Harold was so satisfied and impressed by all this he could barely speak when spoken to. His novel must have come alive to him in these glamorous surroundings. When he looked at Mary his eyes grew misty and deep, as though he were creating story and dialogue. Allyson Turnbridge and Francis Ravendon, dining with the Colonel Imminghams. No Allard Benson with his crude and dangerous youth showing. How shyly Harold had presented his novel to Mary, one long romantic love letter she had found sad, resenting her desire to laugh at it. She still remembered with gratitude the real pleasure she used to get from reading novels not much better than Glitter and Gold by Harold Roux. And in one year at college under the tutelage of Allard Benson she had been alienated forever from those perfect people, their loves and fortunes.
But the Colonel did beam at his aging Lady with love and admiration. Though it was strange, Allard felt that it was real. Trompe l’oeil The old artificer had to understand reality before he could reproduce it. Did he ever suggest to his Lady that those feverish blots of red might not be the perfect decorations for her little cheeks? Evidently he did not change people, only their images. Maybe one had to be fooled, to be a fool in order to fool.
His Lady, with the enthusiasm and equality of youth, was asking Mary about herself. “All about yourself! I’m ferociously inquisitive and I hope you’ll forgive me, but such a beautiful young woman must be strange and interesting.”
“But I’m not,” Mary said.
“Oh, pooh! And why then are there two swains so much aware of you? And I assume there must be many another who wonders what you are doing at this very moment!”
“For instance Hilary David Edward St. George,” Allard said.
Harold frowned.
“Is that one person or several?” Morgana said, laughing. “Surely, Mr. Benson, you must find Miss Tolliver fascinat-ing?”
“Indeed I do,” Allard said.
“She is talented. I know I’m right. I have ways of telling because I’m descended from a witch. The fleshy lobes of the little fingers say things, and just where the thumb bends is very, very important. And I suppose you don’t think I’ve noticed the small jewel in her pretty eye? That is tourmaline, Mr. Benson, a gem of great beauty, but it must be cut ever so carefully before it is transparent.”
“Morgana is never wrong,” the Colonel said.
Mary was pleased and embarrassed by this flattery. Harold was somber, perhaps sad that his daydreams and reality came so close together here, with the real Allyson Turnbridge sitting across from him, her beauty in his eyes so vivid it must have hurt. Allard was impressed by these judgments, too, and thought of her arms around him on the ride back to town. It would be a calm, clear night. Even the cold of the stars would not bleed away the warmth of the air.
After dinner the Colonel served small glasses of brandy which they took into the living room. He was telling them of his affinity with others who had become enthralled by projects such as his—some magnificent, some absurd, some both. A man in a poor suburb of Los Angeles was constructing great colorful towers out of what was, simply, junk; yet the towers grew daily toward a statement of some magnificence. Another, near San Francisco, was carving an elaborate city in limestone, all beneath the surface of the earth—grottoes, shrines, staircases, rooms and underground vistas of somber and impressive beauty. Not far from here a retired farmer was filling his empty cow barn with murals upon plaster, frescoes almost terrifying in their primitive power. A man in Vermont, not nominally an artist, and never with the idea of selling his work, carved great humanlike figures from the boles of ancient pines. Another man, in Massachusetts, was constructing a gigantic machine out of old automobiles and farm machinery, washing machines and pumps, with gears and pulleys, revolving shafts and cams, all to no purpose except that it was a machine and ran only for its creator’s aesthetic purposes. Others filled their basements or attics with models of idealized countryside through which model trains busily rushed upon command.
“The Lilliputown Railroad is of slightly larger gauge, of course, but everyone has his scale. I’m condemned to have less trackage, I suppose, but it’s a matter, I’m convinced, of finding the right scale. I know a chap who prints books so small they’ll fit into your watch pocket and you have to read them with a magnifying glass. He makes and sets his own type and he has a library larger than mine in a cabinet no bigger than an orange crate. Amazing!”
