“It’s complicated.”
I said, “We’ve had worse. And now I can fight them off. They can throw what they like at me. If they still want to.”
“My grandfather’s too feeble now. My mother won’t care—she wants to retire and live here.”
“Those aren’t complications. Jesus, Venetia, I’ve just been in a war.”
“Ben, I’ve remarried.”
I stood up and walked away. And there, you see, is where the fault always lay. And there because of that fault, as I will now tell you, came my next great mistake. The fault lay in the fact that, all through those years, I could have found her—I know that. I could have found Cody, and I could have bribed or beaten the truth out of him.
But I preferred the martyrdom, the brooding self-pity, the wandering, lonely scribe. No wonder I had great violence in me—all sentimental people do. And it gets in our way, that sentimentality; on the Atlantic beaches of Florida that morning, I failed again to do the right thing—because I stood for a minute or two as she spoke to the back of my head, and I walked away from her without a word.
131
The words she spoke do matter—or, rather, it matters that you know them, now that I have “met” you, as it were. As I stood there, and before I took that dreadful, stupid decision, she explained.
“I met a man who wanted to look after me. He had a road show, we could work together. And sometimes we do. His name is Jack Stirling.”
“Is it called Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show?” I didn’t want the answer to be “yes.”
She answered, “He calls it ‘Gentleman Jack and His Friend.’ He has a pickpocket act.”
“How appropriate,” I said, the words blurting out before I could stop them.
“He persuaded me to get a divorce in a city named Reno. Ben, I sent you a telegram. You didn’t reply. I sent you five telegrams.”
This was too much. My parents opened all my telegrams and letters—they had my permission, because Goldenfields was my only address. Either Venetia was lying or they had never told me. Too much. I walked away.
She called after me, “Do you want to meet the twins?”
And one last, fainter plea: “Ben, don’t. Please. I always hoped—” and she didn’t finish the sentence.
Could I have wanted anything more in life? Venetia and our children? And still I walked, my shoes and socks discarded behind me on the sand, ready to be sucked out to sea on the next tide.
132
July 1946
Kate Begley said to me once, “A Love Lost is an Angel hurt. Did you know that, Ben?”
By now, she must have had them weeping in buckets. And so did I, and that, I concluded, was what ultimately had kept Kate and me so friendly—in all the hearts and flowers and ribbons and bows, we had both lost the most important people in our lives. Such was my thought, as I drove from Jacksonville Beach to Jacksonville and took a train to New York. In short, cheap music had proved once again too potent for me—it was what I now wanted to hear. I waited for the devastation to sweep in, and hoped it never would; there must, I thought, be a way of keeping it at bay, or replacing it with something else.
She had stayed in the same apartment because, as she’d said, she could hear the ships coming in. New York hadn’t changed her; in fact, she looked better than ever, and I thought I saw a certain calm in her, a new serenity. She still possessed the high energy, the bouncing around, the quick movements, the ready laugh.
On the last morning that I’d seen her, our brief acrimony had been severe.
“Go then.”
“Kate, I’ve been through a lot with you.”
“Have you?” She was as arch as a bridge.
“And I did it for you.”
“But you don’t believe in me, do you?”
To which I said, “What do you mean?”
“You don’t believe what I believe?”
I knew that the appropriate phrase should be “That Charles is alive.” After all—Venetia was. But I didn’t say it. I couldn’t say it. And I couldn’t say it because I didn’t believe it—simple as that. Which, I suppose, meant that I didn’t believe in her. So, once again, I said nothing.
We’d had so many moments when I felt, Now is right, tell her now. Look at all the evidence. Good God! Even his tunic was bloodstained. But she had said to Peiper, my Number Forty-two from Dachau, “Will I tell you what that is? That’s a bloodstained jacket, that’s all it is. That doesn’t prove anything.”
Our parting had taken place as she prepared like a bride. But the waiting pen had long vanished because the need for it had long disappeared too. By several months, in fact.
