Farragut didn't reply. Tiny patted him on the head. "I'll bring you in some fresh tomatoes tomorrow. My wife puts up fifty jars of tomato sauce. We have tomatoes for breakfast, lunch and supper. But I still got tomatoes left over. I'll bring some in tomorrow. You want anything else?"
"No, thank you," said Farragut. "I'd like some tomatoes."
"Why is you an addict?" asked Tiny, and he went away.
Farragut was not disconcerted by the question, but he was provoked. It was only natural that he should be an addict. He had been raised by people who dealt in contraband. Not hard drugs, but unlicensed spiritual, intellectual and erotic stimulants. He was the citizen, the product of some border principality such as Liechtenstein. His background lacked the mountainous scenery, but his passport was fat with visas, he dealt in spiritual contraband, spoke four languages poorly and knew the words to four national anthems. Once when he was sitting in a café in Kitzbuhel with his brother, listening to a band concert, Eben suddenly sprang to his feet and clapped his Tyrolean hat over his heart. "What's up?" Farragut asked, and Eben said, "They are about to play the national anthem." What the band was about to play was "Home on the Range," but Farragut remembered this to illustrate the fact that his family had endeavored to be versatile at every political, spiritual and erotic level. It helped to explain the fact that he was an addict.
Farragut could remember his mother coming down a circular staircase in a coral-colored dress heavily embroidered with pearls on her way to hear Tosca; and he could remember her pumping gas on the main road to Cape Cod at that memorable point in the landscape where scrub pine takes over and the nearness of the Great Atlantic Ocean can be read in the pallor of the sky and the salt air. His mother didn't actually wear tennis sneakers, but she wore some kind of health shoe and her dress was much lower in the bow than in the stern. He could remember her casually and repeatedly regretting invitations to dine with the Trenchers, who were famous in the village for having, in the space of a week, bought both a pipe organ and a yacht. The Trenchers were millionaires-they were arrivistes-they had a butler; but then, the Farraguts had run through several butlers-Mario, Fender and Chadwick-and now claimed to enjoy setting their own table. The Farraguts were the sort of people who had lived in a Victorian mansion and when this was lost had moved back to the family homestead. This included a shabby and splendid eighteenth-century house and the franchise on two Socony gas pumps that stood in front of the house where Grandmother's famous rose garden had been. When the news got out that they had lost all their money and were going to run a gas station, Farragut’s Aunt Louisa came directly to the house and, standing in the hallway, exclaimed: "You cannot pump gasoline!" "Why not?" asked Farragut's mother. Aunt Louisa's chauffeur came in and put a box of tomatoes on the floor. He wore puttees. "Because," said Aunt Louisa, "you will lose all your friends." "To the contrary," said Farragut's mother. "I shall discover precisely who they are."
The cream of the post-Freudian generation were addicts. The rest were those psychiatric reconstructions you used to see in the back of unpopular rooms at cocktail parties. They seemed to be intact, but if you touched them in the wrong place at the wrong time they would collapse all over the floor like a spatch-cocked card trick. Drug addiction is symptomatic. Opium eaters know. Farragut remembered a fellow opium eater named Polly, whose mother was an on-again off-again recording and club singer. Her name was Corinne. When Corinne was way down and struggling to get back, Farragut took Polly to her mother's big breakthrough in Las Vegas. The breakthrough was successful and Qirinne went on from a has-been to the third-biggest recording star in the world, and while this was important, what he remembered was that Polly, who had trouble with her size, ate all the bread and butter on the table during her mummy's first critical set and when this was finished- Farragut meant the set-everybody stood up and cheered and Polly grasped his arm and said: "That's my mummy, that's my dear mummy." So there was dear mummy in a hard spot that blazed with the blues of a diamond and would in fact prove to be the smile of the world and how could you square this with lullabys and breast-feeding except by eating opium? For Farragut the word "mother" evoked the image of a woman pumping gas, curtsying at the Assemblies and banging a lectern with her gavel. This confused him and he would blame his confusion on the fine arts, on Degas. There is a Degas painting of a woman with a bowl of chrysanthemums that had come to represent to Farragut the great serenity of "mother." The world kept urging him to match his own mother, a famous arsonist, snob, gas pumper and wing shot, against the image of the stranger with her autumnal and bitter-smelling flowers. Why had the universe encouraged this gap? Why had he been encouraged to cultivate so broad a border of sorrow? He had not been plucked off some star by a stork, so why should he and everybody else behave as if this were the case? The opium eater knew better. After Corinne’s big comeback and breakthrough there was a big triumphant party and when he and Polly came in, dear Mummy made a straight line for her only daughter, her only child. "Polly," she said, "I could have killed you. You sat right in front of me, right in front of me, and during the first set of my big comeback you ate a whole basket of rolls-eight: I counted them- and you cleaned up one of those ice cream scoops of butter. How can I follow my arrangements when I'm counting the rolls you eat? Oh, I could have killed you." Polly, plucked from a star, began to weep, of course, and he got her out of there and back to the hotel, where they had some great Colombian cocaine that made their noses bleed. What else could you do? But Polly was thirty pounds overweight and he had never really liked fat women; he had never really liked any woman who wasn't a dark-eyed blonde, who didn't speak at least one language other than English, who didn't have an income of her own and who couldn't say the Girl Scout Oath.
Farragut's father, Farragut's own father, had wanted to have his life extinguished as he dwelt in his mother's womb, and how could he live happily with this knowledge without the support of those plants that draw their wisdom from the soil? Farragut's father had taken him fishing in the wilderness and had taught him to climb high mountains hut when he had discharged these responsibilities he neglected his son and spent most of his time tacking around Travertine harbor in a little catboat. He talked about having outmaneuvered great storms-a tempest off Falmouth was his favorite-but during Farragut's lifetime he preferred safe harbors. He was one of those old Yankees who are very adroit at handling their tiller and their sheets. He was great with all lines-kite lines, trout lines and moorings-and he could coil a garden hose with an authority that seemed to Farragut princely. Dance-excepting a German waltz with a pretty woman-the old man thought detestable, but dance best described his performance on a boat. The instant he dropped the mooring he began a performance as ordained, courtly and graceful as any pavane. Line squalls, luffing sails, thunder and lightning never broke his rhythm.
O heroin, be with me now! When Farragut was about twenty-one he began to lead the Nanuet Cotillion, The Nanuet landed in the New World in 1672. The leader of the expedition was Peter Wentworth. With his brother Eben away, Farragut was, after his drunken and cranky father, the principal male descendent of Wentworth, and so he led the cotillion. It had been a pleasure to leave the gas tanks to Harry-a spastic-and dress in his father's tails. This was again the thrill of living in a border principality and of course the origin of his opium eating. His father's tails fitted perfectly. They were made of black broadcloth, as heavy as the stuff of an overcoat, and Farragut thought he looked great in tails. He would drive into the city in whichever car was working; lead some debutante, chosen by the committee for her wealth and her connections, down to the principal box, and bow to its occupants. Then he would dance all night and get back to the gas pumps in the morning.