Cool's Ridge

by Perrin, Ursula;

  “Well, I sure hope you’re workin’ on him,” he said with a wink. He raised a hand. “‘night, folks.”

  “Good night,” we said. They went out, their rocking gait shaking the floor. Looking at me, the woman’s face had been guarded, her eyes narrowed.

  Sonny dropped a basket of garlic bread on our table. “You just met the Whites, Fred and Evola. Local celebrities. They sold their farm to developers for a million bucks. It’s about time they had some good luck. They’ve got a kid, Turk, who used to be a great pal of Dan Knacker’s, but he’s been in a wheelchair for the past four years.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was hunting with Dan. Dan always has a couple of drinks before he hunts, and a couple after. That day, maybe he had more than a couple, I don’t know. It ended up he shot Turk in the back. Everybody agreed it was an accident, but I’m not sure why they thought so. Dan Knacker was the only one I’d ever heard of who got caught poaching deer up here. It was always Dan’s idea that he should be able to shoot deer any time of year on his own land. It turned out he was baiting the deer with corn and shooting them in a paddock, with a rifle. Not exactly sportsman-like. I must say, everybody was relieved when Dan was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Now he’s back, and married to that sly, stupid little Coral Reef. Yes, that’s right, that was her maiden name. Reef. Poor Erroll! You wonder sometimes about the Deity. I’ve heard that Erroll was as nice as Dan was bad, but he got sick, and afterwards, he was never the same.”

  “What was it he had?” my father asked curiously.

  “I don’t know,” Sonny said, looking away. “All I’ve heard is that he was sick and when he finally got better he was strange in the head.”

  “Encephalitis, maybe,” my father said.

  I said, “Do you think Erroll’s crazy?”

  “Crazy? No, not crazy. I’d say … oh, peculiar. Anyway, Coral and Dan terrify him. They do it out of pure meanness, the way some boys torment cats. I suppose that makes Erroll even worse. My guess is they’re hoping to push him over the edge. If they can get Erroll locked up, they can sell the farm.”

  “They could sell it now, couldn’t they?”

  “No, because the farm was left to Erroll. They’d have to get him committed and get a Power of Attorney.”

  My father, who’d been intently listening, said, “Well, easier said than done. In New Jersey a patient’s only committable if he’s dangerous to himself or others. That usually translates into obviously dangerous.”

  Sonny smiled crookedly. “They say it safeguards the patient’s rights.”

  “Does it?” my father asked, sharply. “Maybe it just reduces the patient’s chance of getting treated.”

  “What’s the truth?” Sonny said. “People don’t care. Nobody gives a darn about anybody, anymore. You folks want a drink? Supper’s going to be a while.” There was another thud on the ceiling. Sonny looked up, shook her head, and went back out to the kitchen.

  “So that’s it,” I said. We were driving down and then up the rollercoaster back road to The Farm, flying along in the dark. “They want the land. If they can get Erroll jailed or hospitalized for arson, they can get Power of Attorney and sell the property.”

  “That’s a big ‘if.’”

  “I keep thinking, isn’t there something we can do for Erroll? He seems so terrified.”

  “What to do?” my father said wearily. “We all know about that one, don’t we.”

  Well here it is, I thought. The topic we’d managed to avoid all evening. I said, “How is Johnny? Have you seen him?”

  “I haven’t seen him, but he appeared at your mother’s late last night. She said he was wearing sandals, shorts, and the Navaho blanket from his old room. He had long hair and a full beard. We don’t know whether he thinks he’s Jesus, Mahatma Ghandi or Geronimo.”

  “These days lots of people have long hair and full beards.”

  “True. But they don’t speak in rhymed couplets. Strange, isn’t it, how all his talents still show up, but in a completely bizarre way. What a waste.”

  “Where’s he living now?”

  “I’m not sure. Last time I looked, he’d moved into a packing crate in the woods behind Otis Pharmaceuticals.”

  “Oh Dad, he needs to be hospitalized.”

  “I know that, Elizabeth. I hardly need to be told that. Go tell it to the ACLU. They’re so eager to protect everybody’s rights, they’ve managed to get all these sick desperate people put out of the hospitals and onto the streets.”

  “It wasn’t just the ACLU.”

