Loon Lake

by E. L. Doctorow

  And it was at this moment that I saw over the rise to the meadow two people on the tennis court—one of them a girl with blond hair.

  I fixed my eyes on her and walked forward already confirmed in expectation by the agonized heave of my heart.

  Mr. Penfield the resident poet, an absurd roundish figure in white shorts and a shirt stretched dangerously by an enormous belly, was showing from his side of the net the proper form of the forehand. Once twice three times he stroked the air. His lithe student, trim in a tennis dress, watched him while holding her racquet on her shoulder.

  Penfield now hit a ball to her. Careless of all his advice, she swung at it with a great wild lunge and poled it far over the fence across the meadow. I saw tennis balls lying like white flowers everywhere.

  He reached into a round basket for another ball and hit it gently, and again she took a furious swing and the ball flew over the fence. Once more he hit to her and she spun herself around missing the ball entirely. He said something to her. She glared at him, dropped the racquet and left the court.

  She strode across the grass toward the main house. She tossed her visor away unpinned her hair fluffing it to the breeze ignoring him as he stood on the court and called after her in a voice half reproach half apology, “Clara! Clara!”

  But she went over the crest of a slope and descended by degrees until only her head could be seen moving toward the house. Mr. Penfield hurriedly collected the tennis balls lying about the court. I did the same thing in the grass. We met at the court gate. His large bleary face gazed upon mine.

  “She can’t bear to be taught,” he said, admitting me with a stunning lack of ceremony to his thoughts. “All I said was Take a level swing, don’t worry about hitting hard.’” He looked again in the direction she had gone. He smiled. “But what game can it be, after all, in which one doesn’t hit one’s hardest!”

  He thrust into my hands the racquet and pail of balls and hurried off after her, moving lightly on the balls of his feet with that ability of some fat people to be quick and graceful. I stepped onto the court and picked up her racquet. I took everything to the shack not even thinking of it as the site of my grisly misfortune. I had forgotten misfortune. I headed back to the staff house, from one moment to the next, a worried probationary in my dark green shirt and pants no thought further from my mind than leaving. I wanted a job! Their job! Just as they knew I did. I would take up the rake or any other tool they had in mind oh God it was Clara, that was her name, Clara the girl on the train, no question about it, twice now the sight of her had stopped my heart.

  I didn’t know what would happen in my life but I knew whatever it was it would have to do with her, with Clara. I thought even having her name was an enormous inroad of intelligence. Was she a Bennett? But wouldn’t they know their games, weren’t they trained to their tennis and their riding? This one, so blazingly beautiful and pissed-off, knew nothing, this one standing pigeon-toed and swinging stiff-armed at balls so incredibly breath-takingly awkward and untrained—no, she was not a relation. Was she a guest? If so, where were the others, she had come with a train, maids in waiting! an entourage! but they were nowhere about, only the resident poet Penfield ambled after her like her pet bear. Was she related to Penfield?

  I would do anything be anything to know her and know about her. Dressed in dark green, a spy! I worked to show them how worthy I was, how useful, to show them how I admired what they were and how I wanted to be like them and one of them. How much time did I have? Only until the big man arrived, I had only that time to prove I shouldn’t be thrown out on my ass.

  Of course I couldn’t express to Libby even the most idly curious question about this princess living on the grounds. But she had loved showing me the guest book and I thought from her same peasant identification with Bennett wealth she would enjoy the wonder on my face as she secretly showed me the main house, where they lived and had their lives and Charlie Chaplin and the one-named kings sat down to dinner.

  The Bennetts not at home there was a bending of the rules: on Saturday night two Loon Lake station wagons pulled out leaving a skeleton staff.

  On Sunday afternoon with the sun coming through the trees at low angles to light the rooms, through rectangles of sun along dark corridors, Libby and I tiptoed about the vast upstairs with its hall alcoves of casement windows and window seats and bookshelves and its suites of rooms, each with its generous shade porch, and Adirondacks chairs and sofas.

