The Labor

By Wilson White

The Labor details the events of my life from 1989 through 1992, when I left my home town of 57 years to venture to New York City. Free, white, and sixty-one. This book, part of a series I call The Gates of Hell, follows the first four, The Descent, and The Task, Parts 1, 2, and 3, which covered my years after college in 1954.

The series and book titles derive from The Aeneid:
The Gates of Hell stand open night and day;
Smooth The Descent, and easy is the way;
But to return, and view The Cheerful Skies,
In this The Task and mighty labor lies.
Virgil, trans. Dryden

I hope my readers appreciate how I've recreated the joys and accomplishments of these sixty-some years. However, a dark thread runs through them. Only dimly aware of it, a relentless psychological disorder, a powerful neurosis, N.P.D, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, gripped me in it jaws.

And the Leader, who beheld me so attent,
Exclaimed: "Within the fires the spirits are;
Each swathes himself with that wherewith he burns."
Dante, trans. Longfellow

When I sought help, many professionals refused to take me on. I finally entered psychoanalytic therapy in New York City. Slowly the treatment began to take effect, and you may see the results for yourself in my out-of-sequence book, The Cheerful Skies – Book 1.

A former friend asked, 'What are you trying to be – the Great American Knausgård?'
My writing style? Maybe a combination of rambling memoire and diary, with discourses.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Robert Lowell

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098320652

Book preview

This book is a work of historical fiction. Some names of real institutions, people, or places have been included. However, the events depicted are imaginary, and the names of nonhistorical persons or events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real persons or events is purely coincidental.

Copyright © Wilson White

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ISBN: 978-1-09832-065-2

Fiction by Wilson White

Ernest

Twenty Thirty-four

A Basket of Summer Fruit

The Turtle’s Nest

The Descent

The Task Part 1

The Task Part 2

The Task Part 3

The Cheerful Skies - Book 1

THE GATES OF HELL

A life-long first person narrative of a Narcissist

The gates of Hell stand open night and day

Smooth the descent and easy is the way,

But to return to view the cheerful skies,

In this the task and mighty labor lies.

Virgil, trans. Dryden

And the Leader, who beheld me so attent,

exclaimed: "Within the fires the spirits are;

Each swathes himself with that wherewith he burns.

Dante, trans. Longfellow

The Labor

1989 - 1992

Contents

1989

To a Mouse

ACT ONE, Scene 4.

ACT TWO. Scene 1. Fireside

Chandler Rudd

Norm Wright

Norm Wright 2

Bucky Fuller at the Plaza

Fifty-Fifty

ACT ONE. Scene 1.

ACT ONE. Scene 2.

ACT ONE. Scene 3.

ACT ONE. Scene 4.

ACT ONE. Scene 5.

1989

Peter Peter pumpkin eater,

had a wife and couldn’t keep her.

No job, no book, no house, now no wife.

To a Mouse

On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785.

—Robert Burns

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

Wi’ bickerin brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee

Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion

Has broken Nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion,

Which makes thee startle,

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

An’ fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;

What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!

A daimen-icker in a thrave

’S a sma’ request:

I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,

An’ never miss ’t!

fellow-mortal!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!

It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!

An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,

O’ foggage green!

An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,

Baith snell an’ keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,

An’ weary Winter comin fast,

An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,

Thou thought to dwell,

Till crash! the cruel coulter past

Out thro’ thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble

Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!

Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,

But house or hald,

To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,

An’ cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane [Alone]

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

For promis’d joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!

The present only toucheth thee:

But Och! I backward cast my e’e,

On prospects drear!

An’ forward tho’ I canna see,

I guess an’ fear

Of course there was always Alexia-Jane, and maybe Martha. That’s how I pictured it – Joanna vanished, Alexia life-sized here and now, Martha half-sized, and somewhere near.

====================

Joanna kept to her part of the house, and we did things by appointment. One night in the city I went to see The War of the Roses, which somewhat resembled our home situation. The titles showed just one red rose – I guess Hollywood doesn’t know about the House of York. I thought DeVito and Douglas were great, and K Turner odious. I could see that he neglected her – mostly absorbed in his lawyer work, but nothing else terrible, though they did disagree about the kids. But we never got into her head, just saw her ferocious anger. Must have been something else bugging her, so the film lacked that depth. I guess I’ll long remember its last few seconds, both entangled in the fallen chandelier, when he made a final, tender, death gesture, and she cast away his arm. Deep – but what? How did this work with me and Joanna? Teicher said revenge was too sweet for her to give up, so J’s anger at me resembled Turner’s.

