Wrong Information is Being Given Out at Princeton

URGENT YOU TELEPHONE THE ADIRONDACKS.

DRUSILLA

I went out to the nearest local Bowery bar, where no one was usually wasting nickels on phone calls when it could buy beer instead. And stared at the bleakness of the telegram again. All except for a cheerful label attached, exhorting use of telegrams for distinctive socially correct modern correspondence. I dialed the operator to get long distance who tried as the minutes passed to obtain the number, and the number engaged. And as the call was attempted again and again, new nightmares taking wing. Something somehow more than dreadful had happened. When at last I got through, person-to-person, Dru was unavailable. And Parker, the butler, was on the phone who seemed to be crying but agreed to speak as the operator waited for me to plunge in quarter after quarter, clanking and chiming. To then hear his sobbing voice.

“They both got burned up in the fire, sir.”

“Who.”

“Our Sylvia and Mr. Triumphington. They’re gone. I can’t say any more, sir. I can’t. Good-bye.”

I telephoned Sutton Place. No one answering at that socially acceptable telephone exchange, Butterfield 8, I walked away across this socially unacceptable barroom floor where the toes of my shoes were disturbing the sawdust. Dark figures hunched on their stools, coughing in the stink of smoke and sound of spit landing in a spittoon. And the bird that seems in every bar dipping its beak amid the bottles. Two habitués drunkenly declaring their lifelong friendship with each other. “You take care of me, buddy, and I’ll take care of you.” And neither by the look of them, could take care of anybody. And do I now wait to go back to the phone and try again. Order a beer. Stand at the bar. Watch once more the little bird dipping its beak. Up and down. Like the words I hear over and over. They both went up in fire. Means flames. Immolation, as women do in India. They’re gone. Means both are dead. Only Dru left to speak to. And until I do, there is now no way of knowing if maybe wrong information is being given out in the Adirondacks.

I bought a pizza to bring back to eat in the apartment in Pell Street. Gave one of my quarters for the phone to a vagrant who stepped up from the gutter and silently held out his hand. His tired worn face like the paintings Catholics have on their walls of Jesus Christ. My good mother always said to her children, “Always wait on bad news and hear it in the morning when, if it’s bad, it will always be better to cope with after a good night’s sleep.” But my restless slumber was riddled by a nightmare of rattlesnakes coming from under the seats of the Bentley, beady eyes and forked tongues and rattles rattling, coiled to strike. And Max with his shotgun suddenly appearing out of a coffin alongside the Bentley, shooting their heads off one by one. I then suddenly found myself sitting up in the broken bed, sweat pouring from every pore, listening to the strange silence of Oriental nighttime out on the street and that refrain with a drumbeat marching through my brain, “The eyes of Texas are upon you.”

The rest of the night I sat frozen awake, wrapped in a blanket till dawn. Knowing that the bleak light of the sun would first cast upon the tip-top towers of the tallest buildings as they became gleaming spires in the sky. And I would have to further wait until the sun came lower down, glinting on the millions of windows and to finally light up this edge of Chinatown and the world here of our little lives cheek by jowl. The tenant upstairs who burned incense and occasionally played what sounded like an Indian tom-tom, which rhythm I adapted for a passage in my minuet. And the guy who lived beneath who you never saw but who never complained about the piano sounds and drove a taxi by night and studied acting by day. Rip back the covers. Get out of bed. Fight. Fight the world. Fight death. Sit to the piano. Imagine as I always do an audience chattering. Its perfume. The glittering diamonds agleam on women’s wrists, necks and ears. And then the conductor steps up on his podium. Bows to applause. Turns to his orchestra. Nods to the performer. His baton raised and brought down. As I play my minuet that took weeks to score for orchestra. In the hope that someday it would be heard. And is here now before me renamed.

Adagio for Sylvia.

Slow the movement. My fingers possessed by sorrow pass over the keys. Each note so touched to softly sound this threnody. Asking her forgiveness. For whatever trespass upon her I might have done. And who was never as cold and hard as could be her adoptive mother. But Sylvia did not as I can remember, ever cook one single meal. Or put her hand to my brow and say, You poor boy, do you suffer. Yet ask her. Still stay with me. Even in death. That our bones can one day lie melded together in the same grave. So that she would not be nor ever be unwanted. For I could remember another story she once told me of when she was a little girl all dressed up for her seventh birthday party. She’d gone to a new school and had brand-new playmates. Dru and her adoptive father away at polo matches in England, her English governess had organized the little “get-together,” as she called it, by sending engraved invitations whose printed bumps she said Sylvia could run her thumbnail over and always know when she herself got one that the invitation was top-drawer from top-drawer people. The dining room table festive, set for thirty. Surprise presents for each welcome little guest. A conjurer, circus clown and quartet of musicians. Fire-eaters and a man nine foot high on stilts. And when a handful fewer came than were invited, two little girls who did come said the others stayed away because Sylvia had no real mother or father.

Stephen O’Kelly’O in tattered crimson dressing gown. Of which Sylvia always said, “Why don’t you throw that rag away.” Horns blowing down in the streets. Day’s first traffic jam. Wait till it’s over. And it is. Dress and go out. Get something like a bun and a roll for breakfast and buy the paper. Look now out the window and up and down the street to make sure the coast is clear. Chill-enough day for a sweater. Get my mind to remember to buy a can of tomatoes and pound of onions and be able when I need to, to cook up a spaghetti meal.

