In the Land of Dreamy Dreams Read online

  In the Land of Dreamy Dreams

  Ellen Gilchrist

  Copyright © 1981 by Ellen Gilchrist

  Originally published in print form 1981

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from Don Congdon Associates, Inc.; the agency can be reached at [email protected].

  Cover design by Barbara Aronica Buck

  I am grateful to the editors of the following journals, in whose pages some of the stories in this volume originally appeared: Prairie Schooner for “The President of the Louisiana Live Oak Society” and “Revenge,” copyright © by the University of Nebraska Press; New Orleans Review for “Traveler” and “The Famous Poll at Jody's Bar”; and Intro 9 for “Rich.”

  This book was completed during a period of time when I was a Fellow of The National Endowment for the Arts. I thank them for their faith and support.

  ~Ellen Gilchrist

  For Rosalie and Freddy

  who kept watch

  and for Bill

  who put me up to it

  Contents

  There’s a Garden of Eden

  Rich

  The President of the Louisiana Live Oak Society

  There’s a Garden of Eden

  The Famous Poll at Jody’s Bar

  In the Land of Dreamy Dreams

  Things Like the Truth

  Suicides

  1957, a Romance

  Generous Pieces

  Indignities

  Perils of the Nile

  Revenge

  1944

  Perils of the Nile

  Traveler

  Summer, an Elegy

  There’s a Garden of Eden

  Rich

  Tom and Letty Wilson were rich in everything. They were rich in friends because Tom was a vice-president of the Whitney Bank of New Orleans and liked doing business with his friends, and because Letty was vice-president of the Junior League of New Orleans and had her picture in Town and Country every year at the Symphony Ball.

  The Wilsons were rich in knowing exactly who they were because every year from Epiphany to Fat Tuesday they flew the beautiful green and gold and purple flag outside their house that meant that Letty had been queen of the Mardi Gras the year she was a debutante. Not that Letty was foolish enough to take the flag seriously.

  Sometimes she was even embarrassed to call the yardman and ask him to come over and bring his high ladder.

  “Preacher, can you come around on Tuesday and put up my flag?” she would ask.

  “You know I can,” the giant black man would answer. “I been saving time to put up your flag. I won’t forget what a beautiful queen you made that year.”

  “Oh, hush, Preacher. I was a skinny little scared girl. It’s a wonder I didn’t fall off the balcony I was so scared. I’ll see you on Monday.” And Letty would think to herself what a big phony Preacher was and wonder when he was going to try to borrow some more money from them.

  Tom Wilson considered himself a natural as a banker because he loved to gamble and wheel and deal. From the time he was a boy in a small Baptist town in Tennessee he had loved to play cards and match nickels and lay bets.

  In high school he read The Nashville Banner avidly and kept an eye out for useful situations such as the lingering and suspenseful illnesses of Pope Pius.

  “Let’s get up a pool on the day the Pope will die,” he would say to the football team, “I’ll hold the bank.” And because the Pope took a very long time to die with many close calls there were times when Tom was the richest left tackle in Franklin, Tennessee.

  Tom had a favorite saying about money. He had read it in the Reader’s Digest and attributed it to Andrew Carnegie. “Money,” Tom would say, “is what you keep score with. Andrew Carnegie.”

  Another way Tom made money in high school was performing as an amateur magician at local birthday parties and civic events. He could pull a silver dollar or a Lucky Strike cigarette from an astonished six-year-old’s ear or from his own left palm extract a seemingly endless stream of multicolored silk chiffon or cause an ordinary piece of clothesline to behave like an Indian cobra.

  He got interested in magic during a convalescence from German measles in the sixth grade. He sent off for books of magic tricks and practiced for hours before his bedroom mirror, his quick clever smile flashing and his long fingers curling and uncurling from the sleeves of a black dinner jacket his mother had bought at a church bazaar and remade to fit him.

  Tom’s personality was too flamboyant for the conservative Whitney Bank, but he was cheerful and cooperative and when he made a mistake he had the ability to turn it into an anecdote.

  “Hey, Fred,” he would call to one of his bosses. “Come have lunch on me and I’ll tell you a good one.”

  They would walk down St. Charles Avenue to where it crosses Canal and turns into Royal Street as it enters the French Quarter. They would walk into the crowded, humid excitement of the quarter, admiring the girls and watching the Yankee tourists sweat in their absurd spun-glass leisure suits, and turn into the side door of Antoine’s or breeze past the maitre d’ at Galatoire’s or Brennan’s.

  When a red-faced waiter in funereal black had seated them at a choice table, Tom would loosen his Brooks Brothers’ tie, turn his handsome brown eyes on his guest, and begin.

  “That bunch of promoters from Dallas talked me into backing an idea to videotape all the historic sights in the quarter and rent the tapes to hotels to show on closed-circuit television. Goddamnit, Fred, I could just see those fucking tourists sitting around their hotel rooms on rainy days ordering from room service and taking in the Cabildo and the Presbytere on T.V.” Tom laughed delightedly and waved his glass of vermouth at an elegantly dressed couple walking by the table.

