After breakfast I would usually take a walk, to work up an appetite for lunch. It was early Fall and the weather was superb. Often I strolled to the Park and flopped on a bench to doze in the bright sunshine. A marvelous sense of well-being possessed me. No worries of any kind, no responsibilities, no intrusions. Completely my own master, and waited on hand and foot by two eager, beautiful women who treated me like a peacock. Faithfully each day I wrote for an hour or two; the rest of the day was—fuck, feast and fun. What I wrote must have been of slight consequence—probably dreams and fantasies. It was too good a life to inspire serious work. I wrote to, keep my hand in, nothing more. Now and then I knocked out something expressly for Marjorie’s benefit, something whimsical and humorous, which I would read aloud at table between sips of cognac or some precious liqueur from her inexhaustible stock. It wasn’t difficult to please either of them. All they demanded of me was to go through the motions.
I wish I knew how to write, Marjorie would say sometimes. (To her the art of writing was sheer magic.) She wondered, for example, where I got my ideas. You hatch them, like eggs, I said. And those big words, Henry? She doted on them, mispronounced them deliberately, rolled them over on her tongue lasciviously. You sure can juggle them, she’d say. Sometimes she made up a tune in which she introduced these jaw-breakers. What a pleasure it was to hear her hum a tune—or whistle softly! Her sex seemed to move right up into her throat. Often she burst out laughing in the midst of a tune. Such laughter! As if she were getting her ashes hauled.
Sometimes of an evening I would go for a solitary promenade. I knew the neighborhood intimately, having lived for a time right opposite the Park. Only a few blocks away—Myrtle Avenue was the boundary line—the slums commenced. After strolling through the sedate quarters it was a thrill to cross the line, to mingle with Italians, Filipinos, Chinese and other undesirables. A pungent odor invested the poor quarters: it was compounded of cheese, salami, wine, punk, incense, cork, dried fish skins, spices, coffee, stale horse piss, sweat and bad plumbing. The shops were full of nostalgic wares familiar from childhood. I loved the funeral parlors (the Italian ones especially), the religious shops, the junk shops, the delicatessen stores, the stationery stores. It was like passing from a cool, immaculate mausoleum into the thick of life. The tongues employed had a musical quality, even when it was nothing but an exchange of oaths. People dressed differently, each one in his own crazy fashion. The horse and wagon were still in evidence. Children were everywhere, amusing themselves with that lusty exuberance which only the children of the poor display. There were no longer the stereotyped wooden faces of the born American but racial types, all saturated with character.
If I kept walking in a certain direction I would come eventually, to United States Street. It was somewhere near here that my friend Ulric was born. Here it was easy to wander astray; in every direction fascinating detours opened up. At night one walked with dream feet. Everything appeared to be up-ended, churned, tossed about. Sometimes I found myself winding up at Borough Hall, sometimes in Williamsburg. Always within striking distance were the Navy Yard, fantastic Wallabout Market, the sugar refineries, the big bridges, roller mills, grain elevators, foundries, paint factories, tombstone yards, livery stables, glaziers, saddlers, grill works, canneries, fish markets, slaughterhouses, tin factories—a vast conglomeration of workaday horrors over which hung a pall of smoke impregnated with the stench of burning chemicals, rotting flesh and seared metals.
If I thought of Ulric on such walks I thought also of the Middle Ages, and of Breughel the Elder, and Hieronymus Bosch, or of Petronius Arbiter, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Fra Lippo Lippi … to say nothing of the Seven Dwarfs, Swiss Family Robinson and Sinbad the Sailor. Only in a God-forsaken hole like Brooklyn could one assemble the monsters, freaks and anomalies of this world. At the Star Theatre, which was given over to burlesque, one rubbed elbows with the hairy denizens of this incredible region. The performance was always on a level with the almost extinct imagination of the audience. No holds were barred, no gestures considered too indecent, no filth too slimy to be rippled off the tongue of the comedian. It was always a visual and aural feast such as Peeping Tom craves. I was thoroughly at home in this broth: Smut was my maiden name.