“When you go down there this morning,” I’d said, “look around you. There’s nobody here.” I should have said, “He’s not coming back, he’d have been back by now.” Instead, I made a sweeping gesture with my hand and asked, “Why do you think they’ve taken away all the barriers?”
She said, “There’s still the wounded.”
“Kate, they came back last year. The last of them. They told us.”
“Go away,” she said, “and leave me alone.”
“Do you mean that?”
She didn’t reply; she turned her face to the Hudson River and I walked out of her life.
Now, as I swept in from Florida, she said to me, “Ah, I knew you were coming.” And since I’d so recently heard those words elsewhere, I almost turned my back and left. But I didn’t, and I stayed—and went forward with her into her next and final act of faith.
Kate had this walk that I’d first noticed at Lamb’s Head, a curious, unfeminine surging forward, planting each foot one step at a time, as though carrying a bucket of water in each hand; it entailed almost a personality change. I came to recognize that she walked like that when deeply focused on the task in hand.
Now, two days after my return to her, I saw the stride again on the sidewalks of New York, and it pleased and intrigued me.
“We’re going to Brooklyn,” she said.
“Why?”
“To meet a man.”
“About a dog?”
She said, “No. Not a dog exactly, but you’re fairly close.”
I didn’t count the hours, but this was no stroll. From time to time she pulled a piece of paper from her cuff, peered at it, put it back, and strode on. I had difficulty keeping up with her.
“Talk to me, Kate,” I said.
She said, “No. I’m thinking.”
“Well, tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I can’t ’til I’ve thought it.”
“Is there a scheme under way?” I asked.
She said, “What do you think?”
“That you have a plan.”
“Yes, I have a plan.”
“At least tell me the name of the man we’re going to meet.”
“His name is Bobby Bilbum.”
I said, “There’s nobody in the world named Bobby Bilbum.”
She said, “You’ll see.”
Half an hour after crossing the greatest bridge I had ever seen, we stopped somewhere on a wide street, at a place that sold food.
“I have become devoted to the frankfurter,” she said.
“Devoted?”
“I chose my word carefully.”
I said, “Devoted suggests a spiritual dimension.”
“So?” She looked up at me; on her lower lip hung a speck of golden mustard like the egg of a tiny, tiny, golden bird.
“People are devoted to God, or the Blessed Virgin Mary, or Saint Anthony of Padua—like your grandmother.”
“Nana’s only devoted to Saint Anthony because she’s always losing things, and Saint Anthony always finds them for her.”
“No, Kate. She finds them. He died six or seven hundred years ago.”
“You’re a heathen, Ben.”
“Nevertheless, you can’t apply the word devoted to a sausage.”
“Why can’t I?”
I said, “I like celery soup a lot, but did you e
ver hear me saying I’m devoted to celery soup?”
She laughed—and I had to look away, because when she laughed like that, and her eyes lost all their newfound age and caution, and the dimples in her cheeks sparkled, my heart turned over. A crumb from my own hot dog went astray, and I began to catch my breath.
“Cough it up, ’tis only a brick,” she said.
What could I do? I couldn’t tell her to stop being so appealing, so vulnerable, could I? Charles Miller, you’d better be dead.
We ordered coffee, to which, since Germany, I had taken a shine. The sun gleamed on distant tall buildings; not for the first time I thought of Hy-Brasil, the Irish legend of the man who saw golden towers out in the sea and set sail from the western shores of Ireland to find them—and never did. That day, and ever since, I have wondered if the golden towers he saw were the skyscrapers of Manhattan.
I knew that Kate was looking at me, and I knew that she had then followed my gaze.
She said, “Do you know about Hy-Brasil?”
I said, “You did it again.”
“What?”
“You homed in on the thought in my head.”
“Honed.”
“Homed.”
“No. It’s honed.”
