In the Slammer With Carol Smith (22 page)

What I have been doing now is putting Martyn’s history together. ‘Collating’ it, as my two Boston scholars would have said. So that I may ponder what has brought him to make the offer he has, to a woman with a history like mine. When I think of his hostility to the PAK, as to some pet I over-cherish, I have to smile—and he is at once in the room. My intent is not that. Perhaps I shouldn’t open this second letter at all.

The postmark is not from Pretoria but from Durban. I had heard of that city and its industries, at that rally where Martyn had observed me. We had come in protest against American companies who had investments in South Africa; in our ignorance we hadn’t thought of the banks.

—For Laura, who had retroactively adopted the Holocaust though none of her family had been involved,
apartheid
had been merely ‘one of those separations.’ Her voice, so deaf to others, weathers the past well.

‘I understand they plotz them into three colors,’ she’d said, as we’d entered the arena. ‘Whites, pure blacks—natives, y’know?—and coloreds. Mixed. Which includes Asians as well. And the tribals are in separate townships. My mother’s been to Soweto, organizationally. She claims it was just
de facto
Mississippi. But she met some whites in South Africa who were benign, most of them Jews of course. Though not all.’ She’d reached out to pat Carey. ‘What’s “de facto” mean?’ Dora had asked. Carey said: And I suppose your mother picked up some art?’—

Forgive them. That is what memory can do. And sometimes, not too late.

I wonder now whether Laura’s mother met any British. Below the clippings, whose slow descent to the eye-level present is a chronology, there is a small bookshelf, divided in three. In the first section are small mementos obviously British: a pipe rack with the seal of the Manchester maker; a small fake barometer from the Greenwich observatory, with the weather mark Always Fair; and an initialed silver traveling clock—are they the baggage a mother might impose? In the third section are her books. The space between is bare. I have put Martyn’s first letter there. The second joins it. His past rises from this speaking wall, part of the smell I crave.

Martyn’s mother writes nursery tales, in the language she calls
Worldese.
She has revised Mother Goose in it, in terms culled from English, Dutch, Hindustani, Arabic, and French—‘all the basics one needs.’ That’s on an early book-jacket; on a later one she apologizes, regretting that she had not included Russian and Japanese. According to the book-jackets she has run for Parliament many times, but never made it. ‘I run so that people may read.’

Martin must have spoken
Worldese
early. Educated in Capetown, which he bolted from, then Sydney, where an Australian uncle had property that for a time he helped manage, he first turns up in the news as an organizer of sports events for their native population, ‘with international competition in mind.’ Then it is Antwerp, where he does a movie short, using handsome drug addicts, all talking Afrikaans. ‘Filmed in the gray mists of racial violence,’ a foreign review says. I look closer at the photo. Not us. Not specifically. But I have learned from other clips what Afrikaans means.

Martyn’s elder half-brother, full son of his landowner father, is a power in the national police. ‘For certain the young hot-head deserves the sentence,’ he was quoted at the time Martyn was jailed, and later hadn’t denied his role in that. ‘Safer there. And he wasn’t in long. But he’s clever, you know, like his doctor father. Coloreds make good scientists—look at India. But my kinsman—for this I don’t deny—must now make his protests from abroad. Not from the Transvaal. Or any roads that lead to it.’ And so Martyn had done, in any media that led to talk.

‘I have one son who’s been in pokey, one who houses and feeds me,’ his mother reports. ‘Is it any wonder I have to run for office?’

‘The more recent her interviews, the more incendiary,’ the Manchester Guardian reports: ‘And the official photos larger. Is the lady making history or navigating it?’ Scrawled in ink in the margin of that clipping, in flowing script that must be hers: ‘Hah. Same as you, dear boy. Both.’ In the photo in the last newsclip on her, she is seated, cane at side. ‘Don’t use it. Shows where I stand.’ The cane has a pennant on it, the party’s lettering on it not decipherable. She is wearing a lace head-dress. ‘Dowagers have perks. And can you say for sure the Queen Mother didn’t send me it?’

Few of the notices on Martyn himself are from his own country. Barring the jail ones, they tend to be in university-student rags, or broadsides with no source indicated. The singing troupe, opening in France, and elsewhere, and a one-act play performed at a Rights conference in Bern, get what must be wide coverage.

