The next Monday, while I was waiting at the counter of the film processing company, I saw a man who looked familiar. He came up to me and I recognized him. He was Honorée’s film director.
He said, “I know you. I’m sorry … I can’t remember.”
“Iowa,” I said.
“Right. You’re Honorée’s teacher.”
I was willing to let it go at that, but he seemed to want more. We talked. It turned out he was doing a documentary film about the Catholic Worker. It took me several questions to realize that he’d become unlapsed—or reconverted. The reason he wanted to talk was that he was ashamed about his time in Iowa, but in a curiously unembarrassed way. His memory, he admitted, was somewhat sketchy. He did know he’d been selfish. He now had a social conscience. In fact, he said, his social conscience had been awakened first. Then he ran into some people from the Catholic Worker and he realized that the Catholic Worker had been in there all along. And then he realized that the Catholic Worker people were only good because they loved Christ and it was Christ who had been in there all along.
His statement was not nearly as embarrassing as it sounds.
I asked him if he ever heard from Honorée. He said he hadn’t. I asked him what had happened to “Hail Holy Queen.” That did embarrass him. He said he’d shown it in Iowa, and he’d been very ashamed of himself. He hadn’t looked at it since—his whole life had changed.
I said that I would love to see it if it wouldn’t trouble him.
He looked at me and said, “I remember now. You were there for the balloon part. I remember that.”
“It was less than two years ago.”
“I know,” he said, “but one of those years was a long one. Look—you can see it. I’m pretty sure I have a print I can let you have.”
He called me several days later and said he’d found the print. When I picked it up he warned me that the first half had gone gummy in spots. I wanted to pay him something. He refused, but finally accepted a contribution to his Catholic Worker film project.
As I left he said, “You ever hear from Honorée?”
“Yes, I just got a letter.”
“If you write back say hi. Tell her I’ll pray for her. I’m glad I ran into you, you know. This is O.K. about the film. It feels good.”
I was struck by his sweetness because it was oddly impersonal. It was quite real—I had no doubt of that—but it was pleasantly disinterested.
I got Bobby to show me the film. We had to strip off part of the first half, but we finally got it going.
I was prepared for cute tricks. After all, Phil had said he was ashamed of it now. But it was wonderful. What was wonderful about it was that all the cute tricks, the studio effects, were funny in a less strained way—simultaneously rowdy, smart, and relaxed. Piety was mocked. That, of course, was expected. In fact, a lot of the early scenes were parodies of famous paintings or sculptural tableaux—Adoration of the Magi, The Last Supper, the Pietà. Phil had a good touch with making the actors flow into these set configurations—sometimes they would do a sort of double take as they fell into the picture; other times they went through the formal pose so fast that it was like a throwaway tag line.
But all this artificial comedy was distinctly framed by a sense of the natural world. While the mock pieties were on screen, the sound track blared appropriate confections—the Sanctus from the Berlioz Requiem or snatches of other sweet choral glory. But when there was an exterior—a field of black earth glazed with rain and giving off mists that steamed up to low clouds sliding by—there was silence. These moving pictures of landscape soon began to convey to me a sense of the natural world as an endless comfort (a feeling I never had when I had been in situ). No pathetic fallacy here: nature didn’t sympathize; it was simply endless and other, but other in an attainable way, other but not alien, a stillness that will finally absorb all extravagance. It was as though Phil played out his quick-wittedness and delight in farce and mockery, and then laid them out as offerings to whatever was more formal and mysterious.
Of course, I’m in no position to make a perfect judgment. I brought a great deal of personal knowledge in the first place, and I’ve seen the film so many times that it is in danger of becoming a talisman. I have my own little projector now, which I keep in my study here (Bobby’s old room). I’ve had the first part of the film cleaned, and the broken part respliced. If I look at the film only once every week or so, it is as fresh as ever. It is only when I let this habit get out of hand and run it more frequently—slowing it, stopping it, reversing it and advancing it, tantalizing myself by skipping over all the parts with Honorée in it or, worse, wallowing in those parts—only then, by intruding my control of time into the film’s integral time, do I cause its enchantment to go a little dry. A two-week fast is then required to restore the enchantment. However, at the very first screening my objective knowledge of these matters was intact and operable.
