Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  Wies was home free, on extremely firm footing here. Through long practice, she considered herself the best examiner of toothaches, skin imperfections, and somethings-in-the-eye in the working-class quarter of Maastricht. She made the appropriate ghastly sucking in of breath. She pulled out all the stops, going so far as to reach out with one timid, overly shaking third finger to touch the area—a normal birthmark—as if it were an infected animal capable of transmitting the increasingly popular phenomenon of germs even through her cotton confirmation gloves.

  The August day was hot, and smoke shops stood particularly low in popularity. Perhaps the start of the war, too, kept the normal clientele at home. Not anticipating a long war, the Dutch did not start queuing for and stockpiling staples for another five months. They stayed home from the shops to take part in a sophisticated form of ambulance chasing: the habit of tobacco stood no chance against a stronger addiction to the tabloid press with its line engravings of the shifting fronts.

  For this reason, the First War kept the smoke shop mostly empty and kept the tobacconist’s widow out of the shop preying on war rumors. Peter came from behind the counter and began conducting Wies about. He placed his hand in the small of her back, guiding her in the manner popular on the dance floors that year. Having familiarized itself with that fascinating but too local area, his hand began playing Balboa in search of the Pacific.

  He talked to her at great length about cigardom, making up names and curiosities when the facts weren’t enough to distract her from what his hand was doing. Yet she showed Olympian skill at asking an ingenuous question while turning in such a way as to return his hand from its perch in Peru to its remote port in Spain. She knew by heart the old formula for compound interest: delay is the way to compound the crime without losing the criminal’s interest.

  Their sales talk followed the basic pattern of he proposing and she disposing. He steered her starboard toward a box of the cheapest, garden-variety panatelas, fabricating:

  —Perhaps your cousin would be charmed by a gift of these remarkable eleganta. They were first brought back by one of our early explorers of Java. This fellow discovered a tribe there that smoked these by putting the lit end into their mouths. Like this. Don’t laugh, you. This tribe turned out to be cannibals, and that explorer lost three quarters of his men.

  —Oh, awful! I don’t want to hear.

  —But did that explorer care about the dangers? Of course he didn’t. He thought of only one thing: how to get this cigar back to Holland so he and Her Majesty could make a mint.

  —And . . . he made it back? Alive?

  —No. He mailed it back parcel post. Say, you’re not too much upstairs, are you? Anyway, that’s what makes we Dutch great. You and that explorer: neither smart enough to get distracted. That’s why the Huns better leave their mitts off us, or they’ll be tied up with an enemy too dumb to know when to quit.

  —You’re Dutch?

  —Limburger, if you please. What did you think, Latvian?

  —I thought he said . . . Oh, no reason.

  —So what do you say, miss? Elegantas for the cousin?

  In each instance, she would remove her glove, pick up the sample, smell it, roll it between her fingers, replace it in its box, and give the shelf the pat of extreme unction. Visibly aroused, Peter warned her that this was a good way to get “nicotine sores,” but made no effort to restrain her. And after each ritual she would say, with disarming, nostalgic regret:

  —Why no, I don’t think that’s quite the thing for my cousin.

  And they would sail to another bin. Aware that the obstacle had to be surmountable if it were to raise desire, Wies encouraged Peter to open a second front. She let the garments of her greatskirt brush unrestrained against Peter’s arm. The effect at that time of a light brush of fabric is beyond the imagining of a modern. The century’s progress killed that sensibility. Submarines, battleships, welfare, radio, the psychological novel, exploding shells, the computer, depth analysis make it no longer possible to confuse a graze with contact, suggestion with the deed.

  Peter returned pressure for pressure. He began to brush her leg accidentally as they walked, apologizing at first, then acting without cover. His sales pitches suffered a steady attrition until they deteriorated to “Your cousin care for this?,” and finally, “You like this?” With the most delicate schedule, he worked them into the shop’s back corner, not visible from the street but still not without danger.

