Chapter XI: Part FOUR: Rondo (2)

"The cause, the pattern, the existence of it in animals and man, the physical laws and forms of the universe, and the instincts of living things that match those laws and forms. What's the difference between the laws of instinct--the great drives of life taken with the opposed drives that balance them and the harmony possible in a person who understands these--and other laws? The attraction and repulsion of electrical energy, for instance? We do not regard _them_ as 'mutually exclusive.' What are you going to say about a question like Schrodinger's? He shows that one fragment of one atom hitting another atom in a gene will change the nature of the resulting being. I'd add that the instincts may change, too. Schrodinger shows you that what we know of energy lies at the heart of what we know of form. You can also see that form lies at the heart of what we know of behavior and of consciousness. When they understand the laws of the energy in atoms--they'll probably have a brand-new parallel, like that of other natural laws, for instinctual laws. They may even have a potential new insight into instinct. For how can anybody who notices the perfect instinctual pattern that corresponds with every living form, and who sees these forms evolving in awareness down the aeons, doubt that the universe has purpose or wonder what its purpose is? Unfortunately, in this putrid day and age, new discoveries in many fields are military secrets--so we, the people, won't be told them."

"You sound extremely bitter about that."

"Bitter? Yes, I'm bitter, in a way. All my life I've devoted myself to following the inquiry into the nature of Nature. This pursuit has led me--by way of psychology--into finding out a great deal about what is popularly called the nature of God. But now, knowledge at the source is restricted, classified, forbidden, secret--to protect the damned atom bomb. My government, as a security measure, has cut off my inquiry into God, my power to extend my own religion, my equivalent of your faith, my access to truth. Perhaps I'd never even manage to persuade anybody that the time has come to connect instinct and energy by theory. But the _right_ that I hold most valuable has been taken from me. And from you. And from everybody--if they stopped to think. Freedom--that precious necessity--is _actually_ freedom for the mind. There is no other pure liberty. All other freedoms stem from intellectual freedom--but all others are qualified by the material, social, political, and spiritual desires of people. What we call liberty in America is the right to know and to change: to extend or limit this liberty for the sake of that advantage or because of that prejudice--and then to learn better and shift the position once again--and so on forever. That is all there is to liberty insofar as it concerns behavior. But when the behavior of the mind is circumscribed, liberty is dead in its one absolute sense. It is dead today. We live in a midnight imposed by fear--a time like all dark ages. Truth and learning have gone underground. I am forbidden to know any more. What I think might be centuries in advance of what common people are thinking. It is still--at least potentially--obsolete, or inadequate, in relation to what other men may know--that I am not allowed by my government to find out. Wouldn't you be bitter--or sad--if your church were shut up by the Congress, if you were forbidden to learn more about your God, and if you were obliged to confine even your thinking to bootlegged guesses?"

"It's a pretty remote argument," he said.

"Is it? Remote to destroy the source of freedom?"

"Would you have us tell the Soviets how to make a bomb?"

"Is that the question? They know how! You have been told and told and told that they know how and have known since the Smythe Report appeared. And even that's not the point. When it became evident that the people of the United States faced the alternatives of maintaining the freedom of knowledge--at the risk of atomic conflict--or of destroying liberty at the source to gain the dubious advantage of a few years' time--the people chose the phony safety of secrecy for a mere unknowable dozens of months. They were too dumb to see they had sold their birthright."

"What would you have done?"

I shrugged. "The hell with it! If we had understood science and if we had believed in freedom we would have been willing, the minute the problem appeared, to fight for both--because they're one. We would not have permitted any bleak tyranny to interfere with the world-wide course of knowledge and the existence of our freedom."

"You're asking a good deal."

"I ask nothing. I merely point out that the fear of holocaust has been made permanent by our fearful failure to act. Freedom throttled will be difficult to revive. The habit of intellectual tyranny is already seeping into the pores of a world destined to be more panicky each year until either freedom of knowledge is restored or the far more likely chaos ensues. After chaos will come the regimentation, by opportunists, of a world that will have lost its grip on liberty. We bought a little time at the cost of all the values our ancestors piled up for us in the ages. It is a cheapskate civilization."

The Reverend Socker Melton suddenly chuckled. He had, in the midst of at least mild anxiety, hit on some straw, some philosophical prop. "Don't take it so hard! You sound as if you felt responsible for all the woes of man!"

"Don't you?"

"Good Lord! Certainly not!"

"You are a man, though."

"Just one man."

"Just one. But if you had access to instinct, you might realize that each one, to the degree he is aware, is all men."

"A cold, distant, impersonal idea, I must say!"

"The hell it is! The idea I'm putting forward involves being and acting what instinct orders in us--and the constant sense of that process. It relates me to every man--to every king and statesman and politician and movie queen and carpenter and garbage man--to every creature that walks and flies and swims and crawls--and to the sea, the setting sun, the stars. I see them all and I find in them the response that rises from being related to them. I consider them in my cortex--but my God consists also in _feeling_ them. I do not stumble about in schisms and dichotomies. An infinite number of aspects of life which seem antithetical to most people seem merely two manifestations of one awareness to me. You're the kind of fellow, reverend, I bet, who goes around saying, like Will Rogers, that you never met a man you didn't like. I can buy that--and still know, besides, I never met a man I did like altogether, including me. I can say, there was never a moment when I altogether liked myself, or disliked. Warm sentiments pervade my coldest thoughts. Heaven and hell are here in this one room.

"There--you see--we get back to the original sin, again: the static standards that must be maintained if the ego is to be kept intact. _This_ is evil--_that_ is good; he is saved--she is damned; my opinion is right--yours is wrong; my faith makes me perfect and whole--yours, meaning all the other faiths on earth, is imperfect and fragmentary at best. For why? Simply because my faith is mine. Me, me, me. I, I, I. That is what happens--that is the tragifarce--of taking instinct away from the brain and being entire, and investing the gigantic force of it in the little front lobes. From then on--'I have faith--and I, alone, am right. I, alone, am God.'

