The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Thank you for your most understanding letter, and thanks, on her behalf, for your reply to the letter from the Woman, who asks me to tell you that she will only intrude when she feels that her harmonica (from Italian, armonico, harmonious) is necessary to create, farther along, agreements in feeling, approach, action, disposition or the like: harmony. You did serve as a harmonica yourself (although I know full well that the recorder is your natural instrument) in bringing the Woman and I closer together. I am no longer jealous of her attentions to the Dying Man. How could I be, since he was not here for either of us to give our attentions to?

  He disappeared yet again. It was the day after we accepted an invitation to dinner (that is, supper) with the Forest Ranger and his Mistress and the Grandson, a somewhat awkward situation since the Dying Man knew that I’d been swimming with the Grandson, although the Forest Ranger and his Mistress perhaps did not. During our lengthy conversations pro and con about restoring the town (as usual the women were all in favor, the men were all opposed), the Forest Ranger’s Mistress generously offered to subsidize the Dying Man in the undertaking, if he would undertake it, but he was noncommittal. He later told me that the use of that word “undertaking” had given him pause. The association with a mortician who embalms the body led him to draw an analogy with what he would be doing to the town if he restored it. He had told the Forest Ranger’s Mistress he would have to think a good deal about it. The evening as a whole was uncomfortable for him because of the obvious looks I kept getting from the Grandson.

  The next day the Dying Man disappeared. Without a word. When he did not return, I assumed he had returned to his cave. I didn’t have the energy, being “all tuckered out” (all right, all right, read that as the Woman hinted: “all fuckered out”) to seek him out in his cave. Let him sulk, I said to myself. Let him come home, or not, when he grew tired of sulking, or grew horny enough to bed me once more. (Little did I think that he thought that I should have thought that he would not “come home” but had already gone home, to his cave.) I bided my time. I sat in my room, or, when it was hot (and women of these hills would never have used the word “hot”), when it was “passing warm,” on the porch, in the rocker, reading the rest of First’s diaries and watching the people pass. The people passed. Of course! Why haven’t I mentioned it before? This may be a ghost town, but it’s the only road out of town, and a number of people have to use the road, now and then, and they had even used the road during that first hour I had let the Dying Man sit on the porch and contemplate whether the town was worth saving, as Marius contemplates the ruins of Carthage in that Vanderlyn print which hangs in your office, but, like disconsolate Marius, he had scarcely noticed them. Some of those passing people politely waved. A few of them, if I was not mistaken, winked at me! The Grandson did not return, and damn me if I was going to seek him out. Underwater intercourse may sound like a great innovation or divertissement, but let me tell you, if you haven’t tried it, don’t. The water washes all the natural lubrication away. There must be more. Anyway, I sat on the porch reading the rest of First’s diaries (her passion in the years after the ex-governor died was Passion in the true sense, more painful than the Passion of “Our Savior”: suffering), which at the same time gave me a new empathy for the Woman’s passion and Passion and a foreboding for There Must Be More: all of the years that you and I, no less than the Woman, must spend without mates, and all those gerontologists in your department will not be able even to mention the topic, let alone address themselves to it.

  I thought: if I am not actually First, then my gradual reading of her diaries has had some profound effect on me—disillusioning, or making me aware of my own spiritual poverty or deathly envious of First for her great relationship with the ex-governor. But if I really am First, then my gradual reading of her (my) diaries has reminded her (me) that her (my) past was not as happy as nostalgia had deluded her (me) to believe.

  I sat, and read, and waved at the people who passed, and winked back at a couple of them who winked at me. I watched as two posts supporting the roof of the general store’s porch collapsed, and a portion of the porch roof caved in. I shivered as something (termites?) caused the sills of my house to crumble and the house shivered with me. Come home, my beloved! I silently beseeched the Dying Man, and there, I had said it, I had silently told him I loved him, although I had only said that aloud, and perhaps falsely, to the Grandson, who had responded by saying that he was awfully fond of me too, but then had been so tactless as to remark that his Mistress, whom he missed most misquotedly, had been a lot more “inventive” in bed (or water) than I, not that he meant invidious comparisons, but that he wanted me to know that even if she never came back, I could never fully replace her in his affections. To which I replied, “S” as in sweet, “H” as in holy, “I” as in intestinal, “T” as in transudation.

  After a few days of this, this recuperation from being all fuckered out, and feeling lonely, I replaced my flounced skirt with a pair of jodhpur breeches, and hiked up the mountain to the ex-Bluffdweller’s bluff, where I found the Dying Man sitting in the mouth of his cavern, holding in one hand what was obviously the copy of his last will and testament that he had written, and staring at his dog. The dog seemed to be happy to have returned to his lifetime home. The Dying Man did not seem too happy. He was dressed again in his Bluff-dweller attire: breechclout, sandals, nothing else, save his sparring helmet. Save his sparring helmet.

  “Hi,” I said, cheerfully as I could. “How you?”

