Extreme Magic (17 page)

Sweet intoned a name she didn’t catch. “Great fan of yours, this young man. Great fan.” He beamed impartially at them and departed.

“You don’t have to
say
anything.” She smiled up at the young man.

“It’s true, though.” He spoke with a bluntness past having to be put at its ease. “Charles Conway put me on to your work.”

“Yes?” she said. She looked down the room. “I miss him here.”

He too looked down the room. “I loved Conway,” he said. “Even if you were only a student, he made you feel that you counted.”

She glanced at him more sharply. One seldom heard them use the word “love” in the quiet sense that he had used it—it was contrarily the one four-letter word they still spoke with a sense of shame.

“Yes,” she said. “He was a good man.”

“They never made too much of him here.”

“No,” she said. “I guess the good don’t dramatize easily.”

“That’s true!” he said with a rush. “True in books too, isn’t it?”

She nodded, smiling. “So then—you’re going to specialize in Medieval?”

He grinned at her and, grudgingly, she felt the familiar rictus of interest. Intelligent, of course, she warned herself, but then the room was full of intelligence, beady-eyed with it, full of quick-billed birds, and if the eyes of the younger ones seemed more luminous, it was only because they hadn’t quite learned when to drop the secondary lid, the filmy lid of conformism.

“No,” he said. “I’m giving up the graduate school. I haven’t told anyone yet. I’ve—I’ve got some notes for a book.”

“Oh?”

He bent his head, flushing. “Actually…I wrote a book. While I was in the Army. But I chucked that too. I had just enough sense to see how derivative it was.” He brought out the phrase, as they so often did, like a password.

“But we’re all that,” she said, hearing in her voice a melting note that she decried.

“But this wasn’t just style,” he said, raising his head. “It was full of the best prime anxiety—and all secondhand. It had everybody’s fingerprint on it except mine.”

“And your fingerprint?” she said. “What will that be?”

He drooped again. “Oh, I’m still in boot camp. I know that!” But his doldrums were only those of the young, easily routed by the tensing of a muscle, or rain drying on a pane. He reached toward a plate on the table and popped several pallid triangles into his mouth. “This lost-generation stuff we were tossed this aft—you believe that?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ve never been sure. It’s more important whether you believe it. All of you.”

“We get so confused,” he said. “They’ve got us staring at their navels, not our own. And we’ve got nothing to answer them with—yet.” He cast her a desperate smile and concentrated on an empty cup and saucer, pushing them back and forth on the table. “Guess I’m a freak or something. But I like being in the world. And if I write, oughtn’t it to have some—some of that in it? Oh, I was in the Army—I know there’s enough trouble to go around. But I have to earn mine—not inherit it!” He cast her another agonized glance and bent again to his game with the saucer. “Speech, speech,” he said.

“No,” she said slowly, “you’re not a freak,” and caught an echo of what she had said to Paul. No, you’re not a bastard. But what they are, she thought, I can’t tell them.

“Anyway, that’s why I’m leaving,” he said. “I told myself, okay, I helped mop up a war for them. But I’m damned if I’ll write their books for them.”

His voice was loud and she looked apprehensively around the room, but it had emptied and they were alone.

“I guess I shouldn’t get so angry,” he said, averting a cheek that was as mild as a child’s.

She leaned forward, peering at him with the habit of a lifetime. It’s just the glow they all have once, she told herself, nothing special. It’s like the gaudy light that clings to their first poems; one must always be suspicious of it, for it may be simply the peak of freshness attained at least once by everyone, like the transitory skin bloom on a plain girl.

“I seem to be angry practically all of the time,” he said. But his eyes, before he slanted them away again, were proud.

She looked at him. Maybe, she thought. But in any case why do I watch for it, why have I spent my life watching for it? The Freudians would say I was still looking for a son. She drew a deep breath and leaned back. And if so, she thought, we are all, at any age past a certain one, hunting hopefully for our sons.

He’ll think me odd, she thought, staring at him this way without speaking. But she saw that he stood there dreaming, lost in a dream of his own oddness.

