He shrugs. It isn’t at all sad to him. He doesn’t really expect his mother to get any better.
What he really wonders is, will she let him take the car one night? Because it has been a vacation full of the possibility of miracles, and he has been given the opportunity to fall in love. Gloria Stacey, at home, in high school, is one of those girls one simply never considers. She is made of light gold, and her eyes are dark amber. In his class there are four such goddesses, and Gloria is either number one or number two. Carol Eckhardt is another, then Norma Tolman, and then Brenda Fortuna. Gloria is so beautiful and talented and gracious he has never even had the nerve to dance with her, much less engage her in conversation—even though he considers himself no dub at this art. He is afraid that if he put his arm around her slender waist, or if he pressed his chest against hers, he would explode.
Yesterday they met at the bottom of the gondola lift, and they rode together alone in the enclosed little car (a blue one, number 79) for twelve-and-one-half minutes. She is here for a week, with her parents, and she skis fairly well for a girl; but he skied so beautifully before her eyes that she, with a powerful ability to smile and say right out whatever she meant, told him so. She is staying at the Bella Vista Lodge, a mere two miles away from his. Twice more they rode the lift together, first in a red car and then in a yellow one, their shoulders nearly touching; he hoped the cable would stop, as it often did, and leave them for precious minutes suspended fifty feet above the tops of the sleet-covered spruce, a mile above the valley. But the cable never stopped.
Although he thinks her kind notice of him is simply because they are both so far away from home, and perhaps she hasn’t yet had time to meet another of the golden people here in the mountains, he feels that if he is given the chance to use all of his talents he might have a chance to win her. If the gods are kind, he will touch her lovely hand; if they are madly generous he will kiss her beautiful lips.
Now the car hums down the mountain road, and the dark trees rise on each side. There is a small river down to the left, full of rocks encased in ice, but here the salt has cleared the road and even dried white on the asphalt. Billy pretends, carefully staring straight ahead, that it is not his mother who sits beside him, but Gloria. The sleek instruments in front of him are friendly and romantic, and the smell of the car is as new and crisp as the treads of the tires, whose grip upon the road is all for him. Beside him is Gloria, and perchance her hand will move along the top of the seat and rest lightly upon his shoulder. The neat legs he can just barely see from the corner of his eye are not clothed in dark gray but in brilliant young green, and they belong to Gloria. He is taking her away.
Margaret turns to look at her son; the one eye she can see is squinted slightly, as though he feels either joy or pain. He loves to drive, and she is happy to see him having so much pleasure even though it is hard for her to understand why driving can make him so happy. She tells herself to remember that whether she can share them or not, she may still be surrounded by great pleasures.
Soon they will be back at the Mountain View Lodge. The sun has been gone a long time behind the mountains, and now it is dusk. The one discreet little neon sign will be lit, and waiting for them in the lounge will be Japh Villard, her father, who cannot ski this week because he has recently undergone a prostatectomy. He will be standing there by the fire, though, waiting for the stroke of five, his gallant old legs encased in immaculate ski knickers or lederhosen, speaking with some old friend or other of Tuckerman’s Ravine and the Headwall, and the peculiar crystalline structure of the corn snow there in April, 1938; or how he helped Sepp Ruschp plan the Nosedive or the National. Japh has been staying at the Mountain View since before the old farmhouse that is its basic structure had an inside toilet, and the present owners sometimes feel, during Japh’s annual visits, that they are only mortal, that their short period of custodianship will end long before Japh does.
When Margaret and Billy enter the lodge and cross the new Swedish hemp rug toward the big stone fireplace, there is Japh, sneaking a glance at the grandfather clock. He is talking to Smucky Scudder, the ski instructor.
