Searches & Seizures (20 page)

It is as I see it a perfect genealogy, and if I can be bought and sold a hundred times over by a thousand men in this country—people in your own town could do it, providents and trailers of hunch, I bless them, who got into this or went into that when it was eight cents a share—I am satisfied with my thirteen or fourteen million. Wealth is not after all the point. The genealogy is. That bridge-trick nexus that brought Newpert to Oh, Salts to Ashenden and Ashenden to Oh, love’s lucky longshots which, paying off, permitted me as they permit every human life! (I have this simple, harmless paranoia of the good-natured man, this cheerful awe.) Forgive my enthusiasm, that I go on like some secular patriot wrapped in the simple flag of self, a professional descendant, every day the closed-for-the-holiday banks and post offices of the heart. And why not? Aren’t my circumstances superb? Whose are better? No boast, no boast. I’ve had it easy, served up on all life’s silver platters like a satrap. And if my money is managed for me and I do no work—less work even than Father, who at least came up with those two slogans, the latter in a six-month solitude that must have been hell for that gregarious man (“For Our Matchless Friends”: no slogan finally but a broken code, an extension of his own hospitable being, simply the Promethean gift of fire to a guest)—at least I am not “spoiled” and have in me still alive the nerve endings of gratitude. If it’s miserly to count one’s blessings, Brewster Ashenden’s a miser.

This will give you some idea of what I’m like:

On Having an Account in a Swiss Bank: I never had one, and suggest you stay away from them too. Oh, the mystery and romance is all very well, but never forget that your Swiss bank offers no premiums, whereas for opening a savings account for $5,000 or more at First National City Bank of New York or other fine institutions you get wonderful premiums—picnic hampers, Scotch coolers, Polaroid cameras, Hudson’s Bay blankets from L. L. Bean, electric shavers, even lawn furniture. My managers always leave me a million or so to play with, and this is how I do it. I suppose I’ve received hundreds of such bonuses. Usually I give them to friends or as gifts at Christmas to doormen and other loosely connected personnel of the household, but often I keep them and use them myself. I’m not stingy. Of course I can afford to buy any of these things—and I do, I enjoy making purchases—but somehow nothing brings the joy of existence home to me more than these premiums. Something from nothing—the two-suiter from Chase Manhattan and my own existence, luggage a bonus and life a bonus too. Like having a film star next to you on your flight from the Coast. There are treats of high order, adventure like cash in the street.

Let’s enjoy ourselves, I say; let’s have fun. Lord, let us live in the sand by the surf of the sea and play till cows come home. We’ll have a house on the Vineyard and a brownstone in the Seventies and a
pied-à-terre
in a world capital when something big is about to break. (Put the Cardinal in the back bedroom where the sun gilds the bay at afternoon tea and give us the courage to stand up to secret police at the door, to top all threats with threats of our own, the nicknames of mayors and ministers, the fast comeback at the front stairs, authority on us like the funny squiggle the counterfeiters miss.) Re-Columbus us. Engage us with the overlooked, a knowledge of optics, say, or a gift for the tides. (My pal, the heir to most of the vegetables in inland Nebraska, has become a superb amateur oceanographer. The marine studies people invite him to Wood’s Hole each year. He has a wave named for him.) Make us good at things, the countertenor and the German language, and teach us to be as easy in our amateur standing as the best man at a roommate’s wedding. Give us hard tummies behind the cummerbund and long swimmer’s muscles under the hound’s tooth so that we may enjoy our long life. And may all our stocks rise to the occasion of our best possibilities, and our humanness be bullish too.

Speaking personally I am glad to be a heroic man.

