American Dreams Read online

  Higgins reflected on his fate as though it belonged to another man. He was unfit temperamentally for physical activity, preferring sluggish meditation on schemes and vaguely fraudulent enterprises that would make him obnoxiously rich. Yet he was temperamentally unfit for mental activity as well, preferring violent explosions that broke through doors and scattered bodies. He loved war, hated peace; and vice versa. Where was he to go?

  Higgins had fearful, grappling visions of himself.… The respected professor discussing the Indian influence on Greek art, a topic he was good at. Then he moved closer to the blond girl in the front row, can’t stop himself now, and snatched off her underwear in one smooth professorial stroke, and goddamned well fucked her right there. While he came, he would hold the young whelps in their seats with a .45 pistol waved crazily about.… Then he dreamed himself among mercenaries, Angola division, a job he could get. Machine-gunning cows and natives for breakfast. A job well done is its own reward, Higgins always said. But wouldn’t his lust for a volume of poetry or the sight of a particular painting propel him from the bush? It had; it had.

  Sometimes Higgins thought he had a grip on himself, some self or another. He was wrong. Other people could tell, too. If they looked at his eyes, they tried to sit somewhere else on a bus or plane. His brown eyes that were murky and seemed faintly diseased. They did not hint at intelligence, but threatened to break open and erupt thin red lava. Higgins did not like his eyes nor the rest of his face, which looked French. He wore sunglasses. He hunched tense shoulders.

  Higgins stood by the statue. She was worth twenty-five thousand to him. He ran his fingertips over her shoulders and briefly stroked her terra cotta breasts. She was to him beautiful beyond telling. He was thinking how he might methodically crumble her, rubbing her dust laboriously between his fingers until she was gone. It would be for love, he thought; people wouldn’t understand that.

  Higgins’ favorite poem was by Wilfred Owen. He thought of the first lines now.…

  What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

  Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

  Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle.…

  Wilfred had died in the Great War, 1918, many long years ago. What Higgins wanted to know, and had not been able to know, was whether Wilfred was himself killed by machine gun. For Higgins, this was a very neat way to die. Neat, as in tidy, efficient, thorough.

  Raphael Higgins went for his suitcase. It was clear to him that he had been cursed. Blue genes—haa haa, he laughed sneeringly. Or perhaps God just did not like him.

  Higgins had to be in the airport in ninety minutes. In Texas by the next morning. The phone rang. Higgins did not feel like answering it, and so he did not.

  4

  Dick and Jane were their names. They paid a severe price for it, too—the joke that never died. See Dick and Jane. Etc.

  When they opted for the $175,000 house in Connecticut, they thought life was complete. Two children later they were cramped again. An unease had crept into their conversation, and perhaps into their marriage.

  Dick Robertson was run over jogging on a back road at dusk. A freak accident. Jane Robertson was suicidal for a week. The only silver lining Jane could see was that the joke also died. All of this happened, Jane thought, because God has no shame. He’s capable of anything, she decided.

  Jane hadn’t seen anything yet.

  Despite her blasphemous attitudes, she let a minister come to comfort her. His name was Reverend Michaels. He was soft and shy and seemed as safe as her first date—in the ninth grade. He paused a lot when he spoke, apparently due to deep thought but actually because of a general bewilderment. The Reverend Michaels was trim and dark-haired and kind-faced, and his eyes were more sincere than a puppy’s. Within a month of the funeral, these two were necking like teenagers. Jane told herself that she actually loved this man, more even than she had loved her husband. In quieter moments she suspected that she was quite out of her mind, probably in the grip of some terminal trauma. Oh well, she would sigh, maybe God has finally figured out what He’s up to.

  What was more assuredly factual was the guilt, for both the widow and the married minister. The guilt was three miles high. They lived inside this guilt and ate it with their meals.

