Perhaps, she thought, he was showing his prowess. But she herself, even with her limited experience, could tell that he was not doing well; first he could not locate the proper spot for the jack and then he could not tell how the jack itself worked, and finally, when the back end of the car had begun to rise he could not figure out how to get off the hubcap. Searching around, he found a screwdriver that belonged to the Texaco station; he used that to pry the hubcap loose and it fell with a clatter. Meanwhile, the station attendant had approached to watch. She and the attendant watched together, neither of them speaking, both of them skeptical. To have the station attendant beside her, sharing her opinion, was pleasant.
Still, Roger remained happy; he twirled the wrench and dropped the bolts or nuts or whatever they were one after another beside him. The wheel wobbled off; he set it against the fender and then lifted the spare to take its place. Crouched with his bony knees stuck out before him, sweating and grunting, he struggled until the attendant stepped over to steady things for him. When the first bolt was in place the attendant departed and Roger finished alone. Cheerfully turning to her he said, “You think I’ll make it to California?”
“I guess you will,” she said.
He thanked the attendant—too elaborately, she thought—and soon they were on their way again. Beside her Roger told a long tale about himself and Irv back in the ’thirties, but she did not listen; she pondered until all at once she realized that by the tire-changing business he had wanted to show her that he could not get to California, that he was incompetent. It was not something he could say. Perhaps he did not understand it.
With that thought about him she felt a wave of emotion, a kind of gentleness. Now she saw that he was astonishingly malleable. Behind the wheel of his car he waited for her to direct him; he was not really taking her to Rock Creek Park. He had no idea at all, no plan, only the sense that he wanted to be with her. So he drove around corners and through lights, talking unceasingly, but without actually saying anything. And, she thought, he was hiding almost everything of importance about himself. There was no use asking him direct questions because the answers would be myths, tales, like his fighting in the Pacific. But he did not intend to impress her; he was not boasting, he was filling in.
But she found him likeable. She did not mind being kidded. She saw no harm in it.
“Do you know anybody in California?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of connections out there on the Coast around L.A. They sure are expanding out there; you can make plenty of money.”
“Have you ever been out there?”
“Sure,” he said.
“I never have,” she said.
“I’ll drive you,” he said.
She did not answer. And he didn’t say it again. But now, without warning, she felt as she had when she first met him, when she discovered him drinking up the wine for her party.
“You should see some of these veterans,” she said, trembling with a sort of dim moral outrage, almost a sort of quaking. “The awful burns and injuries, and they have to be taught to move their legs and arms again as if they were children; they have to start again all over. People on the outside just don’t understand how terrible it is. And they come in every day, they pour in from the different islands in the Pacific. People see the newsreels and that’s nothing but the guns going off and the troops landing; they don’t see how awful it is, what it’s really like. They think it’s exciting, like adventure stories. Like the stuff in the magazines. It’s screened.”
“It sure is,” he said, but his tone lacked emphasis. “People here in the States have a funny idea what it’s all about.”
“I see them every day,” she said, and after that there was no more to be said. But she let him drive her around; for one thing she was curious to know if he were really going to leave that night or if the California business had sprung into his mind to explain the loaded car. Perhaps, she thought, he was only moving from one apartment to another. Or these boxes and parcels were going to be stored at the Rattenfangers’. He so clearly was in transit…padding about the Rattenfangers’ apartment in his stocking feet, rooting in their cupboards, buying their car and hauling his possessions. Maybe here she had met a tramp, a hobo. As a child, growing up in Maryland, she had peered out as her mother intercepted tramps at the front gate; the tramps had got into the yard, they ate their sandwich and drank their cup of coffee on the back steps, out of sight, and then they moved on. Once a tramp had left a sandwich uneaten and her mother had told her to throw it in the garbage can instantly and wash her hands. But she had given the sandwich to a dog.
