With the world fluttering away on the last wings of a hollow snore I see the door opening to admit Grover Watrous. “Christ be with you!” he says, dragging his club foot along. He is quite a young man now and he has found God. There is only one God and Grover Watrous has found Him and so there is nothing more to say except that everything has to be said over again in Grover Watrous’ new God-language. This bright new language which God invented especially for Grover Watrous intrigues me enormously, first because I had always considered Grover to be a hopeless dunce, second because I notice that there are no longer any tobacco stains on his agile fingers. When we were boys Grover lived next door to us. He would visit me from time to time in order to practise a duet with me. Though he was only fourteen or fifteen he smoked like a trooper. His mother could do nothing against it because Grover was a genius and a genius had to have a little liberty, particularly when he was also unfortunate enough to have been born with a club foot. Grover was the kind of genius who thrives on dirt. He not only had nicotine stains on his fingers but he had filthy black nails which would break under hours of practising, imposing upon young Grover the ravishing obligation of tearing them off with his teeth. Grover used to spit out broken nails along with bits of tobacco which got caught in his teeth. It was delightful and stimulating. The cigarettes burned holes into the piano and, as my mother critically observed, also tarnished the keys. When Grover took leave the parlour stank like the backroom of an undertaker’s establishment. It stank of dead cigarettes, sweat, dirty linen, Grover’s oaths and the dry heat left by the dying notes of Weber, Berlioz, Liszt and Co. It stank too of Grover’s running ear and of his decaying teeth.
It stank of his mother’s pampering and whimpering. His own home was a stable divinely suited to his genius, but the parlour of our home was like the waiting room of a mortician’s office and Grover was a lout who didn’t even know enough to wipe his feet. In the winter time his nose ran like a sewer and Grover, being too engrossed in his music to bother wiping his nose, the cold snot was left to trickle down until it reached his lips where it was sucked in by a very long white tongue. To the flatulent music of Weber, Berlioz, Liszt and Co. it added a piquant sauce which made those empty devils palatable. Every other word from Grover’s lips was an oath, his favourite expression being – “I can’t get the fucking thing right!” Sometimes he grew so annoyed that he would take his fists and pound the piano like a madman. It was his genius coming out the wrong way. His mother, in fact, used to attach a great deal of importance to these fits of anger; they convinced her that he had something in him. Other people simply said that Grover was impossible. Much was forgiven, however, because of his club foot. Grover was sly enough to exploit this bad foot; whenever he wanted anything badly he developed pains in the foot. Only the piano seemed to have no respect for this maimed member.
The piano therefore was an object to be cursed and kicked and pounded to bits. If he were in good form, on the other hand, Grover would remain at the piano for hours on end; in fact, you couldn’t drag him away. On such occasions his mother would go stand in the grass plot in front of the house and waylay the neighbours in order to squeeze a few words of praise out of them. She would be so carried away by her son’s “divine” playing that she would forget to cook the evening meal. The old man, who worked in the sewers, usually came home grumpy and famished. Sometimes he would march directly upstairs to the parlour and yank Grover off the piano stool. He had a rather foul vocabulary himself and when he let loose on his genius of a son there wasn’t much left for Grover to say. In the old man’s opinion Grover was just a lazy son of a bitch who could make a lot of noise. Now and then he threatened to chuck the fucking piano out of the window – and Grover with it. If the mother were rash enough to interfere during these scenes he would give her a clout and tell her to go piss up the end of a rope. He had his moments of weakness too, of course, and in such a mood he might ask Grover what the hell he was rattling away at, and if the latter said, for example, “why the Sonata Pathetique”, the old buzzard would say – “what the hell does that mean? Why, in Christ’s name don’t they put it down in plain English?” The old man’s ignorance was even harder for Grover to bear than his brutality. He was heartily ashamed of his old man and when the latter was out of sight he would ridicule him unmercifully. When he got a little older he used to insinuate that he wouldn’t have been born with a club foot if the old man hadn’t been such a mean bastard. He said that the old man must have kicked his mother in the belly when she was pregnant. This alleged kick in the belly must have affected Grover in diverse ways, for when he had grown up to be quite a young man, as I was saying, he suddenly took to God with such a passion that there was no blowing your nose before him without first asking God’s permission.
Grover’s conversion followed right upon the old man’s deflation, which is why I am reminded of it. Nobody had seen the Watrouses for a number of years and then, right in the midst of a bloody snore, you might say, in pranced Grover scattering benedictions and calling upon God as his witness as he rolled up his sleeves to deliver us from evil. What I noted first in him was the change in his personal appearance; he had been washed dean in the blood of the Lamb. He was so immaculate, indeed, that there was almost a perfume emanating from him. His speech too had been cleaned up, instead of wild oaths there were now nothing but blessings and invocations. It was not a conversation which he held with us but a monologue in which, if there were any questions, he answered them himself. As he took the chair which was offered him he said with the nimbleness of a jack-rabbit that God had given his only beloved Son in order that we might enjoy life everlasting. Did we really want this life everlasting – or were we simply going to wallow in the joys of the flesh and die without knowing salvation? The incongruity of mentioning the “joys of the flesh” to an aged couple, one of whom was sound asleep and snoring, never struck him, to be sure. He was so alive and jubilant in the first flush of God’s merciful grace that he must have forgotten that my sister was dippy, for, without even inquiring how she had been, he began to harangue her in this new-found spiritual palaver to which she was entirely impervious because, as I say, she was minus so many buttons that if he had been talking about chopped spinach it would have been just as meaningful to her. A phrase like “the pleasures of the flesh” meant to her something like a beautiful day with a red parasol.
I could see by the way she sat on the edge of her chair and bobbed her head that she was only waiting for him to catch his breath in order to inform him that the pastor – her pastor, who was an Episcopalian – had just returned from Europe and that they were going to have a fair in the basement of the church where she would have a little booth fitted up with doylies from the five-and-ten cent store. In fact, no sooner had he paused a moment than she let loose – about the canals of Venice, the snow in the Alps, the dog carts in Brussels, the beautiful Uverwurst in Munich. She was not only religious, my sister, but she was clean daffy.