  “The ACLU and the usual money-hungry state politicians. ‘Discharged to the community!’ Last time your brother was home he went off his medicine and drank a quart bottle of vodka. Then he took an ax to the freezer in the basement. When I asked him why he’d done that, he said he didn’t want to sleep in it. I said, ‘Well, who asked you to?’ He said he could read my mind. Right there was when I finally had it. I’ve told your mother not to let him in. I know how hard that is for her, keeping him out of the house when he’s sick and hungry, but my God, it’s impossible. No! We both have to keep going, we both have to function, if only to keep on paying his medical bills. When he gets really bad the police will notice him, they’ll pick him up, get him admitted. A nice suburban town like Comstock doesn’t want sick people wandering around. It’s bad for real estate values.”

  I thought, But what if the cops only beat him up and throw him into a cell? They do that with the druggies. They’re always beating up on the druggies.

  “Funny,” my father said. “John. Who would have thought? I remember when he came home and said, ‘Dad, I am the smartest boy in the second grade.’” I glanced at him and he swiped at his cheek with his wrist. “Hell,” he said.

  I looked out of the car window at the black scenery streaming by. It was so dark up here, so blissfully, soothingly dark. You could just close your eyes and sink into velvety blackness.

  “Well,” my father said, “there’s nothing to be done. At least not right now. Anyway, I’m getting out.” He corrected himself. “Moving out. A small remove.”

  “Slow down, Dad, it’s that next dirt road.”

  He made the turn and we slowly bumped up the road to The Farm. When the tall lit-up house appeared through the trees ahead of us, I felt a burst of fondness for it, as if we’d been on a long dangerous journey, traveling for days seeking asylum. How comforting it looked, the roof faintly whitewashed with moonlight, the big windows of the second floor lit up and reflected on the gelid surface of the glistening pond as a series of faintly trembling gold squares. He drove slowly around the house and pulled into the back parking lot.

  “Well,” he said, and cut the motor.

  “Well,” I said. I hadn’t told him about our engagement. I’d been waiting for the appropriate moment, which somehow hadn’t arrived. Was this it?

  “There’s something else, Liz,” he said. “I guess you’d better know now. I’ve been seeing someone.”

  I looked at him perplexed, and then afraid. What did he mean? Was he ill? Breaking down? Until the money ran out we’d had endless hours of therapy, all of us had “seen someone.”

  “She’s a nice person and she knows about John, but not everything. I guess I want to shield her.”

  I said, stupidly, “Shield her?”

  He raised both hands from the steering wheel. “All right, or shield myself. I admit it. I don’t want to destroy what we’ve got. What I’ve got.” He went on in a musing voice, “She has an odd background.”

  “Like what?”

  “She’s a Catholic.”

  “What’s odd about that?”

  “In fact, she was quite religious.”

  “Isn’t she still?”

  “She was a nun. A Dominican. She left her order.”

  “Really. For you?”

  “What? No, not for me, she left some time ago. She has … a bad heart.”

  “So do I.”

  “What?”
<
br />   “My heart’s on the bum,” I said. I got out of the car and closed the door. Above me in the black summer night the trees were full of strumming cicadas.

  “Liz?” my father said out of the car window. When he turned his head toward me a glint of reflected light played on his glasses, giving him a light-struck look, the look of a blind man. “I’d really like to talk some more.”

  “What’s there to say?”

  “There’s lots to say.”

  “I’m tired, Dad. Some other time. Drive carefully going back, all right?”

  In fact, I was exhausted. Through the screened windows of the house I heard May’s husky voice call out, “Wayne? Honey, listen to this on the radio.”

  I went around to the front hall and crept up the narrow stairs. I locked the door to my stuffy box-like room and lay on the bedspread waiting for a breeze. When John was a senior in high school he’d written all the songs, words and music, for the senior play. We thought he was going to be a songwriter, the Cole Porter or John Lennon of his generation.

  “Where are we going? What will we find?

  Life’s full of treasure, about to be mined.

  Will we strike gold or lose our way?

  Who can say? Darling, who can say?”

  3.

