A New England Affair

by Steven Carroll

  And it is while she is confirming all of this to herself that a song starts up on the jukebox: the same song Grace has often noted, somebody’s favourite. There is a jingle and a jangle, like all the songs now, and yet when this song starts it sounds strange in her ears, but wondrously so: as if it were at least three hundred years old and written by nobody in particular. Blown in on the wind over a wild field. A community creation, if created by anybody at all. If it were a poem, the author would be Anon. Some songs are like that, sound as though they have always existed. It sounds wondrously strange in her ears, and she is drawn into it. Words that she only partly hears: a line here, a phrase there. Lines that, because she can’t hear them properly, she’s not even sure she hasn’t made up herself. As though not only were they written by nobody in particular and in no particular time, but were also constantly being written and rewritten: a constantly evolving chorus. And in this song the singer is telling an unnamed listener to lay down his tune, his weary tune. As you might tell a soldier to lay down his sword or a poet to lay down his pen. The drummer to lay down his drum; the bugler, his bugle. The time for such things as battles, poems and reveilles is done. Soldier, drummer and poet alike have given their all and can give no more. Lay down your weary sword, your weary sticks, your weary pen. Lay down, lay down. Lay down and rest ye, weary soul. Lay down … And she is so drawn into this strange, this haunting, timeless sound that she barely notices when her cakes are handed to her.

  The chirpy voice of the young woman behind the counter breaks the spell. The young man guiltily lays down his guitar, placing it in its case. The song continues, but Emily is no longer drawn deep into it. The spell is broken. All the same, it stays with her as she leaves the diner, haunting her, following her down the street like a fog on a wintry night.

  Miss Hale might think of Grace as old for her age, but if she were to tell her at this moment, Grace would answer that today is the first of her grown-up life. The difference between one day and another, although not often, can be that dramatic, and Grace is just discovering this. She knocks on Miss Hale’s door. Once, twice. But she’s not in. She keeps busy, Miss Hale. Grace stands at the door, a duffle bag on the ground beside her, and looks around for a sign of her teacher. Nothing. She takes out a letter. No stamp, just Miss Hale’s name on the envelope. For it is a letter that was always meant to be hand delivered. It is a letter she has given much thought to, for it has been a night of much thought and little sleep. And many imagined drafts: a letter of guilt, confession, apology.

  But in the end, she wrote a thank-you letter. The sort one of Miss Hale’s girls might write upon leaving school: part playacting, partly sincere. But mostly true. For she has heard of Miss Hale and her girls, the loyalty of her girls. And she would not like to be remembered as the only one of her girls who ever failed her. So she has written a thank-you letter: not for anything in particular — lessons, advice, conversation — not for any one of these, although she does mention them. No, it is for the experience of having known Miss Hale, an experience, she knows, that will stay with her through the years.

  For Grace, over the last few months, and for all the times she’s laughed at Miss Hale behind her back, has come to think of her as a kind of cry from one age to another. One that she’s only just heard, a realisation that has just crept up on her; and last night in dreams or dreamy half-sleep, Miss Hale tapped her on the shoulder: don’t laugh, she said in that soft, proper way of hers, don’t laugh, but I could have been you, and you me. You and I, we are very similar after all — the difference between us is merely a matter of timing. And your timing is better than mine. She fixed her with her eyes like an older, a distant sister, and then she was gone, her words a cry from what would have been an incomprehensibly distant world had Miss Hale not come along and made it comprehensible. A stifled cry from another world altogether: a world of parlours and lounge rooms overseen by the stern, framed faces of the dead and the living, the keepers of the script as well as of the faith; those stern faces whose power to sway and to cower is not diminished by death but enhanced by it. What must it have been to grow up with them staring at you? Like having God himself watching your every action and reading your every thought. What must it have been? For there was something inside Miss Hale that they, these keepers of the faith, were all afraid of: some impulse to live that was beneath her, beneath them all, something even rough, a bit of an animal, that never got out. Only its cry did. Grace registered, but she didn’t hear properly until last night when she watched Miss Hale listening to the old gramophone and a silent cry seemed to rise up from her with the cigarette smoke: for a stage she never stood on, a song she never sang, a love that fled, a life she never lived. Yesterday Grace was too young to take it all in; today she’s not. All of it incomprehensible, until Miss Hale came along and made it comprehensible. And so, as much as Emily Hale may think of Grace as old for her age, today feels like the first day of Grace’s grown-up life.

  The events of the previous night are like a bad dream now; she, another Grace altogether. What on earth was she doing? But it wasn’t a dream. It was her. And as she taps her chin with the envelope in the bright summer sun, she’s asking herself how old do we have to be before we take responsibility for what we do: ten, twenty, eighty? Ted, she knows, is one of those who never will. And her mother (when was the last time she even heard from her?), Grace is beginning to suspect, another. And this, perhaps, is the difference between yesterday’s Grace and today’s. And as she drops the letter through the flap in the door for the mail, she’s feeling like an Alice who’s come back from her summertime adventures and grown back to her normal size. An older and wiser Alice, who’s done something beastly and promises not to again, and who has come to say thank you, Miss Hale, for making the incomprehensible comprehensible, and hopes it’s not too late.

