The King is Dead

DEDICATION

For Philip and Karen and Dylan and Milena

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prelude

Part One: Shot

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12: Stay

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23: Country

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35: Casey Stengel Testifies Before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly

36

37

38

39: A Dress Ball at the Governor’s Mansion, on the Occasion of his Reelection to a Third Term

40

41

42

43

44: An Indian on Beale Street

45

46

47: Speech for Walter Selby: Draft

48

49

The Brushy Mountain Letters

Part Two: Stay

Pied Beauty

1

2: Ten Percent of Nothing

3

4: The Invention of Pornography

5

6

7

8

9

10: Million-Dollar Bartender

11

12

13

14

15

16

17: Shot

18

19: The Ballad of the Little Sister

20

21

22: Coyote

23

24

25: Options

26

27

28

29

30

31

32: Yvette

33

34: The Death of Walter Selby

35

36

37

38

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

PRELUDE

There was a woman named Kelly Flynn. She was born in 1720 to a Dublin banker, and raised in London, where her father had been sent to service a loan from the King. At court she met and married a Belgian furrier named DeLours; together they had nine children, and six of them died, four from disease and two through misadventure. One who survived, an intrepid boy named Henry (b. 1745), cut short his schooling to join the Army and was commissioned as an officer.

The Empire was widening into the subcontinent and there was a great need for resourceful men. Henry DeLours was clever and brave, and he was sent to Calcutta; while there, he met an Englishwoman named Elizabeth, the daughter of a fellow officer. He married her, and they produced five children. One of them, a daughter named Mary (b. 1770), returned to England to attend boarding school.

During a tour of Cornwall, Mary met an older man, a printer named Samuel Crown, who admired her, courted her, and soon won her hand. They returned to London, and their children were William, Theodore, Olivia, and Georgia, each following on the last by a little over a year. It was expected that the male children would join in their father’s business, but Theodore (b. 1790) was willful and wandersome, and as soon as he came of age he sailed for America, looking to make a fortune of his own.

For a time he clerked in a law office in New York. Each evening he went home to his small, dark room and wrote to his mother, describing both the faith he held in his future and the hardships that were testing it: debt, the dismissiveness of the men for whom he worked, the desolation he felt in this new, strange city. But he was frugal by way of defense, and he soon managed to amass a small amount of cash, which he used to purchase a few acres of land in Kentucky. He planted tobacco, labored, prospered, and within a few years he’d expanded his estate to some three hundred acres and two dozen slaves; by the age of thirty he had come to sufficient prominence to run for a local judgeship, and, with the help of some casks of whiskey that he had delivered to the taverns on the eve of election day, he won.

It was 1820, and Judge Crown was unmarried. Instead, he took a Negro woman, a slave named Betsey, who served in his house. He brought her into his bed almost every night—Apollo may not forgive me but Pan assuredly will, he wrote in his journal—and soon she gave birth to a son, a light-skinned boy named Marcus (b. 1821).

When he was a child, Marcus’s mother told him that his father was a house slave from up the road, but by then he’d already heard rumors that he was sired by the man who owned him. The cook would cluck about it and shake her head; the footman would tease him in their quarters at night; but he never sought to confirm or disprove the story of his origin. He didn’t dare, still less when Theodore at last found a wife, with whom he could have children who were legal and sanctified.

One midnight Marcus ran away from Crown’s farm, toward a legendary North. In his pocket he carried eighteen dollars, a sum that his mother had pilfered, penny by penny, from the household accounts, and which she’d given to him along with instructions to find his way to Ripley, Ohio. Under darkness, Marcus ran through fragrant fields; in morning towns, on broad bright days, he purchased food by pretending to be on an errand from some nearby estate, where the Master had a sudden need for a particular cut of meat, or oranges to make a punch, or bread to serve to an unexpected guest. By afternoon he would be sleeping in the cover of a thick forest or down at the bottom of a ravine.

In a week he came to the south bank of the Ohio River, which he followed east as far as Ripley. He could see the town on the other side of the water, but he was afraid to cross to it, and he waited at the riverside four days and nights, for what he didn’t know. In order to stave off hunger pains he slept as much as he could; in his dreams he heard women’s laughter. At last he was discovered by the freeman John Parker, who ferried him across the water and sent him along the Underground Railroad, northwest to Chicago. Fifteen days after leaving his home and his family, Marcus landed in the living room of a boarding-house on the south side. Not knowing what his own surname might be, he called himself Marcus Cash, and soon he was working as a laborer on the docks of Calumet.