  That night I slept in a tattered patchwork of dreams, dreams that were all about Alice, and Skip, and Alice who wasn’t Alice, but an ex-roommate of mine, a woman from Washington, D.C., named Eileen Marshall. I’d known Eileen at college, and in September of 1968 we’d decided to share a small apartment in Manhattan. In October, Eileen invited me down to her parents’ home in Chevy Chase for a weekend. Her parents thought we were coming down for some R & R, but in fact we’d made plans to join a peace march taking place in front of the Pentagon that Saturday morning.

  Things had just kind of settled down for me then, in October of that year. The summer had been gloomy and chaotic, but by Labor Day Weekend there’d been a sense of resolution: I’d been accepted into a graduate program at Columbia, my brother John had improved somewhat and was “safely” back at Princeton for his junior year.

  That summer, John had become religious. He’d spent most of his time in his room, reading the Bible and praying. We all thought something was going wrong with him—this couldn’t be John, the jokey son and sibling—but personality change was not then recognized as a treatable malady and so we’d decided to go together as a family for “family therapy,” something John only agreed to because, in his opinion, the rest of us were very ill.

  This was an opinion that the psychiatrist seemed to share: Dr. Walker was less concerned about John than about “family dynamics,” and instead of focusing on John, he zeroed in on my mother. It was immediately obvious that he didn’t approve of a woman who functioned as a mother and a lawyer, and almost at once words like “tense,” “ambitious,” “compulsive,” began dominating the group proceedings. Here was John who was rail-thin (he had lost twenty pounds), pale, with a dark yet glittering look in his eye, but Dr. Walker was wondering if my mother, “a career woman,” was “okay.” And what about me? Was I “really” all right? I’d gone to a prestigious women’s college—that seemed to make me suspect. My father got off totally, I suppose on account of ‘professional courtesy.’

  “Isn’t it amazing,” my mother said, sitting wearily down on my bed one night after another session, “these people have thought of the perfect neo-Freudian double-bind. First, they tell women to stay home and concentrate on raising children, and then if things go wrong, it has to be the mother’s fault. On the other hand, if the poor benighted woman doesn’t stay home, it’s also her fault. Crooks! That Walker person is a total charlatan.”

  My father stood in the bedroom doorway and laughed. “But Cassie,” he said, “Walker has wonderful credentials, you said so yourself. He went to Yale Medical School and trained at Payne-Whitney. You were thrilled.” He was always needling my mother about Yale because she had an old boyfriend—the one she moonily mentioned whenever she was especially irritated with my father—and this hero of her early love-life had gone to Yale.

  So we left Dr. Walker and hoped for the best. In August, John didn’t seem much better. He had joined a group of Born Again Christians and still spent most of his time in his bedroom, praying. At dinnertime, he would emerge unbathed and unshaven, barefoot and dressed in a black tee shirt and torn black jeans. A cross made from a wire coat hanger hung from a piece of twine around his neck. He would sit down at the dinner table with his head held back and his eyes narrowed, watching us from under his lashes. “Mother,” he’d say, “why are you staring at me?”

  “What?” she’d ask nervously.

  “I am praying for you, Mother,” he’d say. “You are the whore of heaven and are going to hell.”

  She’d shake a cigarette from the pack she kept next to her plate and light up. She, too, was losing weight and was smoking constantly.

  “You see,” John said, “you’re doing it again. You are the eye of a needle, Mother, and you’re piercing me to the heart. You stab me to death with your needle’s eye. You cannot get through it. Don’t look at me that way.”

  He would laugh unpleasantly and ask for the bread. All summer long he ate nothing but bread, drank nothing but wine. Half the time he was blotto. His room stank and was full of empty wine bottles. When he looked at my mother, his expression was full of loathing. The pupils of his eyes were as hard and constricted as raisins.

  But by September he’d seemed better. Hadn’t Dr. Walker assured us that adolescence was a time of transition and John was in just such a phase? John insisted on going back to Princeton, only now, he said, he was going to major in philosophy and religion. He had decided to be a minister.

  He left for college neatly groomed, dressed in a white shirt, a black tie, a navy blue blazer and gray flannel slacks. He had carefully shined a pair of black dress shoes only (I don’t know if anyone else had noticed) he’d forgotten to put on socks. He kissed my mother goodbye and patted her on the head. “Goodbye, little Mary,” he said.

