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

“Gee ma’am. I mean Dru. That would be nice.”

“I can see we’re going to have to be tolerant. Perhaps very tolerant. I think, in fact, I might quite like it if you do call me ma’am. But I would prefer if it didn’t make me feel a little staid and stuffy and perhaps just even a little bit illicit, considering our relative positions.”

Dru speaking into a small microphone. Chauffeur nodding his head as we travel west on Central Park South. Slow down. Stop for a red light at Columbus Circle. Spacious enough for this open-air forum dotted with a few speakers attended with even fewer listeners. One on a soapbox wielding his fist to an empty street. Another patrolling with a sandwich board.

DOWN WITH

WRONGDOING

UP WITH RIGHTEOUSNESS

SAYS THE TRUE

AND ONLY ZORRO

Nearby, a shoving and pushing fight in progress. An old lady beating the protagonists with her umbrella. Nobody looking like they are going to change the world in this little oasis of discontentment. The gray stone ancient hotel there. And a warehouse. And we speed through the traffic to the elevated highway along this great noble river of the Hudson. Dru smiling, pointing through the thick glass of the windows.

“Up there atop that building, a newspaper magnet lived. Had an apartment with a swimming pool in it. He built himself a palace in California with a much bigger pool.”

Under the soaring silver sweep of the George Washington Bridge, the highway weaving its route along the shore of this solemnly deep river. Staring out the window and holding this hand giving a reassuring squeeze that I was told growing up, transmitted a message of true love to come. Listening to this voice as it tells me more. That beyond all this solid rock is Fort Tryon Park. The Cloisters. Lawns, terraces, and where they have the most secret of wonderful rock gardens. The remains of a Romanesque twelfth-century church. And dissolved over this voice telling me of these rocky cliff sides, the prostrate girl, her leather coat spread each side of her like the broken wings of a bird. Her face turned aside, twisted upon her neck. A hole blown through her skull. The blood on her hair. White specks of her brain. As if now strewn dotted across the beautiful passing wooded green contours of countryside.

“Stephen, you’re awfully silent. I won’t of course pry, but you must tell me if something is wrong.”

“Nothing is wrong, ma’am, and you sure do know New York.”

“Well of course one shouldn’t speak of it as being anything important but one’s family have over the years done various things in various parts of the city which I suppose, out of curiosity, one would sometimes investigate, making it familiar.”

Farther north, the highway curving past the hillsides with their strange distant amalgam of buildings, each isolated like the beginnings of abandoned empires. Then just as Dru knows what she does about the island of Manhattan, all growing familiar as places where I walked and knew were passing by. Where my best friend had a trapping line in the swamp in the valley of the Saw Mill River. Catching muskrats to sell to the Hudson Bay Company. And right in this, the area of a borough insisting to be known euphemistically as Riverdale but in reality the Bronx. That word, just like Brooklyn, conjuring up boorish accents and behavior. That makes one in unambiguous affirmation want to brag about where one comes from. As we pass another hillside. Over which the ghosts of childhood hover. Race through my memories. Of what happened beyond in those suburban streets. The artfully chastising, if not horrendous things we did to the neighbors. Especially at night, and most of whom were highly deserving real grumpy bastards with similar wives. Point now upward and toward houses in the trees.

“Dru, that’s where I grew up.”

“And someday it will be immortalized.”

Words such as Dru’s were glowingly pleasant to hear. Even as untrue and impossible as my humility made me feel them to be. But at least such sentiments could get you through another couple of hours of life believing there was reason to live. And not die brain destructed, facedown in a bus station. As go by now the little conurbations from Heather Dell to Hartsdale. My soul quieted a little from the turmoil of the spirit and my accumulated restless nights, I nodded off to sleep. Dreaming I was a salesman in a jewelery store and just having failed to make a sale, I woke. My head resting on Dru’s shoulder, her fur rug up over my knees and the limousine parked on a cemetery road. A chill in the air as I got out to follow Dru in her flat walking shoes. And just like the dead girl’s, her wonderful legs. Her calf muscles flexing in front of me to where we stood in front of the Russian cross on Sergey Rachmaninoff’s grave. Standing there in silent reverence on the grass, paying our respects. And I could hear the fervent poetic eloquence and intensity and the melodious sweeps of the strings in his Symphony No. 2 in E Minor. Then walking and wandering not that far away, there was the final resting place of a baseball player. The same one Max said he emulated.