Smucky hasn’t waited for five o’clock, however; an awful thing has happened to him this afternoon. At three o’clock he didn’t feel like skiing any more, and he canceled three lessons and came back to the lodge. He is forty-two, and he has begun to wonder if he really gets more pleasure from aprés ski than he does from skiing itself. Skiing has been his life, and lately he has begun to think too much about his life. Since four o’clock he has nursed a beer, and now it is flat, and the bottle is warm in his big hand. He likes to talk to Japh because it is the old man’s best talent to make the things he is interested in seem more important than anything else in the world. Smucky has heard Japh’s stories before, but somehow they come out again ringing with the enthusiasm that Smucky himself is afraid he may be losing. He is happy to see Margaret and Billy, too, for they admire his skiing; because he does this one thing so well it really doesn’t matter that he is past forty and overweight. He is Smucky Scudder the skier, who flashes across the moguls with such control and precision, the flash whom all the other skiers on the slopes stop to watch. The ones who don’t know who this is ask the others, and as he schuss-booms over a fifteen-foot dip he hears them yell, “Smmuuuckyyy!” as though they were yelling track! in admiration of his exuberance and daring. But isn’t this cry of admiration for the old party boy just a knife’s edge away from derision? Down he goes, anyway, his Wedeln so crisp he never seems to care at all for the configuration of the snow, that the slope here is forty-five degrees, that he is now entering an impossible turn. He is out of sight for a moment—but there he is again, ten feet in the air, followed by a veil of snow, triumphantly flying.
If he could not do that.… He knows he is a man who has some doubtful little habits. He has been cruel to women in little ways. He bites his fingernails. On the back of his electric-blue Bogner stretch-pants there can be found a darker circle as big as a dime; a few days ago at a party he sat on a fragment of Vienna sausage.
He knows the spot is there, and he is a little worried about the direction in which he turns; but it seems to him that there is always something he half tries to conceal. His bitten fingernails, the little spot on his pants—he has resigned himself to such nagging little imperfections, and if he thought too much about them he might realize that they reflect his own opinion of his immortal soul. It is for this reason that he has never thought of trying for Margaret. She is kind, and a lovely woman; she is out of his class. Not only is she unattainable, he would not know what to do with her if by some miracle he did get her. He is used to small change, and would be confounded by riches. He would love her, and how could he ever reveal his ragged self to such a woman? No, he’ll stick to his own kind, the ones in whose eyes he detects his own dishonesty.
Now, Japh declares, it is five o’clock, so they all sit at a bench and table near the fire and wait for the owner’s wife to bring them drinks. Billy will have a Coke, and Smucky decides to switch from beer to martinis, which Margaret and Japh are having. They speak of snow.
“It was pretty icy on the Spout in places,” Billy says. “But not too bad,” he quickly adds, glancing diffidently at Smucky.
“Couldn’t we use a few inches of fresh powder?” Smucky says, and the others nod dreamily.
“Now, I grew up on powder,” Japh says. “We had to make our own trails. We had to walk up hills.” His lined, shiny old face is still dreamy, and Smucky wonders how they could have liked skiing so much in those days. But he did, too; he has walked up many hills in his time, too. Japh’s face turns scornful: “I mentioned sealskins, could you believe it? And some of these young bunnies didn’t even know what I was talking about. They never went up a hill on their own steam.”
“I’ve got a pair,” Billy says. He wonders where they are, though; he hasn’t seen them for a long time. Then he thinks they’d look pretty good tied around his waist, like a belt. Five po
ints, Man! It would look as though he sometimes went up higher than the tow, and came down cross-country. Gloria might ask him what they were!
“Why climb when you’ve got a ride?” Smucky says. He wants it to come out ironic, but it comes out sad.
Margaret hears that sadness, and looks at him. She has never seen him sad, just as she has never seen him without a deep-red tan. He still has the tan; his big round face is the color of briar, and full of muscle. In the summer he runs a ski school in Chile, and he never leaves the hard winter sun for very long.
Japh says, “Ten inches of new powder,” and sighs.
