M/F Read online

  – It didn’t work. I was advised to transfer to something useless. I was appalled by the lack of oceanic mysteries in Business Management. But, when you come to think of it, Elizabethan drama can teach you a lot about business. Intrigues, stabs in the dark, fraternal treachery, poisoned banquets –

  – Oh, for God’s sake –

  – There was this matter of the entry in Fenwick’s diary. He was recording the wonders of London life to savour in provincial or foreign exile. He’d seen a play at the Rose playhouse on the Bankside in the summer of 1596. All he said of it was: Gold gold and even titularly so. Professor Keteki was drunk that morning. His wife had given birth to a son, their first. You could smell the Scotch from the third row. Keteki, crane-like in body, owl-headed, ululating a mostly unintelligible lecture, with the smell of Scotch as a kind of gloss.

  I couldn’t, I suppose, really have said that last bit. But I really said:

  – He was quite intelligible, however, when he offered twenty dollars to anyone who could say what play Fenwick had seen.

  – Look, I have a client at –

  – It came in a flash. I’d been dating a Maltese girl from Toronto, a student of her native literature. She’d shown me one of her texts, and I was struck by the word JEW, pronounced jew. She said it meant or, the conjunction. But or in French and heraldry is gold. She’d also said once that I was as randy as a fenech, meaning rabbit. So this Fenwick might have been Fenech – a common enough Maltese surname, I gathered – and an English-speaking Maltese agent of the English chapter of the Knights. The play he’d seen had to be Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. I’d got the twenty dollars out of Keteki before he’d wiped the chalk off his fingers. I drank the money.

  – Ah.

  – There’s a Chinese restaurant in Riverhead called the Pu Kow Tow. Riverhead, as you may know, was named for Lord Jeffrey Amherst’s birthplace. A great hero up there, Amherst. He did for the French and made North America free to revolt against the British. His nephew, William Pitt Amherst, was sent to China as British ambassador. He messed up the job by refusing to grovel before the Emperor.

  – Look, this client’s coming at five.

  – Aren’t I a client too?

  He looked foxily at me. He said:

  – What precisely is it you want?

  – First, to complete the story. I meant to eat there, but I got drinking instead. There was this very gay and game lady, also drinking. She taught them to mix a cocktail called a Clubfoot. Very brutal, with Bacardi and bourbon and double cream. She was just passing through, she said, on her way to Albany. She had this very game idea.

  Looking down at my hand, I discovered that I’d been smoking another Sinjantin in total automatism. But I was determined to reform. I was nearly twenty-one, and time was slipping away.

  – You realize, Loewe said, I can do nothing for you till you come of age.

  – I know, I said, all about what’s due to me in due time. At the moment I’m still concerned with my education. I want to pay a visit to Castita.

  – Where, for God’s sake?

  – Latitude 15, south of Hispaniola. Three hundred miles west of the Leewards. A one-time British protectorate. Capital, Grencijta. Population –

  – I know where it is. I know all about the damn place. What I don’t understand is –

  – Why is simple. Professor Keteki got me interested in a man called Sib Legeru, a Castitan poet and painter. Very obscure, very talented. You’ve never heard of him, nor has anyone else. His writings are unpublished and his paintings mouldering away unseen. I read a xeroxed manuscript. Astonishing. There was a colonial administrator who did his best for Legeru’s work when Legeru died. A certain Sir James Pismire. He fixed up a sort of Legeru museum on Castita, an unvisited house with the key hanging up in a tobacconist’s. I’m curious. I want to pay it a visit.

  Loewe did another imploded roar. He said:

  – I refuse to be superstitious. Your poor father met his death in the Caribbean, as you know.

  – I’d forgotten.

  – Never mind. The position is this. You come of age in, let me see, when is it –

  – December. Christmas Eve. Two minutes to midnight.

  – I know, I know. You’re aware, of course, of the condition of inheritance.

  – A totally stupid condition.

  – That’s not, shall I say, a very filial attitude. Your father had the cause of miscegenation very much at heart.

  – When I marry, it will be for love.

  – Oh, Loewe said, that’s very much a young man’s notion. If everybody married for love it would be one hell of a world. Love is something you learn along with the other duties of marriage. All the rest is for poets. I hope to God, he went on, worried, that the Ang family don’t find out about your, your –

  – If you tell me where they are I’ll drop them a note.

