Even the littlest ones had seemed momentarily transported. Towers, sweet water, heavy crops. He had begun to comb his anthologies of British poetry and mark certain passages with little slips of paper. When they became restless or edgy as the wind scored the siding of the school or the stove-pipes began to hum and vibrate, Joe would read to them. He was a good reader. He knew that.
How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below,
Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow;
There oft as mild evening weeps over the lea,
The sweet scented birk shades my Mary and me.
Looking back, he considered it a miracle. But then, you tempt people with the impossible.
O sound to rout the brood of cares,
The sweep of scythe in morning dew,
The gust that round the garden flew,
And tumbled half the mellowing pears!
Those kids were lucky to get a goddamn orange in their stockings at Christmas. Few ever did. Tumbling pears.
And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,
We heard behind the woodbine veil
The milk that bubbled in the pail,
And buzzings of the honeyed hours.
And gradually, with each of the succeeding thirty-odd years of small towns and stifling classrooms, these visions of refreshment sustained him, although the poetry stopped working for the students. He came to the conclusion that they no longer needed it or wanted it. With prosperity, their dreams became more elaborate, more opulent, less dictated by peculiar circumstances. Their desires were the conventional lusts of a consumer society.
But Joe needed the old visions during those sweltering June days as he prepared class after class, row after row, face after face, for the Department of Education final examinations. Every year his head pounded and ached from the stunning sunlight, the smell of hot paper and dirty hair.
“I heard the water lapping on the crag / And the long ripple washing in the reeds.” It had always helped to imagine the cool sinuosity of moving water, the liquid coiling between green, lavish banks, the silken run so silent and so deep.
Perhaps, Joe thought, that is why I have come. For the healing waters. Like a nineteenth-century gentleman in search of a cure for what ails him. I have come to take the waters. I have come to be made whole.
Mark was speaking to him. “I made a reservation at the Bloomsbury Centre,” he said. “We’ll go there now so you can catch up on missed sleep. That jet-lag is a killer. I was a zombie for a week.”
Joe nodded. It was a good idea. Already jet-lag was making it difficult for him to concentrate. He felt stretched on the rack of two continents. Physically here; in time, located some place back there.
“It’s a good location,” his son said. “It’s within walking distance of the University of London and the British Museum, so we’ll be able to meet easily. I can slip out of the Reading Room at noon and we can have lunch together in a pub or at your hotel.”
“That’s fine,” said Joe equably. “I don’t want to take you away from your work. Just go about your usual business.” He was proud to have a son who was a scholar.
“You know,” Mark said, shrugging apologetically, “we only have a bed-sitter. Not even our own bathroom. We’d put you up if we could, but there’s no room. Joan’s mortified. She’s afraid you’ll think she doesn’t want you.”
“Christ,” said Joe, hurrying to interrupt him, “as if I didn’t know? The shack your mother and I lived in when we were first married – a crackerbox…” He trailed off, uncertain if the boy had flinched at mention of his mother. The beard was a mask he couldn’t penetrate, the face couldn’t be read.
“Look at that!” said Mark, suddenly fierce, diverting the conversation. “Bastards! The National Front thugs are at it again.”
The train was slowing for a station. Brakes binding, it slid by a carious warehouse with skirts of broken-brick rubble, windows painted blind. A message several feet high was painted on the building in white letters. “No Wogs Here.”
“It seems,” said Joe, “that the sun has finally set on the British Empire.”
“No,” said Mark, his face intent, “the Empire’s come home to roost.”
Joe woke to hunger and the sound of voices speaking German in the hall outside his doorway. The glowing numerals of the clock on the dresser announced that it was two o’clock in the morning, but his belly informed him that if he were back in North America he would be sitting down to a meal. What meal – breakfast, dinner, supper – he couldn’t say. He wasn’t sure how to compute the time change.
The woman outside his door was drunk. There was an alcoholic, forced gaiety to her voice that couldn’t be mistaken. And although Joe barely knew three words of German, he could guess that the man’s guttural purr was directed towards convincing her to go to bed with him.
