When I’d checked into the bathroom with Seymour’s diary under my arm, and had carefully secured the door behind me, I spotted a message almost immediately. It was not, however, in Seymour’s handwriting but, unmistakably, in my sister Boo Boo’s. With or without soap, her handwriting was always almost indecipherably minute, and she had easily managed to post the following message up on the mirror: “Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man. Love, Irving Sappho, formerly under contract to Elysium Studios Ltd. Please be happy happy happy with your beautiful Muriel. This is an order. I outrank everybody on this block.” The contract writer quoted in the text, I might mention, has always been a great favorite—at appropriately staggered time intervals—with all the children in our family, largely through the immeasurable impact of Seymour’s taste in poetry on all of us. I read and reread the quo
tation, and then I sat down on the edge of the bathtub and opened Seymour’s diary.
What follows is an exact reproduction of the pages from Seymour’s diary that I read while I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub. It seems perfectly orderly to me to leave out individual datelines. Suffice it to say, I think, all these entries were made while he was stationed at Fort Monmouth, in late 1941 and early 1942, some several months before the wedding date was set.
“It was freezing cold at retreat parade this evening, and yet about six men from our platoon alone fainted during the endless playing of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ I suppose if your blood circulation is normal, you can’t take the unnatural military position of attention. Especially if you’re holding a leaden rifle up at Present Arms. I have no circulation, no pulse. Immobility is my home. The tempo of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and I are in perfect understanding. To me, its rhythm is a romantic waltz.
“We got passes till midnight, after the parade. I met Muriel at the Biltmore at seven. Two drinks, two drugstore tuna-fish sandwiches, then a movie she wanted to see, something with Greer Garson in it. I looked at her several times in the dark when Greer Garson’s son’s plane was missing in action. Her mouth was open. Absorbed, worried. The identification with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer tragedy complete. I felt awe and happiness. How I love and need her undiscriminating heart. She looked over at me when the children in the picture brought in the kitten to show to their mother. M. loved the kitten and wanted me to love it. Even in the dark, I could sense that she felt the usual estrangement from me when I don’t automatically love what she loves. Later, when we were having a drink at the station, she asked me if I didn’t think that kitten was ‘rather nice.’ She doesn’t use the word ‘cute’ any more. When did I ever frighten her out of her normal vocabulary? Bore that I am, I mentioned R. H. Blyth’s definition of sentimentality: that we are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it. I said (sententiously?) that God undoubtedly loves kittens, but not, in all probability, with Technicolor bootees on their paws. He leaves that creative touch to script writers. M. thought this over, seemed to agree with me, but the ‘knowledge’ wasn’t too very welcome. She sat stirring her drink and feeling unclose to me. She worries over the way her love for me comes and goes, appears and disappears. She doubts its reality simply because it isn’t as steadily pleasurable as a kitten. God knows it is sad. The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth.”
“Dinner tonight at the Fedders’. Very good. Veal, mashed potatoes, lima beans, a beautiful oil-and-vinegar green salad. For dessert there was something Muriel made herself: a kind of frozen cream-cheese affair, with raspberries on it. It made tears come to my eyes. (Saigyo says, ‘What it is I know not/ But with the gratitude/ My tears fall.’) A bottle of ketchup was placed on the table near me. Muriel apparently told Mrs. Fedder that I put ketchup on everything. I’d give the world to have seen M. telling her mother defensively that I put ketchup even on string beans. My precious girl.
“After dinner Mrs. Fedder suggested we listen to the program. Her enthusiasm, her nostalgia for the program, especially for the old days when Buddy and I were on it, makes me uneasy. Tonight it was broadcast from some naval airbase, of all places, near San Diego. Much too many pedantic questions and answers. Franny sounded as though she had a head cold. Zooey was in dreamy top form. The announcer had them off on the subject of housing developments, and the little Burke girl said she hated houses that all look alike—meaning a long row of identical ‘development’ houses. Zooey said they were ‘nice.’ He said it would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody goodbye in the morning thinking they were your own family. He said he even wished everybody in the world looked exactly alike. He said you’d keep thinking everybody you met was your wife or your mother or father, and people would always be throwing their arms around each other wherever they went, and it would look ‘very nice.’
