Loon Lake

by E. L. Doctorow

  “You mean a job?” I said.

  “That’s what I mean. You think you ought to be hired?”

  I swallowed. “No,” I said.

  “No?” He seemed amused.

  “I couldn’t live here,” I said. “It’s not for me.”

  He laughed out loud. “You seemed to have adapted well enough. From what I understand you’ve made the place your own.”

  Something outside had caught his eye. He stepped onto the terrace, closing the glass doors behind him, and stood calling down the hill to somebody at the boathouse.

  My muscles were tight and my hands clenched. I tried to loosen up.

  Mrs. Bennett glanced through the window to where I was and said something to her husband. He turned to her smiling and said something back and she looked again in at me briefly, a half smile on her face. She was a very elegant, honest-looking lady, very well composed, with brown hair cut short, no make-up or anything like that, she wore a loose sweater and a longish skirt and low-heeled shoes. I thought you would not be able to tell, if you didn’t know, that this slim handsome woman with her flowers knew how to fly the hell out of airplanes.

  And then it came to me he was telling her who the boy inside was. The one and only Joe of Paterson. She was so elegant I realized that what I had written in anger and pride was from another point of view pathetic. I felt betrayed, like a child who gives out his most precious secret and hears it laughed about.

  I turned to leave. I thought how powerful this Bennett was if I could be made to feel so bad from just a moment or two of his attention.

  “Just a minute, Joe,” he called. “I’m not finished with you.”

  He went past me into the front hall and then down the corridor of the other wing of the house. He opened a door and beckoned to me.

  A large room filled with books, cabinets with silver cups, photographs of Mrs. Bennett standing in front of airplanes, Mr. Bennett in a railroad engineer’s cap waving from the controls of a steam locomotive, photographs of cars and horses and presidents and governors and film stars. There were globes on stands and big dictionaries on lecterns, a ticker-tape machine under glass—a whole life of glory was in this room.

  Bennett sat down behind his desk and took a manila folder out of a drawer and studied the papers in it for several minutes while I stood before him.

  Without looking up, he said, “Are your injuries healed?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Have you been in touch with your parents?”

  “My parents?”

  “They signed a waiver,” he said, removing a document from the folder. “You mean you haven’t talked to them? I am not at fault for the injuries you incurred on my property. They received two hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “How do you know my parents?”

  “We looked through your billfold. You might have been on your way out.”

  I was too stunned to speak.

  “They haven’t called or written to see how you’re getting along?” He shoved a paper along the desk and I saw at the bottom the shaky signature of my father. “I’m not lying to you,” Bennett said. “By rights that’s your money.”

  I shook my head.

  “You don’t want to work for me. Fine. You can go home and if you’re smart you can use that money to make money. Buy something and sell it for profit. Anything, it doesn’t matter. Some of the great fortunes in this country were built from less.”

  I pictured my father in the kitchen, coming to terms with this legal paper that had to be signed. Finding my school pen somewhere in a drawer and the bottle with Waterman’s ink. Testing the penpoint on the oilcloth that covered the table and then rubbing the ink off with his thumb before it dried. My mother standing at the sink, washing the dishes, disguising the moment of the waiver in their lives as one more ordinary moment.

  “No,” I said. “It’s theirs.”

