He yawned and stretched, and fell back onto the blanket with a happy smile. A few minutes later he was asleep.
That happy boy had had his lunch. Full of the moment he went off to sleep as easily as a cat. I looked over at him and felt a pang of something—either tenderness or rage, I didn’t know which. I realized that it was occurring to me to seduce him. That’s what happens when you go out into the world: you discover yourself in the grip of feelings you did not know you owned. I wanted to seduce him and streak him with confusion and disorder as clearly as a disappointed lover mutilates a tree with the initials of the girl who turned him down. I could show him a thing about heartbreak and pathos and send him back to Marina marked for life—by me.
Of course, he would learn his lesson. If I met him by chance in an airport in ten years he would barely remember me. Or if he did, he would show me a picture of his wife and it would not be Marina. He would have dozens of Marinas.
I took a walk to the stream and sat beside it, watching the water rush past. Above me was a big, blue Scottish sky, crowded with bright clouds. I was going home. Someday all of this would be something to remember. I had books of photographs of Raggy and not one of Francis Cluzens. I had been careful never to take his picture. Certain things should never be captured—they ought to stay in your memory and serve as a sharp edge of broken glass to cut yourself on.
How lucky Billy was to have such tidy notions. Love was process to him. A vision such as his incorporated everything, even a random event that, if it happened to him, he would doubtless like to stretch out endlessly. Could you live if you remembered everything, or live properly if you remembered nothing at all?
When I got back Billy woke up and rubbed his eyes. He yawned, revealing the tender pink inside of his mouth. How happy he was! He was out in the countryside with a divorced American woman who was returning to her first husband; who wore her hair in a chignon; who carried a silk scarf and who had been through the fiery crucible and emerged on top of the mountain, a finer alloy.
He took my hand and walked me around the graveyard. Near the church’s ruined wall was a crypt. He tugged my hand, and we sat down beside it. From his back pocket he took his candle stub, lit it with my cigarette lighter, and placed it on the crypt. From his pocket he drew a sheet of airmail paper and a pen. He leaned against me. Like most people who have been asleep, he smelled warm and sweet.
“Can you hand me my Italian dictionary?” he said. “It’s in my jacket pocket.”
As he wrote he leaned closer to me. From time to time he looked at me and smiled as if we were soul mates.
The little candle flickered on the crypt. I looked over his shoulder and with the remnants of my college Italian I could make out:
Dear One:
This is a beautiful moment in my life. I am so close to you I do not have to count the hours until we are together. We are as near as two people ever were. Each breath I take is yours. These moments are printed on my heart forever.
A Girl Skating
I grew up in the shadow of a great man—James Honnimer, the famous American poet. My family lived on a college campus, and Honnimer was its sensation. His classes had to be divided into sections; his readings caused traffic jams on the local roads. When he came back from collecting the awards he was always winning, the receptions in his honor were held in the chapel, since no one’s house was big enough. When he played tennis, his court was lined with students who loved to watch their hero sweat like other men; and when he went off campus, you could feel the change—something stopped happening.
When I was young, Honnimer was always on hand as the birthday-party entertainment. He loved a gathering of children—especially the bright offspring of his academic colleagues. If the fathers would not let themselves be made fools of, Honnimer would. He got down on all fours and growled like a bear. He let children ride on his back, and he swung them in his arms until their heads almost touched the ceiling. He could imitate the standard barnyard animals, and he could trumpet like an elephant. He taught children how to hang from doorjambs by their fingertips. Most of all, he liked to make up stories. At any birthday party, you could find him on the couch, surrounded by children, whose feet barely cleared the seat cushions. His children’s books started out as stories told at these parties, and after they were published, he read from them aloud and showed the pictures. I hated him.
I was the only child of two professors. My father taught advanced mathematics; he was Honnimer’s chess partner. My mother taught botany, and she supplied Honnimer with the Latin names of flowers that he used in his poems. We were a quiet family. Honnimer mistook that quietude for sadness; his poems indicate that he thought we were sad. So into our house he brought noise: large gestures, fierce opinions, his big laugh. My parents, who were extremely fond of him, did not mind having their peace disturbed in this way, and the calmness of their lives seemed to soothe him. They were not silent people, but they had the tidy, orderly habits of scientists. Their colleagues encouraged their own children to display emotions, lest they suffer from repression in later life. My parents would not have minded a demonstrative child, but I was not one. I was a tidy, orderly child.