Some college boys have clumped in, and sit themselves at a booth in the back of the room; they have stopped for one expensive beer before going back to their ski-dorm and their six-packs. Margaret sees them casting somewhat furtive looks at Smucky, and nodding their heads. “Down hill,” she hears one say, and in the context of Smucky’s sadness she doesn’t realize for a moment that the boy said “downhill,” not “down hill.” Smucky has been a national champion, and their looks are not derisive. One boy has an unfortunate voice which carries to her ear as if by wire: “When he’s showing a class he never hops. God, he’s pretty! But you watch him when he’s by himself. He hops. You just watch.” Another boy at the booth puts his hand out, palm down, and lowers it to the table. The electronic voice fades down. Margaret wonders if Smucky heard. But of course he has, she knows. She has always liked him and felt sorry for him; she has seen his face, at parties, when a certain brutal look could wipe away his intelligence the way a damp cloth wipes a slate, and what was left was only darkness, unself-loving. Then she would look to see what woman he had decided to cut out of the herd. They looked so much alike, all of Smucky’s girls. Girls in their thirties. They always had good figures, and a husband somewhere, and children somewhere, and bright, unhappy, smiling faces. Her heart goes out to them. How pretty they had all once been, and how much they had been taught to expect. After another drink dinner is ready, and Japh invites Smucky to eat with them. After dinner they sit around for a while. Billy has gone to examine his new Head skis—a present from Japh—to see if that ice on the Spout has made grooves in his bottoms. Smucky almost falls asleep over his brandy and coffee. It is fairly early, but nothing seems to be developing, and they all decide to go to bed. The lifts will open at eight-thirty, and that is what they have come for, isn’t it?
For a while Japh tries not to think of the little pains that flicker through his skin. His doctor has told him to take as few of the white pills as possible, and he thought the martinis might suffice for tonight. But the pains are just enough to keep him awake and thinking. They are not much in themselves, and if he hadn’t a too vivid idea of the surgery which caused them, and the greater pain they predict will come, he might be able to sleep. Finally he gets up, and on the way to the bathroom he looks down and sees his ropy old shanks, skinny as ski poles below the jockey shorts he now has to wear. He takes two of the pills, but it is a concession he is not happy to make.
He has to sleep, though, and he must do what will let him sleep. He wants to see the sun rise in the morning, and he wants to be rested then. He wants to eat the early breakfast that has always been his favorite meal, and to feel in the other people there the excitement of anticipation. To feel it, unfortunately perhaps, too strongly in himself; to stand on skis at the top of a mountain is a thrill that time and weakness have never dulled. Sometimes he feels like a character in a fable, whose Midas’ wish has been wholly granted, and in his old age he must pay tenfold for all the pleasures he has had from all the cold bright days and those lovely, curving descents across the snowfields.
He can say to himself that he has had a good life, that his moderate success in the wool business (yarns) has let him enjoy his hobbies. His twenty-four-foot sloop, Prometheus, is snug in its blocks at Great Bay. His son-in-law, Herbert Woolley, seems to have been destined even more than his name might indicate to be successful at running the mill. Herbert: one needn’t actually like a man to take him into the business, but at least that part has worked out well. That Herbert has left Margaret for that rather dim accountant, Verna Price, does not bother Japh as much as he feels it should. He has always suspected Herbert to be a romantic fool, and he feels that Herbert will come back; everyone has taken advantage of Margaret’s good nature.
He can say to himself that he has led a good life, but this is like saying that his life is over, and he is cursed with a perpetual eagerness. To see the sun rise, to see the first deep snow of the winter, to smell the bay mud at low tide, with the sand eels shooting away in formation beneath the bows of his dory as though swept by a broom—it is almost as though these little visions, these little memories which impinge upon all of his senses, are the only real losses he must suffer. He does love; he does try to protect the people he loves, but has he ever needed them very badly? His wife, who died twenty years ago; a good woman who loved him, whom he never really disappointed. Margaret, who is so much like her, so generous. He cannot say that he doesn’t love, but then it is not a word he cares to define too carefully. What is true is that in his brightest memories, in those memories that make him feel his heart beat in his chest, there is just the one man alone against a beautiful and dangerous world.
Smucky’s shower has waked him up; he hasn’t gone to bed this early for a long time, and at first he considers getting dressed and going out—maybe to the Bella Vista—to look for a little action. He knows a girl who is there for the week, sans husband. He met her last year when she bought the series of lessons called “The Housewives’ Special.” She’s all right—blondie, lean, nervous, all decked out in the very latest stuff advertised in the skiing magazines. But she reminds him so much of all his women, and he wonders if he has become sick of the illicit, sick of the vacation spirit in which there are just two kinds of liaison, one justified by a weirdly out-of-date coyness which later turns false and hysterical: I love you! God! I love you! The other is just as false: You were good, you know? The sophisticated camaraderie of the adulterers.
