Читать книгу Singing My Him Song - Malachy McCourt - Страница 8

On Sunday afternoons in 1963, the summer I worked in a Hamptons hostelry called the Watermill, myself and assorted staff would adjourn to the beach, armed with a largish cooler chock-full of ice, vodka, and orange juice. One of our number, Dan Cohalan, did a creditable job with the guitar, and, as we knew a reasonable number of songs with choruses, we were able to gather quite a number of children around to join in, and their parents were delighted to have us in loco parentis so they could go off walking, swimming, or having affairs in the dunes.

What a joy it was to hear forty or fifty silvery six- and seven-year-old voices raised in bawdy song, and sung with as much conviction as if they knew what they were singing:

Oh, I’ve got a cousin Daniel,

And he’s got a cocker spaniel,

If you tickled him in the middle,

He would lift his leg and piddle.

Did you ever see,

Did you ever see,

Such a funny thing before?

D’ye know my Auntie Anna,

And she’s got a grand piana,

Which she rams, aram, arama,

’Til the neighbors say, “God damn her!”

I taught them the occasional limerick, as well.

Rosalina, a pretty young lass,

Had a truly magnificent ass.

Not rounded and pink,

As you possibly think,

It was grey, had long ears, and ate grass.

I can only assume that the parents never asked to hear the new repertoire the silvery-voiced little ones brought home from their sandy Sunday school.

Not a few adults joined us, too, as we were the jolliest gathering on that strand. Two very attractive young women, Louise Arnold and Lynn Epstein, plunked themselves down on the sand at Cohalan’s invitation, and soon became regulars. They revealed that they had produced some Off Broadway shows, which sparked my interest. I was of a mind to get serious about the acting trade, due to my newfound penchant for suffering.

It depends on where you are in life, I suppose, but some people think that to be a great actor it’s necessary to be entirely miserable, and if misery is the grandest qualification, then it was, Move over, Burton, Olivier, and Gielgud—McCourt is on the way.

Sundays were not a joy unalloyed, as every child singing there might suddenly remind me of my own two, who seemed lost to me forever. That summer, my estranged wife, Linda, had informed me that she was going off to Mexico to divorce me. We’d been separated for two years by then, but occasional bouts of blind optimism had led me to believe that it would somehow all work out.

“What about the children?” I had asked her.

“What about them?” she asked. “We never did have anything resembling a marriage, so don’t be a hypocrite and pretend we were a family.” She spoke truth, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it.

One Sunday, when it was too hot to sing, my morbid contemplations were knocked right out of my head, at least for a time. I was enthroned beneath my protective umbrella (this because I have skin which, when exposed to the sun, makes the common beet seem albino), when out of nowhere there hove into my purview the most astonishingly beautiful and graceful woman I’d ever seen in all my life and travels. She had rich brown hair and striking almond-shaped eyes. She wore a modest white bathing suit and, as she stepped along the water’s edge on her long lithe legs, the water glinting with sunlight behind her, her slim body and swanlike neck seemed to sway in time to music. Upon her right hip there was perched like a koala bear a bright-faced, blond-haired child in the two-year-old range.

It never occurred to me to think that the presence of a child might imply that there was a husband somewhere; in that moment I was so absolutely smitten that I couldn’t conceive that any obstacles might stand between me and this vision.

I don’t know how long it took me to realize I wasn’t breathing, but a huge exhalation brought me back from near drowning on dry land. Turning to the nearest body on the beach, who happened to be Louise Arnold, I gasped the question, “Who in God’s name is that vision walking toward us?”

“That’s my friend, Dee, who’s visiting me this weekend,” sez she.

I was flabbergasted that a mere human being would know this celestial creature.

“I must meet her,” said I, “and would you be kind enough to do the introductory honors.” Louise was amenable, as she was quite the hand at matchmaking. “Dee!” she called out. “Would you come here for a sec?”

“Dee” came striding over, a somewhat bemused expression on her lovely face. Silenced by the presence of such beauty, I could only extend my own paw to shake her soft hand. The brain and the tongue had disconnected at once, and anything I thought of saying seemed stupid and banal. Finally, I managed to rasp out a “How do you do?” though my tongue felt inert.

Dee sat down and, as I’m not fond of nicknames or diminutives, I ascertained that Diana was her proper name. So Diana she was to me, although old friends and family still call her Dee. I mumbled something about it being a nice day. She agreed. A bit of silence, then I tried again, “A bit too hot, though.” She agreed again. An agreeable woman, she was.

Shortly, Diana excused herself, and off down the beach she went, and I was left feeling like a complete ass. “By Christ, McCourt,” I said to myself, “for all yer gift of the tongue, for all your much-vaunted charm and gallantry, you couldn’t trot out the treasure trove of complimentary clichés you keep on hand in case of being caught without something to say?”

Diana was leaving that afternoon, Louise told me, so I asked Louise for her friend’s telephone number, which she obliged me with on the usual matchbook cover. It was a RIverside-9 number, and to this day I haven’t forgotten it. I made the vow to ring her immediately upon returning to the city, and I was to carry her number with me everywhere, but I never dared telephone, not even when I was filled with the bravado conferred by whiskey.

This was sacred business, which made my brain whirl and my legs go rickety—and there was still Linda, and the unresolved matter of the divorce. Or unresolved for me, anyway. It was well resolved for Linda; she was divorcing me.

