He looks at his wristwatch. It will be an hour before the tows close on Splitback, before the gondola lift is still. He does have a slight pain down there, and he has a creepy vision of the scar. But he will wait until five for the drink that will help him ignore such things. There must be pain, he knows. Without privation, life is bland. Without mountains and freezes, what good feelings can a man get from his good legs and living heat? And Japh has done his work in the world as well as anybody.
He’ll be glad to see his daughter, whom he loves, and his grandson, whom he also loves, but who might have been a better man of sixteen if he’d had to follow Japh across Splitback before the bulldozers had banked each trail and cleared out the blowdown. In these days, the weekend sports would break their necks if they had much more than a mogul or two to cope with. Then he chides himself; he’s had his clear and beautiful times in the wilderness, in the winter that sometimes froze his cheeks and heels.
A little pain ominously tickles his haunch, and he moves his legs as he looks at the grandfather clock. In the rack next to his chair is a skiing magazine, and on the cover is an Alpine snowfield full of powder as white and pure—in the Kodachrome, at least—as the snow he can remember.
At Splitback Mountain, Margaret Woolley is walking across the hard snow of the parking lot, her skis over her shoulder. She is tall, and her ski boots fit well, so that she strides stiffankled, in that odd, somewhat majestic way skiers must. In it there is some awkwardness, yet there is also that strange prediction of grace one sees in a walking swan. Her dark gray stretch pants fit her long legs well—tightly but not dangerously so—and even though she is thirty-eight and the mother of two, one would never know it from her hips, which are neither too round nor too starved and pelvic. Her face, especially now that it has been burned by the wind of her last run down an intermediate trail called the Cataract, is blotched here and there with a deep red, but these marks will fade in the warmth of the car. Her hair is glossy black, and she has removed her yellow toque, so that her hair’s black thickness will rise and loosen.
She is no more vain than any other good-looking woman; she knows what she looks like. And today she has seen with her own eyes (blue, and rather glinty in the freezing air) the young girls who, in ways she can never recapture, proclaim with every gesture their fresh youth. To her sixteen-year-old son, who made his last run down the more dangerous Spout and is idling the car’s engine in order to get the heater going, she feels that she is not really a woman at all but a force, or, more accurately, a combination of forces and indications. Does it please him, she wonders, to have a mother who skis well? She would like to believe this, but she knows that at his age he wants to appear older than he is, and will, therefore, in the most natural and heartless way, condemn her to old age. And yet to have a mother who wears the correct clothes, who has the leisure to keep up, even though she hears with half an ear the latest skiing terminology, might give him some pride in his family’s position. It is this doubtful claim, she is afraid, that she has on him as a companion. She sadly realizes that the force she will always retain is made of affection, love, and, most of all, the authority of motherhood; she is half policewoman, half indentured servant.
Now she is in the row in which her car is parked, and that little white dot falling from the vent window is a cigarette butt. She has a pang of sadness whenever she sees Billy smoke, for it proves without a doubt that she is an old woman. At that very moment, the edges of her skis seem to press more heavily into her shoulder, which has suddenly become bony and vulnerable.
Billy has seen her coming, and he is afraid she may have noticed the cigarette falling down the black side of the car; he had been daydreaming, and hadn’t seen her quite soon enough. He doesn’t want to smoke in her presence, to assume that much equality. Although he has never tested her, he is afraid that in her loneliness she might take too strongly to an offer of companionship. It seems right to him that he have secrets from her. He is not a cruel boy, but he is a boy without a visible father. His father’s name is Herbert, and even before his mother and Herbert separated, Herbert had never been too visible, had never been too much of a force in the family councils. Neither Billy nor his sister, who is eighteen and married, even looks much like Herbert. They are tall and dark like their mother. Sometimes Billy thinks of his father as a kind of alien, a grumbly guest who somehow by accident mated with the tall woman in those brownish, historical photographs in the hall desk drawer at home. There is something vaguely unreal about the whole business.