“It isn’t,” I said. “Ignorant people say ‘honed,’ which means ‘sharpened’ or ‘refined,’ but what they mean is ‘focused.’ ”
“Well—there’s Hy-Brasil,” she said. “You’re looking at it.”
“That’s what I thought, too.”
She said, “I’ve seen it so often from Lamb’s Head.”
“You’ve seen the island of Manhattan from the cliffs of County Kerry?” I didn’t bother to keep the incredulous, even contemptuous tone out of my voice.
“So?” she said.
I replied, “But that’s three thousand miles.”
And Kate Begley said, “Only if you allow it to be.”
To which I said, in a tone of resignation, “So there is a fellow called Bobby Bilbum?”
“There is,” she said, “and he has a giraffe for me.”
“A giraffe?”
“Name of Jerry,” she said. “Young and not fully weaned. And a truck.”
“To take Jerry the Giraffe?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Where?”
She took a breath and said, “Since you asked. Here’s my scheme. Don’t you remember? I told you already what Charles and I agreed. If the war parted us, and the absence became too much or too long, I’d go to the very center of the United States and wait there for him. And that’s what I’m doing. We’re going to Kansas.”
“Kansas?”
“Lebanon, Kansas.”
“Is that the very center of the United States?”
“To all intents and purposes, yes.”
I said, “How do you know he’s not there already?”
“He wasn’t there two weeks ago.”
“Did you go there?”
She said, “I’ve been there four times in the past year.”
“Tell me that again,” I said.
She looked at me with a frown like a cross little girl.
“Charles and I made a pact. We promised each other. If the war kept us apart we’d wait for each other in the most obvious place on earth—the center of the United States. I argued for Kenmare, we tossed a coin. He won and I’m keeping my promise.”
“Did you also promise him a giraffe?”
“Ben, don’t be stupid.”
“But what do you want a giraffe for?”
She sighed, as though explaining something to a dimwit.
“I’m going to open a matchmaking business out there, and since they won’t have seen many giraffes in Kansas, I figured a giraffe would draw crowds. It’s called advertising, Ben.”
I looked at her, amazed again.
“He’ll certainly draw crowds,” I said. And after a moment’s thought I added, “Okay. Bobby Bilbum, here we come?”
She nodded.
I invite you for a moment to think of our age—how old we were. Young enough for all kinds of adventures, and old enough to be marrying, settling down, and having families. On the train from Jacksonville I looked at men my own age, and I looked at girls of Kate’s age, and I knew that few of them had lived through anything like the experiences she and I had shared.
Those thoughts came back as we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, and as we stood in the sun eating hot dogs. What I could not divine was the use to which I would put whatever I had learned, or what the war had done to me. To my bitter regret, I would soon find out.
133
I have never seen, nor expect to see, a fatter man than Bobby Bilbum. Nor a man who so enjoyed being fat. He wore dungarees big as a tarpaulin and a red check shirt. The brown dye from his extravagant pigtail ran down his neck because he sweated all the time, and he had perfect, perfect teeth. He showed them the moment we met him, as he slapped his stomach—the sides, not the front. Let me make it clear—he slapped the sides of his stomach like the man in the parade beats the big drum.
We’d reached his place by walking past the corner of Prospect Park, and, on the next long street, finding a deep lane somewhere off Montgomery Street. The long, narrow passageway opened out into a great yard full of dismantled trucks and vans all lying on their sides. Kate, once more sharp as a razor, picked up their significance.
“He wouldn’t have been able to drive these down the lane—they’re all too wide.”
She pulled a bell rope outside a wide-open door, and cymbals clashed somewhere—so tuneful that she tugged again.
“Everybody does that,” said Bobby Bilbum, whom we saw walking from the farthest point indoors, as light on his feet as a dancer.
They made their connection, he and Kate; and he went back and fetched her letter.
“I give a compliment to you,” he announced. “Nobody writes proper English anymore.”
