One of the drinkers looked us over. A wrinkled pinch-face in working clothes.
He said in a loud voice to no one in particular, “Hippies! I don’t like ’em. Dirty hippies. Ruining the country. We don’t want ’em moving in around here. Bums.”
The man sitting at the other end of the bar seemed acutely uncomfortable and looked away from him. I leaned back against the pool table. This sort of thing doesn’t happen to me often enough that I know what to do about it.
The drinker kept up the comments. At last I took two steps toward him and said something inane like, “Look, do you want everybody to dress and think like you?” It was inane because he and I were dressed much the same.
He threw his hands up in front of his face and said anxiously, “Get away from me! Get away from me!”
So I stopped and shut up and moved back to the pool table. And he returned to his comments to no one.
“Creeps! Making trouble.”
From the doorway to the store Mrs. Lokay said, “Mr. Pinchen,” and I turned, grateful for the interruption. She hasn’t got my name straight and she knows nothing of William Pynchon or The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, but at times, when I’ve come in for the Sunday New York Times and found no change in my jeans, they’ve put me down in the book on trust.
We followed her into the store. She said, “Don’t mind him. He’s mad about his stepson. He shouldn’t talk to you that way. Thank you for not making trouble. We’ll talk to him.”
I shrugged and said, “That’s all right,” because I didn’t know what else to say. I was calm, but I was upset.
Juanito and I waited in the store while Mrs. Lokay went back into the bar for our order. I carried the sack all the way around the building rather than walk back through and set him off again.
I don’t really like trouble much, and I’ll go out of my way to avoid violence. I clutched the wheel tightly. Instead of driving directly home, I turned off into East Rockhill where the farm country plays out and the woods take over. I set my jaw and drove and thought about all the things I might have said.
I could have said, “That’s all right, buddy. I’ve got a license to look like this. They call it the Constitution.”
I could have said, “Have you seen Lyndon Johnson’s hair hanging over his collar lately?”
I could have said, “What’s the matter? Can’t you tell a simple country boy when you see one?”
But I hadn’t.
Juanito said, “What you ought to do is get a big plastic sack with a zipper and rig it up. You have two controls. One for warm saline solution, the other for your air line. Spend the night in that. It’s very calming.”
I said, “It sounds like what I’ve read about Barry Goldwater falling asleep on the bottom of his swimming pool. Never mind, I have something as good.”
I stopped the car, pulling it off to the side of the road. On that side were woods. On the other were fountains, fieldstone walkways, planting, dogwoods, and two scaled-down pyramids, one six feet tall, the other twenty.
“What’s this place?” Juanito asked.
“It’s the Rosicrucian Meditation Garden,” I said, and got out of the car.
The signs say it is open from eight-thirty every morning. I’ve never seen anyone else walking there, but no one has ever come out to ask me to prove that I was meditating.
After I walked around for a time and looked at the tadpoles swimming in the pool around the smaller pyramid—just like the Great Pyramid in Egypt—I got a grip on myself. Thank the Rosicrucians.
As we drove back to the farm, we passed the rock quarry. “Rock quarry,” I said in answer to Juanito’s question. They don’t call it East Rockhill for nothing.
“It won’t always be that ugly,” I said. “When they have the dam in, all this will be under water. Until the valley silts up, all we’ll have to worry about is an invasion of speedboats.”
They don’t have lakes in this part of Pennsylvania, so they propose to make them.
“I know about that,” Juanito said. “Cory mentioned it.”
The lake will run through the State Park land. Where the deer herd is now. I don’t relish the trade. Ah, but progress.
After dinner, after dark, we all gathered in the living room. Cory collected me from the study where I was taking ten minutes after dinner to stare at my typewriter.
“Are you getting anywhere?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing written. Great and fleeting ideas only.”
“Alexei, what are we going to do about the money?”
I said, “Henry said he mailed the check. We just have to trust it to come.”
I opened my desk drawer and took out the checkbook with the undernourished balance. I wrote out a check to Internal Revenue for $371.92—more than we had to our name.
“Here,” I said. “Put this in the envelope with the return. We’ll mail it when the check comes from Henry, or on the fifteenth, whichever comes sooner.”
Cory tucked the check under the flap of the envelope, but left it unsealed. She set it on top of the phonograph speaker by the front door.
When we came into the living room, Rob said, “Oh, hey. I almost forgot. I brought something for you.”
He fished in his bag while I waited. I like presents, even if I don’t lie awake on Christmas Eve in anticipation anymore. He came up with a paperback and handed it to me. It was The Tales of Hoffman, portions of the transcript of the Chicago Eight trial.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll read it tomorrow.”
It was just the book for Rob to give me. His idea of the most pressing urgency in this country is court reform. Which is needed, as anybody who has been through the agonies of waiting in jails and courtrooms can attest. I’m more bothered by the debasement of thought and language—starting with calling the War Department the Department of Defense and proceeding down the line from there. One thumbing of the book told me Rob and I had a common meeting ground.
