Authors: Jonathan Raban
In the study, I tried to concentrate on a lovely Courbet sketch.
Sally said: “What’s all this worth? A million? Millions?”
“Tens of millions. Hundreds, probably. I don’t know. Billions. Trillions. Squillions.”
“God,” said Sally, “I’m so innocent about that kind of thing,” and suddenly hugged me. With my arms around her, I could feel her pulsing
and sparking; it was like embracing a human-sized microchip with all its circuits on Overload. Next to us stood a skeletal Giacometti on a low side table. Its head was on a level with ours. Sally twisted her face around, stared at the sculpture, and looked back at me.
“Hey—do you think I’m too sort of, well, like,
skinny?
”
We went out into the garden. The swimming pool, drained for winter, was soddenly carpeted by dead leaves. Its marble rim was lined with reclining figures: fat ones by Henry Moore, thin ones by Giacometti and Arp. Together they suggested a group of badly out-of-condition old folks at some Californian hydrotherapy clinic. One expected nurses to come from out of the trees and ease them, one by one, into the pool.
That evening we met Sally’s father at the St. Louis Club for dinner. Like just about everything else in the city, the club had moved west; it now occupied the fifteenth floor of an office building on a hill in Clayton, where its fumed oak, sporting prints and civic portraits were surreally suspended in their frame of concrete, glass and steel. From the club dining room, the hideous buildings of the central city looked innocuous and pretty. By night, at this height and distance, they looked like a fleet of lighted ships riding at anchor. We were a long, long way away from the St. Louis of gunmen, black magicians and wretched conventioneers.
Sally’s father greeted his daughter with a look of deep mock melancholy. He raised his right hand and slowly clenched and unclenched it three times.
“The market’s fallen?” Sally said.
“Fifteen points,” her father said. “Tomorrow, know what I’m going to do? I’m going to buy some clothes.” He encircled her with his arm. “There’s a recession on: let’s go shopping.”
He was a big man with a frost of white hair over a pouchy, humorous face; a wise and wary ironist. I was frightened of his reputation. I’d heard of him before I met Sally, and he’d been described as “the one man in St. Louis who makes Wall Street listen when he talks.” He was “sharp as a pistol.” In the business aristocracy of the Midwest, Sally’s father was a self-made duke. He handled the marriages and divorces of great companies. He was a conjuror with money. He could, so I was told, pull a handful of the stuff through a napkin ring and make it billow out into a fortune.
As he walked through the dining room, his importance was as manifest as the glow of light around a medieval saint. People stopped talking at their tables and nodded gravely to him as he passed. Waiters flew on wings ahead of him. When Sally announced that she was going to
the ladies’ room, I panicked at the prospect of being left alone with him.
“That one …” he said, half-lowering his large eyelids in the direction of Sally’s back, “she’s bright.” It wasn’t a father’s fond indulgence so much as a neutral, financier’s assessment of a stock.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t she. Very bright. Indeed.”
I felt that my own rating on this particular question was already beginning to drop through the bottom of the market. I had only one idea I thought might arouse a glimmer of interest in him, and that was borrowed; from Edmund Wilson’s
To the Finland Station
. Wilson had described Karl Marx as a man who had made a kind of poetry out of money and its movements. He had been able to apprehend currency as a sensuous object. He might have been a brilliant capitalist had he not felt revulsion for the financial system which, in his writing, he compulsively caressed, half in tenderness, half in hate.
I put the Wilson argument to Sally’s father. Yes, he said; that sounded right. Money was something for which it was possible to have an artist’s feeling for his medium. There was still for him as much creative excitement in the making of a deal now as he’d had in his twenties. He loved the sense of “swinging from the rafters.” He stopped speaking. Something was nagging at him.
“Look,” he said. “You take a book, like the one by this Wilson guy. How many copies would they have to print of that, to make a profit? Five thousand? Ten?”
I told him what little I knew of the commercial side of the book trade, fascinated by the way his eyes followed what I was saying. They were Trappist’s eyes: serious, peaceful and contemplative.
“This must all seem terribly small beer to you.”
“Small? A dollar interests me. Especially if it’s a dollar profit.”
Sally came back. Her father, swinging from the rafters between dour puritanism and gross excess, made niggardly sips at a glass of Coca-Cola while he lit each new cigarette from the butt of his last.
