Standing at the window made no sense: the drapes were drawn. But I couldn’t bring myself to turn around. My shoulders may have hunched a little as I steeled myself. I heard the click of the needles stop, and a rustle as she put her knitting in a basket on the floor beside her chair. Then I turned around.
We can seldom adequately foretell how people will react in an emergency or to extraordinary tidings, even people whom we know intimately; I had supposed my wife’s disapproval of Augie’s deeds would ring out proportionately to this their fruits. Nothing could have been more mistaken. She sat quietly a moment, after my announcement, greeting it with only a stare into her lap. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.
She reached over for a package of cigarettes and dug one out.
“Yes,” I said, “so am I.”
She sighed with her whole body.
“Well,” she observed philosophically, yet at the same time a shade more censoriously, “people sleep together with their eyes open.”
Seventeen
BACK in town once more, the next day, I drank three whiskies in rapid succession and dialed Terry’s number. I shut my eyes and gritted my teeth as the ringing phone drilled into my brain: once, twice, six times, eight. No answer. This failure was blessedly repeated the next day, and three days later—five times in two weeks. And then the operator said, “That number has been disconnected.”
It would be idle to disguise my relief. It was as though a stone had been lifted from my chest. She had been as good as her word then, “seeing it through” herself; and I as good as my vow to meet the demands of honor. Terry had undoubtedly gone back to her family, and I had not the remotest idea where in Massachusetts that was. There was nothing more for me to do—but try to forget.
My agony sloped off to a vicarious concern, once again, with Augie’s. My wife did not press me for details; in fact, she wanted to know as little of them as possible now that she knew the gist, out of a feeling of loyalty to Isolde. I gave her to know that the situation was “contained,” and proceeding toward a satisfactory resolution. Of the good this ill wind blew she needed no reminder: that was obvious in Augie’s conduct. The account he gave of his reconstruction, on standard breadwinner lines, was enough also for Mrs. Mash, who troubled me no more. I suppose the woman had concluded that the opinions of a zany such as I were worthless in any case. The Crib O.K.’d the Pooles. It was now simply a question of settling down and waiting till the agency had “something that seemed right for them.” For such an institution goes to as many pains to choose the child for the parents as it does to choose the parents for the role.
Typical of the new Augie were certain burning moral wants, a tendency to take inventory of himself in preparation for the role; in particular, to contemplate the awful symmetry of the circumstances under which he was about to assume it. We had long ethical discussions, of which the fruit was the conclusion that this was all a moral charade which had elicited his best and must now be forgotten, in favor of preparing himself for his new duties, the faithful discharge of which would give him quittance in full. This was a premise to which he clung, but one he insisted tirelessly on rehashing, like a man punching out a pillow on which he is trying to rest his head. We recapitulated it on long hikes we took with the aim, also, of fatiguing him so he could sleep, and on which he insisted on dragging me along (the word is an apt one for I am no lover of walks) both to keep him company and help hammer out a coherent position. So while we chose varying terrains to traverse on foot, we covered the same philosophical ground so often we were letter-perfect.
“You see, it’s a sort of moral charade, no more,” I puffed as we mounted a stile and struck out across an open field, one Saturday afternoon. “Your right hand will cancel out the debt contracted by your left.”
“How can I be sure?”
“Because every man fathers a child and then rears one. You will do no less.”
“But the two are not the same. Someone else will rear mine.”
“And you will rear another’s. All life is random. We conceive in blind happenstance even what is our fleshly own,” I replied in a fairly turgid passage we had worked out in numerous marches across the stony meadows of Connecticut. I built dutifully to my climax, though breathing hard from exertion. “What are we but ciphers in the manswarm, grains in the anonymous dust. Nameless we come out of darkness, nameless return to it.” Some of this was Augie’s, some of it was mine, and some of it was Thomas Wolfe’s. “But there is no point in flailing ourselves with fruitless reproach.”
“You certainly seem to have done a lot of thinking about this,” Augie said.
“Yes.”
“Tell me the fable of the Roman mother and her child.”
