“It’s a castle all right!” Eva cried happily. “But we can’t get in, the door’s locked!” She pulled Janet by the hand to a padlocked, steel door. “The king and the queen had to go to work, I guess. They aren’t home.”
“I guess not, Pickle,” Janet said. They walked slowly around to the other side, where they sat on the ground and peered down the slope that the two bicycle mechanics had used for launching their strange machine. Then, as if a wonder were unfolding before her eyes, filling her with awe, Janet saw a large, clear image of the two men from the Midwest and their clumsy wire, wood, and cloth aircraft and the sustained passion, the obsession with making it work, and their love for it and for each other. It was like discovering a room in her own house that she’d never suspected existed, opening a door that she’d never opened, looking in and seeing an entirely new room, unused, unknown, altering thoroughly and from then on her view of the entire house.
The image was of her own making, but that didn’t lessen the impact. She saw the brothers as having released into their lives tremendous energy, saw it proceed directly, as if from a battery, from their shared obsession and their mad, exclusive love for each other—a positive and negative post, the one necessitated by the presence of the other. They had not permitted themselves, she decided, to live as she feared she was condemned to live: curled up inside a self that did not really exist.
For her, the image was perceived by her body as much as by her mind, and she felt lightened by it, as if she could fly, like a deliberately wonderful bird, leaping from the lip at the top of the little hill, soaring from the height of land first up and then out, in a long, powerful glide across the slope and then over the field that aproned it, drifting easily, gracefully, slowly to the ground, coming to rest at the far end of the field, where the two workshops were located, where, she decided, she would pitch herself into the task of making a machine that could fly, making it out of wires and shreds of cloth and odd remainders of wood and rough pieces of other machinery—the junk of her life so far. Her daughters careened uphill past her, mocking and singing at each other, asserting their differences to each other, and she knew, from the way her face felt, that she would be tireless.
Standing, she turned and waved for the girls to follow, and the three of them descended the hill, holding hands, and talking brilliantly.
Comfort
Leon LaRoche, the bank teller, tried to tell this story once to his friend and neighbor, Captain Dewey Knox (U.S. Army, ret.). Leon was in his late twenties when he made the attempt, and he had been drinking beer with the Captain in the Captain’s trailer for several hours, so he was slightly drunk, or he probably would not have tried to tell it at all. When drunk, it’s your judgment about the sayable that goes, not your inhibitions.
The two men had been talking about a kid who used to live at the trailerpark, Buddy Smith, who had been a thief and a liar and whose father, Tom Smith, had finally thrown him out of the trailer he’d shared with his son for most of the kid’s life. Six months after the son departed, the father shot himself, and nobody understood any of it. Buddy Smith never showed up in Catamount again, not even for the funeral, and that had been the end of the matter, except when folks now and then wondered whatever happened to him and wondered why his father, a sociable, though utterly private man, had killed himself. Most people believed that by now the kid was locked up in jail somewhere out West, where his mother was supposed to live, and that Tom Smith had shot himself in the mouth with his shotgun because, since he had been living alone, his drinking had got out of hand, and too much drinking alone can make you depressed. Nobody thought the two events, the son’s departure and the father’s suicide, were connected. At least not in such a way as to think the suicide could have been avoided, which is to say, at least not in such a way as you could blame the son for the death of the father.
“I liked Buddy,” Leon said, gazing into his glass. “I really did.” The two men were seated at the Captain’s kitchen table, the television set still rumbling behind them in the living room, for when Leon knocked on the door and offered to share a six-pack of beer with him, the Captain had been watching the evening news and in his pleasure had neglected to shut the machine off. The older man was grateful for the interruption—it was a frosty November night, and people generally don’t go calling on people uninvited on nights like this—and when the first six-pack was drunk, the Captain started offering beer from his refrigerator, until they found themselves working their way through a third six-pack. The Captain said he didn’t mind, it was a Friday night anyhow, and he was restless and felt like having company, so what the hell, crack open another, Leon, and relax, for Chrissakes, you’re too uptight, boy. “You remind me of myself when I was your age,” he told Leon. “Some people have to learn to relax, have to force themselves to do it, and then after a while it comes naturally,” he said laughing, as if to prove how finally it had come naturally to him.
