Hearing from Maisie

Dear Ann Landers:

…I was a closet smoker who went through a pack a day for 20 years and tried to quit dozens of times. I failed because I felt as if I was depriving myself of a great deal of pleasure even though I knew in my heart that cigarettes were killing me.

What I was REALLY experiencing was a healing crisis. Those withdrawal symptoms were just the way my body purged itself of the toxins that had built up over two decades of addiction.

Each crisis lasted only about 30 seconds — just long enough to pull out a cigarette, light it and take a couple of drags. I decided to change my attitude and do something good for myself in those 30 seconds. I did 20 push-ups and occupied my hands and my mind during the crisis periods. The result? I developed a great set of pecs and haven’t had a cigarette in over four years….

Healed and Healthy in Virginia

________________

My Dearest Mother,

Well, your little girl is finally here.

I had been looking forward for absolute centuries, it seems, to my first footsteps upon the golden-asphalt boulevards of the United States.

As you know, Father had adored the Yanks, as he called them. His afternoon-tea disquisitions upon their habits (who among us can ever forget the tale of his ribald first encounter with the chain-smoking “GI” forever engraved in our memories as “my wartime pal Bud, from New Jersey”: new, Mother, can you believe it?) frequently sent me running from the parlour, breathless with laughter and longing, to my lonely private place in the north tower. There I would hug and hug my favourite Pooh — his amber fur burnished to a dull tawny lustre — and dream that he was not Pooh at all, but Alan Ladd, his hair combed straight back from his forehead which I would kiss and kiss because I could not get within an inch of his rueful smiling mouth, from which always depended a glowing, o! I don’t know, Herbert Tareyton or some such.

Given the Yanks’ Westward-ho! history, of course I had been expecting to encounter in them a sort of restless ineffable yearning not unlike that which drove me to the north tower and which, I imagined, lay behind the pounding of Alan Ladd’s diminutive heart as he gazed soulfully up through the swirling smoke at the underside of my proud chin.

And I was right about that, you know — the yearning. What took me quite by surprise was the effect that this yearning has had upon their characters. They do not, as did I those decades now past, convert all their formless yearnings into unbreakable attachments for material possessions which then require no yearning, being always present (Pooh asks me to say hullo for him, by the way, and to reassure you that the RK treatments have done wonders for his remaining eye, and to thank you ever so much again for underwriting his stay at Doctor Bunkin’s Eye, Ear, Nose, Throat, and Plush Institute). No. The Yanks turn their yearnings inward, towards the self and its unceasing improvement.

You have no doubt read, for example, of all the controversy over on this side of the water — “brouhaha” is a wonderful new tidbit of diction I have heard more than once, also “ruckus” and “flap,” I think I am falling head over heels with this flavour of our native tongue! — concerning cigarette smoking. (You have read of that, haven’t you Mother? You have been reading the daily American newspapers that I arranged to have mailed to you, haven’t you? I sincerely hope that Cook has not been pinching them for the backstairs lot and their fish wrappings and such, and I hope that you are at least checking her fingertips for tell-tale black ink. And don’t you dare trust to any such disingenuous wavings-away as that it’s ashes, not ink, unless of course she’s been again groping round in Father’s humidors and briars.)

Yes. As with the French and their neuroses about the sanctity of French culture and language, so with the Yanks and lighting up. An American who smokes is at best merely sneered upon by his fellow citizens and at worst consigned to skulkery outside his place of employment, where he is subjected to the awful depredations of climate, vagrancy, and a sort of pitiless pity in the eyes of passersby. Anxious not to linger in this endless corridor of ostracism, the smoking Yank casts about first to the left, then to the right and then back again, searching always searching for the “gimmick” as they say that will bring him once more back into the fold of society’s stingy approbation. (Pooh, now just stop for a moment, I will play with you shortly, dear, only just let me finish this epistle to Mother, won’t you! You are such a fussbudget sometimes!) Concern about health plays a part, of course; but I do believe that the smoker’s greater motivation arises not from some dim premonition of hospital beds and oxygen tents, but rather from a quite pointed desire to stop looking out of the corners of his eyes.