  But perhaps it is. Grace picks up the duffle bag and ambles across the lawn towards the main street, which leads down to the station and the train to Boston. She is sure Miss Hale, like those keepers of the faith who oversaw her every action and knew her every thought, knows everything. But is also sure she would never report Grace. For apart from shrinking at the thought of inviting the police into her house, she would be reporting one of her girls, and that would reflect badly on both of them. No, she corrects herself with a smile, it would be beneath them.

  On the way to the station she passes the diner and looks through the window. No Ted. That’s good. But in the usual corner where the jukebox sits, three familiar faces sing along to a pop song. I’m a little bit wrong, the song says, you’re … She waves, they wave back. She’s knows it’s goodbye; they don’t. No Ted. That’s good. Ted, in the end, was nothing more or less than a small-town nobody. And as much as she knows her Ted phase has just ended, she’s also asking herself what on earth she was thinking in starting it. How could she? And with a jolt, she realises that she has just passed a Miss Hale judgement on Ted. That he is beneath her, and always was. What did Miss Hale say once? Never marry beneath yourself: I had a friend once … No, her Ted phase was always going to end, and end badly, but not because he was beneath her or she above him. No, they were just they: two people who found something in common for a short while, but were always from different worlds and different times, for, occasionally, the difference between one decade and another can be that dramatic. No, Ted was all right. A rough nut, but all right. She laughs; at least he looked like a poet. And good arms. The right animal — or the wrong one — at the right time, or the wrong one. As the song on the jukebox sang, it was all a little bit right, and a little bit wrong.

  The main street is well behind her now as she crosses onto the Boston-bound platform. Some of the town’s young people are gathered there: either going away or seeing someone off or, possibly, just come to see the train. Summer holidays, she smiles: doesn’t matter where you are, they’re always too long, then suddenly too short. But it’s a smile tinged with sadness, for it is, she knows, a big-girl observation. She spoke to her
father that morning at breakfast. She was a big girl now, she said. Eighteen. He nodded. And this was a small town. He nodded again. She wanted out. To go back to their home in New York. Back to Washington Square. She could look after herself, she really could. And, to her amazement, her father nodded a third time. He believed her. Perhaps it shows, the difference between one day and another. And so here she is. Boston bound; New York by late afternoon. Why not, her father said. Why not, he’d be back in a few weeks himself. And with that, her small-town phase was over. And Ted with it.

  Somewhere out there, beyond the houses, there’s an open field strewn with letters and envelopes, at rest on the ground with no wind now to stir them. And with the image of the letters at rest on that bare field, she’s remembering the moment the previous night when they were all flung from the car window, took flight and floated out into the breezy air, gradually disappearing into the darkness. And with that the sound of Ted’s manic cackle. I love you, I love you, I looooove you, he’d sung. No, not sung. What do you call it, what would her father call it? Crooned. Yes, that’s it. But not the sort of crooning that’ll ever get you on record. No, just the usual singalong crooning that accompanies any jukebox in any diner. I love, I love you, I looooove you …

  The clang-clang of the locomotive breaks into her thoughts as the train enters the station. She takes a quick look at the ragtag collection of kids and travellers around her, takes a final glance back towards the town, then steps on, duffle bag slung over her shoulder. Her heart leaps. Boston bound; New York by late afternoon.

  Epilogue

  There are letters that are lost in the sense that someone put them some place and forgot where, only for them to be discovered a hundred years later and opened once again to a changed world. And there are also letters that are burnt or thrown out with the rubbish, and become lost forever, with no hope of recovery. Emily Hale puts her lost letters in that second category. ‘Chance’ had stepped in where her will had failed. In the end, it was the right ending.

  She can barely remember the drive to Rockport. She has parked the car near the wharf and is now sitting on a bench overlooking the rocks. They are distant, possibly three or four miles away; she’s not sure. The view from the bench is not ideal, but good enough. The Dry Salvages. Les Trois Sauvages. In the late-afternoon light, though, they hardly look savage. There’s no wind. The sea is calm. The water still. The waves lap about the whale hump and those granite teeth surrounding it. She might have offered the letters to the sea and the god of the rocks. They might now be either floating around the rocks or have drifted out to sea or become entrapped in seaweed.

  But it’s not so much the letters she’s contemplating, as she looks out over the water, as the question of the lives we live and the lives we don’t: what comes to pass and what might have come to pass. If your mood had been different on a certain day; if you had not assumed the luxury of time to change this or that in your life and put it in order; if the world had not been so large and Tom not gone into that large world, where the wrong somebody emerged from its largeness far away to change everything so that it would never be the same again.

  She stayed in a kind of contact with Tom till the end, through his writings and his interviews. Especially the interview in which he talked about the mug’s game of writing: a phrase that she’d heard from him long before the world or his young wife did; a phrase carrying with it the confession that the price for what the world calls art and fame was too high, and that he might well have lived another life altogether. That others might be well satisfied with their chosen paths, might not feel that they have wasted their time and messed up their lives for nothing — but not him. And for the last five or ten minutes she has been lost in a world of speculation, contemplating that other life. As if life — his, hers, theirs — were a story with many beginnings and many endings. A constant negotiation. Continually evolving. Or imagined.

