Bullet Park Read online

  “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with him,” the doctor said when he came down. “I’ve taken a specimen and some blood and I’ll have the laboratory check these. If he gets up tomorrow I’ll give him a cardiogram but I’m pretty sure there’s nothing wrong. As a matter of fact I haven’t seen as perfect a specimen in a long time. Of course he’s a young man but he’s certainly enjoying all the benefits of his time of life. This doesn’t get him out of bed but it may be a passing depression. If he doesn’t get out of bed tomorrow I’ll give you some pills that ought to do the trick.” He wrote a prescription and smiled at Nellie. Our relationships with healers are swift, intimate and in some ways tender, and for a moment Nellie loved the doctor. He asked her to call him in the morning at around eleven and she did.

  “He wouldn’t get up again,” Nellie said. “He’s been in bed six days now. I gave him one of the pills in a glass of orange juice at about ten. A little later I heard him get up and take a shower and then he came down into the kitchen. He was dressed but I saw right away that something was wrong. He was staggering a little and laughing and the pupils of his eyes were like pinpoints. I asked if he wanted some breakfast and he said he wanted six fried eggs and six slices of toast and a quart of milk. He said he’d never been so hungry in his life. He was very restless. He wandered around the kitchen laughing and once he bumped into a table like a drunken man. After he’d eaten all his breakfast he said: ‘I feel strong. I’ve never felt so strong in my life. I’d better get out of the house before I tear it down.’ That’s what he said. Then he went out of the kitchen door and started running up the path towards Courtland. It’s an old bridle path that cuts through the woods there for about six miles. He used to run it when he was on the track team. Well, I couldn’t keep up with him of course so I drove around to Route 64 where the path comes out. I waited there for about an hour, I guess, and then he came running along the path. He seemed to have sweated out the drug because he didn’t seem drunk any more but he seemed to have lost his memory. He couldn’t remember eating breakfast and he didn’t seem very clear in his mind about how he’d gotten out to Route 64. I drove him home. He went to sleep in the car. Then he took another shower and went back to bed.”

  “Well I guess we won’t try that again,” Dr. Mullin said. “I’ve heard of bad side effects from that drug but I thought we’d take a chance. I don’t really know what to tell you Mrs. Nailles unless you want to try psychotherapy. I work with Dr. Bronson who has an office in the village if you want to call him.”

  The psychiatrist was even more reluctant than the general practitioner to leave his office, but when Nellie made the situation clear he finally agreed to come. Nellie was standing at the window when he drove up at three. His car was a bright-blue sports convertible with a peculiarly long hood, determined, it seemed, to give an impression of bestiality and expensiveness. It confused Nellie that a man whose profession was to cure melancholy and sorrow should have such a worldly car, but when the doctor climbed out of his racer he seemed unworldly. He seemed a little browbeaten and indecisive. He closed the door, wrung his hands and examined the car from end to end with a deeply worried and suspicious frown. Then he climbed the stairs and rang the bell.

  He carried no bag, of course—no identification of any sort. He had, she thought, some of the occupational mannerisms of a dentist. His manner was weary and kindly and he wrung his hands. While she described what had happened he circled the living-room floor as if a dentist chair stood in the middle of the rug. He was a little stooped as if he were accustomed to spending his time in the company of prone patients and his voice had a sad and a healing tone. Nellie led him upstairs to Tony’s bedroom and closed the door. Fifty minutes later he was back in the living room.

  “I’m afraid he’s quite sick, Mrs. Nailles, and the worst of it is that he’s uncooperative. I think you may have to send him to a hospital.”

  “What hospital?”

  “Well there’s a sanatorium called Stonehenge in the next town where I often send patients. He might respond to electric shock.”

  “Oh, no,” Nellie said. She began to cry.

  “Electric shock isn’t fatal, Mrs. Nailles. After the first treatment he won’t know what’s happening. The treatment does not build up anxiety.”