  Peter had a strong sense of the impossibility of the situation but had learned, along with one hundred million other Europeans that hot August, how small a step it really was over the bounds of the possible. Wies faced yet another shelf of merchandise and waited for the inevitable, momentarily visited by a stillness that seemed to come from somewhere out of her past, settling on her like an old friend. When, against all odds, Peter managed to lift all her undergarments in one smooth motion, she did not so much as flinch, but stood with the docile fatalism of August corn. She only smoothed down the front of her skirts so that, from head on at least, she seemed the least molested. Somewhere behind her, Peter was asking her something. She found that the question went away if she ignored it.

  He asked if she liked his free hand on the back of her thigh. Soon, he forgot such trivialities and attended to the job at hand. He moved to open his trousers and found he had already done so. He guided himself forward to take her from behind. He drew back, momentarily stunned as a crossed synapse caused him to believe he had touched a wet sea mammal that had made the two hundred miles overland from the Zuider Zee for the express purpose of lodging itself up her dress.

  Instantly the impression passed, and he found his way inside her. She turned her head and made her face partly visible for the first time since he touched her. Her lids, cheeks, and forehead lay slack over her skull in abandon. She held a cigar in wet lips, puffing imaginary smoke out of the corner of her mouth, pantomiming a corporate higher-up who sees all things going exactly per plan. She must have learned such luridness in Maastricht, as she had never traveled. The play-acted smoking aroused Peter even more than the anonymity of rear entry. He held on and pushed into her with adolescent severity.

  Whether she faked or felt an ecstasy did not concern Peter as much as it did men later in the century. His anxiety came from another source altogether, for almost at the peak of their acceleration, she half-screamed:

  —Peter!

  He came instantly, prematurely, inside her. The next moment the whole incident vanished without trace. He grabbed her by the shoulders and swung her around, his nails making half-moons in her exposed skin. Without speaking, he demanded how she had come to know his name.

  —You are . . . that is, you are called Peter? Peter Schreck? I am right?

  She took a chance, appending the Christian name Hubert had mentioned so often to the German surname he had labored to write on the scrap of paper the night of the attack, the night he went away. Peter’s response to her accusation became forever unreadable as he turned, head down and away from her.

  —Your brother Hubert came to me several nights ago and . . . acted so strangely. Then he left and has not come back since. Have you seen him?

  Peter replaced his clothes as she spoke, then walked with all the old impudence back to the front counter and cash till. Wies followed him, near hysteries, doing no better than repeating:

  —Have you?

  Her dress was still mostly décolleté. Peter stared at her, at her hands, which still held the cigar she had used to mime wantonness for him.

  —One Spanish panatela comes to one quarter guilder.

  —Peter?

  —All right, take it for free, then. I’ll pay for it out of my wages.

  —Your brother, Hubert. He may be in trouble.

  Weeping now, variations on “What have I said?” took her all the way to the shop door while he said nothing. She opened the door, ringing a small brass bell meant to warn the widow and Peter of a customer’s entrance. Hearing Pet
er speak, she turned with infinite relief toward him, her rubbery face already composed in joy and forgiveness. But the boy only said, for no one’s benefit in particular:

  —I have put my bread in a cold oven.

  Having touched the seam between need and cruelty, Wies found she wanted no more of male love for the rest of her waking life. She returned home, growing closer than ever to her parents and to the evening newspaper. And frequently over the next weeks, she would remove from the back of her press and reexamine the two documents—one mechanical, the other handwritten—that could change in so short a time from nostalgic keepsakes to legal leverage, should she find in the days to come that the seed of either boy left her in need of documentary proof.

  That evening, as the tobacconist’s widow mocked, Peter wrote to the Schreck family in the Westerwald, knowing that they, perhaps even more than the imprisoned blood mother, would care about Hubert’s whereabouts. He wrote: “I told him not to, but the fool has gone and mixed himself up in this international business, and I can no longer be the protector of his safety. Your son, Peter.”

