I was in Mama’s chair (its new upholstering material, to cover the places Colum’s dog had chewed, flung across it and shoved down in the corners), reading the sonnets Dante Gabriel Rossetti had on first thought buried in his wife’s coffin, and on second, dug up and published. Nobody said much to me about J.D.’s wedding, but I’d found out from a look at the invitations that it was going to be on August 2nd in Charleston, Jardin’s hometown. J. Dexter was there now, taking snapshots of the silverware. So I didn’t mention it either, except to Colum, who offered to have a girlfriend of his get James summonsed on a paternity charge August 1st. Colum always took a legal approach to life.
“Well,” he mumbled at me from the couch, where he was scratching his toes with a long plastic stick, “maybe he’ll send us all mink coats to wear. Mink hats too.”
“What was that, Colum?” Mama asked.
“Nothing,” Maeve turned to me, “Would you like some cantaloupe, Devin? Shut the door, Fitzgerald, you’re letting out the air conditioning!”
As he went by, Fitzgerald announced quickly, “Mama, I’m going over to Jackson Frederick’s. I’ll be back in a little while, okay?”
“Fitzgerald!” Maeve yelled after him, “Will you please shut the front door?” She was afraid Harnley III was going to get a heat rash under his bandages.
“Where did he say he was going? It’s after eleven,” Mama asked us.
Mama couldn’t hear. Sometimes we took advantage of this handicap by insisting we had told her where we were going. The telephone in particular put her in a very vulnerable position since she couldn’t read our lips on it and would usually say, “Yes, yes, all right,” just so she could hang up. That’s how we got our television set; Colum had told the appliance store manager that Mama was definitely interested in buying a set on time if they went on sale, and the guy called her up about it. She had just bought a secondhand piano, and as we hovered in front of The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid, her dreams of a Rubenstein gathered dust on the other side of the room. She hated the telephone. Still, her deafness was the footstool to the throne of her serenity. Simply turning off her hearing aid had enabled her, as we bragged, to read the works of practically everybody while raising five children. (It was our great disappointment that we couldn’t persuade her to go on a quiz show and win us a real house, for she even knew all the major league batting averages.) She wore her hearing aid clipped to her bathrobe pocket.
I gave up on Rossetti’s sonnets; given the opportunity to bury some of my poems in Jardin’s casket, I was sure I’d leave them there. “Listen, I think I’ll go up to South Campus.” We lived only a few blocks from Earlsford University, where, at fifteen, I had strolled about pretending to be an undergraduate.
No one said anything. Weren’t they afraid I’d jump in front of a truck?
Stepping out into the thick, still air, I walked to the stone wall that protected Earlsford University from the tobacco town that had built it, and sat there for a while remembering easier summer nights. Colum and I used to hide behind that wall to throw dirt clods at passing vehicles. One day three college guys jumped out of their car right in the middle of the street and charged after us. I got away by climbing up the fire escape to the roof of the language building. But Colum crouched down inside an empty garbage can in the alley below me, and his dog, Perry Mason, stood right outside the can barking until the college guys got there and shook Colum out. How big and terrifying they had seemed to us. Now I was all the way through college; now I was older than they were. And people were still big and terrifying.
Walking back, I hadn’t even noticed the beat-up yellow Triumph outside the house, that’s how bad off I was, so I didn’t know Verl was inside until I saw everyone grinning, exhilarated with surprise, and him standing there, tall and much too thin, smiling at me.
“Why don’t you ever answer my letters, you lazy bastard?” he greeted me.
