29

Ongoing American Flctionll

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

TriQY�mr.ly EDITOR

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BUSINESS MANAGER

Charles Newman Elliott Anderson

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Theresa Maylone Lawrence Levy

ART DIRECTOR

M. D. McDonnell

ASSOCIATE EDITOR ASSISTANT EDITORS

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Dave Sedgewick

Debby Silverman Mary Elinore Smith Gerald Graff

ADVISORY EDITORS

Suzanne Kurman Peter Michelson

Cynthia Anderson Kathy Jordan

PRODUCTION FULFILLMENT

TriQuarterly is an international journal of arts, letters, and opinion published in the fall, winter, and spring at North­ western University, Evanston, Illinois 60201. Subscription rates: One year $7.00; two years $12.00; three years $17.00.

Foreign subscriptions $.75 per year additional. Single copies usually $2.95. Back issue prices on request. Contributions, correspondence, and subscriptions should be addressed to TriQuarterly, University Hall 101, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60201. The editors invite submissions, but

queries are strongly suggested. No manuscript will be re­ turned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. All manuscripts accepted for publication become the property of TriQuarterly, unless otherwise indicated.

Copyright © 1974 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. The views expressed in this magazine are to be attributed to the writers, not the editors or sponsors.

Printed in the United States of America. Claims for missing numbers will be honored only within the four-month period after month of issue.

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JOHN GARDNER

The warden

URSULE MOLINARO

Chiaroscuro:

5

a treatment of

light & shade

DAVID ZANE MAIROWITZ

The channel

53

JOSEPH MC ELROY

from Lookout cartridge Exploded view 104

JOY WILLIAMS

41

67

131

WILLIAM KITTREDGE

The stone corral

VICTOR SKADE

I dream of all my friends

ROBERT BOLES

New York sketches

140

149

Untitled piece

152

Doffing the hat

154

Window pendant of colored

glass and fly ROBERT BONAZZI

155

The ancient tragical motif as reflected in the modern

GEORGE CHAMBERS

They

are

but their flesh is painted ELLIOTT ANDERSON GILBERT SORRENTINO JOHN

BATKI

157

naked,

from Virginia Flynn from Splendide-Hotel Rimbaud's parents

164

167 173

181

Mallarrne on the 14th of

SAMANTHA LEVY PETER MICHELSON

July, 1889 182 183 My design blows away.

A polemical-poetical oration ..

in the narrative-dramatic­ cinematic mode

184 197

FA YE SOBKOWSKY

Untitled piece

W. B. SCOTT

Work in progress

A. B. PAULSON

The Minnesota Multiphasic

199

Personality: a diagnostic test in two parts

204

Cover creature and all interior illustrations are by Elwood Smith

The warden JOHN GARDNER

1

The Warden has given up every attempt to operate the prison

by the ancient regulations. Conditions grow monstrous, yet no one can bring them to the Warden's attention. He paces in his room, never speaking, never eating or drinking, giving no instructions of any kind. He dictates no letters, balances no accounts, never descends to the dungeons or inspects the guards. At times he abruptly stops pacing and stands stock still, listening, his features frozen in a look of vengeful concen­ tration. But apparently nothing comes of it. He looks down from whatever his eyes have chanced to fix upon, his stern and

ravaged face relaxes to its usual expression of sullen ennui. (I speak not of what 1 see but of what 1 used to see, in the days when he occasionally called me in, in the days when sometimes he would even smile grimly and say, "Vortrab, you and 1 are the only hope!") After a moment's thought he remembers his pacing and at once, doggedly, returns to it. His pacing has become a kind of heartbeat of the place. Even when I'm far from here, lying in my cottage in the dead of night, 1 seem to TriQuarterly

5

hear that beat come out of the stones, then ominously stop, then at last start up again, the old man walking and walking in his room, like a gnome sealed up in a mountain. I, his mere amanuensis, am left to do what little I can to keep the institution functioning. I pay the guards and give them encour­

agement; I visit the cells and arrange for the changing of straw and the necessary burials. When we lose personnel, which happens often-sweepers and gravediggers loading up their

satchels with government equipment and slinking away like wolves in the night-I go to the village and find, if possible,

replacements. It's a touchy arrangement. They all know I have no authority. They doubt that they themselves have any. It seems to me at times that we have nothing to go on but our embarrassment. That and the money that still comes, from time to time, from the Bureau of Correctional Institutions. I have a

subterfuge that I've fallen into using, though I doubt that anyone's convinced by it. I tell the guards and supervisors that the Warden has commanded so-and-so. I say, for instance, "The Warden is concerned about the smell down here. He's

asked

me

to

organize

a

clean-up detail." At times, when

morale is unusually low, I pretend that the Warden is angry,

and I give them stern orders, supposedly from him. They look

down, as if afraid, and accept what I say, though they do not believe it and certainly stand in no awe of me-a small, balding fat man forever short of breath. It gives them a reason to continue.

How long this can last I do not know. Let me set down here,

for whoever may follow, a full report of how things stand with us, though none of this touches on the cause of our troubles-a

thing so complex that I scarcely know how to comprehend it.

Some weeks ago, finding one of our older and more loyal guards asleep at his post, and being, perhaps, a trifle edgy and self-righteous from worry, lack of sleep, and irritation at being required to do more than I'm trained to do, I stepped briskly to the sleeping man's side and shouted directly in his ear, "Heller! What's the meaning of this?"

6

Heller jumped

foot, then looked

angry. then

sheepish.

"I'm sorry, sir," he said. He's a small man, narrow chested, with a thin, nervous face like a comic mask-large-eyed, large­ eared, beneath the long nose a beard and moustache, and to the sides of it, rectangular spectacles. He was obviously distressed at his lapse of vigilance-at least as distressed as I was, in fact.

If I'd been fully myself, I'd have let the matter drop. But I couldn't resist pressing harder, the way I myselfam pressed.

I jabbed my face at him. "What will the Warden think of a

this?"

He lowered his eyes. "The Warden," he said.

said, "What would happen if some prisoner got into the corridor?" I came close to shaking my fist at the man. He looked past me, morose. They always know more than you do, these Jews. You see them shuffling along the roadside, hats sagging, beards drooping, eyes cast down as if expecting the worst. They tempt you to swing your team straight at them, let I

them know for once how matters stand. No doubt that's what Mallin would have done-the man we had here some time ago.

A nihilist, destroyer of churches, murder of medical doctors.

At the thought of Josef Mallin I pretended to soften, but it

really from cruelty not unlike his, a sudden wish that the accident had happened. "You wouldn't be the first guard killed by his own reckless laziness, Heller. You know what they're like. Wild animals! Whatever touch of humanness they may ever have possessed Heller nodded, still avoiding my eyes. He refused to say a

was

"

...

word.

"Well?" I said. I struck the stone floor with my stick and

stamped my foot. The idea of Mallin, even now that he'd been dead for months, made my indignation seem reasonable.

Guards had been murdered, from time to time. And there were certain men so bestial, so black of heart

...

Heller's eyes swung up to mine, then down, infinitely weary.

Immediately, I was ashamed of myself, slapped back to sense and sick to death of the whole situation. I turned from him in 7

stiff, military fashion, though I have nothing to do with the

military, and started away. I knew well enough that he had no answer. No one has an answer for a question, a manner of behavior, so grotesque. But as I started up the dark, wet stairs, self-consciously dignified, full of rage which no longer had anything to do with Heller, he called after me: "Herr Vor­ trab!"

I stopped, despite myself. I waited, squeezing the handle of my stick, and when he said nothing more, I turned to look at

him, or turned part way. The tic which troubles me at times like these was jerking in my cheek.

"I'm sorry to have troubled you," he said.

His foolish, weak face made me angrier yet, but for all his meekness he managed to make me more helpless and ludicrous than ever. Nor was it much comfort that in the flimmer of the

lamp he too looked childlike, downlike, absurdly out of place.

The flat, heavily initialled stones glistened behind him, wet as the bed work of the moat.

He had his hands out and his

shoulders hunched, like a scolded tailor. It was impossible to meet his eyes, but also impossible not to, in that ghastly place.

The corridor winding through the shadow of chains and spider­ webs toward increasing darkness was like a passage in a dream

leading endlessly downward toward rumbling coal-dark water­ falls, sightless fish.

"You haven't talked to them, sir," he said.

I stared at him, eyebrows lifted, waiting.

He raised his hands, the center of his forehead, his narrow shoulders in a tortuous shrug, as if pulling upward against centuries. "I do talk to them," he said. "If they're animals-" I said. I It's forbidden to talk with the prisoners, squeezed harder on the handle of my stick.

He nodded, indifferent. "Doesn't it strike you that we-we too are prisoners? I go home at night to my wife and children, but I never leave the prison. -That makes no sense, I suppose." His shoulders slumped more.

"It certainly doesn't," I said, though I understood. I too go "

"

8

evening to the same imprisonment. My senile father, who's ninety, paints pictures in the garden, thoroughly oblivious to my worries; amused by them. My two small children cackle over jokes they do not explain to me, watching as if through high windows, great square bars. My wife "Heller, you need a vacation," I said.

His smile, for all its gentleness, was chilling. Centuries of despair, determination to continue for no clear reason, some ludicrous promise that all would be well though nothing had ever been well or ever would be. A brief panic flared up in me.

I took a step down, moving toward him, then another, and another. The panic was fierce now, icy. irrational, a sense of being led toward ruin and eagerly accepting it. "What prisoners home every

...

do you talk to?" I asked.

Again, this time more thoughtfully, he looked at me, his fingers on his beard. With a slight shrug he turned and moved down the corridor, then timidly glanced back, looking over his spectacles, inquiring whether I'd follow. At the first turn, he lifted a lamp from its chain and hook, glancing back again. I nodded impatiently. He held the lamp far forward, at eye-level.

Rats looked up at us. We came to the worn stone steps leading downward to the deepest of the dungeons. The walls were so close we had to walk single file, the ceiling so low that even a man of my slight stature was forced to walk cocked forward like a hunter.

At the foot of the steps, the cells appeared, door after door,

dark iron-barred crypts. Most of the barred doors supported great silvery spiderwebs like spectral tents, their sagging walls

gaudied by moisture drops that shone in the glow of the lantern like sapphires and rubies. The stink was unspeakable. Old straw, human feces, old age, and the barest trace, like some

nagging guilt, of the scent of death. At the fourth door on the right hand side, he held up the lantern, and, obeying his gesture, I cautiously peeked in.

What I saw, when my eyes had adjusted to the gloom, was a naked old man seated in his chains-seated or propped, I 9

couldn't make out which-in the corner of the cell. Beside him

lay a pan of uneaten food and his lumpy, musty sleeping-pallet.

He was a skeleton awkwardly draped in veined, stiff parch­ ment. His hair and beard, which reached to the floor, were as white as snow, or would have been except for the bits of straw

and dirt. One could see at a glance that his luminous eyes were useless to him. His hands, closed to fists, were like the feet ofa

bird; his wrists and ankles were like crooked pairs of sticks. I could not tell for certain whether or not the man was still alive,

impression-the smell perhaps-was that he wasn't. I thought I felt something behind us and turned to look.

There was no one. A flurry of rats. but my distinct

Heller called out, "Professor, you have a visitor." The words were distorted by echoes running down the long stone

bouncing from the lichen covered walls of the cells. The prisoner made no response. Heller called out the same words again, more slowly this time, as if speaking to a child hard-of-hearing. And now it seemed to me that a kind of spasm came over the face-not an expression, not even a movement of features suggestive of human intelligence, but corridor and

some

kind of movement, all the

same.

I watched in horror,

pierced to the marrow by the sight of that dead face awakening.

Then-still more terrible-the skull of a head turned slowly to the right, straining, perhaps, to decipher some meaning in the echoes. Heller called out a third time, leaning forward, hand on beard, calling this time still more slowly, and as the echoes died, there came from the creature in the cell or from the walls around him a windy. moaning syllable almost like a word.

"He's saying 'Friend,'"

Heller whispered, at my shoulder.

Then, to the prisoner: "Professor, tell the visitor your crime."

Again the prisoner seemed unable to grasp what the guard was saying. He swiveled his head like an old praying mantis, translucent white. But when Heller had asked the same ques­ tion three times, the prisoner brought out a series of noises,

hoarse, reedy grunts-his stiff, dark tongue seemed locked to his palate-and Heller interpreted: "'No crime,' he says. 'Was 10

never

accused.''' Heller studied me, looking over his specta­

cles, trying to see what I made of it. But I had no time to consider that now. I was beginning to understand, myself, the

prisoner's noises. I needed to hear more, test my perceptions against Heller's. I struggled against distraction. I had, more strongly than before, the impression that someone was behind us. Except when I looked closely, I was aware of a bulky, crouching shadow. No doubt it was merely a trick of my nerves; at any rate

Heller

was

unaware

of it.

I nailed my

attention to the prisoner.

"Why do you call him 'Professor'?" I whispered.

The guard looked away from me, annoyed by the question, then changed his mind. He asked the prisoner, Professor, tell ••

us of Matter and Mind.

"

The prisoner sat perfectly still, as before, but it did not seem to me now that he was

struggling to make sense of Heller's

words. He seemed to consider with his weakened wits whether to respond or relax his attention, drift deeper into death. Then,

little by little, I

him

laboring back toward thought. He began to speak, if you could call it speaking, and Heller interpreted word for word until, by my touching his arm, he perceived that I no longer needed his assistance.

I can suggest only faintly and obscurely what I felt, listening in darkness to the tortuous syllables of that spiritless old man.

The lamp threw the shadows of bars across his body, and I had saw

a sense-a conviction

related to his words-that insubstantial

shadows alone were sufficient to pin him in his place.

"There is no immateriality," he said. "Mere word. Mere sound." He

his

thick, dry tongue around his lips. His eyebrows lifted, part of an attempt to get his jaw muscles working. For all his difficulty in expressing himself, it was plain that he had his words by heart. He'd delivered the lecture a hundred-more like a thousand-times. Not merely to stu­ dents; to himself more often; to the rats, the spiders, the bats, the darkness and emptiness around him, perhaps to neigh­ boring felons, while they lasted. The lecture was doubtless the ran

II

anchor of his sanity. or had been once. Such tricks are common

long as he could still put the words in some part of their significance, he was order, himself, a man, not yet reduced to the level of beasts, whose suffering. if not unconscious, is soon forgotten. I could see by his pauses and the accompanying expression of bafflement and panic that the power of the magic was draining away. A ghostly pallor layover his features, his voice trembled, and his blind eyes stared fixedly, as if he were listening intently to every among prisoners. As

still grasp

word.

I no longer recall the exact phrasing, but I remember very well the general argument-that and the terrible struggle in his

voice, like the labor of the prematurely buried. As Heller and I have reconstructed it, the lecture went as follows: "There are gradations of matter of which man knows noth­

ing, the grosser impelling the finer, the finer pervading the grosser. The atmosphere, for example, impels the electric principle, while the electric principle permeates the atmo­ sphere. These gradations increase in rarity until we arrive at matter unparticled; and here the law of impulsion and permea­ tion is modified. The ultimate, unparticled matter not only permeates all things but impels all things, and thus is all things within itself. This matter is God. What men attempt to embody in the word thought is this matter in motion.

"There are two bodies, the rudimental and the complete, corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call 'death' is the painful metamorphosis.

Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, tempo­ rary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.

"But of the worm's metamorphosis, you may object, we are palpably cognizant. I answer: We, certainly-but not the worm. Our rudimental organs are adapted to the matter of which is formed the rudimental body, but not to that of which the ultimate is composed. We thus perceive only the shell which falls from the inner form, not the inner form itself. Yet consider. In certain states-in states of entrancement, as for 12

instance when we have been mesmerized-we perceive inde­

pendent of rudimental organs: we employ the medium we shall fully employ in the ultimate, unorganized life.

"Only in the rudimental life is there any experience of pain, for pain is the product of impediments afforded by number, complexity, and substantiality. That is not to say that the rudimental life is bad, however painful in a given case. All things, after all, are good or bad only by comparison. To be happy at anyone point we must have suffered at the same.

Never to suffer would be never to have been blessed. But in the

inorganic life, pain organic.

cannot

be; thus the necessity for the

"

I have no idea how long it took him to get all this out, nor

what I thought of his opinions at the time-though I've had fearful occasion to think back to them since. I stood motion­

less, clinging to the square iron bars as if the slightest move­

might shatter his delicate hold on sense. Heller, too, staring at the floor, his hand closed on one end of his moustache, his bearded chin pressed firmly to his chest. When the lecture broke off, the guard shot a glance at me, then moved the lamp closer to the bars and peered in at the prisoner. The sudden alteration of the shadows was alarming, as if something alive had slipped closer to us. Then, without a word, the guard stepped back from the door of the cell, gave me a nod, and started toward the stairway we'd come down.

When we reached the relatively less dismal passage above­ a corridor six feet wide and eight feet high, lighted, every feet or so, by flickering, smoke-dulled hanging lamps twenty and etched, like all our prison walls, with the initials of a thousand miserable souls long since departed-Heller dropped back to walk beside me, his head bowed and his long hands ment

stood motionless,

folded in front of him.

"So now you've seen," he said.

I nodded, not certain what it was that he meant I'd seen. My

mind turned over the Professor's ideas-those and the irony of his present condition, his whole life of pain grown remote, unreal, a cold refutation of his optimistic theory.

13

"The man's innocent," Heller said. "A keen, metaphysical

mind; and yet through all these years-" "On the contrary," I said, "we've no notion whatever of his

innocence or guilt. He was no doubt legally sentenced to this

dungeon."

The guard stopped and looked at me, holding the lamp up to see me more clearly-exactly, I noticed with a shudder, as he'd held up the lamp to inspect the old man. "Why would he deny his guilt at this stage? Surely he's aware-" "Habit, perhaps." I said it too sharply, as if for the benefit of the darkness behind us. I could hardly blame the guard for his quick little shrug of exasperation. I looked away, toward the steps that would lead me to higher, wider corridors and at last to my chamber, remote from this graveyard of the living. The guard waited, not even bothering to scoff at my suggestion.

Again I could hardly blame him.

"I must speak to the Warden about this," I said, clipped and official, and looked over his head. The guard leaned toward me with ajerk and a bewildering smile, and caught my arm. "Do!" he whispered. His fingers dug into me. (l have seen it before, the guilt the men feel about the horrors they help to perpet­ uate.) Though I know the importance of keeping the forms in a place like this, I did not shake Heller's hand from my arm. "I'll see to the matter at once," I said. My voice was accidentally stern.

And so I left him, my step as metallic as an officer's, my

walking stick a weapon. As I passed the guards in the passage­ ways above I gave to each of them a crisp salute. Some responded, looking up from their half-sleep, their dice games, their lunch baskets; some did not. I let it pass, secretly listening already for the sound of pacing that would prove that the Warden had been all the while in his chamber and knew nothing of our breach of regulations.

And so I came to the Warden's door and stood listening. My knock brought no change to the rhythm of his step. I knocked

again, and then again.

14

It

was

unthinkable that the Warden

couldn't hear the

banging of that great brass knocker-the figure ofa lion with eyes worn blank by a century of hands. But the Warden continued pacing.

2

The sky ahead of me, as I walked home that evening, was a

thing of sublime and fearsome beauty. The sun was still high­ it was the middle of summer-and the weather had for weeks been alternating between hot, dense, muggy days and twilight

cloudbursts. Mountainous thunderheads towered all around me, some miraculously white, where the sunlight struck them,

some-the lower clouds-glowering,

oppressive. The sky in

the glodes between masses of cloud was irenic blue, and down

through some of them came shafts of light that transmuted the ripening wheatfields, the pastures, the plane trees, hedges, and haycocks to images from a dream. Here and there on the horizon, sheet lightning flickered.

I hurried. The rain was not far off. I might easily have gotten transportation if I'd wished-with one of the guards relieved of duty; with the lumbering, creaking supply wagon that went back each night from the prison to the village; with some kindly stranger in his touring carriage; or even with one of the farmers bringing in hay. But I preferred to risk a soaking; I valued, almost superstitiously, the long walk home, transition from the world of officials to the world of men. Tonight especially. I hadn't yet shaken the image of the wasted, enfeebled "profes­ sor" or that ominous burden on my soul, the Warden's self­ confinement.

The land was becalmed. Shadows lengthened almost visibly, and the

light

grew

fiery

green.

Moment by

moment

the

landscape around me darkened more. The river vanished, then the hedges, soon all but the hills. I would hear now and then the low warble of a bird,

a

sound that seemed to come from all

directions, like sounds heard under water. Gradually even the hills sank away. All the more impressive, even awesome, then, that directly above me stood a window of somber sky, its frame 15

edged by moonlight, and in the infinite depths ofthat sky, three stars. Despite the warning of thunder in the distance, I stopped in my tracks-as stirred to wonder as my father would have been, a foolish old man, but one with all his sensibilities refined

by landscape painting. Something of what the old prisoner had said came back to me. Not words, exactly. A sense; an impression. I had a feeling of standing outside myself, as if time and space had stopped and in one more second would be extinguished. As quickly as the queer impression came it

passed, faded back into shadow like a fish. And for some I was left with a feeling of reason impossible to name, indescribable, senseless horror, a terrible emptiness, as if I'd penetrated something, broken past the walls of my conscious­ what? But perhaps the cause was ness and discovered above me, not within. The walls of the open, moonlit glade were collapsing violently toward one another, blotting the stars out, tumbling downward like a falling roof. I seemed to hear a ...

step, and I turned to look back. In all that darkness there was

nothing to be seen-neither on the hi1ls nor on the road behind me-nothing but the smouldering torches on the prison walls.

3

I do not ordinarily mind the burden of my father's senility. It

provides distraction from those other problems I have no power or authority to solve. In any case, I'm the dutiful, respectful sort. If I'd meant to question or judge the old man, I'd have done so long since. He has his opinions, and I have mine. I let it go at that. On this particular evening, however, his whimsey took an extraordinary turn.

We had finished supper and were seated in the parlor, except for my wife, who was washing dishes. I've told her time and

old enough for that, if only she'd give them some discipline. But she prefers to do all the

time again that the children

are

work herself. She enjoys work, no doubt. It frees her from the rest of us. So

tonight, as usual, they lay scribbling, gouging

great holes in the paper, on the floor beside my father's shoes.

16

Every now and then they would glance through the window,

keeping watch on the storm like creatures in secret league with it. My father was sorting through old canvases-paintings of craggy precipices; huge-boled hickories, walnuts, oaks; sun­ light bursting through chasms, orange and purple. Whatever the quality of the paintings-I'm no judge-the old man certainly had the look of an artist, irrumpent white hair ferociously shaggy, eyes deep set as two caves in an overhung cliff. When he clamps his mouth shut, the tip of his nose and chin come together. You'd think, from the looks of him-the heavy-veined temples, the glittering eyes-that the old man misses nothing; but not so. One can have no notion, from moment to moment, where his mind will surface next.

Hejerked his head up, cracked lips pursed, staring at me as if angrily in his attempt to remember what it was that, a moment earlier, had occurred

him.

lowered my treatise-the Discourse of Descartes, I think it was-and at last, with another little jerk, abandoning the paintings stacked beside his to

I

chair, he said, "Ah! So you're executing Josef Mallin!"

I was so startled I nearly dropped my book. There are times

when his

senility seems purposeful, malicious. Worse than there are times when, for all his confusion, he seems to that, see

with perfect clarity what troublesome thoughts are astir at

the

edge of your consciousness. "Mallin's been dead for months," I said sharply. The tic came over me, flickering like lightning. I covered it with my hand.

"Impossible!" he snorted, but the next instant he looked unsure of himself, then cunning. "An interesting man," he said and like a liar quickly firmly, good shifting his ground. He leaned toward me, bent-backed, slightly drooling, and in the lamplight it seemed his head grew larger. His eyes were like a tiger's. "A man could learn a good deal from that Josef Mallin," he said. "Tried to burn down my studio once."

It happened to be true, though how it fit with the subject at hand was impossible to determine unless, like my father, you were addled. He suddenly jerked still nearer to me, as if he'd hit on something. "He's an atheist!" he said.

17

I sighed, still covering the tic, then sadly nodded to prevent

his

continuing. I did not appreciate (to say the least) his insistence on bringing Josef Mallin back to life. The period of Mallin's imprisonment, first while he awaited trial, then while he awaited execution, was a terrible strain on all of us. He was a

brilliant devil, black-haired and handsome and deadly as a

snake, so cunning at bribing or persuading his guards that at last the Warden himself took charge of holding him. It was

shortly after his death that the Warden began that interminable pacing in his chamber. Mallin's execution, I might add, was unpleasant. His crimes were the worst of the three main kinds of which the laws speak, so that after the decapitation, his head was thrown to the sawdust in the village square, to be eaten by dogs, as the law requires.

But my nod did nothing to check my father's babblings. "He claims the Bible is a pack of lies," he said, squinting, tightening his fists to get the thought exact. "The man's not merely indifferent to religion, he hates it, heart and sou}!" He struck his knee with his fist, as if some great point were scored.

I could not help but glance at my children, sprawled on the floor with their coloring papers and candies. One of these days I

must

force them back to their Bible lessons. My wife,

unfortunately, can see no reason for reading the Bible if one does not like it. She enjoys it herself, and she merely laughs­ as she laughs at everything I stand for-when 1 insist that religion is no natural impulse but a thing to be acquired. (I know only too well. It's a thing I myself never properly acquired, despite my father's love of Scripture and his labor, when 1 was a boy, to make me study it. 1 could profit by

religion's consolations, 1 think, if only I'd reached them at the proper age, the age when trust is as reasonable as reason. If I'd

known what troubles this world affords

...

)

"I admit," my father said abruptly, "that I've never seen a

ghost myself, that 1 know of." I blinked, grasping in vain for the connection, and I felt my heartbeat speeding up. Needless to say, I'd said nothing to my father of my foolish idea, in the 18

'

dungeon this morning, that something was watching us. My But I know a little something of father continued soberly, states of entrancement. Sometimes when you're painting, a kind of spell comes over you, and you know-you positively know-that there's no chance of erring with the picture at hand. You're nailed directly to the universe, and the same force that moves in the elm tree is moving your brush." He ..

nodded.

Again I nodded back; I hardly knew what else to do. I'm always uncomfortable when he speaks of himself as a master craftsman. His paintings in recent years have been clumsy and confused as a child's. Not even kind old ladies buy them. I listened with the back of my mind to my wife in the kitchen, rhythmically washing and rinsing plates. She works, always, in a pleasant daze, humming to herself, her mind as empty as a moonbeam.

My father said, "He hates Swedenborg, too, and the politics of Spinoza. 'The essence of life is suffering,' says he."

Once

again I gave a start, thinking of Heller's pathetic "professor"; but my father didn't notice, engrossed in the pleasure of pontificating. "Says Mallin, 'I can say at least this for myself. I have steadily resisted illusion.'" My father smiled wickedly, as if he'd just made some vicious joke at my expense. I pursed my lips, watching him closely, but of course the whole thing was lunatic. I took off my spectacles and sighed.

Now both of us listened to the kitchen sounds, and the sound of the children's chewing. After a time he began nodding his head. "It will be a great blow to the Warden, no doubt. The minute the axe comes down on Joe Mallin, the Warden's life will go fssst!" He grinned.

I was positive, for an instant, that the old man knew perfectly well that Josef Mallin, "Laureate of Hell," as he called himself, was dead. I suspected that he brought the matter up just to torture me, remind me of my worrisome troubles at the prison. But then, as before, I was unsure. I saw 19

vividly that I winced away-the image of Mallin's head rolling from the block into sawdust, spraying blood. The moustached lips were curled back, furious, raging their pain and indignation even now, and the black eyes-small flecks of sawdust hung on them-stared, now, full of hatred as ever, at the clouded sky.

My father looked down, disconcerted for some reason. "The prophets leap backward and forward in time," he said loudly,

-so

and slammed the arm of the chair with his fist. "There is no

past or future in the grammar of God." The children looked up at him and laughed. There was candy between their teeth. I felt

giddy, pulled crazily in diverse

directions. I was suddenly reminded, looking at my children, of those bestial creatures at the

prison-your usual criminal, I mean; not "the professor," as Heller calls him, and not some outraged philosopher-poet like Mallin. They live, the more usual criminal lot, for nothing but pleasure, like animals. They wallow in their food; when you let them together, they attack one another sexually; when you let them out into the exercise yard they snap at the sunlight, roll in the mud, and provoke horrible fights, even killings. I must have been fond of my children once, but if so, I had now forgotten it. They were

completely out of hand. I had tried to correct them-I'd tried many times-but my wife and father undid all my labors,

she

because she saw no point in correcting them-"Let them be, let them be!" she'd say lightly, with that foolish, carved-wood smile. As for my father, he disapproved of my mode of

correcting them. He preferred tiresome argument to switch­ an ings. What time have I for argument, a man overworked, in I was impossible situation? Between my wife and my father,

hopelessly walled in. speak again-he was raising his hand to shake his finger at me. To sidetrack his ravings I leaned forward quickly and began telling about Heller's "professor."

He closed his mouth tight and listened carefully, his heavy I white eyebrows so low they completely hid his eyes. While He

was

20

about to

spoke, he turned his head, apparently looking out the window, not at me. I too looked out.

It was

a

violent, sternly beautiful night. A whirlwind had

apparently collected its force in our vicinity, for there were frequent and severe alterations of wind, and even the brief illumination the lightning gave was sufficient to show the velocity with which the great black tons of cloud careened and collided. When I'd told the whole story, including as much as I remembered of the lecture on Matter and Mind, my father nodded, his eyes screwed up tight, and said, perplexingly­ "Some poets get to the heart of the matter. Most just fool around with language." I could not help but wonder, that instant, who was more lonely, more desperately helpless-the prisoner whispering in his pitch-dark dungeon, or myself.

Fortunately, however, our conversation ended there. My wife came in, wiping her hands together, smiling vaguely, passing her eyes like a casual benediction over all of us.

"Father,',' she said, "it's bedtime. The same for you, chil­ dren.

"

My father looked hard at her, thinking about whether or not to consent, then got up, stiffly, and shuffled toward the far end of our cottage, where he sleeps. Halfway there he paused, noticing his violin, and, as ifhe were curious, discovering some object never seen before, he bent to pick it up off the table. The children, meanwhile, had for some reason decided that they too would obey, and had started in the direction of their bedroom.

They too, however, found some pretext for changing their minds. Though she still went on smiling, two lines of conster­ nation appeared between my wife's eyebrows. "Children, do go to bed," she said. They did nothing, of course, and she merely put the tips of her fingers together. "They're just like Grampa," she said to me, and smiled, exactly like a picture of a hang-dog saint. I studied her thoughtfully, saying not a word.

My father told her, raising a trembling arm and pointing, "They're not like me at all. They're like you."

It was not strictly fair, of course: my wife is the soul of 21

diligence. and she's sensitive besides. She prays nightly; she cooks. cleans. darns our stockings for us; she has a remarkable natural feeling for music. Nevertheless, I was perversely delighted at hearing him speak so crossly to her. I closed the volume over my finger. rose from my chair, and bent down to pick up the children's horrible scribblings.

"Good heavens!" my wife cried, staring out the window.

Her face had gone white. I straightened up quickly. I had an impression, for an instant, that there was a man out there-a man

in a great black coat and black boots, someone I would

know, if I could make myself think calmly. But we were both mistaken, for the next instant there was nothing; it was merely an

illusion manufactured by the storm. Yet when the children

squealed, an instant later, my first thought was that now they too had seen it. It turned out to be nothing of the kind. The little girl was trying to pull down her brother's trousers.

Without

a

word to their mother (I had

miserable evening) I

never

spent a more

after the little criminals, spanked them soundly with my shoe, and put them to bed. I now felt went

much better. My father's look of outrage had no effect on me.

My wife's alarm was a pleasure. I stood at the window, smiling out at the storm with

satisfaction. But there was a flaw in my

comfort. I could not seem to rid myself of the feeling that he was

still watching us, standing behind some tree, perhaps, or

peering in from the darkness of the shuddering grape arbor. I watched for some time but saw nothing in the least suspicious, neither on my grounds, nor on the rainslick road, nor on the serpentine lane beyond the stone gateposts, rising past lindens and maples toward the old church.

4

The situation at the

prison grew desperate. Though I tried

repeatedly, I could get no response whatever to my knocks at the Warden's door. I t was a case altogether without precedent, and so, though I knew the risks in appearing insubordinate, I wrote to the Bureau of Justice. After two 22

weeks, I had still

received no answer. At even greater risk to myself, I wrote a second letter. I might as well have dropped my complaints into

closely questioned the courier-a man I have always found, in the past, to be dutiful and efficient. He spoke of an iron-studded door in an unlighted hallway. a huge brass plate bearing the single word JUSTICE, and beside the door a bill of instructions, among them instructions for the delivery of petitions. These last had a deadly simplicity: Deposit petition in slot. No exceptions. I studied him, looking severe, no doubt.

"Could you hear anything through the door?" I asked. "Noth­ ing, sir," he said and touched his cap as if in sign that he must leave. "Not a sound?" I said. His blue, button eyes stared straight ahead. His turned-up nose was like a halt signal reared in my roadway. "Do not press me, sir," the nose seemed to say. "It's none of my affair." I couldn't help but compare the man to my troublesome friend Heller. Heller, too, knew what

a

cistern.

was

I

his business and what

was

not, but he

never

put that

knowledge in the way of his lugubrious humanity. However, I sent the courier on his way, and I did not trouble myself about

sending more letters. As a matter of fact, I'd heard before of the inefficiency and corruption of the Justice Department. It was one

of the Warden's chief complaints.

He, luckily, had

strings he could pull.

Meanwhile, we had one near-calamity after another at the prison. The cook was found murdered. All evidence suggested that the murder was the fruit of a long-standing feud between

the cook and his assistant. Being unable to rouse the Warden, I took action

myself, placing the assistant in confinement to await his trial. I did this, of course, upon no legal authority; but I could see no reasonable alternative.

Hardly was that ugly matter resolved, and a new cook installed, before a second crisis struck. A sizable group of the guards revolted. I asked, in the absence of any other authority, for a conference with their spokesman. The meeting was arranged, a ridiculous melodramatic affair, since the leader of the rebellious faction was convinced-surly, double-dealing 23

peasant that he was-that my intent was to get him alone and

unceremoniously shoot him. I scarcely bothered to protest the opinion, but met him, as required, at the prison front gate, at the hour of noon, with all the guards loyal to him on one side, with their guns aimed at me, and all those loyal to me on the other side, training their guns on him. Even if we'd met as friends, it would have been a dreary spectacle. The guards' uniforms were faded and threadbare, here an epaulette missing, there an off-color elbow patch. Coats lacked buttons, trousers and boots were no longer standard; if treachery came along, it was

doubtful that more than a few of the rifles on either side

would fire.

Clownish and base

as

all this was, I sweated profusely What assurance could I have that

throughout that meeting. men so disloyal would not hazard a further disloyalty, and shoot me for their sport? The rebellious guards' demand was simple. I must double their pay. "Impossible!" I said-as it most certainly was. If I hadn't been so frightened, I might have laughed. My opponent declared the meeting ended; he would speak no further except with the Warden himself. I found a delaying tactic: I would relay to the Warden the rebels' demand and would meet them in twenty-four hours with the Warden's response. With some mutterings, they accepted. The guards on each side lowered their rifles, and I went briskly back to my chambers next to the Warden's. I did not bother, this time, to

knock on his door.

unlocking my own, a hand touched my elbow. I jumped. It was Heller. "Good heavens!" I said. He nodded, As I

was

his bearded mask-face smiling sadly down at me, and he took off his cap.

I'd been avoiding Heller, I need hardly explain. I had given my assurance that I would speak to the Warden about his

so­

called Professor, and for reasons outside my control (though I could hardly admit that to Heller), I had not done it. I was

certain, now, that he was here to ask what the Warden had decided with regard to his friend.

24

"Come in, Heller," I said, and cleared my throat. "I've been meaning to speak with you. "

He must have known well enough that that was untrue. I'd

sight of him for a week. But he nodded, still smiling sadly, and stepped ahead of me into the

been ducking and fleeing at room.

"Very elegant," he said, pretending to look around for a moment, then staring at his cap. Though it was plain that he wasn't much interested, in fact, in the elegance of my cham­ bers, I seized on his remark to stall the embarrassing question I expected. "So it is," I said. "In former times, the prison used to have important visitors. In those days cases were in constant review. In certain situations, the chief justices themselves would come down. But of course it's no longer practical. With the seat of government so much farther away

" ...

Heller nodded. I saw that he relished our meeting as little as I did. I too now fell silent, knowing there was no escape. We

stood

like

two

miserable

children

gazing apprehensively

around us. I remembered my own first impression of the place.

Though smaller than the Warden's, the central chamber is enormous. Exactly as in the Warden's chamber, the windows are long, narrow, and pointed-situated so high above the black oak floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within.

Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light fall from the trellised panes to warm small patches below. Ancient, dark draperies hang on the walls. The furniture is sparse, comfortless, antique. The general effect, I felt at the beginning and I now felt more strongly, was one of oppressive, irredeemable gloom. One has an occasional, rather eerie sense of something moving in the corners of the chamber-an effect, perhaps, of cloud banks passing between the windows and the sun.

Heller drifted toward the far end of the room, hands behind his back, head tipped forward and to one side. When he came to the bust of Plotinus on its high black marble base, he

paused

and looked at it. I waited, perspiring, wringing my hands.

He turned and said, "Do you know why the guards want 25

higher pay?" "Do you?" I asked. Again I waited, rigid and official to hide my uneasiness.

"They lose everything they make through gambling. Stop the fellow who empties their pockets, and all the rest will resolve itself."

"You're quite certain of this?"

