The autumn leaves were falling before Wellfleet began to write. By now he felt he had been living in a vast time-house divided into many separate rooms. The first lines he wrote, believing that he would cut them out later, were these:
“As it is with the individual, so it may be with the whole world. When the individual is wounded in his soul he often wishes to die. But time passes and then, for no reason he understands, he wants to live again. Can it be the same with communities?”
His thoughts returned to Conrad Dehmel. He realized at last that his stepfather had lived through something of a preview of what he had lived through himself, for in the war which had been fought before he was born, nearly every city in Conrad Dehmel’s country had been blasted to fragments. He had been too young really to know Conrad Dehmel when he was alive. Now through these papers it seemed that he would have the chance to know him at last. At least Uncle Conrad had been sure of where he was, which was more than he could say for himself. His own youth? What chance did it have, really? Bombarded by pentillions of words, pictures, ideas, explanations, counter-explanations – who could have sorted out a fraction of what had been thrown at them? That was why marijuana had been such a relief.
So, facing a blank sheet of paper one morning and trying to write, he recalled a night from long ago that had no connection with anything in his life before or since. They were smoking and it was like a rocking cradle. Voices from far off, delicious visions so vivid you could reach out and caress them, a girl lying on the floor with her cheek against his thigh while the others were talking distantly, but so wisely and fascinatingly, out of a cloud and he had wondered whether he and the girl were really mating in the depths of the ocean millions of years ago. He could not remember her name or even what she looked like.
He forced the recollection away and concentrated on Timothy, who had been twenty years older than himself and had come out of a luxurious and conforming era before he revolted. At this stage Wellfleet was reasonably sure that Timothy intended to use this material for a book that would make him rich and perhaps even free. And how typical of his mother that she had never told him that she and Timothy were planning a book together.
Wellfleet smiled, thinking that after all these years he could afford to smile at Timothy, who had been one of those men who can write only when the impulse moves them. There were some finished passages in Timothy’s unmistakable style, but few of them were linked up. In between were hundreds of sketches and comments of the sort you might find in any writer’s notebook, but there was little continuity and this meant it was impossible to let Timothy speak entirely for himself. The more he thought about it, the more complicated his task became. In most parts he would have to weave this divergent material into some kind of form and he doubted if he would be able to do it.
Then panic seized him. What if he did not live long enough to finish it?
“I’ll have to begin somewhere,” he muttered to himself, “and I’ll have to begin now.”
He decided to begin with Timothy.
_________________
PART TWO
JOHN WELLFLEET’S STORY
as told by
JOHN WELLFLEET
When Timothy Wellfleet was three and a half years old and too young to remember, his father went across the sea to fight in an enormous war and the boy was almost eight before he returned. He was the only child of that marriage and he lived with his mother in the large stone house where my own mother was born. It had been inherited by my grandfather, John Wellfleet, after whom I was named, the gentle old man who had been a father to me when I myself was a child.
Mother often talked of that house because never in her life had she been so happy as when she lived in it. There were gardens in front, and behind were the woods of the mountain with squirrels, ring-necked pheasants, songbirds, and even a few raccoons and harmless snakes. The front windows looked down the long slope of the city, undulating waves of green when the leaves were on the trees, at night a shining wash of electric lights sweeping down to the broad belt of darkness that was the river.
Timothy’s father, Colonel Greg Wellfleet, the youngest of my grandfather’s brothers – at least twenty years younger than Grandfather – had bought the house after Grandfather had failed in business and lost his money. Montreal was a sizable city then, but no megalopolis yet, much less a metro. All the families who had lived there for more than three generations knew each other and when older people mentioned Grandfather’s name it was always with sympathy. “Dear old John Wellfleet was simply too much of a gentleman to understand how to do business with the kind of people who’ve come to the top lately.” The man who skinned him was a character whose name I forget. I once heard an older man say that he had come over from Belfast with only one pair of pants.
After Timothy’s father returned from the war, my mother went back to the old house to take care of Timothy. She was Timothy’s first cousin and twelve years older than he.
During the war years when his father was away – they called it the Second World War – Timothy lived alone with his mother and the servants – there used to be plenty of servants then – and this seems to have been when his troubles began. I mean troubles in his character that showed up later.
