Uncollected Works Page 2

  The strong nasal r’s Siegel had secretly admired there now eneverated and pallid; and in that classic shibboleth, Siegel recognized poor, innocent Grossmann’s swan song. A year later Siegel got a letter, the last: Grossmann had married a Wellesley girl and they were living in Swampscott. Sit tibi terra levis, Grossmann. But Siegel wondered how in the hell it was possible for anyone to sink roots in a town at once as middle class and as cosmopolitan as Washington. You could become bourgeois or one of the international set but this could happen in any city. Unless it had nothing to do with the place at all and was a question of compulsion—unless there was something which linked people like Gaugin and Eliot and Grossmann, some reason which gave them no other choice; and this was why, when it had happened in Boston and now maybe even in Washington, for God’s sake, Siegel felt uneasy and unwilling to think about it too much. This little Jesuit thing, this poltergeist, would start kicking around inside his head just as it had done with the briefcase, and call him back to the real country where there were drinks to be mixed and bon mots to be tossed out carelessly and maybe a drunk or two to take care of. It was doing that now. So all he did was look at Lucy quizically and say, “Well I don’t know. He seemed sort of under the weather. Also maybe a little neurotic.”

  The girl laughed softly, not trying for rapport any more, not even the bedroom kind; but anxious now for thoughts of her own which Siegel was neither ready to be curious about nor confident he would be able to cope with. “A little neurotic,” she said, “is like being a little bit pregnant. You don’t know David. He’s well, Siegel, he’s the only one of us who is.” Siegel smiled. “I shouldn’t talk,” he said, “I’m a stranger. Look Lucy, would you help me out a little with this group?”

  “Me help you?” Suddenly weak, she answered with something that was so curiously both impotence and scorn that he began to wonder how well she was herself. “All right, I’ll make a deal. Mutual aid. The truth is I need a shoulder to cry on.” Siegel threw a quick glance behind him out into the kitchen, a glance which she caught. “Don’t worry about them,” she smiled, “they’ll take care of themselves for awhile. They know where the liquor is and everything.” Siegel smiled in apology, pushed the door shut and settled back on the bed next to her, resting on one elbow. A Klee original was on the wall facing them; two crossed BAR’s, hunting rifles and a few sabres hung around the other walls. The room was sparsely furnished in Swedish modern and carpeted wall to wall. He looked down at her and said, “OK, cry away.”

  “I don’t really know why I should be telling you about this,” she began and it was as if she had said. “Bless me father for I have sinned,” because Siegel often thought that if all the punks, lushes, coeds in love, woebegone PFC’s—the whole host of trodden-on and disaffected—who had approached him with that opening formula were placed end to end they would surely reach from here back to the Grand Concourse and a timid spindleshanked boy in a slashed necktie. “Except,” she continued, “that you look like David, you have the same kind of sympathy for anybody who gets kicked around, I feel that somehow.” Siegel shrugged. “Anyway,” she said, “it’s Brennan. Brennan and that bitch Considine.”

  And she went on to tell how apparently this female economics expert named Debby Considine had returned a week ago from an expedition to Ontario and right away Paul Brennan had started chasing her again. There was a tree outside her apartment house on P St. and Brennan had climbed up this tree and waited for her to come out and whenever she did he would proclaim his passion for her in loud and improvised blank verse. Usually a small crowd would collect and finally one night the cops came with ladders and hauled him down and dragged him away.

  “And who does he call to come down to the precinct to bail him out,” Lucy said. “Me, is who. Right before payday too. The bastard still hasn’t paid me back. And to make matters worse he already had a record. Krinkles Porcino, that’s Paul’s roommate, got engaged to this girl Monica back around February. The two kids were really in love, and Paul was fond of both of them, so that when Sybil—she was living with David at the time—started running after Krinkles and threatening to break the thing up—well anyway she finally threw this big bitch scene with Paul in the lobby of the Mayflower and Paul ended up slugging her with a vodka bottle he happened to be carrying, and they got him for assault. And of course David had a bad time of it because he hates to get involved in anything, but Sam Fleischmann, who’s hated Paul’s guts ever since Paul sold him $100 worth of phony uranium stock, felt so sorry for David that he started writing poison pen letters to Sybil, dumping all over Paul. He’d write them in the morning right after we got up, while I made breakfast, and we’d both laugh and laugh because it was so much fun.”