“No, I really liked Buddy, although I can’t say I knew him very well. He was a chess player. I never knew that, until this one night after work, and I went into the Hawthorne House for a drink, because I was angry, pissed off, from having been yelled at once too often by Bob Fosse at the bank. You wouldn’t believe that man, I don’t believe that man. After what, seven years, and he still treats me like shit. Anyhow, I went into the Hawthorne House, which is unusual for me, because that place can be kind of rough, you know, and I hate the smell of it, like urine and old beer, but like I said, I was angry at Bob Fosse and needed a drink to calm down.
“Buddy was playing one of the pinball machines, alone, as usual. He never seemed to have friends in town, even though there are plenty of kids his age in town, too many of them, if you want my opinion, who don’t seem to do anything except hang around drinking beer and flexing their muscles and getting themselves tattooed. Buddy was like that, too, or at least he seemed like that, except that he kept pretty much to himself. Also he didn’t exactly look like those guys. I mean, he was always clean-looking, and he wore his hair short, and he took good care of his clothes. He looked like an Army recruit home on leave from boot camp. Even so, he never seemed to do much except hang around the trailerpark or up at the Hawthorne House, as if waiting for someplace far away and very different from this place. Those other guys his age, they were made in Catamount, New Hampshire, to stay in Catamount, New Hampshire, and eventually to die in Catamount, New Hampshire. It was stamped all over their faces, all over their bulky muscles, all over the way they talked and laughed and punched each other around.”
The Captain knew the type. He shoved his paw across his white crew cut and sighed. “Bring back the draft,” he intoned, “and in a year the streets of America will be cleared of that type and safe to walk in again.”
“Buddy had spent a year in the service, actually. The Marines, I think he told me, and just as he was about to be shipped overseas to Germany or someplace, he was in a motorcycle accident that put a metal plate into his head and got him discharged. He told me this while we were sitting at the bar, but I don’t think I believed him, because while he was telling me all this, he kept smiling at me and watching my eyes, as if he was putting me on, just to see if I’d believe some lie.
“He was a chess player. He said he wasn’t very good, but he liked to play, which is true for me, too, so I said we should get together to play chess sometime, and he thought that was a great idea. He didn’t know anyone around here who played chess, he said, and neither did I. He had a way of watching the point of his cigarette while he smoked that was unusual. I bought him a second beer, and we talked about how hard it was, living in a small town in New Hampshire, how boring it was, and how mean-minded the people were. He said as soon as he got some money that was owed him by a guy in the Marines he was leaving for the West Coast, and then he asked me why I stayed here, living in Catamount, going back and forth every day from the trailerpark to the bank. I explained how my mother lives in Concord, where I grew up, and this was the best job I could
find when I got out of New Hampshire Commercial College, and I go to Boston sometimes on weekends, I told him. He was curious about that, about what I do in Boston on weekends, and I told him the truth, that I go around to the bars and maybe take a meal at a fancy restaurant and go to a movie. That’s all. He didn’t believe me, but he was very nice, very cheerful and friendly. He said I probably stayed home every weekend and watched TV.
“By then the place was filling up and had got pretty noisy. The jukebox was playing, and two or three couples were dancing, and you had to holler to be heard, so I asked Buddy to come back to my place for some supper and a few games of chess. He asked me if I had anything to drink, apologizing as he asked, explaining that he was broke or else he’d offer to buy the beer. I had plenty of beer in the fridge plus a bottle of Scotch I keep around, and I had planned to go on home and cook up a couple of hamburgers for myself, anyhow. I hadn’t played any chess in over a year, not since my brother was back East visiting my mother two Thanksgivings ago. Buddy said fine, so I paid, and we left in my car.
