Deceased but Undeparted

I thought of Charles as a contemporary though he was sixteen years my senior. He was young in the ways he thought and behaved, good looking for his age, and immensely charming. When he was younger he had been mistaken more than once for the actor Dana Andrews (Laura, Fallen Angel, Where the Sidewalk Ends). There was an unpredictability about him that made it exciting and perhaps a little dangerous to be around him. He would do odd things I’d never seen done before. For instance, I found when we turned up at a restaurant that he’d booked himself in under a different name—I wondered whether he carried credit cards in more than one name, as I’d seen done by a re-married woman I knew well. When I asked why he did it he said it enabled him to book into a restaurant or hotel on a second occasion if he’d ruined his name by failing to turn up the first time, but I was not entirely convinced. There was something psychological to it, I suspected.

He had put together an anthology of short fiction for American college students. It made a lot of money for Prentice Hall, and a decent cut for him. In a lecture hall filled with admiring students at the University of Delaware, where he headed the English department for a time, he once let fire with a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver loaded with blanks, in order to illustrate the psychological effect of violent action upon a group of people. It was relevant to the story he was discussing, Flannery O’Connor’s “The Misfit”. One student rushed out of the lecture hall in a fit of fear to report his discomfort to the university authorities, but the rest remained seated. The incident was splashed over the local paper, a copy of which Charles sent me because he knew I’d admire him for it. He kept his job because his students rallied to his defence.

He enjoyed flouting liberal taboos. For instance he once sent me a photograph of himself beside a security firm’s notice on the lawn of a friend’s house in Palm Springs. It read “Armed Response”. I asked him to get me one of those so I could put it at the front of my house. It was perfectly legal, though the threat to kill was latent in the ambiguity. That was what made it so interesting.

His grandfather was born in 1828, eight years before the Alamo, and conscripted to fight for the Union in the War Between the States—he paid another to take his place, as you could do then, if you had money and intelligence. I found Charles’s two-generational link to 1828 impressive, though it’s not all that remarkable: the grandfather had been around fifty at the birth of Charles’s father, who had been around fifty when Charles was born. In any case it was less impressive than the plays of chance and fate I associate with him.

I got to know him during a six-month period he spent as a Visiting Professor in Melbourne. He was living at the house of a colleague of mine, who was living for a few months in America, and he would invite me around to help him drink the in-house supplies of whisky he had discovered in a cabinet there. We’d drive down to Cinema Point, eighty miles south-west, where I was living half the week in my friend Claudio Veliz’s cliff-side house, “South Main”, during Claudio’s first year heading the University Professors section of Boston University for its President, John Silber. “South Main” sits below the Cinema Point Lookout on the Great Ocean Road, high up over spectacular ledges of rock across which the waves of the Southern Ocean endlessly crash.

Winter is a good time to be there, especially in stormy weather. During the day we’d walk the four-mile arc of beach from Cinema Point to Aireys Inlet, and I’d tell him about shipwrecks that had occurred along this rocky coast in the nineteenth century—three months of sailing through tumultuous seas, in anticipation of a new life, and suddenly, out of the darkness, death by night. In the evenings we’d sit by the fire listening to the Velizes’ opera recordings. I told him of a dread I had about that place. There’s a point in Rigoletto where a storm is abating and a bell begins to sound. I had dreamed that around 3 a.m., in the midst of a violent storm, the bell Claudio had rigged up outside South Main’s entrance door began to clang. Who could it be? How had they found their way here, down the precipitous path in the pitch black, and what could they want? I opened the door and there was someone without a face. I had to leave with him.

We’d talk about American history and politics, or a new novel Charles was working on. He had published a successful historical novel for young people about the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–06, but later novels had been rejected and lay about in drawers. He’d talk about the war, and the time he’d spent on Okinawa, just after the end of hostilities when he was seventeen. The place was still haunted by the spirits of the tens of thousands of non-combatant Japanese, many of them mothers with their babies, who had thrown themselves off cliffs to avoid capture by the Americans. The smell of death still lingered. He’d talk about those times, about his college years, about the women he’d known, and about his ex-wife, whom he seriously hated. We never discussed religion—he wasn’t interested, though his father had been a prominent Presbyterian minister in Wilmington. “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” he told me.

“Then how do you explain what happened at the staff meeting the other day?” I asked him. One of the secretaries had asked me afterwards if I had seen the woman in dark green, in the corner beside the bookshelves—the secretary told me she had never seen her before, and that when she looked again the woman was gone. I said I hadn’t noticed her. I did know, however, that a female student had jumped out of the windows there, six floors up.

