III
A Fire in the Garden
ZSA ZSA GABOR: And so ze entire house was destroyed, darling, everyzing burnt to ze ground. All zat was left was ze garden.
JAYNE MANSFIELD: Well, um, a garden is better than no garden at all.
—An exchange on The Jack Paar Show, 1963
NINETEEN
The rains came in the last week of July. Either July or August was apt to be a fairly wet month, but every few years wet weather struck the Delaware Valley with a vengeance. It was a region not much given to extremes. The heat of summer was always somewhat modulated by the rolling hills and valleys, while in winter the temperature rarely dropped below zero and snow was not often too deep or long-lasting. Rain, endless rain whipped along by high winds, was the greatest source of climatic peril.
By the fifth day of heavy rainfall, local wits made repeated allusions to the biblical precedent of forty days and forty nights. When the rain had continued another three days, the joke no longer seemed remotely humorous. Instead references were made to the summer of ’55, when the swollen Delaware overflowed its banks as if it were the Mississippi in the springtime. Residents with antediluvian memories dined out on anecdotes of the Great Flood, and local newspapers kept their memories alive with photographs of flood damage under headlines like CAN IT HAPPEN AGAIN? The answer to the question seemed to be that it could, and that it was damned well going to.
Recently planted vegetable gardens washed out of the ground. Tomato vines collapsed, their fruits splitting and rotting on the soil. Fruit trees lost the bulk of their ripening crops to the winds, while an excess of moisture in the earth caused them to drop their leaves. The remaining apples and pears cracked and died, and the trees, along with spring-flowering shrubs, went into an unseasonal second bloom. Other trees lost limbs or were uprooted completely. An ancient hickory fell across a secondary road outside of Upper Black Eddy, and the highway crew dispatched to deal with it skidded into a drainage ditch brimful of rushing water.
North of Lambertville, a young novelist and his English wife had invested the proceeds of a Hollywood sale in an almost baronial estate. They had moved in that spring and had devoted all of their time to remodeling and restoration. When the rains came, they discovered the special charm of a sheltered valley on the shores of a rushing stream. Day after day, the stream rushed into the house itself, bubbling up under the wide board pine floors. A tree collapsed onto the house, another upon the guest cottage. The timbers in the pool house, already weak with dry rot, gave up the job and floated downstream. A bridge washed out. An other, just constructed that spring, stayed majestically in place while the stream permanently diverted itself, so that the rugged redwood span now stopped abruptly in midair above the furious waters, resembling nothing so much as an old Roman road, still straight as an arrow and flat as a pancake but going from nowhere to nowhere. “We’ll fix this place up again,” the writer said to his wife. “Don’t worry about a thing. We’ll fix this place up perfectly, and then we’ll sell this fucking place, and we’ll move back to New York where we belong.”
Business in New Hope fell off sharply. The bulk of weekend trade consisted of visitors from Philadelphia and New York who came to spend a day or two or three walking along the town’s determinedly quaint streets and browsing its little shops. As neither of those activities was much suited to a downpour, those tourists remained in Philadelphia or New York. Others, who liked Bucks County as a stopping place between Washington and New England, tended to stay in their cars and keep on the road; if they did stay a night, the hotel bar would get all their trade.
There were a clutch of bright days in early August. Then the rains came again, and the winds took down electric lines faster than the power company could tack them back up again. A dairy farmer on the Titusville-Pennington Road in New Jersey shot to death his entire herd of milkers, several barn cats, his wife’s bantam hens, a collie-shepherd cross, two of his three sons (the third was in Vietnam), his wife, and himself. Acquaintances said he’d always been a trifle strange, but a majority of people held the weather at least partly accountable for his behavior. It was generally agreed that it was a hell of a shame about the cows, as they’d been one of the best Holstein herds in the county.
