Herbert Woolley is standing by the base lodge watching his wife and Smucky Scudder as they come planing over toward him. They are side by side, and it is as if they were dancing together or making love the way they come down so smoothly together. They don’t see him, and he runs over to intercept them. His life cannot go on as it is now; he must get it back in order again. It is too scary to be as alone as he now is, and he must do something; already he has been as brave as he has ever been in any situation in which he has not had a perfect right. The very idea of coming here among all these insane people who throw themselves off cliffs and break their legs for fun—these insane people in clothes gaudy as peacocks and parrots—, it is so dangerous. To see his wife he has come through an environment as alien to him as the most exotic jungle. He has made it here, but over all his thoughts hangs the terrible feeling that he has forgotten something—something he can’t quite remember to remember, but which is as deadly in its absence as a neglected inoculation. He can usually depend upon his senses to warn him of danger; for that reason he never smokes, he never drinks. Should he deliberately put himself in jeopardy? Should he ever lessen in the slightest his awareness of danger, dull his reflexes and his alertness in this hostile world? But what is it that he has forgotten? As he runs he is unstable; he feels drunk. His first mistake is that he tries to cross some snow that hasn’t been trampled down, and his left leg in his thin Italian shoe and silk stocking, garter, pantsleg—everything goes right down out of sight. There is ice up his thigh, in his shoe, under his garter. And then, ignominy! Smucky Scudder is there, grabs him under the armpit and pulls him out. He can’t even feel his left leg, it is so cold. His garter is like a metal band around his calf, and he hops and stamps.
“Margaret,” he says. There she is, his wife, in all that equipment.
“Are you all right, Herbert?”
“I want to talk to you,” he says desperately, for both she and Smucky Scudder are expertly removing their skis. Both of them are bent over at once, doing professional little things with snaps and cables.
“But I have a lesson right now, Herbert,” she says. Then her face lightens, and he knows that expression—she has found a way to be kind. “Why don’t you ride up with me, and we can talk? You can get a round-trip ticket.”
He looks over toward the gondola lift, where it ominously hums and bangs. The alternative is to have her go up all that way alone with that big animal, Smucky Scudder. “All right,” he says.
He goes with them, feeling barefoot and vulnerable as they clump solidly in their huge boots. He is aware of Smucky Scudder following, the weight of the big man. When he has to pay money for the coming ride he reflects with near-hysteria that it is always the most unpleasant things one has to pay for. Then up the stairs into the groaning machinery. Margaret carries her own skis—he thinks to offer to carry them, but she seems so much stronger than he. They come into a huge room open at one end, and hanging from the ceiling is an engine, whole, eviscerated from some motor vehicle; why isn’t it running? A wheel ten feet in diameter turns too fast for its size, and men stand too close to iron teeth and make mad, meaningless gestures as they push and pat the big metal parts. The gondolas come whirling in, freewheeling, and a madman swings them around on their track so that they bang into each other like battered old oil drums. They are rusty and tinny, their windows are cracked and missing, and the welds that hold these cheap tin spheres to their stems are as sloppy as wax on the sides of candles. None of this slipshod workmanship escapes him as he has to cross to the loading place. But he must follow her. The egg they choose for them and lock them into is full of slush. The thin round walls of it are dented and wet, and the seat is cold from its long empty trip down from the mountain. He wipes the windshield and looks up to see the towers and the thin cable going up, up. With a terrible shock he realizes that those tiny things hanging out over nothing up there are identical with the very thing that encloses him. Then they are moving forward. There is a bump, and a screech of machinery; something must have gone wrong, but he is rising anyway. The car is hanging by a hair, by friction; a bump will jar it loose. He doesn’t dare look. Why did he wipe the mist from the windshield? There is a little bar he can hold, and he shuts his eyes as tight as he can, rising, swaying, rising. Part of his overcoat is caught in the door, but there is no handle on the inside. He will fall out. The cable will part, and they will snap out into the air like the end of a whip. They will be crushed. They will fall and fall down to the mountain below. He holds on desperately, but what good is it to hold onto a piece of metal when the whole business will surely fall? His eyes are shut, and he gasps.