“It was an hallucination,” Charles assured me. “Either that, or she dozed off and dreamed it.”

I thought, occasionally, that there was something about Charles he wasn’t letting on, beneath the level of run-of-the-mill talk, so on one occasion I manufactured an elaborate lure he wasn’t dumb enough to take.

“I always thought that statement by the character in The Woman with a Dog, about one’s real self being different from what the world sees, was right, didn’t you?” I asked him. “That everything that’s essential to you, everything that makes the kernel of your life, is hidden from other people. It means you can’t believe what you see in others, because everyone has their real life under the cover of secrecy—that’s what Chekhov says.”

“You and me both,” he replied. “We know we’re defined not by the work we do, the people we work with, or the things we write, but predominantly by something else. It might be an obsession, or a vice, or another person—the person could be close, could be absent, could be ‘close’ and absent, but whatever it was, we’d be aware that this thing largely defined us. ‘I am Heathcliff’—Cathy knew what defined her. And you, you are Patricia.”

“OK, something in all that, maybe, and maybe we’d take it past the grave,” I suggested, “because even if our memory were lost in death, that thing, whatever it was, would be deeper than memory.”

“Except there’s no beyond.” Then he changed the topic.

He took a couple of weeks off for a rail trip to Perth on the trans-continental and sent me two postcards. The first, mailed just after he reached Perth, read, “I was sitting on the train, reading the West Australian, when I saw a half-page advertisement: Australia’s leading beauty consultant would be in Perth’s Myer Department Store during the week to talk with women about their make-up. There was a photograph of her. I couldn’t believe my eyes, because she was sitting across from me in the club car. I introduced myself and bought her a drink.”

A couple of days later I received a second: “You won’t believe it! I was on a tour around Perth and noticed the same honey-blonde woman from Melbourne sitting close by, so in obedience to fate I made a subtle but distinct move on her. Well, my friend, what else should I do? It seemed ordained. There may be more to come.”

About a fortnight after his return to Melbourne I got a call: “I’m taking her out, and I told her about you. She’d like to meet you. Can you come around this Saturday night to her place down here at Mount Eliza?”

I turned up around 7 p.m. and parked in the garden. The evening was warm and the scent of honeysuckle hung in the humid air along the drive. I switched off the ignition, got out and walked to the entrance, which was at the back of the two-storeyed house—the reception rooms were downstairs, and the front of the house looked out over the Bay, down to which there was a private walking track. It was already dark. The lights of the bayside suburbs, clear around to the city thirty miles away, reflected in the silent waters below.

Charles opened the door to me and led the way into the kitchen. There was a Strauss waltz, the “Emperor”, coming from a radio somewhere below. “She’s downstairs,” he said. “I’m fixing some pre-dinner things. Help yourself to a Scotch—there’s ice in the bucket and soda in the siphon.”

As I complied I noticed a portrait on the wall.

“Is that her?” I asked, looking at the picture, trying my drink, and deciding it needed more ice and soda.

“That’s a portrait she had done by someone or other, yes.”

The woman in the picture was familiar to me—the facial features, especially the eyes, and the thick hair done up like that. I knew this woman from somewhere, and she was waiting below.

“OK now,” he instructed, “put your drink on this tray—you take the tray, and I’ll take this other stuff—and we’ll go down.”

As soon as I met Joan and heard her voice, with its rich modulation and tonalities, it clicked. Her voice was one of the best things about her.

In my time as an undergraduate in Adelaide in the early 1960s I had occasionally killed time by walking across North Terrace and into the new David Jones department store, where I’d watched her. I’d watched her close-by, near enough to smell the perfume she was wearing, and I’d watched her from up on the mezzanine floor too, where they served coffee and cake. A cappuccino cost three shillings, and for ten shillings you could have two of them and a slice of chocolate cake with clotted cream. Joan was Revlon’s foremost beauty consultant at that time and for a good number of years thereafter. She’d also worked for Coty. Dressed like a goddess and impeccably made up, typically she’d have a microphone in one hand as she introduced the latest product range and then proceeded to supervise the makeover of some woman from among the crowd that inevitably gathered.

Most of the women standing around her seemed over the hill to me. Perhaps that was good—there was more for her to work on, more before-and-after contrast, and they could afford the stuff. She achieved impressive results, I thought, and I later found she was widely respected in her field. Revlon would send her to Tokyo and other Asian cities, even to Buenos Aires, to do this job, pay her well and put her up in the best hotels. The crowd around her invariably included a number of men, all of whom would have liked to sleep with her. I was only seventeen—I’d have needed to have taken a couple of amphetamines to ask her to join me for a drink after the show. I envied Charles his luck.

