We Are Still Married (8 page)

“Warren has thrown away his career,” says one old pal, but has he? Or has he found a new one? One thing is sure: no pal of his dares criticize Julie to his face. Jack Nicholson called her “dumpy” once, and he and Warren didn't speak for days. To Warren, she is the source of happiness. She now takes all his calls, and even if you're a top producer, if she thinks you're phony or stuck up or only trying to use Warren and not really caring about him, you may as well say goodbye right then and there.

O
UR MOTHERS BROUGHT US ALL UP to be nice people. We all knew what it meant. Around the age of fifteen we may have thought niceness was too uncool and was retarding our development as sex symbols and we may have bumped around in the dark for a while, being nice and trying to hide it, but eventually we came out as a
very nice
person, or
basically nice, or nice once you get to know him. Or not so nice.

Nice people are quiet and responsible and don't make you pay a big price for their presence. They don't beg or threaten, they are self-effacing, and they do what they can to make human life smooth and enjoyable. The fact that there are no flies on you doesn't qualify you as nice, nor the fact that you never burned the flag or that an independent prosecutor has decided not to seek an indictment. It's who you are that counts, not your reputation. So it's unfortunate that nice people are so sensitive about vicious slander.

When your Aunt Hazel, the Mother Teresa of Bonhomme, Iowa, hears via the Methodist grapevine that a neighbor named Mildred has told numerous Bonhommeans that she, Hazel, isn't as nice as everyone thinks but is “selfish” and has a “glorified opinion” of herself, it knocks your poor aunt flat on her back. Stunned, she leaves the community outreach luncheon in tears, drives straight home, and spends the afternoon lying weeping on the couch, bewildered by hostility from a woman she has gone out of her way to be nice to. She imagines Mildred cutting her up all over town with lie after shabby lie, but this cruel injustice does not make your aunt angry, it fills her with sadness, and she feels depressed for days, imagining the terrible things people are thinking about her. It does no good to tell this wonderful Christian woman, “Ignore that slut. She's a tramp, a liar, a piece of baggage. She drinks big tumblers of sherry in the morning, her house is filthy, her cucumbers are puny, her begonias are all eaten up with bugs. Don't let the bitch get you down.” Hazel is unable to think in those terms. She's all torn up over it.

Of course, who can blame Mildred that Hazel's extreme niceness invites disbelief? Hazel's reputation suffers from a lack of interesting negatives. Her faithful service to the church, the library, the Girl Scouts, the 4-H, the park board, the Bijou Theater renovation committee, the soup kitchen and shelter where she volunteers two days a week, her Sunday visits to the county jail, the parade of damaged children she has taken under her wing, her lifetime of Christian charity and hopeful good humor in the face of drought and illness and death—people are hungry to hear a bad word about her. Some Bonhommeans suspect that Hazel suffers from occasional depression and that she may take medication for it. They speculate about this from time to time. If on the other hand, she were a professional wrestler named Olga the Mistress of Death & Whore of Babylon, a three-hundred-pound witch with black lipstick and green-and-purple hair who spits big gobs on the flag and carries a whip and waggles her boobs at the referee and gouges her opponent Betty Anderson's eyes and screeches weird obscenities into the darkness, she'd have a million fans around America, including many in Bonhomme, who'd say, “You know, in real life Olga's really a nice person. She knits and cooks and is devoted to her husband and children.” But as Hazel the Soul of Kindness she has a hard row to hoe: after her three decades of good works, people say, “I hear that she may have seen a psychologist at one time.”

America is a big two-hearted forgiving country. If Hitler was alive today, he'd be on the “Today” show, talking about his new book,
My Struggle.
Around the country, people would turn away from the toaster and stare at the little screen:
Hitler.
“A lot of people still have hard feelings toward you because of that whole Auschwitz thing, you know,” the host is saying. “What do you say to that? How do you deal with animosity on that level? I mean, personally, you and Eva. Is it rough on your marriage? How do you explain it to your kids?” The former Fuhrer speaks in rapid German and we hear a woman's voice translate: “Bryant, a person can't look back. I live in the future. People who still carry a grudge from forty—what was it?
fifty
years ago—that's a tragedy. The stories about genocide are so old and worn out and threadbare and the people who repeat them are—I'm very sorry to have to say this—they're to be pitied. I feel sorry for them. Life is a garden, a summer day, a fragile butterfly, the smile on the face of a child. Why would I kill millions of people when I myself love life so much?” Some dogfood is then sold, followed by instant coffee, and then we're back for the weather. Coming up in the next half hour, a report on St. Luke: did he steal some parts of his gospel from other sources without attribution?

