The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  Day did not seem to find anything funny about it. He stared at her with a puzzled expression, and then hesitantly he asked, “You mean…you aren’t going to take me home?”

  “Oh sure,” she said. “I’ll take you home right now, if you want me to.” He did not say anything.

  “Well?” she said. “Shall we go?”

  “It’s up to you,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “No, it isn’t. Because, you see, since you’re concerned about legality and you’re a good Boy Scout and all that, you’re still a minor. I’m not. I don’t know what the laws are, but—”

  “We aren’t doing anything wrong,” he protested.

  “No,” she agreed, “we aren’t.”

  “Okay,” he said. “If you want to know the truth, I don’t really want to go home.”

  “Fine,” she said. “And if you want to know the truth, I don’t really believe in reincarnation, not for one minute, and I don’t believe in hypnosis either, and I certainly don’t believe you’re my grandfather, and I don’t believe his house was in that grove of mountain laurel up there. I don’t believe any of it. But—” she qualified what she was saying “—I would like to believe. I would like to find out. Wouldn’t that be marvelous, to be able to believe?”

  “I guess it would,” he said.

  “The trouble with me is,” she said, “I don’t believe in anything. I would like to find something to believe in.”

  “Me too,” he said. “I sort of feel like that, myself.”

  “Are you with me, then?”

  “I’m with you,” he said. “All the way.”

  Fourteen

  They Become Somewhat Better Acquainted with One Another

  Diana Stoving and Day Whittacker did not have sexual relations in their motel room that night. Undoubtedly the possibility must have crossed their minds, but they slept chastely in their separate beds. Diana, for her part, was certainly not unmindful of the fact that he was a male and she female and that they were spending the night together. All questions of incest aside, and rightly so, for the time being at least, Diana presumed that a clean-living Boy Scout who neither smoked nor drank and was, although not at all bad-looking, a somewhat timid and reserved young man, was in all likelihood a virgin, and thus, even if she had felt like it, which she did not, it might have created awkward moments for both of them if she had introduced a romantic note, or even a nonromantic sexual note, into their relationship at this point.

  They did, however, before putting out the lights and going to sleep, talk for well over an hour, getting acquainted. Here, more or less, is what they learned about one another:

  Diana Ruth Stoving was born twenty-one years ago in St. Vincent’s Hospital, Little Rock, to B.A. (Burton Arthur) Stoving and Annette M. Stoving. She was their only child. A Libra, she took a short-lived interest in astrology while in college after reading that Harper’s Bazaar’s horoscopist had correctly predicted that she as a Libra would have “unlimited quantities of money to spend as you please,” but after being told later in the same “Eye on the Sky” column that she should spend her money for “idealistic causes” she was unable to think of one, and unable to sustain her interest in astrology. Her other qualities, as a Libra, according to the horoscopes, were a “great imaginative capacity” and “an inclination to take the lead in any endeavor.”

  Her father had met her mother while on army maneuvers as a captain, in the Ozarks. Her mother had been a country girl; Diana’s father, after his discharge from the army following the war, had spent some time trying to find her again, and, succeeding, had eloped with her. She was twenty when he married her in a lavish church wedding in Little Rock, befitting the social background of the Stovings but scaring the wits out of a poor country girl of obscure origins. Anne Stoving apparently adjusted to her new life without difficulty, however; Diana did not learn that her mother had been a country girl until she, Diana, was almost ready to go away to college and her mother, after several drinks, confessed her rural origins. It helped Diana understand, for the first time, why her mother had been in the habit of using certain quaint words and expressions, but apart from that it meant little to her.

  The episode involving her grandfather was a vague memory; she had to reconstruct it with the aid of a newspaper clipping which she had discovered in (and stolen from) a shoebox in her mother’s closet. This was during a Christmas vacation when Diana was home from her final year in prep school. She had never been told that the man who abducted her was her grandfather. To her, at the age of three, he had been simply, as her mother put it, “that bad old man who came and got you but now he won’t bother you any more.” The newspaper clipping told her that the bad man had wounded three sheriff’s deputies and two state troopers; apparently the rifle wounds had been inflicted with uncanny accuracy meant to disable rather than to kill, but the lawmen had come to believe that the only way they could conquer the bad man was to kill rather than to disable.

