Loon Lake

by E. L. Doctorow

  I wondered if this wasn’t really the last stop, if California was like heaven, unproven. In this flatland of grit and rubble, you might sense the barest whiff of it in the air or intimation in the light of the sky—but this was as far as you got.

  I wandered to the rear to the end of the platform. I picked up a folded newspaper from a Railway Express baggage cart—the rotogravure section of a Sunday paper a week or two old. I looked at the pictures. I was looking at Lucinda Bailey Bennett the famous aviatrix, two whole pages of her at various times of her life. She stood beside different airplanes or sat in their cockpits. A separate ruled column listed her speed and endurance records by date. At the bottom right-hand page of the story she was shown under the wing of a big two-engine seaplane. She was waving at the camera. The caption said: HER LAST FLIGHT. Behind her, climbing into the cabin, was a large man, broad of beam, unidentified.

  I turned back and found the beginning of the feature: Lucinda Bennett’s plane The Loon had been given up for lost over the Pacific somewhere between Hawaii and Japan. F. W. Bennett was quoted as saying that if his wife had to die, surely this was the way she would prefer, at the controls of her machine, flying toward some great personal ideal.

  Images of falling through space through sky through dreams

  through floor downstairs down well down hole downpour.

  Birds that fall into the sea as a matter of lifestyle include

  kingfishers canvasbacks gulls heron osprey pipers tweaks.

  Birds that fall most prominently into fresh water are loons

  a type of grebe. Sixteen lakes in the Adirondack Mountains

  named Loon Lake. The cry of loons once heard is not forgotten.

  Clara has time to think, the space to realize her thinking mind. Never in her life has her life been so uncrowded, something she never before realized consciously how crowded her life was how people from her infancy had always been in her eyes, how the sounds of them had always been in her ears, how their presence moved in her their wills directed her even insofar as she created opposition she had been crowded by them their wills their voices their appearance directing her their cars and trucks the rumble of the elated horns horses pulling wagons splatting dung in the street, peddlers pushing their carts the stone blasting out of the rock of Manhattan tying in the girders with rivets, slapping in the stone, every manner of machine whining growling rumbling roaring in its own pitch, and all the gangsters of menace all the pain, others and her own, and the sound of fear in her, her own fear which she hated most of all because it was the loudest noise in the universe, the nuns at their prayers, kids shouting down the street, the muttering of murderous intention, and every square inch of space in her eyes blocked out by stone and tar and moving metal, by dark stairs and painted apartment walls, by overstuffed furniture by cots and pots and sinks and roaches and tin plates and later by phony butlers and the pretensions of the earth’s scum, there was nothing left in her eyes for a bee gravid with being bending a flower to the earth, or for simple blue skycolor unpenetrated by the spires of skyscrapers, or for something small and lovely to be contemplated for its own seriousness, like a comb or a hand mirror or a goldfish in a bowl, there was no chance, nothing reflected, nothing gave back from the contemplation of it, even her dreams were pure shit they did nothing for her, they were her days all over again, filled with the same people the same things in different arrangements or proportions but the same the same. So she stands quietly after some days molecularly reassembled widely spaced in her own density and watches through some branches and some leaves which have interest in themselves and pay her for the most marginal attention as she watches between them the lake water flung like a cast of silver grain in the gray day, two wakes widening behind the pontoons of the airplane finally losing the chase like porpoises turning back underwater as the green-and-white plane exchanges one environment for another and rising slowly turns, twists in the air rising turning its wings concentrating to a point then flaring out the plane falling swiftly away into the sky losing its color finally its shape and becoming possibly a speck of dust in her eye and when she blinks it is gone altogether, made of cloud made of sky gone even the sound of it gone, and she stares at the silver-scattered lake, the green leaves at her eyes, the branches and the big important journey of the ant along the twig.

