Refiner's Fire (18 page)

Young stagehands (officiously directed by older boys who were socially unacceptable and so turned to the ropes, lighting boards, fishy paint, and high ladders) scurried about making examples for one another of their prowess at skimming catwalks a hundred feet up, riding sandbags from one grid to another, and manipulating the rheostats of the lighting board like Atlantic submarine captains. They imagined that the girls in the chorus were watching. They were not, but rather were hoping that they themselves were being observed from beyond the footlights. And if they were aware at all of the little stagehands it was as midget footmen in a well-defined hierarchy, monkeys in gray and brown swinging above them as counterweights to their own fantasies.

But the monkeys of the upper galleries, in love and outcast, watched these lovely young girls, mouths open and eyes gawking from between ropes and belaying pins, charged glances traveling instantaneously downward onto the tempestuous color-filled stage. The girls' hopes went outward to the darkened auditorium, and the music and heat sailed up into the gray winter air.

Marshall lay back against brick and iron on a platform seventy-five feet off the ground. He was alone there, resting unobserved, and he felt like a bird in a tree at a nighttime garden party. But unlike the bird, he was thinking about what had been said in a class just before he put on his work clothes and climbed into the ropes. As was often the case, the teacher had ridiculed someone for liking that which was in bad taste, common, cheap. Arguments against it were strong. It was a short, bad poem by someone who had probably died immediately after writing it. But Marshall found himself pulled toward it, in defense of the indefensible and harmless, a strange combination which could boil him like a pot of tea.

He watched as the teacher formed a collection of students welded together against what they had been told was contemptible. But what then of the Irish woman and her grandchild Marshall had seen on Dyckman Street in upper Manhattan. He had gone to buy a fencing foil in a sword store. It was Saturday in winter with the snow packed onto the streets and the jingle of chains from municipal vehicles, and gusts of cold and colder air coming from the parks, from around the corners, and from the wooded snow-covered Palisades. The woman was great and fat and must have weighed 300 pounds. Her coat fit her like a tarpaulin slung over a Volkswagen. She had gum shoes and striped socks, a kerchief was drawn over her head, and she wore alabaster-colored glasses with thick lenses. The material of her coat was so cheap that Marshall could see the cold traveling through it. And her grandson of three or four was bundled in thin single-stitched cloth; an earmuff hat which covered his little head had slipped back. Marshall passed them as they stood in front of a religious articles store, its window crammed with garish unholy implements. The grandmother held the child's hand and pointed to one of the plaster castings, saying: “Look. Isn't it beautiful? A beautiful statue. Beautiful.”

What would his classmates and the teacher have said about that? By absolute standards it was indefensible, and yet even if the love which the woman had for the plaster statue were formulaic, automatic, and artificial, it was all she had, and because of that the indefensible gained a great power and came up behind arguments assembled against it. It was all she had and she approached it with dignity and love, and as the little boy's hand stroked the cold window, learning the lines of an object of beauty, Marshall felt a strong bond. Sitting on his high platform shielded by darkness and beams of bright lights, he thought that not everyone can be schooled rigorously in art, not everyone can be lean and aristocratic, not everyone can win. But
he
would. And if he failed, he expected to die rather than live an uncharmed life. No Dyckman Street for him, and no contempt for it either, if he could keep his distance.

He stood up and looked across a dark chasm separating him from another, larger platform. The distance was about four feet down and four feet laterally—not excessive for a jump except in view of the considerable drop. One of the dancers below was staring past the hot lights into the darkness, and thought that she had seen a form sailing above her in the black. She had, and Marshall stood on the larger platform, his heart beating ferociously.

Humiliated in the role of monkey, imagining heroic action on the stage below, determined to be efficient and brave among the cables and pulleys, and always aware of the snow falling outside covering the ground and the dark English trees, he was momentarily sustained by the clocklike mechanism of the play—its form and discipline being love in counterpoint. The production was out of phase, awkwardly directed, bursting with energy. In a theater flooded with white light and washed-out pastels, they were all entranced. It got dark early then, and yet they often stayed until midnight. They danced below. The snow danced past the darkened windows.