"Well, in my book, I am God, padre, and so are you, and so are all the people on the street down there, and so is the heat wave, and so are scorpions and rattlesnakes and botuli bacilli, and so are the intergalactic clouds. _One thing._ It is not necessary for me to elevate myself above these--to commit original sin by defining that unity in terms of my fatuous self-admiration. I do not have to give my days, my doings and my dreams to the establishment of the general illusion that I am no animal--whether by fasts or feasts, by fish on Friday or by Easter celebrations, by shutting the door when I tend my body, and especially, dominie, I do not have to pretend the procreative urge in me is superior to that same urge in cosmos--by delimiting it, stylizing it, codifying it, and hiding it wherever and whenever it must have expression. Chastity, celibacy, virginity, purity--these are the lowest terms of original sin. These condemn the animal to a vile psychological and social beastliness by forcing him to pretend he is not the unashamed pure animal that he is."

"You want free love--promiscuity--no moral ethic--"

"Nonsense! I want to build our sex behavior around what is learned to be true nature of man--to establish an aesthetic from instinct--not from the instinct-perverting demands of ego and superego.'

"And what would it be?"

"Loving, for a start."

He moved impatiently. "Spiritual love--"

"I mean the same. What spiritual love has man today? What friendliness toward other men? What regard for Nature? Man fears. Man hates. And as to Nature--he is the hostile parasite on the whole of it, and calls himself its conqueror. Let him conquer his ego--and then--if he should prove to be--in some almost unimaginable era of clean passion--capable of as wide a variety of ways of loving as he is capable of simulating and extending the other faculties of other species--he will have to build his aesthetics around that. Love takes two people. If neither is injured, made less, turned hateful, rendered afraid--if the purposes of instinct, become aware and consciously directed, are not finally frustrated--no specific behavior will offend this dim-seen Nature. Shameless awareness lies far nearer to a way for mankind to grow loving than any so-called love of a Jesus which requires a man to think he is impure, vile, inevitably born a sinner, inferior physically to all other living things in Eden's Garden--and this, so he may publicly proclaim himself and secretly imagine himself to be their 'spiritual' superior. Isn't that clear?"

"Sometimes I follow you--sometimes not."

"Look at it this way. You say you've chucked out heaven and hell--or hell, anyhow--you modern religionists. I say, you cannot do so. I say--if your God is a god of what you consider pure goodness--you have to have a devil to balance Him. I say that all the saints and holy men and all the simple, human people who have managed, by one religion or another, to get some sense of the integration of their instincts, have done it because the religions did give them a semantic for instinct--a heaven-hell formulation of their nonverbal impulses--a yang-and-yin for Christianity, so to speak--or a Jehovah-Satan for Taoism. Take that away--and you take away all opportunity for the religious--the instinctual--experience. You produce a bunch of gassy bounders who--since hellishness is everywhere but since they've discarded hell--confuse the goodness of the species with goods, good health, prosperity, long life--things that may be possible devils for the species. They lose sight of the inwardness of the nongood and see evil as a material fact, entirely. Modern devil-seekers--men like Sheen, like Niebuhr--are closer to the mechanics of human nature than these idiot modern congregations that throw out Satan and his kingdom and as a result are condemned to evil behavior because they have made themselves blind to evil's source. Closer--but still not very damn close."

"What, then, is your criterion of good and evil?"

"I could give you dozens. I give you a sample. When you consider what you are doing, or what any man does, or any group of men--ask yourself whether that particular deed will benefit or injure the chances of future generations to evolve toward increased consciousness."

"Great heavens, man--most _preachers_ wouldn't be able to decide a question like that! Let alone plain folks!"

"Sure. Did I say that preachers--let alone plain folks--or any handful of contemporary men--knew what they were doing? Or why? Or what anybody else was doing? They don't know. So they go on by instinct--the statistical sweep of impulses that lop off nations as readily as the wind lops trees. I said we _could_ know. I said we weren't trying. Instinct is the immortal property--the urge in behalf of the future. Ants are doing what they can for ants, bees for bees, fish for fish--without much individual hesitation. But not men for men. Men today are trying either to get themselves into heaven, or to make a mint, or just to get by, as individuals. The future, to most men, means their own here--or their reward in heaven. To instinct, the future means the future of awareness, and men are but its most conspicuous exponents here and now. If we began to plan life for our progeny--what a world!"

I was getting sick of the guy. Sick, rather, of myself--my endless efforts to put a simple idea in some form that would perfuse skulls hardened against it--sometimes even by what they imagined to be open-mindedness. "Look. You believe, don't you, that you could sit down and write out a mode of behavior satisfactory for man to the end of time?"

"I could take a crack at it," he said.

"Well--I don't. I believe that future men should be left free to make up their minds without consulting any bulls and fiats from me. I get some sense of orientation, a _raison d'être_, from giving thought to the rights of the species now and to come. Not saving adult souls for present bliss--or spiritual cradle-snatching, either--but forwarding the whole, rolling business of biology on this sin-drenched planet, is the fun--for me."

"You are totally pessimistic about the present scene, apparently."

I looked out the window. It was getting on toward sunset. "Excepting for a few physical technologies--are we so different from our human predecessors? Crueler, it may be. And weaker physically, perhaps. Otherwise--not any different. And has there ever been a time in our past history when optimism for even one era or one society was warranted? History says not--the record. It is hardly an encouraging fact."

"No hope, then? No fringe of lining on the cloud--?"

"I didn't say that. The record has at least--continued. I hardly expect mankind to be blotted out. I just don't have a very high opinion of man's present works in relation to what he really is, desperately needs, and someday could be. There are compensations. I give you one. We won't be missed."