Judge Crown’s farm began to falter, he owed money to every merchant within fifty miles, and bill collectors came by regularly to dun him. In the summer of 1840, Crown got into an argument with a barmaid over a glass of beer; he became belligerent, he became violent, and she struck him in the temple with an ax handle. He lingered on for a delirious few days, and then he died. To help pay off the debts he’d accumulated, his wife sold the slave Betsey, Marcus Cash’s mother, to a plantation in northern Mississippi.

By and by, Marcus Cash met and married a mulatto woman named Annabelle, eleven years his senior, a widow with three boys of her own. She had long soft braided hair, she could sing as sweetly as a flute, she cocked her hip and swept back her skirts. Within a year she was pregnant with a daughter they named Lucy (b. 1843).

Lucy was fair-skinned and full of feeling, and she needed more attention than her parents had to spare. What’s more, she was so much younger than Annabelle’s three boys that they scarcely thought of her as a sister at all, and as soon as she reached adolescence each in turn made advances on her. Marcus Cash walked in on the third and administered a whipping to him; but the incident suggested a danger that might recur on any wicked day, and soon Lucy was on her way to school in Philadelphia with instructions to study charm, to keep her legs pressed together, and to pass for white as well as she could, whenever it was possible.

When the War Between the States began, the Cash men watched and waited, and as soon as colored troops were allowed to enlist they joined up. Marcus died at Milliken’s Bend, when the tip of a bayonet tore his heart in half; one of his stepsons died of gut wounds received by gunshot at Fort Pillow, another of pneumonia contracted in the mountains of West Virginia, and the third of inanition while marching through Arkansas.

By then Lucy Cash had returned to Chicago, and after Appomattox she and her mother moved south to Memphis, Tennessee. At Annabelle’s insistence they pretended to be a young white woman with her aged and loyal servant—but in truth the older woman was nearly insane. Memphis had been in Union hands since the middle of the War, but she wanted to be within defaming distance of the former Confederacy: The two of them moved into a rooming house and the girl took a job sewing for a local tailor; and every evening Annabelle Cash would venture out onto a bridge over the Mississippi, where she would spit down into the water, and let the river carry her insult down.

Years passed—ten years, fifteen years. Lucy Cash had become a spinster, while her mother died a long, slow, puzzled death. The daughter was thirty-two; it was unlikely that she would find a husband, and a child was almost impossible to conceive. The daughter was thirty-three, thirty-four. And then one summer morning Annabelle awoke with a chill, complained briefly, and died, leaving Lucy Cash alone with her inheritance.

What happened then became a legend in Memphis: Lucy Cash moved out of the rooming house and into a small but elegant place on the north side of town. She hired a cook and a handmaid, bought chandeliers for the house and dresses for herself, and began to throw parties for young women and men. Within a year she was among the city’s most prominent belles, fifteen years too old but no one seemed to care; the yellow-fever epidemics of the 70’s had killed many of the younger women who might have been her rivals, and besides, the gatherings at her home were so elegant, so lively, the hostess was so charming and so duskily pretty. And in time she had her suitors: a pale and wealthy middle-aged man with a horse farm, a young rich gadabout, the blond boy born to a prosperous merchant, and the son of a minister, named Benjamin Harkness.

Having a keen sense of the mystery of salvation, Lucy Cash married the minister’s son. Her wedding took place just a few days before her thirty-seventh birthday, and exactly 280 days later the first of her four children were born; they would be Sally Harkness (b. 1879), and then Benjamin Jr. (b. 1880), and Charles (b. 1881), and finally Katherine Anne (b. 1883). The two daughters were prolific from a young age, producing a total of eleven grandchildren for Lucy Cash, none of whom she’d see or hold; she died of tuberculosis in 1892, revealing only on her deathbed, and only to her two boys, that she was one-half Negro.

In 1899, at the age of nineteen, Benjamin Harkness, Jr., went north to work for big steel, staying briefly in Philadelphia before being sent out to San Francisco to oversee the development of supply lines from the port. It was an unruly town, and being the grandson of a minister born to the privilege of wealth, he took full advantage of the sins of the Barbary Coast. By day he shuffled papers in his Russian Hill office; at night he gave syphilis and cirrhosis a run to see which could kill him first. In the end, the waves preempted both; stumbling home from a wharfside saloon late one night, he fell into the Bay and was drowned.