  Whatever empty room I saw led my mind to the next room, the next turn in the corridor, everywhere the light off the lake cast its silvery shimmer on the walls or in my eyes as we passed open doorways.

  One wing was closed off. “We can’t go there,” Libby said.

  “Why not?” I asked, casual as I could be.

  “It’s the Bennetts’ wing, where they stay.”

  “Is someone there?”

  “No. But I wouldn’t feel right about it. Rose and Mary take care of it,” she said.

  She led me down a back stair through a kitchen with two black steel ranges and pantries of provisions and several iceboxes each crowned with its humming cylindrical motor.

  Through a room of glass cabinets filled with sets of china and drawers of silver service.

  Through the hexagonal dining room, three walls of glass and a table hexagonal in shape to seat thirty people.

  To the huge living room, the grandest room of all, with tan leather couches built into the walls, the walls hung with the heads of trophy. There were two different levels of game tables and racks of magazines and clusters of stuffed chairs all looking out enormous windows to the lake.

  I found myself tiptoeing, with a sense of intrusion, my chest constricted—and something else—the thinnest possibility of destructive intent, some very fine denial on my part to submit to awe. “Of course this is just one of their places,” Libby said. “Can you imagine?”

  One or two steps up and we were in the entrance hall. The walls were of dark rough wood. We stood under a chandelier made from antlers. I gazed up a wide curved staircase of halved logs polished to a high shine, with balusters of saplings. I gazed at this as at the gnarled and swirling access to a kingdom of trolls.

  “Don’t you love roughing it?” I said to Libby, running her up the staircase. “What!” she cried, but laughing too, entirely subject to my mood. In the long upstairs corridor I placed her hand on my arm and strolled with her as if we were master and mistress. I led her into one of the suites and flinging open the glass doors of the porch, I extended my arm and said, “Let us enjoy the view that God in his wisdom has arranged for us, my deah.” She swept past me giggling in the game and we stood in the sun side by side looking over the kingdom.

  “Do you mind if I smoke, old girl?” I said in my best imitation of wealthy speech. “No? Why, thank you, I think I’ll light up one of these monogrammed cigs with my initials on them.”

  She was animated with pleasure, how easily she could be made to live! I kissed her to show her how the wealthy kissed, their noses so high in the air that their lips never met, only their chins. Then of course I kissed her properly. She was confused, she drew back blushing, she had thought it her secret that she was sweet on me.

  Whatever I wanted from poor Libby I couldn’t explain what I was doing solely to gain it. We had the run of the house and pretended to be masters. For those few minutes the upstairs maid and the hobo boy were the Bennetts of Loon Lake.

  Libby took my hand and showed me a storage room where F. W. Bennett kept his stock of outfits that he provided his guests as gifts: riding habits and boots, tennis flannels, bathing suits, a goddamn haberdashery.

  I stood in front of a full-length mirror and took off my greens and put on a pair of tan tweed knickers with pleats, ribbed socks, brown-and-white saddle shoes, my size, a soft white shirt, and a white sweater with an argyle design of large gold and brown diamonds across my chest.

  I was stunned by the magnificent youth that looked back at me from the mirr
or. All the scars and deeper marks of hard life were covered in fine fashion. The face, a bit gaunt but unlined, the hair I combed back hastily with my fingers. He made a passing aristocrat! Well, I thought, so a lot of the effect comes from the outside, doesn’t it? I might be a Bennett son!

  And then I felt again my child’s pretense that those two gray sticks in Paterson were not really my parents but my kidnappers! Who knew whose child I was!

  I dreamed of recognition from her from Clara. It was her nearness that made me so crazy, and bold with Libby. So feverish so happy.

  And as for Bennett I thought, He is no more aware of me than of some unfortunate prowler mauled by the wild dogs. But here I am, wearing his clothes, wandering freely through his house. Here I am, Mr. Muck-amuck, and you don’t even know it!

