Leah, New Hampshire

by Thomas Williams

  I hadn’t cried. In spite of the tears I’d seen, I hadn’t caught them, and I considered this a terrible insult—an unforgivable insult; considered this and suddenly burst out bawling, enraged by the underhanded trick.

  “God damn you son of a bitch!” I yelled.

  “Ah! That’s better,” the tailor said calmly, as if my tears had released and strengthened him. “Do you think I don’t know you, my funny little one? It is his nature to try to escape. He does not know how we survive, eh? Never mind! We are the slobs who make the world.” He motioned with his hand. “Now give me the pants you got in your hand and go back to work. Go on!”

  I left him, seeing that shrewd and twisted smile as I fled to my hiding place behind the overcoats, to my private ceremony; the tearful funeral of that thin-lipped version of myself as Tabber, as a Yankee boy of ice and few swift words. I heard again the tailor’s long wail as it had grown over the deer’s death and Mr. Brown’s escape, and now I found the doleful music apt, as if it were part of a ritual some memory of my flesh found anything but alien and strange.

  …Not so long ago, though Trotevale’s and the things of Trotevale’s are scattered to the rag bags and the antique shops of Leah.

  My son fixes me to here and now, the only place and time there is: he has cornered his apple by the stairs, and found that he can break the skin by smashing it against the edge of the bottom step. He sits quietly, his little tongue busy on the split, his eyes darkly watchful. He reminds me of an animal—a young raccoon in some quiet corner of the deep woods—self-sufficient, aware. “You little bastard,” I say admiringly, with perhaps too much affection in my voice. “You little bastard…” Gently, because he is soft and young. And with fear, for I do not really know what I should hope for him.

  The Orphan’s Wife

  MICHAEL STORY, at sixty-one, contemplated his possible retirement, although nothing, as far as he knew, loomed in the near future to cause him to have to retire. It was an idea that came and went—came in off moments, sometimes moments of irritation or of fatigue, though not that often, really. The idea was occasionally fascinating, that was all. Sometimes, contemplating retirement, he recognized a feeling he’d had in his twenties, that a life was out there to choose, and that he had the power, if he wanted to use it, to choose that new life. Choice was the thing.

  There were two directions in which imagination and hope could go—forward, into the land of unknown possibilities, and backward, into the land of choices taken, where the alternatives were as mysterious as the future ever was. He could never know whether the choices he had made in his life had been good ones or bad. After each choice was the memory of the former life, and memories of the life before earlier choices, and earlier ones. Memories of memories.

  But suppose the man he had been at thirty could suddenly look out of these older eyes, not knowing what had happened in between, having only the evidence here in this room. What sort of wondering evaluation would he make? Michael had no blood relatives to judge his life or his performance. No one had looked at him that way, judging or praising.

  And what would that young man see right now, to guess at a life by? He’d be observant enough to look at the small desk calendar and see that more than thirty years had passed, that he was more than thirty years on, into his future. Then he would look around, at the room and at the window. Beyond the small panes of the big window was a white field, apple trees, tall pines, and a set of distant wintery hills. Within the warm room was a fieldstone fireplace containing a silent fire of applewood and oak. Over the mantel was a large black-and-white print, a lithograph of two reclining women, one blond and one dark-haired; the young man would recognize this as the work of Yasuo Kuniyoshi. In the room were bookcases full of books, shredded dust jackets peeling here and there across their backs, and a city scene in oil by Aaron Bohrod. Yes, he’d see that.

