Henderson the Rain King Read online

  It looked as though the mother had decided to behave well. She was going to be big about it and beat Lily at this game. Perhaps it was natural. Anyway, she was highly ladylike to me, but there came a moment when she couldn’t check herself, and she said, “I have met your son.”

  “Oh yes, a slender fellow? Edward? He drives a red M G. You see him around Danbury sometimes.”

  Presently I left, saying to Lily, “You’re a fine-looking big girl, but you oughtn’t to have done that to your mother.”

  The stout old lady was sitting there on the sofa with her hands clasped and her eyes making a continuous line under her brows from tears or vexation.

  “Good-by, Eugene,” said Lily.

  “So long, Miss Simmons,” I said.

  We didn’t part friends exactly.

  Nevertheless we soon met again, but in New York City, for Lily had separated from her mother, quitted Danbury, and had a cold-water flat on Hudson Street where the drunks hid from the weather on the staircase. I came, a great weight, a huge shadow on those stairs, with my face full of country color and booze, and yellow pigskin gloves on my hands, and a ceaseless voice in my heart that said, I want, I want, I want, oh, I want—yes, go on, I said to myself, Strike, strike, strike, strike! And I kept going on the staircase in my thick padded coat, in pigskin gloves and pigskin shoes, a pigskin wallet in my pocket, seething with lust and seething with trouble, and realizing how my gaze glittered up to the top banister where Lily had opened the door and was waiting. Her face was round, white, and full, her eyes clear and narrowed.

  “Hell! How can you live in this stinking joint? It stinks here,” I said. The building had hall toilets; the chain pulls had turned green and there were panes of plum-colored glass in the doors.

  She was a friend of the slum people, the old and the mothers in particular. She said she understood why they had television sets though on relief, and she let them keep their milk and butter in her refrigerator and filled out their social-security forms for them. I think she felt she did them good and showed these immigrants and Italians how nice an American could be. However, she genuinely tried to help them and ran around with her impulsive looks and said a lot of disconnected things.

  The odors of this building clutched at your face, and I was coming up the stairs and said, “Whew, I am out of condition!”

  We went into her apartment on the top floor. It was dirty, too, but there was light in it at least. We sat down to talk and Lily said to me, “Are you going to waste the rest of your life?”

  With Frances the case was hopeless. Only once after I came back from the Army did anything of a personal nature take place between us, and after that it was no soap, so I let her be, more or less. Except that one morning in the kitchen we had a conversation that set us apart for good and all. Just a few words. They went like this:

  “And what would you like to do now?”

  (I was then losing interest in the farm.)

  “I wonder,” I said, “if it’s too late for me to become a doctor—if I could enter medical school.”

  Frances opened her mouth, usually so sober, not to say dismal and straight, and laughed at me; and as she laughed I saw nothing but her dark open mouth, and not even teeth, which is certainly strange, for she has teeth, white ones. What had happened to them?

  “Okay, okay, okay,” I said.

  Thus I realized that Lily was perfectly right about Frances. Nevertheless the rest did not follow.

  “I need to have a child. I can’t wait much longer,” said Lily. “In a few years I’ll be thirty.”

  “Am I responsible?” I said. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “You and I have got to be together,” she said.

  “Who says so?”

  “We’ll die if we’re not,” she said.

  A year or so went by, and she failed to convince me. I didn’t believe the thing could be so simple. So she suddenly married a man from New Jersey, a fellow named Hazard, a broker. Come to think of it she had spoken of him a few times, but I thought it was only more of her blackmail. Because she was a blackmailer. Anyway, she married him. This was her second marriage. Then I took Frances and the two girls and went to Europe, to France, for a year.

  Several years of my boyhood were spent in the south of the country, near the town of Albi, where my old man was busy with his research. Fifty years ago I used to taunt a kid across the way, “François, oh François, ta soeur est constipée.” My father was a big man, solid and clean. His long underwear was made of Irish linen and his hatboxes were lined with red velvet and he ordered his shoes from England and his gloves from Vitale Milano, Rome. He played pretty well on the violin. My mother used to write poems in the brick cathedral of Albi. She had a favorite story about a lady from Paris who was very affected. They met in a narrow doorway of the church and the lady said, “Voulez-vous que je passasse?” So my mother said, “Passassassez, Madame.” She told everyone this joke and for many years would sometimes laugh and say in a whisper, “Passassassez.” Gone, those times. Closed, sealed, and gone.

