At the main-line stop, although we were well ahead of time, the red signal was already blinking. The old huddle of sheds and lean-to’s, once piled against each other like domino counters, had long since been cleared away, leaving the ancient ticket office with its iron-rib-banded eaves, although one still had to buy one’s ticket elsewhere. There was no platform; we would still have to cross to the track from the cindery siding on which a few other travelers were already standing, well back from the huge rush of air that would come with the train. The train stopped regularly now; there were eighteen thousand people in Charlotte and Denoyeville, and more coming. But Tuscana still had the main line.
A light summer rain began falling, welcome on the cheek, smelling of the reviving grass. Here and there a traveler lifted his face to it, regarded the sky and spoke of the night, that after such a rain might be clear. Voices were single in note but joined in portent, as they are in the open air and when speaking of weather. A bit of crushed bird’s egg lay pale green in the cinders near my shoe, and I felt the foolish softness, weak happiness of someone long housebound who is admitted again to the range of the seasons, under whose passing in his absence people have maintained themselves like sturdy blooms. From a distance a man wearing a hat and carrying a briefcase waved to my uncle, who nodded back, fumbling at his collar. He had lost formality, even neatness, in his nursing; he had come out without a tie, and his shirt collar was soiled. Between its limp tips his throat seemed newly meager, and the underline of the chin descended in that aging tautness so particularly human when, as with my uncle, the jawbone kept its youth. Far off, communicated not yet through the ground or any shimmer in the air, but in the hardening curve of the group waiting, we sensed the oncoming train.
My uncle took out his watch. “Four minutes yet.” He held the watch overlong, warmed it in his hand, hesitated, ran his thumb over the chain, before he slipped it back in his vest pocket. Sometimes I fancy now that he meant to give it to me, tried to, failed. “We’d have had time for a short one,” he said. “For luck. I had the bottle out … but I forgot it.” Forgetting that Mrs. Jebb had come over to stay in the house while we were gone, he had run back, just as we were leaving, to answer the tinkle of my mother’s bell. “Well … God bless,” he said, and gave me his hand.
“When we came home that day—” I said. “You were home before your time, before us. And you had the bottle out that day.” It was never out, as we both knew, except for celebration.
“Ah … yes.” Although the track was still quiet, his answer was almost inaudible. “You will not have heard.” Red tinged his cheek. “Blankenship has stepped down.”
The train shuddered in then. We fell back in the smacked air. He is head foreman then at last, I thought, as I lugged my bag up the iron steps to the coach car. I remembered the bottle and pushed-back chair in the sitting-room window, on my aunt’s table the whisky’s slopped ring. Blankenship has stepped down. He had had it ready to greet her with when we greeted him with her. I turned to catch sight of him at the window and found him behind me. He had followed me into the car.
“She will want news of you,” he said hurriedly.
I nodded without speaking.
“She will want to write to you … after a while. But at first, you understand, I shall have to do it for her.” He coughed. “Tell me then—under what name?”
I looked down at the seat, at my bag. “The new one.”
“Yes, of course. But I must not ask her. What is it?”
I stared, then gave it to him. Why did I not know him before, I thought? Neither will he speak, neither will he press others to.
He repeated it, spelled it out, tested it. “Pierre Goodman,” he said, not a hint on his face, and nodded. This was the first time I had heard it spoken aloud outside the court. It half felt as if I received it from him, as if in the moment of parting he for better or worse dubbed me with it. The train lurched and he turned. I followed him to the end of the car. There was something I ought to say, but I had no idea of what it was. For a minute, while the train paused again, he clung to the iron handhold of the coach. “Well, God bless,” he said, and swung himself down.