Ted Meth was happy to be my divorce lawyer – one of his specialties. One morning at his Westfield office I told him what I knew, and he came up with a plan. He would file the papers, because it was better to attack than defend a case like this. We spent a couple of hours going over most everything, including any violent incidents. I forgot to tell him about the time she threatened me with a Mosel wine bottle. New Jersey was a no-fault divorce law state, but there had to be some sort of reason. So I told him how she mocked me as Doctor Libido in one of our Murder Weekend scripts, and that was enough for him to start. He charged $150 an hour, $50 for typing and filing, etc., and he’d try to get it done in less than a year. Sounded reasonable, so I wrote him a $ 5,000 retainer check. Ted had been WWBLR’s lawyer in our parlous times back around 1976, and we got through. Barely. He told me Joanna would get 40% of my net worth. Little did I know.

Joanna had this lawyer over in Livingston , Wolff something, and he and Ted exchanged views and counter-views, tried to arrange some sort of compromise, but her guy was tough. After about six months they had a conference, and after another month or so, both sides filed, and pretty soon a trial date was set, in Elizabeth County Courthouse.

In the meantime, Joanna and I met for dinner at 297, maybe twice a month, and mostly discussed household details – what to do with the maid, or with our tenant in the garage wing, and I paid the bills, as usual. Then one night Joanna told me she’d bought a nice little house over on Glen Oaks Ave:

https://goo.gl/maps/U2fDyyMgiRaoRFjCA

‘I guess I’m not invited.’ No verbal response.

Around a year ago she got Nancy Rockefeller to redecorate our piano room. (Ex-Husband Tom R. had the name, but wasn’t closely related to the you-know-who’s. He ran SPS for W. E. Hutton, the white-shoe outfit, not E. F. Hutton, the wire house.) A lovely big room at the south end of the house, was originally a front and rear sitting parlor, with a fireplace on its north wall. A baby Steinway on one end, and Father’s old upright Hardman on the other, with some furniture in-between. Nice. For my Holiday parties we’d roll up the rugs, and make it a ballroom. Sort of. Now, Nancy installed some tables, and two small sofas and four chairs, light green, which looked odd to me. When Nancy wanted to replace our two nicely enclosed radiators with heating pipes, I put my foot down. NO! Period. They pleaded, but No. Case closed. The furnishings came, which looked too small for the room, but there they sat. Light green. $40,000, including tacky green drapes which I hated.

At divorce time Joanna said she’d like to take the piano room furnishings over to Glen Oaks, including the Steinway which she had from her mother. Then the light dawned. She’d been planning for the divorce for some time. And pulled the plug when I retired, when the $$$ stopped rolling in.

Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women, and become servants for their sakes. Many also have perished, have erred, and sinned, for women… O ye men, how can it be but women should be strong, seeing they do thus?—Esdras.

Meth and Wolff sparred over the divorce terms, until Ted said our case was the best that could be done. I glanced through the papers, and from what I could see, I’d get only 50% – about $1.5 million, including my half of the house. It didn’t seem fair, because I’d made every cent, and she got half. Much different from when we were married, but Ted said ex post facto didn’t apply. So there it was. Maybe Ted could find some more somehow. Maybe one thing went against me – J had looked through my cancelled checks and found the $8,000 to Sayonara Pearls I’d bought for Alexia-Jane. Fortunately I’d paid cash for the citrine and the trinkets from Paris.

Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye;

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing,

Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?

====================

Around then I scuttled back to Teicher, despite his having described my condition as ‘Acceptable’. But he also said that you get three chances – in childhood, adolescence, and therapy. So this was a fourth --Lucky Pierre! As he’d promised, there would always be a place for me. Good mother, or good father, I didn’t know which. He looked a bit older – I guessed he was around eighty, since he’d served in the Army Medical Corp during WWII – but same office, same crappy furnishings, and as always he mostly listened, then commented. This time at 10:30 AM, Tuesday mornings. Always there, same apartment, Broadway at West 88th.

After a year or so Joanna had stopped seeing him, and he told me she’d told him about her plans for the divorce. When I asked him why she did it, ‘Revenge is too sweet for her to give up.’ I hadn’t thought about it as revenge, but it was true. At least partly. No loud disagreements, no heated arguing, not like Turner in The Roses, just the knife in the gut. ‘I know this won’t make your day, Wilson,’ and now Wolff and his pack. Of course I couldn’t blame her, after everything I’d done. I resented her not seeing the changes I’d made, resented her failing to grow forward with me. But that’s understandable. And