  So she’s alone with him at Loon Lake and finds that still there is no intimacy and the mysteriousness of this fact begins to interest her. This is the way the rich do things. Getting herself dressed, she marches downstairs defiantly accepting it all and sits down for breakfast on the terrace overlooking the lake and waiting till they came out to see what she wants and eating a half grapefruit sitting in its silver shell in ice and daring anyone Bennett included to look at her the wrong way.

  But nothing has happened, the schedule is unaltered, the drinks at certain hours, the meals at certain hours, the morning a certain time in a certain place, the afternoon and evenings all timed, the past between them unacknowledged, the past ignored, personal reactions forsworn, you-naughty-girl forborne, every breath in its good time and Bennett keeps his distance with the utmost courtesy and only sees her at the times planned for seeing, at table, or on the tennis court her lesson or riding on the trail and she is left alone at her wish and settled into the timed ordered planned encounters of the rich in their family life who dole out time in carefully measured amounts to each other, they even sleep in separate rooms so as not to wear out their lives on each other, so as to avoid anything like the fluid mess of most people’s lives, and those who are closest to each other are as timed to be apart as anyone else. So at last she understands what wealth is, the desire for isolation, its greatest achievement is isolation, its godliness is in its isolation and that’s why never in her life before, her days and nights of time, has she enlarged this way, has her mind enlarged to the space this way, and has this voice been heard this way in reflection of herself. And the point is that she is growing to the environment, beginning to match it, and it is all beginning to make proportional sense, the timed encounters, the ceremony of courteous meetings, the space between people sharing space, the great distance to be traveled even in an obvious situation like this, so crudely obvious as to outcome, the aloneness of the two of them now, not the ironic wife not the fat poet sharing the fifty thousand acres, even now the isolated distance will have to be traveled before he can allow himself to put his hands on her. And that makes her smile. Because now she will know when that time is too, it will match her awareness and nothing will shock her or surprise her because the distance he must travel is the function of his wealth, as separative as it is powerful, and she waits in grim amusement knowing that by the time something happens he will have become recognizable to her, her familiar, and their intimacy will be all that’s possible for her, so natural she will wonder what it ever was that enraged her when her gangster left her sleeping and took the private train.

  But it was all in my mind, it was the furthest thing from everyone’s mind except mine. She had not come back, he had not thought of bringing her back, the world had gone on and only I, like Warren Penfield, mourned its going. The ant on the twig was at my eye and I saw no plane and in fact knew I wouldn’t, in fact felt the wolfish smile of secret satisfaction on my face, a simple mindless excitement just being back at this place, redballed home in comprehensive correction of my life, more comprehensive than the wild hope of seeing Clara again or the desire to take revenge. No simple motive could fill the totality of my return.

  Following job description fall into sea: fighter pilot naval

  bomber pilot naval, navigator bombardier gunner naval

  carrier-based Pacific Fleet World War Two

  with or without parachute drowned strafed dead of exposure

  or rescued one thousand and eight six.

  This is apart from individuals going down in their aircraft

  shot down or deprived of carrier landing

  from attack of Divine Wind or heavy seasr />
  collapsing their landing gear or snapping constraint cable

  or sailing into lower deck amidships or

  otherwise stippling the sea like rain like the hammers of sculptors.

  I thought oddly of eviction, a city street miniaturized in one cell of the remembering brain, a cityscape of old cheap furniture piled on the sidewalk and an old woman sitting on one of the chairs looking at old photographs of Paterson in an album. The chair arm had a doily. She showed me the picture she was looking at, herself as a girl, and she smiled. She smelled of urine, her hands were frighteningly swollen and twisted, she was totally unashamedly in residence on the sidewalk with her furniture, in some state of dreamy peace, careless of the cold, the first snowflakes came down toward evening and there was no derision from the tough kids on the street because she didn’t weep or bow her head or display grief or fear in her misfortune and so not misfortune itself, but sat and thought her chin in her hand, her elbow propped on the armchair doily, while the snow turned her hair white. What frightened them off was the triumph of her senescence, only a stickler for custom would demand that such a lady of property be required to have four walls around her a ceiling above her a light in the lamp and tea in her cup.