  The couple forwarded the information to Adolphe, assigned to a corps of von Bülow’s army in the middle of the German West Front’s right wing. Mail remained sporadic but mostly reliable through the end of the war’s first year. They warned Adolphe not to answer any questions about his two brothers, should anyone come poking about the camp, as many had already come by the farm.

  Adolphe got off two letters of his own the night that the mail caught up with his advancing column. He wrote both letters standing at ease in marching formation, while his regiment waited outside Namur for officers to unsnarl the traffic caused by two failed gasoline engines. The first letter was to corps headquarters, forwardable to the appropriate authorities, reading: “The evader Peter Kinder Schreck can be found at . . .” He was not yet twenty, and had to be forgiven having had no chance to consider the other names for loyalty.

  His second was his weekly letter to his wife, differing from all its predecessors only in slight details. It began, “My baby Alicia: I am in a new country!”

  Chapter Nine

  Selling the Market Short

  . . . When ladies of beautiful hair came in . . . he was like the cat turned into a lady, who jumped out of bed and ran after a mouse. . . . If a particular kind of reddish brown, crepe wavy hair came in, he was away in a moment struggling for an introduction to the owner of said head of hair. He is not mad as a March hare, but hair-mad.

  —Elizabeth Gaskell, in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton concerning Dante Rossetti

  Mays stepped into the back corner of the elevator, put on his best act of contrition, and waited for the button to the fourth floor to activate itself. He hated asking favors of inanimate objects, especially man-made ones. It was humiliating when they wouldn’t cooperate and humiliating when they deigned to condescend. The metal doors slid shut, but the car remained still. At last Mays, beaten, moved toward the button panel and pleaded to be taken up. He who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be humbled.

  Following a timid jab of the finger, the elevator, after waiting an authority-challenging second, lunged into a slow assault of the upper stories. When the doors again slid open, they revealed a slick, Swedish-modern anteroom with walls coated in the tragically fashionable gunnysack material that monks had at one time worn for self-punishment. On one wall, foot-high burnished letters identified a major East Coast stock brokerage which, in a fit of creative invention, named itself after its three founders.

  Ten yards past the door, Peter had to choose between a Teletype news wire spitting out data and a woman making mechanical clucking noises into a bank of switchboard buttons. A self-contained, mass-production line, this woman manufactured precise, identical greetings—“Good morning Phillips,” and “Please hold”—converting them into neat packages of electromagnetic disturbance through the intercession of Dr. Bell’s machine.

  Mays thought it odd that everyone who called should be named Phillips. After a few hundred calls, it dawned on him that she was not saying good morning to Phillips but good morning from Phillips, that is, the firm’s senior partner. Mays wanted to warn the woman that impersonation was a felony.

  He opted instead for the safer prospect of the news ticker. Not that the woman’s glossy dress and ballpark figure intimidated him. Formerly a woman of her looks (“Primo vintage,” said Delaney, who still couldn’t “get a handle on what all this consciousness-raising racket was all about”) reduced Mays to a conversational level midway between Cal Coolidge and bread mold. Now, however, as she was a brunette, she could no more move him to “please hold” than the old Liberty posters could move him to buy bonds. Red; red was the issue. Auburn, perhaps, but not a tint-type lighter.

  A perusal of the news wire led Mays to believe that it must have been a primitive means of communication at one time. Stories smudged their blue ink across a perpetual roll of newsprint. Mays read in mute admiration; his contemporaries were busy moving and shaking various parts of the globe as he looked on from his cheap seat in the pit. On the far side of the linkup, never directly visible except through the electronic moving finger, were the doers, people who through obstinacy of genetics had the rare ability to make something, however inconsequential, happen. Latching on to these deeds were the reporters—stooges like the gang back at Micro, newshounds hanging around the courtroom turning some sordid accident into COP SLAYS CON, blamed bringers of bad news, glorified middle-persons mucking the data with personal bias—whose only power lay in passing the info on to the Teletype.