In the comic scenes of the pursuit of Honorée by the apostles, Honorée gaily flirts and flutters about until they have her almost cornered. Then she disappears—poof!—and reappears in the branches of a tree or on a rooftop. She looks surprised and a little disappointed. As she clambers down and wanders off, she is even somewhat awkward without the dance of the chase. But later in the film she seems to become more graceful on her own.
Phil had made fun of Honorée, but he had also admired her. More than admired her. He’d used her to her advantage as well as his. By the end his attitude toward her body is almost the same as his sensual attitude toward the landscape, so that her nakedness in the final sequence is not at all comic, as it had been in the two or three earlier routines of tear-away robes and gaping apostolic admiration.
Mary Magdalene’s (that is, Honorée’s) ascension is cleverly cut. It appears at first that she has suddenly sprouted wings and risen. She examines her wings, radiates delight to be aloft. I’d thought at the time of the filming that her face had been blank, but the zoom-lens close-ups are clear. But then—deliberately, I think—the devices are exposed. The camera pulls back to show the harness, the shrouds, and then the balloon. Then the cameraman on the roof. Then his clumsy attempt to catch the balloon. Then some hasty shots of the balloon in its cross-lots flight, until it finally disappears over the oak trees near the river.
Phil must have gone back later to shoot more film of the same part of the landscape. The portions of landscape become longer and longer in between shots of the balloon. The final minute of film is nothing but countryside.
He got it just right: The chalkiness of the pressed gravel and white dust on the roads. The bosomy low roundness of the rising ground. The stillness of the shadows in the stands of trees. The glimmer of streams flowing in easy curves through the square fields. Of course, the fields are square only in conception; they heave up and bend with the motion of the land. The fence lines and straight furrows are really arcs pinned at either end in dells or stream beds.
The very last shot is of a road—a straight, unstoppable bright ribbon rising and falling and reappearing crest after crest. I’ve since realized that three arcs of road can suggest endlessness. There is no greater suggestion of openness or promise, unless it’s the flat undersides of the clouds seeming to extend the design beyond the horizon, promising more space in which it is certain that the road continues to rise and fall.
Bobby recognized Honorée. He’d even noticed my Volkswagen in one of the hectic shots toward the end. I’d missed it. He mentioned all this casually. He’d enjoyed the film, but he didn’t intrude on what must have appeared to him as my intense interest.
I got him to show me how to operate the projector.
Not long after that, but before I’d decided I’d better show the film to Antoinette, I got another letter from Honorée. She’d come back to America with some other Americans she’d run into in Scotland. She didn’t say what she’d been doing in Scotland. She was currently living in a commune in Arizona, helping to build buildings she described as “brea
kthroughs.” They were some sort of dome made of old car bodies. She enclosed a photograph of herself wearing a tilted-back welder’s mask and holding an acetylene torch.
She wrote: “We use the excesses of society. It is possible to live off the land and do no harm. That is what many people don’t understand. Although we have the support of many other people. I wish you could come here. You’d scarcely recognize me I bet. I tried to adopt an Indian baby which a lawyer I met said was possible for unmarried people and that he would help, but the agency refused and he never came back as he said he would. If you come, bring warm clothes and a sleeping bag as it is cold at night although hot during the day. You are in my thoughts and prayers. Love, Honorée.”
It sounded as though she didn’t have much time to write out there. She was back to “Our dog is named Kartoffel.” I liked the motherly touch at the end about warm clothes. Also “thoughts and prayers.” Her Lutheran mother undoubtedly had just written that to her. Probably surreptitiously—Honorée had mentioned in an earlier letter that her father had disowned her. But faithful old mutti sent her thoughts and prayers. And so to me.
