When he gets to the mountain, it is nine-thirty. He spots Margaret’s car in the parking lot. Everything is under control so far, but how is he going to approach her? How is he going to let her know that he is going to change his life? He sees her in one of the T-bar lines. It is a weekday and lines are all short. He half runs to his office in the base of the gondola lift, puts on his boots, and picks out a pair of limber recreational skis. By the time he gets back to the T-bar, she is on her way up, and he puts on his skis, deciding to wait for her. But he’s trembling, and he seems to have all kinds of excess energy, so he herringbones a third of the way up the slope to meet her. On her way down she sees him and stops next to him—stemming too much, but her eyes are bright from the wind, her legs are trim and strong, and he has the feeling that he can teach her to ski very well. He knows he has that power.
“Is it time for my lesson?” she asks, surprised.
“No, I just saw you.” That seems to him a poor effort, and he tries again. “I just saw you going up the T-bar.”
Now she is looking at him queerly, and he doesn’t know what to say, so he does a kick turn, jumps off his poles, and does a gigantic Geländesprung from the top of a mogul, four wedels and four hop christies, another Geländesprung, during which he turns lightly in the air and comes down to a dramatic stop, snow exploding higher than his head. He feels like a bird. In the air he could feel the pressure of the air itself on the bottoms of his skis.
Down she comes, checking a little and flexing her knees. He knows he can teach her how to use reverse shoulder. Now, he thinks, as she does a pretty fair parallel Christie and gains speed, now put your weight on the downhill ski and face the fall line, there! She goes by him quite fast, her skis hissing over the snow, and stops before the last steep grade to wait for him. He feels so good he takes the grade down to her on one ski and jumps high into the air before he turns and stops beside her, light as a feather.
“Beautiful!” she says. “Bucky, you’re beautiful!” Tiny points of light glint all over her clothes. Her face shines with admiration for him, and in his triumph it seems that his life has changed already, that from now on his whole life will have a chance to be as beautiful as so many of his days have been.
The last of the skiers have gone to the lifts. Japh has watched them go. He didn’t sleep very well. His knees feel weak this morning, so after Margaret and Billy left he took his second cup of coffee into the lounge and watched the skiers decide where to go, who would go in whose car, who was going to be brave and take the Spout. They swung their boot trees and checked to see if they had their wax, their wine, their cigarettes. The women were gaudy and happy in their bright clothes; the men strode around proudly in their trim, varied uniforms. Now they have all gone, and Japh doesn’t know what to do with himself. He feels too weak even to skate, and yet his hands are trembling with excitement.
Wryly he considers this gift of his, the gift of excitement that has outlasted his youth. There are two things that have never lost their power: the sea and the mountains. They are all he has ever needed. They have always been there, indestructible, and they have never failed him. The one receives and cannot be filled, the other can never be diminished. Now he would be at the summit of Splitback, putting on the new skis he has never used, letting them slip for the first time through the new powder.
At least he can look at his new gear. He goes to the ski rack in the hall and takes his boots and his new Heads up to his room. This is more or less against the rules, but he is careful not to let his edges touch the walls or the doorframes. He puts the skis down on the rug, where they bounce upon their camber. They are subtly arched and tapered, and look like speed. They haven’t received their first scratch, and they are black and silver. He has always liked the look and the feel of gear—a brass turnbuckle for the rigging of his sloop, or a toe release. Both are so spare and pure about what they do. Here are his skis, perfect and ready. His Arlberg straps are threaded to the cables, and now lie slack, waiting to be crossed over his boots.
So he takes his boots out of his boot tree. He admires the boot tree, too. It is made of extruded aluminum, not an ounce heavier than it must be, and as with all fine gear there is not a dimple or bump or a rivet upon it that does not perform some necessary function. And the boots, their leather and lacings, their handsome thick soles. It is a little painful for him to bend and put them on, to pull the inner and outer lacings tight, but he does, and then he fits them to the bindings of his skis, snaps the cables tight, and winds his Arlberg straps around and down through their tension buckles. All this equipment is heavy, and though his legs are bound rigidly to all this weight, he suddenly feels light and agile. He bounces, and unweights his skis. There is some pain, but the camber pushes him up so that for a moment he is weightless. It is the strength of memory in his legs.
Where shall he choose to be, poised for the long downhill run? No choice—it is Tuckerman’s Ravine, on the corn snow of late spring; Tuckerman’s, because you have to climb those miles to get there. You have to pay for each precious christiania. As you descend, there is the memory of the long climb, like a debt paid in full. There is the Headwall beginning its impossible curve up toward the vertical, all-blinding white. Who schussed it that time? Was it twenty years ago? Names of skiers, and their tough red faces, pass through his memory. Berndt Nadsen? Joe Foss? Pee-Wee Bellavance? Bucky Scudder? Toni Matt? Who was that black dot, no bigger than a spider, he once saw drop down across the snow at the speed of falling?