Times of tragedy draw people together, and if the Delaware had given up and overflowed its banks, this might well have been the case. But the interminable rain was not sufficiently dramatic a tragedy. The rain continued for a period of almost four full weeks, but each time it broke just long enough for the river to do its job of running off the water. The promise of catastrophe hung in the humid air, while on a day-to-day basis life was less tragic than inconvenient. People were not drawn together. Rather, they were kept apart, staying in their own houses and contending with the incessant parade of minor irritations in their own lives. Basements were pumped dry, fallen trees sectioned and stored for firewood, dollars stretched, and homeowners sat with pencil and paper working out ways to transform flood damage (uninsured) into wind damage (fully covered).
Until, late in August, the rain stopped. This, too, was less dramatic than it might have been. No dove returned bearing an olive branch. There was one day with a little rain, another day with less, and then a day when, although clouds blocked the sun, no rain fell at all. When a full week passed without anything falling from the skies but pollution, the valley realized that it was over. The rains had come and gone, the river had held, and a repetition of ’55 was postponed for at least another year.
“Well, it’s over and we got through it,” they said. “As bad a season as we’ve seen in years, and God willing we won’t see it as bad again for some years to come.” They said this and meant it, and thanked God it hadn’t been worse than it was. And yet there was an undercurrent to the words, never voiced but almost always present, a resentment after the fact that the level of catastrophe had never been quite attained. If the governors of two states had declared the valley a disaster area, this was small comfort; the residents knew what true disaster was supposed to look like, and they had fallen short of it. There would be few stories to tell of this summer, and few ears interested in hearing them. They had endured, to be sure, but endurance, if easier in present time, is less thrilling in retrospect than survival. What might have been a moment in their lives of triumph and heroism was to have been no more than discomfort. So they resented this, and felt guilty at their resentment, and stood outside in the warmth of the sun.
TWENTY
She stood on the sidewalk in front of the Shithouse watching Hugh’s Buick until it took a right at the corner and vanished from her sight. She took a last puff on her cigarette and let it fall from her fingers to the pavement, then ground it underfoot. It was early, not yet midnight, and she did not feel like going to sleep. Nor did she feel like staying awake in the loneliness of her room. It seemed that there ought to be somewhere to go, someone to whom she would want to talk. But she could think of no logical destination and no suitable companion.
She was discontented, and wondered why. The evening had been a pleasant one. A good dinner at Tannhauser’s, a drive in the country, a walk in his woods where they had lazily undressed before making gentle love in soft grass. It was a perfect night for outdoor lovemaking and their bodies had worked together to match the mood of the evening. It had been good for her and good for him, and after it they had gone into his house for a drink and his daughter Karen had joined them. Then Karen went diplomatically and with little awkwardness to her room, and they might have made love again, she might even have stayed the night, but the discontent set in and she wound up pleading tiredness. She had asked to be taken home, and now she was home, and if she had felt tired before she was certainly not tired now.
“Linda?”
She started at her name, then recognized Tanya Leopold.
“You were just standing there staring,” the little actress said. “You okay?”
“I was just thinking about something.”
“What was it
? Not to be prying but you had this really intense expression on your face, and I was wondering how it got there. This play I’m in, Veil, not the one I’m in now but the one we’re rehearsing, we’re doing it next week, and I’ve got this one scene where I’m supposed look pensive, and I don’t have it down yet. Looking pensive. And you know, the Method, all of that, I oughta be able to find something to use to look pensive, so thought, oh, but what makes you look pensive wouldn’t do me any good, would it?”
“I don’t really know.”
“The thing is to find something in my past that had me looking pensive, but I could go bananas trying to think of something. Unless that would work. Do you think so?”
“Do I think what would work?”
“Trying to think of something to use. Did I look pensive to you just then?”
“In a way.”
“I think the problem is I don’t think very much. It blows my mind that some people will just sit still for hours, and all that time they’re thinking, thoughts are running through their brains. Are you going upstairs now or what?”
“That’s what I was trying to decide. Whether to go up now or not.”
