Donald Barthelme Page 3

  Despite his slowness already remarked upon which perhaps inhibited his ingestion of the splendid curriculum that had been prepared for him, Baskerville never failed to be “promoted,” but on the contrary was always “promoted,” the reason for this being perhaps that his seat was needed for another child (Baskerville then being classified, in spite of his marked growth and gorgeous potential, as a child). There were some it was true who never thought he would extend himself to six feet, still he learned about Andrew Jackson, helium-hydrogen, and abortions, where are my mother and father now? answer me that. On a circular afternoon in June 1945—it was raining, Florence says, hard enough to fill the Brazen Sea—she was sitting untidily on a chaise in the north bedroom (on the wall of the north bedroom there are twenty identically framed photographs of Florence from eighteen to eighty-one, she was a beauty at eighteen) reading a copy of Life. It was the issue containing the first pictures from Buchenwald, she could not look away, she read the text, or a little of the text, then she vomited. When she recovered she read the article again, but without understanding it. What did exterminated mean? It meant nothing, an eyewitness account mentioned a little girl with one leg thrown alive on top of a truckload of corpses to be burned. Florence was sick. She went immediately to the Greenbrier, a resort in West Virginia. Later she permitted me to tell her about the Principal Seas, the South China, the Yellow, the Andaman, the Sea of Okhotsk. “I spotted you for a weightlifter,” Joan says. “But not for a poet,” Baskerville replies. “What have you written?” she asks. “Mostly I make remarks,” I say. “Remarks are not literature,” she says. “Then there’s my novel,” I say, “it will be twelve years old Tuesday.” “Published?” she asks. “Not finished,” I say, “however it’s very violent and necessary. It has to do with this Army see, made up of children, young children but I mean really well armed with M–1’s, carbines, .30 and .50 caliber machine guns, 105 mortars, recoilless rifles, the whole works. The central figure is the General, who is fifteen. One day the Army appears in the city, in a park, and takes up positions. Then it begins killing the people. Do you understand?” “I don’t think I’d like it,” Joan says. “I don’t like it either,” Baskerville says, “but it doesn’t make any difference that I don’t like it. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as though it were a painful duty Oscar Wilde.”

  Does Florence worry about her life? “He said mine was old-fashioned and they didn’t make parts for that kind any more.” Last year Florence tried to join the Peace Corps and when she was refused, telephoned the President to complain. “I have always admired the work of the Andrews Sisters,” Joan says. I feel feverish; will you take my temperature doctor? Baskerville that simple preliterate soaks up all the Taylor’s New York State malmsey in reach meanwhile wondering about his Grand Design. France? Japan? “Not Japan dear, we had a lovely time there but I wouldn’t want to go back now. France is where my little niece is, they have twenty-two acres near Versailles, he’s a count and a biochemist, isn’t that wonderful?” The others nod, they know what is wonderful. The Principal Seas are wonderful, the Important Lakes of the World are wonderful, the Metric System is wonderful, let us measure something together Florence Green baby. I will trade you a walleyed hectometer for a single golden micron. The table is hushed, like a crowd admiring 300 million dollars. Did I say that Florence has 300 million dollars? Florence Green is eighty-one with blue legs and has 300 million dollars and in 1932 was in love, airily, with a radio announcer named Norman Brokenshire, with his voice. “Meanwhile Edna Cather’s husband who takes me to church, he’s got a very good job with the Port, I think he does very well, he’s her second husband, the first was Pete Duff who got into all that trouble, where was I? Oh yes when Paul called up and said he wouldn’t come because of his hernia—you heard about his hernia—John said he’d come over and look at it. Mind you I’ve been using the downstairs bathroom all this time.” In fact the whole history of Florence’s radio listenership is of interest. In fact I have decided to write a paper called “The Whole History of Florence Green’s Radio Listenership.” Or perhaps, in the seventeenth-century style, “The Whole and True History of Florence Green’s Radio Listenership.” Or perhaps . . . But I am boring you, I sense it, let me say only that she can still elicit, from her ancient larynx, the special thrilling sound used to introduce Cap-tain Midnight . . . The table is hushed, then, we are all involved in a furious pause, a grand parenthesis (here I will insert a description of Florence’s canes. Florence’s canes line a special room, the room in which her cane collection is kept. There are hundreds of them: smooth black Fred Astaire canes and rough chewed alpenstocks, blackthorns and quarterstaffs, cudgels and swagger sticks, bamboo and ironwood, maple and slippery elm, canes from Tangier, Maine, Zurich, Panama City, Quebec, Togoland, the Dakotas and Borneo, resting in notched compartments that resemble arms racks in an armory. Everywhere Florence goes, she purchases one or more canes. Some she has made herself, stripping the bark from the green unseasoned wood, drying them carefully, applying layer on layer of a special varnish, then polishing them, endlessly, in the evenings, after dark and dinner) as vast as the Sea of Okhotsk, 590,000 square miles. I was sitting, I remember, in a German restaurant on Lexington, blowing bubbles in my seidel, at the next table there were six Germans, young Germans, they were laughing and talking. At Florence Green’s here-and-now table there is a poet named Onward Christian or something whose spectacles have wide silver sidepieces rather than the dull brown horn sidepieces of true poets and weightlifters, and whose poems invariably begin: “Through all my clangorous hours . . .” I am worried about his remarks, are his remarks better than my remarks? We are elected after all on the strength of our glamorous remarks, what is he saying to her? to Joan? what sort of eyewash is he pouring in her ear? I am tempted to walk briskly over and ask to see his honorable discharge from the Famous Writers School. What could be more glamorous or necessary than The Children’s Army, “An army of youth bearing the standard of truth” as we used to sing in my fourth-grade classroom at Our Lady of the Sorrows under the unforgiving eye of Sister Scholastica who knew how many angels could dance on the head of a pin . . .