  “I’ll tell you,” Bennett said. “I always respect a man’s decision. Never try to argue him out of it. You’re not staying here and you’re not going home. That leaves you back on the road, doesn’t it? Back on the bum. Well, I say why not, if that’s what you want. But be sure you can handle it. Just be sure you’ve got the guts. So that if you have to steal or take a sap to someone’s head for a meal, you’ll be able to. Every kind of life has its demands, its tests. Can I do this? Can I live with the consequences of what I’m doing? If you can’t answer yes, you’re in a life that’s too much for you. Then you drop down a notch. If you can’t steal and you can’t sap someone on the head when you have to, you join the line at the flophouse. You get on the bread line. If you can’t muscle your way into the bread line, you sit at the curb and hold out your hand. You’re a beggar. If you can’t whine and wheedle and beg your cup of coffee, if you can’t take the billy on the bottoms of your feet—why, I say be a poet. Yes”—he laughed at the thought—“like old Penfield, find your level. Get in, get into the place that’s your nature, whether it’s running a corporation or picking daisies in a field, get in there and live to it, live to the fullness of it, become what you are, and I’ll say to you, you’ve done more than most men. Most men—and let me tell you, I know men—most of them don’t ever do that. They’ll work at a job and not know why. They’ll marry a woman and not know why. They’ll go to their graves and not know why.”

  He was standing at the window gazing out with his hands behind his back, gently slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other. “I’ve never understood it, but there it is. I’ve never understood how a man could give up his life, give it up, moment by moment, even as he lives it, give it up from the second he’s born. But there it is. Bow his head. Agree. Go along. Do what everyone’s doing. Let it leach away. Sign it away. Drink it away. Sleep it away.”

  He was standing at the window meditating, eclipsing the window light so that the dark bulk of him was apparent. He was stocky and short-legged with a large head, like a mountain troll. “Well,” he said, “you’re brash enough. Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. As far as I can get.”

  He came back to his desk and wrote something on a piece of paper. “You happen to need something—this is a private number, not to be given out, you understand?”

  He folded the paper and handed it to me. He gave me a quick glance, one eyebrow arching over the lighted eye of shrewdness. “But don’t leave until I’ve got my dolmen,” he said, turning and picking up his telephone.

  The first chance I had I hurried to Penfield’s. He was the only one who could help me with Clara’s escape. That was his word, escape. Clara would leave because she was dislodged by the returning wife, Clara would leave because with unforgivable haste she’d been removed from the cozy confidences of Loon Lake’s master bedroom. But it wouldn’t do to tell him that. He thought he was in torment for her sake. He brooded about rescuing her. That’s the way poets are, I said to myself. They see what no one else can see, and what is clear to everyone else they don’t see.

  I found him in bed. His breath rasped. His skin was a strange pink-gray color and it shone in a glaze of perspiration. He stared at me mournfully from his pillows, his blue and bloodshot eyes swimming in helplessness.

  Oh God. That was all I needed.

  I went out and found Libby in the staff house.

  “I’ll have nothing to do with you,” she said.

  “It’s not me, Libby. It’s Mr. Penfield. Something’s wrong with him. I think he needs a doctor.”

  She looked at me with suspicion. She went ahead of me to the stables and ran up the stairs to keep as much distance between us as she could.

  She took one look at the poet and without troubling to remove herself from his hearing said, “There’s nothing wrong with him, he just likes to carry on.”

  “What do you know, Libby?” he cried out, stung.

  “I know what a hollow leg is,” she said. “Look at this place, it’s enough to make anyone sick.”

  “Get out, get out!” Penfield shoute
d. “Will everyone torture me? Am I to die with the scorn of servants in my ears?”

  She ignored him and with a great flurry went into action, picking up papers books dirty socks.

  “Go away,” he shouted. “Don’t touch a thing, damnit, you’re disrupting everything!”

  She straightened his bedcovers and plumped up his pillows while he shouted at her to leave him alone.

  Furious with both of us, she marched out.

  “Joe, there’s a bottle of wine under the window seat,” Mr. Penfield said.

  I wondered what was wrong with me to be so gullible to the claims of this man. He lived here at Loon Lake sloshing in self-pity, the best aspect of him, his gift for poetry, put to the use of unsound notions. Obviously this was the solution of his life. I couldn’t change that if I tried. Nobody could.

  I handed him the bottle and a glass. He sat up.

  “Mr. Penfield, I’ve got to tell you something,” I said, pulling a chair to his bedside. “But I need some information first. Who is Clara? Who were those people who came with her on the train?”