Charles Harkness was a dull and dutiful man, less ambitious and less lively than his brother, but his blood survived. He finished college, married a woman named Alice, and became a wholesaler of dry goods. Around Louisville, Kentucky, where he lived, they called him Gain for the number of his offspring: Charles Jr. (b. 1904), George (b. 1905), Diana (b. 1905), John (b. 1906), Robert (b. 1906), the twins Mary and Elizabeth (b. 1908), Patrick (b. 1910), David (b. 1911), and the second twins, Emily and Irene (b. 1913).

As soon as she was old enough to leave the house, Diana went north to New York—to study art at the city’s great museums, she told her father, but in reality to play amid its prosperity. Many nights she came home to her Riverside Drive apartment giggling and trailing black feathers from her boa across the lobby; many mornings she sat on the edge of her bed and wept—in despair at her loneliness, in pity because she was lost. Later, she would marry a bad man named Selby in a lavish church wedding; six months passed and she had her first son, Donald; a year and a half afterward she divorced her husband, not telling him that she was going to have another child. It was a second boy, Walter, born in 1925 in his grandfather’s house in Louisville, but cared for by Diana, until one day in 1937 when she stepped in front of a car on West Oak Street, was struck and thrown, lived on for three more days, and then passed away.

When Walter Selby was eighteen he enlisted in the Marines and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. In 1945 he came home a hero, finished college in two years on the GI bill, and then went to law school at Vanderbilt. Afterward, he settled in Memphis, the home of his great-grandmother, where he went to work for the governor of Tennessee. He met a woman named Nicole, he loved her more than love knew how; he married her and they had two children, a boy named Frank, and a girl, four years younger, named Gail. This book is their annals, twice-told and twofold.

PART ONE SHOT

Dearest Father:

You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you….

—Franz Kafka, “Letter to His Father”

1

Nicole’s hand was warm and damp. Three-thirty had come, the Governor hadn’t called—nor had anyone else—and Walter Selby had gone home lively to his wife, happy to have some time to spare before dinner. He was still thinking about work, running phrases for a speech through his head, but he wasn’t thinking hard. It was an afternoon toward the end of May, and he was enjoying the last hours of sunlight, along the street, under the shade of the pin oaks. To see his own house in the late sunlight of a spring weekday was a rare pleasure, and not one he wanted to squander.

To see his own wife. He parked in the driveway and emerged into a noiseless world; some money had bought that quiet, that still and green street. He could hear his steps on the walk, the hiss of the spring on the hinge of the outer door. He had his key in the lock and he paused to prolong the homecoming moment. These were instants he liked to savor: the border, and just across the border, where he would call Nicole’s name and then wait for her to answer, wait and wonder where her voice would come from, where she would appear. In the years since they’d married the process had taken on a formal quality, and the closer it came to ritual the more it delighted him; the smell of his own house delighted him, the weather dampening, the day-late hour, the light lengthening across the lawn, his anticipation lengthening along the front hall.

It was a Wednesday, and the Governor was back in Nashville, appearing at a hearing in the State Senate about advisory appointments; he would be strolling amiably down the aisle right about now, dressed in his thin grey penitent suit, a half smile on his face while he shook alike the hands of men he enjoyed and men he despised. Then he would take to his table, sit down slowly, and drop a tablet of bicarb into his water glass to distract his interlocutors while he composed himself. The water would remain fizzing at his elbow until his remarks were done, at which point he would stand up, take the glass and down its contents quickly, and then stroll out of the room again, smiling again, shaking hands, whispering.

The Selby house was quiet. Frank and the baby would be in the park with Josephine, the nanny they’d hired soon after Gail was born. This was Nicole’s own time, the part of the day when she could do what she liked, and Walter seldom interrupted her with so much as a phone call. There was some mystery in every marriage, or else there was no material left for later intimacies—for the hours after the children had been put to bed, to save and to spend, repairing the ragged forward edge of their affairs. Away from others, away from work, toward the night.

He stepped inside and called her name. There was a long silence, and he began to wonder if she was in the backyard, so he headed through the house. Along the way the light stepped down into the darkness of the living room where the blinds were drawn, up a notch in the rear hallway, and then up again into the illumination of the kitchen, which, with its south-facing windows, its formica and its reflecting metal, was as bright as a room could be. He stood there, blinking, then he turned and started back into the living room and saw her standing in the doorway, with a look on her face that he couldn’t quite describe: surprise, the satisfactions of a day, and worry or a question. She smiled a little. You’re home early, she said.

Short day, he said. She was wearing black slacks and a simple blue sweater; her hair was down, and once again he was struck. The man who first burned clay to make china: Wasn’t this what he was after? This face, in age? He put his briefcase down on the kitchen table and crossed the room to her, taking her shoulders in his hands. How beautiful, even on a bright, unglamorous afternoon; her cheeks were slightly flushed, her pupils were dilated, her lower lip hung slightly on the flesh. He hugged her; her nipples, half hard, pressed against the upper edge of his abdomen. He stepped back and looked at her from arm’s distance.

