Next day, when we had to do our Saturday marketing, Ruth cut a bunch of rosebuds and some sprigs of daphne and put them in the car. As we drew opposite the Catlins’ parking area we saw Marian pushing her daughter in a swing hung from a high oak limb in the grove. Their voices came up in chirps and cries, a sort of stinging musical spray from that brown pool. Marian saw us, gave the child a last running push, and came up the bank. I had not been mistaken about the vividness of her face; she brought light with her out of the shadow of the oaks.
Panting, she took the hand I held out, gave it a quick hard squeeze, and still holding it, stooped to smile through the car at Ruth, who was leaning to pass the roses across me.
“The worms we promised you,” I said.
“Do I dare sniff them, or will I be inhaling DDT?” But she buried her face in the buds, and lifted it only to bury it again, though that variety, Fred Edmonds, does not have much odor. “I love them,” she said, to make sure we didn’t misunderstand her joke. “They’re beautiful.”
She was laughing at me through the bouquet—and what a blue her eyes were: cornflower, delphinium. The tilted updrawn look in the outer corners that women try to get with make-up was in her somehow wistful and young and vulnerable, since she wore no make-up at all and was in spite of the exercise so pale.
If I am really remembering, and not inserting feelings I had later, every movement she made troubled me with its intimation of the mutilation she had suffered. I could not help wondering if it was her scarred side she held the roses to. The left, was it? I could see no difference, but she had to pad herself, obviously. And would that seem offensive to her, that falseness? How did she feel when she looked at her ruined body, or when her husband looked at it? Mystically addicted to the distribution of seeds, did she feel herself crippled for love? She couldn’t have, for what had she done as soon as she recovered from the operation but get herself pregnant? For just an instant I wondered if a husband in John Catlin’s position might feel used, and then I thought of his good-humored, firm, guarded face, his eyes that followed her around, and I knew he didn’t.
She chattered in the fluty, hyperthyroid voice, a thin girl in a faded denim skirt that showed no slightest sign of podding under its wide pocket. The orange-red roses lay in her bent arm. Behind her the weathered cottage stared, still curtainless, into unspaded beds of weeds. Ruth was offering slips, geranium or ice plant or something that took practically no care, but no, Marian insisted, they really weren’t going to plant anything. Maybe she was a nut, but she believed that plants whose genes were adapted to an environment ought to be let grow in it, instead of being uprooted in favor of exotics that would die as soon as the gardener turned off the hose. Besides, why should she break her back gardening when the neighbors brought her such lovely flowers? In exchange, we must come and sit in their nice dusty grove, and get oak moths in our hair.
From that grove her daughter was calling. “Mummy! Come push me, I’m dying.”
“I’m talking now, hon. Pump. See how high you can go.”
“I can’t, I go all crooked.”
“Sit square in the middle.”
“I am !”
Marian frowned, made an explaining face, seemed about to excuse herself and leave us. Across me Ruth passed the sprigs of daphne that filled the car with their scent. “Ask her if she’d like something for her buttonhole.”
Sniffing—ummm!—Marian called, “Debby, the Allstons have brought you something nice.”
The white nylon ropes jerked, twisted, and hung shaking. The girl came up the bank, flinching and frowning when she brushed against a thistle. She took the handful of perfume as if she had expected something a good deal more gorgeous, maybe a pony. “Smell,” her mother said. Debby held the daphne against her nose and stared at us owlishly. Her mother hugged her shoulders. “Debby, this is Mr. and Mrs. Allston, who live up on the hill in a beautiful house and have a Siamese cat named Catarrh.”
“What’s catarrh?”
“Sinus trouble,” I said. “We only call him Catarrh inside the family. His registered name is Otorhinolaryngitis.”
She was not amused. Exit clown, to scornful laughter.
“Say how do you do, and thanks for the lovely daphne,” Marian said.
“How do you do. Thanks for the daphne.”
“I hope you’ll come and see us often,” Ruth said. “How do you like your new house?”
“All right.”
“She hasn’t had a chance to find playmates yet,” Marian said. “John’s at the lab all day, and she gets tired of just me. And she’s had to change schools. We’ve got to get busy organizing some of her friends to come out and play, or find some new ones.”
