Extreme Magic (23 page)

“I admire you,” she said. “For the way you do nothing and people just come to you.” For the rest of the afternoon she was silent. It occurred to him, absent in mind as he’d been all week—or elsewhere in mind—that her prayer might be being answered; she was certainly more natural.

Early Friday morning, before leaving, she came by for an uncalled-for visit to the cats, who were by now accustomed to his feeding them. He was mildly surprised at her appearance as she bent daintily over their dishes—travel suit, hat and bag, hair brushed to a burnish, from what he could see of it, and a new, sooty dimension to her unremarkable eyes. When he heard she was walking to the station, he of course drove her there, and waited with her for the dusty, division local that would take her on to Grand Central, where she would be met by a chauffeur, she said, and driven on. The station, merely a junction beneath the once Indian highland, was bare of persons on this national weekend away. Beyond the sheds and other ramshackles, deserted outbuildings of another century, that quietly rotted here and at other up-Hudson junctions, the flat valley of water took the sun. As always, the wide expanse made him uneasy; he turned his back to it. The girl beside him, taking the compliment to herself, smiled gratefully. Now that she was leaving, he was suddenly great with a four-day-repressed need to be by himself again. When he put her bag up for her in the train, he was already irritated with her for making herself out a waif to him, as she could apparently do without moving an eyelash. There were others on the train dressed exactly like her, most with friends or parents it was true, but her own were returning in a few days. Still, her hat, though so regulation, reared back from her forehead like the pure feather of flight. He felt he ought to make it up to her, for not being able to keep his mind on her, somehow to explain to her that she was simply at that interim in her life when no one was around to do it. “Good-by,” he said. “And good luck on the weekend, don’t you worry now. You have no idea how different you look in shoes.”

He hurried home to his house, to be alone with being alone there. It was good, infinitely good to mosey and loll, a man in no way bereft of the small things of life, one whose phone was contrarily atap with friends, waifs and petitioners—merely a man who preferred dogs, but had no dog. Toward dusk, he set his meal on a tray, and once more brought it out to the porch. No one, entowered somewhere in the tree-murmurs, was there to watch him. At last he was at peace enough, if it could be called peace, to dwell on what all week he’d been powerless to keep his mind from—to let it ring its changes inside him.

On Tuesday, he had called the Canal Zone. During the day, there’d been no reason to fear she might be bereft; Tuesday, when the place reopened at four, was always a big day domestically, with cleaning to be done, suppliers’ salesmen to be dealt with, and the full staff in attendance, two waitresses, Carlos the cook, and sometimes Roy, the assistant barman. He had restrained himself from calling until six, the busy hour at the bar, when Sligo was always in attendance there. Roy had answered the phone. He had asked to speak to Marion.

“The missus, she’s in the kitchen,” said Roy. “Talkin’ to Carlos.”

Everyone knew of course that Carlos did drink; his temperament, often to be heard from the kitchen, was cherished as much as his cooking by those patrons who liked to think that they haunted a bar for its colorfulness. No one would have known of it otherwise. The staff, loyal to each other and apparently to the owners, never gossiped.

“You want to talk to the mister?” said Roy. “He’s awful busy, Mr. Callendar, we got a rush on that IBM Country Club crowd.”

“No thanks. Just ask her—” He hesitated. “I just called to find out if the lamp I left was okay. Just ask her if everything’s all right. About the lamp.”

“Okay, sir.”

“Maybe I’ll stop by myself to check on it tomorrow,” he added half to himself, as Roy hung up.

He did that. During the period when he had helped furnish the upstairs, the staff had grown used to his checking. Wednesday afternoons, as he knew well enough, Sligo and Marion were usually in town with the station wagon, doing all the weekly errands from meat inspection to talking improvement loans with the bank manager. He pretended to have forgotten this.

“Wednesday their town day,” said Roy. It was the usual midweek afternoon, trade dull. Everything appeared normal. Of course, everything always had. Why was he here?

“One day gets to be like another, out where I am,” he said. He knew how to talk to Roy, not that it took anything special; anyone did.

“Out where anybody is, around here!” Roy said at once. “I tell you, Mr. Callendar, we can’t wait for winter.” Winters, Roy did the Miami run. “We” meant his wife and mother, as devoted as he to the crowd, the tables, the money, the sun and the sea, in that order—to all the big-time externals of life. It was hard to imagine any of the three ever suffering from one of the inner varieties of love-death, certainly not from love of death, or even perhaps from the death of love. They were happy. But knowing how to talk to Roy meant knowing that even he, they, were in their own way extreme.

“When you going?” Guy said.