What would Father’s wartime pal Bud have made of this, one cannot help but wonder? We know what Bud would have made of it, Mother: he would have lit up, rolled his eyes, and uttered some risible sobriquet for excrement.

But enough of that; I have news, real news.

Now, Mother, before you read this next section if you would be so kind as to sit yourself down (as they say over here) in the wheelie; have Catherwood roll you out into the veranda if the sun is shining or into the library, before your favourite window, if it is not. Arrange for Pippa to bring you one of your secret Guinnesses (of course I knew about that, Mother, I am not completely blind nor daft either) from up the basement.

There. Comfy now?

Good. For I must tell you Mother — and I will thank you not to breathe a word of this to Jack, Margaret, or Lindsay, you know (from your own dreadful experience with Aunt Cynthia when she heard about the matter of Father’s favourite Percheron) how tiresome siblings can be once they’ve got hold of this sort of rumourous nugget — I have met the most wonderful man.

Had I spoken of him earlier than the fortnight past, I should have had to tell you that “met” was too strong, too intimate a verb— But I proceed ahead of my tale, and I know you shall insist upon the entire story, every comma and semi-colon of it.

One evening shortly after my arrival in the City of New York (that new again, I shall never get accustomed to it), Pooh and I had managed to escape the ferrous attentions of the fearsome Nurse Riley, who by now I am sure has quite probably communicated to you her displeasure at being locked in the loo for hours with nothing for company or sustenance but a Reader’s Digest magazine and her oh so precious bath oils, if you ask me Mother the woman should feel lucky that there, of all places, she at least had plenty to drink.

In another city, in another century perhaps, your little girl, her Pooh clutched close to her bosom, would have been found wandering the streets by a kindly old gentleman — perhaps one of the Barrymores, or Alan Ladd in his dotage — who would take her in, introduce her to his household, and nurse her back to health from the brink of death by, o! I don’t know, something awful and common-sounding, consumption or pox or something. When she was again well, he would discover that her cheeks were not sunken but rosy, that her lips were not naturally foam-flecked but like little flowers or fruits awaiting their first plucking, and that her eyes were not dull orbs but mischievous little pools of laughter. Eventually the kindly gentleman would get over his dreadful jealousy of Pooh, and in the final chapter would be seen filing papers for the little stuffed one’s legal adoption as the heir he had long ago surrendered all hope of ever having.

That did not happen to me, Mother, nor did it happen to Pooh.

We roamed the darkened rain-swept streets for — o! awful! I shudder at the memory! — nigh upon fifteen minutes before anyone took the slightest notice of us. As Nurse Riley has doubtlessly reported, I had taken the liberty of liberating (as Bud might say) one of her uniforms, and had secreted Pooh within its roomy upper stories. It was evidently this garb which caught the eye of the first gentleman to pay me any heed; he was not elderly and white-haired but he was quite the charmer, although frankly rather ratty about the eyebrows and moustaches, Mother. And he said to me in a sort of feral mutter, not at all like Alan Ladd, “Lost, honey?”

I did concede (clutching Pooh to me but discreetly, Mother, by sort of hunching my shoulders together and gripping him there, our hearts beating as always in sympathetic counterpoint with each other) that we were rather in need of Traveler’s Aid or any other such institution, and could he kindly direct us thither?

“‘We,’ huh?” he croaked, and then — I blush to be discussing such matters with you Mother but am determined to see this through — he looked upon what he fancied to be my bosoms and rather chuckled, you know, and added, “Oh yeah, I see what you mean.”

It was awful, you see — in a way. But in another profounder way it was as I said rather charming, especially when he invited me to his secret place (as he called it, and I thought with longing of the north tower) in what he called the Port Authority. There, he said, he would render unto me all the directions I needed.

