Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (13 page)

Still, the whole thing struck me as fantastic. “Frankly, all this strikes me as fantastic,” I said. “Who’d go to all this trouble just for me?”

My son looked nonplussed—though not for the reason I was expecting,
it turned out. “Oh, it’s not just you,” he finally explained. “Thousands and thousands of these go out to everyone like you. To your whole class, in fact.”

“From
Groton
?” I gasped. “There were only a couple of hundred of us, my boy, and that was before the fellow with the scythe got to work.”

“No, no. I mean, most of them probably do get the comics, but it’s everybody with your kind of money. All the people so high on the ladder that they haven’t had a clue for years who’s actually running things or how, since they can take it for granted—accurately enough—that it’s all for their benefit anyway.”

“I suppose next you’ll be telling me that all those nonsensical war films and assassinations on television are real, too,” I said, perhaps somewhat huffily. “For all that a hambone like that Cronkite fellow would have been laughed off the stage in my youth—as would poor Vladimir Huntley and Estragon Brinkley, for that matter.”

“I’m afraid so, Dad,” my son said gently. “Whoever is doing this apparently didn’t worry about TV. They knew that everyone your age wouldn’t believe anything on the tube was real.”

“But do you know
why
they’re doing it?” I asked. “I mean, what are the comics
for
—to amuse us? Believe me, that was one thing we could always manage on our own, without too many casualties except among the servants.”

“It’s so you won’t be completely uninformed about what’s going on, but won’t take any of it seriously If you hear someone talking about any of it, and even if you join in, you’ll think it’s all just hobbies and conversation pieces.”

Although I still couldn’t credit what my son was telling me, its import had nonetheless begun to sink in. “But my God,” I cried, looking up at my neatly bagged and filed shelves in a daze. “My God, if everything in there is
true—all
of it, from VJ Day on—then this is a
nightmare,
what we’re living through.”

“ ‘A nightmare from which I am trying to awake,’ you could say,” my boy cheerfully agreed, audibly quoting some author unknown to Dad.

A new thought now struck me smartly across the face, as if in challenge to a duel. Briefly, as I shook my head, I thought this slap was advising
the old self never to speak of any but trivial matters again, which I found oddly soothing. Instead, it made me say this, although Alger’s name had not passed my lips in many years:

“I used to know Alger Hiss, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Well"—I was groping among unfamiliarities-”the truth is, my boy, in all this time I’ve never known if he actually did this country of ours real harm. Try as one might, it was hard to see much menace in that pumpkin. One’s thoughts would drift to Halloween, Linus’s vigil and so forth, and picture Alger as some sort of pin-striped trick-or-treater—for all that virtually unlimited treats apparently didn’t dissuade him from secretly smashing eggs on one’s car and writing rude words in soap on one’s mirror.”

“Perfect penmanship, though,” my son proposed—mockingly? Defensively? I hardly knew.

“But all the same—and much as it pains me to say so—there isn’t much question that he was indifferent to the
possibility
of placing this country at risk, at a time when one had put him in a position of trust. If he’d been a bank teller, all sorts of people who swear by Alger’s innocence would have been calling for his head. And for
that,”
I said, surprised by my own conviction, “he jolly well
should
have been penalized—for all that even some of your mother’s Newport friends developed a temporary but noticeable stammer when they electrocuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, presumably on the theory that two
more
Jews wouldn’t matter much to anybody, while giving my fellow AngloSaxon a mild five-year prison term on a perjury rap.”

“Well?” my son said.

“Well—but they were
traitors,
by Jove!
Of course Alger
and the Rosenbergs betrayed their country. That was their job—that’s what traitors
do
! If I could see that, I assumed anyone could. But
these
people,” I said, staring around my shelves, “call themselves the
patriots
—so what on earth is going on?”

“Nobody really knows,” my son said. “I’m not sure even they do.”

I sat back, feeling exhausted. “What would you like me to do with these?” I asked, waving my hand around the room.

“That’s up to you,” he said. “Some of the parents have gone on reading them, and thrown their kids out instead. But I’d like it if you burned them.”

“Done, my boy!” I said, with what his eyes told me on the instant was a sad remnant of his father’s hearty brio. A second earlier, lowering my hand, I had noticed it trembling. Now, although I’d planned to rise and hug my son before he took his leave, I found that my knees were advising—no, imploring—quite another plan, which was to stay put.

Though briefly mystified, I soon gathered what had happened: I was old. Well, here it was, with whatever experiences it would bring. I thought of Alger, still chipper and glacially reserved somewhere, and of virulent, raging Congressman Cancer. And even of Gliaglin, to whose fuzzy face, rescued from the brink of memory’s oblivion, I saw my son’s had a slight resemblance—at least in the boy’s goateed phase, which I believe this was. They all swam about, like the framed but bursting covers of the comic books on my den’s walls.

At the door, the only one of them who was present in the flesh had turned, and was hesitating: “Dad?”

“Yes, what is it?”

“Do you remember what you said earlier—about Jack Egan being my real father?”

“Who? Oh, Jack Egan … Did I say anything like that?” I asked, confused.

He paused.

“No,” he said. “Neither of us did.”

With some sheepishness, I will admit that I granted my comics collection several stays of execution from its fiery demise, and even considered an outright reprieve once the boy was back at Andover. But this was my son, so off to the incinerator the lot went one mild but windy day in April, in what year I don’t recall. While I found I had no real regrets, I also had nothing to replace Jack Egan and his cohorts with, certainly not
in the now dismal den. Neither could I stir much desire in myself to resume getting the good old
Times
and
WSJ
, which I couldn’t help suspecting must have been somehow party to the whole enterprise.

