Great Circle: A Novel

by Conrad Aiken

  —They’ve gone out to the boat——

  —What do you mean.

  —Doris and David. I tried to stop them——

  —You mean in the Osprey——?

  —It was David’s idea, he thought it would be nice to go out in a storm—do you think you could stop them. It isn’t safe. It’s crazy.

  —When did they go.

  —Five minutes ago. If you ran straight down to the Point——

  —Can I go, Uncle Tom, I can run fast——

  —No, Andy, you stay here.

  —I’ll go down and see.

  He took his raincoat from the cupboard under the stairs and went out. I wondered if he would be struck by lightning. And whether the Osprey would be struck, because of the little mast at the front. What a silly thing to do, it was just like Uncle David, he was probably drunk. I went upstairs to Susan’s room, where Susan and Porper were building a fortress in the middle of the floor with blocks and books and tin soldiers and the rockinghorse and the elephant, and the wastebasket for a tower, and helped them with it, now and then going to the front window to watch the storm, which got worse and worse. Every time the lightning came Porper shut his eyes, but he didn’t cry. The whole bay was dancing with lightning, and now and then we could see all of it, every single detail, even the white houses on Clark’s Island, in a green flash, but we couldn’t see any boats, only the water, which seemed to be nothing but whitecaps. Uncle Tom must be down at the Point now, but what could he do. How could they see him or hear him, even if they were still there. But where would they go.

  It was after supper, Susan was putting Porper to bed, when he came back, soaked to the skin, and tired, and said he hadn’t been able to find them. They had gone off in the Osprey, and taken the tender with them, he could make out the mooring, but that was all. He had walked out on the long bridge as far as the draw without seeing anything, there were no lights in either direction. If they had gone out into the bay, and got caught, they might be safe enough by this time if they had got into the lagoon, by the village. Or they might have gone up through the bridge into the cove, and perhaps anchored there in the lee of the bluffs, or perhaps even beached the Osprey. In any case, he didn’t think anything more could be done. They were probably all right. What could you do, in this rain that came in sheets, and this wind like a hurricane. Though he thought the thunderstorm itself was about over, was moving out to sea.

  —Do you think we ought to telephone the police.

  —What could the police do. And probably they’ve cut off the telephone service.

  —If they aren’t back by ten I think we ought to tell them.

  —You mean send out a search party. But what could a search party do. Nobody would go out in a boat, not if he could help it. You can’t see as far as your hand.

  It was after I had been sent up to bed that I heard the telephone ringing. The thunder had stopped, and the wind had gone down, but it was still raining hard. And a little later I heard voices downstairs, and the doors opening and shutting, and when I got out of bed and went to the window I saw Uncle Tom and two other men going off towards the Point with lanterns, the three lanterns noddling up and down over the drenched grass, and showing the bright yellow edges of sou’-westers. I got back into bed and listened to the hard rain on the roof, but I couldn’t go to sleep. It seemed to me that I was awake all night.

  ———and in the playhouse that afternoon, alone, it was hot and steamy there, and quiet, and Uncle Tom came in, and looked at me, tapping on the Gonko table with his fingers, and I could see that he was wondering if I had been crying. But I hadn’t been crying. And then he said that Sergeant Homer was at the house and wanted to ask me a few questions. Just a few questions. About how I had found them. About how I had found the Osprey in the marsh channel that morning.

  —Don’t be worried, Andy. It’s just official. Just tell him what he wants to know, it won’t be long. It’s all right.

  The Sergeant was sitting at the dining-room table, with his hat upside down on the floor beside him. Aunt Norah was standing by the window, she had just said something when we came in, and the Sergeant was writing it down with a pencil. She was blowing her nose.

  —And your name, young man, is Andrew Cather, isn’t it?

  —Yes, sir.

  —You went out in your dory this morning at about five o’clock, that’s right isn’t it, and rowed up the marsh channel toward Brant Rock?

  —Yes, sir.

  —And you saw the tender of your uncle’s boat there, in the channel, and that led to your discovery that the Osprey had been sunk there. How much under water was the Osprey when you saw it, would you say.

  —I should think about two feet.

  —So that you could see everything quite clearly?

  —Yes, sir.

  —Was she on her side?

  —A little on her port side.

  —You could see quite clearly into the cockpit, you could even have got into it—but you didn’t get into it, did you, Andrew, or interfere with it in any way?

  —No, sir.

  —Was the door to the cabin open or shut.

  —It was shut.

  —You are sure of that. Did you notice whether the boat had been anchored?

  —Yes, sir, the anchor had been dropped.

  —Could you see anything through the portholes?

  —I could see some brown cloth quite close to one of the portholes, and I knew it was my mother’s dress, the one she had on yesterday.

  —You didn’t touch the doors of the cabin, did you?

  —No, sir.

  —Thank you, Andrew—that will be all.

