The Lone Pilgrim

by Laurie Colwin

  At the time I lived in all ways like a Shaker. My apartment might have had fresh straw on the floor. It was in an old Village building. The rafter beams had been exposed, and all the walls were white. I didn’t have much in the way of ornament or furniture, so it was not entirely my fault that my apartment looked like a restored room at the Hancock Shaker Village. What I had was old. I had a glass bird from my grandfather, an eighty-year-old decoy given to me by my boss at Woods Hole, and my father’s brass fishing rod, hung across two hooks. I had a watercolor of flowers my grandmother had painted and a picture of a donkey, done by my great-grandmother. I hadn’t had anyone to love in three years.

  From the armchair my husband asked if I would like to have dinner with him—if I was hungry, that is. His visit was so informal that I didn’t feel the need to state anything except the case. I said that I didn’t want to go out but that I would feed him.

  The food I lived on was eccentric. I strained yogurt through cheesecloth to concentrate it, and I ate it with pickled cabbage and salted Japanese plums. I cooked carrots with honey and garlic and ate them cold—the odd tastes of a solitary person. When I had people in to dinner, I spent days wondering what ordinary people ate. I gave my husband what I ate: a cup of thick yogurt; a plate of pickled cabbage, salted plums, and cold carrots; and some chicken cooked the way I liked it—with soy sauce, paprika, and clove. He ate what was set before him and never said he found the meal strange, which warmed me to him. It never occurred to me that he might have the same odd taste, or his own odd taste. Outside, the rain spun on intensely. My husband said, “I came over here to claim you, if that’s possible.”

  When I looked at him, I realized that I had never wanted anyone so much in my life, so I claimed him, too.

  Thus, at the age of thirty, in top physical condition, with excellent training and an excellent job, the author of two highly praised monographs—one on oil-eating algae and one on the regenerative mechanism in starfish—I found myself involved with a tall, standoffish, moody, and temperamental pianist, who, at the time we claimed each other, was living on the upper West Side with a flutist. It was not until weeks later, by which time my husband and I claimed each other every chance we got, that I knew of his alliance with her. I never knew her name. After I was made aware of her existence, there were times when my husband did not call when he said he would, or called to say that he would not appear as he had planned, and I expect he thought that my knowledge of his situation would get him off the hook.

  On the other hand, my husband knew the condition that lay beneath that tidy apartment. He knew I strove to keep my life level, and that if he was not around I would work at my research, commute to work, strain my yogurt, and live as I had always done. He knew I didn’t want to expect much—I was frightened to. He knew if he wasn’t around I would step back and run my life as if he had never walked into it.

  But he was wrong. He didn’t know what he had done, so I told him, as simply as you explain addition to a child. I told him that I had a heart to break and that he was breaking it. I said I didn’t want to be misunderstood, and as I said these things I could imagine how he would look leaving my apartment, and how I would feel watching him walk down the street. But he didn’t leave. He asked me to marry him. Then he went home and settled matters with the flutist. Five months later, we were married at my parents’ house, and the chief emotional feature of that wedding was relief.

  But retrospect makes everything look easy. It wasn’t as easy as that. There was a large gulf between finding out about the flutist and saying anything about it—I was that glad to have someone love me. I wanted my Shaker life disturbed utterly but quietly. I didn’t want slammed doors or shouting. One night, my husband and I sat down quietly and wrenched our hearts out—at least, I wrenched mine. He went home, and for a week I didn’t see him. Those nights, I felt I was sleeping on top of a live wire in a rainstorm, I was so fearful. I made lists of his bad qualities: covert, silent, moody, sometimes won’t talk, doctrinaire about music, frequently snobbish, has girl on whom he cheats—with me. I thought I would never come to know him. On the other hand, when he looked at my life what did he see? Did he see some multilayered, complicated homemade jam with a thick seal of paraffin on top? How did he know what he was getting into?

  Well, he left the flutist without a trace—on himself I mean. I never saw one of her possessions, or any letter she may have written. One day he showed me a diary he kept sporadically—two years in one notebook, mostly musical ruminations. He lived with her a year, and she was never mentioned once.