Stephen O’Kelly’O in the candy store. Reminders of youth. Of jelly beans, fudge and bubble gum. Reach down to take up a newspaper. An argument in progress as two customers say they were there first to be served. And now I am served. I hand over a coin for a paper. Move outside slowly back into the street. And stare down. And there it is. The bottom of the front page of the newspaper. Under a photograph of the charred remains of Sylvia’s doll’s house in the woods. Special to the Herald Tribune and all the news that they think is fit to print in such a conspicuous headline.

PROMINENT SOCIETY FIGURE

IN DOLL’S HOUSE FIRE

WHICH TAKES TWO LIVES

What has been regarded by some as a family jinx has again befallen the socially prominent family of the heiress, the former Drusilla Guenevere Marchantiere, wife of Jonathan Triumphington, who died with their adopted daughter in a fire Thursday that occurred in a small cottage building called the Doll’s House located in isolated woods not far from the family mansion on the Triumphington family estate in the Adirondacks. The tragedy occurred when Mrs. Sylvia O’Kelly’O, the twenty-eight-year-old adopted daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Triumphington and married to an out-of-work composer, had noticed a fire that had started in the building where her playthings and dolls were kept from childhood.

According to a witness, an estate workman, Mrs. O’Kelly’O was seen leaving the Doll’s House and had already walked some distance on the front drive by which the Doll’s House is approached, when, it is believed, in stopping to look back, it was as if Mrs. O’Kelly’O had forgotten something and it was then she must have noticed the fire. In returning and reentering the house, it is thought she did so in an attempt to rescue some very valuable antique dolls kept there. She ignored shouts from the estate gamekeeper not to enter. He described that she seemed oblivious to the fierce flames which had already extensively engulfed the building.

Meanwhile, another workman had gone to raise the alarm and seek help finding Mr. Triumphington, who was at the time at his stables visiting his horses. Mr. Triumphington, upon reaching the Doll’s House, now a raging inferno, soaked himself and his jacket in a nearby rain barrel and put the jacket over his head, then, according to the estate gamekeeper, who attempted to stop him, entered the building, in spite of the intense blaze, to rescue his adopted daughter.

Summoned from seven miles away, the local volunteer fire department, having to traverse the winding and hilly rural roads, arrived at the scene, only to find the small cottage-style building, already with its roof collapsed, beyond saving. The victims’ remains were identified by Mrs. Triumphington, adding yet another tragedy to the long history of misfortune to haunt the Marchantiere family.

Walk along seeing nothing but my feet stepping one in front of the other. The tears chill in the breeze as they roll down my face. And now all over my body I suffer your pain of burning. Unable to stand your being hurt, driven away as you were by my unfaithfulness. Spat upon by your mother. Haunted now by what drove you most to death. We could have had little children with beautiful limbs like yours who at birthdays played games and had treasure hunts in gardens and gathered around a Christmas tree, opening presents at Christmastime. Amid your dolls. Your elegant limbs charred black. Like those conflagrated aboard ship and roasted alive belowdecks after the blast of an enemy shell. Skin melted. Your hair burned off. Lids of your eyes gone. Left staring out of the bone holes in your head. Lips seared, to stretch in a grin of death over your teeth. Triumphington no phony poseur, as I had christened him. Nor was my wife his adopted daughter without principle and dignity. Who unlike Max’s alimony-grasping, greedy helpmates, only said she would give me the cheapest divorce it is possible to get. She intended to die. Walked deliberately into the Doll’s House. On her own exquisite long legs. And now so weary and worn, force my own legs to go back into this Bowery saloon where the bartender has got to know me because I’ve been here twice before. He returned to me quarters in change from my dollar bills, wiping the bar and placing my glass of beer in front of me.

“You must like us in here. And hey, this one is on the house.”

Under the roar of the elevated train, step over five prostrate bodies to get here. Crumpled figures in the doorways. Those still sitting up sat with a bottle clutched in the hand, staring out into the shadowy gloom under the elevated train and mumbling to themselves. Either someone’s son or someone’s father. Then in this bar a brief friendliness comes from out of the bowels of all this dereliction. The long-distance operator’s voice sounding familiar, and I finally get through to the Adirondacks and Dru on the other end of the line. Long silences between her words. Her voice less cold than it was with that inference that I was trying to get something out of her. And now she asks if I agree that Sylvia’s sealed coffin be brought down to New York with her husband’s. A funeral service at St. Bartholomew’s prior to the interment and burial in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. And did I agree that Sylvia would be buried beside the Triumphington family mausoleum. Then she said that we shouldn’t be seen together but that she was being driven down to the city and we could meet if there was somewhere ultradiscreet, as the newspapers were looking for stories. I suggested the counter selling coffee and hot dogs down in the subway at Lexington and Fifty-ninth Street, as it was unlikely anyone in the Social Register would ever be seen congregating there and where she would be safe from recognition or photographers.