"I can show you," he said.

agreed at once, and Heller led me down the great dark stairway to the first of the lower passages, and thence to a large, communal cell which had not been in use for many years.

At the back of the cell a large stone had been removed, as I saw at once by the reddish light breaking through from somewhere lower. At Heller's direction, I stepped to this patch of light and looked through it. Below lay a windowless room without I

furniture of any kind;

an

abandoned cell whose door

was

directly beneath us, out of sight.

Four guards in shirtsleeves hunkered on the floor, shooting dice. It was clearly not one of those ordinary games, the kind I break up in the corridors. All four were sweating, their shirts pasted to their chests and backs. Beside each man stood a small pile of pebbles. One man's, pile was slightly larger than the others, but not significantly so.

"Keep your eye on the fat man," Heller said.

I nodded.

The fat man-a guard named Stuart, a man with hair longer than

regulations allow, and a neatly trimmed beard, small fingers like a woman' s-threw the dice several times and lost.

He seemed unconcerned. On the other hand, those who took

his money, represented by the stones, did not seem as cheered

by their success as one might normally have expected. The others threw, sometimes winning, sometimes not. I began to feel Heller was wasting my time. He apparently sensed it.

"Keep watching," he said. I did so, mentally telling myself that after five more rolls of the dice I would insist upon leaving.

Then something happened. The guard named Stuart began to glow. Call it hallucination if you will, a trick played by the oil lamps around them, but I saw the glow, and so did Heller, 27

whose hand

immediately tightened on my arm. The fat man was glowing like a lamp-chimney. "Stuart can't tell you himself how it happens," Heller whispered. "All he knows is that for

four or five minutes he knows exactly what the dice will do."

He stared at the dice now, white

as new

bone against the

lamp-reddened floor. He patted them, smacked them, fussed with them as a mother fusses with a baby. Suddenly he snapped

them up and flung them the length of the room. "Five and two!" he yelled while the dice were in the air. Five and two came

up. The other three gasped. Once

more

Stuart fidgeted

with the dice, then flung them. "Hard six!" he

yelled. Two

threes showed. The others were trembling.

"Get out of the game, fools!" Heller whispered.

But it was impossible.

Next Stuart called out eleven and made it. Then four. Then

nine. I felt a weird urge to go down to them, join in.

"Come away," Heller whispered.

I resisted.

"Come at once."

That evening I called the fat guard to my chamber. Simply,

brutally, rapping the table with my walking stick, I gave him my imperative-which I attributed, of course, to the Warden.

He would return all his winnings to those he had robbed and would depart the prison forever, or I would jail him. He expressed indignation, outrage. I was firm. He wheedled, spoke of "divine gift." I said nothing. Heller sat across from us, toying with his pistol. Stuart whimpered, begged, called me irreligious. I read him the regulations on gambling in the prison.

I did not mention that I had no authority to confine him to the dungeon. The simple truth was in any case that, authority or no authority, I would do it. At last, he was persuaded. And so the second of our near-calamities was averted.

5

Less than an hour after my meeting with the spokesman for the

rebels (the second meeting by the prison gate, the meeting 28

which resolved our differences), Heller came to my chamber, where I lay resting a moment, and, when I answered his knock,

expressed a desire to speak with me. I met him more guiltily than before, since now I felt that not only had I failed to fulfill my promise with regard to "the professor," but had failed him though owing him a favor. When I'd ushered Heller to an old tattered sofa and had seated myself across from him, he brought himself immediately to the point-that is to say, to the first of his points. Looking sadly at his knees, he said, "Have you spoken to the Warden, Herr Vortrab?"

I could

see

no

alternative but to confess the truth. "I'm

afraid I have not. The plain fact is, I can't get to him."

His eyebrows went up in an inverted v

,

but despite that, he

did not seem surprised. "He refuses to listen?"

I held back for a fraction of a second, and then came out with

it. "He refuses to answer his door," I said. I felt so curiously

relieved at having unburdened myself of that dreadful secret that on an impulse I told him more: "In fact, Heller, I haven't laid eyes on the Warden in months!"

The guard was stunned. But the next instant, to my astonish­

ment, he laughed. "Why then," he cried, "what makes you think he's there?" Almost merrily, he threw out his hands. I could

hardly account for his look of joy.

revelation

It

was

as

if my

...

But I said firmly, "I hear him pacing."

"Impossible," he scoffed. "What does he eat? Does he sneak away for supplies in the dead of night?"

I had gone, of course, too far; I must now go all the way.

"Believe what I say or not," I told him, bending toward him, my hands raised, fingers interlaced, to hide that infuriating tic, "but the Warden never leaves his room-at least not by the one door I know of.

"

He stared at me as if convinced I'd gone mad. At last he

said, "How can you be sure?"

After a pitiful flicker of hesitation, I rose, keeping my face turned away, saying, "Come, I'll show you," and led him to the 29

great studded door, showed him how firmly the door pressed down on the smooth oak sill, and directed his attention to the undisturbed dust. He studied it all with the fascination ofa scien­ tist. At last, with another queer shake of the head and that same odd smile, he said, "Apparently it's all up to us, then."

I was at the point of agreeing when I sensed something left unstated in his words. He glanced at me and saw my hesitation.

He smiled,

lugubrious than usual, and shrugged. "The prisoner you met-the Professor-has passed away," he said.

I made no attempt to hide my embarrassment. "Poor devil," I said, and snatched off my spectacles and bit my lip. "I'm not surprised," I added, merely to be saying something. "It's a miracle he lasted so long." more

Heller nodded.

As I turned back toward my chamber, he said gently, "We must give him a proper burial, sir. We must,

so

to

speak, put

his soul at rest. He belongs in the churchyard, where he would have gone, as a Christian citizen, if it weren't for this terrible

judicial mistake."

I

saw

that he

serious. I

was

might have laughed at the

outlandish idea if I did not already owe so much to Heller-and

if, moreover, I had not just now placed myself in his power by my ill-considered admissions. I said, at last: "Only the Warden can order such a

"

thing.

He looked down, rubbed his moustache ... But it seems the

Warden has abandoned us."

brought me to my senses. "Not so!" I said. "Listen!"

Catching his arm a trifle roughly, I led him back to the door and bent my head to it, indicating by a gesture that Heller do the same. For an instant, I heard nothing. Then, listening still more It

intently, I caught the faint, familiar sound of the Warden's footsteps pacing the carpet, louder as the Warden came near, then softening as he retreated to the further wall ... You hear?"

I said.

He listened, neither convinced nor unconvinced. His ears, a unfortunately, were considerably less acute than mine. After 30

time he said, thoughtfully studying me,

..

I don't hear a thing."

flurry of panic swept through me, and I pressed my ear tighter to the door. But there was no mistaking it: he was there, still pacing. At times, as he'd done in the old days, he would pause-I remembered again the way he would stare, fierce with concentration-and then he would begin to pace again.

A

"Take my word for it, Heller, he's in there," I said.

long moment he looked at me, absent-mindedly smoothing his beard. At last he accepted it, or seemed to.

"Then we must rouse him," he said. Before I knew he would do it, he snatched up the lion's-head knocker and banged it on the iron plate with such force that it rang like a blacksmith's maul. I did nothing to check him, though I was sick with fear.

Obviously he had no memory of the Warden's wrath.

When he stopped, I bent, trembling all over, to listen at the door. The Warden had stopped pacing, but he did not come to us. The longer we waited, the greater my apprehension grew.

Heller said: "You see? It's up to us." He smiled again, but his thoughts were far away, his long, thin hand still mechanically moving on his beard.

I agreed in haste and, catching his arm, virtually hurled him For

a

away from the door and back to my chambers. Almost unaware

that I was doing it, I allowed myself once more to be guided by Heller. As

soon as

behind

and locked

pushed the door shut immediately crossed to the brandy closet, where I poured a glass for myself and one for Heller. When I'd taken a sip, which did not calm me, I turned to my conspirator. "What are we to do?" I whispered. It no longer mattered to me, in fact, that if we did as Heller wished we were throwing the ancient regulations to the winds. I had no more authority to grant a pardon than to flap my arms and fly.

Indeed, formal pardon was out of the question. But we could perhaps entomb Heller's friend, if we were circumspect.

Heller sipped his brandy and ignored my agitation. "My people," he said, "have a long history of dealing with absurd situations. Leave everything to me." us

we

were

secure, I

it, then

31

"Gladly!" 1 said, and gave a laugh as hollow and despairing as

Heller's own.

He sat stroking his bearded chin, looking up over his glasses

at the shadows in the room's dim corners, as if reading there, in

indefinite shapes, the outline of his plan. At length he said, "This evening a large parcel will be delivered to your cottage.

From there it's only a stone's throw to the churchyard."

"Whatever you say," 1 said helplessly. I drank off the brandy and returned to the closet for more. My whole chamber rang,

it seemed to me,

with the

sound

of the Warden's

footsteps.

"A burial detail," my friend said then, with the same queer

smile, "will meet at your gate after sunset."

The footsteps paused. I was sure he could hear every word we said.

"Good," I whispered. "I agree." We shook hands in haste,

guiltily, and parted.

6

What anxiety I

suffered, waiting in my cottage that evening! seemed determined to drive me mad-the children My family

quarreling endlessly, my father more fantastic than I could remember ever having seen him. Shortly before sunset I caught sight of the great black supply-wagon coming from the prison to the village. I tried to show no particular interest as it lumbered down toward my gate, drawn by four gray horses ruled more by mindless habit than by the sleepy old peasant who held the reins. The wagon listed on its broken springs like a foundering ship, and with every pothole the wooden wheels struck (the road has been in shameful disrepair for years), I was sure the whole hulk would topple, and our secret come clattering out. I fixed my eyes on whatever tract I was pretending to read-my father had his fierce eyes fixed upon me-and I did not look up until the clumsy structure paused in front of my gate. The

tulip tree. The driver slept on. And then, as if of its own volition, the wagon started up again. I nearer horses nibbled at my

32

cleared my throat, closed my book as if casually, and ambled toward the door.

"Smells are strange things," my father said.

My heart leapt; but I was sure an old man could not smell, from this distance, the corpse that now lay, I knew, beside my gatepost. I strolled out onto the porch and down to the road.

When I glanced past my shoulder I saw my father, my wife, and the children peering through the window. Perspiration poured down my inner arms. Heller would feel no such guilt, I was sure.

I was determined that before this was over I would

learn his secret,

When I reached the road (the sky was now red, and evening birds had begun to sing), I found an old, innocent looking trunk, its clasps unnaturally gleaming in the decaying light. The stone wall beside the road and the long-dead climbing roses hid

it from my family's view. I drew it into the shadow of the wall,

holding my breath against the stench. I hastily covered it with branches and leaves, then hurried back up to the cottage. My

father was sitting in the kitchen, tamping his pipe with a nail.

"It's

a

beautiful

evening,"

I

remarked

as

naturally

as

possible.

"It's agood evening," the old man said, pursing his lips and squinting at me, wicked eyes glittering.

My panic increased by the minute. I'd be a very unsuc­ cessful criminal! I remembered Josef Mallin's ungodly calm, the smile of scorn, the self-righteous conviction that was visible even on his decapitated head. Half-heartedly, I made conver­ sation with my palely smiling, abstracted wife as she prepared our supper. She was later than usual, which alarmed me. If Heller's burial detail should arrive while we were still at table, I had no idea how I'd escape my family's watchfulness.

Between dreary, absent-minded remarks to my wife and father, I asked myself a thousand questions. Was I right to trust Heller to arrange the detail? Obviously I'd been out of my wits! It was a hundred to nothing that sooner or later one of the guards he'd persuaded to help would disclose what we'd done. But it was 33

thinking about such things now. I n my agitated state, I felt downright relief when my father turned, for no discernible no use

reason, to the subject ordinarily more distressing to me than all

others.

"I'll tell you what it is with Josef Mallin," he said. He drew in pipe-smoke, savored it, and let it out again. I actually leaned

forward, eager to hear him, "He's convinced all ideals are a flight from reality. The unpleasant facts of life, he claims, charge the human soul with longing. They drive a man to make up a world that's better than ours. But that better world is mere

illusion, says Mallin; and illusion, being false, a mere cowardly lie, is as foul as actuality. So he goes at the universe with

dynamite sticks.-lt's a natural mistake." He leered, showing his crooked, gray teeth. His eyes came into me like nails.

"Well, he's paid for his mistake," I said too loudly.

My father nodded, presumably to keep peace. He lit another match, and held it over the cracked, black pipebowl. He said, "The Warden, now, he believes in the mystical experience.

But unfortunately, he's never had one. He wastes his life anticipating. It's a terrible crime. A mortal sin, I judge."

"That's true," I said eagerly, senselessly. But it did not persuade the old man to babble on. He fell silent, as if

everything were settled.

At just that moment, my wife announced supper. I went to the parlor to call in the children. They came at once, not from obedience, of course; from hunger. As I was about to follow, 1 glanced out, hardly thinking, toward the lane. They were there -Heller's burial detail! 1 could see nothing but their shapes, dark blocks against the gray of the road, standing motionless as tombstones, waiting. A curious feeling of calm came over me, a mingled indifference and determination that reminded me of Heller. Without a word to those expecting me for dinner, 1 stepped to the door, opened it, and went out.

34

7

My mind was curiously blank, climbing, with my walking stick, up the old stone lane toward the churchyard; and blank as I took my turn at the shovel. We would have been, to a passer-by, a curious sight. Of the dozen or more of us, only I myself was beardless, the rest of them shaggy with orthodoxy. Two of them at least must have been rabbis; they were not only bearded but wore tattered robes. No one spoke. They were a company born for undertakings, sad-eyed, stooped shouldered, all their faces the mirror images of a single expression: shrugging surprise and -rnild pleasure that they too were not dead. They worked in rhythm with one another, or stood harmoniously silent. It was as if they were performing a religious duty-though the churchyard was Christian and the man we were burying certainly no Jew. The night above us was immense, majestic. Except for the graveyard itself, all the grounds of the church were shrouded in darkness, shadowed by the interlocking limbs of chestnut trees and oaks. Above the open space of the graveyard, the full moon shone serene, mysterious. The grave was chest-deep when, panting heavily, sticky with sweat and slightly dizzy from my unusual exertion, I handed the spade to the old man seated in the grass above me and prepared to climb out for my period of rest.

A hand reached down out of the group to help me; I accepted it.

When I was free of the grave I recognized Heller. "Thank you, I said. He said nothing. He led me to a crooked, low tombstone wide enough that both of us could sit on it. The old man who had taken my place shovelled steadily, his upper teeth closed on his bearded lower lip, three younger men standing above him, waiting their turns.

"He was a strange man," Heller said. I merely looked at him, too winded to comment. "He never ate," he said. He took a deep breath and looked up into the night. "It's amazing he lasted as long as he did."

I nodded, a trifle reluctantly, glanced over toward the gravediggers.

Heller frowned, silent for a moment, then at last continued: "I think of something he used to say: 'In the inorganic life, pain '

35

,

cannot

be: thus the necessity for the organic.' There's the

secret of the man. He relished his pain because of, you know,

his mysticism." He looked away from me, down at the grass,

then sighed deeply and looked up at the moon again. "He hated

life, you know, yet delighted in it, because of what its horrors would do for him later."

Something my father had said crossed my mind, flitting softly, like a bat at dusk, almost too swift for me to catch it.

"Perhaps he was guilty after all," I said.

Heller turned his face toward me.

I rose from the tombstone, less giddy now, though still short

of breath, just perceptibly lightheaded. He too rose. I walked,

hands in pockets, down the aisle between graves. Neither of us

spoke. At length we came to the slope declining to the moonlit pool. The shadow of willow trees lay on the water, motionless, snatched out of time. We could hear the faint crunch of the

spade behind us. On the opposite side of the pool the old stone church stood brooding, as patiently still as its reflection.

Beyond the church, where the dark trees began, there was motionless fog. We stood for a long time saying nothing. At length, following some train of thought of his own, Heller said, "It was a terrible injustice."

I said nothing, watching the reflection of the church.

"He clung to his pain, but in the end he lost all sense of it. If there are angry ghosts, envious prowlers in the shadow of the living-" He stared across the pool, smiling thoughtfully, perhaps unaware that he was smiling. It was not, I saw, a matter of great importance to him. Merely another of life's ironies. I felt a queer irritation and found myself squeezing the handle of my cane. I calmed myself, listening to the rhythmical crunch of the spade.

"There's no such thing as a ghost, I said suddenly. "

"I don't believe in them either," he said, "but I'm afraid of

them.

"

moved closer to the water, head bowed, musing. He followed. We looked at the dead-still reflection of the church.

I

36

No one had used it regularly for years. Doors hung loose, some

of the windows were broken. People who came to the grave­

yard would repair it, from time to time, for the sake of the dead or for those who were yet to be buried here, but the repairs were pitiful at best. A wired-up sash, a softwood patch where the door had been broken, a supporting stake to prop a sagging iron fence. Heller said: "Or is it the Mallins of the world who come

back-the enemies of 'illusion'? Maybe the unexpected

fact of their survival-maybe it makes them more furious than before at the particled world of sticks and stones, the obstruc­ tion blocking-" "No one comes back," I said, and struck the ground with my stick.

He smiled, looking at the grass. "No doubt you're right. Not

the Mallins, at any rate." He sat mechanically nodding. "How

could a man like Josef Mallin live more intensely than he did?

-boiling like a cauldron from the cradle to the grave!"

Nothing, it seemed, would drive him from the subject. Why it was important that we speak of other things, I could not say; but it was. I felt as I'd felt on the road, walking home from the prison that night-that any moment I might slip outside myself, become no one, everyone, the drifting universe.

"Enough of this," I said, and gave a false little laugh.

"Heller, this is hardly the time or place-" I let it trail off. I was thinking suddenly: Which is more appalling, the crude stone church on land or the one upside-down in the pool?

Heller touched my arm and tipped his head down to study me. "You're in

earnest," he said.

"We're grown men," I said, and laughed again. "Talk of ghosts is for children. "

He too laughed,

watching me. His teeth, in the darkness, were misty white. "Come now, Herr Vortrab. Look at the fog in the trees, the glitter of stars in the windows of the church.

Surely such stubborn realism does them an injustice!" But he paused, seeing my agitation. "Well-" he said. He turned his hands palms up, a harmless tailor once more.

37

Behind us, the crunch of the spade, old men's voices, the black hole awaiting the world's latest victim, persuading him to rest.

"What

man

can

say what he

really believes about these

things?" Heller said lightly.

I felt unwell. I'm too old, too fat to be shovelling graves. My

heartbeat was a little wrong somehow; my tongue was dry.

Heller said, downright merry now, "No one comes back, of course.

You've convinced me, Herr Vortrab! Neither the

unfeeling nor the hypersensitive, neither idiots-" I touched his arm.

Everything was silent. The pool was so still the night itself grave-digging was finished and Heller's

seemed dead. The

burial detail stood across from us. I counted them. Eleven.

I

gazed at the upside-down image of the church. Tangled vines crawled down toward the steeple and pushed against the windows. The still air was wintry, not as if cold had come but as if all warmth in the area had lost its vitality, decayed. I was aware of someone standing to my right, and I glanced over, casually. It was the Warden, standing with one hand in his pocket, the other cradling a revolver. He stood with one highly polished boot thrown forward. I saw, without alarm, that a part of his forehead was blasted away, as if by some violent explosion. He noticed my glance and nodded, severe, withdrawn-laboring, despite some inner turmoil, to be soci­ able. Dried blood from his wound layover his left eye and cheek. "Good heavens," I said, with a quick, no doubt somewhat obsequious smile, and leaped back a step. I threw a look at Heller. When I turned to look back at the Warden, he

walking away, moving hurriedly around the rim of the pond in the direction of the church. Heller was touching his was

beard, looking over his spectacles at me.

"Impossible!" I whispered-probing, perhaps, to learn

for

certain whether Heller too had seen it.

But Heller had no answer, as silent as the eleven across from us, watching-all twelve of them watching: grim,

moonlit jury.

"We're finished here," I said abruptly, my voice rather shrill 38

in that

midnight stillness.

I

pointed with the tip of my stick

toward the grave mound.

Heller nodded, still not commenting. What was I to do?

Stiff-legged, ridiculous, my back still tingling, I led them past headstones to the iron gates and down the pitch-dark lane to my cottage, where I left them with a crisp good-night and a click of my heels. No doubt they smiled at that later.

What was I to do? I too had my laugh. From the darkness of my parlor I peeked out at them, trudging down the road, the rabbis' skirts dragging, the younger men clinging to the elbows of the old.

That is how things stand with us. I no longer bother to deny that I

pretend

am

frightened, hopelessly baffled, but neither do

to believe that

sooner

or

later he will

answer

I

my

knock. I need rest, a change of air, time to sort out my thoughts ...

but each day provides new calamities

....

We no longer go home nights; it wouldn't be safe to leave the

prison in the hands of the guards we have now, except, of course, Heller.

A fool came to visit me, to sell me a book. It began,

as

I

remember, Modern thought has made considerable progress by reducing the existent to the series of appearances which manifest it. Its aim was to overcome certain dualisms which have embarrassed philosophy, and to replace them by the singleness of the phenomenon .•..

I drove the man out with my walking stick. Heller looked on

with his cap in his hands, mournful of eye but not altogether

disapproving. He thinks I'm mad, of course. Each new regula­ tion I bring "from the Warden," each new pardon or death sentence, increases his despair. I understand his feelings. I do what I can for him. "If Order has value, you and I are the only hope!" I whisper. He nods, mechanically stroking his beard.

I worry about him. Late at night, when he should be asleep, I hear Heller pacing, occasionally pausing, deep in thought.

39

Chiaroscuro: a treatment of light & shade URSULE MOLINARO

for Rudi

She first noticed the

bump

on

Sunday morning.

Her first

Sunday in the art critic's elaborate downtown apartment. 3 days after she'd moved in with him.

On a Thursday, when she always did things; when things always seemed to happen in her life. When she'd finally let the art critic convince her to move out of her parents' house & in with him. After convincing her that living with one's parents was living with one's past, when one was past 20.

She'd been brushing her teeth when something made her look up. & she saw it in the still unfamiliar elaborate bathroom

mirror: a pale oblong swelling in the middle of her forehead.

Slightly above the eyebrows.

It made her think of the young horns of deer. Which she'd

watched rub their lowered heads against the pine trunks on her

grandparents' country place, during vacations.

For whom her grandfather used to put out glittering bricks of red salt.

The bump wasn't red. & it wasn't shaped like a sprouting deer horn.

More like

between

slightly above

a

small-bird's egg, laid

horizontally

her eyebrows.

TriQuarterly

41

It didn't hurt when she touched it. Nor when she rubbed it,

after it began to itch.

She decided to cover it with bangs, to hide it from the art

critic. Who would be easier to deceive than her parents.

From whom she'd tried to hide years of bruised vacation knees & school-winter earaches. & post-pubescent monthly

migraines. Until a forgetful limp or pang of pain betrayed her to their two-fold vigilance.

.

Her mother had been a registered nurse before she'd mar­

ried. & was forever on the lookout for symptoms, to justify

using her dormant skills. Stripping off her numerous rings to plunge into avid first-aid, with the same joyful anticipation with which she plunged into the bra boxes during a sale at Saks. & her father enjoyed diagnosing whatever malfunction his daughter's forgetful body had betrayed, in a way he could not afford to diagnose his patients' afflictions: as self-inflicted. The body's translation of a self-dissatisfied usually idle mind. That felt bored. With being healthily anonymous. & tried to cop out. From an art class

gym

a math exam.

& was

punishing itself for being bored/lazy. For not being more popular/beautiful. Etc. Amply illustrated with examples from Greek mythology. medicaBefore he'd administer a usually unpleasant tion. A usually intentionally unpleasant medication, intended to discourage his daughter from self-inflicted cop-out relapses.

Encouraging her usually to try to hide future symptoms better longer She was practiced at the art of deception: she hummed, separating front strands of wetted hair.

Which was shoulder-long & very thick. Crunchily satisfying .

.

.

.

to cut into.

Her parents had

always insisted that she comb it straight

away from her face

back

out of her eyes. Which were a

deep-set deep brown. & very small. & gave the impression of nearsightedness.

false

The art critic's elaborate bathroom mirror

fleetingly re-

42

fleeted the carefully forgotten face of a boy who'd called her

'Pig Eyes' during an art class, in high school.

She blanketed it with a strand of wetted hair still to be cut. &

wondered what the art critic would think of her bangs. & quickly put her hand over the bump, & turned rashly at the

sight of his Sagittarian centaur face smiling over the top of her head in the mirror. & wondered resentfully how he'd managed to come in when she was positive that she'd locked the door. If he had perhaps some kind of PlayBuggs' gadget that opened bachelor bathroom doors from the outside after they'd been locked from the inside, permitting him to walk in on his lady visitors. & wondered ifthe art critic had convinced

how many

other girls to move in with him before he convinced her. If he had

perhaps failed convincing her

to

convince all the other

girls before

...

But the door had stayed locked. & no one had come in. She was

safely alone. & hallucinating, in the elaborate bathroom

mirror.

Feeling giddy with filial disobedience: she thought. Still at her age

...

...

The art critic would like her bangs: she assured her giddily

fringed new face. Like her better with bangs, after she told him that her parents considered a hair-hidden forehead an adver­ tisement for loose morals. The shingle of freelance prostitutes & pimps. He'd think

perhaps rightly so

that living with

him was beginning to free her.

She'd mime the instant

Sunday breakfast drama for him which her disobedient bangs would have provoked at home. If she were still living at home: she thought.

She had a vision of her mother's ring-stripped hands reaching across the Sunday breakfast table. Across 4 carefully separated stacks of Sunday papers: The stack which had been read by her father, but not yet by her mother. The stack which had been read by her mother, but not yet by her father. The stack which had not yet been read by 43

either. & the stack which had been read by both. On top of which sat her mother's fat black & white cat. Formally erect, on top of the breakfast table.

Across all of which her mother's

reaching ring-stripped

hands were brushing the bangs to either side of her forehead.

With proprietary disregard for her

20, almost 21-yeardaughter's bodily privacy & right to self-determination.

old

over

Her mother's eager outcry, as her brushing hands found &

exposed the bump.

Her avid question: Where she'd been? What kind of place had she moved into, down town, to be coming home with a bedbug bite that size? & her father's gently joyful contra-diagnosis: That the swelling was too big for a bedbug. A spider-bite, more likely.

Perhaps a poisonous spider. The classical Erinys. Which their daughter had gone way out of her way to attract to the center of her forehead. Because she felt guilty because she had left home. To punish herself for feeling guilty because she'd left home. Everything every imaginable human relationship & had been covered by the Greeks in subsequent emotion their mythology Her mother's and father's combined Sunday thumbs & index below fingers, feeling her re-exposed forehead above around the bump. Pressing down on it She would go to see them as soon as the bump cleared up: she thought. Pressing half-dry bangs into place. Evaluating ...

...

their side-effect in the art critic's still

more

elaborate hand

mirror. Of 18th century silver.

In which she didn't look as huge & homely as she usually

strictly functional bathroom mirror at home. In her parents' house. looked to herself. In the familiar

Which was perhaps the effect of the bangs.

elaborately flattering. things he said & did; & & his visitors' morning ego.

Unless the art critic's mirrors

Intentionally so, like owned. To boost his 44

were

most of the

She didn't remember

feeling so good since before she'd started school. When she'd tried to go on a vinegar and mustard diet, in first grade, after somebody told her that the Chinese fed vinegar and mustard to their dogs, to keep them tiny.

The art critic was standing on his head, in his living room, his

heels

propped against the wall between the 2 elaborately draped windows. Clad in the custom-knitted purple-&-black­ striped jump suit in which he stood on his head every morning, before breakfast, to keep his hair from falling out. : she thought. Smiling to herself as she Any further tiptoed past his inverted blood-rushed centaur face. To the window to his left. & slipped behind the floor-long drapes. & looked down into the sunny Sunday street. ...

At a small blue truck that had been parked down there the

morning before. & the morning before that. Friday morning.

Her first morning in the apartment. When she'd first seen the pouchy little grey-haired man play the fiddle, in his truck, on a folding chair, beside the steering wheel.

When she'd first read the window sign on the third floor, directly across from her, that WANTED LAPSEAM FOLD­ ERS, male or female.

While she waited for the art critic to finish standing on his head. For his long well-groomed hands

with a well-defined half-moon at the base of each long well-groomed fingernail to

reach through the

slightly parted drapes & draw her back

into the living room. & notice her bangs.

On which he complimented her

on

her new liberated self

when he noticed them when they sat down for breakfast at the oval Biedermeier living

table. & laughed heartily, when she mimed her parents' unanimous disapproval for him. room

Which prompted a discourse on the fashion-swayed concepts 45

of beauty &

ugliness. On which he elaborated all through

breakfast.

On the sophisticated beauty of a certain kind of ugliness a sensuous kind of

ugliness

in art as well as in life. That was

not subject to fashion.

By which he did not mean the ugliness of chicken-chinned chicks. &

chicken-legged old ladies with a youthful cackle.

Whose ugliness was not subject to fashion either. Who were often surprisingly promiscuous. Often incidentally found surprisingly good-looking partners to be promiscuous with. In whose good-looking faces they stared as though they were mirrors.

Who were

incidentally quite often surprisingly good lays. Which their often good-looking partners were often not.

The frigid ugliness of certain beautiful people. Male as well as female. Who had stifled what sensuality they might have had to begin life with, for fear of ruffling their beauty.

The warm-glowing beauty of sensuality.

Which it took an older person to appreciate. An older man to bring out, in a young girl. To surface her dormant desirability.

To have the patience it took to peel away the layers of self­ critical impression-making. Making her feel more desirable, & less unique ...

& quite impatient. Waiting for him to finish eating his second soft-boiled egg.

Looking at him across the oval table she had the strange impression that she was looking at another face, behind his 40some-year-old centaur face. With longer, less firm cheeks. & a higher forehead. At a loose-lipped mouth, puckering toward the spoon in a liver-spotted hand. Which trembled slightly,

spilling a drool of yolk.

Which flooded her heart with an astonished tenderness. face behind his face. older For the fear, in the other A fear of loneliness. Of shabbily 46

aging

alone

in the

elaborate apartment. With no young girl to convince of her dormant desirability.

She wanted to hold his face. To hold her face close to his, like a mirror of youth. To shield it

face

with her new liberated

from the fearfully aging one behind it.

To make love to him.

Again. On the elaborate living room carpet. On which they'd made love the morning before. & the morning before that; Friday morning; her first morning in his apartment. After breakfast, when he preferred to make love.

Which was another reason why he had wanted her to move in with him. To be able to make love to her in the morning, after breakfast.

Before he disappeared behind the closed door of his Second­

Empire bedroom, for the remainder of the day, until dinner time, to continue writing 'Portraits of Anonymous Geniuses.'

On which he'd been writing for several years. When he wasn't writing art criticisms. In his Second-Empire bed.

He had finished eating the second soft-boiled egg. & smiled at

her

across

the oval table. & walked around it. & stood

behind her chair. & drew the collar of her sweater away from

her neck, in the front.

& smiled down into the

opening.

Complimenting her on her no-longer-dormant sensuality, when her nipples stood up, in anticipation of his touch. & kissed her on her bangs. & pulled her head backward, by her thick Which was her best feature. & a sure shoulder-long hair. measure of a woman's sensuality-potential. & tilted her chair way back. Bending over her to kiss her upturned face.

Smiling down at her. & abruptly let go of the chair. Jolting her forward, against the table. & clamped one of his long well-groomed hands over the middle of her forehead. Bluntly; one long well-groomed half­ mooned fingernail digging into the skin beside the bump.

Which must have shown through her bangs. When the bangs fell backward, when he tilted her chair.

She glanced up at his bluntly clamping hand. Sideways. Into 47

his set disgusted face. & into the set disgusted fearfully aging other face that was still behind it. With hard staring eyes.

She pried his hand loose from the bump. & replaced it with one

of her own. & wriggled out from between her chair & the

table. & walked out of the living room, as casually as she could, with one hand on her forehead. & locked herself into the bathroom, to look at the bump. & gasped, when a large luminously blue eye opened

the elaborate mirror

in

in the middle of her forehead. Slightly

above the eyebrows. Where the bump had been. & tenderly smiled at her.

It was the most beautiful eye she'd ever seen: she thought.

Smiling back at it. Making it close & open. Close and open. & blink. & wink. Her heart drowning in a second flood of astonished tenderness.

For her parents. Still sitting at their Sunday breakfast table.

Without her. Peering out from behind Sunday-paper screens to

exchange misgivings about her moving out. & in with the art critic.

In whose elaborately lonely down town apartment she could not stay, now.

Nor could she move back in with her parents.

Who would continue to breakfast without her & dine without

her. & to diagnose self-inflicted afflictions. & to go shopping for bras. & pretend that everything they did was essential. That at least their 2

life

paper-screened Sunday lives

had a

purpose.

Which her absence made easier to believe. Relieving their

make-belief of the witness. & judge. Of the childishly judging third person that turned a couple into a crowd.

A

lonely crowd of 3. Cheating on solitude by living alone

together. often with irritated intensity Each assuring the other 2 of his/her/their indispensability. & hopefully a & each other Convincing themselves that they had fulfilled/or were number of extraneous others 48

fulfilling their purpose in life. By marrying/or making love. & procreating. & pursuing/or studying for a career. & by worrying about each other. & an occasional extraneous other. Which they called: loving. Each other & the occasional extraneous others. But not themselves. Which they called: narcissism; selfishness.

Calculating the worry-coefficient of each about the other & occasional others. In order to determine whether the other & others worried sufficiently in return. often with intense Reassuring themselves and each other that they had irritation; an occasional hiccough of pride done/or were doing their best.

Which was considerably better than the best of most others. to certain envious others & not so easy as it might look most of cooperation. others' chronic lack considering & for the greatest Playing for themselves & each other roles which they expected most possible number of others others to expect them to play. Which they expected the greatest possible number of others to applaud.

For which they rehearsed in front of kaleidoscopic paper­ mirrors:

The registered mother

...

the loving nurse

...

the wedded

siren.

The

cunningly mythological doctor-husband-father. Who that Ulysses ingenious survivalist whose legendary mind outfoxed all matter told bed-time stories about the emulatable

...

To the lonely only pig-eyed daughter. Who saw better than

she looked. Had inherited her father's legendary intelligence rather than her mother's legendary beauty.

Who re-invented

or added to

pubescently stupid high

school jokes for which her legendarily inherited colossal intelli­ gence felt nothing but contempt.

Like: You are well come

Everybody for Joy

was

...

feeling Mary, so Mary left, so they jumped

...

49

The Purple Torrent, by Hyman Schlitz; a book-of-the-month

selection

...

2 nuns in a European railroad carriage. Seated across from a man

who is traveling with a kitten. Which is strictly forbidden,

European railroads. Who is

therefore

traveling with the kitten inside his pants. or again Which still have buttons rather than a zipper.

The kitten is getting restless & reaches out through the man's fly, trying to escape. & one nun says to the other: 'Sister, aren't you glad we took the veil before those things grew claws' With which to purchase pig-eye indulgences from normal­ size classmates who looked better than they saw. For whom she felt nothing but contempt.

Who contracted a severe hatred for the ingeniously surviving whom Circe should have turned into the pig he Ulysses was, rather than his pig-companions during a bedtime-story of the blinding Cyclops.

A hatred she later extended to James Joyce. In spite of his eye trouble. When she started reading Joyce, during her first on

...

year at Columbia.

After having extended it school

much much earlier; still in grade

to her colossally intelligent pig-eyed self.

At which the beautiful eye

smiled luminous tender-blue

forgiveness. For her colossally presumptuous intelligence.

Before it shed one limpid-blue tear.

Apprehending the 2 band-aids which she was going to put over it. Crosswise, over its closing lid. Before she combed the bangs over it.

Before she ventured out of the bathroom. & tiptoed through the living room. Past the half-turned back of the art critic. Who had sunk into her chair, at the oval

holding both hands over his face; both elbows in her dirty breakfast plate.

Before she opened & closed the door of his apartment.

Biedermeier table. & was

50

Before her father's

legendarily cunning hands performed their first plastic surgery. In his empty Sunday-evening office.

With the once-registered assistance of her mother.

Which left only a I �-inch-Iong scar in the middle of her forehead. Slightly above between the eyebrows. Like a thin, barely perceptible frown.

She hardly had any recollection of the long bus ride up town.

Except for a balding man with long flabby cheeks & a hearing aid. Who'd sat yawning in the back. Whose yawns had sounded like the roars of a beast in a zoo.

51

) I). ,

.

\

'.

,

�

,

�

: /:/',

1.:;:',

f

',;-'/ /

I

I I

/

I

!

.(:

I,.

••

f• .

.

The channel DAVID ZANE MAIROWITZ

I always took Pippa intravenously. A burning up the tissues,

rugged stark fix, that's the girl. She was the brain scare, like serum, bone liquid and laughing in the nerve. So she walked my streets, and shuffled me in her power. There was a tale of this in the eyeballs, some rushings of blood, viscous film to cut the

delivery of clear sight.

It

was

the overdose. Could I have

measured to the intrusion, there might have been perfect wealth in Pippa's star. But not me, not there at the brink, no

Ma'am, not me to suck it up for poison. That's why I struck back, in my fashion, to lift the strap from round my muscle, to hide again the leaping vein, the only way I could in this old mortal recoil-that was the germ.

But slow down, bring it all to pause at Miss Cambridge, rough and tumble our gentle barber Cambridge. She

never so

rolls on memory's tongue like gravy. Before she burned her TriQuarterly

53

bridges. she had turned the software at me, and there was a curved embrace, beneath which we held the fort. This was serenity, and it combed a wave of years, a soft, even spread. A pause in the dramatic line. In our domestic commonwealth, she was our voracious Prime Minister of fact and event (so dear Pippa would later perform her coup d'etat), caretaker of realm and scalp. And into my naked expanse would fall the clippings of her dark enthusiasms, pieces of me pruned to her measure.

