Clem Anderson: A Novel by R. V. Cassill | eBook

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Clem Anderson

A Novel

By R. V. Cassill

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

CHAPTER 1

At the Blackhawk railway station, where Janet and I picked Clem up, we found him being helped from the train like an invalid V.I.P. by a porter twice his age. Clem was drunk—"Already," Janet whispered. In that moment of seeing him come back to us like a battered refugee from time, it seemed to me no early indulgence that we were witnessing. "Still," I said.

"Fat, too," she had time to say before he saw us hurrying down the platform to rescue him from the solicitude of the porter. Evidently Clem had added twenty pounds since we had seen him last, two years before. In his blue flannel suit, blinking in the warm April sun and rocking gently, he looked like a roly-poly toy in exile from the nursery where it is at home.

He could not have heard her. Nevertheless, his first words of greeting to us who had known him through the string-bean days of his poverty were a direct response to her observation. "Fatness has come on me, cried the Lady of Shalott." Turning once more to the porter and giving him a dollar, he identified himself otherwise. "W. C. Fields to you," he said, clapping the man's shoulder. Then, raising his fat-softened muzzle to the academic sky that he saw spread over us, lifting both elbows so that Janet and I could get the necessary purchase, he gave the stage direction, "Here comes Oedipus, poorly led."

"Thank y', Mr. Fields," the porter said. He scampered back onto his train with an alacrity that suggested all his gladness in passing this torch of volubility on to us.

It fizzled quickly enough in our hands. Or else the implacable fact of arrival settled its melancholy on Clem at once. He blinked at us several times, suggesting we had been much nicer people in his anticipation than we appeared, in daylight, to be. While Janet was still hugging him—she had refused his offer that we take hold of him like a wheelbarrow—his hands were already anxiously busy inside her embrace. He was searching his inner pockets for the paper he had come to read that night before an audience of Blackhawk University people.

Since I had sponsored his invitation and would be in about three hours on the platform with him, introducing him to my colleagues and students, I was almost as relieved as he when he had nudged Janet back and produced the tattered, dirty envelope that contained his talk. I didn't doubt his ability to improvise if necessary. I was merely afraid of it.

Relieved to find it he was. Yet the relief itself reminded him of the ordeal to come. Mutely he handed the envelope over to me for security, but with such a look of the disgraced Soviet official handing himself over to a Siberian welcoming committee that I could not help a slight feeling of injury.

"You've landed in the U.S.A.," I said to his fogginess. It was like calling out the window into the night on the presumption that your listener is out there somewhere. "Mrs. Hartsell and I are going to take you to our president."

He nodded raptly and stared past me at the half-leaved gold and green of the trees by the end of the station. Mirrored in his slightly protuberant eyes I saw the silhouette of this residential part of our little town. "Those are trees you see," I told him.

"Trees I can recognize. I believe that they require oxygen to do their part in the scheme of things. So do I. I'd be obligated, Dick, if you'd take me where I can get some."

Our little whimsies of greeting all ran down while Janet and I drove him to our home to leave his bags and then to the highway restaurant where we had planned to eat before his scheduled appearance. He continued to concentrate powerfully on something besides us or what we had to show him—perhaps on the talk he was to give, on what W. C. Fields had said to the porter on the train, on the kindly city of New York that he had so ill-advisedly left last evening, or, for all we could get out of him, on his cloaked and sweaty navel.

He hardly seemed to notice that we left the car for a few minutes at our place. He looked outraged when Janet asked if he wanted to wash or change his clothes or lie down. Had she forgotten how his strength deserted him in contact with water?

When we explained that we were not going to eat at home because we wanted to escape, one evening, from the children, he smiled sociably and looked behind him, as if we were addressing some other guest whose presence with us he had not noticed yet. We said that after all there was so much to catch up on. We said that his visit was as much an occasion for us as it was for him. He went on smiling sideways.

I thought that while we drove up the highway north of town he was putting us off so that he could concentrate on the loveliness of the evening. It was wonderful, with ranks of silver-and-blue clouds diminishing away into the sundown, columns of showers standing here and there among the velvet dark clumps of half-leaved trees like a Rubens landscape or something by an English water-colorist of the eighteenth century. This was nearly home country for Clem. We were two states away from the town in which he had grown up, but it must have been a long while since he had seen the Midwest at its promising best. Well, whatever he was taking in, he was giving nothing out. We asked him about Sheila and their children, Jess and Lulie.

"Fine, just fine," he said.

