The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  It would have been further serendipity if April 23 marked your leaving this burgh, but it was simply the day you left the mansion; another day would pass before you could get out of town.

  Late that afternoon, you stuffed everything you owned into the one pasteboard suitcase that you had arrived with: your few books, the manuscript of Geordie Lad (all except for the chapter that the professor had not returned), your little radio, and your few books, including the songbook, the Russian-English dictionary, and the two Nabokov novels. You cleaned out your room as you had cleaned out your office, and you folded the murphybed up into the wall. All that remained were the four volumes of I.’s novels, not one of which you had ever had time to read. You stacked these outside his door, with a note folded into the top one.

  Dear I.:

  Suddenly I received an unexpected opportunity to teach at another university, and I regret that I have to leave without saying good-bye to you. Here are your novels, and you must forgive me that I am apparently not the novel-reading type. Let me, as a final word to you, in addition to thanking you for the pleasure of your company during so many dull times in this mansion, urge you from the bottom of my heart to reconsider your feelings about Cathlin.

  With fondest regards and best wishes,

  E.V.D.

  Then there remained only one more note to write. You sat at your desk for the last time and stared for a while at your last sheet of paper. You gazed out the window and noticed one more of April’s thunderstorms brewing, the first drops already falling. You touched your pen to the paper and wrote, Dear Kenny, but that was as far as you got. You realized, with embarrassment and regret, that you really had nothing to say to him. It was a question not simply of how to say something, but of what to say. You stared at the salutation a long time and tried to think of polite expressions of sorrow, words of grace, courteous good-byes.

  You were spared the task by his breathless arrival in your room. He saw your suitcase ready to go beside the door and said, “You can’t go!”

  By way of answer you simply declared, “You told your mother.”

  “I was real pissed at her,” he said. “It was, like, the only way I could fix her wagon.”

  “But you fixed my wagon, too, and now my wagon is heading west.”

  “Huh? Where are you going?”

  “I’m not sure. But I must go. Good-bye, Kenny. I wish for you much happiness. I wish for you that you will stay out of trouble, work hard in school, be a good boy.”

  He stared at you, his mobile face warped into an expression of disappointment. “Is that, like, all you’ve got to say to me?”

  Yes, it was. But then WQED, which was driving you nuts (your little radio was stuffed into your suitcase and wasn’t plugged in, but you could hear it clearly, all the same), compelled you to begin singing. Even I, who thought I knew you so well, was surprised at the lovely soprano of your voice:

  “Oh, Kenny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling,

  From glen to glen, and down the mountainside.

  The winter’s gone, and all the mirrors falling,

  It’s I, it’s I must go, and you must bide.

  “But I’ll come back, when summer’s in the meadow,

  Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow.

  It’s you’ll be here, in sunshine or in shadow,

  Oh, Kenny boy, oh, Kenny boy, I love you so!”

  “I guess I sort of, like, love you so, too,” he said when you finished. “But will you really come back?”

  You lifted your suitcase, kissed him on the forehead, and got yourself as quickly as possible out of there, out of the mansion, into the pouring rain, down to the street, the avenue, where you caught the first westbound city bus, which took you down into the heart of town, where you checked in, wet and weary, for your last night in the burgh, at the Young Women’s Christian Association hostelry.

  But most of that stormy final night you spent not in your YWCA room but in your office at the Biological Sciences Building, where you graded final examinations and filled out grade reports.

  And while you were engaged in this activity, an Avis rented car pulled up in front of the mansion, where I was still hanging around, keeping an eye on I. and making sure that he was staying sober enough to get his stuff ready to go. He had been so saddened to find your farewell note that he had immediately gone to his bottle and was tying one on. The driver of the Avis was a man in a trench coat who waited for the downpour to cease and, when it didn’t, jumped out of the car anyway and rang the doorbell, and then spoke to Loretta in thick English with a Slavic accent, asking for you. Loretta informed him that you had just moved out. He demanded to know where you had gone. She said she had no idea, but she was quite certain that she would never see you again. “I’d just better not,” she said. The man asked to speak with Dr. Elmore. Loretta informed him that her husband “can’t hear worth a damn; all this thunder doesn’t mean a thing to him.”