Joe got out of bed and flicked on the TV. The screen was empty. He ran quickly through the channel selections. BBC 1 and 2, ITV, all blank. Bathed in the aquatic, wavering blue light and kept company by the hum of the box, he sat on the foot of the bed and lit a cigarette.
Odd the often simple source of our most complex imaginings, our most disturbing dreams. The sounds of an attempted seduction heard in indistinct German and he had dreamed that his wife and her mother (dead these twenty years past) had been sitting talking the Deutsch in his living-room, just as they had in the first years of his marriage when the old girl was still alive.
He had always resented that. He had felt left out not being able to follow the conversation. He was suspicious that his mother-in-law asked questions and pried into their private life. He hadn’t liked her much. Frieda was what his own father would have called a creeping christer. A woman of a narrow, fundamental piety and sour views who hadn’t liked her daughter marrying outside the charmed circle of the Kirche.
But a dream has its own rules and logic and Joe had understood this conversation perfectly well. He knew that Frieda was trying to take Marie away with her. She was trying to persuade her to leave Joe and go away some place with her. Silly old bitch. The only thing was that Marie seemed half inclined to follow her mother’s suggestions.
And while all this had been going on Joe had found himself unable to move out of his chair. He was paralysed, and no matter how he struggled to unlock his rigid limbs he could not do it. He was unable to stir a muscle, not even to speak.
He saw at last that they were in agreement. Marie got up and put on her coat. She went around the house turning out the lights as if he weren’t there. Then she followed her mother out the door. But she forgot to close the door. That was strange.
And there Joe sat in an empty house, rooted in a chair, blinded with tears. Not even a decent goodbye.
The sounds outside intruded. Joe was sure that the man’s voice seemed to be growing more insistent and demanding, and the woman’s more encouraging in a sad, passive sort of way. The bargains struck, the diplomacy and language of love.
Joe made the rounds. He began as a proper tourist. He wound through the Jubilee-jammed streets of London on a tour bus. The banners were out, the buildings were being cleansed of a century of dirt and grime. The workmen exposed clean stone in patches; it shone through like white bone in an incinerated corpse. The windows in Oxford Street were stuffed with regal souvenirs; the crowds surged on the sidewalks.
Everything was done with haste. They disembarked for a thirty-minute gawk at St. Paul’s, a stampede through the Tower, a whirl around Piccadilly Circus. Their female guide was disconcertingly brazen. She browbeat outlandishly large tips out of them. She claimed intimacy with famous people. Described a night out on the town with Lord Snowdon. She drove her charges relentlessly through the sacred places, hectoring, scolding, full of dire warnings not to be late, not to dawdle. Joe put up with the woman and his fellow tourists for two days; then he gave it up as a bad business, likely only to get worse.
It didn’t take him long to realize that something was wrong. He was filled with anxiety. The long Engl
ish faces with their bad teeth made him shift his shoulders uneasily when he looked at them. The streets were too full. The lure of royalty and the weak pound was a powerful attraction.
Joe was surprised to find that nothing much pleased him. Most things he saw made him feel sad, or lost, or lonely, or guilty. He was sorry to see the English look like the landlords of boarding-houses, possessors of a testy dignity, forced by straitened circumstances into a touchy hospitality.
Where were the healing waters? He might have said that he never expected to find them in London. They were in the Cotswolds. Or Kent. Or Norfolk. Or Yorkshire. But he knew that wasn’t true. He knew that now. The great trees in Hyde Park should have been enough, but weren’t.
He left off sightseeing and began to aimlessly wander the streets. Following his nose, he found himself drawn down narrow alleys daubed with graffiti and slogans. The messages disturbed him. He could see nothing suggestive of the vigour with which they were executed in the tired people he saw in the streets. “No Boks Here!” they said. “CFC Rule OK!” “David Essex Is King!” “Mick Is King!” “Arsenal Rule!” He was not sure why they made him angry, why they upset him. Most of them he couldn’t even understand. Later he had to ask Mark to explain to him what they signified.
