This mystery and excitement seemed to hold me immobile and timeless, and my sensation was one of power. It lasted until I heard the pickup truck drive onto the bridge.
Honorée laughed and raised me up—I had fallen to my knees and embraced her lower half, pressing myself against the perfect ovals of her knees, and against the plump swelling of thigh muscle. I hugged the firm square of her hips and buttocks, two full volumes tightly shelved.
Let it stand. I recognized then and there the absurd mixing of genres. For the instant it was an amazing liberty.
Honorée and I picked our way through the brush to the road. The director and his cameraman were standing behind my car. They were relieved to see Honorée unharmed, but they immediately asked us to help them retrieve the balloon. I said we were too cold and wet to help. Honorée and I got in my car and drove off.
We drove through the countryside. We grew steamy in the blast of the car heater. It was dusk. We passed a farmhouse. Honorée said it looked like her house. Its clean white porch was lit by a simple yellow “no-bug” light. It suggested a cell, not one in a jail or an asylum, but a chamber in which to be subject to visions. This chamber of artificial light stood against the dark house and the darkening violet sky, the bare bulb standing in for the missing moon.
Honorée said, “Why can’t every day be like today?” She paused. “It could be.”
“Weren’t you frightened?”
“No; not too bad except once or twice,” she said. “I was more excited.… I could see for miles. I don’t mean that I want everything to be that exciting all the time. I just mean—oh, I don’t know exactly.”
I realized her ecstasy had been impersonal—that when I’d called her a heroine she’d been beyond praise of herself. That was why she’d hushed me.
“I was going to untie myself even if they hadn’t let me go. Once I got up I didn’t want to just be pulled down.”
“Weren’t you embarrassed?”
“Oh, no. We’d done, you know, scenes like that before. It doesn’t matter so much what you do if it’s for a part; you don’t mind if the character does things, because that’s not you. You can even look ugly or stupid and not mind.” She added with a sudden brightness, “Otherwise actors wouldn’t ever play villains.”
“Oh, Honorée,” I said.
“Isn’t that right, Mr. Hendricks? Or are you thinking about something else? Wasn’t today pretty good for you too? Was it interesting? I mean, maybe this thing will be a really good film. I feel that there is that possibility. We don’t have to be geniuses to just be good. I really felt I was in the middle of something.” Honorée stretched her toes toward the heater. She put her hands under her legs to hold them off the seat. I stopped the car at an intersection. I wasn’t sure where we were.
Honorée said, “Go left. Town’s somewhere that way.” She continued. “I can’t tell what you’re thinking. I used to think I could but now I can’t. Of course, maybe when you get closer to someone, they get blurred.”
I felt myself almost coaxed into simplicity, but I foresaw that it would be an impersonation. The immediate counter-stroke, unfortunately, was that I saw the care and patience of my habitual frame of mind as contrivance. I thought—although only for a short while—that I might be keeping accounts for a phantom enterprise, that Elizabeth Mary was right in saying that there was no true center to any age or culture, and that there was therefore nothing but one’s own adventure, one’s own passage through human thought, which was as trackless, formless, and all-receiving as the sea.
One would always find America and not the Indies. And one could never return to the mother country—the mother country was as chimerical as the Indies. Only adventure. I hated that idea. I’d thought that was Elizabeth Mary’s existential contrivance to keep her own courage up.
I thought of Feste the jester, speaking to the DUKE: “… for thy mind is a very opal! I would have men of such constancy put to sea, that their business might be everything, and their intent everywhere; for that’s it that always makes a good voyage of nothing.”
When we got to the edge of town, Honorée said she’d prefer to go to my house since I had a bathtub, and her place only had a shower. When we got to my house she became silly, and not very funny. All my exuberance had waned, and I could tell she was disappointed in me. But she kept on pushing, as though she had to make absolutely sure I was not everything she’d thought me. I recognized the grim determination to wreck an idol. I’d felt the same urge when faced with cousin Josie’s foolish backing away.