We asked about the rumors that his play Death and the Devil was at long last scheduled for a Broadway opening in the fall. "True, that's true," he said, staring through the windshield as if I were driving recklessly through a mine field.

I asked about his friend Terry Burbidge, though I had a suspicion that he and Terry had fallen out for reasons I could not know. I withheld any comment about the prize given Terry's new book of poetry until I should have the chance to sound Clem's present sentiments. I supposed he might be somewhat embittered by the success of a man who, not many years ago, had frankly recognized Clem's superiority to himself. Clem in his old days had been a fierce literary competitor.

"Terry deserved the award," Clem said.

Altogether, by the time we had parked, Janet and I had pulled as much information from him as he might have put on a postcard. That was some accomplishment, I supposed, since we had not had a postcard from the Andersons for more than a year. Clem's letter accepting the invitation to speak had said nothing about his private fortunes or opinions.

Once seated in the restaurant, where he could peer like Narcissus into a crystal martini, we got a little more from him. Overheard it, I felt.

He told us that Sheila had, since we saw her, written a children's book scheduled for early publication. "It's called Beauty Bear," he said. "The idea for the title is mine—you know, from that breathless line of Edgra St. Whipleash McTate about who's the lucky individual that's seen bareback loveliness—and it's, her book, a true-life portrait of an unfortunate friend. There's more ambiguity in children's books than meets the adult eye, the cunning little bastards. Every one of them a world of delight closed by our senseless five." He laughed into his ginny reflection, shaking like a bowlful of wicked jelly. "I'm working on 'The Skeleton Key of Beauty Bear,'" he said.

After another martini and a few bites of steak, he volunteered that he didn't mind Terry Burbidge's getting the National Book Award, since some people he didn't like were running Robert Mingus and Edgar Tobey against Terry, and Mingus was queer as a three-dollar bill—no disqualification in itself, we were to understand, but the queers in this country owed it to the young to reveal themselves, like Gide, not play hide-and-seek-I'm-a-misunderstood-straight-boy-like, and Tobey would be a better poet if he spent less time on the road organizing his reputation.

"At least Terry's honest," he said. "If he wrote that his heart ached and a drowsy numbness pained him, you know, I'd believe him. Who cares who gets the prizes anyway, except it catches the academic boobs who still believe in standards." That was me he meant. "It's all huckstering anyway, and in a couple of years I'm going to straighten out their curves, Dick. I've got a tremendous long poem going. I call it 'Prometheus Bound.' That's a title will stick in your mind. You like it, Janet? My agent forbids me to tell you the real title, but it's the logic of my life. The everything. Then the crumbs will all shake out. They'll have to invent me a new prize, you know. Knight's Order of the Two- headed Vulture with rubies, silver-on-gules ribbon that will cover me from armpit to armpit."

We were starting to laugh with him at this when, abruptly, he jumped up and started for the men's room. Our laughter died thinly before an obliging waiter caught his arm and guided him in.

I looked at my watch. I looked at the brown-and-ruddy steak on his plate from which so few morsels had been cut and fewer eaten. In less than an hour he was supposed to speak.

"He can't go on," Janet said firmly. "Call the department secretary and have her announce that he's sick. Poor Clem."

No doubt I should have taken her advice. I had nothing to lose if he missed his engagement. I might be embarrassed for a few weeks by those who guessed why he was unable to appear. In some intangible matters of prestige my rating might swerve a bit downward, but I had tenure now and was bucking for exactly nothing except peace and security in my middle age.

Nevertheless it seemed to me at the threshold of this decision—and the intuition was odd enough—that the only hope we had of continuing our thin- worn friendship with Clem was to bring him through what he had undertaken to perform. I was shaken by the evidence of remoteness that had grown between us since our last meeting. I didn't like his reticence or the egocentric brashness of his talk when it came. (The talk about "running" poets against each other for a respected prize, as if they were horses doctored and doped by a crew of cigar- sucking gamblers, had seemed pitiably offensive.) I was angry enough to assume my right to know what he was really thinking—where, in his view of his own field, he had come to by now.

Let me say at the same time I was not forgetting Clem's old complaint, "Everyone that Sheila and I make friends with thinks he's our best friend. How can you have so many dozen best friends?" It was the understandable plaint of a man who had traveled far. He had met an absolute swarm of nice people to whom he had given more encouragement than, perhaps, he realized. I remembered and respected the warning, even to Janet and me, against presuming an intimacy that might be onerous to him. Still the case seemed different with us.

Academic boob though I might be—and my poor wife dragged down to my level—we had known him a very long time. Over fifteen years. So much of what had happened to him had involved us that I could not quite bring myself to accept the alienation I felt now. I told myself that after his talk was out of the way we could be easy together again.

