A World Elsewhere

by Wayne Johnston

  He intrigued them. They listened when he spoke. He told tales of the hunt, but also spoke of Princeton, of poetry and novels that he quoted from. A writer who had a life worth writing books about. Now he fancied that the passengers to whom his back was turned had made those crossings with him years before and were bemused to see what had become of that paradoxical young man, that urbane sealer who had seemed so doubly promising.

  But Landish rearranged the table and sat beside the boy. All eyes turned towards them. There was a momentary lull in conversation. Then the diners returned their attention to one another, their voices starting up as if in the wake of some awkwardly delivered toast.

  Landish surveyed the room. The tables gleaming like wafers of ice. The pale, perfect clavicles of women in white pearls. The unobtrusive music of the orchestra. The bank of chandeliers that hung in unadmired splendour from the ceiling. The to-and-fro of servants. Their expressionless discretion as they made their rounds with trays upraised on white-gloved hands. The oblivious conviviality and fellowship of wealth.

  He felt more jealous and nostalgic than disapproving. He would rejoin them if he could. He would re-enlist and raise the boy among them starting now so that someday he might forget what living in the attic had been like.

  “Let’s look at Gen of Eve,” Deacon said.

  Landish took the sketch from the carpet bag and displayed it on the floor.

  “You can see it better here than in the attic,” Deacon said.

  “The room is brighter.”

  “Did your mother ever cross the Gulf?”

  “She never left the island.”

  “Do you like Captain Druken’s hat more than Gen of Eve?”

  “No.”

  “If the nobleman took Gen of Eve, would you steal her back?”

  “It wouldn’t be stealing.”

  By the light of the cabin, Landish could see that the sketch was creased in places and in others had begun to fade. When they got to Vanderland, he might ask Van to frame it and cover it in glass if he could not soon afford to have it done himself.

  One evening when they returned to their cabin, both beds were piled with clothes. Dinner jackets, tuxedos, shirts and trousers.

  On one bed, in a tidily arranged but massive heap, were clothes for men for various occasions, and a smaller such heap of clothes for boys lay on the other bed.

  Deacon’s pile was full of the sort of clothes he had seen boys with long hair and dressed like girls wearing on the ship: skirts and short pants and sailor suits and hats with floppy bows.

  Nothing in Landish’s pile came close to fitting him. He went through all the pockets in both piles and found two dollars in coins.

  “Maybe we can have one or two things altered,” he said.

  Landish wondered which of the men, who would soon be looking at him, had once owned the clothes he was wearing. He thought it likely that when Deacon saw other boys on the ship he’d wonder if he was wearing what until recently had been their clothes, but he was wrong. Deacon slept in his dinner jacket.

  The tailor regretted that he couldn’t alter shoes, so both of them had no choice but to wear ill-fitting ones when they left the cabin, Landish’s feet so cramped in his that he had to scuff his way from their cabin to the dining room.

  “An ill-shodden pair we are,” he told the boy, whose shoes came off his feet every few steps.

  A barber came by their cabin, his haircutting kit tucked beneath his arm.

  “The Captain insists, sir,” he said. “Not so much for the boy, but—for you.” Landish, about to shout an objection, looked at Deacon.

  Deacon watched. Landish sat in a chair and the barber put a sheet around him. He snipped big handfuls of hair and threw them on the floor. Landish sneezed when some fell on his face. The barber brushed his nose. Landish said Christ. His head got smaller. His hair was even all over. His throat was red when the barber shaved away the cream. “Just some cologne and we’re done,” the barber said. He spilled some on his hands, then put his hands on Landish’s face and rubbed in a funny way until Landish said Christ again.

  On the promenade deck, he put the boy on his shoulders. Some people complained that to see around or over Landish was difficult enough but impossible when the boy was on his shoulders. Landish felt the boy tighten the grip on his new, shorter hair at the first full view of Bedloe’s Island.

  “What is it?” Deacon asked.

