Wisteria Cottage, page 4
“I know what Richard is talking about. He means bathing nudey, that’s all, only he’s too shy to say so, poor thing,” she said suddenly, with that wonderful mixture of frankness and innocence that was always hers. And she got up and patted his cheek with her hand. “Don’t you know everybody does that now, darling?” she demanded. “There’s no reason for getting all gawky about a little thing like that, you know.” Then she picked up their highball glasses and started toward the kitchen.
“I think I’ll make us all another drink,” she said. “Don’t you think? And then Richard can tell us more about this cottage. I think it sounds wonderful.”
And in the end he put the thing over. Louisa, the recalcitrant, settled her share of the matter by simply withdrawing. She’d be busy with her programs most of the time, she said, and they came at such odd hours that the best thing to do was to make up their minds without her; whatever Florence and Elinor decided would be O.K. with her, she said. She’d come down only week-ends, probably, anyway, and the rest of the time she would stay in the city at the apartment. But there was no reason, because she’d be tied up so much, that the others shouldn’t have a good summer.
Richard let her get away with it. He knew perfectly well what was in her mind, probably, and the only thing that bothered him was that Florence, her mother, didn’t seem to see it too; it showed a lack of maternal concern that disturbed him a little. Because all that Louisa wanted was to have the road clear and the apartment empty; she had her dates, heavy dates, and if she could get the place to herself—well, then, the sky would be the limit. He said nothing, however, because for once what she wanted fitted in so well with his own desires.
But he sometimes wondered, could a mother be so blind, or so foolish as Florence was, and not see what was going on, practically under her eyes? Or—he wondered, too, sometimes—did she know, or suspect, and either just didn’t care, or was too lazy and easygoing to do anything about it? After all, he thought cynically, at such times, Louisa was the family’s meal ticket. But he said nothing.
And that, anyway, was a development that came after Florence had come down with him to see the cottage. She went down there, and Richard went with her, letting Miss Jennie Carmody and the book shop once more go hang.
And in the end, after haggling over such matters as rent, and furnishings, and so on, until Richard was almost frantic, she signed the lease; Richard stood beside her in Mr. Debevois’ quaint little office, watching her sign. Then, and later, going back in the evening train to New York and the long wait—but now a confident one—until June first when they might take the cottage over, he felt more and more like a son to her, and more grateful than he had ever felt before.
“I’ll write, this summer,” he told her. “You’ll see, Florence. I’ll really write.” And it was like the promise of a child to a parent, as if he’d said, “I’ll work hard, Mother. I’ll really try to pass those exams.”
But Mrs. Hackett had chosen that moment, or the moment after, to be coquettish. They were in the train by then, headed back to New York. They were seated side by side in the yellow-lit little day coach; and the train had stopped, and started, and stopped again (and the conductor had called out a name—was it Sunny Brook or maybe Stony Brook? Anyway, it had sounded familiar; had he walked through that town, on one of those days when he had been walking?) In the midst of it, suddenly, he felt a faint mood of depression settling upon him.
He had done enough for one day, he thought; all this traveling, all this cajoling. He was tired, and he wished he were back in his room and alone, and instead he was conscious, a little unpleasantly, of the soft, flesh-intimating sag of her hips against his, as they sat side by side, jostled now and then by the movement of the train. He had opened a copy of Life that he had bought in the station.
“Well, I must say, Richard, you’re not being what I’d call galant,” he heard her saying. She was using French words, and the purpose, he felt, was to put him in his place a little. “Or is it the custom, perhaps, in your part of the country, for a gentleman to read while his lady companion sits beside him?” And he looked up and saw her, saw her plain; saw the carefully made-up, slightly uneasy, falsely supercilious, malicious, worried, aging—oh, aging, malicious—sagging-skinned face; saw the toothed, teasing smile; and it was suddenly, horribly, as if his own mother, back there and a long time ago in Topeka, instead of comfortably smiling had been grinning and leering at him. “Can’t you think of something bright to say, Richard?” Florence demanded.
