Henderson the Rain King Read online

  Over the years I had fixed up the little basement for myself, paneled it with chestnut and put in a dehumidifier. There I keep my little safe and my files and war souvenirs; and there also I have a pistol range. Under foot was now Lily’s rug. At her insistence I had got rid of most of the pigs. But she herself was not very cleanly, and for one reason or another we couldn’t get anyone from the neighborhood to do the cleaning. Yes, she swept up once in a while, but toward the door and not out of it, so there were mounds of dust in the doorway. Then she went to sit for her portrait, running away from the house altogether while I was playing Sevcik and pieces of opera and oratorio, keeping time with the voice within.

  IV

  Is it any wonder I had to go to Africa?

  But I have told you there always comes a day of tears and madness.

  I had fights, I had trouble with the troopers, I made suicide threats, and then last Xmas my daughter Ricey came home from boarding school. She has some of the family difficulty. To be blunt, I do not want to lose this child in outer space, and I said to Lily, “Keep an eye on her, will you?”

  Lily was very pale. She said, “Oh, I want to help her. I will. But I’ve got to win her confidence.”

  Leaving the matter to her, I went down the kitchen back stairs to my studio and picked up the violin, which sparkled with rosin dust, and began to practice Sevcik under the fluorescent light of the music stand. I bent down in my robe and frowned, as well I might, at the screaming and grating of those terrible slides. Oh, thou God and judge of life and death! The ends of my fingers were wounded, indented especially by the steel E string, and my collarbone ached and a flaming patch, like the hives, came out on my jowl. But the voice within me continued, I want, I want!

  But soon there was another voice in the house. Perhaps the music drove Ricey out. Lily and Spohr, the painter, were working hard to get the portrait finished by my birthday. She went away and Ricey, alone, took a trip to Danbury to visit a school chum, but didn’t find her way to this girl’s house. Instead, as she wandered through the back streets of Danbury she passed a parked car and heard the cries of a newborn infant in the back seat of this old Buick. It was in a shoebox. The day was terribly cold; therefore she brought the foundling back with her and hid it in the clothes closet of her room. On the twenty-first of December, at lunch, I was saying, “Children, this is the winter solstice,” and then the infant’s cry came out by way of the heating ducts from the register under the buffet. I pulled down the thick, woolly bill of my hunting cap, which, it so happens, I was wearing at the lunch table, and to suppress my surprise I began to talk about something else. For Lily was laughing toward me significantly with the upper lip drawn down over her front teeth, and her white color very warm. Looking at Ricey, I saw that silent happiness had come up into her eyes. At fifteen this girl is something of a beauty, though usually in a listless way. But she was not listless now; she was absorbed in the baby. As I did not know then who the kid was or how it had got into the house, I was startled, thrown, and I said to the twins, “So, there is a little pussy cat upstairs, eh?” They weren’t fooled. Try and fool them! Ricey and Lily had baby bottles on the kitchen stove to sterilize. I took note of this caldron full of bottles as I was returning to the basement to practice, but made no comment. All afternoon, by way of the air ducts, I heard the infant squalling, and I went for a walk but couldn’t bear the December ruins of my frozen estate and one-time pig kingdom. There were a few prize animals whom I hadn’t sold. I wasn’t ready to part with them yet.

  I had arranged to play “The First Noël” on Xmas Eve, and so I was rehearsing it when Lily came downstairs to talk to me.

  “I don’t want to hear anything,” I said.

  “But, Gene,” said Lily.

  “You’re in charge,” I shouted, “you are in charge and it’s your show.”

  “Gene, when you suffer you suffer harder than any person I ever saw.” She had to smile, and not at my suffering, of course, but at the way I went about suffering. “Nobody expects it. Least of all God,” she said.

  “As you’re in a position to speak for God,” I said, “what does He think of your leaving this house every day to go and have your picture painted?”

  “Oh, I don’t think you need to be ashamed of me,” said Lily.

  Upstairs was the child, its every breath a cry, but it was no longer the topic. Lily thought I had a prejudice about her social origins, which are German and lace-curtain Irish. But damn it, I had no such prejudice. It was something else that bothered me.

  Nobody truly occupies a station in life any more. There are mostly people who feel that they occupy the place that belongs to another by rights. There are displaced persons everywhere.

  “For who shall abide the day of His (the rightful one’s) coming?”

  “And who shall stand when He (the rightful one) appeareth?”

  When the rightful one appeareth we shall all stand and file out, glad at heart and greatly relieved, and saying, “Welcome back, Bud. It’s all yours. Barns and houses are yours. Autumn beauty is yours. Take it, take it, take it!”

  Maybe Lily was fighting along this line and the picture was going to be her proof that she and I were the rightful ones. But there is already a painting of me among the others. They have hard collars and whiskers, while I am at the end of a line in my National Guard uniform and hold a bayonet. And what good has this picture ever done me? So I couldn’t be serious about Lily’s proposed solution to our problem.