Yes, she thought, he was a hobo. But in her mind the image of the hobo had become confused with the bright face of Tom Sawyer as he set out with his bindle over his back, his property tied up in a—what was it?—red pocket handkerchief, the huge old kind for the men who took snuff. Dancing down the road…blue eyes and guileless smile. Singing, talking, dreaming as he hopped along.
And the dog, she thought; it had not died. Although she had kept her eye on it, afraid that the hobo might have left poison in the sandwich. Or was it germs? Too long ago, she thought; now she could not be certain.
Propped up among his boxes Roger Lindahl carried on a conversation about something. She listened; it had to do with television. In the Post War world, television was going to be a giant industry and Roger had involved himself in television electronic engineering and design; a buddy of his, unnamed, had designed a scanner with more lines or with fewer—she could not follow the discourse because it poured out so fast, the words trying to appear at once. The tail of the discourse came first; he sputtered in his eagerness and became breathless, as if he had run to tell her, as if he had just now witnessed a surprise. She saw him hopping across the snow; she saw his spindly legs pumping over the fields of Maryland. In her mind the frail, hectic man beside her had become mixed with her view of the land through which they now drove; looking out the car window she realized, with a start, that he had brought them downtown almost to the Tidal Basin. Delighted, she exclaimed. And he stopped talking instantly, as if sliced off. To her the Tidal Basin and the trees had a mysterious quality; they kept the countryside here in the center of the city, as if it could not be completely suppressed. Actually she was afraid of the Tidal Basin; it was part of the lines and pools of water that had cut into the ground by the coast, the canals and rivers and streams; Rock Creek itself, and of course the Potomac. When she came near the Potomac she believed she had been removed completely away from the present; she did not accept the fact that the Potomac existed in the modern world.
Along the Potomac grew thickets, scrub brush, tangled bushes that had heaped up in mounds, and the ground, the land, was close to the water; there was no bank, no rise. The water had spread out, to the roots of the trees; even the birds skimmed at eye level when they coasted past, going out toward the Atlantic or west into the further woods. Once she had run along the banks of a canal, deserted, its locks shut for a century; weeds had split the wooden beams and in the trapped water thousands of tiny fish moved in and out, born there, she decided, peering down from the great height. How remote it was, even then. Desolation. Only the smallest living creatures remained; jay birds, a rat swimming with its tail after it like a rudder. And none of them made any noise, except perhaps the jay, and even the jay waited until he was safe, off in the brambles, before he squawked. And she walked, with her mother, along the cracked plank of the canal. When they arrived at a train track—grass obscured it until their shoes stubbed against the ties—her mother said she could walk on the rails; no trains, or few trains, came by. And if one did, she would hear it an hour in advance. The track passed beneath misshapen trees, and later across a stream. The water, beneath the trestle, was muddy brown, thick, inert. If a train came, her mother said, leading her across the trestle, they could drop off into the water. Striding, her mother took her to the far side. And there the trees began again as before.
> “They fought here,” her mother said. That was so indistinct to her, then (she was eight or nine). Only the idea of fighting; not people, just the idea of fighting among the brambles. Then her mother explained about the Army of the Potomac. A grandfather had been with the Army, McClellan’s Army, in the Shenandoah Valley. They saw that, too, the Blue Ridge Mountains and the valley itself; by car they drove down along the floor of the valley; the mountains poked up like cones, each one separate from the others. And she could see cars up on the sides, traveling around and around, winding up to the top. She was afraid she would be driven up there, too, and later on she was. Her mother’s family had come from Massachusetts and she saw on her mother’s face a cold look as they drove through the valley; her mother’s eyes got a withered, terrible meanness and she refused to talk. Everyone else enjoyed the trip, the fields and the maps spread out on laps and the soft drinks, but her mother sat with her face screwed into silence. Her father pretended he didn’t notice.