  But Frances and I didn’t go to Albi with the children. She was attending the Collège de France, where all the philosophers were. Apartments were hard to get but I rented a good one from a Russian prince. De Vogüé mentions his grandfather, who was minister under Nicolas I. He was a tall, gentle creature; his wife was Spanish and his Spanish mother-in-law, Señora Guirlandes, rode him continually. The guy was suffering from her. His wife and kids lived with the old woman while he moved into the maid’s room in the attic. About three million bucks, I have. I suppose I might have done something to help him. But at this time my heart was consumed with the demand I have mentioned—I want, I want! Poor prince, upstairs! His children were sick, and he said to me that if his condition didn’t improve he would throw himself out of the window.

  I said, “Don’t be nuts, Prince.”

  Guiltily, I lived in his apartment, slept in his bed, and bathed in his bath twice a day. Instead of helping, those two hot baths only aggravated my melancholy. After Frances laughed at my dream of a medical career I never discussed another thing with her. Around and around the city of Paris I walked every day; all the way to the Gobelin factories and the Père Lachaise Cemetery and St. Cloud I went on foot. The only person who considered what my life was like was Lily, now Lily Hazard. At the American Express I received a note from her written on one of the wedding announcements long after the date of the marriage. I was bursting with trouble, and as there are a lot of whores who cruise that neighborhood near the Madeleine, I looked some of them over, but this terrible repetition within—I want, I want!—was not stopped by any face I saw. I saw quite some faces.

  “Lily may arrive,” I thought. And she did. She cruised the city in a taxi looking for me and caught up with me near the Metro Vavin. Big and shining, she cried out to me from the cab. She opened the antique door and tried to stand on the runningboard. Yes, she was beautiful—a good face, a clear, pure face, hot and white. Her neck as she stretched forward from the door of the cab was big and shapely. Her upper lip was trembling with joy. But, stirred as she was, she remembered those front teeth and kept them covered. What did I care then about new porcelain teeth! Blessed be God for the mercies He continually sends me!

  “Lily! How are you, kid? Where did you come from?”

  I was terribly pleased. She thought I was a big slob but of substantial value just the same, and that I should live and not die (one more year like this one in Paris and something in me would have rusted forever), and that something good might even come of me. She loved me.

  “What have you done with your husband?” I said.

  On the way back to her hotel, down Boulevard Raspail, she told me, “I thought I should have children. I was getting old.” (Lily was then twenty-seven.) “But on the way to the wedding I saw it was a mistake. I tried to get out of the car at a stoplight in my wedding dress, but he caught me and pulled me back. He punched me in the eye,” she said, “and it was a g
ood thing I had a veil because the eye turned black, and I cried all the way through the ceremony. Also, my mother is dead.”

  “What! He gave you a shiner?” I said, furious. “If I ever come across him again I will break him in pieces. Say, I’m sorry about your mother.”

  I kissed her on the eyes, and then we arrived at her hotel on the Quai Voltaire and were on top of the world, in each other’s arms. A happy week followed; we went everywhere, and Hazard’s private detective followed us. Therefore I rented a car and we began a tour of the cathedral towns. And Lily in her marvelous way—always marvelously—began to make me suffer. “You think you can live without me, but you can’t,” she said, “any more than I can live without you. The sadness just drowns me. Why do you think I left Hazard? Because of the sadness. When he kissed me I felt saddest of all. I felt all alone. And when he—”

  “That’s enough. Don’t tell me,” I said.

  “It was better when he punched me in the eye. There was some truth in that. Then I didn’t feel like drowning.”

