Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (40 page)

I knew, at the very bottom of my heart, that we could not succeed. Of all the fears there are, perhaps the fear of physical pain and destruction is the most devastating. For I had to admit to myself that I was simply, ignobly, and abjectly afraid. I didn't like the taste of my own blood. I didn't want all my teeth knocked out, didn't want my nose smashed, my eyes blinded, didn't want my skull caved in. To drive to town, to walk about, to get through a single day, demanded at least as much energy as would have been demanded for a fifteen-round fight. More: for a fifteen-round fight supposed a winner and a loser, supposed a resolution, and, hence, a release. But there was no release for me, and especially not where it should most certainly have been found, in Barbara's arms, in bed. Fear and love cannot long remain in the same bed together.
And how many nights I lay there, while Barbara slept, filled with an indescribable bewilderment; feeling that all that held me to life was being gnawed away, and feeling myself sink, like a weighted corpse, deeper and deeper in the sea of uncertainty. It's hard, after all, for a boy to find out who he is, or what he wants, if he is always afraid and always acting, and especially when this fear invades his most private life. Barbara and I were marooned, alone with our love, and we were discovering that love was not enough—alone, we were doomed. We had only each other, and this fact menaced our relation to each other. We had no relief, we had no one to talk to—far behind us were the days when we had played at being lovers, and laughed at how easily the world was shocked. We were not playing now, and neither was the world. Even in the pizza joint they now reacted to us nervously, and we stopped going there. Matthew had left town, we never saw Fowler again; I did not go to the Negro part of town anymore. Some of the Workshop kids were nice, but bafflement on their part and pride on mine kept a great distance between us. And the Workshop brass were cold. Apart from Rags and Madeleine, they simply ignored our relationship, ignored it with a condescending charity, treating us as though we had contracted some loathsome disease, which we couldn't help. As for Rags, she once volunteered some motherly advice concerning Barbara's destructiveness, and offered to send me to a psychiatrist. Madeleine was hurt and jealous, tried hard to understand, but couldn't avoid realizing that she had been badly used—and she had been. She did not exactly stop speaking to us, but discovered that she had nothing to say, and, after the fiasco of
To Quito and Back,
returned
to New York. And I was a little sorry to see her go. I liked her, and we had had fun together. And, while I knew that having fun wasn't enough, I resented Barbara a little for having forced my hand so soon.

We started out a little late the day we climbed the mountain, and the sun began going down when we were a little more than halfway up. I was pushing us hard, not only because of the sun, but because I was terribly afraid that people might realize that we intended to spend the night on the mountain and follow us up and kill us. We hadn't driven through town, but had taken the long back road which led to the foot of the mountain. I had parked the car there, off the road, in a clump of trees. No one had seen us, as far as I could tell, except a couple of the ladies in the old ladies' home. This old ladies' home sat in the clearing at the foot of the mountain, and the old ladies sat on the deeply shaded veranda, flashing their silver spectacles and their silver hair. Two of them had watched Barbara and me, as we disappeared up the trail. But everyone else, hopefully, would suppose us to be at home.

In spite of everything, we were very happy in the August sun, toiling up the trail. I'm small, but Barbara's smaller, and I am very strong. I was leading Barbara by the hand. The sleeping bag was on my back, and Barbara had the knapsack.

“Let's stop a minute. It's
hot.
”

“Barbara, there are snakes all over this place. If we stop now, we'll never make it up. Come on, now!”

I was being Spencer Tracy, in
Northwest Passage.

