah, that was a teacher called Perrin. They had to fire him."

       "Well," I said, "she's your child. And America's. But, speaking as a decadent European, I'd say she needs stuffing with something solid. Not candyfloss and wow and zowie."

       "She's just a good normal healthy teenage girl," she said defensively.

       "With an allergy to cigar smoke. And, she tells me, to tomato skins. And goldenrod in the season of goldenrod. And she gets all itchy when she touches the cat. These are substitutes for European guilt."

       She's normal sexually, anyway," Ann said. That seemed to be a crack at me. And of course her mother. "Thank the Lord for that."

       "You mean she's already slept with that long youth who takes her to the movies? And had the right physical responses?"

       "That's just dirty, Uncle Ken, and you know it. I mean she likes boys and scored eighty-live in that sex quiz in Mademoiselle. She's normal. And she's good." Ann then blushed. "She started to read an article in one of those literary magazines that Mike had. It was about what it called the homosexual strain in the British novel. She saw your name there and said there's a bit here about Tunc, I didn't know they wrote about him in magazines. And she said, 'What's it mean, homosexual?' That's how innocent she is."

       "And you, or Mike, enlightened her?"

       "Mike was very good. He said homosexuals liked men, that's what homo meant, man, and she said, 'Well, that makes me homosexual.'"

       "His etymology's at fault. Well, so her Tunc or Tunkie is a kind of corruptive influence. And Superman and Gregory Peck and Senator McCarthy are just fine. I'd better go. A little chat with your mother before bed."

       "You won't say what I told you about Eve not going to church or anything?"

       "She's not particularly interested in Eve. She's got enough on her plate at present."

       "Look, Uncle Ken, I didn't want you, you know, to be offended. I mean, I know you can't help being the way you are—"

       "The way I was, Ann. I'm now what your daughter thinks I am—past all that, you know, a hundred years old and all the rest of it. Thanks for the dinner." And I gave a dry kiss to her narrow forehead.

       Hortense was at the bar in a tigerstriped housecoat. She was weary, I could tell, and she was sipping pure scotch with a lot of ice. "Is she asleep?" I asked.

       "She got off about half an hour ago. I gave her a shot of PT6. The shots have to get bigger all the time. She was on again about hemlock, and then she said sorry sorry. I think she's right about the hemlock."

       I took a shot of brandy unblessed by Christian brothers. I felt, while pouring, a faint simulacrum of the pain that Dorothy was suffering. The growth was located in the lower bowel. Inoperable. "What's the modern version of hemlock?"

       "I'd say a bottle of scotch and about a hundred aspirins."

       "Cumbersome. And Carlo wouldn't approve. Did you by any chance hear anything from Carlo?"

       "You mean on television? We had him on for about fifteen minutes telling the world about love. Then Dot said let's have an old movie. So we had Bette Davis in Dark Victory. Not the best of choices."

       "I meant something personal. A personal message or something. He always thought highly of you."

       "That changed when the Milanese discovered that Saint Ambrose had balls. No, nothing from him and I expect nothing. Let him keep out of my life. I was 4,grateful that time for the commission, but I would have been grateful to anybody. And it won't be long before I'm grateful to these people in Bronxville."

       "What people?"

       "Wheeler College. They'd like me to teach the History of Art. I gave them a talk once on the technique of sculpture. It went down well enough. I'm going to need a job. Not for the money, of course."

       "Poor poor Dorothy. How much longer can she stand it?"

       "How much longer can I? Christ helps a bit. But I don't think crucifixion could be as bad as cancer."

       "Do you think Dorothy will—well, seriously ask?"

       "She'll seriously scream. And I'll take that to be seriously asking."

       "I've had trouble sleeping. Doctors in Morocco don't have any qualms about overprescribing. In my bag I have one hundred brown pills. I know that will do it. Poor Jack Tallis in Tangier sailed off on thirty-five. That wasn't cancer, it was thwarted love. I'll leave them with you. Having them there makes it easier to put off and off and off till you can't put off any longer. Why don't you get some sleep? You won't need any tablets."

       "She'll wake in an hour. Or less. I have to be ready. I slept this morning when the nurse came for her two-hour stint. I'll sleep again tomorrow. I don't need much sleep. I'll sleep while the bells are clanging and Carlo's proclaiming love and peace to the TV cameras." And then, "I'm sorry about Ralph."

       "Ralph's doing all right."

       "No, I mean you and Ralph. It was my idea, after all."

       "Oh, it worked for a time. But I'm old and scrawny and also of the colour of the damned. It couldn't last. None of my sort of thing ever can."

       "A good title," she said, "The Colour 0f the Damned. For James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison or the other Ralph's pal out there. There was a nasty thing happened in Central Park. A white kid was dragged into some bushes by the Hans Andersen statue and his balls were cut off. He'd gone for a pee and his mother wondered why he was so long. And bloody Carlo preaches about a new age of love and tolerance. You get off to bed, Ken. Dream about love and tolerance."

       The following morning I embraced poor Dorothy for, I knew, the last time. She knew it too, for she wept and clung to me. One more last thing to be filed: last trip to the movies, last meal in that Belgian restaurant on West Fortyfourth Street, last sight of crocuses in Central Park, last meal cooked in her own kitchen, last sight of Ken Toomey, old, dry, but horribly healthy. I embraced Ilortense with love and pain, left, with no word, my bottle of barbiturates on the dining table, then went down to get a cab to take me to La Guardia. There I Caught the noon flight to Oklahoma City.

       I have confused recollections about the loose forking together of my univer sity visits, which in memory congeal to a single and generic one, and Carlo's American mission as read of in the papers and seen distractedly on the motel screen. I don't know whether I'm being just either to time or the potentialities of his aggiornamento when I say that I associate this continental tour (not, after all, my last) with the more bizarre of the innovations, ritual or doctrinal, which his strong podgy arms blessed. Was it at Rockhurst College in Kansas City that I witnessed a mass whose liturgy derived from Coventry Patmore's An Angel in the House? Was it in the town in Pennsylvania confusingly named California (from a long-exhausted mineral strike) that I saw a little of a rock mass, with guitars and trapdrums and a Kyrie that went Lord, Lord, have mercy on us, yeah Christ do the same, yeah And if you have mercy on us, yeah We will bless your name, yeah We'll sure bless your name?