  Then Libby came back from the female supply store and she was wearing jodhpurs and a silk blouse and a riding helmet perched none too securely on her thick hair and she wobbled in a pair of shiny boots too wide in the shank for her thin legs.

  “You look swell, Libby,” I said. She turned around with little shaky steps and gave me all the dimensions. Her gray eyes shone, her mouth stretched in her tremulous overbitten smile. I danced her out of there down the corridor doing a fast fox trot full of swirls while I hummed the tune I had heard the night I came, “Exactly Like You,” Libby laughing and worrying at the same time, telling me to hush, looking back over her shoulder, giggling, falling against me every other step, brushing my cheek with her lips. And the light lay like a track along the carpet and shone in golden stations of the open doors.

  There being no sign of her in the main house I knew she was staying in the smaller lodge perhaps a hundred yards west, into the woods and halfway down the hill to the lake.

  I think I must have spent some while calculating how to get there, figuring out a pretext and then a script for the conversation we would have. But one evening, during the staff meal, one of the woodfolk, a grandmotherly one, said to me, “That Penfield called. You’re to go over to the cottage.”

  “Who, me? What for?”

  “How should I know?” she said. “I’ll be glad when you’re gone and them with you.”

  I finished my meal as slowly as I could, feigning the attitude of the workingmen of dark green. I washed my tray and lit a cigarette and sauntered back to my room.

  I latched the door and changed from my work clothes to the knickers and shirt and sweater and ribbed socks and saddle shoes. Poor Libby, all happiness drained like the color in her face when I told her I was keeping these things. Shouldn’t she have known that the fellow who’d write in the guest book would do that? Anyway, she understood the firm basis of our relationship, that whatever trust she placed in me I would betray.

  And as for Mr. Penfield I knew in my bones I didn’t have anything to fear from him. He had a way of canceling himself out if you let him talk long enough.

  I washed my face and combed my hair and got out of the staff house without being seen.

  Already dark on the path, the first stars coming out. Joe drew a sharp breath and tried to calm himself. He was trembling. He had followed her, navigating by her star, and by that means had been sleeping in a bed and eating well and indulging his self-regard for several weeks. An edited view but fervently held.

  In his mind, his feelings were enough. He didn’t need intentions, plans, the specificity of hope. Presenting his heart was enough.

  “Here he is—and look at him!” Penfield said at the door. He held a bottle of red wine in one hand and a glass in the other. “Come in, come in!”

  It was a low-ceilinged cottage with a living room and kitchen and stone hearth all in one. I tried not to look at her she was sitting on the sofa Indian style wearing a robe of white satiny material and it had fallen open across her thighs. I tried not to look she was not looking at me but taking a mighty pull from her wineglass head up neck beautiful pulsing neck.

  “Here he is, Clara—Joe of Paterson, the man I wanted you to meet.” A glass was put in my hand.

  “Miss Clara Lukaćs,” he said.

  Pointing me at a chair, he crossed his ankles and sank his bulk down on the floor at her feet.

  They were both facing me and to my right and their left a fire was going in the fireplace. The light flared and dimmed on their faces as some kind of wavering attention, I thought, especially from her she had not asked to meet me how absurd to have thought that. I sensed some purpose not entirely complimentary in the summons. Yet Penfield was smiling amiably indicating to me to drink and so I did, with the odd conviction that I had never tasted wine before. I had ridden the cars with the bums of three states worked with freaks and was wicked and shameless but in this moment it was my inexperience that shone.

  What was the conversation? Mostly his, of course, the brilliant singsong of the failed poet, but how could I have been listening with the attention such beautiful words demanded, people from my world didn’t talk with such embellishment such scrollwork. I had never before met someone who admitted to the profession of poet but believed it by the way he spoke. I kept my eyes on his face but it was her I looked at, this restless cat of inattention sitting quite still and staring into her wine careless of exposed limbs the inner thigh the rounded knee small cream cracked hummock of the underknees she sat quite still but her mind pacing from one wall to another, an expression on her small fair face of grief or petulance I couldn’t tell. But how she felt was of overriding importance to me, how she felt!—then and every moment after—was my foremost concern, what I lived by. This was her quality and I think she was unconscious of it, that her presence occupied great moral space around her though she was surprisingly small, a small-boned slight thing with narrow shoulders. There was nothing stately about her except the alarming size of her moods. I studied her face with a fervent rush of recognition, a fair skin with a rouge of chapped cheeks, quick green eyes prominent upper lip everything framed in marcelled bleached blond hair I had friends playing as a child with such faces in Paterson I heard the fluent yowl of injustice from this face.