“Oh, not that again,” I groaned, making for a stone wall. “Let’s sit down here and take a breather.”
We did. I took off my hat, a gray homburg. I have a great difficulty with hats which stems from the shape of my head, which is long and narrow like that of a football, so that a hat which fits from front to back will be too wide. I had recently gotten a haircut and so this homburg kept slipping down with each impact of my heels on the hard ground—the way you bring an ax down on its helve by pounding the other end on something. There were times on these marches when it dropped down over my eyes. This naturally obscured my visibility and once nearly cost me my life when I stepped out on the road in the dusk and into the path of a car whose driver had not yet turned on his lights.
I squeezed off a shoe and nursed a foot which had a large blister (edelreif) on it. “Life is a fortuitous conglomeration of Adams,” I said. I looked up at the sky. Augie followed my glance. Appraising the dark wooliness of the clouds he said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we got one hell of a snowstorm. There’s one due, you know.”
“Yes,” I said. “Does look like it. Let’s go home.”
Hobbling along down a road along which cars whizzed steadily, I said at last, “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to flag a ride.” So we hitchhiked, and at last a man we knew named Hal Mansfield came by and, recognizing us in the dusk, stopped. He took us both home. I remarked that it looked like snow, and Hal said heartily, “Yes. That reminds me of that sleigh ride party we’ve always talked about getting up. This time let’s do it.”
“I’m game,” I said, glad for the lift in the warm car.
I had once defined Reality as “a shuffled deck of cards.” That sleigh ride party turned out to be the Joker in the pack.
There were close to twenty of us half-yokels in it. Sleigh rides were constantly being gotten up or talked about, there in Avalon; the impulse at work was, I suppose, that nostalgia for simplicity that motivated a population a third of whom lived by taking in one another’s antiques. Forgetting that true simplicity that lies in the flip of a thermostat switch on a cold winter’s night—and reminded by Hal Mansfield of my promise—I agreed to turn up at his house the following Saturday night, “if there is still snow.” There was, a frozen coat of it, in a temperature plunging toward zero and below.
A few feelers were put out about postponing the lark, but bravado carried the day, and half past seven found me upstairs sheathing myself in successive layers of cotton shorts and shirts. At this point my wife, whom I had thought busy scratching together a getup of her own, came into the bedroom where I was dressing and lay down, with the statement that she believed she had a cold coming on. Murmuring persiflage about the Spartan spirit, I drew on vest after vest. I donned a coat and then wormed into a mackinaw I remembered I had in the closet. When I crowned this improvisation with the homburg—the only “old” hat I had—my wife turned her face to the wall and pleaded a sick headache. “You’re the doctor,” I said humorously, and feeling more upholstered than clothed, descended the stairs, pocketed a pint of brandy, climbed into the station wagon and drove off. The Pooles were visiting Isolde’s grandmother in another part of the state.
I found a sleigh in the Mansfields’ yard, and standing beside it a man in a
decayed blazer, flapping his arms. A cap that he wore with the earlaps down, a muffler one end of which was flung over his shoulder, his guarantee that he had newspapers under the blazer, and a mustache on which icicles had begun to form indicated that no detail would be lacking in our search for an Arcadian pattern.
“Where’s everybody?” I asked.
“Inside,” he said, pausing to adjust the harness on a steaming roan. I turned to the house with visions of warmth, eggnog and cancellation dancing in my head, but at that moment the door opened and people came tumbling and laughing out of it, their arms laden with blankets and heated bricks and stones. Hal Mansfield led the way to the sleigh, on the floor of which muffed and mittened people disposed themselves under quilts. “Hop in,” somebody said, and handed me a tepid rock.
The possible alternations of sexes having run out, I scrounged down between a former tax assessor of perhaps forty-eight to fifty and the tail of the sleigh. He and I were supposed to share a warm stone, as well as a blanket, but the stone became speedily indistinguishable from our shoes, with the result that the former tax assessor and I kept feeling for each other’s feet under the robe. Tiring of this rigmarole, he finally kicked the rock into the middle of the sleigh with an oath. He talked briefly about how the speedometer of his car had squeaked on the way up, owing to the cold’s having rendered the grease in the mechanism ineffectual; then conversation died between us.