  “Oh, no,” Nellie said. “Please.”

  “Well he’s deeply troubled, Mrs. Nailles. It would take months of intense therapy, with his cooperation, to begin to understand what’s gone wrong. Men of his generation, coming from environments of this sort, very often present us with problems that resist analysis. I suppose you give the boy everything he wants?”

  “Within reason,” Nellie said. “He doesn’t have a car.”

  “I see that he has a tape recorder, a record player, a closet full of expensive clothes.”

  “Yes.”

  “There is a tendency in your income group to substitute possessions for moral and spiritual norms. A strict sense of good and evil, even if it is mistaken, is better than none.”

  “Eliot goes to church nearly every Sunday,” Nellie said.

  How poor and transparent the fact seemed now that she had stated it. She knew the lassitude of Eliot’s prayers, the indifference of his devotions, and that it was habit, superstition and sentimentality that got him up for Holy Communion. “We don’t tell lies,” she went on. “I think Tony’s never told a lie.” The doctor gave her an offensively thin smile. “We don’t read one another’s mail. We don’t cheat. We don’t gossip. We pay our bills. Eliot loves me. We drink before dinner. I smoke a good deal …”

  Was that all? It seemed like a poor show but what else was expected of her? Prophets with beards, fiery horsemen, thunder and lightning, holy commandments inscribed on tablets in ancient languages? “We are honest and decent people,” she said angrily, “and I’m not going to be made to feel guilty about it.”

  “I don’t intend to make you feel guilty, Mrs. Nailles. There is nothing reprehensible about honesty and decency, but the fact is that your son is very sick.”

  The telephone rang and when Nellie answered it someone asked to speak with the doctor. “I will not sell that property for less than fifty thousand dollars,” the doctor said. “If you’re looking for a cheaper place I have a nice modern ranch on Chestnut Street. I know the property is assessed at thirty thousand but that assessment was made eight years ago. Fifty thousand dollars is my final price. Excuse me,” he said to Nellie.

  “Certainly,” Nellie said, but the conversation had nettled her. Did this healer sell real estate on the side or was the healing of madness his sideline?

  “Will you come again?” Nellie asked.

  “Not unless he asks for me,” the doctor said. “It would simply be a waste of your money and my time.”

  When the doctor had gone Nellie climbed the stairs and asked Tony how he felt.

  “About the same,” he said. “I still feel terribly sad. I feel as if the house were made of cards. When I was a little kid and sick you used to make me card houses and I’d blow them over. This is a nice house and I like it but I feel as if it were made of cards.”

  The third to come was a specialist on somnambulatory phenomena. He came by train and taxi and looked to Nellie like a mechanic. He carried a suitcase and a larger case filled with instruments. When she asked if Tony might be harmed he assured her that he had nothing but gentle electrodes that recorded body temperatures. She showed him up to the guest room and was about to introduce him to Tony when he said: “I think I’ll take a little nap. You see, I’ll be up most of the night.”

  “Is there anything I can get you,” Nellie asked.

  “Oh no thank you. I’ll just lie down.” He closed the door.