The Colonel had trouble sitting down for long. He got up, leaned against the mantel, walked to the end of the room and back. His bristly gray hairs looked as stiff as wicker. He seemed wiry, in perfect shape except for the veins and wrinkles on his hands and face that gave away his age. For the first time in his life Allard thought he too would probably get that old, and it wouldn’t be so bad to look like Colonel Imming-ham at sixty, trim and spare in his lightweight summer suit, his body quick with energy. When the Colonel stood for a moment beside his wife’s chair, she put out her small ringed hand and he took it between his wide brown ones, holding it as carefully as a tender young bird.
When the Colonel listened he stared, awed, totally un-selfconscious about his bugging eyes or the play of expression running in waves and counter-waves across his face. This made Allard speak slowly, thinking about each word before releasing it to such intensity of reception. The Colonel had asked him what he intended to do with his life.
“I’m not sure,” Allard answered, “but I want to make something.”
“What do you make now?” The wide eager eyes stared into his.
“I write things. Nothing I like very much yet,”
“But the time will come, eh? The time will come!”
“I hope so.”
“Harold tells me you do interesting things. If this is true it’s only a matter of persistence, a matter of persistence!”
“Hamilcar is the most persistent person I’ve ever known,” Morgana said.
“I had to be persistent in my pursuit of this lady! Let me tell you, every junior officer in the United States Army came under her spell!”
“That’s what you thought, Hamilcar, but you were always the one. Next to you most of the others seemed half alive.”
Bowing, he kissed her hand.
At ten-thirty the Colonel and Morgana went with them to the columned portico of the Town Hall to say good night and to ask them to return whenever they wanted to, that they would always be welcome. Mary’s enjoyment and excitement were so apparent in her thanks that they both seemed to gleam back at her. They held hands, the tall Colonel and his tiny lady who was almost in the scale of Lilliputown. After a final good night the Imminghams retired and Harold stayed out in the night air for a moment.
“Be careful on your way back, Allard,” he said.
“Harold, it was just absolutely fascinating,” Mary said. “I’m so grateful. I really had a wonderful time.”
“The Imminghams,” Harold said, and cleared his throat. “The Imminghams … are pearls of great price.” He said this in a ministerial voice meant to cloak his emotion, but he was so moved by his own statement he was actually close to tears.
Mary saw it, and said, “They’re charming people, Harold. I can see why you like them so much.”
“Yes,” Harold managed to say.
They left him there, pale and stern beneath the portico lights of Lilliputown Town Hall. The Indian Pony’s forever interesting surge of power took them out into the wavering yellow beam of its old headlight, Mary’s arms tight around Allard; her body, pressed against his back, sent needles of ice and molten metal through his nerves as he controlled his and his woman’s passage through the dark.
Aaron Benham, forgetting that he cannot release his clutch, stalls his Honda in his garage. He turns off the switch and puts the machine on its stand, hearing immediately from his knee in the form of hammerlike pain and the feeling that something alien, something similar to a bubble in the throat, teeters beneath his kneecap.
“Idiot,” he says to himself as he enters the kitchen. On the table
is a pile of mail he now remembers putting there after his last trip to his office—familiar brown campus mail envelopes, shiny brochures from textbook publishers, various campus organization handouts, maybe even a legitimate letter or two. Since he seems to have little left in him but habit, he sits down (hello, knee!) and opens the first thing at hand, which turns out to be the announcement of a new freshman English text based upon “mass media” and intended to seduce recalcitrant minds by using materials as familiar as the television programs, comic strips, advertisements and movies they grew up on, thus enabling them to communicate without hang-ups. The next envelope contains the announcement of a meeting of the senior members of the English department for—he looks again—four o’clock this very afternoon. An hour and ten minutes from now.