  The scene is a large house in some university town. A man returns home after a day’s work, carrying a briefcase full of essays to be marked, lecture notes and notices about staff meetings and the coming event of a visiting distinguished scholar or writer. And although he has been working all day, he bears the face of a man content with life. Even happy. She pours him a drink as he sinks into his usual armchair, the measure of the drink commensurate to the nature of the day. The children know to leave him alone for the next half-hour or so, then he is theirs. For this man was born to have children, numerous children. About ten of them. Although, in her mind, Emily draws the line well before ten. All the same, she’s not exactly sure where. They sit, they talk. At ease with each other; at ease with the world.

  And when the familiar routine of the evening meal is done and the children have scattered to various parts of the house or garden (for it is summer, just as it is now), he retires to his study. But instead of marking the essays in his briefcase, he takes a manuscript from his desk drawer. A book of poems. For he writes poetry in his spare time. Has for years. And this manuscript is the result. He opens the folder and looks at the poems, one after another, always correcting them, always writing or rewriting them. Poems with odd characters that have odd names such as Prufrock, Sweeney and Burbank; street lamps that talk; and Boston ladies of a certain age who serve tea with biscuits as brittle as themselves.

  They will never be published. He knows that. Not because they are not good enough, for he has no idea of their merit. Whether they’re good or not. He’s not even sure what that means or if it matters. No, they will never be published because he will never send them to a publisher. These poems are where he goes in his spare time. His retreat. His other world. And he has no intention of losing them or that other world. Has Emily read them? Possibly, possibly not. She’s not sure about that, sitting on the bench, watching the waves lap about the rocks, while a state away Grace’s train completes its journey and she watches the mellow evening light fall across the wonderland of Manhattan.

  No, if he were ever to give them up to the arbiters and the gods of the reading public, he would lose those spare hours in which he writes and rewrites them. For they are an endless source of pleasure and amusement and constitute that other world that everybody must have, and which he goes to when time allows, occasionally contemplating what would have happened had he pursued the mug’s game of poetry, as he fully intended to as a young man.

  And would it have mattered, anyway? A world without Prufrock? A world in which Prufrock and all his co-creations remained locked away in the drawer of the desk of a philosophy lecturer, professor material, who spends more time correcting essays than writing poems; who is content to sink into an armchair at the end of the day, a Scotch glass of varying quantity in his hand, with the sound of numerous children running through the house and the garden? Would it have really mattered, after all?

  No T.S. Eliot. No public man. Just Tom. Tom Eliot, a philosophy lecturer who once harboured poetic ambitions, but, like most young men, grew out of it. And Emily – an actress who did tread, for a short while, the stages of Boston and New York, but wearied of it – a different young woman in that Cambridge garden all those years before: the world no less of an annoying place but Tom not held responsible for it, her response to his stammered declaration to her confirmation that they were both of like affection and a like mind. Their meeting ending with a pledge: that he would return. That she would wait, and together they would watch unfold the great event of their lives: the sheer, wondrous ordinariness of it all.

  That was the life that never happened. But would it have mattered, after all, if it had? If the man were happy? Not a wreck? And if the Lady were there, not withdrawn?

  The grey-blue sea is turning orange. The rocks, the Dry Salvages, are ghostly in the twilight: the rocks that the young Tom, sailing these waters in a catboat called Elsa, observed time and again. Emily never saw the boat, but he spoke of it often. These rocks, these waters, these headland pines, he took with him, for as much as he may have left these shores, they never left him. A
nd in a way, he never left at all.

  Emily shifts on the bench as the song from that morning in the diner returns to her. Not so much a song, as a ‘thing’. Written by nobody in particular. Or nobody at all. Blown in on the wind. Not written by anybody in particular, and belonging to no particular time. Lay down, Tom. Lay down your song, your pen, your dreaming waves; your lone delight. The effort of a lifetime took everything. You have given more than you ever dreamt, or knew. Lay down your weary body. Your work is done. No worldly hand can touch you now. No cold doubt. Neither censure nor approval can reach you now in the swirling seaweed and lapping waves against the rocks. Lay down, Tom. Lay down.

  Emily stays on the bench as the blue-grey sea turns to orange and black, then she rises and takes the short walk back to her car. Couples, families, children in varying numbers pass around her: the sheer, wondrous ordinariness of it all. And, no doubt, some of them will turn and watch with either curiosity or amusement as she withdraws into her car: the car itself a curiosity. And just to give them all something to think about, when the lead foot of Emily Hale hits the accelerator, her hand comes down on the car horn, emitting a sound that is almost prehistoric, like a cry from one age to another.

  Notes for a Novel

  This is an abridged version of Steven Carroll’s essay ‘Notes for a Novel’, published two years before A New England Affair, in Meanjin, vol. 74, issue 2, 2015

  It was the question of accent that took up most of the conversation at my first meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the editor of the Harvard Review, Christina Thompson — also a former editor of Meanjin.