  I had this same mind, unhoused but triumphant coming off the streets through the dogs up the mountain to Loon Lake. And I greeted him like a complicitor while he stared at me quite astonished and then turned nodding as if he understood and continued to make his lunch in the spring sun. I was given Penfield’s old room. That night I heard the sound of surging power, some transformed connection, an electric pungency and pop, and everywhere around all the houses of the compound great flood-lights came on, over every bit of space, the courts, the boathouse, the staff house, the stables. And a while later I heard the dogs but they came this time on leashes pulling three men with shotguns broken in one hand and leash straps in the other woven like reins, a dozen yelping matched hounds and uniformed guards with Sam Browne belts and boots.

  I read the Penfield papers at his window from this outside light a peculiar bright amber night, and I heard the Poet’s voice and saw his large debauched pleading eyes and tried to understand his death, what it was, what was terminated, if the voice and the face remained, if the presence lay in the rooms, and the faint winy redolence of his being was sniffed on my every breath. A wineglass still sat on the mantel, the dregs evaporated to a glazed scab in the bottom of the petal.

  I mourn all change even for the better and in the days of my return I measured what I had known as the injured intruder against what I saw now as the sole guest. I mourned the absence of terror, the absence of hopeless desire, the absence of betrayals still to come.

  I thought of Sandy James asleep in the train coach, curled on the seat and from the wrist under her cheek the trembling droop of her five-and-ten charm bracelet, a tiny tarnished lady’s shoe, a tiny tarnished bottle, a tiny tarnished steam engine.

  Bennett had changed too, he was in an interesting derelict state of mourning. A gray stubble grew on his face and he wore the same plaid flannel shirt day after day. The white hair of the careful shining pompadour was uncombed, shocked forward over his forehead and suggesting from a flash of boyishness what he might have been had he not been a Bennett—a farmer perhaps, a logger, or heavy-chested stevedore of some honest life. We took our meals together, the two of us alone, with a manservant serving heated canned food. All the women of the light green were gone, as if having lost Lucinda Bailey Bennett he wanted the race expunged. A couple of the outside men were now doing the household work and the cooking. In the kitchen the dishes were piled unwashed. I saw roaches going along the floor. It was as if the establishment was in some accelerating state of decrepitude, beginning with Bennett’s heart and working outward. The grounds were immaculate as ever, Loon Lake was groomed for its spring. The stables were clean and horses shining and fit. But if he went on like this, the men of dark green too would be sent away and the boats would sink in their berths, the earth around the dolmen would grow back and the fence around the tennis court would fall and the clay court would crack like the surface of a blasted planet. Mourning had illuminated the natural drift of his life to isolation, and if it was not corrected it would go on, outward in all directions, spreading out over the universe in some infinite looming reclusiveness.

  But his eyes were curious when they lit on me for a moment or two at each measured meal. And the days were, after all, timed just as they had been, the hours appointed for drinking and eating, and naps, and exercise. He looked at me as if he were waiting. I met him each day in a renewed wonder of my own. I had seen his kingdom and I appreciated him almost more for the distracted humanity he displayed, broken as easily as anyone by simple events. For men all over the country he was, finally, a condition of their life. Yet he wandered about here in his grief, caring for nothing, barely raising his head when the phone rang. He moved slowly, almost listlessly, which brought out the natural lurch of the short-legged top-heaviness of him.

  In the mornings I heard the horses stomping in the stable, and looking out the window, saw Bennett come out galloping, having spurred his horse from the very portal.

  At noon we took lunch on the terrace if the day was fair and he’d glance at the sky over the lake as if expecting a plane to appear.

  At night while the guards in their belted uniforms walked the floodlit grounds with their dogs I heard him playing his phonograph records, his favorites, I heard the song of the night of my arrival.

