All the Little Live Things (18 page)

As for Peck himself, assuming that I did not misread his attitude toward me, it must have tickled him to have me in a position where I would permit the whole camel to creep into the tent rather than seem petty. He robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, that one. His morality, which I was sure did not all come from the Upanishads, would have told him that he was making it, and that to make it was good. On the other hand, he seemed as willing to evade a direct confrontation as I was, for he never discussed any of his theosophy-and-water faiths and two-candle-power illuminations in my hearing. When I was around he was invariably quiet, polite, soft-voiced, and he smiled as if he knew something. I got his beliefs secondhand from Marian, who patiently attended his philosophical regurgitations. I say philosophical: occasionally a philosopher was his source. More often, his enthusiasms were straight out of old James Dean movies and Ginsberg poems. That was one of the things about him that was hardest to swallow. There was so much Dean in his Ginsberg.

One day I came up from the mailboxes just as Peck was mounting his Honda in the Catlins’ little parking area. He came toward me along the foot of the hill, bare-chested, bare-legged in his cut-off Levis, insect-headed in the white helmet, and as he passed with a gust of hot air and dust-and-oil smell, he gave me his gleaming, knowing, wordless smile through his beard. Ten feet down the road (did I imagine this?) he goosed the motorcycle into a derisive snort. I turned to look after him. He was just crossing the bridge, attentive to the narrow tread his wheels followed, but as he reached the other side he looked back. We exchanged some sort of message before he whipped out of sight behind the trees.

Walking on, I saw Marian stretched in the old lounge in the grove. She waved me down, and I went, though I was not overjoyed to be succeeding Peck as her visitor. And I couldn’t ignore him, as I probably should have. I had to spit him out of my mouth. “Been having a discussion with our friend?” I said.

Braced back in the lounge with a paperback book in her hand, Marian cried, “Why so glum? Isn’t it a gorgeous day—again? Discussion is right. I think he’s been trying to convert me.” She lifted the book.

I put my bundle of mail and magazines on the ground and sat down in a wicker chair. Why so glum indeed. This was the best half hour of my day, this pause on the way back from the mailbox. On days when I found her gone, or Debby home from school, or somebody’s car in the parking area, I could count on my heart wavering down through me like a flat stone dropped in a water barrel. And just to see her there, fizzing, an open and inexhaustible bottle of champagne, did make it a gorgeous day in spite of Peck.

“Converting you?” I said. “That must have been fun. Has he got a mind? Is anything going on under all that hair?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I said there was.”

“No. I don’t believe you’re going to say so, either.”

“It’s funny, I really don’t know,” she said, with the quick switch to earnestness that often made me regret having chosen a joking tone. “A lot of the time he’s absolutely predictable, a sort of conditioned response-young anarchy—
you
know. He’s twenty-four, he says, but it’s a young twenty-four. And sometimes he just seems to be drifting in this cloud of abstract ideas and sometimes he’s literally reforming the world. He thinks you could make it over, he really does, and he has a lot of enthusiasm—” she glanced at me under her eyelashes—“when he trusts you not to laugh. If he thinks you’re laughing at him, he gets stiff. Just now he was reading to me, sort of explaining where he starts from.”

She held up the book again, and then dove into it, hunting through the pages with that bright, laughing, now-you-listen look of hers. When she found it and began to read, her voice was artificially high, like a child’s reciting.

“Historicity
of their
souls?”
I said.

She frowned me down with her eyebrows while still smiling at me with her mouth.

She stopped. It seemed I was supposed to comment. I said, “From the quality of the prose it’s probably Kierkegaard, or maybe old Jaspers.”

“Joe, you’re incredible! It is Jaspers.”