In any case, the day’s main drama soon became the moment of exchanging a view from one window for a view from another, with fine shadings of indecision and remorse provided by a comedy duo of kneecaps whose long-stanched flair for vaudeville had come at last into its own. All that tepidly went on until, as I was breakfasting with L. one morning, an invisible hyena leapt out of the floral arrangement to bury its teeth and all four paws in my chest. As the self keeled carpetward, L. dropped her napkin, knelt with a small cry, and wondered in a voice that waltzed and tangoed quite alarmingly about the room which telephone number was the one that summoned ambulances.

They must have given me a dose of painkillers, for I was woozy in the gurney that wheeled me into exploratory surgery at top speed-”a mile a minute,” as we used to say in my youth, thinking that nothing could sound faster. Trotting alongside it, L. looked uncharacteristically distraught. But something else was pressing on her; apparently, she was worried—the things that women can dream up to divert their thoughts from the real danger!—that I might start babbling gibberish under the anesthetic.

“Just don’t bring up our son, that’s all,” I thought I heard her say.

“Wha’?” I managed to mumble, above the noise of jiggling wheels and below the fluorescent flash of a thousand passing lights. “Is he in trouble? I’ll-”

“Just don’t bring up the kid,
all right
?” she said in harsh tones that were most unlike her, jabbing an equally atypical forefinger at my horizontal, already much beleaguered bosom. I had no idea what she was talking about, although my last, vague thought before a rubber mask pressed down to cup my face from nose to chin was that the boy had been at Andover for an awfully long time.

Afterward, when the doctors told me what they’d found, I asked that L. not be informed. Then I was sent home to resume my game of windowed hopscotch with the sunset. Having shared this bit of private terminology
with him some years before, I took what amusement I could in writing my son that I’d been diagnosed with terminal nixon.

I still haven’t told L. She is fragile, and—let me put this delicately—I fear that her fragility has made her all too resourceful in finding compensations for it. Having seen the results in our much younger years, I would rather be a memory than a temptation. However, I may have a few years left, and I’ve sometimes thought that she and I might yet sail away somewhere. Not that I’d really know the difference between here and elsewhere now!

Indeed, as I mentally palpate my nixon’s daily encroachments on my innards, I’m often not even sure which of us is the malignancy, which the comfortable old self. But all that will get settled with no need for help from my cerebellum.

Our son, of course, is made of sterner stuff than his mother. On his most recent visit from Andover, I had just asked after Suzanne when he blurted out his wish that he and not I were the one afflicted with nixonous insides. Putting aside my reading (
The Man Who Was Thursday
), I said, Tut-tut, my boy: you’ve got a future.

We were in the now empty den off the once more disused library, him crouched as before in front of my armchair—the only survivor of my old burrow’s trappings. He glanced around at the bare walls, where the patterns of lighter wallpaper left by the now absent frames still stood out, although faintly.

“Then fight, Daddy"—an unprecedented monicker in our relationship, may I say. He swallowed hard, looking most unlike himself; he’d shaved the goatee, I noticed. “Fight like you were still a Marine, and this was Iwo Jima.”

“What an odd thing to say!” I guffawed. “Me a Marine! That’s rich and so am I, as I always say. Unless Andover’s wasting your time and my money, you know very well that the proper phrase is ‘as if.’ And this is Fifth Avenue, not some Godforsaken tiny island out in the Pacific, and you also know that there’s no hope once you’ve got my kind of Nixon. So what are you asking me to do-’Rage against the dying of the light’? Whatever for? To please Dylan Thomas, a Welsh sot who once vomited,
in my presence,
into Margie Dumont’s best tureen, not long before making his own less than splendid goodnight? Did you know him—should I feel I owe him a personal favor of some sort? No, no, my darling child. There’s no real point. When I die, I plan to slide into it like a bath at the end of a lovely long day of hunting.”

IV

Sail Away

FOR THE LONGEST TIME, I DIDN’T KNOW DAISY BUCHANAN ALL THAT
well. We knew
of
one another, of course; ours was a smaller world than you might guess from its equivalents in a later era’s wan salad of saucy fun, where every suburban “gang” in possession of a hi-fi and a blender could fancy itself
le tout
Levittown. We Twenties free spirits were more exclusive but also more publicized, by a press whose goggling readers knew their place too well to mistake a vicarious participation in our frolics for equality. As our case might have been described by Sir Winston Churchill, whom my dear bear of a father, then floating a loan in London, bucked up over brandy in 1916 after the pudgy young First Lord of the Admiralty had been sacked in the wake of the Dardanelles disaster: Never have so many been so entranced by so few.

Father had most of the raising of me. In the years when I grew from a mere slip of a girl into a modest minx of a maiden, and needed her help and guidance most, Mother had become an addled recruit to the cause of women’s suffrage instead. On the tiniest summons, she would duck down to Washington to parade unbecomingly before the White House with her fellow females, carrying wordy placards, while the poor, glowering man who put food on our table and paid for her train tickets took what comfort he could in laughing at my girlish pranks and teaching me my manners.

Even after Mother returned from one of her suffragette antics to breathlessly announce that she’d been knocked down by a pair of sailors while attempting to push a petition into President Wilson’s carriage in a place called Lafayette Square, and Father had joshingly retorted, to my own barely muffled titters, that he might well have given her a good kick himself had he been a witness to the scene, she wouldn’t abandon her mania. Increasingly, when Father brought his knife down with a crash at the dinner table to implore her once again to recognize how foolish and insulting to him her behavior was, she’d startle her daughter if not husband into silence by holding up her hand to stop his tongue, as if he were the butcher, and saying that she simply couldn’t bear another tirade.