  “A statue like I showed you in the park.”

  “It’s a lot bigger.”

  “Over a hundred feet high,” Landish said. “I’m smaller than her toes.”

  “She has a crown of thorns. Like Jesus on the Cross. Is she Holy Mary?”

  Some of the passengers laughed.

  “More like hollow Mary,” Landish said. “You can walk around inside her. Climb up to the torch and look out across the sea. Imagine sitting on her shoulders.”

  “Who is she?”

  Landish told him she was not a statue of a real person like the statues in the park in St John’s. She was a symbol. She stood for something the way the plus sign stood for something. Liberty. The Statue of Liberty. That meant freedom. No one could boss you around. The passengers in steerage came from places where everyone was bossed around. The passengers in first class thought that no one in America was bossed around. The Golden Queen stood there in defiance of the sea, holding up her torch as if to say that the sea was nowhere deep enough that she would be engulfed by it, that even in its deepest part she would loom above the waves, unmatched, unsmiling, haughtily disdainful of a world whose every inch she was tall enough to see. The Golden Queen didn’t want you to forget that she was there, no matter where you were or where you went.

  “The Statue of Not Being Bossed Around,” Landish said, and a man leaning nearby against the rail laughed. Another city had the Statue of Virtue, he said. Just like this one but with her virtue encased in a chastity belt with a lock the size of a door. Chastity meant running away when you were chased by anyone other than your husband. If you were chased but got away, you were chaste. When you ran as you were being chased, the belt made a clanking noise that brought men of virtue to your rescue. Another city had the Statue of Puberty, which depicted a boy two hundred feet tall looking astonished as he peered into his long johns.

  They were coming at New York from the sea, which smelled like smoke, like St. John’s did when something big burned down. Deacon wished the ship hadn’t reached New York so fast. They were on their way from here to there. The name of there was not New York. They would get “there” from New York by train. Landish told him there were trains that never touched the ground, trains that went over everything—houses, streets, the people and the horses in the streets. They wound in and out like birds among the buildings. “El trains,” he said, but Deacon heard Eel Trains.

  “Imagine living in the attic with a train above your head, people looking down at your roof while you looked up at the ceiling, watching from your shaking bed the faces flashing by outside your window.”

  Landish had changed back into his own clothes and shoes, but Deacon, though he was glad to say good riddance to his shoes, had insisted on disembarking while still dressed in the manner of a diner in first class, ignoring Landish who warned him of the dirty city streets and people who assumed that the pockets of the nicely dressed were full of money.

  “Here we go,” Landish said as they went down the gangplank with the others. At the bottom, he lifted Deacon off his shoulders and put him on the ground. “Dry land again, Deacon,” he said. “See how different it feels. It doesn’t move beneath your feet. Solid land. I feel like jumping up and down, don’t you?”

  Deacon nodded slightly and swallowed the way he did when he was scared.

  “Are you all right?” Landish said.

  Deacon held out his arms and Landish picked him up and put him back on his shoulders. Deacon sagged to one side.

  “Whoa, there,” Landish said, looking up into his eyes. “Are you sure you’r
e all right?”

  Deacon nodded again.

  “It’s the excitement of a new place,” Landish said.

  Deacon thought of the big dot on the map that stood for New York. He felt sorry for St. John’s. He wished he and Landish were still there. He couldn’t understand why Landish liked New York in spite of having seen the Queen nine times. He wished Landish had never gone to Princeton-on-the-Mainland. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have met the friend he had written to, the friend who lived in not–St. John’s and sent them first-class tickets to take them away to Vanderland.

  It would have been an easy walk to the concourse if not for Deacon and the carpet bags. Landish had walked the route several times unemcumbered, when his things had been forwarded from the ship to the train for Princeton, courtesy of Van. They were taking the Vanderluyden private train, the 630 Express it was called, after the street number of Van’s house on Fifth Avenue.

