Very Old Bones by William Kennedy
They put me in tight security and limited my visitors to Giselle and an army psychiatrist, Dr. Tannen, who saw the condition I was in and transferred me to an army hospital. It became clear I was not fit to stand court martial.
“The man seems to have had a psychotic episode, but I would not say he’s psychotic,” the doctor told Giselle in my presence, as if I didn’t exist. “He is living in the very real world of his second self, where there is always an answer to every riddle. He believes he is a bastard, an unwanted child. He was seriously neglected by mother and father, though he exudes love for them both. He is so insecure that he requires a façade to reduce his anxieties to manageable size; and so every waking moment is an exercise in mendacity, including self-delusion. He has found no career direction, and has completed nothing of significance to himself. He left the publishing world, rejects teaching and journalism, loathes the army, and rues the inertia that allowed him to be called back to active duty. He sees nothing worth doing, including completing the last contorted sentence of his unfinished book, which now ends on a high note of suspense with a comma. He is a man for whom money means nothing, but who has wrapped himself inside a cocoon of such hubris that he centers his life at the apex of the haut monde, as he calls it, a world for which there is no equivalent in reality, at least not without much more money than he possesses. Seated beside him at this apex is you, my dear, his goddess of the unattainable moon. He never quite believes you are really his wife, and so, when he reaches out to impose love upon you and you push him away, his moon explodes, and he drops into near catatonia, his so-called zombie condition.”
I nodded my agreement, which amused Giselle and also the doctor, who continued: “To finance his life with you in the haut monde, he thrust himself into the petty criminality that now threatens his freedom. Further, after his arrest, and being simultaneously abandoned by his mentor in corruption, Meister Geld, a man about whom he knows almost nothing, he is once again the bereft bastard, without parent, without salvation. He is the unredeemable, loathsome, fear-ridden orphan of the storm, living in the shadow of an achieved father, crippled, he thinks, by the genes of unknown ancestors, and now with a future that holds only degradation, possibly of a lifelong order. And so he descended into a neurotic abyss, and resurrected from it in the guise of a blasphemous new Jesus, the only saviour available in this profane world he now inhabits. The army would be as mad as he is to put him on trial in this condition.”
The army, citing my illness and my sterling war record, moved me toward a medical discharge. Dr. Tannen also announced that his tour of army duty was at an end, and that he was returning to private practice in Manhattan. This news plunged me into a new depression.
As I slowly came out of it, I was released from the hospital, and at the sunny lunch hour of the third day I told Giselle I wanted to go to the Künstler Klause to dance. It was the first time I’d expressed interest in doing anything since my collapse. The dismissal of the charges buoyed my spirit, but the impending loss of my therapist weighed on me. Giselle asked him if he would take me as a patient back in Manhattan, and he said of course. She then made the private decision to send me home alone.
Eva the belly dancer was one of the Künstler Klause’s attractions, along with a magician and a four-piece band—trumpet, drums, violin, and accordion. The club was cheap glitz with a marine decor. Fishnets adorned with anchors, marlin, and mermaids formed the backdrop for the small stage and modest dance floor. The waiter lit the table candle when we sat down, and as we listened to the music I became intensely happy. The club’s crowd was mostly Germans, with a few GIs. Quinn came in while the band played.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” I said to him.
“I asked him,” Giselle said. “I thought we’d celebrate your first night out.”
“That’s a fine idea,” I said.
“I’d like some wine,” Quinn said to the waiter. “Moselle.”
“Moselle all around,” I said and I took a fifty-mark note out of my pocket.
“Put your money away,” Quinn said.
Quinn looked very young. He had large even teeth and a handsome, crooked smile that gave him a knowing look.
“I saved the good news for our party,” Giselle said.
“What good news?” I asked.
“Quinn started it,” she said. “He sent my photographs to Paris Match and they bought them. Isn’t that something?”
“That’s quite something,” I said. “What photographs?”
“The photos of you at Fritz’s Garden, you and all those freaks. The editors said they hadn’t seen anything like this out of Germany since the early thirties. Isn’t that remarkable?”
“Photos of me?” I said.
“No one could recognize you,” she said. “You were biting yourself. Paris Match is using four pictures and they have an assignment for me in Berlin.”
I said nothing.
“I did very little,” Quinn said. “I just put her in touch with the editors. The pictures sold themselves. Not only that, the magazine’s art director knew Giselle’s mother very well.”
“She knew everybody in art,” Giselle said.
“So Giselle comes by her talent naturally,” Quinn said.
“She’s a natural, all right,” I said, and I heard that my voice had gone flat.
Eva the belly dancer came on, dancing close to the ringside tables so men could stuff money into her belt, which rode well below the belly
“I remember her,” I said when I saw Eva. “People insulted her at the Christmas party.” I took my fifty marks out of my pocket again and tucked it into Eva’s belt, just under the navel.
“Orson,” Giselle said, grabbing the bill as Eva spun away from us, “you can’t afford to give money away.”