  The man returned to his car but did not drive away. He was still there the next morning when Dr. Elmore came out, tested to see if he would need his umbrella, found that he would, and started off for Hillman Library. The man in the trench coat followed him.

  And that night, when Ah met his last Narrative class in the Scottish Room, the man in the trench coat followed him to the Cathedral of Learning, where he parked and waited patiently for the class to end. The man waited with more patience after the class while Ah stood outside the Cathedral talking to one of his students, a girl with very long red hair and dark sunglasses. The man was not close enough to hear what they were saying.

  “As I told the class, I’ve already submitted my final grades,” Ah was saying to her, “but I was sorry to discover that your name was not even on the computerized class list and grade report. You made an A, of course, but how can I report it so it will be on your transcript?”

  The man in the trench coat observed that the red-haired girl was writing something on a pink card, which she then gave the professor to read; and after reading it the professor spoke to her again, and again she wrote something on a pink card. And so it went. The man in the trench coat surmised, correctly, that this professor, like Dr. Elmore, could not even hear the thunder, and this was the student’s way of communicating with him. But what was it that required so much communication? The man in the trench coat was a very patient man. People who mistrust “reality” must cultivate an exceptionally high level of patience in order to survive.

  “Yes, I’m sober enough to drive, but I wasn’t planning to leave tonight. I suppose I could, though. Where are you staying?” The red-haired girl apparently had only one more card for the professor to read. He read it and spoke to her: “The YWCA? I’ll pick you up there in an hour,” and they said their good-byes, and the professor started out walking to the mansion.

  The man in the trench coat, before following, wrote something on a card of his own. It was his business card, without much room on the blank reverse side, but it had enough to write his question. The man was waiting in his Avis rented car at the mansion when the professor arrived, and he presented his question to the professor. The professor read it, answered it briefly, stuck the card in his shirt pocket with his other cards, excused himself, and entered the mansion.

  The storm was still abroad in all its wrath. The man waited and watched as the professor carried his clothing on hangers out of the mansion and to a trucklike vehicle. The man wrote down the license plate’s inscription, BODARK, and the state, a New England state noted for its maple syrup and red covered bridges. The professor made several trips from the mansion to his vehicle, carrying several boxes and a large typewriter, and, finally, made six trips to carry gingerly, two at a time, twelve small potted plants. They appeared to be marijuana. Then the professor stood at the door and said a long good-bye to Loretta Elmore. They kissed briefly.

  The man in the trench coat followed the bodark-plated vehicle as it drove through the dark, mostly deserted streets (it was almost 10:00 P.M.) d
owntown to the building of the Young Women’s Christian Association. The red-haired girl came out bearing a cheap suitcase and got into the professor’s vehicle. The man in the trench coat recognized the pasteboard suitcase! The red hair was obviously a disguise to fool the man in the trench coat, and he cursed himself for not having recognized her figure, her way of walking, her lovely nose, her confounded aura! His heart leapt up, and eagerly he followed the BODARK plate and would not let it out of his sight as it gained the throughway, crossed the bridge over the Monongahela, and entered the Fort Pitt tunnel. Emerging from the tunnel on Interstate 279 just a few car lengths behind his quarry, the man was startled to discover that the radio of his rented Avis, although he had not turned it on, was playing some local station, some abominable operetta, some atrocious baritone screaming in English something about the sweet mystery of life. The man tried to turn it off. The blasted radio would not turn off. He pounded at it with his fist, but this only had the effect of increasing its volume, the wailing of all the longing, seeking, striving, waiting, yearning—the man in the trench coat thought he would go mad, and he cursed these American capitalist machines that always went wrong with burning hopes and joy and idle tears that fall!