  Deacon clung to the collar of Landish’s coat. It looked like people were on their way to Mass in a thousand churches all at once. They walked fast, as if they were late, as if worried that the doors would soon be locked. Landish and Deacon tried to hurry but everyone got in each other’s way, and they didn’t all make room for Landish despite his size. He had to zigzag and turn sideways, moving around so much it made Deacon giddy. Deacon couldn’t help trying to look at everything and that made him more giddy. He closed his eyes and that made it even worse. He mustn’t throw up. All the way to here on the ship and he didn’t get seasick, but now—

  Landish twisted his head to look back and up at Deacon. He was pale and a film of sweat covered his face. His eyes were barely open and he was crying.

  “DEACON?”

  “How far?” Deacon said.

  The boy was vasted. Gidaddled. Colossalized.

  “Not far. Nearly there. You’ll feel better soon. Hang on tight.”

  Deacon on his shoulders, one carpet bag in each hand, Landish tried to run. They were conspicuous—the very large man with the small child on his shoulders, slipping sideways and clutching his hair—even in these streets where sights that elsewhere would catch the eye of everyone were commonplace.

  Landish knew he would be helpless if someone made a grab for their luggage. He wished he had insisted that Deacon not wear his ship clothes on the street. He should have packed them while the boy was sleeping and left him with no choice but to wear the rags that matched his own. They were walking through crowds awash with men who had never seen more likely marks and would not be put off by his size or their being shod like beggars or toting luggage they would assume had been acquired in the guileless hope that it would seem unpromising to thieves. In the eyes of oncoming walkers and of men in top hats who peered at him from passing cabs, he saw only flickers of curiosity and passing looks of pity for the boy in whose fate it would never have occurred to them to intervene.

  Landish stopped, put down the carpet bags and reached back to feel the boy’s forehead. He was feverish.

  She was onrushing, an eel with the head of a fish and the body of a snake. He dreamt of trains propelled through the waves by fin-like wings that flapped slowly like those of massive birds. He was underwater in a whale with rows of windows and chatty passengers who milled about with glasses in their hands.

  Not far above the city, giant eels with wheels slid about on railway tracks while people pointed up at them and screamed.

  Deacon let go of Landish’s hair and wound up hanging back to back with him, Landish holding one of his feet in each hand. Deacon sometimes did this just for fun, looking upside down at whatever was behind him, holding his hat in place. Then he would swing back up into his seat, grabbing the sides of Landish’s trousers and shirt.

  “Hold on to your hat,” Landish said, but this time Deacon didn’t try to climb back up, so Landish swung him slowly round, holding Deacon by his ankles.

  Deacon’s hat was gone, his hair and arms hanging limply. Using his knee, Landish hoisted him up and slung him over his shoulder as he had seen women do with bawling children.

  He worried that someone might demand that he identify and explain himself, accuse him of mistreating Deacon, challenge him to prove that the boy was in his rightful care, that he meant him no harm and was able to take care of him.

  He needed somewhere to sit so he could let go of the carpet bags and get a good look at the boy. But he didn’t want to drape a lifeless-looking child across his lap and try right there on the sidewalk to revive him, didn’t want to draw more attention to them than he had already, a boy in a dinner jacket that people would assume was stolen, unless they thought the boy was kidnapped. He could only imagine how they would gape at a boy laid across the lap of a man who looked like Landish, the gentlest ministrations of whose massive hands might seem suspicious.

  Van’s hatred of Manhattan had never inclined Landish to hate it. He’d always fancied that he could adjust to the size and pace of the city, flourish here as he’d believed he would not in Carolina. But now he saw that no one looked as enlivened as he felt. The sheer scale of everything, the frenzied intent of it, the number of people, the traffic-jammed streets, the near-stampede of horses, the voices that were all pitched to the same excited, breathless level as if the subject of every conversation was Manhattan—it was too much for many. Something had sprung into being here that no force on earth could stand against. And he’d had no choice but to bring the boy right into the middle of it.