He began putting on his dickey. It plastered itself against his sodden undershirt. He ran his thick fingers around his collar.

"You're a hard person, Phil."

"I am a very gentle guy, Socker. The men of the earth are hard. They have confused another instinct here--and think to be hard is estimable."

"Somehow, I believe you're all wrong."

"Of course. So much of what I think is the opposite of what you do. And then--I believe a lot that Jesus said. While you don't believe any of it at all."

He flushed. "I'm not sure I'd want you to talk to my young people."

"You relieve me. And you've been very decent to listen--yourself."

"Oh," he said, fairly jovially, now that he was about to be gone, "I listen to them all. Crackpots, nuts, psychiatrists, anybody--"

"Listen to yourself, once."

Suddenly he was sore. "Who in hell do you think you are?"

"Somebody," I answered, "whose religion doesn't insist it knows all about all truth for all people for all time. Somebody who isn't a stuck-up, luxury-struck, fatuous, patronizing jerk in a black vest who carries around God's credit card in his hip pocket and keeps in the collection-plate business by holding smut sessions in the church gymnasium. Now, for God's sake, get out of here and let me work."

He stood at the door. He smiled again. "I'm sorry for you, Phil. Truly sorry. You're a brave man--in a way--and so arrogantly blind."

"Sure. We all are."

"Do me one favor?"

"Do me one. Cross the hall--poke the bell--"

"Pray."

"You pray. Wear holes in the sky. Tell God you're coming, soon. And tell Him I am, too, while you're at it. See you there!"

When he was gone, I felt washed out.

Why had I bothered to try something that couldn't come off? Didn't I know the work I'd done--the hells I'd gone through to get my Inkling--would never tempt that fat bastard past the first six steps of a million rugged miles?

Houses on sand paper roofs putty pillars no brains

What is conscience but fealty to truth?

What man can have good conscience if his beliefs conceal the smallest truth--or especially if they conceal himself from himself?

With honesty toward science--and toward the inner sciences--man and ethic are one.

Ethos is, indeed, what man has, and is.

Come off it, Wylie! The serial!

4

But I couldn't work, any longer.

I filled my tub, instead, with the coolest water in the tap.

_You_ pray.

He would, too.

A lugubrious joke uttered itself within me.

Father, bring insight to this sincerely mistaken man--

(Taking the words out of my mouth: you right--me wrong)

Or,

Spare us the ineffable harm of the intellectual, the Antichrist--

(All who oppose us oppose Jesus--but didn't He say, In my house are many mansions?)

Prince of Peace! (Peace, in a pig's eye.) A mighty fortress. Onward, Christian soldiers. The Son of God Goes Forth to War. He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword-- All the clayfaces, upturned to the ceramic excellence of the dominie Let us pray: Father, forgive them-- The hypocrites!

Perhaps some--the widow kneeling in the stained-glass effulgence--clutching her mite--debating love against appetite--a possibly hungrier widow against bread and her own belly--she might see God there--

Our organ cost thirty-six thousand dollars and has five keyboards

God,

we migrants, traveling with galaxy, sun, slogging sphere, geological budge of continent, movement of races, American transportation, feet,

we on our journey-forever in time-space are sure as hell, unmistakably, definitely--as the saying goes-- en route. Hence, I deem the status quo of ego unimaginative. Is this a sin? A sin to hunger for more Light? Or is it goodness

to reject the surrounding brilliance--call it The Dark--in order to make personal hay with the pewee flashlight of Episcopalianism.

Judge not that ye be not judged, Wylie, He said. Then shall I sit like a Buchmanite on the john waiting for guidance? And there shall be laughter in heaven They omit that chapter. Anger is their meat: Gabriel's pinfeathers, torn out by handfuls. Pluck yourself a quill, pal. Make yourself a pen from a seraphim. Remind them they should enjoy it. Nature, that's all, simply telling us to fall In love. And that's why Chinks do it-- Japs do it--

I got out of the tub, scattering water, and turned the radio loud.

Let me communicate again in the idiom of man-- my conceit has suddenly tired me out. I lay forlornly in the water, the water browned off by rust in the Astolat's pipes, the waters of life, but not much left. Sadness encompassed me. The sadness of little children dying by merely growing up

of mature men turning childish again
of American trees
of the disinherited
the stood-up
the disappointed
the deserted
the uncomprehended
of the walking wounded
I hate to see
that evening sun go down
The love songs of the world are sad.

The old English ballads quaintly drone--murder and rue.

Gypsy violins have wet the eyes of European centuries.

Italians shake their opera houses with love's grief.

Don Juan dies young--and Romeo grows old.

The Hindu on his fetid riverbank throbs to the guillotine moon.

The damsel in Xanadu may be different--it doesn't go on to say.

But--

Frankie shot Johnny.

We Americans have had to borrow rue from our slaves; they have enough, and to spare

We call it blues--and the origin's appropriate to us.

The child in his cradle listens to locomotives talking themselves up the long grades, bidding the counties farewell in the night.

Ours is a civilization of pistons, motors turning, electrons peppering filaments into light. We are

a racy people. We got rhythm.

The tempo of our love and the momentum of our woe are one.

Our exultation soars with edifices that scrape the sky--then falters underground where we have iron rivers to carry the people home--and there is no home when they get there but only the percussant streets again, the shooting tabernacles, the radiance, the tumult in time.

We sleep. Morning comes.

In the mammoth sunshine of our cities we remember our blues the way the slaves remember.

No heart, no intellect, but we got rhythm! Look at the towers! Look at the sky--that's blue, too, baby!

The streets are straight, the blocks are square, the intersections regular. The shadows are geometry--they dive one hundred stories. It is a gameboard, ruled and sharp by transit here and plummet there, concrete and rectilinear.