In a morning fog settling over the city, the tops of the skyscrapers disappearing. Trying to stop myself plunging into grief as a misty soft rain drizzled down out of the shadowy whiteness. The atmosphere of the world one now lived in, bleak and black. Wore the same dark suit I wore to our first restaurant meal with Sylvia and her adoptive mother. Put on a black tie. If you’re in mourning people are not supposed to be rude to you or punch you in the face. Each time I enter or return to the apartment, I look behind and watch the shadows ahead for the glint of a knife or lurking figures. Took the Lexington Avenue subway uptown to the Fifty-ninth Street stop. Hungry, I had two hot dogs smothered in mustard, relish, and sauerkraut while wondering how I was going to afford paying for them. Quickly approaching getting broke again after pawning my watch and radio. And now waiting for what one had to presume was one of the richest widows in America. But who after half an hour was not showing up. And just as I was ready to go and sipping the last of my 7UP and reaching in my pocket for coins to pay, she arrived. Black silk scarf at her throat, her tall slenderness covered in a gray mackintosh of the French Resistance sort that Max wore. A black cloche hat pulled tightly down over her hair. And as she stole up to my elbow, looking like an unlikely spy with her sunglasses, it took more than a moment to recognize her. She leaned over, and I could smell her sweet breath as she kissed me on the cheek and my most private part instantly stiffened.

“Sorry I’m late, Stephen.”

“Hi.”

“It’s a very very sad time. I can’t think of anything worse or more dreadful to have happened.”

“Yes.”

A smell of brandy on her always-beautiful breath. She sat on the stool next to me and ordered a coffee and a Danish pastry. I thought, My God, the cup’s not gold and pastry has no diamonds glittering in it. And she’s going to eat and drink like any of the people who have nothing better to do than to be here. Her voice softer and quieter than she’d ever spoken before, speaks.

“But now I’m afraid so many practical things have to come first. You can’t afford to pay for Sylvia’s funeral, can you.”

“I can try. And I will.”

“Please don’t complicate matters, will you. Everything is already being taken care of. Jonathan was an honorable man. And Sylvia a lovely young woman too young to die. And their physical bodies were the most terrible things I have ever had to witness.”

Tears rolling from beneath her sunglasses and down her cheeks. A train pulling in would have drowned out any wounded sob. But stoic she sat, opening her crocodile-skin bag and taking out a handkerchief to dab the tears. And here had now come what had to be the cold calculation that was about to involve our lives. Her assumption that I would be glad to be rid of my responsibilities, even though I was relieved and was too ashamed to admit it.

“Sylvia, as you may know, Stephen, was cut off upon her marriage.”

Then just as abruptly as this information was offered, she quickly caught herself, nearly dropping her crocodile bag as she reached her hand over and placed it on my knee. Put there perhaps for reassurance as she faltered in assuming her schoolmarm persona.

“Stephen, we can’t really talk here. Shall we go. I just want to walk a bit.”

I counted out the coins to pay, like tiny steps down the ladder into impoverishment, pushing them one by one forward on the counter, adding a tip of a little pile of pennies. And we climbed the steps up and out of the subway, away from where the thundering roar of the trains was silencing our conversation. The brim of her cloche hat pulled down, she swayed a couple of times as we walked together along the street. But now in silence passing movie theaters and stores. Maneuvering through the shopping crowd streaming around the big department store entrance on the corner that my own mother, from the redoubt of her kitchen, used to surprisingly say was frequented by people with backgrounds totally without refinement. Then we heard screams and shouts. An elderly lady in a fur coat being robbed. The brigand running zigzag through the pedestrians and then bolting across the street. The squeal of tires of a car trying to stop. A thud. The thief facedown, unconscious in the gutter. A belligerently angry old lady thanking a Good Samaritan handing back her purse. A few seconds of life gone by in this haphazard city. Where the unjust, the corrupt, the criminal and the discourteous can suddenly get their comeuppance from the courteous, the good, the honest and the just. And as we walked on and passed a newsstand, there it was. Publicity rules all. Front page of the Daily News, a headline along with Dru’s photograph. And next to it a picture of the smoking, charred ruin in the woods.

DEATH IN

THE DOLL’S HOUSE

The gray sky turning dark and glowering. I could feel Dru stiffen next to me and her walk become hurried. And in sensing her anguish, it was as if Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings scratched across my brain to express her soul’s terrible pain with violins screaming out their raging notes. As it had come to me on that earlier day of tragic occurrence, when another young girl had died and left a darkened red stain on the bus station floor. And now on this very day with my own publicity a cipher of conspicuous ignominy. Referred to as an “out-of-work composer.” Yet no one can claim more resolve to achieve my purpose nor can feel stronger in the fight I shall fight. With a strength even greater than that power held by the richest woman on earth. Who could hire a crane to lift the Empire State Building right up out of its foundations and put it somewhere else like Max’s Chicago with a live elephant dancing on top. And garbed as Dru was, people looked at us as we passed in case she might be the famed reclusive Hollywood actress rumored to live a bit farther south on this East Side of town.

“Please, Stephen, tell me. Tell me that everything is meaningless. That there are no other worlds out beyond the sky that we will ever be able to take a spaceship to. I don’t want to believe that nothing matters. Even though it doesn’t.”

And as I watched the random faces pass and for the glint of knives, I was trying to think of an answer to everything not being meaningless. Especially having such recent firsthand information on the meaningful. Something to eat and somewhere to sleep. And if you were extra-lucky, a concert grand piano or a more portable violin to play. Then you could go on dreaming to thunderous applause with an orchestra having performed Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major. Shouts for an encore and flowers flooding the stage. And we pass another newsstand and even a vendor calling out, “Read all about it.”

