Pages from a Cold Island

by Frederick Exley

  Almost immediately he will have left Oneida County and passed into Lewis County, then almost as quickly he will have moved up and into Talcottville, where if he is not speeding to get to—well, as an example—Alexandria Bay and the Thousand Islands resort area, where I’m play ing necrologist and putting down this “elegy,” he will be able to get a glimpse of Wilson’s stone house. From the rise on which the stone house sits, the road dips almost immediately, crosses the very narrow bridge spanning the Sugar River, then rises up the twisting and treacherous northern approach to the bridge. If the traveler safely negotiates this unfortunate twisting rise he comes to Locust Grove and Potters Corners (here the road to the west leads to Constableville, where Wilson often dined at the hotel in the Parquet Room) and up into Turin, where they ski and where Wilson, in the off-season when the skiers weren’t in rowdy residence, often drank at the Towpath Lodge and chatted with its owners, Klaus and Mignonne Heuser. From Snow Ridge one motors to Houseville and up into Martins-burg (all I ever think of moving through these hamlets is interminable and harshly inclement winters and illicit sexual mores among towheaded inhabitants), and at the latter one begins a miles-long descent into the idyllic, shaded, brick and clapboarded village of Lowville, the county seat of Lewis County, where one again picks up the main Route 12 north to Watertown, Lake Ontario, the Thousand Islands, and Canada.

  Save by natives like myself this alternate route isn’t much traveled, and I suspect few have traveled it for my motive: hoping to see a car in Wilson’s front yard and thereby draw sustenance from the knowledge that Wilson was once again in residence and still putting down words. To upstaters the alternate route—we call it the “high road” —is known to be four miles shorter, a good deal less pa trolled by state police, and hence in our journeys to and from Utica, where one picks up the New York State Thruway and comes together with what I’ve always insisted is “the rest of the world,” we feel we can make better time and travel with immunity from speeding tickets. As I am most familiar with the road I have often traveled it at a break neck and lunatic seventy miles an hour, braking only at the hamlets, the insidious approaches to Sugar River, and at Wilson’s stone house.

  On a brilliant blue Sunday morning in early July, three weeks after Wilson’s death, I was standing in front of Kramer’s Pharmacy in Boonville, leaning my elbows on a parking meter, and looking across the way at “my” hotel, the Hulbert House. At nine-fifteen the sun was already relentless, the humidity oppressive, and I was upset by a number of things and growing more uneasy by the moment.

  Driving down from Alexandria Bay I had stopped at Wilson’s stone house, empty now, and to my sorrow had discovered Wilson had at long last lost his battle with the State of New York. For a number of years he had fought the State’s attempts to eliminate those treacherous approaches to Sugar River. To do so entailed building an elevated widened span across the waters and for the bridge’s southern approach it would be essential to take a large piece of Wilson’s sloping front lawn. Wilson had retained counsel to put his case. Over the years I’d read some pieces in local newspapers about the controversy, and I’d been told by John B. Johnson, editor and publisher of the Water-town Times, that in a majestic snit Wilson had once come to his Watertown offices and tried to get him to enlist the rhetoric of his editorial pages in behalf of saving Wilson’s lawns. I don’t know what briefs Wilson’s counsel invoked, or the case Wilson put to Johnson. No doubt Wilson took the position that America On The Move could goddam well stay on the main road where it belonged; probably Wilson felt the already harassed taxpayers’ dollars were being used to duplicate a perfectly good main highway; perhaps, with Johnson, Wilson even became chummily provincial by pointing out that the alternate route was used only by natives—that is, used by “us,” Wilson and the rest of us.