The train grooved a few yards down the track and stopped again. Other travelers in the car were leaning out of their windows in the superstitious concentration of the leaver, exchanging with their people on the siding the nods and smiles with which each reassured each that he would be brooded upon until perspective bodily removed him, that not until then would either lean back, even in sorrow secretly relieved. I leaned out with them, though not as far as the rest. He was still standing there among the others, our opposites back there on the cinder path, but his face was hidden by a taller man. Timidly, half hoping I too was hidden, I waved. The tall man moved aside. An exclamation, some formless syllable, came from me, one of those sounds, mysterious to their makers, that unnerve us with the sudden sense of our still uncalculated selves. But the distance was too far for speech, and I saw that my uncle was not looking at me. He had remained, perhaps out of that inflexible, median courtesy of his that would not allow even the offender to leave town unspeeded, but he was looking, not idly, at others around him who, absorbed in their ave’s, were not noticing him. It seemed to me that his face that could not change had changed. Distance, much more swiftly than I had expected, was showing me its alchemy, teaching me how little apart one needed to move from a man. I thought of the map of the world, of those nervously dotted lines of communication between two places whose simultaneity no speed could outwit, of how two men, dotted next to each other, were not unlike these; and for the first time in my young life I ascended to that grim cliché from whose height all philosophers, lovers, friends before me had gazed down. For the first time since I did not know when (since those listening afternoons with Johnny, since that last day when Frau Goodman had refused me what I could not even remember, since I had been born, perhaps), I thought of it not as my safety but as my prison—that all of us, man beside man, friend beside friend, should so incurably coexist.
The train moved again, pulling me backward, forward, away. I could see my uncle clearly. He was looking at me now. Surely his face had changed. He was waving at me. Good-by. I leaned out with the rest, as far as the rest, but in the moment that I might have, I forgot to wave. For in the moment that the train, gathering speed, suddenly bore me away with a centrifugal lurching, I had recognized him. Then, like a pinpoint scooped from behind, he vanished, a man of whom I could have asked, whom I could have trusted never to ask—the confidant I could have had, the last man on earth to say “Listen …”
A mile or two ahead we stopped again. I had had no time to do more than sit stiffly within my new name, revelation, the way a boy sits in a new set of clothes, half reluctant to disturb or discover the unfamiliar seams of his housing. Then the lights went on and the two conductors came down the aisle in their grave, ticket-taking antiphonal, one repeating the passenger’s destination to the other, the other sticking the proper replacement ticket up above.
“No, ma’am,” I heard the forward one say, “dining car stays on until Memphis. Just taking coal on here.” Then they came to me. “New York,” said the one in front to the one behind, scrutinized my sheaf of tickets, tore off one and returned it, while his aide placed a long red ticket in the slit before me. “Forward cars only going past Memphis,” said the first one. “Pretty crowded up ahead now, though. You better off shifting when we get there.” Then they passed on, the talker and his mute, carrying on the craft-ceremony that from then on in all the travel-years ahead never failed to confound and amuse me—to require two of them, and for such solemnity, there surely must be more to what they did than met the eye.
I watched them in the first of these fascinated puzzlements; the only other great train I had been on had been the one that must have carried us from Montreal to wherever we had made connections for Tuscana, and all that belonged to that period of hearsay, which I had never yet been able to recall. At the end of the coach
they turned and came back. This was the last car. I felt a thrill of confirmation that it should be; in my reveries “leaving” had always begun just that way. This was my luck beginning, I told myself, my peculiar, personal brand of luck, and indeed it was—the chance, fledgling move of an imagination unorthodox but always earthbound to the possible, as objectively chill to itself as to others, that in foreshadowing events in its way half compelled them. I walked to the rear of the coach and let myself out into the open, onto the short platform of what in my ignorance I thought of as the “observation car.” We were carrying no freight; there was no caboose. I could look back unobstructed. This was the way I had always imagined leaving—looking back from the observation car of my first great train.