“Oh God Stephen, it’s everywhere. Stacked on the newsstands all over New York.”

And what could be meaningful to all these people going by. Who can for a nickel read about burning death spelled out in the paper. Because there it was. Shouted out to the world. Happening to the rich and privileged. On the heels of the secret quiet death of Max. And to another lovely girl, in the bus station where wrong information was being given out at Princeton. Then Sylvia’s death. To which she calmly walked. Back to her most private little refuge, now to be seen in ruins by everyone including my favorite sister. Then by my whole family which wasn’t invited to the wedding and never met her. My mother who prays with her rosary beads every day, said even Protestants deserve a prayer and will say Hail Marys for the repose of Sylvia’s soul. And philosophize, saying that children brought with them adversity which could wear out the heart with worry. And now I am as if I were a ship, bow-on crashing through a vast ocean’s wild waves. Unleashing broadside salvos over the horizon. Not knowing in my turret if they will sink the enemy. And where you, if it’s you they’re aiming at, crouch low. It will do you no good at all if a shell direct hits. Just creates the dead to slip into the deep. And the victor on the sea swells rides away.

Walking now two of us in sorrow with her hand in mine. A gust of wind and first drops of rain falling. Waiting for the lights to change to cross west on Lexington Avenue. This widow. Who I was certain was now so sad that despite her gentle inebriation, she would never again be merry. But in just less than a minute I was wrong. As we reached Park Avenue on the corner where the Ritz Tower rose into the sky, her mood and disposition abruptly changed. Just as it did when she became the rigid schoolmarm, removing her sunglasses and gimlet eyed winking unwelcomingly at me. Now suddenly grabbing my arm, she stopped on the sidewalk. Mascara smeared around her reddened eyes.

“Dru, what’s the matter.”

“The matter is that I suddenly feel so awfully horny and desperately badly in need of a fuck.”

“Holy cow, Dru.”

“Put your arm around me, please. Give me a squeezing hug. And come on. Let’s go. Flag that taxi, sailor.”

Grabbing my arm. Her arm linked tighter around mine. Her fingers closed over my wrist, squeezing hard. As I open up the taxi door and shut it closed. Joining the flow of yellow Checker cabs up Park Avenue. As the rain now belts down and the taxi driver waits to ask, “Where do you want to go, folks,” and then the quiet reflection on this destination of a side street off Sutton Place. And now I was counseling myself. Not to break down and sink in an awful sea of guilt. That the wonderful word sailor sounded comforting to hear. And softened the sound of the words horny and fuck coming from Dru’s lips. Remembering when she said during our first clutching in bed together, “Of course, darling, when you want to be fucked by somebody, then you forget all your worries and all their faults.” Jesus Christ Almighty, whatever you expect from a woman, don’t believe it. Because it is always going to be something else you didn’t expect. And if you were expecting it soon, it would always be later. Or expecting it later, it would always be sooner.

Nearby steps up to a little park overlooking the river, the taxi stopping down this side street off Sutton Place. And some more of what I never expected. Paying the fare, which would now, less two dimes, leave me again flat miserable broke. And the taxi driver scratching his head, delivering two servants to their destination, because that’s where they worked.

“Just follow me, Stephen.”

Dru producing a key, we entered the black steel door and along to the service elevator. She slumped back against the elevator wall, her head bowed as we went up to her floor. And gently smiled as we stepped out on the landing to her pantry door where the delivery boy had masturbated in front of her. Gilbert taken ill and in the hospital with pneumonia. Other staff in the Adirondacks. The apartment empty. Dru casting her coat and hat aside, locking the door behind her, and taking my hand as we entered and went through the kitchen. Past a pile of chopped vegetables on the table. Tempted I was to put hand to and take and chew the healthy end of an unchopped carrot. But instead snatched three grapes from a bunch in a basket. As Dru grabbed a bottle by the neck and briefly put it to her lips.

“Don’t be shocked, Stephen. I often swig from the bottle.”

Chew down my grapes as we pass ormolu-mounted mahogany commodes and go to the end of the longest hall and up the stairs where she led me to a spartan and nunlike bedroom, the windows looking out onto the East River below. And suddenly she retreated.

“Oh no. Not here. Let’s go to the music room. We can listen and have some music.”

Pulled by the hand I followed her back down the stairs and along the hall, over the splendor of rugs and parquet and past the paintings and a Canaletto scene of Venice I’d not seen before. The doors of the music room closing behind us. Out the windows the sky darkening with a storm and the glass streaked with rain. Dru going to her record player.

“I want to dance.”

Bach’s Suite No. 2 in B Minor. Then over by the window, Dru lifting her sweater over her head and undoing her skirt and casting them aside. Now her under-clothing and stockings dropped to the floor, her lithe body twirling around in the middle of this room, in a sinuous dance. And a shiver of recognition of Sylvia. Then as the record ended and I was licking my lips watching her, she crossed to the piano to sit to the keys.

“Stephen, I’ve practiced and played from this whole pile of scores. I wish I could play as beautifully as you do.”

“Ma’am you do, you do.”

“Could you recognize the composer if I play a piece.”

“I believe Ma’am, if I am not already distracted by other more pleasantly urgent matters, that you can play me any successive five or six notes or chords from any composer you like.”