Divorce is an odd thing, but so is marriage for that matter. Although you are generally present at your own wedding there is a certain unreality to the whole goings-on. There you are, having reached the age of reason, standing up in front of two to a couple of hundred friends, relatives, and neighbors, making promises to love, honor, and cherish, to have, to hold, to cleave flesh to flesh, till death do you part. A bloody tall order to ask of a twosome who in most cases have only known each other for a short period. The sort of commitment that if you are asked to make to a member of your own family, or a childhood companion, someone you knew and loved your whole life, your immediate response would be, “Not on your Nellie.”

But at least you’re physically present at your wedding ceremony, whereas at the divorce, equally momentous, changing your life just as much, it’s not always necessary to be at the formal smashing of the union. According to my soon-to-be ex-wife, she was proceeding to Tijuana, our signed agreement in hand, and there a sofa salesman who also repairs mufflers and works as a judge in his spare time will stamp a document declaring our marriage to be over and done—the parties of the first and second parts now free to proceed singly through life without let or hindrance from each other.

It’s eerie enough waking up of a morning to be startled by another head on the pillow, who turns out to be your new marriage partner. You find yourself saying, “I’m married. Jesus Christ, I’m married! Now what will I do?”

But, then, another morning, you wake up with a vague notion that something important happened yesterday, and it dawns on you, ah, yes, Linda said she was going to divorce me in Mexico. There is no other head on the pillow, but it wasn’t just a bad dream, you are unmarried again, but single no more, now you are divorced, such a serious word, even to a recovering Catholic like myself.

Your own mind can be a remarkable thing, telling you things about the world that nobody else standing right alongside you would even suspect to be true. In my years of marriage to Linda, it didn’t occur to me that my amorous extracurricular adventures might have consequences. Didn’t I come home to her in the end, and shouldn’t she be grateful for that? When she’d thrown me out, hadn’t I broken into the apartment, ripping the place apart in a rage, and gone to jail for it? Didn’t that show I cared? And during the years after, when I’d be off smuggling gold in India, or living on a houseboat on the Seine, couldn’t everybody see I loved my children anyway? They were five and four that summer, Siobhan and Malachy, and if I’d been absent much more than I’d been present in the last few years, surely my drunken bouts of self-pity, my maudlin despair at having them taken away from me, counted for something. Why couldn’t Linda see any of this? How could she want to divorce me?

I had to avoid that word, “divorce.” I was still so bedeviled by remorse over wrecking the marriage I couldn’t yet get the sleep I needed without having the drink, and lots of it.

That summer, there was a huge debutante party for a young thing named Fernanda Wood at one of the grander manses dotting the Arcadian landscape. A few of us plebeians popped over after our toils to join the festivities. Apparently, the mini-scions and -scionesses had made a decision to redecorate the Hamptons mansion wherein this bacchanal took place. They had hurled champagne bottles through the windows and attempted to set a number of small fires. The place was aglitter with flitting Caucasians, debs leaping half clad throughout the house, pursued by young bucks garbed in the remnants of tuxedos. Furniture in disarray, glasses smashed, ornaments shattered, chandeliers gyrating to twist music, until some of the higher-spirited lads began to swing from them, bringing them crashing down (predating that famous chandelier scene in Phantom of the Opera by many years), while shrieks and screams echoed throughout the house: It was simply the rich at play.

Somehow the press, local and national, got hold of the story, and there were sober articles and tut-tutting editorials re the younger generation and what they were coming to, and rich kids with too much money to spend and too much time to waste. There was a great deal of “In my day, sir” commentary, and headlines containing the words “rampage,” “orgy,” “volcanic eruption,” “riot,” “uproar,” and every other synonym known to Roget and all the sauruses.

I, being somewhat of an adult, took a different view. I just cheered them on. But it was too rowdy even for us old hands at running amuck. We had gotten to the party just as it was breaking up—in the most literal sense—anyway, and as there didn’t seem to be an intact glass to sip from, we departed, shaking our comparatively hoary heads at the wonder of it all.

As I drove down the road, I spied flashing police lights and, not wanting to face judges again, I congratulated myself on making the getaway. I found myself on the Montauk Highway, drunk at 2:00 A.M. It seemed to me a good idea to see how fast I could drive, and off I went.

’Twas a dark night with lacy swirls of sea mist floating toward me as I raced along the empty highway. The only indication of speed was the needle quivering on the dashboard; despite my foot savaging the accelerator, the damn car seemed to be encased in air, immobilized in a Bakelite night. The thought that I could crash and reduce myself to smithereens did float into the head, but I didn’t respond, so it left of its own accord.

There were no other cars on the road, no house lights, nothing to tell me I was hurtling to possible destruction. My concentration was on the speedometer and stomping the foot on the accelerator and of course the thought of the soon-to-be ex-wife took over as it generally did in the small hours, spurring me to more teeth-grinding, jaw-clenching, screaming efforts to outrun the demons.

All that tumult being in my head, it took me a while to become aware of the sound of the tires on the road, a sound that seemed to form the words: Stop it now. Stop it now. Stop it now. And as I slowly touched the brake, I became aware of the high speed I’d been hitting and suddenly shuddered with the understanding of what this attempted suicide might have done to my children, Siobhan and Malachy, and then I stopped the car.