The stories I was read as a little girl that impressed me most were stories about Indian children, who did not cry when they were hurt. Instead, they were brave and fleet, and learned to make useful implements out of willow twigs. I was let loose to wander in the woods and pastures that bordered the campus, where I spent as much time as possible practicing to be an Indian.
My parents were bookish, and so was I, but they taught me all the other things they had loved as children. I learned to swim, fish, and sail. On weekends, my mother took me bird walking; and when I could read and write, my parents presented me with a pair of child’s field glasses and a notebook in which to start my life list. Honnimer knew all this and found it enchanting.
I was the child he loved best, and there was no escaping him. When he read to a group of children, I was the one he read for. I never sat on the couch with him, but in my own chair or on the floor in the corner. When he came to the house, he tried to draw me out by asking what birds I had seen, or he made up a bird and asked me what it was. In the spring and summer, he brought me birds’ eggs and feathers, bouquets of wild flowers. This upset me in a way that I did not understand. It made me uneasy that he knew about my collection of birds’ eggs, my shoebox of feathers, and my book of pressed flowers. I did not see why he should bother to know anything at all about me. He was an adult, and I was a child. His attentions made me more quiet and solemn than I generally was. When I did not respond as other children did, Honnimer was further delighted by what he called my “infant seriousness.”
Everyone else adored him. He and his wife, Lucy, were the most popular couple on the campus. Lucy had blond hair and wore cashmere sweaters. She often went to his lectures and sat in the front row, smiling up at him. When he ran out of cigars, he would look down at her and she would hand him one. She either could not have or did not want children. The two of them kept three large black cats, one of whom produced a litter a year. There was a waiting list for these kittens and also an unofficial lottery to see who got to drive with Honnimer when he took his sports car to the next county to be serviced. If Lucy went with him, they always left a few disappointed students hanging around the parking lot, watching Honnimer and Lucy drive off with the top down—Honnimer in his army jacket, Lucy with a silk scarf over her hair. Undergraduates fell in love with the idea of them.
Honnimer crept up on me little by little. When I went out with my fishing gear or field glasses, he always spotted me. He was either in his car on the same road or crossing my path on his way to the tennis courts. I became so used to these encounters that I started to expect them. As soon as I saw Honnimer, I saw myself: a long-legged, black-haired child wearing khaki shorts and carrying a fishing rod. I could scarcely take my field glasses off their peg without thinking about myself.
Besides learning how to be an I
ndian, I taught myself to ice-skate. My parents started me on the college pond, holding out a broom handle for me to steady myself with. As soon as I got my balance, I began to watch the better skaters. I studied what they did and imitated it. Once you get the feel of ice, it doesn’t fight you.
When the ice on the pond got mushy or started to crack, my parents gave me bus fare to go to the rink in town. There the townies sat in the bleachers, drinking hot chocolate and kissing. My peers shouted and fell down on the ice. In the center of the rink, away from falling children, the serious skaters worked out. I hung around the perimeter, watching. I did not want to be taught to skate. I wanted that mastery all to myself. The things you teach yourself in childhood are precious, and you have endless patience for them. My parents knew that I skated, but they knew that I did not want to be encouraged or given fancy skating sweaters for Christmas. I did not want them to witness my achievement, or comment on it, or document it. I did not want praise for effort.
My colleagues in childhood were the precocious children of intellectuals—ferocious, noisy kids who learned calculus at the age of nine and were trilingual at ten, sources of pride to their parents. My parents, I felt, were simply pleased with me. They were interested in my pastimes but kept their distance. We had three sets of amusements: mine, theirs, and ours. My father loved to go fishing and taught me to tie flies. In the spring, we trekked to a trout pool and spent the day in water up to our hips, pushing gnats out of our eyes. My mother took me bird walking, and from her I learned my orderly habits of observation and notation. But they left me alone, liking to be left alone themselves.
