Time being what it is, the rector was now a young seminarian. And no worse for it, said the mate, to whom it was smart business for the old to deal with the young—who as he said would have everything at their fingertips. Since it was Jim’s wife who had died, the young minister deferred to him, and couldn’t have been kinder or taken longer to help search out what Jim thought suitable for a wife like that, and a stone. Neither of the two old men walked over to look at old Civil War names, wars being too new again, but if Jim’s search took the long, trembling time it did, this was because he remembered what he had once said in this place.
“‘I can wait,’” he said to the mate. “Do you remember?” And it seemed to him that now, now if ever must be the time to express all that he had been gathering for a lifetime and had never expressed properly, about our place in the world here and his modest place also; now if ever was the time to say it all. But though dozens of texts were brought forth, there was none that satisfied him. It came time for evensong, but the mate didn’t press him. The young man, though nobody had come for the service, was going round quietly, turning on lights and so forth, being his own sexton. And suddenly he was stopped in his sweeping. “What’s behind that curtain?” the mate said. “I wondered, at the time.”
That young man almost fell over his broom, he was so eager; he had seen the Bentley. It must have been hard on him to accept a church so hopelessly faded in congregation as that one, and as you may have noted at today’s dedication, though he very kindly returned for it, he has since been called elsewhere. But he had everything at his fingertips that day. “There were to have been two,” he said, pointing to the high memorial window opposite the curtained one. “But something happened.” Then he pulled back the curtain. The day was one of the short, winter ones, no anniversary of an autumn one and no sunset, but between the darkness outside and the light within, the blank pane perhaps showed up best. So that is how come, two years later almost to the day, which the stained-glass people told us was optimum—Emily’s window. The mate wanted to pay for it, but of course that couldn’t be, even though he was the one to persuade Jim to have it.
“She wouldn’t have wanted such a thing,” said Jim.
“In some ways, Jim,” said the other old man, “I—other people—knew her better than you did!”
Then the young man put his hand between them. It was the nearest they had ever come to an out-and-out difference of opinion, not to say quarrel.
“She was a common woman, a homely one,” said Jim. “Words change, but when I was a boy, that’s what the mourners used to say at barge funerals, of any woman who had the human touch to her, and had brought with her all the home comforts, during a lifetime that wasn’t never nothing but daily.” He looked ashamed then, either at his grammar or his eloquence, but with him who can tell? “She was an ordinary woman,” he said. “She was a nonpareil.”
“I know what you mean, Jim,” said the mate. “Even without going to one of your dictionaries. I know what you mean.” How he could remember! “You mean—she was like everyone else.”
So, between them, that was her epitaph—though when it came to the window, they finally left it to the rector, after all. He chose “Many Waters”; I suppose you know it. Of course you do, with the window, how could you not? “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods”—and so forth. Maybe the mate did help suggest it because of all the water in it, knowing Jim’s tastes or thinking he still did—remember that sloop! And it is a beautiful verse.
“So it is, mate,” said Jim. “So it is, Jim.” Calling the mate by name was meant to repair the sharp words. “But you know something?” He stared through the blank pane at the dark land outside it. “This is a mixed region, around here. I see it more and more.”
Later, when he saw first the window itself, back at the glassmakers’ of course, not at the unveiling, he both nodded his head and shook it, even though the figure rising from the water in all its blood-reds and milky whites was an angel, not Emily. “Funny thing,” he said. “I always see her … from the water. On the land.”
And now Jim. He was fond of saying that if there was something he wanted to know about himself he could always go to the mate for it. The mate, if he was there to hear him, always remarked, “Same here. Only, he won’t tell.” For forty years or more their lives had been twined together, but in such a way that if one showed himself ready to drown, the other didn’t go down with him but held him; they weren’t twins, unless twins can be of totally different temperament. The mate had his Floridas, and did or didn’t speak of them. In the early years, the three sometimes had had to speak among them of Lottie, though never of the mate’s long undivorcement itself; during the years when Emily did get a letter or two, these were spoken of, but curiously, only in twosome, either of the men to Emily or to each other, but never in threesome; after Emily’s death, the other sister was not spoken of at all. In money matters, the town had at various periods thought it remarkable that the pair never minded who was the richer, but the friends themselves knew that too much teetering had gone on in that direction, ever for them to feel constraint. During the stunned years when the mate clung to his job like a man who has forgotten what his hands are holding, then it was Jim, the ever solider townsman, who lent him money for unspecified needs, and it was only during the Second War—at a time when the limits of a small business, if these don’t soar, are likely to be fixed—that the mate began to stumble forward, to climb as if he knew there was a top, and finally to claw to it. Until then, Jim, with his strong figure, hair faded and thinned but not balded, and his busy little cockerel of a wife beside him, had looked the younger of the two; now it was the mate, with the powder-white hair which had once been raven, and the kind of tycoon charm which can demonstrate in a handshake that it has known what it is to be shy. Jim, by now, had a particular kind of townsman’s face, relaxed but puzzled in repose, the quality which in a younger man is called willing-to-learn. But—as you may have noticed—we haven’t yet got solely and wholly to Jim.
