by Unknown
The Alton Motor Inn and Function Suites sat slightly north of the river, where Kern’s mental map of the county gave out. North of Alton had always had a different, hostile flavor: the high-school kids were tougher, the industrial landmarks were bigger and darker, and the rich, who had made their fortunes off the dismal mills and quarries, lived on walled estates well back from the highways. The geography was a tangle to Kern; confusing new highways sliced through former villages and sped shoppers to malls that after a few decades were becoming shopworn. Just after his mother’s death, without her to guide him, he had gotten lost on his way to the local airport to meet his children for the funeral. Though he now managed, after several wrong turns, to find the motor inn on its little rounded hill of asphalt, Kern was afraid he could not find, in the dark, in the rain, the Alton Country Club.
The girl at the front desk wore a mannish jacket and had had blotches of magenta dyed into her tufty hair. To her it was so obvious where the Alton Country Club was that a few stabs of her pencil at a miniature map and a hurried recitation of several route numbers satisfied her that Kern was as good as there. Uncomprehending, but afraid of appearing senile, he docilely nodded and went to his room. The room, its picture window overlooking the muffled traffic of a mysterious cloverleaf, seemed a safe cave. But his classmates, in deference to their age and frailty, had urged an early dinner hour, so, instead of lying down on one of the inviting twin beds and turning on television, he unpacked his toilet kit, brushed his teeth, changed his tie to a more festive, flowered one, and tried to clean his muddy loafers with a wad of moistened toilet paper. Out on the parking lot, the controls of the rented Nissan still seemed foreign, the dashboard miniaturized and dim. There was an invasive sweet smell in the car: Enoch’s apples. How could he get them home on tomorrow’s airplane? Did California admit alien apples? Blazing streams of other cars were hurrying home; the county was not so depleted as to lack a rush hour. He was due at six, in just fifteen minutes. Where had the time gone?
As Kern squinted to see road signs, the headlights behind him pressed mercilessly, and those coming at him wore troubling haloes of refraction. He had turned off at the route number that the girl at the hotel desk had written for him, but possibly in the wrong direction. Anonymous mills and storage tanks hulked on one side, with silhouetted conveyor belts and skeletal stairways; on the other side, after a distance, a restaurant in an old limestone house advertised itself with a discreet white sign, and, closed for the winter, a driving range and miniature-golf course hurtled by. None of this was exactly unfamiliar—ages ago he and some boisterous friends had played, he felt, on those miniature fairways, merrily putting small white balls through windmills and tunnels—yet nothing told him exactly where he was. He was being punished: he had lived his formative years in this county while disdaining to learn its geography, beyond the sections proximate to his ego and his immediate needs. Now, in revenge, the area manifested itself as a shapeless shadowy mire, experienced at a perilous speed.
Then a sweeping searchlight straight ahead declared, he realized, the presence of the Alton airport. It was down to about two flights a day yet kept its bright lights on. But it seemed to be, if he remembered the magenta-tinged hotel clerk’s sketchy indications, on the wrong side of the highway. Kern was beginning to sweat. He would never get there. The highway surroundings were thinning into countryside—distant isolated house windows, darkened low stores for carpeting and auto parts. He wanted to scream. He needed to urinate. At last, the broad glow of a combination Getty gas and 7-Eleven appeared. The doughy woman behind the counter—the lone sentinel in a sea of darkness, wearing steel-rimmed granny glasses—seemed afraid of him, her only customer. He saw as if through her suspicious oval lenses his frantic expression and wrinkled Burberry and California-style necktie, splashily patterned in poinciana blossoms. When he explained his disorientation, her face hardened. She appeared offended that he could have gone so far astray. “Go back the way you came,” she told him. “It’s after the airport. You passed it.”
“How far after?”
“Oh—a mile or so.”
“On the right or the left?” These Pennsylvania people, it occurred to him, did not want out-of-staters to make themselves too much at home.
“On the left.”
“Is there a sign or anything?”
The woman mulled this over, continuing to size him up and keeping one hand out of sight below the counter, probably on the button that would summon the police. “You’ll see it,” she grudgingly promised. “There’s two big gateposts.”