This we call traffic. It is the way we move on the board.

Trucks and taxis playing fast chess to the beat of the Christmas-colored signals. We are a great, free, democratic people whose trains run approximately on time. In this civilization, eight-o'clock children make skip-ropes of rainbows and slide down the balustrades of sunbeams. One contraction of our chamber of commerce ventricle will thrust ten thousand tons of ore from Duluth to Pittsburgh.

We rate fireflies in kilowatts.

But we hate to see the evening sun go down.

Paul Bunyan's ox was blue. So--our hills, the evening in our thoroughfares, our dying lips.

Hence, when we talk about rue in these United States, brother, we do it in brass! We put

pistons and kilowatts in our lament, grief, sorrow, lostness!

We take a breath of our American air and we-the-people burst.

That's blues!

The mood would have led to God knows what charade in the auditorium of my senses--the multitude of watching, listening "mes" reacting in all their various ways at once; it might have become a ululation you could have heard on Mars--or frozen as if the head of Medusa had come on stage--or, by that third unanimity, blazed into laughter, revolted ecstasy at ecstasy itself.

The singing woman stopped. There was a knock.

I yelled, "Come in!" relieved--thinking it might be Paul.

For more than an hour, now, worry over him had cankered me.

(Do you imagine I tell you all that happens, here? I nearly would if I could--it is not that. But the compendium of the eighteen simultaneous trains of consciousness (the intrications and alternations and separate chains that run in a man's mind and that you could see in your own if you tried) would, in a weekend fill up all the books a man might read in his life. I give you hardly the essence, my friend--but only a sample of the aggregate--a biopsy of its own sort.)

A knock, then.

I realized it was the door in the bedroom.

"May I come in?" Yvonne asked.

"Certainly."

"Your radio's positively shaking the building!"

"Turn it down. I hope you won't mind I'm in here--slightly naked."

"Oh!" I couldn't see her, or she, me. The rooms waited because she had stopped. "_Slightly!_"

"Barely, if you prefer. Barely nude. Covered in a meager depth with rusty water. Concealed in soapy murk, besides. And, in addition, protected by scum. It's hard water, you know--Croton."

Presently the radio went down and out--a moron throttled in midspiel. "I'll sit in here," she said.

"Any place you like."

"I'll bet! I'll bet if you heard me coming--you'd grab the shower curtain--"

"Flowers for tonight?"

"You certainly have a long, mean memory, Philip Wylie! So that's just what I do bet!" She was approaching. She exclaimed, "What do you mean--soapsuds?"

"An invention for the Puritan mind. A burlesque. After all--!"

"After all--what?"

"In a better world--but skip it."

She did. "You certainly know how to upset people," she said.

"Now what?"

"After lunch--I phoned Gwen--to come over this evening."

"So?"

"And after that--I began to feel jittery."

"And now?"

"I came over here."

"To ask me how to feel? Ye Gods! I recommended having your own feelings--and I thought you were catching on."

She was wearing a faintly rose-pink frock of some shiny, translucent material. You could see the garments beneath--you were supposed to see. There were two--and the lace hem of the lower one showed below the blush of her dress--as it was supposed to show. She looked like a kid.

"I've got too many feelings at once." She walked toward the window, where I could now see her only by leaning a little. "I almost called Rol this afternoon."

I said nothing.

"Did you hear me?"

"Yeah. Why didn't you?"

"Because I wanted to see Gwen again. Once more, anyway."

"Suppose she couldn't have come?"

"That's unkind of you!"

"Would a friend have done as well?"

She didn't answer for so long that I leaned out again. She was swinging the cord of the window blind. The last debilitated glow in the sky made her look like a flower at twilight--like a single tinted object in a black-and-white photograph of a room. She caught sight of me.

"Maybe even better," she said falteringly. "What sort of person am I!"

"The sort that a person is, when a person begins finding out what sort."

"But not the final discovery?" The turn and set of her head was eager. I couldn't see her eyes.

"Who is?"

"You mean--you think everybody--?"

"Yes," I said, swirling the water around. "Everybody. Most--when they're young. Most grow out of it. Some--hardly notice it. Some have a minor case of it all their lives. To others--it's an intermittent hint--a leftover that crops up as a suggestion, not a fact. Lots--are carried off stage for good by it. The great majority insist they have no such feelings--never could and never did and never will. The result of that--"

"Is what?"

"Look out the window and see the crummy mess yourself, honey! If you'll toss me my dressing gown--from the closet--"

"I'm scared," she said, when I came into the sitting room.

I kissed her once.

She said, "Again."

So I really kissed her.

She stepped away, afterwhile. "I'm not so scared now."

"It's good for you to be."

"Why is it?"

"Because you so seldom knew you were. You spent your time trying to frighten other people--instead of knowing."

"Not frighten. Impress, maybe--"

"Another word for the same dirty deed: convince them of your inherent and cultivated superiority. Whenever people achieve that--they also convince others of their relative inferiority. And when that conviction comes from a false estimate of the situation--believe me, it's upsetting. Frightening is the realer word."

"Which implies that I'm not superior to anybody in any way."

"Check."

She stood there, looking at me through the murk. "Not even--prettier?"

"What's prettiness? The power to attract. If you were a genuine, all-around, Grade-A woman--you'd have the power to attract, without trying to impress a soul. As a pretty girl--you're not superior to a hundred thousand others--and inferior to tens of thousands."

"At least," she murmured, "I'm trying."

"Are you?"

"Am I not?"

"Who can really tell but you? For all I know, Yvonne, you may just be indulging in some new paroxysm of the spoiled rich matron."

"I did want to call Rol, though."

"Sure. When you had the jitters. Flight, maybe."

"Then do you think I ought to wallow in myself?"

"It's your word--wallow."