Honorée kept saying, “Come on—just be yourself.” In nervous reaction to this slogan, I found myself spewing bits of quotations. She thought I was doing this as a joke, as a caricature of my own manner. I discovered that she became nervous in the face of detailed praise of her looks. I couldn’t help persisting in it. She finally said, “Look, I’ve had to talk about my elbows, my nose, my everything with all those guys. So it’s not so much fun. And I don’t really believe it. No, I believe it sort of, but it feels like I’m being teased.”
She added later, “You never say things to Miss Chetty about her looks. She’s too beautiful.”
She burned her hand cooking supper. I said to put butter on it, and she contradicted me flatly. By the time we finally embraced, we’d both been cross and we were both grieved. I’m not sure what her awareness of her feelings actually was, but I sensed that she was still toppling her idea of me.
Much later that night, just as I was falling asleep, Honorée said, “Oliver, now I am embarrassed.” I think she meant she was sorry, but I was too thinly there to respond.
I don’t remember our several subsequent meetings. I do remember going to see Elizabeth Mary the day after the balloon ascension. That was when she told me she thought she’d had a stroke. The doctors had told her there was no evidence of it. Elizabeth Mary said she had two clear symptoms. One was a slight stutter that occurred occasionally and unpredictably. The other symptom was that on one occasion she hadn’t been able to add numbers. She’d been playing a card game by herself that required adding up the numbers of little piles of cards. She’d tried and tried but found that she couldn’t even add, say, four and seven. She said that she knew the words for numbers but couldn’t see their numerical value. She wished the doctor to consider whether this might be at least a symptom of transitory cerebral ischemia. The doctor had said he was considering every possibility and that she should stop arguing with him because that seemed to make her restless and that she needed rest.
Elizabeth Mary had first noticed her stammer when she had five of her seminar students in to see her. She said she was now terrified of giving a lecture. She had only four left before review week (what we used to call reading period). She wished the doctor to send for a speech pathologist. She knew that the University of Iowa had a very advanced speech pathology center. The doctor had said he’d look into it.
I tracked down Elizabeth Mary’s doctor. At first he wouldn’t talk to me, but finally I prevailed on him. What he told me, and what she hadn’t told me, was that he had tentatively diagnosed her problem as an anxiety attack. He thought her dizzy spells came from hyperventilating, and that her hyperventilating was caused by anxiety.
I said, somewhat stupidly, “You mean it’s just nerves?”
He explained, obviously not for the first time, “No, not just nerves. No, not just in her mind. Her symptoms are real, whatever their origin. Anxiety is not just a cop-out diagnosis on my part. The only thing I’m copping out on is prognosis. My guess is she’ll feel better when she feels better. Sounds pretty dumb, huh? I gave her the name of a psychiatrist.” I must have looked alarmed. He said, “That doesn’t mean anything dramatic. It just means I’ve ruled out the possibilities that might have required the kind of treatment I’m competent at. O.K.? If I’m brusque with you, it doesn’t mean I’m brusque with the patient. And finally, I think she’s better—that is, I think her symptoms have abated. I’ve got to go now.” He got up and added,
“Look. I’m sorry. I know you’re a friend of hers. O.K.? That’s a help. O.K.?”
I was still at a loss. When I saw Elizabeth Mary again, I asked if she’d recovered her use of numbers. She said she thought she had and asked me to check the grade point averages of her graduate seminar. I did. It only took several minutes. I said she’d got all fifteen of them right.
Elizabeth Mary asked about my own state of mind. I said I thought I was O.K. I told her about my spell of agoraphobia, and said that it hadn’t recurred. I said that I’d just taken a drive through the countryside and had found it beautiful.
“Well, Oliver, that is reassuring, because you and I are birds of a feather. But I think I need an antidotal calming influence. I think I shall call Bobby and have him come visit me. Bobby is so untroubled, he is just what I need after being in hospital.”
I said that was a good idea. I also said that she looked better. In fact, she looked quite beautiful, but frail. Her pale gold skin was drawn tight across her face. There was a shadow under her eyes.