Arriving home after one of these promenades I would usually find Marjorie and Mona waiting for me, the table spread for a light repast. What Marjorie called a snack consisted of cold cuts, salami, head cheese, olives, pickles, sardines, radishes, potato salad, caviar, Swiss cheese, coffee, a German cheese cake or apple strudel, with Kummel, Port or Malaga to top it off. Over the coffee and liqueurs we would sometimes listen to John Jacob Niles’ recordings. Our favorite was I Wonder As I Wander, sung in a clear, high-pitched voice with a quaver and a modality all his own. The metallic clang of his dulcimer never failed to produce ecstasy. He had a voice which summoned memories of Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere. There was something of the Druid in him. Like a psalmodist, he intoned his verses in an ethereal chant which the angels carried aloft to the Glory seat. When he sang of Jesus, Mary and Joseph they became living presences. A sweep of the hand and the dulcimer gave forth magical sounds which caused the stars to gleam more brightly, which peopled the hills and meadows with silvery figures and made the brooks to babble like infants. We would sit there long after his voice had faded out, talking of Kentucky where he was born, talking of the Blue Ridge mountains and the folk from Arkansas. Marjorie., always, a-humming and a-whistling, would suddenly break out into song, some simple folk tune which one knew from the cradle.
It was the glorious month of September, described in the Old Farmer’s Almanac as the time when the porcupines take their fill of the ripening apples and the deer munch the fine green beans one has tended so carefully. A lazy time and not a thing to worry about. From our window we looked down on a row of well-kept gardens studded with majestic trees. Everything in apple-pie order, everything serene. The leaves were turning gold and red, flecking the lawns and pavements with fiery splashes. Often I sat at the breakfast table, which commanded a view of the back-yards, and fell into a deep reverie. On certain days not a leaf or twig stirred; there was only the splendor of sunlight and the incessant drone of insects. It was hard to believe sometimes that not so very long ago I had lived in this neighborhood with another wife, that I had pushed a baby carriage up and down the streets, or carried the child to the park and watched it romp in the grass. Sitting there by the window, my past grew dim and faint; it was more like another incarnation. A delicious feeling of detachment would overcome me and I would swim back, leisurely, playfully, like a dolphin, into the mysterious waters of imaginary pasts. In such moods, catching a glimpse of Mona flitting about in her Chinese shift, I would look at her as if she were a total stranger. Sometimes I even forgot her name. Looking away, I would suddenly feel a hand on my shoulder. What are you thinking about? I can hear her say. (Even now I remember vividly how from far, far away her voice seemed to come.) Thinking … thinking? I wasn’t thinking of anything. She would remark that there was such a concentrated look in my eyes. It’s nothing, I would say, 1 was just dreaming. Then Marjorie would chime in: He’s thinking about what he’s going to write, I guess. And I would say, That’s it, Marjorie. Whereupon they would steal away and leave me to myself. Immediately I would fall back into a state of reverie.
Suspended three storeys above the earth, I had the illusion of floating in space. The lawns and shrubs on which my gaze was riveted would vanish. I saw only what I was dreaming of, a perpetual shifting panorama as evanescent as mist. Sometimes queer figures, garbed in the costumes of the period, floated before my eyes—incredible personages such a Samuel Johnson, Dean Swift, Thomas Carlyle, Izaak Walton. Sometimes it was as if the smoke of battle suddenly rolled away and men in armor, chargers sumptuously caparisoned, stood lost and bewildered amidst the slain of the battle-field. Birds and animals also played their part in these still visions, particularly the mythological monsters, with all of whom I seemed to be on familiar terms. There was nothing too outlandish, nothing too unexpected, about these apparitions to rout me out of my nothingness. I wandered with motionless feet through the vast halls of memory, a sort of living cinematograph. Now and then I relived an experience which I had had as a child: a moment, for instance, when one sees or hears something for the first time. In such instances I was both the child experiencing this wonder and the nameless individual observing the child. Sometimes I enjoyed that rare experience of synchronizing my