I am pleased that I am attractive to women but grateful I’m no bounder. Though I’m touched when married women fall in love with me, as frequently they do, I am rarely to blame. I never encourage these fits and do my best to get them over their derangements so as not to lose the friendships of their husbands when they are known to me, or the neutral friendship of the ladies themselves. This happens less than you might think, however, for whenever I am a houseguest of a married friend I usually make it a point to bring along a girl. These girls are from all walks of life—models, show girls, starlets, actresses, tennis professionals, singers, heiresses and the daughters of the diplomats of most of the nations of the free world.
All
walks. They tend, however, to conform to a single physical type, and are almost always tall, tan, slender and blond, the girl from Ipanema as a wag friend of mine has it. They are always sensitive and intelligent and good at sailing and the Australian crawl. They are never blemished in any way, for even something like a tiny beauty mark on the inside of a thigh or above the shoulder blade is enough to put me off, and their breaths must be as sweet at three in the morning as they are at noon. (I never see a woman who is dieting for diet sours the breath.) Arm hair, of course, is repellent to me though a soft blond down is now and then acceptable. I know I sound a prig. I’m not. I am—well, classical, drawn by perfection as to some magnetic, Platonic pole, idealism and beauty’s true North.

But if I’m demanding about the type I fall in love with—I
do
fall in love, I’m not Don Juan—I try to be charming to all women, the flawed as well as the unflawed. I know that times have changed and that less is expected of gentlemen these days, that there’s more “openness” between the sexes and that in the main, this is a healthy development. Still, in certain respects I am old-fashioned—I’m the first to admit it—and not only find myself incapable of strong language in the presence of a lady (I rarely use it myself at any time, even a “damn” even a “hell”) but become enraged when someone else uses it and immediately want to call him out. I’m the same if there’s a child about or a man over the age of fifty-seven if he is not vigorous. The leopard cannot change his spots. I’m a gentleman, an opener of doors and doffer of hats and after you firster, meek in the elevator and kind to the help. I maintain a fund which I use for the abortions of girls other men have gotten into trouble; if the young lady prefers, I have a heart-to-heart with the young man. And although I’ve no sisters, I have a brother’s temperament, all good counsel and real concern. Even without a sister of my own—or a brother either for that matter; I’m an only child—I lend an ear and do for other fellows’ sisses the moral forks.

Still, there’s fun in me, and danger too. I’m this orphan now but that’s recent (Father and Mother died early this year, Mother first and Father a few days later—Father, too, was courteous to women), and I’m afraid that when they were alive I gave my parents some grisly moments with my exploits, put their hearts in their mouths and gray in their hair. I have been a fighter pilot for the RAF (I saw some action at Suez) and a mercenary on the
Biafran
side, as well as a sort of free-lance spy against some of your South American and Greek juntas. (I’m not political, but the average generalissimo cheats at cards. It’s curious, I’ve noticed that though they steal the picture cards they rarely play them; I suppose it’s a class thing—your military man would rather beat you with a nine than a king.) I am Johnny-on-the-spot at disasters—I was in Managua for the earthquake—lending a hand, pulling my oar, the sort of man who knocks your teeth out if he catches you abusing the water ration in the lifeboat and then turns around and offers his own meager mouthful to a woman or a man over fifty-seven. Chavez is my friend and the Chicago Seven, though I had to stop seeing them because of the foul language. (I love Jerry Rubin too much to tear his head off, and I could see that’s what it would come to.) And here and there I’ve had Mafiosi for friends—wonderful family men, the Cosa Nostra, I respect that. And the astronauts, of course; I spent a weightless weekend with them in an anti-gravity chamber in Houston one time, coming down only to take a long-distance phone call from a girl in trouble. And, let’s see, sixty hours in the bathysphere with Cousteau, fathoms below where the ordinary fish run. So I have been weightless and I have been gravid, falling in free-fall like a spider down its filament and paid out in rappel. And in the Prix de this and Prix de t’other, all the classic combats of moving parts (my own moving parts loose as a toy yet to be assembled), uninsurable at last, taking a stunt man’s risks, a darer gone first, blinded in the world’s uncharted caves and deafened beneath its waterfalls, the earth itself a sort of Jungle Gym finally, my playground, swimming at your own risk.

