Trinity Fields

by Bradford Morrow

  —What’re you so edgy about? I asked him one day in regard to some incident I’ve since forgotten.

  —Edgy? and on his face was a look of genuine bewilderment.

  I waited.

  —Look, if I’m edgy, it’s because this place is getting on my nerves. It’s like a chicken coop here.

  —That’s ridiculous.

  —It’s an incubator, where eggheads come to get hatched.

  —I don’t see any shell around you.

  —That’s because I’ve got the good sense to chip away at mine.

  Maybe he tried harder than I could see. Kip was forever full of hidden energies. Even when his spirits were low, some deep power was there, smoldering and impatient to burst back into flame. Dutiful to the degree allowed by his creeping cynicism about the value of higher education (—Like, higher than what? higher than a kite?), he went through the motions, bought the books, attended classes, though even in the freshman composition course we shared he managed to posture himself in his desk chair in such a way as to emanate rebelliousness and impetuosity. His entrance into Columbia was a means to an end, not for him of value in and of itself, not even finally a place to learn, but instead a crossroads—similar to the one back in Chimayó where he chose Taos over Pojoaque—valuable in that it freed him from one home he refused to accept as home, and at the same time offered a kind of solace, a transient residence that would shelter him until he could figure out how and where next to go.

  For better or worse, the converse was my response to this new life. Though pride forced me to conceal my outlook behind facial expressions that ranged from skepticism to scorn, behind complicities such as —Yeah, this is no good, and —That’s terrible, sorry complicities that were nothing short of lies, this life was, for me, radiant and chimeric at the same time, forbidding and spirited, a rich, promising amniotic sea in which I swam with such inner ease that it seemed everything I’d ever done before was preparatory to this moment. And, of course, I wasn’t too proud to consider myself something of an intellectual embryo afloat in its albumen, in need of just the right amounts of warmth and time to gestate. I understand that I, too, was impatient in my way, but impatient about different things than Kip. And it wasn’t as if paradoxes didn’t await me, it wasn’t as if the time wouldn’t come when I myself considered the idea of a cloistered school with Ivy League pretensions, set apart from the community that surrounds it—as if you could separate culture and research and reflective thinking from the realities of adjacent communities—to be medieval. The difference between my arrival at this idea and Kip’s was subtle, but as defining as anything in a dictionary.

  As I say, what Kip and I shared was a quick assimilation into city life. However frenzied it could sometimes get, the city seemed familiar, and those first weeks I walked its streets with uncanny dead reckoning. I never felt lost and was often struck by a sense of déjà vu, turning a corner and seeing the facade of a building I could swear I’d seen before, walking along in the upper reaches of Central Park where I’d suddenly be overwhelmed by the odd intimacy of sights—the autumn yellows that were more varied than the llanos of New Mexico, the savannahlike yellow of dried desert grass of home—and sounds—the muffled siren off to the east, the low rumble of the streets. To me, Manhattan was like a well-worn shoe, ugly but honest, forthright about its flaws and beauties. It was comfortable with its premature senescence but at the same time was wired with a wildness and youthful energy. People here had seen and said and risked and done things I couldn’t begin to guess at, and as I passed them, my speculative self—inspired by books of my childhood and movies of my adolescence—witnessed a whole new fury. There was an un-scrubbed magic in the air, a dirty charm so different from the thinner, purer air of the Jemez mountains. In comparing my new home to my old, I was as unfair as a man giddy in love with eyes for no one but his new beloved. The sins of the Hill I held tight to my heart, while the sins of the city, sins whose nature and character I didn’t yet know, I forgave without question. And while I respected the fact that New York had a claustrophobic and gray, funereal firmness to it, I still came to see the city as beautiful. These were man’s mountains that rose to touch the pewter sky and I welcomed the cramped cave in which we lived as much as the soot-caked brick facades out the windows. Bridges with catenary lights that spanned rivers wider than I could swim. Planes and jets overhead, subways rumbling below. It was a barrage of discomposure, a garden of exfoliating concrete and granite. Every window that shone with light was but a fragment of colored glass that rewarded those who would look with an endless variety of forms and colors. I was infatuated, smitten.