She was just being Barbara, who was afraid of snakes. “Shit,” she murmured, exasperated—but we kept moving
upward, toward the retreating, cooling sun, which had nevertheless set everything around us on fire. Except for our breathing, and the breaking of twigs beneath our feet from time to time, it was very silent. Barbara was a good walker; we moved together like two soldiers. On either side of us, as we climbed, were the green, dark woods, hiding everything, hiding the height, hiding the snakes—there really were snakes—and becoming darker, it seemed, with every instant. The path was very narrow, so narrow that we had to walk single file; and very steep; sweat was pouring down my neck and down my back, seeming to soak into the sleeping bag, and making it heavier. A narrow strip of sky was directly over us, ahead of us was only the path, with sunlight splashing down erratically here and there. The path became steeper and then began to level off, the trees became more sparse, and then more individual—they began to look as though they'd had a hard time growing—and then we saw before us, above us, the gothic shape of the abandoned hotel someone had begun building on this mountain long ago. There were many stories about this hotel. Some mad financier had begun it and then lost all his money; the commune had never built a road. And there the hotel stood, a stone structure as gnarled as the trees, with great holes where windows had been. There was a large courtyard with a stone wall and the memory of a driveway and stone steps leading up to the aperture which had been the front door. This led into a high vault which had been intended as a lobby. In this space were stone steps leading up to the unfinished and unsafe second story, and stone steps leading down into the basement. There was a reception counter, the only detail which caused one to
think of a hotel. There had, apparently, been other fixtures; but everything that could be moved had been carted away long ago. Some of the townspeople were earnestly discussing the possibility of tearing down the building and turning the stones to profit. But their ingenuity had not yet defeated the many practical difficulties this plan entailed.

It did not look hospitable as we approached, with the light now failing fast, and the night sounds beginning. “God,” said Barbara, “wouldn't it be awful if some other people had the same idea as we did—of spending the night here, I mean.”

“Oh, I don't know. I wouldn't mind seeing a friendly face.” And, because I, too, was uneasy, I sang out, “Hello! You got visitors! Is there anybody here?”

My voice echoed and echoed, crashing through the trees, sounding in the valley, and returning to us.

I said, “Nobody here, I guess.” I dropped the sleeping bag in the middle of the courtyard, and Barbara put down the knapsack. I took Barbara's hand. “Come on.” We walked into the lobby. I switched on the flashlight, and there was a scurrying in the darkness. “Rats. I wonder if they've got bats, too.”

“Oh, Leo. You stop that.”

I laughed, and trained the flashlight on the steps leading up. “Let's see what's upstairs.”

Hand in hand, like children in a fairy tale, we started up the steps. We walked close to the wall, for there wasn't any railing—there had been one, of mahogany, but it had been hijacked. At the top of the steps, there stretched before us a high, wide space. I turned the flashlight on the floor, which was wooden. There was a hole in the
floor, to our right. The solid part of the floor was covered with all kinds of debris—old paper bags, paper cups; and facing us was a space in the wall which had been a window; and it gave onto a flagged terrace. We tiptoed across the floor, worried about whether or not it would bear our weight, and stepped onto the terrace.

The mad financier had not been so very mad, after all, for when one stepped onto his terrace, one understood his dream. The terrace faced the valley which dropped before us, straight down to the river. The trees were blue and brown, purple and black. In the daytime, the houses and barns were red and white and green and brown. Now, the sun had turned them all into a color somewhere between gold and scarlet. We stood on the terrace, hearing no sound, and making no sound. The far-off river was as still as a great, polished copper plate.

“If this had been mine,” said Barbara, at last, “I would never have dreamed of making a hotel out of it. I'd have kept it to myself.”

“Perhaps he was lonely,” I said, “and he wanted people to share this with him.”

“It really would have made a marvelous hotel,” said Barbara, after a moment. “He was right about that. Poor man. He must have spent a fortune. I hope he didn't break his heart.”

“I'll go get the whiskey,” I said, “and we can have a drink up here.”

I turned back into the dark house, and went down the steps and across the vault, into the courtyard, and picked up the knapsack. I came back to Barbara, who was sitting on the terrace, with her chin on her knees.

“And what are you thinking, princess?”

“I was thinking—that—it's nice to be here. With you.”