  Landish blustered through the teeming concourse of the train station, more encumbered by luggage than the porters who ignored him. The boy began to stir, perhaps roused by the suddenly amplified sounds of footsteps, the ringing din of echoes that augured their departure to a place that wasn’t home or anywhere they had ever been before.

  He sat near the wall of the first-class waiting room and held the boy against his chest until he felt his heart beat as if it were his own, his hands spanning his back from shoulder to shoulder, his little finger thicker than the boy’s spine, a tiny cage of cartilage so delicate that he might crush it with the slightest pressure of his palm.

  Deacon woke, his ear popping when he pulled it away from Landish’s chest. Men were sitting on plush chairs, which they had formed into a circle. They were drinking and smoking like the men did on the ship. The air was blue with smoke from cigars and cigarettes. Chandeliers hung above them, like on the ship. Other men strolled about, their hands behind their backs, or with arms folded like Landish folded his when he was worried. Everyone talked low like people did in church.

  Opposite Deacon, an old man, cane planted in front of his closed knees, kept adjusting a hat that had no need of adjustment.

  “Where?” Deacon whispered.

  “We’re back in first class, Deacon,” Landish said. “This is the men’s waiting room. Everyone is waiting for the train. It won’t be long.”

  Deacon said, “I fell asleep.”

  “That’s all right. I could put you in the luggage if I had to.”

  Deacon looked around again. A man with a hat on his lap sitting beneath the large clock on the wall was so sound asleep that his glasses had slipped off one ear and were hanging at a slant across his nose. He saw that he was the only boy, the only child. The others must be in the women’s waiting room.

  Then he coughed for so long and so loudly that some of the men moved further away from him. When Landish asked him how he was, he told him he would like some lemonade. Landish thought of asking him if he could wait till they were on the train, where everything was free, but he saw the boy looking thirstily at the trays of glasses going by and pictured him trying to hold out until the train, which might be hours late, arrived. So he went to the bar and with Van’s expense money bought a glass of lemonade with sugar-dusted cherries on the rim. He knew the boy would suck the sugar from the cherries while the lemonade grew warm, so he picked them off and held them in his hand.

  Deacon took the glass from Landish in both hands. He wanted to wait until he couldn’t stand to look f
orward to it anymore, but Landish told him he should drink it now because the melting frost was dripping from his fingers and the glass would soon be hard to hold. So he put his face above the glass, took the straw between his lips and began to drink. He knew that he would spoil it if he coughed, so he held his breath, drinking with his eyes closed until he had to pull away, gasping in a way that felt as good as drinking lemonade, his chest heaving like it did when he shovelled snow too fast.

  He knew he might spoil it even worse if he got sick. He felt better when he burped, which he couldn’t help doing in the all-at-once way that he knew was not polite. Landish moved his hand in circles on his back to coax up any more that might be there, to assure him he was undeserving of the looks he was getting from the others in the waiting room, men who were not accustomed to the presence among them of a child of seven or a man who was dressed like Landish.

  “Where is the boy’s mother?” asked the man beneath the clock. Landish said she was in a place where no one was so rude as to inquire where the mother of a belching boy might be.

  “I should have said ‘excuse me,’ ” Deacon said, but Landish said it was the man who should have said it before interrupting the boy’s post-guzzle contemplation of the rug.

  Now all the men were looking at them as if, having thought that to object to their presence wasn’t worth their bother, they had changed their minds.

  “You should be waiting for the train with others like yourselves,” a young man said, though his tone was more instructive than otherwise. Perhaps he thought them guilty of nothing more than making a mistake.

  “We have first-class tickets,” Landish said. He spoke about the ship. “The clothes that I was given do not fit me, and the clothes the boy was given do not suit him.” Then he said the name of the place where they were going and that of the man who wrote the letter that was in his pocket. He didn’t roar the name as he had when they were on the ship, but calmly said it would have been unkind of them to refuse an invitation from a man like Padgett Vanderluyden, who had been his friend at Princeton.