A High New House

by Thomas Williams

  George, Great George, Great

  Washington of thee

  Our fate

  Is to your greatness see.…

  He coughed, and the odors of chemical pine and perfumed detergent made him gag slightly, so that he tasted waterbrash. The five minutes were almost up. Is to your greatness see. A line like that could actually make him ill. See to your greatness? See that your greatness remains unsullied? He could never stop trying to analyse lines like that, and even when he knew the ambiguity was nothing more than sloppiness or stupidity he still tried to give the writer credit for plan, for intelligence. Madness. If he could hurt his own little son, why couldn’t he tell Mr. Hiskey off? What did he owe that solid citizen?

  The five minutes were now up, yet he was still a little worried that Mr. Hiskey might see him sneaking back to his office, and angry at himself for having to hide. He left the stall and went up to the mirrors, where he saw his own face despising him for such childish behavior. Brown eyes, just like Willis’ eyes; too much like Willis’ eyes. Had Willis really been looking around, like radar, for Busby’s head? Willis probably believed he had been, anyway; no case could be made there.

  He made it back to his office and managed to read The Allegory of the Cave before his eleven o’clock class, which turned out, strangely enough, to be a good one. Again he had cause to remember that to the freshmen such an essay was delightful merely because it was understandable. He drew the stomach-like cave on the blackboard, and even the three students he had thought to be too intelligent for such a simple approach brightened up and helped to place the fire, the silhouettes and the cave men. At the end of the class he went back to his office with the odd feeling that he had taught something. That and another, familiar feeling he had never tried to explain—a pleasure quite definitely tinged with guilt; somehow it did not seem right that he should have a good class on a bad day.

  He went home for lunch, and Lois still was cool, thoughtfully preoccupied with something her blue, tired eyes never quite focused upon. Ellie was upstairs taking her nap, talking contentedly to her dolls in subdued little yelps and parts of sentences; it was all right as long as she rested. For lunch he had a cottage cheese salad, a hamburger patty and coffee. Lois was trying to lose two pounds, so she had only the cottage cheese salad.

  “I don’t know what I’m trying to lose weight for,” she said.

  “You’re tired because you wait on the kids too much,” he said. It was a familiar argument with them, and here they had skipped several transitional sentences: All I do is.…No, we get out as much as anybody. Why should I bother to look slim? Because I like you that way. You’d never notice anyway. Yes, I would. You go to school—at least you get away. They had skipped all these. It was as if they were too tired to try to convince each other of anything.

  That afternoon he had twelve student conferences. Four students forgot to bring their papers with them, and he rescheduled their conferences for later in the week—times he had planned to use for other things. At five-thirty the last student left. Outside his office window it was dark except for the windows of the library, whose light lay like gauze across the walks and against the sides of trees. He emptied the big ash tray into the wastebasket. He had smoked too much, and his neck was stiff from reading papers held at an awkward angle so that the students could follow his corrections as he made them. He picked up his brief case; maybe he would get some energy after supper and correct some themes. He was dried out, and stale. Grit cracked under his shoes, and near the main doorway of Beech Hall a butt can smouldered. Everyone else had gone home, and the lights burned for no one.

  He walked home, past the lighted windows of the dormitories, past the bare maples whose branches he could hear creaking up there in the dark. It was a cold night. He would build a fire, and when he was warm from doing that he’d make some martinis. Then, while the kids watched Rocky and His Pals he and Lois could have a few minutes to try to get over this day.

  From the street his house looked snug and warm, but when he opened the front door Ellie was crying and Lois was shouting.

  “Leave me alone for a minute! I’m trying to get your dinner!” Lois’ voice was petulant, near tears—a tone of voice that always scared him and even disgusted him. For a second he felt like imitating it—giving it back to her in all its ugliness so that she could hear it herself.