  He did not smile. He crumpled up his will and threw it into the small fire that was burning in his fireplace, although the weather was more than “passing warm.” “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  I noticed all of the rocks, the stones, that had eons ago tumbled down the slope from his cavern mouth, and asked, pointing, “What do you call that stuff?”

  “Talus,” he said.

  “Did the talus come out of here?” I said, indicating the cavern. He nodded. “There must be more,” I said.

  “There’s not any more,” he said. “The talus had to fall to make the space of the cavern.”

  “I want to—”

  He gestured toward his crude but multilayered bed. I sat on it, or fell into it, and removed my jodhpurs. He undid his breechclout. We made love, the dog pretending not to watch, and afterwards he had to know, “Didn’t I hold out longer than the Grandson?” Oh yes, I had to allow. “Then you did let him screw you?” he said. It’s not important, I said. “Then what is important, for Kind’s sakes?”

  “The town is falling,” I said. “The general store is about to collapse, and our house is being eaten up by termites and also is hopelessly infested with cockroaches.”

  “You said ‘our’ house,” he pointed out. “Yours and mine.”

  “Yes, for the nonce. The Grandson hopes that if you will supervise the restoration of the town, his Mistress might come back from California.”

  “Do you want her to come back?”

  “Why not? I think I could be a very good friend of hers, as good a friend as First was to the ex-governor’s wife. That was a sincere friendship, by the way, not simply a trick or ruse so that First could share the ex-governor with his wife.”

  “So you are planning to share the Grandson with his Mistress?”

  “What alternative would I have?”

  He just stared at me, and rightfully so, hurt as he was. You, dear Linda, if you were sitting here beside us, would have kicked me in the shin, wouldn’t you’ve? But I was prompting him, you see. I was giving him a little nudge. And it worked. “You could marry me,” he suggested, offhand and casual. That was the way he proposed. He didn’t make a question out of it, he didn’t ask, Will you—? Nor did he make an “I want to—” out of it, he didn’t say, I would like to marry you.

  “There aren’t any marriages in this place,” I pointed out. “Everybody seems to be, if not widowed or widowered, simply living together, or alone, or separated or divorced.”

&
nbsp; “There aren’t any swans, only a lone goose.”

  “There must be more.”

  “I want to—”

  “Say it.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s not important.”

  “Play your hair-comb-and-tissue for me.”

  “I didn’t bring them with me.”

  “I don’t mean the ‘real’ ones.”

  “Oh. Well, if you must hear it, I’ve been meditating about the circumstance of the burial, over there, of The World’s Oldest Man. On one hand, if his body hadn’t been in the cavern that night, making me nervous and sleepless, I wouldn’t have drunk so much that I inflamed my pancreas. But on the other hand, if I hadn’t arranged in advance for Jick to come and help with the burial, nobody would have discovered me and I would have gone into a coma and died. So I am alive because I buried the old man. If it is true, at least in part, that his bringing of Progress was what caused the town to die, the Indian’s revenge, or the parenthesis, then this would be one more parenthesis [and Linda, I send you, or rather the Dying Man sends you, like Buddy Glass, a whole bouquet, not of early-blooming but of late-blooming beauties: (((((())))))]: that through the circumstance of burying the old man who caused the town to die, I am permitted to live, to restore the town…”

  I interjected excitedly, “You mean you’ll do it?”

  “Don’t interrupt. I was about to add, ‘…if I wish.’ I haven’t made the decision yet. If the Grandson and the Forest Ranger’s Mistress are determined to pour a big chunk of their millions into an authentic restoration, they could hire any number of experts who are more knowledgeable about architectural restoration than I am. Interiors, not exteriors, are my former specialty. I would not be honest in fobbing myself off as a professional consultant on exterior work, or, at the very least, I would have to spend some time studying up on the subject. And I would oppose vehemently any attempt to commercialize the restoration, or even to open it as a museum to the public on a non-profit basis. I would also oppose any attempt to turn back the clock in terms of what progress has already fallen to us. I wouldn’t abolish automobiles in favor of the horse and buggy. If anyone wanted to use a horse and buggy, that’s their business. But there’s simply not any going back. The past is past. People who have television have to keep it. People who use modern contraceptives…speaking of contraceptives, what have you been using?”

  “That’s my business, right?”

  “Okay, right. But I can’t get to sleep at night without you, or my Dalmane [dollmane, Linda?], or a combination of both. I’ve tried it. I haven’t slept a wink for the past three nights. I don’t know how hopeless insomniacs got to sleep before the invention of Dalmane, without immoderate doses of booze, but there’s no going back. We have what we have. We might have the old town to look at, and walk around in. It could not be a rustic Utopian village, nor one of Toffler’s “enclaves” against Future Shock. It could not be a Brigadoon or Xanadu or Walden iii. If restored, it would have to be an assemblage of dollhouses magnified to life-scale, for us to admire and perhaps play with. It would be partly a gift to the Woman. By restoring her former store-and-post-office to its original appearance and contents, perhaps we could persuade her to become proprietress if not postmistress again. Don’t you think that might make her happy? Yes, but the restoration would also be a wedding gift for you, so that Second could see the town exactly as First saw it.”