  But Wilson had lost this, perhaps his penultimate battle; the State had forced its right to eminent domain; and on this hot Sunday morning on the soft scarred earth above the Sugar River the bulldozers sat at Sabbath idleness. To accommodate the bridge’s southern approach a large sec tion had been taken from Wilson’s front yard. The stone house now sat somewhat astonished-looking almost atop the highway, and workers had built a white cement curb nearly as high as a cottage’s picket fence on the east and north sides of the house. In Upstate Wilson had rued the hoodlum motorcyclists and snowmobilers cutting kitty-corner across his yard and ruining his ferns, and if for nothing else one had to be grateful that the curbs would now prevent this. The house looked run down, its trim badly needed painting, and I knew if the house were to be saved someone—how I wished it could be me!—would have to spend considerable money and begin immediately. From the amount of work already completed on the bridge’s approaches and the tons of earth moved to support them, it was apparent that in the last days of his illness Wilson had to put up with not only the rain but the noise of the bulldozers. It was a pathetic irony. It couldn’t have escaped Wilson that the bureaucracies he had fought all his life could not be thwarted in their “missions” (what one would give for his dying words on those bulldozers and that white cement curb!). In the end, at Talcottville, not only couldn’t Wilson flee that America with which he had been on distressing terms for so long but in the name of a concept he deplored, “progress.” that America had brought its earthmovers and concrete within spitting distance of his doors.

  In my pilgrimage south to bid Wilson adieu—from what I’d read every other writer in America was going to Miami to rub elbows and sip martinis with Ms. Steinem and Mr. Mailer and to articulate the cause of Senator George McGovern—I’d come to Boonville to meet Mrs. Mary Pcolar (puh-KÓL-ar), Wilson’s last great “passion.” Dur ing the week Mrs. Pcolar worked at Kramer’s Pharmacy. It’d been there she’d first met Wilson a dozen years before, and she’d suggested the drugstore as our obvious meeting place. But it was now approaching nine-thirty, and she was already half an hour late. I was wondering if we’d under stood each other correctly, and recalling what the state had done to Wilson’s yard I was growing more restless by the moment. To kill time I bought the New York Sunday Times; in the book review I read Wilfred Sheed’s nice reminiscence of Wilson; in the back of the review in “The Last Word” Wilson was himself represented by a piece he’d writ ten for The New Republic in 1928, “The Critic Who Does Not Exist.” In it he called for some enlightened criticism of contemporary writers, a chore that at his death he himself had not undertaken for years. It was too hot to read in the car, so I read sitting on the cement steps leading into the pharmacy. On finishing these articles I got up, brushed the dirt from my pants, balanced the fat Times on the con vex top of a mailbox, and placed my elbows on a parking meter and waited.

  Almost everyone who entered the store came out with the Sunday newspapers, but only a few had the Times, most of them having bought the Rome and Syracuse papers and the New York Sunday News. One woman with le tags signifying she was down from Lewis County pulled up and parked, went in, and came out with the Times, three or four crossword-puzzle magazines, and a carton of Pall Malls, obviously literate and in for a leisurely day.

  I said, “There’s a wonderful piece about Mr. Wilson on page two of the book section.”

  Startled, she said, “Pardon?”

  I repeated myself, adding, “You know Mr. Wilson—the writer from Talcottville.” To my embarrassment the woman said, “Oh?” Then she giggled self-consciously.

  Up and down the pavement behind me a stupendously moronic-looking girl kept walking back and forth, back and forth. She had on dirty beige hip-huggers and a cerise tank shirt under which she wore no bra, allowing her sturdy, youthful and provocative tits to sway back and forth. Her hair was lank with dirt. She was cross-eyed. Her comings and goings behind me were so aimless, and so obviously did she have great pride of hip movement and such devoted affection for her own swaying, pulpous tits, that one couldn’t doubt she was the town fuck and an idiot into the bar gain. For years I’d been cognizant of her in these upstate villages, the gi
rl who ripens at eleven and by thirteen has the farm boys taking her out into the pastures, settling her on her knees among the cowpies, and jamming their up-country throbbing pricks into her jaws.

  To me there was something obscenely inappropriate about her, something that clashed hideously with the “sacredness” of my pilgrimage, and I tried to concentrate on “my” hotel across the way. But the Hulbert House also looked run-down. I thought that if I were ever coming into that mysterious patrimony that would allow me to restore it, I’d have to come into it soon, and in exasperation I walked across the street, turned my back on the hotel, and watched the front door of Kramer’s for Mrs. Pcolar. In Upstate Wilson had included a picture of her, her husband George, and her children. I’d studied the picture and was sure I’d have no difficulty recognizing her. It was getting on to a quarter to ten, the sun was high and the humidity stifling, abominable for that time of morning in that part of the country. And I was tired, anxious and irritable.