“We have to pay for insulting the girl.”
“I already paid,” Giselle said. “Remember?”
“Ah,” I said.
“I remember,” said Quinn.
We didn’t speak until Eva had finished her dance and the magician came on. He gave his patter in German and then did a few simple tricks with handkerchiefs and flowers. Boring. He lit a cigarette and made it disappear to his left, then picked it out of his right pocket, smoked it, threw it, lit, from hand to hand, and smoked it again.
“That’s a fake cigarette,” I said. “It’s not lit. Watch what he does with it.”
The magician put the cigarette inside his shirt collar, against his neck.
“He gets rid of the real cigarette right away and holds its smoke in his mouth to use for the fake one,” I explained.
“You know all the tricks,” Giselle said.
The magician had relaxed me and I asked Giselle to dance. We danced well, like old times.
“I’m sorry I’m sick,” I said.
“You’re not sick. Things just got to be too much.”
“I’ll come out of it.”
“Dr. Tannen thinks he can help you. He said he’d continue treating you.”
“How? By mail?”
“You could go to New York.”
“I could.”
“Yes, you.”
“Not you?”
“One of us has to work. I’ve got another six months in my contract with the government. And now there’s the photo assignment in Berlin, and I really want that.”
“So. You go your way, I’ll go mine.”
“Wrong, wrong, wrong. I’ll come to New York to stay in six months’ time.”
I let my arm fall and walked back to the table and drank my wine. “I have no place to live in New York,” I said.
“I called your father yesterday and again this morning. He has space in his apartment. He also called your old publisher and they’ll give you free-lance editing work.”
That widened my smile. “My father,” I said. “My father, my father, my father. I could sleep on my father’s couch anytime. I could sleep on his couch or I could sleep in his bathtub, in his sink. He’d give me his bed, two
And on I went until Giselle leaned over and kissed me with her Judas kiss. Then she and Quinn took me home. Dr. Tannen came the next afternoon and the way to New York was arranged, the charges against me buried in the army’s dead-case file, my troop ship awaiting. Quinn and Giselle took the train with me to Bremerhaven and we had a fine time while I said my farewells to Germany. We ate in the first-class dining car, ordered champagne to toast our reunion in six months, and the beginning of our new lives. I put Quinn in charge of Giselle, told him to report anyone who tried to move in on her while I was away. Quinn and I shook hands on it. On the way back to Frankfurt I have no doubt that Quinn, being in charge of Giselle, bought a first-class sleeper for their trip.
When Kathryn Phelan died in her sleep of oblivion on December 9, 1934, her son and my father, Peter, after twenty-one years of part-time exile from his mother’s influence, was at the brink of the success to which his exile had led him. The Greenwich Village gallery that had paid him seventy-five dollars for every painting he created during his first two years in New York, and which doubled that amount after he returned from the Great War, decided that the time for Peter’s elevation into the stratosphere of artistic repute and solvency was at hand, and so its owners gave over all their wall space to an exclusive showing of his work. Peter’s mother would neither know, nor, if she had known, care, whether Peter ever lifted a paintbrush. But her death, and his one-man show, were benchmarks of liberation for this son and erstwhile artist manqué.
Peter moved to the Village in 1913 after a fight with Kathryn and his sister Sarah over the Daugherty family. Until 1912 the Daughertys had lived in the house next door to the Phelan homestead on Colonie Street; but that year the Daugherty house burned and its only occupant of the moment, Katrina Daugherty, died on the sidewalk in her husband’s arms, victim of smoke, anguish, and a prolonged marital emptiness.
One year later, on the anniversary of Katrina’s death, her husband, Edward, an established playwright, would celebrate her by staging the play in which their idyllic marriage and blatant infidelities were dissected. This play, The Flaming Corsage, would run for two nights on the stage of Albany’s premier theater, Harmanus Bleecker Hall, and would be assaulted unto death by critics, and by civil and ecclesiastical authorities, as a menace to the purity of the community. During this fated year the playwright would thus not only lose his wife, and see his lifetime accumulation of papers and unpublished plays incinerated, but would also find his career halted, and his voice silenced at the peak of its eloquence.
Edward Daugherty would recover from this assault, but my father would not, quite. Exposed for a decade and a half to the chorale of vitriol directed against Edward and Katrina Daugherty by his mother and sister—“a family of filth . . . an evil man . . . a low woman . . . a vile slut . . . a corrupter of innocents”—Peter at long last counterattacked, defending Katrina, whom he had coveted as long as he could remember, as a splendid woman, whatever her peccadilloes, and the exemplary mother of his closest friend, Martin Daugherty; also defending Edward as a genuine artist and the only real writer Albany had produced in the new century, this latter defense being as much an expression of the passion for art that lay within Peter’s own heart as it was empathy for a friend. Peter stood up from the dining-room table, which gave a view onto the ashes and embers of the Daugherty house, and told his sister she would shrivel from the vinegar in her veins, told his mother she was a wicked-tongued bigot whose poisoned thought came up from the cellars of hell, and told both that he would listen to them not a minute longer.