She said, “Well, I shall just give my lectures. What is the worst that can happen? A hundred people I shall never see again will hear me sounding foolish. But I wish to see a speech therapist—I’m sure there are one or two little tricks that will help.”
Bobby did fly out. I picked him up at the airport. It was wonderful to see him, and he was wonderful with Elizabeth Mary. We all drove to her lecture together. His presence made it a different occasion—he radiated cheerfulness, as though this trip was the biggest treat in the world and Elizabeth Mary’s lecture a chance to catch up on something he’d always wanted to know about. He had acquired something of the charm his father had had in his prime—a steady flow of alert but slightly inarticulate enthusiasm for other people’s events. I remember feeling pleased by (but superior to) Mr. Morse’s pleasure at school functions, to which other fathers came looking tired and bothered, or else alertly scanned the boys, inspecting us early for traces of family faults. Mr. Morse liked the buildings, the view, the glee club, the art room, the prospect of eating a meal at the town inn, of being with us. And here it all was again—Bobby at thirty saying how healthy the students looked, how handsome the old stone capital, how much fun it was to come out to see us.
“I’ll bet Oliver knows a good place to eat lunch. What was that ad we saw—the Amana Colonies? What about that?”
I said I didn’t know; I’d heard of a German restaurant there; it was quite a drive.
Elizabeth Mary said, “Bobby wants to see the countryside. We shall all go. Do you know they have pigs here that are entirely black to their waist and then entirely white? Or is it the other way around?”
We arrived at the lecture hall. “A pig’s waist?” Bobby said. “Where on earth is a pig’s waist?”
Elizabeth Mary said, “The same place as on a fish.”
The transfusion of Bobby’s good spirits into Elizabeth Mary seemed to do the job.
She stood boldly at the podium, she apologized to the class for having missed last Thursday’s lecture, and then launched into her topic with aplomb.
Honorée came in late and sat in the aisle beside Bobby and me. I offered her my seat but she said no.
Elizabeth Mary faltered only two or three times; she got past her difficulty in each case by almost singing the word and then blending this note back into speech by half chanting the next several words.
I was sympathetically exhausted by the end of the hour, so I expected Elizabeth Mary to be near collapse, but when she joined Bobby and me she was buzzing with energy. There was a swirl of students about her in the aisle. Bobby looked at Elizabeth Mary’s fans with interest and pleasure as he stood beside her. As the students began to leave, Honorée touched my arm. I’d lost track of her for the moment.
Elizabeth Mary said, “Bobby, I’m ravenous. Are you ready, Oliver?”
Bobby said to me, “Are you as good as she is? Don’t tell me I’m the only dumb one in our gang.” As he spoke he took in Honorée and smiled at her. Honorée smiled back. I introduced them.
Honorée laughed and said, “I know—you’re Oliver’s friend from school. It’s so funny to see you like this because I think of you as a schoolboy. I mean, I heard about you as Oliver’s roommate in boarding school. So I think of you as younger than me even though Oliver is older now.”
Honorée became embarrassed. Bobby laughed and fussed over her. “Oh, no, no, no. He’s probably told you all sorts of things, hasn’t he? I can’t stand it. Look—I’m not like he says. What did he say? I’ll bet it was his other roommate.” He held her wrist in a friendly way for a second, then clasped his hands together in comic pleading. Honorée squeezed her lips shut and tucked her chin in with pleasure. Bobby nodded at me and said, “Are you in this joker’s class? Herr Professor here. Is he any good?” Honorée was smiling like a very young child being entertained by a teasing uncle.
The upshot was that Bobby invited Honorée to join us for lunch.
In a way that I didn’t understand at the time, I felt diminished.
We had a huge German meal—sauerbraten and spaetzle—that made us sink into our chairs. Honorée and Bobby had chocolate cake with nuts in it. Elizabeth Mary was not, as I’d first feared, mad at Bobby for inviting Honorée. And Honorée wasn’t shy or overeager. I finally realized the difficulty was all with me.