As his mother approaches, he jumps out to take her skis and poles, and expertly clamps her skis into the rack on top of the car. He wants to drive, and he wonders if he should ask or merely get in behind the wheel and pretend that no decision on who shall drive is necessary. There are certain things about this problem he can’t understand. For instance, he picked out this car. It is a Pontiac Tempest, and he knows the number of cubic inches in its cylinders, its compression ratio, its valve lift, its turning radius, and the width not only of its spark gap but of its point gap. He has had his driver’s license for a month, too, and yet each time he asks to drive he sees his mother hesitate, and think. This gives him much pain, but he will never complain about it.
Finally, he makes up his mind. His mother has to sit on the passenger side in order to remove her ski boots, and he slips in the driver’s side, ostensibly to help her put her boots in her boot tree. He knows that she knows, but in this family (except for his father, who always had to explain the already known) communication is always a fine compromise between words and gestures. When the boots and poles have been stowed behind the front seat, Billy sees her thinking, and is pained. But then he is made happy, because the time for her to suggest that on these icy roads perhaps she’d better drive has passed—just barely—and he very carefully eases the car out of the parking place and turns left toward the highway. He loves the feel of driving, and it is wonderful to him that the hood of the Tempest turns and moves at his instigation. He feels that it could never happen that he might drive off the road, or that the car might not obey not only his manual directives but his will. He is young enough, in fact, to feel that it is miraculous not to have to walk.
He is very careful, and though it seems to him just a little dishonest, he drives much more slowly than he ordinarily would. The lodge is five miles down into the valley, and it is his intention that his mother not feel the slightest sense of risk. He has more magic to experience, and sometime within the week, preferably Thursday night, he wants her to let him take the car out alone.
While they drive, they say a few things to each other.
“I saw you on the last run,” he says. “Where the Spout crosses the Cataract. You looked pretty good, actually.”
“Thank you,” she says, but she wonders why that word “actually” disappoints her.
“You still rotate a hair too much,” he says.
“I know it. It’s the Arlberg in me. I can’t get rid of it. I learned it too well, too long ago.”
He shrugs. It isn’t at all sad to him. He doesn’t really expect his mother to get any better.
What he really wonders is, will she let him take the car one night? It has been a vacation full of the possibility of miracles, and he has been given the opportunity to fall in love. Gloria Stacey, at home, in high school, is one of those girls one simply never considers. She is made of light gold, and her eyes are dark amber. In his class there are four such goddesses, and Gloria is either No. 1 or No. 2. Carol Eckhardt is another, then Norma Tolman, and then Brenda Fortuna. Gloria is so beautiful and talented and gracious he has never even had the nerve to dance with her, much less engage her in conversation, even though he considers himself no dub at either of these arts. He is afraid that if he put his arm around her slender waist, or if he pressed his chest against hers, he would explode.
Yesterday they met at the bottom of the gondola lift, and they rode together in the enclosed little car (a blue one, No. 79) for twelve and one-h
alf minutes. She is here for a week, with her parents, and she skis fairly well for a girl, but he skied so beautifully before her eyes that she, with a powerful ability to smile and say right out whatever she meant, told him so. She is staying at the Bella Vista Lodge, a mere two miles away from his. Twice more they rode the lift together, first in a red car and then in a yellow one, their shoulders nearly touching. He hoped the cable would stop, as it often did, and leave them for precious minutes suspended fifty feet above the tops of the sleetcovered spruce, a mile above the valley. But the cable never stopped.
Even though he thinks her kind notice of him is simply caused by their both being so far away from home and that perhaps she hasn’t yet had time to meet another of the golden people here in the mountains, he feels that if he is given the chance to use all of his talents he may have a chance to win her. If the gods are kind, he will touch her lovely hand; if they are madly generous, he will kiss her beautiful lips.