“Okay. Here we go, then.”

“From the exquisiteness which comes when he lets go with his larghetto in his Oboe Concerto in C Major, that’s Vivaldi.”

“Oh, you are clever. Here we go next, maestro.”

“Although great orchestral volume always provides the grandness, those four tinkling notes are from a Beethoven piano concerto.”

“Well, I’ll have to be more obscure. Try this.”

“Ravel, Piano Concerto in G Major, adagio assai.”

“Oh my God, how can one win. And one more.”

“Rachmaninoff. Piano Concerto Number Four in G Minor, opus 40, allegro vivace.”

“Well this one I’m sure you won’t get.”

“Sibelius, the ‘Swan of Tuonela.’”

“My God, you are, aren’t you, really clever. Which I always knew you would be. From the very first moment I clapped eyes on you and you first spoke, if a little bit pedantically.”

“Ma’am, one does not regard this as any feat. It’s just that I praise and love music in all its forms, harmonies, and rhythms.”

“Khachaturian, then. Let me put on the record. While you dear sailor, take off your clothes. To have my need sated, it badly requires that Irish cock of yours stuck deep within me with plenty of percussion fucking to the ‘Sabre Dance.’”

“Ma’am, outside of those motifs reptilian, you sure as hell do have some fine orchestral ideas for accompaniments.”

“Inspired of course by having those arms of yours around me hugging and holding, that one day soon will have conducted some of the great orchestras of the world performing your first, second and third symphonies. And who knows, out of death perhaps the freedom of life doth come.”

Dru pirouetting across the room to the window, turns, staring at me, her arms outstretched and undulating her breasts. Directed to sit on the piano, I sat. Waiting for her to come smiling on tiptoe. Slowly approaching, hips swaying, her winking eye winking.

“I come now to fuck thee, sailor.”

And boy oh boy, who knows, maybe out of death the freedom of life really does come. Kissing me on the lid of each eye as she does. Her tongue burrowing like a corkscrew in each ear. Kissed then on the tip of the nose and at last on the lips. Then spreading her thighs she sits astride me. Haunches heaving to the rhythms of Khachaturian. Requiring astonishing syncopation. Bury my face in her soothing breasts. The bleakness of death to come again tomorrow. And wondering if we will break the goddamn stool which already felt as if it had gone wobbly and weak in one leg. Another’s flesh against mine. Touch the beautiful, shun the ugly. Growing up I was told I was so good-looking that I would be welcome anywhere. And to try it out I walked the streets of Riverdale to see if I could find where there might be a party in progress. When I saw several lights on, I walked up the path to their door and knocked or rang. When the door was answered, I asked in all deep sincerity, “excuse me, kind sir, is there a party going on in there.” I would nearly always be invited in and even was able to test my looks further by beckoning to a couple of friends hiding behind trees out in the road or across the street and asking if they could be invited as well. Only once did I hear a voice say, “Get the fucking hell off this goddamn porch before I fucking well kill you.” And that bastard always flew an American flag on his front lawn.

And now here was Dru. Her hair shrouding her face and her head hung over my shoulder as she milked me, she sang:

“My momma done told me

She didn’t tell me much

But she told me not to do

To do such things like this.”

A mournful hoot of a tugboat on the river and sound of rain spattering windows as Dru released herself from my lap and her voice dropped and seemed to fade away. Her beautiful breasts seemed to hang lower.

“Oh God, Stephen, all these things have their repercussions. What have I done. Betrayed a daughter. A husband. Betrayed him.”

“Holy cow, ma’am, you mustn’t think like that.”

“Don’t you damn well tell me how to think. His memory should be sacred and it’s betrayed. And he cares. I know he does. He’s somewhere, I know he is. And is mortified and horrified.”

“Holy cow Dru, take it easy. As people die, they’re no longer there to care.”

“Well, maybe you don’t care.”

“Gee Dru. Give me a break, will you. At least from the new surprises, until I recover from some of the old ones.”

My first nearly angry words spoken in the company of this rich woman. Innocent but carrying all the blame of all the millions dumped on her. And right at the moment I would love to get the sort of spiritual bliss that one can feel listening to vespers as I did once at King’s College Cambridge, sung under the vault of the great chapel ceiling. And I suddenly imagined that in order to shock my Irish Catholic soul Dru might now hold out her hand in front of my face and say, Okay sailor you’ve had yours, pay me. But instead, her voice was plaintive.

“Although he loved Sylvia, I so disappointed him. That I wouldn’t be a mother and he be a father of his own offspring. But I decided that with so many children already in the world, more coming would be too much. And I didn’t want to bring any into the world myself. And still, even if I could, don’t want to be a mother.”

Dressed, we went out of the music room, past where I had pissed all over the powder room floor and up the stairs again to a different and sumptuous bedroom. Dru’s private domain. A television set. Bookcases and books galore. Rugs deep as snowdrifts on the floor. Her diamonds which she usually wore around her wrists and neck, were on her dressing table. Portraits of her own mother and father on the wall. As she now lay on her back on the purple covers on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. A bottle in one hand and the other thrown across my stomach. She said it was time to think. Of Paris and next year’s racing at Longchamp. And perhaps I thought she was even thinking of caressing my Irish cock to new endeavors as she always seemed to ethnically call it. And I was thinking of ole Max’s occasional words of wisdom. “Pal, the world is where you make it, right in the close little space of the world around you. If you want more spiritual room, get back to old Europe, pal. Old Europe. That’s where the solution is. Deep in the bowels of ancient traditions. And if what you’re not doing is what you should be doing, then the solution is to have a roof over your head. Keep chickens. Fresh eggs for breakfast. Be careful of women. Trust none.” And I said to Max, “Isn’t that cynical.” And he said, “You bet, pal, you bet.” And then as she took a drink from her bottle, came Dru’s words.