Honorée got Elizabeth Mary to tell the outline of her life. Honorée said that this confirmed her belief that she herself should travel more, have more adventures, and be more open to change. She hoped that by doing that she might become more like Elizabeth Mary.
Elizabeth Mary smiled at this compliment. I thought that Honorée sounded like Walt Whitman, all aggressive innocence.
Honorée asked Elizabeth Mary if it would be a good idea for her to go to Sweden for a year. Honorée said she probably would learn Swedish very fast since her mother had spoken it to her when she was a baby.
I said, “Saying ‘Dere’s a yady with a yight’ when you’re two years old isn’t the same thing as speaking Swedish.”
Bobby asked Honorée what “yady with a yight” was all about. Honorée told the story. Bobby loved it. He repeated, “Dere’s anudder yady with a yight!” several times.
Honorée said, “If I went to Sweden and learned Swedish, then I might even try to be in a Swedish movie. Maybe not with Ingmar Bergman, but maybe with someone like him when he was just starting out.”
“Or you could go sit at a drugstore counter at Hollywood and Vine,” I said, “saying ‘Dere’s a yady with a yight,’ to distinguish you from the other ten thousand apple-cheeked farm girls wearing too much make-up. Your dreaming is taking a bad turn. At least Miss Quist only wants to be homecoming queen. You used to wish for something better than movies.”
Honorée turned to me and said seriously and much too slowly, “Why are you being so mean to me?”
I was stunned. Her saying that was out of the question; by the expression on her face she showed everyone she was wounded.
I said, “Honorée, don’t be so touchy. For heaven sakes …” I was horribly embarrassed. I also felt a poisonous rage. There was a silence.
Elizabeth Mary said, “Honorée dear, sometimes boys will be nothing but boys. He teases you because he likes you.”
Bobby said, “ ‘Boys will be nothing but boys.’ That’s really better. I like that better—‘nothing but.’ Pretty soon you’ll be nothing but adorable. I was at a party once and a tall woman came up to me, a complete stranger, and she pinched my cheek and said, ‘When God made you, sonny, he made you cute!’ I can’t tell you how charming it was. It may not sound as charming as it really was. But it was. So I drink to charm.” He raised his glass to Elizabeth Mary and then to Honorée. He said to me, “Your problem is that you’re resisting charm.” He laughed. “And my problem is that I can’t.”
I said, “You remind me of your father when I first met him.”
Bobby kept on entertaining everyone. I looked out the window. Bobby wa
s very nice, and he was certainly my friend, but he was wrong about my resisting charm. He couldn’t tell his own charm apart from what charmed him. I didn’t resist what charmed me—I only wished to separate it from its impurities. Bobby was easily pleased and easily pleasant. He would have been corny if he hadn’t been graceful.
But the main circumstance for me then was that Honorée had hurt my feelings worse than I’d hurt hers. I couldn’t tell when. Perhaps it was her talk of wanting to change, to have adventures. All this talk of change and adventure made me wish for stillness, made me wish that accidents would vanish, that what was beautiful would be itself and nothing else.
And, as in a fairy tale, I got my wish. We all got our wishes. That is to say, we got to go on wishing. My wish became my seal.
Honorée ate the last crumbs of her cake there, finished the school year, and arranged to go to Sweden for the summer to stay with her mother’s relatives. She sent me a letter and a picture of herself carrying a knapsack. She wrote that in the picture she was crossing the Arctic Circle and that it was the middle of the night and still light.
Elizabeth Mary finished the school year and went back to New York with Bobby.
Honorée didn’t come back to school. In the late fall she sent me a letter and a picture of herself in cross-country ski clothes after the first snowfall.
I spent the summer in New York. Bobby, Elizabeth Mary, Antoinette, and I were a perfect circle of friends.
In the fall, when I was back in Iowa, Elizabeth Mary wrote me that she had a job offer for the following year, and that she and Bobby were thinking of getting married. Elizabeth Mary also discovered a job for me at a fairly good Catholic women’s college near New York. We could all be together again.
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