Margaret can see Herbert’s fear. The cable moves silently and their gondola sways gently as they are lifted up the mountainside. Occasionally there is a series of little bumps as the bar passes over the pulleys of a tower, and when this happens Herbert shudders. She has wiped the mist from the windows, and the spindly tops of the spruce pass silently below. By turning her head she can see her skis and poles on the rack outside, and the valley sinking below as the tops of the white-and- green mountains rise up higher and higher into the light blue sky.
But Herbert’s eyes are shut tight; shudders pass through his body, and from him comes a small, high sound. His hands are clenched around the bar, and his head is bent forward as though waiting for a blow.
“Are you all right, Herbert?”
His head, though still bent forward, turns slightly. His eyes open just to slits and then clamp shut again.
“Margaret,” he says in a tiny voice. “Margaret.”
“Are you all right, Herbert?”
“Margaret, I’m so scared.” His voice is tiny, like a little leak in a pipe. “I want to get down out of here.”
“You can’t,” she says. But she pities him. “We’ll be at the top in about ten minutes. There’s no danger, Herbert.”
“I’m frightened,” he declares in his tiny voice. Shudders pass across his shoulders, and she puts an arm around him to try and comfort him, but he is rigid.
“It’s all right, Herbert. It’s all right, now.”
“I can’t help it. I can’t,” he says. His eyes still tightly closed, he turns toward her like a child and grabs her around the waist, his head tight against her breast. “My coat’s caught in the door. I don’t think we’re attached right. I think we’re going to drop.”
“It’s all right,” she says. She strokes his face with her hand, feeling the bristles, the smoother skin around his eye and temple. He has always been afraid of the most unexpected things, and it’s not the first time she’s had to comfort him.
“We’ll be at the summit pretty soon,” she says.
“But how am I going to get down?” he cries.
She has heard that cry before, from little boys up in trees.
“Just stay on and you’ll end up back at the base.”
“You can’t leave me, Margaret!” His arms are locked around her waist. “You can’t leave me alone in this thing!”
They are approaching the Summit House; below them she can see the skiers swooping down, and hear the swift hiss of their skis as they pass across the lift line to whatever trail they’ve decided to take. She wants very much to get out into that bright air and snow. She wants to put on her skis and feel the snow light and powdery beneath her, to look down the miles into the valley and feel that each foot of altitude is a gift of energy she may expend in any way she chooses. But then their gondola passes into the hollow-sounding darkness of the Summit House.
When the attendant opens the door, Smucky jumps out and receives his skis and poles from the other attendant whose job it is to take them out of the rack.
“Smuckyyy!” they say, delighted to see him. He grins at them and goes out into the snow to find Margaret. Among the few stunted spruce other skiers are laughing as they lean against the wind and put on their skis.
“Which trail this time?” one calls. “I feel brave! Let’s take the Spout!” But Margaret isn
’t there. He jams his skis into the snow and goes back inside, to the observation room. It is empty except for Billy, who is smoking a cigarette and kicking his boot against the splashboard.
“Billy,” Smucky says, and Billy turns away from the window. “Have you seen your mother?” Billy shakes his head and starts to speak, but Smucky turns and goes back to the lift line. “Did a man and a woman get off just before me?” he asks the young attendant.
The boy grins and shakes his head. “They didn’t want to get off, Smucky. Went back down, skis and all.”
Smucky goes back to the observation room. What did he really have in mind, anyway? And now she’s gone back down.
Billy stamps his cigarette into the tracked-in water on the floor. He looks listless and unhappy.
“Want a Coke?” Smucky asks, and Billy nods.
“Want a cigarette?” Billy says. Gloria has gone home, and she didn’t tell him.
Smucky gets two Cokes out of the machine, accepts a cigarette, and they both stand there in the water kicking their boots against the splashboards. Through the glass they can see the mountains descending, dark green where they are covered with spruce, spiderwebby where tall hardwoods stand leafless, white in the few openings visible, and then as far down and away as they can see everything turns blue.