“You got that look on your face just from whether or not you’re going upstairs?”
“More or less.” She smiled suddenly. “That’s what it boils down to, anyway. In a very pensive way, evidently. Are you going up? I’ll walk with you.”
On the way up the stairs Tanya said, “You’re looking so good lately, Linda.”
“I am? Why, thank you.”
“I’m glad you’ve got somebody,” she went on, avoiding Linda’s eyes. “What I said that other time—”
“Oh, forget that, Tanya.”
“I felt awful afterward. I just jump in and say things before I think about them. Do you think you’ll move in with him?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He’s working on a book now, you know.”
“Bill’s always painting. At least he always was before the rain. Did the rain stop Hugh from writing?”
“I think it slowed him down some. It slowed every body down.”
“It stopped Bill cold. But even if he’s working, you know, he wants me with him. I couldn’t imagine not living with somebody.”
“I guess I’ve gotten used to it.”
“I don’t just mean the sex. It probably sounds as though I just mean the sex, huh?”
“Oh, I don’t—”
“But I mean having somebody to be with. But maybe getting used to it makes a difference. I hope I never have to find out, to tell you the truth.”
Tanya went on chattering as they climbed the stairs to their floor. The girl was just the sort of companion Linda needed at the moment, and she smiled at the discovery. It seemed paradoxical, as Tanya’s conversation centered on precisely those subjects Linda would have preferred not to think about, but she was able to bathe in the rushing stream of Tanya’s words so that they oddly took her mind off what Tanya was saying. The girl would never look pensive, Linda thought, because the girl could never hold a thought in her little head without marveling at the fact that she was thinking.
On impulse she asked Tanya to come in for coffee. “Well, if Billie wants to,” she said. “Unless you wouldn’t want him.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know. He makes some people sort of nervous, not talking and all. I guess I talk enough to make up for it. I’ll ask him, okay?” She knocked on the door while Linda was fitting her key into her own lock. “That’s funny,” Tanya said. “He wouldn’t go to sleep so early. Bill?”
“Maybe he stepped out.”
“He hardly ever goes anywhere. But maybe he did. He’s been in this mood.”
“Do you have a key?”
“Yeah, in my purse somewhere. You go ahead, Linda. If he’s out I’ll leave a note and be over in minute.”
She opened her own door, switched on the light. Then Tanya’s scream cut through her like a sword.
She spun around. Across the hall Tanya was framed in the doorway, facing into the room. Over her shoulder Linda could see Bill Donatelli swinging on a rope from the overhead light fixture. His tongue, black and obscenely swollen, projected between enlarged purple lips.
His whole face was tones of blue and purple and his bulged from his head and his body swung in slow circles.
Tanya screamed and screamed.
Afterward she could never be certain of the sequence of things. Her memory would hold scenes and flashes of scenes, jumbled together like bits of intercut film. The room and hallway filled up with people. How they got there or the order of their coming she never knew.
Two men from the second floor stood arguing, one determined to right the chair overturned at Bill Donatelli’s feet so that he could climb on it and cut him down, the other insistent that nothing be touched or moved until the police arrived.
“He’s obviously dead, man. You can’t help him by cutting him down.”
“Well, forget the police, man. I mean that’s suicide, man. I mean forget television, I mean it’s suicide, that’s all it is, and what you do is you cut him down just in case and get that fucking rope off his fucking neck.”
“Man, how you gonna help a dead man?”
“You keep saying dead, but how do you know he’s dead? Like how many dead men did you ever see?”
“Man, the first spade I saw, I knew right in front he was black. Anything looks like that is fucking dead, baby.”
Linda’s own role was never in doubt. Throughout it all she stood holding Tanya in her arms, patting her back, holding her while she cried, listening to her when words spilled from her.
