"Thanksgiving?" he said. "Oh, yes. Of course, that's why they served turkey and pumpkin pie, ridiculous washy stuff. I'd nothing," he said, suddenly sorry for himself, "to be thankful for, really. Besides, they were a hell of a long time achieving a reasonable harvest. The Pilgrim Fathers, that is. Good theologians but bad farmers. No, I just stayed where I was."
"Where you going for Christmas?"
"Same thing, I suppose. Turkey and. Perhaps they don't serve pumpkin pie at Christmas."
"Christmas," she said, "you're coming home with me."
Enderby took that in very slowly. "Home?" he said.
"Not my apartment in New York. Home where my momma is. And the kids. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina."
"Kids? Which kids?"
"My kids. Bobby and Nelson. Five and seven. My momma looks after them."
"And who," dithered Enderby, "is their father?"
"Their daddy done go away," she slavesingsonged. "I tell him to get the hell out. He was prime meatjuice, baby, but he done hit the bottle and was a real no good mean nigger. Now he's in a black stud agency for white women some place."
"In what," Enderby asked, "capacity do I? That is to say."
"Momma," she said, "don't hold with poets and showbiz people and all that crap. She's a gooood woman. Reads the Bible all day. You got to come to momma's house that I bought for her out of my sinful showbiz success as an Englishman spreading the word of the Lord, kind of a smalltown Billy Graham, dig, I worked all this out in mah lil what ah calls mah mahnd, you got to be called Reverend. You'll be okay, momma cooks real good."
Enderby had read in some magazine of soulfood, strange name, as though the soul resided in the lowliest of animal organs, intestines, hog's bellylinings, spleens. Perhaps it did, black wisdom. Also mustard greens.
"And," she said, "she makes tea good and strong in a quart brown pot, ladling it in by the shovel. She drinks it all day when the kids are at school, reading her Bible. You better bone up on your Bible, Reverend, don't want to be caught out."
Enderby warmed at once to the quart brown pot. "That goes with the name Johnson," he said. "Dr Samuel Johnson, great tea drinker. Boswell said he must have had exceptionally strong nerves."
"How did you know that," she asked, surprised, in a straight, or American straight, voice, "about Boswell? My great grand-pappy was called Boswell Johnson."
"Some learned and facetious slaveowner," Enderby said, catching with no pleasure an image of elephant hided men called Cudge whining under Simon Legree whips in the cottonfields, what time old massa in the parlour read with mild interest a great record of the conversation of the English Enlightenment. And then: "Alas, I have no money. I can't afford the fare."
"I pay, baby. Ah is a rich lil gal."
"Well, then, yes, thank you, it's a great honour and you're very very generous." Then he began to weep, he did not know why. The voice of Toplady sounded over loudspeakers, its very tones giving him a partial reason why, calling the company together. "Sorry," Enderby sniffed, "ridiculous, I know. Emotional lability. Creative tension, something. Again thank you."
^^She laid on him hands intended for comfort but provocative of a ferocious glandular gear change and said: "Something's going on in there, I know. Life's not easy, kid. We'll talk again, okay." And she darted off, showing a cunningly placed patch, affluent mockery of the Third World to which her colour entitled her to belong, but Abe Fourscore had changed all that, on her divine posterior. Enderby returned to his little room and switched on the electric typewriter, which sang gently to him of the need to work and not waste current. He relented somewhat (there was always this danger, adjacent toilet doors or a jaunty "Hi" in the greenroom) and did not wipe her wholly out of Act Two, no confrontation of queens but mention of her part as evil genius of uprising, and then she was to languish in some jail or other or be thrown onto the ragheaps of Clerkenwell, no more be heard of Mistress Lucy Negro except as pocked whore. But then.
Then there was Hamlet, Will as ghost misnaming prince as Hamnet, sick for many reasons (death of son and end of Shakespeare line; his lordly friend Southampton in prison; the loss of a rare mistress, brightness falls from the air or hair) and sent off to Stratford to be made whole. And in marital embraces with ginger Anne (it had been decided, and no bad idea, to combine the parts of queen and Mistress Shakespeare) he dreams of Afric gold, Egypt being in Africa. And so Cleopatra. But who was he, Enderby, to adapt a great tragedy to the limited talents, New World phonemes and intonations and slangy lapses, cecity towards the past, Pyrrhonism and so on of this weak cry of players? A straight blank verse Cleopatra, and she could not do it. Dumbshow to music (not Silversmith's, better to drag in some genuine musician from Indiana University, a Moog man who, forced to write tonalities wholly atmospheric, would produce the diluted romanticism that was his true, if suppressed, idiom?)? Enderby lighted a White Owl. Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the rang'd empire fall! The world well lost for love, and did the world include art and, for that matter, William Shakespeare?
Let's have one other gaudy night,
Let's have one other bawdy night
And fright the white owls away.
Come, captains, drink beneath the stars
Until the wine peeps through your scars,
Drink till the dawning of the day!
For some reason that needed a black voice, altogether male and fully ballsed, but it had to be the fag Oldfellow transformed in vision to a Will with a chest like twin kettledrums. And for her?
God knew, she was Cleopatrician enough as they boarded the plane for Chicago, she in plain moulded emerald dress with seagreen cloak that had flared in the wind as they left the taxi, he in cap and old overcoat, blinking without glasses. At Chicago they got on an aircraft bound for Raleigh, named for the father of smoking. Smoking, she said:
"Now, honey, you can talk."
"What about?"
"You know what about, kid."
Enderby sighed like furnace. "You mustn't," he said, "consider me to be a sexless recluse advancing into grey middle age. I live alone after a brief failed marriage. Unconsummated, indeed. She was a woman of great chic and skill and ambition, and she wanted to be married to a poet. Then she became well known as a manager of pop groups and similar abominations."
She looked at him wideeyed, new angle on him. "Who?"
"A certain Vesta Bainbridge who became a certain Vesta Wittgenstein."
"Oh Jesus, her I knew. She wanted to manage me one time. She was a bitch, one hundred per cent and no discount."
"Well, there you are then. The muse was very angry about it and went away. I couldn't write. I attempted suicide. Then I was rehabilitated, as they put it. Then she came back."
"Who came back? La Wittgenstein?"
"No, the muse." Enderby looked very gravely at the smoking goddess beside him, a meanly framed vista of American bad weather beyond her. "Personification, if you like. Writing poetry isn't like adding up figures. There's a force outside that gets inside and starts dictating. Easier to call it the muse. Her, I mean. She can be very jealous. She's gone for good now, I think. So much and no more is granted to a poet. I've published my Collected Poems, to no applause. What I do in that bloody theatre or theater is nothing. Pure craft. Not so pure either. I hope I'm not boring you."