  He was so distracted by the malfunctioning apparatus that he did not notice the professor’s vehicle taking a veer from Interstate 279 to Interstate 79 South. The vehicle he found himself trailing had taken Interstate 79 North, and by the time he caught up with it he found that its plate did not say BODARK.

  Chapter twenty-six

  By the first light of dawn, somewhere in western Ohio, he showed her the card. On one side printed in Cyrillic letters were the name, title, and Moscow address. Cathlin didn’t know the Cyrillic alphabet, nor did I., and all you needed to know was the one word Большако, which somewhat resembled its English form so that you were surprised I. hadn’t recognized the name of Cathlin’s psychiatrist. Cathlin turned the card over and read the English on the other side: Prof. I.: It is imperative that I find Ekaterina Vladimirovna, and I have reason to believe you know her whereabouts. Can you help me? I will make it worth your while.

  “I simply told the guy,” I. told Cathlin, “that I was sorry but I had no idea, that I’d just received a note from her saying good-bye, she was taking a job somewhere else, but she didn’t say where. You know, she was a very strange woman. Lovely but mysterious. This guy was obviously Russian, maybe a secret agent or something, but he was just a day too late. She used to tell me about an imaginary companion of hers called Anangka, sort of a pooka, you know—aren’t they Irish?—this pooka of hers was always looking out for her and taking care of her, and maybe the pooka warned her that this guy was coming soon.”

  Cathlin tried to stay awake enough to remain Cathlin and to write a pink card in response to this, resisting the impulse to look over her shoulder to see if they were being followed. She had found herself nodding off in the middle of the night and becoming you, and she had had to share I.’s coffee. He miraculously kept on driving, never seeming to tire, but needing to stop periodically along the vast, straight Interstate 70 in order to buy more coffee or to relieve himself. Two things appeared to keep him going—or three, if you counted his dream of the Bodarks: The interior of the Blazer was filled with the tangy fragrance of the small tomato plants that were lined up across the dashboard and on the floor behind the seat, and just the inhaling of this fragrance was enough to turn Cathlin into Ekaterina if you weren’t careful; and occasionally, whenever the interstate approached a bridge, I. would suddenly pull over to the shoulder, stop, and take a lusty swig from his quart of bourbon. The first time he did this, he explained to Cathlin, “I have gephydrophia. That’s not as good as your photodysphoria and hebedysphoria or whatever it is, but it’s a big problem anyway. It means ‘fear of bridges over water,’ and somehow it doesn’t bother me if the bridge is a viaduct or the creek is dry, but just let me get out over water and I panic.” His occasional swigs from the bottle had given him courage to cross the bridges without apparently affecting his driving ability. You and Cathlin, even bringing in Anangka for a third consultation, had huddled nervously to discuss this problem of committing yourselves into the hands of a drunk driver, but as it turned out I.’s driving never once showed any sign of being affected by his drinking. Maybe it was the coffee, but I. was never Ah with his hands on the wheel.

  Don’t you want to stop soon? Cathlin’s card asked, and, Yes, Kati told me some Russian KGB agents were on her trail, because, you know, she was a dissident dissenter.

  “Soon,” I. said, and then he said, “‘Kati’? Did she let you call her Kati? I knew her for a whole term and she didn’t want me to call her anything except Ekaterina Vladimirovna, no more, no less.”

  He had mispronounced the nickname but Cathlin decided not to attempt to correct him. We became very good friends in the short time I knew her, she wrote.

  “I don’t think she even let little Kenny Elmore call her Kati,” I. said, and cast Cathlin a glance before going on, “and the funniest thing about Princess Dadeshkeliani was that she and Kenny, age thirteen at most, were lovers. Did you know that?”

  No! Cathlin wrote. How do you know? Did she tell you? Did Kenny tell you?