“Stephen.”

“Yes.”

“Do you want a swig of this sauce.”

“No thank you.”

“Well, Stephen, are you listening.”

“Yes.”

“You change your name by deed poll to mine. Swear fidelity to me under pain of discontinuance and renouncement. And I’ll finance your career.”

“Holy cow, ma’am.”

“Is that your answer.”

“No ma’am, just my expression of amazement.”

“Well, what’s your answer.”

“You’re buying me.”

“In so many words. Yes. In certain circles it’s called, ‘singing for your supper.’”

“Well ma’am, you may be able to buy another world out beyond the sky. But I’m not singing for my supper. And while I still have a hand on the end of my arm and I can run and grab a hot dog off a hot dog stand, you’re not going to buy me.”

Waiting for a janitor to jump on me any second as an escaping jewel thief I went out the service entrance at Sutton Place. Just like the masturbating boy who probably wanted to do what I had just done. Gonads paining more than glowing, I walked every inch of my impoverished rain-soaked way down Third Avenue under the elevated train and back to Pell Street. Having thoughts enough that made it seem to take only a moment. Be adopted. Sing for my supper. Put on a butler’s uniform. Announce, Madam, dinner is served. Then sing, “Bimba, bimba, non piangere” from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Wait for my own crumbs to be brushed off the table and fall into my upturned open mouth. She said as an aside one day, “We who buy people know those who can be bought.” Well ma’am, not me.

Hanging clothes to dry I lay the night through in Pell Street, staring at a ceiling. Trying to make sure to wake in time for the funeral which gets more sounding like my own. Yet many great composers had patrons. And were bought and kept. And King Ludwig of Bavaria’s largesse to Wagner never made his music any less beautiful.

In the early hours, down from the Adirondacks, a cold front descending on New York. A sprinkling of white on the street in the morning was the first sign of snow after one of the city’s coolest summers. No frying eggs on the sidewalks or crisping your bacon on the steel manhole cover in the middle of the street. But it was after a snowfall that I first really learned how to spell when a bigger boy named Newt taught me while taking a pee, how to write my name with piss in the snow. Newt also said that it was knowing how to do things like that that held the Indians back and let the white man make our country great.

From the Bowery bar where now it seemed every other drink was on the house, I telephoned Amy again at the Pennsylvania Hotel, but she was out. Left a message to invite her on a ferry ride. At a nickel a head, a dime round-trip, it was the only thing that I could afford to do in New York. Smell of garlic on the subway train and a fume that comes from wet wool. My shirt not the cleanest and covered up by a black chesterfield coat belonging to my older brother who, like Max, worked on Wall Street before he married a rich girl with money. But for it’s being too conspicuous, I thought of coming in Max’s motorcar. There were the hearses and a line of limousines parked outside St. Bartholomew’s. And more around the corner with their chauffeurs waiting across from the entrance to the busy luxury of the Waldorf Towers. As I passed Ajello’s candle makers, a perfumed smell came out the doorway.

Brace myself. Cross the street, join as anonymously as one can the elegant gathering. In the church, a flag on one coffin and a posy of flowers on the other. Church nearly full. Obsequies begun. The searing sorrow already anguishing through one’s body. My lungs heaving to pour out tears. Hold. Hold back. The despair. The hopelessness. The dreadful guilt. Head up. Straighten the back. Stand when they do. Kneel when they do. Sit when they do. Recitation of the words from the Bible. Said to these heads of the living and these coffins of the dead. “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live …

“For a man walketh in a vain shadow and disquieteth himself in vain, he heapeth up riches and cannot tell who shall gather them.

“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”

Voices of a choir. Sing “Now the Day Is Over.” And here I am at the back of this church in this last pew, the object of an occasional furtive look. It being nobody’s business to care who I am. Or what I do or how I feel. But what I am is an outcast. An outsider. Who would not sing for his supper. Amid these mourners from near and far. Can nearly pick out the polo players. The society celebrities. Rustle of black silks. Yet perhaps silk doesn’t rustle. But the scent of burning candles and fragrant perfumes is certainly aromatic. Dru in a front pew with relatives, family servants and retainers. And suddenly it’s all over. The choir sings “Abide with Me.” Triumphington had a great-aunt and — uncle who went down on the Titanic, stood on its deck in their evening clothes as it sank into the frigid Arctic waters.

Snow now falling heavily. The big white flakes melting on the church steps and sidewalk. Pallbearers, coffins on their shoulders, loading them back into their hearses. Odd nods, condolences and handshakes from the few familiar faces as they pass. Very very sorry about Sylvia. In one of the limousines, Ertha, Max’s divorced wife. She nods her head about her. Sees me on the church steps just as she bends down to step into her car. She must now have Max’s shell collection, all his silk ties and shoe trees. Plus his refrigeratorful of marvelous champagnes. Dru. There she goes. All in the bleakest but most luxurious black. On those wonderful legs carrying the rest of that slender wonderful body an out-of-work composer has got to know so well. For a moment I even thought I’d have to walk to take the subway to Brooklyn where the cemetery was. But on the sidewalk I was tapped on the arm by the chauffeur who took Dru and me to Valhalla when she was alias Mrs. Wilmington. He opened up the limousine door for me to step in to the comfort of this armored vehicle.