People can forgive anybody for just about anything but they don't respect nobody, and so a miserable sinner with one redeeming virtue is equal to a righteous person with a secret fault. Maybe better. The prodigal son's brother learned that lesson one day about 6:00 P.M. in St. Luke's gospel when he stumbled through the back door bone-tired from another ten-hour day hoeing corn and heard happy voices and found a crowd of family friends on the patio, the fatted calf on the spit, the band warming up, the beer on ice, and the honored guest, Donnie, dressed in rags and smelling of pig shit, and his dad hugging
him
. His dad had never hugged him, hardly even squeezed his hand, his dad wasn't a hugger, but he was all wrapped around the prodigal. The brother said, “What's happening? Oh, hi, Don. Nice to see ya, fella.
What's going on, Dad?”
Then he caught the gleam on Donnie's finger. “The
emerald?
You're giving him the emerald ring that you told me—Dad, you promised me that ring. Two years ago. This isn't right, Dad.” Hot angry tears filled his eyes, but, nice person that he was, he also felt darn guilty about making a stink when everybody else in the parable was jumping up and down.

His dad said, “Look! it's Donnie! he left and now he's back! be happy! we're having veal tonight!”

So he smiled and had a beer, but with a certain contrary inner resonance.
Great. Wonderful, Dad. Terrific. I'll be hitting the sack now. Back's killing me, but never mind. Night-night. Maybe I'll sleep in the pigpen, seeing as how you go for that. See ya later, Don. Help yourself to my stuff. Clothes, jewels, shekels, just take what you need, Don. Take my room. Want me to introduce you to my fiancée, Sheila?

Soon afterward, the brother joined a humane society opposed to cruel practices in the meat industry, e.g., calf fattening. Poor dumb animals kept chained up in cramped dark pens and force-fed, to produce pale tender beef for a feast to honor a jerk. The brother was a liberal, or Samaritan, as liberals were known in those days, and while there were a few bad Samaritans, about ninety-five percent of them were nice people who would have stopped to lend assistance to anyone who needed it—a man set upon by thieves, for example. But most Samaritans would draw the line at the sort of boondoggle enjoyed by the prodigal son. You run off and waste your substance on riotous living with a fast crowd in Galilee, you shouldn't expect to come home and get a feast and a ring and a big hug.

The Old Story: jerks rewarded, nice people abused.

Take the liberals that George Bush, the Willie Horton of American politics, spent the 1988 campaign kicking down the stairs, the one or two that Ronald Reagan hadn't kicked already. These aren't Iranian liberals, they're a bunch of extremely nice American people. Call them reformers, progressives, New Dealers, or call them the Great Satan of Massachusetts and his hounds of hell: liberals are fundamentally democrats with a quick social conscience who carry water for a million good causes from here to 123 Maple Street, Anywhere, U.S.A. They are teachers, boosters, and inveterate instillers of social obligation. Call them schoolmarms, goody two-shoes, busybodies, or bleeding hearts: basically a liberal is a person who knows you very well and loves you very very much, perhaps more than you deserve.

Who wanted you to be aware of the hungry children in China as you played with the food on your plate?

Who taught you to take turns on the swings and share your cake with other children and made you feel guilty for being such a greedy selfish little child?

Who taught you to be decent to children whom you
despised?

Who, when you lost the game and incurred the silent wrath and contempt of Dad, took you into her arms and said she loved you?

Who could possibly be more liberal than that?