Now the car hums down the mountain road, and the dark trees rise on each side. There is a small river down to the left, full of rocks encased in ice, but here the salt has cleared the road and even dried white on the asphalt. Billy pretends, carefully staring straight ahead, that it is not his mother who sits beside him but Gloria. The sleek instruments in front of him are friendly and romantic, and the smell of the car is as new and crisp as the treads of the tires, whose grip upon the road is all for him. Beside him is Gloria, and perchance her hand will move along the top of the seat and rest lightly upon his shoulder. The neat legs he can just barely see from the corner of his eye are not clothed in dark gray but in brilliant young green, and they belong to Gloria. He is taking her away.
Margaret turns to look at her son. The one eye she can see is squinted slightly, as though he feels either joy or pain. He loves to drive, and she is happy to see him having so much pleasure, even though it is hard for her to understand why driving can make him so happy. She tells herself to remember that whether she can share them or not, she might still be surrounded by great pleasures.
Soon they will be back at the Mountain View Lodge. The sun has been gone a long time behind the mountains, and now it is dusk. The one discreet little neon sign will be lit, and waiting for them in the lounge will be Japh Villard, her father, who cannot ski this week because he has recently undergone a prostatectomy. He will be standing there by the fire, though, waiting for the stroke of five, his gallant old legs encased in immaculate ski knickers or lederhosen, speaking with some old friend or other of Tuckerman’s Ravine and the Headwall, and the peculiar crystalline structure of the corn snow there one April, years ago, or how he helped Sepp Ruschp plan the National. Japh has been staying in the Mountain View since before the old farmhouse that is its basic structure had an inside toilet, and the present owners sometimes feel, during Japh’s annual visits, that they are only mortal, that their short period of custodianship will end long before Japh does.
When Margaret and Billy enter the lodge and cross the new Swedish hemp rug toward the big stone fireplace, there is Japh, sneaking a glance at the grandfather clock. He is talking to Bucky Scudder, the ski instructor.
Bucky hasn’t waited for five o’clock, however; an awful thing has happened to him that afternoon. At three o’clock he didn’t feel like skiing anymore, and canceled three lessons and came back to the lodge. He is forty-two, and he has begun to wonder if he really gets more pleasure from aprés ski than he does from skiing itself. Skiing has been his whole life, and lately he has begun to think too much about his life. Since four o’clock he has nursed a beer, and now it is flat and the bottle is warm in his hand. He likes to talk to Japh, because it is the old man’s best talent to make the things he is interested in seem more important than anything else in the world. Bucky has heard Japh’s stories before, but somehow they come out again ringing with the enthusiasm that Bucky himself is afraid he might be losing. He is happy to see Margaret and Billy, too, for they admire his skiing. Because he does this one thing so well, he thinks perhaps it really doesn’t matter that he is past forty and overweight. He is Bucky Scudder the skier, who flashes across moguls with such control and precision—the flash whom all the other skiers on the slopes stop to watch. The ones who don’t know who this is ask the others, and as he schussbooms over a fifteen-foot dip, he hears them yell “Buuuckyyy!” as though they were yelling “Track!” in admiration of his exuberance and daring. But isn’t this cry of admiration for the old party boy just a knife’s edge away from derision? Down he goes, anyway, his Wedeln so crisp he never seems to care at all for the configuration of the snow, or that the slope here is forty-five degrees and that he is now entering an impossible turn. He is out of sight for a moment—but there he is again, ten feet in the air, followed by a veil of snow, triumphantly flying.
If he could not do that…He knows he is a man who has some doubtful habits. He has been cruel to women in little ways. He bites his fingernails. On the back of his electric-blue Bogner stretch pants there can be found a dark circle as big as a dime; a few days ago, at a party, he sat on a fragment of Vienna sausage. He knows the spot is there, and he is a little worried about the direction in which he turns. It seems to him that there is always something he half tries to conceal—his bitten fingernails, the little spot on his pants. He has resigned himself to such nagging imperfections, and if he thought too much about them he might realize that they reflect his own opinion of his immortal soul. It is for this reason that he has never thought of trying for Margaret. She is kind, and a lovely woman; she is out of his class. Not only is she unattainable, but he would not know what to do with her if by some miracle he did get her. He is used to small change, and would be confounded by riches. He would love her, and how could he ever reveal his ragged self to such a woman? No, he’ll stick to his own kind, the ones in whose eyes he detects his own dishonesty.
