I Dream Alone

by Gabriel Walsh

  While we danced, drank and reminisced about our past, Muriel kept telling me and others about how she looked forward to attending Williams College. The same was true of just about every other graduate at the party, each of them boasting about the university he or she was going to attend in the fall. The consequence of hearing and listening to my schoolmates talk about leaving town and attending college in other parts of the state and country only made me feel more disconsolate. Muriel picked up on my dejected mood and made every effort to revitalise me by hugging and kissing me and telling anyone who would listen that I would be getting my high school diploma within six weeks after I attended summer school in Ossining, a township about ten miles north of Tarrytown. I reminded those who were listening that I’d be applying to a college of my choice where I wouldn’t have to focus on Intermediate Algebra. That wishful thinking got a small applause. I had trouble accepting anything positive about the evening. It was as if someone had hit me with a baseball bat months earlier and I was only now feeling the impact and pain.

  On top of wallowing in self-pity, my mind simply couldn’t come to terms with the fact that in a very short period of time Muriel would be leaving town and going away from me. Her anticipated new life in college was a reality that didn’t include me and the more I thought about it on this vulnerable night, the more forlorn I became. I was also tempted to tell her about my encounter with Mrs. Axe but I was too insecure and uncertain about how she’d react.

  I had once, when the Axes were away, taken Muriel on a tour around the grounds but she didn’t take to the place or consider it very welcoming. In many ways the imposing sight of the castle was simply forbidding to anyone who lived in a normal or regular house. Almost everyone I talked to, particularly my schoolmates, knew about the castle but very little about the people who lived in it. When I told friends that I lived in it I was always asked if it was haunted. When in conversation with schoolmates in the local luncheonette, Muriel would sometimes humorously quip that I was related to the ghosts that walked the stairways at night. In turn I would add that there was only one ghost but under the threat and penalty of being turned into the son of the Headless Horseman or Rip van Winkle’s sister I was sworn to secrecy never to reveal its name. Muriel often encouraged me to take notes when I walked about the place on weekends and bring them to our English literature class. In that particular class I was introduced, mainly through Muriel, to William Blake, an eighteenth-century English poet who said, “It is important to see life through the eye rather than just with it.” I took the position in the class discussion that perhaps the poet meant that to see life with the eye is a limited experience that separates us from a lot more than our own perceptions of self – living, so to speak, as if we are only our own shadow rather than the figure that casts it. Muriel countered with something to the effect that, according to her interpretation of Mr. Blake’s poetry, humankind is forever trapped between enlightenment and ignorance. She insisted on quoting Blake to me quite often. “A robin redbreast in a cage puts all Heaven in a rage” and “Truth told with bad intent beats all the lies I can invent.” A few times I accused Muriel of equating me with the robin redbreast in Blake’s poem. She denied it but it was clear to me that she considered the castle a cage that I was in. And as far as I could comprehend I was never objective enough to distance myself from the environment of my jigsaw-puzzle-like relationship with the Axes. This was particularly true when it came to explaining what Mrs. Axe meant to me and what I meant to her.

  Muriel was such an anchor for me in school and in the community I felt I’d simply float and fade away if she turned away from me. Listening and hearing her share her future college plans with others who would also be leaving Tarrytown added to my disappointment and drove me into a deeper sense of insecurity. When I thought about her going away to college a feeling of abandonment engulfed me and I felt like a fish out of water. When it became clear to Muriel at the graduation party that I was sinking into a state of melancholia she asked me to take her home, which I did.

  Outside her front door we sat and talked very quietly to each other so as not to attract the attention of her parents who were very likely awake and waiting for us to call it a night. Muriel was in good humour and still concerned about my mood. In as sweet a voice as I’d ever heard she began to reminisce about our relationship.

  “Remember the first time?” she asked me.

  “The first time what?”

  “The first time we did it!”

  “Yes, I remember. I remember it every day.” I looked up at the summer sky as if to be sure it was bearing witness to what I was saying.

  Muriel then broke into my pensive hesitation. “The first time for you was the first time for me: a wonderful experience to share at the same time. A cosmic-like thing,wasn’t it?”

  “That’s a fact,” I answered, feeling a bit self-conscious.

  Muriel laughed and questioned me again, more to tease me than anything else. “It is true, isn’t it?” she continued as if she had nothing else to talk about.

  “It’s the truest thing I know about my whole life.”

  A moment of complete silence followed. I waited for Muriel to say something that would change the subject but she didn’t. Finally I concluded that she was waiting and perhaps even anxious for me to comment on the night we both shed our virginity.

  “At the time I hardly knew how to do it or what I was doing,” I said, looking at her directly and hoping she’d compliment me in some way for being honest.

  She giggled again. “I couldn’t tell if you hadn’t been at it since the day you were born,” shesaid with a bit of a laugh.

  I replied, “I think I’ve been thinking about it since the day I was born but on the day I was born in Ireland I was told not to be thinking about it. With that kind of thinking it’s a bit of a miracle that anyone is born at all in Ireland if you ask me.”

