Telling Time

by Austin Wright

  ATTENTION

  To my wife Lucy and whom it may concern,

  Forgive me.

  You’ll know what I mean by the time you get this. A terrible thing to do, I know that. I feel the cruelty as if I were you. I never thought my life would end like this, I thought it inconceivable. Believe me it wouldn’t if there were an alternative.

  I can’t explain. The reasons are beyond us. Don’t try to guess. It’s not what you think. Think only this: I love you no less. I love you if anything more and you can construe even this as proof, if you’ll give me the credit.

  HENRY WESTERLY: Dialog

  Hey, I found what we’re looking for.

  Show it to Philip.

  William: What is it?

  Family business, William.

  William: Sorry.

  Philip looks at me and hands it to William.

  William after reading. Suicide note?

  What else?

  William after handing it back to Philip. What’s the date?

  Philip: There isn’t any.

  “Provost Top Secret.” Maybe the Provost wrote it.

  Philip: It’s addressed to my wife Lucy.

  William: What’s the Provost got to do with it?

  It’s a screen. Obviously.

  No one says anything.

  The bastard.

  Philip: Don’t say that, Henry.

  He had no right to do a thing like that.

  William: He didn’t do it.

  He changed his mind? What a hypocrite.

  William: He must have been unhappy. Whenever that was.

  He was never unhappy. He was blithe, cheerful, optimistic. Always. Damn it.

  William: Maybe it was that fight as President.

  He loved that fight. He loved being misunderstood.

  William: It would be nice to know when it was written. It could have been many years ago.

  What do you think, Philip? You’re wise and grown up, what do you say?

  Philip: Don’t tell anybody.

  Nobody?

  Philip: We need time to think about it.

  Nuts to that. I expect to tell Melanie.

  Philip: Must you?

  William: I won’t tell Patricia.

  Philip: He wrote it but nothing came of it, thank God. He kept it to himself.

  William: Maybe you should burn it.

  Philip: I’ll take it out of the file.

  You’re going to keep it?

  Philip: Until we decide what to do with it.

  William: Is this what your father wanted you to get rid of?

  Philip: I doubt it.

  It’s his all-purpose escape, if and when the occasion should arise. I wish he hadn’t written it. It’s as bad as if he had done it.

  Philip: No it isn’t. Be quiet, Henry. It’s over now, and he’ll never have to worry again.

  We won’t have to, you mean.

  THOMAS WESTERLY: As read by Philip

  When the others had gone to bed, the Wyoming narrative which Ann had forgotten to take. He read the title —

  WYOMING 1

  —and the description of Penny’s pictures and the narrative about geology and going to Wyoming, and then another chapter before quitting for the night.

  WYOMING 2

  I used to treat my adventure with Penny Young as a joke. The joke was on me, because I was so shy she had to kiss me before I could kiss her. That’s embarrassing to remember, so I made a joke of it. The joke was also on her, because she was engaged to two other men at the same time, though that seemed to amuse more than embarrass her.

  Her word for me was “bashful,” which was the language of the times. In 1941 there had already been a jazz age, a roaring twenties, a depressed thirties, a revolt of youth, but I didn’t know about all that. Like every young man I was obsessed with sex, but I had not read Hemingway or D. H. Lawrence, never heard of Henry Miller, and still believed what my parents taught me. So did my college friends. They wondered and gossiped and made crude jokes to avoid getting laid. Like my friend Robinson, who did not want to lose it sordidly, only in some high exalted way. The West was different, though. In the field she wore a cowboy hat, a cardigan sweater over her plaid shirt, and heavy geological boots. Her intelligent eyes squinted in the sun, and I did not know what to expect in the West.

  On the trip she wore light summer dresses. The trip took four days. I sat next to her in lunch rooms. When I was not driving I rode in back between her and Mimi. The silver dollar rolled, the moon harvested. Clementine, Abdul Abulbul, and the old gray mare. Lake Cayuga and Notre Dame, show me the way to go home. In the back, they held my hands, she and Mimi, their warm palms and fingers. She teased me, but I did not feel humiliated. Later, after Mimi was gone, she told me what she had in common with Mimi. We like to flirt, she said. I thought about flirt, its literal meaning, its possible euphemistic meanings, which frightened me.