  Mr. Penfield speaking of injustice explained how much more modest were his own rooms over the stables than this full cottage in the rustic log style. On the other hand he wrote well there he said in his way of negating his every point of view by obliging himself to express its opposite.

  Then he recites some lines about the place, about Loon Lake. The glass in one hand, the bottle in the other, he sits with legs outstretched he is in his dirty sneakers with no socks his tweed jacket with the elbow patches his tennis shirt with the soft collar turned under on one side, he produces a deep melodious voice for his lines not his normal voice I was embarrassed by this sudden access to performance but she was not. She paid attention to his poetry as she had not to his conversation. But no audience was as responsive to Mr. Penfield’s words as he was. His red eyes grew large with a film of tears.

  I augment my memory with the lines actually printed in a private edition, the last of his three privately published volumes all recording different times of his life in the different places the same person. “The loons they heard were the loons we hear today”—in his deep reader’s chant—“cries to distract the dying loons diving into the cold black lake and diving back out again in a whorl of clinging water clinging like importuning spirits fingers shattering in spray feeling up the wing along the rounded body of the thrillingly exerting loon beaking a fish rising to the moon streamlined its loon eyes round and red.”

  And I, resonantly attuned to her, alive to the firelit moment—somewhere I had gotten at great cost, with the scars to show it, from such profound effort, the kind of unceasing insistence on my life’s rights that was only now so exhausting in my release from it. As this absurd fat drunkard sang his words they seemed the most beautiful I had ever heard. But perhaps any words would have done. I heard them and I didn’t hear them, I had no idea he had just written them I thought they were from some book already done, I heard the feeling they inspired in me, t
hat I was living at last! That it was the way it should be, I was feeling Penfield’s immense careless generosity, the boon of himself which granted me without argument everything I was struggling for, all of it assumed in the simple giving of words, so moving to this scruffy boy.

  It was the moment of dangerous specification of everything I thought worth wanting. After the loon flew off whose red eyes were much like his own he cleared his throat and he poured wine all around although I’d barely sipped mine. He emptied the bottle on his turn and struggled to his feet for another bottle which he uncorked while continuing to speak and again he sat down with the new bottle as attached to his hand as the old.

  I tried not to look at her. I saw the glance from under her brows toward the ceiling, the impatience, and then I began to feel the force of the occasion which was that somehow I was enlisted to help divert, distract or pacify Clara Lukaćs. That was the meaning of the self-dramatization of the man, that we were in some overburdened instant, with our backs to it, grounding our heels, digging in.

  And then he was telling us about the war, of all things, a veteran, migod, would he bring out the poppies? But soon we were inside his images, listening like children, the mule-drawn caissons sinking in the mud, the troops in greatcoats and tin helmets riding the mules’ backs, kicking their boots sharply against the mules’ flanks, the bracing of backs on six-foot wheels, spokes like baseball bats tires of steel, each soldier alone and miserable inside his coat, charred trees beside the road the sky showing through city hall, gusts of acrid air blowing from the front, and here is Corporal Penfield riding the signal wagon, flag tubes strapped to his back like quivers, a helmet tilting over his eyes because the strap is too loose, and on his lap the crate covered with a khaki blanket shifts perceptibly, the pigeons whirring with each dull boom lighting the sky like lightning miles ahead.

  He was dangling a medal. He had taken it from his pocket. He handed it to me. The colors of the ribbon had bled, there was thread and lint attached to it, but it was a Silver Star and it was his.