Behind me the lights went out in the coach and all along the train, blotted out now to a dark serpentine curving far ahead and to the right, between the end where I stood and the engine, uglily knobbed and pygmy-attended, appearing now and again in occasional flashes of red and white, like a magic-lantern slide of a hippo being fed and watered. I knew where we were now, although since the place was approachable otherwise only by roads under construction, I had never seen it. We were in the uncompleted railroad yard that had laid waste a wide territory behind the dams—holdings of farmers who had for years plumed themselves on their safe escape from the dams, then had scattered agitatedly before the maw of the dragon called “eminent domain,” then had settled back fatly to advising less fortunate ones to sell out now, even if they had to sell off to niggers, and join them in their newly industrialized lives. The yard was to be an enormous catch basin for the toppling traffic of freight sluiced in because of the dam. It was the first such expansion of the railroad in the memory of any local ancient, in this queer new kind of pioneering in which steam no longer opened up a country but followed humbly after more demonic powers, in which townsmen who had moribund rail stock certificates in their bureaus raised their heads again at the thought that the trains might still be the land-language of the nation, and no one, under quiet skies where a steel wing still drew upturned faces, could conceive that the next language to die for us might be the land. For the change, plain to be seen now by everyone, bulldozed into the geography, energized into the pocket, was still thought to be only in the terrain; those riparian banks, convoluted to the heavens, edged by dainty lines of light that outshone day and at night made them look like impenetrably risen Atlantises of the air, were still the land.
We must have remained there for as much as twenty minutes. Trainmen ran past us with the special lanterns that as a boy I had always wanted to examine, hold in my own hand. Here and there along sets of track that fanned in every direction, others probed and swabbed at the undercarriages of coaches strewn like huge building blocks between drums of wire, concrete mixers covered for the night, and holes that sent up the strong troll-smell of freshly excavated earth. Farther back, away from the incessant shunting of the front lines, in the dead, starlit aisles of the freight cars, yardsmen slunk suddenly from them like huntsmen from blinds and stooped over cupped cigarettes, over their shoulders the long, faded mottoes on the car sides streaming almost as if heard, only silence needed to melt their Munchausen horns. I watched, spread below me the vast, smudged final impression of a Biblical woodcut in which I, raised and imperially hidden on my platform, was like the presence concealed in the cloud. “Hotbox,” said one of two men going past me with lanterns, and I envied them the pygmy lore of their black trade and wished to penetrate it, as in the cobbler’s shop I had sometimes wished my fingers tanned or emeried close to his tallowy secrets, or on waterfronts would one day wander past the ship chandlers and wish myself initiate to the creakings and joists of the sea. Yet it was not any of these simple apprenticeships I wanted; what was it I would ask for if, as in the Bible pictures, there were an angelic being, its cheek puffed with prophecy, in the upper right-hand corner of the heavens—a demanding voice rayed from a cloud?
Above us, the night was clear, as the travelers had predicted. Under the milky light of the nebulae only two of the four peaks of the dam site were visible; I was north of them now, they no longer enclosed the world. On each of the two a searchlight of a candle power that erased the humble thought of candles swept toward us at a minute’s interval and disappeared again, passing its pale field upward over the motionless cirrus-sheep that ranged the blue. In that pale federal light even the heavens were neutral; nothing might ignite there without being seen. Beneath it, on the crest it protected, I could see the fine, suave sodium air of a no-man’s country. There no men ran like burning crosses, no crosses stood like running men who burned. Back of it lay Tuscana, whose little collection of spore-lights I could just see through the divide. But there, on that one strip, the swinging alternate had annihilated the bitter and personal dark. If by a like alternation I could annul the bitter personal of my boyhood, then was that what I should ask of my angel? To be apprenticed from now on only to the protean; to acquire the gift of tongues but never choose one. To make a no-man’s country of the past. Ahead of me lay all the variorum of living, into which, if I was to step freely, I must do as the parvenu does, who halts only to drop behind him in some crevice his old bundle of the past. For back of me too still lay Tuscana. To hate it would still be to choose it. To hate it would be to stay.
So, standing there on my platform, that is what I prayed to the angel. If memory is what keeps us, what saves us from neutrality, then allow me, who cannot forget, to forget. For it is memory that keeps us where we are, what we are. If to forget is the cardinal sin, the only failure, then for once let me commit it. For once help me to fail as others do. Allow me to forget. Make this fade.
When I raised my head we were moving, but only inching, as if the train too could not quite decide. Then we gained speed. As we swung north, northeast in a wide arc, I saw the little collection of sporelights slip from view. Next the dams faded, showing me how even the four corners of a world could recede. Ahead of me the train gave tongue, as if it had at last made up its mind. It was the long wail, half resigned, half triumphant, that I had heard every night there of my boyhood, the sound of the to-from Memphis train.