There was some friendly ridicule of those who had begged off. To the insinuation that their courage had failed them, someone replied that it had served them—we’d not the guts to back out, nor the sponsors the intelligence to call it off.
“We couldn’t,” Hal Mansfield said. “We’ve made arrangements to meet the other bunch, you know.”
“What other bunch?”
“There’s a party heading this way from Southport. We’re to meet up somewhere between the Yacht Club and Grove Corners, on Grackle Hill Road. That gives us about eight miles apiece.”
The connection between group misery and mirth is a boon on such occasions, but I never reached the stage evidenced by the hoots and buffoonery of my companions. Mile after mile I lay quivering under the robe, my teeth chattering, the homburg crushed indifferently under my head. I began to feel what is, for me anyhow, the first symptoms of really bitter cold—a pain in the eardrums. High time for a nip, I thought, and bit off a glove. But my fingers were too frozen to fish the bottle out, and after a few moments of fumbling among the stratifications of my clothing, I laughed weakly and said to the former tax assessor, “There’s a bottle in my right inside pocket. Maybe you can get it out.”
No maybe about it. In three seconds he had rummaged it out of my ribs and was unscrewing the cap. “Ah, brandy!” he said, taking a pull.
“Brandy!” someone else shouted. Word went round and then the bottle, with many a lusty slug and many a good word for me. More impotent than either hurt or angry, I saw it passed from one mittened hand to another. There was some left when it got back to me, but my hands were so stiff half of it trickled down my chin, where it speedily froze. Then, settling down as far under the blanket as I could, and as nearly in the shape of a hoop as is humanly possible, and in a state of hopeless discouragement, I tried to concentrate on the localized glow in my stomach.
A sister-in-law of Hal Mansfield’s, a woman named Mrs. Kipling, revived the spark of life in me with something she said. It was a reference to “the real sou’wester” she had on, which someone was admiring. I remembered her having once related being aboard ship “in a terrific nor’easter.”
I hauled myself around and into a sitting position against the side of the sleigh. The woman was opposite me and one to the right. Pushing the homburg out of my eyes I asked, “Are you originally from New England?”
“Yes. Well, that is, Papa and Mama moved up to Vermont when I was eight.” She smiled. “Are you?”
“No. I’m from the Mi’est,” I said. “I went to Nor’estern.”
This wasn’t definitive parody being largely due to my jaw’s being so stiff I couldn’t manipulate it well enough to talk any better than that; but I stood a hundred per cent behind the way it came out.
“Have you lived in New England all your life since then?” I pursued.
“All my life except for three years when I was abroad.”
“Oh, you were a broad at one time. How long ago were you a broad?”
“In my twenties.”
“That’s the best time to be a broad,” I said. “What’s it like, being a broad?”
“Oh, wonderful.”
“I imagine it must be.”
I gave this up, being engaged in another foot joust with the former tax assessor who had hijacked a hot jug from his neighbor. We were rewarded with a warm trickle on our trousers cuffs, having kicked the stopper loose. I reorganized my limbs on the floor again. As I did so, I heard someone up front ask Hal Mansfield, “You’re sure they’re on their way? This is Grackle Hill Road,” and Hal Mansfield answer, “Positive. I talked to Ned McBain on the phone just now before we left.”
That rang a bell somewhat louder than those tinkling on old Dobbin’s harness. Rigid as a figure on a catafalque and steadily more garnished with ice, I lay in a fixed stare, contemplating the brass tacks in Cassiopeia’s Chair. A young woman next to Mrs. Kipling, imagining herself to be guessing my thoughts, glanced up at the sky and said softly: “Isn’t it majestic? Think of it—in just the Milky Way alone, all those billions and trillions of stars.”
“I don’t have my glasses with me,” I said.