And Kern did, ten minutes later, see the gateposts, very faintly, on the other side of the road. They might have been ghosts—spectral apparitions between beats of the windshield wipers—but his only hope of refuge lay between them. It was the worst kind of highway, a two-lane wanting to be a three-lane. The streams of traffic behind him and coming toward him looked endless; he braked in the center of the road and, as halted headlights piled up in his rearview mirror, he took a breath and swerved into the oncoming lane. The first car coming at him gave a long blast of protest on its horn but braked enough to avoid the head-on collision that Kern’s old heart had leaped up to greet.
He was in. A tiny sign in a flowerless flower bed named the club. An allée of horse-chestnut trees led him between two areas of darkness—golf-course fairways, he guessed. The clubhouse loomed, spottily lit. There was plenty of parking; it was a weekday night. Kern got out of the car. His eyes watered; his knees were trembling. The day’s drizzle was letting up. He left his wet Burberry in the car. Ned Miller was waiting for him in the foyer. “We were getting worried,” Ned said.
“I had trouble finding it,” David told him, fervently gripping his old friend’s hand. “Then when I finally found it I nearly got killed pulling in. The guy who had to brake gave me a huge blast.”
“That’s a bad left turn. You should have been coming from the other direction.”
“I know, I know. Don’t rub it in. I’ll do better next time. Maybe.” Ned said nothing; both men were thinking that there might not be a next time.
Ned had been, like Kern, a good student, but less erratically and noisily so. He spoke no more than he needed to, and talkative Kern, so excitable the words sometimes jammed together in a stutter, had realized that Ned was his best friend only when he realized that silence was the other boy’s natural, companionable mode. Ned’s head was full of unvoiced thoughts; they were for him a reservoir of strength. He had become a lawyer, a professional keeper of secrets.
The three other guests were seated at the table, their faces glamorously lit by glass-shaded candles. Ned’s wife was Marjorie, a firm-textured, silver-haired graduate of a different high school, east of Alton. Kern’s other classmate he had known as Sandra Bachmann, though she had long since married one of Ned’s legal partners, Jeff Lang. It had been Ned’s sly, considerate idea to include the Langs, since Kern had, at a safe distance, loved Sandra all through school. It had taken no great imagination to love her—she was conspicuously vivacious, an athlete and a singer as well as the class beauty, with smoky green eyes and glossy brown hair worn, in elementary school, in pigtails and then, in high school, in a page boy with bangs. He had heard from Ned that she had fallen prey to various physical ills. He wondered if the aluminum walker tucked over by the windows was hers. Even as he gratefully took the place they had saved for him at the table, beside Sandra, he observed that her face had been stiffened and distorted by some sort of stroke. Yet, since his love for her had been born in kindergarten, long before sex kicked in, it was impervious to bodily change.
In his happiness to be next to her, he gushed, “Sandra, I had the most terrible time getting here, not knowing where anything is any more. Not that I ever did. And my night vision isn’t that great. All the headlights had this rainbowy hair on them. In my panic I pulled right into the path of an oncoming car, and even in that split second I was thinking, ‘Well, stupid, you were born here, you might as well die here
.’ Was the traffic always this bad?”
She stared at him out of her stony, twisted face, and with a spasmodic motion lifted her hand toward his lips as if to touch them, to still them. “David,” she said carefully, “I don’t hear well. Speak more slowly, and let me watch your mouth.” Her hair was sleekly swept back; he saw that the socket of her dainty ear was filled by a flesh-colored hearing aid. But her voice had kept its rich timbre. Contralto in pitch, it bore for him the intimate music of the regional accent, the Germanic consonants pressed from birth into his own ears. Sandra had never had to shout to get attention. Except for her bust, abruptly outthrust in the eighth grade, her physical attributes were precise rather than emphatic; she was like a photograph slightly reduced to achieve an extra sharpness. Her nose had a barely noticeable bump at the bridge and her mouth a slight, demure, enchanting overbite. Kern’s lips tingled where Sandra had almost touched them.
He slowly mouthed, for her eyes, the words “It’s won-derful to see you. I’m sor-ry I was late.”