Now, Japh declares, it is five o’clock, so they all sit at a bench and table near the fire and wait for the owner’s wife to bring them drinks. Billy will have a Coke, and Bucky decides to switch from beer to martinis, which Margaret and Japh are having.
“It was pretty icy on the Spout in places,” Billy says. “But not too bad,” he quickly adds, glancing diffidently at Bucky.
“Couldn’t we use a few inches of fresh powder?” Bucky says, and the others nod dreamily.
“Now, I grew up on powder,” Japh says. “We had to make our own trails. We had to walk up hills.” His lined, shiny old face is still dreamy, and Bucky wonders how they could have liked skiing so much in those days. But he did, too; he has walked up many hills in his time, too. Japh’s face turns scornful. “I mentioned sealskins—could you believe it? And some of these young bunnies didn’t even know what I was talking about. They never went up a hill on their own steam.”
“I’ve got a pair,” Billy says. He wonders where they are, though; he hasn’t seen them for a long time. Then he thinks they’d look pretty good tied around his waist, like a belt. Five points, man! It would look as though he sometimes went up higher than the tow, and came down cross-country. Gloria might ask him what they were!
“Why climb when you’ve got a ride?” Bucky says. He wants it to come out ironic, but it comes out sad.
Margaret hears that sadness, and looks at him. She has never seen him sad, just as she has never seen him without a deep-red tan. He still has the tan. His big round face is the color of briar, and full of muscle. In the summer he runs a ski school in Chile, and he never leaves the hard winter sun for very long.
Japh says, “Ten inches of new powder,” and sighs.
Some college boys have clumped in, and sit themselves at a booth in the back of the room. They have stopped for one expensive beer before going back to their ski dorm and their six-packs. Margaret sees them casting somewhat furtive looks at Bucky, and nodding their heads. “Down hill,” she hears one say, and in the context of Bucky’s sadness she doesn’t realize for a moment that the boy said “downhill,” not “down hill.” Bucky has been a nationa
l champion, and their looks are not derisive. One boy has an unfortunate voice that carries to her ear as if by wire: “When he’s showing a class, he never hops. God, he’s pretty! But you watch him when he’s by himself. He hops. You just watch.” Another boy at the booth nudges him; the voice fades. Margaret wonders if Bucky heard. But of course he has, she knows. She has always liked him and felt sorry for him. She has seen him at parties, when a certain brutal look on his face could wipe away his intelligence the way a damp cloth wipes a slate, and what was left was only darkness, unself-loving. Then she would look to see what woman he had decided to cut out of the herd. They looked so much alike, all of Bucky’s girls. Girls in their thirties. They always had good figures, and a husband somewhere, and children somewhere, and bright, unhappy, smiling faces. Her heart goes out to them. How pretty they had all once been, and how much they had been taught to expect.
After another drink, dinner is ready, and Japh invites Bucky to eat with them. After dinner, they sit around for a while. Billy has gone to examine his new skis—the present from Japh—to see if that ice on the Spout has marred their bottoms. Bucky almost falls asleep over his brandy and coffee. It is fairly early, but nothing seems to be developing, and they all decide to go to bed. The lifts will open at eight-thirty, and that is what they have come for, isn’t it?
For a while Japh tries not to think of the little pains that flicker through his skin. His doctor has told him to take as few of the white pills as possible, and he thought the martinis might suffice for tonight. But the pains are just enough to keep him awake and thinking. They are not much in themselves, and if he hadn’t a too vivid idea of the surgery that caused them, and of the greater pain his doctor had predicted to come, he might be able to sleep. Finally, he gets up, and on the way to the bathroom he looks down and sees his ropy old shanks, skinny as ski poles below the jockey shorts he now has to wear. He takes two of the pills, but it is a concession he is not happy to make.
Leah, New Hampshire Page 4