I could determine no distinctive New York or American accent, and he later told us that he was half-Scottish, half-Polish.
“Do you sing?” he said to me.
“Should I?” I had picked up Kate’s habit of answering one question with another.
“With that big chest,” he said, “you should sing.” He opened his mouth and warbled a scale as sweet as any blackbird. “I love to sing,” he said, “and I do believe that I have in my repertoire a thousand songs and more. And essentially I call myself a crooner.” Still addressing me, he said, “Have you acquainted yourself with the song, ‘Beautiful Dreamer’?”
I said, “My father sings it.”
With his hand on his chest and the other hand held out, fingers splayed, Bobby Bilbum launched into song like a nightclub singer.
“Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me, Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee; Sounds of the rude world, heard in the day, Lull’d by the moonlight have all pass’d away! Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song—” and then stopped. “Impressive, isn’t it?” he said.
Kate applauded, and so did I.
“How many people answered your advertisement?” Kate asked.
“Alas, you and you alone.”
“It said very little.” She raised the famous eyebrow at him.
“The world is full of barbarians,” he said. “Not everybody is suited to this enterprise. And I suppose you require a viewing?”
“We walked from Tenth Avenue,” she said.
“Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness. How rude of me. Come in at once, you need to come through the house anyway.”
Bobby Bilbum had no furniture—of any kind. He lived in a completely bare house. The kitchen contained a refrigerator; cabinets lined the walls; I could see coffeepots and utensils of all kinds on the long counters—but no table, chairs, nowhere to sit.
He saw me looking around. “I sold everything,” he said. “No chair bears my weight anymore. I sleep in there. Or in the truck. With THEM.” He freighted the word so heavily that he might have been speaking of mysterious
beings—which, in a sense, he was. I looked into the room that he’d indicated, and saw a mountain of rich and wild, red and yellow bedding, a sultan’s couch, taking up the entire floor of what must once have been a dining or living room.
From the refrigerator he took a large stone jar and poured a drink that I had never tasted—iced tea. He reached back in, took out a round box, opened it, and began to cut slices of pie.
“Blueberry and apple,” he said. “It sustains me. I have them made specially for me by a woman from Vienna. She lives two blocks away and delivers every day.”
I ate my slice like a greedy pig—but I knew I wouldn’t need to eat again for many hours. Bobby Bilbum ate two slices.
“I get peckish,” he said. “And now you have to tell me why you’ve come to see me. I know you want to buy Jerry, but why?”
Miss Begley explained. Bobby listened, tears in his eyes.
She ended her tale by saying, “But how do I take care of a giraffe?”
“You are an inspired and inspiring woman,” he said. “And your dear husband has been helping to free my country from the depredations of the mighty Hun. I will do all I can for you, but it will be complicated.”
My inner man went, Uh-oh. Complicated. This will be interesting, and sure enough, in Bobby Bilbum’s application, the word complicated reached new heights.
“You’ve reached me through my backyard,” he said. “The creatures live in the front.”
We followed him, the floorboards shaking and bending under his feet, to a wide hallway, and a great front door with stained glass. He lived, I could see, in what had been a mansion, set well back from the street and shaded with abundant trees. From outside the large gate it would have been impossible to achieve a clear view of the house—or the building beside it, a tall, simple wooden shed, painted bright green. It looked like a loose box from an impossibly high stable yard. Beside it stood a truck, with a trailer and an equally tall structure made of canvas.
“Here we are,” said Bobby Bilbum, “or should I say, here they are.” And again he emphasized “they.”
We crossed the gravel to the tall loose box.
“Good morning, children,” Bobby called, and from inside I heard sounds of delight. He opened the middle section of the door—which, I saw, had been made in three ascending parts—and said to us, “Voilà! Meet the love of my life. Jerry,” he called. “You’ve never met an Irish person before, my boy, have you. They’re very civilized, you’ll like them.”