Authors: Paul Ableman
“Good book?”
In one movement she laid down the book, swept off her glasses and bowed her head in a humourous gesture. At the same time she smiled. I was impressed, particularly by the fact that she didn’t even glance at me. She was like a social machine recalled to its function. She began speaking even before she’d raised her head to see who’d intruded.
“No, it is a bad book. But compulsive. Who are you?”
“Tornado Pratt.”
“Ah,” she nodded, “I’ve heard of you. Alexandra Wilks.”
She was wearing a green, velvet dress with a plunging neckline. She was small and I could see a good way down that cleavage and tell she had good breasts, low but good. Her body was rangy but
exciting. But the crazy thing is, I always saw Alexandra Wilks, when I was with her, in a kind of haze. When I was away from her, I’d conjure her up in my mind and dwell appreciatively on her slim, but voluptuous, body, and her attractive face with dense black locks cascading to her shoulders. But as soon as we were together a kind of electric current of talk and ideas started flowing and I could no longer appreciate her physically. I never did get laid by Alexandra Wilks but I’m pretty sure she would have done. She liked me a lot. She said so. But on the first evening it was
supposed
to happen, Germany sundered us.
The evening started real good. I was a few minutes early arriving and Alexandra Wilks was still dressing. She came to the door with tumbled hair and a Japanese silk robe clutched around her.
“Oh, you traitor,” she exclaimed. “I’m too old to be caught like this.”
“You look wonderful,” I insisted, strangely stirred by her lithe, mature looks.
She flashed me a brief smile, seized my arm, guided me to a leather chair and planted me down. Then, just as it was parting disastrously, she snatched her robe together again. She exclaimed:
“Wow. You sit here. You read this and you wait five minutes.”
She dumped
Time
magazine in my lap and flashed out again like a kingfisher. Everything she did was swift and glinting and inspired confidence.
So I sat with
Time
magazine but studied instead her living-room. It was large but far from ostentatious. I’d learned that Alexandra had received a divorce settlement of a quarter of a million bucks. This room suggested a professional woman doing pretty well, not a rich lady. It was brave with wood and books and it scintillated with colour. Many of her things were like humming-birds and opals; their hues were iridescent rather than pigmented and stable. But she herself, within the glinting, rainbow box, was hard and true as teak or geometry.
I was glad we’d had a good, brisk, intimate start. Almost at once it got better. She called from the bedroom which was adjoining:
“Are you a boozer? Of course, you are. Drinks on the trolley, behind the door.”
I searched and then called:
“No trolley.”
“What?”
She appeared at the bedroom door and my heart clenched in the old, thrilling, almost vertiginous shudder of desire. She was in
her slip, white and short and diaphanous enough to reveal her panties and bra beneath. She stepped swiftly, like a trotter, to the door and confirmed my allegation.
“Where can it be—ah.”
She peeped behind a gaudy screen and immediately turned and tripped back to her bedroom, calling over her shoulder.
“It’s there—help yourself—nothing for me. I’ll be three more minutes.”
I fixed myself a scotch and soda against a mental frieze of Alexandra, nut-brown Mediterranean skin darkened by the
dazzling
white of her slip, in various frames of frozen motion. As I sipped the drink the warming nudge of alcohol reinforced my
feeling
of intimacy. It seemed already I belonged with her, maybe not as a husband but as a treasured guest who’d always be
welcome
in Alexandra’s living-room, bedroom, body.
Then—they are rare but they do happen, evenings, days, magic afternoons by the river, lyrical hikes in the forest, spells which are flawless, which, if you’d designed them yourself, couldn’t have been improved. So it was that first evening, or so it was almost to the end of that first evening, spent in the company of my dear friend and mentor, Alexandra Wilks of the Hellenes.