It is hard for me to imagine an establishment like that old house when Timothy was a child. Had he not described it so carefully in the papers I would never have guessed that any house was like that. Many nights during the war the downstairs was filled with men in the uniforms of the army, the navy, and the air force, and the noise they made when they talked and drank and sang and danced with their women and girls was like the noise of a riot. There were nights when the little boy did not get to sleep until three in the morning. He grew accustomed to the great walnut tables laid out with whole boiled salmons and delicious cold hams, cold roast beefs, and jellies, to the whiskeys, rums, gins, sherries, and brandies arrayed on the sideboard, to the glasses for red and white wines and the hot rolls and butter pats with ice cubes keeping them stiff and cold. Like a young animal he sensed the throb of greed in the house on nights like these, which was not a greed for money but for life itself, the men for the women and the women for the men, for some of these men were going to be killed, others had already missed death or had returned wounded, and some of them had already killed other men. He grew accustomed to watching these strangers with the candid eyes of a lonely, resentful child. He also grew accustomed to those heavy footsteps, often shambling footsteps, mounting the stairs to the second floor where the bathrooms and lavatories were, mounting even to the top floor where his own room was. Once he heard a different kind of noise and when the door opened a crack, there was a big military officer wrestling with a tall, thin woman who had a long, thin nose and a desperate face. Both of them were panting and the woman was holding him hard and twisting her hips against his. Then the woman pulled away and whispered in a kind of gasp, “No, Harry – no – we can’t do it here.” After staring at each other with heavy breathing, both of them went back down the stairs without noticing a child’s face in the crack of the door.
His father’s photograph stood on one of the living-room tables and to Timothy he looked like a hostile intruder, with his officer’s face and the uniform Timothy had come to hate without knowing why. Years later he learned that his father was considerably overage for a combat officer and that he had used influence to get himself posted overseas. His father was ten years older than Timothy’s mother, who was a small woman, neatly slim. His father was burly and tall, big all over, and his face in the picture wore the expression of a man who had always been bigger and stronger than other males, even when he was a boy at school.
For Timothy the war was just the war, the biggest thing in the world, and he had no interest in it. When his father came home after the victory with his sirloin face and all the medal ribbons on his chest-stuffed uniform he scared Timothy because he was so huge and full of authority and his big square-fingered hands hurt when he picked up his son
and tried to be jolly and affectionate with him. Timothy thought he must be crazy, for how could any full-grown man expect a child to believe he loved him when he had never seen him since he was a baby? What his father really wanted, he thought, was to own him. Then came the time in the last week of August when his father drove down to Maine with him for a week of surfbathing (“It’s time the men in this family had some fun together, Timmie”) and when they undressed in the bath-house his father’s tool (Timothy’s word) was so massive it reminded him of an animal’s and scared him so badly he could hardly sleep that night.
They went home again and Timothy was sent to a boarding school for the first time in his life. A year later when he was home the shouting began and his mother’s face showed the usual streaks of tears. The boy could not understand it, only that his parents now hated each other. Then he began really to hate his father on account of all this terrible anger that had entered the house with his return to it.
Soon came the morning when his mother packed his things into two suitcases and put them in the trunk of her car, Timothy having been born in the kind of family that could afford two cars. Her own suitcases were there already, and on an early October morning when the leaves were scarlet and the air was the breath of the earth itself they drove down across the border into his mother’s country. They drove all day, his mother tight-lipped, and it was twilight when they reached a place called Scarsdale where his mother’s father lived.
Her own mother was dead and Timothy stayed more than eight months in the house of his maternal grandfather, who now was a widower. During this time his mother came and went. He was sent to school in Scarsdale while his elders awaited the result of a lawsuit between his parents to decide who would have the custody of Timothy. The court awarded the boy to his father and two days after the verdict his mother descended from Montreal and for Timothy it was terrible. She kissed him with her face wet with tears and though her thin, nervous hands held onto him in nervous spasms he sensed no tenderness in them, only fury because she had lost something that belonged to her. The boy was aghast, for he was thinking of that huge animal-thing of his father’s and how awful it must have been for his mother and at the same time he resented her because she had never really looked after him and now she could not protect him. He also sensed fear in her. Later he was to write, “I could smell it.”
More days passed and he heard her arguing with his grandfather.
“I’m sorry, Alix,” the grandfather said. “Of course I’m sorry for you, but what is the point of all this? You’ve never paid any respect to my opinions, but I trust I’m at least entitled to them.”
“He’s cruel,” the mother said. “And he’s coarse.”
“Did you say cruel? Didn’t he take care of you? Did he ever strike you? Of course he didn’t. Greg was a soldier just as Everett was. He did his duty and I’d like to remind you that his country did its duty before ours did. What’s happened is your own fault and you know it and –”
“I suppose you think he was faithful to me all those years he was over there?”
“Can you prove that he wasn’t?”
“None of them were.”
“Do you know that? If so, how do you know it?”
“Because everybody knows it.”
“That, Alix, is a meaningless statement. As a lawyer, I have to tell you that the court’s decision was a proper one. As a man, I will tell you something else that isn’t popular these days. In affairs like this the woman does not automatically have the right to the child. A male child, believe me, needs a father just as much as he needs a mother. Timothy’s been weaned quite a while, Alix.”
“What about Timmie? Yes, what about him? Did anyone ask him?”
