On the River Styx (20 page)

T
O HIS CHILDHOOD HOUSE
he wishes to return alone, on foot. Since he means to break in, he makes sure that he leaves the hotel unobserved, that he is not followed. Not that there is anyone to follow him, it is simply a good habit, sound procedure.

He enters the park by the iron gate beyond the railroad station, climbing transversely across a field, then skirting an old boxwood border so as not to be seen by the unknown people who have taken over his uncle’s house. He trusts the feel of things and not his sight, for nothing about this shrunken house looks quite familiar. It was always a formal, remote house, steep-roofed and angular, but now it has the dark of rottenness, of waterlogged wood.

He hurries on, descending past the stables (no longer appended to his uncle’s house or frequented by horses, to judge from the trim suburban cars parked at the front). In the old pines stands a grotesque disc of the sort recommended to him by his would-be friend the agent, drawing a phantasmagoria of color from the heavens.

He is seeking a childhood path down through the wood, across the brook, and uphill through the meadow.

F
ROM THE TREES
come whacks and pounding, human cries. A paddle-tennis court has spoiled the brook, which is
now no more than an old shadow line of rocks and broken brush. Wary of his abrupt appearance, his unplayful air—or perhaps of a stranger not in country togs, wearing unsuitable shoes for a country weekend—the players challenge him. Can they be of help?

He says he is looking for the Harkness house.

“Who?” one man says.

Calling the name—
Harkness!
—through the trees, hearing his own name in his own voice, makes him feel vulnerable as well as foolish, and his voice is thickened by a flash of anger. He thinks, I have lost my life while soft and sheltered men like these dance at their tennis.

He manages a sort of smile, which fails to reassure them. They look at each other, they look back at him. They do not resume playing.

“Harkness,” one man says finally, cocking his head. “That was long ago. My grandfather knew your father. Something like that.”

Dammit, he thinks. Who said that was my name!

Now the players bat the ball, rally a little. He knows they watch him as he skirts the court and leaves the trees and climbs the lawn toward the stone house set against the hillside at the ridge top.

His father’s house has a flagstone terrace with a broad prospect of the Hudson. It is a good-sized stone house, with large cellar rooms, a downstairs, upstairs, and a third story with servants’ rooms and attic. Yet even more than his uncle’s place it seems diminished since his childhood. Only the great red oak at this south end of the house seems the right size, which confuses him until he realizes that in the decades he has been away it has grown larger.

In a snapshot of himself beneath this tree, in baggy shorts,
he brandishes a green garden stake shoved through the hole of a small flower pot, used as a hand guard. He is challenging to a duel the Great Dane, Inga.

The oak stands outside the old “sun room,” with its player piano and long boxes of keyed scrolls, and a bare parquet floor for children’s games and tea dancing. The world has changed since a private house had a room designed for sun and dancing.

The weather-greened cannon are gone from the front circle. Once this staid house stood alone, but now low dwellings can be seen, crowding forward like voyeurs through what is left of the thin woods farther uphill.

Completing the circuit of the house, he arrives at the formal garden—“the autumn garden,” his mother called it, with its brick wall and flowered gate, its view down across the lawn to the woods and river. The garden is neglected, gone to weeds. Though most are fallen, his mother’s little faded signs that identified the herb species still peep from a coarse growth of goldenrod, late summer asters.

In other days, running away, he had hidden past the dusk in the autumn garden, peering out at the oncoming dark, waiting for a voice to call him into the warm house. They knew his ways, and no one ever called. Choked with selfpity, a dull yearning in his chest, he would sneak up the back stairs without his supper.

The boiler room has an outside entrance under the broad terrace, on the downhill side. He draws on gloves to remove a pane, lever the lock. He crosses the spider-shrouded light to the cellar stair and enters the cold house from below, turning the latch at the top of the stair, edging the door open to listen. He steps into the hall. The house feels hollow, and white sheets hide the unsold furniture. In the
kitchen he surprises an old cockroach, which scuttles beneath the pipes under the sink.

T
HE SILENCE FOLLOWS HIM
around the rooms. On his last visit before his father sold the house, faint grease spots still shone through the new paint on the ceiling of his former bedroom. Sometimes, sent up to his room for supper, he had used a banged spoon as catapult to stick the ceiling with rolled butter pats and peanut-butter balls.

