Loon Lake

by E. L. Doctorow

  And for my mother a woman in pale green uniform and white shoes and opaque brown hose with a thick seam down the back. An impassive porky being with hands that worked at high speed setting down trays pounding pillows carrying off urinals while she thought her own thoughts.

  I could tell that each of them felt badly used to be taking care of some tramp who had wandered onto the grounds. It was an affront to the natural order which made service to people bearable because they were higher than you, not lower.

  I responded with a pride of my own which asked for nothing and gave as little indication of need as possible. And I never thanked them for anything. As I felt better I grew contemptuous as if, coming into this province of wealth, I had adopted its customs. Or perhaps it was more serious, perhaps it had been injected in the saliva of the dogs.

  On the other hand I had only the word of these people that the dogs didn’t belong to the owner of this place. And even if they didn’t, they certainly ran to his advantage. My rage flared as if it were the last wound to be felt and the slowest to heal.

  As time went on I understood that I lay in a room of the staff house where perhaps fifteen or twenty people lived who wore the green livery, forest-green for the outdoor workers, the paler shade for the indoor. They all looked somewhat stolidly alike, as if related.

  I was alert to find a friend and I did. She was a girl of the pale green set, a young maid in the big house who shyly looked in on me, advancing each time a little farther into the room until finally she showed up in mid-morning one day when everyone else was working. She had seen we were the same age and that was enough.

  Her name was Libby. She didn’t think of not answering any question that occurred to me.

  This place was called Loon Lake. It was the domain of the same F. W. Bennett of the Bennett Autobody Works. Did I know the name? He was very rich. He owned thirty thousand acres here and it was just one of his places. He owned the lake itself, the water in the lake, the land under the water and the fish that swam in it.

  “But not the dogs,” I said.

  “Oh no,” she said, “those are wild-running, those dogs. It’s the fault of the people who own them and can’t feed them anymore. And then they go off and forage and breed wild and hunt in packs.”

  “The people?”

  “The dogs. All through the mountains it’s like that, not just here. Does it hurt?” she asked.

  “It don’t tickle.”

  A tremor went through her. She held her arms as if she was cold.

  “Tell me, does your F. W. Bennett have a wife?”

  “Oh, sure! She’s famous. The Mrs. Bennett who wins all the air races. Her picture’s in the papers. Lucinda Bennett?”

  “Oh, her,” I said. “The one with the blond hair?”

  “No, she’s a brunette.” Libby touched her own hair, which was brunet too. Like all her features it was ordinary. She was possessed of a sort of plain prettiness that caused you to study her and wish this feature or that might be better.

  “Brunettes are my favorite,” I said.

  She blushed. She was a simple innocent person, she granted me her own youthful face on the world without knowing who I was or where I came from. In five minutes I had her whole history. Her uncle, one of the groundkeepers, had gotten her the job. She made twelve dollars a week plus room and board. She was fervent in her gratitude. She spoke in what I could tell was the communal piety of the staff. How nervously lucky they would have to feel, how clannish in their good fortune exempt in these mountains from an afflicted age. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Bennett came or went separately or together or had guests or didn’t, but the place was maintained all year round including the dead of winter.

  “Don’t you get lonely up here?” I said.

  She thought a long time. “Well, I send six dollars to my father in Albany.”

  Not realizing this was enough for me to feel chastened, she frowned and cast about in her mind for justification. “You’d be surprised who comes here,” she said. She brightened “You get to see famous people.”

  “Who?”

  “Why, big politicians, and prime ministers from England. And Jeanette MacDonald? She was here in the spring! She’s beautiful. I saw her clothes. She gave me five dollars!”

  “Who else?”

  “Oh well, I never saw him, it was before I came. But Charlie Chaplin.”

  “Sure,” I said. “On roller skates.”

  She looked then suddenly frightened. Who would doubt her word? She turned and left the room, and I thought to myself well that’s that. But a short while later she returned, softly closing the door behind her. She held a large leatherbound book to her chest and looked at me over the gilt edge with bright excited eyes. “I better not get caught,” she said.

  It was the Loon Lake guest book. She fixed the pillows so I could pull myself up and she sat on the side of the bed and opened the book to a page marked “1931.” Her index finger ran down a list of signatures and stopped and she turned her eyes on me as I saw whose signature it was: Charles Chaplin had made an elegant scrawl, and next to it, where there was a space for comment, he had written: “Splendid weekend! Gay company!”

  Vindicated, Libby watched with pleasure as I became absorbed by all the names, right up to the present: signatures of movie stars, orchestra leaders, authors, senators, all famous enough to be recognized by me, but also signatures I recognized only vaguely, or only sensed as names of magnitude, like the name F. W. Bennett, names that had been given to things, names painted on the big signs over factories or carved in the stone over the entrances of office buildings. I couldn’t stop looking at them. I felt I could learn something, that there was something here, some powerful knowledge I could use. But it was in code! If only I could understand the significance of the notations, I’d have what I needed I’d know what I’d always dreamed of knowing—although I couldn’t have said what it was. I touched the signatures, traced them trying to feel the ink. It was some mysterious system of legalities and caste and extended brilliant endeavor—all abbreviated into these names and dates of proud people from all over the world who had come here to this secret place in the mountains.

