NORMAN MAILER
And now prepare your throats. Lavinia, come,
Receive the blood, and when that they are dead,
Let
me
go grind their bones to powder small.
And with this hateful liquor temper itj
And in that paste let their vile heads be baked.
Come, come, be everyone o.fJicious
To make this banquet, which I wish might prove
More stern and bloody than the Centaur's feast.
619
He recited it in the full sonority of a renowned lecture voice, gave
it all the Elizabethan hullaballoo due vowels and consonants grappling
with one another over hurdles and down falls: how he relished the con–
junctive sinews of these words. Hair stood on my neck. I knew then
what a sixth sense was hair.
"I do not approve of the play," said Dr. Gardiner when he was
done, "but the bile of the ages is in the boil of this fabulous stuff."
Maisie had fallen asleep while he read. Her head was to one side,
her mouth was open, and I thought for a moment she had suffered a
stroke. I was mistaken. She had merely taken her nightly jot of three
Seconals; soon Dr. Gardiner walked her up to bed. It would also take
years before I learned - how many little confessions was Kittredge
eventually to make! - that Dr. Gardiner had a preferred means of
connubial union: it was to investigate Maisie while she slept. Kittredge
discovered her father's habit when she was ten. She peeped and saw it all.
In sleep, Maisie, a wanton of Morpheus, made cries like a bird.
Husbands and wives have been known to discover that their sepa–
rate childhoods are curiously linked: Kittredge and I had both seen our
parents in the act of love. Or, more to the fact, we had, between us,
seen three of our four parents. Titus and Lavinia, taken together, had lost
three of their four hands. The allusion is meaningless, I am certain, except
that numbers command their own logic, and Augustus Farr may have
been on a promenade that night while Dr. Gardiner and his somnolent
Maisie were transported to those underworlds that dwell beneath the
navel.
