Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

Perhaps these are the reasons I see her more clearly than is usual in a case of unrequited love. I know she drinks too much, throws herself at pretty, stupid men. I know that her progressive politics (sometimes she calls herself a socialist) collide with her taste for the high life, and that her brittle gaiety and white-powdered face are both attempts to mask Jewish melancholy and ethical rage.

Thirty years later I still do not know why I loved her with a husband’s love rather than the blind passion women like her seem to require – only that I did. But I do know what I admired in her. She had no calculation in her. Which is not to say she was ever blind to what she was doing. She understood the consequences of her adventures, was ready to live with them, was ready not to make excuses. Her mistakes were on a grand scale. She made enemies and friends with abandon, embracing both as badges of honour. She carried her head high. Hers was the beauty of courage and intelligence, to be read in her face, in her eyes, in her passionate, grasping, darting hands. She was a passionate, grasping, darting woman. Rachel Gold sometimes confused rudeness with honesty, but never honesty with anything else.

I am thinking these things when I spot William DeShane crossing the floor, headed in our general direction. The look on my face alerts Rachel. “What?” she says sharply. I don’t answer; I’m watching him. William DeShane has caught more than my attention; a lot of people are suspending their conversations, neglecting their shrimp and soup and meringues to follow him with a hungrier interest.

William DeShane is a graceful man, capable of sailing across a room without faltering under close inspection because he is confident inspection will find him faultless. At the moment he is attracting more stares than even a great star might expect to attract because the diners in the Grove are industry insiders, and for insiders a star in the making is more fascinating than a star made. Nobody knows just how big William DeShane might get, but the guess is very, very big indeed. They watch to see which table he is headed for, who among them swings enough weight to receive a courtesy call from William DeShane. This is not Tuesday. This is small-fry night.

He stops at our table, addresses Rachel. “Miss Gold?” I can sense him basking in the knowledge that all the eyes in the room are upon him.

“That’s right,” she says.

“Allow me to introduce myself. My name is -”

She finishes for him. “William DeShane.”

He bows. “I am flattered that one of the ornaments of our industry should know my name. It goes without saying that I am a very great admirer of your work.”

“Say it anyway. Tell him to say it, Harry.”

“Say it.” I try to sound as bored as humanly possible. DeShane offers his hand for me to shake. “William DeShane.” The palm is cool and dry, a confident temperature. Mine isn’t.

“Harry Vincent.”

He’s no longer looking at me. His eyes are doing a slow pan of the room. I’ll give him this. The man is an actor. He imagines cameras everywhere, all on him. It gives me a moment’s satisfaction to note that his eyes are a smidgen too close together, that he’s one hundredth of an inch short of perfection.

“Would you care to dance, Miss Gold?”

“Excuse us, Harry,” says Rachel rising.

There’s a way that a woman folds herself into a man when they waltz that is like handwriting on the wall. I can read it in very big letters. Everybody watches them simply because they are a beautiful couple. The mensch pays the bill. The gigolo’s evening is just beginning.

The situation in the Cocoanut Grove the previous night leaves me feeling hopeless and despondent, which contributes to my being late for my appointment with Shorty McAdoo. I find him sitting on the step of the bunkhouse, honing the rusty blade of a shovel with a file. I take shovel-sharpening to be a way of killing time and apologize for being late, ending lamely with the word, “Complications.”

McAdoo leans the shovel carefully against the step. “Speaking of complications, friend Wylie’s in the bunkhouse.”

“What’s he doing in the bunkhouse?”

“Setting with his brother.”

McAdoo is sometimes a trial to the patience. “Okay. What’s his brother doing in the bunkhouse?”

“His brother’s dead.”

“Dead?” I say stupidly.

“Dead as old Pontius Pilate. We reckon to bury him this morning.” He indicates roughly where by pointing off beyond the derelict, ravaged house. “Wylie hauled him out here in a milk wagon.” Gauging the look on my face, McAdoo companionably pats the step beside him. I sit. He drops his voice. “Didn’t know what else to do with him. Wylie took all the money he had, every last nickel, bought Miles a coffin, had him embalmed – without he calculated a plot was going to cost extra. There Miles is, all dressed up and no place to go. The county would have give him a spot, but Wylie wouldn’t have his brother lying in a potter’s field. So he freighted him out here.”

“In a milk wagon,” I repeat.

“Wylie is acquainted with a fellow delivers milk. They pack considerable ice on a milk wagon. They took Miles with them on the route and when they was done deliveries they brought him out to me.”

“And the two of you are going to bury him this morning.”

“That bunkhouse ain’t no goddamn milk wagon. He ain’t going to stay fresh. Sooner he’s in the ground the better.”

We sit on the step, silent. I am thinking I might as well have stayed in bed.

“Can’t be helped. I know you was supposed to interview me this morning.”

“My publisher is getting impatient. He wants Indians.”

“Maybe I ain’t got no Indians to deliver.”

“That’s not what I hear.”

“Why don’t you pay your respects to the deceased,” says McAdoo, turning dodgy as he always does whenever he begins to feel cornered.

“I didn’t know the deceased. Never met him.”

McAdoo gets to his feet. “You know Wylie. Wylie’d appreciate you paying your respects. And doing it ain’t going to scrape no skin off your ass.”

We enter the bunkhouse. There is a cheap coffin of some kind of garish yellow wood resting on a bier made of straight-backed chairs. Wylie sits vigil beside it, the brim of his cowboy hat buckled in his hands. The coffin lid stands directly behind him, leaning against the wall.

“Mr. Vincent come to pay his respects, Wylie,” says McAdoo. “You remember Mr. Vincent.”

Wylie, nodding sombrely, rises from the chair to shake my hand with a church deacon’s solemnity. When I attempt to take it back, he holds on grimly, a dog with a stick in his mouth. It seems he wants to lead me up to the casket for a bird’s-eye view of the corpse. Given the situation, I haven’t much choice.

A young man lies with his head propped up on a satin pillow, his complexion watery blue-white, like skim milk. The only brightness in the face is a feverish red seam where his eyelids close and two red-rimmed nostrils tilting up at us. A thatch of bushy, sandy hair is the deadest-looking thing about him, stiff, lifelessly brittle as dry wisps of summer hay.

“They cut his hair at the undertaker’s,” Wylie volunteers. “I didn’t know they cut hair at an undertaker’s.”

“What was it?” I ask. Meaning the cause of death.

Wylie looks at me. Looks at his brother. Looks at me again. “On account of the fall he took with the Running W, he busted up inside. Doctor said his liver, something else…” He stops. “He looks every bit himself though, don’t he?” Wylie still clasps my hand, gaze resting on his brother’s face. We stand in a pocket of stillness, onlookers to a greater stillness boxed by the casket. “It would have meant a lot to Brother, you coming,” Wylie confides.