  In Sioux City on the second day, hot, in a large empty restaurant for lunch, dark with ceiling fans, the waitress served ice water, for the land was full of fever, the roads afire. I went blind. I could hear the talk, but I couldn’t see. So she washed my forehead and my face, and in a moment I was fine, more than fine, I was full of ecstasy. I did not mention the fierce pain in my groin when I got out of the car to come into the restaurant. That was the result of the erection I had been fighting in the back seat for half the morning. This in turn was the result of her lying in my lap, looking up at me while she chatted. It was monstrous, and I could not keep from poking her, with acute embarrassment wondering if she noticed and wondering how she could fail to though she gave no sign. So that when we finally got out in Sioux City, and stood up on the sidewalk and I turned aside so as not to be seen, my testicles banged against each other like gongs, and I walked bowlegged to reduce the clang, while she stretched herself in the open air and breathed in the sun. That afternoon we went to the movies and continued the trip that night. She thought what had blinded me was the shock of the ice water after the heat. So she said.

  On we went from Sioux City, dropping people along the way, while she sat beside me, leaned on my shoulder, slept on my lap, and my erection struggled not to be noticed. By the next afternoon, as she lay looking up at me, the invitation to kiss was so obvious it could not be mistaken, and still I failed to respond. At a road stop in Indiana, I heard her tell Mimi, making no attempt to conceal it: He’s not human.

  I was human enough to know what she meant. In the car again she lay in my lap, smiled, and closed her eyes. For miles and miles across the historic states of Indiana and Ohio, in the shell of the car on the fast two-lane highways, while Turley drove with Mimi beside him in front, passing cars, watching speed signs, slowing down for towns, stopping for traffic lights and regaining speed across the high flat farm lands, with the distant farmhouses and silos and barns and high tension wires crossing the horizon and railroad tracks accompanied by telephone poles thick with wire, for miles and miles she lay on my lap waiting for me and though I knew it perfectly well, I did not dare. What was I afraid of? That she would say like the woman in the poem, That was not what I meant at all? I was not human and could not believe the world I was in.

  Then it was the third day of the trip, a sunny afternoon and always the wind shrieking by the open windows, tire and engine, a three-day scream of noise. And motion, lurching, braking, accelerating, and I with my head on the soft cushions of her thighs looking up while she leaned over me, grooming me monkey-style, looking for blackheads to pinch, her eyes large, lips half open in her amused smile. I wasn’t human and I could see her reach a decision. Close your eyes, she said. If you close them, I’ll give you a surprise. I closed them and for a moment felt the light double touch of velvet on my lips. I looked at her and she laughed.

  How do you like my surprise?

  Do that again.

  Your turn now.

  So she kissed me and I kissed her, and we kissed each other the rest of that afternoon whenever Turley drove, and all next da
y through Pennsylvania and New Jersey except when I drove. We kissed in the tunnels of the Turnpike and the traffic of New Jersey. We kissed in Sherwood Forest after Turley had gone, before taking her to my family’s house, and again the next morning before delivering her to Greenwich and again six weeks later in the evening when I took her to the play and the following morning before returning her for the last time to Greenwich.

  I took my understanding of kissing from her. Two lips touching two lips, mouths closed, touch light enough to appreciate the satin texture. The first kiss was short, though I learned gradually to stay with it. She said something about kissing more passionately, which I thought meant hold on longer and exert more pressure. On the last morning, by the beach road near Greenwich, I felt a third thing emerge between her two lips, but I did not open to receive it, thinking it an accident.

  So how did we vary the endless miles of lip-to-lip? It was too new to need much variation. She leaned on my shoulder to sleep while the car jounced, her hard little head against my jaw, her silky soft hair. She was always there. When not kissing or sleeping, we talked. She asked me what I was thinking, offering the equivalent of her name for the information, as if my mind was treasure, and she told me about her aunt who wanted her to take the pledge, which she refused to do, not because she wanted to drink or get drunk but because she didn’t want to rule out any experience. And the two boys she was engaged to, a dilemma, pretending to ask me for advice. Jule Foss in Wyoming. Harrison in Amherst. She would marry one of them next year, one or the other. I tried to locate myself in her scheme. What am I, Number Three? Better than Four or Five, anyway.

