Expensive People (7 page)

The strange man has a black instrument with a light bulb on it. He pauses and stares at us. Father, entering the room slowly through the smashed door, stares at us. Father wears a soiled coat and he is wet. The strange man is wet too. That is because it is raining out. The man checks something on his instrument and turns and hurries out, bumping into Father. Father seizes him in a kind of embrace and lifts him aside, without looking at him, and the man leaves. Father is still staring at us. He is staring at Nada. I cannot hear what they are saying to each other in this silence, but the room is filled with their screams and their cries of hatred and rage and triumph. The room is filled with it, and I could drown in its very silence.
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One detail about someone in Nada's family an uncle or bizarre distant cousin: he committed suicide by overeating. He decided to kill himself by forcing food down his throat and into his bursting stomach, eating his way through a roomful of food. Admirable man! I can almost see him, can't you? Some dismal, philosophical-faced, hawk-nosed, masculine version of Nada, lost in the gloom she too sometimes fell into, and, unable to rise out of it again, deciding on this only half-serious method of committing suicide. The word “committing” necessitates a certain amount of judicious consideration, and it has always seemed to me idiotic that a madman can “commit” murder or indeed anything. He does it, that's all. Or rather it gets done somehow, with or without his volition. But when you set forth to “commit” a crime you do it with your heels springing off the ground with glee, your brain cells whirling and popping with energy, and, I think, a certain air of magnanimity toward the world. After all, you are leaving it. Whether you kill yourself or someone else you are leaving the world, and if any of my readers succumb to the enchanting music that so cruelly deafened me, they will know just what I mean. The rest of you are in no position to judge.

So this man committed suicide by eating. I had overheard Nada tell this grisly anecdote more than once, but never when Father was around. She told it once to a good friend of hers, a man with a skimpy, sandy beard who kept staring down at the floor and breathing harshly and sympathetically through his beard. He kept saying, “Yes, yes,” while she told the story of this uncle or cousin (I forget which) who locked himself up in his room and ate until the lining of his stomach burst. Did he die in agony? I don't like to think of that. I like to think of that supreme moment when he broke through the slippery, stubborn wall of his own stomach and entered eternity at once—I don't like to think of lesser details. He did it, Nada said, to rob his family of dignity and to make fun of the way they gorged themselves. They were such gluttons—she laughed—and they had to move away from that city out of shame, though they did not stop being gluttons as far as she knew. Behind all her mysterious, melodramatic contempt she was proud of that family of hers.

The anecdote always inspired in those who heard it, and in me, a
strange jealousy along with our natural admiration. I suspect we are all very suspicious and jealous of those who commit suicide, anxious to prove that it was “cowardly” or “painless,” we could do better, indeed we will do better, wait and see.

And so we came to Fernwood, the town of my disintegration. There I bade farewell to myself as a child. Should I bother to describe Fern-wood, or can you imagine it? Fernwood and Brookfield and Cedar Grove and Charlotte Pointe are always the suburbs farthest out, but don't confuse yourself by thinking they are the newest. No, they are the oldest. They are the “country,” where the country houses of the past had been built for the wealthy of the city many horse-drawn miles away. Now, of course, in between these suburbs and the city are those absurd new towns and villages, row after row of clean, respectable houses and maze after maze of buff-brick housing developments, all overpriced and treeless, the slums of tomorrow. The hell with them. The “country” was where Father always took us, sure in his instincts and surer still in his bank account, for nothing more was demanded of one than money in this world. There was a jolly camaraderie because of this fact. Fine. Great. Fernwood had been the site of these old country estates, and enormous estates they had been too; it would make your heart swell to the danger point to see one of them. A few were left, but most of the land had been divided up into, say, three-acre plots for other houses, and in the more citified part of the village plots as small as two acres. Our Fernwood house, on a winding street called Burning Bush Way, was one of these lesser homes, of course.

