To stick to the subject, however, the bridge Mlle. Montecuccoli gave me was terrible. It felt like a water faucet in my mouth and my tongue was cramped over to one side. Even my throat ached from it, and I went up the little elevator moaning. Yes, she admitted it was a little swollen, but said I’d get used to it soon, and appealed to me to show a soldier’s endurance. So I did. But when I got back to New York, everything had to come out.
All this information is essential. The second bridge, the one I had just broken with the hardtack, was made in New York by a certain Doctor Spohr, who was first cousin to Klaus Spohr, the painter who was doing Lilys portrait. While I was in the dentist’s chair, Lily was sitting for the artist up in the country. Dentist and violin lessons kept me in the city two days a week and I would arrive in Dr. Spohr’s office, panting, with my violin case, after two subways and a few stops at bars along the way, my soul in strife and my heart saying that same old thing. Turning into the street I would sometimes wish that I could seize the whole building in my mouth and bite it in two, as Moby Dick had done to the boats. I tumbled down to the basement of the office where Dr. Spohr had a laboratory and a Puerto Rican technician was making casts and grinding plates on his little wheel.
Reaching behind some smocks to the switch, I turned on the light in the toilet and went in, and after flushing the John made faces at myself and looked into my own eyes saying, “Well?” “And when?” “And wo bist du, soldat?” “Toothless! Mon capitaine. Your own soul is killing you.” And “It’s you who makes the world what it is. Reality is you.”
The receptionist would say, “Been for your violin lesson, Mr. Henderson?”
“Yah.”
Waiting for the dentist as I waited now with the fragments of his work in my hand, I’d get to brooding over the children and my past and Lily and my prospects with her. I knew that at this moment with her lighted face, barely able to keep her chin still from intensity of feeling, she was in Spohr’s studio. The picture of her was a cause of trouble between me and my eldest son, Edward. The one with the red MG. He is like his mother and thinks himself better than me. Well, he’s wrong. Great things are done by Americans but not by the likes of either of us. They are done by people like that man Slocum who builds the great dams. Day and night, thousands of tons of concrete, machinery that moves the earth, lays mountains flat and fills the Punjab Valley with cement grout. That’s the type that gets things done. On this my class, Edward’s class, the class Lily was so eager to marry into, gets zero. Edward has always gone with the crowd. The most independent thing he ever did was to dress up a chimpanzee in a cowboy suit and drive it around New York in his open car. After the animal caught cold and died, he played the clarinet in a jazz band and lived on Bleecker Street. His income was $20,000 at least, and he was living next door to the Mills Hotel flophouse where the drunks are piled in tiers.
But a father is a father after all, and I had gone as far as California to try to talk to Edward. I found him living in a bathing cabin beside the Pacific in Malibu, so there we were on the sand trying to have a conversation. The water was ghostly, lazy, slow, stupefying, with a vast dull shine. Coppery. A womb of white. Pallor; smoke; vacancy; dull gold; vastness; dimness; fulgor; ghostly flashing. “Edward, where are we?” I said. “We are at the edge of the earth. Why here?” Then I told him. “This looks like a hell of a place to meet. It’s got no foundation except smoke. Boy, I must talk to you about things. It’s true I’m rough. It may be true I am nuts, but there is a reason for it all. ‘The good that I would that I do not.’ ”
“Well, I don’t get it, Dad.”
“You should become a doctor. Why don’t you go to medical school? Please go to medical school, Edward.”
“Why should I?”
“There are lots of good reasons. I happen to know that you worry about your health. You take Queen Bee tablets. Now I know that …”
“You came all this way to tell me something-is that what it is?”
“You may believe that your father is not a thinking person, only your mother. Well, don’t kid yourself, I have made some clear observations. First of all, few people are sane. That may surprise you, Edward, but it really is so. Next, slavery has never really been abolished. More people are enslaved to different things than you can shake a stick at. But it’s no use trying to give you a resume of my thinking. It’s true I’m often confused but at the same time I am a fighter. Oh, I am a fighter. I fight very hard.”
“What do you fight for, Dad?” said Edward.
“Why,” I said, “what do I fight for? Hell, for the truth. Yes, that’s it, the truth. Against falsehood. But most of the fighting is against myself.”
I understood very well that Edward wanted me to tell him what he should live for and this is what was wrong. This was what caused me pain. For every son expects and every father wishes to provide clear principles. And moreover a man wants to protect his children from the bitterness of things if he can.
A baby seal was weeping on the sand and I was very much absorbed by his situation, imagining that the herd had abandoned him, and I sent Edward to get a can of tunafish at the store while I stood guard against the roving dogs, but one of the beach combers told me that this seal was a beggar, and if I fed him I would encourage him to be a parasite on the beach. Then he whacked him on the behind and without resentment the creature hobbled to the water on his flippers, where the pelican patrols were flying slowly back and forth, and entered the white foam. “Don’t you get cold at night, Eddy, on the beach?” I said.
“I don’t mind it much.”
I felt love for my son and couldn’t bear to see him like this. “Go on and be a doctor, Eddy,” I said. “If you don’t like blood you can be an internist or if you don’t like adults you can be a pediatrician, or if you don’t like kids perhaps you can specialize in women. You should have read those books by Doctor Grenfell I used to give you for Christmas. I know damned well you never even opened the packages. For Christ’s sake, we should commune with people.”
I went back alone to Connecticut, shortly after which the boy returned with a girl from Central America somewhere and said he was going to marry her, an Indian with dark blood, a narrow face, and close-set eyes.
“Dad, I’m in love,” he tells me.
“What’s the matter? Is she in trouble?”
“No. I tell you I love her.”
“Edward, don’t give me that,” I say. “I can’t believe it.”
“If it’s family background that worries you, then how about Lily?” he says.
“Don’t let me hear a single word against your stepmother. Lily is a fine woman. Who is this Indian? I’m going to have her investigated,” I say.
“Then I don’t understand,” he says, “why you don’t allow Lily to hang up her protrait with the others. You leave Maria Felucca alone.” (If that was her name.) “I love her,” he says, with an inflamed face.
I look at this significant son, Edward, with his crew-cut hair, his hipless trunk, his button-down collar and Princeton tie, his white shoes-his practically faceless face. “Gods!” I think. “Can this be the son of my loins? What the hell goes on around here? If I leave him with this girl she will eat him in three bites.”
But even then, strangely enough, I felt a shock of love in my heart for this boy. My son! Unrest has made me like this, grief has made me like this. So never mind. Sauve qui peut! Marry a dozen Maria Feluccas, and if it will do any good, let her go and get her picture painted, too.
So Edward went back to New York with his Maria Felucca from Honduras.
I had taken down my own portrait in the National Guard uniform. Neither Lily nor I would hang in the main hall.
Nor was this all I was compelled to remember as Romilayu and I waited in the Wariri village. For I several times said to Lily, “Every morning you leave to get yourself painted, and you’re just as dirty as you ever were. I find kids’ diapers under the bed and in the cigar humidor. The sink is full of garbage and grease, and the joint looks as if a poltergeist lived here. You are running from me. I know damned well that you go seventy miles an hour in the Buick with the children in the back seat. Don’t look impatient when I bring these subjects up. They may belong to what you consider the lower world, but I have to spend quite a bit of time there.”