She was favourably impressed by the details in my box of memories, and seemed to approve of Charles’s choice of friend. Joan was a widow of several years’ standing. She had the kind of self-possession that allowed her to live happily alone, but I could see she had fallen for Charles.

He returned to Delaware a couple of months later but continued to see her. They’d meet each year for two or three weeks in London during what used to be called the Season, and he would take her to all the latest plays and shows, something he’d been accustomed to indulge himself in for years. They’d also meet in Maui, and in Delaware. The arrangement was that Joan would cover her own travel costs and he would cover just about everything else. There were a lot of these trips. Given the spectacularly-sited house she lived in, he was assuming she must be rich, but it eventually became clear to him, through her own confession, that all these trips were draining her cash reserves, and that night he confided in his diary, “So I’ve discovered her secret, but she hasn’t discovered mine.”

When we die we leave behind our diaries, if we’ve kept them, and they lie around begging to be read as the only things that any longer speak for us. Part of us still, they live in death, but the secret was beyond reach by the time Joan read those words.

“Do you have any idea what his secret was?” she asked me during one of our telephone conversations following his death.

“No, I don’t,” I told her honestly. “I don’t think he was any more bisexual than I am. Anyway, he never said anything that suggested it. Maybe he sensed I’d be critical. I really don’t know.”

However, I anticipate.

It wasn’t long before they decided to get married, but, on account of some insignificant heart murmur, Joan had trouble persuading the local American Consulate to grant her a residence visa for the United States. Ultimately it came through, and she left to marry Charles and live with him at his principal house in Newark, Delaware, and on weekends at Rock Hall in Maryland, on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. They also had an apartment at Noosa.

Meanwhile I had instituted a course at Monash based around Charles’s best-selling anthology of short fiction. Although my field at that time was eighteenth-century English literature and culture, the department had gone over to a smorgasbord-style choice of courses for the three-year major, with just two or three compulsory period courses, and I knew that if I didn’t offer a popular course in modern literature I would face the consequences of declining enrolments in my pre-1800 offerings. The worst consequence would be having to help some colleague teach an ideologically-committed course I instinctively disliked, maybe Marxist or feminist—there were a number of these, and that was not going to happen to me. By this stage the world of the humanities was a place I was in, but it was no longer of me. There were schools of this and that, with the constituent fields no longer disciplines, for they had been infected by theories specifically designed to deprive them of stable meaning. Subsequently, not needing to work any more, I retired early without any “package” incentive.

The best thing about Charles’s anthology was that it came with a separate “Instructor’s Manual”, not available to students, which contained Charles’s analysis of every single one of its hundred-odd short stories, as well as a concise bibliography for each. I mined it unashamedly, as he suggested I do. After all, it was not my field. As Charles was about to retire from the University of Delaware he gave me hundreds of slides related to the stories, and these made the course even more attractive. All our courses were advertised on a noticeboard down the corridor, and mine put the emphasis on “Short”. I set out to compete with courses on the novel. “There are just 50 to 60 pages of reading a week in this course,” my advert read, “but close reading.” Not that I needed to salve their consciences. My notice had the desired effect: during the years in which I offered the course, an annual average of 160 students chose it, and I had to get a colleague to help me out by taking a couple of seminar groups. The head of the department walked into one of the overcrowded seminars before my arrival one day and said to my students, “Come on now, tell me honestly, you’re only doing this course because the reading is short, aren’t you?” My question to him was, “Why did you need to ask?”

In 1990, partly to see my wife Patricia, partly to work on the 3rd Earl of Burlington’s library at Chatsworth, I flew to London via Philadelphia and stayed with Charles in Delaware. That was before he married Joan. His house was adjacent to the university grounds and we’d walk to his office past rows of enormous dead elms, killed by Dutch elm disease, leafless stiff corpses against the breezes meant to cool them. He drove me into Pennsylvania, around the Amish area, through towns with odd names like Intercourse and Paradise, and to a battlefield of the War of Independence on the Brandywine. Hundreds of rebels lie beneath the fields, buried in mass graves by the victorious British.

Then in 1993 I was Visiting Professor in the English Department at Vassar College, on the Hudson a couple of hours north of New York City. There were a little over 2000 students enrolled at the time, mostly young women but young men as well, as the place had recently become co-educational. The grounds included a large acreage of treed parks and lakeland. One of the Ivy League’s “Seven Sisters”, the college includes among its alumnae Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep, and Mary McCarthy, who made the college the setting for her novel The Group. There was a strong sense of tradition—it was as though the institution’s departed generations were there in spirit.