She was silent for quite a while. Finally she drew a breath and stretched voluptuously. "Did you ever feel as if you'd like to seduce everybody you saw?"

"Just the good-looking women."

"Are you trying to impress me--now?"

I laughed. "Guess so."

"Couldn't I begin with you?"

I shook my head. "You don't know yourself well enough to suit me, at the moment. And--anyway--I'm booked."

"A date!"

"A wife."

She considered that at length, too. "Gwen said last night she knew from the minute she saw you that you wanted company, but not particularly a pretty girl. Just a person. She said she told you all those things about herself, hoping--"

"They had their little effect," I reminded Yvonne.

"Your Ricky," she answered, "must be some gal."

"She's my gal--which makes her some gal to me."

The door knocked again--the front door, this time.

It was a box of flowers--yellow roses, again.

For a minute I thought the manager had slipped up.

There wasn't any card.

Then I knew.

That, I thought, was what it meant: a perception of the nature of other people.

Flowers are for the living, and I'm fond of yellow roses.

They'd be no use to me, dead. So I had these now. To remind me that the idea of flowers for the living, though seldom put in practice, describes the immortal essence.

Except for taking Paul off my back awhile, there wasn't anything else that Dave could do or say. But this, he did and said.

I stood there, rooted with the comprehension.

Yvonne fumbled womanishly through the stems.

"Who sent them?"

"A guy I know."

She gasped. "Guy!"

"It's the grown-up manifestation."

"Manifestation of what?"

"Put them in water while I get dressed," I said. "Of something you might learn--someday."

5

We had dinner together in the Knight's Bar.

She with one white orchid.

Jay received us with just the right look of appreciation for her--just the right glimmer for me. He was sorry such things happened, but he admired my taste.

The hotel staff, I knew, was by now vigorously discussing the matter. The girls who ran the elevators, the telephone girls, the room-service checkers, the cashiers, the waiters, the bellboys. Pros and cons:

He's an artist--and they're different. She's just another of those rich wives on the make. I bet you wish you were one, yourself, you hypocrite! Poor Mrs. Wylie! She's a nice, quiet girl and I'll bet he swept her off her feet--because that's what newspapermen and writers all are: chasers. Those quiet ones knock over more husbands than all the flashy jobs in town! We all do, if we get a chance. I don't blame either of them. I think both of them are stinkers. Whose business is it?

Up with the dishes, down with the cars, in with the stapler, out with the phone plugs--and on and on while typewriters paused and adding machines stood briefly still. Romance or scandal--take your choice. And never a sign to me but Jay's gleam--never a future syllable to Ricky: a conspiracy of employed custom, reinforced by a small world of reciprocal liking.

I wondered what they'd think if they knew the truth.

But, then, I always wonder that.

I'm the silly jackass who does.

Look--waiters, busboys, and you over there in the cage with the pointed auburn haircut and the long eyelashes and the tight dress--here we have a handsome young woman who has set about, by means not nearly so rare or unorthodox as you pretend among yourselves--to find one or two universals, or fundamentals, which are not in the book.

What book?

Not in any?

Oh--yes--those banned novels. And those mournful characters who thought only of their pale, poetical brows plunging into the Pit, the lonely well. Or sordid sun-tan oil on Jackson's vulgar beach.

When will the poets get the censors off _their_ backs, too--and write like men, for a change? God's no fairy, or Satan, either.

What foul compulsion is this--that every page of the Tragedy must itself be mournful stuff, sinister, or sick?

Farce, instead!

Does the tragic deer, the beautiful, the doomed, imbue his every poolside hour with dolorous contemplation? Must all the activities of the woodchuck be regarded as dismal? To write the stark terms of our essence on every breath and sentence of the moment is to be the own advocate of death, the white bones himself, and to overlook the splendor with such eyeless concentration that the poem becomes a joke on the poet.

I flirted with Yvonne--told her stories of Paris and Hollywood and Miami Beach--held her hand--all, in chivalrous camouflage.

Paul came at last.

I hardly needed to see the stoop--the broken reach to push open the doors that enclosed our cold air cube--to know that, between us, we had not lifted his oppression. For, when it is succubus that's lost, incubus perforce remains.

He looked disapprovingly at Yvonne. "Mrs. Prentiss, this is my nephew," I said. "Paul Wilson."

"Hello, Mrs. Prentiss." He turned from her. "I'll barge along, Phil. I thought you'd be alone."

"Oh, hell, sit."

"Really--it's not possible!" His ardent features were emphasized by pallor--and shooting about on his face, besides.

"Sit," I said, "and eat--or otherwise you'll force me to leave the lady and go with you. She has a date after dinner, anyhow."

He groaned and sat down--nipping the menu from the waiter's hands roughly. "No news."

"Tough." I turned to Yvonne. "His--fiancée--is lost."

"How awful! What happened?"

Paul glared at me for a moment. "Your friend Dave," he finally said, in a tone more polite than his facial expression, "did all he could. Got an agency looking. Sent a fellow over to stay in my--our--place. We hunted up some more friends of hers--that Dave got track of--and they told us of others. We've been seeing them. It isn't much fun."

"Why not quit, then? Wait for her?"

"If all she did was walk out," Yvonne agreed, "that's absolutely the only thing to do. Sit tight. Have a good time. Suppose she finds out you're apparently raising heaven and earth to locate her? She'll just hide in a safe spot and enjoy things that much more."

Paul turned to her. "Are you serious?"

Yvonne was working on him--signaling interest with her gray eyes (they had come considerably alive)--tossing the organized gold shower of her hair--moving herself about in such a way as to emphasize her sex. "It's a darned good generalization. But what happened?"

I wondered how he'd put it.

