To Sail Beyond The Sunset: The Life and Loves of Maureen Johnson

Chapter 24 - Decline and Fall

I am not certain that my situation was improved when these ghouls grabbed me away from those spooks. I suppose that almost everybody has fantasies about making the punishment fit the crime or about some scoundrel who would look his best in the leading role at a funeral. It is a harmless way to kill time during a sleepless night.

But these weirdos mean it.

Murder is all they think about. The first night I was here they listed fifty-odd people who needed to be killed, itemised their crimes, and offered me the honour of being the next member to count coup - pick a client, do! One whose crimes are particularly offensive to you, Milady Johnson -

I admit that the listed miscreants were a scrofulous bunch over whom even their own mothers would not be likely to weep but, like Mr Clemens' favourite son, Huckleberry Finn, I am not much interested in killing strangers. I am not opposed to the death penalty - I voted for it every time the matter came to a vote, which was frequently during the decline and fall of the United States - but in killing pour le sport I need to be emotionally involved. Oh, forced to a choice I would rather shoot a man than a deer; I can't see the ‘sport' in shooting a gentle vegetarian that can't shoot back.

But, given full choice, I would rather watch television than kill a stranger. Some, at least.

I said, ‘I don't see anyone on that list who is to my taste. Do you happen to have in your file of better-deads someone who abandons kittens?'

The fat chairman smiled at me under his dark glasses. Now that's a delicious idea! No, I think no unless by chance there is someone nominated for other reasons who also abandons kittens. I will have Research set up an inquiry at once. Madam, what would be an appropriate termination for such a client? Have you studied it?'

‘No, I haven't. But his death should involve homesickness... and loneliness... and cold... and hunger... and fear... and utter despair.'

‘Artistic. But perhaps not practical. Such a death might stretch out over months... and we really do not have the facilities to permit a deletion to last more than a few days. Ah, Bluebeard! - you have something to add?'

‘Do what our sister suggests for as many days as we can afford the space. Then surround the client by a halo of enormous trucks, giant holos, the way traffic must look to a kitten. Have the images bear down on him, with overpowering sound effects. Then hit him with a real truck - a glancing blow to maim him. Let him die slowly, as is often the case with a road-killed animal.'

"Madam, does that appeal to you?'

(It made me want to throw up.) ‘Unless something better comes along.'

‘If we can find such a client for you, he will be saved and held at your disposal. In the mean time we must find you someone else for coup, not let you sit among us naked of proper pride.'

That was a week ago and I have begun to feel just a hint of the idea that if I do not promptly find on their list a client I wish to terminate, then... just possibly... we don't want to hurry you... but still... if I don't make blood coup soon, how can I be trusted not to betray them to the Supreme Bishop's proctors?

On that Time Corps mission I carried out in Japan in the 1930s, I wish I had investigated those reports of another woman who might be me. If I had proved to myself that I was indeed tripled for 1937-8, then I would sleep better here now, as that third loop would hava to be further ahead on my personal time line... which would prove that I will get out of this mess still breathing.

That's the real trick: to keep breathing. Isn't it, Pixel? Pixel? Pixel! Oh, damn!

Changes - in 1972 Princess Polly died in her sleep - heart failure, I think, but I did not have an autopsy. She was a little old lady who had lived a long life and, I think, a happy one, on the whole. I said a prayer to Bubastis, asking her to watch for the arrival in the eternal Catnip Fields of a little black and white cat who had never scratched or bitten without just cause and who had had the misfortune to have had only one kitten - by Caesarean section and the kitten never opened its eyes - and then she had lost her kitten factory by spaying because her surgeon said that she could never have a normal litter and could not safely risk another pregnancy.

I did not get another kitten. In 1972 I was ninety years old (although I admitted only to fifty-nine... and tried my darnedest - exercise and diet and posture and cosmetics and clothes - to look forty). Being ninety in fact, it was possible, even likely, that another kitten would outlive me. I chose not to risk that.

I moved to Albuquerque because it had no ghosts for me. Kansas City was choked with ghosts of my past, of every sort, both sad and happy. I preferred not to drive by a site, such as our old home on Benton Boulevard, or where our old farmhouse out south had once been, then driving past would cover the happy used-to-be with dreary or unrecognisable what-is.