I left the letter and snapshot out for Antoinette to see.
After she’d discovered them and taken them in, she held up the picture at me. “Hmm—this is the Miss Hogentogler you told me about. In her new role as Rosie the Riveter.” But she immediately softened. She said, “She’s sweet. It’s odd—so many people are sweeter these days. At least … I don’t know why. Or maybe I don’t know why we were so cross. Except Bobby—Bobby was sweet all along.”
I knew what she meant. It was easy at that point to invite her to watch the film.
Elizabeth Mary and Bobby came over for supper, and afterward I put the film on.
“Ah ha,” Elizabeth Mary said when the credits came on. “Phillip McMahon was a student of mine.” She didn’t notice Honorée’s name, but recognized her when she appeared.
When the film ended after the shot of road looping away over low hills, Elizabeth Mary said, “It’s like the end of A Nous la Liberté. René Clair.”
I didn’t mind this secondary opinion.
As my past had become lighter in my improved present, now the present became lighter in the face of the film. It wasn’t that I forgot the improvement in my life, but while I contemplated the film, the present was pulled away like foreground mist blown off to reveal a vanishing point in the distance.
I ran the film backward and then forward again through the final sequence. I can’t go to Arizona, I thought. I would burn in the sun. I wouldn’t like those people. I am devoted to Honorée in other ways. I ran the film backward and then forward again. Here is how I secretly worship, by these clouds and arcs of road, although this is just the image of them.
TESTIMONY AND DEMEANOR
I SHOULD NEVER HAVE COME TO NEW York. I do the work O.K. I guess. But everything else is hard. I talk to myself. At least in law school I had roommates. I didn’t like them, but we could always talk. About how we didn’t like law school. Here I come back to this apartment—and I admit the apartment is my fault, I don’t have very good taste—anyway, I come back to the apartment at 10 p.m. and talk to myself. Approximately the same conversation every night.
“Work hard today, Charlie?”
“Nothing special. Usual fifteen hours.”
“If you were as slick as some, you could have done it in twelve. I suppose you’d like a drink.”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
“I suppose you still drink rye.”
“I suppose I’m still a hick.”
“Why don’t you go back to New Hampshire? Do a little work for the electric company. Get backed for the state legislature. Go home where people notice your hard work. I suppose you’re going to work this Sunday?”
“Only a half day.”
“Why not the whole day? You got anything better to do?”
One drink and in my state of mind I’m plowed. I speed-read a detective novel and fall asleep by midnight. Every night.
No, I don’t even admire my endurance anymore. And there’s not much besides that.
Yes, I work late even when I don’t have that much to do. I just let it stretch out. Today I know I could have left before supper. I also realized I know the new I.R.S. regs by heart. But there’s no way anyone could find out. Mr. Leland remains a guarded mystery behind his secretary. And I stay in my broom closet. I even know the sections on farm income. I read them for no reason at all.
One of the partners I worked for last year came down to ask me out for lunch.
“Young man, it’s time for lunch. Get your hat.”
I got up, smiled, said I didn’t wear a hat.
He said, “Let me know when you get one and we’ll arrange lunch.”
Honest to God.
Maybe I could find my freshman beanie.
That was so weird that I barely noticed it, but later in the day I went uptown to deliver some things by hand—I didn’t have to but I wanted out. Just for an hour or so. On the street I ran into a girl I’d known when she was at Bennington. She was going to an art gallery. I needed some more time out, so I went along. She cross-examined me on my job. I said I was helping fat cats to stay fat. She said that was awful. At length. I’d been through everything she said, but I was pleasant enough. I listened, agreed, and even sharpened up some of her arguments.
But she wanted to know how I felt personally. “Personally,” I said, “if it’s still the same after five years, I’ll go back to the woods.”
“Five years,” she said.
“Counting from when I started,” I explained.
