The Deer Park (4 page)

I needed it, and I paid for it. My father left me a bum’s inheritance; underneath his drunks and his last disappointed jobs and his shy hello for me, in all those boardinghouse rooms where he watched the wallpaper curl and the years go down in one hash-house after another, he kept his little idea. There was something special about him, he had always thought, someday, somewhere …

Everybody has that, but my father had it more than most, and he slipped it on to me. I would never admit it to a soul, but I always thought there was going to be an extra destiny coming my direction; I knew I was more gifted than others. Even in the orphanage I had a lot of talents. They always gave me the lead in the Christmas play, and when I was sixteen I won a local photography contest with a borrowed camera. But I was never sure of myself, I never felt as if I came from any particular place, or that I was like other people. Maybe that is one of the reasons I have always felt like a spy or a fake.

Of course I had been faking all my life. At the children’s home, I remember we used to go to a parochial school, and during class hours we were treated like everybody else. But the lunch period was a torture. They used to bring us sandwiches from the orphanage, and we were supposed to eat together in a corner of the lunchroom while the others looked at us. That didn’t make it easy to become friends, and I remember one term when I did without lunch. On the first day I got to know a boy who lived down the street from the school in a two-family house. Today, I couldn’t give his name, but for all those months I was sick he might discover I was from the home. Later, I realized he must have known all the time, but he was nice enough never to let me guess.

There are enough stories I could tell of those years, but it would be a mistake. I would go on forever about the orphanage, and how none of the Sisters were like one another, for some were cruel and some were peculiar, and two or three were very good. There was a nun named Sister Rose, and when I was
a child I loved her exactly like a hungry child. She took special interest in me, and, with it all, since she came from a wealthy family, she spoke in a very clear way, and I used to have dreams at six and seven that when I grew up I would pay her family a visit and they would appreciate how good my manners were. She used to teach me Catechism in every way she could, and when I learned to read she would give me the lives of the saints and the martyrs. But I do not know how well that took, for my father gave me another catechism, and in his acquired brogue he would tell me to ask her about the life of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and he would talk for hours about the martyrdom in Boston and how religion was for women and anarchism for men. He was a philosopher, my father, and afraid of Sister Rose, but he was the only one I ever knew who was nice to the hunchbacked boy who slept next to me, and that was a poor boy. He was ugly and he had body odor, and we used to kick him. The Sisters would always have to make him take a bath. Even Sister Rose could barely tolerate him, for nuggets would drip from his nose, but my father had pity on the cripple and used to bring him presents too. The last I heard of the hunchback, he was in prison; a feeble-minded boy, trapped while shoplifting.

It was quite a life in the orphanage, and after my father died I ran away from the home five times in three years. Once I stayed away for four months before they caught me and brought me back. Yet I would not even be telling a fact, for the fact would have to include what I learned and that would take too long. It’s a trap to spend time writing about your childhood. Self-pity comes into the voice.

I would rather mention what I learned. I came out of the home when I was seventeen with one ambition. I had read a great many books, whichever ones I could, I read constantly when I was a boy—I would leave the lives of the martyrs and sneak away to the public library where I would read about English gentlemen, and knights, and adventure stories, and about brave men and Robin Hood. It all seemed very true to
me. So I had the ambition that someday I would be a brave writer.

I do not know if this can explain why Charles Francis Eitel was my best friend for almost all the time I stayed in Desert D’Or. But then, who can explain friendship? the explanations cover everything but the necessity. Yet one thing I believe can be said. I had the notion that there were few kind and honest men in the world, and the world always took care to put them down. For most of the time I knew Eitel, I suppose I saw him in this way.

Days before I met him I had already heard his name with its odd pronunciation, “eye-TELL.” As I have said, he was a subject for gossip in Desert D’Or. I even had a clue to explain Dorothea’s state. It seemed that years ago she had an affair with him, and in some way it must have hurt. I gathered that the affair had meant something to her and very little to Eitel, but this isn’t definite, and they had each had so many affairs. In all the time I knew them both I never heard them mention the few weeks or the few months when they had been together, and I would guess that its history was important now to nobody but Marion.

One night when I wandered over to have a drink at his house, he mentioned the director. “There’s a case,” he said. “When I was a kid, I used to think”—and Faye laughed harshly—“that Eitel was a god and devil all in one.”

“It’s hard to think of you feeling that way about anybody,” I said.

He shrugged. “Eitel would talk to me when he was dating Dorothea. I was such a freak of a kid. Even after he broke up with my mother, he used to invite me over once in a while.” Faye smiled at the hint of feeling in what he said.

“What do you think about him now?” I asked.

“He’d be all right,” Marion said, “if he weren’t so middle-class. Very nineteenth century, you know.” With a blank expression, he left me for a minute to search through the drawer
of his aluminum and blond-wood desk. “Here,” he said, coming back, “take a look. Read this.”

He handed me a printed transcript of the testimony taken at the hearings of a Congressional investigating committee. It was a heavy pamphlet, and as I looked at it, Marion said, “Eitel’s dialogue starts on page eighty-three.”

“You sent away for this?” I asked.

He nodded. “I wanted to have it.”

“Why?”

“Oh, that’s just a little item,” Marion said. “Someday I’ll tell you about the artist in me.”

I read it through. The testimony of the director came to twenty pages, but it was my introduction to Eitel, and I think I ought to give a page or two which is typical of the rest. In fact, I read it aloud many times. I had brought a tape recorder with me to Desert D’Or, and I would study my speech and try to improve it. Eitel’s dialogue was an opportunity for me, and although I cared little enough about politics, considering them a luxury like gentleman’s ethics which I could not yet afford, I would always have a reaction from his words. It is not very neat to say, but I felt as if I were speaking my own words, or at least the way I would have liked to say them into the eye of somebody who knew I had broken a regulation. So the testimony was not boring to me, and I took the idea while I read, that I had a lot to learn from Eitel:

When I finished reading, I looked up at Faye. “He must have lost his job in quick-time,” I said.

“He certainly did,” Faye murmured.

“But why is he staying in Desert D’Or?”

Marion grinned out of his private humor. “You’re right, man. This is no place to stay when you’ve lost your loot.”

“I thought Eitel was rich.”

“He used to be. You don’t know how anything works,” Faye said dispassionately. “You see, along about this time they started looking at his income-tax returns. By the time they got done, Eitel had to strip himself to pay the back taxes. All that’s left is his house here. Mortgaged, of course.”

“And he just stays here?” I asked. “He doesn’t do anything?”

“You’ll get to meet him. You’ll see what I mean,” Faye told me. “Charley Eitel could be worse off. Maybe he needed a kick in the pants.”

By the way Faye said this, I had a clue.

“You like him,” I said again.

“I don’t dislike him,” Faye said grudgingly.

At the Yacht Club, a few days later, Marion introduced me to Eitel. By the end of a week, I suppose I was making a point of going to see him every day.