Imagine Fernwood like this: an odor of grass, leaves, a domesticated river (with ducks, geese, and swans provided by the village, and giant goldfish swimming gracefully), blue skies, thousands of acres of faultless green grass, not Merion Blue but the low creeping type used on golf courses, and an avalanche of trees everywhere!—and enormous stone houses, brick houses, fake Scandinavian houses, English, French, Southwest, Northeast houses, a sprinkling of “modern” architecture
that never manages to look more than nervously aggressive in this conservative environment. And mixed in with the odor of lawns being sprinkled automatically on warm spring mornings is the odor of money cash. Fresh, crisp cash. Bills you could stuff in your mouth and chew away at. My mouth is watering at the thought of that tart, fine blue-green ink, the mellow aroma of the paper!

Should I digress and tell you a strange little incomplete tale about cash? Bills? Raw money? One morning back in Brookfield, my eight-year-old self was dawdling on the way to school when I happened to see one of Nada's friends drive up. I could tell by the way she braked her car and slid into one of our evergreens that she was distracted, and when she jumped out of the car she left the door swinging ponderously. So I followed her quietly back to our house. She burst in the back door without knocking, into the kitchen, and cried, “Natashya! Natashya!” I peeked in through a window, inclining my ear to the screen. The gauzy kitchen curtain hid me perfectly. Nada came in, and the woman said, before my mother had a chance to show surprise, “You'll never guess what I have in this!” A moment of silence, then Nada's hesitant murmur, which I couldn't hear. Then the woman cried out with a horrible, ugly triumph I can still remember, “Look at this! I found where that bastard has been hiding it all!”

And I took every chance and looked up. Yes, entranced by her frenzy, I raised my head to peer through the window, to see the woman holding open a brown leather ice container stuffed with bills.

“Thousands! Thousands! A million maybe!” she said, panting.

Some of the bills spilled onto the floor. I could see the woman's saliva in the bright morning sunshine, and the sight so unnerved me I lost my balance and fell a yard or two to the ground.

So you see? Cash like that. And other forms too, in tiny books and stamped on pieces of paper. Oh, it was wonderful, wonderful, and in a way I wish I still had access to it. If I wanted to stuff myself with money and die in that unique way I couldn't; I don't have enough cash. But I want to tell the story of Fernwood, and cash is only part of it. It is the foundation of it, yes, but we like to rise above our foundations, our muddy beginnings. We like to rise without looking back because that is perhaps declasse, and when there are no true classes, what greater horror than becoming declasse, unfit for even the classless society?

My school was a private school by the name of Johns Behemoth Boys' School, not affiliated with any religion, pure and Anglophile, like all these schools, with an unmarked bus to take care of the few “town boys” who did not board at the school. The school was one of the old estates (I promised that your heart would swell to see one), and surely no mortal human beings had ever lived in that big main house. No, I like to think that giants had lived there, archangels or monsters. And up behind it, terraced into a hill, was a garden of exquisite beauty tended by a deaf-mute, whose only justification in life was to keep the blown petals swept up off the grass, the roses trimmed, the rhododendron spiced with acid, the rich soil tilled, the insects at bay. Any monstrous hero would have cultivated this beauty as a delicious contrast to his own degradations.

The buildings were covered with ivy, very staunch and brittle. A bit ugly, like all these schools. The architecture was solid and masculine, squat, unimaginative, English and prisonlike in an easy combination. Graveled walks for the boys to bicycle upon, and a series of waterfalls set up for visitors and parents and magazine photographers. (The water was
verboten
to us boys.) Rather narrow, cheerless dormitory rooms, but built solidly, with good solid imitation antique furniture. Country English. Down in the classrooms the floors were smooth and polished as if by a hundred years of feet, caressed by boys impatient for learning. Small classrooms; a table and chair for the teacher instead of a desk; desks were—shall I guess?—declasse because the public schools had them. We boys wore ties every day of our anguished little lives, and blazers, and we worked hard, very hard. I am not joking. The school started with seventh grade and took in all of the high-school grades, but Fernwood's conservative parents had been blocking and graphing out their boys' careers for over a decade before they entered Johns Behemoth. Public-school students matured before we did in every way except intellectually; the typical Johns Behemoth boy was undersized, lank, intense, nervous, and given to sarcasm and superb, automatic manners. In the presence of girls he regressed to early childhood. I believe about thirty percent of my classmates were in analysis, a good many of them with the same man, Dr. Hugg, who specialized in
disturbed adolescent boys. I never advanced that far because I was kicked out of the school in a few months.

