The old cowman I approached up at Diamond Ranch to get permission to wander out here without being shot told me a story about a little girl who used to run away from home and hide up here with a wild stallion. I made no attempt whatsoever to correct him and render his story more accurate. Instead I felt myself honored to be acquainted with a myth in the making, and I was determined to do nothing to diminish it. On the contrary, I drew him out as long as possible and, as I suspected he might, he took the bait and wove me a tale Mark Twain would have found tough to beat. But I refuse to be so easy as to write it to you; it will be had only in the telling, as oral literature should be had, and in exchange for your presence.
The wind has come up since I began writing, and I have to take great care lest these thoughts be lost to the wind.
Here, more than any other place, where there is nothing from the past to recommend it, no ruins, no monument, I sense the greatness of the ordinary that has tread here before me. Cattle paths approach this spring like the spokes of an old wagon wheel, and I see coming to me on the wind a Kaw buffalo hunter; a Czech immigrant; a Boston barber seeking gold; an army lieu- tenant sent to map topography seemingly endless, a land that haunted his nights with dreams of walking on the bottom of the sea; a mischief-loving ten-year-old girl (whom you would have liked); a Spaniard in chain mail with skin and mind the toughness of buffalo hide; and then those nomads of eras so long past they escape my imagination and I feel them only as spirits, with no faces, no history to define them.
There is, however, a vision that haunts me more than these, and it bears your face and your eyes and your smile.
Fondly,
Anthony
June 28
My dearest Anthony,
Your offer was providential; I hate to think what kind of misery my grandma might have brought down around my ears had I stayed under her roof one more night. We have times of peace and times of war, and we seem to be entering upon the latter.
Did I mention to you how, as a child, I used to imagine myself living here in this house of yours, daughter of a great landlord, with servants and ponies, and only once did I set foot in the place before yesterday, and that was in the dead of night the New Year's Eve of my senior year in high school, with a riotous gang of friends looking for ghosts.
Since you estimate your absence to be at least three weeks, I took the liberty of bringing over some of my painting materials and setting them up in the parlor. Rest assured that your privacy and your work will be completely respected.
Yes, the bed is spartan at best—on sleepless nights I think it not much better than the rack. But I have brought my David Roberts from home and hung it above the bed. It is quite serene here with your rugs, and the high naked walls seem to stand proud with a kind of forlorn beauty. I would dare not touch a thing in here.
I sense the sanctity of your solitude. Ifeel I am able to read you through what is absent—not what is visible. On these naked walls I feel there is written a part of your life.
I loved hearing your voice, all the way from London! But I see you so much better on the page. Please write me. Even though I am surrounded by you, I still miss you.
Love, Sarah
P.S. I am going to repaint the kitchen, however. Would a pale buttercup yellow suit you ?
July 10
My lovely Sarah,
You will receive this letter after my return, and should it come into your hands while you are by my side, I beg you to look away and shield me from your reaction should it be other than the one I desire.
My publisher here in London has agreed to do the next work in this series. My first was in Africa—in Baratzeland—as you know. Then the
Flint Hills. The next will be a region in the Australian lowlands. I haven't decided where. But it will be a small town. A prairie town like yours. And then, if all goes well, I will finish in the pampas in Argentina.
Come away with me, my dear Sarah. Come away with me and we shall travel these places together, you and I.I have made many attempts in my past to live this life peacefully with other women (as you well know) but I have not yet been successful. Could you see fit to forgive me my past and come with me—for as long or as briefly as you wish? I will be satisfied with whatever you can give me.
I do love you, my dearest Sarah.
Anthony
That was the last letter.
John sat for a long while in stunned silence, thinking about the lives revealed so intimately on those pages. Even though Sarah's replies were short, had her own letters been missing, he would have been able to measure the woman by the man. This was no common drifter who had passed through these parts, and the dignity and beauty with which he had announced his love for Sarah left John feeling vaguely envious, even inadequate. Who was this man who had tried to charm her? Lure her away with him? What had become of him? And why had her letters been returned?
He switched off the lamp and lay in the darkness with his eyes wide open, his mind in a muddle. It was a long time before he slept.
CHAPTER 11
John generally slept late and heavily. Rarely was he disturbed by the racket of the family's morning ritual, the baby's wails and the sweeper running downstairs and the telephone ringing, but on this morning he was up in time to catch Susan in the kitchen tussling with Will over breakfast. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sank into a chair opposite her, and told her about Sarah Bryden.
"You mean she actually volunteered to come back?"
"She did."
"You're kidding."
"Nope."
"You must be."
"I'm not."
"Did she fly out of here on wings?"
He gave her a sleepy smile and ran his hand through his tousled hair.
"Took her truck."
"That's not very angelic."
Susan set down the bowl of cereal and tried to clean off the baby's mouth, but he resisted the wet cloth, stubbornly flinging his head back and forth until she finally gave up.
"So, somebody thinks they can handle you, Will." She gave a derisive little snort. "Imagine that."
"How do you know her?"