  – No, no, no, no, no.

  – The Riverhead Star didn’t carry anything. The college authorities saw to that. Something may get through to the more responsible organs, but there’ll be no name mentioned. Protesting students possess only a collective existence. Identity swallowed in purpose or ritual. Slogans at the point of orgasm. Guitars and bongo drums and a brotherhood-of-man song. Glossy young beards opening to cheer us on to a dead heat.

  – The young lady, Miss Ang, is a very estimable young lady. Her photographs don’t do her justice. And very strictly brought up. These old Cantonese families. Moral, very moral.

  – Moral, indeed. A dynastic marriage. A device for getting money. Otherwise that combine in Salt Lake City –

  – Well, Loewe said irrelevantly, you can’t imagine anybody in Salt Lake City doing what you did. I mean, the reliability of a product is tied up with the morality of the producers.

  – Utter nonsense.

  – As for you going to Castita – I can’t for the moment see anything – There may be something in a subsidiary file – I’ll see when I get back to the –

  – Did you bring the money?

  – Your call sounded very confused. Were you still tight?

  – It was a bad line. A thousand dollars?

  – There’s a clause about reasonable sums being doled out in respect of your education. Education, indeed.

  – It’s a very wide term.

  – I had Miss Castorino get five hundred from the bank. A thousand’s much too much. Five hundred should keep you going very adequately till your birthday.

  Loewe suddenly smiled with horrible saccharinity. He said:

  – You’re a crossword man, yes?

  From among the papers, all about me, he dug out a puzzle torn from some newspaper or other. I now throbbed from prepuce to anus.

  – A difficult clue. Listen.

  He read out, or seemed to:

  – Up, I am a rolling river;

  Down, a scent-and-colour-giver.

  The answer was obvious: flower. But the throb told me not to give Loewe the answer. Why not? I’d been quick enough with that answer to Keteki. Then I knew why not. Loewe was being, for some reason, deceitful. The up and down of his clue referred to the respective tongue-positions that started off the diphthongs of flow and flower. No crossword, except in a linguistics journal, would have so learned a clue, and linguistics journals did not go in for crosswords. Loewe smiled, saccholactically.

  – Well?

  – Sorry, too tough for me.

  The throb went. Loewe seemed to shrink and become less hirsute. He nodded, seeming pleased, and said:

  – I take it you’ll be back here in plenty of time for your birthday.

  – I’m not sure that I want to inherit. Let Salt Lake City take over. I like to feel I’m a free man.

  – Oh, for God’s sake, Loewe scoffed. Nobody’s free. I mean, choice is limited by inbuilt structures and predetermined genetic patterns and all the rest of it.

  He blushed minimally and added:

  – So I’m told.

  – By the Reader’s Digest?
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  He had recovered from his embarrassment and went on boldly:

  – Nobody can help thinking these things these days. The French started all that. Not a very abstract people, despite their boasts about being the big rational nation. Philosophy can only come to life in the bedchamber or over the coq au vin or before the firing squad.

  – The existential marinade.

  – That’s a good phrase. Where did you pick up that phrase?

  – Not in the Reader’s Digest.

  Loewe looked fattish and fifty and unlionlike. He said:

  – As for freedom, you’re not free not to eat and sleep. You’re free to cease to exist, of course, but then freedom has no more meaning. It’s just silence and emptiness.

  What I said now I hadn’t, I think, really thought of before. I said:

  – Only if you’re thinking in terms of structures. Perhaps you can get beyond structure and cohesion and find that it’s not quite silent and empty. Words and colours totally free because totally meaningless. That’s what I expect to find in the work of Sib Legeru.

  – And, Loewe said, not listening, on top of necessity there’s duty. Your very name implies duty. That’s its meaning.

  – My name?

  – It means a soldier. You were enrolled before birth in the regiment of your family name. Miles in the service of the Fabers.

  – The hell with the Fabers.

  – Yes? But your father wanted the Fabers to embrace everybody. You marry Miss Ang and your son marries Miss Makarere and his son marries Maimunah binte Abdullah, and so on for ever. Creative miscegenation, he called it. The only hope, he said.

