William Kennedy: Very Old Bones

I bought her a camera, took her to Versailles, Mont St. Michel, and other spectacles for the eye, took her to Omaha Beach and tried to explain to her some of the war and my puny part in it. She’d lived in Paris the entire war and saw no fighting, only occupation, during which her father had been executed by the Nazis. Her mother, a paragon of independence and survival, raised this very willful daughter.

There was much more, but, to get to the point, Giselle-love broke me. I ran through my paychecks and small savings account, and got a bit of money from my mother. But I soon went through it all, and it was out of the question to ask Peter for money. He never had any.

Then I remembered Walt Popp, captain of Special Services, mentioning a game of poker. That was a month after I met Giselle, the days when I had no time for any other game but her. Now I tracked down Popp at the officers’ club and bought him a drink.

“I thought you were getting a poker game together,” I said.

“I did ask a few guys. Are you ready?”

“I could use a little action.”

“I thought you had this beauty, this cover-girl type.”

“Hanging out with you mugs, I’ll appreciate her even more.”

“I’ll round up a crowd for Friday night,” Popp said.

So I practiced. There’d never been a time I hadn’t, really. Manfredo’s wisdom was that once you lose your touch it will never come back with quite the same delicacy. Any talent must be husbanded or else we diminish in the breach; and so I spent two hours a week, maybe three, handling the cards, cutting them for aces, dealing seconds, bottoms, reading the deck when I shuffled. I practiced in bed, in the latrine, anytime I was alone. Almost nobody after Fobie’s knew about me and cards. My magic was still in my hat.

Popp told the Captain there’d be a game and I’d be playing, and the Captain brought it up the next day in the office.

“Cards? You mean you aren’t seeing Giselle anymore?”

“Matter of fact I am,” I said.

“I don’t see her anymore.”

“Is that so?”

“You damn well know it’s so.”

“I don’t follow you around, Captain.”

“You follow Giselle around.”

“I wouldn’t deny it.”

“She likes ’em young.”

“She’s young.” She was twenty.

“I miss her,” he said.

“I’d miss her too.”

“You took her away from me.”

“That’s not how it happens. People do what they want.”

“She liked me.”

“We all like you, Captain.”

“You do good work, Orson. It’s a good thing you do good work.”

“I try not to disappoint.”

“That’s smart. Never disappoint. What time is the game?”

“Seven o’clock.”

“I’ll see you across the table,” he said.

It sounded like an invitation to a duel.

“Is the coffee ready, Orson?” my father called.

“It is,” I said. “Come on down.”

I heard him shuffling toward the stairs in his slippers, and I remembered when as a child I shat in one of his slippers, a moment of my precocious psychosis. It is a thief’s traditional trick to shit in the victim’s lair, and I had been a thief of vision — of my father’s and mother’s private life. The occasion was an argument over love. Whose property was Claire Purcell? Was she owned body and soul by Peter, her live-in lover, or was she the intimate assistant to Manfredo the Magnificent?

I awoke in the middle of the night to find my father home after a two-week absence, heard his voice, moved toward it comprehending no words, closed on the parental bedroom to see my naked father standing over my supine, naked mother, and hear him say: “Why don’t you take your cunt back to Manfredo and have him give you another one?”

I, at the age of eight, had never heard the word “cunt” uttered other than once in schoolboy talk: Why do they call it a cunt?. . You ever see one?. . Yeah. . Well, then, what else would you call it? Nor did I understand the import of the phrase “another one,” until time had passed and I had dwelled sufficiently on the overheard words to conclude that my father had been talking about me, the only one there was: Orson Purcell, son without siblings (living or dead) of Claire Purcell-never-Phelan. I was “son,” “sonny,” “Orse,” and “Orsy-Horsey” to Peter Phelan, the only father I’d ever known. But when I at last understood the meaning of his assault on my mother (I soon began to use the term “father” in an ambiguous way, and eventually abandoned it), then it occurred to me that bastardy might be an enduring theme of my life. I grew angry at Peter for not ( if not) being my father, grew angry also at Manfredo, who was unacceptable as a father.

This latter anger prevailed after I entered a dressing room of the Palace Theater in Albany, just after Manfredo had finished his act on stage. There sat Mother on the dressing-room vanity, naked legs akimbo. There stood Manfredo in top hat, tux jacket, and pants around ankles, thrusting his magic wand into her rabbit, and giving moon to all visitors who did not know they were not wanted, just as the magic couple did not realize that they had not locked the door until after the Orse was gone.

Orson the adventurer, Orson the thief of vision. I waited a week before making the assault on my father’s slipper (I should have shat in Manfredo’s hat) as an ultimate gesture of rebellion against his verbal cruelty. My mother rejected my act of solidarity with her, terming it loathsome, and my father, whose anger with Claire had abated, took off his belt and said, “Now I’m going to whip you until you bleed,” and did. I then brooded myself into a dream of being attacked by crocodiles and, while pulling myself out of the water, of being consumed by the crocs up to the neck, my head floating away to live a disembodied life of its own.

That, more or less, is the truth of my head.

Peter finally reached the bottom of the stairs and shuffled toward the dining room.

“I never thought my bones would turn into my enemy,” he said with a great wheezing sound. “Skeletons are not to be trusted.”

He sat at the dining-room table and I put the toast and butter on the table and poured his and my coffee.

“Are you going to go to work?” I asked him.

“I have no alternative.”

“You could take it easy. Take the day off. It’s a special day, isn’t it?”

“That’s like cheating at solitaire. Who gets cheated?”

“Are you nearing the end of this painting?”

“There’s distance to go, but there’s even more to do after this one.”

“You always talk about dying but you don’t behave like a dying man.”

“As soon as you behave like a dying man, you’re dead.”

“You’re a man with a mission.”

“A man with curiosity. I come from a long line of failed and sinful flesh, and there’s a darkness in it I want to see.”

“Speaking of sin,” I said, “isn’t today the day that Adelaide comes to give you your therapy?”

“You have an abrasive tongue in your head this morning.”

“I just want to make sure I’m here to let her in.”

“You’re a thoughtful boy, Orson.”

“I used to be a boy,” I said.

We looked at the window at the beginning of the day, a grudging gray light, no sunbeam to color it brilliant.

“They say it’s going to rain,” I said.

“They always say that,” said Peter. “And they’re always right.”

Those who do the great heroic work of being human never work solely from experience. My father, for instance, could never have painted his Malachi Suite , that remarkable body of paintings and sketches that made him famous, without having projected himself into the lives of the people who had lived and died so absurdly, so tragically, in the days before and after his own birth. I am not implying here that any historical reconstruction is heroic, but rather that imaginative work of the first rank must come about through its creator’s subordination of the self, and also from the absorption into that self of what has gone on beyond or before its own existence.