Suddenly—and the train was stopping again, and the starting and stopping gave a feeling of tedium to the voyage; it would be a long time, and late, before they reached New York—he wished he was on his way far away from Louisa and her and all the Hacketts, and from all their involvements, that he knew (he was tired: he knew) he would never be able to understand completely.
3
That night, back in his furnished room (on Third Avenue; and the El, and the trains going by. Even in his sleep he heard them: and each one the long faraway rumbling; the (growing, the) feeling of menace, and the wolflike, bright, flashing-toothed, almost-enveloping roaring as: passing, and then (dying) the long hungry-hunting sound trailing after. That night) he had a dream.
Richard was a man who often had dreams, and tormenting ones, and this one was no worse than a good many others of his had been. And yet somehow it bothered him. He woke thinking about it.
It may have been because it was too close to reality. The train scene with Florence was in it. He was again in the train, and it was the same dozing, jostling day coach and Mrs. Hackett was sitting beside him. And again she kept nudging and jostling him. He was looking at a book that was a book of his poems; he was surprised that the book was so nicely printed, and in a way he was surprised at the poems themselves.
They were poems that he himself had written. He knew that because the title page said so. POEMS, by Richard Baurie, it said, but as a matter of fact the title page was about all he could read, because trains, other trains, kept passing; and the noise and the light from their windows passing falling on the pages confused him, while his own train’s jostling—and beside him the insistent light nudging and crowding of, who was it? Mrs. Hackett?—kept his mind just that much more uneasy and distracted.
He kept turning the pages distractedly, seeking for something he could understand. (And outside the window the trains, other trains—with a rising deep roar and a sidelong flash and a long, departing, warning screech—and beside him, Florence Hackett.) Florence had begun reading his poems now, too, reading them aloud and looking over his shoulder. She read rapidly and with complete assurance, but all she said was gibberish, and as the train’s noises grew her own voice grew louder. In the end she was shouting, while people all down through the coach turned around to look and then glanced at each other and smiled. And the conductor, when he came in the gusty door to call out the name of the next station—only he didn’t quite finish calling it; he got part way and stopped—“Mount . . . Mount . . . Mount . . .” he called, and then he broke down too and laughed; he was staring straight at the two of them, Florence and Richard: she fat, shameless, shouting, and all Richard could do was just sit there, angry and embarrassed; he knew suddenly that he must disavow her.
“She is not my mother!” he cried. It seemed important to tell them that. “She is only a friend. She is Mrs. Hackett, Florence Hackett.” And he pointed, and knowing already before he pointed: he pointed. “There’s my mother!” he cried; and there, sure enough, surely, surely, far back down along the linked train corridor he saw her, his mother, as if enshrined, nichelike, in the last of the series of diminishing rectangles made by the successive car doorways. She was at the end of the vista, and he was running now, back along the aisles from car to car toward the last car of all where she sat or she stood looking calmly out at him.
Lights, of stations, of towns, of houses, alone or in clusters, winked along beside him; trains kept screeching, flashing, passing. But they passed him more slowly now. He was going in the same direction that they were going, and it began to seem almost that he was keeping pace with them; and when the conductor began crying, “Mount . . . Mount . . . Mount . . . Mount . . . Mount . . .” monotonously behind him again he had the feeling that if he could only run a little faster he might outrun that too—like the man in that passage of, what was it? some book? his poems? who went away from the earth so fast that he went backward in time as well, and (he was waking now: “I must tell Elinor,” he was thinking, and) suddenly it was not his mother he was running toward at all.
“Elinor,” he was thinking. It was Elinor standing there, purely, sadly, benignly; naked (she was naked, and innocently unconscious of it) and she was reaching down gently toward him; she was as innocent of her shame as, who was it? her mother? had been unconscious of hers. Suddenly, overpoweringly, there was a sense of pursuit.
He heard the yelling. Mob noises. The terror. “Mount . . . Mount . . . Mount . . . Mount . . .” the conductor was chanting. (And behind him the swelling, the voices; the trains, flashing, passing.) Richard found himself yelling too.