  That took my breath away, Linda, and if ever a woman received a nicer (or a nicer idea of a) wedding present, I’d like to hear about it. And when he said it, a novel idea (a “novel” idea) suddenly struck me: that he and I are unique, in our separate ways, that there has never been another man quite like him, and never another woman quite like me, so why couldn’t we “enhance” our uniqueness by becoming the only couple in the town who actually are married rather than just living together, so that I would not simply be the Dying Man’s Mistress, but the Dying Man’s Wife. “Yes, yes,” I was about to say, “Yes I’ll marry you,” I was about to say, but I did not interrupt him, as he went on dreaming.

  I stayed three nights and four days at the cave. I became so accustomed to the comfort of his bed, where we both easily drifted off to deep sleep after sex, that I could almost imagine living there. The Dying Man caught with his atlatl a brace of quail and a squirrel—enough to keep us well-fed. The whole four days we debated the restoration of the town. The last night we stayed up all night arguing my point that living like a Bluff-dweller is just a hopeless reconstruction of the distant past, and his point that any dream of restoring the town would be a hopeless reconstruction of the recent past.

  At length he said, “You know I’m very much opposed to reconstruction as against restoration. I would hate to reassemble those stones, piled as a levee against the creek, back into their original form as the Bank and Trust Company. But I was thinking: Many of the roads into and out of the village were once lined with stone walls; the stone walls accounted for much of the charm of the village, but year by year someone tore down the stone walls to use them as building materials or for foundations or whatever…‘something there is that doesn’t love a wall.’ I can’t come up with any objection to reconstructing the stone walls in their original locations, if we could find sufficient photographs to indicate what each wall and each stone looked like. So then why could I object to the reconstruction of the bank and trust? In that case, we would have all the original stones, and simply the Herculean task of trying to fit them, jigsaw-puzzle fashion, back into their original positions. As for the old gristmill, although we might have photographs of it from just about every angle, I would oppose the construction of a duplicate out of modern wood and tin. Instead, I would arrange to have moved here an abandoned gristmill of approximately the same date and size…”

  And he went on, for the rest of the night, talking like that, his eyes gleaming, his hands thrashing in the air, shaping, building, reconstructing. I think he was talking as much to himself as he was to me, trying to persuade himself to do it, and giving himself plenty of arguments against it, for example, “Wherever a piece, member, fragment or detail of a building is missing, it could only be reconstructed by using the same material and by copying an existing identical piece, member, fragment or detail, and if such were not available, then no reconstruction could be permitted.” And at one point he practically wailed, “Where, in this day and age, could we hope to find the dedicated craftsmen with the talent to do the work?” And at another point, he shook his head in resignation and said, “As soon as news of the project leaks out to the rest of the world, we would be mobbed with sightseers and prospective settlers.” He shook his head. He looked around him at his humble, primitive cave home with a lingering scrutiny that suggested he might be trying to give it a last, long farewell appraisal. But I could tell from his eyes that he was asking himself if he would be able to give it all up for good, and the answer was no. He shook his head again, and kept on slowly shaking it. “You know,” he said, “it is true that there is never any end. But there is also never any going back.”

  “How can you say that?” I demanded. “What do you call your life as a Bluff-dweller if it isn’t a going-back?”

  “Touché,” he said. “But it wasn’t a going-back in the sense of returning to something that I had lost. It wasn’t done out of nostalgia. If we restored—or reconstructed—the town, it would be out of longing for the past, for a way of life that is beyond our reach and should be left there.”

  “So you won’t do it?”

  “I’m sorry, dear Eliza Cunningham. I can’t.”

  So that was that. He whistled up the dog and we each carried as much of his “gear” as he could hold, and headed back down the mountain to the town.

  What I’m about to ask you, O Sage Sister, is not for further ammunition in the battle to restore the town, but rather consolation: could you please tell me why, in this lost battle, all of those on the pro side, who strongly support the restoration of the town—myself, the Woman, the
Forest Ranger’s Mistress, the Grandson’s Mistress, and, I’m sure, you—are women, whereas all those opposed to it—the Dying Man, the Grandson, the Forest Ranger, Foreman, and Jick, too—are men?

  I never did accept his proposal.

  Much love,

  Liz

  Chapter thirty-two

  Sunday

  Dear Linda,

  I took the liberty of reading aloud to the Dying Man your lovely letter with its little essay on the meaning of “keep,” and your conjecture, with which I’m inclined to agree, that women are more inclined than men to keep the past, to preserve old friendships, to treasure the ruins. Men, pragmatic by nature, live in the present. They live from day to day…although they do a good job of it. They throw things away. They forget birthdays and anniversaries because those things are in the future, honoring the past.

  The Dying Man and I argued a bit over your essay on keeping, but for the most part he agrees with you…and with me. He pointed out that the membership and patronage of the Foundation which he had led in Boston, devoted to the great American past which had vanished, was almost entirely female, not because only wealthy widows were interested in the work of the Foundation, but because only women truly appreciated the aims and goals of the Foundation.