I preferred to remember Central High School the way it had been when my children attended it. In those days the scholastic records of Central's graduates at West Point and Annapolis and MIT and other ‘tough' schools caused Central to be rated as the finest secondary school in the west, equal in academics to the best preparatory schools, such as Groton or Lawrenceville - instead of what it had become: mostly babysitting for overgrown infants, a place where police prowl cars gathered every afternoon to stop fights, to confiscate knives, and to shake down the ‘students' for drugs - a ‘high school' where half the students should never have been allowed to graduate from grammar school because they could not read or write well enough to get along in the world outside.

Albuquerque held no ghosts for me; I had never lived them I had no children living there, no grandchildren. (Great-grandchildren? Well, maybe.) Albuquerque had had the good fortune (from my point of view) to be bypassed by moving roadway Route Sixty-Six. The old paved road numbered route 66 and once called ‘The Main Street of America' had run straight through Albuquerque, but roadcity Route Sixty-Six was miles to the south; one could not hear it or see it.

Albuquerque was favoured also through having been bypassed by many of the ills of the Crazy Years. Despite its size - 180.000 and growing smaller because of the roadcity south of it; such shrinkage was usual - it continued to have the sweet small-town feeling so common in the early twentieth century, so scarce in the second half. It was the home of the main campus of the University of New Mexico... a school blessed with a chancellor who had not given in to the nonsense of the sixties.

Students there had rioted (some of them) just once; Dr Macintosh kicked them out and they stayed kicked out. Parents screamed and complained at the state capital in Santa Fe; Dr Macintosh told the trustees and the legislature that there would be order and civilised behaviour on the campus as long as he was in charge. If they did not have the guts to back him up, he would leave at once and they could hire some masochistic wimp who enjoyed presiding over a madhouse. They backed him up.

In 1970 at campuses all over America half of all freshmen (or more) were required to take a course called ‘English A' (or something similar) but known everywhere as ‘Bonehead English'. When Dr Macintosh became chancellor, he abolished Bonghead English and refused to admit students who would have been required to take it. He announced, ‘It costs the taxpayers a minimum of seventeen thousand dollars a year to keep a student on this campus. Reading, writing, spelling, and grammar are grammar school subjects. If an applicant for admission to this university does not know these grammar school subjects well enough to get along here, let him go back to the grammar school that had dumped him untaught. He does not belong here. I refuse to waste tax money on him.'

Again parents screamed - but the parents of these subliterate applicants were a minority, while the majority of voters and legislators were discovering that they liked what they heard from Chancellor Macintosh.

After Dr Macintosh revised the university prospectos, it carried a warning that students were at all times subject to surprise tests for drugs-urine, blood, whatever. If they were caught - expulsion, no second chance.

A student who flunked a drug test found his quarters searched at once, all legal and proper, as there were seven judges in town willing night and day to issue search warrants on ‘probable cause'. No attention was paid to tender feelings; all who were caught in possession were prosecuted.

Especially for the benefit of drug dealers the legislature reinstituted a fine old custom: public hangings. Gallows were erected in plazas. To be sure, drug dealers sentenced to death always appealed to the state supreme court and then to Washington, but with five members including the Chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States having been appointed by President Patton, it worked out that drug dealers in New Mexico had little reason to complain of the ‘Law's Delays'. One bright young entrepreneur lived exactly four weeks from arrest to jack Ketch. The average time, once the system got rolling, was less than two months.

As usual, the ACLU had a fit over all these matters. Several ACLU lawyers spent considerable time in jail for contempt of court, not in the new jail, but in the drunk tank of the old jail, with the drunks, the hopheads, the wetbacks, and the quasi-male prostitutes.

These were some of the reasons I moved to Albuquerque. The whole country was losing its buttons, a mass psychosis I have never fully understood. Albuquerque was not immune but it was fighting back, and it had enough sensible men and women in key posts that it was a good place to live during the ten years I was there.