  Kip said, —Just a couple of hicks is what we are here. All we need are cowboy boots with spurs and some Red Man chewing tobacco. We stand out like sore thumbs.

  I said, —You’re wrong, man, what makes this place so great is that nobody stands out here.

  —Well, I feel like I look like a sore thumb.

  —You shouldn’t bother. No one’s watching you.

  —And you look like a sore thumb, too.

  —Will you stop with sore thumbs? It doesn’t matter. Nobody’s watching me, either.

  Kip said, —I’m watching you.

  I must have given myself away, despite my efforts to erase my joy, because Kip finished with something like —And for godsakes would you wipe that smirk off your face?

  —It’s not a smirk.

  —Whatever it is, get rid of it.

  The months flew through toward Christmas, the anniversary of the reconciliation. At break we took the train home, a curiously unmemorable and taciturn trip, watching the provinces flow by out the window. What was going through Kip’s mind I could not know, but for my part I was suffering a reverse homesickness of a kind that made me feel less cheerful the more miles the train put between us and New York. Chicago, Denver, on through Santa Fe to the little train station town of Lamy, where all the Manhattan Project people used to arrive and make their jokes like —So this is Manhattan? but where we arrived to broad smiles and awkward hugs. The country somehow registered different, more flat and colossal and more tiresome, on the way home to Los Alamos than it had when Kip and I came east just a few months before. I’d begun to feel divided.

  Kip, back on the Hill, painted for his parents a far rosier portrait of our accomplishments at college than I would ever have expected. Spirits were already high in town, and everyone was still talking about President Kennedy’s visit a couple of weeks earlier. On a clear day, warm enough for the president to ride without his overcoat in the back of a white convertible Lincoln Continental and wave to our townspeople gathered along the streets which had been freshly swept, he was here for a hundred minutes. He inspected a new reactor, which in the newspaper photos resembled nothing more than an overgrown milk can with a diminutive space capsule attached to its top. He drank coffee with the laboratory heads, and it was rumored that he took three teaspoons of sugar and far too much cream. He gave a speech at Topper Field and heard the Los Alamos high school band play. He said, “There is no group of people in this country whose record over the last twenty years has been more preeminent in the service of their country than all of you here in this small community in New Mexico.”

  During dinner on New Year’s Day, our two families gathered around the long table in our house, Kip and I were offered wine to drink from the crystalware stemmed glasses that came out of the cabinet on only the most special occasions, and we were the objects of rousing toasts made by both fathers.

  —Columbia’s lucky to have them, Mr. Calder enthused, and Kip gave me a good conspiratorial kick under the table, before making a little speech of his own about how we missed everybody back here, and how much at the same time we were learning out there. As our fathers looked on, encouraged by the wine and the fine display of admirable sentiments from my apparently reformed friend, I couldn’t help but think how out of it they’d both been, when it came to understanding either me or Kip, how out of it right along, and how,
now, they seemed more dazed and distracted than ever. The recognition was at once sad and hilarious. One of the remarks the president had made in his brief speech was how much he admired the kind of schools our parents were running “and the kind of boys and girls that you are bringing up.” While it was a fact that in our elementary schools we began to use the typewriter in the second grade, and that by the fifth grade we used adding machines to check our arithmetic answers, there was still no way of typing, calculating, or marshaling our youthful souls. When asked to say a few words myself, I said, —I don’t have anything to add.

  —He certainly seems to have turned a new leaf, my mother said the next morning. The way she phrased it transformed the statement into a question. I looked at her face in the colorless sunlight that streamed through the windows. Gentle, fine wrinkles about her lips when she drew on her pipe. Her eyes were full of mischief and her comment was like a deep well into which I decided I’d rather not tumble.