  Diana could remember the sound of gunfire, and the sight of the bad man falling; it had disturbed her, because she had been thinking of him not as the bad man but as The Good Man.

  Although Diana’s earliest memory was of the week she had lived with him at his yellow house in the Ozark woods, at the age of three, she did not recall much of her childhood before the age of eight, when she was transferred from Forest Park Elementary School (public) to St. Andrew’s Day School (private, parochial, Episcopal). She remembered this transfer because she had had to give up several friends who were classmates at the public school. The remainder of her schooling was in private schools. For the ninth through twelfth grades, she was sent away to Margaret Hall, an exclusive Episcopal girls’ school in Versailles, Kentucky. She graduated third in a class of forty-two, and was accepted at Sarah Lawrence not so much on the basis of her grades and college boards as on the recommendations of her teachers, all of whom agreed that Diana was “highly original and creative, and lends contrast and color to any group.”

  During the years of her preparatory schooling, her father, B.A. Stoving, advanced rapidly to his present position, chairman of the board and president of National Community Life Insurance Company, headquartered in Little Rock, with branches throughout the south and mid-west. He also serves on the boards of two banks, six industries, three colleges and an airline. Diana’s mother is active in social, cultural and charitable work.

  Mr. and Mrs. Stoving were spending the current summer in Europe; their flight for Paris had departed the day after they attended Diana’s graduation from Sarah Lawrence. It was to be both a grand tour and a second honeymoon for the Stovings; consequently they had not wanted to invite Diana to accompany them. As a substitute or consolation, Mr. Stoving had offered to send her on her choice of several other tours of Europe, and, when she rejected this offer, even to send her on an unguided tour alone or in the company of whichever friends she might like to invite along. When she rejected this too, he gave her as a graduation present the automobile of her choice and an exorbitantly large sum of money in traveler’s checks. She chose the Porsche on the recommendation of some of her college friends. “Keep in touch,” her father had said in parting, and had provided her with their itinerary, a list of famous hotels in all the major European cities.

  When Diana had entered Sarah Lawrence, she had entertained a general notion of becoming some sort of writer. During her sophomore and early junior years she had studied under Kynan Harris, that imp of black humor, who was also her don (advisor) and also, very briefly, her lover (she did not tell Day this; “We were close” is the way she put it), who, however, gave her his frank opinion of her writing, which was that it was much too conventional. “Pedestrian” was his word, and the word stuck in her mind; a pedestrian literally is one going on foot, and she decided that since she was going on foot she would not walk but dance, and spent the rest of her junior year and all of her senior year studying with Bessie Schönberg, the dancer. An unusually large number of Sarah Lawrence students seemed t
o be taking dance during her senior year, and the competition was severe. While she was assured, by Miss Schönberg, as well as by Mr. Redlich and Mrs. Finch, the other dance teachers, that she could dance professionally after graduation (they encouraged her to try out with Merce Cunningham), she was not confident that she was all that good.

  These are Diana’s interests:

  Martha Graham, of course, particularly her Appalachian Spring. She danced the principal role in the Sarah Lawrence production of this work.

  José Limon, Betty Jones, Doris Humphrey, and Ruth Currier, particularly the latter’s Search for an Answer, which she also danced, to acclaim, at Sarah Lawrence.

  She does not like classical ballet very much, although the movie of the Fonteyn-Nureyev Romeo and Juliet made her cry.

  In music: among the moderns, nobody later than Tschaikovsky except possibly Aaron Copland and Charles Ives. Among the ancients, Telemann and the anonymous composers of English Country and Morris Dancing as recorded by John Playford during 1651–1728. As her senior project, she choreographed a modern adaptation of eight Playford dances.

  In art: the early Venetian school and Giorgione, particularly his “Tempest.” Among the moderns, only Kokoschka.