What is it? she asked.

I was just about to ask you the same thing, he said. What is it?

Nothing. What do you mean?

He shrugged. Nothing, he said. He drew her toward him again, leaned down and kissed her cheek. Neither of them smiled. He reached for her hand, a gesture he had made a thousand times before: he loved the feel of her palm against his—soft, cool, and dry—how her fingers would begin to tremble when the contact, plain at first, quickly grew awkward and unnatural, and then settled again into something comfortable, as each of them abandoned the tiny flickers of will that made their fingers clench, and peace was achieved for two. It was very much like marriage itself, he thought, where some small part of one’s self was deliberately, happily, allowed to die. But that afternoon her palm was damp—slightly hot, and slightly damp—and small and subtle though the difference was, it bothered him. He felt a clinging sensation, moist and cloying; it was like putting on a still-wet bathing suit, and he disengaged his hand from hers and rubbed his palm, slowly and almost unconsciously, against the hip of his trousers, and then bade her good-bye for a time so he could shake off the office day.

He was upstairs changing into home clothes when the children came back from the park; he could hear them burst through the door, hear Frank boasting loudly about a game. I hid in the sandbox! he said. All the way down and in, and they couldn’t find me, no matter how hard they tried. Not even Josephine could find me, could you?

No, I couldn’t, said Josephine. And I looked and I looked.

And then finally I had to come out and show them where I was, or they never would have found me, ever.—Daddy!

Walter was coming down the stairs, watching the tableau below him: Nicole had taken the baby from Josephine; Frank was struggling to get out of his muddy clothes. In the hallway? said his father. We don’t get undressed in the hallway. Frank. Come on, now. Son. Frank.

The boy said, No one could find me!

I heard, said Walter. Now go around back to the porch and take your clothes off there. And then you can tell me all about it.

Later, Walter drove Josephine home to South Memphis, his big brand-new blue Impala gliding down the streets, passing into the colored part of town, with its neat little houses set a short way back from broken sidewalks. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Someday, he thought. And when Someday comes, what happens? He knew very little about the woman on the seat beside him, now holding her glossy black purse tight against her middle. She was good to his children; she had several of her own, all of them now grown. She had a husband at home who worked hard for a paycheck that always seemed to fall a little bit short of the week’s expenses. How big was their bed? And how well did they sleep? No better, no worse, this year or a hundred years ago; because bed was where the world reached its level, the one place where all the efforts of the State—his efforts, his State—came to nothing. This Negro woman beside him, the room she was traveling toward, the man she would meet there: When the blinds were drawn and the lights turned off, and she lay down beside her husband, the lying-down would exist in its long kindness, no matter what was done to help them or to cause them to die. Then was all work futile? He pulled up to the curb before her house and turned in his seat to face her. How are you doing? he asked.

Well, Frankie’s reading better …

No, I mean you. How are you and your husband doing? He couldn’t remember the man’s name.

Josephine shrugged. We’re getting by, she said … And she hesitated, waiting for him to say something else, then looked over and found him gazing at her, his expression split between the half smile on his lips and the darkness in his eyes. She didn’t want to know what he was thinking, so she made her good-bye and stepped out of the car, leaving Walter to nod and say, See you tomorrow, and pull away from the curb.

Promptly at seven, the family Selby sat down to dinner, but Walter was distracted, hardly listening to Frank as he recounted his boy’s day. Throughout the hour he could feel the sensation of Nicole’s nipples against his chest. Well, she wasn’t feeding Gail anymore, was she? Was it a thought, then, that had gotten into her and then started out again? He could feel her hand on his; the sensation had somehow stuck to his palm and wouldn’t dissipate. He felt it, beneath the skin and below the veins, behind the bones, between the nerves.

Little Frank didn’t want his food, he said something about the food, he complained about the food. I don’t like this. Mommy? he said, his gaze wandering off to one side. He really needed to learn to look people in the eye, thought Walter, if he was ever going to get the things he wanted.—Can I have something else? said Frank. Please? Can I? Please, please, please? He pushed his rice around his plate a little bit with his fork and then slumped down in his chair, his mouth set against any obstacle to his appetite.

Nicole was talking to the boy, but Walter wasn’t listening; he was trying to follow a rustling in the rearmost hollow of his mind. She looked at him with wide eyes. Could you help me? she said. Could you help me with this?