I would have felt my life to be entirely unremarkable and happy if it had not been for Honnimer. He was studying me. He knew what sort of dolls I liked—ones with real porcelain heads, hands, and feet. He knew about my collection of arrowheads and animal bones, and that I had tried to carve myself a bow from a willow branch. He dedicated a children’s book to me. He used my name in a poem, “A Day in Pastures with Bernadette Spaeth.” When he came to play chess with my father, he watched my every gesture. He singled me out. I felt that there was nothing worse he could do.
At fifteen, I was a relatively accomplished skater. I went to the rink every afternoon and during the winter to the pond every weekend, always at odd hours to avoid crowded ice. For playing around, I liked the pond. I liked to see trees when I spun. For serious skating, the rink was best.
One afternoon at the rink, I saw an older girl doing a complicated turn. I shut my eyes and tried to duplicate it in my mind. Then I looked up. Almost hidden in the darkness at the top of the bleachers was Honnimer, staring at me. You are the inspiration for a poet, he seemed to say. If you think you are being spied on, tell your parents. They will think you are silly and hysterical. They will tell you how great art is made.
Of course he wrote a poem called “A Girl Skating.” That was the title of his next collection, which my parents kept on the table in the study, with all his other books. My parents admired his work and did not mind his writing about their daughter. They knew that his Bernadette was not me but a transformed Bernadette.
There was no way I could duck him. If I withdrew, I felt him appreciating my withdrawal. If I stayed away from anywhere he might be, my absence interested him. If I ever spoke to him, he listened intently, as if my voice revealed some new side of my nature. Everywhere I turned, Honnimer was there. He was visiting my parents the night of my senior prom. As I came down the stairs, I saw the familiar plume of his cigar smoke above the wing chair. I was only a girl going to a prom, but that prom, I knew, would live forever. If I forget the color of my dress, I have Honnimer’s poem to look it up in.
I felt I had another life besides the one I was living—a life in Honnimer’s mind—but no idea what that life consisted of. Certain bonds are primitive, and so was Honnimer’s with me. He counted on the kind of pull you feel toward someone who has seen you asleep or has dreamed about you and told you so. He made me wonder what he knew. He deprived me of the right to know when I was alone.
His last book was called The Black Bud. I had just started my final year of college when it came out. Honnimer had his publishers send it to me. I kept it on my desk for weeks, unread. It reminded me that for three years I had been praying—praying that Honnimer would never come to read his poems at my college. It reminded me of the intense, literary girls who had tried to grill me about him; of the freshman-English instructors who had sought me out; of the general assumption that I had been, and was still, Honnimer’s lover.
I finally read the poems late one night. I did not understand modern poetry and I especially did not understand Honnimer’s. The black bud seemed to be a young girl. In the title poem, as I understood it, the poet took the bud home with him and kept it close to see what sort of flower it would form. In another, the bud emerged—half flower, half girl wearing a dress that I realized was the one I had worn to my parents’ Christmas party the year before. In the last poem, the poet took the flower to what appeared to be a motel, and removed its petals, one by one. By that time in my life, I had not yet been in love. I had never had a lover or a love affair. Honnimer’s poems made me feel how my legs might move, what words I might say, how my mouth might look after hours of kissing. I could not accomplish the end of my own innocence. Honnimer had done it for me.
He shot himself ten days after my twenty-second birthday. My parents sent me the clippings of his obituaries, a few of which quoted from “A Day in Pastures with Bernadette Spaeth” and some poems in The Black Bud to show Honnimer’s poetic journey from light to darkness. I read these clippings in a cottage overlooking Casco Bay—I had been given a fellowship to study flight behavior in young seabirds—and when I finished reading, I took my parents’ letter, my field glasses, and a notebook, and went down to my observation point, an outcropping of rocks near a cormorant’s nesting ground.
The letter said that Honnimer had been increasingly depressed. He and Lucy had separated. He began to cancel classes—something he had never done in all his years of teaching. When he came to play chess with my father, he was distracted and quiet. Finally, the only person he seemed to want around was my mother, who took him dinner and sat with him. The last day of his life he had spent at the Bergmeister Collection—a small and beautiful group of paintings left to the college by a tin magnate. Honnimer shot himself at home, my parents said, leaving no note.