  My husband had been drafted over the protest of his agent, the head of Juilliard, and several renowned pianists. The president of Octagon Records had threatened to take out a protest ad in the Times, but my husband put his foot down. None of this sat well with him—he didn’t see why he should be exempt from service because he was talented, while those who were not talented were unspared. It was not exactly a noble sentiment; it was, rather, that he wanted to be left alone. He didn’t have any feelings about the war, but he had been a prodigy in a mild sort of way, and he was tired of special treatment.

  Actually, as it turned out, he liked the army. No one had ever heard of him, and he sat around the canteen playing “Chopsticks” on the piano; this ironic gesture amused him. The war itself upset him, but he was glad, since it was an upset outside himself. Besides, he isn’t very protective about his hands, as some musicians are. All his life he fought his parents and teachers for the right to play baseball and otherwise endanger his priceless limbs. In the winter, he never wears gloves, and he likes to go fishing. The fish he likes best are fighters—bass and blues. He says he was more comfortable in the army than he ever had been before.

  We are not a young couple, so our sense of personal history is wide and separate. My husband remembers his first piano—a child’s piano. My family took lessons on a huge Chickering we felt like gnats in front of, and forgot all we had learned by the time we were in high school. I didn’t play Mozart sonatas when I was twelve. Instead, I stole a lipstick from a drugstore in Kennebunkport, Maine. My husband was thirty-five when we got married, and I had just turned thirty-one. We didn’t have a pool of mutual friends. The friends he had at Juilliard he had either outgrown or known so well so long that they seemed exclusively his. His pals from the army live in places like Ketchum, Idaho, or Blue Mountain Lake, New York, and he never sees them. No, we came with separate friends. We have separate love affairs to think about. He had his marriage. I saw whales at Baja, and he saw combat in Vietnam. That accounts for a lot of richness but quite a lot of sadness, too. I would be happy not to travel on out-of-the-way spur lines—although I love to fly over islands—but I often think the more we travel to inaccessible places the more we will be like a couple who fell in love in high school and married out of college. Our personal histories will merge, and our reference point will be each other. The parts of my life that were solitary will blur. He will think, maybe after thirty years, that it was to me he wrote from Vietnam, and I will think that I commuted home in my old Saab from Riiks Point to him, and my prim apartment will be the memory of waiting at a bus stop before my husband came along to pick me up.

  In September, we flew to Miami on a yellow jet, and in a glum corner of the airport we found our spur line, Everglades Airways. We were going to fly to French Falls. The gloomy lobby was manned by an overweight giant with hair crew-cut into a putting green, and a dour monosyllabic Indian with a gold tooth. Waiting for the tiny Cessnas were our fellow-travelers: a Cuban woman and her child, three sleeping Indians with straw hats and dead cigars, a dissipated boy in rumpled white ducks, and us. No one was flying. We sat down and waited out the tail end of a tropical storm.

  We ended up waiting for three hours. The chairs filled up with Cubans, farmers, and fishermen. Finally, the flights were called. Eight people lined up to go to Oopalachia. Six flew off to Little Trinidad. The fishermen went to Connaught Key. They all had to wait for the morose Indian t
o load the luggage and for the pilots to finish their coffee. The pilots on spur lines are like motorcycle racers. Given the chance, they would fly in any weather, but commercial responsibility imposes itself on them. The older ones were mail pilots, the middle-aged ones were commercial pilots who got bored, and the younger ones learned to fly in Vietnam and didn’t want to stop once they got home.

  Finally, we lined up for French Falls. The plane held eight, but there were only six of us: the Cuban woman and her child, my husband and I, and a couple who appeared at the last moment—a hatchet-faced man with a blond pompadour, carrying a fiddle case, and his wife, whose cheekbones obliterated her eyes. They looked like birds of prey in a moment of pause.