For the curious thing about Jim was that one always got to him best through others, which may be why he persisted in claiming that he never quite knew himself. He wasn’t an enigma, any more than any of us, but he had thought it his duty to face the world’s enigma and study it—or he had always meant to; this meant that if he could wait, others must watch. Why was it otherwise that though he and Emily stood all their lives in handfast, Jim, as against the mate, seemed the more divided? He never minded being in business with a wife, even such a competent one, and never consented to lose dignity for it—though a town will try. The town could do nothing with him or to him, while he studied it. He had his hobbies then, not too cranky ones for a self-styled reflective; about the time he married, for instance, he seemed to give up books at large—or the timid taste which had been tending that way—only to replace them with a collection of dictionaries which, all along unknown to himself, may have been what he had been going to the libraries for. For a while it would seem as if he never read these either, for it was at this period that he took to collecting the names of towns on matchboxes, merely for the way they pleased or teased the something within him which he couldn’t explain otherwise; when he drove the highways on a trip to Yellowstone for instance, passing through a state he would chant some such refrain to the children: South Bend, Plymouth, Mishawaka, Peru. But that was only when the children were small, and he could think he was teaching them America. After one particular Christmas, he and the mate tried to tinker over a hobby together; do you ever remember your parents telling you of a year when both Jim and the mate came back from separate trips to New York City—with toy trains? But it didn’t last long, and here they did share a likeness; if, like most, as they got older, they wanted only the more to see the world and to grasp it, then this wasn’t their style of miniature.
Curiously enough, as their teeter-totter went now up, now down, it was the mate who had begun to educate himself with books—real books. He would
do it on his own terms of course, when and if he felt he could get to them, and in his own character—which he so well knew. In just the same way, before a certain trip abroad, he had gone to a language school and demanded they teach him French in ten minutes—which they did, if poorly, and to a dancing school where, in somewhere double the time, he did well. Why he had been moved to do this for a trip with Jim on which they never got to do either of those things, did stay a mystery to him, until Jim told him.
“Why do you suppose I ever suggested that trip?” the mate asked, long after it was over.
“For old time memory’s sake,” Jim replied.
By that time, like most people, they were pretty good at memory, and each was able to swallow Jim’s He—for what they had gone for was to help shake from them the real death of youth, of the mate’s son—not to remember their own. And from that trip Jim did bring back a huge terrestrial globe, lighted from within and girdled with half-life size figures clasping it, the gods of antiquity, holding it up with their spread arms and thighs. He found it in a stationer’s in the Strand and had it sent home in sections for his collection: sometime back, he had gone on from his towns, and from America too, to globes. But when brought home, though it glowed as magnificently in the home as in the shop, instead of adding to his collection it ended it, for here the thing was, great with history and glass jewels too—did I say it was sixteenth-century and Venetian?—and even in Sand Spring it was only a globe. That ended all his collections except—as he said to the mate, spinning the globe for him, interpreting its yellowed mapskin by its own inner light, at dusk of a cold Sunday—except for one. From now on, he said, he would collect only the intangible, where a man had more chance.
“Will you look at that expression of his!” said Emily, watching him. “Worse than the children!” How she always watched, and the mate too—and how they knew him! For himself, he could decide best who and what he was, he always said, in the way she spoke to him. For, though often she said to him exactly what she had said to the mate and the mate’s baby, on the day when they all had first to face up to things—over the years she had reversed these in tone. When she said, “Don’t fret, don’t fret now,” it was as if to a wise child who knows that beforehand, but when she said, “It can’t be helped, can it,” she spoke as if to a strong man who bore with the world. As for the children, Jim always said they loved him too much, that likely if he had done more in the world, they wouldn’t have. He often said it. So here, maybe if only to help complete the circle within which a family is always judging itself, he was for once heard to participate in his own measurement.
And here we all are now: the four of us—two old men accountably present, and two women accountably absent—plus a listener or two now dogging their footsteps, from the crowd of them once upon a time at their knees. Between a last ride and a first memorial, the distance never changes, though opinions vary on the length of it, some memories going by wheel, others by wing. But all of us are here now, and ready to go back.