  “Tommy Crapo,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Tommy Crapo. The industrial consultant.” He drank off a half-glass of wine. “Don’t you read the newspapers? Don’t you look at the tabloids? Tommy Crapo who has his picture taken on night-club banquettes with beautiful women.”

  Color was coming back to his face. He emptied the glass and lay back on his pillows.

  “Is he in the rackets?”

  “Mr. Crapo is a specialist in labor relations. Yes. I think that’s a fair description.”

  “Does he work for Bennett? Does he knock heads for Bennett?”

  He stared at the ceiling. A moment passed. “Why do you ask? You think I should get Miss Lukaćs away from here, don’t you?”

  “Well, she’s ready.”

  “What?” He was not used to being taken at his word. He was not equipped for action.

  “Miss Lukaćs is ready to get out of here,” I said.

  “What?”

  “She’s ready to make her escape.”

  I have committed many sins in my life. This precise sin—the sin against poets—is without absolution.

  He was out of bed and struggling into a worn maroon robe that had a few tassels left on the belt. I could hear each breath he took. He got on his knees to look under the bed for his slippers. He found them, stood, stepped into them, and then went slapping across the floor, back and forth from one corner of his apartment to another without purpose or intent but busy with agitation.

  I sat him down in his reading chair and brought him a cigarette and lit it for him, he held it between thumb and forefinger, his hand shaking.

  “What did she say?” he asked.

  “She wants me to get her away.”

  “You?”

  “She thinks if you leave together, you’ll be too easy to follow. Like a hot car.”

  “What?”

  “Crapo doesn’t know me from Adam.”

  “Crapo is back?”

  “He’s on his way, Mr. Penfield.”

  “I see. I see.”

  “Miss Lukaćs says once she’s safe she can get in touch with you.”

  “She said that?”

  “I’ve worked out a plan but I need money and I need a car.”

  “Yes, yes, so that’s the way it happens. I see. I see.” He was not fooled, he was not a fool, the large protuberant eyes stared through me. “Yes, yes. To be absolutely realistic I’m not in the picture. That’s all right, it’s just, I’m reconciled. The two young ones. Yes.”

  He kept talking this way.

  I had the uncanny feeling that he was translating what I told him into another language. Yet I could hear everything he said. He rose, he seemed to gain strength, he strode back and forth from the window to the door. “Yes, of course, there is more than I knew. Yes. I want this for her. It’s just. I put my faith in you, Joe. Yes, take her away from here. Two young people! It’s right. Yes, it’s the only way.”

  “I’ll need money and a car,” I said.

  “Of course. Leave it to me. I’ll help you. I’ll get you both out. You’ll see, you’ll see. I have resources. Yes. You’ll find Warren Penfield comes through. I have resources. I have allies.”

  He seemed joyful. He clapped his hands together and glanced heavenward to express his joy. In this moment he would rather have died than reveal his anguish.

  As I was leaving he stood at the door and pulled back the sleeve of his robe. “Look here, Joe.” he said. He held up his right arm. “The sign of the wild dog! Right?” He gave me a wan but demonstrably brave smile. I had to smile back. I rolled up my sleeve and showed my arm.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You know what two men do who share the sign of the wild dog?” He touched his forearm to mine so that they crossed. “That’s right,” he said in a husky voice. “My pain is your pain. My life is your life.”

  Data linkage escape this is not an emergency

  Come with me compound with me

  A tulip cups the sun quietly in its color

  Dixie cups hold chocolate and vanilla

  Before the war after the war or

  After the war before the war

  A man sells me a Dixie cup for a nickel in a dark candy store.

  The boy stands on the sidewalk in the sun

  Licking the face of Joan Crawford free of ice cream.

