J. Donleavy: Wrong Information is Being Given Out at Princeton

I learned about dairy cattle and the chemistry of paper and a coed blew me out in the middle of a cornfield. And in the sylvan collegiate pleasures there, I got to thinking the world should have more dance and music. So after only a year I took off to attend the next two years at a music conservatory in Italy. Living in Europe and traveling a bit, I developed a social consciousness about the upgrading of the underprivileged. That they should enjoy the better things in life. That everybody, despite color, creed, or race, should be entitled to getting a square deal. But returning to America and arriving back in the land of the free and the home of the brave, I began to find that not all Americans were on my side in this conceptual concern. In fact I found that when I posted up a sign, EQUAL OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL, some of these bastard neighbors flying the Stars and Stripes on their front lawns shouted they were taxpayers and were shaking their goddamn fists at me and wanting to kill me. And then along with all this I was having more than a few of life’s blows fall. My favorite and so beautiful sister I dearly loved and with whom I often exchanged our concerns, one evening, anguished after discussing her unhappy marriage alone with me at the kitchen table, fled the house in her nightclothes and rushed out in front of a truck on the nearby highway.

Back then upon that cold blue winter day there was already enough said between Sylvia and me to reach a sort of understanding, especially that I was on the side of the underdog, and it had us both thinking that we were suddenly in love at first sight. We giggled holding hands down those dark ramshackle stairs of Max’s apartment, leaving him and Ertha examining the seashells in his bedroom. Jumping into her nifty but chilly convertible car which I helped push out of the snowdrift, we sped off up Eighth Avenue to get on the West Side Highway. Crossing the George Washington Bridge to the top of the majestic Palisades along by the Hudson, we had warm new questions about who we thought we were and where we came from. And I was telling her that you could so easily be that way in America. Invent yourself moment to moment. Because in Europe, if you were anybody, it was already carved on a building, printed in a book, or remembered by somebody somewhere all over the goddamn place.

Sylvia said there was a lot of secrecy about her being adopted. And she didn’t, despite four years of searching, yet know who her real parents were but had nightmares that her father might have been a pimp and her mother a prostitute. Even growing up on a big estate with a farm and even learning how to milk a cow, she felt her life with her real parents would have been in a shack by the railway tracks. She often reminded me of being able to milk a cow, which I pretended to her was not a totally useless skill. Especially a few times later in our relationship when I found her exercise of the practice pleasurable. But her obsession with who her real mother and father were became bleaker and deeper. And she took to chanting a little song she wrote.

Keep your muscles strong

Around your asshole

Keep your muscles strong around your brain

That way too much shit doesn’t get out

And stops you sounding insane

Her adoptive parents had a property way up in New York State in the mid-Adirondacks, and in that direction is where we headed, driving north breaking the speed limit on the scenic highway. Stopping once along by the Hudson on a promontory, we looked back at the distant silvery thin skyscrapers sticking up out of Manhattan Island. Then farther north past all the passing wildernesses, where I had the fantasy of cheaply and healthfully living in a tent where I could with a piccolo compose and in order to eat, hunt with bow and arrow. It had just grown dark when we were finally driving through the tree-lined streets of Albany, and one took pleasure from the somber comfort of all its Edwardian and Victorian framehouses and their little lawns where nobody yet was standing shaking a fist at me. Then there were these small kind of hick towns she knew well. With names like Sabbath Day Point, Ticonderoga, Pottersville, and Sodom. And where she said folk talked in a twang and you knew if you asked them if they smoked, they’d say, “I ain’t never got that hot.”

Her adopted parents also kept an apartment of sumptuous sprawling rooms full of Impressionist masterpieces back in the city at Sutton Place, overlooking the East River. But here up in the country she said we should stay well away from her adopters, whose too-close proximity put her under strain. Fast driver that she was, she sure had me under strain as we whizzed around and especially as we reconnoitered a few curving miles of the adoptive parents’ estate wall and fence. And finally, at my insistence, slowly driving past the big iron front gates that led into their thirty-two-room mansion with an indoor swimming pool, tennis and squash courts. And as Sylvia described, a dozen French doors opening onto that many different brick terraces screened in summer and glassed in in winter. From a high point on the road and through the trees, you could see in the distance the front gable and tops of four Doric columns holding up a porte cochere. We then had a whole week of hilarity racing around town to town visiting a few of her friends who rode horses and played lacrosse, and who also had estates, one with a polo field, and others with formal gardens and imported statuary, and all the ladies seemed able to heave a football farther than you could believe and make you feel you needed a Charles Atlas course.

I didn’t want to be too nosy, but sometimes you really want to know where such nice things as her adoptive parents’ obviously lots of money came from. And where there could be so much at once that it never stopped coming. But she would never say where exactly, indeed if she even knew, but vaguely mentioned a couple of ranches out Utah, Oklahoma, and Montana way and utilities in one of the bigger midwestern cities, plus the land that a couple of midtown cross streets of New York City were built on. And reference to Palm Beach, Paris, and Rome were never far from her lips. However, as I was fairly broke, why worry about geographical details when she was paying the expenses as we stayed in a couple of pretty nice roadside inns. And dined plentifully on steak and knocked back some really nice dinner wines from around the Finger Lakes. But having to obey a sense of frugality in my life, I was tempted to complain about the size of the tips she made me leave. Her out-of-control extravagance making her sixteen hundred dollars disappear fast. And once she even grabbed a bunch of bills right out of my wallet when she said she needed some change. But again, aside from snatching a few bucks from me, what the hell, why intrude my parsimonious attitude, it was her money.

The nights got freezing cold and all the places we stayed were practically empty of other guests. Nor were the managements killing themselves making an effort to send heat up into the radiators of the bedrooms. In one place, the coldest, as well as the architecturally grandest, we danced alone on a dance floor where, with no other customers, the guy playing the piano at midnight, after dinner, suddenly stopped and was closing his piano and taking a bow. Then coming out onto the tiny stage from a side door, a guy looking like a Mafia don threatened to fire him if he didn’t get back strumming the keys. It was embarrassing, as then we had to go on dancing, and the guy looked so downtrodden glum as he went on playing in the empty room. Sylvia, obviously recognized as local gentry, said it served him right, but since I caught a snatch of marvelous Berlioz he played out of the Symphonie Fantasique while we were eating dinner, I thought this was cruelty to one’s talented fellowman and that the guy, if he already didn’t belong, should go pronto to join the musicians’ union.

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