William Gaddis - A Folic Of His Own

— We forgot the popcorn.

— Is there any more ice cream?

— That's always their escape Harry, make a real mess they pretend they did it on purpose and call it satire.

— More wine? A very Merry, Dancing, Drinking, Laughing, Quaffing, and unthinking Time not long in coming with the wedding at Cross Creek where soon enough The Sprightly Green In Woodland Walks, no more is seen; Arms and Honour Set the Martial Mind on Fire, And kindle Manly Rage. Plenty, Peace, and Pleasure fly; Sound the Trumpet, Beat the Drum, Sound a Reveille, Sound, Sound, — too loud, will you turn it down a little? as the secular masque of the old order took its farewell in the orotund tones of a Union commander and Lover of Poetry high on a bluff above the Potomac shaking an officer's hand with 'I congratulate you, sir, on the prospect of a battle,' uncostumed artifice of breast and sinew given place to brawn and those sweet beads of perspiration to rank sweat, the curried stallion in the Woodland Walks to a drayhorse mired on the bank below and that lone shotgun's burst to the crash of small arms fire from the higher ground in the woods beyond through gunsmoke lain like a pall over his green regiments, and echoing Sir Walter Scott with a bugle blast worth a thousand men the Lover of Poetry went down with a Rebel bullet through his heart, his prospect of a battle gone withershins in a tumultuous rout down the steep bluff for four small boats to carry them back across the wide river white as a hailstorm with bullets fired from the abandoned heights and of those thousand men nine hundred lost, shot, drowned, or left for prisoners on the dark Virginia shore.

— God!

— Oscar? you okay?

— That was stunning! he gasped, lurching upright to fill his emptied glass — exactly yes, exactly what it was like! as though he'd been there himself that late October day in eighteen sixty one, a boy cheering when the Lover of Poetry turned on the Twentieth Massachusetts with 'Boys, you want to fight, don't you?' —as though they really were there, they must have been they must have filmed it right there at the real Ball's Bluff that was clever, telling it from the Union side that was clever, that great flatboat turning over and the drowning soldiers being shot to pieces right at the end, did you see that right at the end? that wounded man left behind on the beach? filling his glass again, — that was Holmes, that could have been the young Oliver Wendell Holmes wasn't it, he was a lieutenant in the Twentieth Massachusetts wounded at Ball's Bluff just like that wasn't he? gasping, pausing for breath, — left behind on the beach just like that wasn't he? raising his glass to the screen where just then a car came careening round a bend with the reckless abandon of a drunk at the wheel and an exhortation to buy one.

— You got quite carried away Oscar didn't you, I thought you…

— Well the battle, the battle they, that was clever, the Confederates you hardly ever got a look at them, just a flag or two and their shapes through the trees and the smoke except for this, this ridiculous Major on horseback with a swill from his flask and the, and our hero the one playing my character Thomas when he gets hit, this ridiculous actor playing Grandfather he's twice the…

— Well my God Oscar he's not playing your character Thomas, he's never heard of your grandfather he's…

— Well he's twice too old! And he can't act he's as wooden as a, he can't even act he's a stick, stands there reading his lines there's nothing in his face at all it's just a face and he, now! Look, look at him with his scar this is where it's supposed to begin, this is where my play opens coming home with his battle scar it's the first line in the prologue isn't it? his own hand rising to brush at his stubbled cheek — where a cab driver bit him? and that voice, it's as lifeless as he is just listen to it.

— If you keep talking this way how can we listen to the…

— You don't have to! he seized up the bottle, — will you look at him? pouring the last of it — he's supposed to be seething with excitement and indignation, this letter his mother just gave him he's supposed to be exulting over the death of this uncle who'd humiliated him and cheated his father and now it's all his, it's revenge for the humiliation heaped on him since the day he was born and he's acting the part like a, like Father used to say? And he stabbed him in the back with a wet sock! No wonder Father hated it, seeing Grandfather played by this sullen morose, God, if Father could have seen it. If he could have seen what I saw there.

— Well it's not going to get any better is it, I mean you've read those reviews, do we have to suffer through it? We can just turn it off, there's no reason to get in a state over…

— I am not in a state! and he sank back muttering imprecations, finishing his glass and gasping with the effort of fighting off the creatures of his own invention travestied before his eyes narrowing at the unctuous duplicity in the Major's embrace of his hero's scarred wooden counterpart urging him north to claim what was now rightfully his and rescue the decaying plantation from the burden of gambling debts revealed in a vicious encounter belowstairs with his own lamed and sniveling son about to be shipped off as a substitute for the transgressor to unnamed battlefields beyond this one above where even now in canopied splendour none but the brave deserved the fair tempestuously breasted, flaming haired, her glistening thighs spread wide astride what now, flushed with a purple grace, was rightfully hers.

— Oscar where are you going? In answer he brandished the emptied wine bottle at a woman on the screen astride a mechanical marvel who had lost 118 pounds in just three weeks, — Lily? He'll never make it, will you bring in another? and to the startled look she drew — just go ahead, I mean my God at this point he probably deserves it.

A light glissando greeted her return with the threat of comic relief set up against the bleak prospect of a Northern mining shaft as she perched on the sofa's arm inexpertly manipulating the corkscrew. — Here, give it to me! his impatience less with her and the bottle which he had by the neck without a glance than for the figure now filling the screen in cunning parody of the manager of the mines, Bagby's obsequious brogue gone for the flagrant guile of old Calabria wheedling, remonstrating, cajoling and patronizing the new master by turns, now for his misguided notions of fairness in dealing with the striking miners, now for the uses of influence in getting ahead, breaking off for a highly theatrical interlude of mugging and arson and here came the playful glissando again as new comic possibilities emerged in the parade of petty thieves, rumpots, fugitives from wives and creditors and a brace of Chippewa Indians being cursorily questioned, pummeled, browbeaten, paid and fleeced as recruits for the Union army by the mine manager in his time away from raising stores of vermifuges, decorative sabres, trusses and mule feed cut with sand in the patriotic cause.

— Oscar be careful, that's going to spill.

— What? he looked up startled, righted the bottle against a cushion beside him and sank back muttering — listen! his impatience burst at her abrupt intrusion on the unwilling suspension of disbelief that seemed gradually to have come over him, the polished scorn of his defenses eroded by the desecration prospering before his eyes, enveloping his senses pillaged into submission to this version of his own creations, until at last the plot's device calling for the draft notice for the Union forces enmeshed his reluctant hero's ignoble counterpart in the fatal decision to send up a hapless boy from the mines as a substitute provoked no more than what might have been a wheeze of acquiescence or even in fact, one of satisfaction with this glancing shot at his own dwindling contribution even now, with another pull at his glass, dissolving altogether before his eyes in the mists of a country morning where a curtain stirred by a gentle breeze over a bared shoulder might have signaled the return of testimonial relief after a satisfactory bout with an overnight laxative but for the ominous rise of a cello and the burst of gossamered breasts suddenly and splendidly real as she flung a cape round her shoulders and cried out.