My hair. of course, had long since hung in hempen rope­ strands like cables cast adrift to a silent pier. But such was the anarchy Miss Cambridge's administration would not tolerate.

So with my head in the warm basin, buried to my brows in egg and soap, I considered the nature of my crime. Here I had done my years of service to the

goddesses who delivered me my manhood. I'd fought valiantly in these gentle wars and had my bravery rewarded at damp mattresses. It was all a soft ferry­ ride over languid waters, guided by the softest embrace. And yet, in all this, hadn't I lost the midnights of drunken abandon, games of poker and dice in male alleys, the hard punch in the rib of comradeship, the rasping talk of war and mutilation in smoking trenches? And all for the thumb in the scalp, the patient rinse, crop and blow-wave, the poncy X-chromosome bangs hanging now like a drop curtain to my frontal brain, the loss of my ears and neck to this new era of disguise. Thanks awfully, Miss Cambridge, the femininity that shaped my ends, rough hew them as I would have!

Oh for some sanctuary from it, to set some limit to the pain!

Where can you go in all this? Who opens a door for you unless

yourself? That is, unless you've your needle.

Then you've a little cushion for the impact. Best to be floating you kick it in

on calm waters when the air raids come.

In those days, you could have found me (that is. if you had of the mammoth library at the in the to

cared

54

look)

safety

British Museum. Not in aid of anything at all, of course except ,

perhaps the gathering of cheeks of wind to blow the smoky obscurity from me. Penniless, without the will to labour, I nonetheless brought me to my moorings here. For in these shelves, which vaulted their knowledge to the symmetry of the room's perfect dome, lay the undisclosed documents to some future deed. Here must have been a puzzle, a key left to me as legacy by a thousand scholar-corpses. And in those days, I devoured what learning I could, tossed back my shoulders in the retreat of my cubicle, and waited.

The Right Honourable Miss Cambridge, naturally, prodded me to put it down to paper, write a treatise, do the proper research, compel my random facts to use and memoir. A tribute to her infinite tact and wisdom where my feelings were at stake! The very unperturbed Miss Cambridge. How she haunts me still in her giddy refusal to come apart at the seams.

Her flopping broad hats like wings, and antiquated lace gowns working overtime from toe to gorge. Miss Cambridge. All in one piece, the lace notorious, the lift from hem over head to reveal her, displaying at last her fine points of entry. And, on the occasion of first night, her fingers diving and dipping, catching in my eye her bend, now the full posture and the disappearing face, steady rapid focus, a gift. Miss Cambridge, in her ideology, wore no underclothes. Never the impediment or middle-man. Rather, a raising of the all-embracing safety curtain, exposing the instant theatre of her being.

Still, she had chosen to bewitch me at the very pitch of my need to survive, fallen out of the sky at a moment most inopportune.

I fell to my scholars in hot pursuit. Someone there, there in that bookish room, fat with enlightenment, someone might have explained her ability to razzle-dazzle me. And yes, I would go to my Greeks, then on to my wise Viennese, my thumb throwing up pages in rapid fire so that hundreds of eyes, bent on specific pursuit, were compelled to acknowledge me 55

there. But even these paltry comforts vanished as Miss Cam­

bridge's knot gripped. In the night, I would return to the little room was

where she held court, and watch her dance. The music

overloud and violated me through tubes in my head. The

wall held my back and clasping devices kept my eyelids

up. It

Cambridge's rain-dance, performed nightly by candles, and this was further method in her cunning voodoo. This was was

followed hard upon by her reading of the Tarot cards, to which I

was

made to submit the secure secrets of my future. Then,

exhausted, mesmerized by the cards, overcome by her musky smell tossed at me by the wringing wrists of her dance, I would tumble into the solitary luxury of unconsciousness. There were, too, moments of greatness to which we might both rise in a fierce heat, moments in which I seemed to endure the passing of paste-matter into vessels without end. But, after, I lay boxed again, without recourse to pride, lame under the perfect peace and woven carpet-hair of Miss Cambridge. And all the while our genital rage continued to echo in her, as if her steeple-bell had been rung in such fury it might proceed to call witnesses some lifetimes hence. My hand, I knew, had only wrought some initial shock, some quick slap and seizure. But to the rapture which followed, I was a beggar, a phantom at the gates of this woman's mystery. I pushed into sleep.

And now we had begun to have our nightmares simultane­ ously. It was never my habit to fall awake, for I would make the fretful yawning leap to submission any time, anywhere, all to ease the pain. But those days I would fumble out of broken terror-images to find her moaning in the bed-at the precise moment-stirred from her perfection by some fanged adders or Jacks-the-Ripper. I wondered why she would want to do me this injury, to conjure savage dreams when I was already plagued by her daytime tortures. But perhaps it was beyond her grasp as well, perhaps she had stolen inside me to a point where she couldn't flee, no recourse but to eat her way out through my soul.

56

enough, it was measured in years. Not that I had decided to keep her, nor she me. But there it was, nonetheless, a deed accomplished somehow, all ecstasies and regrets shored up mercilessly like habit. And as it came to be so, I crept more and more to my sheets, only to find dark men pasting adver­ tising bills on me, covering me to choking with the glue of their slogans. Only to awake at the kindred scream, further fellows clawing her in urine alleys, choking awake to the song of Miss Cambridge. Where else then might I sleep, but in my lovely books, choosing the widest only, to encompass my face.

During such a sleep, in the British Museum, I devoured an exquisite dream. It seemed a memory of my first fearful moment, at last discharged from the thumb of the family, a loneliness filled with the delirium of windy landscapes. I held my breath and saw me emerge in yellow jerkin, codpiece and plume, my epee at rest, hip thrust forward menacingly on the world, a splendid un-windswept fellow. He never moved in the sheer cameo of it, no, at last, it was the frozen hour without compulsion, the tower.

On waking, I peered about the massive circular hall, with its endless parade of brain, where the great rages of thought seemed to have settled in a tableau without atmosphere. I loved this hall, so broad-based with superstition and under­ cover lust, a house of infection. Here, despite (no, because of) the burden of insight, an aberrant carnality fought in its chains.

All along the diameter of the great sphere you could sense the community of danger. Nowhere was solitude sacrosanct. The scholars were in a rampage. The matter of one man's reading could be sniffed and sucked up by another, planted the hundreds of yards of distance across the fields of mentality.

There was no protection, no remedy for it. You had to live.

My fine swordsman plagued me. I wondered why I had, at the very edge of enthusiasm, traded family for tutor, tutor for patron, patron for lover, tumbling out of ambition, pressed into Soon

endless conditions of contract and relation which never bore 57

the stamp of my pride. A splendid lucidity took me in its arms then and I

rose

to

a

power of thought: too

long had I sat

bundled in the back streets; it was time to make an entrance upon the boards. But as I mused, I was pulled into the vacuum

of a staggering creature, sleek like a heron, who sat at the desk

mine. A glance told me her books were all on the subject of alchemy, but I could not keep my eyes from her lips,

next to

pale and dry and tight. Something in me shuddered in the vision of probing further, dropping down the gum and cavern of that mouth.

The lady proceeded to roll up her sleeve and tie a rubber strap round her bicep. Then she took a syringe from her bag, filled it with the liquid from a phial and plunged the works into a

passing vein. In full view of my person and anyone else who wished to peep in that brain-crowded arena. She caught me gasping and mumbled it was the insulin for her diabetes. (Not by way of explanation, mind you, for there- never existed with Pippa an urge toward apology or merest enlightenment. If you wanted her, you had to leap on the train as it roared past your village.) She was lying, of course, as I could easily see the jolt her system took from the spike. She burst into flame like dry tinder, without extravagance. Soon her eyes were fluttering like humming-birds all over me and I too fell into a swoon. She was

passing through my blood-but like lead, not the mercury

of her own blast.

Pippa's eyes leapt out of the Library and her body followed shortly thereafter. I couldn't move for some time. It seemed as if the scholars had collected here to witness my impending act, their eyes had groped me from the far depths of the hall. Each, in his turn, was hungry to record the tender first signal of nerve and spinal tremor. I noticed Pippa had not returned her books.

I made a note of their titles, returned them for her and drifted

into the streets.

That night I held Miss Cambridge at bay. But leave it to her side­ not to notice. She removed her dress herself that night,

stepping the ritual she had assigned me ever since the first 58

time

astonishing labour of it. I had refused. This earned me a casual shrug and a hurried kiss. I sat by the bed as she slept, fighting off my own instinct to sleep, always to sleep, and waited for the onset of her nightmare. When it came, and she gave voice to the night, I felt a dazzle in the freedom from it, laughed out loud in her eye-opening, climbed on her in her tears, plugged her mercilessly, leapt from her at the finish, alert, overjoyed, washed and walked to the Museum in the first I watched the

dawn I had seen for centuries.

I was first in. I ordered all of Pippa's alchemical books and

awaited her disappointment. When she arrived to discover the books were not to be had-not just one, but all of them, as she had abandoned them-a fear worked in her, audibly in a gasp.

In the vast thicket of paper that housed us here, she knew only

force could have arranged the coincidence. When she saw me

then, my teeth flashing at her, there was an anger over her in the room, and I desired her, in that net. That night, when I bent her under a bridge, she was insane with my fever. The Thames came up to rise at my ankles. And, after, as we lay in our new­ made swamp, I massaged her aches on damp ground. The drugs had left her body wracked and I would cleanse her now.

Soon enough I had to help her probe for a vein in the darkness and a glint of moonlight caught the fierce needle as it sought its channel.

They had begun to riot in the streets, so Pippa and I stayed home nearly all the time. I ventured out only to collect the drugs from her connection, an antiquities scholar at the British Museum. Otherwise, I nursed her through her hours, preparing her syringes, adjusting her head beneath the soaked pillow. I cooked her food, bathed her, kept her afloat as best I could. I too was fighting against a new heaving in my chest; my breath came up short, with quick spasms of such intensity that I often lost consciousness for some seconds. But Pippa's pain was sharper than mine, that was evident, as the drug carried her 59

further into the swift arc of her own shadow. So I

saw

my

greatness in her distorted mirror.

She had also begun to rot, in the way that women do when

they're not on the lookout. All hell had broken loose up the spout, and indescribable bits of lady-matter burst forth from her. the sight of which stopped me cold from my nightly routine indecent assault. What with my chest in a dither, I surely didn't need the further complications of urinary debilitation. This of course went hard with Pippa, who had almost come to enjoy my visits to her chamber. It had been, in the first years, a great

struggle for her to accept me, what with her great horror of being entered. She could readily rise to the occasion once I was well inside, oh yes, she could turn the wind right around to suit her secret forces down deep. But it was the hovering moment that terrified her, the invasion force dropping from the landing boats to the shore, about to blast forth up country. But it all

nothing now she was pouring up enough disease to stop me trespassing.

In consequence, I had dropped into depression. On such a day as this, she offered me the syringe. She claimed this was modern alchemy, look, a base substance, pinned to the rush of blood in the vein, a mixture producing luxurious gold in the came to

spine, Hosanna in the limbs. Here was sweet elixir to warm more than your intestines, the pitch to tune your piano. But of her tool the offer that, it was proof of her love for me to persistence. This was a vow to set down amongst the great peace treaties.

But I had to provide. It was not for me to falter when Pippa's life's work. Not that she wanted it that maintenance was my

way. For she protested I

was

watching her, just as they had

watched her all her life, there in the country estate where the him and Squire had kept his nightly vigil at her fearful bedside, looked after her all right, kept her from the 'others'.

They

her outside annoyance, but their eyes and teeth had followed would and continued to act as sentries. Often she into the

city

60

cough violently from the heavy smoke of their expensive cigars, curling in wisps about our naked light bulb. And I had joined them in persecuting her, as she liked to say. I was getting on her wick, no doubt, blocking up the pathway. Were I to follow her now on her rampage to oblivion, she might then laugh me into any sleep she chose. But like it or not, I thought, I'm nanny to you now, Lady Lovely, pressing rapture in your blood, the sustainer.

I shivered and vomited regularly now, and even considered

the prospect of medical attention, an idea which would have

terrified

Pippa-of-the-clamped-will. On

of these

one

nights

when I had convulsed my body empty and tumbled into a grim

sleep, I dreamed that I was sleeping and thought I had forgotten, in these new days, how good an adventure it was to truly sleep. I was terribly out of practice, had neglected the careful procedure of soft withdrawal, had instead run headlong from the day. I thought I could feel Pippa beside me in the bed and wondered if she too were dreaming, and whether I might leap into her dream, wake her in the fear of it and deliver myself up as impresario to Pippa's night. I felt myself stepping clear of the line which marked my sleep and drove to the border town, across the river from which lay Pippa. Easily enough I swam the distance but, as I did, she receded. Now the currents took me and I was twisted along the waterway, caught at the intersection of what were now our overlapping dreams. At once the liquid turned to glass and I was detained at the throat.

Only my head remained above the surface and I was made to look out across a perpetual horizon of brilliant light, from which the sound of horses' hooves seemed to wake .

,

me.

And

there, in the distance, fast approaching, were all the Cossack horsemen who'd

ever

loved

me

or

held

me

in their

teeth,

advisors, confidants, dentists, trampling my scalp­ pulp with fanciful horsemanship, all those whose concern and now

penetration had forced

me

to this

over

frozen channel between

desire and terror.

61

I

hadn't screamed myself awake for what seemed like decades of regret and vanished affection. I turned and waited in the silent hope of catching Miss Cambridge's lips on her own scream, but heard instead the brisk accommodation of steel to

flesh, and

Pippa bent by the bed as she sought fresh incision at the buttock. I watched her fumble in the gloom, and wondered who she was. I knew the once graceful, now gnarled, aristocratic cut of the thing, crippled in dubious activity on the floor, but she was somehow obscured from me, eclipsed. She stood up at last, but it was clear she couldn't walk. And as I jumped to her aid, a breast came free of its trapping and caught my thumb. She tried to push me off, but I was taken with her then, despite everything, even the hot anger that raged in me.

One shudder in her troubled pathway, this was my measure.

And she, too, held me in a terrible grip, and we forced out a mutual cry, thrashing in each other's sweat like landed fish.

I braved the streets, leaving Pippa to decay as she would, and thought, for a change, to set my own lands in order. The pains had now shot to my arms and I found these limbs a great unnecessary weight on my body. I was also shaken in my loins where I had sucked up Pippa's fluids like a pen drawing ink. In the night I would return to find her shattered beyond repair with her own infection. She complained of my increased absence and said the pains downstairs had mounted. She called for her treatment but, in my own despair, I had neglected to saw

meet the man. She spat venom at the idea that I could let her

down at long last. I thought to squash her then, make her pay

for my snakebite. Best to press at her throat where no wind might enter the valley. But she would no doubt take care of

business herself. No achievement here.

Despite fatigue, it was the cure which possessed me. With one final effort of will, I sought my scholars, no longer for their guidance, but rather for the health and vapours of the Library's feeling of cloister. I searched through mountains of books till their spines cracked, crying sanctuary, sanctuary from the uncertain edge. Sleep began to overtake me, but I fought it off 62

like a trooper. But the pains came again, forcing me to rest my arms on

the pages. I began to daydream and noticed that my

lay flat, palms open and twisted upward in a suppliant gesture. It seemed to mark me as a beggar and I saw my waiting here as self-mockery. Everything in the room had tended to fill me, to come into my arms, open now in a painful pleading. All the wealth of fact gathered there in my cradle, so had the sullen actors who performed in my gut. The heat overcame me, and I shrugged my shoulders, shaking off the fingers of scholars who had pressed my back with points. As I came back to rest, I ceased trembling and thought to deliver myself through pressure, to turn my helpless arms to barri­ arms

cades of chain. But I couldn't lift them, and the heat

was

oppressing me in the very weights I held. In combat, I rolled my sleeves to allow the ancient pages to cool the flesh. I leaned

back in my chair, but

stopped suddenly as my gaze ran the length of one arm, then the other. There, from wrist to elbow, like tiny blue swollen anthills, were countless punctures in the trail of veins.

For

time I stared

absently at my affliction. A soft heaving came in my intestines, but I had no time for it, held it back. Then I closed all the books and pressed them out of my some

reach, as I bent in amazement to examine the minutiae which now

governed me. I knew I had not summoned this, that it

rested somehow outside of me.

In the distance I could hear gunfire and the usual screams of vengeance to which we'd become accustomed. Some dim few

had struck back and I envied their several brief moments of

fury before the inevitable slump at firing squads. And I, I still heaved inside me but couldn't spit. I fell into a sweat, in my seat, and felt my brow for fever. There was none. But my hand

lingered in the zone and I felt I had let my hair gather once again in chaos.

And-need I say 'of course'?-the venerable Duchess of

Cambridge greeted me with a soft nod and poise which threw 63

up an instant brick wall to my outrage. I had shaken her from

her meditation; nonetheless, there was tea. If she'd had a brush, she might have papered me to the walls.

The

had

changed decidedly. I was no longer in it anywhere. Miss Cambridge had blown up a photo of herself to room

mammoth size so that it covered the entire wall beside the bed.

It was one I had taken of her, with a rose in her teeth. There were

fresh flowers

everywhere and

I could feel

a

surge of

oxygen all about me. But my clothes were not in their assigned

place astride the three-legged chair, nor was my crusty razor to be found clasping her mirror. So she would mock me even in my someday crypt, the coldest of cold showers, our Cam­ bridge.

Now came the Tarot and she told my fortune. There was an ocean voyage.

I said I couldn't afford it. Money no object, says

Cambridge. Great wealth not measured in coin of the realm, say the cards. I fear drowning. Ah, but, beams the Duchess, you will be Captain of the frigate at long last. I stared at her, but she would not meet my eye, sensing the danger that hung there. The ship passes round the globe, cuts across the hemispheres in triumph. What port? I asked, my knuckles pounding the cards. Then she looked up. I staggered and clutched my head. It was true. I had wandered into a gypsy camp and fallen foul of the crystal ball. I braced. I couldn't summon a fist but I managed to disperse her cards with my

fingers. What port? I shouted. And collapsed on the bed.

That shout coughed up another terrible drama in my insides and I could see she knew my pain. Rest, she beckoned. I knew her drift in this, again she would be the Source, the beginning of endless flow into my life. She went to work on me instantly, rubbing liniment in all my joints, silently, cunningly.

I'd only come for the trim. She continued. And in I some

protested.

the love for her which welled in me, I tried to warn her of the

great danger that threatened her well-being. But my throat

was

dry and words came forth as dust. Miss Cambridge brought me 64

liquid and I pulled her on top of me. But quickly she was free and began her dance.

She blossomed in it. But I managed to rise and twist her arm to stop her. Pushing me back, she then put the music on her machine and danced in time to it, never looking back at me, lost at sea, gentle Cambridge. Now I got to my feet and, with all the pressure I might bring to bear on the event, kicked the disc so that it rolled off of one wall and cracked on the next. I had

denied her all the tools of her trade. Her back was to me now and she turned

slowly to meet me. At last, I thought, here anger I might savage at once. Instead, she backed slowly to her wall and gazed at me for the first time. I too waited silently, hoping for my signal, any sign which might point my way to her. But the oil she had rubbed into me now

comes an

burned in my pores and made me shudder. I had met her eyes.

She didn't know who I was.

I reached for her then and clawed my way through her lace

pulling forth handfuls as if it were fleece. To this she rebelled, but I had wrapped around her and pinned her arms back, dropping her to the bed. She fought by tightening her thighs against my weight and, at last, I could see the long­ awaited panic in her face. I grinned, as if to say: look here, Miss Cambridge, thus is come the New Morning. gown,

I broke and entered.

And oh how she crept over me in that instant, catching my

wild hair and combing it to her desire. Into my ears, I dreamed her pouring all the most calming phrases and sweet as

I gathered in her.

was a

Still,

lingerings

I hammered at her, after all, there

bill to be paid. But she merely reared back, absorbing,

absorbing, draining off the rush of my malice. And I knew then she would never take me back, knew from her photo looming over me,

her image falling under me that here, inside her, I had

gone up river and found the

helpless sea. It was a drowning

then as I sank in, collected in me the swift revenge of Pippa's

poison and injected it into Miss Cambridge.

65

Pippa was gone. Not a trace. In the room it seemed as if all past inhabitants had softly fled. I searched for evidence, but every rusty spike, every phial and bloodied bit of cotton wool had vanished. Only in my joints could I still feel her as I tried to drop down to the bed. How I had missed my sleep and how I needed it now more than ever. As I fumbled into that tranquil dark, my eyes covered the twilight room and once more found it alien. No ghosts stalked here, no remnants lurked as incident of calamity in times gone by. No smells informed the air of special lives passed beneath these walls. Even the mattress seemed without contour, the pillow buoyant. All shapes of peculiar merit had sprung back to attention. I drew the curtains, locked the door, stuffed the keyhole, closed the light, closed my eyes.

66

from Lookout cartridge JOSEPH McELROY

{,

fil, I'

1

It is a silent flash there in the city's grid, and as I happen to

look down at that precise point I

am

thinking of real estate

prices.

From my height the detonation noise is a signal of light only.

My cabin responds by at once easing its forward motion so we're barely moving. We hover level with the 900-foot tower at 40 Wall Street, three-quarters of a mile to our right. We have a new purpose.

We dip, and the controls alter the tilt of the rotor head's TriQuarterly 67

swash-plate ring which is above my head out of sight in the open air.

Had I been

watching left or right of where the flash ap­

peared, I would have seen it more clearly still.

Up in the cockpit the flash has been seen and the man in the

right-hand seat is reporting it. But something is happening to our prop blades, the cadence is gone. Something is wrong, we we throb, rock, we drop, we wait. The pilot is rubbing his head the side window, he is peering up. against Helicopters are designed to wait, but can we? We hover lower, the props seem better, but if it is possible to swerve with no forward motion, that's what we're doing-or the cabin is now hung on the end of one of its own prop blades.

We have to get down, we can't just drop onto a roof. We tilt to go ahead toward the River, the heliport; therefore, the swash-plate hasn't come loose. But the blades, in a sensation that is not the vectors of revolution and is not sound, feel less

hinged. I know that if the blades' lag-hinges have come loose, the blades can't feather and will take too much stress and will snap, and the copter then loses its lift; and when it does, does it come down like a

landing?

I can't make out the radio voice from headquarters.

I did not hear the flash, I saw it, I was contemplating real

inflation, Peter Minuit, the Indians, and an American gentleman named John Lloyd Stephens buying a Maya city in estate

the 1840's for twice what the Dutch gave for Manhattan-the flash just north of City Hall Park could have been a vehicle

blowing up. But there was no shock up here.

Smoke came like a substance squeezed from the hole that now narrows following the flash. Not the quick smoke of artillery.

And dark points come and move almost as if sound and speed have become identical, but not quite, for I can see them move. They are like genes in a microphotograph.

This light without sound is not the beginning.

Was there a beginning?

68

Sound without illumination maybe.

Such a field of noise

was

coming everywhere, from tile,

concrete, the chill-blown street above, the tracks below, and even as

if from the change booth where a black girl in blue­

smoked cartwheel glasses pushed out tokens without looking up from her paper-that till I was through the turnstile and to

the brink of the escalator and put my foot on it hearing behind me

the click of steps closing fast yet seeming oddly slow, I

didn't guess why the toddling graybeard in a herringbone with the hems drooping who'd preceded me through the turnstile had made for the stairs instead.

But about to put my hands on the escalator rails only to see

they weren't running and clear to the bottom the escalator was stopped, I got a blind jarring shove in my back that jumped me three or four of those stationary steps over the brink just as I felt both my hands stuck in the tailored pockets of the trenchcoat I'd bought in London for this trip to New York. But legs and feet believing they could survive apart from the rest of me

slowed their motion to fit the momentum of fall and

frequency of steps so that just then my four-steps-at-a-time was a metro-beat my limbs were marking like old times when my school friends and I took stairs three, four at a go and here

again now years later no hands.

So I paced my plunge two-thirds of the way before slowing enough to do two then one at a time, then stop, get the hands and fingers free, and twist to look back up to the top. But I saw only the old man on the adjacent stairs who'd been ahead of me but was now looking down at me no doubt taking me for an escalator freak, not somebody who'd been pushed.

The old man had known the escalator wasn't running. The pusher perhaps had not.

I ran back up. The steps weighed as much by contrast as if going down the first time I'd been riding. In London they used to call it Moving Staircase.

I pushed through the exit gate. I could barely hear the change-woman when I said what had happened, but her tongue 69

flickered out and I put her moist smile with her words: Enough to do watching nobody cheats the City.

How was it the steps behind me had been much slower than

mine yet right on top of me?

She let me go back through the gate free like a transit worker or a

cop, and I went back down the stopped escalator into a

noise like the subway rails splitting and caught the train the old man had boarded.

A large black woman yawned without opening her eyes and I smelt her breakfast. Travellers on the London Underground do not as a rule sit with their eyes closed.

I had in my head somewhere why Dagger DiGorro's film got

destroyed. I saw almost none of the film itself and shot only a few minutes of it; but no one saw more than I and I was there when Dagger shot the bulk of it.

Who knew better what was in that film? Only Dagger maybe.

And he must have forgotten parts-to judge from what he once said in London and once in Ajaccio and once when we changed the Druid's tire on Salisbury Plain.

Just the one rush got processed at first. Rush may be rather

big talk; we weren't exactly pros. You'd have thought Dagger cared about the Beaulieu 16 he'd got hold of more than the film we were supposed to be making with it. Alba took my hand the

day Dagger and I left London for Ajaccio; she'd decided she pregnant and she was sorry because she'd never seen Corsica and she retains something of the metropolitan French was too

condescension toward La Corse. She said, Cartwright, you take care of Dag, and she put a finger on a button of my shirt where my collarbone is. She wore rust-colored nail varnish.

She wouldn't have expected much from this film idea we'd had that I'd spoken of as mainly his idea. But she loves him, and there was money in the bank and the promise of more in the autumn. And she perhaps did not even want him to stay home;

his absence excites her, and she's as glad as I

am to

live in

London.

When I went to see the Druid south of the River weeks later 70

about my breathing and my imminent trip to New York, the old

sitting there in his dark green business suit told me someday the destruction of Dagger's film would seem part of a large endless harmony. He asked if my trip would include Cape Kennedy. I said I was not after all a tourist, and he said at once though slowly, But you try to become one.

Which seemed not up to his usual standard so I opened my mouth to get us back to my breathing but the moment grew and the words stayed in my head and instead he spoke: You keep a diary.

I said, I don't just keep it. And I was about to say I give-or send-parts of it away now and then, but the interview seemed

man

over.

Still, as I was showing myself out he said from the far end of his hall, But whatis cinema? Evanescent no doubt. Years ago I went to see a film called Breaking the Sound Barrier.

I have in my head things I may not have exactly seen, just as you who read this have me.

A hand enters

a

lab's

glass wall through large elastic lips

sleeving a glove port.

You have seen this, don't think you haven't. Once the hand is into the sleeve it feels its way into a thick lightweight glove in order to get at pieces of who knows what on the other side of the glass-cans of bacteria say.

You have this in your head- You have it from some grainy wire service photo on the way to the editorial page or the fishing column or the real estate; or you have it moving live contained by your living room television; or you've had it shown you in the enlarged privacy of a dark theater; or you have it from less pure sources, someone has told you it.

Or, as with me, the image emerged out of standard elements while you sat in a dark projection room during an intermission

half-listening

to

a

couple

of

computer-filmmakers

argue

whether one can compose more freely with cartridge loops.

You may never be called to account for what you've seen, but you've

seen

the

glove port and the white coveralls and 71

some of the semi-automated gear on the other side; and you've seen

let

us

say radioactive material the

glove hand handles

without contamination.

Like me, you have in your head things you may not have

exactly seen.

Like a lookout cartridge.

Or the Landslip Drive-in Movie, whose monumental screen under clean and clement American stars and in front of you and hundred other

without audible

warning one summer night began to lower, to tilt back hugely and drop as if into a

a

cars

slot in the earth.

The image became yours even more surely by disappearing.

distinguished rumble mixed with what still came out of the speaker draped over the edge of your car It disappeared with

a

window. An actress and actor in the corrected colors of the

spectrum had been touching each other's colossal faces and their breaths kept coming faster and more intimately loud to bring right into your car this whopping slide of mouths and

fingers and nostrils inserted into the night-pines and sea-sky above the locally well-known clay cliffs that had just enjoyed their first clear day in two weeks. But now for the first time since before World War II a section of cliff gives way and the famous faces

are

monumental screen until you two

torsos

up off the have only the upper half of the

swept by their

thrown

onto

the

camera

remaining

right

upper

half of the

descending screen as it tilts back toward the sea; and now where's the movie? The drive-in screen's rear props fall with the clay cliff, and mouths and cheekbones and eyelids have

tipped away under the projector's light.

Then you have before you ocean sky-not to mention an experience tomorrow's news won't do justice to-and you get with its static swings your feet on the ground as your speaker with the car door. You look to the rear of the drive-in and

see

many silhouettes doing the same as you.

You find the cone of light still projected.

Now if I never really saw this-and don't think just because 72

I imagined it I may not also have seen it-there are nonetheless

circuits in the head that make the image feasible. These often

bypass other printed circuits neater and newer. These newer circuits can ask questions not so sharp as the images streaming from older circuits but still of interest to me. Questions like: Is there an insurance group prepared to write a policy to cover Landslip Drive-In up to and including landslip itself? Would fissures appear well in advance of such a major landslip? What are

the dimensions of such

cinema screen? How many hundred by sixty feet exist in

a

outdoor drive-in screens one England?

The American girl said no to breakfast, then shifted under the clammy-looking khaki blanket she'd tucked round herself in the deckchair some time the night before and looked apparently through a break in the bushes toward the Thames and a barge pilot-house passing, and said well yes she would, then stared up at me and said after all no thanks, and instead of asking what I was doing in Embankment Gardens at seven, which is early for a commuter to be coming through Charing Cross, she said, How long you been over?

Most of them don't know

a

fellow American short of an

Alabama twang or an American Express traveller's check. I said I had a daughter almost her age who

was

born

a

year

before we moved to England. The barge pilot-house had moved

beyond the corner of my eye, pigeons walked along BruneI's Embankment wall, the girl smiled back up at me from her deck chair on the grass near the band stage and said, Lucky scrounger.

I thought, A

girl doesn't have to shave first thing in the

morning.

In the

summer

of '53 Lorna laughed and

laughed when I

couldn't zip our sleeping bags together because one track was

half rusted out.

When I was a boy my grandfather wouldn't shave till after we came back for breakfast and cleaned our white

perch. The

loons the other end of the lake would toss out their watery 73

laugh. No one else would be on the still surface. My grand­ father would bob his rod a couple of times and so would I. If the Maine sky was gray he'd say, They love that sky.

The American girl's suede desert boots were propped on her knapsack. My hand on the top of her deckchair felt the drizzle beginning. She looked up and said, You homing on me? and I said, Scrounger.

In summer I let the odd bus conductor take me for a tourist.

What does it matter? But also English people down from the North with their children for a weekend have asked way. I know London

me

the

only an American can. They'd say how long since you've been back to America, and I'd say I'm always going back. as

If you are not sure where you are, you have me.

Lorna came with me to the airport when I went to Chicago in

'64. Her

perfume and her pallor went together. The cabbie when he let us out at the Departures Building said, Had a good time then? and Lorna quickly said, Oh we've lived here for years.

What do you mean, always going back? said the American

girl. She worked the blanket up under her chin. You must be rich or you've got a racket, Spain's cheaper.

No surprise in any case to be once again entering a holding­ pattern over Kennedy listening to the captain's baritone pass on to his passengers the computerized forecast of an autumn cold front coming in from Ohio which to a New Yorker is the mid-west.

surprise to be held up getting into Manhattan from Kennedy.

No surprise in ochre twilight on the expressway to see No

slowed outbound cars with their lone drivers float toward us over the rise.

No surprise to find New York hard to enter, though perhaps

always a surprise to find New York.

No surprise to be on a sidewalk Wednesday morning walking north trying to use the Druid's advice.

74

Surprising only that this time I brought a venture whose principal product had been virtually ruined a month before. So instead of concentrating on letting my neck muscles ease into my lung mass, I was imagining that the Druid had secretly pondered Dagger's film and my diary ofit.

I knew just how much I was going to tell Claire.

Twenty blocks north the

mauve

and amber air waited

retreating before a glittering length of vehicles. Down into the deafening business of the avenue down through the late­ morning film the dots of light thirty-six stories up gave alter­ nately time and temp. The traffic here was spaced close and moving. On the small panel truck that passed me was my name.

To feel the sheaf of diary inside my jacket I put my hand to my breast like a hatless bigwig hearing a national anthem.

I knew roughly what I was going to do.

However, I could not know in advance that at an intersec­ tion in Manhattan I would abruptly have to think about a piece of equipment common everywhere but put now to unusual use.

On such

an

instrument the stabber will leave

no

usable

prints: at most a few curves broken from a second still more fugitive set of marks in his moist palm. Recompose the two sets if you can, but it won't be with an expert's dust and a police photographer's plate.

The stabber may reflect that given the instrument's diameter there could be no prints worth developing. But what he will not recall is what he did not see--or feel in his skin gripping the instrument-to wit, the presence behind him of an old college classmate Cartwright whom he might have known if he'd turned around.

At the corner ahead, sandy hair and a tanned neck became now the

profile of Jim Wheeler who turned his head sharply as if to peer at the couple on his left who had stepped off the curb and stood looking at each other.

It was Jim, and he'd appeared in front of me during the few moments I was seeing my name on the panel. I turned to see if likewise someone had spotted me from behind.

75

The light was now green sharing its light with the green word GO.

The couple went forward still looking at each other. Jim

stepped off the curb.

But from his left

black

with bird-lime

the hood launched itself veering out of the northbound avenue into the a

car

on

eastbound street they were moving to cross and it must have

brushed the couple and would have swiped Jim with the tail end but his hand came up to clasp the rear radio aerial and so he

able to stop himself, but when the car did not instantly brake, the aerial snapped in his hand, which it is not supposed

was

to be able to do, and this was what seemed to stop the car.

The driver was out fast. He came back along the far side of the car as I slowed my approach. He was a big man in a white

T-shirt with a brown decal on the chest. Someone said, Jersey

plates.

A woman's

laugh was off to my right somewhere near a

florist's doorway flanked by pussywillows in a black can and soft dark and bright pansies in tiers of flats.

The driver came round the rear of his car, his hands in front

of him at hip level.

Jim stuck the length of aerial straight out.

The man in the T-shirt rushed onto it.

It went into his shirt well below the brown decal, which I now saw was a target of numbered

rings. suddenly survived above the engines whose din swirled like a virtually immeasurable air conditioner killing itself yet letting off staggered signal horns to mark its decaying sequences.

The two words "License revoked"

The victim's mouth was open.

From the rise and fall of the woman's laugh I couldn't teU if

she had seen the stabbing.

The driver had got his aerial back in one piece. The other man let go.

A few inches showed in front.

When the victim turned, as to avoid the aerial already in him, the rod could be seen to have gone clear through and pierced it tented it his T-shirt his back. But instead of

puncturing

76

again

out as if he had a rolled tabloid in his back pocket sticking up

under his shirt.

The stabber, Jim,

stepped back onto the curb. He set out east finding his way into the clusters of early lunchtime strollers.

The driver, with the severed aerial through him, stood against his black fender not doing anything. The gathering mass of midtown traffic pressed north. There was blood at the corner of the driver's mouth. His eyelids were pinched shut. [ was at the curb now. There was more than enough of the

broken silver rod to get hold of.

Jim walking east was already half a block a way if that was his

beige suit.

A voice like the laughing woman's said, Call a cop.

The noise volume guarded by high buildings homogeneity like quiet; like a patient OM.

rose

into

a

Back down the swarming block [ saw [ am certain Claire,

because she still looked much like my Jenny who is only seventeen.

At once she turned back and went into a corner camera shop.

Even if she simply didn't want to meet me an hour before the

time we'd

agreed on

well

in

place other than her apartment, had she in any case seen the stricken man through as

as

a

the crowd?

At this point, then, the driver is several feet in front of me,

Claire is in a shop a block south, Jim is now half a block east.

The aerial is fixed in the driver's front and gleaming so cleanly the T-shirt is like a new polishing rag.

He went to his knees and the aerial

sticking out his back

scraped a line on the fender.

The pressure then must have increased his pain inside, but

his eyes

were

shut and he

was

apparently silent among the

vehicle horns and the revvings of diesel trucks pushing dark

fume out of side-stacks.

The kneeling man dropped his large hands from his stomach to the street, and one mashed a length of ochre turd, the other a

dark circle of spit. So he was on his hands and knees, and his T77

shirt had ridden above the two inches of aerial that

came

straight up out of his back red-sleeved.

Two Puerto Ricans pushing coats and dresses along left their four-wheeled racks at the curb and looked into the black car.

One of the driver's hands

was

missing part of the middle

finger.

A siren that seemed in its low register as close as a speaking

voice rose and swooped to rise again,

a

cop

car

in traffic a

block and a half south.

There was clearly nothing to do for the man in the T-shirt till

the ambulance came, certainly not disengage the aerial.

I felt I had been inserted into a situation.

I went back to the camera shop a block south but being on

the

corner

it

happened to have another door around on the

crosstown street.

I entered, and someone called behind me: I saw it.

I passed along the glass counter thinking to catch Claire in

the crosstown street. The man said, What happened?

Jenny was looking for a Leica IIIG box for a hundred dollars top, and if I could find one an Elmar f3.5 too.