At the very time that America's schools and families were going to pieces the country was enjoying a renaissance in engineering and science, and not alone in such big items as space travel and roadcities. While students frivolled away their time, the research facilities of universities and of industry were turning out more good work than ever - in particle physics, in plasma physics, in aerospace, in genetics, in exotic materials, in medical research, in every field.

The exploitation of space flourished unbelievably. Mr Harriman's decision to keep it out of government hands, let private enterprise go at it for profit, was vindicated. While Pikes Peak Spaceport was still new, Spaceways Ltd was building bigger, longer, and more efficient catapults at Quito and on the Island of Hawaii. Manned expeditions were sent to Mars and to Venus and the first asteroid miners headed out.

Meanwhile the United States went to pieces.

This decay went on not just on time line two but on all investigated time lines. During my fifty years in Boondock I read several scholarly studies of the comparative histories of the explored time lines concerning what was called ‘The Twentieth Century Devolution'.

I'm not sure of my opinions. I saw it on only one time line, and that only to the middle of 1982 and in my own country. I have opinions but you need not take them seriously as some leading scholars have other opinions.

Here are some of the things I saw as wrong:

The United States had over 600.000 practising lawyers. That must be at least 500.000 more than were actually needed. I am not counting lawyers such as myself; I never practised. I studied law simply to protect myself from lawyers, and there were many like me.

Family decay: I think it came mainly from both parents working outside the home. It was said again and again that, from mid-century on, both parents had to have jobs just to pay the bills. If this was true, why was it not necessary in the first half of the century? How did labour-saving machinery and enormously increased productivity impoverish the family?

Some said the cause was high taxes. This sounds more reasonable; I recall my shock the year the government collected a trillion dollars. (Fortunately most of it was wasted.)

But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolised and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously - after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important... so his opinions on foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth. (Most of his fans were just as ignorant and unlettered; the disease was spreading.)

Consider these:

1) ‘Bread and Circuses';

2) The abolition of the pauper's oath in Franklin Roosevelt's first term;

3)'Peer group' promotion in public schools.

These three conditions heterodyne each other. The abolition of the pauper's oath as a condition for public charity ensured that habitual failures, incompetents of every sort, people who can't support themselves and people who won't, each of these would have the same voice in ruling the country, in assessing taxes and spending them, as (for example) Thomas Edison or Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie or Andrew Jackson. Peer group promotion ensured that the franchise would be exercised by ignorant incompetents. And ‘Bread and Circuses' is what invariably happens to a democracy that goes that route: unlimited spending on ‘social' programmes ends in national bankruptcy, which historically is always followed by dictatorship.

It seemed to me that these three things were the key mistakes that destroyed the best culture in all known histories up to that time. Oh, there were other things - strikes by public servants, for example. My father was still alive when this became a problem.

Father said grimly, ‘There is a ready solution for anyone on the public payroll who feels that he is not paid enough: he can resign and work for a living. This applies with equal force to Congressmen, Welfare "dients", schoolteachers, generals, garbage collectors, and judges.'

And of course the entire twentieth century from 1917 on was clouded by the malevolent silliness of Marxism.

But the Marxists would not and could not have had much influence if the American people had not started losing the hard common sense that had won them a continent. By de sixties everyone talked about his ‘rights' and no one spoke of his duties - and patriotism was a subject for jokes.

I do not believe that either Marx or that cracker revivalist who became the First Prophet could have damaged the country if the people had not become soft in the head.

‘But every man is entitled to his own opinion!'

Perhaps. Certainly every man had his own opinion on everything, no matter how silly.

On two subjects the overwhelming majority of people regarded their own opinions as Absolute Truth, and sincerely believed that anyone who disagreed with them was immoral, outrageous, sinful, sacrilegious, offensive, intolerable, stupid, illogical, treasonable, actionable, against the public interest, ridiculous, and obscene.

The two subjects were (of course) sex and religion.

On sex and religion each American citizen knew the One Right Answer, by direct Revelation from God.

In view of the wide diversity of opinion, most of them must necessarily have been mistaken. But on these two subjects they were not accessible to reason.