Yes, they keep coming, she thought—another and another. And some of them will be the Pauls, who dramatize so easily, to love whom is the worst dead end of fate—for they will knock at every door and never be able to unlock their own. But these others will be coming too. They’ll keep coming, the angry ones, another and another, and when they hold out, they are the bright specks on the retina of the world.

He turned. He had picked up the cup and saucer and was holding them out to her with a tentative smile.

She took them and held them, staring down into the cup. I can’t help it, she thought; I’m of the breed that hopes. Maybe this one wants to live, she thought.
Maybe this one wants to live.
And when you see that—that’s the crux of it. We are all in the dark together, but those are the ones who humanize the dark.

Pouring the cold tea into the cup, her hands trembled so that the cup clinked against the saucer, but when she held out the cup, staring up at him, her wrist was firm.

O
VER THE ROLLTOP DESK,
in the handsomely remodeled barn which Guy Callendar used for antique shop and home, he had hung, among other things, a present once given him by another dealer for obvious reason—a thinnish old almanac whose heavily scrolled frontispiece bore the title, in letters to suit:
The Resourceful Calendar
—for 1846. Printed McGuffey reader style on the good old paper of the era, its blunt, steel-engraved homiletic for weather, crops, and the general moral behavior taken for granted by its readers, had withstood the finely manicured air of the Hudson River shoreline some miles above Garrison, New York, for almost as long as he had—seven years. He liked to see it hanging there, a tightly integrated little universe whose assumptions were only as yellowed as its paper—including that flourished motto which, despite its missing “l,” seemed indeed intended for his life, for him. He had never known whether or not the giver had known his history.

At the moment he was busied in converting an old Rochester lamp, object and task both rather out of line for a shop owner who seldom bothered with the humbler Victoriana and had his own finisher, but these pretensions were his trade’s and the neighborhood’s, not his own. The lamp belonged to a neighbor—if one could give that name to Sligo and his wife Marion, proprietors of an old waterfront “hotel” ten miles up the shore, really a restaurant-bar of the land smartened up with horse brasses for the Saturday afternoon country squires. And Callendar liked any task which let him look continually up and out at any one of the weathers of his own acreage, modest in size, but vast in trees through whose ancient swirl, layer upon layer toward the river, he could see, like a natural fence that gave him the limits he still so needed, glimpses of the waterline, even of the sky—but not of the opposite shore. For this he had bought the barn on a day’s decision, and the barn, in turn so neglectedly beautiful, so rescuable and then so emptily waiting, had brought him by gentle nudges to a trade that was no more out of line than any other for a man so nearly out of life.

Ten years ago, he had been an ordinary young man of thirty-one, living with wife and three children—an infant, a boy of seven and a girl of two, in a split-level cottage in one of the developments outside Hartford, Connecticut, working as a company man for the largest in the constellation of insurance underwriters in that city, and doing well enough. Born nearby, married to a town girl, he had come of that lower-middle native stock, in name often resonantly Anglo-Saxon, which the boys from the great schools studding New England called “townies”—a class that, with the will, the luck and the proper scholarships, frequently ended up years later socially alongside of those same boys. With some of the luck, two army-earned years at an obscure business college, and no will beyond that of someday having his own agency, he had been contented enough, unlikely to end up anywhere except much as he was. But that year, while he had been away at the company’s convention plus special classes for men of his caliber, his house, catching fire at dead of night in a high November wind, four miles from the nearest hook and ladder and no waterpower when they got there, had burned, with all his family, to the ground. Two owners of badly scorched houses adjacent had urged him to join their suit against the contractor whose defective wiring had already been the subject of complaint. Even if he had been able to overcome his horror, there had been no need; as a model employee, he had had Ellen, little Chester, Constance, and even the baby heavily overinsured in every available form from straight life to special savings plans, college plans, mortgage, fire and endowment. He had managed to survive all the obsequies, the leaden vacation in Bermuda insisted upon by his office manager, even the return to a furnished room and restaurant meals in the best businessmen’s residence club in Hartford. It was only when the indemnity money came in, thousands upon rolling thousands of it, that he had gone out of his mind.