  Thirty years! The young man would guess that he was in New England. New Hampshire? He, himself, could not remember wanting, at the age of thirty, to go back to Leah, New Hampshire. That came later—another choice among all the choices taken or not taken. All those choices. No, instead of having the young man come here, he would go back. One could go back, as well as forward: each way was a fantasy in part, and memory itself tended to weave its own cohesion. In Paris there was the right bank and the left, but in which direction was the pale spring sun? In Des Moines, Iowa, were the generous houses of the well-off, each built as a version of happiness and perfection. But was a thing (a couch, a window, a radio) on the right or on the left? Memory cared less about such technicalities than one thought it did. What it really cared about were those tones and flashes of the sensual—tastes, odors, colors—that by their vividness kept the past from being totally lost. Now, memory…

  The car hummed contentedly, the sun was climbing in a dusky fresh day, and beside him a beautiful girl drowsed in the morning light, her fresh yellow hair as clean and somehow as unanimal as corn silk. On either side of the straight highway the corn, in thick yet graceful ranks, seemed to breathe heavy life into the air. It was Iowa in August, and the sense, the feel, of growing was so thick he wondered how anything could matter anywhere but here. It was as though he had come, finally, to the center of life itself. Come as an alien, though.

  Phyllis certainly hadn’t come as an alien. He had to glance down at her smooth long legs that were so clean and perfect they were hard to believe. Her strong hand lay open on the seat, and in its openness, its quietness, life moved without the jangling of nerves or the sweat of emotion. It seemed to him that the lovely hand lived with a natural economy and rightness, as did Phyllis. All she needed was food and water, and her skin glowed, her eyes stayed pure and blue, and her blood moved smoothly through her healthy flesh. He liked to drive with her drowsing beside him, with the clean smell of her in his nose.

  Because, awake, Phyllis was constantly active. Always her mind grappled with something or other; there was always some paradox or some injustice toward which she directed herself. Idleness to her was not a sin, it was something which didn’t exist. She read, she listened, she went to things like lectures and plays and rallies; and she was the first girl he had ever known whose schedule hadn’t perceptibly changed under his influence.

  She was, he couldn’t help thinking, not his type at all. His girls had always been in tune, somehow. Intellectual types, basically passive under the casual force of his desires, careful to get the joke, to have heard of everything, to act as comrade as well as lover. Those poor girls. Phyllis would despise their obeisance to his male ironies. If Phyllis didn’t really think something was funny, she didn’t laugh.

  She woke up.

  “Where are we?” She yawned and stretched her long muscles, and he was startled, as usual, by the quick chemical change in him whenever he saw her move her body like that. It was sharp, and almost hurt.

  “We’re in Iowa at last,” he said.

  “Oh? Where?” She sat forward and looked around at the green banks of corn as though, being a native after all, she might be able to tell at a glance.

  “Somewhere west of Davenport,” he said.

  A sign came by: CLABBER GIRL BAKING POWDER.

  “I’ve always wondered what ’Clabber’ meant,” Phyllis said. “I’ve always meant to ask somebody or look it up but I never have. Isn’t it funny? You have these little questions and you never ask them?”

  “I know what it means,” he said, and she turned toward him delightedly, took hold of his arm, and smiled as though it were really a great treasure he had to give to her.

  “Really? Michael!”

  “Yes, I know what it means.”

  “Tell me! Tell me!”

  “It means curds, like in cottage cheese, or butter. Maybe the clabber girl churned the stuff. You know, the girl on the farm who made the clabber.”

  “Wonderful! I know that’s right, Michael. But how did you know? You’ve never lived on a farm.” She was still delightedly squeezing his arm.

&nbs
p; “You know my peculiar memory,” he said. “Once, God knows why, I signed up for a course in Irish. The word comes from the Irish.”

  “You remember everything, Michael. I honestly believe you do. It’s so wonderful! You know it makes me feel more valuable? You never forget anything so nothing’s lost, and I’ve got everything right here beside me. No, I don’t mean valuable—me being, that is. No, wait a minute. Yes, I do. Do you remember everything about me?” She blushed and looked away, grinning happily at the highway and the endless green and blue outside.

  “Every little thing,” he said.

  “Oh, my goodness!” she said. “Oh my goodness!”

  “Is that why you want to marry me?” he asked. “Because I’m just a kind of permanent record? An encyclopedia?”

  She looked at him, suddenly thoughtful, and her words seemed to come out automatically. “I want to marry you because I love you.”

  But she still smiled at the countryside. She didn’t ask him why he wanted to marry her. This was a question he had to ask himself. And he asked that question again, getting no straight answer.