  And I began to drink, harder than ever, and was drunk in every one of the great cathedrals—Amiens, Chartres, Vézelay, and so on. She often had to do the driving. The car was a little one (a Deux Cent Deux décapotable or convertible) and the two of us, of grand size, towered out of the seats, fair and dark, beautiful and drunk. Because of me she had come all the way from America, and I wouldn’t let her accomplish her mission. Thus we traveled all the way up to Belgium and back again to the Massif, and if you loved France that would have been fine, but I didn’t love it. From start to finish Lily had just this one topic, moralizing: one can’t live for this but has to live for that; not evil but good; not death but life; not illusion but reality. Lily does not speak clearly; I guess she was taught in boarding school that a lady speaks softly, and consequently she mumbles, and I am hard of hearing on the right side, and the wind and the tires and the little engine also joined their noise. All the same, from the joyous excitement of her great pure white face I knew she was still at it. With lighted face and joyous eyes she persecuted me. I learned she had many negligent and even dirty habits. She forgot to wash her underthings until, drunk as I was, I ordered her to. This may have been because she was such a moralist and thinker, for when I said, “Wash out your things,” she began to argue with me. “The pigs on my farm are cleaner than you are,” I told her; and this led to a debate. The earth itself is like that, corrupt. Yes, but it transforms itself. “A single individual can’t do the nitrogen cycle all by herself,” I said to her; and she said, Yes, but did I know what love could do? I yelled at her, “Shut up.” It didn’t make her angry. She was sorry for me.

  The tour continued and I was a double captive—one, of the religion and beauty of the churches which I was not too drunk to see, and two, of Lily, and her glowing and mumbling and her embraces. She said a hundred times if she said it once, “Come back to the States with me. I’ve come to take you back.”

  “No,” I said finally. “If there was any heart in you at all you wouldn’t torture me, Lily. Damn you, don’t forget I’m a Purple Heart veteran. I’ve served my country. I’m over fifty, and I’ve had my bellyful of trouble.”

  “All the more reason why you should do something now,” she said.

  Finally I told her at Chartres, “If you don’t quit it I’m going to blow my brains out.”

  This was cruel of me, as I knew what her father had done. Drunk as I was, I could hardly bear the cruelty myself. The old man had shot himself after a family quarrel. He was a charming man, weak, heartbroken, affectionate, and sentimental. He came home full of whisky and would sing old-time songs for Lily and the cook; he told jokes and tap-danced and did corny vaudeville routines in the kitchen, joking with a catch in his throat—a dirty thing to do to your child. Lily told me all about it until her father became so actual to me that I loved and detested the old bastard myself. “Here, you old clog-dancer, you old heart-breaker, you pitiful joker—you cornball!” I said to his ghost. “What do you mean by doing this to your daughter and then leaving her on my hands?” And when I threatened suicide in Chartres cathedral, in the very face of this holy beauty, Lily caught her breath. The light in her face turned fine as pearl. She silently forgave me.

  “It’s all the same to me whether you forgive me or not,” I told her.

  We broke up at Vézelay. From the start our visit there was a strange one. The décapotable Deux Cent Deux had a flat when we came down in the morning. It being fine June weather, I had refused to put the car in a garage and in my opinion the management had let out the air. I accused the hotel and stood shouting until the office closed its iron shutter. I changed the tire quickly, using no jack but in my anger heaving up the little car and pushing a rock under the axle. After fighting with the hotel manager (both of us saying, “Pneu, pneu”), my mood was better, and we walked around the cathedral, bought a kilo of strawberries in a paper funnel, and went out on the ramparts to lie in the sun. Yellow dust was dropping from the lime trees, and wild roses grew on the trunks of the apple trees. Pale red, gorged red, fiery, aching, harsh as anger, sweet as drugs. Lily took off her blouse to get the sun on her shoulders. Presently she took off her slip, too, and after a time her brassière, and she lay in my lap. Annoyed, I said to her, “How do you know what I want?” And then more gently, because of the roses on all the tree trunks, piercing and twining and flaming, I said, “Can’t you just enjoy this beautiful churchyard?”

  “It isn’t a churchyard, it’s an orchard,” she said.

  I said, “Your period just began yesterday. So what are you after?”

  She said I had never objected before, and that was true. “But I do object now,” I said, and we began to quarrel and the quarrel got so fierce I told her she was going back to Paris alone on the next train.

  She was silent. I had her, I thought. But no, it only seemed to prove how much I loved her. Her crazy face darkened with the intensity of love and joy.

