I hoped to disabuse him, gently, of this confidence (though I could not say even then he had not hit the mark). But, strange to tell, a soft light fell instead upon my darkened heart – from, as it were, an opened door.
I returned to my room, now blazing with a cheerful fire, and called for my supper. There was no fuss about country manners and common dining here, and Mr Barnaby Rusk duly arrived bearing a plate of cold beef and cheese, slowly and with great deliberation, as if to assure me that his whole being had been bent upon the task. By this time I was as hungry as a shepherd, and ate with an appetite sharpened for more than the food that lay before me. I had never known such delightful hunger as I knew then, upon my second night in America. And I supposed that I had Syme to thank for that at least, as I called for a dose of rum in my tea.
This I set beside my bed when it arrived at last. Tenderly disrobing, I laid my blue coat across my knees, and combed the lustre back into the fine wool – catching the dirty snow and the ash and even the smoke in the fine teeth of the brush. Then I hung it upon a hook. A similar application succeeded less well with my yellow trousers, whose legs suffered greatly in the planet’s drenched decay; but there was nothing to be done, so I draped them across the back of the chair. Slowly the room took on a familiar appearance, and pieces of myself occupied this or that corner. I shook out my hair and put the tortoiseshell clasp on the table, where it gleamed a little when the fire-light caught it. I confess there is great comfort in the embrace of a night-gown; and I was sore in need of comfort, as I looked out of the cold window, over the dirty, snowy, moonlit street.
Perhaps I was only homesick, a green foreigner, confused by fatigue and strangeness – and indeed, I appeared to myself as a thoroughfare, windy with unfamiliar longings. (I find it hard to write the idea I now have in my mind; but I will try.) Perhaps if you understand my homesickness, you may hear part of the call Professor Sam Syme made to me on that first enormous night when each piece of the traveller’s soul wishes to be touched by some native comfort, and shifts and changes, reaches and shrinks back, for consolation. The image of Syme, the picture of Syme bent over the ruin of his grand experiment, declaring that “The one fact – indisputably true of every child – at its birth – is this: that all the world is wrong – and I have come for myself – to see what is right …’ moved me, as I lay in a foreign bed, to the notion that I had come and FOUND SOMETHING. Tom was right. Misguided or not, Syme was a man to whom the questions of life were questions, which a man desires even when they have no answers, as he desires land, bread, and love. So I turned at last to the tea at my bedside, sipped and lay down, shifting the warming pan from my feet. And I slept with great hopes of the morrow, and the weeks to come; if I was disappointed, it was not a simple disappointment.
To the Reverend William Jenkyns:
Pactaw, Febr. 1826
My dear Father,
I thought perhaps it might please you to know that our little company has received a significant addition in the past fortnight. A German gentleman, a certain Dr Müller, and once a protégé of the great Werner himself, has arrived to look into the question of Syme’s theories, and adapt them it may be to the service and renown of his own country. In truth, he is a curious specimen, long in the neck, and much given I believe to ruffling his feathers; a great dandy, forever preening himself, and admiring his image whenever we pass a window or a glass. But rather in a nervous hopeful manner, than as a confident fellow giving himself airs. The Germans are an odd lot, I declare; one never knows when their humors begin and their philosophies end. But he seems a sharp creature, if a little silent now – a real Werther-faced gentleman, somewhat lovesick looking, as if he left behind a decidedly tender Lottie.
I suppose the only fly in the ointment – or midge perhaps – if at all, is, to be brief, thus: I cannot help feeling somewhat left in the cold when they babble their geologic hocus-pocus and I lag a dozen paces behind. And a time may come – and the better we get along, the sooner that will be – when he has no use for me, and it is such gentlemen as this Dr Müller who keep his company. (Though, as for that, I cannot imagine Müller himself would hold Syme’s attention long, vain and silly bird that he is; only such as he, you understand me.) Nevertheless, I write in excellent spirits, and on the cusp, I trust, of great things, though you doubt, Father, though you doubt, as is your way, I believe.