“The Port Authority,” I thought to myself. I rather liked the sound of it, so, yes! authoritative, don’t you know?, and I fancied that perhaps this man, however unkempt he might seem now, was in fact someone in a position of charitable responsibility for a socially-conscious local vintner; someone who roamed the streets of the city in search of the lost; a scooper-upper of poor waifs, as it were, who appeared thus in public in order to put the naturally destitute at their ease.

Now Mother I know you have always insisted — and so did Father, of course, before the Archangel Gabriel swept down from a cloud and bore him off to The Happy Lands, as you have always averred — that we tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Yet I cannot possibly bring myself to describe to you the horror that awaited your little daughter in the so-called Port Authority. You will simply have to accept, for now and forever, that I felt quite triumphant when this “Mister DuPREE from TennesSEE,” as he called himself, when he ever so casually — he thought he was quite clever you see — slipped one of his horrible claws between the second and third buttons of Nurse Riley’s uniform and felt not whatever-it-was he thought he’d feel, but rather the soft fur and smooth shiny but vengeful nose of precious Pooh!

(Forgive me, Mother, for a spate of giggling schoolgirlism here. Pooh! O I love you so much! And did you bite that awful man, dear heart? And did I not flee with you to the foul “ladies” room and scrub your little mouth out with lukewarm filthy water? Yes you did, and I did, and you were so brave through it all!)

And it was upon my still somewhat panic-stricken and disheveled emergence from that selfsame lavatory (please don’t blush Mother, you know there are far worse words for it) and thence out to the streets once again that I caught my first sight of the gentleman I mentioned to you earlier, yes, that one: the most wonderful man.

When I first set my eyesight upon my dear Ambrose — he insists that his name is Andy but I do think Ambrose suits him (and my taste, truth to tell) so much better — it was through the plate-glass front of one of the local public houses. I was looking in, Mother, drenched in a sort of forlorn visceral restlessness that I can describe only as hunger. Nurse Riley, you see, had (as is her custom) quite meanly taken her purse into the loo with her, the woman is absolutely stark raving paranoid about that seedy old faux-cowhide thing, Mother; and as a result neither I nor Pooh had the merest penny upon our persons with which we might have purchased some refreshment. (And you said that the Riley was to look after us. Shame, Mother! If I were you I would have her certification looked into.)

So there we stood upon the pavement, looking through the window. Pooh’s cotton-stuffed tummy gurgled in an excrescence of appetite, and in my reflection — false modesty aside, your little girl looks precisely marvelous in white — I caught myself licking my lips. For inside was spread the most amazing array of delicacies!

Most directly inside the window, for example, were an elderly couple whose words were inaudible to me but whose appetites were clearly well upon the way to satisfaction; He would reach for her chips with his fork, and She would angrily stab at his hand with her own implement. Farther in, at a table by himself, sat a man whose dimensions put me rather in mind of the ambulo, you know, that bore Pooh and me and Nurse Riley from the grounds that last time; he had before him two heaping plates, Mother, whole mountains as they seemed of Italian noodles and some sort of cooked meat-and-cheese sandwiches just dripping absolutely dripping O God positively running with fried onions and rivulets of molten Cheddar, it made my mind want to burst and indeed makes it want to burst even now with the recollection. I am afraid I rather swooned face-first against the window, and the buttons of Nurse Riley’s uniform parted to reveal to the man and woman on the other side Pooh’s soft furry mounds. Her eyes started quite from their sockets, and whilst She was recovering herself He made off with at least two mouthsful of chips that I could count.

I looked up then, and saw by the bar, staring in my direction, my Ambrose.

What was it like when you first saw Father, dear Mother? Was it not unlike the yearning of the tongue for the postage stamp? the spanner for the carriage bolt? the shuddery tug of wind-driven sand for a bather’s eye? O for me too, Mother! For me too! And before I knew quite what had got into me, there I stood next to him, borne upon unspeakable waves of a mysterious magnetic pull that I daresay suffuses me yet.

And did I say “me,” Mother? Rather “us,” for Andy — Ambrose — feels it too, felt it then as I knew before he uttered a word!