I said over my shoulder, A man was stabbed.

Claire was out of sight.

Back through the door, the camera man said, Oi. Could I get Jenny a reliable second-hand 200-millimeter automatic as cheap here in the camera capital as through

Dagger?

It had been Claire, but she looked even more like my own

seventeen-year-old Jenny now the difference in age was less.

My eyes stung as if blinking through chlorine. Eastward the hatband way I thought Claire had gone, a Salvation Army showed dull soft red moving toward me.

Did Jenny even want something from America this time?

Why did I have the idea she was saying to me, Don't bother, I'll get it myself when the time comes.

In 1957 she was three and didn't yet object to Ginny; I said I'll bring you a present when I come back from America. She 78

knew present but not America. A list of all I've brought her since would make a history.

If I told the camera man my problem too simply, he'd say,

Look, an camera prices are much higher in England, they got a very serious problem with their economy.

point about the U.S. PX or the continental duty-free shops Dagger had connections with, he'd turn right off; he'd say, Well we don't compete with those foreign prices-maybe you need some film? you take slides, try But when he took my

this Fuji color.

During this absence from

my house in London that has

almost no mortgage left on the freehold, I could be holed up in

fortnight and not even be in America. Bringing a present from the PX in Ruislip on the outskirts of London or the Navy place near the Embassy was like bringing a present from the States. But Jenny wanted something else.

I cut back through the camera shop, I would meet Claire as arranged. The man was outside the other door looking up the block, but behind the counter now was evidently the proprie­ tor, a white-haired broad swarthy man in very dark glasses.

another part of London for

a

A man in a stained apron came in behind me and put a lidless

cardboard box

on

the counter. The clerk

came

back in the

other door: The ambulance is stuck in traffic.

What's the ambulance? said the deli man, who didn't know.

On his forearm across a vein and in the hair, he had seven blue numerals.

Claire's disappearance wouldn't have mattered if she hadn't

first appeared. You see Jim Wheeler you haven't seen in years -or been aware

of not seeing. You see him impale somebody

without exactly meaning to and walk away down a lunch-hour street. You see behind you a young woman you're going to talk to in half an hour. She cuts back through a camera shop and

you lose her.

My children aren't children any more. Not like the big Kodacolor display ad propped high on this glass counter-a 79

regular neighborhood snap enlarged and backed-five kids aged say six to ten: if I could draw them out from behind their u-v filter, slide away the health spectrum, leave them black and hear the tale of my trip to America and dismiss it white, they'd in none of the adult ways your own family can.

The weekend had been confusing. Jenny had picked an argument Friday night but dropped it until Monday night and then Lorna seemed deliberately to have stayed upstairs packing my bag when I knew she'd normally get into the act.

I hadn't told Lorna and Jenny and Will the trip was more than business, though Lorna unlike Dagger knew I had an appointment with Claire, and Lorna must have thought I wanted support for a second tryon the film and wasn't just having a friendly lunch with Dagger's beautiful niece. Lorna knew nothing about the Indian who I thought might have slipped into Dagger and Alba's flat during the three hours when someone had apparently broken in and ruined most of our film.

My son Will would not dismiss the trip's true purpose if he could understand it. But he'd think big, he'd imagine interna­ tional manipulations.

Feed facts to wife, to son, to daughter: before you're through you're retrieving responses.

Yet take these little Americans in the Kodacolor blow-up who would be just as multi-racial in black and white: whip them out of their crush of color-corrected health, polarize them into TRI-X prints, and they'd ask good questions.

About Dagger's film. They'd ask why and how. Maybe not when.

And who ruined the movie? And why did they?

Were the cops there-? The pigs, you mean, says the oldest,

ten-year-old black girl, her full lips moving in this still enlargement and my mind moving with her lips-let's say she had fish-fingers for lunch at her school on Ninth A venue this noon-Fish:fingers! what's fish:fingers? calls a nine-year-old oriental boy whose mother does not permit him to take a

advantage of the new hot breakfast how many New Yorkers in 80

the highest-taxed city in America know is given at that same

public school on Ninth Avenue, It's fish-sticks! And the rest giggle, and two little ones add their motion to this blow-up ad for Kodacolor and start wrestling saying Fish:fingers! Fish­ fingers !-and I'd tell them that in London fish-sticks are called fish-fingers (hot, fish-fingers old, which little piggie stays home with a cold), and I'd remind them it was in London that the film was destroyed.

Yeah? Anybody get killed in it? What's it about?

I could be mysterious and the kids would take it. But if after I said what would you rather do, see the film or hear me tell about it and

they said, See it, and I said, But it's ruined, wrecked, exposed, burnt up by the light of day, then they'd squint in the New York sun, shrug and maybe nod and say, Yeah you could tell about it.

Last year when Will was fourteen he asked for a book on

analog computers. (Or did

I suggest

it?) This trip

it

was

brochures from the Stock Exchange. He is thinking of opening a numbered account in a Swiss bank with a hundred

pounds. display case under the glass were some used items. Cameras mostly Japanese, then four lensless boxes with lens cap covering the hole; then some lenses on their own, At my end of the

at waist level

black barrels ribbed with white-numbered dis­

scale, depth of field, f numbers, cylinders so rich you could just reach through the display case's plate glass (avoiding tance

the smudges) and lift out the heavy zoom and adjusting it to your eye and the subject snap without a box directly into your

head like an act of Polaroid thought. A 12-120 zoom with crank and with a little steel bar either of which turns the barrel. On

sale also

Olympus-Pen just like Dagger's; the half-frame thirty-six-exposure roll you get seventy-two shots, said Dag; and it was one of my bad days and I said to him, What if they're lousy?

At the avenue door through which I'd first entered, I was weighed back by a thing in my eyes and chest like the damned sickness in my wrist when I fell off a ladder in Highgate and an

means on a

81

Lorna couldn't stop laughing and Jenny ran to me and cried.

(My Maine grandfather died not in his boat casting for lake bass but in a hotel.)

A new breeze blew steam to the doorway of the camera shop, sewer steam was what I smelt looking out. A smell not of London.

When I asked what she wanted this time, Jenny said, Bring me

back a memory. But maybe because Dagger had just been

on

the phone to me I didn't decide what she'd said and filed it

away in my head as a request for a Memorex, which to begin

with was unlikely because you can buy them in London.

Outside I couldn't see through the crowd up at the accident.

Two cops were backing them off, but you'd think the trick would be clearing a way for the ambulance.

Crosstown vehicles were now locked into the uptown traffic.

The black car hadn't been moved. One cop was very tall and had a moustache.

In reply to my letter Claire couldn't see what there was to

discuss: her Uncle Dagger's film as she saw the situation did not now exist even if it had been shot with a 16 that blows very

well to 35, and Phil Aut doesn't exactly promote non-existent films. Furthermore, Claire went on, Mr. Aut had only said originally that he'd look at it, you never know what you can sell to TV, it wasn't necessarily going to be a commercial proposi­

tion; he liked Claire, she said, and so he'd said he'd look at it when it was finished. What was there to discuss now?

If I'd wanted her just to hear my voice I could have sent her

explaining myself.

Granted, I saw her once a year, so what did I know?

a cassette

She was in New York. [ was coming to New York anyway. I didn't write her that.

Did the appointment stand?

Forty-eight hours before my flight from London, there was a cable. WEDNESDAY NOON INSTEAD MY PLACE CLAIRE.

82

Printed circuit cut-in flash-forward

England is not safe for me. Is that it? The tempered voices in Geoffrey Millan's living room above me as I pad up his stairs are past and future. I trail him into the long room that has at the street end some of his curious work and at the garden end some people. The round healthy face of the pediatrician and across the circle his sleek wife who has illustrated a children's book.

A bearded grim intellect whom I don't know, with eyes either

puffy or with an eastern fold at the corners. A splendid dark­ haired woman not my wife who rises for some purpose. A girl named Nuala who once looked up my friend Sub in New York.

A white-haired lady in a tweed suit who is a maths don and a

vigorous violist and asks where my wife Lorna is tonight. A tall, long-haired boy of twenty named Jasper stretched in brown velvet trousers on his side on the rug between the chairs of Nuala and the woman who has risen,

so

he forms the one

explicit arc of the circle.

The subject is not dropped on my entrance. It is a person­ something he has done. The splendid woman is leaving. I've arrived even later than I knew. The pediatrician's wife is insisting to her husband that violence on the contrary can make one

more

leaving;

authentic.

she

gives

Geoff embraces the

me

nod, disappears,

a

woman

and I

who

acquire

is her

chair. There comes a time, says Nuala, when one has to act.

Nonsense, adds Jasper and giggles.

I can't tell if everyone knows the person or no one.

The pediatrician is arguing that the man would do better to consult the authorities,

a

man

who has

appointed himself a

committee of one to attack and undermine an organization of

potentially violent exiles by sowing confusion here and there among them. The mathematician argues that violence nullifies

itself and that hewing to a line of moderation while less attractive particularly to people of certain temperaments and of certain ages is more delicate, difficult, and complexly responsive to the really human. even

more

Around me are the years in London, years of evenings in 83

which people listen and talk and do not drink too much, get a ride home after the Underground closes down or phone a cab that

comes

in

seven

minutes. The bearded

man

has been

what after all

can one expatiating allegiances: expect of Americans, they never reflected seriously upon their own revolution, they cared only to put it behind them. The mathematician interjects that Charles the First's last word before they chopped off his head was Remember. on

American

The bearded man seems not to hear her. He says that indeed Americans confused the natural

resources

of their continent

with their own ability to exploit those resources, even mingled those now

resources

with the illusion of philosophical ideas, and

in the interest of holding violence down, whom does

America back?

I

am

about to intervene, as I have on some other evenings

glass in my. hand on the side of ideas I do not hold defending for instance American internal security systems (for after all we do have something to be secret about!); challenging the standard of living here which for ten years the English middle classes have comfortably not let themselves inquire into; and gently (though later at home Lorna says I was the what was it I challenged? obnoxious) challenging ease of friendly intercourse has fogged my recollection-but I don't intervene now, for the bearded speaker is saying he is not sure what violence is and he can sympathize with the man in question. And Geoff Millan returns us to the man himself, an with

a

...

...

American resident here from whom now for lack of information the talk finds its exit into sex, and I have the odd sense that no one in the room in fact knows this mythical committee of one,

and it turns out that Geoff doesn't know the name of the man.

I stay and stay.

The guests are gone. Geoff does not betray surprise when I ask if I can stay over. It's very late, a new stage of talk.

84

Who is Claire?

Claire is in New York.

Cartwright's contact.

For the film.

You've lived well enough here on the Yankee dollar.

As the pound is measured by it.

American connections.

But my boats on the south coast were bought with money made here in England, and so were the French stoves, you have one yourself.

You bought into those young married boutiques, you started an

antique bottle shop.

They helped each other.

It was cordless electric carvers from the States at the time of the assassination. Who ever heard of exporting brass beds from here to Manhattan?

My margin was surprising.

And quilts from Maine and Appalachia, some old some new, and antique stoves from France that aren't really antique. And then that University of Maryland education racket at your Air Force bases

here.

I'm hardly involved.

And this film. Cartwright Tries Again.

You make that sound like the title.

What did you hope for?

More than what we have.

Is it all a waste?

What can you do with several pounds of ruined film?

You're the American.

The English take photographs too.

Not so many.

Maybe they don't see so much.

They're not so busy snapping pictures.

They would know better than an American what to do with a load of ruined film.

85

You said some burnt. Then blow up the negative (three by four),

silk screen it, rephotograph the print, hang it over that flak hole in your study-

It's a crackOr just hang the blown-up negative.

Find me the negatives and we'll go into business. There are no negatives. Or just one.

But you had other prints. I don't see.

You really don't. The point is. it hadn't been processed. So no

negative. Dagger was taking most of it in on the Monday to someone he knows in Soho. When Dagger found it it had been yanked out of the cans, most of it.

Were you actually there?

He's my friend.

What was it all doing lying about?

When Dagger shot most of it he put off thinking about rushes.

Anyhow a lot was shot in the boondocks.

Not exactly a home movie. Real art.

This was real. This was something.

Where was it lying?

On a table Dagger uses. For working, eating, talking. A big table by a window.

You said yanked out of the can. Was it burnt then?

There was a magnifying glass on the sill and a couple of inches of leader was trailing out of a cartridge.

You're not saying it was burnt by the English sun.

During a bright interval.

Is it so easy to pull film out of a cartridge?

Sixteen millimeter comes in spools. This that was burnt by the

magnifying glass was eight.

Did you plan on a mixture of eight and sixteen?

We planned to blow the whole lot to thirty-five. Eight doesn't blow to thirty-five, though we did have a cartridge of eight that

Dagger'd

been against using one evening when we were out of film, but I wanted to blow it to thirty-five so you'd see sprocket holes and frame lines.

And that was what was so to speak incinerated.

86

No, the eight that was burnt by the magnifying glass was a baby­ movie Dagger's wife Alba took of a friend's baby.

What happened to the sixteen millimeter film that was yanked out of the cans?

It was unspooled and exposed.

Ah. Burnt by light.

You should be endowed.

My father is entirely too old to have a thirty-five-year-old son on a permanent family fellowship. Why don't you take some money out of the Cartwright trust and endow me; sell some of that cheap land you bought in the Norfolk broads, you'll never build there.

I'll let your father take care of you.

Let him give me what he's going to leave me, then leave me and

disappear into his retreat in Sussex and if he lives long enough escape death duties or the added hazard of dying before he endows me, for then we might find that not having in the end to face me, he's posthumously endowed the retreat instead.

Someday Will and Jenny will sell my Millan originals for ten times what you let them go for.

No one knows what they are.

Admit it's hard to describe what you do.

Why describe?

It might help you finish things.

Look at yourself. You start things that others finish. But how was the magnifying glass fixed? I should have thought sort of on end.

That is to say, on its side. Was the sun burning through the glass when your friend came in?

This was later. Dagger and Alba came back from shopping. There was a smell.

The sun had gone in.

The smell of course was from the eight-millimeter baby film. Your vandal was indiscriminate.

He didn't get it all. But what he got is almost irreplaceable.

Why don't I know Dagger? I feel I know him.

Dagger DiGorro. Everyone else in London knows him.

American of course.

Irredeemably.

Now why should someone destroy your great American film?

87

I should have stayed in waterbeds.

Wasn't it water bumpers?

You do listen.

So do you.

Who was the American they were talking about tonight?

No name mentioned. Lana was the one who knew him and she only knows of him through a friend of hers.

The splendid dark-haired woman.

Why did you say a moment ago almost irreplaceable? And if the baby film wasn't part of yours with Dagger DiGorro, then there must be some more eight-millimeter unaccounted for.

At least you listen. They don't always listen in New York.

2

Looped London minutes with pink-faced Millan, I insert them in front of Claire even though they haven't happened yet. They come equipped with what I don't like about him-his automatic ironies-and what I do like-his attention. Once looped, those moments of friction will never run out of sprocket holes, the loop runs as long as you want, its hard data too hard a vita of me I cannot pause to understand for if I do I cannot, or not yet.

I forgot, said Claire, to ask about Lorna and Jenny and Billy.

He wants to be called Will.

That's wonderful.

He went on a school trip to Chartres.

That's great.

The long room had little in it-only beige and cream and pale orange and light lavender tones amid which Claire in a brown

pants suit possessed the sinister vividness of the only painted

thing in a drawing. Dark lip-gloss thinned her mouth.

Newhaven, Dieppe, Rouen, Chartres, I said.

Imagine.

Coming back, Rouen, Dieppe, Newhaven.

Recently?

Oh no. A year ago.

88

But I've seen you since then.

The news has had time to age.

Claire wanted me to get on with it. She had avoided me forty minutes ago in the street, no question. It hadn't been my daughter Jenny who'd turned into that camera shop; Jenny was in London and she did not wear lipstick, though she looked a

bit too much like Claire.

Claire was saying we'd arrived in Chartres.

thought I would press her further, so I described the English guide, quite a young man, who lives in Chartres eight I

months a year and knows everyone of the 176 windows inside out, and he told Will's group about things way high in Chartres meant

only

for God, and Will's friend

Stephen said they

weren't all that high.

Oh Christ, said Claire, I could throw it all up and go live in

England.

But I want to know what Claire knows, however little that is,

and I am fresh from London and in New York, and

Dagger

DiGorro's film is in my head.

Brighton, said Claire.

I said my mother's dentist who lives on the Park

Slope in

Brooklyn hosted a cocktail party at the Brighton Pavilion for an international group of dentists. I thought Claire might at least

speak of the campy orientalia assembled under that debauched king's dome.

Claire drummed on the sofa arm.

I had come all the way from London. If she didn't want to

talk she could have cancelled. Fine by me:

no

film, no deal.

Instead, I was here in her lunch hour in the pastel clarity of her flat which seemed oriental partly because of what hung hori­ zontal behind her-a poster perhaps treble the size of its subject which in the grainy blowup seemed slow-motion even more than enlargement, a slim arm-elbow to finger-tips­ Claire's I sensed (though I do not know why)-and an empty margin all round yet without the amputated look.

Granted, I'd have looked Claire up cable or no cable.

89

I told her how Will was half talking to himself one night in the

kitchen and was muttering something about pulley blocks and

hoisting yourself up in there to see some of that stuff meant only for God, and Lorna had reached into the fridge bent way over and Will had eyed her behind and the ceiling and without shifting his gaze had slid his arm off across The Radio Times to reach a chocolate digestive biscuit.

Claire did not get it. Maybe I domestic scene.

was

showing a very dull

Chartres made an impact on him, said Claire. She drummed on the sofa arm.

I explained that it was the engineering, I thought, more than any religious meaning, that for Will it was the hoisting and the

getting up there more than the actual seeing, that for instance he would take suction boots to walk up the wall and didn't

believe that that stuff way up there wasn't meant for people to see.

Claire

dropped her wrist to

see

the time. Where

was

I

staying? I said Sub, and she said the man with the children, and I said a friend who asks all the right questions and had a notion my life abroad was exciting.

Claire wanted to know what questions. I said, Not only about the film, and she said, Oh, and I said, Like why you wanted to see me when I have no film to show, and why the cable.

Claire got up and sauntered around behind me and then in front swinging her wide, high-cuffed trousers, stopped and with

deep breath said softly didn't I understand she felt bad about Dagger's film, to which I said I wouldn't be surprised one way

a

or the other.

She went and fell back into her sofa under the six-by-eight

poster and said, If I really wanted to know, she'd thought I was

coming anyway on business and she'd felt kind of bad about Dagger and his film, she loved Dagger-and wasn't the film mine too?

90

She kept raising her voice slightly only to drop it and there was a difference between her chic and the sound of her words.

I said that as for business, if she meant business

Dagger's

film was pretty much ruined and only me left to tell the story.

Claire said well no she'd thought I

might bring Billy over

again if I came on business.

She was filling in while she thought.

I said that once Will had asked me to bring him back a book

building a twenty-eight-bit computer, he even went out and got a big tin for a drum and some dowelling for an axle and put on side supports, but it ended there. Like me, I said, he was a great admirer of Brunei and Babbage. She didn't know Brunei?

The famous engineer of French extraction Isambard Kingdom Brunei, I explained, who once in a nursery entertainment for his little nephew Ben happened to swallow a coin that stuck in his wind-pipe and who thereupon in danger of choking designed a centrifugal pivot board on which he had himself strapped and swung round and round till the half-sovereign came up out of his mouth. The same Brunei that designed the Great Western Railway.

I said that last year I had gotten Will a digital computer kit through an American firm I occasionally represented complete with input sliders, circuit changing, and a read-out panel that lights up, but that now he was into shares and was planning a world stock exchange, which I supposed should not bore me

on

but in fact did.

You've always gotJenny, said Claire.

I thought I saw her go into a camera shop near here, I said.

Claire seemed to ease herself when I said that, as if it told her that she was in New York and I was not. She said, Who is the

fairest of the fair, is it Jenny or is it Claire?, and I said the

difference in looks

was

uncannily small and decreasing

as

Jenny approached twenty.

I said Claire must be

getting to know a lot about film distribution, and she said Enough. I said didn't she ever want 91

film, and she said, Distribution's creative too, I should see what some of my experimental geniuses are ready to do for a buck. I said, Why my?

I grinned. She may have seen not the friendliness I know wasn't exactly there but rather the domestic male expatriate gently downing her by paying real attention to her, yet the

to

make

a

guard I guess I had up worked almost accidentally for such a guard was one thing she'd wanted to see, so for a moment now she stopped looking for something else. She burst out, Oh I could tell you a tale or two about your own London.

You sent that cable.

Only knowing you were coming anyway.

Claire pulled a foot up under her; she hadn't said quite what she'd wanted to.

I could have written you what I have to say.

Look, said Claire, I'm in a business. Mr. Aut's got like all three phones triangulating on him in his office and in the outer

office it's very complex-you don't know Monty Graf-look, last April I thought we might be able to do you a favor, that's all.

Yau look, I said speeding things up but now splicing into some circle of which I was the center the stabbing I'd seen and the young woman who'd been behind me when I turned around (namely Claire)-the film we shot is not lost just because

people think it's destroyed.

Think? said Claire and tapped the middle finger of her right hand on the sofa arm.

I recall it absolutely, you see.

I get your point, said Claire and cast a look out the far window beyond her circular dining table as if fifteen floors up she

might see a secretary if she had one waving an urgent

message.

I said I recall it absolutely.

How do you promote a film that doesn't exist?

That's my line, I said.

The soft angles of my eyes were soiled with grains of the 92

bright haze outside that either was the product of a sieve-like must be both the substance process or was the sieve itself, and beyond which stood what you waited to see, and the abundant

ground that was all you were going to see.

She kept looking and I said, So you see your Uncle Dagger's film isn't wholly destroyed.

you? Is that what you mean? I haven't heard a thing from him since it happened. Where were you shooting besides England and Corsica?

It began with a fire, you know that.

Claire shrugged. A helicopter sounded close enough to be Do you mean there's still

outside her clean window. She said she couldn't care less how the film was destroyed, and I said I meant the bonfire, we'd

wanted a bonfire and it was there in a foggy midnight field in Wales ready for us sooner than Dagger expected.

Claire got up again and went and stood looking out toward the East River and fuel storage tanks like giant drums beyond

in Queens, and the sound down in the street seemed to increase. She said something about vandalism everywhere, even

London, and I thought, How sure am I the stabber was

Jim? and I answered, Very sure.

I went on through the foggy midnight field making it graphic

for Claire, the sun in her long straight hair which seemed to

have had a faint gray or heathery rinse run through it

so

it

wasn't as sandy-bright as Jenny's. I was telling about the ditch,

about how Dagger switched off the lights fifty yards before he

pulled over to the right side and how he half-tilted us into a ditch. He reached into the back, needed two hands, turned all the way round. He said he didn't know about the light. He

hauled the Beaulieu out of the sponge-lined aluminum case. It had the 200-foot

magazine screwed to the top. To find the

mechanical button to unscrew so he could pistol-grip the light

independently of actually running the camera, Dagger needed more light. So he pushed the door handle down but the dome light would have advertised us and I stopped him with my penlight. I said, Wait-we want eight frames a second for meter

93

this light. Dagger was trying to make out the light meter's hair­

line Maltese Cross. He said I'd been reading the wrong

books,

he was going to stick to twenty-four. [ flicked the overhead switch,

so

when he opened the door

the dome light stayed off.

Claire looked back from the window. In my light, I said, every black hair of Dagger's moustache was distinct, and the lowered eyelids when he looked from me down to that French camera in his hand showed some

tiny red and blue dots from all the Beaujolais and the good times that just seemed to come to him the first years in those Hampstead pubs or later when he

married and pubs were too public for him and he wanted to

was

know who he was drinking with.

He gets his way, said Claire, and [ could tell she loved him.

Dagger was in profile against the fire in the field, and I turned off my penlight. [ was telling Claire an odd, graphic tale, yet some half­ knowledge I hoped she had could give the secret pivot to my own story which meanwhile she seemed indifferent to.

He looked straight out the windscreen, the heavy nose, the

cheek bone, the mouth a bit open on his overbite. He said he'd had enough trouble loading the Beaulieu why didn't we load it with color, here

we

were

in the dark and

a

great fire and

probably someone from Berkeley over there in the ring-they couldn't all be Welsh hippies-and what have we got but black and white. [ said they probably weren't Welsh they were probably from London, and [ said overall we'll mix color and black and white, we'd be wasting color here, we need fast film.

Well even before we reached the hedge he was shooting, hand-held, and I said Steady. We stood in soft earth that gave but wasn't mud. The inevitable stone farm house must have been nearby but the inevitable dogs must have been friendly or

deaf.

Where's yours? I said to Claire.

Hospital, she said, and came back from the window to the sofa.

94

Jenny's crazy about dogs. I guess she's quite English.

Manhattan's crawling with dogs, said Claire.

It's different, though, I said. You never see children.

I never do. You probably see plenty.

London's more ofa family city.

You must be right.

You get the picture, I said. Fog damping the sound.

The chanting soft, close. Maya Maya. Somewhere not in the circle a guitar drummed alternating chords like somebody learning. I couldn't see where it was. Maya Maya Maya was one word. The others I didn't understand.

Hell, I didn't understand Maya either. Not then. But I could make it out and I said it in Dagger's ear. We're in South Wales. How we got there is plausible enough. I had business on the Dorset coast, then we drove up past Bristol where we had a mutual actor­ friend. So far, Dagger was the casual traveller. I was the one

talking about the images we needed to go with what was then the third section of the film. But when we got into South Wales and night had come into the soft farm valleys above Newport and dew chilled the

manure

and sweet grass and

we

were

running snug between hedgerows, Dagger was scooting around curves and shifting down and accelerating as if now he had a purpose. And now he's saying let's find a bonfire to film­ which seemed right to me because I'd said in the beginning that we ought to find visions intermingling England and America so you wouldn't be able to tell.

And here

we

were

between

villages hunting for a bonfire, though Dagger was also now saying he was looking for a roundabout that would get us onto the A 40 east to London.

Claire was looking at her hands wedged between her thighs.

The fog partly hid Dagger and me from these people. Claire

didn't yet know I was recalling my diary. Fog stood here and there as far as the edge of the ring. But passing through the ring the fog became

something else gassy and jumped and bent

through the forms of those people into the inner circle where it passed into the fire but freshened and inflated the colors of 95

their clothes, the

woven

oranges and denim

blues, a brown

cloak, some yellow, some olive green.

A baby's cheek flashed

on a

girl's back. Dagger tracked a

little boy in overalls who as he walked stared at the blaze they were

all

circling. The camera's drive motor seemed loud, a

softer or more musical dentist's drill, a buzz saw under water.

Dagger switched off and focused on one comer of the ring and whispered wouldn't it be if some were Americans.

When he said, Recognize funny someone from Berkeley? he may not have been kidding though he often speaks of his old bailiwick and feeding some friend who later became an official in Washington. A big woman with a red and yellow blanket over her shoulders burst from her place and surged across the inside of the circle to embrace and kiss the boy in overalls-and they all shouted something. And she, in a glad tantrum of head-wagging, stood aside till her spot in the circle came by.

My ankles were wet and tom. Sheep bleated. Dagger flipped shot till they'd all gone by once. I

the turret to get a closer shot of the fire.

What were they burning? They stopped circling and clapped.

What was burning? I saw two branches sparkling and one gray label with letters that didn't mean anything.

Is that all? Claire murmured, staring at her hands.

They stopped circling and began to clap.

We didn't know about the Hindu group, said Claire.

Who didn't?

At the office.

You mean you did know other things we filmed?

Dagger I thought had written her a note in April answering the tentative encouragement he said she'd given him.

Dagger didn't mention Hindu to you, did he?

Maya's the giveaway, said Claire. I mean, that's Hindu.

Anyway, I think Dagger wrote me.

I let Claire get away with that. Instead I told her that later an

American Dagger and I know in London hearing me talk about 96

the bonfire got worked up about looping zoom dissolves. He

thought Dagger had zoomed in through the ring to the fire; but we had no zoom then.

What was his name? said Claire.

Cosmo. And he had a friend from Delhi he wanted Dagger to

completely in the present. I said we weren't interested in technical tricks like looping zoom dis­ solves but he just kept talking at Dagger saying we ought to make a separate cartridge loop. Dag said he thought you could do that with eight but not sixteen, but Cosmo said when we got to projecting just insert the cartridge wherever we wanted and change the whole scene at will. Like, three, four loops, the audience couldn't tell if it was repeat or the people in the ring were just being shot all over again round and round. Dagger said, No, you better check that out, that doesn't sound right. meet who he said lives

Cosmo said to me, What else you got, man?

Once Cosmo got some high-priced audio equipment through

Dagger and turned up one midnight waking Dagger and Alba and meaning to tape their entire record collection.

Did anyone say anything to you? said Claire. Did you get close to the ring?

Here, I said, pulling out of my inside pocket a handful of

diary pages.

Look, said Claire, I didn't shop for lunch, all I've got in is granola and Earl Grey tea bags from England. And honey, Greek honey. Like how long are you in New York? I could return those pages to your friend's.

I said I didn't have time. I

skipped to a passage way past what I'd read her, put all but ten pages back in my inside pocket, and said I was skipping a sentimental part full of technical stuff on loading our 200-ft. magazine when we used it.

She said, Eight doesn't blow, so it wouldn't have been any

good to us. But that was Alba's film you said-how many 8

cartridges did you say?

But I began again.

97

Look, said Claire, but she sank back stiff into the pale cushions.

I said, There's some here you wouldn't care about.

We're well past the hedge, well past a young American Indian's challenge to us and Dagger's raucous I'm-from-Pathe.

News-I'm-Iooking-for-the-United-States, wait! hold that! out of the pan into the can, I do my best work when the subject stays still, who's on guitar I got news for him there's a chord called the sub-dominant.

And well past the guy who when we approached got off into

the dark to a small tall grove of trees; well past the Beaujolais I went back to the car for and we couldn't

get this crowd to

touch.

All the way a few minutes later to a tough little apple with hair to her buttocks. Dagger touched her fire-bright face with the back of his hand, he looked twice her size when he bent and

hug and got shoved. The camera looked heavy then. He said, But it's you I've been looking for ever

gave her a one-arm

since I got onto this road. Because you are beautiful.

He raised the camera, the motor hissed, he started to pan, he

said Try to be loving, what do you get.

I said I didn't understand, why not just shoot some footage­

and as for panning, it's over-rated.

The N agra unit was in the boot; no point intruding it. Too bad because against the snapping of the blaze the damping of the various voices sounded an odd turn of distances.

When Dagger swung to get the grove where the man had gone, he didn't switch off the motor. So it was an unintentional

swish-pan and hand-held at that, so you can imagine how it must have wobbled however strong the Dagger arm. The grove was just a shadow in the dark and thus almost as indefinite as the intervening blurs he swished through. Then the round­ cheeked woman grabbed the arm supporting the pistol grip and Dagger switched off and listened to her.

She said they were finishing and we had no right to force it by

entering their field.

98

A gaunt fellow said to me, It doesn't matter, you will come

and break bread at the house and we will drink a glass of your wine. I said, Oh you drink.

But the little woman said they'd been combining a Hymn to

Night with the little boy's initiation and she turned and informed me only three of them drank and the group was unusual in not excluding visitors from meals.

On the side of the fire toward the grove three men circled the

boy chanting what sounded like Rama Rama. Several of the group were drifting away from the light.

Who's that in the grove, said Dagger, I think your guru's taking a breather.

There is no one in the grove, said the little woman, though she need not have answered, and as if continuing an instruction that had not been interrupted she explained that just as the group included different conditions of rebirth, so it included also different styles of practice, Tantric release, ascetic re­ lease.

Dagger moved away saying, What I want to know is who went into that there grove.

He was having trouble revolving his turret to find the 50 lens.

I said to the little bright-cheeked woman, Are there Ameri­ cans here?

She said,

Why do you ask? and pointed to the American Indian, who was saying to Dagger, I've been here four months, I mean in Britain, and I'm not looking back. I'm from Kansas City originally.

The woman pointed to the small circle chanting Rama and said, Also the boy-his father's American, his mother's En­ glish, they're in London.

Dagger was on the far side of the fire. The big woman in the blanket stopped him and embraced him so he had to drop his camera hand. She said, Anyone who enters as you entered is so lost he risks rebirth as a tortoise. She giggled.

The little woman called to Dagger across the fire, But I know you, I know you from London. The big woman said with more 99

laughter, Elspeth knows you. The big woman held Dagger and his camera at arm's length: As the calf follows the mother, she

said, you have not known the relation between your samsara and your karma.

Dagger very friendly said, Out of the karma into the camera.

I joined him near the grove. He was shooting. Sure enough I detected ahead a pale motion though why he had to get (as he said) the complete picture puzzled me.

A skinny man in a hooded jacket stood with his arm around the young initiate: Come with us, brothers, he called, and Dagger called back, Just a minute, and the other fellow said, Throwaway your machine, brother, you are filming as if you were pursuing your enemies.

Dagger called back, Don't know till I catch up with them.

But now, instead of the elusive character in the grove, out of

it came at us in a brief, accidental charge a cow that cantered off into the fog-sifted night.

She is going to the river, said a man's voice behind us and

chuckled, and I said, Just some of the local fat stock (for that was no dairy cow), and Dagger said, apparently to me and calmly as if quoting, Near the intersection of the River Usk someone

and the Monmouth-Breconshire border.

The

man

in the grove-unnecessarily it seemed to me and

almost as if to show us-stood clear of a tree and I saw him

quite well in the light of the fire at my back. I saw him, and Dagger got a shot of him veering out of the grove and running after the cow.

The big woman captured Dagger from behind. As when a lute is played, she said with her cheek against his shoulder, one cannot grasp the external sounds but by grasping the lute or the

player of the lute the sound is grasped.

The little woman at this distance not so ruddy was close to across me low and rather fiercely to Dagger: This is me

talking place, we rent it, we are here only a small part of the year.

We prepare now for the cosmic dance of the Dancing Siva

our

evening and no one outside the group is allowed here, I don't know what you are doing to us.

tomorrow

100

And that, I said to Claire, looking up from a page of onion

skin, is the dance that celebrates the end of the world, and when I said this to the woman, Dagger said, Well I don't want here when it

happens-he asked her name-a baby started crying-I said Elspeth, and he said, Do you go to the National Film Theatre? Maybe you saw me there.

She only said, I do know you, and Dagger said, Dagger DiGorro, and this here is an untrustworthy merchant adven­ turer named Cartwright. Now the cat chasing the sacred cow, is he dancing Siva tomorrow night?

to be

She turned to go back to the fire. She seemed to sense we weren't sticking around. Dagger said, Oh hell.

He didn't like this after all, and I wasn't sure why.

Mind you, I said getting up and leaving on Claire's table the

onion-skin pages I'd had out, that was catcher, the piece of his face I did see.

more

than

a

cow­

Funny, said Claire.

In the bathroom Scotch-taped to the wall beside her beige toilet was a two-page glossy-spread of a stately mansion, Luton Hoo. To the viewer's right of the pillared portico and one of those English lawns so vastly level green they seem artificial (and in a sense are) and under Dr. Samuel Johnson's This is one of the places I do not regret having come to see, was an inset shot of the celebrated ivory casket whose deep surfaces hold twenty carved scenes from the lives of Virgin and Son. Claire called out: Did you write down a description of him?

I reached for the silver flusher and then did not push it, and

said without raising my voice, Somewhere.

And the phone rang.

On the inside of the bathroom door was a white felt heart and

pinned to it a big button showing Claire in a floppy hat.

Peace, said Dagger, and we passed the fire heading for the hedge.

Why did I say to the newly initiated boy, Is it tomorrow you welcome the god?

The boy said, Every day.

Without thinking, I said, Every minute, and he said, Right.

101

Those few words weren't in my diary and Dagger didn't film them. The boy had a narrow face and a cowlick and sandy hair

light as Jenny's. And real overalls. I bore down with all my weight and gentleness upon the bathroom doorknob.

In her bedroom Claire was saying, I knew he might be­

as

that's all.

My onion-skin pages in the living room were neater now.

Monty, I didn't know, said Claire from the bedroom; then not so loud, That's what I said.

The receiver rattled but she did not come out.

I had the diary pages stuffed back into my inside pocket with

the others when she appeared in the bedroom doorway. She

put her hands in her jacket pockets to cheer herself, and said, I'm afraid I have to make another call.

(Ifno, keep looping; if yes, proceed.)

I said, You still haven't explained why I saw Jenny behind me today and then she turned into a camera shop and gave me the slip.

She took heart. I strengthened her. She shrugged and said, What do you want? You're not going to believe this, but I didn't know what to say to you seeing you there. I mean we had a date for half an hour later.

I asked what Outer Film was interested in at the moment,

and she said a little bit of everything. I said I couldn't think who would want

film

destroyed. Claire said, Maybe a competitor who was making a film on the same subject. I said, Very funny. She said, Next time I'm in London we'll go to the theater. I said I must go see Cosmo's Indian, maybe he'd know what happened.

Oh don't do that, said Claire ironically.

I let her feel she was making me go. our

She asked me for Sub's number and address. She said it was better than staying in a hotel, and I said my grandfather from Maine died in a hotel.

That fire, she said, and came away from the bedroom as I went to the front door. I put my hand on the knob.

102

That was the third part, I said. The first was in Hyde Park two weeks before. Too bad you never got any idea of all this.

But the fire, she said.

We'll never know if Dagger got a good shot of what they were

burning, I said.

I meant when the film got burnt on his table.

Oh it only got Alba's Super-8 baby film.

But your film was destroyed there too, right?

Not burnt. Except by the light of day. Exposed. No, I meant

the fire might have spread.

I held the front door. Poised concern in the tilt of her head,

cigarette in her fingers, some melancholy immobility in the cheeks which next to my Anglo-American Jenny's seemed bloodless.