  Once the impartial machine had hold of all the news that fit, it sent it violently into the hands of the thousands of information brokers on the receiving end of world events. This class, although not of the real current of history, were privileged in that they would interpret the data coming out of the wire and sell it to the event-illiterates. And yet, Mays noticed that in the click and hum of this model office, the information brokers went to the well only for explanations after the fact. Sea Board Shipping down a handful of points by three o’clock? Check the wire, and sure enough: the Lusitania, reported sunk at noon.

  Low on the totem pole came the class of perennial eavesdroppers who, like Mays, found themselves day after day gazing into the data stream (the only natural resource left to contemporary life), seeing but unable to comprehend the prolific chattering of the ticker. To these scavengers all tabloids were tarot; they gathered in knots of bodies outside appliance stores whenever Management left color TVs running in the showcase. The tons of newsprint spewed daily out of wire machines, if unintelligible, could at least divert.

  Mays, having renounced the Church at puberty, Marx upon taking his first job, and the Scientific American when partial differentials began to elude him, had of late become a card-carrying scavenger of the first rank. He let the network news run in the living room of his Back Bay flat each evening as he worked halfheartedly in the kitchen to approximate a balanced meal. He had, in fact, arrived at Phillips, Please, and Hold for privileged data, for a market system. He had come to find out through the wire what he could not find out alone. He had come to ask Lenny Bullock for help in finding a redhead.

  When Brink had suggested ingenuously that her beau could work Mays into Boston’s musical power structure, Peter swore he’d call every name on the Veterans’ Day parade manifest before soliciting help from the fellow. In a business where behavioral aberrations were job prerequisites, Bullock stood out among brokers at Phillips as the unacknowledged legislator of mania-depression.

  Peter had last encountered the man at a party at Caroline’s hopelessly upwardly mobile digs on Route 128. Brink and Bullock Inc. had hosted an embarrassing office get-together on a Tuesday night, the invitations announcing the motive as “chat, burgers, and volleyball.” The memory of Moseley feebly attempting to take part in a team sport made Mays wince.

  Filled with culinary zeal, Lenny had made about four times too much food. Whil
e his guests threw themselves ineffectually against the meal, trying to go over the top and occupy a hill of pork and beans, he held forth on how the U.S. should have taught the Russkies a lesson when they had the chance, and how the Marshall Plan was money flushed down a toilet. Caroline let no guest leave without taking home a half gallon of potato salad. In a hasty exit, Mays forgot his apartment keys and had to go back to the bash for them. He returned to find the party long dispersed, with Brink in the kitchen washing the dishes by hand so they would be clean enough to put in the dishwasher and Bullock out back mowing the lawn by flashlight.

  Naturally, when Caro offered Lenny’s help in solving a problem no one entirely understood, Peter did not rush to close the deal. That was before he had learned, seat-of-the-pants style, exactly how many redheads, clarinetists, and combinations thereof were milling about on the eastern seaboard.

  The first illusion that his search for the exotic figure dispelled was Mays’s belief, picked up through grade-school propaganda, that culture in this country was readily accessible to the little person. Concert ticket prices alone had nearly reduced him to selling his blood to the Red Cross in an attempt to make his editor’s salary stretch from the first to the fifteenth. He’d started out attending Symphony concerts, intending to knock out several clarinets in one sitting. He’d stay only long enough to make sure that all the ill winds were old, male, and bald.

  This meant surviving the first piece, invariably Beethoven’s Fidelio Overture. After several hundred hearings, Mays still did not like the work. Perhaps he was impervious to things not immediately useful. For utility, Fidelio ranked right up there with parsley and napkin rings. He’d never quite gotten the hang of the arts in general, ever since he’d missed three weeks in the sixth grade. He came back from a bout with mono to find all his friends post-Renaissance, with him still raging in the Middle Ages.