You can applaud as it draws its first breath or scream "No!" as it stares glassy-eyed from its coffin; you can watch it balloon and bounce against the clouds or try to grab it by the tail as it skims along the foamy shoreline. You can sneak up behind it, juggle it, hose it down, and speak it; but, you will never touch it.
One of my favorite characters, second only to Elizabeth Bennett, is Lear's daughter Cordelia. Now, there was a girl who honored the truth, and in so doing, she also honored everyone around her. The only problem was that no one knew it.
In fact, she could have spared everyone numerous scenes of madness, mayhem, and murder had she only taken one small truth and bent it, maybe a little to the left, maybe a little to the right. But, she didn't, because she couldn't touch it. She could only honor it, which meant she had to speak it.
And, it's the speaking of truth that can produce the sternest response. Cordelia's insistence on truth lit the fire of her family's demons, sent regiments into bloody battle, and eventually killed just about everyone downwind of it. However, no one touched it.
Shakespeare managed to throw a rope around it in and set it on the stage, but even he was unable to coax it into the palm of his hand.
The man who lives around the corner at 15 Palm Place doesn't come out of his house any more because of a truth left behind by his youngest daughter just before she drove off in his black Corvair some twenty years ago. Neighborhood buzz has it that once day Fifteen Palm that's what everyone calls him now shaved off his long mustache and asked his daughter if she thought her old daddy looked good with a naked face.
She told him he would look a lot better if he'd get that little wart removed from the end of his nose, for it ruined the symmetry of his face and distracted the viewer from his big brown eyes and dimpled chin. Well, he lost his temper and broke the dishes and aimed a string of mono-syllabic Germanic words at her before telling her to go away until she could figure out how to get off her damned pedestal. After she left, he became obsessed with the wart and spent his days with his index finger pushing the knobby cream-colored growth in little circles on its axis five circles to the left, five to the right.
Over the years, the wart has grown to the size of a baseball. And, still he pushes it round and round five circles to the left, five to the right. Of course, his truth has nothing to do with his wart.
It has, however, become his life.
Then, there was our high-school teacher, Miss Petrie everyone called her Dish, which we thought was an especially witty nickname for a science teacher who was taken away in an ambulance because she had arrived at school one morning at 6 o'clock to watch the sun come up. Mr.
Eebie, the head custodian, found her sitting in a lotus position on a tiny patch of dewy grass outside the art building, chanting a series of ohmmmmmmmm's. He asked her what she was doing, but she didn't respond because she thought it was obvious.
"Ohmmmmmmmmmmmm," she continued.
"I gotta tell you the truth," Mr. Eebie observed. "You're a nut job.
"
Miss Petrie grabbed a patch of grass and dirt in each hand and threw them at his face along with a barrage of Latin obscenities that insulted the purity of Mr. Eebie's mother, grandmother, wife, daughters, and all other female relatives. And, while he didn't understand Latin, he certainly grasped the gist of her tirade.
He ran to his office and called the police, saying, "I gotta tell you the truth. The broad is off her rocker." Of course, his real truth had nothing to do with Miss Petrie's burgeoning madness.
It did, however, become a fond memory that grew with each telling just like the wart on Fifteen Palm's nose. Before he died and could no longer tell the story, Mr. Eebie had adorned Miss Petrie with a loaded gun and razor blades in her long wiry gray hair.
Oh, and she was wearing a bikini. Had he lived for another telling, I'm sure she would have been cracking a whip or reciting "Splendor in the Grass." We never got Miss Petrie's side of the story, for we never saw her again.
That's not so much a truth as it is a fact.
Few people remember poor Magda Morana who spent eight years walking through the streets of Northport yelling into her newspaper all because her daughter had come home from her first semester at Oswego and announced that her upbringing had lacked poetry. The accusation caught Magda by surprise, for she had always considered herself an excellent attentive mother who had never used the television as a babysitter as her daughter claimed, had not partaken of nearly as much booze as most people thought she had, and had never actually consummated her affair with the church choir director.
She didn t start marching and yelling immediately. Instead, a slow buildup of anger bubbled and curdled in her cauldron for two or three years before erupting in a daily rant through town. Children crossed the street when she passed, unless they were in a group, in which case, they said dopey things for her benefit, like: She should get a broom" or If she had a car; she'd get through yelling a lot faster.
Teenagers laughed and poked each other when she went by, but again, only if they were in groups of three or more. The power of the pack increases exponentially with each additional member. Adults lowered their heads or looked the other way when she passed.
Others frowned and smacked their lips as though their disapproval would surprise or shame her into more acceptable behavior. Some people called the local police station to complain about the liberties Magda was taking with their peace of mind and sense of decorum. Usually they spoke to Al, the desk sergeant, who always assured callers that the police were on the case.
Of course, such scraps of truth don't always lead to anger, and anger doesn't always blossom into madness. But, it happens often enough to make a good case for lying. My friend's husband left her because she couldn't promise him she'd never have an affair with his mistress's husband, the desk sergeant at the local police station.
As it turned out, she never did, but it wasn't in her power to make a promise she wasn't sure of keeping. Another friend tells me about the time she was beaten by her father for not promising to keep her room clean, that is, if she ever had one to keep clean. Even at the tender age of seven, she knew she'd have a hard time keeping such a promise.
Her sisters, aka Regan and Goneril, dutifully promised to keep their hypothetical rooms in shipshape condition, so they didn't get beaten. As it turned out, each girl eventually did get her on room, and so did their father. None were kept clean, not even Dad's.
Everyone loves a liar. My personal heroine was a co-worker at 666 Fifth Avenue during the early sixties. Her name was Janine Smytheworth-Blue, and she was as artificial as an Easter bunny in December.
Janine's great talent was her ability to tell everyone what they wanted to hear and to do it in such a way that you knew it was a lie, but it was such a beautiful lie, you didn't want to change it in any way. She was the politician who promises no more war, the MTA official who promises not to increase fares, the guru who promises eternal peace in exchange for your checkbook. She was Tartuffe with breasts, Iago without malice, a snake charmer whose instruments were the compliment and the empty promise.
Janine never made a promise she could keep and never paid a compliment she meant. But, she did it all with panache and a smile. Had Cordelia learned at Janine's knee, King Lear would have retired in peace and spent his remaining days bouncing his grandchildren on his knee, baking brownies, and squeezing himself into the family chariot every few months to attend dance recitals and school plays.
The question remains: Does truth cause madness or is it just an excuse for going over the edge? If it's the former, then poor Cordelia was the one with the fatal flaw. But, if it's the latter, it doesn't really matter.
There will always be someone desperate enough to twist a lie into a truth like any decent politician and then slip into some silly form of insanity. It's all a matter of perception. Janine Smytheworth-Blue née Jayne Smith would have told us that little truth, but she was never able to speak it.
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