"Marcia--" he began, and described her. We were made to see a woman somewhere between Elaine-the-Fair and Florence Nightingale. "I was just about licked when we met! I'm a physicist--work on atomic energy. She made me live--filled me with new feelings--taught me what love could mean to a man like me. Then--we scrapped. Over nearly nothing!" His eyes moved reproachfully to me--then back, confidingly, to the girl. She was listening, nodding with understanding, frowning with sympathy, and keeping her red lips parted the whole time. "We scrapped. She decided we weren't suited to each other. So she left me. That was--yesterday. I'd give everything I own to get her back! Everything I own--and am!"

"What exactly did you fight about?" Yvonne asked.

Paul's expression became vague. "Never mind. It wasn't important."

"Are you sure?"

He gave both of us a dark, defiant stare. "Yes."

"Then," Yvonne said, "I'm right. You mustn't continue this search operation. You should wait. And entertain yourself. Let her do the coming back--since she ran away."

It was the first hope he had felt. "I wish I could believe it would work."

"Take my word for it. I'm a woman."

"And how," he asked scornfully, "do I start this gay, forgetful act?"

"With me," Yvonne said. "I'll break my date. You can escort me to the most conspicuous place in town."

"You?" Paul took his first careful look at her. She undoubtedly satisfied him. But he was not altogether persuaded of the plan. It represented merely a new idea--and, as such, offered a small unexpected degree of optimism.

"I'd like it," Yvonne went on. "For a lot of reasons. I wasn't sure I wanted to keep my date. I think you're nice--even if terribly foolish. And Phil bailed me out of a tizzy the other night--so I could hardly do less for a nephew of his."

"What if I did it--acted blasé as hell--and Marcia was just relieved when she found out?"

"Then, Paul," she said, "nothing would have helped, anyhow."

You could see him grinding his jaw down on that one. He wanted Marcia. He was determined to get her back. Into what he regarded as his love had gone a good deal of unrecognized pride. Furthermore, he had undertaken to recover her by what he thought of as logical steps--ignoring his own hysterical condition--and unaware that his brand of logic did not, would not, could not apply in such a situation.

Yvonne knew that to interest men you talked about them. She started, indirectly. "Is he a good scientist?" she asked me.

"Terrific!"

I told her of his achievements in school; of his appointment. "He didn't quite make Saipan for the first bomb drop. But he was at Bikini. And he commutes to Eniwetok."

"I guess they're born," she said.

Paul took that up. "Born, hell! Made. You have the urge to study something. You happen to get going on math. In the end, you're a physicist."

I argued that. I thought an argument would change the subject from Marcia--on whom he'd concentrated ever since he'd brought up her name on Thursday. "Aptitude's hereditary. You can't take ten kids--even with high IQs--and turn out ten mathematicians."

"I say you can!"

"So does the Soviet. Marx, Lenin, Stalin. Communism depends on the theory that, given the right environment, people will turn out the way you want--since they start with equal possibilities. If that isn't so--communism doesn't make sense."

"It's silly on the face of it," Yvonne said.

"The geneticists think the communist idea is silly," I agreed. "In fact, they know so."

Paul said, "Nuts."

"Do you," I asked, "know anything about genetics? Are you _au courant_ in this particular affair?"

"No. But--"

"Then stay out of it. Good God! Isn't that like a damned scientist?" I turned to Yvonne. "He'd laugh at me if I tried to argue with him about mesons. He's been briefed to the eyeballs on that. But he'll argue with anybody about genes and chromosomes and heredity--because he hasn't bothered to learn the known facts!"

Paul didn't rise. "Okay!" he said. "Okay. So communism is based on that fallacy. Others, too. We have a few fallacies to contend with, in this country."

"Sure," I agreed. "I pointed one out to the Reverend Socker Melton, who called on me today. Old friend of pop's. Pointed out that, if we understood the importance of our celebrated liberty--we'd have been ready and willing to go to war the instant we realized that the Soviet holdout was going to force a restriction of knowledge. So what? Do our faults entitle other people to faults? Or vice versa? That's merely the maudlin attitude of Joe Doaks!"

Paul looked at the girl with a mock sneer. "Phil hates the common man."

"Hate, hell. I'm about the last friend he has left. Nearly the only one who refuses to boost common man exclusively, so as to exploit him--consciously or unconsciously. I'm one of the few who still care enough about poor old common man to criticize him. Everybody else is a planner or a mere booster--presidential candidates--Stalin--Hitler--just rah-rah-for-humanity boys. I'm still trying to save common man from himself."

"You chill me," Paul said sarcastically.

"Chill you?" I would have picked up any lead to keep this bicker alight. It wasn't about Marcia.

He spoke to Yvonne. "Phil is the champion lost-cause defender of them all. Whatever he's for is sure to fail. He has the mildew-touch. My childhood is pockmarked with embarrassments that came from having people read his stuff--or having them barge over to see us and tell my dad that his brother-in-law was off the beam again."

"I can imagine," Yvonne said.

"Phil was out there hollering for rearmament in the thick of the old pacifist days. He was an air-power promoter when the brass was folding 'em in like eggs in puddings. He predicted we'd have to fight the Soviet a dozen years ago--and our boys immediately chummed up with Stalin. He went roaring out for intervention in the last war--bucking isolationists and practically cracking his insides when England and France went in without us. The minute the bomb was shot off--he started battling military control and telling the folks the mess we'd be in--and are in--right now. Once--down in Miami--where he lives--he started a big health crusade. It's a prize pesthole. But that collapsed in his face, too. What he says is usually right--but what happens always makes him look like a louse. If he's championing common man now--well--draw your own conclusion." He winked at me.

"I'm championing the Better Man, these days," I said. "Breeding the Better Common Man. Another noble prospect doomed to fail in our time."

Paul snorted. "I'm for training them better. Education."

"And I'm not against education--either. But you can't polish a brick. You can't make--"

"Watch it! The chemists can make anything out of anything."