“But you’ve got a beautiful swing,” Ruth said.
“Ya,” Debby said, “but she’ll never push me.”
“Hon, I can’t push you all the time. If you’d learn to pump you could swing all day.” To us, with a deprecatory down-drawn mouth, she said, “She’s been simply berserk about that swing since John put it up last night.” Again she hugged Debby to her hip. “We’re a little lost, that’s our trouble. But we’ll soon get acquainted and like the country better than anywhere. Won’t we? We’re already making friends with the animals. We saw one of our foxes again, and a raccoon got in our garbage can, and three deer came by. You don’t see those in town.”
Held against her mother’s leg, Debby seemed to resist the pressure without wanting to break away. “You forgot the man that lives in the tree.”
Marian broke into laughter. “Yes, why didn’t you tell us about our arboreal neighbor?”
“He never crossed my mind,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I don’t want him crossing my mind.”
“Why not? He seems like a real original.”
“Original?” I said. “You can grind out originals like that on a mimeograph machine.”
“Oh, come on, how many people do you know who live in trees?”
“How many beards do you see running around on motorcycles?”
“But that’s unfair. Should I call you a stereotype because you drive a car like a hundred and fifty million other Americans? As far as that goes, it’s a shaven face that’s unnatural. I think beards on men are handsome, sometimes.”
“You’ve persuaded me,” I said. “Starting right now, I’m growing a beard.”
“Not in my house,” Ruth said. “I have trouble enough with Catarrh shedding all over everything.”
“Don’t talk to me, it’s her responsibility. She likes these dustmops, and what she likes, that’s what I try to be.”
“You’re so amenable,” Marian said. “Isn’t he amenable ? But I like your face all bare. I just think you shouldn’t judge a person by how much hair he’s got.”
“Have you met this kid? Do you find him charming?”
“Well, charming, that’s a word. He’s pretty far out. But maybe that’s because he cares about things.”
“Cares about what? If he cared about things, he’d be down in Mississippi or carrying a sign in some protest march, not perched in a tree with his drawbridge up.”
“I take it back,” Marian said. “You aren’t amenable at all, you’re full of gross prejudice. If you don’t like him, why do you let him live down here?”
“Softheadedness. Amenability.”
“I’ll bet. No, he really isn’t so bad. Coming home the other night he rode his motorcycle by the window pretty loud, and Debby woke up scared, so we went out and talked to him while he was putting it away.”
“I hope you did. If he disturbs you with that hoodlum machine, he’s through roosting in that tree right now.”
“Oh tush,” Marian said. “He was perfectly good about it, he just hadn’t thought. This morning he pushed the motorcycle past and started it down by the bridge. But he is about as odd as Dick’s hatband, with the whiskers and that flying suit. John says he’s got a bad case of disestablishmentarianism.”
“I noticed,” I said. “He’s all brok
en out with it.”
“And he eats only nuts and fruits and vegetables.”
“He seems to tell everybody that.”
“Did he tell you why?”
“No.”
“His father’s some bigwig in the meat-packing business in Chicago, and that’s why he won’t eat any meat.”
“That’s a great reason,” I said. “Doesn’t his father wear pants, too? How come Tarzan doesn’t wear a sarong, or a toga?”
“You can’t say those coveralls are exactly orthodox.”
“Nor very sanitary,” I said.
“Ah,” she said, smiling and screwing up her eyes, “you like to sound like old Scrooge, but I notice he’s still living in your tree. And that’s going to disrupt this household, you know that? This one here has been after me all day, when she hasn’t been screaming to be pushed in the swing, to go see his treehouse. And he obviously doesn’t want people looking at his treehouse.”
“But I could ask him,” Debby said. “Why can’t I ask him?”
“Because he’s fussy about his privacy,” her mother said. “Everybody’s got his peculiarities. He likes privacy, Mr. ,Allston is grossly prejudiced, you’ve got bug eyes, I’m a skinny hysteric. But we’ve all got a right to be what we are. Haven’t we?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do. So that’s why he keeps his bridge pulled up and doesn’t want us snooping around his place.”
“Well I’m going to!”