We had been friends since the second day of the tenth grade, when he came to Earlsford High from Shreveport and got put right away on the basketball team. He played the trumpet too, and became head of the National Forensic League. I admired first his height, then his brains, and finally, I guess, decided that the main thing about him was that you sensed he had the key to something, a way of being that you wouldn’t mind having too, if you could figure it out. A sort of inside order he felt sure of, that let him know what the meanings were. At various times we planned various futures. We wrote an opera together about the assassination of President Kennedy that wasn’t accepted for the senior play. When I went to Harvard, he went to Columbia; he planned to go on to divinity school not to preach, he said, but to teach. He was a Quaker. We’d meet in New York City, where we’d ride back and forth on the ferry and debate the world. Then Verl became a conscientious objector, took a bus to Wyoming, and went to work in a national park. He would startle you that way every now and then. Like when he socked me for eating in a restaurant when there was a sit-down strike there. He’d always loved American folk songs, and at first I figured the western lyrics had gotten to him; I predicted he’d be back before long. But he said he liked being around mountains, and he took a job with a paper in Boulder, Colorado.
Now he said he had a plan, but that he’d save it until morning. Was it about me and my situation (James and Jardin)? I had the feeling everyone had been telling him about it while I was gone, but when we finally went to bed, no one had mentioned a thing.
Off and on until morning, I heard Colum’s crutches clomping to the bathroom. Mama always told him not to drink so much Pepsi because they used it to clean johns in the navy and it was going to corrode his stomach, but he said it was never in there long enough to do much damage. I was pleased to discover I had insomnia, for I knew from literary experience that blighted suitors lost their appetites along with their beloveds, and so I’d been a little disturbed by the amount of food I had been able to absent-mindedly consume subsequent to my third full meal, when (according to Mama) I had ingested a leftover pork chop, a banana split, half a cantaloupe, a bowl of popcorn, a bowl of chicken noodle soup, and two cold slices of pizza. But I could only assume that anguish leads to excess as well as to deprivation.
Chapter 2
The Emigrants
The next morning, after what Mama called “eating off our laps” but Maeve said was a “breakfast buffet,” Verl and I walked up to look around Earlsford High, last site, as he quipped, of our sense of unlimited importance to the world.
Then he told me his plan. “I didn’t want to bring this up in front of your mama in case you felt with her being sick you shouldn’t leave. But I’ve got to start back to Colorado tomorrow, and I figured maybe you’d like to come along. It looks like you don’t have much planned here.”
“I never do,” I agreed.
Verl stopped at the old water cooler. “The thing is, on my way back east, I stopped off in Floren Park a couple of weeks ago and saw Leila.”
“Leila! Does she still have that theater out there?”
“Yep, and she asked me if I’d let you know she’d like you to come on out there and design sets for her and Mittie. She wanted to know if I could bring you out. Sounded like she’s been sort of worried about you, you losing touch and all.”
“What’s she worried about?”
“I don’t know. Maybe somebody wrote her you were kind of down.”
“Well, how do you expect me to act?” I was alarmed by Verl’s insensitivity. He still hadn’t asked me about the Jardin situation.
“Listen, Devin, if you don’t mind my saying so, I think you’re letting things get bent all out of shape. You know how you do. But, come on, I was there. Sure. You really liked Jardin. But, frankly, I don’t remember any talk about how madly in love you were until after she started going out with James Dexter. Good Lord, man, you were dating other people.”
I walked off.
“And this whole thing,” h
e threw out, “has got more to do with your big brother, and your big brother’s got more to do with your damn father, than it does with Jardin, anyhow, and you know that’s true.”
“Stop analyzing me.”
“Okay, okay,” he caught up with me and put his hand on my shoulder. “But what good does it do sitting around here like a lost soul, giving your mother something else to worry about. Why don’t you let me take you on out there? You’ve never been west, really. Look, you’ll be doing yourself a favor and helping Leila out at the same time. You’ll get room and board. Most of all, you’ll be doing something productive.”
“Look here, Verl. I’m no James Dexter. And I’m not Fitzgerald. I don’t especially want to be productive.” He gave me one of his looks.
But I thought it over as we walked on through the old halls. I had to do something. I knew Mama was worried about what she was going to do with me, especially when everybody went down to Charleston for the wedding. Taking off westward with Verl would show them all I was okay and, at the same time, suggest to Jardin that I was indifferent to her betrayal—or that I found being in the same half of the country with her too painful to be borne. Both ways, it had an appeal. And I ought to be able to do the work too; after all, I’d won a state prize for my South Pacific set in the drama club competition. Besides which, going out to Colorado might actually be—I wasn’t prepared to say “fun”—but at least a distraction from misery.