The last time I saw him was at the Bergmeister Collection. Each time I came home from college, I traced my childhood. I went to the town rink. I sat in the tree where I had read The Biography of a Grizzly. I went fishing and to my favorite spot in the pasture to watch hawks. Then I went to the Bergmeister Collection.
Bergmeister had left the college some Dutch florals, some English landscapes, a big Corot, examples of the Hudson River school, a German altarpiece. In one very dark room hung four small paintings—two Sienese, two Tuscan. These were the paintings I always came to greet and say goodbye to. One was a Pietà, one of a Crucifixion. Two were Nativities. In these the baby Jesus looked elderly, and Mary looked childlike beside him. All four paintings were framed in gilt and lighted by brass lamps. The figures were painted on backgrounds of gold leaf. Each figure had a halo of worked gold. If you looked at these paintings for a while, the room around you appeared to take on the texture of black velvet. You had to blink to get the gold out of your eyes. You turned away, into that black velvet, and waited for another painting to gleam at you out of the darkness.
I was standing in front of the Pietà, gazing at the stylized, grief-stricken faces, which never looked to me like the faces of real people until I moved close enough to see the tiny details, like the teardrop on Mary’s face. I turned away, toward one of the Nativities, and realized that someone was standing next to me. It was Honnimer.
“They’re my favorites, too,” he said.
I could barely see him. My eyes would not adjust to the darkness. My heart sounded very loud to me, and the tips of my fingers we
re suddenly cold.
Slowly he took shape: his long, fine nose; his oval eyes, which in the light were hazel; his crisp mane of hair and beard. He was very near me. I could smell the spice that cigar smoke leaves on clothes, and I was more frightened than I had ever been. What could I have said? He moved closer; He said: “I know you’re going back to school soon. I always miss you, but I keep you by me in my mind.” Then he bent down and kissed me on the forehead. He seemed to stand beside me for hours, but it must have been seconds. Then he was gone, leaving a warm circle where his lips had been. As soon as I was sure he was out of the building, I walked home, rubbing the spot on my forehead where he had kissed me.
An Old-Fashioned Story
The Rodkers had a son named Nelson, whom all the world called Nellie. The Leopolds had a daughter named Elizabeth. Marshall Rodker and Roger Leopold had been at college and law school together and courted wives who had been roommates at college. Nelson was two years Elizabeth’s senior, and he was a model child in every way. Elizabeth, on the other hand, began her life as a rebellious, spunky, and passionate child, but she was extraordinarily pretty, and such children are never called difficult: they are called original. It was the ardent hope of these people that their children might be friends and, when they grew up, would like each other well enough to marry.
In order to ensure their happy future, the children were brought together. If Elizabeth looked about to misbehave, Elinor Leopold placed her warm hand on Elizabeth’s forearm and, with a little squeeze Elizabeth learned to dread, would say in tones of determined sweetness: “Darling, don’t you want to see nice Nellie’s chemistry set?” Elizabeth did not want to see it—or Nelson’s stamp collection or his perfect math papers or the model city he had built with his Erector set. As she grew older, she did not want to dance with Nelson at dancing class or go to his school reception. But she did these things. That warm pressure on her forearm was as effective as a slap, although her compliance was not gained only by squeezes and horrified looks. Elizabeth had begun to have a secret life: she hated Nelson and she hated the Rodkers with secret fury. While she was too young to wonder if this loathing included her parents, she felt that if they forced Nelson upon her and chose the Rodkers for their dearest friends, they must in some way be against her. At the same time she realized that they were foolable to an amazing extent. If she smiled at Nelson, they were happy and considered her behavior impeccable. If she was rude, she spent weeks in pain—the pain of constant lectures. Thus, she learned to turn a cheerful face while keeping the fires of her dislike properly banked. The fact of the matter was that an afternoon of Nelson’s stamp collection was good for two afternoons hanging around the park with her real friends.
The Lone Pilgrim Page 5