I see how the Martyn I knew so briefly has himself learned to escape. Yet does what he must. In Bern, a young woman from a Human Rights magazine interviews him. ‘Though known as a brilliant monologist in his stage, screen, and song documents, and as an appealing actor in works not his own, he has no public dialogue. Rumor has it that his mother, a long-term dissident, is hostage in some way to that silence, but this both he and she deny. An octogenarian, and a character admired if not beloved even by rightists, she campaigns from home, whether under house arrest is not known.’

On the small shelf of her publications all so cannily for children, there is a thin cookbook not hers:
750 Dishes From Overseas,
compiled in 1945 by one Ivy Priestnall Holden of Cambridge, England, published ‘for New York and British palates,’ covering Europe but also ‘novelties’ from Canada and the British colonies. The compiler is deferent to the known cuisines but her heart is wide open to the colonials. All the recipes are by local women. Most are identified by province: ‘A Canadian Woman.’ ‘A New Zealand Housewife.’ They speak in one voice. As if over the shoulder, with timid authority, their hands meanwhile busy at a dozen other tasks.

While I eat deli-or take-out dinners I have to get from blocks away, these women are my company. I allot them their hairdo’s, from spitcurls to high combs, their complexions, spotty to creamy, their weights. Some are massively breasted—best mother-style. Some are thin, with a colonial anxiety not always due to geography. A woman can be colonial in her own country. In her own house.

Yet when the newspapers get me down, or a bad outside night has, I huddle in their company. I return to them, as to one of the ‘soap’ operas not seen since the ward, when we were all too spaced out to change the program, many of us swaying from left to right. That sway, between whatever poles, may be in my consciousness, if not my body, to the end. I’ll handle that. But are these women the ‘serial,’ not mine, that will travel forever at my side? Martyn’s mother has made me their spy.

South Africa’s recipes are the last in the book, which is inscribed by her to her daughter-in-law. ‘Herein is the coffeebread that Martyn so much likes. You’ll find that the servants make it better. We don’t have the touch.’

Now the book has landed back here. No servants in a caravan? Or to be fair, had Martyn and his wife likely never had them? But studying this text, as I do, she would learn Martyn’s geography: Cherry fritters à la Natal … Zambesia Compote … Pretoria Pudding…(‘always a delight with the children’)…(Which one is certain to have?) … Veldt Date Porridge … Kenya Pineapple Gateau … Bloemfontein and Daloaga Bay Steak.

I riffle through for Durban. Ah, here:

TENNIS Sundaes From Africa: ‘Out here in Africa, tennis and sundaes are synonymous. But our sundaes are such that any girl can make for herself, even if she be inexperienced.’ The flavor for Durban is peach.

My heart opens and closes for these three people. For a man sweating out his sundaes. There is no tennis racquet here.

I fell asleep. Waking from those deeps at what must be long past midnight, I sense that velvet lack of movement into which even a city of clarions may fall. I am in an acute state of perception. The dream is just around the corner, the present sharp in the nostrils.

I see my legs stretched before me. That want to walk.

I smell the odor of being.

I taste the vim of the apple I ate before sleep, cracking the pips for their almond tang.

I hear—my heart.

I touch—hand to hand, clasping gratitude.

I breathe me in, slowly. I may not embrace the bizarre. But I know it exists. I plash in a modest backwater of well-being, knowing well that I am nude until I reach the clothes on the shore.

Don’t boast, Carol. Keep a little caution-powder handy. Just don’t salt the coffee with it. Or tell too many people, maybe not anybody, what you now know is at last wrong-right with you.

Nothing much really. Only what smug millions expect of themselves daily. Or plod along sweetly unconscious that they are wearing its crown.

Oh, Carol honey. Honey honey honey. Love it or leave it, you know damn well what’s the matter with you.

You’re sane.

‘Nothing’s so pedestrian as sanity,’ a patron who was giving the hospital some millions in return for his cure was reported as saying, over drinks with the gratefully assembled board of directors. ‘But fellas, it leads to such … panoply.’ The trusty who was serving the drinks as part of his own cure broke into hysterical laughter, afterwards informing the ward that the old boy had spittled his
p
’s. That night the trusty required sedation, being unable to get the phrase out of his head. The ward was restive too. We thought we knew what that word meant. And what sanity was. So did he.

My next session with Dr. Cee, I asked him: ‘What’s the word “panoply” mean?’ He’d had to look it up. ‘Let’s see—ah. It means, “a complete set of armor.”’