  Jane Robertson and the Reverend Michaels were sitting on a sofa, Jane’s head on the minister’s shoulder, all very childlike, her leg sprawled over his, his hand nervously inside her thigh, when the oldest child came from nowhere through a door. The minister was whispering in the mother’s ear and the boy said, “Mom—”, and stopped like a statue. Maybe if the guilt hadn’t been three miles high, they could have said, “Oh, hi there, Jimmie, how are you?”

  Instead they also stopped like statues. Except that the minister’s hand first jumped into the air as though burned.

  All of this was sadder than Dick Robertson’s encounter with the fender of a Pontiac. When Jimmie’s brain becomes soft from too many years, he may still remember his Mother’s white thigh with the minister’s hand there. And that look on her face. And that identical look on the man’s face.

  Within the week Jane took her children three thousand miles to California. That was as far away as practical. The fact was, the Reverend Michaels should have left his wife, and he and Jane Robertson should have been married. They belonged together.

  There were a few letters. No use. As long as that boy was alive, Jane and her minister could not be together. The boy’s eyes contained a curse.

  The sad truth was that killing the boy may have been best for him, best for the minister, best for Jane, and best for the boy’s brother and sister, who would grow up in a loving family. Only the minister’s wife would have been hurt and she not much. (Mrs. Michaels, with her cameo face and cameo mind, was refined to the point of having sought out a minister to escape the ugliness of existence; she had thought she wowuld be safe in his port. But the storm followed her in, and the minister no longer had his earlier justification. She was distressed with his work as talisman. A lot of what most people call life she had decided more and more to ignore.)

  So the boy stood in the way—hanging onto life as he did—of everyone else’s life. The boy and his startled eyes that grew wide. The guilt that Jane Robertson had stacked on her shoulders was too heavy to admit another package. God forbid she should think for a second of the advantages of her son’s disappearance. But the possibility of the thought lay somewhere in her like the industry of insects under stones. Years of analysis might not discover this unspeakable thought. Perhaps in her eyes only did the thought glimmer. Maybe the boy’s eyes, strong-seeing as they were from shock, detected the secrets of her eyes. If so, he would be doubly cursed.

  He has sixty years to go. And it may be that in all those years nothing that transpires visibly will have half the significance of what can not be seen. He might not tell his wife; he might not tell his friends; he might never tell his children. Then we would know that the statuesque faces of mother and minister had indeed sealed his fate. They were prisoners; and so they had made him a prisoner. And because he would be a different man, he would raise his children differently, and they theirs, and so the sins of the parents would be passed on into the middle and end of the twenty-first century.…

  This was certainly one possible scenario.

  In San Francisco, Jane went to work for a large department store, in purchasing. She enjoyed the store, so tidy were the aisles and counters and signs, and a glow like the sun indoors. The store made sense when the world outside did not. Going to work was balm to her mind. From her desk she could look through plate glass at the floor below. There was the order of an airfield: runways and rows of little lights. Customers came, of course, in convulsive numbers. Changing nothing. The store put up with customers, and they left, and the store looked the same.

  When she turned 33, Jane Robertson was pretty enough, thin enough, competent enough, financially secure enough. But she wasn’t happy enough. That much she knew. God, she ha
d decided, was all talk and no action. Men noticed Jane; she virtually never noticed them. She lived in a sort of muddled and distracted state that she had come to think of as perfectly normal. The main goal was not to think of … well, of things she shouldn’t think about.

  One afternoon in the store she met a man named Roger Freeman. He was charming and aloof, apparently in need of “a woman’s advice,” as he put it. The man looked and dressed like a matinee idol. His features were even, attractive, devoid of irregularities and, she later decided, character. Roger Freeman could play excellent tennis. On and off court he moved with the same precise and confident smoothness. From a distance he seemed to be what most men wanted to be.

  Their romance somehow lasted three years. Roger, she realized belatedly, was more of an opportunist than an opportunity. She finally became disgusted with her needs. Why else would she become involved with this man? Still, he was charming. He had distracted her in a bad time. Even as she felt smugly contemptuous of the man’s character, she liked him as she might like an errant brother.