After a while it was silent. We were running through all those small towns ahead that night after night briefly shone toward it, briefly waned. Above us, in relative motion, the cirrus clouds streamed backward, away from us, yet stayed. And in a dark patch in their center, there was Tuscana; I saw Tuscana, keeping time with us too. I leaned backward from it as if drawn by the hair, but it leaned forward with me, both of us drawn by an angel through a stratum so thin that perspective vanished, and I could see it now as never before. It rode lightly with me, that bitter and personal dark. Desire and injustice were there, and people flowing toward me like analogues, and feelings rubbing together like knives, all the shapes of life at their game—he did it for her, she did it for me, and I did this, and I did nothing—hand over hand over hand. It was there that I had found others were necessary even to me, the listener, where I had begun to imagine how people might even hoard trouble in order to feel. Where I had come to the resolve that even if people should be for me always too late or too soon, too open or closed, too near or far, then living itself was the privilege, and interest alone would carry me through.
I looked back at it for a long time. Now that I was truly leaving it I could see it most clearly. I closed my eyes. Now I was leaving. Now I had left it. I opened my eyes. I looked back at Tuscana and it was beautiful in memory, as are the faces of all those we leave.
PART III
False Entry
SO I SHOULDERED MEMORY, and set out to be a man. Since, like the young everywhere, I had been bred by preceptors who wanted me to believe that life was conducted by choices, I still believed them—out of the wonderful disorder that confronted me, no doubt a retributive god would one day demand that order be made. But, like all my fellow-pupils before me, I secretly assured myself that that day receded dimly ahead—dim as my own death. Our mentors either
did not see for themselves or could not bear to say that with each move we would make or that would be made for us—and with each permutation thereof—the choice was already being formed.
So it would happen to me—as to all of us who, whatever else we were, were unreconciled to living unexamined—that memory would become not nostalgia but necessity. Out of the continuum in which we found ourselves to be floating, it would come to seem the one autonomy we might still retrieve.
So, between what I have done and what I have not done, I have come this far. And I begin to see how the chronicle is made. What we do not do persists, classic and perfect, beneath what we do. The final admixture is the judgment.
Chapter I. The Upstairs World. Maartens. Mrs. Papp.
AND SO—I HAVE written to Ruth.
Very morning-clear, that small, lower-case “so,” after the pneumatic, midnight three struck chordally down the preceding page. I use “pneumatic” as one might expect the part-time pedant would, in the old theological sense of having to do with the spirit or soul (pneuma—the Greek “breath”), and yet with a chuckle for its modern usage too—“filled with air.” Not that I decry those three others; they have produced the fourth. Where will it take me, that sudden cap to the winds, that small “so”?
How it came about is after all quite simple—amazing that the switch had not taken place before. For I have been sojourning down there for a long time now, on that long skin-dive into the nether regions of myself, learning to move about in that intense, direct element of motive which underlies the upper atmosphere of acts. Most men shift about in partial glee, discomfort, behind the façades they see themselves presenting to others; I differ only in always having been able to reach a minim or two more accessibly behind the façade I present to myself. But one finds—or rather, the exquisite, reflexive sanity of instinct finds for one—that one can parlay that accessibility only so far. Time up for air. The foray is over, not forever, but for now. For in whatever way I am aberrant from the average, I am not, any more than most, a Jekyll-Hyde. My “split”—that cocktail party profundity—is no more than the next one’s, and the halves, if there are such, are quite, quite aware of each other. I have never indulged in much thumb-twiddling over my basic sanity, either in parlor games or in private. Even in adolescence, when the very elasticity of any decent brain—its almost felt growing—is often a wonder and a worry to its owner, I seldom teased myself with that semidelicious question, “Am I mad?” Within the unreasonable limits of my species, and the quanta peculiar to this hour in its history, I am sane. Man is a schizoid animal. And Socrates is a man.
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