It was late spring and what I get is the whiff of magnolia on the deep lawns and the emerald of the young woods. And what I get is the couple in the foyer of the restaurant who turned from
tuxedoed
stone to merry flesh and laughed with us over cocktails for quarter of an hour before we were seated. And what I get is one of those rare meals in which every course, from mousse to sherbert is delicate and rich and the claret is dense and fragrant. And what I hear, murmuring still in my brain which has cupped it for forty years, is the lilt and crackle of the talk that bound Alexandra Wilks and me that evening. We found that in many things we were twin facets of the same mind. We agreed, but with our own original, complementary perspective, about almost everything, and when we disagreed it was only to find a new and henceforth shared
understanding
. I felt that I had never really met another intellect before. Her laughter and applause were the stimulus I’d always
instinctively
sought. So, hand in hand, we danced across the lawn of the Cambridge Inn, at that time the finest restaurant in the vicinity of Washington. In her faint Greek accent, harshly aspirated, she proposed:
“Tell me everything.”
And I tried. I wanted her to inspect and approve all the elements
of my being. Suddenly, in the shared glow of her interest, all my loves and achievements and friends and adventures shone fresh and new. It seemed to me that she would both understand what I had made of the past and clarify the things that puzzled me about the present, that she would approve or disparage in the same frame of reference as myself. And, just as urgently, I wanted to explore
her
past and reality and so, for the next three hours, in various parts of the city we presented to each other fragments of our lives. Even the interruptions were benign. We looked in at a party and
everyone
there who knew me was cordial in a flattering way and a female friend of Alexandra’s said:
“He suits you, darling.”
And finally we sat in my car, outside a tavern, in the velvet, musky night and she asked:
“Where to now?”
And I said, still, in spite of our burgeoning rapport, with a faint tremor of dread at the possibility of demur:
“Back to my place, I guess. Suit you?”
“Of course.”
Filled with the electric joy of anticipation, I drove us home. A sudden spring shower exploded and we went whistling through a tunnel of water, laughing in delight. We hissed into my drive. My man opened the door and I dismissed him for the night. And then, stupidly, I showed her round the house. And inevitably we came to the German room.
Now that room wasn’t ostentatiously corrupt. It wasn’t pasted up with big posters and slogans. At first glance it just looked like a small library. It had a pile carpet and a few leather armchairs. The pictures were mainly historical scenes. I flipped on the light by the door and we entered. When we’d about reached the middle of the room, Alexandra, who’d been glancing about, nodded
appreciatively
at what she saw. She reacted pretty negligently because we were in deep discussion about some thing. I can’t remember what but I remember that I suddenly realized it was very important to pursue that discussion. This was because, in a wretched flash of insight, I perceived how Alexandra would react to that room if she discovered its real meaning. And a profound feeling of humiliation swept over me. All my obsession of the past year with Germany and German matters suddenly seemed to me neurotic and despicable.
I didn’t give anything away but, just as naturally as before, I
took Alexandra’s arm and, with an indifferent glance about, turned her gently back towards the door, murmuring:
“Well, that’s the downstairs. Now there’s the upstairs.”
And I gave her arm a squeeze of complicity which, by that stage, was expected, and strolled with her back towards the door. She was still talking and my hand was reaching up to flick the switch back into merciful darkness when she abruptly stopped talking and walking and looked about attentively. She said:
“But what do you read?”
“Well—”
But it was too late. She sprang forward to the nearest shelf and pulled out
The
Soul
of
Fascism
or something. She wrinkled her nose, pushed it back, looked along the shelves. Soon she asked, in a faintly puzzled voice:
“Are they all about Germany—Fascism?”
“No—not all. A good many—”
But now she was on the scent and it didn’t take her long to sniff out the secret of that base temple. She asked:
“What is this? You’re not a Fascist, are you?”
“I’m not a Fascist—but I recognize its importance.”
“Importance?”