“When we got to the trailer, he opened a beer and set up the chessboard in the living room, while I cooked hamburgers. He had the television on and was watching it and drinking beer and seemed very relaxed to me. But he seemed sad, too. It’s hard to explain. He probably reminded me of myself, somehow, sitting there alone, with the television set on and a chessboard set up in front of him. I walked into the living room to say something to him, I don’t know what, just something that wouldn’t make him seem so sad and alone to me, maybe, and when I passed behind his chair, I lay my hand on his shoulder in a friendly way. You know. Just lay my hand on his shoulder as I passed behind his chair.
“What happened then was … embarrassing. I don’t know why I’m telling this to you, I’ve never told anyone else. But it’s bothered me ever since. He grabbed at my hand as if it were an insect, a spider or something, and threw it off his shoulder. When he stood up and turned to face me, he was red-faced and enraged, sputtering at me, calling me a fairy, all kinds of names. He knocked over the chessboard, made a few wild moves around the room like he was trying to find a way out without passing me, and finally went by me like I had some kind of disease he could catch, and slammed the door.”
The Captain was at the refrigerator and had drawn out a pair of beers. He let the door shut on its own and stood facing it. “Well,” he said. “Well, then … so he decided you had … unnatural desires, eh?”
“Apparently. Yes, he did. But I didn’t.”
“Of course not.” The Captain was still facing the closed refrigerator door.
“It was just that he looked so sad and alone there. So pitiful. I can’t describe it. Sometimes you can have a feeling toward a person that makes you want to do that, to place a hand on him and that’s all, just to comfort him, even though he doesn’t know he needs comfort—no, especially because he doesn’t know he needs comfort. But I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I must need comfort myself and not know it or something,” Leon said, and he laughed lightly, nervously.
The Captain laughed with him and turned and sat back down at the table. Leon, his face pinched in thought, opened the bottle and filled his glass, then studied the glass carefully, watching the bubbles rise inside and the moisture drip down the outside. The Captain filled his pipe from a brown leather pouch and lit it, drawing in the smoke rapidly, until he had it going on its own. Then he asked Leon if it was true, was he a fairy?
Leon slowly looked up at the older man, the way you would look at a falling tree if you had got unexpectedly caught beneath it. It was too late to step out of its path. “Yes,” he said. “A fairy. I suppose I am.”
The Captain smiled and said that he had always thought so, but Leon was not to worry, because his secret was safe with him. He understood that sort of thing, it happened all the time in the service. Well, not all the time, but often enough that you had to learn to be tolerant, so long as people kept these things to themselves. He continued talking a few seconds longer, but Leon was already standing and pulling on his jacket, moving for the door.
At the door, he apologized for having drunk so much of the Captain’s beer, and quickly stepped outside to the cold night air. It was a clear sky, with falling stars and a crescent moon that looked like a narrow streak against the dark blue sky.
Success Story
After high school, I attended an Ivy League college for less than one term. A year later, I was married and living in central Florida. This was 1958 and ’59. General Dwight Eisenhower was our President, and Dr. Fidel Castro, hunkered down in the mountain passes southeast of Havana, was getting praised for his integrity and good looks by Time magazine and Reader’s Digest.
I’d been a whiz kid in high school, rewarded for it with an academic scholarship. In this Ivy League school, however, among the elegant, brutal sons of the captains of industry, I was only that year’s token poor kid, imported from a small New Hampshire mill town like an exotic herb, a dash of mace for the vichyssoise. It was a status that perplexed and intimidated and finally defeated me, so that, after nine weeks of it, I fled in the night.