“Each one a world. And all billions and trillions of light years away. All swinging through inconceivable reaches of space.”
“It’s all right if you like that sort of thing,” I said.
“Doesn’t it fill you with reverence?”
“No. It just makes me sick to my stomach.”
“Then what have we been put here for?”
“To freeze.”
“You think everything is futile?”
“Yes.”
“Then why not commit suicide?”
“That’s futile too.”
My jaw having worked itself loose a little in this colloquy, I turned to see what other groups in the party I could throw cold water on; but almost all the rest were clustered now at the front, watching the road ahead for the other sleigh. I turned to Mrs. Kipling.
“Have you ever been to We’inster A’ey?”
“No,” she said, giving me an icy stare; and heaving herself to her feet, picked her way to the front.
A cry went up. “Here they come!”
Bells on bobtail rang as we sailed to the summit of Grackle Hill and slid to a stop. A second horse snorted and stamped nearby, and the merrymakers boiled down off the sleighs and mingled on the road, shouting and laughing and thumping one another on the back. Those in our sleigh stumbled out past and over me, till only the former tax assessor and I were left; then he climbed down. “Coming out for a stretch?” he said. I murmured something negative. I had caught the name McBain again.
When our sleigh was empty, I raised myself cautiously on one knee and peered over the side. They jigged and chatted in the snow. Everyone had that tearstained and kind of fiendish look that people have in extreme cold. Which of them were Terry’s cousins? Suddenly my eye caught a glimpse of a face above a woolen scarf, which made me duck down out of sight again. A moment later, I heard a voice that went with it.
“—Mother always walked into the house backwards in winter, because she claimed that kept her glasses from steaming up? Never did though.”
I lay in a paralytic trance, hearing the bright cries shuttled in the air around me, like swirling flakes of sound. We were there five minutes, ten, maybe more. I didn’t concern myself with time. Because now I began to feel an ominous comfort, and I thought of that slow-creeping, delicious warmth with which doomed travelers are said to lie down in the Alpine snow. Remotely, I heard something about going to Shively’s for hot
chocolate. Then figures came pouring back into the sleigh, tumbling over me and taking their places again. Then we were off, again in a tinkle of harness bells. We took another hill, and I kept my eyes on the stars, for it was toward these that we seemed to be mounting.
“Excelsior!” the former tax assessor said. “Why couldn’t somebody think of putting excelsior in this damned thing? Pad the floor as well as warm it up.”
I turned and gave him a dull look, fancying that my neck squeaked as I did so, like his speedometer. I knew what the “Excelsior” meant. I felt a pleasant sleepiness, now. Things receded; all words fused in a general babel, and had that remote and elfin sound of voices that trickle through to you on the telephone from another connection. Indifferently, I remarked the fluency with which two women gossips clacked their tongues; because at this point I felt that my own would retain any position into which it was bent, like lead. I put it out weakly to wet my upper lip; it slid across it, there having occurred under my nose a marked thickening of the filigree that goes with death by freezing. I laughed softly at a rotting star. Already I could feel my spirit, like gas let out of an uncorked bottle, drifting toward the blue pavilions of eternity. I turned my head toward the open tail of the sleigh. A moon was rising, like a bad orange.
Shively’s was a large ice-cream place on the Post Road. I heard them piling off the sleigh, and, still more dimly, off the other one, and into the store.
I thought, after a moment, I mustn’t lie here. I must get up and take a bus home. Maybe I could even find a cab. But I remembered—I had no money. I laughed helplessly as my hands fumbled at a pocket, then crept to a standstill, like some numb arachnids.
Two figures hove into view at the tailgate. “There he is. What’s the matter?”
“I have no money.”
“We can let you have money. You can’t stay here—you’ll freeze to death.”
I smiled. It took quite a while, being like something making its way through silly putty. Yet I had at the same time, as they helped me over the tail of the sleigh, the most extraordinary sense of lightness, like a window mannequin any one of whose limbs could be disjointed and laid aside. They helped me across the sidewalk and through Shively’s door.
The Tunnel of Love Page 18