  I became aware of this girl Libby in her pale green uniform. She sat very close to me, the starched front of her uniform rose and fell with her breathing. When I glanced up from the book I found her face near mine, her head bowed and her eyes on the page, but her consciousness all directed to me. Her full lower lip was impressed into a suggestion of voluptuousness by her front teeth. She had thick wavy hair. What sweet appropriate modesty of being. Her trust was part of it, or so I understood—the willingness of the others of us to find a place and live our lives within it, making our trembling alliances and becoming famous and powerful to each other.

  I turned back to the book. Some of the people there were such big shots they needed only one name to identify themselves. Leopold, one of them had written. Of Belgium.

  I said to Libby, “Hey, how long have I been here, anyway?”

  “We were taking off the summer covers and putting the rugs down,” she said. “It was that night. I never hope to hear what I heard that night.”

  “Well, when was it, please?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “Wasn’t someone here then? Didn’t you have visitors?” She looked at me and then looked away. She glanced at the book. She wanted it back.

  “I saw the train, Libby. People were on it. Is anyone here now?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, how come I don’t see anything that recent in the guest book?” She was silent a long while. I knew I was extending her loyalty. I gazed at her and waited for my answer. She looked discouraged. “Not just anyone gets to sign,” she said finally.

  “Is that right?” I said. She wouldn’t look at me now.

  “I think someone’s calling you, Libby.”

  “Where?” She went to the door, opened it and listened. I leaned over with a painful lunge to the bedside stand. In the li
ttle drawer was a fountain pen. I unscrewed the cap, shook a blot on the floor, spread open the guest book and signed my name with a flourish.

  “What are you doing!” Libby said. Her hand was on her cheek and she stared at me in horror.

  “Joe,” I wrote. “Of Paterson. Splendid dogs. Swell company.”

  I fell back on the pillow. By signing the guest book, did I mean to be going on my way? I felt the pretense, as well as any other, washed away in a wave of weakness and despair.

  The girl grabbed the book and ran.

  She had a friend, as it turned out, a man who lived on the grounds as a kind of permanent houseguest. He came to look at me later that day, peering in the door with an expression of wonder very odd in a full-grown middle-aged adult.

  He was a large heavy man. He was bearded. His hair was overgrown and unkempt. His eyes were blue and set in a field of pink that suggested a history of torments and conflicts past ordinary understanding. His weight and size seemed to amplify the act of breathing, which took place through his mouth. His nose looked swollen, a web of fine purple lines ran up his cheeks from the undergrowth, and all the ravage together told of the drinker.

  He said his name was Warren Penfield. He wanted to speak about moral responsibility.

  He padded around the room in a pair of old tennis sneakers. He wore baggy trousers belted below his stomach, and an ancient tweed jacket with patches at the elbow. Beneath the jacket was what seemed to be a soft graying tennis shirt part of the collar folded under he didn’t seem to be aware of this.

  “I can understand your feeling better than you can, young man. I spend my life understanding feelings, yes, my own and others, that’s what I do, that’s what poets do, that’s what they’re supposed to do.”

  “You’re a poet?”

  “I’m the poet in residence here,” he said, drawing himself up slightly trying to tuck his shirt in glancing then at me from the corner of his eye.

  I thought I would never know the end of the subtle luxuries with which the wealthy provided themselves.

  “So I can understand your feelings. But I also understand poor Libby’s, good God she’s one of the few decent people around here, and now she’s in fear for her job. Do you realize what it would mean for her to lose her job? Of course I’ll do what I can, the Bennetts aren’t here right now, fortunately, I’ll think of something, yes, I’ll speak to Lucinda, I suppose I can, but that’s not the point. You should have realized the girl was responsible for anything you did. She was nice to you, she made you her friend, she shared something she knew, and that’s how you repaid her.”

  I liked him enormously. I was smiling I was admitted into his realm of moral concern without passport credentials references of any sort. There I was a hobo boy lying on this cot in this weird place suppurating, for all he knew, in my dereliction, not a pot to pee in, and he was trying to recall me to my honor. He assumed I had it!

  He saw me smiling and started to smile too. Then we were laughing.

  “Of course it was wicked, a good wicked joke, God knows I can enjoy a joke at his expense. I wish there were more of them. Incidentally, he himself is not totally devoid of humor, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “Bennett. I’ve studied him a long time. He’s a very capable human being. Quite charming at times. The mistake most people make is to jump to conclusions before they even meet him.”

  “Well, I’ll try not to,” I said and we laughed again.

  At that moment my mother-keeper came in, took my tray, gave Penfield a dirty look, and left.

  “Dreadful woman,” he said. “They all are. Except for Libby, of course. They despise me. I’m more than they are but I have no place as they have. They play all sorts of tricks on me, I have to beg for my meals. But when the Bennetts are here they’ll invite me to dine and then I’m served like I’m the king of England.”

  I saw that he suffered from this, as from everything, in a state of expressive self-magnifying complaint.