The cortege swept around the ramps of Grand Central Station and rapidly down Park and Fourth avenues. Funerals in New York always rush the fastest way away. Leaving behind all those familiar streets that I have so many times passed in my broke circumstances. Houston, Prince, Spring, Broome and Grand. Now travel in the luxurious comfort with my guts twisted in guilt and grief. I did and do love her. Her death now swept away over the Gothic majesty of the Brooklyn Bridge and down and along these stranger streets to the sudden oasis of open sky over this vast cemetery with its large buildings flanking its entrance. Triumphington’s flag-draped coffin carried up the steps of the Triumphington family mausoleum. Sylvia’s casket covered in flowers, waiting in the hearse parked on the road. So hard to believe that that once-lithe body is in there in its coffin, its living beauty scorched, seared and stilled in death. On the mausoleum steps, sailors in leggings, rifles at present arms. A commander in attendance, gold braid on his cap. Calling “Ready, aim, fire.” The crack of shots echoes in the cold air. Bugler blowing taps. I raise my hand, stiffening my fingers to my brow in my best salute. Sailors take the flag from the casket and the Stars and Stripes is deftly and exquisitely folded and handed to Dru, and they too salute.

Sylvia’s college chums assembled by her grave. High heels sticking into the ground. A pile of earth covered in artificial grass. The funeral director urging me closer to the hole. Elbow-to-elbow with Dru who draws away. And makes a distance which may be the closest we will ever be together again. The college chums standing behind me in force. Recognize a voice. Ertha pronouncing to her companions in her gossipy way clearly meant to be heard by my ears.

“Sylvia deliberately went back into the Doll’s House, according to the workman. Before he even knew there was a fire she was standing on the drive in front watching it burn for fully three minutes and then as the flames took hold, she calmly walked back in.”

Ertha’s words dissipating in the chill air. Every silence now sounding like the end of my life. Straps unwind to lower the coffin. And whatever terrible burned part of her was left is gone. And Jesus Christ Almighty, thank God for the intervening voice of this refined Protestant clergyman. Who with faintly British vowels elegantly intones.

“Lord my God shall make my darkness be light. Deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death. But thy kingdom come.”

Mourners retreating. Ertha stared at me and then as I stared back, she looked away. One wants to say, What the fiick else did you do to Max, you bitch. Mourners reaching the roadway. Limousine doors opening and shutting. More snow falling. A blue jay squawking nearby in a tree. Dru in her black splendor accepting last condolences from relatives, staff, acquaintances. Making me feel as if I were some sort of trespasser. After someone for their money. Which is after all, the greatest tribute they can be paid. And now she’s gone her way. And I’m gone mine. Walking down the gentle slope of this hill whitening in snow. As a figure sidles up. What more must I hear if I listen. The voice is asking would I chat with him at his office on the seventeenth floor of the Triumphington building on Madison Avenue at a time convenient. And now good God, a tap on my shoulder. What next. Another voice comes near as I turn. And this from a famous face in magazines and newspapers.

“I am so sorry and I apologize for intruding upon you at a time like this but I had, having only recently been able to meet with your wife Sylvia, been unable to reach you by telephone. I just wanted you to know that she gave me the score of your minuet sometime ago and which I regard as such a brilliant work of composition that I took the liberty of rehearsing it with my symphony orchestra. Might I just ask at this time if you would consider its being performed. Please telephone my office. I should like to invite you more formally to conduct its premier performance. I’ll say no more except that Sylvia was one of the most brilliant and wonderful dancers, and she was too, such a princely girl. Again, please accept my most sincere condolences.”

Dark pointed shoes of this famed conductor and composer who did not show up for our appointment when I was previously to meet him. Was the news of this event all over the newspapers. To bring him here in all his finery. Yet so courteous and pleasantly glittery-eyed, bracelets on his wrists. Amazing how when you meet people and they tell you something you want to hear, it transforms them from someone previously objectionable at a distance into someone delightful close-up. And even utterly charming and compassionate. But at least one thing is for sure. My name O’Kelly’O is going to go carved on a piece of marble over a grave dug near a socially registered Protestant mausoleum in one of the best cemeteries. And I’ve got to say again that when the chips were down, Jonathan Witherspoon Triumphington III, IV, or whatever he was, had plenty of guts after all. And some of Dru’s words — or were they Sylvia’s — come back to ring in my ears. “There will be one day in your life when you need not worry about the mundane anymore.”

Workman at the pile of soil shoveling it into the grave. And then a figure in a tattered-looking brown coat who’d been lurking back at the side of the gray granite mausoleum, was coming down the little hill to walk away on the road. And from the corner of my eye I saw just a flash of the face seen before behind a screen door in Syracuse. And I knew even now, cloaked with its veil, it was Sylvia’s never-forgotten mother.