  The odd resolution was that they became bridge partners. She was a Life Master, having invented her own system of cues. They played in doubles tournaments throughout the Bay area. They were good. More exactly, Jane had card sense and Roger was attuned to every angle and gimmick that would give a player an edge. He had memorized every signal Jane gave off, albeit unconsciously. He was a cunning psychologist, sighting minute tendencies in other players. He lived in a universe populated by gestures, signs, Freudian slips, lapses, intonations, grimaces and tics. He read them as readily as a scholar reads mysterious hieroglyphs. Roger also had a rare power of concentration, in the sense of focus. Whatever he was doing was done thoroughly. Therefore as he played bridge with Jane, he played bridge and did not speak much of what else he did.

  Jane heard only the most scattered mentions of an older woman Roger had become involved with. A married woman named Adele Morris. The attraction was not clear. Then Jane heard that the woman’s husband had died, of a heart attack. Roger seemed to imply that the way was now open. But for what? The only problems were a will and a troublesome son, an architect with the strange name of Bradford. Roger mentioned the son in passing, but with increasing vehemence. He was “in the way.” What seemed to bother Roger even more was that he had not been able to fashion the key to the man’s lock. “Everyone has a key,” was how Roger put it. Which is not the same as saying everyone has a price. It is much more subtle.

  Jane Robertson thought back to the day when they had first met. She believed at the time that Roger had kind, inquiring eyes. She now realized that he had been looking for her key. All of this came to her while she playing a hand in six no-trump; she became agitated and misread West’s discard and went down.

  Even though Jane Robertson would never meet Raphael Higgins, there was a connection. He was going to save her life, with his last breath, so to speak. Probably because God has no shame.

  As Jane often said: He’s capable of anything.

  5

  Bradford Morris was handsome in a brooding, neurotic way, his hair theatrically full. In his college days he had been a leader of rebellious students. People said he had “charisma.” Women did not merely fall in love with him; they became devoted. He dimly remembered his angry eloquence. Only ten years ago—but that was another age. He had been another man.

  So many of the things that happen happen because people are inelastic, Morris thought, staring blindly out the window of a 727.

  People won’t give. Maybe they can’t. They think they see a vision, what they have to do. They keep trying. Honor is at stake.

  Life wouldn’t be the same at all without visions. There is no point in saying that most visions are foolish. The person inside the vision doesn’t know. That person is enwrapped, enshrouded perhaps, tucked into bed for the long sleep. It’s the only world the person knows. You think that the world is outside you? The world is in your head, streets, vistas, even cities. You move knowledgeably through them; you are alone. It is useless to ask someone else, which road do I take? They won’t see the roads you are pointing at. So you push on, dragging your sack across your own continent.

  Morris blinked and began tapping his pencil against the window. Below him, 30,000 feet below, Cincinnati drifted along, like an artful slick on water. Morris was glad that he did not have to go to Cincinnati. But wasn’t it supposed to be a pleasant city, on a river, with its own symphony orchestra? Something about the name inspired ridicule. People probably thought it was an Indian name, but it was Latin. Cincinnatus—aristocrat farmer and popular dictator. Morris thought back: when would he have been taught something like that? Not college certainly. High school? The eighth grade, that was when you learned about things like Cincinnatus. Probably the kids today no longer were told of him. He was irrelevant. Morris doubted that. Perhaps Cincinnatus was the only fact he knew that did matter. Morris imagined Cincinnatus in a white robe, by marble columns, among men with leaves in their hair. Cincinnatus had dignity. Morris was sure of that much. Dignity was like a rare metal these days. Cincinnatus whispered to other men in white robes and vast public decisions were made. Perhaps his life now was different because of decisions that Cincinnatus made. Morris was sure of it.

  Morris wished that Cincinnatus had made other decisions. Then perhaps he would not be flying to meet his mother. He did not wish to see her, nor did he care for the business they had to finish. He would prefer to have his father back.