“I felt unbearably happy all evening. The familiarity between Muriel and her mother struck me as being so beautiful when we were all sitting in the living room. They know each other’s weaknesses, especially conversational weaknesses, and pick at them with their eyes. Mrs. Fedder’s eyes watch over Muriel’s conversational taste in ‘literature,’ and Muriel’s eyes watch over her mother’s tendency to be windy, verbose. When they argue, there can be no danger of a permanent rift, because they’re Mother and Daughter. A terrible and beautiful phenomenon to watch. Yet there are times when I sit there enchanted that I wish Mr. Fedder were more conversationally active. Sometimes I feel I need him. Sometimes, in fact, when I come in the front door, it’s like entering a kind of untidy, secular, two-woman convent. Sometimes when I leave, I have a peculiar feeling that both M. and her mother have stuffed my pockets with little bottles and tubes containing lipstick, rouge, hair nets, deodorants, and so on. I feel overwhelmingly grateful to them, but I don’t know what to do with their invisible gifts.”
“We didn’t get our passes directly after retreat this evening, because someone dropped his rifle while the visiting British general was making his inspection. I missed the 5:52 and was an hour late meeting Muriel. Dinner at Lun Far’s on 58th. M. irritable and tearful throughout dinner, genuinely upset and scared. Her mother thinks I’m a schizoid personality. Apparently she’s spoken to her psychoanalyst about me, and he agrees with her. Mrs. Fedder has asked Muriel to find out discreetly if there’s any insanity in the family. I gather that Muriel was naïve enough to tell her where I got the scars on my wrists, poor sweet baby. From what M. says, however, this doesn’t bother her mother nearly so much as a couple of other things. Three other things. One, I withdraw from and fail to relate to people. Two, apparently there is something ‘wrong’ with me because I haven’t seduced Muriel. Three, evidently Mrs. Fedder has been haunted for days by my remark at dinner one night that I’d like to be a dead cat. She asked me at dinner last week what I intended to do after I got out of the Army. Did I intend to resume teaching at the same college? Would I go back to teaching at all? Would I consider going back on the radio, possibly as a ‘commentator’ of some kind? I answered that it seemed to me that the war might go on forever, and that I was only certain that if peace ever came again I would like to be a dead cat. Mrs. Fedder thought I was cracking a joke of some kind. A sophisticated joke. She thinks I’m very sophisticated, according to Muriel. She thought my deadly-serious comment was the sort of joke one ought to acknowledge with a light, musical laugh. When she laughed, I suppose it distracted me a little, and I forgot to explain to her. I told Muriel tonight that in Zen Buddhism a master was once asked what was the most valuable thing in the world, and the master answered that a dead cat was, because no one could put a price on it. M. was relieved, but I could see she could hardly wait to get home to assure her mother of the harmlessness of my remark. She rode to the station with me in the cab. How sweet she was, and in so much better humor. She was trying to teach me to smile, spreading the muscles around my mouth with her fingers. How beautiful it is to see her laugh. Oh, God, I’m so happy with her. If only she could be happier with me. I amuse her at times, and she seems to like my face and hands and the back of my head, and she gets a vast satisfaction out of telling her friends that she’s engaged to the Billy Black who was on ‘It’s a Wise Child’ for years. And I think she feels a mixed maternal and sexual drive in my general direction. But on the whole I don’t make her really happy. Oh, God, help me. My one terrible consolation is that my beloved has an undying, basically undeviating love for the institution of marriage itself. She has a primal urge to play house permanently. Her marital goals are so absurd and touching. She wants to get a very dark sun tan and go up to the desk clerk in some very posh hotel and ask if her Husband has picked up the mail yet. She wants to shop for curtains. She wants to shop for maternity clothes. She wants to get out of her mother’s house, whether she knows it or not, and despite her attachment to her. She wants children—good-looking children, with her features, not mine. I have a feeling, too, that she wants her own Christmas-tree ornaments to unbox annually, not her mother’s.
“A very funny letter came from Buddy today, written just after he came off K.P. I think of him as I write about Muriel. He would despise her for her marriage motives as I’ve put them down here. But are they despicable? In a way, they must be, but yet they seem to me so human-size and beautiful that I can’t think of them even now as I write this without feeling deeply, deeply moved. He would disapprove of Muriel’s mother, too. She’s an irritating, opinionated woman, a type Buddy can’t stand. I don’t think he could see her for what she is. A person deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things. She might as well be dead, and yet she goes on living, stopping off at delicatessens, seeing her analyst, consuming a novel every night, putting on her girdle, plotting for Muriel’s health and prosperity. I love her. I find her unimaginably brave.”
“The whole company is restricted to the post tonight. Stood in line for a full hour to get to use the phone in the Rec Room. Muriel sounded rather relieved that I couldn’t get in tonight. Which amuses and delights me. Another girl, if she genuinely wanted an evening free of her fiancé, would go through the motions of expressing regret over the phone. M. just said Oh when I told her. How I worship her simplicity, her terrible honesty. How I rely on it.”
