The Loved One Read online

  “Oh, I am sorry.”

  “Yes, she certainly feels it. I’ve never known her so cast down. I’ve been arranging for the disposal this morning. That’s why I went out. I had to be at the Happier Hunting Ground. The funeral’s Wednesday. I was wondering, Miss Thanatogenos: Mom doesn’t know so many people in this State. She certainly would appreciate a friend at the funeral. He was a sociable bird when he was a bit younger. Enjoyed parties back East more than anyone. It seems kinda bitter there shouldn’t be anyone at the last rites.”

  “Why, Mr. Joyboy, of course I’d be glad to come.”

  “Would you, Miss Thanatogenos? Well, I call that real nice of you.”

  Thus at long last Aimée came to the Happier Hunting Ground.

  Nine

  Aimée Thanatogenos spoke the tongue of Los Angeles; the sparse furniture of her mind—the objects which barked the intruder’s shins—had been acquired at the local High School and University; she presented herself to the world dressed and scented in obedience to the advertisements; brain and body were scarcely distinguishable from the standard product, but the spirit—ah, the spirit was something apart; it had to be sought afar; not here in the musky orchards of the Hesperides, but in the mountain air of the dawn, in the eagle-haunted passes of Hellas. An umbilical cord of cafés and fruit shops, of ancestral shady businesses (fencing and pimping) united Aimée, all unconscious, to the high places of her race. As she grew up the only language she knew expressed fewer and fewer of her ripening needs; the facts which littered her memory grew less substantial; the figure she saw in the looking-glass seemed less recognizably herself. Aimée withdrew herself into a lofty and hieratic habitation.

  Thus it was that the exposure as a liar and a cheat of the man she loved and to whom she was bound by the tenderest vows, affected only a part of her. Her heart was broken perhaps but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt that things had been simplified. She held in her person a valuable concession to bestow; she had been scrupulous in choosing justly between rival claimants. There was no room now for further hesitation. The voluptuous tempting tones of “Jungle Venom” were silenced.

  It was however in the language of her upbringing that she addressed her final letter to the Guru Brahmin.

  Mr. Slump was ill-shaven; Mr. Slump was scarcely sober; “Slump is slipping,” said the managing editor. “Have him take a pull at himself or else fire him.” Unconscious of impending doom Mr. Slump said: “For Christ’s sake, Thanatogenos again. What does she say, lovely? I don’t seem able to read this morning.”

  “She has had a terrible awakening, Mr. Slump. The man she thought she loved proves to be a liar and cheat.”

  “Aw, tell her go marry the other guy.”

  “That seems to be what she intends doing.”

  The engagement of Dennis and Aimée had never been announced in any paper and needed no public denial. The engagement of Mr. Joyboy and Aimée had a column-and-a-half in the Morticians Journal and a photograph in The Casket, while the house-journal, Whispers from the Glades, devoted nearly an entire issue to the romance. A date was fixed for the wedding at the University Church. Mr. Joyboy had been reared a Baptist and the minister who buried the Baptist dead gladly offered his services. The wardrobe-mistress found a white slumber-robe for the bride. Dr. Kenworthy intimated his intention of being there in person. The corpses who came to Aimée for her ministrations now grinned with triumph.

  And all this time there was no meeting between Dennis and Aimée. She had last seen him at the parrot’s grave when, quite unabashed, it seemed, he had winked at her over the gorgeous little casket. In his heart, however, he had been abashed and thought it well to lie low for a day or two. Then he saw the announcement of the engagement.

  It was not an easy matter for Aimée to refuse communication with anyone. She did not live in circumstances where she could say: “I am not at home to Mr. Barlow” and order her servants to refuse him admission. She had no servant; if the telephone rang, she answered it. She had to eat. She had to shop. In either case she stood open to those friendly casual-seeming encounters in which American social life abounds. One evening shortly before the wedding-day Dennis lay in wait for her, followed her to a nutburger counter and took the next stool.

  “Hullo, Aimée. I want to talk to you.”

  “There’s nothing you can say means anything now.”

  “But, my dear girl, you seem to have forgotten that we’re engaged to be married. My theological studies are prospering. The day when I shall claim you is at hand.”