  In a big styrofoam container on the back seat of a borrowed Pinto I had provisions for a magnificent picnic and I prayed the heat would not wreak its despoliation. The night before I’d filled two Mason jars with water and put them into the freezer but that morning discovered the expanded ice had cracked both of them—and these ac cursed jars had been sold for precisely this purpose!—and to keep my delectations cool I had to settle for the cubes from a single tray (naturally only one was full) dumped into a plastic bag. Unable to sleep but a wink (I’d been as nervous as if I were going to meet The Great Man himself!), my picnic got altogether away from me. To pass the hours from two a.m., when I gave up all hope of sleeping, I prepared four big chicken breasts with Shake ‘n Bake only to discover that this took less than forty-five minutes. In the pantry I then found two boxes of premixed ingredients, one for banana bread and another for a chocolate marble coconut cake. For the bread, one had to add a splash of milk and two medium-sized bananas. I put in six small bananas, then mixed up everything in the electric blender for an hour until the texture was as lubricious as a cheerleader’s cunt. As both the bread and the cake demanded the same oven temperature I could have baked them simultaneously, but to kill time I did them separately. On completion the bread looked a masterpiece.

  I put it on the sideboard to cool, then went eagerly —a little dementedly, I think—after the chocolate marble coconut cake. For this I had only to add milk, but I found two tins of shredded coconut and to heighten the artificial flavor poured these in. To adorn the cake I found a pint can of Hershey’s Dutch chocolate frosting. On the cooled and sliced banana bread I spread cream cheese and made a half-dozen sandwiches, wrapped them individually and ever so neatly in wax paper, and put them in the refrigerator against the moment I’d have to load the styrofoam hamper. In a pint plastic container I put radishes and celery, in another a pound of medium-old Cheddar cheese cut into delicately edible bits. Then with a flourish I frosted the chocolate marble coconut cake with the Dutch chocolate frosting, scraped out the can with a knife, licked the knife, and cut and wrapped four wedges of the cake. I located half a dozen apples, a bunch of grapes, and four cans of diet (a nice touch, that!) black raspberry soda.

  Was this going to be enough? Better not take a chance, I thought. By then I was absolutely loony with industry. So anxious was I to make this gesture to the ghost of Wilson that I’d begun to resemble the proverbial mad chef preparing dishes for that joker Jackie Kennedy! I decided to make a couple of my famous tuna fish, chopped hard-boiled egg and onion sandwiches, the kind I’d made for Ms. Steinem. As tartly as a maiden aunt I then primly excised the crusts from some slices of white bread (which I hadn’t dared do for Gloria, thinking it much too frivolous for The New Woman), and with the mixture made three of these sandwiches, wrapped and put them in the refrigerator. There was no room left in the refrigerator—it had begun to “swell.”

  I would have very much liked to make cucumber sandwiches but didn’t know how. In English novels people were always sitting about sipping tea, nibbling at cucumber sandwiches, and saying marvelously subtle and witty things. But no English novelist had ever told me how to make such a sandwich—whether one simply sliced the cucumbers, chopped them up with mayonnaise and salt and pepper, or what. Then I started to chuckle. I was thinking how nice it would be if some brilliant Limey like Anthony Burgess or John Fowles annotated, with lengthy footnotes and for Americans only, an entire English classic, something of Dickens or Jane Austen, and straight-facedly detailed just such British cultural hang-ups as the proper preparation of a cucumber sandwich. In exhaustion and laughter I then lay down on the couch until it was time to go. When I started to pack the styrofoam container I discovered the Mason jars were cracked.

  “Shee-it!” I spat the word into the back of my teeth and grudgingly settled for my single plastic bag of cubes.

  My thinking was to take Mrs. Pcolar up behind the stone house to Flat Rock on the Sugar River where Wilson had himself picnicked for seventy years, to spread out a blanket, to settle all comfy down, perhaps in the yoga position, to nibble all afternoon on my lovingly prepared good ies, and to let Mrs. Pcolar talk while I scribbled on my yellow lined tablet. I don’t know what I was after, certainly not an “article.” I knew I wanted to take something of Wilson to carry with me, and I thought that in Mrs. Pcolar’s laughter, her tears, some gesture, a tilt of the head, a coy shrug, some expression, grave, lightsome, even perhaps an imitation of Wilson—that in something meaningless to her I might abstract a piece of Wilson, however fleetingly minute, and in all the days ahead carry that abstract with me against my needs.

