Comfort Me with Apples

231 Pages·2011·1.76 MB·English

by  Peter De Vries

Comfort Me with Apples
A Novel
Peter De Vries
For Katinka
Stay me with flagons,
comfort me with apples:
for I am sick of love.
THE SONG OF SONGS
One
If an oracle told you you would be a shirtsleeve philosopher by the time you
were thirty, that you would be caught in bed with a woman named Mrs.
Thicknesse, have your letters used for blackmail and your wife threaten to bring
suit for sixty-five dollars because that was all you were worth, you would tell
him he was out of his mind. Yet that is what happened to me, and not because I
was out of mine. We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from
grating on one another, and mine played that role well in the rational and moral
pinches I will try to recreate. What we do in the pinches depends on other
equipment and on all that has gone before to make us what we are. The past is
prologue. Right, and Man is not a donkey lured along by a carrot dangled in
front of his nose, but a jet plane propelled by his exhaust. So perhaps a brief
glance at my background is in order.
My sharpest early memory is of a summer-night storm during which we were
sought out by lightning. Our family of four (I have a younger sister) were all in
the parlor at the time, and saw something nibble the golden fringe of a scatter
rug, run over my mother’s shoe buckle, lap at wall plugs (not looking for an
outlet, just foraging for metal), rummage in an open sewing kit, and browse
along a shelf of books, leaving the gilt in some of the titles illegible. I remember
thinking that in its career across the living room it seemed to resemble some
whimsical and very wicked marmalade. I’m not defending this comparison,
merely reporting a childhood association itself lightning-swift. Anyway, it
bounced off a pair of pinking shears on a table and shot out through the front
door into the yard where it ended its call by splitting up a cord of wet kindling.
That was only preliminary to a hurricane, Clara, which howled out of the
Atlantic and cut a wide swath which included our city of Decency, Connecticut.
Several ships sank, millions of dollars’ worth of property lay strewn along the
Eastern Seaboard, and the salt had to be humored. The wind and rain got almost
everything along our municipal beach except a bronze statue of a Minute Man,
which had however been battered into neurasthenia by a thousand predecessor
storms and now wore a look of Byronic fatigue. “Now we know,” my father said
unclearly. Suggesting that the current may have passed through other matter than
I have enumerated.
Those meteorological twenty-four hours have always been to me symbolically
like the Mrs. Thicknesse business which struck in later life, and not because her
name was Clara, too. Near-calamity is never completely digested; that is, we
keep thrilling ourselves with thoughts of what might have happened. The
fascination of the narrow escape. Now I can never hear of an amorist being shot
in the tabloids, or anywhere for that matter, without evoking, with a delicious
shiver, that charged name by which my own and my children’s was so nearly
riven. Just as I can never, at breakfast, put a knife to marmalade without
spreading coagulated lightning on my toast. All connections are fused.
But to get back to my background.
I think I can say my childhood was as unhappy as the next braggart’s. I was
read to sleep with the classics and spanked with obscure quarterlies. My father
was anxious to have me follow in his footsteps—if that is a good metaphor for a
man whose own imprints were largely sedentary—and he watched me closely
for echoes of himself that were more felicitous than most. He advised people to
have intellect, and to look beneath what he called “The epithelium of things,”
though he did discourage scrutiny of his own motives.
Living on a little money my grandmother had left him, he spent his time
exercising a talent which was more or less in his own mind. He wrote essays of a
philosophical nature which he sent to those periodicals off which he tried to rub
some of the bloom on me. They were all returned. This gave him a feeling of
rejection (rather than one of submission) and he developed internal troubles. He
went to a hospital for observation but they found nothing worse than what they
called a sensitive colon, which is I suppose an apt enough ailment for a man as
meticulous about punctuation as he was.
The hospital library was nothing to brighten his stay, and he rather truculently
offered to “send over something decent” as soon as he could, a promise he set
about fulfilling the minute he got home.
He drove back to the hospital two days after he was discharged, with a few
cartons of selections from his own shelves. I rode along and helped carry them
in, through the emergency ward, from which the basement room where the
ladies’ auxiliary handled books was most conveniently accessible. It was an icy
day in late winter, and I picked my way carefully behind my father with a small
boxful—he toting a rather large packet on his shoulder, like a grocery boy with
an order. The walk we traversed sloped upward across a short courtyard, and at a