“So?” I said. “One of the four cloudy gospels. Once I read them all, trying to understand something, but I never succeeded. Do you understand what the historicity of the soul is? Or loneliness of soul, which is so much worse than ever before in man’s history? Do you too take refuge in vain in the erotic and the irrational? Are you too dissatisfied with mere achievement?” The mere phrase made me start to roar.
“Mere
achievement! Jesus. Well, you’ve answered my question. There isn’t a mind there, there’s only a phonograph record cut on litmus paper.”

From the way she laughed, I knew she had thrown the passage at me just to
hear
me roar. (I have it in front of me now, and it is as ponderously banal as ever.) “The trouble with the people to whom that sounds profound,” I said, “is that they’re dissatisfied with mere achievement before they’re in the slightest danger of accomplishing any. Is Peck having trouble with his great book, is that why he’s getting sick of achievement?”

“Who told you?”

“Nobody told me. Is he?”

“You know,” Marian said, studying me with her head on one side, “if you weren’t so irascible you’d be very impressive. As a matter of fact, he’s given the book up. He says it was only a preliminary exercise anyway, to help clarify his consciousness. It was part of his withdrawn phase. Writing is a dead art. The future belongs to interpersonal relations-communication between man and man, the way it says here.”

I should have felt justified, I suppose, since Peck seemed to be fulfilling my prophesies for him. But all I felt was my old weary exasperation-years old, much older than my acquaintance with Jim Peck. I said, “His recent sociability is philosophic, not accidental, is that it? He’s given up contemplation? Too much loneliness of soul there? How’s he going to start the flow of communication between man and man?”

“He’s going to organize a school,” Marian said.

“All right, improvise. He’s already started improvising. The last time John was back, before he went up to Alaska, he and Margo and that blond one, Peter Whatever-his-name-is, were over here all one evening asking him how to approach the foundations.”

“That figures,” I said. “Let the Establishment fund the Disestablishment. I hope John wasn’t fool enough to help them.”

“Oh, he gave them some names. He was sort of touched, they’re so earnest and naïve. It hasn’t got a chance anyway.”

“I wonder,” I said. “I’ve known some foundation people. They’ve all got projectitis. This could be just idiotic and far out enough to strike some board as interesting. What kind of school?”

She giggled. “Can’t you imagine? No courses, no admissions requirements, no administration, no degrees, no faculty.”

“No faculty,” I said. “Now that’s getting right at the root of the evil. They’ll teach each other, is that it?”

“Of course.”

“Under some bo tree.”

“I suppose. In the country, anyway, outdoors as much as possible. There’s a lot of frontier, pioneering enthusiasm in Jim, did you ever realize? He’s sort of like a homesteader, over there.”

“Squatter,” I said.

“What?”

“Squatter. Nester. Intruder. Interloper. Trespasser.”

“All right. Anyway they’ll build their own meeting room and library, that’s all they’d need.”

I brooded for another while. Naturally I had read about this “free university” business. Naturally, since it was a contagion epidemic among his kind, Peck would think it a brilliantly original idea. He had no immunities, that boy. I said, “Except for the building and the bookshelves, I can’t see but what they’ve got their school already, right there across the creek. Professor Peck’s Outdoor Academy.”

Sprawled in the lounge as if she had thrown herself there and alighted anyhow, with legs doubled under and brown arms hanging down, she watched me with the impish expression of a child waiting for the firecracker to go off under auntie’s chair. “Did you look at his mailbox today?”

“I burned his daily trash. With my daily irritation. But I don’t think I noticed his box. Why?”

“You didn’t see the initials under his name? U.F.M.?”

“Unimaginably Foolish Man? Universal Federation of Morons?”

“University of the Free Mind,” Marian said, and burst out in giggles again. “You’ve got it! It’s in operation. It’s being presented to Ford and Rockefeller and Carnegie as a going concern, with ten students. Including Julie and Debby.”

Her laughter was so infectious that I laughed too. I was always willing to laugh with her, even at myself. One on me. A going concern, Oh ha ha ha.