He doesn’t really have to go to this meeting because he is on leave. There are other reasons he might also find convincing: he doesn’t feel good; he has just had a motorcycle accident and finds it painful to walk; his only means of transportation is stalled in gear in the garage; he is depressed because he has been unkind to his family. And there is the sadness and guilt of an ancient passion, and who needs a senior members’ meeting when he is depressed already? But he knows that one of the items to be discussed in this meeting will be a possible extention of George Buck’s dissertation deadline. George is probably unaware of this, but he isn’t. What makes the whole thing intolerable is that in theory he is against such extensions. A man should never ask to be coddled unless sick or disabled in terrible and obvious ways. And even then he probably shouldn’t ask. But this concerns his friend’s livelihood, perhaps more than his livelihood. So, taking with him no definite attitude or plan, no comforting moral reserves whatever, Aaron must go to this meeting. His eyes ache, his pulse becomes audible in his ears, tangible in his wrist and knee. Maybe if he goes and soaks in a hot bath for a while he can let some of this anxiousness dissolve.
But why is this house so breathless and silent? Where are Agnes and his children? Not that they would be expected to comfort him; he is expected to be perfect, or at least to approach perfection, and anything that goes wrong is presumed to be his fault—which it often is. They all seem to love him in a kind of exasperated way. Intensely, but with this undertone of betrayed perfection. “What has he done now?” he can hear them thinking. “What has he forgotten now?” But it is unnatural not to have them here. It feels like falling—that breathless, anxious moment in an elevator that quickly passes, but now does not pass. He limps upstairs, no witnesses to see how painful his knee really is, and begins to pull off his clothes. If he gets into the bathtub at three in the afternoon the telephone is sure to ring. Somebody will come to the door. Why is he compelled to answer every ring, knock and question, no matter whose? And what is he going to say to Mark Rasmussen’s mother, whose child is a man but still her child? Just as his children are still his, though growing into their strange independence.
He sits in the bathtub, the water rising, burning him slowly, its half-visible presence, this strange white-blue translucence, rising on him as slowly as the minute hand of a clock. It seems wrong to be alone in an empty house and in the bathtub. There is sin in this flowing liquid, this unfamilial solitariness.
There could be a winter night with the cold snow ticking at the windows, the two children in their cotton flannel pajamas, warm against his inner arms. Janie and Billy Benham, those soft-hard awarenesses, one on each side of him, waited for his voice. Agnes waited, too, for their story to continue, watching from across the room where the fire flickered in its black irons. The story would continue, immune to change because the children would not let it change. They would grow out of its magic someday and it would remain, whole, like an abandoned old friend, like Jonquil the teddy bear in the old tin trunk in the upstairs hall closet, fondly remembered if thought of at all.
Janie said, turning her intense, pale face to look up at him, “Come on, Dad. Where the little girl and the little boy saw the mountain and the waterfalls and the black clouds.”
“In the old lady’s eye,” Billy said. “Right inside her eye.”
“All right,” Aaron said. He must tell the story but keep himself from the power of their involvement in it. It is so dangerous to him to have this power, so far beyond pleasure in the telling of the story. When his children squeeze his arms in happiness, or in anticipation or dread, he feels their lives moving beyond his fiction, beyond this warm house, into the real places of blood and death.
But he told the story as best he could, about Tim Hemlock the father, Eugenia the mother, Janie and Billy the children, and of the terrible winter when the Traveler never came, when the strange old lady who never spoke except with her hands sat every day and night on the bench before the fire. He told what they ate when their food began to run out and all the animals were gone from the forest. How they had to slaughter the pig, and how they did it, the pig’s bright blood crimson on the snow, and all the lean pieces and parts of the Pig
Later Tim Hemlock grew weak and sick. That happened after the one-day thaw when the air turned summery and strange, then turned back to winter cold so deep the farm and the forest were encased in blue ice hard as iron. When, after that, Oka’s milk began to dry up, Janie spent many hours in the animal-smelling richness of the barn. Sometimes she thought she could talk to Oka, but other times she wondered if she made up Oka’s words in her own mind and Oka hadn’t really said them at all. Brin, the ox, deep in the stall, sighed as if he never felt like saying anything, but Oka did seem to say things to her, to answer her questions in deep ruminant slow answers as heavy in themselves as Oka’s great body and bones. “Oka knows how butter grows,” the butter song went, and those seemed to be Oka’s words, too.