  In literature: she enjoyed reading the Greek tragedies as a requirement, but would not have read them on her own. Among the moderns, she has read most of the novels of what she calls her “five Johns”: Updike, Barth, Cheever, Fowles and Hawkes; as well as Kynan Harris, Donald Harington and her special favorite, Nabokov.

  Other miscellaneous interests: the films of Stanley Donan. Although she does not particularly care for rock music, being over-exposed to it by her roommates’ phonographs, she does not object to it. In sports, she has played some tennis, which she likes, and some lacrosse, which she doesn’t. She has watched a few football games on television. Politics holds no interest for her at all. Nor does religion; although raised an Episcopalian, she has attended church only a few times since leaving prep school.

  If she were forced to choose a career, she would probably—but she would never be forced to choose a career.

  Charles Day Whittacker was born nearly ninteen years ago in San Diego, California, where his father, Charles J. “Chuck” Whittacker, was stationed before being sent to Korea. After the Korean War, Chuck Whittacker returned with his wife, Jane Billings Whittacker, and their infant son, to his home town, Rutherford, New Jersey, where he found employment as a salesman for Lang Manufacturing Company, makers of asphalt roofing and siding. Young Day, who from birth was called by his middle name to distinguish him from his father, attended Antonio F. Calicchio Elementary School until the third grade, when his parents moved to Wood Ridge, New Jersey, after Chuck Whittacker took a position as salesman for Hendrie Products, distributors of sulfur and mineral pitch. Day finished elementary school in Wood Ridge and attended Hackensack Avenue Junior High School for two years until his father moved to East Passaic after becoming a sales engineer for Rohn Refining Corporation, makers of a diversified line of solvents. Day finished junior high school there, and attended East Passaic High School, graduating twenty-sixth in a class of 456.

  One of the very few things Day Whittacker had in common with Diana Stoving was that he was an only child. His mother had had ovarian cysts requiring surgical removal.

  While attending elementary school in Wood Ridge, Day joined Cub Scout Pack 16. He became a Tenderfoot Scout in Beaver Troop 22, advancing rapidly to Second Class, then First Class Scout, then Heart, then Life, and finally Eagle during his sophomore year in high school. In the process, he earned merit badges in archery, astronomy, beekeeping, bird study, bookbinding, botany, camping, canoeing, citizenship, cooking, first aid, fishing, forestry, gardening, geology, hiking, Indian lore, insect life, lifesaving, nature, personal fitness, pioneering, radio, reptile study, safety, scholarship, signaling, swimming, weather, woodwork and zoology. One of the very few merit badges he failed to earn, after two trials, was that for public speaking.

  For three summers past, he served as a cabin counselor at Camp Whanpoo-tahk-kee near Lake Hopatacong in northwestern New Jersey. He also attended the Valley Forge Camporee and the International Scout Camporee in Nova Scotia.

  After lengthy consultation with his vocational counselor in high school, Day decided that he wanted to become, first choice, a forester, and, second choice, a national park ranger. Neither of these choices, however, matched the aspirations Mr. and Mrs. Whittacker had for him. Mr. Whittacker hoped the boy would enter a premed or predental course in college, while Mrs. Whittacker clung to a long-cherished wish that he prepare for the ministry, even after she learned of his second failure to pass the public-speaking merit badge examination. Dutifully, Day applied for admission to Rutgers, Monmouth, Newark State and nearby Farleigh Dickinson; the last three all accepted him but he had taken no further steps to enroll. None of the three offered programs in forestry.

  Apart from disputes over the matter of college attendance, Day’s relations with his parents were, if not ideal, harmonious and unstormy. He strove to be a good son. Perhaps because he was an only son, their yardstick for his measurement was a bit warped. Mr. Whittacker, particularly, exhibited great disappointment at anything less than excellence, and his strict discipline had caused Day, at the age of only five, to run away from home (the police found him within eight hours). Curiously, at the same time that Mr. Whittacker demanded excellence, he was resentful of Day’s intelligence. Mr. Whittacker himself was not terribly bright, but he prided himself in having “horse sense,” which, he often reminded Day, his son did not have. In other ways, too, there was little resemblance between father and son. Day was taller than his father but nowhere near as muscular. His father liked to “go out with the boys”; Day did not, except for Scouting activities. His father had a mechanical bent and could repair anything from a washing machine to an automobile; Day had little mechanical aptitude.