  “I’d rather die.”

  “Yes, I confess I overlooked that alternative. D’you know, this is the first time I’ve ever eaten a nutburger? I’ve often wondered what they were. It is not so much their nastiness but their total absence of taste that shocks one. But let us get this clear. Do you deny that you solemnly swore to marry me?”

  “A girl can change her mind, can’t she?”

  “Well, you know, I don’t honestly think she can. You made a very solemn promise.”

  “Under false pretences. All those poems you sent and pretended you’d written for me, that I thought so cultivated I even learned bits of them by heart—all by other people, some by people who passed on hundreds of years ago. I never felt so mortified as when I found out.”

  “So that’s the trouble, is it?”

  “And that horrible Happier Hunting Ground. I’m going now. I don’t want to eat anything.”

  “Well, you chose the place. When I took you out I never gave you nutburgers, did I?”

  “As often as not it was I took you out.”

  “A frivolous point. You can’t walk down the street crying like that. I’ve my car parked across the way. Let me drop you home.”

  They stepped out into the neon-lighted boulevard. “Now, Aimée,” said Dennis, “let us not have a tiff.”

  “Tiff? I loathe everything about you.”

  “When we last met we were engaged to be married. I think I am entitled to some explanation. So far, all you have complained of is that I am not the author of some of the best-known poems in the English language. Well, I ask you, is Popjoy?”

  “You meant me to think you wrote them.”

  “There, Aimée, you misjudge me. It is I who should be disillusioned when I think that I have been squandering my affections on a girl ignorant of the commonest treasures of literature. But I realize that you have different educational standards from those I am used to. No doubt you know more than I about psychology and Chinese. But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse.”

  “I shall never believe anything you say again.”

  “Well, damn it, what don’t you believe?”

  “I don’t believe in you.”

  “Ah, that’s another point. There’s all the difference between believing someone and believing in them.”

  “Oh, do stop being reasonable.”

  “Very well.” Dennis drew in to the side of the road and attempted to take her in his arms. She resisted with fiery agility. He desisted and lit a cigar. Aimée sobbed in the corner and presently said: “That awful funeral.”

  “The Joyboy parrot? Yes. I think I can explain that. Mr. Joyboy would have an open casket. I advised against it and, after all, I knew. I’d studied the business. An open casket is all right for dogs and cats who lie down and curl up naturally. But parrots don’t. They look absurd with the head on a pillow. But I came up against a blank wall of snobbery. What was done in Whispering Glades must be done at the Happier Hunting Ground. Or do you think that the whole thing was a frame-up? I believe that sanctimonious pest wanted the poor parrot to look absurd so as to lower me in your eyes. I believe that’s it. Who asked you to the funeral anyway? Were you acquainted with the late parrot?”

  “To think that all the time you were going out with me you were secretly going to that place…”

  “My dear, you as
an American should be the last to despise a man for starting at the bottom of the ladder. I can’t claim to be as high in the mortuary world as your Mr. Joyboy, but I am younger, very much better-looking, and I wear my own teeth. I have a future in the Non-sectarian Church. I expect to be head chaplain at Whispering Glades when Mr. Joyboy is still swilling out corpses. I have the makings of a great preacher—something in the metaphysical seventeenth-century manner, appealing to the intellect rather than to crude emotion. Something Laudian—ceremonious, verbose, ingenious and doctrinally quite free of prejudice. I have been thinking a good deal about my costume; full sleeves, I think…”

  “Oh, do be quiet! You bore me so.”

  “Aimée, as your future husband and spiritual director, I must tell you that is no way to speak of the man you love.”

  “I don’t love you.”

  “ ‘Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear.’ ”

  “I haven’t the least idea what that means.”

  “ ‘And the rocks melt wi’ the sun.’ That’s plain enough anyway. ‘I will luve—’ You can’t fail to understand those words, surely? It’s just the way the crooners pronounce them. ‘I will luve thee still, my dear, While the sands o’ life shall run.’ The last words, I admit, are a little obscure, but the general sense is obvious to the most embittered. Have you forgotten the Heart of the Bruce?”