"Take me," I said. "All my life, I've hired somebody to give me lessons in something."

Paul grinned a little. "You _are_ a hard case. We admit that."

Yvonne laughed. "If he means dancing lessons--he's done all right."

"People," I plugged along on the new topic, "ought to summarize their professional, postschool lessons and see what they've learned. Consider me. In New York, I once took boxing lessons. Can't box for a damn. In Hollywood, I hired a strong man to live with me and teach me to lift weights. I got all beefed up--and then got sick in Poland--and the beef evaporated. I took lessons on the piano accordion for a year, once. I've also taken piano lessons, saxophone lessons, and mandolin lessons. Ukelele, too, in 1919. Can't play a note. Took golf lessons for years. The last few times I played, I pushed 110. Took tennis lessons. Haven't hit a ball over the net in twenty years. Got a whiz to teach me ping-pong--for five bucks a throw. Can't return the serves of children. Studied a couple of foreign languages, besides the ones in school and college. Can't even say, 'Good morning' and 'Thanks' in 'em, any more. And horses! Great God! Hired cowboys to murder me every day, all day, for six months. Went to a dude ranch in the Carolinas and got briefed in eastern saddles. Hundreds of saddle-hours. And what? Hate to ride. Never do, if I can avoid it. Is that all? I haven't begun! Hired some Olympic champs to give me fancy diving lessons. Got going good--and found out in a couple of years I was slowing up--couldn't snap around any more. Had to quit that. Spent a lot of time in the North Woods. Had an Indian for a guide. Learned to stalk game. Learned to shoot--taught by experts. Can't hit a barn. Don't enjoy hunting. Spent a fortune deep-sea fishing. Don't even rate as an 'Expert' at my club. Bridge lessons--God Almighty, the time I've fussed with that! And what? Some days I'm fair--and some days I can't remember through jacks--which is how I was when I began! Learned once to identify all the flora and fauna in the Adirondacks. Moved away and never seen the region since. Couldn't tell bluebells from burdock. Well, maybe those. But--"

"Is all that the truth?" Yvonne asked doubtfully.

Paul chortled. "The funny thing is, it is! Old Phil's spent his whole life trying to discover something he could learn!"

"I draw myself up," I answered, "with dignity. As a modern gentleman, I am the complete sciolist. The most-smattered man you'll meet in your lifetime. There is almost nothing that I'm not slightly versed in and pretty poor at. Why--I even took archery lessons, once. Got second prize in Palm Springs--"

"Good heavens!" she said.

"I gave him some lessons in quantum theory, myself," Paul continued. "Rotten student. Wants to know the final formulation and what it means--and detests to brush up his calculus first. He can do magic tricks, too--earned his high school pin money that way. He used to spin ropes--jump through 'em. When I was a very small kid, I looked forward to seeing him. Like a one-man circus. Then I caught on--at about four years old. Uncle Phil was in kindergarten in about every subject there was. Never got any farther. Just took different primary courses every year."

"In a minute," I said, "I'll leave you guys to your libel and go back to my serial. Somebody taught me how to write fiction, along there someplace--"

Paul grinned and said, "_Touché_--a little."

I felt better than I had all weekend. Paul surely would calm down with Yvonne. And she wasn't going to loiter with Gwen that evening.

It left me with nothing to worry about except a no longer very sore spot in my throat--and with no emotion to grapple--except a feeling of being lonelier than God.

I went back to my room and turned the lights on bright and sat down and looked at the roses Dave had sent.

They were my flowers-for-the-living and, being alive, they should be appreciated.

There they stood--with lighter green stems and leaves than most roses and perilous, pale-green thorns. The blooms weren't quite full blown, in spite of the heat, and they were as large as any I'd ever seen--as long as my fingers. The many lamps in the room highlighted the curved outer edges of the flowers and left only the deep, inner shadows. The petals were as voluptuous as a woman's skin; they seemed to glow, like an aniline dye in ultraviolet rays. A slightly sharp perfume filled the room--a mnemonic of things that could not be materialized, of tea roses in childhood gardens and people who had been nice to you and died a long time ago. There they stood--stiff and radiant and hopelessly beautiful.

I let myself feel them--feel them the way you let yourself feel when the concert hall goes dark and the baton makes its first, swift oval.

They came from hothouses.

I thought of gardens.

All the gardens I had made or cared about.

Roses of my own, on carefully pruned canes standing in New England mulch. Rented roses on rose trees in Hollywood. I thought of sweet peas--fragrant rainbows along old fences. Of delphiniums--hybrids taller than my head, rockets frozen at the climax of blue burst. Lilies and phlox and poppies. I thought of annuals--of planting the grains, setting out the frail seedlings--and walking the later carpet--a hundred styles of color: zinnias and marigolds and asters, verbenas and lavender, sweet William and candytuft and pansies, nasturtiums, forget-me-nots and primroses. I thought of foxglove, too, and Canterbury bells. For a long time, of hollyhocks regimented against white clapboard--red, mauve, yellow, pink, purple, orange. Then I thought of sunflowers growing like Jack's beanstalk. Spring flowers and the years I'd spent changing a steep rise of field into a rock garden, plowing, bulldozing, wading in a cold brook to collect the great, flat stones, trucking them home, embedding them one by one in the slope--on aromatic rainy days, in the sweet spring sun, and in the hard dirt of October. A wall here, steps there, an outcrop yonder, and a place for a pool below.

Then the little hill opened into memory's bloom of crocus and narcissus, daffodil, tulip, hyacinth and scilla, the creams and livid whites, pale yellows and money-gold hues, and the many blues of springtime, bright, pastel, lilac. The bells and stars and cups--and the spring scent that is the honeyed promise of summer coming.