  Our pilot’s name was Ike Fooley, a stocky vet with a moustache. He knew everyone on the flight except us, but my husband sat co-pilot with him and learned that they had been in Vietnam at the same time. When we got to French Falls, we went to the bar of the local lodging house and had dinner with him. Ike Fooley had been considered the dolt of his family, he told us. His father and brothers were in steel, in New Orleans. He had saved enough to have his own plane. He pulled out a picture of it—a red-and-white Piper Cherokee with Fool’s Paradise painted on the wing in black. He also showed us a stack of photographs of Hué—the intense, heartsick photos of an amateur. He said that he had still not gotten over what had happened to him in the war, that he was slow and that it took him a long time to sort things out. His moustache curved down and gave his cheery face an edge of mournfulness. After dinner, he told us who our fellow-travelers were. The Cuban woman was the housekeeper at a mansion outside French Falls that was owned by the former ambassador to Argentina. The couple had just come back from a fiddle competition in Paris, Kentucky. They flew around quite a bit, Ike said—to Nashville and Muscle Shoals to do studio work—but they didn’t like it much. The man had explained country fiddling to him as follows: “Something pretty you put on the edge of something plain.”

  As we had our dinner, the weather kicked up, and finally another storm broke. Ike Fooley called Miami to say he was laying over. He and my husband settled down to drink. Ike asked why we had come to French Falls, and we told him the truth. The truth was it was just a place to fly to. My husband subscribed to Aviator magazine to keep informed on remote landing strips and oddball spur lines. French Falls sounded good to him, since he was just about to record the French Suites. Ike found this altogether reasonable. But he said there wasn’t any reason to stay in French Falls unless you lived there, so he offered to take us to Key West the next day. He had the weekend off, he said, and if we liked to fish and snorkel, he knew a good place to do both. In the morning, we would fly back to Miami with him, drive to a private airport, pick up Fool’s Paradise, and fly around the Keys.

  They stayed downstairs to drink out the storm, and I went to our room to take a bath and go to sleep. The room smelled of seawater and rain.

  As I lay in bed, I thought of all the places we had flown to as something pretty you put on the edge of something plain. The love my husband and I bore for each other seemed very plain to me—there was still no communal reference point for it. It was only the two of us.

  One day after we were married, my husband opened up a battered wicker case and put on the bed an ammunition pouch, a dog-eared copy of the “Italian” Concerto, a leather-bound diary, and his army belt—his relics of the war, he said. When he pulled shift, he had studied the “Italian” Concerto and sung it in his head. During the sixties, you often saw in slick, liberal magazines photos of the possessions of dead or captured enemies, photos that were meant to show you that the enemy was a human being, too. That clutter on the bed looked like one of those photos, but these things belonged to my husband. I remember thinking, What if he hadn’t come back to me? Suppose he had come back to me all shot up? Suppose he had never come back at all? I never touched a thing on the bed—I remembered that I hadn’t known him when he came back, that we had met by chance in a time when people didn’t think much about the war, and if you said you had fought in it they looked at you without much interest, registering a fact they had no connection to, or for.

  In point of fact, my husband takes the ammunition pouch, his army belt, the diary, and that score for the “Italian” Concerto with him’ whenever he flies. I saw them first one evening while I was unpacking in Shawano, Wisconsin, to which we had flown on Wolverine, and I’ve seen them ever since. I’ve never mentioned it, and neither has he, but it is a fact between us, since I always unpack for him.

  He carries around those artifacts, and I dream about wrecked jets. Secretly, I read accounts of crashes in the paper, which indicates to me that I never get used to flying, that I am always caught between thrill and fear. He knows I read the paper for those ghoulish accounts, and I know about his kit. But it all works out. When he isn’t rehearsing, and I get time off from the Riiks Point marine-biology station, we fly to someplace central and then to someplace remote so that I can ask, some wide, scopeless afternoon on a bleak winter’s day, “Remember when we flew around Key West with Ike Fooley?” And my husband can nod yes, with exclusive understanding.