The phone rang. “Guy? Polly Dahlgren here. How are you?”

“Hi, Poll, how are you?” An Englishwoman, widow of a Swedish ceramist, she had continued to run their gift shop at Orient Point, the farther tip of Long Island, a place he imagined to be a seashore version of Garrison, in terms of quiet estate money ever more fringed by a louder suburbia, with here and there an air pocket for people like themselves. He had been careful never to see it, though now and then she asked him down, and he liked Poll. She liked him too much for a man who could only like. “What’s on your mind?” He’d said it too fast, sad for them both because he already knew.

“Those silver luster canisters you said you’d seen a set of someplace, a dealer’s. Near where you fish.”

“The Battenkill.” It was the first place he’d gone from the hospital, in the beginning with another patient, the stockbroker who’d taught him flycasting, then, for every one of the years since, on his own. “But that was last April.”

“Collector down here went wild when she heard about them. Pay anything, if they’re what she wants.”

“They wouldn’t cost all that much,” he said. “About two hundred for the four of them. If they’re still there. They just might be. I could find out for you. Or she could go see.”

“Invalid, can’t. I do a little legwork for her now and then, expense-paid of course. Nice old gal.”

“Well, why don’t you?” he said. “Beautiful country in August. And five or six dealers strung out along one lovely road. Not too far for a three-day weekend. With the parkways.”

“Where is it, did you say? And the name?”

“Vermont—New York border,” he said, “the Battenkill.” He couldn’t keep the dream of holy peace out of his voice, the years of gratitude. “The most beautiful trout stream in the world.” He’d never seen any other.

“I might just do that,” she said. There was a pause. Then she spoke brusquely. “Like to go with me?” Into his silence, she said abruptly, “For the fish.”

“Thanks, Poll, but I can’t—” Get away. She knew he could, any time. He plumped for the truth, at least some of it. “It’s particularly a place where I like to go alone.” As he went most places.

“Right!” she said at once. “Nice of you to tell me that.” She understood that he had given her an intimacy. He did like her. “And now, give on those names.”

He gave her the lot, extra warmly. This was what he was good at, and where he could be generous. “Don’t bother with the Graysons if you’re in a hurry. Retired couple, he’ll want to talk and she’ll want to show her collection. Goes in for ruby hanging lamps and anything doll-size, from tea sets to iron cookstoves. Has some good glass, but none of it for sale. One of those. Then, along the road north there’s a tidy little farmer’s wife, barn stuff mostly, woven comforters and moss-rose china et cetera, but cheaper than most. Doing it to send the older girl through beautician’s college.” He stopped, at a snort of amusement from the other end. “Hmm?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Just that you can’t sell your specialty either. A pity. You’re so good at it.”

“I know.” He smiled at her. “Don’t hold it against me. And listen now. The lady you want is named Katrina Bogardus—and she is a lady. Gets the early stuff from the big houses when they break up. Has a couple herself. Looks like a little French marquise and is a retired superintendent of schools.”

“Record of sale then, if she’s sold. Or she’ll remember.” Poll’s voice was her business one, to remind him that though not strictly in the trade she knew as well as he the range of its characters from junkyard on—as varied as its stock and as severely appraisable.

“Decidedly.” He hesitated, then warmed to his specialty. “And look, Poll, if you do have time, hit there on a Thursday, when her son-in-law visits. He’s a parson, I guess you’d call him, but you never saw anything like him in America, though he is one—minister, up-Hudson way. Dresses high Anglican and calls her
mater
—she must have had him re-finished somewhere. Right out of a British movie, the kind they don’t make any more.”

“Barchester Towers,”
she said.

“Never saw it.”

“A book.” Her voice risked tenderness again.

He covered this with a rush. “And Poll, if she likes you—which I’m sure she will—she’ll take you upstairs to see the drawing room. Paneled. Moved from somewhere. Lowestoft to match. Your cup of tea, as I’ve heard you say.”

“Pennies to pounds she liked you,” she said. “Well, I might do. And shall I mention your name?”

“Oh, she wouldn’t know it,” he said. “I was just there once. And I don’t buy, you know—when I go up that way.”