Dropped off on Pell Street, the heavy car door clunking closed, I hated to leave the warm secure comfort. Like being shoved out again into the cold world. And without even showing signs of wanting a tip, the chauffeur saluting me, and I realized he did so with a certain lack of precision distinctly naval. And I saluted back. Went into the hall, up these dusty stairs and back into the apartment. In an effort to prevent mess accumulating further in these shabby rooms I pulled out a drawer to place my clothes away. And there in the back corner of this depository was the sweater Sylvia wore when I first met her. The heavy wool folded on top of a pair of her black leotards. Gently, reverently, I lifted them up. There under the sweater was a brand-new twenty-dollar bill. Like the kind she used to give me for car fare. And a note.

Maestro, who knows, you may need this.

And the sob came up as if from the bottom of my feet and from the end of my toes. Unstoppable. Racking every part of my body. And clinging to myself I lay on the bed, my tears soaking the pillow. And next I knew, it was dawn and a pigeon standing in the snow outside on the windowsill.

I knew somehow that I had to get up out of this whirlpool of sorrow or be forever sucked down to no one’s good. And get out into life again. I was sure I was being followed as I went to my familiar Bowery bar to call the Hotel Pennsylvania to ask Amy when I could take her, as I had promised, on a ride on the Staten Island Ferry which let you escape to a brief freedom and return with renewed confidence to New York. Remind myself again. That a nickel a head and a dime round-trip, it was something left I could afford to do in New York. And knowing the ferry was one of America’s most incredible clubs, where each commuter could recognize a stranger and every other commuter’s face and where they sat and what they read. But Amy was again out.

And so important now that I knew it was, to break the barren hold of all these buildings. To vigorously walk the rest of the streets right down to the tip of Manhattan Island. And past where in a twenty-five-cent lodging house Stephen Foster once lived. And who died abandoned and penniless in this city after creating such wonderful music and song.

At last at the end of Broadway the open park ahead, it was as if a whole new world was starting all over again after one had died and woke up living. Yet knowing one lost someone I must have loved. And the one who in death had saved my life. So that I and my music could live.

Remember again. It was my own decent hardworking parents who, even though they weren’t invited to the wedding and with their own dire worries to think about, gave Sylvia and me a few hundred bucks as a present, and we were just able to afford to take the apartment with the big windows looking down on Pell Street. But they said I was moving back into a world that they had struggled to get out of all their lives. And it is true. Even as I go now, I feel disgust at the lack of human dignity along the Bowery streets. The pawnshops, bars and flophouses. A distinguished gray-haired gentleman who could have been my own father accosting me, begging. Asking him, “What has befallen you, friend.” No answer. And I gave what coins I could. And now I know how the rich of the richest live. They have, while they’re awake, appointments. And yet in these United States we live in, for many it was all falling asunder. Where once-respectable, dutiful, God-fearing people end up strewn in the gutter.

Trotted across the rest of the park on this very tip of Manhattan Island. The whistle blew. A Staten Island Ferry about to leave. Up the steps. Run. Run. Jump past as the gatekeeper closes the gates. The last passenger getting on board. Ferry pulling out, squealing against the greased great pilings. Go buy a hot dog adorned with bowel-moving sauerkraut, relish and mustard. Go out on deck. Eat it in the breeze. Stare out at this massive statue holding up its torch of liberty. Emblem of this city and America. Vessels anchored in the bay. Try to read the flags they fly. The wind beating upon the cold gray choppy waters. A tugboat plowing through the waves, foam up over its bow. Draw in a breath of chill air. Turn to go back into the warmth. Stop. And there she is, leaning on the railing. In a black beret, her blond hair being blown back by the wind over her shoulders. The delicate whiteness of that face. Amy from Knoxville. And I could hear Max’s voice saying, How modern can life get, pal, how fast, and how surprising, to be even a bigger pain in the ass. And he also said, Amy was from a good family. That he had holed up with her without repercussions. And what a gal.

Then she turned, saw me. And smiles. Wide, beaming and wonderful. And welcoming. I smile. Go tell her now that I’ll take her wherever she wants to go. Even on a jaunt in Max’s ole Bentley, his legacy to me. With the headlights like two large bulging insect eyes. Knock this city for a loop. Sport, as he did, a crimson silk cravat adorned with black dots and stuck with a gold pin. Thumb my nose at those who jeer. And I know now Sylvia meant no harm when she said, “Throw that rag away.” And even though death may never be put to death, let us ask that you who take the dead away always treat them kindly. And play music please.

Amy from Knoxville said she would stay on in New York and find a job. And it was on a day a month later that I’d gone to see the famed conductor and to meet him on the steps of the Juilliard School of Music following his holding auditions and also to meet a cellist he had heard of there. But he had just learned from two girls, fellow students, about a girl named Sabrina, who had shot herself in the bus station and who at the school was considered one of their most brilliant young cellists. And as I stood there, still in my mind. That image. Of the girl in the bus station. “Excuse me, sir.” When I was so near her. And who was she. And did it ever matter that I find out in this small city with its millions. And now had found out. On these steps where she once must have stood. And where she must have seen me at least once standing. For now I remember her features. posture and the warmth of her healthy glow. And I should have known of her life-threatening distress which was said in her words written all over her face. Just like the man who was also there and had just gone by. With his own face wreathed with concern.

To tell everybody

That wrong information

Is being given out

At Princeton