  I know why I’ve waited

  Know why I’ve been blue

  Prayed each night for someone

  Exactly like you.

  He began to talk of Lucinda Bennett, imparting confidences that at first excited me inasmuch as I was there on the terrace in the sun at Loon Lake, in all the world the only one privileged to receive them. His voice lacked regret, his delivery was thoughtful, he chose his words as someone does who wants in as orderly a way as possible to impart information. So I hoped he was giving these thoughts to me, as instruction, and I trusted that his reasons would be forthcoming, that he had some plan, and that by being patient and attentive I would eventually learn what it was. Then I wondered if the confession itself was the gracious means by which I would pass through some subtle imperceptible moment of assumption from being something to being something else. But he went on, and the obsession of the subject became so apparent to me, and the confidences so intimate, I couldn’t believe he was aware that I listened or that he would seriously divulge them if I did not lack all importance to him. Day after day I listened. I watched the white clouds disembowel themselves in the high pines across the lake. His man served canned soup, canned spaghetti, canned peaches. Bennett grew shaggier and smellier, looking more like a troll every day. I watched his beard grow. While I waited for a place in his mind I tested my status with the staff. I rode a horse one day with the stableman beside me showing me the elementais. I went upstairs to the storerooms that the maid Libby had shown me so long ago and took several outfits for myself, white ducks already cuffed, argyle sweaters, saddle shoes, shirts, ties, a pair of boots. I had the man in the boathouse bring out the mahogany speedboat and hold the line while I boarded her. I got the hang of it soon enough. I cruised around looking at the beaver lodges, the islands where the loons made their nests, and saw from the water the concrete ramp and hangar where Mr. Penfield and Mrs. Bennett began their round-the-world flight.

  “She was a student when I met her. She was then, and remained, the most handsome woman I had ever seen. I secured a divorce to marry Lucinda. And in the years as they went by, no matter what passed between us, whenever she saw fit to spend time with me I was pleased to see her, I mean that no matter what the state of our affections I was always pleased when she came into a room. If she came into a room I had to look at her. I could not not look at her.

  “I respect character in a man but I revere it in a woman. I am done in when I find it in a woman. That little doxie had it in a chea
p sort of way. But in Lucinda it tested like the best ore, through and through, in the bones and in the beam of the eye.

  “Long ago she lost the pleasure of—what?—the engagement. And I was able to appreciate her character in the depth of her withdrawal from me. And then how I wished she had less of it! Less pride, less distaste for—surprises. Less neatness of soul. I told her she liked the sky because it was clean. She liked to go up in rain. I never flew with her because I sensed that it was her realm. But everyone told me what a wonderful pilot she was. How cool. How capable. And then she began to pull down the prizes and I knew it was so.

  “I was very proud of her. I bought her whatever she needed. She may have fallen in love with a fellow, some mail-service pilot, one of those adventurer types, and I was going to have it looked into. But when I thought about it I knew Lucinda would never permit herself an affair. It was not something to which she would give rein. And gradually she ceased to mention him. If it were possible for Lucinda to exist without a body she would have chosen to. Her body was of no interest to her. She did not like it … handled. She was a very orderly woman, Lucinda. If you look upstairs in her apartment you will see the order of her mind. She did everything with precision, and so was she affectionate with precision.

  “She flew planes but her tastes were very delicate and refined. She knew art, she knew music. She had small bones as befitting a fine mugwump family. They none of them liked me. I took great relish in that. It was one of those things. I have no taste of my own but I could recognize the quality of hers. She could look at something for a long time, a painting, a piece of porcelain. Then I knew it was fine. I envied her vulnerability—that she could be transfixed by something that was beautiful. She became pregnant just once and immediately took measures to have it rescinded. We had no children. I have one child by my first marriage but he is an incompetent, I mean legally, a macrocephalic, he has water in the head, and he lives in a home in Sweden. They take too good care of him. By all rights he should have been dead years ago.