“My father’s sick, Oka,” Janie said. “And you didn’t give much milk this morning. Are you sick, too? I hope you aren’t.”
As Oka moved her head slowly, sighing, her jaw sliding slowly from side to side, Janie seemed to hear deep, echoing words. They were about a calf, a brown and white calf with long awkward legs and a handsome bony head, and how Oka’s milk was rich with cream then, she turning in the warm air and sweet grass, clover grass, into richness and sustenance, the giver of life. But now she was sad, down through the hollow, four-chambered depths of her cowness, heavy, heavy with sadness for a place she had once been long ago, a wide meadow and a bony calf, sweet water and the green heat of the grass.
Janie was filled with sadness to hear of the deep yearning of her friend. She had always been so grateful for the milk and butter and cheese that Oka gave them. Oka was the giver of life, and now her sadness made Janie sorrow for the beautiful rich meadow and the bony, long-legged calf, as if she, too, had been happy and calm there long ago.
Janie Benham’s fingers dug into Aaron’s arm, both of her hands gripping him fiercely. He knew her feelings; he didn’t dare look down at her face which would reveal her pure sympathy for the cow, the beloved beast. Those emotions were so pure and clear, not innocent—because a child could never afford to be innocent—but clear, with the naked clarity of a child’s vision. He had stopped, and now he coughed to hide the uncertainty of his voice, that deep adult tonality that was the maker of this tale for them. Billy had taken hold of his other arm, pulling on it to hurry him up, to get him going again. His children, not by their own choice thrown into dependence upon him.
So he went on with the story, about how Tim Hemlock grew worse, until he lay by the fire on a pallet, breathing quick little breaths hardly longer than the breaths of a deer mouse, and how Eugenia and the children were near to despair. They were all hungry, and the wood was giving out so the room was so cold they could see their breaths. Death itself seemed to hover at the door and the frozen windows of the cabin.
And then came the time when Billy couldn’t make himself eat the small crust of bread he was given for supper. It would not soften in his mouth. There was his father, so sick, and the bread seemed as hard as iron. Iron, he thought. And then he remembered.
It was the old woman. They were all so worried and frightened about his father they hadn’t thought of the old woman at all. She might have been a piece of wood sitting, sitting there on the bench all day long. She had said once in her hand language to Tim Hemlock, “The month of the iron ice will be the worst.” And now, certainly, they were in the month of the iron ice. February. With these thoughts he was awakened again to the strangeness of the old woman, what she had brought with her as a gift when she first came to the cabin. Yes, there they were, all the little birch-bark boxes of powders up on the shelf, each with a picture cut into its top. He remembered some of the pictures of plants: goose-foot, arrowhead, roseroot, kinnikinnick, glasswort, purslane and dock. Others he didn’t recognize. Suddenly he felt that it was time to open the boxes. For one thing, all of those plants he recognized were good to eat, and they were hungry. He got a stool and climbed up on it so he could reach the shelf.
“What are you doing?” Eugenia asked.
“We’ve got to eat,” Billy said. “Here, Janie, take these as I pass them down.”
“But we don’t know what’s in them!” Eugenia said.
“I do. Some of them, anyway.” Somehow he knew he was right, that it was almost too late but not quite. Then he happened to see a movement out of the corner of his eye, a brown thing moving. He looked, and was shocked to see that the old woman stared brightly into his eyes. She was speaking to him! Her arm was raised, her hand limp at the end of her wrist, limply falling. Her hand reminded him of something, of the picture of a hand. Yes! He remembered that on the cover of one of the boxes was a hand delicately poised like that. It also reminded him of something else, something plantlike, but quickly he found the box with the hand on it and took it to the old woman.
The Hair of Harold Roux Page 28