"I don't, really. Not very well. She's a waitress at the Cassoday Cafe. Amy's mother owns the place."
She sat quietly for a moment.
"That makes me think..."
"What?"
"Your dad's sixty-fifth."
"What about it?"
She rose to pour John another cup of coffee.
"What if we ask her to come along with us?"
"Up to Lawrence?"
"We really can't leave Will with my mom for that long. And I already asked Amy. She's got something on that day." She set the mug in front of him.
"What about her job?"
"It's on a Sunday. I think the cafe's closed Sundays."
"You'd pay her, wouldn't you?"
Susan laughed and reached over the table to brush the hair out of his face.
"Of course I would. Silly man. I'm sure she could use the money. I don't think they're very well off. You remember her grandfather?"
"Yes. The open house."
"She lives with him. And her grandmother. Rather pathetic, really." Susan paused, then, "I don't have the faintest idea why she's still living here. She doesn't fit in at all."
"Yes. I'd believe that."
There was a stiff silence while John sat hunched over his steaming coffee.
"What makes you say that?" Her voice held a twinge of something disagreeable.
He smiled up at her. "Oh, I think I know a thing or two about fitting in."
The doorbell rang just then. It was the boy from across the street come to shovel snow off the driveway, and the discussion of Sarah Bryden came to a close.
But talking about Sarah had started John thinking about his own life, and he lingered over his coffee that morning, and wondered about the turn of things in time.
Perhaps, had he been born at another place, another time, had his intellect been spared the
straitjacket of an institutional education, it is quite possible he would have trod another path, would perhaps have become a great mathematician or even a sage. But his mind bore the birthmark of Middle America, and from infancy on, all that did not conform had been sweated out of him.
From the start John had been a source of anxiety and even disappointment to his rigidly conventional parents—both of them professors at the University of Kansas. First there had been the problem of muteness. At the age of three, when most children are becoming fluent (an age at which his older brother could already read), John had barely spoken at all. His parents took him to specialists, paid for test after test to assess and diagnose him, only to conclude his muteness amounted to no more than sheer stubbornness. They were reassured by child psychologists that their son would, when ready, speak. Which he did, of course. But this willfulness seemed to set the stage for the battle between his spirit and his rigid, autocratic family.
Soon, his extraordinary aptitude for mathematics became manifest, and later on, his fascination for the subtleties of physics, but even then his parents were not reassured. He was quite capable of failing a class if he found the subject matter dull or offensive (he told the school counselor he failed American literature because he had heard his father's voice in Cotton Mather's Puritan sermons). Yet he would finish exams in calculus or trigonometry in a third of the allotted time and spend the rest of the class period devising complex math puzzles on the back of his test papers and send them back to his teachers to solve. There seemed to flow through him a deeply intuitive and irrational current that his parents could never fully understand. All the standardized tools of measurement failed to define this quality of his, as if it lurked in some hidden recess of his brain, far away from the gaze of ordinary men.
The Ivy League universities his brothers had attended wanted nothing to do with this changeling (John seemed not in the least dismayed by the rejection), and he found himself dumped in the university in his own backyard, where his father, Dr. Armand Wilde, held the rank of full professor and past chair of the aeronautical engineering department. He tottered along through his undergraduate years, choosing to live a solitary and contemplative existence with another physics major in a small apartment near campus.
At one point he was on the verge of changing his major to theology, a prospect his parents found even more disquieting than the specter of failed classes, given his tendency toward independent thought. Only too clearly did they remember an incident when, in the course of his Saturday morning confirmation classes, Reverend Simpson had assigned the Apostles' and Nicene creeds to memorize, and thirteen-year-old John had come back the following week with a creed he had written himself. It was a wildly mystical monologue annotated with mathematical equations, and he spent nearly half an hour lecturing Reverend Simpson on the nature of the infinitesimally small and the infinitely large. For John, mathematical theorems were the scent (he was insistent on the metaphor) of God's presence throughout the universe. His parents feared no seminary would ever graduate him, let alone ordain him. Needless to say, they breathed a sigh of relief when John renounced theology and opted instead for theoretical physics.
His single-mindedness often left him insensitive to social nuance. He could ramble on about atomic vortic-ity and low-energy elliptical aberrations without ever suspecting it was all well beyond the understanding of his family and friends. But this is not to say he was without charm: on the contrary, everyone liked him, although few understood him. There was in his manner a directness, an unassuming innocence that melted the heart. This charm worked magic on women, particularly older women—at least those who were patient enough to attempt to communicate with him.
Eventually his studies in physics rose to meet the challenge of his precocity, and maturity tamed his eccentricities so that by the time he reached his senior year at university, his parents felt certain their son at long last fit the profile of the brilliant young scientist.
Appearances, however, were deceptive, and the spring before his graduation, a strange event occurred that put to the test what little remnants of rebellion still thrummed in his heart.
