A High New House

by Thomas Williams

  Another hush as a bomber passed. The same one, having missed its approach again? Funny how, when one part of sense was removed, all seemed to grow gray and somehow rigid. A tableau in the cool basement office: the books in green metal bookcases, the fluorescent ceiling light, the buff stucco walls, Lubie bent too closely over his desk. In the hiatus Mr. Morrow’s face for once was at rest—strange how serious it was, that ordinary young face.

  At four he got rid of his last student, picked up his mail—mostly brochures from textbook publishers, which he dropped into a wastebasket provided for that purpose—and walked out of the building into a clear fall day. The campus was kept up beautifully; as he walked to the parking lot, past the old Life-science building with all its ivy, its miniature crenelated towers just surmounting the green, he looked across the lawns for rock maples like his own. The elms, poor things, were not all in such good shape. Near the parking lot several of them looked definitely seedy, and each had an ominous little sign, about as large as a playing card, tacked to its trunk above a child’s reach: DUTCH ELM DISEASE SUSPECT. Wilkins, in geology, had lost the three beautiful trees in front of his house, and now they were down dismembered along the street, like big gray sewer pipes workmen had strewn along the path of the trench they would later come to dig.

  Once, too, New England had been beautiful with chestnut trees. In back of the house one day as he’d followed an old pasture road completely brushed in between its unmended stone walls, he’d actually found a still-living chestnut tree, about six feet high. He’d first been puzzled as to what it was, and then actually ran back for the tree book. What luck! he’d thought then, to own the land upon which the chestnut tree came gloriously back to life! But then he found that this often

  happened, and that the young sapling was really a shoot from an ancient blighted tree, and its disease would sadistically let it grow to a certain height, even blossom once or twice, then strike it dead; this over and over again through these modern years.

  Now, as he got into his old car, he thought, What a way to live! But it was not his way. There were winners and there were losers—like that fellow Childress, in history, who had committed suicide last year, who knew why?—a loser.

  It was luck, he knew. He’d been in his life close enough to see the dark alternatives, leaned like any man close enough to that mirror in which one sees too much of oneself. But we are proud of our luck, he thought, and probably somehow we deserve to be. He took the river road toward his beautiful lucky house, and his wife. Tonight he wouldn’t have a drink before dinner, and afterwards there would be the study, and the satisfying immaculate notes he had made last month at the Widener, on 3x5 cards; an article defending his thesis about the missing couplet between lines 172 and 176 of The Monk’s Prologue. There was what he could only think of as a cleanliness about such work. The light upon his slim-legged desk would seem the very light of mind, and in the dark shelves around the room he would almost hear the lucid voices of his fellow scholars coming from their books, telling him that accuracy and care was all, and that time was on the side of truth, and that even the smallest spark of truth about the smallest conceit in literature was worth far more than all the slobbish bombast that made the world precarious each day.

  Lubie would no doubt consider all this pretty cold—really—but of course everybody had a good public word for scholarship, even Lubie. And Lubie had better get his dissertation on the way, too, if he wanted to stay very long.

  The clouds were high—pillars of clouds—but hid no dark folds in their white sides. The sky between their tall columns was that sheer pure blue seen only in New England. The trees were beginning to turn, white birch to go pale yellow, maples trying out colors here and there on leaves on the ends of branches; yellow, red, speckled like apples. He would stop on the low hill above the river; from one place on the road he could look down diagonally across Forrest Sleeper’s field and see his house, so right, so solid yet delicate in its structure, and the two great rock maples turning iron red to frame it. White against dull red and green—especially that paler, sweet green of lawn, and perhaps Alice would be sitting at the wrought-iron table, waiting for him.

  He did stop, and the vista of the field and trees and house did not disappoint him. As soon as the clapboards were paid for he would try to have the field in back of the house cleared. Then a new dimension would be added to this view, and the house would look even more authentic when it dominated a smooth field surrounded by visible stone walls.

  Alice was not on the lawn. He drove into the garage—the one remaining shed of a whole series that had led from the house to the long-fallen barn—not so much because the car needed to be in, but because he didn’t like to see such an ugly thing sitting beside the house. He even resented the airplanes that flew over it, as one did now, high up; they threatened, with their speed and excitement, that other excitement of solitude and beauty he and Alice had re-created here. As the wavelike sound of the airplane passed, and the vapor trail grew loopy and ragged in the winds of that altitude, a white-throated sparrow gave its clear five-noted call from an old apple tree.

  He came around to the front of the house, to look once before going in—the very good front door and above it the graceful fanlight—and in the window of the unfinished upstairs bedroom he saw what at first looked to be a ghost, beckoning to him; it was Alice, with plaster on her cheeks, wearing a flannel shirt faded to the color of old newspaper. She held her white hands out to him, showing him that she couldn’t touch anything with them, and beckoned him upstairs.

  It was their smallest bedroom, and it had never been finished in all the years of the house. Alice had put on the rough lath—it was a point with her not to use the easier metal—and was doing it all herself.