  “Loretta Elmore, Kenny’s mother, told me. Apparently she had known about it, or at least guessed, for months. The Elmores were even stranger, I think, than our ‘Kati.’ He was a retired professor of anthropology, and what the Elmores had done in the South Pacific was investigate the sexual customs of some primitive peoples, Manaturuans, who often permitted, or even encouraged, their pubertal boys to lose their virginity to experienced mature females. Yeah. It had been Loretta’s job to ingratiate herself among the Manaturuan womenfolk and try to learn the real facts of the matter, but the Elmores had never been able to discover if the experienced mature females, who were usually married women and mothers, had actually enjoyed their duties in teaching the boys how to screw, or if the young boys were in any way adversely affected by their ‘initiation,’ and both of the Elmores had a kind of scientific curiosity as to what was going to happen to their son Kenny in the company of this Russian—or Georgian—woman who had the hots for him. They had made a bet, I don’t know for how much money, over Loretta’s contention that Kenny would turn into a juvenile delinquent if he lost his virginity prematurely. And Loretta apparently won her bet, at the same time that she was required to tell Ekaterina to leave.”

  Could you stop soon? Cathlin wrote. Aren’t you exhausted? The sun was coming up now, behind them. Cathlin cast a glance at it and in the process noted with relief that there were no cars to their rear.

  “Can you drive?” I. asked. “Do you want to take over?”

  I am sorry, Cathlin wrote truthfully, I never learned to drive. I should have warned you of that beforehand.

  “Like warning me beforehand that we can’t share a room? Do we have to stop at a motel where we can take separate rooms?”

  In Nabokov’s book you gave me—not Pale Fire but Lolita—there is much discussion of the American motel. I have never been in a motel. I think I would not like that aspect of America. If you can find a hotel, however, I shall share a room with you. Not a bed, but a room.

  He read it and laughed. “But they have only motels near the interstate,” he said. “To find a hotel, we’d have to leave this throughway and go into some city.”

  The sun was fully up now. The light was behind you, but it was sufficient to show him, perhaps, that you were there with Cathlin. Her profile was yours. Then let’s do it. Aren’t you exhausted?

  The small city of Richmond, Indiana, is only a couple of miles off Interstate 70, a short detour, and I gave I. a little help in finding the street that would lead him to the Eagle Hotel, erected in 1887 and scarcely changed since its heyday, except by the addition of a multilevel parking garage for the convenience of the very rare motorist who prefers hotels to motels. The level where the Blazer parked was even with the third floor, on which your room was located,
a room that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the typical motel room, furnished as it was with Victoriana and flocked wallpaper, with chromolithographs instead of offset lithos in the picture frames. There were twin beds. I. had a nightcap (or rather a morning cap) of the remainder of his bottle and went to sleep immediately, fully clothed. The thick draperies blotted out most of the sunlight coming into the room. Cathlin woke about noon to discover that her red wig had got twisted around and was covering her face. She hoped that wouldn’t happen again. She woke again, finally, at about four in the afternoon. I. would sleep another hour before she woke him. Waiting for him to wake, she read the various literature in the room, including a menu for room service. She counted her money, the remainder of your April paycheck, all she and you had in this world in the way of cash, and decided against calling room service. When I. woke up and they got in the Blazer again, he treated her to breakfast at a stop on the interstate.

  He made other stops, on the highway shoulder, before crossing the Wabash River and, later, the Kaskaskia River, in Illinois, in order to fortify himself with bourbon against his gephydrophobia. But neither of these bridges nor any of those encountered thus far on the trip had prepared him for the bridge over the Mississippi at St. Louis. It is a large river. It is much wider and deeper than the Kura at Tbilisi or the Neva at Leningrad, or, as far as Cathlin was concerned, the Foyle at Londonderry or the Lagan at Belfast. The preparatory dose of bourbon was not enough; I. panicked before reaching the midpoint of the high, long span. Luckily, that late at night there was little traffic coming behind. Still, there I. was, his hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly he had no control, asking desperately once more, “Can’t you drive? Can’t you drive?” You could only shake your head, which he, with his eyes glued to the roadway of the bridge, could not see. You couldn’t write him a note. He couldn’t read it in the dark.