  Perry had asked him, in Paris, why he had suddenly decided to go home. His answer then was “Because I’m twenty-five and I discover that I have piles.” So he’d gone back home, finished law school, and now (it seemed more or less part of the same plan) he was headed toward marriage with this girl from Iowa. Headed toward it at sixty-five miles an hour on a concrete causeway that held them above the deep black earth. He would meet Phyllis’s mother and father, in Des Moines.

  The memory again. Perry had been on Dexedrine for a few days, and Michael and MacGregor were waiting for him to drop so they could carry him across rue Cujas and deposit him in his room. Perry was heavy as hell, too. “Piles?” Perry said. “Piles?” And Michael had explained that somehow his image of himself as a youth was in the process of disintegration. “Piles, ” he said, imitating Perry’s British accent, “are not, somehow, compatible with my present life. Farewell.” “Rot!” Perry said. “Exactly,” Michael had explained. It had begun to seem to him that all his orifices were closing up; he couldn’t smile as wide, or laugh as loud, for instance. That was four years ago. Now he was twenty-nine, and a lawyer. His specialty was patents and copyrights, and already he had been relieved of the usual, mechanical tasks of the apprentice; it was his amazing memory again. He found his work at least as fascinating as bridge or chess.

  Phyllis was a senior at Sarah Lawrence, and she was twenty-two. They had known each other less than a year. “Carnally,” she said once, “we have known each other only six months.”

  He grinned himself, now, as the highway made a ninety-degree right turn (a corrected section line, he supposed, and in a certain number of yards it would make a ninety-degree left turn and continue straight west), but in his grin he felt some self-consciousness; there was just a little fear mixed in with his amusement. Yes, there was, and he liked that fear, because it made him feel alive. In a few hours he would have occasion for another fear, too, and he looked forward to it. Phyllis would present him to her parents, and that would be interesting.

  William and Hannah Krause would not be shocked by his appearance, because he looked as conventionally Anglo-Saxon as anybody. He was even blond. But there was something about him, he knew, that would give the Krauses pause. It always happened. Some turn of phrase or turn of mouth would, he was afraid, turn the father’s thoughts to darkness. He’d seen it happen before; it was as though he suddenly became a Negro in the sight of fathers. Their little daughters—they had a hard time facing up to it.

  And the daughters, how they seemed to rub it in. Strange, because girls had always wanted to bring him home to show their parents, and he thought one reason was his conventional appearance, as though they wanted to show their worried parents what a clean, nice young man they had, so their parents wouldn’t worry about them. But it never seemed to work out that way. What usually happened was that the father seemed to grow more bouncy on his feet, and a little caustic in his remarks. Well, he would see.

  Michael was born in Leah, New Hampshire, and lived there until fourth grade, when he was nine. His parents died in an automobile accident that year, 1936, and he’d had to leave New Hampshire to go to New York City, to the house of his grandmother and grandfather, a brownstone on Tenth Street with the sidewalk in front and in back a dusty little garden with a broken fountain and a fig tree that was in a state of suspended animation. The garden there, compared to this rich Iowa earth, was such that the plants were always dirty to the touch. In that house nothing much was kept from him or given to him; because of his youth and his grandparents’ age he did what he wanted and made his own rules. When he was old enough he was sent to boarding school, and after that there was the Army and college. His grandfather was still alive, but Michael went to that house only as a visitor; the old man’s memory wasn’t too good, and most of the time he considered Michael to be his son rather than his grandson. It was disconcerting to act as the impersonator of a father he hadn’t known too well anyway. Michael’s grandmother was dead, and with her had gone all the remembered evidence of family and relatives—cousins and second cousins, ancestors and aunts. When his grandfather died he would in effect have no family, and so it was as a kind of singleton he traveled through Iowa with this warm girl.

  “I wonder what you’ll think of them,” Phyllis said.

  “I wonder what they’ll think of me.”

  She was honest; she wouldn’t ever lie. “Yes, I wonder,” she said, looking at him speculatively.