M
ARSHALL WAS
extremely restless. He was, of course, still a virgin, and as such driven to unspeakable fits of temper and longing. Who but a young virgin boy would walk many miles through thick brush and untraveled woods (even in the middle of winter) with the hope of coming upon a nude and lascivious widow-instructoress? He could not learn Latin, because Virginia Boar, a red-haired beauty fond of clothing with a revealing cut, sat (and bended, and stretched, and turned) in front of him in each class. The Latin teacher was afraid for Marshall. She thought that he had heart disease, because he often broke into cold sweats, and hot sweats, during which his face would become purple or red and his eyes would float upward in their sockets as he seemed to lose consciousness. He tried not to look at Virginia, but got a crick in his neck. Then he brought a bag of herbs into class, thinking that if he smelled it he would defuse his lust. Every few minutes he would take deep draughts from his herb bag.

“What
is
that, Marshall?” asked the Latin teacher.

“It's an herb bag, Mrs. Vouvoulis,” he answered, dreading what he knew must follow, because he never lied in important confrontations.

“What in heaven's name is it for?”

He hesitated, but there was no way out. “It defuses lust.”

Virginia Boar gave a long wanton sigh, and Mrs. Vouvoulis made poor Dinario Maravedis, the son of the barber, stand in front of the class and recite the declension of
oppidum
at the top of his lungs.

As if anticipating great changes he tried in still feeble ways to precipitate their occurrence. His experience and reading suggested that disease and sickness were weighty and majestic phenomena which imparted great wisdom. He tried therefore to catch impressive diseases. Once, he took off his clothes and stood in the snow for half an hour. He went to the filthiest restaurants in search of typhoid and botulism. He rode the train to New York to nap in garbage cans. He went to Times Square in search of syphilis but could not find her. He volunteered for medical experiments at more than a few hospitals but was too young. No matter what he did, he remained uninfected.

He dreamed of a time when the confusion and fear of adolescence would vanish in deference to understanding, excitement, and the flow of events. He thought that it would be like a mist lifting to show a sparkling city, or green mountains where every leaf on every tree was visible. He turned from searching out disease to the railroad and the river, where he could be close to danger and, by surviving, experience the changes which he thought might help to give him an adults power and compassion.

Running along the railroad tracks which separated Eagle Bay from the river was a swamp of reeds and cattails through which muskrats, snakes, and spiders ran and burrowed in loam and mud. To gain wisdom, Marshall crawled on his belly through this swamp for about a mile and a half. He went in a straight line, crashing within the reed banks, where he frequently surprised quiescent muskrats and sunning snakes. When he came upon dead insects he ate them. After several hours he emerged entirely covered with stinking mud, gashes, cuts, puncture wounds, stings, and slime. His left eye was swollen, and his muscles were sore. Mrs. Livingston repressed her horror and asked where he had been.

“Just hanging around the village,” replied Marshall.

In winter he rode ice floes on the river, teaching himself gradually in the shallows their characteristics and capabilities. Eventually, he was able to hop from one to another, in blue water. His only tool in this was a long pole with a spike at the end, which he used to maneuver and to secure his stance and, when the water was shallow, to push himself back to the beach. Knowing the currents (after heart-pounding experimentation in which he was often convinced that he would be carried down the January river out to sea), he rode the ice sometimes a mile into the bay, but was always swept back to shore. The danger was that currents and winds would vary, and that his chunk of ice would break up beneath him. But he had a good feel for piloting and traveled many numbing miles on those white rafts, never even wetting his foot.

Sometimes the river froze all the way to the channel, where icebreakers kept it open. Above windblown river ice covered with crescents of snow were clouds of rushing powder like the atmosphere of Venus, howling past the hard mirror below at the behest of Canadian winds which scourged the valley. Once he stood alone in the middle of the frozen plain and looked shoreward. It was not the same as being in a boat, for then he was constantly busy with shrouds and tiller, and here he simply stood, legs planted in the rushing polar vapor, looking at his home on the hill and the woods he knew so well. Downriver, a moving line of confetti appeared, winding along the bank. It was a long freight, at a distance like a dragon of Chinese New Year—scaled and colorful, jointed, and yet smoothly traveling. Entrapped in a frozen moment of white and ice he saw the train come between him and Eagle Bay. He heard the rumbling, and felt the ice quiver and snap in response, as if a high-tension cable had parted. The cars were brightly lit by the sun, which had come low down and unexpected through a bank of lateral gray clouds, robbing it of its silver. It was cold and thunderous. The ice quaked. He wanted, like most of those his age, to leave. To his shock and surprise, he
did.