  Morris stood up and entered the aisle. He moved unsteadily to the lavatory. He passed a man holding up a New York Times. Morris was annoyed. So many people thought you know what is happening if you know what is on the front page of the New York Times. It was like a minute description of yellow drops. And only years later do you learn that somebody was pissing on you.

  Morris was sad. His father had been only 52. Morris had assumed that he would always be around. He went into the tiny compartment and gripped a rail on the ceiling. He had to concentrate on the small hole in the silver funnel. Concentrate. Who were the people who would dispose of the contents of the box below?

  He thought of his wife. Fondly. Faintly. He kissed a white thigh as he zipped up his pants.

  The trouble with his wife was that she had not been born a man. He wasn’t sure Felicia had gotten over this. So what did it say about him that he had married her? The question of whether he was henpecked did not trouble him. He was comfortable. Like someone recuperating in a hospital. There are flowers and presents. People tend to him. His wife is officious on his behalf. Shhh.

  When Morris came out of the lavatory, he faced a lean man who looked away from him. They both went left, then right. Morris said, “Sorry.” The lean man stared hard at him, finally. Morris liked faces. He lapped this one up. The nose was slightly aquiline, a bit of a beak. The eyes, even behind sunglasses, were disturbing. Brown and flat like mahogany left in the sun.

  The other man looked at Morris forbiddingly. Abruptly he smiled. “I say, maybe you’d like a few hands of gin rummy?”

  Morris shrugged, “All right.”

  When they played, they played at first for score, then for a few dollars. Morris lost. He never realized that he had been cheated. The other man was wonderfully adroit with cards. The other man had wanted to play so that he could cheat. At the airport they exchanged business cards. The other man’s name was Raphael Higgins, Dealer in Objets d’Art. They would see each other one other time, later in the year, but that encounter would have even less significance than the first one. And shortly afterwards Higgins would be killed.

  When Morris met his mother in the evening for dinner, they promptly began to argue. There were provisions in his father’s will that his mother preferred to circumvent. Morris did not care what the will said or whether it made sense. He would follow the will to the last letter and period. This was a sort of love he understood. What he did not understand was that he and his mother lived in separate worlds. Mrs. Adele Morris had been bored
for a decade. When her husband died, it was an instance of unspoken prayers being answered. She had a lover she wanted to help in business. Money was needed; the will seemed to her to waste money. Now her son wanted to obstruct her. She remained ladylike and motherly. Quietly she raged inside. With dessert came the realization that she hated her son. Morris was a contemptible sort of man, she decided; he had no juice in him, just like his father. The pair of them deserved each other.

  She could hardly swallow her apple pie.

  One problem was Uncle Hughie, her husband’s brother. Permanently age six, although he had been alive for 42 years. The doctors thought he might set a record. He always smiled, that was what Morris remembered first about him. Hughie had lived most of his life in a private institution outside Saint Louis, very expensive. The money was wasted, Hughie would be as happy in a dog pound, Mrs. Morris had no doubts. The will set aside funds to maintain Hughie until his natural death. Morris wanted this for Hughie because Hughie was his father’s brother and his father had wanted this.

  “We are talking about 38,000 a year,” his mother said. “That is not bus fare.”

  Mrs. Adele Morris often said she hated weakness. Somehow she had always made sure she was surrounded by it. In photographs, if she was smiling, she seemed quite handsome. In person, as she rarely smiled, you first noticed her hearty and scornful eyes.

  Morris now articulated something he had only half-thought before. His mother was truly inexorable. Inelastic, he realized, savoring the word. There was a deep association accompanying the word. Elastic was what circled the leg in women’s panties. Elastic was for Morris a sexy word. His mother was for Morris not sexy at all. Inelastic. Exactly! He knew about the lover, knew the name Roger Freeman. He had been surprised when he learned, surprised at the lover’s tastes.