I meant the film they missed that wasn't on

Dag's table, I

said. That's what I meant.

How is he? said Claire, keeping me.

Older, well-covered, very strong, keeps open house, magi­ cal, more American than ever, a father now at last as you know. And in that film never mind how clumsy we were we

really saw something.

So did we, said Claire. I mean, something in it.

we

thought there

was

I was over her threshold and let the door slip.

Too bad, said Claire softly. What's Jenny up to?

Dying to try America. Has a new boyfriend. Plans to take A­ levels in Latin, I hope.

Now Claire let me wait. What'll you do with the film they missed?

Who's they?

My chat with Geoff Millan recircuited Fast Forward; I heard nothing new.

Claire smiled: It's your life; how would I know who they is?

Going to make any more films?

I'm still working on this one. It's all written down.

Who reads any more, said Claire.

103

Exploded view JOY WILLIAMS

1 Daddy often told me that those who love become a single angel in heaven or a sole beast in hell.

Everything began a long time ago. Daddy always told me that my ruinous life was quickly and immediately determined.

He did not elaborate. Now I wouldn't say that I agreed. I was a simple child! Daddy used to say BEWARE THE WRATH OF THE LAMB, but Daddys say that you know. It was just a little joke.

But I was a simple child. I was always straightening my drawers for instance. [ was always arranging, arranging, organ­ izing, memorizing. [ do not follow racing anymore, but as a child I had memorized the names of every Derby winner. The jockeys never interested me. In the photographs they had the smooth faces of dwarfs, tiny waists and wardrobes. I was a child. They reminded me of evil playmates with terrible knowledge. I dismissed them and dwelt on the horses. I knew 104

TriQuarterly

their lineage, records and running times and could recite these statistics without error. Memorization then took the place of

something else, something deep, deep which I did not want to touch. I wanted order and it was everywhere.

Now it's true I suffered from lack of sleep. I dreamed but did not sleep. Daddy was mistaken there. He saw me pretending, I suppose. They say all children maintain this, but I want to tell you, never was I sleeping. I would be the last to say I saw it all but never was I sleeping.

I did have fevers. The house was always cold and I was chilled. Snow in the winter and rain in the summer fell on me.

So much broken and so little repaired

....

But things were always out of my hands. I have always been

grateful for that.

My eating habits If I were not so hungry and thirsty all the time 1 would like to starve to death. But the only thing I've never been able to eat is a

banana. The thought that a male banana tree and a female

banana tree are necessary to produce little bananas has always

upset me. I never eat anything that has been born or pollinated.

If this were only so! (I used to lie constantly but now 1 assure you, I've stopped.) 1 want to starve to death but the

the hunger!

I must admit I eat this

myself.

hunger,

...

We think

as

we

garbage because

eat. Our brains

I want to insult

take

on

flavor and

scope. What I want is to slow down my head and eventually

stop it. I strive for a brain friendly and homogenized as sweet potato pie.

My entertainments I sit in the liquor store parking lot and drink with gentlemen

friends. It fills up. Men and women, single women, men and We sit in

watching each other and drinking. It's very pleasant. Four carpenters drink pints of peppermint schnapps. A tanned lady, very pretty, an older

men.

our

allotted slots,

105

lady, refined, drinks brandy. Potato chips fall out of her mouth.

Someone kisses

me.

It's

an

awkward moment but

we

have

another glass of gin. The lot is lit indirectly from the liquor store on one side and a nursery on the other. A sprinkler works

its whippety way across the plants and dribbles water across the hood of the vehicle in which I sit. Beside us, a few children in the back of a truck protect their candy bars from the spray.

Yes, it's very nice. There were three children, three candy bars. I could tell by the wrappers that they were ZEROS.

My advice

My suggestion is to confess to everything. Once, on the street here, in this Florida coast town, shortly after I arrived, the FBI spotted me in a laundromat. I'd thought the manager was giving me the eye because his machine was acting oddly, clanging and banging and taxiing around its filthy slot. I tried to ignore his mean and greedy eye. He thought the reward was his.

These fellows slipped around me. Smith, their names were, and Smith. When Smith showed me his card, he exposed the

weighted exercise belt around his middle. Smith, on the other hand, conducted the questioning.

"Howdjew find Jessup the last time you was there," he said.

"They sure changed that town some.

"Jessup?" I say. '

,

"Y ou let your hair grow out," he said. "I gotta say it ain't becoming. But a girl like you. I can't imagine you traveling alone. Where'd your boyfriend be. The boy what done the carving. I'm sure a little thing like yourself wouldn't have done that carving.

'

,

"Sheeit," Smith said. "I bet a little girl like you can't be aware even of the Enormity Of Her Crime."

Unfortunately, something or other had run in SOAK. My clothes were the color of gasoline.

"Whyn't we jest check up on your little niceties here," Smith said. "Blood's harder'n tar to get out off your clothes."

106

Smith did not smell good. "We might add that your boy's

caught now. It was him that told us where you was. He's up in Tampa spilling the beans and doesn't give a pig's piss for you at this point.

"Wrong girl," I ventured. But of course I was. They wandered away. The manager said that he wasn't responsible "

for clothes left in machines and if I didn't take my clothes away, he wouldn't be responsible. Of course I knew what

Smith had been referring to. A dreadful story. Chopped up someone's lover and sent him to Coconut Grove in a casserole dish.

But that

when

I

first arrived.

sought after, accosted, but never found. Is that not how you find it? was

I

am

The time of my arrival

I came by train. Everything is amiss on Southern trains. There

is no ice water, no meat, no flowers. There is no service at all.

The train does not speed but it's never not arrived. There's no timetable available but it's never late. The train bears me and others through a swamp. Part of the swamp is burning. There is a

smell of toast.

I

am

the

only one to disembark at this

particular station. I am alone on the platform as the train glides away. Once the place had been much busier. This had been a

circus town. The circus left from this station each season. They went away came back and so on. And an elephant was killed

right on these tracks, though there is no plaque, for it was not Jumbo, who was killed in Indiana, but another elephant.

It was early but the heat was rising. One could smell the fertilizer they'd packed around the sidewalk lily plantings.

Opposite me, the proprietor of a U RENT IT ALL put out his wares on the sidewalk.

Mowers and beds and automatic nailers

and hoists. And then he brought out an aluminum ladder that

he would rent you too and he climbed up on it and put a new

combination of letters in place on his glass marquee, a new message on this fresh new day: RENT YOUR CONVALESCENT NEEDS. His little boy came out and voiced some easily accom107

plished desire in a piping screech and the man descended, folded up the ladder and leaned it against the storefront.

And those letters, those portable letters so ominous took me home again. Yes, home with Daddy, years ago. I am a darling toddler assisting him with the slate letters on the church bulletin board. I choose from a sturdy box that still smells faintly of apples. A remarkable box. It can make any word that anyone can think of. It is limited only by me. I slide the letters along the rusting runners, following Daddy's instructions. He is my only consideration. It is summer, it is spring. Daddy and I seduce the mornings. The earth shimmers with the yearnings of God. Daddy guides my hand I LAID ME DOWN AND SLEPT I AWAKED. My thoughts were his thoughts. PSALMS, I would say. Yes, darling. It is raining. It is a day of high cool sun fading our hair. SONG OF SOLOMON, I say GENESIS. Yes, sweet, he would say. Life's simple as it seems for we love but once, darling. The rest is dissolution.

I walked across the street and into the rental place. The little boy sat on a hide-a-bed. What time is it?, I asked. His mouth was full of jelly. Ten till, he said eventually. That's wonderful, I exclaimed. And what's your name? Rutt, he said peacefully, after a long pause. The proprietor emerged, Percy, he said, what does this woman want? The time, I interceded. He jerked his head in the direction of a big wall clock. Feast your eyes, he ...

said.

The one millionth visitor

Into this town drives a little family in a Volvo station wagon.

Everyone is stuffed with ham, quaint grits and papaya juice.

They are just passing through, heading for The Last Supper which is being enacted somewhere in the middle of the state.

The young daughter is counting Mercedes automobiles. One two THREE, a diesel, a 190-SL and an error for it is actually a Rolls Royce. The small boy has soiled his pants and is changed

seventy miles an hour. It looks funny. Greenish. Curdeley she whey. The mother is distressed. Before she had children

at

108

had never thought about it, but now it seems that she is always

examining shit. Is it pasty and odorless or cheesey and foul or to fall into slippery and shiny or fat and dull? It seems ...

certain patterns. It seems to have a tale to tell. She has found that shit will often supply the answer when all else fails. She even has the

suspicion that shit is the lane-end into heaven and

so on, the lost key opening and so forth.

She peers at it, slides it around in the diaper. She is alarmed and expectant. She joggles the diaper up and down. Her gay young womanhood passes before her eyes. She shows it to her

husband.

Impersonal knowledge

The oldest riddle on record is in the Bible.

Yes, Daddy. JUDGES 14:14.

That's right, darling.

It is

summer.

I

am

on

his shoulders. He walks

along the

beach and into the frigid water. I am squealing with the cold.

My hands beat upon his neck. I slip off. I start to drown.

My friends, new and old I quickly got my first job here. I worked in the dirtiest little

Dari-Whip in the county. The practices that went on there! My God. I left to become a cocktail waitress in one of the town's

finest restaurants. Where even more terrible things occurred.

Why I've heard them pissing in the Rhine wine. Jizz in the bechamel. Running sores in the cherry flan. I let it all ride.

Who am I to bubble the globe of the ordinary life? My only concern was that Father would enter and demand to be served.

He sent his surrogates, I know, but never himself. What's a girl

like you doing in a nice place like this, they'd say. Actually, I've never seen a man who resembles him in any way, but if

Father's the Shepherd, then we're all his willing lambs.

You've a nice face, dear, they'd say. You bring to mind a girl I loved once and lost, and what are you doing after this place

closes and you've washed your lovely hands?

109

When you think of Life's routine

They'd always have to make a crack about Entree Six: Red Snapper, Hush Puppy and Cole Slaw, our luncheon special and all for only $1.35. They'd have the same attire seersucker jacket, black pants, white shirt and the same amusements in their linty pockets.

Comb, nail clip and a roll of Lifesavers in assorted flavors. I believe that 98%, if not more, of all the Lifesavers in America are sold to middle-aged men out to turn a trick. I can't understand why God made every tiny snowflake different and ...

...

...

all these men the same.

But I'd attend to them all the same for I'm just passing the

time while I

recover.

I'm just taking this

opportunity to get

better. And I'd scoot my body under the chassis of their

strangeness, under the cologne, the Camel and Lavoris flavor oftheir caste, for I'm an ideal young woman, all tanned meat as I am, so carefree and compliant.

Think you're for special occasions, don't you, they'd say.

By any means deliver me from special occasions, I'd say.

But I'll agree, they took me to nice places. The bedposts did not have the taste of Pine-Sol.

Nonetheless, "Howdet go," they'd ask, kissing with all embellishments. I thought for a moment you'd chipped my tooth, I'd say, but I was mistaken.

It was fortifying, thank you. It was peachy. Never did they offer compensation as far as I could see. They always had to

buy a speed nut for the washer or a new solenoid for their second-hand GTO. When a bill's broken, it's shot as far as I'm

concerned, they'd say.

Now once a boy had given me a silk tassel of his hair. It was blue. I counted the strands. Thirty-one. I wanted no mistake.

The next time there were twenty-nine. His mommy owned a drugstore. You mustn't mention this to anyone, the boy had said. His hair was the color of dungarees. I'll send you a can of syrup. You can make all the Coca-Cola you want. I showed the hank of his hair to Daddy. He lost it, though he wasn't angry.

He simply lost it. The wind swept it onto the rocks, I suppose.

110

My situation I wait. What is going to happen waits with me. We have always been reluctant companions.

It is the coast.

Everything is here. It starts out poor but it

wealthy. The woods are first. Rattlers slide down colored gullies. Goats climb in the trees. They prefer live oaks because of the low sturdy branches. This is not peculiar. The woods join the bay. Black people live in stucco houses with bright tile roofs. They farm. There are a few calves and

grows

chickens. Some of the livestock are hobbled to the docks at low tide. The cormorants rest on the pilings,

drying their wings.

The road is littered with oyster shells. They shine like oil and

crack beneath the wheels of cars like bones.

It is

Saturday. Everyone is outside the Whopper-Burger.

There is a tiny Mennonite girl who has been picking fruit. She wears a bonnet and a long brown dress and smells of citrus. She eats her hamburger with a knife and fork. It takes forever. A group of 4- H children are sitting beside her. One of them raised the steer that brought top price at the county fair. They have just returned from a packing plant tour.

Someone says, "There was your old Scoobi-Doo hanging there.

"

"There he was," the child giggles.

It is Sunday. In church the Baptists are singing, But none of the ransomed ever knew

How deep were the waters crossed Nor how dark was the night that the Lord Passed through ere he found his sheep That was lost

In the garden, the sexton is watering the stones.

The bay water becomes deeper, more clear. The palmist bars and spaghetti houses are left behind. There is the college, the

hospital; the Ferrari dealer, the mansion of the circus king. The beach is more visible. It is tamed and raked. There are hotels.

They become monstrous, elegant. The beds are vast and white.

Lovers lie here. Obstreperous retirees. Deep-sea divers with butterfly strokes. Retired wealthy aerialists with sequined groins. They lie, dreaming worlds in their heads.

111

The weather

On some mornings when the air is very clear, windless muggy

mornings when I feel my head earnestly trying to repair itself, I can hear Father tracking me. It's a sound like a hymn. Pale.

Full of rectitude. And I'm distressed because I see that even

when I cheat, I'm losing.

My camera I have a camera.

Every time I go out I take it with me, hoping to find a repair shop. !\1� last time at the movies I slip behind the pneumatic door of the movie theatre. Every­

thing works upon the principle of exhaustion. In and out. Open and close. The floor slopes. I guide myself to my seat. I feel smug but nervous for I didn't have to pay. I came in after the

show had started. The cashier had turned her head. I never

paid for anything. The film has been terribly preserved. At this rate, it will be tomorrow before I get out of here. I try to concentrate but then I realize that Daddy is coming toward me,

from the red EXIT sign in the front of the theatre. He's walking

slowly, as though for amusement. I'm not startled for I knew he'd come. Redoubtable Father, it's him all right. Ablepharous Daddy. There's no need to ask anyone whether my recognition is true. I'm not my age now, surely. I'm not a year old now, no, I haven't gained a day. I'm just a tiny thought now, rocking in his sperm and then I go back

even

further than that. I'm

nothing but bloodless warmth like the hot yellow beak of a bird.

He's at my aisle now. His hair grows sweet and island­ ragged on his neck. His coat is rumpled, his luggage old. He turns his lidless eye on me.

2 Kate is ten, the Reverend thirty-one. He is a handsome man,

his hair a little long, a little out of style. There is one eye, his 112

left, which he cannot close. The nerves are severed in the lid.

An old injury. Noone is aware that his eye is curious. It can

only be noticed when he is sleeping.

It is the Fourth of July and they are eating salmon and peas.

There is Kate and her mother and her father.

Kate has

glass of milk. On the bottom of the glass is a McCarthy. She is a child and this is her picture glass. Any time that she lags in drinking her milk, her mother urges her on with the promise that there is a surprise at the bottom. Kate has seen the picture a hundred times and loathes Charlie McCarthy who even in real life is only made of wood.

She thinks her mother is simple-minded. a

of Charlie

Kate's mother often expresses concern vocabulary which is rigid and obscure.

over

the child's

Kate hums and stares past the worn window-sill toward the sea.

There is a sailboat race in progress. Three of the boats in

the race have plum-colored sails. Kate has thick, dark braids,

tightly knotted. Her hair troubles her. She feels it is a vanity and is afraid that some day when she is riding the neighbor's great bay horse, she will catch it in an oak tree like Absalom and die.

Kate's mother takes her to the amusement park. There is the smell of the tide and of clams and tomatoes baking on dough.

Everywhere there is sputum and paper blowing. There are religious pictures and the faces of movie stars sliding out of machines.

Kate's mother tells her that Kate will have a baby brother or sister soon. They sit on a bench on the sand, watching the green calm sea and the lace curtains blowing in the windows of the old hotels. The mother's face is extraordinary. A brown vein throbs in her temple. Kate cannot look at her mother. She never

looks

at

her, unless she forgets. She never looks at 113

herself either, in mirrors or in photographs. She has no interest in it. An old man walks in front of them. He wears a tight brief

bathing suit. His limbs and chest are brown and oily. He is very old. Kate wishes that the old

man

would take her mother's

hand and walk away with her, into one of the decaying hotels.

The man looks as though he might do something like that, if

requested.

Kate's mother often makes references to "the guilty party."

Kate listens carefully. She thinks of a dreary hall, riddled with

black and brown crepe, tables of disgusting food, broken toys,

cowering chicks and kittens and rabbits in fetid boxes, and everyone there, all the children, weeping, blindfolded and in chains.

Kate had witnessed the day her mother lost her mind. She walked down the hallway of the house, toward Kate, her hands

pressed to her head. Kate watched her, and from her head, Kate saw the black, corrupt and weightless blossom of her mother's knowledge fall.

The Congregation is the town and the town makes up this

Maine island. The townspeople do not care for the child, Kate.

something lame about her, something dark. It is as though she is living out some event that is not part of her life.

The townspeople believe this but do not think about it. How can they? They live in the faltered rhythm and dip of the island.

They listen to the telephone. Nothing happens here. The town has no possibilities and this is the only child. The wombs are barren, the land cannot bear. They swim in conjecture, the time and the tides. Nonetheless, they feel there is the air of a sanctified crime about her-of a holy slattern-although this has never been suggested by any of them. The child reflects nothing but her father. He is in her eyes, the way she holds her hands. Already she has developed great skill at recitation and can quote long sections of the Bible with a dreamy and There's

114

stage she's going through. The Congregation knows nothing about children.

daemonic exactitude. Perhaps it's just

a

The Reverend meets the child every day at the dock when

the ferry brings her back from school on the mainland. It is

suppertime when she comes home. The townspeople see them walking together, not speaking, the child's fingers in the man's big hand. The townspeople watch from their windows, eating fish and beans.

They take

delight in her inconsistencies, embarrassed because she is, after all, only a child, and they wish her 110 ill. They have seen her playing.

Once the postman heard her singing. an

embarrassed

God's begun a state of grace in me I'm the only one in town

The sea wind carries such scraps of conversation, nonsense rhymes, dream images for miles. Everything is echo. She is a

child, nothing more, small, dependent and without resources.

The parsonage is open once a month for tea. On the wall in the kitchen is a calendar but it's wildly inaccurate-a dated car

journeying through a constant August, advertising a brand of tires that is no longer sold.

The house seems

empty. It seems that everything has

so

been sold or given away. The members of the congregation comment on this without coming to any conclusion. There are

leaves in the hallway,

a

box on the floor filled with

summer

dresses, cracks in the plaster and windowpanes, rust and water marks on the chairs, ant cakes in the corners. Some purpose seems to have been forgotten. Some simple lesson and require­ ment of family life has been found unnecessary and not

resumed. The

being abandoned, their services discontinued. There's no telling how long this has been going rooms

are

on.

1I5

The Reverend is not present, the mother is resting. There is

only little Kate, who serves them tea. She is feverish and thoughtful. She shows no interest in their presence. Children are supposed to be curious and shy, they think. Outside the kitchen window is a sparrow, strangled in the end coils of the clothesline. It could have just happened or it could have happened in the last month. It is frozen solid. No one mentions it. They don't want to bring it to Kate's attention. She is really not a very observant child, they think. The wind blows in from the sea but the bird doesn't move. Icicles sparkle on its breast like spurs.

"I have a cold," Kate says, "and won't be going to school

for a week. I have all my books at home and I also have books from the

library. They're overdue.

I have

an

excellent one

called THE LORE OF THE HORSE. One white foot, buy a horse, two white feet,

try a horse, three white feet look well about

him, four white feet do without him. Father doesn't ride. If he did it would be wonderful. We could employ ferries and planes

when necessary and ride right around the world. I know everything about horses. Horses know everything about us.

You can tell the future by reading the hairs in a horse's mane.

Of course, you shouldn't do that."

"I'd bet you'd like to run off to the circus and be a bareback

rider," Morgan the fisherman says.

His wife looks at him and rattles her teacup. "Little girls do not run off to the circus," she says. "Only little boys do."

"Well where do they get their girls from then?" Morgan says

loudly, not looking at his wife but at his neighbor, the man who sharpens blades.

"Why should I run off anywhere?" Kate says. always behind them. She has a pervasive, inhibiting quality. They have seen her everywhere.

Grocery, graveyard, boat basin, tumbled duck-blind. In springs past they have watched her, trotting a horse through The child's voice

116

seems

the crumbling frost-heaved streets of the town and into the sea.

She

wore

grey

jodhpurs, crusted with

sea

water

and the

animal's sweat. She wore a small stern blouse, buttoned tightly at the throat and wrists. They heard her high clear voice on the

holidays, bringing the horse to a gallop. Now the horse is dead.

A big clay-colored horse with a black mane and no name. Its legs got thick as railroad ties and it cried bloody tears before it died. They remember the day the carcass was burnt, behind the owner's barn. It smoked and smoked, a hopeless blue. They remember her walking through the town, fumbling at the wide hips of her jodhpurs, trembling, the tears springing from her eyes. They remember her as she walked stiffly past their houses, her hair white with dusty grain, and then began to trot, to canter, changing leads, loping miserably in her shined boots beneath the smoking sky, galloping now, horseless, toward her life which is up past the hill, in this parsonage, through the winding halls, into the rooms gone to storage, into this silence, this requitement, this dream

...

"Father and I care for each other beautifully," Kate says.

"He tells me everything, of course. He tells me the things 1

should know and the things 1 shouldn't know. And he tells me which is which. As God says, 'I set before you the way of life and the way of death.' That's in Jeremiah. And Father has done that for me."

"You're a lucky little girl," a man named Jesse says. Jesse

farms a little,

a

luckless man, with allergies but vain. "And

you're just a little girl certainly but soon you'll be all grown up and what will you be?" He sucks on his teacup, finds it empty,

swallows, regardless, twice. "What will you want to be then, eh?"

A

lady ventures to touch the child's shaggy bangs. Each person here feels giddy with a liberty they can't understand.

They catch each other's eyes above the child. Jesse gives her a little pat and then goes to a closet door, opens it, turns away,

pushes on a light. Then walks with a quick step through the 117

house. Some of those present murmur, and follow. They feel like a mob. They feel slightly dangerous to themselves. The think of a vast sale, the sale of the century, where fantastic bargains are offered. The man are ruttish, warm. woman

They tug at their crotches. They think how long the nights are, how little warmth familiarity brings. They would like to take something from here, from this house. What? They want to steal something, anything, something trivial. Who knows?

They want to push this child away, put her in her place, this pale elderly child who makes them feel so rancorous. But nothing is here for their taking.

Kate looks past the sparrow toward the rock ledge that hangs

above the sea. Beneath the surface of the water are the fishes and beneath them, caves, and beneath the caves are sightless,

creeping creatures, wailing with a whale's song from ever­ lasting starvation and beneath the creatures is the bottom of the earth and below that, the wealth and terror of everything. The child chews on her hands. The seaweed on the ledges is delicate as lace, sheathed in ice and shining in the sun. Her father told her that there was dead ice and living ice. One was white and one was blue. Everything was living and dead together. There was always some part of you that was dead, her father had told her.

Kate's mother is not well.

Her shanks

are

skinny, her

shoulders gaunt. Her mouth opens into a crooked 0 and her teeth lie across it like tiny fishes waiting to be hatched. Kate has heard of this. Fishes born in their mothers' mouths, fleeing

back there when in danger. The woman's mouth closed with a moist sea sound. One early evening in winter, the Reverend tells Kate that she has died.

Everyone is at the cemetery. The Reverend is talking about the grave, how deep and insatiable it is, just like the barren womb. It is never satisfied, he is saying. The child agrees, 118

moving her small dark head as he speaks. The service is over.

She runs to her father.

It is an ugly day. She sits beside him, her hand in his pocket.

He has some coins there and his pipe, the bowl of which is still warm.

They drive from the graveyard, along the shore road to

the parsonage.

"Look at the ruin on the wrack," Kate says, using her other hand to point at the beach. The Reverend smiles and the child

laughs a little. It is an old joke that she has made up. She can't keep herself from saying it even though she has exhausted its possibilities. She looks at her father gratefully for having acknowledged it once more.

Motherless Kate. She is in a house of mourners. They are all

eating but someone comes out of their number and she feels her coat being taken off. She sits down and her boots are unbuck­ led and then they are gone too. She has loafers on, a white penny in each one. An older girl had approached her one recess at school. A penny means you're single and you're looking, the girl had said. And a white penny means you're a poor dope because they're from Canada and not worth a thing.

Kate doesn't care. How can it matter? All of her dreams are

satisfied. The perils of childhood mean nothing to her.

"Eternity is forever the glimpse of extirpation in the eye of ," the Reverend is saying.

"Ahhhh," someone interrupts. "It was a beautiful, beautiful

...

service."

In the eye of what?, the child wonders. EX TlR PATION in the eye of who?

The. man named Morgan approaches Kate.

Perhaps he has

had a little too much to drink but Kate thinks he smells very

good. He smells of bread rising.

"Eat," he says morosely. "Eat now." He detains her with one hand while with the other he fills a

plate for her. The hand 119

wrapped around the child's fingers is cold. It is like a piece of gear. It belongs to his job, to his big white boat, to the Atlantic.

Kate picks up a cup of punch. Underneath it is part of a fingernail. Someone's nervousness. She puts the cup over it again. Morgan forks food rapidly onto a plate. Ham, meat loaf, macaroni, apple chutney, carrots, stewed tomatoes, potato chips, rolls, cheese, butter. The plate is jumbled high with food. There is a ball of stuffing on the very top but there is nothing visible that has been stuffed. There is no turkey. No duck. Suddenly Kate's throat aches uncontrollably. She wants to cry. There is stuffing but no turkey. It is a ball of dirt on top of everything.

Kate sees her father and hurries over to him. The ache in her throat stops. She sits close to him, resting her head against her arm.

"Whose

eyes,

Daddy? Whose

eyes

were

you

talking

about?"

"What, sweet?" he says.

"You were talking about eyes. They were very important."

"Your eyes are the only ones that are important." He kisses the top of her head .•• It's only what you see that matters to me "

Kate is bewildered. Kate's eyes. Glimpse of ex tri cation in my eyes.

Jewel, the kindly,

man

who passes the

have beautiful eyes, Kate.

You're going to be beautiful, Kate.

"You

plate

on

Sundays,

says

Dark hair, blue eyes.

"

Embarrassed, Kate pauses and then says loudly, "Mortals prepare, for you must come andjoin the long retreat."

"Where did you see that," the Reverend asks.

"I heard it one day, from you."

Her father says, "There is presumption and a sin. "

120

no

retreat. Words are often a

Kate suddenly feels like

a

bride. She

imagines her fingers

smelling of gardenias. She imagines her tongue coated with sweet white icing. Her mother had once begun to tell her about blood. Kate thought it artless of her. She, Kate, will never bleed. This is her wedding day.

3 The morning and the evening of the last day

In by 7 and out by 11 as the laundress says and I'll have to be out of here by noon or I'll be charged for another day. We are at Lonnie's Sunnyside. From the window there is a view of the

street. This is the parade route when there are parades which

there is about to be. It is not a fashionable place. It is lodging

for those who seek relief and not amusement. It is station for those who haven't traveled for quite

a

way­

some

time.

place is inhabited by men who lay tile, newspaper reporters nightly eating chicken and drinking wine on the tufted bedspreads, the boys who bait the hooks on party boats. This is no place for promiscuous gazing.

I look through the venetian blinds at Lonnie. He is an old man, beating on a mourning dove with a garden rake.

Father is looking at me so kindly but he's weary from the long train ride. One eye closes, but the severed one remains and wanders over me with a vague and sleepy touch. If only I knew now what I knew so long ago And what could I from own father's It's the touch ofa shadow expect my gazing? on the papered walls of the mind. He shakes his head so slowly. I know that I could capture it on film and I fumble for

This

....

the camera.

Oh he looks at me so generously! If I could only get this on

film! The development of trysts. One could make a fortune, the processes were perfected. I have my camera but there's fungus in the lens-parabolas of muttony fur both hidden and revealed-which comes from living in the damp, once

too close to the

sea.

I still carry it about with me,

hoping 121

helplessly that it might correct itself. Even the film in it is no good. It's dated. I was duped. BUY ME FIRST I'M RIPE. I always do. I have a conscience. I bought it from a failing store, from a

failing little man, all blond in the face and the head from his liver, shaking like an aspic as he bagged my purchases. Six rolls and a used 35mm Yashika and all of it useless. The moment I

walked out of the store, that film was past its prime and wouldn't print a buttered muffin. And from what I haven't

heard, this happens all the time.

Father says, "The truth removes the need for freedom."

"Oh yes," I say. "I agree. Yes." Next door a toilet flushes and there's a giggle and a rustle.

We've

them both from Number 6, two grinning teens,

seen

wearing the same outfits, goofy Geminis.

And Father says, "You come on home where you belong and stop this crazy "

dreaming. You're from me and of me.

"Yes, Daddy," I say. "You know me better than God himself.

"I

"

do," Father says. "You're my pretty darling dreaming

girl and I was with you at your hour of birth and know all about you." And he looks at me so sadly disappointed. "What's your liberty worth, bringing us both to grief?"

I look hungrily at the basket of fruit which is on the window­ sill, crowding the venetian blinds. Father brought it. The sort of thing you give to dim relations or people in sick chambers.

Everything injected with coloring, lying dimpled in a bed of paper grass.

I've taken a shower. My clothes were hanging on the shower

rod and now are dripping. I'm leaning against the headboard of

wrapped in a sheet. I have been washed so many times, why should I shower here? Once my hands were stained the bed,

with blueberries. Once my hands were brown and wound round with the long patterns of reins. Mother had always

bathed me,

locking the door. She scoured me, so small and

unrepentant.

"You are a sick and dangerous little animal," she'd say. The 122

tub would fill, the water running onto the floor, over her slippers. I'd joggle beneath the washcloth, the clear water

turning brown.

"You should be treated like an animal, put in a stall, in a "

Strange impassive child. My skin pink with her rubbing. My riding clothes lying in a sour heap. I was so innocent with my pure and perfect love but Mother was weeping.

"You know what you're doing," she'd say, and pluck me from the water. She'd scour the tub, down on her hands and knees. Again and again, the door was locked, the water drawn.

Mother had washed me so many times, so long ago and had dried me with a thin striped towel. Her hands were brief upon me. The water went down the drain sluggishly, as though there were truly substance to it, as though she had actually washed

barn like your filthy horses

...

off some of my sin.

HOW LONG WILT THOU FORGET ME LORD? FOREVER?

I do not interrupt. Daddy is addressing me.

"Live without

a

suspect, sweet. There

are

no

criminals.

Only God's largesse and plan." His voice stirs, rises, "When you

were

sleeping.

a

child,

I would hold your hand while you

were

"

Never had I seen him take her in his arms.

"Let me brush your hair," he says. "It's all in a tangle. I "

always brushed your hair.

My clothes will never dry. How can we leave this place? If we should open the door, we would simply find this room again. A bed and a man in black brushing a young girl's hair.

And in that room there'd be no door. Just a bed and a man in

black brushing a broken lover's hair. I put my hand behind me.

Trompe l'oeil. Daddy's face. Never had I seen him take her in his arms.

He goes on and on. "Such a sweet deep sleep with never

any

dreams at all when I was beside you. But when I left there was no way of

knowing, there was no way I could tell, what rose to trouble you, what words you heard, what wicked lies came to seem real in the dark."

123

My head pulls back with his brushing ..

You killed your mother," he

.

says.

My hair is snapping and curling round his fingers. He raises his hand. It follows him.

"Why

of

course

because she had

did, sweet," he

you

evil heart,

says.

"She died

vicious jealous eye. Her knowledge was empty because it was corrupt. We're all weak, an

a

I won't deny it, but it was the Devil himself who gave your mother strength to curse me the way she did. I won't accuse you of it really, she died of rage. "

"I think she died by her own hand, Daddy.

"

"No, love, she died giving birth. She died by God's own felon fist. She was always wanting to have children. Can you

imagine, she wanted to have them in accordance with the planets? She wanted someone to avenge her, but your mother got no relief and why should we, darling? No relief and no release. You must come back with me. I'll absorb the harm

you'd bring to others."

I never hurt anything, I beg. "I would take the moths out of the house in my hands, remember? I was a simple child.

His tone changes. His voice becomes bored, uxorial. "I'm going to buy you some new clothes. Something lovely. Then we'll go to a proper place." He goes into the wretched bathroom, takes my things from the shower rod and stuffs them ..

"

"

into the wastebasket. He opens the door and puts the waste­ basket outside. I am surprised to see the daylight, the street,

folding chairs set up in a rigid row in the distance. In the distance also is a singular fellow standing beneath a light pole.

He looked like the gentleman on the Beefeater's bottle. Flow­ ered red jerkin, hammerhead shoes and a kindly self-conscious beard. He carried a staff. It was all totally reasonable. He was a float marshal, waiting for his float. I have always wanted to go off with the fellow on that bottle but this was not my chance.

Daddy shuts the door. The room seems all the darker. Every­ thing is black. He is in black as he sits beside me once again. I can almost smell the chemicals, hear a hose draining in the 124

soapstone basin. Where my clothes had been there are now curling photographs, still wet, dangling from wooden pins. I clutch my camera to my chest. Everything has been recorded.

Now when I was a child, I also had a camera which I had

directly to me. What a thrill when Mr. Bolt the postman stepped off his red white and blue bicycle and waded through the damaged daisies to our door. I was a darling child then with my little crazes and habits. Oh she adores her father, mother would say as I scampered down the sent away for and which

came

street in his shadow. What if I should have fallen from Father's

silhouette? The sunshine was a pit to me. And even though it was a game,

my mouth would fill with drool, my chest would

ache as though I'd dropped my heart if Father strode away from me. Daddy's little girl, mother would say, though it was

just words that she was using. Oh poor mother, she never heard the coded humming of the world Yes, the day of the postman. The sea was all white and furious that morning from a storm the day before and was I beating up the rocks and filling the air with a fine spray the was in It almost consumed accepted package reverently.

Mr. Bolt's huge hands. His fingernails were tan and thick as hooves, shiny and smooth but at the same time a bit maimed, as though they'd all been crushed. His thumbnail leapt into an orbit all its own, his one significant feature. It was half again as long as his thumb. A lovely ochre and shiny as a writing slate.

Perhaps there was something engraved thereon. And doubtless from the Scripture. I WILL MAKE THEE A TERROR AND THOU SHALT BE NO MORE? It's really not for me to say. Etched with a pin? A reminder of something that hadn't happened yet. For why else such a coarse and local epidermis? But then perhaps it was he who had the hidden vice.

Perhaps he worked with crayons or played the guitar. Of his face, nothing remains today. Just the impossible hand bringing me my plastic camera from Battle Creek, Michigan. And down by the water, on a folding chair beneath the salt-blasted pines, sat Daddy. ....

....

125

Mother was absent then. There was just me and Daddy, like

it was and like it would be in a little while, forever.

And the moment was mine. I knew because I grew up all intuition and no curiosity. There's not a curious bone in my

body. Like clockwork, I grew up with an innate sense of the proper order of things.

I left it to others to discover their

In the South

you'll find them at the age of four, crouched behind the palmetto, comparing parts. In the North, it's colder. They scrabble behind the bin of modeling clay. I recall my own schoolmates professing to enjoy the dopey pleasures of the Tip-O-Whirl in the bleached grassless play­ ground of kindergarten as they wrapped their little thighs around the banana seats. I was not affronted by such behavior. sexuality.

How could I be? I was up to Jeremiah in my insatiable quest

for order. THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS AND DESPERATELY WICKED; WHO CAN KNOW IT?

But I

was

a

child and I

was

running and I've never been

prettier than I was that day as I ran so sincerely thrilled, on my Daddy. The world reflected me, the symptom and the disease, as I ran so childishly simple toward him. The sea smoked with its foam and the sunlight fell bone white on his head as he sat beside the leaping water, all rumpled and harangued as he always seemed when he was by himself, wrestling with the Lord. "Daddy!" I said; "let me long white legs,

to

picture." And of course it is so innocent. An incorruptible request. He shields his lame eye from the wind with a piece of scarf, for it couldn't help itself that eye, it lay open continually, gaping at the world. It has never rested but has only watched, tireless and constant, blazing and cerulean, take your

thick like a muscle.

"Daddy,"

I cried so adorably.

And he kissed

me

then, didn't he, he drew me to him as

guilelessly as he does now in Lonnie's Sunnyside?

I must have taken a nap. When I awake, Father is back with new

clothes for 126

me.

They

are

costly clothes, cool, well-

tailored. We sweep out of Lonnie's. Tables and chairs are set up on the sidewalk. People are eating and applauding beneath small umbrellas.

The Sherriffs Posse prances by. leaving shit all over the street. They are followed by an enormous paper and paste

alligator. Its eyes are telephone spools. The crowd roars. 1 see the town suddenly as feckless and sweet, generous and hope­ ful, wanting only a little spectacle and a sauced pork rib.

Daddy doesn't say anything but I explain. I say.

"It's Homecoming." I look into the sunlight, into the traffic of beasts and bands and athletes. "They march to the bay and they have a ski show and a slave auction and a gourmet booth.

They have a barbecue and a bloodless bullfight and a calliope.

Then they release 2400 balloons into the sky.

We leave the parade route.

"Set thine heart towards the highway," Father says. "Find "

grace in the wilderness."