He climbed the stairs to his bedroom, pulled his steamer trunk out from the attic crawlspace, packed it (as he had planned to do five years earlier, when a similar impulse to escape was on him), filled it with art implements, shirts, socks, and umbrage, hoisted the trunk onto his shoulder, and then in the midst of a rainstorm that would not only drench him to his underwear and the brink of pneumonia, but would precipitate the worst flood in Albany’s modern history, walked twelve blocks to Keeler’s Hotel for Men Only, at Maiden Lane and Broadway, and there slept his first night of freedom from the matriarchal whipsong.
The next morning his brother Francis, with his son, Billy, came for Peter in a rowboat, and they rowed up the two-foot-deep river that Broadway had become, to Union Station, where Peter boarded the New York train. By prearrangement he settled in at the apartment of Edward Daugherty on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, those quarters not used by Edward during the year that he had stayed in Albany to stage his play, and now the temporary home of Edward’s son, Martin. It was Martin who had convinced Peter that his future lay here among the artists, writers, political rebels, freethinkers, unshockable women, and assorted social misfits and fugitives who were amorphously shaping Manhattan’s new bohemian order.
Peter found work illustrating reprints of children’s editions of James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London, and Mark Twain novels, and used a corner of the Daugherty kitchen to set up his easel to begin anew the work of his life. But it would be a year before he was able to think of himself as a genuine member of the bohemian brigade; for he was incapable of fully representing himself, even to himself, as an artist, that word too imperious for his provincially crippled soul. And so he ate, drank, and worshipped with the Village’s Irish working class, into whose midst the bohemians were relentlessly intruding.
These Irish, who looked so very like his neighbors on Arbor Hill in Albany, but were so very unlike them in speech, formed the core of subjects for Peter’s early paintings. He sketched people, if they’d let him, then grew brassy enough to carry his sketch pad to the saloon or the park and sketched what he saw, whether the subjects liked it or not. From hundreds of sketches his imagination would let one, then another, single themselves out for delineation in oil, his theme always being: this is evidence that yesterday did exist; this is what yesterday looked like.
One early choice was the face of Claire Purcell, a nineteen-year-old beauty from Brooklyn with a cascade of dark red hair, brown eyes, and milk-white skin, who resembled he knew not whom, but someone; and her curiosity about his sketch of her feeding pigeons in Washington Square on a spring morning in 1914 began the relationship that would dominate both their lives and lead to the erratic romance that would be interrupted first by the Great War (Peter enlisted in 1917, became a wagoner with the 304th Ammunition Train, ferried shells and bullets to troops in the Argonne, was hit at St.-Mihiel by shrapnel which dislodged his helmet, ripped his gas mask in two, and knocked him into a shell hole from which he was eventually carried to the hospital and evacuated back to New York, the episode earning him a disability pension, two medals, and frontal semi-baldness from the gas), and interrupted the second time by my birth out of wedlock in 1924. Claire gave me her own name, Purcell, first name Orson, for Peter would neither marry her nor allow his own name to be given to me, uncertain as he
The man Peter suspected of siring me was Rico Luca, a vaudeville magician known to audiences as Manfredo the Magnificent, who had hired Claire to be his assistant (known to audiences as The Beautiful Belinda) in 1923, two years after Peter moved into the boarding house on Waverly Place run by Claire’s widowed mother. Peter and Claire pursued their romance in separate bedrooms until Claire’s mother died and they then moved in together, marriage always a subject only for future discussion; for would not marriage negate the freedom that Peter had come to the city to find?
A decade of life amid the pagan romps of la vie bohème had conditioned him to think of fidelity as an abstraction out of his past, and yet he practiced it, and expected it from Claire without ever speaking of it. Then, when travel to the vaudeville houses of the eastern seaboard became part of Claire’s life as well as the means of support for the boarding house that no longer accepted boarders, and whose upkeep and mortgage were beyond Peter’s income, Peter entered into fits of jealousy. He was certain that a woman as comely as Claire, whose body clad in tights was a cause for whistles and hoots from any audience, would be unable to fend off forever the advances of the handsome Manfredo and the stage-door lotharios Peter imagined waiting for her at every whistle stop.
When she announced her pregnancy, Peter broke silence on fidelity and suggested Manfredo as just as likely a parent as himself. Claire first wept at the accusation, then grew furious when Peter persisted, and at last retreated into silence and a separate bedroom; and so the subject was tabled. Jealousy only fattened Peter’s passion for Claire, and after some days she acceded to it. In this way they continued their lives until my birth, the cloud of bastardy always hovering even after I grew to resemble childhood tintypes of Peter (and even of his brother Francis), and even though Martin Daugherty insisted Peter had no worries, for clearly I had been made in the Phelan image. Without legal or moral ties, without faith in itself, this anomalous, double-named family persisted, jealousy, wounded love, and fear of error (in Peter) being the bonding elements of a tie that would not break.