Next, I thought of the woodland flowers--flowers before men found them. The precious arbutus, inexhaustible spring beauties, violets, the anemones, the lady-slippers, bloodroot, showy orchis standing in a wet glade beside a moss-shawled log, and pitcher plants--red rubber flowers on the sphagnum belly of weird bog. All summer long the rues and cardinal flowers and gentians; ferns--goldenrod, when the clear air cooled--when night's sky throbbed with wings and carried to earth the enthusiastic, strange twitter of migration.

I, too, migrated.

I came to my other home in Florida--the crashing flowers, the trees bigger than houses and bright as a florist's potted plants: poinciana, bauhinia, spathodia, jacaranda. Extravagant vines--alamanda, yellow as these roses, trumpet flowers as orange as Mexico's sunsets, pandoreas, solandras, and the holy, nepenthic stephanotis. Jasmine. Glade hammocks with orchids blooming on stumps like swarms of sucking butterflies--great white wading birds watching and vultures pinned above in the blue, cloud-dappled sky.

Brief glory of flower-upholstered deserts.

Alpine flowers in the high, thin, whimpering air with near snow.

And trees. Great God, the trees! It was, taken by itself, a many lifetimes. All good. All beautiful.

A great magic given to the modern man who thought of beauty never. Or who thought beauty was a ship's engine, or the line of high ferroconcrete, or the color scheme of a porch, or--adoring Christ forgive us, a new car! Something _he_ made, anyhow.

This was some of my lives.

Ricky had shared a number of them with me--created and divided the hours and days in the years of the flowers.

Why should I wonder concerning anything, who knew and loved flowers like this--why not, in the continual floral celebrations, take all content from marvel itself?

Men missed it, most of them.

Generals detailed insensate GIs to set square borders of ageratum around the headquarters lawn.

Statesmen wore bachelor's-buttons into their deadlocks. Or maybe carnations.

Dowagers and whores--cattleyas: spilled on avid breasts and icy shoulders.

Millionaires decreed. Gardeners dug. Who looked--who saw?

Business executives had something sent up for the office, daily, and never noticed the color or knew the name. Flowers executed and embalmed to add their priceless prestige to dirty bucks.

Schoolboys planted beans and watched the halved cotyledons ascend. Then grew and prospered and spent their lives sawing women in half.

At last, tired relatives recriminated while they embedded melancholy metal pots in the green grittiness of graves.

Who cherished?

Who left them alone in the forest?

Who else--like Ricky--knew each plant to be an individual?

I put a call through.

"Hello, darling," said her clear voice.

Oh, look--love--we've had--centuries together--so beautiful, so various--people, yes--each other, yes--the topaz mornings and the amorous unsleepiness--the vague rainy Thursday afternoons--the incandescent, rose-petal you--the touching--we've had--places--Havana, for instance--this vaulting steel town--but also flowers, dear. I was thinking how long flowers really lasted. Surely, you won't mind, that the end is here? After entire histories of evolution shared by just the two of us? I knew you wouldn't--now.

I said, "How's Rushford?"

"More important--how are you?"

"Sprung-witted. Weary. And pursuing."

"Nearly finished?"

"I should make it--tomorrow. If I hold out tonight."

"Phil! What's wrong?"

The echo--the electrical overtone--that long way.

"Nothing's wrong, dear. Things are picking up. I picked up a blonde, for instance--and Paul's taking her out. So maybe his mental health is improving."

"And maybe you should have taken her out yourself! You sound like somebody playing an ocarina in Mammoth Cave; positively sepulchral."

"The heat. Expanded my sinuses. Gives me that hollow ring. Is it hot up there?"

"Eighty-six tonight. The natives are dying of it."

"It must be a hundred here."

"I read about it in the Buffalo papers. Gee!"

"It's pretty lurid. They had a veterans' parade yesterday--and I went over to Fifth to watch--and it was damn near immobilized in the asphalt. It would have been funny--millions of guys stuck there--blocking traffic all winter--! If you go out just to get a paper, you need asbestos shoes. Any minute, this joint may run like paraffin."

"I think you ought to knock off and go see somebody."

"Town's evacuated. Wouldn't be emptier if Molotov was threatening to A-bomb."

"Do you feel all right?"

"Sure, Tud. As all right as you can when you're standing by to swim up out of your own sweat, any minute. How's mother? What new mess has Popcorn made?"

She gave me the country news.

"Won't be too long now," I said.

"Miss you."

"Miss you. Been thinking about the gardens. See you day after tomorrow--barring acts of God."

"I'd rather wait longer--and have you sounding better."

"You wait till I get there and I'll do my own sounding."

"Good night," she said. "I love you."

When I hung up, I was quivering.

I'd come pretty close:

Well, Ricky, I am worried. I went to Tom's. Of course, it's probably going to turn out to be nothing. But until I know for sure I feel--the hell with it! I'm ashamed of being this way!

I sat there, taking divots out of myself and not getting on the green.

I looked at the roses again.

They were just yellow roses--big ones--in a glass vase. I yanked out the bridge table, batted the bridge lamp around, sat, and bent into it.

6

Yvonne came through the connecting doors about one o'clock. I was still bent--bent enough so it took a moment to turn and straighten after she said, "Hello, Svengali!"

She was drunk. Not happy-drunk, or mean-drunk, either. Nervous-drunk.

"Your pure relation left me," she said.

"Left you how?"

"Left me in this condition. Buy me a Scotch."

I sent the word.

She threw herself on the divan, blew down the front of her rose-pink dress--which was wrinkled now, wet under the armpits, city-smudged at the edges--and fixed her fidgety eyes on me. "We went down to the Palais and danced a bit. He's lousy. We started in having a flock of drinks. He talked. Good God, how Wylies talk! He told me the story of his life--including the full saga of Marcia. He got to that later--at the Club Mauve."

"Nice little spot!"