"PHILEMON," I say too quickly.

"No," he is cheerful. "You are trying to be exotic, aren't you? My little grown up girl. Nothing will ever be Philemon."

We walk and walk and begin to hear the sounds of the Gulf of

Mexico, plopping and smashing, bringing frantic things in with the tide. Father holds my

holding

it

camera.

It looks unsafe. He is

It turns its

distastefully. foggy eye. The setting's wrong for sunlight. My lungs seem frozen. My dress is damp with sweat.

"You invested in this camera, did you? You've become interested in such things?", Father inquires, guiding me along, his hand in the small of my back.

"I know the terms," 1 confess modestly.

THE VOICE SAID CRY.

WHAT

SHALL

I

CRY?

ALL

FLESH

IS

GRASS

"It's all a question of chemicals," I say. "Potassium hy­ droxide, sodium sulfite, phenidone. It's a matter of accelera­

tors, preservatives, restrainers and water." ..

1 can't imagine why you waste your time on such things," 127

Father says. "I have heard that film can be developed naturally in certain

highly polluted bodies of water. I have seen the results. The eye of God enraged. I'll put it here." He puts it in a planter of succulents outside a waterfront hotel.

"Yes," I say.

AND WHEN

THEY AROSE EARLY IN THE MORNING BEHOLD

THEY WERE ALL DEAD CORPSES

Daddy smiles. We enter the lobby of the finest hotel on this, the finest, thinnest strip of land in town. The desk clerk gives a

key to Father. Beside the clerk is an extravagant bird, chained to a perch. Below the bird is a drink tray with a circle of newspaper cut to fit. On the newspaper are flashy compotes of half-digested fruit.

"If you get too close to Thalassophilia and she bites you, which she may," the clerk begins in a bored voice, "don't "Thalassophilia, that's wonderful!" I say, rousing myself. I must make the attempt to keep witness.

"How can it be wonderful, the clerk says without surprise.

"It is part of the hotel's policy. The owner has other properties in Puerto Rico and Nassau and they too include birds named Thalassophilia. Now if I may continue? If you get too close to her and she bites you, pretend you haven't noticed. Then she "

...

"

will stop.

"

The clerk and I look at each other with distaste. "Shall we go up to our room and freshen up?" I ask Father primly.

We ascend to our room. It is on the seventh floor and soars out over the beach which is empty except for three men playing

bocce. They wear snug, brightly colored trousers and all seem

degree of skill at the game. No one is winning. They yell at each other without passion in to have achieved an identical

Spanish. There's a knock at the door and Father opens it.

"Would you care for luncheon or a beverage?" The tone is intense, funereal. An old man stands in the hall in dyed black hair and milkman-white.

"Yes," Father says. "A bottle of gin and a bottle of lime juice. Water biscuits, pate, and a good Brie." He closes the 128

door and walks out onto the balcony. "Do you find those young men attractive?"

watching the porpoises." I point to the water.

Between the long sandbar and the shore, shadows move in a complex rhythm. Two rise, rolling their wise sweet heads.

"I

was

"I wish I had been a very young man for you. I wish you had known me then."

"I have known you always Daddy," I say dully.

"Why don't you go for a swim? The water looks so inviting.

I'll watch you from here. When you were small, I would watch you enjoying yourself and it gave me great pleasure."

"I don't have a suit." One of the bocce players paws at the beach with his feet like a horse. He throws the ball beautifully and it lands dead in the sand.

"You go for a swim and when you come back our refresh­ ments will be here. The towels here are extraordinary. Did you

notice them? Do you remember the poor towels we had at home? Your mother was always mending them. And the sheets as well.

Tiny stitches. Starbursts of thread. Roses and faces of

colored thread. You made up a story for each one and you would tell them to me. But these towels look brand-new. And so white.

No stories there."

I go out of the room and down the stairs into the lobby. The

clerk is standing beside his desk, bouncing on the balls of his

feet. The bird is sleeping, folded up on its purple talons. I walk onto the beach, past the young men. I hear a voice speaking in

perfect, musical English.

"John, I saw a muscle of yours on that last shot that I swear I have never seen before.

"

I walk into the water and continue until the sandbar. I walk over the

sandbar and instantly into water up to my neck. My

clothes expire. I turn and face the hotel but do not try to find Daddy on the balcony. I stand there for a while. The porpoises have vanished. I wallow back to shore. The young men never

glance at me. I take a turn around the desk upon entering the hotel.

129

"We

prefer that swimmers use the service elevator at the

rear," the clerk says. I go to the rear. The elevator obediently exposes itself.

"Hey," the clerk says. He has a borrowed uneasy face as though he chose it off the television. "This bird can shit seven feet flat across the room."

I return to

Daddy. Our snack is laid out nicely. Daddy is .

fixing the drinks.

"That's fine," he says. "That's fine. I want you to have a

good time." He calls for someone to pick up my clothes for cleaning and pressing. He rubs me dry and wraps me in one of the sumptuous towels.

"You certainly have developed a way about you, Daddy," I say ••

.

I want

everything to be pleasant for you, darling. I can control it all if you allow me to." He hands me a drink, expertly prepared, gorgeous with crushed ice.

"Drinketh damage," he says. His jaw is lean and clenched.

He wears a handsome jersey. His face and thin arms are hard and white like marble. "It's pleasant here but not for us. You can see that darling. The sun is bright with malice."

We sit on the balcony. The sun sprawls scarlet across the Gulf. The sea birds are going home. The plovers, the pelicans, sanderlings, terns and ibis stream across the sky.

He slips his hand inside the towel. It falls from my shoulders.

A breeze swims across me and stops.

"This is not my favorite time of day," I say. "Speaking only

for myself, I prefer dawn. Birds drop their eggs at dawn. It is

generally more a time of hope and promise."

"All the promises have been kept," Daddy says.

130

The stone corral WILLIAM KITTREDGE

...

after Alicia's chastity I cannot describe the warmth.

Wild meadow grass is mowed short inside the circle of stone

wall, around the trash barrels and picnic tables. Broken glass glitters under the dry sun. A Nevada State Historical Marker decorates the entrance, a brass plaque mounted in a chipped concrete block.

Late in June of 1892, the wagon party led by Jerome Bedderly, 137 persons, was without provocation wiped out while attempting to defend themselves within this corral.

One Shoshone woman, a volunteer and guide, was also killed. Her infant child survived

according to later stories. Indications of violence are clearly distinguishable on various stones. This was the "Sleeping Child Massacre.

God Rest You Pioneers. "

Jerome

Bedderly stood on the sand hill to the east, among the sage clumps and bitter greasewood in the still warmth of June while contemplating his oncoming death, which he could anticipate so clearly. In his journal, which turned up in Virginia City almost a year later, finally making its way into the Bancroft Historical Collection at the University of California, Bedderly tells of standing transfixed while the people in his party walked in circles until a woman screamed, drawing his TriQuarterly

131

gaze to "the miserable children, lodged and staring eyes" while

his hands trembled.

The frantic woman was his wife. "She signaled again from her madness

collective doom. Again I suffer fear and melancholia while knowing I must die, as in childhood I dreaded the futility of my prayer. My sin is doubt. Her voice our

was mine."

Paiute Creek runs below and to the west, named for Indians whose greater name was Shoshone, in a shallow valley of meadows and willow-lined sloughs, with rolling sage country

horizon. On clear days in June the DeFoe Mountains to the northwest stand unreal and close in noon­

beyond

at the

time

light, snow-covered and dim against the pale sky, re­ vealing dark and steep canyons gathering watercourses to form Paiute Creek. Bedderly writes of attempting to calm his panic by concentrating on three Ponderosa in a triangular grouping just at the snow line. The grove is still there, impervious to history and oriental, silhouetted faintly against the white in late June.

Her voice was mine.

Alicia Bedderly had been shrieking occasionally for more than a week. As for reasons, we know only what Bedderly

grievance, not the tribes­ man's innocence." Alicia had been touched on the arm by one of the Paiute men. "Those dark inquisitive fingers, the white

wrote.

"Her madness

flesh of her arm

...

causes

the

she never claimed she was harmed.

"

He tells of the first shooting. "The terrible landscape erodes out our goodness, bleakness violating our souls this last week

of unforgiving misfortune. We wrestled

our

fear and aimed

always westward with our remaining resolve and energy and it began so gently. We were pleased to see the natives in this wilderness, anything human preferable to the unending desola­ tion, greeted them in a wholesome and friendly way though they were the most uncouth we have seen, scarcely more than animal in their habits, with almost no charm. at the same moment clever and redeemable, like childish circus rope132

dancers until Alicia's terror. The native attempted hiding in the

brush but our young men dragged him to the rear of my wagon.

Alicia would not be solaced,

accepted no ministration, not

mine or a woman's, and her eyes rolled and she frothed blood,

having severely bitten her tongue and the insides of her cheeks, and she fell down and was mad, the affliction of women. To aid in her cure I shot the native. Not lethally, in the thigh only, a

fleshly wound and warning to him and others, with hope that appreciation of her security within my power might bring Alicia to restoration. In turn his eyes rolled and he fell faint. The native pleaded and was dog-like but in my resolve I shot. May

God forgive me the possibility of error

....

But Alicia was not

restored and I console

myself with the notion she perhaps never truly believed, has always sinned in secret fear. but it was my right to do so." As a boy in Kansas Bedderly witnessed the murder of his father by pro-slavery vigilantes during the six-year underground war known as "Bleeding Kansas." The late spring of 1857 his father was found to be harboring an escaped Mississippi slave and shot down in the afternoon by seven hooded men, falling to bleed on the baked ground near his own doorway, where the turkeys scratched. "Onward from that day," he wrote, "I was unable to think, considered mad and kept from school and other children. Of that time I remember nothing. So I have always been alone." He recovered during the Kansas drought and famine of 1860, twelve years old at the time, by suffering a midnight vision. "I found myself beneath the moon and again aware of myself, unable to sleep, and 1 was relieved of my suffering by the justice of God while lying on the cool hard earth and feeling warmth from the depths to which my father's blood had soaked. I was human, and learned goodness must be willing to injure as my father had been killed, risk deaths and "

"

...

force its own survival if needs be. From that moment 1 was restored and a model pupil, God's Hand."

Bedderly graduated from a ministerial college in Topeka and by the late 1880's had established a following of nearly three 133

hundred

hard-working "Hands of God" around the small

western Kansas community of Divine Law, a townsite chosen

by Bedderly and now vanished under cornfields, abandoned when his vision of purpose drove him west seeking new land,

opportunity to work in the Lord's Way. "We will cultivate immaculate fields and gardens," he wrote. "Our seaward progress is divine. The shade beneath our trees will be perfect and coolon the Sabbath. We will force perfection."

But his first contact

was

with natives who had almost

certainly already been forced, a group of "southwestern Tribesmen" mingling with Shoshone of the Great Basin, those grandly poor, nomadic people who traveled the desert in small bands, always enroute to gather food, possessing only the crudest portable tools, living in temporary shelters constructed of brush and terribly afraid of white men. Hard to understand the gathering of nearly three hundred described by Bedderly unless they were together for some special and fated occasion which in turn kept them from fleeing before the squeaking and shiplike wagons, perhaps a final despairing vestige of the Ghost Dance, that revivalistic movement born at Walker Lake in western Nevada from the vision of a man named Jack Wilson, later known as the messiah Wovoka.

encamped for a quarter mile around a small pool of greenish water, fresh though evil appearing, on the edge of a vastly arid and absolutely featureless alkaline expanse which reached beyond sight to the south and west. We were passing around the northern edge of that desert, seeking the water they occupied, when we discovered their makeshift shelters of brush. Mr. Slater was in favor of driving them off into the wastelands, knowing they could survive like animals, but I intervened, thinking we were all human and could exist together. We camped at the water's edge, displacing only a few of their huts, and they came seeking trinkets, and the rest "The natives

were

ensued."

The leaders of the violence with which the natives answered the

shooting 134

were

the

so-called

southwestern

tribesmen.

"More than thirty, Mr. Slater reports, are camped among the

others, traveling west toward some pagan figure of prominence in their religion.

"

One would like to think of these outsiders as

of the Comanche nation, greatest horsemen of the Americas running from the Oklahoma Terri­ some

escaping

remnant

tory where they had been surviving on dole meat. But it is more likely Mr. Slater was mistaken and they were not from the southwest at all. James R. Mooney, traveling in the west at the time while doing research for the Bureau of American Ethnol­ ogy, reports that Sitting Bull and other Arapaho visited Jack

Wilson at Walker Lake in the fall of 1892.

Perhaps there is some connection. At any rate they were proud and carried good rifles, mostly Winchester Model 1873, rode horses and reacted to Bedderly's shooting of the Shoshone man with a night of mournful singing and dancing. At daybreak they attacked the wagons, which had moved on during the night.

The guide, Mr. Slater from Salt Lake City, was killed along with twelve other men. Bedderly was left alone in command, without knowledge of the country ahead, only the certainty he must continue. "Bad luck is the excuse we give," he wrote.

"American luck is finally good.

After the fourth night of travel they were attacked again at daybreak, this time leaving their wagons to defend themselves above a rimrock. "My error, my fatal mistake," Bedderly writes, "but I thought only of sailing west before the driving wind of our vision with all my people." None were killed but the wagons were burned, stock slaughtered. "Our possessions are gone, our condition impossible without prayer. We con­ tinue on foot. Alicia is the same." They were waterless, followed by the straggling band of Shoshone, scouted by the distant and implacable horsemen. "We rest, help one another, ' ,

walk while prayer burns in the mouth. This desert is endless."

The woman and her child appeared the morning of the sixth

day. According to Bedderly it was as if she simply materialized perhaps a thousand yards off in low brush, a small dark figure holding her swaddled child, seemingly unafraid as they ap135

proached. After gesturing she led and they followed. There seemed nothing else to do. That night they camped by a wide and swift running stream which must have been Paiute Creek where it curls

through the desert upstream and east of the meadows. "We gorged on water, burned willows, shot a deer, cooked. Men vomited during prayer and prayer ended. We are the creatures this desert makes us." They proceeded west in the morning, following the woman in all faith, arriving at noon on the hilltop from which they could see the whole of Paiute Creek Meadows. "The watery place which should seem a glorious refuge is now only a barrier to be waded, vile and boggy, desolate." There was no thin line of smoke lifting toward the sky, no sign of habitation or any sort of help, just isolation and the stone corral below, at the edge of the meadow.

Imagine five men and a string of pack horses in the cold early spring of 1890, mustangers, rain sleeting at them as they make camp near the creek. At the mouth of a stony dry wash they build the corral, prying rocks from lava outcroppings along the shallow rims, rolling boulders onto stoneboat sleds dragged by teams of mules with improvised harness, men sweating and rocks into lifting place, the corral slowly taking its circular In late shape.

July it is finished and the men chop willows and build long wings outward from the single gate, the opening which 'faces up into the wash, waiting for wild horses, men running them in relays for nearly a week, always closer to the corral, the animals exhausted as they trot slowly down the dusty wash, crude willow fences forcing them onto the single path that leads through the gateway, into the corral. The stone wall is higher than a man's head, thicker than the body of a wrecked automobile. It is late afternoon, the horsemen are in the gate, facing the sun, the west, brims of their hats pulled low. For this moment they have saved whiskey.

They drink, one rubs the back of his hand across his mouth, smearing white alkali dust in his month-old growth of beard. The herd stands

listlessly within the rock walls.

137

"The builders are unimaginable," Bedderly writes, "Divine

Providence.

"

The woman led again and there was nothing to do but so

follow, they went down from the sandy hill and entered the corral,

which seemed a refuge, sign they would survive, a found fort.

"Now it

trap we cannot escape," Bedderly wrote three days later. "The natives wait." seems

a

Our seaward progress is divine. Who can imagine the true

beginning Perhaps it was believing the myth of California, heading directly across the desert to the coastal valley where they intended settling near the present day flower-growing center of Lompoc, traveling by wagon in an age of railroad, choosing ...

that mode so they could bring along huge cherry-wood tables and crated

blue-point China, forgetting Kansas is close as the still center of belief. "Who can imagine the anywhere true beginning?" Surely it lay somewhere east of the turkey­ packed earth where his father died.

"They are going to attack," he wrote. "We are terribly hungry. Some are eating cooked grass. We do have water.

Since sunrise I have known. God's vengeance." Then he tells of the night and that sunrise. "By gestures the Indian woman attempted curing Alicia. The screaming became constant and I held Alicia and after weeping she slept. The dark woman left to

her child and came to rest with us in the untrod grass near the

wall and after Alicia's chastity I cannot describe the warmth.

When I awoke the women were gone. It was not yet daybreak

calling in the blue light. Alicia and that dark woman were naked in the mouth of the corral, Alicia's body pale as the morning and seeming to quiver even as she stood without motion. A huge and filthy mass of natives clustered perhaps a hundred yards beyond, silent while Alicia and that carnal woman faced them with hands joined. The native woman at last spoke in a loud voice, in her primitive language, and birds

were

reached to lift her child from the grass, naked and white. The native.s turned 138

muttering away and left.

I

thought we were

saved, approached and saw the child simply fair against her dark mother, with blue eyes and wilted reddish hair. Alicia screamed again. Something I did not understand had been refused.

"

myself with the notion she perhaps never truly believed, has always sinned in secret fear. Is there no escape but into guilt?

The people within the corral waited as the Indians retreated, grouped silently in seeming conference, a diverse scattering of figures on the gray and brushy hillside above the corral. "My sin and carnality did cause this and I would die if I could with grace and honor. Alicia refuses clothing, tears it off when the women attempt dressing her. The day is warm and perfect and we are hopeless."

So Alicia Bedderly's nakedness, her offering, brought nothing in exchange but the perfection of death. "Thy will is mine," read Bedderly's final journal entry. "I have refused I console

prayer and learned the warmth of my father's blood in the earth

only carnality, which I cannot regret." The attack began later that morning and lasted until movement stopped, gestures hanging forever in silent motionlessness, expressions studied while the scream waits to proceed. A stone to examine. Lichen grows in the crevices. The shade is cool; clear water flows through an imagined countryside near Lompoc; the scream dies' away as Jerome Bedderly, purged briefly of his need to continue, desire and belief lost in the body of that Shoshone woman, her small hands touching his back, fluttering, becomes martyr to hatred so justifiable it became love.

was

139

I dream of all

my friends

VICTOR SKADE

(

,{

You have probably seen the advertisement. There were several

versions of it, using different groups of people. The one I was

thinking of showed graduates in caps and gowns. They stood together with their arms raised, their sleeves fallen back to reveal their wristwatches. What they shared among themselves was good-natured and gladdening, bringing them to the verge of laughter, and their smiles were wide. I believe their watches were made by Benrus.

140

TriQuarterly

While I waited for Roxana I studied the ads in the maga­ zines. I could not find the

graduates. Instead I saw manne­

quins, beautiful and conceited, bearing attitudes of defiance and bitterness and carnality. I did not like them.

Later I went out into the afternoon and stood at the curb. I

clenched my fist. Slowly I raised my arm above the herd of

shining cars, the sleeve of my jacket falling back, revealing my wristwatch. My Timex.

Roxana says I was wrong. She discussed it with Bryan and

they are both convinced I was wrong. Omnibus was sponsored by an insurance company, not an oil company. I suggested Mutual of Omaha and she said I was probably thinking of The Twentieth Century. I wondered if there was any way to find

definitely. She mentioned that Bryan's roommate, Jack, was writing a book about the early days of television, the golden age of television, and that he might be able to give us the

out

answer.

We were visiting an exhibit of medieval woodcuts. Roxana took notes. I asked her if she remembered Your Show of .

Shows, Milton Berle, the early Ed Sullivan, Hit Parade. I told her that some years ago Milton Berle had MC'd a program called Jackpot Bowling. I asked Roxana if she remembered it.

She was

writing in her notebook. I glanced away from the round, wan eyes of the medieval figures.

I believe the program was shown on Monday nights.

On Sunday afternoon Roxana and I went downtown to a movie. But the line of those waiting to get in extended around the block. We decided not to wait with them. We returned to her apartment. We sat on cushions and drank claret. I men­ tioned Omnibus. She suggested we call Information and I

reminded her it was now known as Directory Assistance. She

lamented the fact that AT&T had ruined an oldjoke.

Later, we carefully examined five pages she had removed from the telephone directory. We were looking for another woman

named Roxana. There were none listed in the middle 141

S's. Roxana's last name is Fox. Between the ages of nine and

sixteen, she told me, she was called Foxy Roxy.

I told her there

was an

information desk in City Hall and

perhaps they would know the answer.

There is

no

way

to

find out.

Bryan and his

roommate

quarreled and separated and I do not know Jack well enough to ask him myself. Bryan had mentioned, I remembered, that Jack had left him for someone who worked for the Prudential Insurance Company.

Immediately I phoned Roxana and told her The Twentieth Century had been sponsored by Prudential, not Mutual of Omaha. I said we had perhaps been thinking of Marlin Perkins. For some moments she did not say anything at all. Then she began laughing.

She could not hear what I was telling her. I waited for her to stop laughing.

The next Sunday afternoon Roxana invited a number of her

friends over for an Answerphone party. She had run an ad in the Sunday newspaper. When I arrived I found her friends gathered together waiting for callers. They took turns an­

swering the phone. In the course of the afternoon they received eleven calls and seven answers. Simon listed the answers in a

They persuaded me to answer the twelfth call. I picked up the phone and said hello. Roxana's friends watched me closely, exchanging glances among themselves.

Hello? There was no voice, only the sound of deep breathing.

A recorded voice began to pray. coarse

gray tablet.

Jack called Roxana on Tuesday evening. He told her he was and that he had made a mistake by leaving Bryan. I

depressed

asked if she found out who had sponsored Omnibus. Roxana said she had not asked him.

I told her it did not make any difference.

Wednesday I had a long talk with Roxana over coffee at a 142

downtown restaurant called the Brass Tankard, I think, or the Brass Kettle. I told her I did not love her, that I loved either

everything or nothing at all. She did not misunderstand me, but her eyes began to wander. As I talked I saw her watching people going into the theatre across the street, people passing along the sidewalk or hailing taxis or entering the restaurant.

She suggested that since the restaurant was full and people were waiting we should let someone else have our table.

Under the street, in a tiny shop located along the subway corridor I bought some flowers to give her. The air of the tunnel was cool and damp, smelling of concrete and iron.

Although I usually do not wake up until eight or nine o'clock, on Thursday I woke up at five. It was light in my room.

I felt relaxed and comfortable. But it did not seem to be

five 0' clock. It did not seem to be any hour of the day. I began to weep. I felt no sense of failure or loss but I was sad and [

wept steadily. [ cannot recall any dreams I had that should have made me

feel this way.

In the afternoon

the local

park

was

filled with

school

children. I sat on a bench and watched young people playing tennis. I met one of Roxana's friends. William said he thought that just as businesses sponsored baseball and bowling teams and television programs they should also sponsor individuals.

He said he would like to be sponsored by Hoffmann-LaRoche,

which he claimed was one of the world's largest drug compa­

nies. I asked him what this sponsorship would involve and he answered that it would not really involve anything. They would pay his expenses, he said, and provide for him.

People would

look at him and think of Hoffmann-LaRoche and that would be his life.

Roxana tells me she found a telephone listing for a Roxana

Merriweather. She phoned Miss Merriweather and learned she 143

had been a fashion consultant for Bernard Altman at one time.

It

happens that Miss Merriweather had worked in the same building where Roxana worked last year, only Miss Merri­ weather had worked there three years ago. Roxana tells me that since they were not there at the same time, unaware of

each other, there is not now anything suddenly mutual, there is no

radical coincidence. It is her belief that coincidence has to

be of a radical kind and without it there can be no such thing as

friendship or love. She says that only through radical coincidence can one person discover another truly. She said she had no further interest in the reality of Miss Merriweather.

She explained that since her name is uncommon she has decided to talk to everyone in the phone book named Roxana. I suggested that perhaps she defines the sudden too narrowly. true

Several months ago when Roxana was decorating her new

apartment she decided to start a collection of group photo­

graphs. She asked all her friends to donate if they were able.

Her request yielded, I believe it was thirty-two pictures. Most were very old. There were pictures of grade school classes, of Com­ army units, of the employees of a Herschfield Printing pany taken in

1949, another of the staff of a real estate firm

taken as they were about to depart on a Hawaiian vacation. I gave her a yellowed picture of me and my parents

in a group

with two tour guides outside the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.

For a while these pictures filled the wall near her doorway but she took them down. She said they depressed her because every time she looked at them she

imagined that all those

people were older now or dead.

I was going through the old magazines stacked in my closet looking for a copy of the wristwatch picture. When I remem­ bered Roxana's collection, I stopped.

When I saw her Tuesday Roxana told me everything looked I different to her because she had been away for so long.

very

asked her what she meant. She looked at me, wondering, then 144

went

on

to

say that

even

the most familiar

things looked

different, smaller or larger or wider or thinner. I still did not understand. She asked me then, smiling vaguely, what was wrong. I told her I did not know.

Later, as she stared into the thin trail of smoke rising from her cigarette, she told me Jack had slashed his wrists. William had been arrested for possession of narcotics. I mentioned that I had read in the

papers

of

an

elderly

accountant

for

a

downtown bank who had been arrested for embezzlement.

Roxana supposed that we would all be arrested for something,

eventually.

Roxana's friend Gerard works in films and

yesterday he

used the group of us to make a mock television commercial.

His wife, Sora, an artist, had fashioned an oversized cereal box labeled Crabbies, the Breakfast of Puckers. The box was filled with hemp, which we poured into bowls, and in it was a poster of Michelangelo's Pieta, which we unfolded. Gerard instructed us to look

forbidding and to be silent.

Afterwards, as I walked home under streetlamps, I thought

of the house I had lived in as a child, and I remembered how

the kitchen had always been the first room to fill up with the

sunlight of morning.

Sunday morning I woke up at five-thirty. Again I felt relaxed and deeply troubled. Again I began to weep although I did not wish to. I wept softly and soon fell asleep. Later, I told Roxana that perhaps I dreamed I had died. She said this was the strangest thing about life, that until it ends it goes on and on and on.

On Wednesday Roxana called

me

and told

me

her friend

Marcus had invited us to his apartment for a fire party. I told her I did not care to go. She persuaded me to bring something burn. I looked through my high school yearbook. It was damaged by water and the pictures of my classmates were

to

145

stained. My own picture was on a page which stuck to another.

I n separating the pages I tore

We tossed books and

away the surface of my portrait.

magazines into Marcus's fireplace.

While my yearbook burned Marcus said that wisdom reveals to us a

multiplicity of captors. Roxana claimed that freedom is the

absence of love.

On

Friday Roxana stared at me for long moments, silent.

Slowly she drew strands of hair across her lips. Repeatedly. I asked what

was

wrong.

She said she did not believe that

question was in good faith, or that it could ever be so. She said there are questions we need never bother with, statements we are powerless to make. She told me we were not radically coincidental and that she did not want to talk.

Thursday I met Bryan. He told me Roxana was not an­ swering her telephone and that no one had seen her all week.

She would not come to the door, he said, but others had told him that from outside her room they could hear her phonograph and

occasionally the sound of her voice.

I

went

to

her

apartment. She did not answer. I called to her, telling her I had

brought a very old television set. A magical television set. If we turned it on, I whispered, and if we adjusted the antenna correctly, I told her, we could watch Omnibus.

The landlady came into the corridor and asked if I did not know that Roxana had moved out that morning.

In the

evening

I returned out of curiosity to the movie

Again many people stood in long rows, waiting. I passed them very slowly, strolling against the direction in which they faced. I did not see anyone I knew. theatre downtown.

I dreamed of all my friends. I

was

in a very large house,

standing at the top of the main stairway. When I looked down I saw that the house was filled with people and that these people were everyone

146

I have ever known. I saw Roxana. She wore a

formal gown and a bracelet which glittered under the lights.

She was talking familiarly to someone I had not seen in years, a childhood friend of mine she had never met before. There were hundreds of people in this house and I knew them all and I wanted to talk with them, to tell them how much I appreciated them and how glad I was that they could meet each other. I

wanted to go down the steps and greet them, to shake their hands and joke with them good-naturedly. But I stayed at the

railing, relaxed and happy, too happy to move. I spoke to them. I told them how wonderful it was to be with them. But the house was full, and they could not hear my voice. I noticed

standing at my side. I smiled gratefully and asked him who was giving this party for me.

someone

He answered that it was a dream.

This morning I found an old photograph. I think it was taken at my grandfather's farm many years ago. It shows a boy about

old seated

horse. The boy is smiling and enthusiastic. His right hand is raised, clutching the reins. He is

ten years

on

a

smiling but there is apprehension in his smile, as though he will be happy only as long as the horse does not move.

147

Four selections ROBERT BOLES

New York sketches (There were no buses running, at least none that I encountered.

I heard the rumbling of a subway once as I walked, beginning at four am, up

Central Park West from mid to upper manhat­

tan, Harlem, to make some photographs of Harlem waking. I had been unable to get a taxi that would take me there.

At dawn

I

photographed, painfully,

a

man

who

did

a

sidewalk dance at five am on deserted one hundred and twenty­ fifth street, alone, under the marquee of the Apollo theatre.

He was poor and wore ragged, ill fitting clothes. I cannot guess at his age. His hair was uncombed and harbored foreign

elements. He was dirty, had ulcers on his ankles and forearms, and he was mad, dancing lame there a dance as ragged as his TriQuarterly

149

clothes. and singing. singing in a scarred voice, oblivious of me as

I photographed him repeatedly.)

(A young woman, a whore. perhaps. Her eyebrows are both

plucked and heavily pencilled. The overdone. She is

rest of her

makeup is

caricature of a young woman; she has hidden her youth beneath an older one's youthful disguise. She a

is standing on a train platform, her head between two of a row of stars on a billboard. She is reminiscent of late Beckmann. If I

imagine her stripped of pretense she is reminiscent of early Mondrian.)

(A prisoner, handcuffed, being taken from the Graybar building to a double parked patrol wagon. begins to appeal loudly to passers by. He tells them in several ways that he is being victimized. The passers by, mute, look away or look directly at him, few stop, few even hesitate. The policemen are silent, they are mobile sentinels. They restrain the movements that accompany his speech. He is resentful and tries to make his body gestures larger. He yells for assistance and shouts that there is no one to take care of his family. The policemen's irritation is visible. They are frightened as well. When they get him in, and before the doors are closed, one can witness the beginning of their beating him.)

(A woman on a park bench holds with thin hands a handbag before her face, hiding. Leaving it in position she leans and peers out from behind it offering a smile that withers the heart

of reason. It is

large, gleeful, grotesque and sad. Then she

hides again. She repeats this many times.

Others, eating lunch, when she is not looking at them, look at her and and at each other, shrugging shoulders, raising eye­ brows and rolling eyes to suggest that she is a lunatic.)

(A young man on a subway, eyes glazed. He is adrift in drugs and alcohol. He carries a well worn paper bag. In fact, several 150

torn spots have begun revealing shiny objects. He asks the man

sitting beside him for aid, tells him that he is lost and unsure of the past two or three days, says that he is "fucked up and fucked over." He is trying to get home. He does not know what train he is on. He explains that he is a barber and exhibits with shaking hands a pair of clipping shears, a straight razor, a pair of thinning scissors. He asks what time it is and what day.

The stranger beside him moves away.)

(In a restaurant an older woman has spilled a drink on the dress front of a younger

woman.

There is

a

pleasant and

embarrassed confusion of apologies and acceptances and the older woman, seemingly to make amends, produces a handker­ chief with which she begins to wipe away the liquid. It becomes

slowly apparent in the young woman's face that the other's gestures are not examples of generosity or apology, but of frottage. Kindness in the young woman's face turns to further confusion, then to disbelief and embarrassment. In tears she forcibly leaves the disguised caresses and runs, stumbling into white clothed tables.)

(He is

middle aged

standing on a Times Square subway platform. He, with little ceremony--intending not to invite attention-withdraws a paper cup from a trash barrel, then, under the cover of his greatcoat, urinates in it and carefully returns it.

In a moment or two he recovers a Daily News from a different trash barrel, pretends, briefly, to read it, then, also under the cover of his greatcoat, defecates into it quite non­ chalantly and folds it carefully before putting it back and stuffing it deeply into the barrel.) a

man

151

Untitled piece I had been looking for a road. I was in an area I did not know

quite well.

I stopped at a house I had noticed before, for in the yard, which was in need of weeding, was a weatherworn box with windows on the four sides. It stood on a pedestal. [ had been curious as to what was inside. Another landmark was the house

directly across the road which had an adjoining fenced field in which a goat was tethered. [ wasn't sure of the grade of the road. I knew that there was a

sharp turn ahead to the right which led to some extremely 'depressed railroad tracks, rarely used, but without signal. My handbrake didn't work and [ didn't want to cut the engine of my car, a Triumph, because it didn't care for starting. [ let my foot off the brake. The car rolled a little and came to a stop, I waited a few seconds to make

sure

it would roll no further.

Granted, it would have been safer in the sand shoulder but, if it became stuck and [ had to reverse, the right rear wheel would

spin off. [ stepped out and left my right foot resting lightly on the floor board.

My heart, [ hesitate to use the word, 'raced' when [ saw the fellow come out of the open door. [ had seen him several times before. The last time, he had been nude swimming in a nearby

pond. The only conversation we had had had been in nods, telegraphing, there and across an open air dance floor and along a roadside, messages of receptivity and offerings of friendship.

He was no more than twenty, wearing blue jeans, loafers, a checked CPO shirt and an Air Force flight jacket, looking at me in open curiosity, his closed lips beginning smiles. (His jacket suggested an older brother.)

He was 'adam' in the Hebrew sense of the word, ruddy, red­ brown, lightly freckled, black haired. (In seeing him nude there had been no embarrassment. His form was perfect rather than undressed.) He was, to my taste, of the most handsome of men 152

I have ever encountered, one of one's kind and, at the same

time, quintessentially foreign. He approached slowly, relaxed.

"What's that?" I asked, looking toward the box.

The fellow, more interested in the car, barely glanced in the direction I was looking. "House?" he answered, smiling.

"No," I said, fully leaving the car, which he began circling.

I went towards the box. The fellow paid no attention to me.

An old dog stationed by a car which was either abandoned or

being salvaged barked gently at me as I crossed the yard-it came to the edge of the house slowly, arthritically, then went back and lay down.

Insect sounds once away from the car.

In the box, Mary, the virgin. It should have been apparent

from the road. A painted wooden statue, faded, with a dress of

stiff, age dried and dusty cloth.

As I was heading back to the car the old dog, winter maize

colored, stood up watchfully but did not bark.

"Mind ifl take a picture of it?" I asked.

The fellow

kneeling behind the car looking at the tail pipes. "Sure," he said. "Your muffler's not very good," He was

stood up.

Remembering why I stopped, I asked, "Do you know how to get to Coast Salish Road?"

He looked at me very carefully. I was readying my Rollei.

"Let me think about it," he said, then crossed the trafficless

road, cupped his genitals with his hand while settling himself on the fence, folded his arms across his chest, bent forward

slightly and adopted a look of perplexion.

The dog attempted a howl as I walked about the pedestaled box noting the numerous coatings of exterior housepaint on its complicated mouldings, the chips, the fungi, the slime molds rooting on it.

The threateningly handsome face and body of the fellow was in my head.

As I circled the silences enclosed and faded in that box, with

the

dog still lightly barking,

the hum of the

car

engine, 153

I

pondered, in what seemed a state of anamnesis, the threat. It was sexual, yes, but that was only one of its features.

I took several shots of her. The intentions of the makers and

commissioners of her were, or had been, sincere. When I finished the film in the camera, I returned to the car, which shuddered occasionally, got myoid Leica, set it, then crossed the road towards the fellow.

But I was too slow. (Photo) He sensed in my approach

my

intention, and in a circular confusion gave a laugh and an embarrassed smile, then, coming towards me, laughing, at­ tempted to wrest my camera from me, and on the ground by the road we wrestled as if at Peniel.

I found out several days later that two days after 1 had made

the photograph of him, he and a friend dowsed the goat, which

belonged to an old man across the way, with gasoline and set it afire.

Doffing the hat Phil is a bit rustic wearing boots, jeans with a tear in the right

knee, his L.L. Bean shirt and Gaucho hat, brim pinned up on one

side. He hasn't shaved in a couple of days either. And

when his girl, Laurie, joins us, he doffs his hat, i.e., takes off the hat in deference and to expose a handsome mass of curly

hair, to portray a good natured sexual nakedness, to demon­ strate that the male's head is a social genital, to surrender the

back of the neck, to free the mouth for a natural smile and, while bending, allow the eyes more direct sexual searching, to raise the arm and let the underarm odors loose and, when the hat is rested back on the head, let that hand check the fly and

suggest.

Laurie's response is genuine. The gesture wins Phil an immediate kiss. Then they walk about so closely together,

talking and taking laughing spills in the grass, that no one would think them married.

154

Window pendant of colored glass and fly Idly photographing a window pendant of colored glass hobbymade by a retired minister listening to Haydn, heard the a fly on the window, inside, sound of a ticking watch moved the watch waiting for it to move out of the shot away, heard the ticking of crickets or katydids, heard summer arranged odors, flowers, tempera­ imperfectly sheathed .

.

.

...

tures, sunsets and foggy dawns behind the ears and in the vases

of violins, of formal sounds

...

let Bill's dog and one cat out,

let one cat in, listened to Haydn again

...

will listen

...

snow outside

...

will

leaves, exasperated and in rage, colorful

listen to Haydn a

cricket finds his way into the room and is

quickly quiet delayed shiver from the opening of the door, not the fly has moved, is symmetrical and still could, but will not, blow it away, frost the glass right handed smoothing of hair from the part on the left side, music diagonalizing walking, genitals to the left of the crotch music seam, blooming turning around and around in I find waiting my symmetry floating inside. Photo. ...