And yet her mother had settled in Maryland, had bought a two-story stone house with a fireplace and considered herself part of the community. The town was peaceful. At sunset a band from the Guard Armory marched up the streets, the kids—including Virginia—whooping after it. Her mother remained indoors reading, with her cigarettes and glasses; she was a rather sparse, muscular New England woman, living in a town of Southern ladies all of whom were shorter, more voluble, much more strident. Virginia remembered the low voice of her mother among the strident Maryland voices, and in the almost twenty years that they had lived in Maryland, up to this moment in the fall of 1943, her mother’s manners and habits had not changed a bit.
“Let’s stop,” she said to Roger Lindahl.
“This is the Reflection Pool,” he told her.
She laughed, because he was wrong. “No it isn’t.”
“Sure it is. Those are the cherry trees over there.” His eyes danced, a milk innocent fire of slyness. “It really is.” He coaxed her; he begged her in a friendly way to take his word for it. And what did it matter?
She said, “Are you my guide?”
“Sure.” He puffed up, but still joking. “I’ll show you around.”
This, the Tidal Basin, belonged to her. Part of her early years. Both she and her mother loved Washington. After her fathers death she and her mother rode into Washington on the weekends, by bus usually, and walked along Pennsylvania Avenue and to the Smithsonian Institute or the Lincoln Memorial or around the Reflection Pool or here; especially here. They came into the Capital for the blossoming of the cherry trees and once for egg-rolling on the lawn of the White House.
“The egg-rolling,” she said aloud, as Roger parked the car. “They called it off, didn’t they?”
“For the war,” he said.
And, as a child, while her father was alive, she had been brought in to watch a parade in which the Civil War veterans had marched, and she had seen them, the brittle dried-up little old men in brand-new uniforms, going by on foot or being pushed in wheelchairs. When she saw them she thought of the hills and brambles along the Potomac, the deserted train trestle, the jay who flew by her without a sound. How mysterious it was.
The air chilled both of them as they walked; the surface of the Tidal Basin rippled and a mist had come in from the Atlantic, so that everything looked gray. The blossoms of the trees, of course, had disappeared earlier in the year. The ground beneath their shoes sank and in some places water covered the path. But the air smelled good; she liked the mist, the nearness of water and earth.
“Kind of cold,” Roger said, his hands in his pockets, his head lowered. He walked slowly, kicking at bits of gravel.
“I’m used to it,” she said. “I like it.”
“Are your folks here?”
“My mother,” she said. “My dad passed away in 1939.”
“Oh.” He nodded.
“She has a house in Maryland, across the line. I only see her on weekends. Mostly she spends her time gardening.”
Roger said, “You don’t talk like you’re from Maryland.”
“No,” she agreed, “I was born in Boston.”
Twisting his head he peered at her sideways. “You know where I come from? Can you guess?”
“No,” she said.
“Arkansas,” he said.
“Is it nice there?” She had never been in Arkansas, but once when she and her mother flew to the West Coast she had looked down at hills and woods and her mother had, after examining the map, decided it was Arkansas.
“In the summer,” he said. “It isn’t damp heat, like here. This is the worst summer of anywhere, here in Washington. I’d almost rather be anywhere else in the summer than here.”
Out of politeness she agreed.
“Of course there’re a lot of floods and cyclones around where I come from,” Roger said. “And the worst is after the water goes down there’re rats. You know, in the junk. When I was a kid I remember there was a rat one night trying to get into the house up through the floor by the fireplace.”
“What happened?”
He said, “My brother shot it with his .22.”
“Where’s your brother now?” she asked.
“He’s dead,” Roger said. “He fell and broke his spine. In Waco, Texas. He got in some kind of beef with a guy…” His voice receded and he frowned. On his face was an expression of disapproval; he drew himself up and shook his head, a feeble motion, as if the head of an old man had moved, from side to side, a palsy without meaning. His lips stirred.
“What?” she said, not hearing.
The lines of worry had spread out across his face and he hunched over, slowing, staring at the path. Then he summoned his strength; he grinned at her and some of his gaiety returned. “I’m just kidding,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “You mean about your brother?”