  Now listen, I loved my older brother, Dick. He was the sanest of us, with a splendid record in the First World War, a regular lion. But for one moment he resembled me, his kid brother, and that was the end of him. He was on vacation, sitting at the counter of a Greek diner, the Acropolis Diner, near Plattsburg, New York, having a cup of coffee with a buddy and writing a post card home. But his fountain pen was balky, and he cursed it, and said to his friend, “Here. Hold this pen up.” The young fellow did it and Dick took out his pistol and shot the pen from his hand. No one was injured. The roar was terrible. Then it was discovered that the bullet which had smashed the pen to bits had also pierced the coffee urn and made a fountain of the urn, which gushed straight across the diner in a hot stream to the window opposite. The Greek phoned for the state troopers, and during the chase Dick smashed his car into an embankment. He and his pal then tried to swim the river, and the pal had the presence of mind to strip his clothes, but Dick had on cavalry boots and they filled up and drowned him. This left my father alone in the world with me, my sister having died in 1901. I was working that summer for Wilbur, a fellow in our neighborhood, cutting up old cars.

  But now it is Xmas week. Lily is standing on the basement stairs. Paris and Chartres and Vézelay and 57th Street are far behind us. I have the violin in my hands, and the fatal rug from Danbury under my feet. The red robe is on my back. And the hunting cap? I sometimes think it keeps my head in one piece. The gray wind of December is sweeping down the overhang of the roof and playing bassoons on the loose rain pipes. Notwithstanding this noise I hear the baby cry. And Lily says, “Can you hear it?”

  “I can’t hear a thing, you know I’m a little deaf,” I said, which is true.

  “Then how can you hear the violin?”

  “Well, I’m standing right next to it, I should be able to hear it,” I said. “Stop me if I’m wrong,” I said, “but I seem to remember that you told me once I was your only friend in all the world.”

  “But—” said Lily.

  “I can’t understand you,” I said. “Go away.”

  At two o’clock there were some callers, and they heard the cries from upstairs but were too well bred to mention them. I’d banked on that. To break up the tension, however, I said, “Would anybody like to visit my pistol range downstairs?” There were no takers and I went below myself and fired a few rounds. The bullets made a tremendous noise among the hot-air ducts. Soon I heard the visitors saying good-by.

  Later, when the baby was asleep, Lily talk
ed Ricey into going skating on the pond. I had bought skates for everyone, and Ricey is still young enough to be appealed to in this way. When they were gone, Lily having given me this opportunity, I laid down the fiddle and stole upstairs to Ricey’s room. Quietly I opened the closet door and saw the infant sleeping on the chemises and stockings in Ricey’s valise, for she had not finished unpacking. It was a colored child, and made a solemn impression on me. The little fists were drawn up on either side of its broad head. About the middle was a fat diaper made of a Turkish towel. And I stooped over it in the red robe and the Wellingtons, my face flaming so that my head itched under the wool cap. Should I close up the valise and take the child to the authorities? As I studied the little baby, this child of sorrow, I felt like the Pharaoh at the sight of little Moses. Then I turned aside and I went and took a walk in the woods. On the pond the cold runners clinked over the ice. It was an early sunset and I thought, “Well, anyway, God bless you, children.”

  That night in bed I said to Lily, “Well now, I’m ready to talk this thing over.”

  Lily said, “Oh, Gene, I’m very glad.” She gave me a high mark for this, and told me, “It’s good that you are more able to accept reality.”

  “What?” I said. “I know more about reality than you’ll ever know. I am on damned good terms with reality, and don’t you forget it.”

  After a while I began to shout, and Ricey, hearing me carrying on and perhaps seeing me through the door, threatening and shaking my fist, standing on the bed in my jockey shorts, probably became frightened for her baby. On the twenty-seventh of December she ran away with the child. I didn’t want the police in on this and phoned Bonzini, a private dick who has done some jobs for me, but before he could get on the case the headmistress called from Ricey’s boarding school and said she had arrived and was hiding the infant in the dormitory. “You go up there,” I said to Lily.

  “Gene, but how can I?”

  “How do I know how you can?”

  “I can’t leave the twins,” she said.

  “I guess it will interfere with your portrait, eh? Well, I’m just about ready to burn down the house and every picture in it.”

  “That’s not what it is,” said Lily, muttering and flushing white. “I have got used to your misunderstanding. I used to want to be understood, but I guess a person must try to live without being understood. Maybe it’s a sin to want to be understood.”

  So it was I who went and the headmistress said that Ricey would have to leave her institution as she had already been on probation for quite a while. She said, “We have the psychological welfare of the other girls to consider.”

  “What’s the matter with you? Those kids can learn noble feelings from my Ricey,” I said, “and that’s better than psychology.” I was pretty drunk that day. “Ricey has an impulsive nature. She is one of those rapturous girls,” I said. “Just because she doesn’t talk much …”

  “Where does the child come from?”

  “She told my wife she found it in Danbury in a parked car.”

  “That’s not what she says. She claims to be the mother.”

  “Why, I’m surprised at you,” I said. “You ought to know something about that. She didn’t even get her breasts till last year. The girl is a virgin. She is fifty million times more pure than you or I.”

  I had to withdraw my daughter from the school.