  When he came down at five Nellie offered him a drink. “Not me,” he said, “no thanks. I’m AA. I’ve been off it for a year and a half now. Oh, you should have seen me. I weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, most of it gin. The first group I joined was in the Village. That wasn’t much help. I mea
n they were all freaks. Then I switched to a group in the East Sixties and believe me, Mrs. Nailles, there’s not a clinker in that crowd. All important businessmen. Lawyers. Doctors. We get our kicks out of talking about withdrawal symptoms. What it feels like to hit bottom. It’s like talking about a trip to hell. We’ve all been there and we talk just like travelers talk about places where they’ve been. It’s a great crowd. Then when the meeting’s over we say a prayer. I suppose,” he said, “that ministers and priests think about God all the time. I suppose they think about God when they wake up and I suppose everything they see during the day reminds them about God and of course they say their prayers before they go to sleep. It was just like that with me except that I didn’t think about God; I thought about the hootch. I thought about hootch the first thing in the morning, I thought about hootch all day long and I always went to bed with a skinful. Hootch was just like God to me, I mean it was everywhere the way God is supposed to be. The clouds reminded me of hootch, the rain reminded me of hootch, the stars reminded me of hootch. I used to dream about girls before I got on the hootch but after that I just used to dream about hootch. I mean dreams are supposed to come from some very deep part of your mind like sex but with me it was hootch. I’d dream that I had a glass in one hand and a bottle in the other. Then I’d dream that I poured two or three inches into the glass. Then I’d drink it and dream about that wonderful feeling I used to get as if I were beginning a new life. I used to dream about bourbon and scotch and gin and vodka. I never dreamed about rum. I never liked rum. Just sitting there drinking and watching comics on TV I’d feel as if I was sliding down a greased pole, just sliding and sliding so nice and easy. Then in the morning I’d wake up with the shakes and the blues and start thinking about hootch again.”

  The specialist tried to explain his profession at dinner but his vocabulary was so highly technical that neither Nellie nor Eliot was very clear about what to expect. At eight o’clock he carried his case of instruments upstairs and said: “Time to get to work.” He closed the door. When he came down for breakfast his eyes were red and he seemed to have been up all night. Nailles drove him to the station and he mailed them his findings at the end of the week. The report read: “The patient suspended consciousness at 9:12 with a corresponding drop in body temperature. He slept in the Fanchon position—that is on his abdomen with his right knee bent. At 10:00 he had a two-minute dream sequence that raised his body temperature and generally relaxed his cardiovascular tensions. At 10:03 he changed to the nimbus position, that is he crooked his left leg. His next dream sequence was at 1:15 and lasted three minutes. This caused him to have an erection which woke him briefly but he then shifted to the prenatal position and fell asleep again. His body temperature remained constant. At 3:10 he returned to the Fanchon position and began to snore. The snoring was both oral and nasal and continued for eight and one half minutes….” The report was five typewritten pages and attached to it was a bill for five hundred dollars.

  IV

  Nailles thought of pain and suffering as a principality, lying somewhere beyond the legitimate borders of western Europe. The government would be feudal and the country mountainous but it would never lie on his itinerary and would be unknown to his travel agent. Now and then he received postcards from this distant place. There would be a view of the statue of Aesculapius in the public gardens with some snowy mountains in the distance and on the back of the card this message: “Edna is under sedation most of the time and has about three weeks to live but she would like a letter from you.” He wrote entertaining letters to the dying and mailed them off to that remote and quaint capital where the figures on the Rathaus Glockenspiel were crippled, where the statues in the park were the grotesques pain can extort from the imagination, where the palace had been converted into a hospital and rivers of blood foamed under the arched bridges. He was not meant to travel here and he was surprised and frightened to wake from a dream in which he had seen, out of a train window, that terrifying range of mountains.

  When Tony had been in bed for twelve days Nailles’s inexperience with grief was ended. He would not have gone so far as to say that fortune was dealt out like the peanuts at the end of a child’s birthday party, but he felt vaguely that one had one’s share of brute pleasure, hard work, money and love and that the rank inequities that he saw everywhere were mysteries that did not concern him. Lucky Nailles! Now his son lay close to death. This did not come like a new fact in his life. It was to be his life and he was to learn the obsessiveness of suffering. When he woke in the morning his first thought was that he might hear Tony’s step on the stairs. Whatever occupied him—drink, play, work or money—was merely a distraction from the consuming image of his lost son, gripping a pillow. Having observed the obsessiveness of pain he went on to observe the gross jealousy of a man who feels that his luck has run out. Why, of all the young men in Bullet Park, should Tony have been singled out to suffer a mysterious and incurable disease? It was not a question that he asked himself but a question forced onto him pitilessly by the world as it appeared to him from the first thing in the morning until dark. Cheerful and thoughtless laughter on the station platform merely made Nailles wonder angrily and bitterly why the sons of his friends were free to walk and run in the light while his son lay imprisoned. Lunching with friends who spoke inevitably about the successes of their sons would provoke in him such sadness and misgiving that he would seem physically alienated from the company. Seeing a young stranger run down the street he wanted to call after him: “Stop, stop, stop, stop. Tony was once as strong and swift as you.” Having been a patriot about his way of life he found himself involved in subversion, espionage and vengefulness.

