Marshall and Lydia rode in a flood of daytime across the plains to Chicago. Summer had ended. They went through the gin car of beetlelike old men in black suits, train-bound salesmen more constant than Faradays Law and no less corrupt than Egyptian referees. Lydia was so beautiful and suntouched that the gin-car men saw her as if she were a woman, and they were ominously silent when she passed. Marshall was ready to fight, and would have thrown them out the window even though they were twice his size. She blushed and pushed through the air crowded with leers and what she didn’t want. They reached the back of the train and stood at the folding gate.
Wheat. Gold oceans. It smelled red and rich, full of life. The track clatter knocked them together rhythmically. They had to hold on to stay up. The end of the train whipped back and forth with wonderful sinew, pushing them closer. And they held each other tighter and tighter, until they pressed hard from head to toe and could feel one another’s bodies and an entire hot clean summer passing through in an echo. They began to tremble. It was as if they were mixing. Electricity lashed around them as bright and sharp as the fleeing silver lines. The train was propelled in a hoarse power glide across the percussive flatlands. They ran through stations and claxoned crossings in a wheel of speed, continuing forward. Their hands were entwined. He put his lips against her light auburn hair.
7
WHEN THEY pulled into Union Station in Washington the children got off the train weary and dazed, staggering on sea legs, streaming through the gates to enormous rooms where many parents waited. Those continuing north or south engrouped at food stands and sat hooked up to orange sodas and ice cream floats, the straws sticking into them almost intravenously. In one corridor dusty with age Marshall saw to his amazement a tattered poster of Smokey the Bear, on which someone had written: This bear is a communist.
Marshall went to Lydia. She was with a group of girls on an enormous wooden bench. They dangled their legs and spoke in a variety of accents. The end of that season was a special marker in their lives, and they had no choice but to grow up steadily and seldom look back. “Looka here,” said Katy Barnow, a very tiny girl who resembled a field mouse, “Marshall the horse rider. I know why he's here.” By some unwritten code, he was not supposed to show interest in girls. When he appeared, they held up their end of the bargain by acting put upon or coy. All but Lydia, who felt her heart rise uncontrollably with his. They knew her train would leave in twenty minutes. As they walked to the fountain in front of the station they felt that curious inhibition which rises between men and women when there is real love.
In the plaza around the fountain planted thick and treacherous with pink and white roses (the marble itself a sparkling white and alabaster as blue water passed over it), a high afternoon sun lit the great transom and shone in their eyes as if from a polished silver shield, obscuring much of the inscription, and illuminating some. They pieced out alternately and aloud that which the light illumined and did not hide: Fire. Greatest of discoveries, enabling man to live ... and compel ... Electricity, carrier of light and power, devourer of time and space ... greatest servant of man, itself unknown. Thou hast put all things under his feet,...bringer of life out of naught. The farm. Best home of the family, main source of national wealth, foundation of civilized society, the natural providence.
In the train shed the reticulated vault was covered with half a century of soot. Leafy black patterns were engraved on the grated glass. A long row of cast-iron gates divided the room. Marshall was to wait another hour after Lydia left for the South. The noise and steam were deafening and white. The heat poured from above. They could smell the iron above and see black columns disappearing down the platform in a row like telephone poles on the prairie ... tremendous excitement. Her train pushed vapor from under its skirts. She did not want to go. Red caps and pigeons flashed in the periphery of their vision, lines of luminescent color. Steel rails and steel wheels squealed and the sound echoed by and by. She was already beyond the bars. He would wait until empowered and then seek her out. He loved the way she spoke, the way that she was not quite confident in herself, and yet was the very best. He would find her and then they would marry, or rather, resume the marriage which had begun in trains and pine forests and by a rattling iron gate.