It was the last Sunday in April, just five weeks before commencement. He was slowly making his way down the grand stairs of the First Congregational Church behind the vast Gothic figure of his father as they flowed with the crowd to greet the Reverend Simpson on the sidewalk below, when he suddenly felt a cold, wrinkled hand slip into his own. He turned to see a shriveled creature gazing up at him from underneath a billowing mushroom of pale blue netting.
"You're the young Wilde boy, aren't you?" said a watery thin voice, her eyes pallid as the noon-washed sky.
"Yes," answered John. He was struggling to remember her.
"You're graduating this year, aren't you?" she asked pointedly.
"I am."
"What are you going to do with yourself?" She linked her arm in his and leaned on him as they advanced another step.
"I'm going out west. To Stanford. I'll be doing my doctorate in physics."
"Oh," she said, and her voice trailed. "Be careful."
John, misunderstanding, pressed his hand over hers to reassure her. "Let's go over here and use the handrail," he said.
She put on the brakes with a kind of stubborn heels-down jerk that let it be known in no uncertain terms that she was not what she appeared to be.
"I wasn't talking about myself. I was talking about you." She looked up at him with a severe gaze, full of indignation. "I was talking about you, young Wilde." She snorted back through powdered nostrils. "Boys need some time away from the father."
He indulged her with a condescending smile and gently emphasized, "But I'm not staying here. Stanford's in
California."
"Oh, I know where Stanford is," she answered sharply, with an impatient flick of her blue netting. "But it's the same thing. It's the father. All your life you've marched to his drumbeat. It's time to do your own thing, young Wilde. Get out of yourself a bit. Go find the world. Fight in a war. Work in a soup kitchen. Join the Peace Corps. But don't go to Stanford. Not yet. You can do that later." She patted him roughly on the arm and gave him a smile that could scarcely erase the unsettling pallor of those blue eyes.
They were interrupted at that moment by a lady with pumpkin-colored hair who called her Hortense and bustled her away, chattering about the car waiting and how they'd looked all over for her.
"There was a Hortense Potter," his mother said when he asked about her in the buffet line at the faculty club where they lunched together once a month after church. "But she died quite some time ago. You probably wouldn't remember her. She used to work in the nursery when you were a baby. She always seemed to favor you. A very pretty woman. Even when she was old. Never married."
Armand was fishing a slice of ham from a silver domed dish and eyeing the eggs Benedict with restraint. Hortense? He sighed heavily and passed by the eggs Benedict. He could not recall a Hortense, did not much trouble his mind with the detail; it was, after all, of no importance.
But it was.
There had always been that other distinguishing feature about John, a sense of heightened spirituality that no memorized creed could ever invoke. Hortense played to that audience in him, and he took her quite seriously. Her look, filtered through blue netting, lingered with John, and with time the netting faded and there were just those eyes, and soon those eyes began to have a cunning resemblance to his own eyes when he leaned close to the mirror every morning to inspect his stub-bled jaw.
He was a little at a loss as to how to proceed at this point in his life. His doctoral studies were very important, but Hortense had reawakened in him that intuitive streak, and he turned his mind inward and listened.
Only the idea of the Peace Corps truly appealed to him, but for the wrong reasons: its romance and slightly faded splendor, its association with the Camelot of the Kennedy presidency, its nobility of purpose, the lure of far-off, exotic places. But Peace Corps work ge
nerally involved teaching of some sort, and John's previous attempts at teaching had been, if not quite disastrous, then less than successful. During his undergraduate years he had taken an occasional tutoring job to earn pocket money, but most of his pupils left after only a few sessions, and always with the same complaint: instead of toiling on their level, clarifying the steps as they went along, he would wander off into complex theory, leaving his pupils thoroughly confused. Yet there was an intoxicating quality about him, and some students, particularly the girls, returned time after time just to be in his presence. When he spoke he would grow animated, the words tumbling out, his eyes deepening in hue, and whether or not they understood him became irrelevant.
He filled out the Peace Corps application almost as a lark, believing his responses to the questions would be far too vague. He floundered when it came to justifying his motive. He could not very well explain that Hortense Potter's ghost had told him to do this, but he was able to sound plausibly determined, and he sent off all the papers and the recommendations he had so stealthily solicited, and then tried to forget about it. Like some shameful misdeed committed in absolute secrecy.
A month later he was accepted.
To Kenya.
He had a choice now. He could act on his intuition, fly against the conventional winds that had directed his life until now, and it frightened him down to the marrow of his bones. At the same time, paradoxically, a kind of peace settled over him, and when he stared at his face in the morning he saw Hortense's eyes twinkle back at him, and he felt a release from all their expectations. As the weeks went by he began to see Africa as more than a mere experience or an interlude, but as a powerful determinant of his destiny.
A lightheartedness seized him during those last weeks before final exams, and it was undeniably this effervescence that had sent him off with a carload of friends to the Cicada Club up in Kansas City. John sat in the backseat with his roommate, Robert, a young Scottish physics major with a shank of greasy black hair and black-rimmed glasses, the two of them drinking straight gin from the bottle and feeling reckless and decadent.
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