as if we could only summon that sweetness at the crucial end.”
“He is a pathetic child,” A interjected. “But we’re pulling for him, while lamenting the lack he suffered in extremis. Can I say that?”
“You can say it, but it’s a distancing I was really trying to eliminate.”
“What saves us you cannot eliminate.”
“Understood, but not accepted,” C said. “Understood. I’ll rework his death.”
-§-
Later in Meguro, at the Cat Hospital, C said to Madame Vincouvier, “They rejected Lewis’s death utterly. Were unmoved by it. And now I’ll have to rework it entirely. So much energy for such disappointment.”
“You poor boy,” she answered. “You failed, didn’t you? And not for trying hard. Indeed, you tried very, very hard, but your energy was unfocused, almost useless. Useless. You need discipline, don’t you, my disappointed boy. Shall I discipline you?”
“Yes, please.”
“With no easing off?”
“Yes, please, no easing off this time.”
“No safety phrase stopping everything?”
“No safety phrase. Just the punishment I deserve.”
“But only if you pass on your stories of Lewis’s background, as well as your half-plays.”
“They have them already, but already isn’t all read.”
“For a lame pun, punishment is all red.” And Mne Vincouvier ran her tongue slowly across her upper lip.
-§-
The Riches of This World, Part A
Lewis’s Back Stories in 2.2. Chapters
(Chapter One: The Toughest Bar in Worcester)
In the last, most profitable act of his Brahmin life Walter Jelliffe convinced his son, Waldo, to marry Suzan Corcoran, the slightly unhinged daughter of Worcester’s richest family. That union brought Waldo the one enterprise he could fathom and embrace: publisher of Worcester’s “alternative” weekly newspaper, The New Worcester Spy. Thus did Mayflower power fuse with the apparently limitless acquisitions flowing from Corcoran Abrasives. The linkage generated a certain amount of friction, and the titular Walter had been characteristically blunt with his son: “Anyone who marries for money earns every penny of it, but let’s face it, there’s sweat-earnings versus suck-up earnings. And from what I’ve seen of you, Waldo, the latter seems more natural, more in line with your tastes.” There was a wondrous gentleness in the squeeze the old man applied to his son’s shoulder and mind.
“I’ll work at it, Daddy,” Waldo replied. And he did. In the early years of the marriage Waldo spent hours on the fifth floor of Worcester Memorial Hospital’s psych ward, listening to Suzan explain how she had made him rope sandals, and beaded leather wallets. He kept her on her lithium and constantly reassured her that given her situation she could have married almost anyone in Worcester–that he was in fact only the best of a long line of suitors. He worked hard to get her admitted to his luncheon club, The Worcester Club. It was largely through his efforts that women were eventually permitted even in the smoking rooms.
Waldo also worked hard at his publisher position–though he easily understood–as did all Jelliffes, that real work must be accomplished by others; his position and ownership was –and the phrase was his proudest editorial achievement–“residually iconic”. He symbolized the sanctification of achievement by the “old line” in town. It was Walter Jelliffe himself who reiterated, after sufficient sherry, what he called John Keats’ finest declaration: “A gentleman is one who is not wholly preoccupied with getting on.” So Waldo, following Walter’s lead, left actual actions, decisions, rewrites–in short, “getting-on” to others. He enjoyed being the final voice, never invoked, the absolute ruler whose only task was to meet the public and every now and then come up with a “brilliant feature proposal.” The job left him gobs of time for slow luncheons at the club, side trips to Bermuda, early dinners with Suzan, month-long stays with her at various installations of sound mind and body. Waldo immensely enjoyed the latitude he had with The Spy’s staff. He was at once the daffy uncle on the premises and the Zeus of certain death if you didn’t play along. He was at The Spy, as in life itself, to be indulged. Indulgence came certainly with the Jelliffe name enforced with Corcoran monetary muscle.
Now in his fiftieth year Waldo Jelliffe had not given up the khakis of his swell collegiate life, nor the thin sweaters or cashmere blazers. He wore, as if in anticipation of his retirement years, and in recollection of his golden youth, New Balance running shoes or Timberland high tops in reverence for his New England roots even if, he noted at the club bar one night, the labor was not exactly Brahmin on Batam Island (where the shoes were made) perhaps a little swarthy even, and certainly dirt cheap. He was proud of his trip to Batam Island off the Malaysian coast, prouder still of his one single byline feature: “The Worcester/Batam Connection” in which he lovingly recorded the barracks lives of those exploited Southeast Asian laborers who sent everything they earned back home to China, India, the Philippines or wherever. Waldo had liked the spicy food and hammering Malaysian sun; he admired the way things ran so promptly and cleanly in Singapore. Worcester could learn a lot from ASEAN his one article maintained. And Kuala Lumpur was the one city on the planet he could emigrate to, he told the younger staffers and interns at The Spy, if circumstances should ever require him to leave Worcester. It interested him sometimes to wonder what those circumstances might be. Could he be a secret serial killer, filleting young women with one of Chef Tony’s lifetime knives? He saw the knives advertised often enough on T.V., and once he had called the 800 number to inquire which of the knives would be best for gutting girls. “Be serious,” the operator replied. “You want one set or two?” Most of all he liked the strange liberation he felt on Batam. It was almost as if he had lost weight or was wearing weirdly bouncing sneakers launching him farther up into the soft, mucid air. Every step seemed to radiate “Yes!” in his confident striding. There was always a troubling collapse in the return flight, as if the seat, the cramped air, the sour food was pressing down on his buoyancy, returning him to a heritage of empty strangulation. “I swear to God I’m taking you back with me, LP, (his nickname for the Vietnamese in charge of the workers barracks) just to feel alive again.”
Lately he spent more and more time with the younger staffers and interns since they only imperfectly understood his irrelevance. He was for them, the owner, the publisher, the ultimate authority, who merely husbanded his power by never displaying it. They did not understand what lineage could and could not do. And they responded enthusiastically to his rare proposals. And a few of them grasped that it was through Waldo that their own ideas could percolate in The Spy’s system.
Thus it was not exactly clear who thought the feature up but Waldo certainly embraced the great pub crawl search for “The Toughest Bar in Worcester.” And he began the deliberations with what he knew was the central point: “Look, you have to have a standard, a comparison point on toughness. You’ve got to have a clear idea of what you mean by ‘toughest’. What is the essence of ‘toughness’ and where do you find it? If you can point to one bar as ‘tough’, then you can say X or Y exceeds that standard by such and such a factor and therefore it is not yet, ‘The toughest Bar in Worcester.’ And surprise of surprises, I can give us the standard: the old Valhalla Bar on Summer Street.”
“It’s gone–they built the new police station on the site,” someone answered.
“I