But it is his own long run he can feel now, the curving, the kernels of ice from his wake hissing and rattling as he unweights and begins his next long turn toward the narrowest part of the Chute, where he will flash through a cleft in the dark granite, his ears popping. The skis, their pressure and their edges, the perfection of control at speed—there is no other thing in the world so prideful and so beautiful.
Herbert Woolley is standing by the base lodge, watching his wife and Bucky Scudder as they come planing over toward him. They are side by side, and it is as if they are dancing or making love, the way they come down so smoothly together. They don’t see him, and he runs over to intercept them. His life cannot go on as it is now; he must get it back in order again. It is too frightening to be as alone as he now is, and he must do something. Already he has been as brave as he has ever been in any situation in which he has not had a perfect right. The very idea of coming here among all these insane people who throw themselves off cliffs and break their legs for fun—these insane people in clothes gaudy as peacocks and parrots—is so dangerous. To see his wife he has come through an environment as alien to him as the most exotic jungle. He has made it here, but over all his thoughts hangs the terrible feeling that he has forgotten something—something he can’t quite remember to remember but which is as deadly in its absence as a neglected inoculation. He can usually depend upon his senses to warn him of danger. For that reason he never smokes, he never drinks. Should he deliberately put himself in jeopardy? Should he ever lessen in the slightest his awareness of danger, dull his reflexes and his alertness in this hostile world? But what is it that he has forgotten? As he runs, he is unstable; he feels drunk. His first mistake is that he tries to cross some snow that hasn’t been trampled down, and his left leg, in his thin Italian shoe and silk sock, garter, pantleg—everything—goes right down out of sight. There is ice up his pantleg, in his shoe, under his garter. And then—ignominy!—Bucky Scudder is there, grabs him under an armpit, and pulls him out. He can’t even feel his left leg, it is so cold. His garter is like a metal band around his calf, and he hops and stamps. “Margaret,” he says. There she is, his wife, in all that equipment.
“Are you all right, Herbert?”
“I want to talk to you,” he says desperately, for now both she and Bucky Scudder are expertly removing their skis, both of them bent over at once, doing professional little things with snaps and cables.
“But I have a lesson right now, Herbert,” she says. Then her face li
ghtens, and he knows that expression—she has found a way to be kind. “Why don’t you ride up with me, and we can talk? You can get a round-trip ticket.”
He looks over toward the gondola lift, where it ominously hums and bangs. The alternative is to have her go up all that way alone with that big animal, Bucky Scudder. “All right,” he says.
He goes ahead with Margaret, feeling barefoot and vulnerable as she and Bucky Scudder clump solidly in their huge boots. He is aware of Scudder following him, the weight of the big man. When he has to pay money for the coming ride, he reflects with near hysteria that it is always the most unpleasant things one has to pay for. Then up the stairs into the groaning machinery. Margaret carries her own skis—he thinks to offer to carry them, but she seems so much stronger than he. They come into a huge room open at one end, and hanging from the ceiling is an engine, whole, eviscerated from some motor vehicle. Why isn’t it running? Is it for emergencies? A wheel ten feet in diameter turns too fast for its size, and men stand too close to iron teeth and make mad, meaningless gestures as they push and pat the big metal parts. The gondolas come whirling in, freewheeling, and a madman swings them around on their track so that they bang into each other like battered old oil drums. They are rusty and tinny, their windows are cracked or missing, and the welds that hold these cheap tin spheroids to their stems are as sloppy as wax on the sides of candles. None of this slipshod workmanship escapes Herbert as he crosses to the loading place. But he must follow Margaret. The egg the attendant chooses for the two of them and locks them into is full of slush. The thin round walls of it are dented and wet, and the seat is cold from its long empty trip down from the mountain. He wipes the windshield and looks up to see the towers and the thin cable going up, up. With a terrible shock he realizes that those tiny things hanging out over nothing up there are identical to the very thing that encloses him. Then they are moving forward. There is a bump, and a screech of machinery. Something must have gone wrong, but he is rising anyway. The car is hanging by a hair, by friction; a bump will jar it loose. He doesn’t dare look. Why did he wipe the mist from the windshield? There is a little bar he can hold, and he shuts his eyes as tight as he can, rising, swaying, rising. Part of his overcoat is caught in the door, but there is no handle on the inside. He will fall out. The cable will part, and they will snap out into the air like the end of a whip. They will be crushed. They will fall and fall down to the mountain below. He holds on desperately, but what good is it to hold on to a piece of metal when the whole business will surely fall?
* * *
Margaret can see Herbert’s fear. The cable moves silently and their gondola sways gently as they are lifted up the mountainside. Occasionally there is a series of little bumps as the bar attached to the top of the gondola passes over the pulleys of a tower, and when this happens Herbert shudders. She has wiped the mist from the windows, and the spindly tops of the spruce pass silently below. By turning her head she can see her skis and poles on the rack outside, and the valley sinking below as the tops of the white-and-green mountains rise up higher into the light blue sky.
Herbert’s eyes are still shut tight. Shudders pass through his body, and from him comes a small, high sound. His hands are clenched around the little bar beside him, and his head is bent forward as though waiting for a blow.
