I still had my methane-powered Bentley in those days, and I used it to pick up Anna at Grand Central the following morning. She had traveled second-class on a wood-burner, sitting erect on one of those plastic seats by dirty windows, and had brought exactly one small suitcase with her. Samsonite. That was Anna. It wasn’t exactly religion with her and she had taken no vows of poverty. But my God, did she gall me. Yet she wasn’t really stingy in the soul—just closed off somewhere. Often I would wind up spiritually on her side and cursing myself for being oafish and rich. Her suitcase was half full of books.
Anna and Myra and I lived in that mansion for eight months. Toward the end of it the student riots began. Things were bad all over and the students had decided capitalism was to blame. I had no real quarrel with that, although I felt the scarcity of fuels deserved at least equal billing. For a few days of it a lot of the sons and daughters of the upper-middle class decided I was the enemy, and I got edgy when they started chanting things like, “Belson go home.” Hell, I was home.
They hanged me in effigy, and it was a damned good effigy too. Art students. I’ll never forget that stuffed manikin with my steel-rimmed eyeglasses and my characteristic lumberjack shirt and the cigar. It looked so mournful being hanged under the gaslight there at Sixty-third and Madison, my replica head at one side as if in a daydream and my feet jumping around as drunken students jerked the rope. I stared at it a long time from my billiard-room window. Then they burned it and I gasped as it blackened. What a sensation! What a deadly preview! Still, I liked being the star of the show.
Anna saw that effigy too, I’m certain, from her bedroom window. She was a lot more cheerful the next morning. At breakfast she joined me for her Rice Krispies, and for a moment she even hummed a tune. But when I suggested we bounce around in our Louis Quinze bed for a while it was nothing doing. She wanted to finish Proust. I should have divorced her on the spot, citing cheerfulness toward effigy burning as grounds. Denial of conjugal rights. Overweening literacy.
I had never paid much attention to television, but when I moved into that mansion I decided to install the best. People told me the technology had been improved a lot and it was patriotic to patronize it. Since the death of Hollywood in the first part of the century and the demise of General Motors at about the same time, the United States had led the world in only two technologies: fast food and television. During the Depression of the 2050s holographic TV had improved enormously. So I had an RCA set installed in what had once been a third-floor sitting room. It consisted of six projection posts against the room’s longest wall, and I’ll never forget how I jumped when I first turned it on after the installers had left. A group of real people—dancing and singing frenetically—suddenly appeared in the room, life-sized and skimpily dressed, all of them grinning at me like idiots. The sound was real too, loud and sexy and terrible; it was Broadway synthetic music of the worst kind. It turned out they were doing a commercial for life insurance. I’d had no idea. And the whole thing only used a hundred and fifty watts. I left the set on, went to the bar in the next room, got myself some whiskey, and came back and joined my illusory guests, now a middle-class family in turmoil. A soap opera. It was quite a sensation to move among them, a drink in my hand, and hear talk of their electronic hysterectomies and multiple infidelities. They were very earnest. Things were pretty low in my life at the time. I seldom saw Anna, and Myra spent all her time with doctors and lovers. I ran my businesses pretty much from my head, and a dozen phone calls a day made up my labors. I was on hold-both financially and emotionally; I got hooked for a while on television. It was a sign that things were falling apart, that my plan of settling down in New York was unreal. Something in me welcomed the riots when they came. I haven’t watched TV since. I do believe that shooting morphine is better for the soul.
Anna was the child of an improbable marriage between a little dandy of a Presbyterian minister and a big-boned grand-lady Episcopalian. Her mother, who had never attended her father’s church, was far too grand to get out of bed before noon; she had lain on satin with her quilted robe and quilted eyepads while Anna took charge of two younger brothers.
I visited them one summer vacation, when Anna was home from Elmira College, where she studied French Literature. Her family kept her so busy, fixing this and taking care of that, that we hardly had any time together. She spent one morning preparing a Fourth of July picnic for all of us, and when the Fourth came her mother decided that Anna should put away the chickens she had roasted the day before and cook a ham instead.
“Mother,” Anna said, in despair, “I have to hang up the wash. And where will I get a ham on the Fourth of July?” She stood there looking at her mother, trembling.
“You’ll work it out, dear,” her mother said. She turned and walked back up the stairs to her bedroom.
And Anna did in fact work it out. She got the clothes dry and bought a ham and cooked it and had a picnic dinner for six people. That evening she cleaned up the kitchen, fixed the damper on the wood stove and rearranged the books in her father’s library.
“That girl sure is a wonder,” her father said sweetly, puffing his pipe. At the time, I thought so too.
I spent two days after they hanged and burned me in effigy getting police protection and having steel shutters put on the windows of the bottom two floors. It was a private police firm, a subsidiary of Cosa Nostra. There already was a high wall around the building with a stand of barbed wire on top. During this activity I hadn’t seen Anna or Myra, but when it was all over and I was in the billiard room one evening idly shooting the three ball around on the table, thinking things over, who should walk in but Anna. She was wearing a faded green housedress and she looked tired.