  “Oh,” Siegel said, “ha, ha.”

  “And then when Paul got out,” she went on, “what should happen but Harvey had to fly into a rage at Paul because he knew I was in love with Paul and was sending him cigarettes and cookies and things while he was in stir, and he chased Paul for seven blocks through the theatre district one night with a boatswain’s knife. That was sort of funny too because Harvey was in uniform and it took four SP’s finally to bring him down, and even then he broke the arm of one of them and sent another to Bethesda Naval Hospital with severe abdominal wounds. So Paul is out on bail now and threatening to get Monica because she’s living with Sam but what the hell else can she do when Krinkles has been out of town for weeks trying to kick the habit and all. The trouble is that damn junkie doesn’t know how really good she is, Siegel. She pawned Krinkles’ baritone sax only a couple of days ago because poor Sam had just lost his job at the Smithsonian and was actually starving before she found out about it and took him in. The girl’s a saint.”

  She went on in the same way for fifteen minutes more, layng bare, like a clumsy brain surgeon, synapses and convolutions which should never have been exposed, revealing for Siegel the anatomy of a disease more serious than he had suspected: the badlands of the heart, in which shadows, and crisscrossed threads of inaccurate self-analysis and Freudian fallacy, and passages where the light and perspective were tricky, all threw you into that heightened hysterical edginess of the sort of nightmare it is possible to have where your eyes are open and everything in the scene is familiar, yet where, flickering behind the edge of the closet door, hidden under the chair in the corner, is this je ne sais quoi de sinistre which sends you shouting into wakefulness.

  Until finally one of Brennan’s friends, whom Lucy introduced as Vincent, wandered in and informed them that somebody had already walked through the French windows without opening them; and Siegel realized wearily that it was going to be that kind of a party, and having committed himself anyway by the very act of lying next to a girl he did not know and playing the role of crying towel for half an hour, resolved in true British staff officer style to bite the jolly old bullet and make the best of a bad job.

  In the kitchen were a couple seated on the sink making out; Duckworth, horribly drunk, lying on the floor and hurling pistachio nuts at the pig foetus; and a group of four or five people in Bermuda shorts sitting in a circle playing Prince. In the other room somebody had put on a cha cha record and a few couples were improvising freely. Presumably intelligent talk flickered around the room with the false brightness of heat lightning: in the space of a minute Siegel caught the words “Zen,” “San Francisco,” and “Wittgenstein,” and felt a mild sense of disappointment, almost as if he had expected some esoteric language, something out of Albertus Magnus. Beside the pig foetus there was only one other really incongruous note in the whole scene: a swarthy looking person in torn khakis and an old corduroy coat who stood in one corner like some memento mori, withdrawn and melancholy. “That’s Considine’s latest,” Lucy said, “an Indian she brought back from Ontario. Boy, what a hunk.”

  “He looks sad,” Siegel said. Somebody handed Siegel an ambiguous mixture in an old-fashioned glass and he sipped it automatically, grimaced and set it down. “His name is Irving Loon,” she said dr
eamily.

  “Irving what?” said Siegel.

  “Loon. He’s Ojibwa. Oh there’s Paul. Talking to Considine, the bastard.” She led him over to a corner where a diminutive junior executive type was eagerly haranguing this serpentine brunette with heavily mascaraed eyes. At his first glimpse of Debby Considine Siegel drew in a low whistle and let the four fingers of his left hand wobble to and fro a few times, forgetting about Irving Loon, Prince players and drunken sailors. ’”Marrone,” he whispered. Lucy glared at him. “Not you too,” she said furiously. “Goddamn all these sex machines.” He was introduced and after awhile Lucy managed to haul Brennan away on some pretext or other and Siegel was left alone with the lady economist.