In his room at the Mountain View, Japhet Villard is on his knees on the rug, his elbows on his bed. Even though he has taken four of the white pills it is the only position he can find in which he is not in excruciating pain. He is angry and at the same time terrified, for some monstrous force has got him down and won’t let go. He is very angry, and there are tears on his face; he sees one drop to the bedspread. When he curses out loud he is repaid by a knife thrust, and the position he must retain is ludicrously vulnerable to that thrust. They told him it might not be pleasant, that from his old tissues he might expect recalcitrance and pain. But he could never really believe that time would betray him. He has always faced up to fear, to any challenge. His image of himself is that of a clean, brave man, eyes squinted against the freezing wind, a great, wild mountain submissive but grand beneath him. His pride has been to outlast hardship and pain.
But there are positions in which no dignity is possible, in which one cannot rally one’s forces, and here he is, upon his knees at last. With this thought he has to grin; he is no stranger to irony, and he grins the grin that is the only intelligent response to that sort of thing.
Goose Pond
Robert Hurley’s wife died in September, and by the middle of October he had more or less settled everything. His son and daughter were both married and lived far away from New York; his son in Los Angeles, his daughter in Toledo. They came East for the funeral and each wanted him to come and visit. “I’m not about to retire. I won’t be an old man in a guest room,” he told them, knowing the great difference between the man he looked at fifty-eight and the man he felt himself to be. It had taken Mary six months to die, and during the last few of those months he began quietly to assume many of her symptoms. The doctors noticed it and understood, but his children, accustomed to a father who had always been to them a common-sense, rather unimaginative figure, were shocked by his loss of weight, by a listlessness as unlike him, as unsettling to them as if the earth’s rotation had begun to slow down.
But he would do no visiting, even though his business did not need him. “I know what visiting is,” he wrote to his son. “I don’t do it very well. Please don’t call so much. You know how to write letters.” “Daddy,” his daughter said, long-distance. “The children are crazy to have their grandfather come and see them.”
And he thought, there is one place I would like to go, and there are no children I know there: “I’m going to New Hampshire, to Leah.”
“All by yourself? What for?” She began to get excited, almost hysterical. He could see her biting her lower lip—a habit of her mother’s. Afterwards she would be calling Charles in Los Angeles.
“I was born there. Your mother and I lived there before you were born. Do I need any other reason? It’s October. Anyway, I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.”
“But, Daddy, we felt that you shouldn’t be alone.…”
“I haven’t been alone for thirty years,” he said. “I want to try it again. Now go back to whatever you were doing. I can hear a baby crying in your house. Go take care of it. I’m going to stay with the Pedersens. Do you remember the old people in the big house on the mountain? If they still take boarders, that’s where I’ll be.” If they’re still alive, he thought. He wanted to walk in the woods again, but he had other reasons. The sight of his grandchildren, the hundred times a day when their small disasters caused screaming, tears; he couldn’t stand it. They were always about to hurt themselves, they nearly fell so many times. They had so many deadly years to make. Automobiles, knives, leukemia, fire.… On the afternoon of the funeral he had watched his granddaughter, Ann, and suddenly he saw her having his wife’s senseless pain, saw her crying not because of a bumped knee, but at more serious wounds. And the Pedersens? They were so old, they had somehow escaped, and as he remembered them they lived dried-up and careful, in a kind of limbo. He would go to the Pedersens, on Cascom Mountain.
Nana fussed with the Edison lamp, turning the white flame up in the mantle, moving the broad base across the crack made by the table leaf; then with the side of her hand she wiped the shiny surface of the table where it had been. The light shone past the tinted shade, up the glass chimney and sharpened her old face, made her glasses glint for a second until she moved away, tall and always busy, her small eyes always alert. She rarely sat down, and even then seemed poised, ready for busy duty. The old man settled himself cautiously, as he did now, one piece at a time. Nana had his zither out of its case, the light just right; made sure he had his hearing aid, his pick, an ash tray near. In spite of his age, he smoked cigarettes.
