Bluebeard (33 page)

And which patient needed me most now in the dead of night?

Well—what could I do for a pill freak that she couldn’t do better or worse for herself? So I went back to Slazinger empty handed, and we talked about his trip to Poland for a while. Why not? Any port in a storm.

Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple of years back by the wife of our President: “Just say no.”

Maybe Mrs. Berman could say no to her pills, but poor Paul Slazinger had no control over the dangerous substances his own body was manufacturing and dumping in his bloodstream. He had no choice but to think all kinds of crazy things. And I listened to him rave on awhile about how well he could write, if only he were in hiding or in prison in Poland, and how the Polly Madison Books were the greatest works of literature since
Don Quixote.

He did get off one pretty good crack about her, but I don’t think it was meant to be a crack, since he was so rapt when he said it. He called her “the Homer of the bubblegum crowd.”

And let’s just get it out of the way right here and now about the merits of the Polly Madison books. To settle this question in my own mind, without having to actually read them, I have just solicited by telephone the opinions of a bookseller and a librarian in East Hampton, and also the widows of a couple of the old Abstract Expressionist gang who have teenage grandchildren now.

They all said about the same thing, boiling down to this: “Useful, frank, and intelligent, but as literature hardly more than workmanlike.”

So there it is. If Paul Slazinger wants to keep out of the nuthouse, it certainly isn’t going to help his case if he says he spent this past summer reading all the Polly Madison Books.

It won’t help his case much, either, that when he was a mere stripling he lay face down on a Japanese hand grenade, and has been in and out of laughing academies ever since. He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so. Beware of gods bearing gifts!

Before he went to sleep the other night, he said that he could not help being what he was, for good or ill, that he was “that sort of molecule.”

“Until the Great Atom Smasher comes to get me, Rabo,” he said, “this is the kind of molecule I have to be.”

“And what is literature, Rabo,” he said, “but an insider’s newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called ‘thought.’”

“It’s all so clear to me now,” he said. “I understand everything.”

“That’s what you said the last time,” I reminded him.

“Well—it’s clear to me again,” he said. “I was put on Earth with only two missions: to get the Polly Madison Books the recognition they deserve as great literature, and to publish my Theory of Revolution.”

“O.K.,” I said.

“Does that sound crazy?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Two monuments I must build! One to her and one to me. A thousand years from now her books will still be read and people will still be discussing Slazinger’s Theory of Revolution.”

“That’s nice to think about,” I said.

He became foxy. “I never
told
you my theory, did I?” he said.

“No,” I said.

He tapped his temple with his fingertips. “That’s because I’ve kept it locked up here all these years in this
potato barn,” he said. “You’re not the only old man, Rabo, who has saved the best for last.”

“What do you know about the potato barn?” I said.

“Nothing—word of honor: nothing. But why does an old man lock up anything so tight, so tight, unless he’s saving the best for last?” he said. “It takes a molecule to know a molecule.”

“What’s in
my
barn is not the best and is not the worst, although it wouldn’t have to be very good to be the best I ever did, and it would have to be pretty awful to be the worst,” I said. “You want to know what’s in there?”

“Sure, if you want to tell me,” he said.

“It’s the emptiest and yet the fullest of all human messages,” I said.

“Which
is?”
he said.

“‘Good-bye,’” I said.

House party!

And who prepares the meals and makes the beds for these increasingly fascinating guests of mine?

The indispensable Allison White! Thank goodness Mrs. Berman talked her into staying!

And while Mrs. Berman, who says she is nine tenths of the way through her latest epic, can be expected to return to Baltimore in the near future, Allison White will not leave me high and dry. For one thing, the stock market crash two weeks ago has reduced the
demand for domestic help out this way. For another, she is pregnant again, and determined to carry the fetus to term. So she has
begged
permission to stay on with Celeste for the winter at least, and I have told her: “The more the merrier.”

Perhaps I should have scattered milestones along the route this book has taken, saying, “It is now the Fourth of July,” and “They say this is the coolest August on record, and may have something to do with the disappearance of ozone over the North Pole,” and so on. But I had no idea that this was going to be a diary as well as an autobiography.

Let me say now that Labor Day was two weeks ago, just like the stock-market crash. So
zingo!
There goes prosperity! And
zingo!
There goes another summertime!

Celeste and her friends are back in school, and she asked me this morning what I knew about the Universe. She has to write a theme about it.

“Why ask me?” I said.

“You read
The New York Times
every day,” she said.

So I told her that the Universe began as an eleven-pound strawberry which exploded at seven minutes past midnight three trillion years ago.

“I’m
serious!”
she said.

“All I can tell you is what I read in
The New York Times,”
I said.