Your faithful son,
Tom
EVERYTHING, I’M AFRAID, needs a reason to endure rather than the reverse – not a great reason, nor even a good one, but some touch of luck or logic, the most common being this: attachment, by hook or crook (or, in this case, book), to genius or fame or riches or God. These are the four great preservatives of memory. There is a fifth, a slighter fifth, a poor country cousin, or pinkie on the hand of memory, and that is love, which grasps little and releases lightly, but must be mentioned nevertheless. Tom’s letter got stuck in with God; but this is a later story. Sufficient for the day is the thought, subtly suggested by Tom to his reverend father, that the welcome even of strangers brings some confusion with it, some residue of reluctance – though nothing compared to the welcome of lovers, or husbands, as I discovered, shortly after touching down at Bergstrom Airport on a wide, hot night in Austin, Texas.
Where Miss Susie Pitt would greet me after an absence of almost nine months. She would wait, as I had requested, in the white Volvo stationwagon – which suggests to me always an echo of the soldier-poet’s wonderful line, there is some corner of a foreign parking lot that is forever Sweden – under the overpass, beside the carousel. Not at the gate; I never like to be greeted at the gate, for the simple reason that I am pink, and a little ugly, and quite shiny, and I sweat, four facts curiously smudged together like leftover cake by air travel. So as I stepped off the plane and into that rumbling corridor – the rite of passage of modern travel that bears us from jet to terminal, from the incredible to the institutional, to deaden the enormity of arrival – I knew no familiar eye would ‘clock’ me at the corded lines. Gathering my legs beneath me, I ducked into the first WC and stared at my face in the broad mirror: pink, as I had suspected; sweaty, as I had feared; wide and empty eyed with sleeplessness, as I knew; and yes, hesitant with homecoming, as I had guessed.
A handful across my blinking face of water, and then I pressed the skin beneath my eyes (which seemed to sag with the weight of seeing, an almost palpable burden), thumb and forefinger rubbing down either slope of my thick nose. (The thought occurred to me that we sleep to let our eyes be emptied of junked images, and flow free and spacious again; and that when we cannot sleep, they grow thick with clutter.)
‘There is always a push as well as a pull,’ Friedrich had written, and in this belief, at least, he was not mistaken. My wife and I had parted, on a bright blue day of Texas winter, on uncertain terms. How much I would give for certain terms, a precise knowledge of the rules of intimacy, and the concessions made to thee and me. But no, the terms change, are broken and appealed to in equal measure by differing parties, and require in any case constant renegotiation. ‘Why, having won thee, must I woo?’ Coventry Patmore enquired, and I echoed him, at a romantic meeting of our little Blue-stocking Society. (A choice, I am proud to say, that produced a flurry of curious requests: Coventry, they cried, who?) But I would ask rather why, having wooed thee, must I win – again and again, the same ground, only to lose it again.
This ground, in point of fact, is plain enough to the casual eye, and the battles pitched upon it, for an inch of land, now here, now there, may be listed, briefly. Viz: she believes she has sacrificed herself for my career, which I squander and refuse to ‘make good’; she does not wish to live in Texas. I argue that I have squandered nothing, that ‘good’ is not easily made, is rare, is precious and fragile, is too strange a thing to be fashioned by a career; that for my stubborn, dogged insistence on the obscure, the unfashionable, the unlikely, she loves me; that what is given freely – her years of teaching, our years of tight living �
� cannot be retracted sourly; that I conceded to her ambitions, first once, then twice, and though these blessed boys are the boon of my heart, they are the bane of my head and our purse and my untouchable faith that a great, and not simply a good, life lies at my feet if only I stumble upon it. Our feet. That regardless, the bones of her contention break upon one another, as tenure at Texas is an honourable end, offers a good life, according to her construction of the phrase; that we cannot live so wide and well in New York; that (and this I dare scarcely whisper, even to myself) she lacked such dreams as I nurse tenderly, she offered no scale of ambition to rival my own; that she has sacrificed nothing, but a stertorous bus-ride, along 86th Street and across the park, to her mother’s flat.