‘I thought so—’ I said.—

Martyn’s letter, gummy with travel, is still up on that shelf. I know why I’m not opening it—or not yet. It may be offering me a job. Something more than this devotion to the manual of myself. Anyone may have such a manual, puzzled over, only to be tucked away, or now and then taken out for instruction, like the pamphlet that comes with the cordless iron, the VCR, the video screen that will turn the dining-room into a rainforest, the digital box that will answer all calls from outer life on the cheap. A real job comes from that outer life.

I have a choice. Maybe that’s the job?

Memory is Faith, my actress friend assured me. And went out on the road again, with a second company.

I wish Heather were here. Not so we could celebrate.

So we could hug.

B
AG IS PACKED.
Plumped again with all the personals that had seeped from it. In my weeks here have I acted like some sloppy mistress whose man is away with the tidy wife?

Once outside again, I know how it will be. Unable to scatter, I’ll begin to cherish every neatness I can scrape up. The soft, glycerined air of restrooms one cannot even enter unless respectably pre-cleansed—and where one cannot rest. Or, dropping lower in the social scale, and if you have found a store that still stocks Sterno, the campsite fuel—the bunged pot on the improvised hob under some bridge. There’s no glow, but the pot steams.… The bit of company—just enough, when a passing stumble-bum brays: ‘I was a Boy Scout once.’ And stumbles on past, almost politely, far enough on from me so he can pee. Then moves on.…

Where are they moving? Good question. Where did I, during those years when I deemed myself to be on the barricades—because I was nowhere else? Even so, in any planned life I adopt, will my bones ever forget that movement? Where the violences to be met were not legendary, as in a war, but pitiful. And the politenesses too. The street is a low-class war. But should anybody ask—a woman there has full privileges.

Nobody much does ask, or not much, about what goes on in the minds of the walking population. Or people do ask and then forget those who are not sufficiently in-a-slot. But now and then, in one of the scheduled parades that this city adores, a man will join it, dragging a banner without motto, of a meaning known only to him. But he marches; he too is on view.

I have packed the checker board. Red-and-black, black-and-red, will it remind me not only of the fates but of the possibilities? Or will it be just one of those games that help you turn your back on the newspapers? Or is it both?

There are games that tell you where to ‘Go,’ but merely on the game-board. There are battles to be fought on a screen, where one can murder, conquer and travel the universe; there’s one at the stationer’s, though I have never seen any of the luck-seekers stop to play. No matter how wide or thick or far its trick dimensions seem to be, it cannot empower them to win the lottery; you have to leave a video in order to live. No wonder, if at times you want to creep into it and stay.

Not far from the halfway house there was a hall offering those anodynes. It was after a sneaked visit there that the boy and I first crept into bed together. ‘I could murder you for real,’ he shuddered, which only made us creep the closer—until one night, he did half-try. I was the one to be banished, for safety’s sake, they said.

Stop, memory. You too can be delay.

Outside, the weather is getting colder. The autumn sky is that icy blue which triumphs even over city dust. Downstairs, the street is empty. Commerce has gone for the night; cars are few. Today I walked along the Hudson, from the George Washington Bridge, to which I had subwayed, down to Seventy-Second Street, staying always as near the river as the city will let you go. A ‘walk’ is not the same as finding yourself where-ever and slogging on, but for keeping in training it will do.

When I came to the low stone barricade where Alphonse and I had met, I lingered, becalmed. It felt like an anniversary, at least for me. When that play was reviewed, with the cast list printed, I read that Alphonse had taken Martyn’s place as Wall. He’ll be a slender substitute, but as valiant as able. I’ll be forever grateful to him. Though I’ve no plans to keep in touch. When it comes to people, there is a one-to-one continuity I must still lack. Though they may burn like candles in my mind.

As I left Riverside Drive, the west was banked with sunset clouds, those autumnal ones, so piled that one might walk on them, toward winter. At night now, Martyn’s building is barely heated, but since it is classed as non-residential, those tenants who secretly household must not complain. I may have met one or two at dusk, nondescript except for their attaché cases; ostensibly they are merely working late. To them I’m perhaps a secretary doing the same. They are the moles of the city, not its rats. ‘Quality rats prefer the waterfront. Even to the garbage. Best of all they want to be where children are.’ That was Alphonse’s lore. He treated the city as if he was courtier to a mad queen. When I get home, I thought, I’ll send him a card.