AFTER TWO MARTINIS AND an owly-eyed sip at a third, the girl had passed abruptly into semi-coma. Her disablement came without warning; there was no intervening period of distress or giddiness or quietude. One moment she’d been sitting there, chattering as before, pausing only to poke food into her mouth or taste the gin, and the next she had simply ceased to function. She still sat there nearly upright, plump hands resting on the edge of the dinner tray, green-painted eyelids in a three-quarters droop, her mouth slightly parted. It was as if a beautifully turned out machine had developed a sudden, chronic imperfection. Like the pressurizing system on the attack bomber, Stanley thought. He moved his hand in front of the girl’s face; he touched her cool forehead; he leaned close and spoke into her ear — “Hey, honey, how’s it feel?” — but there was no response. He sat back for a moment and cleaned his plate of food. He leaned forward again and speared the remaining bits of roast beef and potato from the girl’s plate. He smoked a cigarette. Then he signaled to the steward to retrieve the trays and he began the laborious business of lifting and pulling on the girl until she was stretched out the length of the reclining chair. He slipped off her new pumps and propped her feet on an overnight case. Then he took another seat across the aisle.
Story of my life, he thought. The goddam past is prologue, and I continue to comfort my drunks … Should have left them all to soil themselves!
He opened a small notebook and began to mark source material for a speech Neil was scheduled to deliver on the following day. He hadn’t any idea of the subject matter; all he could manage at this point in the writing — in the composing, rather — was the assembly of half-thoughts and once-rejected phrases. But he left off the note-taking after a minute or so and again addressed himself on the problem of tending drunks — all his favorite people, fore and aft, front and back, down through the years. Perhaps he could go into the business! He’d had, God knows, enough practice. There ought to be a demand for an attractive young man of good health and pleasant disposition with a lifelong experience at … What? They hadn’t been drunks exactly; not alcoholics in any event. His mother and father hadn’t drunk themselves to death; his uncle at the farm was no lush, and neither for that matter were Neil and his younger brother John Tom Christiansen. It was just that he seemed always to be putting a friend or relative away for the evening. People were always getting snockered in his presence, and he was invariably somehow sober enough to help.
It suddenly came to him that all were dead except Neil. All but Neil: Mother, Father, Uncle, and fat John Tom. Strange … And thoughts of death had never much concerned him. No matter. None of them had choked to death on a whiskey bottle, and there were others still live and kicking who were periodically liquored up in Stanley’s presence to the point of helplessness … He remembered Neil at college, back from the war with his drawerful of medals and the enormous stack of books stolen from Rec Room libraries. Neil had been tight nearly every evening (and many of the days) during that first semester. And John Tom half boozed during most of the next. Still … it had been a marvelously rewarding year. There was a beach they’d driven to on weekends: he remembered it was compared at the time with Cannes and Nice and Marseilles — they were near the same latitudes, weren’t they? There was a corn products factory nearby, constantly belching smoke and disgorging workmen. There was a naval gunnery range a mile away, and clearly in sight from the yacht harbor was a cluster of offshore oil rigs. Even the season had been a little absurd, though it never seemed really to matter. It was a year after the war when the first new cars had two-by-fours for bumpers and the women wore shoulder pads and rather resembled Joan Crawford. He was only seventeen at the time and there was no way of ever remembering all those boozy episodes during which he’d undressed Neil and John Tom and directed them to bed. It was experience that counted in handling drunks, not so much one’s age … He remembered helping his mother and father, first one to the bathroom and then the other, on the evening after Roosevelt’s funeral. How they’d mourned! White horses and helmeted soldiers and blue-uniformed Navy women, the slow procession down Constitution Avenue. God! I mourn’d and yet shall mourn … I give you my sprig of lilac … They’d watched the procession earlier and then gone back to the Willard, in a steamy little room, where his mother had read the Whitman to him until evening. Whitman’s funeral song for Lincoln. All the family had been a little batty about politics. He could remember when he was ten falling asleep in Carole Lombard’s lap, but the experience hadn’t meant half so much to him as shaking hands with Jim Farley or Hopkins or Louis Howe or seeing Bilbo in his last days. Or Forrestal or Frank Knox or Wallace or Mister Cordell Hull. His parents had talked of them endlessly, the way some families gossiped about the neighbors. And how his father would have ragged him today! Writing speeches for southern politicians! Well it was the old man’s fault; it had been his decision to send his son down south to the farm after the mother’s death. And down south the son had remained. He really must have been insufferable when he descended on the farm that first year; a preposterously chic and worldly New York City prepschooler. At the farm they’d just called him tacky. The farm was his uncle’s — how many times had he put him to bed, half out of his mind on Jack Daniel? — it had been his father’s homeplace. And it was to the farm that he had been exiled soon after his mother died and his father realized the son wasn’t going to be chic and worldly about the new lady friends visiting the apartment.
Who had helped the old man to bed, breathing hard, complaining of bad whiskey, after Stanley had gone off to the farm? He supposed they all somehow survived without him. And maybe the old man had never really needed help, not until toward the end. He’d been something of a public figure (an anachronism now, if he were alive: the sort glibly dismissed in nostalgic accounts of an era as just another left-wing journalist), but there was still a whiff of excitement and trench coat intrigue surrounding him when he’d sent his son to the farm. He had a syndicated column and a news commentary on the radio — he’d even grown a goddam beard. It was all in that grand manner that passed out of fashion toward the end of the war … Passing out of fashion was what probably killed the old man …
Dazzling sunlight shone through the windows of the plane, and Stanley rubbed his eyes, wishing now that he had succeeded in drinking himself to sleep during the flight south. He looked over at the girl across from him; the girl groaned softly as she slept: her pumps pulled off, her forehead gleaming, the hard line of her girdle visible against the skirt she’d bought to wear home Easter. He was reminded of a cousin on the farm, a lovely dark-haired girl with whom he had played endless kissing games during the first year. He remembered her distinctly … up to her beautiful arms in the backend of a troubled cow, praying over a new calf. O God please God, she kept saying, make it live God please. The sale of that bull calf had financed her first semester at college …