  “Well, they’re barely breaking even on that one, and now they want to buy up a lot of soft porn movies and sell them to motels in Jefferson Parish. What do you think? Can we stay with them for a few more months?”

  Then the waiter would bring them cold oysters on the half shell and steaming pompano en papillote and a wine steward would serve them a fine Meursault or a Piesporter, and Tom would listen to whatever advice he was given as though it were the most intelligent thing he had ever heard in his life.

  Of course he would be thinking, “You stupid, impotent son of a bitch. You scrawny little frog bastard, I’ll buy and sell you before it’s over. I’ve got more brains in my balls than the whole snotty bunch of you.”

  “Tom, you always throw me off my diet,” his friend would say, “damned if you don’t.”

  “I told Letty the other day,” Tom replied, “that she could just go right ahead and spend her life worrying about being buried in her wedding dress, but I didn’t hustle my way to New Orleans all the way from north Tennessee to eat salads and melba toast. Pass me the French bread.”

  Letty fell in love with Tom the first time she laid eyes on him. He came to Tulane on a football scholarship and charmed his way into a fraternity of wealthy New Orleans boys famed for its drunkenness and its wild practical jokes. It was the same old story. Even the second, third, and fourth generation blue bloods of New Orleans need an infusion of new genes now and then.

  The afternoon after Tom was initiated he arrived at the fraternity house with two Negro painters and sat in the low-hanging branches of a live oak tree overlooking Henry Clay Avenue directing them in painting an official-looking yellow-and-white-striped pattern on the street in front of the property. “D-R-U-N-K,” he yelled to his painters, holding on to the enormous limb with one hand and pushing his black hair out of his eyes with the other. “Paint it t
o say D-R-U-N-K Z-O-N-E.”

  Letty stood near the tree with a group of friends watching him. He was wearing a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows, and a freshman beanie several sizes too small was perched on his head like a tipsy sparrow.

  “I’m wearing this goddamn beanie forever,” Tom yelled. “I’m wearing this beanie until someone brings me a beer,” and Letty took the one she was holding and walked over to the tree and handed it to him.

  One day a few weeks later, he commandeered a Bunny Bread truck while it was parked outside the fraternity house making a delivery. He picked up two friends and drove the truck madly around the Irish Channel, throwing fresh loaves of white and whole-wheat and rye bread to the astonished housewives.

  “Steal from the rich, give to the poor,” Tom yelled, and his companions gave up trying to reason with him and helped him yell.

  “Free bread, free cake,” they yelled, handing out powdered doughnuts and sweet rolls to a gang of kids playing baseball on a weed-covered vacant lot.

  They stopped off at Darby’s, an Irish bar where Tom made bets on races and football games, and took on some beer and left off some cinnamon rolls.

  “Tom, you better go turn that truck in before they catch you,” Darby advised, and Tom’s friends agreed, so they drove the truck to the second-precinct police headquarters and turned themselves in. Tom used up half a year’s allowance paying the damages, but it made his reputation.

  In Tom’s last year at Tulane a freshman drowned during a hazing accident at the Southern Yacht Club, and the event frightened Tom. He had never liked the boy and had suspected him of being involved with the queers and nigger lovers who hung around the philosophy department and the school newspaper. The boy had gone to prep school in the East and brought weird-looking girls to rush parties. Tom had resisted the temptation to blackball him as he was well connected in uptown society.

  After the accident, Tom spent less time at the fraternity house and more time with Letty, whose plain sweet looks and expensive clothes excited him.

  “I can’t go in the house without thinking about it,” he said to Letty. “All we were doing was making them swim from pier to pier carrying martinis. I did it fifteen times the year I pledged.”

  “He should have told someone he couldn’t swim very well,” Letty answered. “It was an accident. Everyone knows it was an accident. It wasn’t your fault.” And Letty cuddled up close to him on the couch, breathing as softly as a cat.

  Tom had long serious talks with Letty’s mild, alcoholic father, who held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and in the spring of the year Tom and Letty were married in the Cathedral of Saint Paul with twelve bridesmaids, four flower girls, and seven hundred guests. It was pronounced a marriage made in heaven, and Letty’s mother ordered masses said in Rome for their happiness.

  They flew to New York on the way to Bermuda and spent their wedding night at the Sherry Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue. At least half a dozen of Letty’s friends had lost their virginity at the same address, but the trip didn’t seem prosaic to Letty.

  She stayed in the bathroom a long time gazing at her plain face in the oval mirror and tugging at the white lace night-gown from the Lylian Shop, arranging it now to cover, now to reveal her small breasts. She crossed herself in the mirror, suddenly giggled, then walked out into the blue and gold bedroom as though she had been going to bed with men every night of her life. She had been up until three the night before reading a book on sexual intercourse. She offered her small unpainted mouth to Tom. Her pale hair smelled of Shalimar and carnations and candles. Now she was safe. Now life would begin.

  “Oh, I love you, I love, I love, I love you,” she whispered over and over. Tom’s hands touching her seemed a strange and exciting passage that would carry her simple dreamy existence to a reality she had never encountered. She had never dreamed anyone so interesting would marry her.

  Letty’s enthusiasm and her frail body excited him, and he made love to her several times before he asked her to remove her gown.