It was partly the incredulous way she echoed the word, but also my own stubborn egotism, that launched me. Patronize me? Imply, by a raised syllable, that Tornado Pratt was a brute or an idiot or both? I felt my mind revving up and soon I was snarling out an indictment. Democracy? The rule of the weak over the strong, of the life-deniers over the life-enhancers. It was an obsolete political concept that had no more relevance to the twentieth century than sacrificial slaughter and oracles. Happiness did not come from eliminating sources of misery. It was not a negative but a positive thing that united men in a goal that transcended their own mean lives. In such an exalted mental state it would be an honour to suffer for the community and a privilege to die for it. The rule of law in fact meant the rule of lawyers and thus the rule of deceit and venality. Why should five hundred weak and stupid leaders be superior to one prophetic, strong one? Where, in contemporary America, could one discern the spirit of joy, of poetry, of humanity which was erupting in Italy and Germany? What right had a gangster society, riddled with corruption, to sneer at a nation undergoing a spiritual renaissance? Government by parliament was government by talkers. What we needed was government by doers. Our constitution and vaunted freedoms conferred only the right to
rot in tenements and be tyrannized by small-time crooks. Our rulers were predatory and the people gullible.
Oh, I got fiercer and fiercer, Horace, and while uttering that fierce speech I understood how a man can feel raw power flowing out of the air into his mind and body. I sensed the intoxication of leadership. I guess for a few minutes, I just about became Hitler. But there was no real impetus to it. It was retrospective, harnessing only the memory of a fire that had, in truth, gone out a few minutes before. While ranting, a part of my mind was miserably analysing the truth I’d suddenly seen.
It was the kid. I’d projected on to America, Democracy, the West, my disillusion with myself. The corruption I’d perceived in my countrymen had been a displacement of the corruption I knew that I contained. So all the while I was haranguing a frowning Alexandra, I was inwardly battling with an honest, agonized self who wanted to confess, to purge himself by proclaiming his guilt. But I couldn’t do it, not then, not ever and so, although we
ultimately
became very close friends and remained so until Alexandra Wilks died of emphysemic heart failure just seven years ago, we never quite regained the peak of mental union we scaled that first evening before Hitler hurled us down.
When I’d run down, I snarled, self-protectively:
“So that’s it. So now do you want I should drive you home?”
She shook her head, chewed her lip for a moment and then fumbled for and lit a cigarette. She glanced about balefully and said:
“I’d like to get out of this room.”
“Okay—let’s try the lounge. Can I get you a drink?”
We moved across the hall into the lounge. She stood by the mantelpiece while I fixed her a drink. I still wanted her and her strange silence encouraged me to think it might still be possible. I handed her her drink and slipped my arm round her waist. She didn’t remove it but said:
“Listen, do you really
know
anything about Fascism?”
I removed my arm.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t mean books. I mean, have you been there? Have you seen what’s happening in Germany?”
Even as she asked it, Horace, I realized that I’d treasured my ignorance. Sure, I’d read all the manifestos and booster books but I’d avoided any first-hand experience. Hell, I could have steamed across the ocean any time and explored my paradise. But I’d
preferred
to keep the legend pure. Now it turned out that Alexandra knew a lot about Hitler’s Germany. She had an uncle who was a German Jew, professor of classics at Yale, formerly of Heidelberg. It seemed he was in delicate health because some storm-troopers, liberating his library, had kicked him about some. They’d left him dying of a ruptured kidney and in pain from broken bones. And die he undoubtedly would have done if one of them, grim and
embarrassed
, hadn’t sneaked back and driven him to the hospital. On discharge some months later, he’d concluded that Germany, his beloved country, was fixed on his destruction and so he’d bribed his way out. Alexandra started off telling me about her Uncle Johan in an objective and dispassionate tone. But she was Greek and her passion rose. Oh, she knew a hell of a lot about Germany. Her husband had done a congressional report on the place. She herself had toured there the previous year. She had anti-Nazi German friends. She knew exactly what was going on and, although she had, with mysterious intuition, perceived that, in spite of appearances, I was not an authentic Nazi, as she talked of the horrors that had already been born there and the horrors that were gestating there, harsh fury began to infuse her voice, and she glared at me in reproach. In the end we had a shouting session and then she stormed out of the house. I was so mad I didn’t even go after her although I knew she’d have a hell of a job getting a cab at that time of night. Three years later, when I next met her, she told me she’d walked, no marched, four or five miles that night, tears of rage and pity pouring down her cheeks much of the time.