  The sobs ceased, and the ensuing silence told Dennis that intellectual processes were at work in the exquisite dim head in the corner. “Was it Bruce wrote that poem?” she asked at length.

  “No. But the names are so similar that the difference is immaterial.”

  Another pause. “Didn’t this Bruce or whatever he’s called make some way round his oath?”

  Dennis had not counted greatly on the ceremony at the Kirk o’ Auld Lang Syne. He had introduced it whimsically. Now, however, he pounced on the advantage. “Listen, you delicious, hopeless creature. You are on the horns of a dilemma—which is European for being in a jam.”

  “Drive me home.”

  “Very well, I can explain as we go. You think Whispering Glades the most wonderful thing outside heaven. I see your point. In my rough British way I share your enthusiasm. I have been planning an opus on the subject, but I am afraid I can’t say with Dowson, ‘If you ever come to read it, you will understand.’ You won’t, my dear, not a word of it. All this is by the way. Now your Mr. Joyboy is the incarnate spirit of Whispering Glades—the one mediating logos between Dr. Kenworthy and common humanity. Well, we’re obsessed by Whispering Glades, both of us—‘half in love with easeful death,’ as I once told you—and to save further complications let me explain that I did not write that poem either—you’re the nautch girl and vestal virgin of the place, and naturally I attach myself to you and you attach yourself to Joyboy. Psychologists will tell you that kind of thing happens every day.

  “It may be that by the Dreamer’s standards there are defects in my character. The parrot looked terrible in his casket. So what? You loved me and swore to love me eternally with the most sacred oath in the religion of Whispering Glades. So you see the dilemma, jam or impasse. Sanctity is indivisible. If it isn’t sacred to kiss me through the heart of the Burns or Bruce, it isn’t sacred to go to bed with old Joyboy.”

  There was silence still. Dennis had made an impression far beyond his expectation.

  “Here you are,” he said at length, stopping at Aimée’s apartment house. This was not the moment he realized for soft advances. “Jump out.”

  Aimée said nothing and for a moment did not move. Then in a whisper she said: “You could release me.”

  “Ah, but I won’t.”

  “Not when you know I’ve quite forgotten you?”

  “But you haven’t.”

  “Yes. When I turn away I can’t even remember what you look like. When you are not there I don’t think of you at all.”

  *

  Left to herself in the concrete cell which she called her apartment, Aimée fell victim to all the devils of doubt. She switched on her radio; a mindless storm of Teutonic passion possessed her and drove her to the cliff-edge of frenzy; then abruptly stopped. “This rendition comes to you by courtesy of Kaiser’s Stoneless Peaches. Remember no other peach now marketed is perfect and completely stoneless. When you buy Kaiser’s Stoneless Peach you are buying full weight of succulent peach flesh and nothing else…”

  She turned to the telephone and dialed Mr. Joyboy’s number.

  “Please, please come over. I’m so worried.”

  From the ear-piece came a babel, human and inhuman, and in the midst of it a still small voice saying, “Speak up, honey-baby. I can’t quite get you.”

  “I’m so miserable.”

  “It isn’t just easy hearing you, honey-baby. Mom’s got a new bird and she’s trying to make him talk. Maybe we better leave whatever it is and talk about it tomorrow.”

  “Please, dear, come right over now; couldn’t you?”

  “Why, honey-baby, I couldn’t leave Mom the very evening her new bird arrived, could I? How would she feel? It’s a big evening for Mom, honey-baby. I have to be here with her.”

  “It’s about our marriage.”

  “Yes, honey-baby, I kinda guessed it was. Plenty of little problems come up. They all look easier in the morning. Take a good sleep, honey-baby.”

  “I must see you.”

  “Now, honey-baby, I’m going to be firm with you. Just you do what Poppa says this minute or Poppa will be real mad at you.”

  She rang off and once more resorted to grand opera; she was swept up and stupefied in the gust of sound. It was too much. In the silence that followed her brain came to life a little. Again the telephone. The local newspaper.

  “I want to speak to the Guru Brahmin.”

  “Why, he doesn’t work evenings. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s very important. Couldn’t you please give me his home number?”

  “There’s two of them. Which d’you want?”

