25: “Sit over there, . . .”
Little Follies, “Do Clams Bite?” Chapter 2 concludes
“Sit over there, by the window.” She indicated the wing chair where I always sat when I visited her, an old pink one with an antimacassar. “You’re not wearing hair oil, are you?”
“No, Grandma.”
“Your father always used to wear hair oil, and he made a mess of everything. Does he still wear hair oil?”
“No.”
“Do you know which one of these heads is your father?” she asked.
“Yes. It’s that one.” I pointed to the one that she had identified as my father. All the heads looked more or less alike to me; I distinguished them primarily by location, although I could tell the women from the men because the women wore hats, dusty hats with broken feathers or stained bands of silk.
“Very good. Now which one is Black Jacques?”
“The one in the middle of that shelf.”
“You’re a good boy, Peter. What was Black Jacques famous for?”
“He invented beer.” This was an old routine for us. Some time, much earlier, I had made this mistake, and it had made her laugh, so I had perpetuated it as part of the ritual of naming the ancestors.
“No, no,” she laughed. “Not all beer, just the best beer.”
“Leroy Lager,” I said. “It was a sturdy and honest beer, a drink for sturdy and honest folks, not like the insipid pisswater they try to pass off on people nowadays.”
“Right!”
“And on the back of each bottle was a poem, a poem that Black Jacques had commissioned especially for the entertainment, enlightenment, or puzzlement of Leroy Lager drinkers. He paid handsomely for those poems, and they raised the tone of taverns across the land. The period when Black Jacques produced that amber nectar has come to be known as the Golden Age of Brewing.”
“And how well did Leroy Lager do in the days of Black Jacques?”
“It depends on how you look at it. It was a great beer, and it had the finest label in the history of beer-bottle-label publishing, but sales were disappointing. Rotten, in fact. You can’t sell pearls to swine.” I knew that wasn’t quite right, but it was close.
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” she said. “Black Jacques would have liked that. So, who was his son?”
“Great-grandfather. Fat Hank.”
“Tell me about him.”
“He wasn’t always fat. When you first met him, he was quite the fellow. Everybody’s friend. You were just a slip of a girl, and he set your heart aflutter when he tipped his hat to you.”
“I was young and foolish.”
“Yes. And by the time you saw him for what he really was, it was too late. That’s the tragedy of your life. If only you’d been born earlier, you might have had the father, Black Jacques himself. Now that was a man! Fat Hank wasn’t half the man his father was, and he ruined the business as soon as it came into his hands.”
“How?”
“He turned Black Jacques’s hearty brew into something so wishy-washy that you couldn’t tell it from water, except that you could get drunk on it, and he began accepting flaccid and self-indulgent poems for the labels. In place of a few trenchant and pithy lines on one of the Great Themes, the Leroy label now offered the anguished sniveling of shiftless egoists whose works were so rambling that some of their poems had to be continued onto several labels, leading to the introduction of packages of six bottles and, ultimately, cases of twenty-four. Well, the result of all this was that after a few bottles anybody with a regret, a pang, a fear—any weepy drunk—could write a poem suitable for the once-proud Leroy Lager label. Many more poems were accepted, and the rate of pay for these dropped as the number of poets increased. Sales of Leroy Lager boomed, since poets drink a lot, and every drinker began to consider himself a poet. So, you see, things tend to get worse as time goes by.”
She sighed and smiled at me with a mixture of sorrow (because what I’d said was so true) and pleasure (because I’d remembered it so well). “And what was Fat Hank’s reward for destroying everything that Black Jacques had worked so hard to build?”
“He made a pile of money.” I looked through the doorway into Great-grandmother’s bedroom. A picture of Fat Hank stood on her dresser. He was fat; that much was incontestable. Even his coconut was round, with heavy cheeks and a flat base. But he didn’t look like someone who had made a pile of money. He was standing in front of a garage with his hands stiffly at his sides. Behind him was a sign that said Honest Service, and to his left was another sign, only partly visible, with a picture of a tire and the words Puncture Proof.
“Grandma?” I asked, slowly, hesitantly. I wanted to ask her what had become of the money from Fat Hank’s watery brew. I wanted to ask her why Fat Hank wasn’t wearing white pleated trousers, a sleeveless sweater, and a white shirt, and standing beside a Packard. I wanted to ask why we weren’t rich.
“What, Peter? Do you want another candy?”
“No. No thanks. I’m still sucking this one. They last a long time.”
“Longer than I would have thought possible,” she said. “What do you want to know, Peter?”
I suddenly knew what I would ask her. The question began to form as I opened my mouth, and pushed aside the other questions that I had thought of asking. It was so big a question that I coughed and sputtered from the size of it, as I might have if I had stuffed too many hard candies into my mouth. It took a moment for me to recover.
“Are you all right, Peter?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” I said, wiping tears from my eyes. “I swallowed my candy, that’s all.”
“This must be quite a question that you want to ask, if it chokes you on the way out. Is it about boys and girls?”
“Oh, no. I know about that.” I didn’t, but I thought that I was supposed to. “Grandma, do clams bite?”
She looked at me for a while, not, as I had feared, with disgust, as if I had asked a question that only a timid little boy would ask, but with surprise and bewilderment. After a long time, she said simply, “I haven’t any idea.”
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