“December twenty-sixth, leave here six-thirty
A.M.
,” Roy said promptly. “I drive the buggy down, U.S. 1 all the way. Ma and Vee fly National. Next night we’ll all three be in our suits at the beach, dinner at the Alcazar. And three nights after. I don’t start work till the first.”

“Sounds wonderful.” He was having trouble keeping his mind on Roy. He stared at the diamond ring in its glass case. Roy’s blunt, shaven head didn’t shadow it.

“I tell you. Whyn’t you pick up and go down. Even for good, you could make a living. They got antique shops galore.” Roy was capable of assuring a banker that Miami had banks.

“Maybe I will.”

“I tell you.” Roy leaned forward. Now came the climax of this refrain. “If we could stay down there—” The preamble was always the same, the conclusion too. Only the metaphor varied. “If we could stay down there—!” Each of Roy’s eyes shone as if it were the only one he had. “Nee one of us ever ask nothing more in this life. Nee one of us ask for two more tail feathers from a duck.”

He almost forgot to make the drink-offer which was the ritual end of this conversation.

It was answered with the ritual headshake. “Thanks, Mr. Callendar. But I’ll have a cigar.”

He put his elbows on the bar, trying to recall how it felt to lean outward into life from some heavy focus, glowing or dark—instead of cordially, temperately, holding the phone. “Roy?” he’d said, as if Roy could tell him. “Roy—what’s your last name?”

Roy, just nipping the cigar, looked up. He spat the tip. “Grotz. Roy
Valerian
Grotz. Must be why I became a bartender, huh, whoever asks a barkeep his full name?” He doffed the cigar. “You ever ready for info ree down there, you just write me. Care of the Alcazar.”

“Thanks,” he said, “I just came to wonder. Don’t know why in particular.” Looking round the calm, empty bar, with its faint smell of bitter from old limbos, he’d shivered his shoulders. “Certainly not waiting for winter.”

“You’re telling me!” said Roy.

When he came home, he found a note from Marion in his mailbox; she must have driven by to put it there. “Please don’t call. And don’t come. My thanks.” With the proper chance, he might have met them there at the end of his driveway, she bending to thrust the note far back in the box, Sligo sitting immobile in the car as one sometimes saw him, hunched forward in the posture of men in World War I statuary groups—a member of the Battle of the Marne temporarily hacked from his stone brothers. Marion always drove.

Thursday—last night—his dealer friend, Sprague, had stayed for supper, and the girl. Though he addressed her by name, in his mind she was “the girl.” He’d been grateful for both their presences. In the summer dimness after the hot glade of the day, as they sipped the wine Sprague had brought, the rise and fall of their own voices had had a pre-fall, alfresco charm. The girl had sipped too, with an over-distinguished air.

“Nice kid,” Sprague had commented, in a moment when the girl had gone in for a bit.

“Lonely summer,” said Guy.

Sprague nodded. “I get ’em from the summer theaters. Apprentices. Sent round to borrow.” A former painter, he now dealt mostly in authentic American primitives, had a shop in the Poconos, and knew Joe and Milly Pink. “Terrible stuff they have,” he said.

“Terrible.” He listened to the echo. “Their boy is getting married.”

“Oh, I know that boy. Different from them.” Sprague, pouring himself another, had gestured with the bottle in the direction where Alden had gone. “Like her, they’re luckier. Kids like her, you can see their whole background behind them, ahead of them, too. Meet a boy of the same, and with a little luck they’ll live their whole lives that way. Lost in the background. The best way.”

Sprague’s history was unknown to him, or whether Sprague knew his—but that each had an unlikely one was one of the comforting assumptions of their trade.

“She looks a little like that print you have inside there,” said Sprague. “The girl in profile—who’s it by, Polliaiulo? Just a pretty girl of the day, but you can see the whole Renaissance behind her. I’ve got a little Federalist one at home now. A stiff little girl of the period, all her life, probably. Only the painter happened to single her out She isn’t the subject anymore. The subject is 1810.” He gestured again at Alden, who had just reappeared, and was now circling the porch, fiddling with the cats’ dishes. She bent there with the bursting shyness of one who knew herself the question. “Girls like that are like stencils,” he said. “For what’s around them. Boys too, of course. Hmm. Used to wish I could paint that way. You know? I wanted to do it for now.”

Alden came in and sat again at the table.

“What’s the name of this county?” Sprague asked her.

“Dutchess.”

“There you are!” said Sprague. “Girl of Dutchess County, with the light behind her. American primitive,
circa
1970, artist unknown. All I need is a hundred years.”

“A hundred years and I’ll be dead!” said Alden gaily. She flung it out like a garland.