“We're going to make it all right,” I said, and I opened the whiskey and I poured some into two paper cups. I gave one to her and I sat down next to her. We touched cups. We sat and watched the sky and the valley change colors. Slowly, and yet not slowly, the sun entirely left the sky—the streaks of fire and gold vanished. The sky turned mother of pearl and then heavy, heavy silver. In the silver, faint stars gleamed, faint and pale, like wanderers arriving; and the pale moon appeared, like a guide or a schoolmistress, to assign the stars their places. The stars grew bolder as the moon rose, and the sky became blue-black. The trees, the houses, the barns were shapes of darkness now. The valley could not be seen. But, far away, beneath us, the river reflected the moon. They were in communion with each other. Barbara put her head on my shoulder. We had another drink. We looked into each other's eyes, briefly, and moved closer together. We listened to the night sounds, wings beating dimly around us, the electrical whirring of insects, the cry of an owl, the barking of a dog. Lights appeared in the valley, here and there. The lights of a single boat glowed on the river. There were no human sounds at all. We were alone, at peace, on high.

“What shall we do when the summer's over, Leo?”

“Why—we'll go back to the city. What were you thinking of doing?”

“Shall we go back to Paradise Alley?”

“God. I don't know. I've got to get some kind of job—you know.”

“Yes. So must I.”

“I'll probably get a job as a waiter. So I can eat till I get paid.”

“Except that those jobs always take away your appetite.”

“That's true. It's pretty hard to make your living watching the human race eat.”

“Well,” she said carefully, “we ought to be able to work it out all right.”

“Don't worry about it. We'll work it out fine.” Then I kissed her. “Tell me when you're hungry and I'll make a fire.”

“In a little while,” she said, and she leaned against me again.

I don't know what she was seeing as we looked out over the dark valley; but I did not see any future for us; I did not see any future for myself at all. Barbara was young and talented and pretty, and single-minded. There was nothing to prevent her from scaling the heights. Her eminence was but a matter of time. And what could she then do with her sad, dark lover, a boy trapped in the wrong time, the wrong place, and with the wrong ambitions trapped in the wrong skin? If I stood in her way, she would certainly grow to hate me, and quite rightly. But I had no intention of standing in her way. The most subtle and perhaps the most deadly of alienations is that which is produced by the fear of being alienated. Because I was certain that Barbara could not stay with me, I dared not be committed to Barbara. This fear obscured a great many fears, but it obscured, above all, the question of whether or not I wished to be committed to Barbara, or to anyone else, and it hid the question of whether or not I was capable of commitment. But these questions were
hidden from me then, much as the shape of the valley was hidden. I knew that I had to make my way—somehow. No one could help me and I could not call for help. There was no way for me to know if the fear I sometimes felt when with Barbara, a fear which sometimes woke me in the middle of the night, which sometimes made me catch my breath when walking the streets at noon, was a personal fear, produced merely by the convolutions of my own personality, or a public fear, produced by the rage of others. I could not read my symptoms, for I loved her, I knew that, and loved her more than I loved anyone else. We were not always happy, but when I was happy with Barbara I was happier than I had ever been with anyone else. We were at ease with each other, as we were with no one else. And yet, I saw no future for us.

We left the terrace and came downstairs to the courtyard, and I built a fire. Our fire, then, was the only light for miles around. We roasted the yams I had found, and grilled our hamburgers; and we had a small bottle of Chianti. As the night grew darker, we began to feel safer, for no one would attempt that mountain trail at night. Barbara leaned back in my arms, and I sang to her.

“You've got a nice voice,” Barbara said. “You ought to work at it. I bet that's how you'll get your break.”

“It's just an ordinary voice. What do you mean, that's how I'll get my break?”

“It's not an ordinary voice. It's a very haunting voice. If you started singing professionally, you'd attract a lot of attention. Well, look, that's practically the classic way for a Negro to break into the theater. Look at Paul Robeson.”