  Florence I have decided is evading the life-issue. She is proposing herself as more unhappy than she really is. She has in mind making herself more interesting. She is afraid of boring us. She is trying to establish her uniqueness. She does not really want to go away. Does Onward Christian know about the Important Lakes of the World? Terminate services of employees when necessary. I terminate you, brightness that seems to know me. She proceeded by car from Tempelhof to a hotel in the American zone, registered, dined, sat in a chair in the lobby for a time observing the American lieutenant colonels and their healthy German girls, and then walked out into the street. The first German man she saw was a policeman directing traffic. He wore a uniform. Florence walked out into the traffic island and tugged at his sleeve. He bent politely toward the nice old American lady. She lifted her cane, the cane of 1927 from Yellowstone, and cracked his head with it. He fell in a heap in the middle of the street. Then Florence Green rushed awkwardly into the plaza with her cane, beating the people there, men and women, indiscriminately, until she was subdued. The Forms of Address, shall I sing to you of the Forms of Address? What Florence did was what Florence did, not more or less, she was returned to this country under restraint on a military plane. “Why do you have the children kill everybody?” “Because everybody has already been killed. Everybody is absolutely dead. You and I and Onward Christian.” “You’re not very sanguine.” “That’s true.” For an earl’s younger son’s wife, letters commence: Madam . . . “We put in the downstairs bathroom when Ead came to visit us. Ead was Mr. Green’s sister and she couldn’t climb stairs.” What about Casablanca? Santa Cruz? Funchal? Málaga? Valletta? Iráklion? Samos? Haifa? Kotor Bay? Dubrovnik? “I want to go to some other place,” Florence says. “Somewhere where everything is different.” For the Talent Test a necessary but not a sufficient condition for matriculati
on at the Famous Writers School Baskerville delivered himself of “Impressions of Akron” which began: “Akron! Akron was full of people walking the streets of Akron carrying little transistor radios which were turned on.”

  Florence has a Club. The Club meets on Tuesday evenings, at her huge horizontal old multibathroom home on Indiana Boulevard. The Club is a group of men who gather, on these occasions, to recite and hear poems in praise of Florence Green. Before you can be admitted you must compose a poem. The poems begin, usually, somewhat in this vein: “Florence Green is eighty-one/ Nevertheless she’s lots of fun . . .” Onward Christian’s poem began “Through all my clangorous hours . . .” Florence carries the poems about with her in her purse, stapled together in an immense, filthy wad. Surely Florence Green is a vastly rich vastly egocentric old-woman nut! Six modifiers modify her into something one can think of as a nut. “But you have not grasped the living reality, the essence!” Husserl exclaims. Nor will I, ever. His examiner (was it J. D. Ratcliff?) said severely: “Baskerville, you blank round, discursiveness is not literature.” “The aim of literature,” Baskerville replied grandly, “is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.” Joan says: “I have two children.” “Why did you do that?” I ask. “I don’t know,” she says. I am struck by the modesty of her answer. Pamela Hansford Johnson has been listening and his face jumps in what may be described as a wince. “That’s a terrible thing to say,” he says. And he is right, right, entirely correct, what she has said is the First Terrible Thing. We value each other for our remarks, on the strength of this remark and the one about the Andrews Sisters, love becomes possible. I carry in my wallet an eight-paragraph General Order, issued by the adjutant of my young immaculate Army to the troops: “(1) You are in this Army because you wanted to be. So you have to do what the General says. Anybody who doesn’t do what the General says will be kicked out of the Army. (2) The purpose of the Army is to do what the General says. (3) The General says that nobody will shoot his weapon unless the General says to. It is important that when the Army opens fire on something everybody does it together. This is very important and anybody who doesn’t do it will have his weapon taken away and will be kicked out of the Army. (4) Don’t be afraid of the noise when everybody fires. It won’t hurt you. (5) Everybody has enough rounds to do what the General wants to do. People who lose their rounds won’t get any more. (6) Talking to people who are not in the Army is strictly forbidden. Other people don’t understand the Army. (7) This is a serious Army and anybody that laughs will have his weapon taken away and will be kicked out of the Army. (8) What the General wants to do now is, find and destroy the enemy.”