  I went out by myself to the tennis court, and met Juniper there, and he swished his tail against my bare leg and made the sound that Porper always called puttenyarruk, which meant that he wanted grasshoppers. I caught him a flying one, and he ate it. The tennis court was almost dry again, but the rain had made deltas in it, it would need rolling, and the lines were completely gone. It was August the 11th. I wished they hadn’t put Mother and Uncle David in the same room. And would Father come down to Duxbury now——)

  III

  —Perhaps, after all, I’d better go. I’m afraid you were busy, old man. And I think it’s stopped snowing.

  —No—I don’t think it has. What about a drink.

  —Well—well——

  —It’ll do you good. Release the inhibitions, et cetera. Remove your consciousness from one plane to another, you know.

  —Oh, yes?

  —Yes.… Here.… Say when.…

  —When. Thanks.… Thanks.…

  —And come to think of it, why don’t you spend the night. You might talk it all out, between drinks. Plenty of whisky here—some Rhine wine, if you prefer—quiet as the tomb—you can sleep on the couch if you get sleepy—What do you say.

  —Well, maybe—if you don’t mind—after all—good God, I feel like crying.

  —Why not sit down.

  —No, thanks, I’d rather stand—walk—touch things and hold on to things—do you mind if I put my hand flat on that picture of Michelangelo and feel the glass——

  —Why should I?

  —He, too. I wonder if he ever went as deep. Did he ever talk to a psychoanalyst and weep? Did he ever pace about a room, at midnight, with a glass in his hand, a glass that might have been his heart, and drink his own bitter blood? Christ, what am I chattering about.

  —Don’t we all do it, sooner or later?

  —Before I came here, half an hour ago, do you know what I was doing? I was walking in the snow, hardly knowing what I was doing. Oh, yes, I did know, too, for God’s sake let’s be honest. I was crying as I walked, and I enjoyed crying—I felt the tears at the corners of my mouth, tears mixed with melting snow, and I deliberately opened my coat and shirt, so that I could feel the snowflakes on my chest and throat. My feet were getting wet, and I didn’t care, I stepped into the puddles and slush, thinking what a good thing it would be if I got
pneumonia. Isn’t it amazing how even at such a moment, when one is absolutely broken, dissolved, a mere whirlwind of unhappiness, when one walks without knowing or caring where one is going, nevertheless one still has to dramatize oneself, one sees oneself as a pitiful figure under an arc light in the snow, one lifts a deliberately tormented face to the storm, and despite the profound actuality of one’s grief, there is also something false in it too. Suddenly the snow is paper snow, one almost expects to hear an accompaniment of sob music on nicely ordered violins, or the whole world breaking into applause! Good God. Let’s laugh.

  —Ha, ha. I’m laughing.

  —Where is honesty then? I don’t believe we’ve got an honest fiber in our souls. We’re all colossal fakes—the more power we have, the more ingeniously and powerfully we fake. Michelangelo—what the hell. Did he ever tell the truth? Or Shakespeare? No, by God, they went lying into their graves, nothing said, their dirty little mouths twisted with deceit, their damned hearts packed full of filthy lies and blasphemies. Their whole lives wasted. One long fake, a pitiful and shameful glozing and glazing of the truth, slime upon slime and prettification on prettification, each new resolve to tell the truth coming to nothing, somehow turning to a neatly turned verse, a fine purple flight of rhetoric, a bloody little tune, an effective action, or a figure of which the very secret of power is artifact. Christ, Christ, what an agony—poor devils, they knew it too, and still they went on surrendering to the lies inherent in language and marble. Why? And why, even when I want to kill myself, do I have to cast myself as little orphan Annie with a rag doll clutched to her shawled bosom? I’m ashamed. No, I’m not either. Yes, I am too. I went into the Waldorf and cried into a cup of pale coffee. I could hardly swallow. I wanted to be dead. That damned dado of college banners made me sick. Old Turgenev, the cashier, was having trouble with a couple of drunks, they started to fight, and I got up with my coffee cup in my hand and went to talk to them—I persuaded them to go out to the sidewalk, and I went with them, holding my coffee cup. One of them, a tough guy from town, got the other down, the other was a mere kid, and when he got up his eye was cut open. I stopped the fight, with plausible words, feeling like a damned little pewter Galahad—Come on, now, I said, that’s enough, the kid’s had enough, leave him alone, what’s the idea, and I smiled a God-damned sickly smile at them both as if I were a paltry little Messiah, and they quit. I think it was the sight of the coffee cup out there in my hand in the snow that did it. One of them went down Holyoke Street and the other into the Yard, and I went back into the Waldorf feeling important and sat down with my coffee cup, and began to remember that I had wanted to cry, to die, to lie down on the mosaic floor with my coffee cup, just to stretch out like a dead Jesus on the dirty floor of this dirty and stinking world. But of course I didn’t do it. I merely thought about it, luxuriated disgustingly in the idea, imagined myself lying there among dead matches and wet sawdust, poor pitiful little Andrew Cather, him that was betrayed by the everlasting Judas tree. What is unhappiness, Bill?

  —Defeated pride. A highball without ice. Ignorance.