  But he quietly shut the door behind him. Ellie came running at him and he caught her up inside his coat. “Mummy’s mad at me,” she said calmly. Lois banged a pan in the kitchen. Ellie said, “Willis vomited in school and we had to get him in the car.”

  He set Ellie down and went into the kitchen. Lois looked harried and nervous. She stirred a pan with a jerky, exasperated motion, and a drop came over the edge and hissed on the burner. Suddenly she turned to him, and he saw what looked like hatred on her face.

  “He’s up in his room. He says he’s never going back to school. You don’t do anything for him. All you do is yell at him,” she said. “You treat everybody but your own son as if they were the Queen of Sheba. No wonder he’s nervous.”

  It seemed totally unfair. It was not exactly true, for one thing; it was just true enough so that she could get away with saying it. He was full of self-pity, and decided not to answer her in that mood. He waited a moment; he’d had that one good class, anyway. He turned away, but her voice followed him as he hung up his coat, and still followed him as he went upstairs to find Willis. “Go talk to your Mr. Hiskey!” she yelled from the kitchen. “Never mind your own son!”

  “Willis?” he said as he entered the dim room. “Willis?” There was no answer. “It’s Daddy.” He went toward the bed, expecting to see his son’s pale face, the dark eyes that would be open and noncommittal; did he deserve such an expression? But Willis was not there.

  “Willis?” he said, but there was no answer. From one window came the pale whiteness of the moon; from the other the yellow street light, and as his eyes grew used to the dimness he began to see through the shadows that crossed the room with almost material solidity—oblongs or acutely angled shapes that now became translucent as his eyes opened up. Then what had seemed only a shadow beside the bed became concave, and it was the side of a tent made of blankets and chairs. Willis hadn’t made that tent for a long time.

  “Willis?” he said.

  “You can come in, Daddy, if you’re quiet.” A whisper from down in there.

  He was forgiven. Or perhaps Willis didn’t know he had anything to forgive.

  “You coming in, Daddy?”

  Harry crawled into the dark place and lay down beside his son. He could hear Willis breathing, and the tick of his own wrist watch. The mothball smell of the blanket reminded him of his own childhood explorations into dark places.

  “Daddy?”

  “What?”

  “I wasn’t looking for Busby’s head.” There was a tremor in Willis’ voice; it seemed to be a terrible confession. Willis was close to crying. “Because I know where Busby’s head went.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Willis.” He didn’t want his son to have to confess anything. He felt a little like crying himself.

  “It was an accident, Daddy,” Willis went on, catching his breath. “Busby’s head went down the toilet.”

  The shadows leaned over them, and through the opening of the tent came the perspectiveless shapes of door and hall and a section of banister, each illuminated by soft light which came reflecting up and around from the dining room. Ellie came silently into the doorway, then across the room toward them.

  “Who’s in there?” she asked.

  “You can come in, Ellie, if you’re quiet,” Willis whispered. Ellie crawled in and lay down beside Willis. She would see no reason to ask why they were there.

  “Is Daddy in here?” she whispered.

  “Daddy’s here,” Harry whispered, and a hand came over and patted him affectionately on the chest.

  They were quiet as Lois came up the stairs. Not knowing why, they held
their breath. And although she must not have been able to see into the dark room, Lois too, as she paused by the door with her hand on the light switch, seemed to be holding her breath.

  “You can come in, Mummy, if you’re quiet,” Willis said. Slowly she came into the darkness, got down on her hands and knees and crawled in beside Harry. She put her hand on his chest and whispered into his ear. “Why are we so unhappy?”

  “Who’s unhappy?” Willis said.

  “I’m happy,” Ellie said.

  “We do all love each other,” Lois said.

  “Of course we do,” Harry said, because he had to say it, and because he believed it; what he felt must be love. There they were, he thought, all their hearts beating in a row. But even then he was thinking that he could not tell a lie, that love is shadows of shadows, and sometimes even the smallest light could make it blind.

