by Paul Hawkins
He sat on the edge of his bed in a square of sunlight to take off his shoes, but he leaned back and before long he had fallen asleep in his church clothes.
Sometime later in the afternoon he woke up. He could not tell how long he had been asleep, but the light was dimmer and he noticed the weather had changed. He crawled across his bed to the white, dust-impregnated windowsill. He looked out at the dry fields and the sky beyond. It had turned late afternoon and there were thin gray clouds with an edge of darker blue at the horizon, the air was full with stillness of a storm still far away but hinting, not coming now, but certainly soon. He was young but already he could tell things like this. He had learned most of what he knew about the world from that window. He'd see his father out in the fields or his mother bent over the pump handle and it all seemed too ordinary, too quiet, something missing.
He changed out of his church clothes into old blue denim overalls worn soft and a white cotton shirt like a little man's, rolled up at the elbows. As he put on the overalls he felt an old rusty nail in the pocket and remembered what he had been planning.
The boy left his room and walked along the upstairs hall. He went past two doorways to one he had never seen opened. It went up to the attic. It was cluttered up there, he'd been told, full of spiders and precariously-stacked objects, dangerous. No place for a child.
And it was locked, but he had practiced on locks before.
He paused and listened for noises of his parents, heard none, and then slid the head of the nail in the keyhole and began rotating it counterclockwise slowly. At first nothing happened, but then he felt it catch. He put force into his thin wrist and turned it. The inside mechanism rotated slowly, grudgingly, then suddenly snapped into a new position. The door fell open several inches with a creak, and a gust of dusty hot air pushed past him.
He hesitated but the door swung fully open of its own accord, lazy and inviting. He stood staring up a short narrow flight of stairs and then walked cautiously up them. Each step creaked some but not much under the weight of his small, thin body. He emerged into a small hot room at the top that was unfinished save for the bare plank floor. The roof peaked above his head and dustmotes danced through a torn grey curtain tacked in front of an octagon window.
He looked around the room and at first he did not notice much. Along one wall was an old brown wardrobe, a few battered chairs, a bland picture of flowers in a vase and a statue of a calico cat. Against another wall was a battered, navy blue steamer trunk. All of it looked tired and old, but then the curtain gusted and he saw that behind the trunk, against the wall, was a small bookshelf, and upon the shelf was a brown photograph of two compelling faces. He approached, brushed away some cobwebs, and took the picture in his hands.
It showed two people standing with lush savanna of Africa behind them. The man had a thick moustache that looked new and unwelcomed by the rest of the face, but he was proud of it. He wore a pith helmet and greeted the camera with a consciously thrust-forward chin. In an almost cartoonish manner he held an oversized rifle across his chest. His eyes were very bright.
The woman beside him wore a wide smile. Her hair fell in long elegant ringlets from beneath a sunbonnet, and nearly every inch of her skin right up to her chin was covered by clothing in spite of what must have been oppressive heat.
The boy turned the picture and found a short message written on the back in the kind of spare, strong, female hand-writing reserved for logging births and deaths in a family Bible: "Chris and Claire White – deceased of malaria."
The boy set the picture back down, careful to return it to the same place, and then his eyes settled on the trunk. He walked over to it, paused for a moment, then creaked the lid open. Inside on the left was a stack of heavily-woven tan clothes, neatly folded, crisp and smelling of starch and soap. They were a shirt with button pockets, an outer jacket of the similar material, and trousers. A tan fabric belt was rolled up beside them. Resting on the top of the stack was a pair of small, wire-rimmed gold glasses.
The right side of the trunk was filled with shirts and pants and ties and two folded dark jackets and on top of them all a pair of long elegant shoes that shone a little even through dust and looked like they’d been made from skin of a crocodile.
In a middle compartment of the trunk were several odd items including a red velvet box containing silver cuff links and a stick pin, a slender black box containing two teak and ivory pens, and a tan box that opened to reveal a gentleman's toilet kit with comb, brush, razor, and a mirrored lid.
But beneath these were two photographs that captured his interest. The first was of the same woman in the safari picture, though here she was younger and her hair was straight and short instead of cascading. She sat on a low window seat in a languid, reclining position with one arm behind her head as if she were staring out and dreaming – well, dreaming and waiting for someone to take a picture of her doing so.
The second picture showed the man and woman together again, on a boardwalk at some big eastern seaboard city, and they were pushing a perambulator between them. Their faces were proud, and a child leaned forward toward the camera from the carriage. The boy looked at the child, whose eyes, two dark dots, stared back. A shock of blonde hair stood up on the child's head, and in its hands the child held a carved and painted toy soldier. The boy stared intently at it. It was the same toy soldier he himself had had for as he could remember.
A feeling of mystery came slowly over him as he stared at the child, then to the soldier, then to the parent and to his own eyes reflected in the toilet kit mirror. He scanned all the trunk's contents again, taking in each item and trying to sort them out in his head so that they made a meaningful picture, told a story about himself.