  —Ignorance be damned, and damn your eyes anyway. You and your amateur psychology. What the hell do you know about it, anyway? You sit there and goggle at the world as if you knew something—what the hell do you know? Oh, yes, I know, something hurt you irremediably when you were muscling your infant way into this cold, cold world, and you’ve never recovered, but you’ve fought your way back by superhuman intelligence to that drastic cold bath of a moment—isn’t that it? So now you’re wise and resigned, and smile Shakespearean wisdom on all the maimed host of mankind. You sit there and smile benignly at me, and wish to God I’d go home and leave you alone to sleep, you think I’m a fool, and you despise me because I’ve been betrayed and because I make such a fuss about it. What’s the use. Tea dance today. Novelty dance tonight. There will be charming favors, and saxophones will syncopate your livers. How long is it since you’ve cried, Bill?

  —Oh, not since I was five or six, I guess.

  —Why don’t you try it. It’s great. I’ve got the habit. I cry all the time. I wake up in the middle of the night crying—I dream I’m crying, and wake up crying. Yesterday morning I cried while I was shaving—it was the funniest thing I ever saw, the tears running down into the lather. I laughed at myself and then cried again. I think I’ll go insane. Deliberately—just think myself into madness. Why not?

  —You’re insane now. Manic.

  —Manic, hell.

  —You’re heading a hell of a good time.

  —Yes, indeed. Step up, ladies and gents, and see the trained lunatic, the miching mallecho Michelangelo, the pig with wings. Here lies the winged pig, feared and befriended by many, loved and betrayed by one. Why do I always dream about pigs? Last night I hit one in the snout with a walking stick—I thought he was attacking me, but it turned out I was mistaken. He merely wanted to attract my attention; but by that time I had fallen down in the mud, and my stick was dirty.

  —It would be. Ha, ha.

  —Don’t make me laugh.

  —Anal erotic, what.

  —Scatological too. Step up and see the scatological hebephrene, watch him weep pig’s tears into his snout.

  —He eats them all.

  —The pig with wings was a much smaller pig—a tiny pig, and such a little darling, as clean as clean could be. His wings were transparent and opalescent, lovely, and oh so tender—they were just unfurled, and scarcely dry, and imagine it, Bill, a dirty little bastard of a mongrel dog chose just that moment to attack him, biting at the wings! When I threw stones at him, he turned and attacked me.

  —That dog was your best friend.

  —My best friend—Christ. I mean Judas.

  —You mean yourself.

  —My polysyllabic soul, yes, of course I am guilty, I go about projecting my guilt like a magic lantern.

  —Do you mind if I open the window a little, and let the smoke out?

  —Oh, no, knock out the wall if you like. Einstein is waiting just outside with the fourth dimension on his forehead.

  —I’ll ask him in.

  —Do.

  —Meanwhile, have you called up Bertha today.

  —No, I went to see the Dingbats. The Dingbat sisters. I met them in the elevator, and one of them was carrying a bottle of gin, and I was already tight and so were they a little, and what with one thing and another, though I’d never spoken to them before, we smiled at each other and they invited me to come in and have a drink. So I did. The mystery women of Shepard Hall. They’re always getting telephone calls from the Navy Yard, and it amuses me to hear them at the public phone trying to answer indiscreet proposals in discreet words of one syllable. The older one took me into her bedroom to show me photographs of her two kids in Montreal. I hadn’t known she was married, and that put me off a little—I understood then why her breasts were so—ahem—mature and maternal. She leaned one of them against me, Bill, but I didn’t budge or feel a tremor. Not a tremor. Then they gave me six cocktails in rapid succession, in the dining room, a horrible room with red walls and fumed-oak furniture with an umbrella stand in one corner and such jolly colored prints of John Peel singing at the hunt breakfast. Why had I never been to see them, they said. They were always glad to see the people they liked, and if I just rang their bell six times, any time of the day or night, they would know it was me, and get out of bed even, if necessary. Very obliging. I asked them if they ever cried, and they were amused. I told them that I had a peculiar passion for crying, and would be glad to come in from time to time and have a good noisy cry with them while punishing the gin bottle. They laughed their heads off, and thought I was a hell of a wag. Then I said I must be going. The younger one, who is not so pretty, but who has no children, she is tall and has a gentler face, not quite so tough, you know, perhaps a trace of what you fellows call the anima type, she pleaded softly and cajolingly with me at the dining-room door, standing so close to me that I couldn’t get past her without
embracing her, and she followed me to the front door and there, what do you think, just round the corner from Alice, we had a ten-minute nonstop kiss, you know the kind. Alice after a few minutes of the silence, said, Hey, there, what are you kids doing out there, and laughed, and then I went back for another cocktail. Oh, it was great fun, you have no idea. And when I finally came away I kissed her again at the door, a long, long kiss, not forgetting the tongue, and so went to the University Theater, where I suddenly and inexplicably felt very drunk. An undergraduate in front of me said, I smell boooooooze, and looked round. I smiled at him, very amiably.

  —Well, and what was it all about? Do you understand it?

  —Don’t be simple-minded. Of course I do.

  —And what about Bertha.

  —That’s what it was about, you idiot. That’s what I’m talking about all the time.

  —So I see.

  —Well, then, don’t interrupt. This was my little attempt at a counterblast.