The old lady lay face up on the dank cellar floor, stunned and dizzy. A Sunday afternoon and she had been fixing pot roast and potatoes in the kitchen and then—It all happened so fast: the sudden blows from her two sons, the long terrible fall backward down the steps like in a nightmare, her hands grasping for the railing as she slid half sideways and then turned a complete somersault and banged headfirst on the concrete. She couldn't see. Her neck felt like it might be broken, and also her right wrist. She could taste blood. There seemed to be a loose tooth in her mouth. Her head started to pulse with pain. She lifted her left hand and touched her forehead. A dent there, and something wet. A radio was playing upstairs. She could hear loud breathing. Her dress was gathered up above her knees, and as she tried to straighten it she saw, standing in the light at the top of the stairs, arm in arm, Ron and George, laughing.

“Guess we showed you!”

She raised her head. What had she said to make them so angry? She certainly was sorry, whatever it was. Had she been too hard on them about how they ought to attend church? Had she nagged them too often about doing their homework and their Boy Scout projects? She didn't mean to be a scold. She moved her lips,
Ronnie, George,
but no sound came out. She struggled to her knees. George took two steps down and spat at her.

“Ptew. Guess
you
learned a lesson! Guess you won't be buttin' inna
my
bidness, Ma! Huh, Ron? Guess you won't be tellin'
me
what to do for a while, huh!”

The pain in her head was deafening, and the words wouldn't come out.
Oh my dear boys forgive me for provoking you to anger. But no matter what you do—if you kill me and throw my body in a ditch and rip out my heart—remember that with the last beat of my heart I will always love you. A liberal's love can never be less. Never, no matter what you do.

“Kinda weak on defense, ain't ya, Ma? Ha ha ha.” With the last ounce of strength in her battered aching body, she hoisted herself to her feet.

“Mother! Your dress!”

She looked down and saw that her blue knit dress had fallen down in a heap around her ankles, leaving her clad in a black one-piece spandex bodysuit she didn't know she possessed and also a pair of black knee-high steel-toe kangaroo combat boots with white laces and red and blue sequins. Her hair was long and snarly, not in a bun like she usually wore it, and in her right hand she held a long riding crop. Across her bosom were silver-lame letters two inches high that spelled “ONE HELLUVA WOMAN.”

“Mother?”

“Don't say another word,” she said, “or I'll bust your heads.”

“Mom?”

She placed her right foot on the first stair, keeping her weight nicely balanced, her eyes fastened on the bottom youth as he shrank back whimpering. She shook her head slowly and smiled and licked her lips. She grabbed both banisters and rocked up and down on the balls of her feet. “Liberal,” she said. “I'm going to liberate you boys from ignorance or die in the attempt.” She took three long deep breaths, and sprang like a tiger, her hairy arms outstretched, her eyes burning bright red, and the sound she made deep in her throat was one they had never ever heard before.

Q: I understand that the frankest book yet about life in Hollywood has been written by someone named Mark Van Doren. Who is he? What is the title of his book?—K.L., LITTLE ROCK, ARK.

A: Mark Van Doren (1894–1972) was a famous poet, literary critic, and professor of English at Columbia University. You undoubtedly are confusing him with Mamie Van Doren, 56, a singer-actress fairly well known in the Hollywood of the 1950s and '60s.

—“Walter Scott's Personality Parade,” in
Parade.

 

F
OR MARK VAN DOREN, famous poet and literary critic, the fifties in Hollywood were a confusing time, especially after he met Mamie at the home of his friends Donna and John Reed. Mark had just left RKO to go with Columbia after scripting Donna's
It's a Wonderful Life
(based on John's
Ten Days That Shook the World
)
,
he was exhausted and disillusioned, and the buxom young star of
Untamed Youth
and
Born Reckless
clearly offered something powerful and natural and free.

“Show me things. Tell me. Touch me. You know so much, you're a poet. I'm a child in the body of a woman. Show me,” she said, as they sat on the railing, looking out across the merciless sunbaked valley toward the Pacific Ocean shimmering like a blue-green afterlife beyond the used-car lots. Just then Donna called from the kitchen, “Do you want a slice of lemon in your nectar?” John was gone—who knew where? The moody hazel-eyed revolutionary had never lived by other people's rules, not even after marrying Donna. And he hated Mark, after what Mark had done to his manifesto. He vowed to punch Mark in the nose if he ever saw him.