  The Skier’s Progress

  Japhet Villard has installed himself at the Mountain View, a place he has known through so many of its transitions he sometimes has the illusion that he can see right through walls. Wasn’t there a window right there, sometime in the thirties, through which one could see the ridge of Splitback Mountain? He sits now in the too artfully rough-textured, modern lounge, waiting for his daughter Margaret and his grandson Billy. The fieldstone fireplace is new; wasn’t there a plastered wall right there with a flue plug big as a dinner plate in it? And painted on the tin was a mountain, in all the primary colors of his youth—an Alp, perhaps, or maybe one of the White Mountains. From this position he is sure he might have once looked straight into the kitchen and caught a glimpse of a deep slate sink.

  Now, for all the weathered silver boards someone has taken from old barns, for all the deliberately rustic stone and the hand-hewn beams, a little sign by the door says “No Skis in Lounge, Please.” How would they have greeted the eightfoot langlauf boards upon which he used to travel snow unbroken by anybody but snowshoe rabbits? Those pure wood monsters with their leather bindings would be museum pieces now—they’d have them up over the mantle to smile at. No steel edges, either—did you need them in that high and virgin deep snow?

  But he is no pure sentimentalist for the past; along with the new skis he brought for his grandson he has for himself a pair of Head Vectors, whose edges are so sharp they’ll pare your fingernail. It’s been just six weeks since he underwent surgery, though, and he wonders if he will ever be able to use them; if, in fact, he did not simply buy them because they are so beautiful to look at. If he does manage to ski he’ll take the lifts, now, and try not to chide Billy for not wanting to break his own trails crest to crest. Japh has never been a man to bellyache the changes in the world; his pride has been to cope, to improve himself.

  He looks at his wrist watch. It will be an hour before the tows close on Splitback, before the gondola lift is still. He does have a slight pain down there, and he has a creepy vision of the scar. But he will wait until five for the drink that will help him ignore such things. There must be pain, he knows. Without privation life is bland. Without mountains and freezes what good feelings can a man get from his good legs and living heat? And Japh has done his work in the world as well as anybody.

  He’ll be glad to see his daughter, whom he loves, and his grandson, whom he loves but who might be a better man of sixteen if he’d had to follow Japh across Splitback before the bulldozers had banked each trail and cleared out the blowdown. In these days the week-end sports would break their necks if they had much more than a mogul or two to cope with. But then he chides himself; he’s had his clear and beautiful times in the wilderness, in the winter that sometimes froze his cheeks and heels.

  A little pain ominously tickles his haunch, and he moves his legs as he looks at the clock. In the rack next to his chair is a skiing magazine, and on the cover of it is an Alpine snowfield full of powder as white and pure, in the Kodachrome at least, as those he can remember.

  At Splitback Mountain Margaret Woolley is walking across the hard snow of the parking lot, her skis over her shoulder. She is tall, and her ski boots fit well, so that she strides stiff-ankled, in that odd, somewhat majestic way skiers must; in it there is some awkwardness, yet there is also that strange prediction of grace one sees in a walking swan. Her dark gray stretch-pants fit her long legs well—tightly, but not dangerously so—and even though she is thirty-eight and the mother of two, one would never know it from her hips, which are neither too round nor too starved and pelvic. Her face, especially now that it has been burned by the wind of her last run down an intermediate trail called the Cataract, is blotched here and there by deep red, but these marks will fade in the warmth of the car. Her hair is glossy black, and she has removed her yellow toque so that its black thickness will rise and loosen.