The general conversation sought its rhythm, and David, the returned prodigal, for a time was allowed the lead. The questions he asked, the details he remembered, arose from years that for him had the freshness and urgency of youthful memories but that for his friends were buried beneath a silt of decades, of thousands of days spent in this same territory, maturing, marrying, childbearing, burying parents, laboring, retiring. He called across the table to Ned, “Remember how our mothers used to take us out once a summer to the Goose Lake Amusement Park, at the end of the trolley line? They would sit there,” he explained to the others, “side by side on a bench, while Ned and I went into the arcade and put pennies in these little paper peepshows that you cranked yourself—girls doing the hootchy-kootchy in petticoats, all very tame, in retrospect. What the kids nowadays see, my God.”
Decades of teaching had left him perhaps too fluent. He evoked aloud the long-gone trolley cars—their slippery straw seats, the brass handles at the corners to switch the backs back and forth at the end of the line, the serious-faced conductor with the mechanical change-maker on his belt. “Like all those pre-electronic things, it was so ingenious!”
“Every child had to have one,” Ned supportively chimed in.
“Exactly!” David agreed. He recalled aloud Ned’s old house—its abundance of toys, its basement playroom, its side yard big enough for fungo with a tennis ball, and the slate-floored screened side porch where they used to play Monopoly for hours at a stretch. Kern, a schoolteacher’s son, had envied that house, and intended to praise it. But he got the name of Ned’s pet Labrador slightly wrong, Blackie instead of Becky; Ned made the correction with an uncharacteristic, irritated quickness.
Monopoly made Kern think of the canasta craze in their junior and senior years, those rows and rows of cards laid out on their parents’ dining-room tables, and asked if anybody could still remember the rules. Nobody volunteered. Marjorie Miller began to look glazed, and stated firmly that no one in her high school had played canasta; it never spread, she insisted, to her part of the county.
Deferential waiters, meanwhile, took orders and brought food. They kept calling Ned “Mr. Miller” and Sandra “Mrs. Lang”; only Kern went unnamed, the outsider. He had belonged to faculty clubs and golf clubs, far from here, but had he stayed he could never have made the Alton Country Club; there was no road up into it for a schoolteacher’s son.
Feeling the fatigue of his day’s adventures, he fell relatively silent, and his companions lapsed into local talk—the newest mayoral scandal in Alton, the hopeless condition of the downtown, the invasion of Hispanic drug dealers, the misfortunes (illnesses, business misjudgments, ill-advised second marriages) of mutual friends. Kern thought that Sandra kept up with the conversation pretty well, her calm gray-green eyes darting from mouth to mouth, her own lips opening in a frequent laugh. When she laughed, the gleeful pealing, a bit harsher than expected, echoed in Kern’s head a chord first heard during recess at elementary school, on the paved play space around the old red brick building, strictly divided into boys’ and girls’ sections. Her voice, though not loud, could be heard above those of all the other girls at play. He must have been listening for it then.
The waiters—two of them, for this was a light night—stood ready, in their pleated shirts and striped bow ties, to take orders for dessert and coffee. The group looked toward David, and he said what he sensed they wanted to hear: “I don’t need anything. It’s late, for us old-timers.” There was a babble of grateful agreement, and a prolonged fuss of gathering coats and umbrellas. Sandra used her walker, but as if it were a toy, swinging it jauntily ahead of her. Outside, the rain had quite stopped, and Kern could see off to the left a shadowy green, with its numbered flag still in the hole, ready for play once November relented.
On the glistening driveway, they shook hands and hugged good-bye. He and Sandra studied each other’s faces a second, trying to decide between a kiss on the cheek or on the mouth; he decided on a cheek, but as it happened on the side of her face somewhat paralyzed. Backing off, he mouthed at her, “Take care. You’re the best.” Not sure the lamplight was strong enough for her to read his words, he added an absurd gesture: he gave her a thumbs-up, and then blushed. In his excitement he had drunk three glasses of wine.
Marjorie, hugging him with a disciplining firmness, said, “We’re all in one car; you follow us. We don’t want you getting lost again.”
