The Black Poker Chip: Did an Insane Vera Cartwheel Imagine the Novel We Are Reading?

Dear Tara and Lori,

In Chapter 68, Vera and her over-excited imagination have arrived in Hell, now referred to as “The Tavern” (the reader recalls “Old Josh” and his unfortunate end). And now she must conjure up the appropriate demons in charge, here in the personages of the Landlord, bluish with tattoos, his bloated and racist wife, and one of the novel’s central characters, Mr. Weed, the Christian Hangman. Vera insists that this scene “surpassed my imagination,” an assertion perhaps too modest given that very little ever seems to surpass an imagination both mother-inspired, and more deeply by an even more omniscient presence named Marguerite Young. Here’s the central passage: “How could I guess, though, viewing the Tavern’s exterior, its interior which surpassed my imagination, Pandora’s mysterious box, the many human-faced wasps, the paper-thin walls which had eyes and ears and tongues, the jingle all night of rusted sleigh bells in contorted corridors?.... How could I guess that a professional hangman, the farmer whose children were happy, a tall, tight-lipped, serious gentleman, was at that moment signing the hotel register with the Parker fountain pen which had been given to him by the condemned’s grateful relatives? The condemned had pinned a paper rose on to the chemise of his sweetheart, whom he had bitten to death in a wheat field.”

How in the world could Vera know all that? We might as well ask how she could have known so much about the back stories of Madge and Homer in Chapter One. She seems supernaturally observant. She could, by looking at Madge’s outfit festooned with illustrations of outdoor sports, that she, Madge, was jealous, vindictive and revengeful, and by staring at the sleeping football player that Homer was kind, empty-headed and hopelessly in love with a terminally ill cheerleader. Here, in Chapter 68, she divines from simply looking at a Parker Fountain Pen that the Christian Hangman had received the pen from the grateful relatives of a condemned man who had murdered a woman in a wheat field by biting her to death. Then she provides the reader with the gory details of that murder. Vera brazenly confesses that she cannot distinguish fact from fancy. She sees a hat hanging on a chair post and conjures up the wearer of that hat and then admits: “Perhaps she was a phantom of the past, and I had only imagined her as I had imagined so many things unreal.” Recalling what the bus driver had said about the dotty doctor O’Leary, she invents a scene where she is a client of the doctor who confirms that she is carrying a nine year old statue in her womb.”

What is under the microscope is Imagination, here understood best in this context by referring to a famous passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where King Theseus castigates the unrestrained imagination of poets, lovers, and madmen that needs but the slightest of hints to conjure up a full scale illusion. Theseus famously says: “the poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, that if it would be apprehend some joy, it comprehends some bringer of that joy.” In short, all it takes for Vera’s excited imagination to ignite is a simple Parker Fountain Pen, and from here to the nightmarish details of the hangman’s surreal life as an expert at tying knots and as the inventor, ghoulish as it may sound, of “painless hanging.” As with her mother, Vera comes to believe that “whatever one found was real was real.” For all her protestations to the contrary, Vera finds that she IS her mother.

At this point we are tempted to think that the whole novel is the result of Vera’s “over-excited imagination,” If we are right, then we come to the uncomfortable conclusion that the book we are reading was written by an insane person. Vera is really, as some readers predicted in a discussion of Chapter Two, a chip off the old block, a true daughter of a woman who takes whatever is ordinary and unexceptional and turns it all into something fantastic, surreal, otherworldly, and, when the mood suits, ghastly and terrifying. Vera has made all this up not only for the satisfaction of her own mother-like need for exaggeration, but also for that of the reader, who would have left long ago if, say, Miss MacIntosh were merely the plain speaking and industrious middle westerner we are told she was, rather than a character out of a romantic gothic novel, mysteriously gone missing, and, in the florid prose of a HP Lovecraft, a bald and terrifying rapist.

A great many things fall into place if we realize that Vera, the “truth” itself, as her name implies, is stark staring mad. As with all supremely mad people, she invents wildly, but often with great cunning, as when she gives different characters similar characteristics, such as the gift of plucking playing cards out of the air, associated with an out of luck magician on p. 11, the landlord of the haunted tavern in Chapter 69, and many others—as if the same actor is seen to be playing many different characters in the movies. How does sheltered Vera, the narrator, know so much about birds and butterflies, ducks and street performers, music and astronomy, the seraglios of sultans’ palaces, and especially how does sheltered Vera know what’s going on in Mr. Spitzer’s head as well as a host of other characters most notably, the most certifiably insane Esther Longtree? A kinder way of putting all this is that it’s a particularly vivid dream with so much varied content that she could never reach its bottom. Or, perhaps, if she did reach the bottom she might find a black poker chip. The clue, as chapter 68 says, “that goes nowhere.”

Michael