  My mother and I stood in the front doorway, watching as the station wagon spun backwards out of the driveway. My father was driving, John sat next to him in the front seat looking straight ahead. He was very upright and very still, and when we waved, he did not wave back. I knew he had a bible on his knee.

  “What do you think?” I asked my mother as the wagon lumbered away down the street.

  My mother inhaled and blew out smoke. “Damn cigarettes,” she said, and flicked hers behind a rhododendron. “I’m quitting right now. What do I think? He’s crazy, of course.”

  “I thought he was better.”

  “I don’t mean John,” my mother said. “I mean Walker.”

  September went by and on the telephone John sounded better. Sober, somber, perhaps, but not crazy. My father the optimist said, “See? He’s doing all right. Really, you’d have to expect something like this after what happened with Bobby Lee.”

  I settled into my new life—graduate classes and the third floor apartment on West 91st Street that Eileen Marshall and I had found. Things got so normal that I went back to thinking of Skip Loomis—I’d forgotten all about him during the awful events of the summer.

  Once back in the academic routine, with the long pale days of library work, and the long brisk New York autumn evenings, when you walk down Columbus Avenue in a scuttering breeze full of dead leaves and scraps of paper, and couples are strolling arm in arm in the twilight, and there was no one, no male I’d come across on the Columbia campus I’d even glance at twice, I thought about Skip a lot.

  Sundays were the worst days to be in the city without a lover, those poignant October Sundays (so clear and sunny and bracingly blue) that dissolved into smoky twilights of billowing purple dusk, a dusk studded with golden stars. On Sundays, Eileen and I would dress up, go out, go everywhere together—cruising we were really, always on the lookout for a “halfway decent” man. If it was warm enough, we’d hav
e an omelette or a pasta salad at a sidewalk cafe near Lincoln Center, our eyes constantly swiveling to the jostling crowd walking by. How was it everyone but us had lovers? We’d walk east on 57th Street and stand in line at an East Side movie house, glancing in back of us, sizing up the men who were always fixedly looking the other way, waiting for girls who arrived with a flurry, dashing out of cabs at the precise moment the ticket holders line began to move forward. Was this what we lacked, this theatrical prima donna-esque sense of timing?

  Later, after the movie, we’d have drinks and hamburgers at a place on Third Avenue, looking, looking, and then, at last, at nine o’clock or so, we’d fall into a taxi feeling irritable, disappointed, a little drunk, and quarrelsome. Stupified by loneliness and lust, we’d climb the stairs to our third-floor-rear apartment.

  Having spent the day together as hopefully as lovers, we were now nigh onto hatred. Eileen and the TV would take over the living room, I’d creep into the bedroom and slide under the covers with a book, hoping she wouldn’t come in until I’d fallen properly asleep or I might, just might, attack her and tear her to pieces. Always by Sunday night I couldn’t stand the sight or smell of her—her curdled underwear dropped in clotted pools on the scruffy longhaired pink rug, her cluttered bureau top with its redundant array of birth control gadgets, pills and creams and a diaphragm in a semen-colored plastic box the shape of a scallop shell. Her high overeager laugh had scared away the only “halfway decent” man I’d seen all day. Really. She had no cool. And coming home in the taxi she’d said, sulkily, petulantly, “Honestly, Liz, do you have to be so quiet? I mean, these guys must think you’re dead, or on Valium.” Right there, in the lurching cab, with a cabbie fresh from Hong Kong who drove like an opiated rickshaw bandit, I had wanted to reach up my black-gloved hands and strangle her.

  So, when I’d told her about the peace march, I hadn’t expected company, and as a matter of fact, hadn’t wanted any, at least not hers. But some of the other graduate students were going down, and I knew that she rather liked one of them, a tall, skinny, perpetually smiling guy from Maine named Quentin Loftus. He had a head full of curly brown hair and there was something so consistently alert and amused about his expression, so eager and empathetic, that he reminded me of a dog my grandfather had had—a mutt named Mortimer who used to lie in sunny doorways waiting for people to pet him. Quentin was doing Russian culture and history. Eileen had made some sort of casual arrangement to meet him on Saturday and thus, on Friday, at noon, she and I took the train down to D.C. together.