  “Two? I didn’t know. I want the one who answers letters.”

  “That will be Mr. Slump, but he doesn’t work here after tomorrow and he wouldn’t be home at this time, anyway. You could try Mooney’s Saloon. That’s where the editorials mostly go evenings.”

  “And his real name is Slump?”

  “That’s what he tells me, sister.”

  Mr. Slump had that day been discharged from his paper. Everyone in the office had long expected the event except Mr. Slump himself, who had taken the story of his betrayal to several unsympathetic drinking-places.

  The barman said. “There’s a call for you, Mr. Slump. Are you here?”

  It seemed likely to Mr. Slump in his present state of mind that this would be his editor, repentant; he reached across the bar for the instrument.

  “Mr. Slump?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve found you at last. I’m Aimée Thanatogenos… You remember me?”

  It was a memorable name. “Sure,” said Mr. Slump at length.

  “Mr. Slump, I am in great distress. I need your advice. You remember the Britisher I told you about…”

  Mr. Slump held the telephone to the ear of the man next to him, grinned, shrugged, finally laid it on the bar, lit a cigarette, took a drink, ordered another. Tiny anxious utterances rose from the stained wood. It took Aimée some time to make her predicament clear. Then the regular flow of sound ceased and gave place to little, spasmodic whispers. Mr. Slump listened again. “Hullo… Mr. Slump… Are you listening?… Did you hear me?… Hullo.”

  “Well, sister, what is it?”

  “You heard what I said?”

  “Sure, I heard fine.”

  “Well… what am I to do?”

  “Do? I’ll tell you what to do. Just take the elevator to the top floor. Find a nice window and jump out. That’s what you can do.”

  There was a little sobbing gasp and then a quiet “Thank you.”

  “I told her to go take a high jump.”

&nbs
p; “We heard.”

  “Wasn’t I right?”

  “You know best, brother.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, with a name like that?”

  *

  In Aimée’s bathroom cupboard, among the instruments and chemicals which are the staples of feminine well-being, lay the brown tube of barbiturates which is the staple of feminine repose. Aimée swallowed her dose, lay down and awaited sleep. It came at length brusquely, perfunctorily, without salutation or caress. There was no delicious influx, touching, shifting, lifting, setting free and afloat the grounded mind. At 9:40 p.m. she was awake and distraught, with a painful dry sense of contraction and tension about the temples; her eyes watered, she yawned; suddenly it was 5:25 a.m. and she was awake once more.

  It was still night; the sky was starless and below it the empty streets flamed with light. Aimée rose and dressed and went out under the arc-lamps. She met no one during the brief walk from her apartment to Whispering Glades. The Golden Gates were locked from midnight until morning, but there was a side-door always open for the use of the night staff. Aimée entered and followed the familiar road upwards to the terrace of the Kirk o’ Auld Lang Syne. Here she sat and waited for dawn.

  Her mind was quite free from anxiety. Somehow, somewhere in the blank black hours she had found counsel; she had communed perhaps with the spirits of her ancestors, the impious and haunted race who had deserted the altars of the old Gods, had taken ship and wandered, driven by what pursuing furies through what mean streets and among what barbarous tongues! Her father had frequented the Four Square Gospel Temple; her mother drank. Attic voices prompted Aimée to a higher destiny; voices which far away and in another age had sung of the Minotaur, stamping far underground at the end of the passage; which spoke to her more sweetly of the still Boeotian water-front, the armed men all silent in the windless morning, the fleet motionless at anchor, and Agamemnon turning away his eyes; spoke of Alcestis and proud Antigone.

  The East lightened. In all the diurnal revolution these first fresh hours alone are untainted by man. They lie late abed in that region. In exaltation Aimée watched the countless statues glimmer, whiten and take shape while the lawns changed from silver and gray to green. She was touched by warmth. Then suddenly all round her and as far as she could see the slopes became a dancing surface of light, of millions of minute rainbows and spots of fire; in the control house the man on duty had turned the irrigation cock and water was flooding through the network of pierced and buried pipes. At the same time parties of gardeners with barrows and tools emerged and tramped to their various duties. It was full day.