  “You came all the way from Ireland and we did it up there on the hill in front of Marymount College.” She was now in a happy and even cheerful mood and doing her best to cheer me up. She continued to interrogate me. “Why did we end up there, do you remember? Was it because it was a Catholic school?”

  I couldn’t wait to answer her question. “There was no place else to park. Every make-out place was taken by everybody we know.”

  “Do you know who got pregnant that night?” she asked me.

  “Not you!” I quickly blurted out.

  “No! Not me! Fool!”

  “Who?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. Tell me.”

  “Joan Paltorsky – that’s why she wasn’t at graduation. That’s why she quit school not long after the prom.”

  “I don’t know Joan Paltorsky that well but I remember a lot of boys in school used to make gestures with their hands about how big her breasts were when she walked up and down the corridor.”

  “She was a cheerleader,” Muriel said.

  “Yes, the guys went to see her at the football games.”

  “Did you?”

  “Once.”

  “And?”

  “She did have a big pair.”

  After another moment of silence Muriel moved closer to me. “Can I tell you something?”

  “Tell me anything you want.”

  “This is about me. No, it’s really about us.”

  At that point I got acutely nervous. I worried that Muriel was going to tell me she was now in the same way as Joan Paltorsky. A few times in the past she reminded me that her ‘monthly’ was late but it always eventually came and banished the shock and fear of early parenthood for both of us.

  “Go ahead! What?” I said.

  “We first did it on the prom night, remember?”

  “You asked me that already.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I thought you did.”

  “I didn’t.”

  I was now unable to hold on to any remnant of patience or humour. “Tell me what you want to tell me.
I’m afraid to hear but tell me! Tell me! Go ahead and tell me!” All of a sudden the pain and rejection of not graduating seemed minor compared to what I was thinking I was going to hear.

  “The dress I wore to the prom, remember?”

  Was Muriel going to tell me that the dress didn’t fit her now and wouldn’t for a few months?

  “Remember the dress, Gabriel?”

  “I remember that it was a beautiful dress. Wasn’t it white?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “You looked beautiful in it. You still look beautiful. You are beautiful!”

  “Yes, but I’m not wearing that dress now.”

  “Where is it? What happened to it?”

  “That’s what I want to tell you about.”

  I braced myself for the news – à la Joan Paltorsky – that Muriel was going to clinically deliver to me.

  She then leaned back on the reclining summer chair that her mother and father usually sat in. “I wanted to tell you about my prom dress because, after I got home that night after we did it, I was so happy and excited that when I took it off I didn’t hang it up. I just jumped out of it and left it on the floor of my bedroom.”

  “So your dress got messed up.”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “The next morning when my mother came into my room to wake me up she almost tripped over the dress.”

  “Is that all?” I asked with a great sigh of relief.

  “Is that all? Sort of! Except when she picked the dress up it was covered in blood. My white dress was soaking in blood. My blood! When my mom saw that she knew what we did that night.”

  “She knows?”

  “She knows. I don’t know if she told my dad. I never asked her.”

  I had no response. I felt sad, sorry, confused and admittedly relieved. I then reached over and kissed Muriel and she was very responsive but she got up from the reclining chair, opened her front door and entered her house. I sat alone for another minute or two then walked to my car and drove back to the castle.

  * * *

  I began my summer school course in Ossining New York, a township north of Tarrytown. Classes started at nine in the morning and ended at noon. Mrs. Axe requested I not serve her breakfast while I attended to acquiring my high school diploma. This gave me a bit more time to concentrate on the homework I was assigned. Every morning I sped off the estate in my car after having a quick breakfast with Pat and most of the afternoons I spent with Muriel. One or two evenings a week I’d join her and her parents for dinner. When her parents were out of the house or away for a protracted period of time I’d spend hours on the sofa with her. How she managed to avoid getting pregnant had mostly to do with my use of contraceptives. When such an item wasn’t readily available we took our chances and – for both our sakes at the time – got lucky.

  As the weeks passed Muriel visited Williams Collegemore and more. She had acquired accommodation on campus and spent a lot of time decorating it and making it her new home. The inevitable day also came when she packed the last of her personal belongings and left home for Williams.

  For me, Tarrytown then became a ghost town. With Muriel in Vermont I felt and looked like a dead spider caught in a web that wouldn’t stop spinning.

  While she was away I would join Mr. and Mrs. Axe and reported to them weekly on my scholastic progress. It so happened that I was doing well in algebra and Latin and my spirits were lifted considerably. Mrs. Axe went out of her way to say – more to reassure me than anything else – that because of my association with Mr. Axe I was a bit more classically educated than almost any other student who had graduated. And she went on to say Mr. Axe, being a Harvard graduate, was likely to pull strings and have me admitted to his alma mater if within the next year or so I could show and display an ability to grasp a few more sophisticated and complex academic subjects. What the subjects were she didn’t say. As encouraging as this sounded and as positive a spin as Mrs. Axe was putting on it, I couldn’t shed the feeling that I had failed at high school.