Rob said, “What about your story?”
I said, “I’ll read the book in the bathtub.”
“Are you going to spend the day in the bathtub?”
“If I have to.”
We turned off the lights except for the chandelier, dim and yellow, and Cory brought out a candle and set it to pulsing in its wine-colored glass. Four of us sat on the floor around the candle, and Leigh sat in the easy chair. The light from the chandelier played off the dark veneer and outlined the carriage beams. The candlelight made the rug glow like autumn.
We talked of one thing and another, and I played records. Great Speckled Bird. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The new Baez. Rob pulled out Highway 61 Revisited, and I got into it as I never had before.
Wolf and Fang went freaking in the candlelight, chasing each other round and round the room. I put on Quicksilver Messenger Service, the first album, and when “The Fool” reached its peak, Wolf went dashing in and out of the room, ending on the deep window ledge with the last bent note.
And sitting there into the night, we speculated.
Rob, sitting tailor-fashion, said, the conversation having carried him there in some drifting fashion, “Is there really a Mafia?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You’re closer to it than I am.”
“I’m in daily contact with people who think there is,” he said thoughtfully. “They think they belong. I could get myself killed. But what I’m asking is, is there really a Mafia? Or are there only a lot of people pretending?”
It’s a good question. Is there really such a thing as the United States, or just a lot of people pretending?
I said, “Is there really a revolution?”
Last summer, just before Cory and I left Cambridge to move down here, in fact the day before we moved, I got a call from William James Stackman. Bill had been my roommate my senior year in prep school, and I hadn’t heard from him since the day we graduated. He and I had never been friends and never seen much of interest in each other. But I told him, sure,
come on over.
I was curious. In the spring, eleven years after we graduated, they’d gotten around to throwing a tenth reunion of my class. I’d had a book to finish and had to miss it, and been sorry. I’d been an outsider at Mount Hermon, and I was curious to know what had become of all the Golden People. I like to know the ending to stories, and eleven years later is a good place to put a period to high school. Bill hadn’t been Golden People, either, but under the circumstances I was willing to let him serve as a substitute for the reunion.
Bill had changed. Fair enough—I’ve changed, too. His hair was starting to thin. He wore a mustache with droopy ends, sideburns, and a candy-stripe shirt.
We traded neutralities and ate chips and dip. He was in Cambridge to visit his former wife. He was studying theater at Cornell. He’d taken a course from Joanna Russ, a writer friend of mine, and mentioned that he had known me, and she had given him my address.
We spoke about relevance. He said that he wanted to do more than just entertain, too.
Then, in the hallway as he was leaving, he said suddenly and with more than a little pride, “I’m really a revolutionary. I’m working for the revolution.”
“So am I,” I said. As he disappeared around the curve in the hallway, I called, with a certain sense of joy, “So are we all.”
Is there really a revolution, or are there just a lot of people pretending? What will happen when enough people pretend hard enough, long enough?
The five of us and the two cats gathered around our candle late on a spring night. If there really is a revolution, are we its leaders? What if we pretended to be long enough, hard enough?
And I wondered in how many other rooms people were gathered around a flame thinking the same things, dreaming the same dreams. There have to be new ways, there have to be better ways, and we all know it.
Later that night, when we were in bed, Cory said, “Did you find out anything about Juanito? I asked Leigh while you were gone and Rob was sleeping, but she didn’t know anything. He was with Rob when Rob showed up.”
I said, “All I got from Rob was a put-on.” And I told her about it. We laughed and we fell asleep.
But when we got up in the morning, Juanito was gone.
Rob was still sleeping on the couch. Leigh was asleep in the second bedroom. And Juanito was gone.
I went outside to look for him. There was a full-grown ewe nibbling on the rosebush by the barn, and I waved my arms and stampeded her back under the wire, kneeling and humping to get through and leaving wool behind. But no Juanito.
There was a trash can by the front door that I hadn’t left there. It was full of beer cans, soft-drink cans, rusty oil tins riddled by shot, beer bottles, plastic ice-cream dishes and spoons, cigarette butts, cigarette packs, a partly decayed magazine, and plastic, glass, and chrome from the last auto accident.
I hauled the trash can away, thinking. Cory was standing by the front door when I came back.
“I’ve got my story,” I said. “I’ve got my story.”
“At last,” she said.
2
At the age of thirty Little John was still a child, with a child’s impatience to be grown. More than anything—more than the long study and the slow ripening that his Guide assured him were the true road to his desires, as indeed they were, in part—he wished to be finished now, matured now, set free from the eternal lessons of the past now. He was a child, one of the chosen few, favored, petted, and loved just for living. On the one hand, he accepted it as his proper due; on the other, he found it a humiliation. It meant he was still only one of the Chosen, only a boy, and he wished to be a grown-up god like everyone else.
It was not that he lacked talent for it. People even more ordinary than he had made Someone of themselves. He simply hadn’t yet gotten the idea. Chosen, but not yet called.