Last winter I fought a duel. I saw a man whipping his dog and called him out. Pistols at fourteen paces. The fellow—a prince, a wastrel—could get no one to act as his second so I did it myself, giving him pointers, calling the adjustments for windage, and at last standing still for him as one of those FBI paper silhouettes, my vitals (we were on a beach, I wore no shirt, just my bathing suit, the sun, rising over his shoulder, spotlighting me) clear as marked meat on a butcher’s diagram, my Valentine heart vaulting toward the barrel of his pistol. He fired and missed and I threw my pistol into the sea. He wept, and I took him back to the house and gave him a good price for his dog. And running with the bulls at Pamplona—not in front of them,
with
them—and strolling at two a.m. through the Casbah like a fellow down Main Street, and standing on top of a patrol car in Harlem talking through the bull horn to the sniper. And dumb things too.

Father called me home from Tel Aviv a few weeks before he died.

He was sitting on a new bed in his room wearing only his pajama tops. He hadn’t shaved, the gray stubble latticing his lower face in an old man’s way, like some snood of mortality. There was a glass in his hand, his one-hundred-dollar bill rolled tight around the condensation. (He always fingered one, a tic.)

“Say hello to your mother.”

I hadn’t seen her. Like many people who have learned the secret of living together, Father and Mother slept in separate suites, but now twin beds, Father in one, Mother in the other, had replaced Father’s fourposter. A nightstand stood between them—I remembered it from Grandmother Newpert’s summer house in Edgarton—on which, arranged like two entrenched armies, were two sets of medicines, Father’s bright ceremonial pills and May Day capsules, and Mother’s liquids in their antique apothecary bottles (she supplied the druggist with these bottles herself, insisting out of her willful aesthetic sense that all her prescriptions be placed in them), with their water glasses and a shiny artillery of teaspoons. Mother herself seemed to be sleeping. Perhaps that’s why I hadn’t noticed her, or perhaps it was the angle, Father’s bed being the closer as I walked into the room. Or perhaps it was her condition itself, sickness an effacement. I hesitated.

“It’s all right,” Father said. “She’s awake. You’re not disturbing her.”

“Her eyes are closed,” I said softly to Father.

“I have been seeing double in the morning, Brewster darling,” Mother said. “It gives me megrim to open them.”

“Mother, you naughty slugabed,” I teased. Sometimes being a gentleman can be a pain in the you-know-where, to oneself as well as to others. Well, it’s often fatuous, and in emergency it always is, as anything is in emergency short of an uncivilized scream, but what can you do, a code is a code. One dresses for dinner in the jungle and surrenders one’s sword to the enemy and says thank you very much and refuses the blindfold. “Shame on you, sweetheart, the sun up these several hours and you still tucked in.”

“It’s cancer, Son,” Father said in a low tone not meant for Mother.

“Lazybones,” I scolded, swallowing hard.

“Oh, I
do
want to see you, Brewster,” Mother said. “Perhaps if I opened just
one
little eye—”

“Not at all, you sweet dear. If you must lie in bed all day I think it best that you do some honest sleeping. I’ll still be here when you finally decide to get up.”

“There, that’s better,” Mother said, opening her right eye and scowling at me.

“Please, honeybunch, you’ll see double and get megrim.”

“Brewster, it’s lovely. It makes you twice as handsome, twice as tall.”

“Please, Mother—”

“Let her, Brew. This is a deathbed.”

“Father!”

“Why are you so shocked, Brewster? It had to happen someday.”

“I think I’ll close it now.”

“Really, Father, a
deathbed…
”

“Since it upsets him so.”

“Well, death
beds
then.”

“But I reserve the right to open it again whenever I choose. If a cat can look at a king…”

“Father, aren’t you being—that’s right, darling, shut it, shut it tight—the slightest bit melodramatic?”

“Oh, for Lord’s sake, Brew, don’t be prissy. Mother and I are going, she of cancer, I of everything. Rather than waste the little time we have left together, we might try to get certain things straight.”

“When Father called you back from overseas he arranged with Mrs. Lucas to have these twin deathbeds set up in here.”

Mrs. Lucas is the housekeeper. She used to give me my baths when I was a child. I always try to remember to bring her a picnic hamper or some other especially nice premium from the bank when I come home for a visit. Over the years Mrs. Lucas has had
chaises longues,
card tables, hammocks and many powerful flashlights from me—a small fortune in merchandise.