Free Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis Page A

they’ll dig up anything they can, if you . . .
    â€”Do you think they haven’t called here? One of these, these mush-mouths from something called the South Georgia Pilot and how familiar was I with my grandfather’s voting record on the Holmes Court back in the twenties pretty far over to the left he thought, maybe a little tainted with a breath of antiSemitism? antiniggra? That my great grandfather was in the diplomatic corps over there in France when the communists were acting up back in the eighteen forties and maybe I could tell him a little about my grandfather’s second marriage? Ask him what the hell business that is of his and he says not his, no, the public, that it’s history, it’s the public’s right to know, that the . . .
    â€”What I’m trying to tell you Oscar. If they dig up things like this in the public domain they’ve got their First Amendment rights to publish pretty much whatever they . . .
    â€”But why! Just to, talk about Father smoking three packages a day hedidn’t even start smoking cigarettes till he was seventy five whose business is that, just a good thing they never caught him on a spree examining his false teeth in the glass to see whether he’d had dinner the night before.
    â€”Look just be patient, the village has appealed his decision and all this trash is just to build up pressure on the circuit court appointment, frankly I think he’s going to be reversed and then he’s out of the picture and the whole thing . . .
    â€”Fine he’s out of the picture fine, what about me? What about this movie they stole that’s what this is really all about isn’t it? What else does it say, go on.
    â€”While his boyish charm is wearing rather thin, under Mister Kiester’s energetic direction Mister Bredford manages the part of young Randal with enough brio and costume changes to bolster a sagging career, plunging into the early battle scenes with commendable bloodthirsty zeal, and handling himself convincingly enough in those steamily explicit sexual encounters where all eyes are, in any event, on the voluptuous attributes of the tempestuous daughter of the neighboring plantation, played with an abandon obscuring any notions of her own acting ability by the stunning Nordic-Eurasian discovery Anga Frika in her first American starring role, had enough?
    â€”Yes. Go on.
    â€”The crisis precipitating Randal’s abrupt . . .
    â€”The most ridiculous rubbish I’ve ever heard, there’s nothing voluptuous about Giulielma at all that’s the whole point. She’s a shy lonely girl, she’s not even supposed to be particularly pretty just, go on no, go on.
    â€”The crisis precipitating Randal’s abrupt departure from the Confederacy, following his heroic showing in the blood drenched battle sequence at Ball’s Bluff, attested upon his return by a raw scar on his cheek which will lend him the credential of a dueling scar through the rest of the picture, is the threat of confiscation by the Federal government to extensive coal mining properties he inherits from an uncle in Pennsylvania where his cry for . . .
    â€”No wait, stop. Stop! Did you hear that? that, that scar? on his cheek? Harry that’s mine, that’s in my play right at the start the same thing, the same battle Ball’s Bluff the same battle he comes back with that scar on his cheek it’s mine, it’s right there in my play, Christina? Where is she, she’s got to find it where is she, yes and then what. And then what.
    â€”Pennsylvania, where his cry for justice, demanding . . .
    â€”Yes in Pennsylvania, the uncle who dies in Pennsylvania and the coal mines yes and then what.
    â€”demanding only what is his, echoes beyond the bugle’s battlefield summons to the fatal confrontation between the Southerner’s fierce loveof the warm and fruitful land,