“It was the rain. He couldn’t paint because of the rain. He would sometimes say it was the light but it wasn’t the light, it was what the rain did to his head. He got so down. And then it stopped and I thought it would be all right but he said whenever he went to paint all he could see in his head was the rain, just rain coming down all the time. But I thought he was getting better. I should of known because he couldn’t ball. He would get excited and then we would start to do it and he would go soft and start crying and telling me that he couldn’t do anything anymore, but there’s no more rain, it’s all over, the rain, the rain is over, Bill is over, it’s all over. I never had that abortion but he wanted me to. He told me I had to have the abortion. He didn’t want a baby. I didn’t want one either, but I want one now, I wish I had his baby now. Oh, my God, his poor face. I hope he never knew what it would make him look like. He was so beautiful, and I try to see his face in my mind and all I see is the way he looks now, God, and I don’t have a single picture of him, not a single one.…”
It was Clyde Herman, the night shift policeman, who cut the body down, George Perlmutter, the doctor, who examined the grotesque naked corpse and pronounced him officially dead. And it was Warren Ormont who somehow stepped into the center of things to take charge, dealing in turn with the policeman and the doctor and Tanya herself.
“Now Miss Leopold, I’m going to need a statement from you, and I know it’s a difficult situation for you right now, but if you could just—”
“It was that fucking rain.”
“The rain. Let me get this right, your name is Tina Leopold, now if you could spell that—”
“No, Tanya, but that’s a stage—”
“Clyde, for heaven’s sake stop doing your Joe Friday number, won’t you?”
“Look here, Warren—”
“Oh, look here yourself, for the love of God. The girl’s in no condition to talk and you’re barely in condition to listen. You’ll get her statement in the morning. You act as though you’ve never seen a suicide in your life.”
“Maybe it’s supposed to look like a suicide.”
“When all the time it’s an elaborate locked-room murder. And you’re Dr. Gideon Fell himself.”
“All the same, I’d be happier with a note.”
“He wasn’t a writer, Clyde.”
“Huh?”
“Writers leave notes. Then they wash sleeping pills down with booze, but not until they’ve done half a, dozen drafts of the note. Doctors shoot themselves. They have dozens of neat painless methods at their disposal and, invariably blow their brains out with revolvers. Painters take off all their clothes and hang themselves.”
“How do you know all this, Warren?”
“I’ve made a study of it. Self-destruction fascinated—I can’t imagine why anyone would hurry it, though, instead of carefully stretching it out over a lifetime.”
“How do actors do it?”
“In front of an audience. They call an ex-lover in the middle of the night and announce they’ve already taken pills, and after they hang up they actually take the pills. Or they excuse themselves, go to another room, and use a knife or a gun. It depends how they perceive their roles. Donatelli never used words in his life, Clyde. Not even in conversation. Anyway, there’s his note.”
He pointed to an easel, where an abstract canvas was quartered by a black X.
“That’s, a note? I get the point, but maybe that was his idea of how he wanted the picture to look.”
“I’ll pretend you didn’t even say that, Clyde. Why don’t you take some pictures and make some chalk marks on the floor? Miss Leopold will talk to you in the morning. And that will be on doctor’s orders as soon as I get the good doctor’s eye. George? Could you give your attention to one of the survivors for a moment? Miss Leopold is in something of a state, and I think you’ll agree with me that she doesn’t want to talk to any municipal employees right now. How would you like to supply a dreamy little sedative and we’ll tuck this poor child into bed. And not that bed, perish the thought. Could she stay with you, Linda?”
In her own room, Linda helped Tanya off with her clothes, got her into bed, and drew the covers over her. The doctor injected her with morphine. She kept talking, not even wincing at the needle’s jab, until her words abruptly trailed off and her eyes closed. George Perlmutter raised one of her eyelids, let it drop back in place. He turned to Linda and asked her if she wanted something to help her sleep. She said she didn’t. He offered a tranquilizer and she shook her head. He told her she was in light shock and a tranquilizer would help her to relax, but when she refused again he did not insist. Tanya, he said, would sleep for a minimum of eight hours.