  “Look!” she said as he came into the little room. The walls were smooth white, and she had been cleaning off her makeshift plasterer’s table. “I wanted it all cleaned up before you got home. And me, too, but now you can wash my back.” She began to shake her arms out of the flannel shirt. He pulled it off the rest of the way.

  “Just let it fall. Get the hook on my bra.”

  He did, and it fell. Her hair was fastened with a series of rubber bands, and she took her little finger and snapped them off, then shook her hair loose.

  “God, I’m filthy.” She stepped out of her shorts and pants and stood there in her tennis shoes, looking at the undersides of her arms. He looked, and saw the little shadings of dust, and the lines—deltas where sweat had organized the dirt. She looked very grimy and very young standing flatfooted and naked in her tennis shoes. Suddenly she realized that he was looking at her that closely, and she turned toward him blushing through the plaster that had dried her cheeks so that they looked powdered. She still had her summer’s tan; and the white slash across her small breasts, the other across her hips and belly, almost looked like clothes of some kind. He had a dull surge of desire for her, and put his hands on her hips. She stood still, her hands back at her sides so that they wouldn’t touch his clothes.

  “You make a drink, then come up and wash my back,” she said.

  “OK.” He turned away.

  “Wait,” she said. “Put out your hand.”

  He did.

  “Higher.”

  Carefully she came up to him and moved her skin across the backs of his fingers.

  “How do you do?” he said. They had been married ten years and his voice was a little shaky. Christ almighty, he thought happily. He went down the narrow back stairs that led, with one sharp right angle, to the kitchen. The steps were worn round, with a dip in the middle—water would have been at home running down these steps—and he wondered how many people had run up or down them full of this sweet passion. He had a kind of communion with them—all the wives and husbands who had had such moments as this, when there were no half-buried arguments, no tensions at all to come between two people.

  He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, put his arms against the frame of the open d
oor and leaned out into the kitchen. The ghosts of those momentarily happy people ran like clouds through his body.

  Alice liked martinis, so he took the time to crush the ice and stir up a couple—no, three; he would have one too, and sit on the toilet seat as he drank it. One wouldn’t matter this far away from dinner. He carried the pitcher and glasses up to the bathroom, the bottle of Spanish olives in his jacket pocket. She was on her knees, her hair thrown forward as she rinsed it under the faucet.

  “What a dignified position,” he said, and she laughed through the falling water.

  “There.” She sat back, letting the hot water continue to run slowly into the steaming tub. He poured the martinis and she handed him in return a soapy washcloth. Her muscular back was smooth under his hand; it was already clean, it seemed to him as the water gleamed upon her tanned skin and down across the white band where her halter had crossed it. It was warm in the steamy room, and he dried his hand so that he could take off his jacket.

  “You’re not through already?” she asked, disappointed. She loved to have her back rubbed.

  “It’s clean,” he said.

  “Oh, no, it isn’t. I can tell. You’ve got to scrub harder than that to get the real grime out.”

  “I know it,” he said. He put soap on his hands and slid them up and down and around, following muscles, reaching around to where she was soft. He wondered how something so random as the human body, with its joints and knees and pitplaces, could be so exciting, could call out so clearly to another. He draped the washcloth over her shoulder and put his hand on her breast. She turned her head and they looked so seriously into each other’s eyes. Calm, blue, her eyes looked straight into his for a long time. How they knew each other.

  The telephone began to ring downstairs. They both counted the rings, and it was theirs. He went down the wider front stairs this time, and swore; telephones always irritated him a little anyway.

  It was Jackson, the department chairman.

  “Hello, Bob,” Jackson said in his breathy, deceptive voice. He always sounded as if he were being calm in an emergency. He was a heavy, wide man who looked much like a bullfrog, and everybody liked him—at least publicly. “Jackson always stands up for you, by God,” was the usual departmental remark about him.

  “Bob, Geoffrey’s child is ill, and he can’t make his extension class, and I wondered if you could take it?” Breath kept coming after the question, a sigh that kept on until he got an answer.

  “Sure, Jack.”

  “It’s at seven, at the airbase. English One—you know. I’ll call and let them know so they’ll let you in. Be sure to have your faculty card, though. Geoffrey says they’re on Chapter Six of Watt. OK, Bob?”

  “OK.” Jackson thanked him and hung up. God damn it, he thought; then, well, now he could have another martini, anyway.

  Alice was out of the tub, drying her hair.

  “What was it?”

  “I have to teach Geoff Lubie’s extension class at the airbase. One of his kids is sick.”

  She turned seriously. “Which one? What’s the matter?”

  “God, I didn’t ask. You know how they’re always worried over nothing.”

  “I’ll call and find out if there’s anything I can do. Why didn’t you ask?” She was too worried, it seemed to him, as though she were suddenly a little out of reach.

  “Well,” he said, “it was all business—that was Jackson who called, you know.”

  “Oh,” she said thoughtfully.

  He held out the martini pitcher. “You want the last wet one? I’m going to make some more, now. I won’t get any work done anyway—the damn class is from seven till eight-thirty.”

  “Make some fresh ones. I’ll call Nora and get supper ready.”

  He was in the kitchen when she finished talking to Nora Lubie.

  “Billy drank a bottle of Mercurochrome.”