  “And how were the boondocks of Ontario,” he said. She looked at him from under lowered lashes. “So fascinating,” she murmured in a husky, detached voice. “Do you know the Ojibwa?” Seigel began flipping over a stack of mental IBM cards frantically. There was something he knew, something he had had in college. It irritated him not to be able to call the information up because most of the courses he had taken had served no other function—at least such had been his undergraduate protests—than to provide material for conversation at parties like this one. Ojibwa Indians. Somewhere in Ontario. Something weird, even funny, but he was damned if he could pin it down.

  “You look compassionate,” Debby said suddenly. “Is there somewhere we can talk?” and Siegel, pulled away from the IBM cards, thought Jesus Christ, here we go again. He led her into the bedroom, which was beginning to look like some perversely-decorated confessional, and wondered whether this had been David Lupescu’s place for listening to bent souls. He had a hunch it was. She stood close to him and played with his Challis tie and gave him the demure bit with the eyelashes again. “You’re the same,” she whispered, “you have this monumental Lupescu coolness. You’re sure you’re not his doubleganger.”

  “No,” Siegel said, “I’m not sure. Go ahead.” She hesitated and he prompted her: “Bless me father ….”

  The eyelids flew open. “David said that too. Who are you, Siegel?”

  “For the moment, a father confessor. What seems to be your trouble, my child.”

  “It’s Irving Loon,” she said, sitting on the bed and playing with the empty highball glass she had brought in with her, ignoring the irony, “he was so happy back in Ontario. At ricing time, you see, all the families are together, everyone happy, Togetherness in Ojibwa land. Blasts, brawls, sex orgies, community sings, puberty rituals. All kinds of wonderful local color to fill up notebook after notebook with. And Irving Loon, ten feet tall with fists like rocks and enough to make even a jaded heart like mine uneasy.” Then, surprisingly—and, for Siegel, embarrassingly—she began reeling off a list of the affairs she had had in all the underdeveloped areas she had visited for the State Dept.; several pages of unofficial statistics which sounded a little like the Catalogue aria from Don Giovanni.

  It seemed she had this habit of picking up male specimens wherever she went and bringing them back with her and dropping them after a few weeks. Her exes either assimilated in with The Group or found a niche in some other group or dropped out of sight completely and forever. But Irving Loon, she insisted, was different. He had this brooding James Dean quality about him.

  “He’s been standing in the same corner all evening,” she said. “He hasn’t spoken a word for two days. I feel”—and her eyes gazed over Siegel’s shoulder, out into God knows where—“that it’s not only nostalgia for the wilderness, but almost as if somehow out there, in the hinterlands, with nothing but snow and forests and a few beaver and moose, he has come close to something which city dwellers never find all their lives, may never even be aware exists, and it’s this that he misses, that the city kills or hides from him.” I’ll be damned, thought Siegel. This broad is serious. “And this is just what I can’t tell Paul,” she sighed. “He makes fun of Irving, calIs him ignorant. But it’s a divine melancholia and it’s what I love about him.”

  Good grief, that was it.

  Melancholia. Just by accident she had used that word, the psychologist’s term, instead of “melancholy.” Little Professor Mitchell, perched like a sparrow on his desk in anthropology lecture, hands in his coat pockets, a permanently sarcastic smile twisting one side of his mouth, talking about psychopathy among the Ojibwa Indians. Of course. The old memory bank was still functioning after all. “You must remember that this group lives forever at the brink of starvation,” Mitchell said in that deprecating, apologetic tone which implied that for him all cultures were equally mad; it was only the form that differed, never the content. “It has been said that the Ojibwa ethos is saturated with anxiety,” and simultaneously 50 pens copied the sentence verbatim.