  —You smoke too much, I said. New leaves, tobacco. Maybe a neat evasion, but not an effective one.

  —You think I’m trying to smoke you out, Brice?

  I laughed, as best I could. —Kip is working hard, probably’s pulling better grades than me.

  —Than I, she said.

  —Smoke too much, you do, you know.

  —You take care of yourself, Brice. I know you find this hard to believe, but there may come a day when you and Kip—

  —I am taking care of myself, I said.

  —Fair enough, she said.

  That was it? That was all? She was something, that morning. Another recognition. She knew that I knew that she knew that . . . and so forth. It was as if she graduated me into adulthood then and there. I remember startling her with a kiss on the cheek. Seldom had I kissed my mother before that moment, being of good Western stock, inhibited unto obtuseness. This Christmas, the shared birthdays, New Year’s, were more serene than any other before or after. Not only had Kip and I come into maturity of sorts, but the Hill itself grew up that year when President Kennedy signed into law a bill that permitted the town’s residents to buy their own homes. Los Alamos became a part of America, and its townsmen were finally real citizens. No longer a collective of geniuses kept like mistresses, no longer slaves and squatters at Uncle Sam’s spread, everyone was finally allowed to possess the roof over his head and the business by which he made his living. It was a watershed year.

  Days when I was at classes, into the months of February and March and on toward when the soot-black snow began to melt, Kip continued to wander. I wasn’t his keeper, I reminded myself, and so followed my own trajectory. He was the one to bring it up, his new plan for himself. For us, I should say. We were sitting on the steps of Low Library looking out over the sundial to the eight names etched above the colonnade of Butler Library—Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, Vergil—which dwarfed us, just as they were supposed to, and I noticed for the first time the shadow over his lip and sweep of whiskers down from the corners of his mouth, which met at the cleft in his chin, forming an heraldic knot, palely dark. His eyes seemed bruised around the rims, deep purple. His hands moved with keen punctuation against the pattern of his words. I was reminded of Fernando Martinez.

  —Brice, how’re you doing?

  What a ridiculous question, I thought. About to answer with something appropriately sarcastic, I opened my mouth, but he spoke first.

  —I mean, I know you’re doing fine.

  —You all right? I looked down at my own narrow clasped hands, saw that my fingers were interlocked back-to-back and thought, I never saw that before. And Kip was speaking.

  —What I’m going to do is this, I’m going to stay in school.

  I said, —What do you mean? and what I meant was, Of course, well, of course you’re going to stay in school because what else is there?

  And he said, —During the day that’s what I’ll do, and at night what I’m going to do is get a job.

  —What for?

  —For money’s what for, what else?

  —I know that. What I mean is, what’s the money for?

  He turned to me on the steps, I can still see his face in the gray penetrating light. —I’m not made for dorms and frats and any of that stuff, Brice. But I’m not going back up to the old Hill either, no way. So what I do is I stay in school for a while, no problem, maybe even all the way to the degree, I can hack it, but I also work, get some money together, see what gives, and go from there. And as soon as the semester’s done we move off campus into our own place. What do you think about that?

  Triumphant cockeyed smile he gave me.

  —Is that allowed? which wiped the smile away.

  —First-year students are the only ones who have to live on campus. Get with it. Come May you and I are out of John Jay and into New York.

  I say, —Cool, and then I say, —But what about my part of the rent? I mean, I’m willing to do something this summer but next fall—maybe you can do both, but—

  —You worry too much. Look, I’ve already figured that out, too. You just take the money that your parents are spending to put you up in the dorm and give it to me, and I’ll take care of the rest.

  —All right, why not? I said, and left it there, in all its glory and ambivalence. Any implication that I was supposed to find work, make money, prepare myself for the newest exodus, Kip seemed to have left out of his announcement. I didn’t want to think about it, and so I didn’t.