So I said, "He has to go on."

My hand flew to my breast pocket to touch his envelope. And I have thought since that my own anxiety should have been another warning, another chance to turn him back. He should have gone home to bed, not to another public trial. Strangers, I have accused myself, would have known that better than old friends. Strangers would have been kinder. I think of that when I think how, finally, he turned entirely to strangers.

In any case it may have been Clem who made his own decision. Just in time he came out of the men's room emanating a reasonable appearance of jauntiness. His plump face was white, but his hair was neatly slicked down with water.

Watching him come toward us, I said to Janet, "Nonsense. He'll win all hearts. What's there to be afraid of?"

Clem said, "Avanti. I go to face the jury of my pierce."

I announced that Clem's topic for this evening's Falmouth Lecture was "Why Is the Play the Thing?" When I had extended the lecture committee's invitation to Clem there had been no specification as to his topic except that it ought to spring from his experience as a writer. He could have chosen poetry or fiction and satisfied our requirements as well, but, as he had blurted while we climbed the stairs that night to the Winslow Memorial Chamber, he had thought he would "draw better" if he spoke as a playwright. "Bigger money in theater," he said.

As he rose to speak I took a chair at his left hand on the dais, breathed easily at last and gratefully heard him raise his voice to a performer's pitch. Though he had put on glasses and was reading closely from his typed manuscript, his tone was strong and flexible. Like many poets, he knew how to use his voice professionally.

Now I could take a good look at our audience and count the house. I was not a little pleased to see that at least three hundred people had turned out, literally crowding the wide, shallow room from the Victorian busts on the right to the huge portrait of benefactor Winslow on the left. Under the chandelier in the center I saw Drs. Weisdrop and Banning, both professors emeriti with bald heads so shining that on them each I could make out the individual reflections of every light in the room. Around them colleagues, faculty wives, librarians, the younger faculty, and students from both the English and the dramatic-arts departments were listening raptly—as for the time I was not.

Truthfully I must admit that for many minutes I did not follow the tendency or catch the major points of Clem's talk. For one thing, I felt I had finished a tricky mission merely by getting him up there. A fixed smile of inattention on my face served as a kind of screen behind which I could first congratulate myself for overriding Janet's doubts (I saw her out there in the audience, her brow beginning to smooth at last) and presently select bits and morsels from the flow of all he told the rest. It was rather as if I were reading a page covered with another blank sheet in which certain holes had been cut so that the messages I received were essentially different from those heard by the group at large. And by this artifice I got a sort of substitute for the frankness he had been withholding from Janet and me since his arrival.

"It was my little boy Jess convinced me that I ought to try my writing hand on plays," I heard him say. "Jess and I communicated well before he knew words. If I cocked my ear he would listen—for Mama or fire trucks or the postman putting checks in our mailbox. If I cooed or simpered he lifted a skeptical little eyebrow. He reached up from the mire of his soiled diaper like a baby Lear welcoming Cordelia home when his mother came to change him. With us the transition from signs to sounds was unbroken. So, when he could talk, the words had grown naturally out of a more primitive communication, and the words were twice as good because they grew stage by stage out of the mystery of silence and noncommunication.

"And the way it was between me and my boy is the way I want it to be between you and me, between my sad and funny characters and whatever audience I can lure into the theater from the business of the street. The reason I'm up here tonight—sweating, mind you—" and here he made a little comedy business of tugging at his ugly jacket—"is so you'll know what I mean better than if you read these sheets instead of me, which," tongue in plump cheek he said, "I imagine most of you would be able to do. This—this you and me—is a kind of theater, too."

And what had I screened from such a passage as this for my private information? Jess's cocked eyebrow and the "mire" of his diapers. Primitively communicated to, I heard the good note of Clem's love for Jess and cut off, letting our speaker run on to tell the others what he had made, in art, from the exploitation of his love. I let go the sound of his voice so an image of Clem and son could expand at leisure in my mind.

The last time Janet and I had been really close to Clem was in the summer before Jess was born. Since then I had seen Jess once briefly in Paris. Janet had never seen the boy, and we had often wondered together what kind of father Clem would make. Knowing Clem, we could hardly have doubted that he would love the boy deeply. But constantly? And wouldn't a child, above anyone else, suffer the bewilderment of expecting a best friend to stay always as close as he had come in his closest moments?

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Clem Anderson by R. V. Cassill. Copyright © 1990 R. V. Cassill. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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Clem Anderson: A Novel

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