  * * *

  On the odd weekend the Axes and I would go and see a play on Broadway. Of the plays – and there were quite a few – that Mr. Axe and I had seen, our favourite was the musical My Fair Lady. Mrs. Axe was less committal about favouring one play over another. She seemed to like them all.

  When my last day at summer school came about, after I had passed my two courses, I was listed and registered to receive my diploma from Sleepy Hollow High School, which I officially received close to the end of summer. That same week, while I was still in a celebratory mood, I decided that I would go unannounced to visit Muriel in Williams. I had been there twice before and knew my way to Vermont. More than a month had passed since I had seen her. I drove along the Taconic Parkway feeling like a new man. The acquisition of the high school diploma was out of the way and, with the exception of serving Mrs. Axe her breakfast on weekday mornings and putting in a few hours in the office at the castle, I was free to go where I pleased. After informing Mrs. Axe that I was planning on visiting Muriel in Vermont, I chose the weekend for my journey. I also bought a small pocketbook edition of William Blake’s poems as a token reminder of our days in class. My car had recently been tuned up and it performed like new. With four wheels under me and William Blake’s poetry in my back pocket, I was in great form as I drove to Williams.

  It was late afternoon when I pulled into the parking lot at Williams. As I headed towards Muriel’s residence I noticed girls and boys dancing on the huge lawn in front of the Commons. Many of them looked like they were active participants at a carnival. There was a palpable sense of looseness and freedom in the air. The place was abuzz with students coming and going in every direction. There was a banner between two trees extending a welcome to ‘freshmen’. Some of the young men from Williams had grown their hair as long as the female companions they walked about the campus with. A few even seemed to have fallen out of the nearby trees. Their attire was anything but uniform-like. Everybody seemed to be doing their own thing. Whether it was a good or a bad thing, respect for authority didn’t appear to be in vogue at Williams. Musicians seemed to be everywhere, playing instruments that might easily have been as old as mankind itself. There was the odd character who still had the courage to wear a crew-cut and a three-piece suit with a shirt and tie to match but that sighting was rare. The voices, the singing and the songs were also of the kind that advocated social change. Woodie Guthrie – “This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York Island . . . this land is made for you and me . . .” – might well have been the patron saint of the college. Freedom of individual expression, it seemed, was overtaking or at least challenging the collective and corporate bunker mentality of national isolationism. The button-down shirt generation had hatched an offspring that resisted buttons both literally and metaphorically. The curriculum may have had its roots in the ‘McCarthy era’ – the plague of Senator Joe McCarthy, a senator from Minnesota, a man who smelled a Communist under every bed in America. Recently he had been exposed for the ideologue he really was. His campaign against communist and godless Russia was a plague on the American landscape that had only just lifted. The college, it seemed to me, was a repository for a new kind of politic that in itself was in danger of falling over the same cliff it had chased its advisories over. As I crossed over one pathway after another on my way to Muriel’s dorm the atmosphere of no perimeters permeated the very air I walked in. A traffic light of any description or function, metaphorically or otherwise, would easily have been the most superfluous sign and symbol of life there. Apparently this was part of the attraction and philosophy of the school. Students who applied for admission were very much inclined to be anti-establishment and that meant rebelling against just about everything that the culture of the three-piecesuit and the crew cut offered at the time. Their parents were more than likely of the generation and the engine that saw extreme capitalism as a threat and a scourge to sel
f-expression. I sensed this kind of politic with Muriel’s father. It was almost a sure thing that he encouraged his beautiful daughter Muriel to enrol there. What he probably didn’t plan on was that Muriel was way ahead of him when it came to being liberal, charitable and caring. Proof of that was when she invited me to dance with her at my first school dance. One of the most appreciated characteristics of Muriel was her artistic inclination. She exuded a spontaneity that challenged convention and saw almost everything in life through the eyes of art. It was one of the reasons she was able to cope with my existence of floating directionlessness. I might well have been to Muriel a splattering of paint in search of a canvas. She touched a part of my being that helped open my mind to see beyond the obvious. She was accepting and even forgiving when I frustratingly struggled with being loyal to the Axes and to her needs. Compassion and creation were her twin engines. I was also aware that she had defied her parents’ wishes by continuing our relationship. The love note she sent to me when I first attended high school was an impulse that foreshadowed an artistic sensibility.

  I had digested a full serving of the college imperative by the time I arrived at Muriel’s dorm. After knocking at her door two or three times it opened and I received what I considered to be one of the great shocks of my life. A young man, about my own age, opened the door and invited me in. He looked like any one of the many carnival-like figures I had seen dancing on the commons. He bid me enter with a spreading of his two hands. Had I not known for sure I was in Muriel’s dorm I could easily have been entering a temple of some sort. I stepped into the room and immediately recognised the familiar photographic display of Muriel’s family as well as several art posters she’d had since I had known her. She liked the paintings of Van Gough and Picasso and had copies of them hanging on opposite walls.