Literally. On a snowy December night, alone in my dormitory room (they had not thought it appropriate for me to have a roommate, or no one’s profile matched mine), I packed my clothes and few books into a canvas duffle, waited until nearly all the lights on campus were out, and sneaked down the hallway, passed through the service entrance, and walked straight down the hill from the eighteenth-century cut-stone dormitories and classroom buildings to the wide boulevard below, where huge, neoclassical fraternity houses lounged beneath high, ancient elms. At the foot of the hill, I turned south and jogged through unplowed snow, shifting my heavy duffle from one shoulder to the other every twenty or thirty yards, until I passed out of the valley town into darkness and found myself walking through a heavy snowstorm on a winding, narrow road.
A month later—with the holidays over and my distraught mother and bewildered younger brother and sister, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all my friends and neighbors and high school teachers, as well as the dean and director of admissions at the Ivy League college, convinced that I not only had ruined my life but may have done something terrible to theirs, too—I turned up in St. Petersburg, Florida, with seven dollars in my pocket, my duffle on my shoulder, and my resolve to join Castro in the Sierra Maestra seriously weakening.
I’d spent Christmas and New Year’s at home, working days and nights as a salesman in a local men’s clothing store, trying hard to behave as if nothing had happened. My mother seemed always to be red-eyed from weeping, and my friends from high school treated me coolly, distantly, as if I had dropped out of college because of a social disease. In some ways, my family was a civic reclamation project—the bright and pretty children and pathetic wife of a brute who, nearly a decade ago, had disappeared into the northern woods with a woman from the post office, never to be heard from again. As the oldest male victim of this abandonment, I was expected by everyone who knew the story to avenge the crime, mainly by making myself visibly successful, by rising above my station, and in that paradoxical way show the criminal how meaningless his crime had been. For reasons I was only dimly aware of, my story was important to everyone.
Leaving them behind, then, abandoning my fatherless family in a tenement and my old friends and the town I had been raised in, was an exquisite pleasure, like falling into bed and deep sleep after having been pushed beyond exhaustion. Now, I thought the morning I left—stepping onto the ramp to Route 93 in Catamount, showing my thumb to the cars headed south—now I can start to dream my own dreams, not everyone else’s.
The particular dream of joining Castro died easily. It started dying the moment I got out of the big, blue Buick sedan with Maryland plates that had carted me straight through all the way from Norfolk, Virginia, to Coquina Key in St. Petersburg, where the elderly man who drove the car had a “fiancée,” he told me, with a suite in the Coquina Key Hotel.
“You,
you’re a smart kid,” he said to me, as I slid from the car and hauled out my duffle from the back. “You’ll do all right here. You’ll catch on.” He was a ruddy, white-haired man with a brush cut that he liked to touch with the flat of his hand, as if patting a strange dog. “Forget Cuba, though. No sense getting yourself killed for somebody else’s country.” He was a retired U.S. Army captain, named Knox, “like the fort,” he’d said, and he gave advice as if he expected it to be taken. “Kid like you,” he said, peering across at me from the driver’s seat, “smart, good-looking, good personality, you can make a million bucks here. This place,” he said, looking warmly around him at the marina, the palm trees, the acres of lawn, the flashy bougainvillea blossoms, the large new cars with out-of-state plates, the tall, pink Coquina Key Hotel with the dark red canopy leading from the street to the front entrance, “this place is made for a kid like you!”
“Yeah. Well, I got plenty of time for that.” I took a step away from the car, and Knox leaned farther across the front seat. I said to him, “I don’t need to make a pile of money just yet.”
“No? How much you got?”
“Not much. Enough.” I lifted my duffle to my shoulder and gave the man a wave.
“If you don’t need money, kid, what do you need, then?”
“Experience, I guess.” I tried to smile knowingly.
“Listen. I’ve been coming down here every goddamned winter for eight years now, ever since I retired. I’ve got experience, and lemme tell you, this place is gonna be a boom town. It already is. All these old people from the North, and there’s gonna be more of ’em, son, not less, and all of ’em got money to spend, and here you are on the ground floor. I’d give all my experience for your youth. Son, forget Cuba. Stay in St. Pete, you’ll be a millionaire before you’re twenty-five.”
The Angel on the Roof Page 28