And seeing Leila. That sounded good. Leila. Leila, née Beaumont, stepfathered Thurston, married Stark. “My old flame.”
For that is who she was. Leila, my first flame, my original carnal knowledge, my first eternal love. Warmth flushed through me as I floated backward into the past. Oh, I had been happy then. Leila and I moonfully in love. Until her mother, Mrs. Thurston, had clamped Leila away in a Catholic girls’ school (St. Lucy of the Pines, hundreds of miles away in Asheville’s mountains) midway through the twelfth grade; this cloistering occurring immediately after her mother accidentally came upon and unforgivably read a sonnet sequence I had written in which her daughter was rather extensively described.
Locked away in a hilly convent where medieval nuns read her mail and kept the door keys to the dormitory rooms, Leila became to me even more erotic than she had been up in the lighting booth of the high school auditorium during study periods. Barriers to love are bonfires. Love became a mystic exercise. My passion in my pen flamed across the state to her secret downtown post office box, and I hoarded my allowance for Trailways tickets. For four months we gloried in our hardship. Then one night my vigil was broken in the back seat of Judy Field’s father’s Lincoln, and Leila subsided from the present of my mind. Yet, over the following years, she had settled down somewhere close to the center of memories. Looking back now, I thought, those had been good days. Leila my girl, Verl my friend. And they had liked each other. Still did.
Leila. I would go and see her. She had probably never gotten over me. Her mother and I hated each other, but her mother wouldn’t be there.
Even before I had a chance to talk to Mama, she suggested that maybe I could ride out to Colorado with Verl. Familial clairvoyance was an unnerving habit of hers. As I was sliding my fingers into that power mower, she had dropped a six no-trump hand and rushed home from her bridge club to find me howling in Lampie’s front yard. But on this occasion she admitted she’d just had a letter from Leila.
She also suggested that we take Fitzgerald with us because he’d been wheedling her for the money to go to the Young Democrats Conference in Salt Lake City, and she had decided that if we could get him as far as Denver, then she could manage bus fare the rest of the way. That afternoon, Fitzgerald had returned home from his last day at school, his hair tousled in tribute to Bobby Kennedy, and announced that he had carried 63 percent of the vote for next year’s presidency; he had predicted only 61 percent. Verl said sure, he could come along.
And so that night we packed; I stuck my framed picture of Jardin in between my socks and pajamas. The next morning was May 1st. After the bags of new clothes Mama had charged, and the boxes of cold food Mama had cooked were loaded into the Triumph, and after Fitzgerald had made about thirty phone calls delegating interim political authority, he, Verl, and I squeezed into the car, and Mama and Maeve went around it to hug us good-bye. From inside the living room window, Colum waved a crutch at me. Mama gave us a list of written instructions and a lot more verbal ones about happiness, hygiene, and courtesy. And three twenty-dollar bills, which Fitzgerald examined all the way to Greensboro. Then she and Maeve stood in the maple-arched summer street and waved until we were around the corner. Maeve held Harnley III up for us to see. He could already bend his legs a little better, and the bandages would be coming off soon.
So out on the highway set forth we three, following the trail of McDonald’s westward to Leila and my destiny. Verl and Fitzgerald in front, and me in the luggage hole, brooding on my despair and hanging my legs over the back to catch a tan.
In Nashville, the left front tire blew. Fitzgerald took a picture of it. We forgot to put the canvas car top back in the trunk with the jack. So all the way across Kansas we were rained on, despite Fitzgerald’s Theory on the Relation of Motion and Gravity, which argued that if we went fast enough, the rain would go sideways around the car and miss us. We still used the windshield wipers, but a spring was broken somewhere, so whoever in the front seat wasn’t driving had to keep pulling the wipers back and forth with one of Verl’s old ties. He no longer wore ties for he considered them symbols of former false and constrictive values.