  “For Christ’s sake. Isn’t he a little old for that sort of thing?”

  “Geoff thinks he wanted to commit suicide.”

  “Of course.”

  “You can see why they’re worried, though.”

  “Suicide’s pretty common in the five-year-old group.”

  “I don’t think that’s funny at all.”

  “Well, the kid’s OK, isn’t he? I mean physically?”

  “Nora said Geoff’s practically out of his mind. You’re going to drop me off on the way to the airbase. Anyway he wants to show you where they are in the textbook.”

  He took his martini and walked rather aimlessly through the dining room and into his study. Alice banged a pan and called from the kitchen, “Don’t you want to talk to me?”

  “Just looking around,” he called back. He turned on his desk lamp. There was a fire all set in the fireplace—Alice had done that for him—with a little tab of newspaper sticking out at the bottom for him to light. The desk was so inviting, the article on the missing couplet so clear in his mind (if, after two martinis, his mind was clear). To hell with it. He finished the martini and ate the olive. Extension classes were fairly interesting—he’d taught one the year before, but on campus. And that class had paid for the installation of the plumbing and septic tank. Quickly he went over his classes for the next day: Chaucer was all right, and in his three freshman English sections it was time for an in-class theme. Boring to sit for three fifty-minute periods, and he’d never managed to be able to do much but sit, at those institutional desks at the heads of the rooms, and look at the students who labored so visibly and then usually produced one or two entirely repetitious paragraphs. Well, so much for tomorrow. The bad thing was that he must face a boring day without the satisfaction of having done the work he’d planned. He turned out the lamp and went back to the kitchen.

  “Lucky I’d planned to have chili,” Alice said.

  “I smelled it when I came in and I thought it was spaghetti,” he said. “Want another martini?”

  “We’ll divide it. What time is it?”

  “Six.”

  “How long will it take to get to the airbase?”

  “Not too long to get there, but I don’t know how long I’ll have to fart around at the gate and all that. Geoff told me they have a whole city in there—maybe I’ll have trouble finding the school.” He could see himself driving out on a runway and getting mashed by one of those monstrous airplanes.

  “Why would a five-year-old want to commit suicide?” Alice said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!”

  “Well, Billy would know better than to drink Mercurochrome. He’s not a stupid little boy.”

  “Probably mad at his mother or something. Kids don’t think very far ahead, do they?” He thought, privately, that Alice was a fool to spend the evening with Nora Lubie, whose whole fund of useful knowledge, it seemed to him, came from Dr. Spock. Saint Spock. “Spock says,” was her introduction to almost any sentence. At first he’d thought perhaps she was taking a kind of cruel pleasure in talking solely about children in front of Alice, but finally he came to believe that children were absolutely all she had to talk about. Anyway, Alice seemed to enjoy it—maybe a touch of masochism there. He and Alice didn’t talk much about children any more—just that vague possibility of adoption, maybe on his sabbatical. They were in for a baby with the state welfare department, but that was an awfully long shot.

  “You’d be worried if it was your child,” Alice said as she set a bowl of chili and a salad at his place.

  “I suppose I would.” As usual this kind of discussion scared him a little. What could he do about it? They’d both been to the Yale Clinic, and they were both fertile as hell, as far as the doctors knew. He had enough live sperm in him to populate Mysore, India, and Alice was perfectly regular in every way, too. But she was thiry-five, now; what had happened to the billions of sperm he must have planted in her, and that she had welcomed so lovingly and hopefully? Suddenly he got up from the table, came up behind her as she dished up her chili, and put his arms around her. “Why?” she s
aid.

  “ ‘Cause I love you, that’s why, you sterile old hag.”

  “Do you think that’s why I want to go?” she said in a low, nervous voice.

  Yes, he thought, and again he was frightened. But he said, “I don’t know. You like to help people. As a matter of fact I feel a little fatherly toward Geoff and Nora myself. They look so much like losers.”

  “But we don’t?” Alice said.

  Her hair smelled so clean. He put his face into it, and it was smooth as quicksilver, a mist—no, a field of silky grass, but golden.

  “We’d better eat,” she said. “It’s getting late.”

  He left Alice off at the Lubies’. Geoff had met them on the stairs, babbling about the brutality of the stomach pump—they hadn’t had time to go to a specialist this time—and in the end he hadn’t thought to tell Robert what the assignment had been in Watt. Geoff was in no condition to teach, that was certain, unless it might be to give an impassioned lecture about the brutality of a mechanical age. But that might not go over too well at the air base.

  Soon he came upon the broader highways that led to the base, past yellow signs that were always rather startling:

  LOW FLYING AIRCRAFT

  and it was as though he’d left New England altogether. The land was flat here, and the arrangements of fields and trees and the thousand lights of the low apartment buildings, schools, and administrative blocks that could be seen from the bypasses reminded him of the wartime army camps he’d spent time in. Flat distance seemed the most characteristic thing about them all. But here thick-legged red-and-white-checked towers, round on top as ice cream cones, stood out in floodlight, and away back inside somewhere were the landing strips, miles long, and the hangars, and presumably storage places for hydrogen bombs. At the main gate was a large billboard: