Telling Time

by Austin Wright

  In the study the computer is off, full of programs and files for somebody to go through. The calendar shows May, in which we still are. Framed photograph of a bird, a great horned owl, idiosyncrasy, bookcase full of his stuff, idiosyncrasies. His stuff everywhere.

  There’s a yellow blanket on the couch in his study, folded into a square. It must have been used for something, I don’t know what. The laws of property have been suspended. A living body has been converted into a trail of residue, ash.

  Analyze the difference between these things today and yesterday. How when he was alive his property was tangible character, exuded presence, a material body emitted by his biological body and spread about, so that to touch something belonging to him, to pick up a book or open his file cabinet, was equivalent to touching him, violating his person. How he expanded, his nerves reaching from the hospital where he lay breathing into the house and to what he owned, a network, tent, mesh, an airy body. It still floated around them after his death, but empty, a property corpse extended from the biological corpse. The corpse enclosed her mother and herself and all the others as they returned to the house. It folded around them. Yet nothing was changed, everything was exactly as he left it. That’s the point: if it had changed it would not be corpse.

  How dead the file folders look, the antiquated typed papers. Like a lifeguard looking for a drowned body, she takes the manuscript up to her room to read after everyone has gone to bed, as if that could revive the dead.

  HENRY WESTERLY: Narrative

  In the Ahab ’n Abigail Bar on Nautical Street, Rupert Newton talked Truro. Showed me the news for tomorrow’s paper: Angel Vertebrate, sought by authorities as a possible mediator in the Sam Truro hostage case, located this morning as a hotel worker in Provincetown. Heard his name in the news and called to offer assistance. Will come to the Island tomorrow. Truro has been informed. Truro: will negotiate with no one else.

  And then repeat the facts. It is now four days since Truro, a teller at the Island National Bank. Etcetera.

  In the bar on Nautical Street talk about Angel Vertebrate. Newton quotes Truro: You get me Mr. Angel Vertebrate who drives the schoolbus. I want to see him. Negotiate? the Sheriff said, giving Truro the word for his vocabulary. Yeah, negotiate. I want to negotiate with Mr. Angel Vertebrate. I won’t negotiate with nobody else.

  Rupert Newton’s researches into Angel Vertebrate. Who came here from the Cape as a construction worker. Hardy: I remember him. Got tired fast, that guy. Reservoir project, then schoolbus, night watchman in the high school.

  Muscular, long hair. Mustache, blond. Little talk. Guys remembered him on the baseball team when he came out to play, tried second base but no match to McWheel, used as pinch hitter, couldn’t hit curves, couldn’t hit fast ball either, struck out both times, quit. Yeah, Bowman said. Long hair sticken out his baseball cap. Funny name. Guys hooten when he struck out.

  Neighbor (Harriman) thinks he did gardening on the Truro place last spring. Digging, planting, starting a hedge. Wore a pony tail. No shirt. Remember him at the back door, drinking water out of a dipper. Heard his name, thought it was a joke.

  Daughter (Dinah Truro, staying at the Froehlich’s since her release) says Angel used to come around. Her words, “He used to come around.” Calls him Angel. That’s his name, she said. How often did he come around? A lot. Did he come to see your Daddy? He come to see me. You? And Mommy. When would he come, evening, mornings, afternoons? Afternoons. When your Daddy was at work? He come to see me and Mommy. He liked me and Mommy. When he came did she send you out to play? Yes. Did she really? She sent you out to play? Sometimes she did.

  Rupert Newton bought Henry a drink. After talking to him for an hour, Rupert looked at him and said, Who the hell are you? I’m here for a death in the family, Henry said. Yeah, who died? My father, Thomas Westerly. How come I didn’t hear of him?

  Henry Westerly on his late night walk. Even at night you can tell it is a white house. A plain box on Shoal Point Drive, just before the sidewalk ends and the speed limit goes from 25 to 55. Square with a steep peaked roof, two front windows on the second floor, two on the first, one on each side of the door, which is centered perfectly symmetrical. At night the lawn is dark, but the last streetlight illuminates a circle of the sidewalk. Two deputies remain on guard, sitting in their cars, their rifles sticking up, watching.

  In the house, the light is in the downstairs window, where they say the living room is, to the right of the door, and another is in the second story window on the right. A half hour ago, the deputy says, he passed in front of the living room window. Now for a moment he appears in the second story window. One of the deputies raises his rifle and sights. After a moment the man disappears.

  Whyn’t you shoot? the other asks.

  The first deputy laughs.

  A man says to the passerby: They say they sit down together for meals.

  It’s a publicity stunt.

  An extortion racket. Five thousand bucks and a safe conduct, for Christ sakes.

  Wish somebody’d give me five grand and a safe conduct for my wife and kids. I’d let em keep the dog.

  WILLIAM KEY: Narrative

  Turning the corner at Nautical Street, William Key sees a chunky human shadow moping along. The shadow stops, turns around, totters his way. Man drunk, William thinks, and crosses city-bred to the other side. The man stops and looks at him with a purpose which tightens William who thinks this kind of thing shouldn’t happen on the Island. Brace himself with no weapon.

  At that moment William recognizes Henry, lame but not necessarily drunk, and in the same moment Henry turns to go away. Stops though, and William realizes that Henry realizes he has been recognized. Also clear Henry wanted to avoid him as he wanted to avoid Henry, but it’s too late for both, and they meet in the street.

  What are you doing out?

  Taking a walk. You too?

  Can’t sleep.

  Stop for a drink?

  No thanks. Smells like you had one.

  I suppose so. Quiet night.

  Fuck it.

  What?

  Never mind. Guess I’ll go home.

  Guess I’d better too.

  There’s the hospital.

  Too bad today. I really liked and admired him.

  Yeah? So did most everybody.

  Not you?

  What do you mean? My old man. How could I not love my old man?

  THOMAS WESTERLY: As read by Ann

  Late in her room Monday evening, the house quiet. A printed manuscript that looks like a story. She’s uneasy about reading more father’s secrets, but decides she’d better take a look. Thumbing through she sees three or four chapters. She won’t have time to read them all.

  WYOMING 1

  The inspiration for the following narrative was my discovery by accident of a name in the Island telephone book. I was looking in the G’s for a carpenter named Greenough. I saw this:

  Glade Harrison J So Village

  That’s the name of the man Penny Young married fifty years ago after which I never heard of her again. A name, a combination of names, rare enough to mean something. If not the man himself, then a relative, a son, nephew, or cousin. The listing doesn’t say if this Harrison Glade has a wife, much less whether she would be the same as the wife he married in 1942, but the odds were good, I thought, or at any rate fair. And if Penny Young herself were not living in the South Village as Mrs. Harrison Glade, the number provided a nearly sure way of finding out what had become of her.

  Like nearing the end of a quest I had not known I was on. I found the forgotten memory skittering in the discarded trash of my mind. I thought, all I need do is call this number, ask for Mrs. Glade, and if she responds, ask her. Are you the former Penny Young? Did you go to Wyoming to study field geology in the summer of 1941? Did you return East that summer in a car belonging to Thomas Westerly—whom you called Tommy? Did you kiss this Tommy Westerly in the back seat while Turley drove, to mark yourself in his memory
as the first girl he ever kissed, though you were at the time engaged simultaneously to a cowboy geologist named Jule Foss and an Amherst man named Harrison Glade? The latter of whom you married the following summer.

  A year has passed since I saw that entry in the telephone book, during which time I did nothing. The new directory repeats:

  Glade Harrison J So Village

  A general address in the South Village, where I seldom go. I have not seen his name anywhere else. I have looked for it in the paper, the obituaries and citizen lists, who owes taxes, attends school committee meetings, runs bake sales. Selectmen and board members, the name of Harrison Glade, or of Mrs. Harrison Glade. If I saw him I wouldn’t know him, for I never met him, but I have looked searchingly at the women in the village, strangers who might be the right age, in the streets, the shops, post office, library, wondering if I would recognize her or she me.