  I want to go somewhere where everything is different. A simple, perfect idea. The old babe demands nothing less than total otherness. Dinner is over. We place our napkins on our lips. Quemoy and Matsu remain ours, temporarily perhaps; the upstairs bathroom drips away unrepaired; I feel the money drifting, drifting away from me. I am a young man but very brilliant, very ingratiating, I edit . . . but I explained all that. In the dim foyer I slip my hands through the neck of Joan’s yellow dress. It is dangerous but it is a way of finding out everything all at once. Then Onward Christian arrives to resume his yellow overcoat. No one has taken Florence seriously, how can anyone with three hundred million dollars be taken seriously? But I know that when I telephone tomorrow, there will be no answer. Iráklion? Samos? Haifa? Kotor Bay? She will be in none of these places but in another place, a place where everything is different. Outside it is raining. In my rain-blue Volkswagen I proceed down the rain-black street thinking, for some simple reason, of the Verdi Requiem. I begin to drive my tiny car in idiot circles in the street, I begin to sing the first great Kyrie.

  The Piano Player

  OUTSIDE HIS window five-year-old Priscilla Hess, square and squat as a mailbox (red sweater, blue lumpy corduroy pants), looked around poignantly for someone to wipe her overflowing nose. There was a butterfly locked inside that mailbox, surely; would it ever escape? Or was the quality of mailboxness stuck to her forever, like her parents, like her name? The sky was sunny and blue. A filet of green Silly Putty disappeared into fat Priscilla Hess and he turned to greet his wife who was crawling through the door on her hands and knees.

  “Yes?” he said. “What now?”

  “I’m ugly,” she said, sitting back on her haunches. “Our children are ugly.”

  “Nonsense,” Brian said sharply. “They’re wonderful children. Wonderful and beautiful. Other people’s children are ugly, not our children. Now get up and go back out to the smokeroom. You’re supposed to be curing a ham.”

  “The ham died,” she said. “I couldn’t cure it. I tried everything. You don’t love me any more. The penicillin was stale. I’m ugly and so are the children. It said to tell you goodbye.”

  “It?”

  “The ham,” she said. “Is one of our children named Ambrose? Somebody named Ambrose has been sending us telegrams. How many do we have now? Four? Five? Do you think they’re heterosexual?” She made a moue and ran a hand through her artichoke hair. “The house is rusting away. Why did you want a steel house? Why did I think I wanted to live in Connecticut? I don’t know.”

  “Get up,” he said softly, “get up, dearly beloved. Stand up and sing. Sing Parsifal.”

  “I want a Triumph,” she said from the floor. “A TR–4. Everyone in Stamford, every single person, has one but me. If you gave me a TR–4 I’d put our ugly children in it and drive away. To Wellfleet. I’d take all the ugliness out of your life.”

  “A green one?”

  “A red one,” she said menacingly. “Red with red leather seats.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be chipping paint?” he asked. “I bought us an electronic data processing system. An IBM.”

  “I want to go to Wellfleet,” she said. “I want to talk to Edmund Wilson and take him for a ride in my red TR–4. The children can dig clams. We have a lot to talk about, Bunny and me.”

  “Why don’t you remove those shoulder pads?” Brian said kindly. “It’s too bad about the ham.”

  “I loved that ham,” she said viciously. “When you galloped into the University of Texas on your roan Volvo, I thought you were going to be somebody. I gave you my hand. You put rings on it. Rings that my mother gave me. I thought you were going to be distinguished, like Bunny.”

  He showed her his broad, shouldered back. “Everything is in flitters,” he said. “Play the piano, won’t you?”

  “You always were afraid of my piano,” she said. “My four or five children are afraid of the piano. You taught them to be afraid of it. The giraffe is on fire, but I don’t suppose you care.”

  “What can we eat,” he asked, “with the ham gone?”

  “There’s some Silly Putty in the deepfreeze,” she said tonelessly.

  “Rain is falling,” he observed. “Rain or something.”

  “When you graduated from the Wharton School of Business,” she said, “I thought at last! I thought now we can move to Stamford and have interesting neighbors. But they’re not interesting. The giraffe is interesting but he sleeps so much of the time. The mailbox is rather interesting. The man didn’t open it at 3:31 P.M. today. He was five minutes late. The government lied again.”

  With a gesture of impatience, Brian turned on the light. The great burst of electricity illuminated her upturned tiny face. Eyes like snow peas, he thought. Tamar dancing. My name in the dictionary, in the back. The Law of Bilateral Good Fortune. Piano bread perhaps. A nibble of pain running through the Western World. Coriolanus.

  “Oh God,” she said, from the floor. “Look at my knees.”

  Brian looked. Her knees were blushing.

  “It’s senseless, senseless, senseless,” she said. “I’ve been caulking the medicine chest. What for? I don’t know. You’ve got to give me more money. Ben is bleeding. Bessie wants to be an S.S. man. She’s r
eading The Rise and Fall. She’s identified with Himmler. Is that her name? Bessie?”