“3:30 a.m. I’m over in the Orderly Room. I couldn’t sleep. I put my coat on over my pajamas and came over here. Al Aspesi is C.Q. He’s asleep on the floor. I can stay here if I answer the phone for him. What a night. Mrs. Fedder’s analyst was there for dinner and grilled me, off and on, till about eleven-thirty. Occasionally with great skill, intelligence. Once or twice, I found myself pulling for him. Apparently he’s an old fan of Buddy’s and mine. He seemed personally as well as professionally interested in why I’d been bounced off the show at sixteen. He’d actually heard the Lincoln broadcast, but he had the impression that I’d said over the air that the Gettysburg Address was ‘bad for children.’ Not true. I told him I’d said I thought it was a bad speech for children to have to memorize in school. He also had the impression I’d said it was a dishonest speech. I told him I’d said that 51,112 men were casualties at Gettysburg, and that if someone had to speak at the anniversary of the event, he should simply have come forward and shaken
his fist at his audience and then walked off—that is, if the speaker was an absolutely honest man. He didn’t disagree with me, but he seemed to feel that I have a perfection complex of some kind. Much talk from him, and quite intelligent, on the virtues of living the imperfect life, of accepting one’s own and others’ weaknesses. I agree with him, but only in theory. I’ll champion indiscrimination till doomsday, on the ground that it leads to health and a kind of very real, enviable happiness. Followed purely, it’s the way of the Tao, and undoubtedly the highest way. But for a discriminating man to achieve this, it would mean that he would have to dispossess himself of poetry, gobeyond poetry. That is, he couldn’t possibly learn or drive himself tolike bad poetry in the abstract, let alone equate it with good poetry. He would have to drop poetry altogether. I said it would be no easy thing to do. Dr. Sims said I was putting it too stringently—putting it, he said, as only a perfectionist would. Can I deny that?
“Evidently Mrs. Fedder had nervously told him about Charlotte’s nine stitches. It was rash, I suppose, to have mentioned that old finished business to Muriel. She passes everything along to her mother while it’s hot. I should object, no doubt, but I can’t. M. can only hear me when her mother is listening, too, poor baby. But I had no intention of discussing Charlotte’s stitches with Sims. Not over just one drink.
“I more or less promised M. at the station tonight that I’ll go to a psychoanalyst one of these days. Sims told me that the man right here on the post is very good. Evidently he and Mrs. Fedder have had a tête-à-tête or two on the subject. Why doesn’t this rankle me? It doesn’t. It seems funny. It warms me, for no good reason. Even stock mothers-in-law in the funny papers have always remotely appealed to me. Anyway, I can’t see that I have anything to lose by seeing an analyst. If I do it in the Army, it’ll be free. M. loves me, but she’ll never feel really close to me, familiar with me, frivolous with me, till I’m slightly overhauled.
“If or when I do start going to an analyst, I hope to God he has the foresight to let a dermatologist sit in on consultation. A hand specialist. I have scars on my hands from touching certain people. Once, in the park, when Franny was still in the carriage, I put my hand on the downy pate of her head and left it there too long. Another time, at Loew’s Seventy-second Street, with Zooey during a spooky movie. He was about six or seven, and he went under the seat to avoid watching a scary scene. I put my hand on his head. Certain heads, certain colors and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me. Other things, too. Charlotte once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her. I still have a lemon-yellow mark on the palm of my right hand. Oh, God, if I’m anything by a clinical name, I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”
I remember closing the diary—actually, slamming it shut—after the word “happy.” I then sat for several minutes with the diary under one arm, until I became conscious of a certain discomfort from having sat so long on the side of the bathtub. When I stood up, I found I was perspiring more profusely than I had all day, as though I had just got out of a tub, rather than just been sitting on the side of one. I went over to the laundry hamper, raised the lid, and, with an almost vicious wrist movement, literally threw Seymour’s diary into some sheets and pillowcases that were on the bottom of the hamper. Then, for want of a better, more constructive idea, I went back and sat down on the side of the bathtub again. I stared for a minute or two at Boo Boo’s message on the medicine cabinet mirror, and then I left the bathroom, closing the door excessively hard after me, as though sheer force might lock up the place forever after.