As he looked he saw one more item tucked in a corner of the trunk, and he took it out. It was a rounded metal box, bronze or brass, small but ornately decorated. Patterns of trees crawled up the sides, with birds and fruit filling the branches, and the birds all had small jeweled eyes and each fruit was a small jewel.
He felt a great curiosity to open it, but just then he heard a noise on the stairs, and before he could begin to put anything away his mother was in the doorway. She turned and called and soon his father was there too. He felt the weight of them looking down at him, but suddenly his mother crouched beside him and wrapped him in one arm.
"I told you not to go in here, didn't I?" she asked.
The boy nodded. He looked up at his father, and the man just stared at him with his hard, flat eyes.
"All this stuff – put it out of your head until you're 18," the father said. "I promised your uncle that if anything happened to him I'd raise you right. No need to let such foolishness go to your head the way it went to his." He turned and walked back down the stairs.
The boy watched him go, and then he turned and looked at his mother, who looked as if she wanted to say something more, but didn’t. She scooped up her son in her arms and took him downstairs.
They all ate supper quietly that night and though he wasn't hungry he ate just enough to be excused without a fuss. They sat around in utter silence, his father reading a county extension bulletin and his mother knitting, until it was time for him to go to bed.
Up in his room his mother helped pull off his clothes and put on his pajamas. She cracked his window open, helped him into bed, led him in his prayers, and left the room.
As soon as she’d left the boy leaned up for one last look out the window. There was a purple cast on all the earth. He saw the lane that led away from their house and beyond that the edge of the woods, and he felt the sort of sad advent exhilaration that would haunt him his whole life, the sense of some mystery that was too much for him, that was too much for anyone, some sweet secret about the earth that would be wonderful to know but would cost you everything, that would bless you and unmake you.
Just then he felt his mother's hand on his back and she sat down on the bed beside him. In her hand was the ornate box from the trun
k.
She set it on the mattress, raised one finger as if instructing him to watch and stay quiet, and then gently wound a small knob at its base. The lid raised and a small, clockwork metal bird began to flutter and sing sweetly. Its eyes were tiny sapphires. Beneath and complementing its sweet sounds was a light metallic rustling of oiled delicate machinery. The bird would cock its head, raise up on its legs, spread its wings, look at the boy and whistle in precise metallic notes, then rest before repeating it all in a flash of bluish steel and silver.
The boy was silent, but his mouth, open for a moment, now sealed. He looked at his mother, and she looked back at him.
"Between you and me," she said. Raising a finger in instruction, she opened his sock drawer, made sure she had his eyes, and then set it in there before closing the drawer again.
She then returned to his side, pulled up the sheet and kissed him goodnight. "I love you, Ernest," she said. "I love you more than anything in the world." And then she smiled and left, and he settled in beneath the sheets as night fell.
From that point on he felt he had a secret right to pursue some mystery about himself. Now and then he would find new books in his room, hidden in the same drawer, and soon his imagination was being fired with child's stories already outdated by his time, Victorian epics filled with illustrated pages about the Star of Cathay and the crocodile-infested Nile.
1918
Ernest was due a large trust when he turned 18. His birth parents, naive and aristocratic in their new wealth, had died of malaria while on an African safari when he was an infant. It had been his father's stipulation that, in case both he and his wife died, the child should be raised by his brother and insulated as much as possible from the corrupting influence of wealth until he was 18. At that time he was to inherit his father's fortune, providing he had acquired the proper moral rectitude to be a pillar of society and captain of industry. If the adoptive parents deemed otherwise, the will stipulated, the estate was to be divided equally among a list of charities, with the son acquiring no more than a token.
When he was 17 a lawyer got Ernest White to contest the will by persuading him that his adoptive father's disapproval would keep him from getting the money. And so one afternoon the parents sat with a lawyer on one side of a brown table in a downtown office and Ernest and a lawyer sat on the other, and a judge sat at the end.
"It's all very clear if you know case law," his counsel said to the adoptive parents. The boy could not meet the eyes of his mother.
"I’m glad to have the law here to teach this boy a thing or two," the father said. "When has he ever listened to a thing I've said? When he hears it from a judge maybe he'll finally understand a few things about the world."
The son said nothing.
The judge looked down at them from the end of the table. "Honestly, Mr. and Mrs. White, I sympathize with your position, but I feel obligated to advise you that I can't see where you have much of a case."
They looked surprised though the son did not.
"But it says right there in the will..."
The judge interrupted. "Wills like this are subject to holographic amendments, provided we have reliable witnesses to testify to their authenticity. Mr. White's counsel has produced one. It seems to me that in light of these circumstances, and considering the sum your brother left you for the boy's raising and your own care beyond, by which you have prospered, it would be advisable to accept your son's offer of lifetime support from the trust, which comes completely uncompelled and in light of the current situation is rather generous."
The parents looked at the son, who said nothing.
The judge continued. "The alternative would be a costly and prolonged legal dispute, which would set you back vast sums with dubious likelihood of even minimal recovery. Case law and precedent weigh heavily on the boy’s side."