“I hope not, baby,” Marian said. “You’d embarrass us awfully if you did.”
Ruth, leaning, said, “I’m afraid we have to go or we’ll get caught in the rush-hour traffic. But please stop by when you’re out walking. And bring Debby up to meet Catarrh.”
I started the engine, mother and daughter stepped back, we were a rotating lighthouse of smiles. “You too,” Marian was saying, one arm full of roses, one around Debby. “Soon as we get settled we want to ... John gets a week between quarters, right away soon. Debby, wait, please! Sometimes I wish Daddy hadn’t put that thing up. Talk about peculiarities, you’re a swinger, nothing but. Say goodbye to the Allstons, baby. Goodbye, and thanks for the flowers. And the worms! The worms especially....”
In the rearview mirror I saw Debby dragging her mother down toward the swing. “The kid’s a tyrant,” I said. “What she needs is the sound of a good firm no.”
“I suppose Marian’s trying to compensate for the upset of moving.”
“And the gorilla man,” I said. “Wouldn’t you know they’d be all buddy-buddy within twenty-four hours?”
“Oh, buddy-buddy! They talked a few minutes.”
“Sure, but I thought he despised square company. He could have grunted and climbed farther out on his limb.”
“Joe,” she said, “you’re fantastic. You’re jealous.”
“Look who’s calling me fantastic,” I said. But of course she was right. I resented Marian’s slightest acquaintance with Caliban.
When we came back around three-thirty, John was in the yard with a golf-club-shaped sickle cutting down thistles. I stopped. “What?” I said. “Improving nature?”
“Thistles only,” he said. “They prickle Debby’s legs. I guess if we went around barelegged we’d have had them down before this. How about a beer?”
I looked at Ruth, with the thought she probably had herself: we shouldn’t fall all over people, we shouldn’t get too thick. But obviously we both wanted to. “Have we, got any frozen stuff that will melt?” I asked.
“There are some frozen vegetables, yes.”
“You hop out,” I said. “I’ll run up and put them in the freezer and come back.”
I hurried, too, like a boy bound for a party. When I got back, I swung in against the trail gate to park, and there was Jim Peck’s motorcycle with the white helmet hanging from the handlebar. As soon as I crossed the parking area and could look down into the grove, I saw him there among them in his orange suit, a satyr come to the picnic.
2
I see that grove as an eighteenth-century landscape, leafy at the top, meadowy at the edges, bronzy at the center where the figures cluster. The sun is low along the hill, and afternoon stretches into the grove in bars and rays to pick out Marian’s faded blue, Ruth’s red, John’s khaki, the hot gold of beer cans on the weathered picnic table. The nylon rope, Maxfield Parrish touch not quite congruous with the rest, becomes a silver cord when Debby’s swinging brings it into the sun. John is pushing with one hand, holding a beer can with the other, turning his head to say smiling things to Ruth and Marian, who are stretched out in canvas chairs. Transparent flames lick up in the barbecue pit, for it is still spring, and not overly warm. The wood smoke that except for the disturbance of Debby’s swinging would go straight up into the leaves is scattered and blown, to wreathe around among gray limbs and drift up to me scented with the nostalgia of a hundred pleasant outings.
Most orderly and neoclassic that pastoral grove, those noble trees, those gracefully disposed figures; most romantic the touch of gaiety and aspiration as the child soars upward in the swing. But also, ines-capably part of the picture, the shape of Disorder stands a little apart, in shadow, gleaming darkly, the orange suit like a gross flower against the brown spring-fallen leaves.
Jim Peck is not one of those apostles of modernity who go stony-faced as if wearing a sign: ALIENATED. KEEP OFF. His wild hair, wild beard, wild eyes, are the components of a true satiric leer. Through his unvarying grin he peers out at the world of civilization and sense like a wild man through a screen of vines. He ought to be ridiculous or pathetic; I am sure his own version of himself contains a good portion of the saintly; and yet the picture that hangs in my mind, remembered or composite or imaginary, places him and half hides him in a way to corroborate my first impression that he is dangerous. He is dangerous, too, and all the more so because, as I now recognize, he has no more malice, than he has sense, and has besides a considerable dedication to beliefs that he unquestionably considers virtuous. Dangerousness is not necessarily a function of malicious intent. If I were painting a portrait of the father of evil, I wonder if I wouldn’t give him the face of a high-minded fool.