  In 1941 she was twenty-one. That makes her seventy-one now. It’s impossible to imagine Penny Young, who kissed one man while engaged to two others, as seventy-one. I went up to the attic, the scrapbook with the picture. Glazed like glass, faded but not discolored. Through the glass I saw her on a clump of Wyoming grass, wearing a thick plaid shirt and cowboy hat, heavy pants and boots. She sits by others with her elbow on her knee, looking up at the camera over her right shoulder. She’s next to Mimi, who shared her cabin and came back East with us when it was over. The grass slopes up into a field with another ridge. Geologists walk on the ridge.

  It’s rest time after lunch before returning to work. She squints as she looks up. Her hat is pushed back a little, and a few loose strands of hair cast a shadow across her forehead. Squinting in the sun gives her a shrewd look, brows contracted, thinking things over. As I look her frozen expression seems to change, passing through possibilities: annoyed or pleased, surprised or not, friendly or indifferent. The expression is stripped of its past and future. The picture implies the motion of rest on the grass, the ongoing conversation in which she was sufficiently uninterested not to mind looking when I showed up with a camera. Fifty years later her image still looks up where she left it before going on to pursue the rest of her life.

  I have two other pictures. In these she smiles, posed, ready, wearing a sweater in one while sitting on a log next to Jule, and in a light summer dress in the other; standing on a corner in Iowa with the group who came back with me. The smile in the pictures is opaque, anybody’s smile, an ordinary pretty girl of the time.

  I try to circumvent the opaque smile, looking for her in the memory of snack stops and restaurants, away from the blaze of the road, in the shade when I moved into the booth beside her, recomposing her eyes as large, as dark and blue, as friendly. Before her, I was in love only with the movie star Vivien Leigh.

  If she’s alive still, she’ll have been through the same years as I and witnessed the same history. I could call the Harrison Glade number, find out if she’s there or who knows about her, perhaps talk about the amazing coincidence of living three years close by on the Island without knowing it. And wonder what she remembers.

  My own memory is amazed, how easy to close the gap of fifty years as if it were no gap at all except the tremendous aging of a whole life. I went to Wyoming full of wonder and surprise to study geology in the field. Why should I want to study that? I was nineteen, inside myself looking out, thrilled by the view. Growing late out of a sweet solipsistic childhood, interested in birds and stars and imaginary countries. I was supposed to choose a serious career and to prove I was serious, I chose the earth. Geology, hard and full of rocks, to curb my dreamier tendencies.

  But Wyoming in 1941 put color into everything and painted the hard geologically serious world with romance. Take the car, my father said. Go West, where I had never been, the West of legend and movies, full of Henry Fonda and the Grapes of Wrath. So I went with Stone and Turley from Columbia, down to the Lincoln Tunnel, across Jersey, through traffic into Pennsylvania, which was already West for me, following route numbers on the shields, road maps in our laps. We found the newborn Turnpike, which had no speed limit at that time, thinking like the Titanic how new and safe it was.

  Closing the gap I remember 1941 less different from 1991 than my children might think. Trees, fields, houses, roads, telephone lines, just like now. Cars and traffic, speed and speed limits. The landscape was less populated, with fewer houses across the fields, the towns and cities proportionately smaller, but I didn’t know it then. I didn’t know the railroads would disappear, not when there were always tracks visible across a field, along a river edge, entering a town, and sooner or later a train with a steam engine, at speed or coming into a station, where cars were parked and people waiting.

  No jet trails but otherwise the same sky, the same clouds, the same clear blue, or gray and gloomy days, mist, haze, towering or sliding cloud banks, rain and drizzle. Farmhouses and townhouses. Fewer suburban subdivisions, fewer real estate developments, no shopping malls, no office parks, but that too I didn’t know. No television, but there was a shared culture of movies and the radio which we read about in Life. Stars and brand names. Jack Benny. Benny Goodman. Clark Gable. Coca Cola. Ivory Soap. Shirley Temple. Juke boxes everywhere, diners and cafes.