  A boy enjoys ice cream from a wooden spoon in the sun

  before the war in front of the candy store on the corner

  while he waits for the light to change. At this moment several

  things happen. A horse pulling the wagon of a peddler

  of vegetables trots by smartly golden balls of dung dropping

  from the base of its arched tail. Then there was a whirring

  in my ears and over the top of Paterson Grade School Three

  a monumental dirigible nosed into view looming so low

  I could see the seams of its paneled silver skin

  and human shadows on the windows of its gondola. It was not

  sailing straight through its bow but shouldering the wind shuddering

  dipping and rising in its sea of air. It soared over the roof

  of a tenement and disappeared. At the same time

  the traffic light turned green and I crossed from sun to shade

  noting that the not unpleasant odor of fresh horse manure

  abruptly ceased with the change of temperature. In front of

  the shoe repair on Mechanic Street at the sidewalk’s edge

  between a Nash and a Hudson parked at the curb a baby girl

  was suspended from her mother’s hands her pants pulled down.

  It was desired of this child that she relieve herself there and then

  schoolchildren going past in bunches peddlers at their cars

  mothers pushing strollers and an older boy with ice cream

  stopping shamelessly to watch. And this beautiful little girl

  turned a face of such outrage upon me that I immediately

  recognized you Clara and with then saintly inability to withstand

  life you closed your eyes and allowed the thin stream of

  golden water to cascade to the tar which was instantly black and

  shone clearer than a night sky.

  In the morning hacking away at the Indian-chief monument, I saw him going down the bridle path, going right by without so much as a glance at the strange work on the rock, walking a few steps, running, walking again hurriedly, on the trail through the woods.

  I waited five minutes and then I dropped my shovel and sauntered off. “Where you going!” someone called behind me. I raised my hand to show I knew what I was doing and that I’d be right back.

  This was the trail the riders took to get to another shore of the lake, a mile down from the main house. It was hoed regularly to keep it soft—I had done some of that myself. It went through stands of tow
ering pine and over small clearings where the grass was turning tan and gold in the autumn, and then it dropped down into an area where the leaves were falling like snowflakes. I felt the same turning season in me.

  Where the trail cornered, along the shore of the wide lake, was an airplane hangar with a concrete ramp. Mr. Penfield sat on the ramp with his arms around his knees. He was looking at the water. The wind had whipped up a small white chop. Wavelets slapped at the concrete. He didn’t seem to notice Lucinda Bailey Bennett coming out of the hangar and walking toward him. She pulled a big red trainman’s handkerchief from the pocket of her overalls and wiped her hands.

  I ducked around through the underbrush and came within a few feet of them. I could see inside: an engine was suspended from pulleys. A man was guiding it to a workbench.

  “What do you do, Lucinda,” said Mr. Penfield in a petulant tone. “Paint the innards like a new toy?”

  “No, old bear. When I’m through, its innards will be dark and oiled, and refitted to tolerances that will take me to the top of the sky.” She stuffed her handkerchief into the pouch of her overalls. “Why are you sulking? I thought you loved me.”

  “Since I gave up manhood to live here, I make no claims of that sort on anyone.”

  She smiled. “That’s not the report I have.”

  “Oh, Lucinda,” he said with a groan, and he turned to look up at her.

  “So much suffering.” She touched the back of her hand to his temple. “Poor Warren.”

  “How much better for me if when I came here my throat had been ripped out.”

  She sighed. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose so.”

  After a moment she turned back and he lifted himself grunting to his feet. He lumbered after her. “Forgive me,” he called.

  “Oh, Warren, it’s such a bore when you whine.” She went into the hangar.

  “Yes,” he cried out bitterly. “Indeed. My agony does not divert.” And he followed her.

  I couldn’t hear them now. The hangar was lit by electric lights that glimmered very faintly through the brightness of the morning. But I saw them moving around, she working and he talking with grand gestures. Every once in a while I heard the sound of his voice, and I knew Mr. Penfield well enough to know he was in good form, eloquent in his self-dramatization. I hoped so, because he was talking for me.