“And did you ask Timothy how he would like it to live with this new man of yours? The boy’s nine years old and now you’re going to marry a man with three sons of his own and all of them are older than Timothy. What chance would the poor boy have with a crew like that? And what chance after your next divorce? All right! All right!” The old gentleman lifted his hands. “It’s a bad business all around and you can call me old-fashioned if you wish, but responsibility is responsibility and that’s all there is to it.”
“Responsibility!” she said, and broke into tears.
“There’s another old-fashioned word called honor.”
The little boy, crouching on the stairs outside the living room and hearing all this, thought how phony his mother was and how he would tell one of his schoolfriends what she was like. So the whole lot of them were phony except his grandfather, and now he supposed he would be taken away from here and sent back to the man with the terrible tool.
The day after this scene his mother returned to Montreal to pack the rest of her belongings and it was a long time before Timothy saw her again. She had wanted him to attend her second wedding, but her father had circumvented this. He kept the boy with him in Scarsdale. Timothy’s schoolwork was going badly and he did not sleep well. Though his grandfather did his best to be a companion to him, the old gentleman always left for the city in the early morning and seldom returned before seven in the evening. When the school term ended, his grandfather told him to begin his packing. His father would arrive in three days and they would all meet in New York.
“It will be fun for you to see New York,” his grandfather said, trying to be cheerful, but Timothy wondered why the old man didn’t live in New York himself if it was all that terrific. The worst thing was knowing that he would have to return to his father and not see this kind old man again. His grandfather was still handsome with stiff gray hair, very straight in the back and high in the shoulders. He came from what the Americans called “an old family” and Timothy had the impression that he hated what his world was turning into. Years later he still missed his grandfather; he wrote that he wished the old man were still alive now that he himself was grown up so they could talk man to man. He wrote that his grandfather had always been kind to him and had tried his best to give him the security of knowing the difference between right and wrong.
In New York they checked in at the old Plaza Hotel where the doorman knew his grandfather and called him by his name, and that afternoon they went to the zoo together. Timothy had never been in a zoo before and he hated it. A huge tiger stood on his hind feet with his forepaws reaching the top of the wire of his cage and he shook the wire and snarled at the people who were staring at him. There was also a camel that for some reason reminded him of his father.
The next morning Colonel Wellfleet arrived after breakfast. He had driven down the night before and stayed at another hotel. They met in his grandfather’s room where both men shook hands silently and were unnaturally dignified with each other. The old man said it would be pleasant to drive north through the Adirondacks on a day like this and his father agreed that it would be very pleasant. The stiff embarrassment of the two older men with each other was devastating to the little boy. Finally his grandfather patted his head, wished him luck, and said it was time for him to leave for the office.
“You may as well stay here, Greg,” he added, “till your car is ready.”
Timothy’s eyes followed the straight back, the high shoulders, and the crisp white hair out of the door and out of his life – a man, so he was to write years later, the like of whom he was never to meet again, “because he was the only man I ever knew who could use words like honor, duty, and responsibility without making me feel like throwing up.”
After he left, Timothy’s father did his inadequate best to relax the atmosphere. He asked the usual paternal questions about the boy’s school, about his sports and his friends, but as he got nothing in return but monosyllables and avoiding eyes, he hunched down behind his newspaper until the desk phoned to say that his car was at the door.
They drove north for most of the day and reached Montreal in the evening with Timothy asleep on the back seat under a rug with a cushion under his head.
TWO
This I had never known unt
il I read the papers – Colonel Wellfleet had asked my mother to come to the house to take care of Timothy when he brought him home. Among the many photographs I found in the boxes was one of Mother with Timothy, and if I do say it myself, she was a very beautiful young woman. Timothy looked a normal boy, reasonably robust but not wide in the hips like his father. Most of the Wellfleet men, myself included, had faces that made you think of horses, though thank God none of the women were like that. Timothy’s face was somewhat horse-like even when he was a child. Anyway, this is what he himself wrote:
“When I woke up and went into that God-damned house I found my cousin Stephanie waiting for me and after an hour with her I felt better than I ever could remember. I don’t know what it was about her. She looked so gentle even though she had one hell of a temper if she felt like it. All the Wellfleets had quick tempers, but when Stephanie got sore she made you feel she had a right to get sore. I mean, she made you feel you deserved it and that it was good for you. And was she ever stubborn! You could no more make her change her mind than a mule. I’d have been scared to death if she’d ever got really sore at me but she never did. The thing was, she was all woman. I mean, she never tried to think like a man the way too God-damned many women do and crap everything up. Everything about Stephanie was very young except her eyes. They were big and brown and sort of washed over with a look that would make anyone feel good. And she was just plain dumb innocent about all sorts of things because her parents were so old-fashioned they’d never told her how babies were born till she was in her teens and by that time she knew anyway. But I can tell you this. She learned all there was to learn about me in the first half-hour even though she was only twelve or thirteen years older than I was.
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