On long weekends I’d drive down to be with Charles and Joan in Delaware. The two-storeyed house was more inviting than it had been in 1990. The reception rooms and kitchen had been transformed, and breakfasts and other meals were a lot better than those Charles had formerly prepared for me.

“I never felt so alive,” he told me. They were both on top of the world.

It was late October 1993 and my son had flown over to stay a few weeks with me. Naturally we were invited down for several days with Charles and Joan in Delaware, and on the Bay at Rock Hall. We happily complied. I had been with them at Rock Hall in August that year and knew the place well. We drove down through Chestertown, home to Washington College, and stayed on the Bay for a couple of days.

By the dock was a place called The Crab House. We sat there in the afternoons on the deck overlooking the water, drinking wine and eating soft-shell blue crabs by the steamed dozen. We’d sit there till we were half asleep with the wine and the sun and the breezes, like drifting on the edge of eternity.

It was the drive back, however, that turned out to be more interesting. Just a few miles out of Rock Hall, Charles suggested we visit an old churchyard where there are historic graves dating back to the seventeenth century, and more recent ones including that of Tallulah Bankhead. As there were no objections, he made a right turn off Rock Hall Road onto Sandy Bottom Road.

“Why would it be called Sandy Bottom Road?” my son wondered.

“It has a sandy foundation, I guess,” I replied. “Not a secure foundation for a road—though appropriate, I suppose, for a road that leads to a graveyard.”

We drove along it for a short distance before turning left into the parking lot of the old churchyard of St Paul’s Episcopal Church, Kent County. The church, built in 1713, was the second building constructed on the site. Its grounds are planted with a variety of trees and combine the qualities of graveyard and arboretum—fine English and American boxwoods, predominantly, and an outstanding 400-year-old swamp oak, possibly the oldest in Maryland. There are about twenty acres of land in the churchyard, which slopes gently down to a mill pond, mirror-smooth on the overcast day we visited. Aside from us not a soul was in sight. The air was still, not even a bird song to be heard. It was late autumn and the trees were bare, deep into the dormancy they paid for rebirth.

“OK, all out!” Charles commanded. “I know this place, it’s interesting to walk around, so let’s see who we can find—lots of interesting old graves in here!”

The church was closed up, we had no brochure to guide us, so each of us wandered about to find whatever there was to discover.

“Look,” my son exclaimed in surprise. “There’s a monument with your name on it, Dad, and right there, alongside it, one with grandma’s name.”

It froze me. “Well spotted!” I told him.

We also discovered that a certain Michael Miller, name of a deceased first cousin of mine, had his grave close to the church door. I later found, through the internet, that he had sold the vestry the original plot of eight acres from his “Arcadia” estate on February 6, 1696, for the equivalent price of 2000 pounds of tobacco, money he later refunded to them. “Et in Arcadia Ego”—I suppose Miller had been aware of the adage. If he hadn’t he should have been.

“Here’s Daniel Coley, whoever he was,” Charles observed. “Died 20 October 1729 and sleeps till the resurrection, apparently. Interesting inscription.”

We all read it:

Behold and see where now I lie.
As you are now, so once was I;
As I am now, so you must be.
Therefore prepare to follow me.

“Do you like that, Julian—the idea of it?” I asked my son. I’d seen other graves in America and England that bore the same message, or something close: “Where you are, there once were we, and where we are, so you must be.”

“It’s morbid.”

“Well, yes, it’s morbid, absolutely it’s morbid. Striking, though.”

We wandered idly about, intruders on consecrated ground, not knowing what we were looking at, and not caring either.

“Look here!” I said to Joan, who was walking beside me. “Hey, Charles, come over here, take a look at this: 1st Lieutenant Samuel Beck, Assistant Surgeon, staff of General John H. Winder, Provost Marshal of Confederate Prisons.”

Charles looked at the inscription, which he said he’d noticed on a previous visit. General Winder, he told us, had been in charge of Camp Sumter down in Georgia, the place known as Andersonville, among other prison camps he supervised.

“You mean the place from which Union prisoners emerged looking like skeletons?” I asked.

“That’s it—45,000 prisoners, of whom over 12,000 died of disease and hunger. But remember that there was precious little food in Georgia in 1865, and 33,000 emerged alive. Also, the Union repeatedly refused a prisoner exchange. Sherman’s march through Georgia was rape and pillage from start to finish and no one ever held him to account.”

“I wasn’t judging, Charles, I don’t do that. Let’s find Tallulah Bankhead, and I want to know more about her. Where’s she laid?”