  Four days we drove, meals and gas and nights in tourist cabins. Hot dog stands and billboards. The Burma Shave signs were evenly spaced along the roadside:

  SHE KISSED THE HAIRBRUSH/ BY MISTAKE/ SHE THOUGHT IT WAS/ HER HUSBAND JAKE

  The rough mountain ridges of Pennsylvania settled into Ohio. The sky bore down on flat Illinois above the high tension wires and tiny distant farmhouses by tiny distant clumps of trees. Flatter still in Nebraska where a far tree ate up five miles without changing shape or size and a jack rabbit did fifty on a dirt road detour. With songs and stories in the screaming window wind.

  In 1941 the war had done terrible things but had not reached us yet. The future was vague. It was either the previous year’s New York World’s Fair, subtitled The World of Tomorrow, with rocket ports, automatic doors, plastics, and Superman capes. Or it was France fallen, England bombed, civilization at an end under a thousand years of Hitler. I didn’t want to think about it, while pacifist friends argued with non-pacifist friends. The world increased on field trips, where the land moved out from our feet in colorful dusty waves, purple and orange and olive drab with sage brush or dry clumps of grass or no vegetation, ridges of layered strata where we climbed with our picks to pick and chip to see what’s what. In cowboy hats and plaid shirts and geological boots, with notebooks and compasses, tables and tripods, we assembled at the tailgate of the trucks for lectures, and worked in groups of two or three over the barren bright lands, poking away, identifying and plotting. Then lunch, food tables on the grass, shaded by canvas on sticks, and the crew built fires under tripods for hamburgers, hot dogs and soup.

  We worked in the Laramie basin and among the formations of Colorado and in the interior of Wyoming. We camped in the Dinwoodie Canyon, and by a green lake in sight of the glacier peaks of the Wind River Mountains. We saw abandoned mines and met rattlesnakes on the open mountain paths and worked a ridge of points and scarpments like the fins of sharks, magnetite which attracted the lightning when a storm came up. We bought Coca Cola at road stands, and at each new destination blew up air mattresses, and in the evenings played softball in the geological fields between the rocks.

  In Wyoming during all this time Penny Young was Jule Foss’s girl. That was the geological reality I had to put up with. In the caravan of station wagons, she rode in his car next to him, ate meals with him, lay on the ground by the camp fire, or disappeared into the geological shadows. But this wonderful thing happened. She reserved her trip home in my car, she and Mimi, and I had it to look forward to. I watched everyone pair off, including her and Jule, and waited patiently for my turn.

  After six weeks, we came home, and this return was the climax of my Western adventure. I let my passengers off along the way until only Penny, Turley, and I were left
. Then she kissed me, sitting in the back seat while Turley drove, somewhere in Ohio. She kissed me and I kissed her all the rest of the way through Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, into New York. She told me she was engaged to both Jule Foss and Harrison Glade. I bore it because she was kissing me. It was only later that I minded, when she stopped answering my letters, and I learned that she had married Harrison Glade and never heard of her again.

  Eventually I’ll call. If Mrs. Glade is not Penny Young, too bad. If she has forgotten Penny Young, too bad. But if I wait until she dies, or until I do, it will be too late.

  A break in the manuscript. The next section is labeled 2, but it’s late and Ann needs to write in her diary before bed.

  ANN REALM: Diary

  Monday May 19. HISTORY: 2:10 pm TW die. LW, HW, MC, me. + PW, PK, WK.

  PRE: Sightsee Isl while TW conk.

  DEATHWATCH. Lung fld > O2 loss brain content? What did TW know? Sink Doria, vicious O: O2 > -heart > -lung > -O2 > -heart > die > rot. Sad3.

  LIFE GOES ON. Business, scurry calls, empty house, magic change (remember, analyze ++). Property = character, dead prop = ghost.

  FAMILY. Collab obit. 5 children -GW. Comment 0, mute GW. Lost? Reject? Reject father mother brothers sisters along with hetero? Reject past with hetero? Past hetero, down with it? Fam silence, does LW know? PW? Is that why, doubt it, doubt2. Forget it.