turn in it my father’s foot shot out from under him and, loudly exclaiming
“Damnation!”, he went down, spilling culture in every direction and breaking a
leg.
The bone was set free by the hospital, which also gave him a room without
cost (“No it is not handsome of them to do this—it would be outrageous if they
did not!”), and soon he was propped up in the same bed again dipping into his
old copy of Plutarch, available to him from a trundled cart of books now
noticeably enriched as to contents.
What displeased him constitute a history of our time. He could not abide
typewritten correspondence or most people’s handwriting. He hated radio and
couldn’t wait for television to be perfected so he could hate that too. The very
word “psychosomatic” was enough to send him into symptoms for which no
organic cause could be found; the decline of human teeth he laid to the door of
toothpaste, “surely chief among the sweets properly arraigned as villains,” as he
asserted through dentures which clacked corroboratively. He hated everything
brewed in the vats of modernity. He hated music without melody, paintings
without pictures, and novels without plots. In other words, a rich, well-rounded
life.
The house on the outskirts of Decency we lived in was built around a silo,
which became my father’s library. Swiss cheese, except for the silo, comprised
the principal masonry, as the dank airs which continually stirred the draperies
attested; the wiring was, to put it no lower, shocking; the fireplace drew briskly
but in the wrong direction, sending out ashes which settled like a light snow on
our family and on the strangers within our gates, for in those years my parents
loved to entertain. They had lived originally in a dinette apartment in town but
had begun to drift apart and needed more room. The capacious new house did in
fact ease their relations, getting them out of one another’s pockets I suppose, and
I can still hear my mother wailing over some new kitchen crisis, “Oh, God,” and
my father answering cozily from the silo, “Were you calling me, dear?”
He believed that the art of conversation was dead. His own small talk, at any
rate, was bigger than most people’s large. “I believe it was Hegel who defined
love as the ideality of the relativity of the reality of an infinitesimal portion of
the absolute totality of the Infinite Being” he would chat at dinner.
It was my father’s example which, more than any other single factor in my
life, inspired in me my own conversational preference: the light aphorism.
I belonged in adolescence to a clique of pimpled boulevardiers who met at a
place called the Samothrace, a restaurant and ice-cream parlor run by a Greek
who let us pull tables out on the sidewalk and talk funny. The Greek’s name was
Andropoulos but he had Americanized it to Nachtgeborn, which blended in
better with the heavy German population that dominated that end of town, and
which he therefore thought better for business reasons. He was a prickly sort
who was always complaining that this country was commercial, especially when
trade was slack and he was more irritable than usual. We expatriates, be that as it
may, could be seen there every evening loitering over coffee and pastry, or
maybe toying with a little of what the Greek called fruit compost. I often wore
my topcoat with the sleeves hanging loose, so that the effect was like an
Inverness cape, when it was not like that of two broken arms. An earnest youth
on the high-school debating squad, who got in with our set by mistake one soir,
tried to interest me in politics by speaking of the alarming layoffs then occurring
in the Department of Agriculture.
“I had thought,” I said, smiling round at my disciples as I tapped a Melachrino
on the lid of its box, “that the Department of Agriculture slaughtered its surplus
employees.”
This attitude grew into a fin-de-siècle one of cultivated fatigue and bored
estheticism, marked by amusement with the colloquial mainstream. I would lie
full-length around the house and with a limp hand wave life away. My mother
took this as an indication that I had “no pep,” and urged a good tonic to fix me
up.
“No, no, no!” my Father said. “This is what they call Decadence. It’s an
attitude toward life.” He turned and looked down at the horizontal product of
their union, disposed on the sofa with a cigarette. “He’ll come to his senses.”
“Instead of coming to one’s senses,” I airily returned, “how much more
delightful to let one’s senses come to one.”
My mother, a thin, sentimental woman who often broke up funerals with her
weeping, tried to get me interested in “healthy” books like the jumbo three-
generation novels she herself couldn’t put down.
“The books Mother cannot put down,” I said, “are the ones I cannot pick up.”
“He is run-down. Now I don’t care.”
Seventeen. Slightly above medium height, slender, with clothes either too
casual or too studied—it makes no difference now. I had a pinched-in, pendulous
underlip, like the pouring lip on a pitcher, which must have conferred an air of
jocularity somewhat at odds with my intention to be “dry.” Anyhow, to sit and
say “Thomas Wolfe is a genius without talent” was a lot less trouble than was