Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

She had to take a photo of her mother and Jerry before they went to the ball. Her mother, she had to admit, looked lovely in her absurd Pierre Balmain dress. Jerry had all the spark of a dog turd in his tailored tux. He rolled his eyes for the picture which later made Alicia angry when she saw it. She always called him darling which made him beam even if she was angry.

What she had learned about Jerry on their fishing trip raised questions in Catherine’s mind about the whole reality of inherited wealth and so did Palm Beach itself. Jerry’s father and grandfather had made a great deal of money in the early electronics field. Jerry’s father had been a terminal alcoholic and syphilitic giving Jerry zero instruction or guidance in life. His father and grandfather were pure unadulterated spenders who were so drunk and disorganized that his family freed him of the money and put it in a trust at J.P. Morgan. Only the interest could be spent. Jerry showed good signs early on and graduated from Yale with honors. But then he discovered the ocean which required boats and he ended up with a fleet and many employees including one who did nothing but help him with his travels. He would go to Europe with twenty pieces of luggage and this required someone to oversee it. He had a great fear of leaving something unspecified behind. He was a grand sucker for luxury hotels. Before Catherine’s mother he had had an apartment way up in the Carlyle Hotel because he liked the room service. The expensive secret power it had was to give him lots of bacon on his order.

Jerry was an expert in the fields of anthropology and ornithology. No place was too far to go see a bird. In his Rhode Island house he kept drawers full of thousands of dead birds, bought from a European collector and smuggled in on the yacht including a unique specimen that he shared with no one but willed to Harvard on his death. What’s the hurry? he thought. A few years before Catherine’s mother showed up he had been married to a French actress for a scant five months. He had taken her down to Cannes to the movie festival and this seemed to make her less popular. He had been married a total of four times and his ironclad rule was no children. He considered himself to have greatly suffered in childhood and would wish it on no one else. His family fortune was aimed at a not very significant college in Ohio. On one of his early, random cross-country drives he had stopped in the college town for the night and liked its aura and the fresh, hardworking people. The college as of yet didn’t know he existed and he didn’t realize that his money would destroy the charm of the place. He was almost a nitwit but not quite.

Catherine left Palm Beach several days later and didn’t get home until midmorning a day late. The plane had had a long delay in Denver with a driving rain that turned into driving snow. She got to Billings late, picked up her car, and drove up to Roundup because she wanted to head home on Route 212 which to her was the ultimate Montana road because it reminded her of the old Montana of her childhood before so many rich people moved west. “All hat and no cows,” as people said. She stayed in a scummy little motel where perhaps drunk truckers had pissed on the rug. She was famished having skipped the loathsome airline snacks. There was an open bar and she hoped for a single hamburger. It turned out that they had passable small rib steaks of which she wolfed two. Two polite cowboys at the bar made equally polite passes at her. “If you don’t got a place to stay I have a clean bunkhouse.” She danced with one who smelled slightly of manure and horses but not offensively. She could really cut a rug but held back from showing off. As a senior at Barnard she had a little apartment down in the Village with a Puerto Rican girl Josita who loved dancing. They danced together insatiably with Josita in drag. They won a number of dance contests with the judges perceiving that Josita was also a woman — her ass was too shapely to be male. One night when drunk they slept together but Catherine didn’t care for it. As stupid looking as they were she still preferred dicks.

She couldn’t hold back and the cowboy was breathing hard. There was applause and then drinks from a table of old ranchers. They slow danced to Patsy Cline singing “Crazy” and he blushed deeply.

She bought a pint and went to her motel, pouring a big one because she was still jangled from Florida. In bed watching the late news she recalled there was one other man she actually liked aside from her grandfathers. That was wounded Tim who lived next door to Great-Uncle Harold and Great-Aunt Winnie just near the Cornwall border. Her grandmother had written that he was finally making some progress with prosthetic devices which he had refused to try for a couple of years but then his goofy grandmother had taken to praying on their stone driveway on her knees in all weather so he caved in. He could now shuffle along passably with his big walking stick and when he fell he was strong enough to shimmy up the stick with his good hand and the artificial one. Anyway he was the third man she admired and she very much wanted to make love to him and hopefully become pregnant. She was past thirty and felt time slipping away. He was so bitter about the severity of his injuries she doubted he would ever let her close.

She awoke early and figured out the room coffeepot. She felt slow-witted and wondered if she was losing her mind, a concept she had always disagreed with. How could you lose your mind? It was always there though it could be in severe disrepair. She felt mired in random thoughts such as realizing she shouldn’t have fired the lawyer who when working on her will had laughed when she insisted her cremated ashes should be strewn on the floor of the chicken coop.

When she got home and took in her luggage there was a note stuck on the door from her father which she put off reading because she was moving her camping cot out to the chicken coop. She meant to spend her first night home in the company of her beloved chickens, a somewhat eccentric means of returning to normal.

She read her father’s note with a luncheon tuna fish sandwich mostly because he hated tuna. The note was a shock and written on Best Western stationery because he was staying there until he found a place. Her brother Robert had stopped for a visit while hitchhiking from Los Angeles to New York City. The visit was “highly wretched” and “insulting.” Robert warned him that he was going to burn the house down. “I said but you left a whole room of your precious books here. That seemed to give him pause so I didn’t call the police about it. We drank a whole bottle of gin together and things further degenerated. That night he did burn the house right to the ground. I barely got out alive but was awakened by the heavy odor of gasoline. I got both dogs out but lost my precious collection of shotguns and antique maps. The police found Robert asleep in a ditch about ten miles east of town. He is now incarcerated in the county jail. I asked the prosecutor to press all charges. He should be locked up for life. Sad to say this grand home would have been yours when I am deceased.”

She called the jail in the county seat about twenty miles distant in Livingston. Yes, she could visit Robert until five that afternoon. She had actually always disliked the house. It had been owned by a minor railroad baron. There’s nothing new, she thought, about “conspicuous consumption,” as Thorstein Veblen called it. Her friends thought it was haunted. It was dour, gloomy, and even smelled ancient. When young she had found a small secret room in the basement which was a fine place to hide her pathetic secret belongings though no one was looking.