  “Well, I suppose I should go. How do you feel, by the way?”

  “Lousy.”

  He pulled up his jacket sleeve and showed me on the inside of his left arm a pale scar from the wrist to the elbow. “You’re not the only one, I want you to know. They treed me seven years ago when I came here one night—just like you.”

  One morning on his bed at the foot a folded suit of dark green. He dressed in it and looked for the first time into the hallway outside the room where he had been since he was carried there on some door was a mirror and there he was thin pale-faced boy pale as a sheet, with a sparse stubble on the rim of the jaw, a head of uncombed hair looking too big for the body, and a hunch as if he were still flinching from the teeth, from the snarling face of the mountainous night.

  Something has leaked out through the stitches and some of the serious intention of the world has leaked in: like the sense of high stakes, the desolate chance of real destiny.

  There was a distant railroad track with telephone poles regularly spaced down the side of my neck over the clavicle across the breastbone. There was another spur line on either arm and the right leg.

  I had no feeling in the fourth finger of my right hand.

  Thus I found myself on a brilliant morning raking leaves in the shadow of the great sprawling lodge house of the auto magnate F. W. Bennett. I was not to consider myself employed, however. My Loon Lake parents would as frankly have sent me on my way but they did nothing without the approval of their employer, who was still to return.

  I felt weak in the knees, I couldn’t have gone anywhere anyway. I was glad to hold on to the rake.

  The lodge house was two stories on the land side, three on the lake side—the land dropped precipitously from the crest of the hill—and its walls were logs, uniformly brown, set with casement windows and crowned with a wood shingle roof of many angles and regularly spaced dormers. The trees oak maple elm, and though it was still September, a heavy leaf fall everywhere behind the meadow of my encounter, a burning wood of orange and gold and behind this on a distant mountain, ageless stands of evergreen against the bright blue sky.

  As the morning advanced the sun was warm on my back. The air was sweet. I felt better. I was one of three or four workmen. A small truck with slat sides moved slowly among us to receive our leaves. We moved around to the back of the house and swept the leaves from two terraces, the upper with tables and chairs for dining, the lower with cushioned wooden wheeled lounge chairs for the view and the sun.

  The lake out there a definite mountain lake, a water cupped high in the earth, its east and west shores hidden from view by intervening hills, its south shore across the water filled with pine and spruce that rose up straight on the mountainside in a kind of terror.

  The lake glittered with fragments of sun, and flying over it were a couple of large black-and-white loons, big as swans. There was a boathouse down at the water in the same style as the main house. A dock going around the boathouse. A swimming float fifty yards out.

  Between the terraces and the water line was a steep hillside garden of wild things, and through its paths we raked away the unwanted leaves from the bushes and plants.

  I looked back up the hill to the house and felt the imposition of an enormous will on the natural planet. Stillness and peace, not the sound of a car or a horn or even a human voice, and I felt Loon Lake in its isolation, the bought wilderness, and speculated what I would do if I had the money. Would I purchase isolation, as this man had? Was that what money was for, to put a distance of fifty thousand acres of mountain terrain between you and the boondocks of the world?

  The man made automobile bodies, and they were for connection, cars were democracy we had been told.

  The wind rose in a sudden gust about my ears, and as I looked back to the lake, a loon was coming in like a roller coaster. He hit he water and skidded for thirty yards, sending up a great spray, and when the water settled he was gone. I couldn’t see him, I thought the fucker had drowned. But up he po
pped, shaking and mauling a fat fish. And when the fish was polished off, I heard a weird maniac cry coming off the water, and echoing off the hills.

  A while later I followed the workers going along the hillside with their rakes through the trees past the stables to the staff house for lunch. The people of the light and dark green ate in a sort of bunkhouse dining room with long tables and benches. The food was put out on compartmented metal trays as in a cafeteria.

  Fifteen, twenty of them looking at me as I hesitated with my tray and then slid into a place next to Libby, who smiled and looked with some satisfaction to the rest of the table. I was inspected by a heavyset man with thick black eyebrows I took to be the uncle she had mentioned. I gave back a clear-eyed friendly face don’t worry I’m no threat not me. After that I was ignored. I studied them all covertly: there were two, possibly three families of Bennett servants here. They did not make conversation. I had a palpable feeling of the politics of the place, the suspicious credential I had as a victim of the dogs. It wasn’t enough to crack their guild. They seemed confident of that.

  Well, screw them, they couldn’t even understand that I wanted no part of it. When I was strong enough, a day or two, I’d be on my way down the railroad track and leave it to them to work out why. I still had the dollars I’d come with, stained brown with my blood but no less negotiable. Nobody here, not even Libby, knew my full name or had asked where I came from or where I’d been going.

  The force of self-distinguishing which I found so foolish among stiffs and hobos was what I ran on. When you are nobody and have nothing, you depend on your troubles for self-respect. I had paid heavily for the bed and board. I wasn’t one of them, I was a paying guest.

  I finished and walked out while they were still drinking their coffee. I’d be damned if I’d lift a rake or anything else. What could they do, fire me? I stood on the porch and thought about leaving right away, immediately.