“Where in hell do these college kids get such an idea!” Franny would complain.
“Not all of them have this idea,” Frank would point out. “They think what’s forced and strained and difficult with a fucking capital D is better than what’s straightforward, fluent, and comprehensible!” Franny shouted. “What the fuck’s wrong with these people?”
“Only some of them are like that, Franny,” Frank would say.
“Just the ones who’ve made a cult out of Lilly’s failure?” Franny asked.
“Just the ones who listen to their teachers,” Frank said, smugly—happily at home in one of his anti-everything moods. “I mean, where do you think the college students learn to think that way, Franny?” Frank asked her. “From their teachers.”
“Jesus God,” Franny would say.
She would not ask for a part in The Evening of the Mind ; there was no way to make that book into a movie, anyway. Franny became a star with so much more ease than Lilly became a writer. “Being a star is easier,” Franny would say. “You don’t have to do anything but be relaxed about who you are and trust that people will like you; you just trust that they’ll get the you in you, Franny said. “You just be relaxed and hope that the you in you comes across.”
For a writer, I guess, the you in you needs more nourishment to emerge. I always wanted to write Donald Justice a letter about that, but I think that seeing him—only once, and from a distance—should suffice. If what’s best and clearest in him isn’t in his poems, he wouldn’t be a very good writer. And since something good and strong in him emerges in his poems, it would probably be disappointing to meet him. Oh, I don’t mean that he’d be a bum. He’s probably a wonderful man. But he couldn’t be as precise as his poems; his poems are so stately, he’d have to be a letdown. In Lilly’s case, of course, her work was a letdown—and she knew it. She knew her work wasn’t as lovable as she was, and Lilly would have preferred it the other way around.
What saved Franny was not just that being a star is easier than being a writer. What saved Franny, too, was that she didn’t have to be a star alone. What Donald Justice knows is that you have to be a writer all alone, whether you live alone or not.
You would not recognize me.
Mine is the face which blooms in
The dank mirrors of washrooms
As you grope for the light switch.
My eyes have the expression
Of the cold eyes of statues
Watching their pigeons return
From the feed you have scattered.
“Jesus God,” as Franny has said. “Who’d want to meet him?”
But Lilly was lovely to know—except, perhaps, to herself. Lilly wanted her words to be lovely, but her words let her down.
It’s remarkable how Franny and I once thought of Frank as the King of Mice; we had Frank figured all wrong. We underestimated Frank, from the beginning. He was a hero, but he needed to get to that point in time when he would be signing all our checks, and telling us how much we could spend on this or that, in order for us to recognize the hero that Frank had always been.
No, Lilly was our King of Mice. “We should have known!” Franny would wail, and wail. “She was just too small!”
And so Lilly is lost to us, now. She was the sorrow we never quite understood; we never saw through her disguises. Perhaps Lilly never grew quite large enough for us to see.
She authored one masterpiece, which she never gave herself enough credit for. She wrote the screenplay for the movie starring Chipper Dove; she was the writer and director of that opera, in the grand tradition of Schlagobers and blood. She knew just how far to go with that story. It was The Evening of the Mind that didn’t live up to her own expectations, and the difficulty she had trying to begin again—trying to write the book that would have been called, ambitiously, Everything After Childhood. That isn’t even a Donald Justice line; that was Lilly’s own idea, but she couldn’t live up to it, either.
When Franny drinks too much, she gets pissed off at the power Donald Justice had over Lilly; Franny sometimes gets drunk enough to blame poor Donald Justice for what happened to Lilly. But Frank and I are always the first to assure Franny that it was quality that killed Lilly; it was the end of The Great Gatsby, which was not her ending, which was not an ending within her grasp. And once Lilly said, “Damn that Donald Justice, anyway! He’s written all the good lines!”
He may have written the last line my sister Lilly read. Frank found Lilly’s copy of Donald Justice’s Night Light, opened to page 20, the page dog-eared many times, and the one line at the top of the page was circled and circled—in lipstick, once, and in several different tones of ink from several different ballpoint pens; even in lowly pencil.
I do not think the ending can be right.
That might have been the line that drove Lilly to it.
It was a February night. Franny was out on the West Coast; Franny couldn’t have saved her. Father and I were in Maine; Lilly knew we went to bed early. Father was on his third Seeing Eye dog at the time. Sacher was gone, a victim of overeating. The little blond dog with the perky, yapping bark, the one that was hit by a car—its vice was chasing cars, fortunately not when Father was attached—that one was gone too; Father called her Schlagobers because she had a disposition like whipped cream. The third one was a farter, but only in this way did he bear an unpleasant resemblance to Sorrow; it was another German shepherd, but a male this time, and Father insisted that his name be Fred. That was also the name of the handyman at the third Hotel New Hampshire—a deaf retired lobsterman named Fred. Whenever Father called any dog—when he called Sacher, when he called Schlagobers—Fred the handyman would cry, “What?” from whatever part of the hotel he was working in. The whole thing irritated Father so much (and so much, unspokenly, reminded us both of Egg) that Father always threatened to name the next dog Fred.