...

.

..

...

...

155

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The ancient tragical motif as reflected in the modem ROBERT BONAZZI

Aesthetically speaking, it is largely

due to

Aeschylus and

Abner Doubleday that I fell in love with Cassandra.

Since Aeschylus added the second actor to Greek drama in the fifth century B.C., I no longer felt compelled to wander

crisscross across America, gathering material for my lyrics, and even foolishly hoping to compose an epic of Homeric proportions. Instead, I discovered Aeschylus' second actor, a

discovery of the highest rank both for myself and Aeschylus, a discovery that made possible the phenomenon of dialogue with Cassandra.

Abner Doubleday invented a game at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839-he called it baseball. Doubleday suggested a maximum of nine players, which he bravely called a team.

Teams formed and challenged other teams, the challenges drew

crowds, the crowds fell into huge choruses of yeas and boos, the choruses were composed of baseball fans, they still are,

Cassandra and I met as baseball fans.

TriQuarterly

157

Chance and luck (or fate and destiny) were also elements in this classical, possibly even tragic meeting.

Chance and luck-in this case good luck disguised as bad luck only to become bad luck once more-these are terms from dear Doubleday's old-fashioned vernacular.

Fate and destiny, also old-fashioned, but much more so, in

fact antiquated, ergo classical-these are terms from Aeschy­ lus' genre.

However, Aeschylus' terms may be no more than cosmic extensions of Doubleday's terms, or Doubleday's terms are nothing but humble modifications of Aeschylus' terms. Of course

there is no mention of Aeschylus' tragedies on Abner

Doubleday's reading list, he had no reading list, he couldn't read, it's no wonder he talked about luck and chance, every­ one, even mythical figures like Abner Doubleday must come to

terms, his terms were simple, the terms of tragedy are simple, the play's the thing, play ball, oh, cathartic collision at the

plate.

The bad luck

was

due to chance, I don't think fate and

destiny had anything to do with it, maybe they arrived later.

The chance was a foul tip off the bat of Duke Snider, he's not mythical like Abner or Babe Ruth, he's not mythical like Cassandra, I mean Aeschylus' Cassandra, not my Cassandra, I'll have nothing to do with myth, oh I'll talk about it, I'll talk about Prometheus for instance, but that's as far as I'll go, the

Duke was real, my Cassandra was real, the bit of bad luck was

real, the bad luck was breaking my left arm trying to catch Snider's foul tip, the fate, if the fate came in that early in the game, the fate was being embarrassed in front of a woman, the

Cassandra, I needn't have been embarrassed, is that why I was always embarrassed, cruel fate, I broke my woman was

dropped the ball, whatever you do you're not supposed to drop the ball, my error, Cassandra's catch, then came destiny, maybe I have my terms out of order, that happens when you borrow terms from different sources, if arm,

worse

than that, I

a batter bats out of order he's out,

158

you must stick to the lineup

card, the lineup card is not a script, that is, the lineup can do

anything it wants, make outs, get hits, but it must come to the plate in the prearranged order, fate gets into everything, Aeschylus had his Zeus, Doubleday had his umpire, I my Cassandra, ah strange bedfellows all, I'm off base, I could dive back, I'd only get dusty, he has me out by a mile, picked off base, sent to the showers, retired to the wings, the destiny was losing Cassandra.

Let me get back on base, the bad luck was breaking my arm, more bad luck was dropping the ball, bad luck to be embar­ rassed, bad luck to faint, to awaken still embarrassed, all that bad luck

good luck in disguise, neither of us was in disguise, this was not a Greek tragedy, we wore no masks, Cassandra even shunned makeup, good luck in disguise be­ cause I fell into Cassandra's box seat, good luck because she knew exactly what to do, good luck because she was a nurse who wore a petticoat, she tore off the petticoat, wrapped it around a splint made from two borrowed scorecards, good luck we didn't have to return the borrowed scorecards, we hadn't kept score, there was no score to keep, it was nothing to nothing at the time, I had gone to see Snider play in his last season, I broke my arm trying to catch his foul tip, I made a fair try at it, I had it, good luck, until I cracked my arm on the back of her box seat, bad luck, then I fell into her lap, good luck, no it was fate by then, I was embarrassed, she was startled, we unraveled, she was not injured, I was not conscious, I awak­ ened still embarrassed, my arm had been professionally splinted, she was a nurse, not a registered nurse, good luck, I was in Cassandra's care, a great future was predicted for us, blessed fate, I should have held onto Snider's lazy foul tip, was was

it poco moto, oh fat chance.

Cassandra wasn't a nurse, not a registered nurse, I didn't

object, she predicted that my arm would heal fine, it didn't, it didn't heal for months and months, I didn't object, she wasn't registered, it wasn't Snider's last season, just my last season to watch him play, he hit that lazy foul tip at me in the fifth inning, 159

I awakened from my faint in the sixth

inning, I realized my fate by the seventh inning, we left in an ambulance by the eighth inning, the reason it took so long to leave was not because ambulances are slow arriving at the scene, they're slow okay, but because I never leave a ball game before it's completed, it's part of my aesthetic, I feel the responsibility to wait it out, it's sometimes a tedious aesthetic, it might even be called a lower class ethic, I don't care for ethics, it was important that we leave, Cassandra insisted in such a lovely manner, she said I'd got my money's worth, but I hadn't, I had been unconscious through most of an inning, she said everything would be fine, I believed her, I let go of my aesthetic, I had to, I always held it in my left hand, my left hand was numb, she held my right hand, we left in an ambulance before the ninth inning, as far as I know the score never changed, that game is still going on, destiny came in extra innings, I don't know how it will end, we always know how tragedies will end, this must not be a tragedy, I was no hero, could a broken arm possibly be a tragic flaw, the score continues in a deadlock, only Zeus can break it, only gods can end it, there are no gods, it goes on, we pray for rain.

With

no

deus

ex

machina to

run

red

lights, we took an

ambulance, Euripides might have got us there a little faster, I never

trusted last-chance invocations of the Muse, I

never

trusted the Muse, it never came on time, it never came at all-I

guardedly enough, I was delirious, I forgot to guard against everything, I'm never on guard when I'm deliri­ ous, I'm never delirious when I'm on guard, I'm never on guard, almost never, sometimes I'm not on guard, there was no need to be on guard, I trusted her, I believe she recited the Hippocratic oath, I think it was the Hippocratic oath, I believe she knew it, I think I heard it, I also heard sirens, Odysseus heard sirens, was Cassandra a siren, I don't think she was, I don't believe she believed she was, sirens wail, Cassandra wasn't wailing, she was very calm, she placed a damp cloth on my forehead, she knelt at my side all the way, I said give me never use never

160

water, she gave me water, I said give me the Hippocratic oath, she gave me the Hippocratic oath, I don't suppose I would have known the difference if she had given me some other oath, I believed her, she didn't have to be under oath, I was under

sedation, she gave me water, maybe she didn't give me water, I must have fallen asleep, probably I fainted, I was always fainting, I'm not guarded enough, I should never say always. I awoke in a hospital, I shouldn't have been surprised, ambu­ lances go to hospitals, I

never

liked hospitals, I

always say

never, always never, never always, see/saw.

The hospital looked like any other hospital, the ambulance looked like any other ambulance, I

was

delirious, what else

could I expect, did the driver expect a tip, I swear I forgot to

tip him, will he curse me, I swear I'm cursed sometimes, will his union curse me, will his union curse him, was it a union ambulance, did Cassandra tip him, no, she never left my side, my right side, my good side, left side, bad side, I was in an ambulance but I swore I was on a see/saw, I cursed ambu­ lances, I was in a hospital, hospitals made me see/saw, I was always arriving at hospitals in ambulances, I never want to arrive that way again, [ will though, I arrive, I see, I saw, I was delirious, a man in delirium can't be trusted, see/saws can't be trusted, they never balance, I could never find anyone to balance me on the other end, [ always tried, always failed, was that my tragic flaw, that couldn't be my tragic flaw, Aeschylus never rode a see/saw, he couldn't have, he had no balance, the gods always outweighed the men, that's interesting, if you weigh less you go up, if you weigh more you go down, it's not that interesting, it's confusing actually, if the gods weighed more, they put the men closer to heaven, are men closer to heaven, I can't take heaven seriously, maybe the gods didn't take heaven seriously, it's clear they didn't take men seriously, no god would seriously see/saw with man, this is just a delirious hypothesis, the Greeks loved their hypotheses, they loved their gods, their gods were hypotheses, hypotheses must balance, this one doesn't balance, was' there a fat-assed god at 161

the other end, I fainted, I awakened,

down, see/saw, present/past, even grammar can't make up its mind, I see

up,

saw

about to lose my grip, I called for water, I called for Cassandra, Cassandra brought water, without Cassandra there

was

is no dialogue, without water there is no talk at all, that's not

part of the Hippocratic oath, the Hippocratic oath turned out to be a code of ethics, it wasn't what Cassandra had been reciting

in the ambulance, I suppose you have to be registered before you can recite

it, I don't know what it was she was reciting,

something like win some, lose some, maybe not, maybe it was you'll be okay, you'll be okay, it doesn't matter, we hardly knew each other, it couldn't have been intimate, I was mut­ tering deliriously, I often mutter deliriously, it's excusable when you're delirious, Cassandra followed all of it perfectly, I was reciting reams of poetry, I can't recite it when I'm not delirious, I can't recite it when I'm not drunk, not my own poetry, I don't own any poetry, I only borrow it when I'm drunk or delirious, I never borrow my own, I give it away, I give it away even though no one takes it, is that a contradiction, my tongue curls back on itself, it curls back on Cassandra's tongue, we were kissing in the hospital, I felt closer to heaven

than ever before, that's my hypothesis, my plank broke in half.

Is

Aeschylus in need of a synopsis, it's too late for a synopsis, what America needs is a new five cent synopsis, America is a five cent synopsis, does that mean it's not worth a dime, I don't know, perhaps a box score would help, I made a box score, I'll not explain that, I was too puny for puns, I had met with a freak accident, was I being punished, when Snider swung his cap fell off, I broke my arm trying to catch the foul tip, it was a foul tip alright, Snider caught his own cap, he didn't own the cap, maybe he did, I don't know the rules covering equipment, he caught it before it got dusty, he dusted it off anyhow, I suppose he did, I didn't see any of it, I had already fainted by then, I was still delirious, everybody calls his own game, the Duke dusted off the cap by slapping it in his palm, he slapped it more vigorously than necessary, there was 162

no

dust in it, was he angry at the cap, it wasn't a handicap, he

was mad as a

hatter, he was mad as a capper, madcap.

I never trusted synopses, just look at how it's spelled, silly­

looking word, I would have never attempted it unless I had been delirious, I had meant to say that I broke my left arm trying to catch Snider's foul tip, I don't know if his cap fell off, I dropped the ball, I think some kid got it, I don't mind kids, I prefer kids to adults, I never minded adults, that usually got me in trouble, I never got the ball back, I never had it, I went off to never-never land, Cassandra revived me, it was like being reborn, rebirth is a freak accident, I was having one freak accident after another, first the bum wing, then the rebirth, was it all accidental, was I a freak, I didn't know, Cassandra revived me, that was good enough, the doctor put my arm in a cast, he gave me something for my headaches, he said I must have bumped my head as well, as well as what, not as well as my arm, my head wasn't broken, Cassandra held my head, head high we left the hospital, Aeschylus had introduced us, she took me home, safe at home.

163

164

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They are naked, but their flesh is painted, foul, ugly, day-glo colors. As they move up the path from the valley below, their screaming and retching and bawling becomes louder, more distinct, filling the still air with a raucous female wailing. On flatbed wagons they drag their belongings, stoves, bathtubs, huge mirrors, cribs and bassinettes and bales of diapers, cosmetics, eyelashes, oaken china cabinets. High above, in my sand-bagged barricade I watch a fight that is taking place on the trail below. Two women are beating one another with broom­ sticks. One falls down and the other straddles her, shoving three fingers in and out the crotch of the woman underneath her. Another woman is following behind a wagon on which a mirror has been set up. She is watching herself move in the mirror. As she walks she touches her hips, her breasts, petting her greasy, painted skin. Another woman is wearing a pistol on a belt, the holster in front, covering her crotch. Soon they will be in range. When the first one falls, her head blown off by the dum-dum bullets from my sniping rifle, the others will shove on, stomp right over her blooded corpse, through mine fields, bear traps, bangalore torpedoes, point-blank artillery, bayonet charges. I'll-get my last one with my hunting knife. No, I'll use my fish-gutter. Rip her belly open, yank out her guts. I hope it's my wife. I hope she's the last one.

They had so many smiles for me I took them home for tea.

They were in line ahead of me at the Sunbeam Bread Thrift Store, they kept turning their pretty heads and smiling at me.

After I paid for my bread- I walked outside and they were standing there by a car. It was noontime, very clear skied and bright, the newly fallen snow crisp and bracing. They said they would come for a while and I sat between them on the seat.

The car was a blue station wagon. There was a decal of Pike's Peak on the rear window. If, I said, you have time, we may

have a snowfight after our tea. They seemed delighted, but then the younger woman said, "we have husbands none­ even

theless." They both had such pretty he;ds of black hair, feather cut. At the same moment, they introduced one another.

165

One said, "this is my mother." The other said, "this is my

daughter.

"

I told them I was their good son. At my apartment, I asked them to boil water for the tea while I made a small fire

in the fireplace. They scolded me for not having curtains at my

windows, for keeping my rooms so bare. They took their boots off and toasted them before the fire as we sat together on the

drinking our tea. "We love," they said, "your Lapsang Suchong tea." Outside the icy reeds were clicking and shining in the bright sun. We got into bed together and they told me they loved each other and wanted me to watch them make love.

I petted their neat little cunts for a while, then I rolled aside and watched them in the acts of love. From time to time, one or the rug

other said, "oh Momma." Naked, their thin little bodies were identical. I insisted on entering them then, but they denied me

saying they had husbands after all and were true. They got up together and pulled open the French doors by the bed. Shiver­ ing, they embraced in the cold, bright light, their little bodies tingling. Then they were in a hurry to get dressed, their bread, they said, would freeze in the car otherwise. I begged them to at least kiss my spine and the dears went so eagerly at it, little sparrow kisses fluttering up and down the length of my spine.

As they left, they told me that next summer they hoped to travel to the Devil's Grotto,

a

series of caves in Arkansas.

They would, they said, get a decal from there too. I went back inside to finish my tea.

166

from Virginia Flynn ELLIOTT ANDERSON

The Wednesday afternoon before Easter was warm and sunny, and I left the shop early, between two-thirty and three. Virginia

unaccountably sad. I remember thinking, this is oppressive, I want to sleep.

Virginia had said, "L'rn going to the bank, then I'm going home.

She hung her smock on the hook by the door and unpinned her hair. Her falling hair has always excited me. We embraced awkwardly, and then she went out, tossing her hips and smiling back over her shoulder.

On my way to the car, I walked through the park, then along Main Street, past the Speedwash, the hardware store, and the defunct creamery. Two fat girls were standing in the shade of the creamery comparing suntan lines and swim suits, and I overheard one tell the other, "This suit makes my legs look thin, don't say it doesn't.

I remember thinking, we'll sell the shop, go to Mexico or Europe. Then our children can tell ·their friends, "We're ·Americans but we were born in Oaxaca, Batcelona, Turin. In our mind's eye, we can still see the yellow stone fountain, the mauve sand of the courtyard, the stained walls of the hotel, the had gone home at noon. I felt lonely,

"

"

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167

deep set windows, and looking over the beach, the shape of a ship belching smoke under a mackerel sky, a darker salmon color now, and the sea, blue and flecked with pink sea sheep from the setting sun, the dark stone beach every shade of •

violet.'

I had driven only four or five blocks when a horn sounded

close behind me and a blue and white squad car, lights flashing,

pulled me over to the curb. I waited, uncertain.

There were two policemen. "May we see your driver's license, please," one said. He was very handsome, a slender man

with fair skin and the delicate face of a bird. "Of course,

yes," I said, "What have I done?"

"Y ou were driving in your sleep," the other said. "You didn't see the light." He was taller than his partner, and heavier, with irregular slavic features and a porous loaf of a nose. While he returned to the squad car with my license, the handsome policeman chatted amiably about the weather. What did I think of the recent rain, he wanted to know, was I properly insured, and where had I been going in my sleep?

When he smiled, his eyes reflected the innocence of a child, sea green or lime green, and his small ears were shell-like.

Soon, the taller policeman returned and whispered some­ thing to him. He pursed his lips and cocked his head, and then he frowned and said, "I'm afraid you'll have to come along with us." "Why?" I said. "Can't you just give me a ticket? I don't want to go with you." "Are you in such a hurry?" he

"Well," I said, "yes, I am. It's my wife. She's pregnant." "Ah," he said, and there was sympathy in his voice, but he lowered his eyes, no longer smiling, and the other

asked

one

me.

said sharply, "Come

right.

along now,

your wife will be all

"

squad car, we did not speak. I sat in the back seat behind the glass screen, the two policemen sat in front. I was unconcerned, amused even, but when we arrived at the police station, and an elderly desk sergeant confiscated my ring, In the

wallet, belt and shoes, and put them in a canvas bag, I said, 168

"Wait just a minute." The policeman with the slavic features

gripped my arm so tightly that I winced.

The cell they put me in was not large, perhaps ten feet on a side, and contained only a dry toilet and an iron bunk. There were no windows. A single bulb protected by a wire screen set in the high ceiling provided the only light. I said, "Enough is enough. What's going on?"

"You'll find out," the taller policeman said.

"I have the right to know," I said.

The handsome policeman shook his head and smiled sadly.

"I wanta lawyer," I said.

The policeman with the porous nose put a finger to his lips.

"Shut up," he said.

"I want to call a lawyer or my wife," I said, but they turned away, locked the cell door, and then they were gone. I could not believe it. "What's the big idea?" I wanted to know. I thought I had been taken for another man, a criminal, a thief.

"Bastards," I shouted, "bastards," but there was no one to hear me.

Time

passed slowly. How long I paced my small cell I cannot say, a day or two, perhaps three. With nothing to eat and nothing to drink, I soon became quite weak. Angry, confused, worried about Virginia, I did not sleep. My mouth became very dry and my lips cracked. I was nearly faint with hunger. After a time, I could no longer stand without becoming dizzy. I spent much of my time sitting on the iron bunk, staring at the walls, or at the light -in the ceiling, and of course, eventually, I did sleep.

When I wakened, the two policemen had returned. With them was a burly, balding man wearing a dark suit and horn rim glasses. His hair, what was left of it, his long sideburns and a narrow band over his ears, was blond and thick and curly.. as was the hair that covered the backs of his hands and the back of

his neck. He wore a white shirt, maroon tie, and carried a slim attache case. Suddenly, I became very angry. "What have you

done to me?" I shouted. "What the hell is going on?"

169

The handsome policeman smiled and said, "There's no need to shout." and

helped me to my feet. I was so weak now, so overcome with dizziness, that I nearly fainted. As I watched, supported by the two policemen, the third man opened his attache case and produced a long black truncheon.

"Ready?" he said. "Ready," the two policemen said, tightening their grip on

my arms. "Hold on, then," the third man said, and struck

me across the ribs. I heard myself gasp and the dull thud of the truncheon striking me, but I felt little pain. Immediately, I was

struck in the stomach, just below the diaphragm, and again,

lower, above the groin. Only the support of the two policemen

kept me from falling to the floor. The beating went on for several minutes before I lost consciousness. I was struck about

the chest and shoulders, and across the legs. Throughout, I felt little pain, only the concussion of the blows, but I was aware of the rhythm of the beating, and the heavy, rhythmic breathing of the man in the dark suit, becoming heavier and more rapid as the beating went on.

When I

regained consciousness,

I

was

lying on the iron

bunk. I tried to sit up, but found that I could not. When I moved my legs, I experienced sharp pains in my knees and

thighs. My groin, chest and shoulders ached from the beating.

And I found that if I lifted my head I made myself violently sick. The spasms left me gasping, weak; the bile burned my nose and throat.

having been arrested and locked in a cell without food or water, and having been beaten by a balding blond wearing a dark suit and horn rim glasses. But what of my crime and what of my guilt, and what, in the meanwhile, of Virginia? Was my broken condition evidence of guilt, of what I might have said or done, and were these tears sufficient proof?

Was this pain? And sleeping, or waking, were the strange figures dancing in my cell, wildly turning, madness? Oh, I wanted to fly, and flying feel no pain. I tried. I shut my eyes. I willed my poor body to rise. I had the wings, the feathers, but my bones were heavy. I was not suited to flight. I could not fly.

I remembered

170

The following day, the three men returned. I felt a hand on my shoulder and opened my eyes. I saw two blue men wearing

silver badges and a dark man with flashing eyes. I felt that I

being lifted like a toy balloon. Then the needle and the voice, "To clear your head," and the handsome features, the delicate features, the sweet breath on my face.

I was swept upward by the drug, a sudden draft of fresh air, the steps they took for me, the electric hum of the elevator by the corridor lights which became abruptly green. "Your eyes," the voice said softly, "the sun is bright, to protect your eyes."

was

171

It was only when I found myself between the two policemen

before

heavy iron door that I understood I was wearing sunglasses now. about to be led through the door and into a a

cobbled courtyard. Before me the sunlight glittered like a ditch in the wind. I was led stumbling over the cobbles toward the far

wall. my bare feet catching at each

stone.

Blurred

by the

shivering sunlight. the group of men in uniform seemed about to dissolve; the rifles they carried were transformed into bright metal wands.

I began to laugh and cry at the same time. I could see more

clearly now: the wooden post protruding from the cobbles, the group of men in uniform forming a single rank, the ropes, the blindfold. "No," I said weakly, "please."

When I had been bound to the post and the blindfold tied

securely over my eyes, the voice of the handsome policeman called the squad to attention. My body began to tremble violently. I heard the rifles cocked. "No," I said, "you're wrong," but the squad fired on command, the shots sounded as one.

Ammonia vapors roused me. "He's awake now," a voice said. I felt hands fumble at the knotted blindfold and at the ropes securing my hands and feet to the post. Suddenly, there were voices all around me, laughter, and applause. "Yes," I

heard, "He's all right," and "Good for him," and then the blindfold was off and somebody handed me the sunglasses. I was too weak to

stand, so I sat, leaning against the post, staring

in utter disbelief at the crowd that had gathered around me.

Several of the faces I recognized

at

once;

some

I knew

intimately, others were strangers; all were talking excitedly, smiling, clapping their hands and pointing at me. It was then that I saw Virginia. She had been standing with the balding blond and the taller, heavier policemen, but was walking now in my direction. Smiling radiantly, she knelt beside me to sit cross-legged on the cobbles. Folding her hands over the swell of her belly, she peered at me through slit eyes. "Jerome," she said.

172

from Splendide-Hotel GILBERT SORRENTINO

G

Williams writes: And so it comes to motor cars­

which is the son

leaving otT the g of sunlight and grass

It seems clear that the poet meant to write the word "song" in the third line of the first stanza, and inadvertently left out the g of that word. One

imagines the flash of imagination as he

realized his error and then, instead of returning to the line to amend it, saw the possibilities of the poem refreshed. The work

takes a new direction, the lost letter reappears audaciously in the next stanza. Yet that lost g is gone from the poem. What if that line had read, as I suspect it was meant to read, "which is the song"?

And so it comes to motor cars­

which is the song of metal and glass

It is that deleted g I wish to

concern

myself with in this

chapter-in one way or another.

Gilbert Sorrentino, Splendide-Hdtel. Copyright © 1973 by Gilbert Sorrentino, reprinted by permission of the author and New Directions Publishing Corporation.

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173

G, as the dictionary tells us, was originally a differentiated form of C, the latter identical with the Greek gamma, and the

Semitic gimel, c and g, divergent species, one might say, of the same

genus. Then consider this

irony: Captain Rimbaud and

General Aupick.

One recalls the well-known story concerning Charles Baude­ laire during the revolutionary upheavals of 1848. At the barri­

cades, an unfired rifle in his hand, wild-eyed, he repeatedly demands that the revolutionists go and shoot the director of the

Military Academy, General Aupick, his stepfather. "Down with General Aupick!" This pitifully desperate cry is, for the poet, the extent of his political activity. This February day in Paris, this young man in the streets, for the first and last time at one

with the people-here is the symbol of Le Poete that the

Master himself would have cherished. It is this artist's work that

deeply influenced that of Captain Rimbaud's son, Arthur, whose first experience with the people was a sexual so

assault by soldiers. The poem in which this is detailed is called "The Cheated Heart." There are men who stand on my corner in all weathers, drinking beer or wine, who might well have the faces of these brutalizing troops. There is a possibility that they know my name, although they have never read any of my work. They have never heard the name Arthur Rimbaud.

Although I do not know for whom I write for it is certain that it is not for these men: another dilemma of politics.

General Aupick was an Irish bastard. Captain Rimbaud last saw Arthur when the latter was six, and never again. It is strange to realize that I know more about the sons than their fathers did.

Arthur Rimbaud

was

at

the construction site when the

Splendide- Hotel was built.

J

J is a hook.

When I

was

sixteen,

I

caught

a

largemouth bass while

trolling from a rowboat on a vacationers' lake in New Jersey.

174

The nearest town was Charleville, notable primarily for its fish

hatcheries. I was using a small daredevil, hoping, I suppose, to hook one of the pickerel that lay along the shore in the shallows

shaded by trees coming down to the edge of the water.

If one looked at this lake at dusk with half-closed eyes it took on the

powdery image of that lake in the picture that hung in my

hall as a child. This has to do with the past. J is a hook. The future is a bore simply because it hasn't happened.

When the bass struck the lure, I thought for a moment that I had fouled my line on a branch or the trunk of a submerged

powerful and steady was his pressure against me. I pulled against the pressure, thinking to free the lure, when suddenly the line went slack and the bass broke the surface of the water, twisting in spray, rainbows! rainbows !-the image has been fixed by many writers before me. I played him away from the shore and reeled him in, then held him up, quivering and twitching, to my friend Artie, who was rowing the boat. He must have weighed two and a half pounds. [ never caught another bass with that daredevil, and although I hooked two pickerel with it, I lost them both. In subsequent summers I became interested in and never girls game-fished again. From the blankets on which we sprawled I would look across the lake to the shady banks, watching the young men fish the shallows. They were incredibly strange, remote from life. I, of course was at the bloody core of it. Of course. tree,

so

,

A daredevil is

a

spoon lure that

comes

in three

or

four

different sizes and is intended for daytime fishing. It can be tied to

the leader

so

that it has either

action. The fact that it

a

wobbling or a spinning

shallow makes it excellent for On the convex surface of the pickerel. spoon the brilliantly enameled design is invariably the same-red with a white stripe runs

running diagonally lengthwise. The concave side is highly polished nickel. From the rear and wider end of the spoon hangs sometimes a treble hook, the points uncovered; some­ times a single hook is rigidly affixed to the lure. This hook is often partially concealed by a wet streamer fly, usually orange

in color. It is a beautiful

spoon and in action the alternation of 175

the flashing colors and glittering nickel makes it an

extremely

effective one.

There

recent news story concerning a researcher under a working large grant from the Department of Health, was

a

Education and Welfare. The man, after many tests, discovered that fish can see colors. He discovered that fish can see colors!

J is

a

hook: to fish up the past: spray and rainbows.

My

friend Artie later fell in love with a girl who lived on Arthur A venue in the Bronx. The writer stands transfixed before such

gentle irony, notwithstanding the fact that he has invented it.

M

One of the cliches of the time is that the very best men-one

speaks of course of men who are "in the news"-are those who have not denied their roots. Wearying columnists with souls of excelsior, blank university presidents, distinguished dullards in every field-all are constantly battering one con­ cerning the splendors of some lackluster politician who still retains traces of a Jersey City accent, who bravely lays into a huge order of scungilli at some restaurant on Elizabeth Street, who puts on a hard hat and screws in a plumbing fixture (badly, of course, as he did when he was a plumber). Roots, roots!

They address groups of drunken Norwegians in Bay Ridge, tell you of the finer points of bocce, remember fondly those days hustling freight on the North River piers. Somehow, these tenuous connections with their drab backgrounds are com­ mendable.

Let us take the case of Mister, or Monsieur-I shall call him

Many years ago, he rejected his roots for one reason or another: success in the theatre, the arts, business, politics. As he climbed steadily in his field-we will use the figure of "climbing" since all Americans, even the neurotic dogs they M.

possess, understand this act-he displayed all the finest traits

such a success can own. (I grant you that this is fantastic: the idea that a political man, for one, can possess "finest traits" is 176

chimerical. But bear with me for the sake of the conceit.) At some juncture in his life, perhaps at those famous crossroads in that famous Yellow Wood, he decided to take the road that led

Back Home.

Years pass. M has rediscovered himself, his heritage, his roots, all the rubbish he was well rid of twenty years before. He

is completely whole. And yet, how curious it is, he has become

By some mysterious law, totally incompre­ hensible to me, he was a more legitimate figure when he lived his manufactured life. As soon as he became real, he became

a sham and a fake.

false. Beware him.

Get out of his way as he speeds back to the People or he will

smash you to pieces. There are men who have deserted their wives and children for the People. Beware them, though their

actions are couched in the most resplendent rhetoric. Beware the man who tells you of his father's eldest sister's second son -the one who could whittle the most beautiful letter openers.

Beware the fake gleam of nostalgia in his eye. Leave the bar

when he

plays "I Can Dream, Can't I?" Be sure you are

behind locked doors when he speaks of Glenn Miller. "While "

the public funds are spent in celebrations of fraternity avoid those feasts and block parties, those playground open­ ...

ings for which we have no one but M to thank. "A bell of rose­ colored fire tolls in the clouds." How few hear it, yet it continues to toll, despite the museums, parks, and new rides on the midway.

And there is M, getting on the Super Bobsled, which destroys the equilibrium of its passengers to "Sympathy for the Devil." He waves to his constituents, his brothers, shining in a dashiki, a cuchifrito in one hand, a knish in the other, speaking a spicy mixture of Swahili, Yiddish, and Spanish. Move swiftly toward the subway as he pats the mounted patrolman's horse: the bell is tolling, flashes of pink fire in the massed clouds over the ocean. And now a great roar as he salutes the flag, a tear in his eye as he recalls to the throng the great days when it was treated with respect. That must have been about the time we

incinerated Dresden.

177

Dresden! And it so turns out that he remembers Dresden and has

concerning its devastation: "Those who live by the sword," he begins, and his voice is lost in the applause. A drunk in a boat some miles out to sea looks up at what he believes to be thunder and lightning. some

words of wisdom

w

It is only by persistence that the imagination is freed in order

that it may create anything: the Splendide-Hotel, for example.

This hotel was invented by Arthur Rimbaud who later went to live there. I have it on good authority that there are few people who are interested in this fact. For that matter, a magnificently aware

and intelligent couple I recently met-their apparel was

forcefully, aggressively even, imaginative-had never heard of the Splendide. They spoke to me of the flowers that they grew in profusion in their small backyard garden. They seemed inordinately proud of them, almost as if they had made them.

When I lightly mentioned that Rimbaud had questioned whether a flower, dead or alive, was worth the droppings of one sea bird, they became angry with me, and, I take it, with Rimbaud. The

products of the imagination must be tendered

with the greatest of care.

Curiously enough, this couple loved the Rimbaud who called for a disordering of all the senses, who spat on priests and flung his lousy body on Mme. Verlaine's bed. In these external "realities" they purported to see the artist. So that the artist becomes a waiter who deftly and unobtrusively serves what is ordered. I agree that the artist as waiter is a fanciful metaphor, yet it leads me to something.

An artist whom I have known for fifteen years has for some time been painting and drawing pictures of waiters arrested in the varied aspects of their work. These are profoundly moving of men, locked into a profession that offers

pictures

desperate

little succor. They are totally beaten, thoroughly defeated, yet is to perform their duties with a bravado that

they manage of the nothing short of heroic. The expressions and postures 178

waiters are tragic, they stand, staring out of the pictures, their faces acute delineations of pain and humiliation. Some of them rush through the space of the pictures, trays above their heads, in a shower of falling china, glasses, and silverware. Some lean

against each other in exhaustion. Some stand, immobile, trays under arms, blowing smoke rings. And others, wild-eyed, fling their arms and legs about uncontrollably. It is, I think, safe to say that they are all on the edge of insanity.

Nowhere does one see a diner.

I assure you that these are not "real" waiters. They are the

waiters of the artist's imagination. They are devastating, they make one uncomfortable, they are totally unlike any waiters that anyone will ever see. And yet-and yet surely they must be the waiters employed by the

Splendide. By an act of the imagination, the artist has driven through the apparent niceties of restaurant dining to reveal the bewildered rage and madness therein. One who has seen these pictures can never again dine out without suspecting that the waiters are all involved in a terrific charade. Their irrational behavior and broken spirits do exist: in the imagination, purified against all change: in the Splendide. These clearly constructed figures of despair, willed into existence by an act of the imagination, allow us to "read" the activities of "real" waiters acutely. They stand revealed.

This subtlety is the artist's entire achievement. Through the employment of the imagination he lays bare the mundane. The painter, who may have seen the necessity for his project in the brief, single turn of a waiter's wrist, must certainly agree with the poet who writes, in a work specifically concerned with the imagination: It is only in isolate flecks that something is given off

So [come again to Williams, another w for this chapter.

William Carlos Williams was eight years old when Arthur

Rimbaud died. It pleases

me

to see a

slender but absolute

continuity between the work of the damned Frenchman and the patronized American.

179

Two pieces JOHNBATKI

180

TriQuarterly

Rimbaud's parents There is

a

couple.

M. and Mme.

Rimbaud, sitting in their

house in the French

provinces, like a couple of books left unread on a shelf dusty with the dust of decades that flew by this corner of France with its big Christmases, less hectic than those celebrated in big cities, but still useful in giving focus to the traditional concept of family, and a razor-sharp straightness to this couple, the Rimbauds, who are thinking about the son fate would bestow upon them, and are weighing the possibili­ ties of a study trip to Germany, where, at one of the great institutes of straight learning he could gain valuable insight into contemporary Zeitgeist and the history of philosophy within the customary framework wherein happiness still means doggedly pursuing a story to its inevitable boring end, one that is, alas, not to be theirs, for this is the night of Arthur's conception, and eventually Arthur himself will appear on the scene with a fat baby's moon-smile to fit into his beginnings with that sly insistence that is bent on survival and depends on forces unknown to us, but points toward that fabulous Wild West of childhood dreams, dreams that haunt

us

with meek

pertinacity, shy red Indians tapping our shoulders with their small green hands reaching out of Rimbaud's childhood, hands

growing even smaller in the "perspective" of time which is nothing but the sum of all the spaces we have left behind, as we proceed, as proceed we must, on our way crossing the conti­ nents, forgetting about our speed as we cut through clouds of confusion with the golden knife of travelers following the sun, a golden knife that will be forever alien to the graduates of the academies of a nineteenth century Germany who become bank clerks and stay bank clerks all their lives, unaware of youthful stoned wanderers dreaming of sandwiches that can be ingested both orally and visually to produce instant music, dance, and song. This is how Rimbaud will stop writing; at an early age.

181

Mallarrne on the 14th of July, 1889 Mallarrne liked his wine. Some of his favorites were Chateau Haut-Brion

,

Chassagne-Montrachet

,

and the ever-mellow red

"Paisano." He also liked the color orange, and long walks under the plantains on the boulevards. "Publishers, publish­

ers," Mallarrne murmured on the afternoon of July 14, after a

pleasant stroll in the course of which he observed the people of Paris dancing on the streets. His fingers leafed through the heavy dictionary lying in his lap. He picked out a verdant bouquet of verbs, adjectives, nouns, and other lesser parts of speech to present to his publisher. Mallarme was wearing a dark flowery tie, flowery not in the sense of the imprinted pattern, but in the configuration of the tie around his neck.

Perhaps "butterfly" is a better description of the tie's lavish folds, a fluttering of dark wings under the poet's chin. Mal­ larrne thought of himself in a perambulator as an infant, the 1843 edition of Mallarrne: was that the same Mallarrne as the young man who walked with a long loaf of French bread under

his arm twenty years later. or the Mallarme now sitting in his

comfortable

reading the evening paper? "Here.

Fido!" he called to his dog, an overweight Saint Bernard.

Mallarrne despised the papers; Mercure de Paris or Sentinel de France, it was all yellow journalism. He threw down the paper and picked up a copy of the Revue des Dell r Mondes, fresh from that day's mail. Ah, another article by .he Freres Gon­ court! Biting into a still warm croissant. Mallarrne perused the sheet. pensi vely stroking the back of his chocolate seal-point fauteuil.

Siamese, Cleo. The entrance of the maid disturbs his rumina­ tions: "M'sieur

..

anything today?"

182

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man

is here. Will there be

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184

TriQuarterly

I

tiN ainU '. I (J.ItI.�'bo�)

PETER MICHELSON

--------�--------

185

(State of the Union message, to be delivered on the Fourth of July, anywhere in "Indian Country" along "The Old West Trail, first explored by Lewis and Clark, then traveled by traders and missionaries, patrolled by Sherman's troops, paved by the U.S. Department of Highways, and now at last realizing its destiny a tidy profit.

Presenting for the first time a practicable and humane "

...

solution to the Indian Problem.

spoken in AMERICAN, slightly southern and slightly western, something combining the styles of Lyndon B. John­ son, George Wallace, and Billy Jo Hargis-old campaigners against, in the great AMERICAN tradition, communism and sin.)

To be

My fella Mericans, you know me, I've

spoke to you before. I am the eater,

I consume.