  She disliked fuss, she disliked artificiality. She didn’t like makeup, she said, nor hairdos or perfume, high heels or stockings. She took care of me, my blackheads. She looked at the bandage where I had sliced my finger against the flange of the trunk while packing the car. It was getting dirty and she told me to come to her room that night and she would change it. But I forgot. At any rate, I didn’t go.

  We let Turley off near Times Square in New York in the late afternoon, I called my parents and asked if they could put her up for the night. We ate in an automat and sat at a table with an old man who asked, Sweethearts? Friends, she said. Then a sentimental movie at the Paramount with a stage show featuring a trio in inky light and a lead singer as if he didn’t care, what a beautiful voice, she said, what a beautiful tenor voice. During the movie, she snuggled and held my hand. When we got home, my parents were waiting up. Afterwards they said what a nice bright intelligent girl.

  I wonder how much of this she remembers. The next morning I took her to Greenwich and delivered her to an aunt in a small house between others on a street up a hill. The aunt was a nice good middle-aged woman.

  PART SEVEN

  WEDNESDAY

  LUCY WESTERLY: Composed in bed

  Here comes the second morning of the new age. Eras we have known: Planting the Tomatoes (Chicago); War and Peace (Chicago Two); Rise and Fall (the Presidential Mansion); Autumn Etcetera (the Island). I don’t want a new age, but who cares what I want?

  Everyone tries to feel sorry for me. Some want me to be upset because we haven’t heard from the University. Why bother, after how they treated you? Some are smug, those who think I’ve joined the group and those too young for it to happen to them. A few wives scared because they know it will. Maybe they’re scared it won’t. Most people treat your death as an event. Generally speaking, I don’t like events.

  Patty came into my room and asked if you and I still had sex. Not anymore, I said. I meant before, she said. I said that was a mystery, wasn’t it? She took that as a negative and lectured me: all the columnists agree there’s no good reason why people even a lot older than you. I asked was she advising me to have an affair and she took offense. All our kids want to know secrets. Knowing secrets makes the world meaningful, that’s what meaning is, a secret disclosed. You and I had just five secrets disclosed, named Philip, Ann, Patricia, Henry, and George.

  Ann ran off to London, she couldn’t wait. All her life she has truncated things, like when she abandoned her degree to take that job. Yet how patient her writing is, so detailed and complete. But I guess it has to be, it’s what she’s paid for.

  They are snooping in your papers. It makes me nervous. Who knows what garbage you left for anybody to read?

  DAVID WESTERLY: To Olga his wife

  Typically, they weren’t expecting me. They put me out to the backyard to sleep, sharing a tent with Charlie, a thing I haven’t done since Mt. Eldenberry, at which time I vowed I would never sleep in a tent again, certainly not with him. But that’s where I’ll be. What a crowd, sunporch full of girls, overflow at the Inn.

  On the plane a regular family reunion, though nobody noticed until we landed. I recognized my cousin Lucy Realm but didn’t greet her since she didn’t recognize me. Is it my beard? Later she said she didn’t say hello because she thought I was snubbing her. There were a couple of familiar-looking teenage kids, and an almost petrified old lady who had to be carried from a wheelchair onto the plane and carried off when we got there. Nobody said hello to anybody. When we landed, Aunt Pat met me, only it wasn’t me she was meeting but the two teenagers, who turned into her kids Angela and Tommy. They’re the brats who used to break up chess games. So Aunt Pat says, David! Nobody told me about you, and Lucy Realm turns to me and says, I was wondering when you’d acknowledge me, and Aunt Pat notices the petrified old lady carried off the plane by four furniture movers and yelps, That looks like Aunt Edna. Why, it is Aunt Edna, while her kids are trying to introduce her to some black guy they met on the plane, whom she almost pointedly refuses to acknowledge, which makes me feel ashamed on her behalf.