“Since that old fool Fred will answer whenever I call the dog, anyway, no matter what name I’m calling!” Father shouted. “Jesus God, if he’s going to be calling out ‘What?’ all the time, we might as well get the name right.”
So Seeing Eye Dog Number Three was Fred. His only bad habit was that he tried to hump the cleaning woman’s daughter whenever the little girl strayed from her mother’s side. Fred would goofily pin the little girl to the ground, and start humping her, and the little girl would scream, “No, Fred!” And the cleaning woman would holler, “Cut it out, Fred!” and whack Fred with a mop or a broom, or with whatever was handy. And Father would hear the fracas and know what was going on, and he’d yell, “Goddamn it, Fred, you horny bastard! Get your ass over here, Fred!” And the deaf handyman, the retired lobsterman, our other Fred, would cry out, “What? What?” And I’d have to go find him (because Father refused) and tell him, “NOT YOU, FRED! NOTHING, FRED!”
“Oh,” he’d say, going back to work. “Thought somebody called.”
So it would have been hopeless for Lilly to call us in Maine. We wouldn’t have been able to do much more for her than yell “Fred!” a few times.
What Lilly tried to do was call Frank. Frank wasn’t that far from her; he might have helped. We tell him, now, that he might have helped her that time, but in the long run, we know, doom floats. Lilly got Frank’s answering service, anyway. Frank had replaced his live answering service with one of those mechanical services, with one of those infuriating recordings of himself.
HI! FRANK HERE—BUT ACTUALLY I’M NOT HERE (HA HA). ACTUALLY, I’M OUT. WANT TO LEAVE A MESSAGE? WAIT FOR THE LITTLE SIGNAL AND TALK YOUR HEART OUT.
Franny left many messages that made Frank cross. “Go fuck a doughnut, Frank!” Franny would scream into the infuriating machine. “It costs me money every time that fucking device answers me—I’m in fucking Los Angeles, Frank, you moron, you dip-shit, you turd in a birdbath!” And then she’d make all sorts of farting sounds, and very liquid kisses, and Frank would call me, disgusted, as usual.
“Honestly,” he’d say. “I don’t understand Franny at all. She just left the most disgusting message on my tape recorder! I mean, I know she thinks she’s being funny, but doesn’t she know that we’ve all heard quite enough of her vulgarity? At her age, it hardly becomes her any longer—if it ever did. You’ve cleaned up your language, I wish you’d make an effort to clean up hers.”
And on and on.
Lilly’s message must have scared Frank. And he probably didn’t come in from his evening date very long after she had called; he put the machine on and listened to his messages as he was brushing his teeth, getting ready to go to bed.
They were mostly business things. The tennis player he represents had gotten in some difficulty over a deodorant commercial. A screenwriter called to say that a director was “manipulating” him, and Frank made a fast mental note—to the effect that this writer needed lots of “manipulation.” A famous choreographer had bogged down in her autobiography; she was blocked in her childhood, she confided to Frank, who just kept brushing his teeth. He rinsed his mouth, turned off the bathroom light, and then heard Lilly.
“Hi, it’s me,” she said, apologetically—to the machine. Lilly was always apologizing. Frank smiled and untucked his bedcovers; he always put his dressmaker’s dummy in bed before he crawled in. There was a long pause on the machine and Frank thought the thing was broken; it often was. But then Lilly added, “It’s just me.” Something about the tiredness in her voice made Frank check the time of night, and made him listen with some anxiety. In the pause that followed, Frank remembers whispering her name. “Go on, Lilly,” he whispered.
And Lilly sang her little song, just a little snatch of a song; it was one of the Heurigen songs—a silly, sad song, a King of Mice song. Frank knew the song by heart, of course.
Yerkauft’s mei G’wand, I Fahr in Himmel.
Sell my old clothes, I’m off to heaven.
“Holy cow, Lilly,” Frank whispered to the recorder; he started getting dressed, fast.
“Auf Wiedersehen, Frank,” Lilly said, when her little song was over.
Frank didn’t answer her. He ran down to Columbus Circle and caught an uptown cab. And even though Frank was no runner, I’m sure he made good time; I couldn’t have done any better. Even if he’d been home when Lilly called, I always told him that it would take anyone longer to cover twenty blocks and a zoo than it takes to fall fourteen stories—the distance from the window of the corner suite on the Stanhope’s fourteenth floor to the pavement at Eighty-first and Fifth Avenue. Lilly had a shorter trip to take than Frank’s, and she would have beaten him to her destination—regardless; there was nothing he could have done. Even so, Frank said, he didn’t say (or even think to himself), “Auf Wiedersehen, Lilly,” until after they’d shown him her little body.
She left a better note than Fehlgeburt had left. Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note.
Sorry,
said the note.