  – There’s no hope.

  – For God’s sake. Today’s youth. Is that all your moonlit campus frolic meant? Nihilism. I thought you were supposed to be protesting about something.

  Generous in victory, he handed over four bills of a hundred and five twenties. I crushed the stern presidential faces together in my hand that held yet another burning Sinjantin. I said:

  – I have no duty to an abstraction. I mean the abstraction called Faber. My father cared nothing for me. He even refused to see me when I –

  – You have to make allowances. When your mother was drowned he changed terribly.

  A cold death. New Dorp Beach. Terribly young.

  – To see you would have reminded him of her. But he provided. He’ll go on providing.

  – Miss Emmett was no real substitute for a parent. Where is Miss Emmett, by the way?

  – There are a number of charities. He goes on providing. I don’t see the whole picture. Your father employed various legal advisers. There’s one in Florida, another in the state of Washington –

  – I could contest that marriage clause, couldn’t I?

  – You’ll learn a lot between now and your birthday. An arranged marriage is nothing very terrible. French civilization is based on arranged marriages.

  – I claim the right to choose.

  – That’s right, Loewe said indulgently, packing me away in his paperholder. You go right on claiming. But not in that terribly immoral way any more. It was a very shameful thing to do.

  – Shameless.

  – And also shameless.

  When Loewe had gone, I telephoned Air Carib and booked my one-way flight to Grencijta. The next one left from Kennedy at 22.00. There’d been no need, then, for Loewe to book this room at the Algonquin, for which I would have to pay out of the five hundred dollars (I’d need every cent). We could have conferred at Grand Central, whither I’d come on the filthy train from Springfield, Mass. Or at his office. Still, being here, I’d get some of my moneysworth. I showered, then dug out a clean shirt and the summerweight green pants from my grip. Transferring coins and matches and pocket-knife from the summerweight blue, I found a crumpled slip of paper. It was a note in felt-pen. A yummy piece of protest. Hope we’ll protest some more some place some time. A small small world. Remember Carlotta. How had she managed to slip that slip in? Of course, yes, there’d been one hell of a scuffle between our student abettors and the armed Burns men who were our campus police. We’d sheltered in the tent of the crowd, covering with speed the functional nakedness that was our badge of criminal identity. She’d taken me back to her room at the Lord Cumberland Inn and ordered sandwiches and coffee. Then the Clubfoot had risen on me and I’d been sick in the toilet. My nakedness, I kept thinking while I threw and threw, was still capering out there. My act, like a rousing sermon, was being broadcast by the idiot protestants. Faber, you’re out. No, no, I quit.

  Showered and dressed, I looked for the television set. As this was the Algonquin, it was concealed in a mahogany sideboard. Strong literary tradition, Ross, blind Thurber, fat Woolcott, Dorothy Parker who knocked everything. I tried channel after channel, but they were all dull, as if for the benefit of those literary ghosts. A pop group wailed, scruffy in checkered shirts and levis. There was an old movie with a funeral in it, wreaths being laid sobbingly on the coffin to music that sounded like Death and Transfiguration. An untrustworthy young man in black spoke to the frail weeded widow:

  – Don’t cry, ma. He lives on, I guess, in his work and our memories.

  The living-on bit was true of my own dead father, though there was no fatherly image in what he had made, and even my physical memories were quite unreliable. I just couldn’t see any face. He lived on in his will, so rightly named. And then I remembered the manner of his death. An aircraft – Air Carib? – hijacked and diverted to Havana, there to disintegrate on landing. Where had he been going? Business, something to do with business, investigating openings in Kingston or Ciudad Trujillo, perhaps even Grencijta. Anna Sewell Products, my conditional inheritance.