  “Do you know anyone named Hammer,” Nellie asked one evening. Nailles explained that he had met the Hammers in church. “Well she called this afternoon,” Nellie said, “and asked us to dinner. I don’t approve of asking strangers to dinner but perhaps they come from some part of the world where this goes on.”

  “It does seem strange, doesn’t it,” Nailles said. “We just said hello on the porch. Perhaps they’re lonely …” He was not thinking of the Hammers’ probable aloneness but of his own. It was the image of Tony in bed that broke down his rigid sense of social fitness. Tony was sick, Nailles was sad, there was more suffering in life than he had been led to believe and mightn’t it be generous to overlook Mrs. Hammer’s importunity and accept her invitation. “If we’re not doing anything else why don’t we go,” he said. “It would be neighborly and we can leave early.” A few nights later then they drove up to Powder Hill. It was a starry night—Venus blazed like a light bulb, and going up the walk to the house Nailles bent and kissed his wife. Hammer let them in and introduced them to his wife and the other guests. Marietta Hammer seemed absentminded, unenthusiastic or perhaps drunk. One of Nailles’s great liabilities was an inability to judge people on their appearance. He thought all men and women honest, reliable, clean and happy and he was often surprised and disappointed. He could see at once that the optimistic estimate of the Hammers that he had made in church might have to be overhauled. There were three other couples—the Taylors, the Phillipses and the Hazzards. There seemed to be no maid. Hammer mixed the drinks in the pantry and Marietta excused herself and went into the kitchen.

  “Have you known the Hammers for long,” Eliot asked the others.

  “I don’t really know them at all,” Mr. Taylor said. “I have the Ford agency in the village and when he came in to buy a car he asked me for dinner. I figure they’ll be a two-car family—everybody on Powder Hill is—so I’m really here on business.”

  “I sold them their deep freeze,” said Mr. Phillips.

  “I sold them the house,” said Mr. Hazzard.

  “Isn’t it a lovely house,” said Mrs. Hazzard. “The Heathcups lived here until he passed away.”

  “He was such a nice fellow,” said Mr. Hazzard. “I’ve never understood why he did it.”

  “Let’s see,” Hammer said, comin
g in from the pantry. “Bourbon for you. Scotch and water …”

  “What business are you in, Mr. Hammer,” asked Mr. Hazzard.

  “I’m president of Paul Hammer Associates,” Hammer said. “We do just about everything.”

  Marietta Hammer laughed. Her laughter was meant to discountenance her husband. It was a musical laugh-half an octave—but it was, Eliot thought, the kind of laughter one hears in women’s clubs, at bridge parties and in those restaurants that feature rich desserts. It had no power of sexual arousal as laughter often does. Her blond hair, her earrings and her dress were all long and she had a definite beauty—the kind of beauty you might see on a magazine cover, but it would be an old cover in a dentist’s anteroom, a little worn and dating from the year before last. She went into the pantry and helped herself to more whiskey. Taylor did not conceal the fact that he was there on business and during cocktails he spoke of the interesting discounts he could offer Hammer when the time came to buy his second car. The dinner, as things went in Bullet Park, wasn’t much. There was some kind of goulash or stew and Marietta picked at it with such obvious distaste that Eliot wondered if Hammer hadn’t cooked the meal. “Well I don’t suppose you’ve been in Bullet Park long enough to form any judgments but we do hope you like the place. I’ve always found it a very nice community.”