Livingston was a little mad, as restless himself as an adolescent, and quite rich. He hated winter, for when he had returned from Arizona he had fallen through the ice on a lake in a Newark park, and remained up to his neck in the freezing waters until a brave, bearded policeman had pulled him out. One day Livingston told Marshall that he would not be going to school for a while.

“For how long a while?” asked Marshall.

“For a year or two,” said Livingston.

They closed up the house, lent out the horses and dogs, had a last dinner in the cold North (the dinner consisted of roast chicken, potatoes, watercress salad, champagne, and chocolate mousse), called up a few goodbyes, slept fitfully, and then one silent winter morning left for several years in the British West Indies.

T
HE NEW
British jet quickly rose to 40,000 feet. Livingston suggested that they anesthetize themselves over the Atlantic and then, when the magnesium-white plane reached the Caribbean, wake up with steaming pots of tea. An informal vote was taken from Marshall at the window to Mrs. Livingston on the aisle, and a steward brought a tray upon which were nine glasses of champagne—four for Livingston, three for Mrs. Livingston (who did not protest), and two for Marshall. These were regular-sized wine glasses, not the disc types, and before long Marshall was enjoying the monotony of the engine's roar, content to sit still for several hours as the plane traversed a gray Adantic—threatening in winter even to those high above it. Comfortable and warm, Marshall remembered the other time he had partaken of the drink.

A year before in early summer Marshall had been stalking in the reeds near the New York Central tracks. It was hot and humid. He wore khaki shorts and shirt, and carried a .30–06 rifle, with which he had to be especially careful because of its range. Making his way eye level with the soft cattails, he froze. Like an animal, he could hold for a long time in absolute stillness if for any reason he sensed a threat. Most of the time the perception came unawares. Perhaps he had heard or smelled it, but he knew somehow that sharing with him the hot and cushiony swamp was another creature of large size. He waited, and then after a while he heard it creeping through the rushes.

It got closer and closer, moving slowly and cautiously. When Marshall could see only that it was chocolate-colored or black, with sections which glittered and sections which were white, it halted behind the beige reeds. It then appeared to roll itself up into a ball and, in this posture, it advanced slowly toward Marshall, who had leveled his gun thinking that perhaps he faced a giant muskrat. As it closed he saw that it was not a muskrat. It was clothed in brown gabardine. Coming toward him were a man's backside and two legs. Not able to grasp the meaning of such a monster, he informed it to halt or be shot, at which an upside-down, snow-white, gold-spectacled, toothless head appeared between the legs and said, “Don't shoot. I'm ninety-eight years old.”

Marshall put down his rifle in embarrassment and the old man, who had been dragging a heavy burlap sack through the swamp, straightened up and threw it over his shoulder. Even though the sack seemed to weigh more than he did, he carried it quite easily. Sticking out his hand, and with a thin but lively smile, he announced himself: “Triggers is the name,” he said.

They walked together from the swamp onto the tracks. The old man was the father of L. H. Triggers. It seemed strange to Marshall that the detective had a living father so thin and so unbelligerent. Triggers pranced on the steel rail, a remarkable feat of balance at the speed he traveled, while Marshall tried to keep up the dizzying pace on the ties. “I got to move along,” said Triggers, “got to move my behind before the day is done. Every night I like to get home early to my new wife. I just got married fifteen years ago. But damn, I said, I'd rather be dead than not be able to satisfy a woman twenty years younger than me. Boy, do you know what it is to satisfy a seventy-eight-year-old woman? Damn near kill a man of my age, that is most men of my age,” he winked, “except for me. I was in the Civil War. I was a drum.”