The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride (12 page)

And now—the mate. We haven’t talked much of him or seen his side, though we will. Perhaps we had better do it now; that way we will at least know more about him than he did himself. As the intenser emotions go, the mate certainly wasn’t a late starter, but he wasn’t hard about them either; he was sudden. To judge him correctly, as he went at a woman with his bull forelock, this ought to be said. Jim was a more practical man; he let himself dream of love. But the mate was romantic, he wanted a wife. That is, now that a house and lot had come his way, or almost, he wanted children to staff it, and that’s one way to do it. He was always on the hunt for reality. Of course, he thought of all this as practical. But if you’re going to be hunting reality instead of submitting to it, it’s best to be sure you’re hunting all of it. What the mate actually wanted was to find himself at the prime of life a self-made man, and everything tidy. In Lancashire, as a blackish boy called “our Jim,” he’d seen this kind of life or thought he had, as far above him as the bit of blue sky to be climbed toward from the bottom of the mine. In France he thought he’d glimpsed it too, pointing it out to Jim in farm after farm of the kilometered farmland, every last tended inch of it cantilevering slowly toward heaven—until laid waste. In America, he said, once a boy had arrived here, it was no longer necessary to look upward, only to wait to be of an age to work and to root as prescribed. For this country, now that it had untangled itself from its own notions of Hiawatha, was already up in that fine blue, with almost everybody here. He’d pointed
them
out to Jim also—the tidy possibles all around them—a whole hemisphere of the self-made. Jim, floating his own watery pastures, had nodded, unable to communicate more than a tinge of his transportational feelings, of all the crowds of barges and liveries going down, derry-down, one after the other, ever since the first ape got down off the first limb of time.

“Down?”
said the mate, his eyes staring ahead even of his hair. “Not in our time. What else can you expect of course, if you get mixed up with horses? Or sail.” He knew barges didn’t sail in that sense of course, though it was a question whether he knew that earlier in their history he would have had a point about the horses which had pulled them; he was speaking generally, or so he supposed. “Not in our time,” he repeated. “Not the way the wheel is going now.”

They were just finishing off half a lemon meringue pie bought at the local Sand Spring bakery, and it was awful stuff; back there so early in the century it wasn’t all good homestyle cooking, though at that period only a bachelor might know it. With his fork, he scraped absently at the hard pie-shell left on his plate, a sign of how bad it was, that even this lightning-careless eater had balked.

“Ought to be another bakery here,” he muttered; this was early in their housekeeping together; after that, for dessert they ate fruit.
“Down?
” he said again, at the same time digging the flat of his fork so hard into the crust that the tines clanked on the plate and the gray, floured bits flew. He was always a violent-moving man, everywhere except in his work which was so delicate; well, you know him, you know. Then, as if he knew this, catching himself about to slap Jim on the shoulder, he carefully rested his hand there instead. “Not this kind of wheel, not in a hundred years, Jim. Why—” He smiled slowly enough, his eyes blind on that horned hair of his forever probing forward. “And the first hundred years is the hardest. “Why—” And then he had to slap Jim after all, his hand coming down even harder than first intended, so that even brawny Jim had to cry, “Whoa.”

But the mate’s cry outshouted him. “Wheels?” he cried. “Why, son-of-a-gun; they’ll be
our
ladder!”

So this was the mate, who was at the time, as you know, a surveyor. Already he had measured half of New York State with the aid of his old Gunter chain, and day after day was increasing his score; how should he know that this land-knowledge of his, pendulum-tied to the ground though it was, was still not necessarily of the earth earthy? So, this was the man who, when the most important kiss of his life, the wedding-kiss, still tasted deeper of fritter than mouth, didn’t think one thing more about it. And this was the man who, standing in a parlor not the minister’s and with sponsors not really kin to the bride, but with enough of the proper feather-hats tremoring and already so willingly remembering, and the bride like a rose in her rose satin since it wasn’t a formal wedding, the pointed bodice of her as small at the waist as anything in Sears—this was the man who immediately after that lass could shout out (with what the hats and even some of the watch chains could only take for heartiness since otherwise what else would they make of it?)—this man could shout out,
“I can see my
GRANDCHILDREN
now!
”

But let’s wait a bit on a wedding which—and you might guess why, if you didn’t already know it—concerned more than the mate. Let us get back to that time, past spring, on into the hottest summer, and after countless trips, sailing trips one could just as soon call them, to Oriskany—when the mate looked up from his stewed peaches to say, “What’s about this Lottie, you once said.”

He saw that Jim began to tremble. “Why,
Jim,
” he said. Around the house they always named each other quite naturally, not having any trouble knowing who was who. When out of the mate’s presence, Jim always called him “my mate”—not having to identify either the mate or himself to others being one of the virtues of Sand Spring. Whereas out of Jim’s company, the mate, as if to emphasize that Jim belonged in the town more than Jim himself dared imagine, or as if referring to his friend’s two years of higher education, or perhaps merely to qualities of character or reflection which gave him precedence, always called him by name—Jim. On the rarest occasions, as in the case of bankers but not waitresses, the mate would mumble out his own last name, then Jim’s very much more clearly. There too, as in all their later walks of life, though he might tease Jim for his style of reflection (the while his own style of impulse never gave him time to ask for advice much less take it) the mate always gave Jim a tender, courtly distinction—the way one might treat a man wiser than oneself, even stronger, whose head, though ready and hard enough for any fight which came at him, was, nevertheless, compared to the speaker’s, short on horn.

