Deadeye Dick Page 0,34

children, for that matter, no longer spoke to him, and had fled Midland City—and so had escaped the neutron bomb. They were sons. One had deserted to Sweden during the Vietnam War, and was working with alcoholics there. The other was a welder in Alaska who had flunked out of Harvard Law School, his father’s alma mater.

“Your baby will be asking you that wonderful question soon enough,” said Ketchum, as amused by his own bad luck as by anybody else’s, “—‘Why, why, why?’ ”

Eugene Debs Metzger, it turned out, lived in Athens, Greece, and owned several tankers, which flew the flag of Liberia.

His sister, Jane Addams Metzger, who found her mother dead and vacuum cleaner still running so long ago, a big, homely girl, as I recall, and big and homely still, according to Ketchum, was living with a refugee Czech playwright on Molokai, in the Hawaiian Islands, where she owned a ranch and was raising Arabian horses.

“She sent me a play by her lover,” said Ketchum. “She thought maybe I could find a producer for it, since, of course, there in Midland City, Ohio, I was falling over producers every time I turned around.”

And my brother Felix parodied the line about there being a broken heart for every light on Broadway in New York City. He substituted the name of Midland City’s main drag. “There’s a broken heart for every light on old Harrison Avenue,” he said. And he got up, and went for more champagne.

His way up the stairs to the hotel proper was blocked by a Haitian painter, who had fallen asleep while waiting for a tourist, any tourist, to come back from a night on the town. He had garish pictures of Adam and Eve and the serpent, and of Haitian village life, with all the people with their hands in their pockets, since the artist couldn’t draw hands very well, and so on, lining the staircase on either side.

Felix did not disturb him. He stepped over him very respectfully. If Felix had seemed to kick him intentionally, Felix would have been in very serious trouble. This is no ordinary colonial situation down here. Haiti as a nation was born out of the only successful slave revolt in all of human history. Imagine that. In no other instance have slaves overwhelmed their masters, begun to govern themselves and to deal on their own with other nations, and repelled foreigners who felt that natural law required them to be slaves again.

So, as we had been warned when we bought the hotel here, any white or lightly colored person who struck or even menaced a Haitian in a manner suggesting a master-and-slave relationship would find himself in prison.

This was understandable.

• • •

While Felix was away, I asked Ketchum if the Czech refugee’s play was any good. He said that he was in no position to judge, and that neither was Jane Metzger, since it was written in Czech. “It is a comedy, I’m told,” he said. “It could be very funny.”

“Funnier than my play, certainly,” I said. And here is an eerie business: Twenty-three years ago, back in 1959, I entered a playwriting contest sponsored by the Caldwell Foundation, and I won, and my prize was a professional production of my play at the Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village. It was called Katmandu. It was about John Fortune, Father’s dairy farmer friend and then enemy, who is buried in Katmandu.

I stayed with my brother and his third wife, Geneviève. They lived in the Village, and I slept on their couch. Felix was only thirty-four, but he was already general manager of radio station WOR, and was about to head up the television department of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, the advertising agency. He was already having his clothes made in London.

And Katmandu opened and closed in a single night. This was my one fling away from Midland City, my one experience, until now, with inhabiting a place where I was not Deadeye Dick.

16

THE NEW YORK CITY critics found it hilarious that the author of Katmandu held a degree in pharmacy from Ohio State University. They found it obvious, too, that I had never seen India or Nepal, where half my play took place. How delicious they would have found it, if only they had known, that I had begun to write the play when I was only a junior in high school. How pathetic they would have found it, if only they had known, that I had