What truce could we reach, what pax sign? As Auden noted, to ask the hard question is simple. And then the Fulbright came, granting me the time and occasion to study the roots of Wegener’s revelation, and trace them to their tender tips; and then I set forth for England, towards the heavy catalogue, miraculously preserved, of Alfred’s childhood haunt, the library on Friedrichsgracht split open by Allied bombs and tipped into the canal; and thus I hoped to publish at last and pluck the flower of tenure from this nettle, academe, resolving, at least, the first point of our dispute: those squandered ambitions. But I did not guess then what I would stumble upon, when I kissed her farewell on a clear January day, and she wept so clear, and free for once of anything but love.
Solitude … unmakes us, and I had tinkered happily with the pieces, hoping to build myself from scratch, a task required, I believe, every several years, in order to keep the hands busy and the soul new. Until such time, of course, when the study of living architecture reveals to us our final shape, and we construct at last, tenderly and surely, the monument of our lives, trusting it will endure. Such time, I believed, had come for both of us at last. For Syme and me, that is.
I saw her through the shine of the broad windows, a patient figure in the driver’s seat, the long car humming around her in a row of humming cars. I knew her at once, but only by the dirt and white of the Volvo, for her face looked straight ahead at the car in front – a run-down Subaru, lifting and jolting as the engine revved. Nevertheless, I waited for my leather case to rumble through the rubber flaps before I went to her. We had lived an ocean apart for half a year, and could endure, quite easy, another half-hour, separated only by the sleepy guard checking the luggage tickets and the automatic doors. It occurred to me then – as I pressed towards the grinding track, empty still, carting only the stickers left over from former bags in tireless circles – that the blood of my father ran in me; my bald, fat father, always covered in dust and paint, who took a job in Mendocino when my mother grew sick, because he could not bear to dwell in unhappiness. I had always thought him the sweetest, most patient of men, almost insipid in his humility; but he left me to attend her dying. I had the stomach for grief, I knew, but could not endure the constant little lies occasioned by lovers’ wrangles; the air of inaccuracies, claims and counter-claims, the subtle misrepresentations, and insistence on subjective untruths. Well, some of these cloud even the house of the sick. More of my father’s blood, perhaps, ran in me than I guessed.
*
The first time I saw Miss Susie Wielengrad – no, not the first time I saw her – the first time my eye singled her out from the frazzled mass of bustling men and women (in varying degrees of middle age) who taught at the high school – we sat together at lunch upon a round table of blue plastic in the cafeteria. The great thing about working at a high school is that it makes one terribly youthful and full of hope; youthful and middle-aged at once, you understand. Children scream, gossip, laugh and make love about one, fill their minds with such a jumbled furniture of intellectual history, no cracked Victorian could hope to match or rather mismatch them for eccentricity. Ions and star chambers, Pips and ellipses crowd their thoughts, until the bell goes, when a wind sweeps through them, driving out the clutter, and friendships, fixed or broken or crushing, fill their heads – such friendships as the assembled grown-ups shepherding their charges from room to room know full well they can never hope to suffer again. The second great thing about teaching at a high school is … the free lunch.
On one side, a wall of windows looked down the wooded hill towards the broad green of Van Cortland Park. The empty green, except for occasional joggers, threading slowly across the expanse, and a few bums spreading out on sunny afternoons; and, of course, on Friday, the cricketers: West Indians in scattered whites standing in the thousand postures of idleness occasioned by the game, apart from the single figure running long-legged up to bowl. Upon the other side a wall of windows looked over the Lilliputians (as one old hand described them) engaged in countless ingenious varieties of consumption, which always managed to put more food upon the table at the end of meals than the beginning. (He called them Lilliputians despite the fact that several among them, lanky, ambling fellows, towered above us, their backpacks slung at the level of our eyes.) I moved to sit down – a textbook pressed awkwardly between my rib and elbow – and bent at the knees to lower an overflowing tray (of smoked turkey, and gravy, and mashed potato and coleslaw, and, in the little square dip in the plastic corner, key lime pie) on to the cluttered table. The textbook fell, of course, painfully upon my foot. And I had begun to sweat and grow pink and – as is my way, when the system overheats – quite loud with opinion and talk.