Fitzgerald clearly thought of the trip as an Experience to be Related in the Future and, for that reason, was seriously engaged not only in taking photographs of road signs, but in garnering proofs of visitation like some suspicious Cortez. Our Triumph was gradually filling with local newspapers, rocks, tourist information leaflets, and regional soil samples collected in empty cigarette packs. He would fill up one large green plastic garbage bag with booty, and then start on another. When the rains came, he transferred all of these to the space left in the trunk by the car top, which we had forgotten in Nashville.
But Fitzgerald’s preliminary passion was to transverse as many states and as many miles as quickly as possible. As we went, he traced our route on a fold-out map in red magic marker. Once a state was touched by our front wheels, he colored it in yellow. Humoring his enthusiasm for acquisition, we drove quickly in and out of Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois, then across Missouri and into the Kansas rain.
THE LONG WAY UP THE MOUNTAIN
Cursing the canvas car top sitting dry somewhere in Nashville and spitting out the water that sprayed into our mouths, we drove through the squalls, and out of the plains, and climbed toward Denver, where Fitzgerald sent his first bulky installment of memorabilia back home C.O.D. By the time he finally got on the bus for Salt Lake City, where he was going to meet with other future leaders of a Democratic Society, his clothes were almost dried out and only slightly mildewed. While Verl and I mugged peace signs at him through the window, Fitzgerald got interested in unscrewing the notice about seat positions off the back of the seat in front of him. He was slipping it into his plastic bag when the bus pulled out.
Meanwhile, someone had lifted both hubcaps from the curbside of the Triumph and, presumably as a caprice, the top half of the antenna.
“The less you want, the less they can hurt you with,” Verl intoned. “You have to will for yourself what the gods will.”
“Verl,” I told him, “you’d sit down next to Epictetus and let them saw your leg in half too, just to show them your integrity would be intact. Maybe it would, but you’d be walking lopsided. The less they can hurt you with, the less you got.”
“Awh shit, all that means is an itch for things.” Verl was scared of possessions the way a mountain climber would be leery of a dead body hanging at the end of his rope.
We argued values just l
ike in the old days—push-ups for the brain—then we tired out and started singing all the songs we could think of with a girl’s name in the title. Then we did cities. Then states, like, “Carolina in the Morning,” “Moonlight in Vermont.” I was trying an Al Jolson finish on “Carry Me Back to Ol’ Virginny,” when we saw the sign.
WELCOME TO FLOREN PARK. HAVEN OF HAPPINESS.
COME AS A STRANGER. LEAVE AS A FRIEND.
UNKNOWN
POPULATION: XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
UNKNOWN
ALTITUDE: XXXXXXXXXXXXX
The Elks Club had noted that they had donated the sign, but apparently somebody else had scratched out all the particulars.
It was nearly sunset when we circled the mountains and sloped down into the valley. And then, there it was: pines and forests of aspens, squares of meadows yellow with dandelions, blue with periwinkle, purplish weed like heather; the town and fields all walled in like a medieval fortress by the ring of green mountains.
In a field across the highway galloped toward us a young girl on a roan horse. Her hair swirled copper in the sunset. As she sped closer we saw that she held a big black transistor radio pressed against her ear.
“Et ego in Arcadia,” I laughed. “The voice of the turtle is heard in the land.”
We stopped the car and walked down past the shoulder into the meadow and squatted down and picked at some tufts of grass. Verl brought out some apples and a sack of ham biscuits. We ate them while we watched the sun going slowly down behind the mountain ring, big and close and familiar as the moon in North Carolina. Verl stretched out, but I was feeling all of a sudden too exuberant for serenity, so I did some knee bends and jogged and talked about how somebody ought to write an article on the disappearance of the father from American television series. Because of my own experience, it was one of the things I felt good about generalizing on.
The Delectable Mountains Page 2