“I can cure you. I can remake you. I can make you whole again,” he yelled. He was yelling to Elinor. He was close to her now. He was close enough, almost, to touch her, and the mob, too, was close enough; he could see their hands reaching, clutching. “If they touch you,” he yelled. “If they touch you . . .” It was clear that she hadn’t heard. She stood, calm, serene, holy, and beautiful—and the conductor, still shouting . . .
He woke, sweating, and for a moment he didn’t know where he was. That was not unusual; frequently, on awaking, there was a blind, empty, helpless, dizzying time when he didn’t know who or what he was, and he would lie in his bed, waiting passively, rather pleasantly, for some hook or tangent of the whirl of reality to come past and come close enough so that he could seize it and haul himself back into himself again. Or some sign . . .
Cloudily, still half-dozing, he heard an El train go past, but too late, when he heard it, for him to be able to tell if it was going uptown or downtown; all he heard was the confused sort of rumbling, dying ponderously—or rather not dying, really, but spreading out overlappingly into the other sounds of the city, so that it seemed to swell out and grow fainter in all directions at once, in a wide and ever widening circle around him. . . .
“Third,” he said, and then the memory of a woman’s voice came to him. “I don’t know why it is—” the voice was saying. A fat woman it was, with a round, soggy face, and a striped dress and wearing an apron—“but there is always a breeze on Third Avenue. I don’t know if it’s the Elevateds passing or what it is. All I know is it ain’t like Second, or First. There is always a breeze.”
That would be Mrs. L., Mrs. Loomis, Gloomy Loomis, his landlady, when she’d been showing him the room, and there was a breeze on Third Avenue now; he could see the curtains stirring. He was on Third Avenue, in New York City. “I must tell Elinor,” he thought. He had remembered about Elinor; she existed and he had dreamed about her, and it was something about running backward. But the reasons for telling her—what?—dropped away again as soon as they had arisen, and meantime it was the room that was orienting him.
It was a room, his room, it was the place he lived in. Bare and plain as it was; like, as undoubtedly it was like, the rooms above and below and beside it (and, too, shadowily, the people in them; they were forming around him too. Mr. Brinkley, tall, spare—wasn’t there a Mr. Brinkley, who listened? And below him the little grumbling man with the dog? Or had that been another city?)—the room still had its place in the city’s structure, and if he could place himself firmly in the room, and the room in its place in the city . . . Or if he could just find Elinor.
Elinor would guide him. The world around him was getting peopled with people—the spry, prying Mr. Brinkley, even now doubtless listening behind his partition; the little man with the dog; Mrs. L., Gloomy Loomy Mrs. Loomis; and beyond them now sprinklingly twinklingly hundreds of others . . . the bright, buttery-face man (was it in (Dave’s?) the sandwich counter?), and the bald, brownish, in the cigar store; and Jennie (had he forgotten? Jennie) Carmody—dotlike, twinkling, they winked here and there.
Only he was obscure; he still hadn’t fitted into place. Or rather, he was multiple; he might be anyone, anywhere, or himself, but still elsewhere, in Rochester, Topeka, Cleveland. . . . And then suddenly, without seeking further, he knew. He was Richard Baurie, poet, artist, artisan, traveler, courtier (“And general all-round knave,” he added, laughing), he was lying in his bed in Mrs. Loomis’s rooming house on Third Avenue—and the knowledge was like a great light pouring power and luxuriance upon him, and through him out on the world he lived in.
The room received its share of the illumination too. Humble as it was—the weekly peering, precarious, carious chest of drawers, the low, bowlegged table, the red-plush-covered chair by the window (and the curtains stirring; an El train went past)—there was a certain justness about it, and a radiance as well that came to it because he lived there. And if he were to rise—“ ‘I will arise and go now,’ ” he said—and go over to the window, he would see . . . He knew what he would see.