He put his head through the bars, noting that they were wide enough to allow an embrace but nonetheless would block passage. They did embrace. He thought he saw in her face the moment for which he had been born. More whistles and vast exhalations echoed in the train shed. The scale and geometry were overwhelming, for not only had time stopped, but past and future were brought together, and in a great spherical infusion they faced one another falling deeper and deeper in love, uncontrollably, like travelers to the earths center falling through layers and layers of inferno. Then she stepped back into a beam of hot white light alive with dust, and he saw no more. All was suddenly a roseate flash, a waterfall of light and black. When he could again see, she was gone, and he felt his fists clenched painfully around the hard iron which had held him up.
IV. HIGH VIEW
1
IN THE dead of winter (and in those days there were indeed winters) the entire Eagle Bay School set together in wondrous precision to present Iolanthe. If the French socialist La Fournier had ever had a point in favor of his judgment that society’s more unpleasant tasks (such as cesspool cleaning, dishwashing, and ditch digging) could be joyfully completed by adolescents and enthusiastic children, it was here illustrated. To be close to the players, the younger students eagerly did all the dirty work, and thought it a privilege. They mixed paint for the flats as if they were concocting hydrogen bombs, they pushed brooms across the stage as if they had just returned triumphant from Gaul, and they took out the garbage with the gait and expression of silent movie heroes.
There were several older girls in the chorus for whom Marshall would gladly have thrown himself off the high grid. The elegance of their costumes under strong stage lights, and the music, dancing, and color intoxicated him. To be even momentarily accepted by them as a junior, an apprentice, was beyond ambition. When occasionally it occurred, he was elated for days. For instance, to be close enough to Suzanne to smell her makeup, look at her hair sweeping downward over her shoulders, and see in the intense lights an expanse of purple hose as she did turns to the music was better even than long life.
Young stagehands (officiously directed by older boys who were socially unacceptable and so turned to the ropes, lighting boards, fishy paint, and high ladders) scurried about making examples for one another of their prowess at skimming catwalks a hundred feet up, riding sandbags from one grid to another, and manipulating the rheostats of the lighting board like Atlantic submarine captains. They imagined that the girls in the chorus were watching. They were not, but rather were hoping that they themselves were being observed from beyond the footlights. And if they were aware at all of the little stagehands it was as midget footmen in a well-defined hierarchy, monkeys in gray and brown swinging above them as counterweights to their own fantasies.
But the monkeys of the upper galleries, in love and outcast, watched these lovely young girls, mouths open and eyes gawking from between ropes and belaying pins, charged glances traveling instantaneously downward onto the tempestuous color-filled stage. The girls’ hopes went outward to the darkened auditorium, and the music and heat sailed up into the gray winter air.
Marshall lay back against brick and iron on a platform seventy-five feet off the ground. He was alone there, resting unobserved, and he felt like a bird in a tree at a nighttime garden party. But unlike the bird, he was thinking about what had been said in a class just before he put on his work clothes and climbed into the ropes. As was often the case, the teacher had ridiculed someone for liking that which was in bad taste, common, cheap. Arguments against it were strong. It was a short, bad poem by someone who had probably died immediately after writing it. But Marshall found himself pulled toward it, in defense of the indefensible and harmless, a strange combin
ation which could boil him like a pot of tea.
He watched as the teacher formed a collection of students welded together against what they had been told was contemptible. But what then of the Irish woman and her grandchild Marshall had seen on Dyckman Street in upper Manhattan. He had gone to buy a fencing foil in a sword store. It was Saturday in winter with the snow packed onto the streets and the jingle of chains from municipal vehicles, and gusts of cold and colder air coming from the parks, from around the corners, and from the wooded snow-covered Palisades. The woman was great and fat and must have weighed 300 pounds. Her coat fit her like a tarpaulin slung over a Volkswagen. She had gum shoes and striped socks, a kerchief was drawn over her head, and she wore alabaster-colored glasses with thick lenses. The material of her coat was so cheap that Marshall could see the cold traveling through it. And her grandson of three or four was bundled in thin single-stitched cloth; an earmuff hat which covered his little head had slipped back. Marshall passed them as they stood in front of a religious articles store, its window crammed with garish unholy implements. The grandmother held the child’s hand and pointed to one of the plaster castings, saying: “Look. Isn’t it beautiful? A beautiful statue. Beautiful.”