Of all the ugly things I have to tell, stored up ripe and rotting in my memory, being expelled from that school is in a way the most shameful.

A man can admit with a cheerful shrug of his shoulders to larceny, wife-beating, treason, even murder (as I am to do shortly), but trivialities concerning his honor arouse the most shame. This is because the ego's threads of radiation never quite stop, even in the most depraved of us, and we must always think, “Yes, but my essential honor wasn't touched. Yes, but my dignity wasn't touched. Yes, but… But…”

But…

It was January when we moved to Fernwood, and Nada found out at once about the schools. The public school was out, she decided, because my nervous little mind needed more stimulation. She had had an interest in the Catholic Church for a while, a fluctuating interest like all her interests, but people told her emphatically that the local Catholic school wasn't good enough for her son. (She talked in a rapid low voice about her “son,” who was me, a prodigious child never understood by his father or his teachers.) So she drove me over to Johns Behemoth one frosty morning.

Let me describe Nada on such a morning. She was dressed in her suburban style (she had two general styles, as you will see) and most fiercely and proudly was she adorned, in her simply cut dark wool suit, and two dots of silver that were earrings, and white leather gloves that looked like baby's skin, bleached, and a purse to match, and the jeweled wristwatch that Father had given her for no particular reason—no reason that I had been able to snoop out—a month before. Her shoes were made of leather, her legs were smooth and scintillating in the vivid light, covered with invisible nylon, and she wore over her suit her sporty fur coat, which was something to wear “in the country,” alternating bands of white and caramel fur, and from all this arose a faint halo of warm perfume that might have been Nada's magic radiance. A child, I did not let on that I noticed the interested gaze of men we drove past, mere gas-station attendants or sometimes village executives strolling to work or down to the train depot. I did not even let on that I noticed the looks Father gave her sometimes, sad and yearning and vulnerable, when she would hurry into a room Father was in, looking
for something she would never find in that room—or in any room he and I were in, drooping, happy Father and I, her prodigy. Much of my child's life consisted of averting my eyes and turning away from things I was not supposed to see.

She took the Cadillac that morning. Father was at work. He had driven off that morning at seven and he was at work, in an office all his own some distance away. I will take you there eventually, but Nada is always more interesting, and this is the story (or is everything in my life only an anecdote?) of how she brought me to Johns Behemoth, saw what the challenge was, and conquered it. In the lovely yellow car she wheeled around the unpaved lanes of Fernwood Heights, which was adjacent to plain Fernwood and much more expensive. We passed stone walls and brick walls and walls of evergreens that must have hidden extraordinary homes, twisting and turning in a kind of perpetual pine forest, until we came to the wrought-iron gate and the sign

JOHNS BEHEMOTH BOYS' SCHOOL
PARKING FOR VISITORS
SPEED 15 MPH

“We're going to get you into this school, Richard,” Nada said grimly. She looked at everything and took in everything. I could feel the jolt of this place on her body, my poor mother, who was so simple in her way that all things ostentatious and expensive seemed emanations of a higher existence, which she never questioned the way Father might. She attributed this to his vulgarity.

Quietly watching them both, which was my life's work, I could see that Nada's superior mind disqualified her entirely for judgments concerning anyone who didn't compete with her on the intellectual level. She criticized scornfully and recklessly those writers she loved best, Tolstoi and Mann, embarrassed by occasional lapses of taste or power in their writing, but any society matron or business executive with the smell of money about them rendered her helpless. It was a good thing she never made it into high society! What could she do? She was as much a child as I was, now that I think of it. She had married Father the way a girl goes on a date with a man she does not at all like, or even know, simply because he will take her to a special event where the very
lights and the very sweetness of the flowers set everywhere make up a world—no people are really needed.
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Father knew nothing, but where his imagination should have been, in that emptiness, where his sensitivity and taste should have been, in that larger emptiness, there was a crude common sense as reliable as a dime-store bottle-top opener.