Dangerous or not, he is one of us. He has responded to the friendly kindness of the Catlins precisely as the Joseph Allstons have. I wouldn’t allow the unwashed fantast in my house, but, I have to remind myself, it isn’t my house he is being admitted to. And- he doesn’t bother me so much that I am going to give up the Catlins’ company because of him. If he can stand me, I can stand him. I walk on down and join them in the fragrant shade.
I thought Peck looked uneasy in that pleasant grove, among those pleasant older people, and my entrance so obviously added to his social watchfulness that I had to remind myself, lest I begin to feel sorry for him, that in his pretentious withdrawal he was arrogant, and as much a dog in the manger as I had sometimes thought myself for resenting him. Moreover, among his own crowd, when he broke training and came out for a frolic, he was a long way from diffident. He could pick the guitar, sing, drink beer, bang the bongos or the girls, and play the bacchant with the best. I thought I had better keep in mind the occasional girls who rode in and out with him, glued as tight as beetle wings to his back while he leaned too fast into the curves of the lane or bounced across the treads of Weld’s booby-trap bridge; and the vision in the black leotard who had emerged into the morning to demonstrate that one, at least, took Peck seriously enough to sleep with him. There was no need for me to feel any idiotic protective-ness. I was not the hostess here. If he was old enough to be playing saint and screwing girls he was old enough to take his chance in civilized company.
Not that they shut him out. On the contrary. Having hailed him out of friendliness, they made him welcome. A potentially squeaky hinge, he got early grease from both Marian and Ruth; so that, though I might have preferred to be part of the conversation that included Marian, I found myself talking to John about the coming town elections and the threat of a gravel quarry in
the hills, while we pushed Debby back and forth between us in the swing. My ear, however, was cocked aside, as Debby’s eyes were: her eyeballs followed Peck the way a portrait’s eyes pursue a tourist around a gallery. It irritated me that I could not ignore him. Why, simply by being there, grotesque in hair and coveralls, did he focus our attention? And to hear what? This:...healthy on his vegetarian diet? (Oh yes.) What did he eat, exactly? (Oh, rice, whole-wheat bread, peanut butter, vegetables, fruit, nuts, like that.)
Did he have to avoid getting too much carbohydrates? Did he gain weight, or lose? (Never paid any attention. Never gained weight, no. Seemed to stay about the same.)
What was he dieting for, health, religion, or what? (Some of both. Also to protest the hypocrisies of meat eating. Every meat eater who thought meat came wrapped in neat cellophane packages should take a tour of the stockyards, he’d never eat it again.)
He seemed sort of—wasn’t he?—sort of Hindu. Was it all kinds of meat he was opposed to, or just the killing of cattle? (All kinds.)
Well, was it the eating of flesh he opposed, or was it the cruelty of the slaughterhouses? Meat eating was natural—guess who is talking—everything belonged to some food chain. Wasn’t it simply the horror of the way animals were killed? (It was meat eating itself he was against. All the largest and strongest animals were vegetarian. He himself wanted to be absolutely harmless. He believed in ahimsa, nonviolence, harmlessness. Besides, the eating of meat had a bad effect on the clarity of his mind. He wanted to keep his mind crystal-clear. He was trying to think his way below all the surfaces, past all the boundaries. The world was shut in. It was the duty of thinkers and intellectuals to help free it. He was writing a book, keeping very full notes on himself as he projected his consciousness farther and farther into unknown or half-known states. If people only knew how, they could get rid of their hangups and their hostilities and come out on the other side into states of pure mind they never even suspected. The longer he stayed, on his strict diet, the longer he worked on his exercises and his sessions of contemplation, the clearer he got, the less he was hung up, the less the world meant, the farther out he pushed the horizons of perception. He had hundreds of pages already, he worked sometimes all night, it came freer and freer, like automatic writing. The things he was discovering were so exciting he didn’t sleep more than an hour or two. And that was something else you could control. You ...)
All the Little Live Things Page 9