  Although she is no more vain than any good-looking woman, she knows what she looks like. And today she has seen with her own eyes (blue, and rather glinty in the freezing air) the young girls who in ways she can never recapture proclaim with every gesture their fresh youth. To her sixteen-year-old son, who made his last run down the more dangerous Spout, and who is now running the car’s engine in order to get the heater going, she feels that she is not really a woman at all, but a force, or more accurately a combination of forces and indications. Does it please him, she wonders, to have a mother who skis well? Although she would like to believe this, she knows that at his age he wants to appear older than he is, and will, therefore, in the most natural and heartless way condemn her to old age. And yet to have a mother who wears the correct clothes, who has the leisure to keep up, even though she hears with half an ear the latest skiing terminology, might give him some pride in his family’s status. It is this doubtful claim, she is afraid, that she has on him as a companion. She sadly realizes that the force she will always retain is made of affection, love, and most of all the authority of motherhood; she is half policewoman, half indentured servant.

  Now she is in the row in which her car is parked. Billy has seen her, and that little white dot falling from the vent window is a cigarette butt. She has a pang of sadness whenever she sees him smoke, for it proves without a doubt that she is an old woman. At that very moment the edges of her skis seem to press more heavily into her shoulder, which has suddenly become bony and vulnerable.

  Billy sees her coming, and he is afraid she may have noticed the cigarette falling down the black side of the car; he had been daydreaming, and hadn’t seen her quite soon enough. He doesn’t want to smoke in her presence, to assume that much equality. Although he has never tested her, he is afraid that in her loneliness she might take too strongly to any offer of companionship; it seems right to him that he should have secrets from her. He is not a cruel boy, but he is a boy without a visible father. His father’s name is Herbert, and even before his mother and Herbert separated, Herbert had never been too visible, had never been too much of a force in the family councils. Neither Billy nor his sister, who is eighteen and married, even look much like Herbert; they are tall and dark like their mother. Sometimes Billy thinks of his father as a kind of alien, like a Silkie, a grumbly guest who somehow by accident came against the tall woman in those brownish, historical photographs in the hall-desk drawer at home. There is something vaguely magic about the whole business.

  As his mother approaches he jumps out to take her skis and poles, and expertly clamps her skis into the ski rack on top of the car. He wants to drive, and he wonders if he should ask, or merely get in behind the wheel and pretend that no decision on who shall drive is necessary. There are certain things about this problem he can’t understand. He, for instance, picked out this car. It is a Pontiac Tempest, and he knows the number of cubic inches in its cylinders, its compression ratio, its valve lift, its turning radius, the width not only of its spark gap but of its point gap. He has had his driving license for a month, too, and yet each time he asks to drive he sees his mother hesitate, and think. This gives him much pain, but he will never complain about it.

  Finally he makes up h
is mind. His mother has to sit on the passenger side in order to remove her ski boots, and he slips in on the driver’s side, ostensibly to help her put her boots in her boot tree. He knows that she knows, but in this family (except for the father, who always had to explain the already known) communication is always a fine compromise between words and gestures. When all the boots and poles have been stowed behind the front seat, Billy sees her thinking, and is pained. But then he is made happy, because the time for her to suggest that on these icy roads perhaps she’d better drive has just barely passed, and he very carefully eases the car out of its parking place and turns left toward the highway. He loves the feel of driving, and it is wonderful to him that the hood of the Tempest turns and moves before him at his instigation. He feels that it could never happen that he might drive off the road, or that the car might not obey not only his manual directives, but his will. He is young enough, in fact, to feel that it is miraculous not to have to walk.

  He is very careful, and though it seems to him just a little dishonest, he drives much more slowly than he ordinarily would. The lodge is five miles down into the valley, and it is his intention that his mother shall not feel the slightest sense of risk; he has more magic to experience, and sometime within the week, preferably Thursday night, he wants her to let him take the car out alone.

  While they drive they say a few things to each other.

  “I saw you on the last run,” he says. “Where the Spout crosses the Cataract. You looked pretty good, actually.”

  “Thank you,” she says, but she wonders why that word, “actually,” disappoints her. She has never pretended to be expert.

  “You still rotate a hair too much,” he says.

  “I know it. It’s the Arlberg in me; I can’t get rid of it. I learned it too well, too long ago.”