“She’s laid over there, in the newer section.”

“I’ve never heard of Tallulah Bankhead,” Julian said as we walked across. “Who on earth was she with a name like that?”

“On earth?—she’s certainly not much under it! She was a star of the silver screen,” Charles told him, “from Alabama. And then, in her declining years, it was no longer Hollywood, but merely ‘as heard on radio and seen on TV’. I read a book about her. Nice girl till she turned fifteen. And then … well, she began to develop and refine all those promiscuous ways,” he laughed. “She must have inherited the confidence to be outrageous, coming as she did from a well-off family of Southern Democrats—her grandfather was a senator from Alabama and her father was Speaker of the House of Representatives before the Second World War.”

“What kinds of promiscuous ways?” Julian wondered.

“I don’t know all the details, I just read the one book. She called herself ‘ambisextrous’, ‘pure as the driven slush’.”

We liked that.

“So she was also witty?” Julian asked.

“Very witty,” Charles went on. “And all of her affairs, and all of her one-night stands, she called them ‘momentary impromptus’. Some guy at a party once said to her, ‘I’d like to sleep with you’, and she replied, ‘And so you shall, you darling little man—today’. Predictably enough she contracted venereal disease, but after the operation she told the surgeon that if he thought this would teach her a lesson he had another think coming. From what I’ve read she was a good person.”

“I’ve found her,” I told them from about ten yards away. “She’s laid over here, under this slab. ‘Tallulah Brockman Bankhead’, it says. ‘January 31, 1902, December 12, 1968’.”

There was an eloquent modesty about that slab. No doubt she had thought about it, and decided to reduce the vanity, fame and display down to nothing, leaving just her three names and a couple of dates. It didn’t stand out, it didn’t even stand up, it was laid level with the earth.

By then it was time to go back to the car, and as we wandered through the grounds in that newer section Charles casually let loose one of those absurd off-handers of his as he surveyed the ground ahead: “The problem with you people down here is that you’re all dumb,” he declared, “and the reason you’re all dumb is you’re all dead.”

It was a strange thing to say, but not atypical of him in its anarchic absurdity. “Good luck with that,” I thought. I guess he just felt on top of the world, but he said it on top of the dead, to the dead.

 

A month later I was back home and decided to call him. He was out and it was Joan who answered. She told me Charles had gone in “for one of those series of tests everyone here seems to have regularly”. The PSA test for prostate cancer had come up positive, but the doctor had told him it was perhaps not worth operating—but it was Charles’s call. He might die with it, a long way down the track, rather than from it. The senior nurse privately cautioned Joan not to allow Charles to have any procedure undertaken. She used terms like “cellular leakage” and “accelerated metastasis”—possible outcomes, she said, of biopsies and cutting procedures. She also mentioned the predictable morbidity: incontinence, nappies, erectile problems, dry orgasms.

Charles couldn’t live with doubt and anxiety, he had to have the problem “fixed”, that was his word.

I spoke with him by telephone a couple of weeks after the operation, and he told me about the after-effects. He was optimistic that things would improve. The doctors seemed encouraging.

When I called again a month later it was Joan who answered. New tests revealed that the cancer had spread. It was spreading everywhere.

The months rolled by, until it was one dose of morphine per day, then two, and finally three. I asked Joan on one of those calls why he didn’t just take two doses a day and store up the third for a couple of weeks, then take sixteen. She said he couldn’t have endured the pain any longer on just two.

I was glad I wasn’t there. By this time, just six months or so since the operation, she had set Charles up in a room downstairs, as it was too difficult to get him up and down to the principal bedroom. He was in a lot of pain, the morphine was radically affecting his personality, and he became paranoid. She must be poisoning him, he thought, and he hurled the accusation at her again and again. Then he would demand that she go upstairs and get his revolver, which he habitually kept loaded (and not with blanks), a reasonable request she declined to fulfil. On one occasion he became so enraged at his situation that he picked up a large vase and hurled it across the room directly at her. It missed, or she moved, and it splintered into a thousand pieces against the wall behind her.

Increasingly unmanageable at home, he was transferred to a hospice for the dying, where he was turned with insufficient frequency, so that he developed bed sores all over his body, and it was there that he died, in an agony mitigated by massive doses of morphine, about a year after our last visit to Rock Hall and the tranquil grounds of St Paul’s Episcopalian Church, in Kent County, Maryland.

I liked him a great deal, and I put it down to bad luck, partly—that, together with the unseen and unknowable flow of causes and effects. He was great fun to be around, a good friend with tons of character and charm, and a lot of guts.