But he has eaten dinner with Margaret, and she is not like that. He knows that she has never been unfaithful to Herbert Woolley, for instance, and he knows it because this is the kind of thing he knows. He can see her clear blue eyes, and in them he sees no avarice, no larceny. Like many libertines, he believes in the existence of another race of humans, so different from himself; the ones who are faithful and honorable, to whom love and sex are exquisitely the same, who stand immaculate in the sight of heaven. He feels that somehow he has been excluded from this race, and that he could no more enter it than he could grow wings.
He can’t sleep, but he doesn’t feel like going out, so he reaches over, takes the new Skiing and turns the pages, thoughtfully staring at all the new faces, the kids who are expected to do well at Chamonix, at Snow Valley, at Innsbruck, at Zakopane. Or who did well at the F.I.S. Games. He’s seen some of them. Perrillat, with this thing called projection circulaire: it looks like nothing Toni Sailer didn’t do. But it’s something; it’s an improvement. How would Dick Durrance have utilized the new equipment, the new techniques? Or Torger Tokle (dead in the Italian Mountain Campaign)? Oh, they were all good, and all brave, the old and the new; there was no Golden Age, even if Japh says so. There is age, though, Smuck.
Can he remember himself back there, when the snow was lighter and more powdery? He almost got married, once, but then he got the invitation to come out and train for the Harriman, and it seemed too complicated, at the moment, to do both. And after the Harriman, in which he did very well, there was the concomitant business of promoting the Smucky Scudder Quick Release Binding. It wasn’t a bad binding, either, and while it was in fashion he and its inventor and its backer made some money. The only trouble was that all this was in the West and Lois wanted to graduate from Smith.
She was like Margaret. With this thought he trembles, surprising himself; Margaret is here in the same lodge, sleeping in a bed similar to his. Lois was l
ike Margaret in that she always seemed to be looking beyond the day or the night, to be seeing something out there more meaningful and complete, like a whole life.
He drops the magazine beside the bed and turns out the lamp. In the dark he is rigid, his hands on his thighs, which are as hard as iron; he has always had amazingly strong legs. Maybe he’s a little overweight, but he’s hard, his body is hard. But then he feels his heart pumping in his breast. It seems to be working so hard, so desperately. He doesn’t like to be aware of the machinery. He must relax; but the pump can never rest. It is then that he half wills himself into his old dream, the one that frightens him even more. First there is the vision of himself rising out of his body. As he rises up and out above the lodge into the night he can see his body down there on the bed. Smaller and smaller it grows as the mountains rise smoothly up with him. It is silent up here, silent as a gondola, but down there in the little body is the tiny heart. Then he can no longer see the little body at all, and he is somewhere like Chamonix, at the top of the piste verte, which falls away below him like a cliff. How can he run it in the moonlight, with the shadows of the dead crags crossing the blue snow? But he must race back down to his body before it is too late. He has never been so afraid, and even more horrible is the knowledge that when he reaches the Alpine town all the windows will be dark, all the chimneys will be cold; no one else will be there at all.
In his room Billy lies in bed constructing the most elaborate fantasy. The object is to strand himself and Gloria in a gondola—all night long. He is kind, and doesn’t want to strand a hundred other poor people, so he is thinking powerfully to find a way to keep them off the lift. Of course he then has to invent the most godawful snarl somewhere in the lift mechanism. Everything has to be workable and practical, because if it isn’t, some of the fantastic reality of his vision will depart. It’s cold, but not too cold up there—just cold enough to make Gloria chilly. Say 29 degrees Fahrenheit? For a while they sit not touching, side by side in the little egg. The moon rises over Splitback and bathes her cheek with soft blue light. She shivers, and the night wind gently sways the cable. He puts his arm up, up, and she leans softly against his chest. Her golden hair lies along his neck, smooth as soap; it is silver in the moonlight. Her left hand moves across and lies chastely upon his ribs. His parka covers them, and as she breathes he can feel her alive in his arms. All right: let eternity pass.
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