Back in the shadows, between a lacy, drooping vine and the narrow window, Nana’s older sister, blue dress and high black shoes, composed and fragile face, sat in a rocker and never spoke. Nana herself was seventy-nine. For forty years she had bossed the seven-mile trek down to Leah in the late fall, back up the mountain again to this high old house in the spring. It was Nana who dealt with the world, who shut the windows when it rained, herded great-grandchildren when the family came in the summer, locked the house for the winter. In a few weeks they would be going down to their small apartment in Leah, to take their chances on another winter.
The old man tuned his zither, humming in a dry, crackly falsetto and turning his wrench as he picked the short strings. Tuned against the windy old voice, the crisp notes of the zither were startling, clear and metallic. There seemed to be no connection between the voice and the sounds of the strings, as if the old man heard other notes, the sounds of memory to check his instrument against.
“German concert zither,” Nana said proudly, still hovering over the lamp. She rearranged his cigarettes, the coffee cup. She spoke from behind him, “He don’t hear so good,” nodding vigorously. “But he got the hearing aid.” She pointed into his ear, where the pink button shone like a flower against brown freckles. “He don’t wear it all the time, like he should.” She moved quickly away on some sudden errand, and the old man looked up and winked at Hurley.
“Sometimes it makes too much noise,” he said, smiling benevolently at his wife. She began to move the table. “It’s all right. It’s all right!” he said. In his fifty years in America he had mastered the sounds of English, but the rhythms of his speech were Scandinavian. “I’m going to play first a Norwegian song.”
Nana poised herself upon a chair, folded her hands firmly, set herself for a moment and then began energetically to smooth her apron down her long thighs. The old lady against the wall stopped rocking. It always startled Hurley when, out of her silent effacement, she responded.
The old man bent over his zither, his shiny face as ruddy as a baby’s. His mottled, angular fingers worked over the strings; he swa
yed back and forth to keep time and snorted, gave little gasps and grunts he evidently did not hear himself, in time with the music. Beneath, occasionally overcoming the sibilant, involuntary breaths, the music was poignantly clear, ordered, cascading, vivid as little knives in the shadowy room. At the end they all applauded, and the old man bowed, very pleased.
That night Hurley climbed the staircase that angled around the central chimney, an oil lamp to light his way, and entered his cold room in moonlight almost as bright as the lamp, but colder, whiter against the lamp’s yellow. Two little windows looked down across the old man’s garden—“Mostly for the deer,” the old man had said of it—then over the one still-mown pasture left to the farm, down the long hills silvery in moonlight to Lake Cascom in the valley, white among black surrounding spruce. Behind, on the other side of the house, he could feel the dark presence of Cascom Mountain.
He wondered if it would be a night for sleep. He was tired enough. In the last few days he had taken many of the familiar trails, especially following those that he remembered led through hardwood. Although the leaves had turned and mostly fallen, here or there one tree flamed late among the bare ones, catching light and casting it in all directions as if it were an orange or soft-red sun. He stopped often in the woods, surprised by each molten maple branch, even the smallest bright veins of each leaf golden and precious against a gnarled black trunk or the green twilight of a spruce grove. He walked carefully, resting often, sampling the few cold, sweet apples from the abandoned mountain trees, eating Nana’s sandwiches a little at a time. He wanted the day to last as long as possible. At night he thought of his wife.
The high, sloping bed was wide and lonesome as a field of snow. During his wife’s illness he could not sleep in their own bed, but slept every night on a studio couch where he could reach the sides, hold himself down and remember exactly where he was and why she was not beside him. If he woke in the night and for a second forgot, he had to learn over again from the beginning that Mary was going to die. It was always the first time over again, when they had left the doctor (the poor doctor, according to Mary) at the cancer hospital and walked together to Grant’s Tomb. Mary finally said, “You know? They should pay a man a thousand dollars a minute for having to say those words.”
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