All through the meal he was courted by young men. They stood deferentially by the table in hound’s-tooth jackets, striped ties and tortoiseshell glasses. Sometime … if he could spare a moment … perhaps … they’d appreciate it. One was thinking of buying a television station in Illinois; another had seen that a baseball team in Florida was up for sale.
“
His
family,” said Sally of one of these young men, “they’ve got quite a bit of money, haven’t they?” The question struck me as a shade redundant.
Her father sipped, smoked, smiled. “I haven’t counted it,” he said.
“Do you ever find yourself taking real pratfalls?” I asked.
“Unh-hunh. Something I learned right back at the beginning. You can make any mistake you like; it doesn’t matter. Only never make the same mistake twice.”
I talked of what seemed to me to be the cruel division between the deep woodiness of the western suburbs and the bald brick of the city ghettoes. I told Sally’s father how my first view of St. Louis had been based on the newspaper story about the rapists who had been caught because their victim had seen a tree through a window. He considered the situation from all sides.
“Now, if they’d had the sense to cut that tree down, those guys’d be running free.” He laughed. “Next time, I guess they’ll pack an axe.”
He left on the dot of ten o’clock. He was always in bed by ten thirty: a rule, he said, that he’d never allowed any boom or crash to interfere with.
“You stay on. Sign for all you want.”
“Please,” I said, “if I may, I’d like to—”
“No,” said Sally. “Daddy
loves
to pay.”
We went in for Sunday treats: bagels, fresh-squeezed orange juice, the multistoried edifice of the Sunday
New York Times
, its sections scattered around every room. We squabbled over who got to read the Book Review first. We annoyed each other by reading paragraphs of news out loud. Former President Gerald Ford announced that he was definitely not available for the Republican nomination. “That means he
must
be running,” Sally said.
The Shah of Iran arrived in New York from Mexico for a cancer operation.
“Why can’t they take his gallbladder out in Mexico, for godsake?”
“You know why the Mexican put his wife on the railroad tracks?”
“Why?”
“Tequila.”
“Huh?”
“That’s the funniest joke anyone’s ever heard in Buffalo, Iowa.”
“It doesn’t sound funny to me. Is that some kind of hoosier place?”
We visited with Sally’s friends, driving downtown to Lafayette Square. It was exactly as the broad Georgian squares of north London must have looked after the Blitz. There were bright little shops on the corners selling hand-sewn quilts and antique bric-a-brac, and Londonlike wine bars with gardens; but their gaiety was forced and defiant. For every smart “rehab” there was a blind ruin, its oxidized brickwork falling out, and weeds growing through the trash on its floors. In the
sacked Victorian streets around the square one could sense the waiting shadows of Catullus Eugene Blackwater, 28, Hugh Saustell, 25, and all the other thugs who hadn’t yet been honored by a mention in the
Whirl
.
Yet sprawled, talking, among colored scatter cushions on a floor of varnished pine, slopping wine from a flagon of Gallo into a tumbler, I felt uncannily at home. It wasn’t just the bookish run of the conversation; it was St. Louis itself. The city was supposed to belong to the West. The full title of Saarinen’s monumental loop was The Westward Expansion Memorial Arch, and the museum below it commemorated the great nineteenth-century drive west beyond the Mississippi; but St. Louis was the least obviously “Western” town I had been in since I’d started my journey. Its architecture had none of the happy eccentricity of places like Muscatine. It didn’t go in for fake steamboats and boondocks-Greek. What St. Louis liked was solid Georgian, Queen Anne, Palladian and half-timbered Tudor. It wanted things to be in prim good taste. It would have got on very nicely over the teacups with my Wiltshire aunts.
Old, genteel St. Louis—T. S. Eliot’s city—thought of itself as a slice of cultivated Europe. It seemed mystified as to how it had landed here, stranded on the wrong side of the big American river. Sally and I had spent an afternoon in the Forest Park section, drinking draft Bass in the Welsh pub off Kingshighway and rummaging in the bookstores along Euclid Avenue.
Kingshighway. Euclid Avenue
. Between them, the names defined the wistful snobbery of a city that was soft on royalty on the one hand and on the most severe of classical geometers on the other.