V
THE DAY THE TWO old men went back was a day un-colored by water or breeze, tempered only with its meaning to them. As one gets older, this happens to days generally, but on that particular one the friends were driving back upstate from the glassmakers’ studio in New Jersey, where they had gone for that private viewing, and now, no matter the weather they passed, the window’s high, fragile rainbow overhung the highway in front of them. There is one stretch of the New York State Thruway that nine times out of ten is leaden with Catskill storm-weather, and this they did finally comment on—that neither had ever seen it in sunshine. Then the miles and the signposts took over again, and the silence—and always up ahead of them over the car’s hood, above the spot where small figureheads were once attached at the radiator caps, that high transparency at the prow.
“Glass,” said Jim. “I’ll never understand how it’s made. From sand.”
The mate didn’t answer at once. He was driving the Cadillac, in which he always kept the air-conditioner going, and the air they breathed was as pure and excellent as an engine accessory could make it, but voices were hollow. On Jim’s side, a sign said NEXT EXIT and gave the number of miles.
“Want to stop?” asked the mate. They had been driving for some time.
“No, not unless you do,” Jim answered, and the mate nodded. One of the latter-day satisfactions of their friendship, and no longer the lightest, was that physically they had kept pace with each other, neither’s digestion or bladder being weaker than the other’s.
“This exit we’re coming to,” said the mate. “We go off it, we could go on over to Skaneateles, have one of those big dinners at Krebs, and still get home.”
“Krebs,” said Jim. “Haven’t heard that name in maybe—must be twenty-five years.”
“Neither have I, come to think of it; maybe it isn’t there.” They drove on, and in a short time, too short if they met a cop, went by that exit.
“On the other hand,” said the mate. “On the other hand, I’ve had to do a lot of driving around in our part of the state recently. Looking for a factory site. Cheap unoccupied land is getting harder and harder to find.” He laughed. “I told the company directors—‘I got a couple of farms you can have, at a price. I’ll never live on ’em.’” By now the corporation drawl he adopted for business had become almost natural to him, and he could say a thing like that about farms without blinking. But he could surprise himself still, and Jim too. “Anyway, struck something when I was going around—came upon something I want to show you. You game?”
“Sure, why not. Just say how far, if I should phone. That housekeeper will wait dinner otherwise.”
The mate moved his head to look at him, turning on him the bachelor stare of a man who ate in restaurants, and had argued housekeepers and other points too, with Jim.
“Guy behind you wants to pass,” said Jim, but it wasn’t the mate’s driving that bothered him; the mate always had one eye on the road.
“Let her cook it,” said the mate, “we’ll get there. Though how you can want to tie yourself down like that—” He increased the speed which momentarily he had let slacken. “No, it’s not far. Given a decent road—” He gave a short laugh. “Well, if it had one, I wouldn’t have gone there and found it. Even so, in this thing, can’t be more than an hour from home. Just that you have to go round it.”
Where, to two natives of the district, could anything unknown to them be so close? But Jim didn’t ask it, as the signposts traveled by. The mate drove on silently, until the definitive one, where they left the highway. Then he spoke, when it was no longer needed.
“It’s on the way to Batavia,” he said.
When they got there, they sat in the still car for a moment, then with one accord each opened the door on his side, stepped out, and turning on his heel, regarded it—sky, tumbled-in roofs, mossy underbrush to treetop glory—all. The windshield of the Cadillac was extra-wide, but there was too much ruin and growth here ever to be encompassed by it. Was cheap land for progress always so beautiful? They numbered it with their eyes—here outbuildings whose flat tops had melted into moss, there a great curved hangar of swallows’ nests, on whose leaning timbers only fantasy tipped a weathercock, pointing not crazily, into the wood. All the facilities were here. And here was the hill, all the inhabitants of that village-for-a-day—except these two—long since piped back into it. It stood there like the massive bulk of their lives. Only those others were gone—and the steel rails.
The Little Otselica was running. One of the men—it didn’t matter which—leaned down to it as if to stroke it for choosing to, then when his knee cracked, stood up shamefaced.
“Must have had a wetter season than we thought,” said the other, but it didn’t matter who, or if both saw the impress of a bather, her piled hair floating the water. The time had now come for memory to be the same.
Each of them found a stony stump to sit on, or a porous stone.
“Going to put your factory here
?” said the one.
The other shook his head. With a wrist flick he waved aside the hill, annihilated it. “No problem there. But still the same trouble. Place still doesn’t go anywhere.”
But this was only the preamble. In the uneasy stillness, the nose of the Cadillac, parked in grasses, reared alert. And after a while, one of the men began at the beginning.
“‘Rushing the growler,’” he said. “Know what a ‘growler’ was? Came across it only the other day.”
“No. Never even heard the word, except from you.
“Must have used them when they wanted to get there in a hurry. Eighteen-sixty-five, the dictionary said. Funny how it leaped right out at me. It’s a horse-drawn cab.”
The other tinkled his car keys against the stone. “It’s all transport,” he said, and drew a flask of brandy out of a hip pocket.
The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride Page 17