We were sunk like minnows in the brown shade. John had been in the Pribilofs for ten days. Debby was away somewhere, perhaps riding with Julie. The Volkswagen bus had not been at the trail gate when I came down the hill. I could hear no sound from Peck’s camp, screened by thick trees and brush. Maybe they were all out stealing books for the library. I said a little grimly, “A going concern that just might go out of business about tomorrow.”

“Would you do that?” Marian said. “Are you that out of sympathy with young idealism?”

“Young idealism has been making a mark out of me for six months.”

“They’re just thoughtless. If you’d unbend and get to know them better you’d probably like them.
I
like them.”

“You like whate’er you look on.”

She smiled, looking at
me.
“And you’re old Scrooge and hate the young. Why are you so hard on these kids?”

“Look,” I said. “Look!” Without warning my hands were shaking and my tongue stumbled over words. “Look, I’ve been
through
all this, I know it backward and forward, I could predict every insanity this fool will find his way to!”

As I said it, wishing that I wasn’t saying it, or that I could say it without that agitation in my voice, I understood that I had been wanting to say it for a long time. To her, for her sympathy. Half ashamed, half hopeful, I looked into her vivid face, which in instant sympathy had lost its laughter. and shaded itself to my tone. I found there the understanding I had been fishing for, and behind it—or was that something my own shame put there?—a sort of reserved judgment. I wondered if she sat there now listening to me with the same amused and scrupulous tolerance she showed Peck. But I didn’t believe so; her eyes were full of wry love. “Your son,” she said.

“My son, yes.”

“Ruth told me.”

“What else did she tell you? That I was a stiff-necked father and drove him to it?”

“No, because of course you weren’t. Only that you were a lot alike, too much alike to get along, and that he never found anything he could
be.”

“And looked in all the wrong places,” I said. “Just like this one-eyed king of the blind over here.”

I was already sorry I had exposed myself, and irritated that in exposing myself I might have seemed to give too personal an explanation for my objections to Peck. I told myself that I would have found his beliefs and his activities dangerous nonsense if I had never had a son, or if my son had not wretchedly thrown away his life.

“I gather Peck has a father too,” I said, “and blames every act of his own life on the old man. Papa was rigid, therefore all discipline must go. I wish he’d come around and spill his insides to me, I’d spray them with turpentine.”

She had attractive, young, abrupt gestures, such as the one in which she now drew up her brown legs and pulled the denim skirt tight over her knees. “Don’t you suppose he knows that? That’s why he avoids you.”

“He avoided me before he ever met me, practically. The first day he rode in here he had a chip on his shoulder that he kept daring me to knock off.”

Marian sat smiling at me speculatively. Every thought that crossed her mind showed in her face like cloud shadows crossing a meadow. She said, “Maybe that was only his way of knocking off the chip he thought
you
were wearing.”

“Maybe,” I said, offended.

But she would not let me sulk. She leaned toward me and smiled me back to friendliness without losing her air of urgency and earnestness. “But that’s too bad! Because you’re somebody who could teach him all kinds of things if you could ever get close.”

“If he’d let anybody teach him anything. You just admitted he avoids me.”

“Yes,” she said, and sank back thoughtfully. “I guess I did. They all quote that bromide about not being able to trust anybody over thirty. It might have to be someone closer to his own age.”

“Somebody such as you, evidently.”

“All right, I’m willing. I feel sorry for young people. They seem to find it harder and harder to believe the world values them or has a place for them.”

“That’s what comes of sneering at mere achievement. The world has a place for anybody who can do anything.”

“Joe,” she said, “I think you
want
to keep your prejudice against that groping boy.”

“Groping!” I said. “Good God, he’s the Mahatma, he’s got the confidence of a road agent.”

“You think so? If he really felt that way would he have to keep on acting so sure of himself? I think he’s as uncertain as he can be—look how he hunts and hunts through all those yeasty philosophies for something to believe in. I do feel sorry for him. People his age have every right to be appalled at the world they find themselves in, the bomb and all the rest of it.”