What would his classmates and the teacher have said about that? By absolute standards it was indefensible, and yet even if the love which the woman had for the plaster statue were formulaic, automatic, and artificial, it was all she had, and because of that the indefensible gained a great power and came up behind arguments assembled against it. It was all she had and she approached it with dignity and love, and as the little boy’s hand stroked the cold window, learning the lines of an object of beauty, Marshall felt a strong bond. Sitting on his high platform shielded by darkness and beams of bright lights, he thought that not everyone can be schooled rigorously in art, not everyone can be lean and aristocratic, not everyone can win. But he would. And if he failed, he expected to die rather than live an uncharmed life. No Dyckman Street for him, and no contempt for it either, if he could keep his distance.
He stood up and looked across a dark chasm separating him from another, larger platform. The distance was about four feet down and four feet laterally—not excessive for a jump except in view of the considerable drop. One of the dancers below was staring past the hot lights into the darkness, and thought that she had seen a form sailing above her in the black. She had, and Marshall stood on the larger platform, his heart beating ferociously.
Humiliated in the role of monkey, imagining heroic action on the stage below, determined to be efficient and brave among the cables and pulleys, and always aware of the snow falling outside covering the ground and the dark English trees, he was momentarily sustained by the clocklike mechanism of the play—its form and discipline being love in counterpoint. The production was out of phase, awkwardly directed, bursting with energy. In a theater flooded with white light and washed-out pastels, they were all entranced. It got dark early then, and yet they often stayed until midnight. They danced below. The snow danced past the darkened windows.
2
MARSHALL WAS extremely restless. He was, of course, still a virgin, and as such driven to unspeakable fits of temper and longing. Who but a young virgin boy would walk many miles through thick brush and untraveled woods (even in the middle of winter) with the hope of coming upon a nude and lascivious widow-instructoress? He could not learn Latin, because Virginia Boar, a red-haired beauty fond of clothing with a revealing cut, sat (and bended, and stretched, and turned) in front of him in each class. The Latin teacher was afraid for Marshall. She thought that he had heart disease, because he often broke into cold sweats, and hot sweats, during which his face would become purple or red and his eyes would float upward in their sockets as he seemed to lose consciousness. He tried not to look at Virginia, but got a crick in his neck. Then he brought a bag of herbs into class, thinking that if he smelled it he would defuse his lust. Every few minutes he would take deep draughts from his herb bag.
“What is that, Marshall?” asked the Latin teacher.
“It’s an herb bag, Mrs. Vouvoulis,” he answered, dreading what he knew must follow, because he never lied in important confrontations.
“What in heaven’s name is it for?”
He hesitated, but there was no way out. “It defuses lust.”
Virginia Boar gave a long wanton sigh, and Mrs. Vouvoulis made poor Dinario Maravedis, the son of the barber, stand in front of the class and recite the declension of oppidum at the top of his lungs.
As if anticipating great changes he tried in still feeble ways to precipitate their occurrence. His experience and reading suggested that disease and sickness were weighty and majestic phenomena which imparted great wisdom. He tried therefore to catch impressive diseases. Once, he took off his clothes and stood in the snow for half an hour. He went to the filthiest restaurants in search of typhoid and botulism. He rode the train to New York to nap in garbage cans. He went to Times Square in search of syphilis but could not find her. He volunteered for medical experiments at more than a few hospitals but was too young. No matter what he did, he remained uninfected.
He dreamed of a time when the confusion and fear of adolescence would vanish in deference to understanding, excitement, and the flow of events. He thought that it would be like a mist lifting to show a sparkling city, or green mountains where every leaf on every tree was visible. He turned from searching out disease to the railroad and the river, where he could be close to danger and, by surviving, experience the changes which he thought might help to give him an adults power and compassion.