  For the last dozen years of his Talcottville life, Mrs. Pcolar, a lovely Hungarian-American, acted as Wilson’s amanuensis. She was his summer secretary. She was his drinking, dinner and movie companion, his occasional chef. Having helped him learn Hungarian, she was his teacher. She was forever his pupil, Wilson never abdicating his role as one-man faculty. She was his “niece” Mariska; to her he was Kedves Ödön Basci, Dear Uncle Edmund. To describe her in Upstate Wilson used the Hungarian ezermester, master of a thousand arts. Mrs. Pcolar was also Wilson’s concern, his “problem,” and in those pages he wrote, “I never leave Talcottville nowadays without an un comfortable feeling of never being able to do justice to my relation to Mary Pcolar.” Most of all Mrs. Pcolar was Wilson’s friend. He sent her valentines, enclosing in one a handmade black paper butterfly which, on winding up a rubber band, was supposed to fly but didn’t. In the center of a gilt-framed heart one read, “I declare by this EPISTLE,” and overleaf, “That I’m yours should you but whistle.” Beneath the verse a red plastic whistle was attached. That also didn’t work. On her birthdays she received cards. “Happy Birthday to someone who’s TOPS in my book!!” And on opening the card, and in obvious reference to Memoirs of Hecate County, “Of course my book has been banned in several states.” As he did to all of his close friends, he sent her at Christmas the booklets of light verse and nonsense he composed and had specially printed for the season:

  A dizzy old duchess named Sarah

  Designed a delightful tiara.

  It was made of live shrimps,

  Alternating with imps,

  Who sometimes tormented the wearer.

  On Mother’s Day he took her and her family to dinner at the Fort Schuyler Club in Utica and to memorialize the occasion inscribed the menu with a suitable sentiment. He wrote her from Wellfleet, from Cambridge, from the offices of The New Yorker, from Lillian Hellman’s New York apartment. He wrote from Israel, from Budapest, from Paris, and in the last winter of his life from Naples, Florida. On his last visit to Paris he petulantly complained that he was going to stay in his hotel room for the duration of his stay because Paris had changed so and the women no longer wore “pretty gowns.” From Florida in that last winter he wrote that he couldn’t abide being around old people. He was seventy-six. More amusing than anything, as though he were a just-published first novelist, he sent Mrs. Pcolar xeroxed copies of reviews of his books with
arch notations to the effect that the reviewer may even have read the book.

  As it got on toward ten, the sun was becoming increasingly merciless. My upper lip was coated and perspiration made its way in rivulets down the small of my back. Now certain I’d come on the wrong day, I was intently watching the front of the store when I detected something that stopped my heart. Across the facade at the top of the store was a yellow and red Coke sign bearing the name SANFORD DRUGS, and it struck me abruptly that I wasn’t even at the right place! Nervously I stepped a few paces down the street to get a different perspective but, sure enough, coming out perpendicularly from the Coke sign and suspended above the walk was a white wooden sign on which in black letters was the legend KRAMER’S PHARMACY.

  When at almost that very moment a profusely apologetic Mrs. Pcolar arrived, I asked her straightaway about the store’s dual identity. She laughed and said it had been Mr. Wilson’s doing. (Throughout the day Mrs. Pcolar was never to refer to him as anything but Mr. Wilson: “I never did in life. Why should I in death?”) Cognizant of how little given to change we upstaters are, Kramer had retained the name of the previous owner, Sanford, when he acquired the store a dozen years before. Wilson, however, knew Kramer to be the new owner and in his finickiness that things be properly called had refused to bestow on the store anything but Kramer’s Pharmacy, always using both words, as though down the street there existed the possibility of a conflict with KRAMER’S SALOON or KRAMER’S WHOREHOUSE. Mrs. Pcolar, who had gone to work there shortly after Kramer took over, told him of Wilson’s stolid insistence; and in what one suspects was a larksome mood Kramer said if it was KRAMER’S PHARMACY to Mr. Wilson it had indeed to be Kramer’s pharmacy: hence the new sign appended to the old, a gesture whereby Kramer didn’t alienate the old-timers by removing Sanford’s name. I love these upstate* villages, and the unreasoning vestedness of their inhabitants, and on hearing this I laughed loudly.