“Really …” I heard someone say; “…
really,
” and the voice had more of the throaty Anglophilia of Beacon Hill, Boston, than of the lolloping drawl of the Midwest. The woman next to me mentioned the word “Missoura.” It was a pronunciation that had often puzzled me. Some people said “Missouri,” others “Missoura.” I had asked why before. I’d been told that the
a
was a south-of-state ending, that it was a west-of-state ending, that it was rural usage as against the urban
i
. No one really seemed to know. I said this to the woman.
“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s perfectly simple. New Money says ‘Missouri’; Old Money says ‘Missoura.’ ”
Somewhere in our garden there was a snake, but neither Sally nor I heard its giveaway rattle. The gales had died down; the temperature had settled. The carpet in the apartment was left unswept one morning while I laid out my river charts on the floor and plotted mileages. I
didn’t pack the charts away, and that evening Sally turned over their big pages until she reached a nowhere down in Arkansas. Not speaking, she put
Miles Davis in Concert
on the turntable and sat listening to it through stereo headphones.
“Martini?”
“Uh-uh.” Her face made a quick, negative squirm.
In the Jewish country club in Westwood, where all the crockery was heraldically imprinted with a tennis racket crossed with a niblick or a mashie, we eked out a moody supper, overlit by crystal chandeliers. Passing friends of Sally’s parents would save us from each other for five minutes at a time; we’d brighten for them, then fall back to listening to the noise of each other’s knives and forks. Gloomily, I remembered that I’d been here before, and at the back of my mind I could see the oily gleam of the river opening out.
Next day the phone rang at ten. I picked it up. “Hi!” said a warm, kittenly voice.
“Sally!” I said. A new leaf. “I’m sorry—”
“This is a recorded message from several chiropractors in your neighborhood.…”
I slammed the phone back into its cradle. Sally didn’t call.
For dinner we drove to the most expensive restaurant in Clayton, hoping that its showy glamour would restore a little of our own lost shine. We were met by a whole ship’s crew of waiters in dress uniform: captains, lieutenants, quartermasters, stewards. It took half a dozen senior officers to escort us to a table for two, but when a pop singer came in, the entire company marched and piped him to his seat. Sally took in his black hat with a Mexican brim, his permed, shoulder-length hair, his beads, boots and caftan.
“That’s what I
hate
to see—” But I knew that the singer, in his arrogant duds, was just a convenient stand-in for the man at Sally’s own table.
We made a solemn, engrossed play of snapping the shells open around the rubbery bodies of our langoustes.
Rubber
, I thought …
bumper;
and tried to talk in our old, light way about the bumper stickers that had kept me half alarmed, half entertained on my rides around the freeways of St. Louis.
GOD, GUNS & GUTS MADE AMERICA GREAT. DON’T GIVE GOD A VACATION: TAKE HIM WITH YOU WHEN YOU GO
.
“I think the best one I ever saw was around Boston in 1973, just after Nixon had dumped Cox as Watergate Special Prosecutor. Practically every car in Cambridge had one. It said, ‘Sack the Cox-Sacker.’ ”
“That’s … obscene,” Sally said, pronging a soggy tomato.
“You’re being stupid and prudish.”
“Plus, it’s not even funny.”
“I saw the weather forecast. It’s okay. I’ll get moving again tomorrow.”
“You know? Something I didn’t kind of see you as? You’re a coward.” Dinner was our Reno. Before the check came, we’d had our divorce.
I
had slipped
quietly out of other towns, but there was no slipping quietly away from St. Louis. The current grabbed hold of the boat, flipped it around, and sent it skidding southward out of the city like a puck on an ice rink. I hardly had time to get the motor going before I was swept past the floating depot where the tows refueled and was into the humping, broken water below the highway bridges.
Today was a new beginning. Everything had changed. On the Illinois shore, the high winds had stripped the forest and left the cotton-woods with the spiky glitter of drummers’ wire brushes. Fields of crops in the bottoms on the Missouri side had been flattened into scalloped brown waves. Only a few squat thornbushes grew on the naked sandbars. The wing dams of the upper Mississippi had been replaced by high dikes of rock and shambling wooden piers which funneled the rapid current into the middle of the stream. The water was cold in the morning sun; a fast, forbidding river, its surface littered with dead trees, gasoline drums, garden fences, and lumps of polystyrene packing like sheets of frozen tapioca pudding.