  That May we looked at apartments, including several as far from campus as Kips Bay—because Kip Calder thought that it was kismet there had been another Kip, Jacobus Kip, who’d lived on the island precisely three centuries before we got here—but finally settled on a fifth-floor walk-up on 115th Street, between Amsterdam and Morningside Drive, in an old building called the Colonial. Railroad apartment with windows on the street and windows in back that overlooked a courtyard. Ginkgo trees and ailanthus, and next door a city garden in a vacant lot, where the superintendent planted roses and hostas. A red-brick tenement across the street, and down at the corner was St. Luke’s Hospital. For a hundred and thirteen dollars a month we had two bedrooms, a kitchen, bath, and common room, not to mention odd-sized alcoves here and there. Former tenants had left behind several pieces of furniture, nothing pleasing to look at, nothing comfortable to sit on or lie in, just the castoffs of transient occupants. We moved in, and Kip seemed to come to life again. No objections were raised back home about our decision—more and more I began to recognize how calculated Kip had been back at Christmastime, preparing the way for our defection from John Jay, its wainscots and the elegant sociability of its dining hall, not to mention its rules and regulations. We were, for a time, on top of the world.

  His first job seemed promising, if only because he landed it so quickly. Nights after work it was like we were children again. The lock would turn over and Kip would come in well past midnight. I would be awake still, reading—bless my tractable heart—waiting up for him, and he would appear exhausted and reek of garlic and tomato sauce but have about him a determined air, and would spread his tip money—bills, crumpled and damp—on the floor in the common room. Then together we’d kneel over the array of green laid out in optimistic fans before us, and worshipfully count.

  —Five, five singles, six, seven singles, and a fin makes twelve.

  We were just kids, I remembered, the last time we counted money. —Not bad, I said.

  —I’ve got wage coming on top of that. What’d I tell you. We’ll be living like kings in no time.

  —We’re doing all right, I said.

  —You call this living? This is a dump, Brice. I’m going to get us out of here.

  —But we just moved in.

  I don’t remember what I did that summer. I was trying to figure out how to grow up. So was Kip. He became devoted to the idea that he and I deserved to live extravagantly, richly, in luxury. And when the semester began in September he led a double life, fueled by his
conviction that we should share a place high above Central Park, overlooking the lights of the city, behaving like princes, a dynasty of two. Sometimes he told me that our delivery into affluence was just around the corner, other times he was despondent and told me all his dreams were either daydreams or pipe dreams and that I might be wiser to hitch my fate to another star. I wasn’t offended by his pushiness. This was vintage Kip. Rampant enthusiasm or black silence was what I came to expect from him during those days, nothing in between.

  We kept going. We both worked hard in our different ways. He worked days, worked nights. I don’t know how he managed. We’d read our way through Western Civilization during our first year, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, the required classics, and had felt the same intimidation as our classmates, buried under the course load, worried about deadlines and writing papers, pulling all-nighters and discovering what five, six, seven cups of coffee can do to your mind and stomach. The Iliad, the Roman Empire, the Goths, Genghis Khan, epics of discord, governments lusting to rule the world, nethermen long gone to their graves—we were learning about wars other than the great one of our parents, and for the first time in my life I’d begun to see that the world was history, not just the dead and gone world of centuries past, but the world our mothers and fathers had lived in and shaped, and our own world, this very one we were breathing in now, it was history too. I can remember one night walking across campus, having read about Plato’s cave, and looking up at the moon, which often you couldn’t see well because of all the ambient light cast upward by the city, but which happened to be clear and full, and I remember thinking, My god, Plato looked at that same moon. And Euripides and Sophocles. It was such a revelation for me. And now, during this second year, I told myself I was going to learn everything I could. Not because I wanted to be a good boy, or get good grades. How can it be admitted in a way that doesn’t sound maudlin? I simply wanted to know. I took courses in anthropology, economics, nineteenth-century American history. I sensed everything was valuable, and in anticipation of classes that weren’t even offered to us, I began doing my own sort of extracurricular work, reading political science texts.