Six or seven of us sat chewing and chatting, knights all of the round blue plastic. There was a large one, a shy one, an odd one, a wise one, a loud one, a loose one, a sweet one. You may guess for yourselves the role I filled; and perhaps, even, the role of Miss Susie. The great appeal of teaching, I believe, is the antiquity of the job; we belonged, like prostitutes and lawyers and soldiers, to the traditional vocations, and there is some comfort in that, millennia of grievances to call upon. A certain honour attaches to age, regardless of its condition; perhaps even prostitutes flatter themselves of the pedigree of their profession. Well, we flattered ourselves, a little, justly, I believe, and engaged with great heat and passion in the talk of the hour: Macbeth, perhaps; or the peculiar difficulties of mathematical instruction vis-à-vis literary, linguistic, scientific and athletic instruction; the particular and rather inventive awfulness of one of our smaller boys, the new depths he had plumbed, new horrors revealed, the inexplicable fascination he held for several of the larger girls; young love, always a little young love; the latest, freshest, most appalling absurdities of the headmaster, an account that included rather lucid and tenderly detailed descriptions of the care home to which he would be best suited; and, as I believe was the case on the afternoon in question, the kind of table necessary for teaching.
I remember, to be honest, little of the discussion, instructive though it must have been. I remember, however, the sweet one, across the table: a slightly plump, very pretty young woman, glowing with natural health and good humour; eyes, surprisingly, blue, given the delicate Semitic fullness of her nose, the richness of her lips, and the light brown curls that hedged her rather perfect white whorled ears. ‘It absolutely matters‚’ she declared more than once, laughing at her own insistence, ‘size of table, colour, shape, room for legs, sturdiness when sat or stood upon. It matters absolutely.’ Something about the ‘lutely’ caught my ear, the New York thickness of it, the pure cool quality of the long vowel, suggesting nothing so much as a steady stream of cold water from a tap. ‘Absolutely.’ She could have said it all afternoon, as far as I was concerned; she very nearly did.
Upon the salad counter in the food court stood a tall wire fruit-basket, filled to the imaginary brim with impossibly large apples – green moon-like Grannies or Reds Delicious shaped like buxom hourglass figures drawn round; mottled pears, hard as wood-chips; and enormous oranges, sitting like winter suns among them. I had never seen anyone pick a single piece of fruit from the basket. I did not know, and frankly doubted, if they were real. Below them, under the sneeze-protective screen, tubs of col
eslaw, tuna salad, cherry tomatoes, cottage cheese, loose-leaf spinach, boiled potatoes (somewhat green), boiled eggs (somewhat green), olives, peppers, crumbled Gorgonzola, various dressings (glutinous blue cheese, shiny Italian, splatted Thousand Island, etc.) sat in melting ice. From these, liberal and inexact portions had clearly been scooped; the evidence lay all around me, in tainted spoons, impure dressings, wandering and promiscuous tomatoes, potatoes, olives, eggs. But every day the fruit shone, undiminished, unchanged, fresh as sunrise, impossibly perfect.
The pretty one had an orange. I remember particularly that she had an orange that day. And after completing a healthful and hefty plateful of cottage cheese, celery and bean salad, mopped up by a single heretical piece of garlic bread, she sat back in her chair and began to peel. Her hands, plump-knuckled, had a practised air. (The technique applied to peeling an orange has always seemed to me a great giveaway, a keyhole into childhood, in particular, the habits and humours of the orange-eater’s mother: in this case, confident, cheerful, a lady with a nice eye. How I suffer from her now.) The left hand clenched the fruit in its soft palm; the right one, harbouring a Swiss Army knife (a little one, for keys), winched around the turning globe, tearing a single, long, parti-coloured strip from top to bottom. This grew and snaked upon her plate, a pleasing contrast to the white remnants of the cottage cheese it lay among.
I could smell it almost at once, a sudden pungent sweetness on the air, that fizzed in the nose like champagne, and made me sneeze. She seemed to take visibly orange-scented breaths; and the rest of us around the table breathed an enriched, pulpier atmosphere. Her jaw worked squashily as she picked off quarters of the fruit and put them in the pocket of her cheek. She talked on, with a full mouth, in juicier, wetter language. ‘Anyone for a quarter?’ she said, holding a clump of the fruit up for inspection. ‘Quarter? Quarter?’ I didn’t dare to accept.
The Syme Papers Page 22