  Delia’s Father

  Delia Schwantes’s father did not work. Her mother worked—she taught French in the private school to which we and Delia were sent. Delia, as the child of a teacher, was a scholarship pupil, while our parents paid through the nose to get us our education. Some of us had crushes on Delia’s mother, who wore the sort of clothes our mothers never would have worn: plaid skirts with pleats, and plain sweaters like a schoolgirl. She wore her hair in a chignon, and she was the first person we had ever seen with pierced ears. Our mothers, who favored short hair and pearl clip-ons, said that Frenchwomen such as Delia’s mother did not need money in order to have style. The Schwanteses, of course, had no money.

  There were a number of girls with crushes on Delia herself. She was thin and undersized with features our mothers said she would grow into. We looked like ruddy, well-fed American girls, but Delia with her straight, pale hair and rather mournful eyes looked like a sprite, an elf, some creature out of a storybook published abroad.

  Then there was Delia’s father who occasionally turned up at school functions but was mostly seen around town. He wore gabardine shirts of rose and blue and brown, with knitted ties and twill trousers and shoes that slipped on—these were the mark of a lounge lizard. Our fathers wore sturdy English business shoes that laced. Delia’s father chain-smoked imported cigarettes that came in a flat, ornamental tin. Our fathers, who believed that cigarettes were for women and foreigners, smoked pipes and cigars. For some of us, our first whiff of manhood, apart from the customary smells of our own old men, was Delia’s father’s cigarettes, and whatever sort of imported cologne he used.

  Our fathers all knew each other, or seemed to. They were each other’s law partners, or fellow club members, or business associates, or they were related or had been at school together. On the weekends they played golf and tennis together and at night they found themselves at dinner parties discussing politics or the stock market. We had never seen anyone like Delia’s father.

  He had been one of a group of avant-garde artists and poets in Prague called the Ten Wild Men. He had been a poet and journalist and had fought in the Resistance. Once in a while a review or poem of his would appear in one of those cultural journals, and he occasionally translated books from French and Czech. When Delia was asked what her father did, she said he was a writer, which sounded much more wonderful to us than banker, lawyer, or stockbroker.

  Her father spoke four languages: Czech with his oldest friend—a man with whom he played game after game of very fast chess called “Blitzkrieg”; French to his wife; English to his daughter; and German to the refugee tailor who made his trousers and jackets for him at half price. Although he did not consider Italian one of his languages, he could pass the time of day with the man who sold him vegetables and fruit.

  He had glossy brown and grey hair which he combed str
aight back from his beautiful, high forehead. He was of middle size and looked both delicate and strong at the same time. In his direction people said things like: “Never trust a man who dresses too well.” Men, by which we meant our fathers, paid no attention to him. He didn’t register with them, and at school functions they passed him as if he were invisible. Our mothers, on the other hand, were drawn to him.

  We were the daughters of people who had money instead of imagination and complete self-confidence. We came from good Jewish and Episcopalian families, and we grew up all alike. We all had small dogs—but not too small—miniature dogs being for the nouveau riche. We had hearty, solid dogs like Scottish and wire-haired terriers, or dachshunds or Welsh corgis, like the Queen of England. Our mothers lunched with one another, worked as volunteers for charities, and were active in our school. Our fathers wore hats and looked most natural either in bathing trunks or business suits. The kind of clothes Mr. Schwantes wore were unknown to them. For sport they wore the brightly colored clothing golfers favor and always looked rather clownish. By and large our parents’ lives were invisible to us—we never saw what they did all day. Our visible adults were Mr. and Mrs. Schwantes.

  It was not until we began to get around the city by ourselves that we ever ran into Delia’s father. One or another of us saw him on the street, or coming out of a café or restaurant bar, or going into a museum—always with a woman. Vivvie Herbert’s sister, a beauty at sixteen, had been escorted by him through the Museum of Modern Art and out to the sculpture garden for coffee. The Herberts did not believe in coffee for children—it made them too nervy. The cup of coffee Delia’s father bought for her caused great commotion in Vivvie’s sister. She gulped it and bolted like a good girl.

  When I was fifteen I met up with him at the zoo in Central Park. He was standing in front of the lion cage, and he appeared to have tears in his eyes.