  “You’ll never kill me, I’m too rugged!” I cried at her. And then I began to weep from all the unbearable complications in my heart. I cried and sobbed.

  “Get in there, you mad bitch,” I said, weeping. And I rolled back the roof of the décapotable. It has rods which come out, and then you reef back the canvas.

  Under her breath, pale with terror but consumed also with her damned exalted glory, she mumbled as I was sobbing at the wheel about pride and strength and soul and love, and all of that.

  I told her, “Curse you, you’re nuts!”

  “Without you, maybe it’s true. Maybe I’m not all there and I don’t understand,” she said. “But when we’re together, I know.”

  “Hell you know. How come I don’t know anything! Stay the hell away from me. You tear me to pieces.”

  I dumped her foolish suitcase with the unwashed clothes in it on the platform. Still sobbing, I turned around in the station, which was twenty kilometers or so from Vézelay, and I headed for the south of France. I drove to a place on the Vermilion Coast called Banyules. They keep a marine station there, and I had a strange experience in the aquarium. It was twilight. I looked in at an octopus, and the creature seemed also to look at me and press its soft head to the glass, flat, the flesh becoming pale and granular—blanched, speckled. The eyes spoke to me coldly. But even more speaking, even more cold, was the soft head with its speckles, and the Brownian motion in those speckles, a cosmic coldness in which I felt I was dying. The tentacles throbbed and motioned through the glass, the bubbles sped upward, and I thought, “This is my last day. Death is giving me notice.”

  So much for my suicide threat to Lily.

  III

  And now a few words about my reasons for going to Africa.

  When I came back from the war it was with the thought of becoming a pig farmer, which maybe illustrates what I thought of life in general.

  Monte Cassino should never have been bombed; some blame it on the dumbness of the generals. But after that bloody murder, where so many T
exans were wiped out, and my outfit also took a shellacking later, there were only Nicky Goldstein and myself left out of the original bunch, and this was odd because we were the two largest men in the outfit and offered the best targets. Later I was wounded too, by a land mine. But at that time, Goldstein and I were lying down under the olive trees—some of those gnarls open out like lace and let the light through—and I asked him what he aimed to do after the war. He said, “Why, me and my brother, if we live and be well, we’re going to have a mink ranch in the Catskills.” So I said, or my demon said for me, “I’m going to start breeding pigs.” And after these words were spoken I knew that if Goldstein had not been a Jew I might have said cattle and not pigs. So then it was too late to retract. So for all I know Goldstein and his brother have a mink business while I have—something else. I took all the handsome old farm buildings, the carriage house with paneled stalls—in the old days a rich man’s horses were handled like opera singers—and the fine old barn with the belvedere above the hayloft, a beautiful piece of architecture, and I filled them up with pigs, a pig kingdom, with pig houses on the lawn and in the flower garden. The greenhouse, too—I let them root out the old bulbs. Statues from Florence and Salzburg were turned over. The place stank of swill and pigs and the mashes cooking, and dung. Furious, my neighbors got the health officer after me. I dared him to take me to law. “Hendersons have been on this property over two hundred years,” I said to this man, a certain Dr. Bullock.

  By my then wife, Frances, no word was said except, “Please keep them off the driveway.”

  “You’d better not hurt any of them,” I said to her. “Those animals have become a part of me.” And I told this Dr. Bullock, “All those civilians and 4Fs have put you up to this. Those twerps. Don’t they ever eat pork?”

  Have you seen, coming from New Jersey to New York, the gabled pens and runways that look like models of German villages from the Black Forest? Have you smelled them (before the train enters the tunnel to go under the Hudson)? These are pig-fattening stations. Lean and bony after their trip from Iowa and Nebraska, the swine are fed here. Anyway, I was a pig man. And as the prophet Daniel warned King Nebuchadnezzar, “They shall drive thee from among men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field.” Sows eat their young because they need the phosphorus. Goiter attacks them as it does women. Oh, I made a considerable study of these clever doomed animals. For all pig breeders know how clever they are. The discovery that they were so intelligent gave me a kind of trauma. But if I had not lied to Frances and those animals had actually become a part of me, then it was curious that I lost interest in them.