My next stop was the kitchen. Fortunately, it led off the hall, and I could get there without having to go through the living room and face my guests. On arrival, and with the swinging door closed behind me, I took off my coat—my tunic—and dropped it across the enamel table. It seemed to require all my energy just to take off my coat, and I stood for some time, in my T shirt, just resting up, as it were, before taking on the herculean task of mixing drinks. Then, abruptly, as though I were being invisibly policed through small apertures in the wall, I began to open cabinet and refrigerator doors, looking for Tom Collins ingredients. They were all there, except for lemons instead of limes, and in a few minutes I had a somewhat sugary pitcherful of Collinses made. I took down five glasses, and then looked around for a tray. It was just hard enough to find a tray, and it took me just long enough, so that by the time I did find one, I was giving out small, faintly audible whimpers as I opened and shut cabinet doors.
Just as I was starting out of the kitchen, with the pitcher and glasses loaded on the tray, and with my coat back on, an imaginary light bulb was turned on over my head—the way it is in comic strips to show that a character has a sudden very bright idea. I put down the tray on the floor. I went back over to the liquor shelf and took down a half-full fifth of Scotch. I brought my glass over and poured myself out—somewhat accidentally—at least four fingers of Scotch. I looked at the glass critically for a split second, and then, like a tried-and-true leading man in a Western movie, drank it off in one deadpan toss. A little piece of business, I might well mention, that I record here with a rather distinct shudder. Granted that I was twenty-three, and that I may have been doing only what any red-blooded twenty-three-year-old simpleton would have done under similar circumstances. I don’t mean anything quite so simple as that. I mean that I am Not a Drinker, as the expression goes. On an ounce of whiskey, as a rule, I either get violently sick or I start scanning the room for unbelievers. On two ounces I’ve been known to pass out cold.
This was, however—by way of an unparalleled understatement—no ordinary day, and I remember that as I picked up the tray again and started to leave the kitchen, I felt none of the usual almost immediate metamorphic changes. There seemed to be an unprecedented degree of heat being generated in the subject’s stomach, but that was all.
In the living room, as I brought in the loaded tray, there were no auspicious changes in the deportment of my guests, beyond the revitalizing fact that the bride’s father’s uncle had rejoined the group. He was ensconced in my dead Boston bull’s old chair. His tiny legs were crossed, his hair was combed, his gravy stain was as arresting as ever, and—lo and behold—his cigar was lighted. We greeted each other even more extravagantly than usual, as though these intermittent separations were suddenly too long and unnecessary for either of us to bear with.
The Lieutenant was still over at the bookshelves. He stood turning the pages of a book he’d taken out, apparently engrossed in it. (I never did find out which book it was.) Mrs. Silsburn, looking considerably pulled together, even refreshed, with her pancake makeup, I thought, newly attended to, was seated on the couch now, in the corner of it farthest away from the bride’s father’s uncle. She was leafing through a magazine. “Oh, how lovely!” she said, in a party voice, as she sighted the tray I’d just put down on the coffee table. She smiled up at me convivially.
“I’ve put very little gin in it,” I lied as I began to stir the pitcher.
“It’s so lovely and cool in here now,” Mrs. Silsburn said. “May I ask you a question, incidentally?” With that, she put aside her magazine, got up, and crossed around the couch and over to the desk. She reached up and placed a fingertip on one of the photographs on the wall. “Who is this beautiful child?” she asked me. With the air-conditioner now smoothly and steadily in operation, and having had time to apply fresh makeup, she was no longer the wilted, timorous child who had stood in the hot sun outside Schrafft’s Seventy-ninth Street. She was addressing me now with all the brittle equipoise that had been at her disposal when I first jumped into the car, outside the bride’s grandmother’s house, when she asked me if I was someone named Dickie Briganza.
I left off stirring the pitcher of Collinses, and went around and over to her. She had fixed a lacquered fingernail on the photogra
ph of the 1929 cast of “It’s a Wise Child,” and on one child in particular. Seven of us were sitting around a circular table, a microphone in front of each child. “That’s the most beautiful child I’ve ever laid eyes on,” Mrs. Silsburn said. “You know who she looks a teeny bit like? Around the eyes and mouth?”
At about that point, some of the Scotch—roughly, a finger of it, I’d say—was beginning to affect me, and I very nearly answered, “Dickie Briganza,” but a certain cautionary impulse still prevailed. I nodded, and said the name of the motion-picture actress whom the Matron of Honor, earlier in the afternoon, had mentioned in connection with nine surgical stitches.
Mrs. Silsburn stared at me. “Was she on ‘It’s a Wise Child’?” she asked.
“For about two years, yes. God, yes. Under her own name, of course. Charlotte Mayhew.”
The Lieutenant was now behind me, at my right, looking up at the photograph. At the drop of Charlotte’s professional name, he had stepped over from the bookshelves to have a look.