The son smiled slightly. The parents turned to their own lawyer. "I did what I could," he said, but he would not meet their eyes. He then reached down and retrieved his valise, opened it, and removed some papers. "I was given the opportunity to look over their proposal in advance, and have copies of the agreement here. It's all very reasonable, stating that he has satisfied the conditions and agreeing to the distribution described in the original document. Given the heavy cost and uncertain prospects of a legal contest, my advice would be that you sign it."
The wife looked at the husband, who stared at the table in front of him in utter shock and flat, emotionless defeat. After a long pause, his right hand rose, took the pen on the table, and signed the documents one after another with a hasty scrawl. After that he rose and left the room. His wife followed. Their lawyer gave one last look to his counterparts around the table and then followed them out.
Ernest White's youthful, boy-man face, hawk-like and set in hues of tan and gold, registered surprise at how quickly it had all transpired. He looked at all the lawyers' faces around him. They were smiling, and his bewilderment seemed to amuse them.
"That's it?"
They smiled in return. "That’s it."
He felt suddenly guilty and deflated, pierced and naked amidst their cynical amusement. "Well I'm going," he said, rising with an awkward scooting of his chair. "I can't stand to be around here another second."
"Oh, you've got to finish your education. We didn't get you out of that."
*
From that day until he turned 18 he lived on his own. He moved into a room in the nicest hotel in town, paying for it on a line of credit extended to him by his lawyer until the day of his inheritance. But for the availability of wealth it was a solitary and basically quiet life. He chose to be alone, to consider the prospect of the prospects before him, to consider himself in the company of himself. At nights he could be seen through the bright front hotel window sitting in the gilt parlor, his lanky body sunk into one of the large chairs, reading through magazines, and he enjoyed burrowing his mind in the printed mix of high-minded passion and low-browed adventure and futuristic optimism. And slowly and slyly his self fell in love with an idea of itself like a bubble in champagne.
And at night that bubble floated amongst the thoughts and stories and curiosities his mind had packed into itself in the weeks and days, and he bobbed untethered in an ethereal infinitude of confessors and showmen and liars, each with his own outlandish gaudy farcical sphere – the wolf-boy the faith healer the pygmy shaman the snake oil mystic Hindu the lilting savant soprano farm girl the albino spelunker the cheesy British comedian, the bubble dancer the "Mister, I seen Jesus" transient the refugee the private dick the anarchist the Shadow. It was their lie with and against your lie – you're an enigma you're special you’re a mystery no oath no credo no uniform can confine you; you're old you're young you're rich you're poor but always part of you is an airy angel, free to hold and mold yourself above the sloganized hypnosis of the Big Machine, the modern substitute for fate.
Ernest used to think that everyone was made for something wonderful.
He stayed in town until he graduated school in a ceremony his parents did not attend. The next day he was at the train station by himself in a new and very expensive suit of clothes. No one was there to see him off. He left, undertook an accelerated study of law in New York and matriculated successfully. He set up a small law office and lived solely off its gains. At the same time, he sought out and threw himself into everything that passed the muster of the sophisticated smart set and the avant-garde. He even briefly became a junior partner in a firm whose name was old and storied by American standards, but America was never big enough for him. Once he became convinced that he had ingested it all, he set off for Europe.
Chapter 8
1925
By 1925 he had already toured from pole to pole and seen the optimistic spirit of the age. He had been to Europe and Asia, seen Alps and Himalayas and zeppelins and shining factories and operas, visited wine festivals and folk dances and parties given by royalty, and seen elaborate village weddings and funer
als and rites of passage with beautiful young men and women dressed boldly but nervously and ceremonially, made to stand in a circle, their dark eyes brushing others' eyes with new lights.
But already he could be standing in the midst of all this energy and suddenly a voice inside of him would ask the point of everything. He would stand there and smile and to people around him it would seem like nothing had changed, but to him the world had gone grey between one heartbeat and the next.
One summer he had come back home at his mother's insistence when his father was sick, and they had a quarrel in which the father asserted that White could achieve nothing on his own without his money, and so White countered by opening a law office in town, ostensibly to show his father up but also out of some grudging realization that now, at last, the old man was sicker than all the other times before and was probably, actually, finally, dying.
While he was in town ready to ride out a short term of austerity in deference to his father’s last days, he met a blonde woman named Constance Marchant. She had not lived in town when he was there before, but now here she was, something new and bright amidst the faded and the familiar. She was tall and lithe, pale with green eyes, a woman of alabaster beauty displaced in this town while her father criss-crossed the state on political business.
He thought she was very interesting.
He was in town to look for a space to lease for his law office when he saw her. It was early in the afternoon and he was waiting for the landlord to unlock the offices and let him inspect them, when across the street he saw the tall lean alabaster girl wearing a sleeveless dress and a cloche hat. She looked self-possessed as she strode into the drugstore.
Soon the landlord arrived and White was ushered into the ground floor of a dark brick building to inspect his prospective offices. He liked the smell of warm stale emptiness and the wide wood floor covered with dust and possibility, and he took the keys in exchange for a handshake. He walked out into the day again just in time to see the woman climb into a stylish roadster and drive off like she owned the road. And he wondered who she was and he was determined to meet her.