From his parents’ bedroom, from the naked windows, he gazes down over the lawn, standing back a little to make sure he is unseen. The court is empty. He is still annoyed that the paddle-tennis players have his name. Possibly they are calling the police. To be arrested would reflect badly on his judgment, just when he has asked if there might be an assignment for him someplace else.

H
EARING A CAR
, he slips downstairs and out through the cellar doors.

“Looking for somebody?”

The caretaker stands in the service driveway by the corner of the house. He wears a muscle-tight black T-shirt and big sideburns. He is wary, set for trouble, for he comes no closer.

Had this man seen him leave the house?

He holds the man’s eye, keeping both hands in his coat pockets, standing motionless, dead silent, until uneasiness seeps into the man’s face.

“I got a call. The party said there was somebody lookin for someone.”

“Can’t help you, I’m afraid.” Casually he shrugs and keeps on going, down across the lawn toward the brook.

“Never seen them signs?” the man calls after him, when
the stranger is a safe distance away. “What do you want around here, mister?”

W
ITH SOME IDEA
of returning to the hotel by walking south beside the tracks, he makes his way down along the brook, his street shoes slipping on the aqueous green and sunshined leaves.

Whenever, in Africa, he thought of home, what he recalled most clearly was this brook below the house and a sandy eddy where the idle flow was slowed by his rock dam. Below this pool, the brook descended through dark river woods to a culvert that ran beneath the tracks into the Hudson. Lit by a swift sun that passed over the trees, the water crossed the golden sand—the long green hair twined on slowly throbbing stems, the clean frogs and quick fishes and striped ribbon snakes—the flow so clear that the diadem of a water skater’s shadow would be etched on the sunny sand glinting below. One morning a snake seized a small frog—still a tadpole, really, a queer thing with new-sprouted legs and a thick tail—and swallowed it with awful gulps of its unhinged jaws. Another day, another year, perhaps, peering into the turmoil in a puff of sunlit sand of the stream bottom, he saw a minnow in the mouth and claws of a mud-colored dragon. The dragonfly nymph loomed in his dreams for years thereafter, and he hated the light-filled creature it became, the crazy sizzle of the dragonfly’s glass wings, the unnatural hardness of this thing when it struck the skin.

For hours he would hunch upon a rock, knees to his ears, staring at the passages and deaths. Sometimes he thought he would like to study animals. How remote this dark brook was from the Smiling Pool in his Peter Rabbit book up in
the nursery, a meadow pool all set about with daffodils and roses, birds, fat bumblebees, where mirthful frogs, fun-loving fish, and philosophical turtles fulfilled their life on earth without a care.

Even then he knew that Peter Rabbit was a mock-up of the world, meant to fool children.

N
EARING THE RAILROAD
, the old brook trickles free from the detritus, but the flow is a mere seepage, draining into a black pool filled with oil drums. An ancient car, glass-shattered, rust-colored, squats low in the thick Indian summer undergrowth where once—or so his father said—an Algonkin band had lived in a log village.

In the sun and silence of the river, he sits on the warm trunk of a fallen willow, pulling mean burrs from his city trousers. From here he can see across the tracks to the water and the Palisades beyond. Perhaps, he thinks, those sugarmaple yellows and hot hickory reds along the cliffs welcomed Henry Hudson, exploring upriver with the tide four centuries before, in the days when this gray flood—at that time blue—swirled with silver fishes.

Hudson’s ship—or so his father always claimed—had an elephant chained on the foredeck, an imposing present for the anticipated Lord of the Indies. Turned back at last by the narrowing river from his quest for the Northwest Passage, fed up with the task of gathering two hundred pounds of daily fodder for an animal that daily burdened the small foredeck with fifteen to twenty mighty shits—his father’s word, in its stiff effort at camaraderie, had astonished and delighted him—Henry the Navigator had ordered the elephant set free in the environs of present-day Poughkeepsie. Strewing its immense sign through the woods, blaring its
longing for baobab trees to the rigid pines, the great beast surely took its place in Algonkin legend.

Misreading his son’s eager smile, his father checked himself, sighed crossly, and stood up.
A vigorous Anglo-Saxon term, not necessarily a dirty word to be leered and giggled at. You should have outgrown all that by now
. He left the room before the boy found words to undo such awful damage.