“Are you all right? Herbert, are you all right?” she asks.
His head, though still bent forward, turns slightly. His eyes open just to slits and clamp shut again. “Margaret,” he says in a tiny voice. “Margaret.”
“Are you all right, Herbert?”
“Margaret, I’m so scared.” His voice is tiny, like a little leak in a pipe. “I want to get down out of here.”
“You can’t,” she says. But she pities him. “We’ll be at the top in about ten minutes. There’s no danger, Herbert.”
“I’m frightened,” he declares in his tiny voice. Shudders now pass across his shoulders, and she puts an arm around him to try and comfort him; he is rigid.
“It’s all right, Herbert. It’s all right now.”
“I can’t help it,” he says. With eyes still tightly closed, he turns toward her like a child and grabs her around the waist, his head against her breast. “My coat’s caught in the door. I don’t think we’re attached right. I think we’re going to drop.”
“It’s all right,” she says. She strokes his cheek with her hand, feeling the bristles, the smoother skin around his eye and temple. He has always been afraid of the most unexpected things, and it’s not the first time she’s had to comfort him. “We’ll be at the
“But how am I going to get down?” he cries.
She has heard that cry before, from little boys up in trees. “Just stay on
“You can’t leave me, Margaret!” His arms are locked around her waist. “You can’t leave me alone in this thing!”
They are approaching the Summit House. Below them she can see the skiers swooping down, and hear the swift hiss of their skis as they pass across the lift line to whatever trail they’ve decided to take. She wants very much to get out into that bright air and snow. She wants to put on her skis and feel the snow light and powdery beneath her, to look down the miles into the valley and feel that each foot of altitude is a gift of energy she may expend in any way she chooses. Then their gondola passes into the hollow-sounding darkness of the Summit House.
When the young attendant opens the door of his gondola, Bucky jumps out and receives his skis and poles from another attendant, whose job it is to take them out of the rack.
“Buckyyy!” they say, delighted to see him.
He grins at them and walks out into the snow to find Margaret. Among the few stunted spruce, other skiers are laughing as they lean against the wind and put on their skis. “Which trail this time?” one calls. “I feel brave! Let’s take the Spout!” But Margaret isn’t there. Bucky jams his skis into the snow and goes back inside, to the observation room. It is empty except for Billy, who is smoking a cigarette and kicking one boot against a splashboard.
“Billy,” Bucky says, and Billy turns away from the window. “Have you seen your mother?” to speak, but Bucky turns and goes back to the lift line. “Did a man and a woman get off just before me?” he asks the young attendant.
The boy grins and shakes his head. “They didn’t want to get off, Bucky. Went back down, skis and all.”
Bucky goes back to the observation room. What did he really have in mind, anyway? And now she’s gone back down.
Billy stamps his cigarette into the tracked-in water on the floor. He looks listless and unhappy.
“Want a Coke?” Bucky asks, and Billy nods.
“Want a cigarette?” Billy says. Gloria has gone home, and she didn’t tell him.
Bucky gets two Cokes out of the machine, accepts a cigarette, and they both stand there in the water kicking their boots against the splashboards. Through the glass they can see the mountains descending, dark green where they are covered with spruce, spiderwebby where tall hardwoods stand leafless, white in the few openings visible, and then, as far down and away as they can see, everything turns blue.
In his room at the Mountain View, Japhet Villard is on his knees on the rug, his elbows on the bed. Even though he has taken four of the white pills, it is the only position he can find in which he is not in excruciating pain. He is angry and at the same time terrified, for some monstrous force has got him down and won’t let go. He is very angry, and there are tears on his face; he sees one drop to the bedspread. When he curses out loud, he is repaid by a knife thrust. The doctors told him it might not be pleasant, that from his old tissues he might expect recalcitrance and pain, but he could never really believe that time would betray him. He has always faced up to fear, to any challenge. His image of himself is that of a clean, brave man, eyes squinted against the freezing wind, a great, wild mountain submissive but grand beneath him. His pride has been to outlast hardship and pain. But there are positions in which no dignity is possible, in whic
h one cannot rally one’s forces, and here he is, upon his knees at last. He has to grin; a grin, he thinks, is the only intelligent response to this sort of thing.
The Survivors
SOMETIMES WHEN I see old Mr. Caswell pulling his shiny little mail cart up our front walk, I think of his son, Ben, who used to be my best friend. That was twenty years ago, when Ben and I were in high school together. Ben looked a great deal like his father, and now I think there was in both of them a kind of wheyish strength. They were both pale and thin, and they had a metallic hardness in their bodies, as though blood didn’t run in their veins at all but some sort of indestructible grayish fluid. I could never think of either one of them getting a tan, or blushing, because the warmth of color never appeared on their faces. They looked so much alike that I sometimes wonder if I don’t get the two of them mixed up in my memories—as though Ben, too, has had a chance to grow old.
Leah, New Hampshire Page 6