‘But you must respect another man's religious beliefs!' For Heaven's sake, why? Stupid is stupid - faith doesn't make it smart.

I recall one candidates promise that I heard during the Presidential campaign of 1976, a campaign promise that seems to me to illustrate how far American rationality had skidded.

‘We shall drive ever forward along this line until all our citizens have above-average incomes!'

Nobody laughed.

When I moved to Albuquerque I simplified my life in several ways. I simplified my holdings and split them among three conservative managements, in New York, in Toronto, and in Zurich. I wrote a new will, listing a few sentimental bequests, but leaving the major portion, over ninety-five per cent, to the Howard Foundation.

Why? The decision resulted from some long, long midnight thoughts. I had far more money than one old woman could spend - Lawsy me, I could not even spend the income from it. Leave it m my children? They were no longer children and not one of them needed it - and each had received not only Howard bonuses but also the start-up money that Brian and I had arranged for each of them.

Leave it to ‘worthy causes'? That is thin gruel, my friend. Most of such money is sopped up by administration, i.e., eaten by parasites.

The original capital had come from the Ira Howard Foundation; I decided to send my accumulation back to the Foundation. It seemed fitting.

I bought a modern condo apartment near the campus, between Central Avenue and Lomas Boulevard, signed up for a course in pedagogy at the University, not with any serious intention of studying (it takes real effort to flunk a course in pedagogy) but to establish me on campus. There are all sorts of good social events on a campus - motion pictures, plays, open lectures, dances, clubs. Doctorates are as common on campus as fleas on a dog, but nevertheless a doctor's degree is a union card that gives entrée to many places.

I joined the nearest Unitarian church and supported it with liberal donations, in order to enjoy the many social benefits of church membership without being pestered by straitjacket creeds.

I joined a square dance club, a Viennese Waltz club, a contract bridge dub, a chess club, a current events supper club, and a civic affairs luncheon club.

In six weeks I had more passes than the Rocky Mountains. It let me be fussy about my bed mates and still get in far more friendly fornication than had been the case in the preceding quarter of a century. I had not limited myself to George Strong during those years, but I had kept too busy for serious pursuit of the all-time number-one sport.

Now I had time. As some old gal said (Dorothy Parker?), ‘There is nothing as much fun as a man!'

‘Male and female created He them' - that's a good arrangement, and for ten years I made the most of it.

I did not spend all of my time chasing men... or in letting them chase me while I ran very slowly - the latter being my MO because it makes a man nervous for a woman to be overt about it - it is contrary to traditional protocol. Males are conservative about sex, especially those who think they are not.

We Howards were not inclined to keep in touch with all our relatives; it was not feasible. By the year I moved to Albuquerque (1972) I had more descendants than there are days in the year - I should keep track of their birthdays? Heavens, I had trouble keeping track of their names!

But I did have some favourites, people I loved irrespective of blood relationship if any: my older sister Audrey, my older ‘sister' Eleanor, my brother Tom, my cousin Nelson and his wife Betty Lou, my father and I missed him always. My mother I did not love but I respected her; she had done her best for all of us.

My children? While they were at home I tried to treat them all alike and to lavish on each of them love and affection - even when my head ached and my feet hurt.

Once they were married - Now comes the Moment of Truth. I tried to do unto them as they did unto me. If one of my offspring called me regularly, I tried to call her (him) as often. To some I sent birthday cards, not much else. If a grandchild gave attention to Grandma, Grandma paid attention to that child. But there just isn't time to be both openhanded and evenhanded with one hundred and eighty-one grandchildren, that being the number I had (unless I lost track) by my ninety-ninth birthday.

My special loves - Blood did not necessarily enter into it. There was little Helen Beck, who was just Carol's age, and the two little girls went to Greenwood school together in first and second grade. Helen was a lovely child and utterly sweet natured. Because her mother was a working widow, Helen spent quite a bit of time in my kitchen until we moved too far away.

But she did not forget me and I did not forget her. She went into show business and travelled; we tried to keep each other advised of moves so that we could make rendezvous every year or six. She lived a long time for a non-Howard and was a beauty right up to her death - so much so that she could afford to dance naked into her seventies, at which age she still gave every man present an erection. Yet her dancing was never styled to be provocative, nothing like the cootch dancer Little Egypt of an earlier generation.