  “Can you look out of your mother’s eyes and see me?” he said.

  “That’s a funny idea.”

  “Sort of incestuous.”

  “Well,” she said, “I wouldn’t stay inside her too long.” She thought for a moment, then added, “My God! Poor old Daddy. He’s such a dear ass.”

  “I’ll tell him you said so.”

  “He’ll be very impressed by you—lawyer and all that. Don’t be too hard on him. Tell him how much money you make—I’m sure he makes three times as much.”

  “You think he’s a good man, don’t you?”

  She cocked her head and thought. It was as if she had never before considered this. “Well, he’s a good man,” she said.

  “You mean he’s stupid.”

  “Not exactly,” she said.

  “Sort of vaguely,” he said, and she punched him playfully on the arm. It hurt, though. Somehow she’d found the exact place, and it hurt like hell.

  In a couple of hours they came to Iowa City, where they had decided to stop and eat, and as they came down a surprisingly steep hill into the town he was impressed by the large trees and the look of permanence and grace in some of the houses.

  “Well, it’s a college town,” Phyllis said.

  “What college?”

  “The State University of Iowa,” Phyllis said.

  “I thought that was in Ames.”

  “No, that’s Iowa State.”

  “Oh. That figures.”

  “Listen,” Phyllis said. “If you think you can patronize Iowa, wait till you meet Mother. She can do it better, and she’s lived here all her life.”

  They stopped at a diner, and as they sat down in a booth the waitress came so quickly and cheerfully, with such an excited and really friendly smile, Michael was certain she must be an old friend of Phyllis’s.

  “Hello!” the waitress said, and Phyllis smiled back, as friendly as the waitress. How they seemed to love each other! The waitress, whose blond hair and perfect teeth were quite similar to Phyllis’s, handed them menus and asked if they’d had a good trip. “All the way from New York?” She had seen their license plate.

  “We stopped over twice,” Phyllis said. “Once in Ohio and once in Moline.”

  “Moline’s a nice town,” the waitress said. “Have you got much farther to go?”

  “My folks live in Des Moines,” Phyllis said.

  “Oh, that’s nice. I like Des Moines. We
ll, you’ve got over a hundred miles to go. You’ll make it for supper, I bet.”

  “They’re expecting us, anyway,” Phyllis said.

  “That’s nice. They’ll be so happy to see you again.”

  They did order, finally, and after they’d eaten, the waitress came to the door with them and asked them to drive carefully.

  “Goodbye!”

  “Goodbye! Goodbye!”

  In the car again, he asked Phyllis if she had known the girl. She just looked at him. “Know her? No, of course not. Oh. I see what you mean. No, that’s something you’ll get used to out here.”

  “Well, I gave her a good tip.”

  Now Phyllis was startled. “But you didn’t have to at all! She wasn’t being friendly for tips. In fact, there’s a law against tipping in Iowa. Did you know that? You only tip in sin places, like nightclubs and bars.”

  “These strange foreign customs!” he said.

  “And of course the bars only serve beer,” Phyllis said.

  They drove on through the town and over a rich brown river, then up again into the inevitable tall corn, where the highway again was a white corridor through all that fuming green life. The sky was wider than he had ever seen it—wider than on a ship—and bluer. And in the sky was the sun, a deliberate part of this system of growth. Symbiosis, he thought; everything is making and reproducing, waxing big. The sun was a huge ball of heat that gave and at the same time drew; it sucked out moisture, and yet the air was full of moisture. Everything was growing. He felt like the one cool piece of matter, the one constant, steady thing in this moiling place. As cool, almost, as a piece of ice.

  After he had driven for a while, Phyllis became fidgety; she went through the dash compartment looking for something, anything, to read, and he suggested that she drive. She liked this. She loved to drive, and she was very good at it. She’d even taken driving in high school. So he stopped the car and they changed places. The thick corn seemed to tremble, not so much from the mild wind as from growth itself, and as he looked closely at the black earth it seemed unnatural that there were so few weeds around the bases of the stalks, that they stood too cleanly in the rich black.