  The next day they breakfasted late and walked for a while along the avenue. In the afternoon Tom explained to his wife what her clitoris was and showed her some of the interesting things it was capable of generating, and before the day was out Letty became the first girl in her crowd to break the laws of God and the Napoleonic Code by indulging in oral intercourse.

  Fourteen years went by and the Wilsons’ luck held. Fourteen years is a long time to stay lucky even for rich people who don’t cause trouble for anyone.

  Of course, even among the rich there are endless challenges, unyielding limits, rivalry, envy, quirks of fortune. Letty’s father grew increasingly incompetent and sold his seat on the exchange, and Letty’s irresponsible brothers went to work throwing away the money in Las Vegas and L.A. and Zurich and Johannesburg and Paris and anywhere they could think of to fly to with their interminable strings of mistresses.

  Tom envied them their careless, thoughtless lives and he was annoyed that they controlled their own money while Letty’s was tied up in some mysterious trust, but he kept his thoughts to himself as he did his obsessive irritation over his growing obesity.

  “Looks like you’re putting on a little weight there,” a friend would observe.

  “Good, good,” Tom would say, “makes me look like a man. I got a wife to look at if I want to see someone who’s skinny.”

  He stayed busy gambling and hunting and fishing and being the life of the party at the endless round of dinners and cocktail parties and benefits and Mardi Gras functions that consume the lives of the Roman Catholic hierarchy that dominates the life of the city that care forgot.

  Letty was preoccupied with the details of their domestic life and her work in the community. She took her committees seriously and actually believed that the work she did made a difference in the lives of other people.

  The Wilsons grew rich in houses. They lived in a large Victorian house in the Garden District, and across Lake Pontchartrain they had another Victorian house to stay in on the weekends, with a private beach surrounded by old moss-hung oak trees. Tom bought a duck camp in Plaquemines Parish and kept an apartment in the French Quarter in case one of his business friends fell in love with his secretary and needed someplace to be alone with her. Tom almost never used the apartment himself. He was rich in being satisfied to sleep with his own wife.

  The Wilsons were rich in common sense. When five years of a good Catholic marriage went by and Letty inexplicably never became pregnant, they threw away their thermometers and ovulation charts and litmus paper and went down to the Catholic adoption agency and adopted a baby girl with curly black hair and hazel eyes. Everyone declared she looked exactly like Tom. The Wilsons named the little girl Helen and, as the months went by, everyone swore she even walked and talked like Tom.

  At about the same time Helen came to be the Wilsons’ little girl, Tom grew interested in raising Labrador retrievers. He had large wire runs with concrete floors built in the side yard for the dogs to stay in when he wasn’t training them on the levee or at the park lagoon. He used all the latest methods for training Labs, including an electric cattle prod given to him by Chalin Perez himself and live ducks supplied by a friend on the Audubon Park Zoo Association Committee.

  “Watch this, Helen,” he would call to the little girl in the stroller, “watch this.” And he would throw a duck into the lagoon with its secondary feathers neatly clipped on the left side and its feet tied loosely together, and one of the Labs would swim out into the water and carry it safely back and lay it at his feet.

  As so often happens when childless couples are rich in common sense, before long Letty gave birth to a little boy, and then to twin boys, and finally to another little Wilson girl. The Wilsons became so rich in children the neighbors all lost count.

  “Tom,” Letty said, curling up close to him in the big walnut bed, “Tom, I want to talk to you about something important.” The new baby girl was three months old. “
Tom I want to talk to Father Delahoussaye and ask him if we can use some birth control. I think we have all the children we need for now.”

  Tom put his arms around her and squeezed her until he wrinkled her new green linen B. H. Wragge, and she screamed for mercy.

  “Stop it,” she said, “be serious. Do you think it’s all right to do that?”

  Then Tom agreed with her that they had had all the luck with children they needed for the present, and Letty made up her mind to call the cathedral and make an appointment. All her friends were getting dispensations so they would have time to do their work at the Symphony League and the Thrift Shop and the New Orleans Museum Association and the PTAs of the private schools.

  All the Wilson children were in good health except Helen. The pediatricians and psychiatrists weren’t certain what was wrong with Helen. Helen couldn’t concentrate on anything. She didn’t like to share and she went through stages of biting other children at the Academy of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

  The doctors decided it was a combination of prenatal brain damage and dyslexia, a complicated learning disability that is a fashionable problem with children in New Orleans.

  Letty felt like she spent half her life sitting in offices talking to people about Helen. The office she sat in most often belonged to Dr. Zander. She sat there twisting her rings and avoiding looking at the box of Kleenex on Dr. Zander’s desk. It made her feel like she was sleeping in a dirty bed even to think of plucking a Kleenex from Dr. Zander’s container and crying in a place where strangers cried. She imagined his chair was filled all day with women weeping over terrible and sordid things like their husbands running off with their secretaries or their children not getting into the right clubs and colleges.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do with her next,” Letty said. “If we let them hold her back a grade it’s just going to make her more self-conscious than ever.”

  “I wish we knew about her genetic background. You people have pull with the sisters. Can’t you find out?”