He conceived progress in his lessons to be his road to grace. It was what Samantha had taught him to believe, and believing it, he was impatient to gulp down one lesson and be on to the next. He had been led to believe that sheer accumulation was sufficient in itself, and he had closets full of notes. He had also been taught not to believe everything he was told and to think for himself, but this information was lost somewhere on note cards in one of his closets.
Impatient though he was, he tried to conceal his impatience from Samantha. He was awed by his Guide. He was awed by her age, by her reputation, by her impenetrability, and by the sheer living distance between the two of them, her and him. At the same time he accepted as right and proper that someone like her should be his Guide, for, after all, he was one of the Chosen.
Samantha encouraged his awe. Awe, like impatience, was a mark of his greenness, a measure of the distance he had to travel to reach the insight that lessons are to be applied, not merely amassed—that one thing in all the world that she could not tell him but could only leave him to discover for himself in his own time. Behind her impenetrable expression, however, she sighed at his awe, shook her head at his pride in advancement, and smiled at his wriggling impatience. And then tried his patience all the harder.
When he returned from his trip to 1381, she gave him a week to think about the experience before they began to discuss it.
“I could live in 1381 and be a god,” Little John said. “It wouldn’t be easy, but I saw enough. It takes endurance. That’s the chief thing.”
They talked about it for a month, day after day. The problems of being a peasant in those times, and still a god, relating as a god should to his fellow men. The problems of overcoming ignorance. And all the while, Little John visibly eager to be done and on the next trip.
At last she sent him on one. She sent him back to 1381 for another look from a new perspective. It is, after all, one problem to be a powerless peasant courting godhood, and quite another, as Buddha knew, to be a noble aiming for the same end. Little John didn’t really see that. All he recognized was 1381 come ’round again when he felt he ought to be off to a new time and new problems of godhood. As though godliness could be measured in trips and not in what was made of them.
So he said again, “I could live in 1381 and be a god. Endurance. That’s the main thing. Isn’t it?”
She told him to think it over. So they talked about it for another month. And in time he finally said something about the psychological difficulty of shedding power when power is held to be a birthright.
He said, “You could give your money and property to the church. That’s a way.”
“Is it a godly way?”
“Well, it could be,” he said. “They thought it could.”
“Do you think so?”
“I met a very decent Franciscan.”
“Organized godliness?”
So they talked further about the times and how it might have been possible to live well in them when your fellow wolves were ready to stay wolves until they died and ready to die to stay wolves. And Little John saw that it was indeed a very different problem than being the godly victim of wolves.
He felt that the last juice had been squeezed from the trip and was ready for the next long before Samantha was ready to send him. And when that trip was back to 1381 again for a stay in a monastery, he felt—well, not cheated, but distinctly disappointed. And he took nothing away from the experience, except for the usual stack of notes.
And after a week of discussion his impatience finally got the better of him.
He said, “Keats died at twenty-five. Masaccio died at twenty-seven, and so did Henry Gwyn-Jeffreys Moseley.” He had memorized a long series of people like that, from Emily Brontë to Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov. “I’m nearly thirty. I want to do what I have to do and be done, and be out in the world.”
He didn’t understand the point. If you are going to do, you do. Those who wait for freedom are never free.
And Samantha, who had a reputation for tartness, said, “Yes, and Christopher Marlowe died at twenty-nine and still wrote all of Shakespeare. Do you think forty or fifty years are too
many to spend in preparation for a life as long as you have ahead of you?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, no.” But in his heart he did. “It’s just that I’m tired of 1381. It’s easy to be a god then. It’s too easy. I want something harder. Send me to 1970. I’m ready. Really I am.”
The year 1970 had a reputation. If you could be a god then, you could be a god anytime. Little John looked on it as a final examination of sorts, and he wanted nothing more than to go.
“Do you believe you’re ready to handle 1970?” Samantha asked.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Please.”
He was sitting cross-legged before her. They were on the hilltop circle standing high above the community buildings and the flowering fields. The outdoor theater was here, and convocation when decisions had to be made. It was a good place to watch sunset and moonrise. His walks with Samantha often brought them here.
He was more than a little apprehensive at making his request, and he watched Samantha’s face closely as she considered, anxious for the least sign of the nature of her answer, impatient for the first clue. And, as usual, her face was composed and gave him no hint.
Little John waited so long and her face was so still that he was half afraid she would fall asleep. He tried to make a still center of himself no less than three times before she spoke, and each time fell victim to wonder and lost the thread. He managed silence and reasonable stillness, and that was all.
At last she said, “This is not a matter for haste. I think we’ve spoken enough for today. Walk, meditate, consider your lessons.”
“And then?”
“Why, come tomorrow to my chambers at the regular time.” And she gave him the sign of dismissal.
So he rose, and gathered his notes, and went down the hill, leaving Samantha still sitting. He turned for a look where the stony path made a corner, and she was still sitting, looking over the valley.
Farewell to Yesterday's Tomorrow Page 14