  I tried another channel, and it was slow-motion trampoline stuff, athletes dreamily levitating to waltz-music – Artist’s Life, Morning Papers, Vienna Blood, one of those. Then another channel, and a Red Indian in a smart suit and hexagonal glasses was a guest on a show, and he was talking about the Weskerini and Nipissing tribes that now, alas, lived on only in the names of certain pseudo-Indian curios manufactured in Wisconsin. Those were, I remembered, members of the great Algonquin family: exquisite coincidence. West 44th Street was Indian territory; a few doors away stood the Iroquois, named for the traditional enemies of the Algonquin nation. Dozing off, I asked myself why the Algonquin and Iroquois were like birds. Nothing to do with the feathers they wore; wait, wait – pigeons. I’d seen a documentary movie of the Berlin Wall, and the commentator had commented, rather movingly, on the pigeons that foraged to and fro, east and west, over it, perching and nesting in blessed ignorance of the bitter ideology that cut a city in half. The border between Canada and the rebellious Union had meant only transitory foreign alliances to the Iroquois and the Algonquin. The Moon of Bright Nights came, and the Moon of Leaves followed, and the long hunting year died in the Moon of Snowshoes, and the opechee and owaissa returned in their season, and the dahinda croaked, and Gitche Gumee, Big-Sea Water, Lake Superior, endured the lash of Mudjekeewis, and the wawa or wild goose flapped wawa wawa over it. And all white men resolved at length into palefaces, French or English, royalist or republican, and all their tongues were ultimately forked.

  In my dream a munching toothless squaw appeared, feeling her way in near-blindness, and a chief boomed, plumed as long as a keyboard: It is she of the koko-koho. Owls flurried about her in a gale that was a broth of their feathers, twitting away. One owl perched on her left shoulder, rocked, settled, then owled me in the eyes and spoke. Esa esa, it twitted. I fought my way up through burst featherbeds to waking. I lay and panted, tasting salt on my upper lip as though I’d drunk tequila. On my palate the stale Sinjantin smoke lay like dirt. The long day was declining. An after-image of birds or angels gyrated. It was the television, some programme about hunting in Maine. Then a commercial broke in, something earnest about stomach acid and ulcers. I looked at my watch, but it had stopped at 19.17. I dialled ULCERSS but got no reply. ULCERSS, I remembered, led astray by the
commercial, was for Los Angeles; in New York it was NERVOUS. Time, north or south, was as painful as a Mauer or a parallel or a taxonomy. NERVOUS told me it was time for dinner.

  2

  – Indiana (or Illinois) nutbake.

  – Chuffed eggs.

  – Saffron toast.

  Something like that, anyway. Dreams, I was thinking, foretell (when they prophesy at all) only trivialities. In the cheap bright eathouse on the Avenue of the Americas I ordered, with my hot beef sandwich, a soft drink new to me Coco-Coho, confected in Shawnee, Michigan. The bottle was owl-shaped – the potter’s first crude moulding, though in green glass – and the label showed what considerations of economy and packing forbade to be sculpted – stare, ears, beak. The drink was green and frothy with a faint bite of angostura under the saccharine. It amused me to take my revenge upon that hisser of my dream by drinking his likeness off, hiss and all.

  – Whiting in tarragon, hot.

  I ate my hot beef sandwich in the European manner, with knife as well as fork. Although I was an American, and had a passport to prove it, I had lived as a child so long outside America that many aspects of its life still struck me strangely. Why, for instance, cut everything first, in the manner of the nursery, in order to fork in everything after? Infantilism, mom standing fondly by to approve the hungry tining of the mom-cut morsels? A relic of the Union’s urgent need to be educated, a Noah Webster spelling-book gripped in the left hand? Or perhaps the left hand had once gripped the fork, the right ready for the holster. Chew your meat and your enemy simultaneously. Or perhaps once, in this still violent country, your knife had been removed as soon as possible by the cautious frontier waiter, lest, after cutting meat, you thought of cutting throats. There was an American thing against knives. At breakfast you were allowed only one knife, so that ham-fat flavoured the strawberry jelly. A vestigial something or other.

  I am imposing again, obviously.

  And then there was this business of the hot beef sandwich – a virtual Sunday dinner for one dollar fifty. The British, with whom I’d had my earlier education, were supposed to be the great understating race, but to call a Sunday dinner a sandwich was the litotic, or something, end. Under the thick slab of steer, mashed potatoes, tomato-wheel, peas, obligatory fluted cup of coleslaw (signature, only marginally esculent, of the Spirit of American Short Order Cookery), there indeed lay a gravylogged shive of white bread, pored like a sponge, but that was a mere etymology, no more.