“Oh, I don’t think I will. I just do the same thing backwards, more or less. Don’t go out of your way. Ways.”
“David. You follow us.”
. . .
The four had come in a big midnight-blue SUV belonging to the Langs. Marjorie’s silver hair flashed in the back seat; Sandra’s tidy profile sank into shadow beside her. Women still rode in the back here. Jeff Lang’s tail-lights led Kern down the long, hushed double row of horse chestnuts, over the mushy litter of fallen pods. At the highway, after a wait for all traffic to clear, the tail-lights turned left, away from the airport, then right at the restaurant in the limestone house. Almost immediately, they were moving down narrow city streets. He had been on the edge of Alton, all along. What was I doing way out at the airport? Kern asked himself.
This section of the city was strange to him. Lone pedestrians flitted warily across the rain-stained streets. The glowing windows of Laundromats, delicatessens, and corner taverns slid by like the unexpected illumined spectres and tableaux in the water ride at the Goose Lake Amusement Park. Many of the signs were in Spanish. The SUV, seeming almost to brush the parked cars on either side, led him first downhill, and then up. Continuing uphill, the street without transition became a strange bridge, high above the black river. It descended on the other side into blocks where tight-packed semi-detached houses were approached up long flights of concrete steps. The two-car caravan came to a traffic circle near a large parking lot, with a garish state-run liquor store on one side, and Kern at last knew where he was: in West Alton.
He and his mother used to transfer to the West Alton trolley from the stop in front of Blankenbiller’s for his piano lessons with—yes, of course—Miss Schiffner. Thin, wan, wistful Miss Schiffner, perhaps once beautiful in her way, had he been old enough to notice. Concrete steps covered by green outdoor carpeting led up to her front parlor, where the piano, an upright, waited amid doilies and porcelain figurines and dusty plush. Its white and black keys were cold to the touch of his nervous hands. The trolley car at its stop—there had been no traffic circle then—would unfold a step with a harsh clack, and David, leaping down, would jar the sour lump of anticipation in his belly, knowing that he had not mastered his lesson. This was before their move to the country, the beginning of his exile. His mother was still a town dweller, still banking on civilization, handing over precious Depression dollars in gullible hopes of lifting her son up from the ruck. It was clear to him and must have been to Miss Schiffner that he was no little Mozart, standing on tiptoe to tap out his first minuet.
<
br /> Jeff Lang’s smug ruby tail-lights continued halfway around the traffic circle, passed the liquor store, and headed up Fourth Street, toward the old textile mills that had been reborn as discount outlets and then had gone empty again; the busloads of Baltimore bargain hunters now went instead to the newer outlets near Morgan’s Forge. It came to Kern that behind him, one block over from Fourth Street, there used to be an all-night diner where he, a teen-ager in no hurry to get back to the farm, would go alone after dropping off his date at her house. After an Olinger High dance, he would go with a gang of others, all the girls wearing strapless taffeta dresses if it had been a prom, their naked shoulders gleaming in the booths. Each booth had its own little jukebox, with “Stardust” and “Begin the Beguine” and Russ Morgan’s “So Tired” among the selections. If Kern went there now, he could get a piece of Dutch apple pie with a scoop of butter-pecan ice cream, to make up for the dessert he had missed.
He wanted to reverse his course, but the Langs’ tail-lights inexorably receded, waiting at every intersection for him to catch up. He couldn’t believe it: they were going to lead him like some out-of-town moron right to the parking lot of the Alton Motor Inn. In his head he shouted furiously, I know where I am now! I’m here.
My Father’s Tears
I SAW MY FATHER CRY only once. It was at the Alton train station, back when the trains still ran. I was on my way to Philadelphia—an hour’s ride ending at the 30th Street terminal—to catch, at the Market Street station, the train that would return me to Boston and college. I was eager to go, for already my home and my parents had become somewhat unreal to me, and Harvard, with its courses and the hopes for my future they inspired and the girlfriend I had acquired in my sophomore year, had become more real every semester; it shocked me—threw me off track, as it were—to see that my father’s eyes, as he shook my hand good-bye, glittered with tears.