“He’s living in Houston. He’s got a family and a job with an insurance company.” Behind his glasses his eyes shifted and glowed. “You believed me, didn’t you?”
She said, “It’s hard to tell when you’re telling the truth.”
Ahead of them two women had got up from a bench, leaving it unclaimed. Roger made for it and she accompanied him. At the final step or so he ran like a boy; he whirled and dropped onto the bench, his legs out, his elbows back of him. As she seated herself beside him he fished a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit up, blowing clouds of smoke in all directions, a sighing and snorting of contentment, as if he considered the finding of the unclaimed bench some significant event for which he was grateful. He crossed his legs, tipped his head on one side, smiled at her with affection. His smile was like a little confident breaking open of him, a coming apart of the rigid outside rind; as if, she thought, he swelled up just enough to break through, and, for a moment, emerge to look around at what she saw, the trees and water and earth.
“I don’t have to go to California,” he told her.
“No,” she said, “I guess not.”
“I could stay here. Any big city there’s going to be a lot of television…like New York for instance. But these guys out on the Coast expect me. They’re counting on it.”
“Then you better go,” she said.
He studied her for a long time.
“I mean,” she said, “if that’s what you told them. That you were coming.”
At that, he put on such a circumspect expression that she knew he was really very smart; he had been shy, a little uncertain of himself, and he had frisked about while he searched for what he wanted, whatever it was, something to do with her, but as time wore on he lost that, he got over the awkwardness; the kidding and the half-boasting, the nonsense, rushed by. He got rid of them. Now he was more like she remembered from the night of the party: quiet, moody, even somewhat despondent. But how clever he was. He could do almost anything. In the beginning she had felt helpless because he sat drinking up her wine, and now a tinge of that helplessness returned; on the bench beside her he seemed so resource
ful, so experienced, and of course he was older than she. And she had no knowledge of him really; she could not really trust what she heard from him, or even what she saw. It was, she thought, as if he had complete control of himself. He could become anything he wanted.
Especially, she thought, he had an enduring quality. Something to do with time; she did not understand it at all.
A long view, perhaps.
“I got to get going,” he announced suddenly. Snapping his cigarette from him, into the wet grass, he stood up.
“Yes,” she said, “but not right this minute.”
“I have a lot on my mind,” he said. But he remained where he was.
Virginia said, “Maybe you better go and get it done.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, go to hell,” she said.
“What!” he said, astonished.
Still seated, she said, “Go on. Go do what you have to do.” They had surprised each other and made each other angry. But for her part she knew she was right. She looked past him at an object out across the water, in the center of the Basin; she pretended to herself that it had moved and she followed its course as it bobbed up and down.
“You don’t have to get sore,” Roger said.
His composure came steadily back, and again she thought that he needed only time. In spite of his size—when they were both standing he was an inch or so shorter than she—he managed to keep her respect; in the past she had regarded small men as ridiculous to some extent, their strutting and posing, their rituals of pride, but that was not so here, that was not the case with him. His resilience impressed her. And, while she still gazed out at the buoy on the water, Roger began to grin again.
5
A figure far off down the street reminded her of her daughter. A lank tall girl, wearing a coat, who marched so swiftly that her hair streamed behind her. And her hair had the ragged uncombedness of Virginia’s. At the curb the girl stepped without looking, the same plunging forward with her head up, with no thought of where she put her feet. It gave her an ungainly quality, as it gave Virginia; the girl did not have a feminine walk, nor grace, nor even good coordination. She did not seem to know what to do with her arms. But her legs were long and smooth—the short war-time skirts showed them up to the knees—and her back was quite straight. When she came trotting up onto the last block Mrs. Watson realized that it was Virginia. For heaven’s sake, had she come on the bus? Always in the past she had come with somebody in a car.
Puttering About in a Small Land Page 6