B
EYOND THE MISTED TREES
, upriver, lies Tarrytown—Had someone tarried there? his mother asked his father, purling demurely. Why his father smiled at this he did not know. From Tarrytown one might see across the water to the cliffs where Rip Van Winkle had slept for twenty years. As a child he imagined a deep warm cleft full of autumn light, sheltered from the northeast storms and northwest winds. He peers across the mile of water, as if that shelter high up in clean mountains were still there.

In the Indian summer mist the river prospect looks much as he remembered it—indeed, much as it had been portrayed by the Hudson River School of painters so admired by his maternal grandmother.
Atrocious painters, all of them
, his father said. The small landscape of this stretch of river—was that in the crate of family things he had in storage? How much he has lost track of, in those years away.

He places a penny on the railroad track.

He longs to reassemble things—well, not “things” so much as continuity, that was his mother’s word. Her mother had been raised on the west banks of the Hudson, and she could recall, from her own childhood, her great-aunt relating how
her
grandmother had seen Alexander Hamilton sculling downriver one fine morning just below their house—“Good day, Mr. Hamilton!”—and how Mr.
Hamilton had never returned that day, having lost his life to a Mr. Burr in a duel at Weehawken.

His father loved this story, too, the more so because that reach of river cliff had changed so little in the centuries between. For both of them, the memory of Mr. Hamilton had an autumnal melancholy that reached far back across the nation’s history, to the Founding Fathers.

It seemed he had not responded to it properly.

I suppose you find it merely quaint
, his mother said.

A
T ONE TIME
he attended Sunday school here in Arcadia, and he thinks he will rejoin the Episcopal Church. On sunny Sundays in white shirt and sober suit he will find himself sustained and calmed by stained-glass windows and Bach organ preludes. Afterward he will return to the garden cottage with its antique furniture, blue flowers in white rooms, fine editions, rare music, and a stately dog thumping its tail on a warm rug. He envisions an esoteric text, a string quartet, a glass of sherry on a sunlit walnut table in the winter—his parents’ tastes, he realizes, acquired tastes he is determined to acquire.

In this civilized setting, smoking a pipe, he will answer questions from young women about Africa, and the nature of Africans, and how to deal judiciously with these Afro-Americans, so-called. Those who imagine that Africans are inferior do not know Africans, he’ll say. Africans have their own sort of intelligence, they are simply not interested in the same things we are. Once their nature is understood, he’ll say, Africans are Africans, wherever you find them, never mind what these bleeding-hearts may tell you.

A
TRAIN COMES
from the north, clicketing by, no longer dull coal black, as in his childhood, but a tube of blue-and-silver
cars, no light between. In his childhood he could make out faces, but with increased speed the human beings are pale blurs behind the glass, and nobody waves to the man on the dead tree by the railroad tracks.

The wind and buffet of the train, the sting of grit, intensify his sense of isolation. To his wave, the train responds with a shrill whistle that is only a signal to the station at Arcadia, a half mile south.

He gets up, stretching, hunts the penny. It glints at him among the cinders. Honest Abe, tarnished by commerce, has been wiped right off the copper, replaced by a fiery smooth shine.

Looking north and south, he picks his way across the tracks. The third rail—if such it is—is a sheathed cable between pairs of rails marked “Danger Zone 700 Volts.” Has the voltage increased since his childhood?
If you so much as point at that third rail
, explained his mother, who worried about his solitary expeditions to the river,
you’ll be electrocuted, like one of those ghastly criminals up at Sing-Sing!
He hesitates before he crosses, stepping over this rail higher than necessary.

The tracks nearest the river are abandoned, a waste of rusted rails and splintered oaken ties and hard dry weeds. Once across, he can see north to the broad bend where a shoulder of the Palisades juts out from the far shore into the Tappan Zee. A thick new bridge has been thrust across the water, cutting off the far blue northern mountains. In his childhood, a white steamer of the Hudson River Day Line might loom around that bend at any moment, or a barge of bright tomato-red being towed by a pea-green tug, both fresh as toys. His father would evoke the passage of Robert Fulton’s steamship
Claremont
, and the river trade on this
slow concourse, flowing south out of the far blue mountains.