  I said to her, “Ricey, we have to give the little boy back. It isn’t time yet for you to have your own little boy. His mama wants him back. She has changed her mind, dear.” Now I feel I committed an offense against my daughter by parting her from this infant. After it was taken by the authorities from Danbury, Ricey acted very listless. “You know you are not the baby’s mama, don’t you?” I said. The girl never opened her lips and she made no answer.

  As we were on our way to Providence, Rhode Island, where Ricey was going to stay with her aunt, Frances’ sister, I said, “Sweetheart, your daddy did what any other daddy would do.” Still no answer, and it was vain to try, because the silent happiness of the twenty-first of December was gone from her eyes.

  So bound home from Providence alone, I was groaning to myself on the train, and in the club car I took out a deck of cards and played a game of solitaire. A bunch of people waited to sit down but I kept the table to myself, and I was fuddled, but no man in his right mind would have dared to bother me. I was talking aloud and groaning and the cards kept falling on the floor. At Danbury the conductor and another fellow had to help me off the train and I lay on a bench in the station swearing, “There is a curse on this land. There is something bad going on. Something is wrong. There is a curse on this land!”

  I had known the stationmaster for a long time; he is a good old guy and kept the cops from taking me away. He phoned Lily to come for me, and she arrived in the station wagon.

  But as for the actual day of tears and madness, it came about like this: It is a winter morning and I am fighting with my wife at the breakfast table about our tenants. She has remodeled a building on the property, one of the few I didn’t take for the pigs because it was old and out of the way. I told her to go ahead, but then I held back on the dough, and instead of wood, wallboard was put in, with other economies on down the line. She made the place over with a new toilet and had it painted inside and out. But it had no insulation. Came November and the tenants began to feel cool. Well, they were bookish people; they didn’t move around enough to keep their body heat up. After several complaints they told Lily they wanted to leave. “Okay, let them,” I said. Naturally I wouldn’t refund the deposit, but told them to get out.

  So the converted building was empty, and the money put into masonite and new toilet and sink and all the rest was lost. The tenants had also left a cat behind. And I was sore and yelling at the breakfast table, hammering with my fist until the coffee pot turned over.

  Then all at once Lily, badly scared, paused long and listened, and I listened with her. She said, “Have you seen Miss Lenox in the last fifteen minutes? She was supposed to bring the eggs.”

  Miss Lenox was the old woman who lived across the road and came in to fix our breakfast. A queer, wacky little spinster, she wore a tam and her cheeks were red and mumpy. She would tickle around in the corners like a mouse and take home empty bottles and cartons and similar junk.

  I went into the kitchen and saw this old creature lying dead on the floor. During my rage, her heart had stopped. The eggs were still boiling; they bumped the sides of the pot as eggs will do when the water is seething. I turned off the gas. Dead! Her small, toothless face, to which I laid my knuckles, was growing cold. The soul, like a current of air, like a draft, like a bubble, sucked out of the window. I stared at her. So this is it, the end—farewell? And all this while, these days and weeks, the wintry garden had been speaking to me of this fact and no other; and till this moment I had not understood what this gray and white and brown, the bark, the snow, the twigs, had been telling me. I said nothing to Lily. Not knowing what else to do, I wrote a note DO NOT DISTURB and pinned it to the old lady’s skirt, and I went through the frozen winter garden and across the road to her cottage.

  In her yard she had an old catalpa tree of which the trunk and lower limbs were painted light blue. She had fixed little mirrors up there, and old bicycle lights which shone in the dark, and in summer she liked to climb up there and sit with her cats, drinking a can of beer. And now one of these cats was looking at me from the tree, and as I passed beneath I denied any blame that the creature’s look might have tried to lay upon me. How could I be blamed—because my voice was loud, and my anger was so great?

  In the cottage I had to climb from room to room over the boxes and baby buggies and crates she had collected. The buggies went back to the last century, so that mine might have been there too, for she got her rubbish all over the countryside. Bottles, lamps, old butter dishes, and chandeliers were on the floor, shopping bags filled with string and rags, and pronged openers that the dairies used to giv
e away to lift the paper tops from milk bottles; and bushel baskets full of buttons and china door knobs. And on the walls, calendars and pennants and ancient photographs.

  And I thought, “Oh, shame, shame! Oh, crying shame! How can we? Why do we allow ourselves? What are we doing? The last little room of dirt is waiting. Without windows. So for God’s sake make a move, Henderson, put forth effort. You, too, will die of this pestilence. Death will annihilate you and nothing will remain, and there will be nothing left but junk. Because nothing will have been and so nothing will be left. While something still is—now! For the sake of all, get out.”

  Lily wept over the poor old woman.

  “Why did you leave such a note?” she said.

  “So nobody should move her until the coroner came,” I said. “That’s what the law is. I barely felt her myself.” I then offered Lily a drink, which she refused, and I filled the water tumbler with bourbon and drank it down. Its only effect was a heartburn. Whisky could not coat the terrible fact. The old lady had fallen under my violence as people keel over during heat waves or while climbing the subway stairs. Lily was aware of this and started to mutter something about it. She was very thoughtful, and became silent, and her pure white color began to darken toward the eyes.