At first Joe had imagined them the work of senile, angry old men – they gave off the crazy intensity he associated with an old man’s rage. But in time he came to believe them the handiwork of the bizarre creatures he sometimes came across lounging in subway stations like lizards, bathing themselves in the noise, smells and smuts. Horrible, self-mutilated young people. They flaunted safety-pins driven through their bottom lips, earlobes, nostrils. Bristling porcupine haircuts quivered on their heads, radiating electric rage and venom. They were clad in intricately torn T-shirts and dresses made of shiny green garbage-bags. Joe felt like the discoverer of a whole subterranean culture down in the tube, a whole crazed tribe intent on festooning itself with refuse and offal.
Staring bewildered at them for the first time in the harsh light of the station, he had been frightened, suspicious they might attack him. And then he found himself laughing when he thought of Dryden’s lines:
These Adam-wits, too fortunately free,
Began to dream they wanted liberty:
And when no rule, no precedent was found,
Of men by laws less circumscrib’d and bound
They led their wild desires to woods and caves,
And thought that all but savages were slaves.
His edginess grew. He seemed drawn to the train stations with their dirt and noise and pigeons and stink and movement. He wandered the Embankment and stared at the sullen Thames filled with commerce. It seemed that this stretch of river bank was dotted with old men and old women bundled in unravelling sweaters and shapeless coats, some drunk, some crazy.
Joe began to drink. He sought out pubs seldom frequented by tourists. This was resented. But nevertheless he sat stubbornly in the midst of strangers who talked past him at the bar, who even occasionally made jokes about him while he drank his whiskeys and got falling-down drunk. At afternoon-closing the proprietors turned him out and he took to the streets again. He walked mile after mile, often losing himself entirely in the city. He tramped past the British Museum and its imposing portico with barely a glance. Inside, his son was reading documents. He ignored the blandishments of Madame Tussaud’s, of the Victoria and Albert, of the National Gallery.
He felt he was on the verge of losing control as he had back home. When he was jostled and elbowed and pushed outside Harrods he had sworn viciously and even taken a kick at a man who had stepped on his foot. Yet his behaviour didn’t particularly worry him. He decided that he didn’t give a damn.
In the first week of his visit Joe spent two evenings at his son’s. He climbed three flights of stairs past strange sounds and Asiatic smells to a bed-sitter you couldn’t swing a cat in. His daughter-in-law cooked them pork pies in a tiny range and they drank whiskey that Joe brought with him. Mark and Joe sat at the table on the only chairs, and Joan, his daughter-in-law, sat on the couch with her plate on her knee. Conversation never ran the way it should have. Mark kept asking questions that Joe didn’t consider any of his goddamn business and tried to avoid answering.
“So that thing with the kid is finished now, all cleared up?”
Joe splashed some whiskey in his glass. “Yes,” he said. “It’s finished and I prefer to leave it that way.”
“Why did they decide to drop the charges?”
Joan coughed and gave Mark a warning look. It was funny, she seemed able to read him better than his own son could.
“They settled out of court for a thousand bucks. They said they felt sorry for me, my wife having just died. They talked about the poor kid walking around with wire-cutters in his back pocket, living on soup and milkshakes.”
Mark’s eyes had that squinty, harried look they got when he was worried. He had had that look even as a child. He hated trouble. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t imagine you doing that.”
“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do,” said Joe.
He had surprised a lot of people: his principal, himself, the kid most of all. A lot was forgiven because it happened two weeks after the funeral. Everybody thought he had come back to work too soon. But Joe wasn’t sure that he hadn’t understood that would be the reaction before he did what he did. Maybe he had calculated the consequences. He couldn’t remember now.
That particular kid, Wesjik, had been giving him trouble all year. Not that he was especially bad. He was representative of a type becoming more and more common. He did the usual insolent, stupid things: farting noises out of the side of his mouth while Joe read a poem, backchat, bothering people, arriving late for class, destruction of books and school property.