  Now I’m trying to write a letter in a corner of the dining room on a piece of my grandmother’s sewing table, ignoring the board games on the dining room table and the talk in the living room and the people cooking in the kitchen and the other people thumping the bedding and cots around upstairs.

  Aunt Edna’s voice like a can opener keeps talking to nobody. I haven’t seen her since Hatteras. She doesn’t remember me. But she gave me a look and said, Every minister needs a wife. Do you have a wife? I explained that I’m a graduate student in English, and she said, I wonder if you know Professor Dingle. He was my father’s favorite teacher a very fine man.

  I am highly susceptible to nostalgia. Thinking of my grandfather brings me back to their presidential mansion in River City, which I remember with a longing I don’t understand. Hard to believe they occupied it only two years. I was fourteen. The big house with its tower and its river view and its front stairs, back stairs, doorways, such that it was never possible to look from one part of the house to another without being thrilled by anticipation. The memory of that house—lost by my grandfather when I was sixteen—recalls similar anticipation in other old things, like the forested cottage where we used to go before my father’s divorce: the clumps of woody islands on the lake, the prospects of rowing among them, the hope of getting lost. And the beach after the divorce before he married Beatrice, enriched in memory by that same anticipation which I underlined above because it’s the essence of all remembered ecstasy (yes) as well as the source of all the poignancy, the unbearable (yes yes, that must be underlined too) sadness in the memory of such ecstasies: the joy of expectation, the hope of fulfillment, embodied concentrated in the very shape of a house, a lake, a shore. Right?

  Nothing in the present can compare. This island is pretty, but it’s just a place, the sunshine is ordinary sunshine, the air is ordinary air, and the time is present tense. What else is there? Sex and love—that’s what the present has to offer, right? I wish you were here.

  If you don’t want to keep this letter, please save it for me. I might want to use some of the writing later.

  PHILIP WESTERLY: Arrangements

  Necessitated by the unexpected arrival of David Westerly and the premature arrival of Edna Forsyth.

  Call the Inn for
additional room tonight.

  Move Patty and William to Inn.

  Move Mother upstairs.

  Force Charles to take David into his tent.

  Also this: Call the University (for Lucy). Ask: Do they know he died? Are they planning to send anyone?

  BEATRICE WESTERLY: What to tell Philip

  How we went for a nature walk when we saw dinner would be late and the bright day had begun to fade. For Betty and Nancy while you folks were having your drinks, and I never expected such a crowd. There was Larry Realm’s Dolores with her baby, could she come along—a nice gesture since we are strangers until now, and I was touched she’d want to know me. Then in the back yard by the rose bush Angela and Tommy Key asked to come. Doubtless they were bored and anything to do is better than nothing. And Greta and Minnie seeing us and never wanting to be left out of anything, suddenly it was a party of seven if you count the baby. I felt like a tour guide. I said I would go slow because this was for Betty and Nancy and the smallest child would set the pace, and soon Greta and Minnie went on ahead though Angela and Tommy and Dolores stayed with me, ambling along politely and sociably at Nancy’s four-year-old speed.

  Our kids have nice cousins. Why would this fourteen year old Tommy Key tag along with a bunch of girls and babies? But he was quiet and courteous, close to us the whole way. We went through the back alley to the rocky beach. Looked among the rocks to check out the small crabs and hermit crabs in their shells. Starfish and schools of minnows. Out past the rotted dock along the sand strip. Plenty of dried seaweed. Tommy had a stick, finding things in the sand, crab shells dried and crusty the color of the sand, and kelp and egg sacs and seaweed coarse like vulgar spinach, and dead fish and dead horseshoe crabs. One dead thing after another, he kept turning them over without saying anything, as if making a demonstration. The dead horseshoe crabs were helmets with a spike, which Angela said was the oldest species on earth, from which Betty recoiled because of the spike and the prickly shell and the package of little legs inside the helmet like a tank, lying on their backs in the sand. Also human residue, egg cartons, picnics of the past, cardboard containers, fragments of red lobster left by people not the tide (I explained) as you could tell by the red shell. I prodded Nancy onward as we went, and the big girls who had sailed ahead came back to see where we were and sailed out of sight again.