Helen changed her name early in her show-biz career; most people knew her as Sally Rand. I loved Sally and Sally loved me, and we could be apart for several years, then manage to make a rendezvous, and be right back where we had left off, intimate friends.

Sally and I shared one oddity: both of us went to school as often as we could manage it. She usually performed at night; in daytime she was a special student at whatever campus was nearest. By the time she died (1979) she had far more collegiate hours than most professors. She was a polymath; everything interested Sally and she studied in depth. Sally did not drink or smoke; her one weakness was big, thick textbooks.

Nancy stayed closer to me than did my other children, and I was her husband's sometime mistress for sixty-four years... because Nancy had decided it that way before she married Jonathan. Not often but always when we met and could find opportunity. I can't believe that Jonathan truly had much interest in this old carcass into its nineties - but he could lie about it delightfully. We really did love each other, and an erection is the most flattering compliment a man can pay to an old woman. Jonathan was a true Galahad, one who reminds me of my husband Galahad. Not too surprising, as Galahad is descended from Jonathan (13.2 per cent, counting convergence) - and from me, of course, but all of my husbands are descended from me except Jake and Zeb, who were born on another time line. (Time line four, Ballox O'Malley) (Oops! And Jubal, time line three.)

As a by-product of Nancy's offering Jonathan to me, Brian got Nancy's sweet, young body - the first incest in our family, I think. Whether it happened again on later occasions I do not know and it is none of my business. Nancy and I were much alike in temperament - both of us strongly interested in sex but relaxed about it. Eager but not tense.

Carol - For Carol I always tried to save 26 June, Carol's Day, Carolita's Day, Carolmas, and eventually Fiesta de Santa Carolita for millions of people who never knew her.

After 26 June 1918, she gave up her birthday entirely in order to celebrate Carol's Day.

During the decade that I spent mostly in Albuquerque she was star-billed several times in Reno or Vegas on Carol's Day. She always held her luau on z6 June even if a midnight show forced her to start it at four in the morning. No matter the hour her friends flocked to attend, coming from around the globe. It became a great honour to be invited to Carolita's annual party, something to boast about in London and Rio.

Carol married Rod Jenkins of the Schmidt family in 1920, when he was just back from France - Rainbow Division and Rod picked up a Silver Star and a Purple Heart without losing anything. (One scar on his belly -) Rod had majored in mathematics at Illinois Tech., specialising in topology, then he had joined up between his junior and senior years, came back and shifted to theatre arts. He had decided to try to shift from amateur magician to professional - stage magic, I mean. He told me once that being shot at had caused him to reassess his values and ambitions.

So Carol started her married life handing things to her husband on stage, while dressed in so little that she constituted misdirection every time she twitched. She tried to time it so that she had babies when Rod was resting. When that was not possible, she would go on working until a theatre manager called a halt... usually as a result of complaints by females not as well endowed. Carol was one of those fortunate women who got more beautiful as her belly bulged.

She parked her children with Rod's mother when she and Rod were on the road, but she usually had one or two with her, a privilege her youngsters all loved. Then, in' 55 (I think) Rod made a mistake in a bullet-catching illusion, and died on stage.

Carol did his act (or a magic act of some sort with his props) the next night. One thing was certain: she was not hiding props or rabbits in her costume. When she started working Reno and Vegas and Atlantic City, she trimmed it down to a G-string. She added juggling to her act.

Later, after coaching, she added singing and dancing. But her fans did not care what she did; they wanted Carol, not the gimmicks. Theatres in Las Vegas or Reno showed on their marquees just ‘CAROLITA!' - nothing more. Sometimes she would stop in the middle of juggling and say, I'm too tired to juggle tonight and, anyhow, W. C. Fields did it better,' and she would walk out on the runway and stop, hands on her hips, dressed in a G-string and a smile, and say, ‘Let's get better acquainted. You, there! Pretty little girl in a blue dress. What's your name, dear? Will you throw me a kiss? If I throw you one, will you eat it or throw it back to me?' or, ‘Who has a birthday tonight? Hold up your hands.'