That day Joe had had to tell him at the beginning of class (as he had every day for the past four months) to sit at his desk and get his text out. The boy had given him a witheringly contemptuous smile and, slouching to his place, said: “You got it. Sure thing.”
Joe had ignored him. “Open your books to page 130, Grade Twelve,” he said, “and we’ll begin the class with Tennyson’s ‘The Splendor Falls’.” After the books had all thumped open and the banging and foot-shuffling had subsided, Joe gave a little hitch to his voice and read, “The splendor falls -”
And there he was interrupted by a voice from the back of the room, brazen and sullen, “on shit-house walls.” There was laughter. Most of it nervous. Some encouraging.
Joe looked up from his book. He knew who had said that. “Mr. Wesjik,” he said, “get your carcass out of this room.”
“I didn’t say nothing,” the kid shot back, his face set in a mockery of innocence. “How could you know who said anything? You were reading.” A courtroom lawyer.
Joe closed the book and carefully put it down. “You come along with me, Wesjik,” he said. There were titters when the kid, grinning, followed him out of the room. A trip to the office. It didn’t mean anything any more.
And that was where Joe had intended to take him when they set out. But there was something about the way the kid slouched along, lazily and indifferently swivelling his hips, that grated. Joe changed his mind on the way. He led Wesjik into the vestibule where the student union soft-drink machine was kept, and pulled the doors closed behind him.
“What’s this?” said Wesjik. “How come I’m not going to the office?”
“You like talking to Mr. Cooper, don’t you?” asked Joe, adopting an artificially pleasant tone. Cooper was a smooth-cheeked character with a master’s degree in educational administration. Joe thought he was a dink, although he never mouthed off about Cooper in the staff-room the way some others did.
“Sure,” said Wesjik sarcastically, “he’s one honey of a guy. He understands me.”
“Is that right?” said Joe.
“Hey,” the kid said, “give me the Dutch-uncle treatment and let’s get out
of here. There’s a draft. I’m getting cold.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Wesjik,” said Joe. “What is it? Is it your hands that are cold?”
“Yeah,” said the kid, smiling, “my hands are terribly cold. I think I got chilblains maybe.”
“Put them in your pockets.”
“What?”
“Put your goddamn hands in your pockets if they’re cold,” said Joe calmly. To himself he said, I don’t give a shit any more. About anything. Let it ride.
“You swore,” said Wesjik surprised. “You swore at me.”
“Put your goddamn hands in your pockets, Wesjik,” said Joe. Get them in there, Wesjik, he thought. I’m an old man. Get them in there.
He could see he was beginning to scare the kid. He didn’t mind. Maybe the kid thought he was crazy. Wesjik put his hands slowly into his pockets, licked his lips and tried to freeze his smart-ass smile on his lips.
“How old are you, Wesjik?” he asked.
“What?”
“How fucking old are you, Wesjik? And the word is pardon.”
“Eighteen.”
“Is that right? Eighteen? Is that your correct age, eighteen?”
“Yes.”
Joe could barely hear his answer. “I didn’t hear that, Wesjik. How old?”
Wesjik cleared his throat. “Eighteen,” he said a little more loudly.
“My brother was dead at your age,” said Joe. “He died in Italy during the Second World War. Ever hear of the Second World War, Wesjik? Any knowledge of that little incident?”
“Yes.” A whisper.
“Do you want to know something, Wesjik?” said Joe, his voice rising dangerously. “I’m so tired. I’m so goddamn tired. I wish I had had that fucking chance,” he said. “I wish I could have died when I was eighteen.” He looked around the vestibule, surprised by what he had said, as if searching for the source of that idea. But it was true. His saying it had made it true. “That’s what I wish now, looking back. You know why?”
“Let me out of here,” the kid said, whining. “You’ve got no business keeping me here, swearing at me!”
Man Descending Page 18