Thirty times my weight in food, good MERICAN foodUnited Fruit, Armour beef, Swift's pork, McDonald's ham­ burgers, Purina wheat, barley, corn and soy beans 2,500 times my weight in goods-General ...

Motors, Sears

washers, RCA stereos, Weyerhaeuser lumber, Portland And cement, Goodyear tires ...

two times my income annually in services­

mortgages, loans, credit cards

...

You

know me, MERICANS,

I'm one ofya

...

And, my fella MERICANS, I'm here to teU ya that the state ofthe union is terrific. I mean, praise be, we're Number One!

186

We started small, as

befits a prudent, hardworkin people. But

kept a good credit ratin, our grindstone, and today, this day of days, we

we

noses clean and to the

,

got somethin to show.

Somethin, MERICANS, to be proud of.

MERICANS,

this whole fuckin continent is ours!

Yes MERICANS,

and the free world too!

And don't you worry none about them Commies, pinkos, and fella travelers, MERICANS, the Reds are on the run. The Chinks buy our airplanes and the Rooskies buy our wheat. Don't you worry about that, MERICANS, we got em

by the balls.

We handled the Redskins (nod of acknowledgment here to the chiefs seated on the platform,

feathered and buckskinned, led by a mannikin on loan from the Department of the Interior's Museum of Good Indians) we

handled the Redskins and WE'LL HANDLE THE REDS!

MERICANS, we kept the faith, the

simple and effective faith of our fathers: whatever mother you can, cream him.

Anybody else, mek a deeal! (for

only a little down and, yes, less than a lifetime a month I can put you behind the wheel

187

of a seventeen hundred and seventy six horse power E Pluribus Mirabulus GRAND PRIX! So come on

in, Gringo,

come on in to your old

Uncle Sam's.

You wont find another deal in town. And remember this, my fella MERICANS, at your old Uncle Sam's, you cut the cards: if

you turn up an ace, we pay the freight! Yessirreebob,

it's the old acey-deucy, a little game of chance

with your Uncle Sam

...

be

the first to win

...

hurry,

time Hurry, HURRY is rapidly drawin to a close!)

••.

But I don't mean to say

that everything is peaches and frijoles (nod of acknowledgment here to the wetback contingent, also

seated on the speaker's platform, led

by mannikin of a barefoot Cesar Chavez with a wooden lettuce knife, you can't be too

careful) No Sir, MERICANS, we still got us ajob to do. Because, my fella citizens, sad

though it is to say, there's bellyachers and troublemakers, yess, my fella MERICANS, troublemakers and bellyachers.

Yeaah, after all our work and sacrifice to make this country what it is today, we still got us a job to do! Just fella citizens, listen a moment: listen,

188

what do ya hear?

Nothin, right? NOTHIN! That, ladies and gents, is the work of the bellyachers.

This is the Fourth of July, Independence

Day,we

ought to be hearin explosions, FIREWORKS,

that's what we ought to hear!

Fireworks is what this country is about, my fella MERICANS. Fireworks! But out here on the reservation, on

guvmint propity, my fella MERICANS, almost no firecrackers are bein

(ladies beggin your pardon) blown!

Now the average for 'breeds in the cities is slightly higher, but

the deficiency is alarmin.

My fella MERICANS, this is serious. We're

harborin, at guvmint expense, with the tax dollars you and me have sweated for, with the giveaway, the welfare state, and the dole, we're harborin right here on these reservations

bellyachers and unAMERICANS.

Just this mornin, right here on Redapple Reservation, over at that beautiful new motel

designed and furnished by Dupont hisself, that

motel we loaned em the money for at only 28% per annum per diem, I was askin that pretty little redskin clerk

(like

to get her out behind the old earth-lodge, eh

MERICANS!) I asks her for the mornin paper. She

189

says, pert as you please, "They

ain't deliverin today." So I says, friendly and humorous like, I says,

"Chuckle, chuckle," I says, "no good news today."

And, my fella MERICANS, that sassy little bitch (Oh gawd, just five minutes behind the barn!) she looks me straight in the eye and she says, Must Be the Fourth of July!

That's what we're up against: smart-ass unAMERICANS!

Now the question is,

what're we gonna do about it.

True, we could hunt em down and root em out, but, pardners, we already done that. And the truth is, we need our ammunition.

Yeaah, we got the Reds on the run, but you can't never tell about those little yella people.

The Bolsheviks don't even trust em.

No, my fella MERICANS, keep our powder dry. Here

we got to

on the home front there's other

tactics,

tactics we learned bringin peace to Ve-et-naarn.

Gringos, the job we got to do here is

win the hearts and minds of these redskin bellyachers. Now, we got some a few old

good injuns--on

nickels, in front of cigar stores, and

up here on the platform (nods to mannikins), but we got to win over the rest, show

em what MERICA is all about-

190

fireworks, democracy, and free enterprise.

True, we got a few of em sellin neckties, and we got a few of em whoopin at rodeos, and we

got a few of em busy makin curios (though that's strained our relations with

Japan somewhat), and we

got a whole lot of em suckin booze. But we got to get the rest. MERICANS, we got to find a practical and humane (but final) solution to the Indian Problem. So

I'm askin you to cinch up for this challenge,

I'm askin you to knuckle down, I'm askin you to serve your country as she's served you.

My fella MERICANS, I'm askin you to begin today, distasteful as it may be,

this very afternoon I'm askin you to find you a redskin and, yes, MERICANS, TAKE AN INDIAN OUT TO YOUR FOURTH OF

JULY PICNIC!

(George Armstrong Custer Memorial Drum and Sousaphone Band strikes up, rising, with the speaker's voice, to the occasion

...

)

That's right, MERICANS, take one of our feathered friends out to

lunch,

let him see what MERICA'S all about.

Let him see the beauty of Old Glory,

let him be inspired by the greatest story ever told, Come on now MERICANS,

everybody SIN G

OHHH SAY CAN YOU SEE

BY THE DAWN'S EARLY LIGHT WHAT SO PROUDLY WE HAILED AT THE TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING

191

AND THE ROCKET'S RED GLARE

...

(at

this verse the mannikin chief begins to grind, rumble, and

whir, coming to life in somber inexorable Indian fashion, the bulbs in his eye sockets blink, his limbs and torso quiver and twitch, jerky at first, like an automaton, but

feeling for their own rhythm and motion, his electronic glands produce oil and moisture on his skin, his

jaws work slowly, he belches, farts, and burps, his alternating current begins to merge with his soul, he

speaks, halting sounds at first, then syllables, begins to chant, finding his rhythm-hi-yi-yi, hoy-yoy-yoy hi-yi-yi, hoy-yoy-yoy Everyone is amazed, the Sousa band squiggles raggedly, the singing falters and stops. The chief speaks: I njuns beware I there's hostiles out there I armed with guns, caps, and crackers I injuns beware I or, as Shakespeare says, I Holy Toledo, Amos, ...

,

his sword's out!

The speaker, recovering, is outraged at blasphemies against great music, America, Shakespeare, prosody, grammar, and The Radio Corporation of America.

Mannikin Chief continues to rumble and

whir, continues his verse, the audience is agape. Speaker has to get the audience back, hoarse stage whisper to assistant, "for Chrissake pull his plug, cross his

wires,

jam his circuits, do somethin," goes after audience

192

...

)

Don't you worry none about him, friends,

just

a little hitch in the

programmin. But

you see what I mean, we got

MERICANS,

ajob to do.

us

That's Old Glory (gestures to flag), that's the Star Spangled Banner, that's the country we love. Those

injuns don't like it here, they can go back to India, right folks? (audience still agape, even old faithful bread and butter routine can't get them back, speaker is desperate, goes into Mitch Miller sing-a-Iong

...

)

Let's have a little song friends and neighbors, a chorus of" Home on the Range,"

yessirreebob, this is the spot for that, right folks?

Maestro, if you please (Sousa band lurches into song, speaker waves his arms and sings) OH GIVE ME A HOME

...

Come on MERICANS,

let's hear it, OH GIVE ME A HOME it MERICANS

...

...

that's

WHERE THE BUFFALO

ROAM remember buffalo, friends and neighbors, it's like apple pie and mom and hay rides and moon andjune and spoon: buffalo, MERICANS, a fairy wonderland, like yesterday and tomorrow just a tourist attraction on the Old West Trail a picture postcard for the folks back home Now for you old timers, ...

...

...

a little chorus of"

...

Across

the Alley from the Alamo," remember that one, MERICANS, that one was a

biggie, a million seller, let's hear it,

ACROSS THE ALLEY FROM THE ALAMO, come on

193

everybody join in, LIVED AN INDIAN PONY AND A NAVAJO / AND

THEY VERY VERY RARELY / GAVE A

HI-DE-HO / TO THE PEOPLE PASSIN BY

...

ONE DAY THEY WENT A-WALKIN /

ALONG THE RAILROAD TRA·CK

...

/ TOOT-TOOT,

AND THEY NEVER CAME BACK

...

don't

you worry none about the redskins, MERICANS,

just a fairy tale, a Disney diorama on the Old West Trail marvelous, so life-like, they walk, they talk, they crawl on their belly like a reptile (nervous glance at Mannikin Chief), but ...

don't you worry none, MERICANS,

Toot-Toot, and they never came back

...

whereupon, sure enough, Mannikin Chief begins blinking and lurching, belching and farting; searches through his computer bank again for the right words, syllables first, hi-yi-yi, hoy-yoy-yoy hi-yi-yi, hoy-yoy-yoy, then phrases-The FBI in Peace and War, Mr. District Attorney, I Spy, Star Trek, Bonanza, Red Ryder (and Little Beaver), The Lone Ranger and his faithful Indian Companion (We're in trouble now, ,

Tonto. Whaddya mean we, white man!) I'm sorry I fucked up again Marshal DiDon: That's all right, Chester, you're the best friend a man ever had

...

all

hell breaks loose, the audience and the speaker are screaming, STOP HIM, STOP HIM, PULL HIS PLUG, SHOOT, SHOOT, SOMEBODY SHOOT HIM!

but all the ammunition is in Cambodia, and

Mannikin Chief at last finds his voice,

194

Injuns beware l there's hostiles out there hysteria: everyone screaming and shouting, ...

all the visiting dignitary generals in their doorman's uniforms are

unarmed, shouting commands,

Column to the right, Harch! Column to the right, TO THE RIGHT! the audience scrambles, Mannikin Chief is moving now, and chanting, at each step his

motion is more fluid, he grows, more and more

immense, great seven league strides,

he marches through the Lilliputian audience, out onto the prairies,

the skies open up, a great deluge, he scoops up a handful of mud, makes effigy of a horse, the horse comes alive, grows, an

Mannikin Chief mounts, takes hammer and chisel in his great hands, over his

slings a huge pouch of dry powder shoulder, and rides south toward the Black Hills where Crazy Horse waits to be reborn

...

195

Untitled piece FAYE SOBKOWSKY

My grandmother was a crematorium mother, but she was not the first of her kind. There have always been dead Jewish babies.

The windows of all the houses faced the courtyard. It was a Yiddish courtyard with plenty of Jews, beards choking in their mouths. Fedor the oldest Jew was without a blood bond. Fedor was

harmless. Mothers with children at their breasts said go

with Fedor, he will tell you stories.

The courtyard connected all the buildings. They were brick

buildings

with basements

bound

together by underground

tunnels. There grandpa Fedor slept and brought back the food the other Jews had given him. And it was to these underground tunnels that the children

were

drawn. These tunnels .

were

graveyards for children and this the children knew but still they were drawn.

TriQuarterly

197

Above in the houses facing the courtyard a Polish peasant woman

sells blueberries. She carries them in white porcelain

pots. Ask this peasant woman and she will tell you tales of Jews eating their children. Ask any Polish woman who giggles into her fist.

You see Fedor. You think he suffers hunger. You think he doesn't have such a fine place to sleep. Fedor carries a feather

pillow given to him by a baby. You think he has no pleasure.

That such an old man needs no pleasure? Fedor has plenty of presents. The children give him their crooked thumbs, they let him shear their soft baby hair.

Jewish children began to disappear that day long ago when the first Jew stumbled, hunger eating at his cheeks. The parents of the lost children cried but the other Jews said better this way, where can a Jew live, where can a man live whether he is a Jew or not? The wisest and most religious Jew of Poland

knew that the Jews nourished the killers of their children in their own courtyards. Polish peasants spoke no lies when they swore

they saw the Jews drinking blood but it was not Christ's

blood nor was it the blood of their own Catholic children. o come, Polish woman with empty porcelain pots, tell your secrets. Your horse moves quickly on a spring night. You see

Jewish children hungrily sucking the teats of cows while the cows lick their foreheads. You see skull caps all along the meadow where the cows have knocked them off baby heads. In

the morning there will be burnt turds in these places and you

will know again that the Jew is everywhere.

Fedor understands graveyards. He is afraid of them. He doesn't want to let his feet slip on the bones of his grandchil­ dren. Later the peasant woman will bring back news to her

village that another Jewish child has disappeared. But grand­ mother survived along with other children of that particular generation. Later she became the mother of brittle gas babies.

198

Work in progress w. B. SCOTT

In response to its

questionnaire about "novels in progress" TriQuarterly has received a rather "mixed bag" of answers, which it would be tedious

as

well

as

wasteful of space to

publish here in full.

Our thanks to all those-established

novelists, "hopeful" novelists, lecturers on the novel, graduate students and instruc­ tors with the big book about the novel, or about somebody's novels, on the fire-who took the trouble to fill out, SIGN, and return the questionnaire. As for those others-happily a minority-who returned it filled out with deliberately nonsen­ sical replies to the questions over which TriQuarterly's editorial board had taken such pains, or defaced by anonymous scrawled scurrilities on the order of "Some s--t!" or "Up yours!" TriQuarterly chooses to settle them with a calm and measured "Up yours too!"

(Appended to one sadly-defaced questionnaire was a letter from New York signed by forty-eight "New York novelists," and denouncing TriQuarterly for paranoid mid-westernism, TriQuarterly

199

reactionary prose. plagiarism. solipsism, and lack of daring. All the same. among those forty-eight names TriQuarterly's expert spotters could confidently recognize only two, Bodmer Tripp, whose "brilliantly savage. devastatingly funny, cruelly hilar­ ious" comic novels [Book Week] have won him increasingly­ larger advertisements in The New York Times Book Review, and self-confessed [in The New York Times Magazine] trans­

vestite masochist Marion Marion, "whose brilliant novella, Cratvl has already ..... [Playboy].) .

(Another letter, signed by eighteen hundred and twelve Upper Mississippi Valley poets between the ages of nineteen and twenty-six, attacked TriQuarterly for an alleged bias in favor of prose.)

The most ambitious-sounding of the many works in the questionnaire-category "Novels about novels" (with its sub­ category "Novels about novels about novels") is Seymour Thackeray'S A Diller a Dollar (the title teasingly evocative of a well-known nursery rhyme) in which we follow-or will follow, when the book is done-the "progress" of seventy-seven (a "magic" number?) academic novels across the length and breadth of the land-"Certainly," Seymour Thackeray asserts in a letter to TrlQuarterly, "but a tiny fraction of the number of such works actually being planned at any given moment-but my book is art, not history or sociology or statistics or journalism, and 'non mi lascia piu ir 10 fren del arte.' [Dante, Purgatorio, xxxiii, 141. Ed.] In a brilliant opening chapter, already in its fourth draft-yet not quite polished enough to merit publication in TrlQuarterly -Seymour Thackeray accompanies the rising sun on a mid­ May morning from Orono (Maine) to San Diego, at the same "

time that he "scans" the country spy-satellite fashion from border to border, looking in with "Old Sol" on each important

heavy or fitful slumber, alone, or beside a still sleeping bedmate, and plunges once again, before resuming the trivial day, into inventing, or delicately refining, in the early-morning stillness, more details character as he

or

for the novel-an 200

she wakes from

agreeable activity interrupted even more

agreeably from time to time by anticipatory thoughts of the reviews ("Astonishing!" "Dazzling!" "A triumph!" "Who said the novel was dead?"), or still more agreeably by visions of all those-colleagues. fools from other departments, presi­ dents, deans, ungrateful students, false friends-doomed to recognize themselves (and to be universally recognized) in personages fixed for all time by a precise art in ludicrous or shameful attitudes-intellectual, social, professional, sexual­ rich in complex implications; many an imagined reader (of these novels within Seymour Thackeray's novel, that is) would be hard put to it to avoid being reminded of, mutatis mutandis,

Dante's treatment of, say, the barrators. [Inferno xxi. Ed.] Of this multitude of characters, all of them with novels more­ or-less in progress, sketched out or partly set down on paper,

perhaps tucked away to "marinate" in desk drawers or filing cabinets, but most often the still-unwritten objects of these gratifying mental exercises on waking (or on sinking deliciously to sleep), or at odd hours of the day or night, most are professors (assistant rather than full or associate, although not invariably so), instructors, and graduate students of English (each with his or her dantean cum dickensian or jamesian or joycean or possibly proustian or perhaps nabokovian or even beckettian or EVEN burroughsian or for that matter barthian strategy), plus a few classicists of the new breed, i.e., lit'ry rather than philological in temperament, their canonical trans­ or

lations of Catullus out of the way, yet for one reason or another

(amusingly hinted at by Seymour Thackeray) not yet launched massive studies of Ezra Pound; modern-language teachers, "philosophers" (i.e., philosophy professors), plus a few house­ wives who have hung on to their college diaries and memories.

There are no scientists among them-is Seymour Thackeray too "elitist" in his notion that mathematicians and physicists, even when literate, to take out their prefer "hangups" in playing chess or the violin, or in purely vocal brawling or on

brooding or internecine slander, without the intense inner need of those who struggle and skirmish on the borders of literature to at least dream of getting it all down in

print?

201

The extremes in age among Seymour Thackeray's charac­ ters are:

(a)

professor of English who has for more than three a half been secretly-except for not-infrequent allusions to it at cocktail parties-rearranging his academic novel (its form, in his mind's loving caressing of it, infinitely expandable, as that of Finnegans Wake must have been during all the years when it was in progress) to accommodate new personages, or old ones revised, as ever-changing circum­ a

decades and

stances, fresh wounds and postures new, dictate; and (b) the ten-year-old daughter of an Associate Professor

of Marketing Analysis, who in the incessant musical-din of her little room is engaged in long long thoughts of a destructive and

punitive nature pointing almost obligatorily towards some sort of badly-spelled and grammatically-eccentric, yet crudely-en­ ergetic and vividly-circumstantial novel, academic by hap­ penstance rather than by design, only because her parents and their scarcely-less-detested friends, academic people all, are to be its central characters (after its youthful heroine).

Exactly half-way between these two in age, "nel mezzo del cammin di [sua] vita," and settled by Seymour Thackeray as close as possible to the geographical dead center of the United States, in an institution called Central U., Professor" AI" E. Gary (a name decidedly" Rothian" in its deliberate archness, but TriQuarterly has not been able to persuade Seymour Thackeray to improve on it) is, at the age of thirty-five (which birthday he celebrates just half-way through A Diller a Dollar) the "hopeful" author of a prospective three-volume academic

novel, in which he plans to trace the comitragic career of his hero, Professor Dan T. Vergehell, an English-teaching poet with tendencies towards drama and Compo Lit., from a paradi­ siacal childhood on a farm near Beatrice, Nebraska [on federal

highway 77 and site of the state institution for the feeble­ minded, according to a 1950s' Encyclopaedia Britannica. Ed.] to an infernal end when seized by botulism in the course of a crucial English-department meeting, especially convened by 202

Chairman "Ben" dello Intelletto to consider the bleak future of

literary studies at Central U. To be loaded with vivid narrative detail, of which specimens

provided us by Seymour Thackeray on behalf of his character, "AI" E. Gary, the novel will follow the intellectual, social, and sexual misadventures of Dan T. Vergehell and his colleagues, friends, and enemies, not only at Central U., but during the course of vacation and research-grant travels in such widely-scattered significantly-named places as Limbourg, Bel­ gium; Helmond, Holland; Foulness, England; Redernpcao, Brazil; and Purificacion, Colombia, although not in that order.

In the long letter already cited which accompanied his completed questionnaire, the outline of his novel, and the above-summarized fourth draft of chapter one, Seymour Thackeray wrote (in part): are

" ...

nothing autobiographical, of course, in any of my characters, their hangups are

their own-Madame Bovary n'est pas moil

..•

of course critics sure to

•..

have a few real grievances, as who doesnt (look at Dante! look at Swift!)

suppose I do wife says I

..•

dont complain enough, let them walk aU over me, but I hate to be what the French caU a

rouspeteur

••..

StiU I hope to Jesus to have A Diller a Dollar finished and in galleys no

later than next June, if [heavily underscored] the knot-headed son of a bitch [these last words written above

a

single tightly-cancelled obscenely-slanderous compound word]

who happens to be chairman of this f-----g department (I'd give a million bucks to know

just what goes on between he [sic] and the dean) ever has the decency (fat chance!) to face the fact that even way out here in whathe regards as the boondocks-he just never

got over Princeton and Haverford, I guess-the poor bastards in his chain gang have

simply got to have their teaching loads cut not to mention more full time off to do their own work whole business really a f-----g shame no secret of course that he manages to promote plenty of grants for himself not to mention leaves at full pay, also for the morons that suck up to him of course that Soot he publishes I guess everybody in America is aware that people with any brains stay in this place only because of the exciting scenery, fairly low rents, skiing, skin-diving, passable public schools, concerts, ballet, desert bird-watching, surfing, bobsledding, mountaln-climb­ ing, numerous airline connections, etc. etc I could my own kids, for example write a letter a hundred times this long, but certainly dont want to the give impression that I'm Personally, I couldnt care less, just laugh at all this, but .•.

...

.•.

•••

.••.

...

"

...

...

To'the heartfelt hopes implied in this communication Tri­ Quarterly is happy to subscribe an equally heartfelt" Amen!" while at the same time apologizing to Seymour Thackeray for

having yielded

prudent editorial impulse to slightly "prune" some of his more vigorous choices of words. to

a

203

The Minnesota

Multiphasic Personality: a diagnostic test in two parts A. B. PAULSON

(I) Name:

Last

(2) Social Security #:

First

(3) Sex:

Middle

(4) Permanent Address:

Street

City

(5) Position for which you an: aprl} mg:

State

Zip

This space for office use only.

A

B

Total

(Note: All prospective employees of the Drummand Fabricating Corporation are required to take the following examination. The results are used for placement purposes only and are strictly confi­ dential.)

The Director of Testing has supplied you with two sharpened pencils.

Use only these pencils in marking your test answers.

Fill in the information requested in the box above.

204

TriQuarterly

The examination consists of two parts: section A and section B. You are allowed one-half hour to

complete the entire examination.

If you think you have finished before the half-hour is up, please wait

quietly in your seat until the others are finished.

Section A

This is a test of your ability to read, comprehend, and evaluate written materials. Read each

paragraph below and then for each

question choose the answer that seems the BEST to you. Mark your selection by circling the letter ofthe answer you chose.

1. The stove was in the corner of the big room where we slept. From my bed across the room I would stare at the warm glow that crept

around the edges of its loose iron door. Some nights in October are cold, and you never know what the sound is that calls you out of

dreaming. Perhaps the geese, high overhead in the darkness crying to one another.

I was awake when he came home, heard the stove's door open and

shut, his boots on the hollow floor. I felt his coarse breath on my face as he bent over me.

I smelled the sweat and grime on his clothes as I huddled there perfectly still.

In this passage we learn that: A.

The narrator hates the man because he is dirty and coarse.

B.

The man suspects the boy has been spying on him and checks to see if he is

asleep.

C.

The father has been drinking and seeing another woman.

D.

The father kisses his son.

2. Genetic mutations in Drosophila M eianogaster may be

grouped visible, biochemical, and lethal. Visible mutations, both dominant and recessive, may involve an additive alteration in the organism's morphology (such as the development of the proboscis into a leg-like or structure), may reveal the loss of some essential function, such as the ability of the organism to recognize members of its own species. Biochemical mutations involve the loss of a specific metabolic function, such as the ability to synthesize essential enzymes. There may also be partial losses which inhibit the organism's normal patterns of behavior under conditions of unusual into three broad classes:

205

stress, such as altered temperature or pH. Lethal mutations cause the death of the organism.

We may infer from this passage that:

A.

Inversion of gene sequence within the chromosomes of Droso­

phila males often results in sterility.

B.

Visible mutations may not be subject to experimental observa­ tion because they involve perceptions internal to the organism itself.

C.

Some lethal mutations may involve partial losses of essential metabolic functions leading to partial death.

D.

The author has submitted test subjects to conditions of unusual stress.

3.

Among the Sioux it was customary for an adolescent male to fast alone and naked on the prairie awaiting the vision that would guide him into manhood. Geissling in 1934 recorded the case of a boy who, on

the fourth day, dreamed the Thunderbird dropped out of the sky

striking him with a bright flash. When the boy regained consciousness he made his way back to the village. He knew that a vision of the Thunderbird would oblige him to assume the role of heyoka, a sort of tribe jester who behaved clownishly for the amusement of the others.

When the time came to relate his vision to the elders, he told them that the moon had reached out to him offering in one hand a quiver of arrows, and in the other a bow. Somehow the older men knew he lied

for one of them said, "So the Thunderbird has struck you; already you are behaving foolishly." The boy could only answer yes. Then

they all had a good laugh together.

The author of this paragraph is illustrating how: A.

Telling lies will get you nowhere.

B.

Homogeneous cultures absorb deviant behavior by providing secondary roles.

C.

Anthropologists fill their technical writings with little stories.

D.

Fasting alone on the prairie will produce visions.

Speak the speech I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier had spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too

4.

on the tongue;

206

much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent,

tempest, and,

as

I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must

acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observ­ ance, that you overstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, that she may see her own occulted soul, which peeps from out the very rags and struttings of her image. This was sometime a paradox, to let your eye and tongue in this be hypocrites, while firm within your

bosom, thus, the inward man in hugger-mugger guides the guilded hand of broad abuse.

The best title for this reading passage would be: A.

"Don't overact"

B.

"Dialogue between self and soul"

C.

"To thine own selfbe true"

D.

"Hugger-mugger man"

5. Frescos

are paintings-usually with an egg tempera base-exe­ cuted on wet plaster. This intimate bond between the pigment and its

ground accounts for the surprising durability of frescos; their colors still appear brilliant after many centuries.

Painting on plaster that began drying as soon as it was applied imposed an unusual limitation on the fresco artist. He was forced to complete at one sitting small areas of his larger composition. A half­ finished fresco must have looked much like an uncompleted jig-saw puzzle. In fact, lines are still visible in completed paintings that mark the edges where the artist left off for the day and began the next with fresh plaster. These boundaries were disguised where possible by following the contours of objects or persons in the painting. In the famous creation scene in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, it is clear that the figure of God the Father, leisurely stretching out his hand, was painted at a different sitting than Adam, who reaches up to receive the spark of life. For just at that point where their fingers might touch, one can see a line dividing one plastered area from another.

207

On the basis of the information in this passage we can assume that: A.

The forms artists choose impose limitations of content.

B.

God and man belong to separate realms.

C.

A spark can jump a gap.

D.

Michelangelo was not afraid of heights.

Section 8

This part of the examination consists of 93 true and false questions.

Read each statement carefully and then circle "T" for "True" or "F" for "False." Because this is a psychological test some of the questions may sound unusual. Answer them all as best you can. You may now begin.

1.

TF

You have to meet people half-way.

2.

TF

A healthy person learns to laugh at his own foibles.

3.

TF

Sometimes I think the world has gone stale.

4.

TF

I am afraid of large machines.

5.

TF

I am afraid there is someone inside me.

6.

TF

I am discreet.

7.

TF

I am straightforward.

8.

TF

I have not made lewd faces at matrons descending

escalators.

9.

TF

I have lain awake at night thinking nothing in

particular.

10.

TF

I have had entire conversations with people only to

realize later that they had mistaken me for someone else.

11.

TF

I have had visions.

12.

TF

Bureaucracies are impersonal.

13.

TF

Doctors are dedicated.

14.

TF

Old dogs are unlikely to learn new tricks.

15.

TF

Someone has his eye on you.

208

16.

TF

I had a dog that never learned a single trick.

17.

TF

I have learned the trick of being straightforward.

18.

TF

We waited up for my father.

19.

TF

Some days I look at the examination booklets piled up on my desk and it fills me with loathing and I feel

distraught.

20.

TF

The supervisor posts lists of office rules above the water cooler.

21.

TF

Long division is not amusing.

22.

TF

I give the supervisor knowing looks.

23.

TF

He thinks I am a good worker but a little odd.

24.

TF

He is afoot.

25.

TF

I have clowned and brought joy into the lives of many fools.

26.

TF

One must take life with a grain of salt.

27.

TF

I have been drinking too much water lately.

28.

TF

Sometimes I find myself in situations where I am forced to say, "This is not life; this is someone' s idea of art.

29.

TF

"

I have worked in this office for five years and they

still mispronounce my name.

30.

TF

I have never told people my real name.

31.

TF

I am afraid of heights.

32.

TF

I have given myself a name that even I cannot pronounce.

33.

TF

I am a prince.

34.

TF

My mother was pretty ordinary.

35.

TF

Variety is the spice of life.

36.

TF

I asked her where babies came from and she told me a story about

chimneys and birds in the night.

37.

TF

I practice regular living.

38.

TF

I never practiced the piano.

209

39.

TF

That was a good sign.

40.

TF

Hordes oftiny flies live in my dresser drawer.

41.

TF

They feed on something in there.

42.

TF

I have abused my member.

43.

TF

I think it is a rotten fig.

44.

TF

I have heard voices in the night.

45.

TF

They told me I was special.

46.

TF

I have gone door to door naked on Halloween.

47.

TF

I have done nothing to discourage people from

thinking that I am a prophet in disguise.

48.

TF

I have stood in front of the mirror for hours until I no

longer recognize myself.

49.

TF

Someday I shall amuse everyone with my rubber mouse.

50.

TF

51.

TF

I have eaten spiders.

On the whole you could say that I am a pretty regular fellow.

52.

TF

Somewhere in the world there is another person

exactly like me.

53.

TF

If I ever met him I probably would not recognize him.

TF

54.

I once wore a pencil behind my ear for three months

hoping that it might be the sign of a secret society, and although no one ever gripped my hand in recognition, a neatly dressed man did wink at me once.

55.

TF

Never discuss your personal life with prospective

employees.

56.

TF

Time is running out.

57.

TF

People are beginning to call me fruity behind my back.

TF

58.

210

I have failed the test of time.

59.

TF

Life is tragic.

60.

TF

I am just waiting for the part that is called comic

relief.

61.

TF

Art is a necessary lie.

62.

TF

The Revelation is at hand.

63.

TF

He said, "What are you doing here?"

64.

TF

I didn't know the right answer.

65.

TF

He said, "I was testing you and I knew that you

followed me here."

66.

TF

I thought I had been testing him.

67.

TF

He and the lady had been drinking together.

68.

TF

He said, "You are a man now."

69.

TF

I said, "I wish you were dead."

70.

TF

I have hidden a fugitive and protected him with half-

truths.

71.

TF

Sometimes I wish all this weren't happening.

72.

TF

I'm tired of being a ship passing in the night.

73.

TF

More than once I've lost a shoe in a snowbank, and somehow I hopped home with one foot bare.

74.

TF

I'm tired of clowning for someone hidden inside me.

75.

TF

For all I know there's someone inside him.

76.

TF

I forbid him to write letters in color-crayon.

77.

TF

I'll try to face the past with honesty.

78.

TF

We waited up but he did not come home.

79.

TF

You can help me.

80.

TF

In the morning they came holding their hats in their

hands.

81.

TF

82.

TF

I can help you.

"He must have stumbled in the dark at the edge of

the quarry."

211

83.

TF

I have lain awake at night thinking of nothing in

particular.

84.

TF

I want to throw my popcorn box at the screen.

85.

TF

I will tell you my real name.

86.

TF

I will sing barbershop in the elevator.

8?

TF

I will let the grass grow under my feet.

88.

TF

I will tighten my belt.

89.

TF

The readiness is all.

90.

TF

I am throwing down the glove.

91.

TF

I will join the march oftime.

92.

TF

You will make a sign to me.

93.

TF

I can only meet you half-way.

212

Contributors ROBERT BOLES is the author of

two

previous novels, The People One Knows and Curling. He lives on Cape Cod where he is completing a third novel. His contributions to this issue include the poem that appears as a TriQuarterly book mark. JOY WILLIAMS' first novel State of Grace was published by Doubleday in 1973. Her short stories and articles have appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, and other magazines. She received a National Foundation for the Arts grant in 1973. and is at work on a second novel to be called

Taking Care. JOHN GARDNER's most recent novel, Nickle Mountain, is forthcoming in December. "The Warden" will be included in a collection of his tales to be published in the spring. VICTOR SKADE recently returned from military service in the Pacific. He is a member of the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa.

WILLIAM KITTREDGE teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana. He will spend the coming year as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His recent short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Iowa Review, Fiction, Antioch Review, and other

magazines. GEORGE CHAMBERS' novel The Bonnyclabber is available from December Press, Box 274, Western Springs, Ill. Recent work has also appeared in Northwest Review. He is currently Visiting Lecturer in English at Colby College. FAYE SOBKOWSKY graduated

from CCNY in 1973. She now attends New Mexico State University in Las Cruces where she is a graduate student in environmental sciences.

Her "Untitled Piece" in this issue is one of a number of such short

short stories that she has completed. JOSEPH McELROY is the author of four novels: A Smuggler's Bible, Hind's Kidnap, Ancient

History,

and the forthcoming Lookout Cartridge. GILBERT SORRENTINO has

published four novels, most recently Splendide-H otel, New Directions, October, 1973, and four books of poems. Black Sparrow will publish a comic masque excerpted from a novel in progress this winter. He is a

Guggenheim Fellow for 1973-74. JOHN BAKTI is a poet, painter. fiction writer, and translator. His publications include translations from the Magyar,4ttila Jozsef: Poems and Texts, Recent Hungarian Poets; poems of his own in a collection The Mad Shoemaker; and short fiction

in a number of magazines

including Fiction and The New Yorker. A

book of poems and a book of stories will be published soon. URSULE

MOLINARO is a poet, painter, fiction writer, translator, and playwright.

She has published three novels, a volume of poetry, and non-fiction

TriQuarterly

213

books on astrology and numerology. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of different magazines: Evergreen, Iowa Review, Cosmopolitan, Nell' American Review, Epoch, and others. Her translations include film

subtitles as well as fiction. drama. and poetry from French. German,

Italian. and Spanish. Her plays have been performed on and off

Broadway and published in a variety of magazines. She writes: "I paint as a reward. after finishing a piece of writing, or a translation. Oil on To our knowledge, wood. not unlike the Haitian primitives ROBERT BONAZZI does not paint. His fiction in this issue is a section "

....

from his novel, The Last Time I Howled at the Moon. Other sections

have appeared in Chelsea, Lillabulero, and Minnesota Review. He edits Latitudes Press from Brooklyn, where he writes and changes cat litter full-time. DAVID ZANE MAIROWITZ is American born, and has lived in England since 1966. Other stories have been published by Chicago Review and Penguin in Penguin Modern Stories. His plays, The Law Circus and Flash Gordon and the Angels, have been performed in

London, and That Was Laura, but She's Only a Dream has recently been produced in Los Angeles. An anthology of street manifestos and ephemera, BA M N was published in 1972 by Penguin. A book on the ,

American Left, The Radical Soap Opera, will appear in 1974. W. B. SCOTT is Professor of Dramatic Literature at Northwestern University.

Over the years he has occasionally thought about thinking about

committing an academic novel. Or tragedy. SAMANTHA LEVY attends King Lab Elementary School in Evanston, Illinois, where she is a member of two first-grade teams. the Firebirds and the Late Birds. She is the author of a number of "title" stories in the minimalist tradition, among them "Once I went to the zoo and I saw a tiger." "My Design " ...

is her first published work. PETER MICHELSON's publications

include The Aesthetics of Pornography, available from The Seabury

Press. and a volume of poems, The Eater, Swallow Press. His most recent poems have appeared in Chicago Review and The New Republic.

ELLIOTT ANDERSON has written a novel. Sleepwalker, and is writing a

second, Virginia Flynn. A. B. PAULSON teaches English at

Dartmouth College. His multi-dimensional story. "2," appeared in

Ongoing American Fiction I. TriQuarterly 26.

214

ELWOOD H. SMITH attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and

the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology. In 1970 he was a Citation

Award Winner in the Psychology Today Pollution

Contests, and in 1973 received first prize in Graphics and Drawings at the New Horizons Show in Chicago. He has exhibited at the 73rd and Vicinity Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, and will

Chicago

exhibit in a one-man show at the University of Illinois,

Champaign/Urbana, this winter. His The See + Hear + Smell + Taste +

Touch Book for children was published by J. Philip O'Hara in 1973.

His work is currently with Nancy Lurie Art, a Chicago gallery. Mr. Smith is also an accomplished country musician, plays the guitar,

clavichord, and lute, and once played lead guitar with Johnny Vitachik and the Thunder-Bay Polka Jacks.

Erratum: The editors wish to apologize for an error in the Table of Contents

for TriQuarterly27.

The essay on Ivanov credited to Vladimir Nabokov is by Vladimir Markov.

215

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NOT TO BE T1Q(EN FROM THE' LIBRAI'(

Contents of

John Gardner

this issue:

Ursule Molinaro

David Zane Mairo

Joseph McElroy Joy Williams William Kittredge Victor Skade Robert Boles Robert Bonazzi

George Chambers Elliott Anderson Gilbert Sorrentino

John Batki Samantha Levy Peter Michelson

Faye Sobkowsky W.B. Scott A.B. Paulson

Cover creature by Elwood H. S