He would see the ragged, wrought-iron cornices, and the glitter of the El tracks, skating slanting past; and beyond the mean neighborhood that enclosed them (and which also, unfortunately, enclosed him; but that would pass, that would pass)—beyond that, rising, rearing, height to greater height: soaring, aspiring, the towers. . . . “The high towers he had come to the city to conquer. He, a poor starveling poet,” he said, and then throwing himself back on the bed and laughing recklessly. (“And you may listen, Mr. Slinky Brinkley, or whatever your name is. You may listen.”) “Oh, you fool, you silly, silly, lovesick fool!” he added aloud.
He had had a sudden vision, luminously clear and as factually vivid as a scene that might appear in a movie: of the city as it lay strewn and sparkling beneath the sun, and himself as the dressing-gowned poet leaning from his garret and poring over it; and then (the camera shifting) of the one roof among all the many other roofs beneath which Elinor, in her bed, in her room, in the hushed apartment, lay, probably, curled in cozy doziness, sleeping. . . .
And the dream . . .
The dream was love, too, really, if you thought about it. He was forgetting the details now, but he knew he had been riding on a train, and the train was crowded, and somehow, there had been Florence—the details were getting blurred, but there had been Florence, Florence shouting or giggling or something and somehow bothering him; he skipped that, because he didn’t feel in the mood for unpleasantness now. They had been coming back from seeing the cottage, that was it—and then, somehow, Elinor. Floating. Naked. And there had been a time when he had run, run to get away from the voices. . . . Had she floated through the train? And (impossibly) naked?
The trouble was, he couldn’t remember, and then in the midst of not remembering he did remember—the pale body standing in its innocent serenity and around that, like an atmosphere, the suggestion of a shrine and (before that?) his mother; and the shock as, behind him, the voices . . . Suddenly, without transition, he found himself thinking of death.
The curtains stirred, and an El train came past; he could see the dark length of it slitting the window, bound uptown. “I am death,” he thought experimentally. But that wasn’t quite true, of course; he was much too full of life and richness and promise for that.
But then too, in another sense, weren’t life and death identical? That at least was what the Hindus thought, with their Karma and their transmigration of souls and so on. Death, to them, was simply a way station, a stop on the long voyage to—wasn’t it?—Nirvana. And if one could believe that, really believe it, then of course one might easily embrace death willingly. “To escape the jumble of Life,” he said. “To reach Karma. . . .”
But there was something that lay hidden still deeper in his thoughts, and he mused a while, trying to recapture it. Had the train been full of Hindus, he wondered, and they all riding on serenely? And was that why they turned and laughed when he, the infidel, got up and ran—away from death, of course, as well as toward his mother and Elinor?
It had been an odd dream, anyway, and that touch about the Hindus would make it better. And it would be better to leave out the nakedness. . . .
“I was riding in this train,” he would say when he told the Hacketts, and he pushed himself up a little higher against the pillows and smiled and nodded this way and that as he acted out the scene. “And the train was filled with all these white-robed Hindus.” (There had been someone in a white robe somewhere in the dream, or hadn’t there? There had been Florence. . . . But he would leave out Florence) “And at every station one or two of them would get out, only making no fuss about it, you understand; they would just get up and shake hands with their friends, and good-bye, good-bye—it was just like a commuters’ train, really; all little stops and starts—and then the train would go on. . . .”
Yes, indeed, it would make a pretty picture, and he could see himself telling it, sitting there in the midst of them, in the comfortable chair: he, pale-browed, the poet. “Only, I got scared,” he would say. “And when the conductor came in . . .” And then so on and so on—about the running, and the trying to outstrip the voices (for he mustn’t forget about that, and the unconscious inventiveness of it; it would make an amusing little interlude), and then the tension, the feeling of pathos, when he came to the part about the shrine at the end of the train, and his mother, and the change. He would pause there dramatically.
“And do you know who my mother changed into?” he would ask. And then he paused dramatically, glancing from the table to the chair by the window and from there to the chest of drawers. And then, finally, focusing on Elinor. “She changed into—you.”