He looked with what I knew to be a flicker of interest in his emerald eyes (yes, emerald! Father’s eyes were emerald!) in my direction. “Uh, hey,” he said. Then he patted his breast pocket once, twice, trebly, and patted the pockets over his thighs as well. I do not know whence comes this gesture, Mother; I think it may be some post-Colonial form of greeting, some symbolic expression of civility meant to communicate something akin to, I have no weapons. I know only that I have seen it in him many times since, and always followed by the same behaviour: he fell prostrate to the floor at my feet, Mother, at my feet!, and with the enormous palms of his equally enormous hands outspread lifted and lowered himself once, twice, 19 and 20 times!

I will admit that rather taken aback, I was, although the other patrons of that establishment responded only by clearing a space for him. I bent at the waist and offered a hand — this one, the left, o! that I needn’t have washed it since! — in the direction of Ambrose’s panting recumbency. Indeed, as if caught up in the spirit of things, one of darling Pooh’s own befurred extremities popped from within its confining white quarters.

“Please sir,” I said, “arise.” (Pooh’s little voice chimed in, “Yes, on your feet you silly sod!” but I shushed him. Would he have spoken thusly to Christopher Robin? No. I know that Pooh frequently gets homesick for the world of fiction but as you have always taught us, Mother, one’s own anxieties never excuse incivility.)

Grasping my fingers, Ambrose scrambled to his feet. For my part, summoning up all the demureness I could muster in so ticklish, so emotion-laden a moment, I tucked Pooh’s limb back between the buttons, and then raised my eyes to behold — well, how should I say it? — my Ambrose’s form. His physique, if you will. Please do not think it an exaggeration, Mother, if I tell you that my Ambrose has the upper arms and shoulders of two, no three! normal men. Shaped something like a top, he is, and in truth whenever your little girl catches a glimpse of him e.g. endeavouring to push himself sideways through a revolving doorway (where he sometimes gets literally wedged, his hips and legs waving and his feet brushing ineffectually against the floor) her mind begins to spin. Giddy-making, it is.

But look, Mother, of course there is lots more to tell you but I must drop this in the post soon, lest your imagination be swayed by the Riley’s wretched misleadings. I assure you that I am quite happy, however giddy, and in no need of being sought out by The Yard’s minions. Indeed — I know that you will be scandalised but truth is truth, Mother, and we may not select only those portions of it that we wish to hear — I am composing this letter beneath the topsheets of Ambrose’s (and now my own!) Queen-sized bed (though why it is called such I am still puzzling out: H.R.H. is surely one of the most tiniest models for a sleeping apparatus that I can imagine); the Riley’s white uniform lays in a befuddled heap upon the carpet, where it has been for, o! positively a week now.

From the pillow beside me, Pooh insists that I say hullo again for him, so “Hullo!” from Pooh.

As for Ambrose, I know he would send his greets, too. Yet at this moment he is slumbering on the floor, as he has been for an hour or so — a consequence of his gallant custom (preceded always by the random patting of his left breast, his thighs, and the nightstand) of rolling off the bed and repeatedly raising and lowering himself after every latest bout of IT (don’t knit those brows, Mother, you know perfectly well what I speak of!). When he recovers his breath, he confides to me that he is up to a hundred seventy-five now — that relentless drive for self-improvement, don’t you see?

And when you think of Ambrose, Mother dear, I want you to think of him not in the crabbed, aged context of your little daughter’s defoliation. No. Think instead of those emerald eyes, and that physique (at least when he is standing, which eventuality has — I blush again — not occurred very often in recent days). I know what that physique would have put Father, and perhaps Bud (from New Jersey), in proud mind of: the letter V, and Churchill’s obdurate-bulldog’s upraised fingers: VICTORIA.

Please proffer my very best to Cook, Catherwood, Pippa and the rest. (Except for the Riley, of course: tell her with a mysterious wink only that her uniform has never seen such action.)

I love you much, dear Mother.

Yours ever,
Maisie