Running along the railroad tracks which separated Eagle Bay from the river was a swamp of reeds and cattails through which muskrats, snakes, and spiders ran and burrowed in loam and mud. To gain wisdom, Marshall crawled on his belly through this swamp for about a mile and a half. He went in a straight line, crashing within the reed banks, where he frequently surprised quiescent muskrats and sunning snakes. When he came upon dead insects he ate them. After several hours he emerged entirely covered with stinking mud, gashes, cuts, puncture wounds, stings, and slime. His left eye was swollen, and his muscles were sore. Mrs. Livingston repressed her horror and asked where he had been.
“Just hanging around the village,” replied Marshall.
In winter he rode ice floes on the river, teaching himself gradually in the shallows their characteristics and capabilities. Eventually, he was able to hop from one to another, in blue water. His only tool in this was a long pole with a spike at the end, which he used to maneuver and to secure his stance and, when the water was shallow, to push himself back to the beach. Knowing the currents (after heart-pounding experimentation in which he was often convinced that he would be carried down the January river out to sea), he rode the ice sometimes a mile into the bay, but was always swept back to shore. The danger was that currents and winds would vary, and that his chunk of ice would break up beneath him. But he had a good feel for piloting and traveled many numbing miles on those white rafts, never even wetting his foot.
Sometimes the river froze all the way to the channel, where icebreakers kept it open. Above windblown river ice covered with crescents of snow were clouds of rushing powder like the atmosphere of Venus, howling past the hard mirror below at the behest of Canadian winds which scourged the valley. Once he stood alone in the middle of the frozen plain and looked shoreward. It was not the same as being in a boat, for then he was constantly busy with shrouds and tiller, and here he simply stood, legs planted in the rushing polar vapor, looking at his home on the hill and the woods he knew so well. Downriver, a moving line of confetti appeared, winding along the bank. It was a long freight, at a distance like a dragon of Chinese New Year—scaled and colorful, jointed, and yet smoothly traveling. Entrapped in a frozen moment of white and ice he saw the train come between him and Eagle Bay. He heard the rumbling, and felt the ice quiver and snap in response, as if a high-tension cable had parted. The cars were brightly lit by the sun, which had come low
down and unexpected through a bank of lateral gray clouds, robbing it of its silver. It was cold and thunderous. The ice quaked. He wanted, like most of those his age, to leave. To his shock and surprise, he did.
Livingston was a little mad, as restless himself as an adolescent, and quite rich. He hated winter, for when he had returned from Arizona he had fallen through the ice on a lake in a Newark park, and remained up to his neck in the freezing waters until a brave, bearded policeman had pulled him out. One day Livingston told Marshall that he would not be going to school for a while.
“For how long a while?” asked Marshall.
“For a year or two,” said Livingston.
They closed up the house, lent out the horses and dogs, had a last dinner in the cold North (the dinner consisted of roast chicken, potatoes, watercress salad, champagne, and chocolate mousse), called up a few goodbyes, slept fitfully, and then one silent winter morning left for several years in the British West Indies.
3
THE NEW British jet quickly rose to 40,000 feet. Livingston suggested that they anesthetize themselves over the Atlantic and then, when the magnesium-white plane reached the Caribbean, wake up with steaming pots of tea. An informal vote was taken from Marshall at the window to Mrs. Livingston on the aisle, and a steward brought a tray upon which were nine glasses of champagne—four for Livingston, three for Mrs. Livingston (who did not protest), and two for Marshall. These were regular-sized wine glasses, not the disc types, and before long Marshall was enjoying the monotony of the engine’s roar, content to sit still for several hours as the plane traversed a gray Adantic—threatening in winter even to those high above it. Comfortable and warm, Marshall remembered the other time he had partaken of the drink.