  “The Ojibwa are trained, from childhood, to starve; the male child’s entire upbringing is dedicated to a single goal: that of becoming a great hunter. Emphasis is on isolation, self-sufficiency. There is no sentimentality among the Ojibwa. It is an austere and bleak existence they lead, always one step away from death. Before he can attain to the state of manhood a boy must experience a vision, after starving himself for several days. Often after seeing this vision he feels he has acquired a supernatural companion, and there is a tendency to identify. Out in the wilderness, with nothing but a handful of beaver, deer, moose and bear between him and starvation, for the Ojibwa hunter, feeling as he does at bay, feeling a concentration of obscure cosmic forces against him and him alone, cynical terrorists, savage and amoral deities”—this time a smile in self-reproach—“which are bent on his destruction, the identification may become complete. When such paranoid tendencies are further intensified bv the highly competitive life of the summer villages at ricing and berry-picking time, or by the curse, perhaps, of a shaman with some personal grudge, the Ojibwa becomes highly susceptible to the well-known Windigo psychosis.”

  Siegel knew about the Windigo, all right. He remembered being scared out of his wits once at camp by the fireside yarn image of a mile-high skeleton made of ice, roaring and crashing through the Canadian wilderness, grabbing up humans by the handful and feeding on their flesh. But he had outgrown the nightmares of boyhood enough to chuckle at the professor’s description of a half-famished hunter, already slightly warped, identifying with the Windigo and turning into a frenzied cannibal himelf, foraging around the boondocks for more food after he had gorged himself on the bodies of his immediate family. “Get the picture,” he had told Grossmann that night, over mugs of Würtzburger. “Altered perception. Simultaneously, all over God knows how many square miles, hundreds, thousands of these Indians are looking at each other out of the corner of their eye and not seeing wives or husbands or little children at all. What they see is big fat juicy beavers. And these Indians are hungry, Grossmann. I mean, my gawd. A big mass psychosis. As far as the eye can reach”—he gestured dramatically—“Beavers. Succulent, juicy, fat.”

  “How yummy,” Grossmann had commented wryly. Sure, it was amusing, in a twisted sort of way. And it gave anthropologists something to write about and people at parties something to talk about. Fascinating, this Windigo psychosis. And oddly enough its first stages were marked by a profound melancholia. That was what had made him remember, a juxtaposition of words, an accident. He wondered why Irving Loon had not been talking for two days. He wondered if Debby Considine knew about this area of the Ojibwa personality.

  “And Paul just won’t understand,” she was saying. “Of course it was a bitchy thing to complain to the police but I’d lie awake nights, thinking of him crouched up in that tree, like some evil spirit, waiting for me. I suppose I’ve always been a little afraid of something like that, something unfamiliar, something I couldn’t manipulate. Oh yes,” she admitted to his raised eyebrows, “I’ve manipulated them all right. I didn’t want to, Siegel, God knows I didn’t. But I can’t help it.” Siegel felt like saying, “Use a little less mascara or something,” but was brought up short by an awareness which had been at the back of his m
ind since Lupescu had left: a half-developed impression about the role Lupescu had occupied for this group; and it occurred to him that his double would never have said anything like that. You might give absolution or penance, but no practical advice. Tucked snugly in some rectory of the mind, Cleanth Siegel, S.J., looked on with approval. “Changing the subject for a moment,” Siegel said, “do you know, has Irving told you anything about the Windigo?”

  “It’s funny you should mention that,” she said, “it’s a nature god or something, that they worship. I’m not on the anthropology end of things or I could tell you more about it. But the last time Irving was talking—he speaks English so well—he said once ’Windigo, Windigo, stay by me.’ It’s this poetic, religious quality in him that’s so touching.” And right about here Siegel began to feel really uneasy, to hear this tiny exasperating dissonance. Poetic? Religious? Ha, ha.