William Peter Blatty - Ill Tell Them I Remember You

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

Contents

for jeanne marie

Someday

after we have mastered the

winds and the tides and the waves

and the gravity

we will harness for God

the energies of love:

and then for the second time

in the history of the world

men will have discovered fire.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

And when the angels

ask me to recall Ill tell them

I remember you

This is a happy book. It is maple tree laughter in orange October. It is apple-sweet rain after wonderful news. It is red balloons and sunlit hugs on morning beaches brimming gold. Oh, yes, some of it is sad: the part that is false; the part about guilt and regret; about death; but the true part is happy and finally joyous and even as I write this, inside I am smiling.

You will love my mother. An immigrant, destitute, suffering, loving, illiterate, defiant, a lion, a giant, she supported five children in New York, on Manhattan, on the heart-squeezing island where the sidewalks leap snarling, in the place where the kiss of the rich is indifference and the sleep of the poor is ice wounds that never knit and the fire-escape flame in August night without end; where they sleep without sleep. And in this place, in this bullying, terrifying place, my mother, in an elevator, desperate and hungry, desperate and pleading with an arrogant social worker, a woman despatched by the City to look into our eligibility for charity, for Home Relief, hauled off and punched the proud bitch in the stomach when she called her Mrs. Blatty in a condescending tone. She told girls that I was trying to impress, You very fat and is solely responsible for the fact that I am the only living mortal in the universe to have won a fixed beautiful baby contest. Her page of life had been printed in boldface. No Everest eluded her reach. Listen! in 1939, in the summer, the President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our number one official, commander in chief of the armies and the caissons, of the windswept armadas and the U.S. Marines, happened by our little neighborhood slum to officiate at the opening of the Queens Midtown Tunnel. The tunnel spilled out onto East 35th Street, two doors down from our tenement apartment building. It had once been a rain-catching lot where Id moped and cursed fate and poled timbers indefinitely across mud-sullen ponds strewn with hopes. When he comin? rumbled Mama like Vesuvius in ponder when I told her FDR would be loitering around; I wanna meet him. When I advised her that it couldnt be done, she advised me in return, You cuckoo, Willie.

On the day of the ceremony, my mother and I were standing at the outer circumference of a cordon of spectators. Mamas left hand held a brown paper shopping bag. I ignored it; the bag was her custom. All eyes at the time were on FDR as he reached from his car with a gold-plated scissors and neatly snipped the broad silken multicolored ribbon that drooped from side to side across the entrance to the tunnel like an unconvinced rainbow. Then, before anyone knew what was happening, my mother was grimly advancing on the President. Suddenly, flashbulbs began to explode, FDR dropped the gold-plated scissors in horror, and a covey of startled and uncertain Secret Service men reached for revolvers and surrounded the car.

Too late. My mother had gotten to the President.

I wanna shake you hand, she told him warningly in a voice of quiet command; then reached out and took his hand in a grip which the power of her mesmerizing presence imbued with an illusion of crunching strength. FDR stared numbly and he might have been thinking, it occurred to me then, about a possible upcoming meeting with Stalin, though of course I cant be sure; I was only a boy and not entirely reliable. But this I remember: this I know: when my mother leaned over and reached in the shopping bag, several Secret Service men leaped from their socks and never noticed the time, but they barely got a glove or a thought on my mother before she had withdrawn from the bag a rather large, sticky jar filled with murky and rust-colored substance. She handed it over to the dumbfounded President.

Home-make quince jelly, she grunted. Then she added: For when you have company.

The President went visiting some planets for a while; then he turned on the sun with his flashing bright smile and he took my mothers hand in his again and he spoke to her softly and gently. He doubtless said, Thank you, but I couldnt make it out.

Two Secret Service men escorted my mother to the spectators circle and the moment that her gaze locked on mine, I saw her eyes flicker briefly with triumph. She was unstoppable and she knew it.

What did he say to you, Mama? I asked her when again she was standing at my side.

He say to me, Willie, you son, hes cuckoo.

She was dynamite.

She still is. Though I tend now to see her as she was in those days; as she is in the cracked, brownish photo now before me that was taken in 1936 by a weary old man in Central Park. It had cost her a dime: she had bargained him to that. It is framed in a yellowing, tattered cardboard. At the top it says, Somewhere in the U.S.A. My mother is staring at the lens of the camera. Rigidly corseted, chin held high, she is squinting into sunlight. Her shoes are torn. She looks at once vulnerable and unvanquished. She is wearing a thrift shop Middy skirt and blouse and a California sport hat made of felt; the front brim is pushed all the way up and back as if in jaunty defiance of the odds. The odds are not small: her husband has left her; she can barely speak English; she has less than a grammar school education. She is 43. With no job. No skills. But see how proudly her back is arched; and from a face of carved walnut her eyes great and dark leap with boldness, with challenge; though within them, very faint and far back and pain deep, glows a light that is meek and pleads Peace! Give us peace! The light is very tired this day. Never mind. A satisfied wiliness creases her eyes. It has been a good day peddling jelly in the streets and her hand holds the strings of a cake box from Cushmans. Willie, surprise! she will call to me, beaming. Stubborn and truculent, an anomaly, an irresistible force, in the heart of her champions heart is a rose. You cannot tell that from the photo. From the photo you can only tell that she is beautiful, patrician in feature and in bearing: a darkly complexioned Ethel Barrymore, but with Anna Magnanis fire. Do you have a little picture of her now? Can you see her?

I ought to be writing Son of Exorcist, a novel about a nuclear sub whose commander has an abscessed tooth, migraine headache, is apparently possessed by Attila the Hun and in the midst of a painful divorce from his wife, a Los Angeles policewoman dating an attorney, with the nations on the brink of a cataclysmic war and the sub lurking hidden off Asbury Park in the wintry off-season with the gulls massing thickly like flurries of snow and no one there to be looking at the whitecaps for a periscope. The submarine is Russian. Why am I not writing that book?

Eventually, I will. But for now I give you hope and the brightness of faith and the laughter of my mother for an hour.