Five years was beyond her. We stopped talking about it. But I had listened to her on the subject. And when we ran into some guy she knew at the art gallery, and he walked around with us, saying this and that about the pictures, I listened to him too. I finally spoke up myself about one I liked, saying it looked like Portsmouth in a fog. The two of them exchanged glances. I hadn’t said I thought it was Portsmouth in a fog; obviously it was some place in Portugal since the painter’s name was da Silva. They began to make remarks after that—“I think this one is a geodetic survey.” “No. A Coca-Cola bottling plant in Secaucus.” I said I had to get back to work, but the other fellow left first.
“Don’t mind him,” she said, as though it had been all him. “He takes this all very seriously. Pure art, and you have a very literary taste.”
“You mean literal,” I said.
“No,” she said. She brushed something off my shoulder. She didn’t explain. She asked after some college friends of mine she’d known, and then she left.
I minded. Why is it that dumb people with “taste” get away with it and smart people without taste don’t? I am patient and I run my own life. What the hell.
Yesterday I felt how boxed in I am. Or maybe boxed out. Today another partner, Mr. Charles Pelham, popped in. I have nothing to do with him as far as work goes. He just dropped in and started talking. There was a while when some of the associates used to wander by and look in as though the corridor was a zoo. I could get rid of them. Mr. Pelham can get away with it, I suppose. But I don’t have to like it. A regular cross-examination.
He asked me—inter alia—if I was religious. I said no.
He said, “That’s what Franklin Roosevelt said. Said he preferred not to think about those things. Odd, don’t you think?”
Odd is right. He asked me if I was a humanitarian, aesthete, epicurean, adventurer. A few others I can’t remember. Then he asked me if I’d ever wanted to be a woman.
I said, “Are you asking me if I’m homosexual?”
“No,” he said. “That would be a different question. That question would be ‘Are you a homosexual?’ This question is ‘Have you ever wanted to be a woman?’ But perhaps I should ask first, ‘Have you ever considered at length what it would be like to be a woman?’ ”
Nope.
“And yet you have imagination.”
I said, “I don’
t know.” I was getting sore. “I’m probably a robot.”
He brightened up. “Would you like to be a robot?”
When I didn’t answer, he said, “If you can save various of our clients millions in taxes you surely have imagination. I’m not one to despise our work here. In fact, I think the tax structure of this country ranks with the pyramids. If you simply consider the labor … Later generations will surely wonder at us, as we wonder how on earth the Egyptians ever got those stones to the top. And taxes are as metaphysical as any theology. Angels on pins aren’t a patch on us. And we’re so various. A warp and woof of contending nominalism and realism. If one only had the swiftness of mind to see it all at once, to compass it, I imagine it would be as intricately alluring as a Persian carpet. I’ve often thought that only Proust and our tax structure stand up to a good Persian carpet. Don’t you think? I mean, in one sense the tax structure is art—a subsuming of the infinite muddle of human activity under a single rubric, as though it had a single purpose and could be ordered by a mind hewing to the line of a single vision. Everything that everyone is doing this very instant in this part of town has tax consequences. Do you ever feel the impact of that? But I imagine you have your own comparisons. I once was possessed by the thought that our tax officials were like Satan in the Book of Job. Congress is like God. And the taxpayer is Job. Then Satan answered the Lord, Doth Job fear God for nought? Hast not thou made a hedge about him and about his house and about all that he hath on every side?’ and so forth. ‘… and his substance is increased in the land. But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.’ You see? ‘And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power’? And that is the tax system. But I imagine you have your own comparisons.”
I began to look down at my desk and up at him and down at my desk again. He mumbled something and popped out. I should have said taxation reminded me of a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Secaucus.
But as I think of it, I get the impression that although he was talking ninety-nine percent of the time, he was trying me out, fishing for me. The trouble is he was using too fancy a lure. If he’d just asked me how I did in law school. Or how I liked New York. Good old worms like that. But he’s too good a talker to bother with anything easy. Like Cardozo writing an opinion. You don’t know what it means but you remember it.
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