  Other than his Scouting accomplishments, Day had not produced a strong extracurricular record. In his sophomore year, at his father’s urging, he had tried out with the track team and was very good in the short dashes and hurdles, but what the coach needed was a distance man.

  P.D. Sedgely was Day’s English teacher in both the eleventh and the twelfth grades, and Day attended several discussion meetings of the Psychic Research Club, as Sedgely’s small group of after-hours students called themselves. He himself did not volunteer to become a subject until the spring of his senior year. He had been thoroughly suspicious of the proceedings, but the first time he listened to a playback of his voice under hypnosis and age regression, he knew that he had identified the source of the voice that had been “bothering” him for years.

  His parents were not unaware of his relations with Sedgely and the Psychic Research Club. He never kept anything from his parents. His mother arranged for him to have a chat about it with their minister. He did. It turned out to be not so much a chat as a sermon. The minister, Rev. Eugene B. Dobler of the East Passaic Church, talked to him about Christ’s promise of a second coming and a last judgement, but pointed out that there is nothing anywhere in the Bible about reincarnation.

  But Day read all he could find on the subject. Still, he was never ready to dismiss the possibility that Daniel Lyam Montross was only the invention of his own imagination, or the imagination of his subconscious.

  Then he met Diana, who said she was the granddaughter of Daniel Lyam Montross. He believed her, and knew then that such a man had actually existed.

  These are Day’s interests:

  Scouting and camping, of course, but he likes back-packing on long hikes more than fixed camping.

  Wood. He likes everything about wood and its uses. He knows the scientific names as well as the familiar names of every American tree; he knows their ecology, habits, growth rate, life span, and economic value. He knows how well or how poorly each wood burns, when green as well as when seasoned. Although he has no great civic pride in New Jersey, he is proud that Joyce Kilmer was
a New Jerseyan.

  He does not think that “Trees” is a great poem, but he likes it. Actually, his taste in poetry runs to W.H. Auden and e.e. cummings. He can quote three or four of the latter’s poems from memory.

  He has not read much fiction. An aunt gave him a complete set of Jack London for his sixteenth birthday, but he read only part of one volume and did not like it. In high school, he was required to read Lord of the Flies and The Catcher in the Rye; the boys in the former were too young for him to identify with, while the boy in the latter was too smart-ass (he did not say this to Diana; “too Huck-Finnish” is the way he put it, although he had never read Huck Finn). His candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature is Walt Kelly; he has read all the Pogo books, and reread them several times.

  He had a course in art appreciation in high school, but very little of it remains with him. He remembers liking Hobbema’s “The Avenue of the Middelharnis” and Rembrandt’s etching “The Three Trees.” In modern art, he likes Van Gogh’s cypresses and Rousseau’s jungles, but thinks Picasso is a joke.

  Despite the closeness of his region of New Jersey to Manhattan, he has never seen a stage play, much less a dance performance. He has visited Manhattan only a few times, once for an extended tour of the Museum of Natural History, once to attend a Scout Council meeting, and once to see a movie on West Forty-second Street. The movie was a “skin flick,” which he found both stimulating and tasteless.

  He has had few dates, of a formal nature, with girls. He took his minister’s daughter, Lila, to a high school football game. He escorted another girl from the church to a hayride sponsored by the Methodist Youth Organization, but after the haywagon (actually just a flatbed truck) was already out in the moonlight he discovered that she was several years older than he. He took a fellow member of Sedgely’s Psychic Research Club, who had been an Eygptian slave girl in a previous life, to the junior picnic. For the senior picnic he chose a girl who lived on his own block, and who was a Girl Scout, but he learned that most of her merit badges, as well as her interests, were not in the outdoors but in homemaking, nursing and child care.