“Stephen, didn’t that baseball player hit a lot of home runs.”

“Yes he certainly did, ma’am.”

“I suppose more people know who he is than know of Rachmaninoff.”

“Yes ma’am. But he hit forty-nine home runs in a single season. And had a batting average of three seventy-nine over his best ten years. And he lived in my neighborhood, Riverdale. I guess you might say he was a hero, knocking balls instead of musical notes, out into the ether. Folks called him Lou.”

“Ah, at last you’re talking a little. Stephen, you don’t mind if I comment that you’ve been so quiet, as I know you usually are, but then even quieter than that.”

“Well ma’am, it is a rewarding feeling to stand like this out here in the fresh good air of the countryside and to find these two gentlemen, both outstanding in their professions and achieving so much in their lives, now both resting here in peace.”

“You’re staring at that stone there.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What are you thinking about.”

“Epitaphs.”

“Such as.”

“Men are slow to gain their wisdom and faster to become fools.”

“You know Stephen, sometimes when you say something, I feel I am meeting you for the first time. Do you believe in God.”

“Well ma’am, I guess there’s got to be somebody like that somewhere. A guy comes into Horn and Hardart on Fifty-seventh Street saying he is. Do you believe in God.”

“Having been self-sufficient unto myself I have never felt I had any need of a God but often wonder if with no one to turn to in terrible trouble, I would become religious. But you do, don’t you, in so loving your music, have a religion. But recently you have you know, rather made me feel that one has been listening to Tchaikovsky’s Sérénade Mélancolique. Ah, that at last has put a smile on your face. You see, I am boning up on my musicology. Tchaikovsky, he did didn’t he, write so much.”

“He did ma’am, and by the way, Tchaikovsky’s Sérénade Mélancolique does have some very forcefully exuberant passages.”

“Well, I suppose my accumulating musical knowledge is bound to leave me occasionally feeling like I’m plunging over Niagara Falls in a barrel, hoping my ignorance is not to be revealed with the barrel breaking up in the turmoil of water below.”

“I should be glad, ma’am, to save you from drowning and swim with you to shore.”

“And if I were like a bottle full of fizz with the stopper jammed in, would you pull it out.”

“I should be most glad to, ma’am.”

“Come on. We’re going back to New York.”

Her smile radiating from her face as one eye winked and the other stayed brightly sparkling under her wonderful eyebrows, as if they sheltered the gleam that came glowing warm out of this woman’s soul. As her hand grabs mine and leads me now out of glumness down this little grassy incline. To the long black shining sleekness of this limousine. The door clunking closed with its heavy thud. As we go bulletproof back to the silvery towering skyscrapers. People say they like New York because there are people there. And here we sit side by side, at opposite economic poles of the universe, our minds married by the faintly heard music of all these wheels humming along on the highway. Everywhere and everyone in New York, it seems, are grabbing and stabbing at immortality. Scratching names in cement as we did as kids on the street-corner sidewalks. Carve John, Jerry, Joe in brass. Or Alan, Dick, Ken, or Tommy drawn on a wall. It could last a day, week, or a whole month before, worn by footsteps, washed by rain, or faded by sunshine, another name or a new building comes to wipe it away. But ole Dru’s name, out of the sunshine, away from the rain, is writ in brass on a pew in the cloistered elegance of St. Bartholomew’s Church. Which still adorns there so peacefully on Park Avenue. Attesting to religion, wealth, and power. And permitting pure beauty and sentiment to pervade the spirit. The pocked-marked-faced girl who tried not to ridicule her fat-bellied clients said once to me to always tell everyone how great and wonderful they are, in case they ever get that way. And then you’d be telling the truth. And better late than never.