In a theatre crowd at least one in fifty is having a birthday, not one in three hundred and sixty-five. She would ask them to stand, and would repeat each name loudly and clearly - then ask all the crowd to sing Happy Birthday with her, and when the doggerel reached ‘Happy Birthday, dear - ‘ the band would stop and Carol would sing out each first name, pointing at the owner: ‘ - dear Jimmy, Ariel, Bebe, Mary, John, Philip, Amy, Myrtle, Vincent, Oscar, Vera, Peggy' - hand cue and the band would hit it - ‘Happy Birthday to you!'

If visitors had been allowed to vote, Carolita could have been elected mayor of Las Vegas by a landslide.

I once asked her how she remembered all those names. She answered, ‘It's not hard, Mama, when you want to remember. If I make a mistake, they forgive me - they know I've tried: She added, ‘Mama, what they really want is to think that I am their friend - and I am.'

During those ten years I travelled now and then to see my special darlings, but mostly I stayed home and let them come to me. The rest of the time I enjoyed being alive and enjoyed new friends, some in bed, some out, some both.

As the decade wore on and I approached one hundred, I found that I was experiencing more frequently a slight chill of autumn - joints that were stiff in the mornings, grey hairs among the red, a little sagginess here and there - and, worst of all, a feeling that I was becoming fragile and should avoid falling down.

I didn't let it stop me; I just tried harder. I had one fairly faithful swain at that time, Arthur Simmons - and it tikcled and pleased him when I referred to myself, in bed with him, as ‘Simmons' Mattress'.

Arthur was sixty, a widower, and a CPA, and an absolutely reliable partner in contract bridge - so dependable that I gave up the Italian method and went back to Goren because he played Goren. Shucks, I would have reverted to Culbertson had Arthur asked me to; an utterly honest bridge partner is that pearl of great price.

And so is a perfect gentleman in bed. Arthur was no world-class stud - but I was no longer eighteen and I never had Carols beauty. But he was unfailingly considerate and did his best.

He had one eccentricity; after our first time, in my apartment, he insisted on getting a motel room for each assignation. ‘Maureen; he explained, ‘if you are willing to make the effort to come where I am, then I know that you really want to. And vice versa, if I go out and rent a motel room, you know that I am interested enough to make an effort: When either of us stops making an effort, it is time to kiss and part, with no tears.'

In June 1982 that time had arrived; I think each of us was waiting for the other to suggest it. On 20 June I was heading on foot to an assignation with Arthur and was thinking that perhaps I had best bring up the matter during that quiet time after the first one... then a second one if he wanted it and say goodbye. Or would it be kinder to announce that I was making a trip back east to see my daughter? Or simply break sharp?

I had come to the intersection of Lomas and San Mateo Boulevards. I had never liked that crossing; the timing of the traffic light was short and the boulevards were wide - and getting wider lately. And today, because of repairs in progress on the PanAmerican Highway, truck traffic had been routed around the repairs by sending it down San Mateo, then west on Central, and the reverse for northbound traffic.

I was half-way across when the lights changed and a solid mass of traffic started at me, especially one giant truck. I froze, tried to run back, tripped and fell down.

I caught sight of a policeman, knew that the truck would get me, wondered briefly whether Father would recommend prayer after my heathen lifetime.

Somebody scooped me up off the pavement and I fainted.

It seemed to me that I was taken out of an ambulance and placed on a stretcher. I fainted again and woke up in bed. A pretty little dark woman with wavy hair was hovering over me. She spoke slowly and carefully in an accent that I thought was Spanish:

‘Mama Maureen... Tamara am I. For... Lazarus... and for all... your children... I bid you... welcome to Tertius!'

I stared at her, not believing my eyes. Or ears. ‘You are Tamara? You really are Tamara? Wife to Captain Lazarus Long?'

‘Wife am I to Lazarus. Tamara am I. Daughter am I, to you, our Mama Maureen Welcome, mama. We love you.'

I cried and she gathered me to her breast.