“They’ll be nice ones, honey,” said Sprague. “Just marry some neighborhood boy.”

“This
neighborhood?” she said.

Both he and Sprague had roared, of course. “Alden’s family is musical,” he had said, in reparation.

“How about that!” Sprague had answered, with the trade’s tone-deafness. “I took in a harpsichord once. Inlaid with Wedgwood medallions. Not the blue jasperware either. The gray.”

He thought now of the girl riding to her destination, for today, somewhere on Long Island—of whether she would ride all her life jogging in the “background” expected of her, through the minor hazards to the final, profound ones—all of her happily submerged life. Right now, as Sprague had said, she was only a mild darkness at whose edges one could see the whole bright pattern of her segment of life, from costume plates of the period to chapbooks of the road-and-home-life of the times. It was in her very voice and no doubt in the fillings of her excellent teeth—all the successive decades of the woman she would almost certainly be, already counterparted by the versions of such women to be seen, in their own decades from blond hair to mauve, in the streets and shops of towns near places like Garrison. And it didn’t have to be that stratum, of course. A same unconscious innocence of itself could work in any—he remembered Hartford. As Sprague had said, innocence of its own import was what was required, of the life that was the subject, as well as of the painter’s hand. And even for those who knew themselves to be the extreme, there might be degrees of innocence. All that was needed was a hundred years.

As for Alden, the girl—He looked up at the trees, behind and behind whose layers there was somewhere a tower from which she had spied on him. He thought of the feather in her hat. Probably the next ten years would show. It might be touch and go—as to whether or not she would be singled out.

Toward dark, the Siamese returned to the edge of the clearing. All that week she had been away—since Monday. Her flanks were fallen in. As she drank greedily from one of the other cats’ saucers, he remembered with a contraction of sadness how, last time, she had proudly refused to be fed. When she had cleaned herself, she stood off and regarded him, eyes opening and closing, head tucked in. He had no trouble identifying of whom she reminded him—that snub head, those mask-clenched eyes. Nor had he any intention of taking her return as an omen—this random, itty-kat vagrant between silk pillow and forest. Just because he was now aware of what must have been being enacted for years at the Canal Zone, didn’t mean he could interpose there. Marion’s note had made him see his place—he was audience. All the watching in the world couldn’t force their stagelight closer to his own quiet demi-brown. After a while, as the moonless night closed in, he could no longer see for sure whether or not the eyes were still regarding him. Only a stencil remained, a head-shaped importance of darkness with the light behind it—ringed round with knives.

On Saturday, as he did the week’s shopping in town, he found himself looking with a purpose, in the store queues and the parking lots, down the market streets and at crossings. He was looking for a family, never the same one of course but one always constituted the same, that over the years had now and then presented itself to him without warning. He didn’t see them. But the quality of the change came home with him, like the edge slid into one at the change of seasons. He had never before looked.

On Sunday, he began the turnout of the barn, long self-promised, and never yet done. The weather was glorious, as people were no doubt saying all over the nation. Out on that highway from which he was a quarter-mile in, the smart ones were already bearing back to the city, to be safe there on the murderous third day of the holiday. There and elsewhere, cars must already be smashing and piling up, duty bound to fill in that annual Tuesday headline for which the funeral presses were waiting. Tuesday seemed to him distant as a new life, or an old one that had to be resumed. It was Monday, day of the smash, that had to be got through, here where the great stasis of land, water, and tree would uphold him in the silent conjunction of all their valleys. As he dragged object after object out on the lawn, none, however curious, lovely or valuable, seized him with that griping in the bowels of possession which afflicted others of his trade. He was neat of habit; there was really no need for this housecleaning. But he had an urge to see the barn as empty as it had been when he came. Meanwhile, there were corners of his eyrie he had forgotten. He turned up the first table he had refinished but had never sold, of itself an honest maple, but in the last rays of daylight too auburn by far. In its drawer, he found the one relic he had saved from the burned rubble, only because it predated it—a small vase of cloudy glass with a cheap scene scratched on it, from its position in his mother’s window, in his childhood always called the “sunset” vase. By nightfall, the place was emptied, except for his huge rolltop desk, weighted with business, that had been the first thing in here anyway, and hanging above it, that archaic reminder to “Resource.” He left those two inside, all the rest of the array turned out to the starlight. The night was as clear and soft as the inside of a grape; no rain would fall. Even if it did, all he stood to lose was some of the money which helped to keep him suspended in life, immovable to the waves of need. And he had all Monday to put everything back. He brought his bedroll to the center of the lawn, and lay for a long time looking up at the barn’s dark ogives, that now seemed to breathe with him, in their earlier communion. The barn was what he loved; he had rescued it.