“Why, Jim—” said the mate slowly, “I wouldn’t want to cross you up in any—” Nor would he. On their nights out together he didn’t ever. He didn’t have enough vanity for it—though more vanity would have changed his life, if not saved it; nobody gets saved. It wasn’t that he didn’t see people; he saw all his targets well enough, from old Skinflint, to the land he wanted the way a woman wants velvet, to the women too. As he once told Jim, he saw them all sky-blue upward, that was the trouble, as if he was still down there looking up to where they were all crowded waiting for him up there in the clear, hard azure of that hole. What he never saw, not at the time, was the sight of himself going at them. He does now though; he’s been seen to start out, then stop himself, many a time. And it helps him of course to know, as Jim knew way earlier, that though some nip and tuck is worse than others, nobody gets saved.

For right then, what shook Jim was another one of those glances at the future, which is all that philosophy ever is, isn’t it? “What’s about this Lottie,” the mate had said. Jim coughed, to clear his voice. “I said ‘Lottie and Emily,’ didn’t I?” he asked. “Surely I said ‘Emily’ too?”

The mate regarded him. Jim was never a target to him; maybe that’s why the mate sometimes looked at him as if safety was there.

Jim saw that too—as the mate could always be sure of—but just now Jim himself was wondering. Had there been anything special in the way he’d said it, months ago? Or had it been in the way the mate had heard it—in which case, had it been with a hearkening toward something in Jim’s manner or something strictly private to the mate? “Surely I said ‘Emily’ too,” Jim said. “Didn’t you hear it?”

Still the mate didn’t quite answer. After a pause, he said, “Are we ever going out there, sometime?”

Whether they would or not, wasn’t what had given Jim the shivers. It was—that if they did, things had already been settled, or else were being, now. It was—that right now, if the choice hadn’t been settled on already, in secret archives somewhere—the choice was being made.

“Sometime,” he managed to say, even nodding.

The mate nodded slowly back at him. “It was Lottie
I
heard,” he said.

And this is the way things were in that part of the state when the last summer came for its interurban, overhead-track trolley cars. Here several explanations are in order, all of them swimming in the full, sad pleasure which is to be had in the description of any event single enough for its influence to be seen, yet faithful to an old cycle—and gone. We can let the cycle be for the nonce, having already said enough of barges and stables. But there still has to be explained how the main street of a town the size of Sand Spring, a street scarcely big enough for its own traffic light, came to be the terminus of a passenger carrier line which—though it never reached its plotted end a hundred miles away in the town of Batavia—did go along, neat as a parlor car on a leash, for twenty-nine of them, only to end up against a hillside in a gentle meadow as wide as a small lake, in among the rushes brimming the sides of an even smaller stream called the Little Otselica. To explain this will be an easy pleasure, follies of this sort being so familiar to everyone, and so acceptable when committed by the worldly—as this one was. Lastly, we have to speak in detail—some of it loving, but still so that you can see it and maybe even smell it—about the mechanism of that fine old sparkler and grinder, an electric traction trolley car. This won’t be any harder, however, than you will someday find it to talk about your old Thundereagle, or Hawkspit, or whatever it is you call those ruby-throated sports cars.

A Folly, says my dictionary, is a costly structure considered to have shown the builder to have been foolish. Add to this, that to my mind a folly is never really very national in outlook; men have been known to build castles-on-the-Rhine up the Hudson, and along the Colorado a Petit Trianon. Follies like these don’t say much about the spirit of a country. Or much that’s profound. But to my mind, a real, home-grown folly can be very local; I would know one of the upstate New York variety anywhere. On land, that is; what to say about the ones on wheels is still in question. But in any case—whether it’s a castle standing dark against the vegetable green of an impossible mountain, or the friendliest tramline trying to sputter between mile after mile of people’s herbaceous borders—what such a Folly shows is the spirit of the owner, just before that breaks through into humanity, or dies back into it. And humanity meanwhile being what it is, the kind of folly which delights
it
most is the hopeless expenditure of a man very well known not to have gotten his money the soft way, the whole history of his happenstance meanwhile being common knowledge round about home. On all scores, Adelbert Riefel’s folly was of such a kind.

The Riefel house, running to pillars in the front, strange Amsterdam-style peaks in the servants’ quarters behind, and two lions couchant before—and as such merely one of countless minor monuments to the last quarter of the last century—is still to be seen, and still appears to belong to a town larger than Sand Spring. Built on a fine central plot at the beginning of its owner’s prime, always in heyday use in its carriage days, and later cut up into first-class apartments which never went unrented, it took care of him at the end of his prime, or what in some men would be past it, so that, except for what it harbored in its basement, the house itself was never a folly at all. Adelbert himself was the son of a scholarly Swedenborgian farmer—which belief we were taught in those days was part religion, part a sort of science—though that might be contested now. Adelbert, as far as anyone could see in the beginning, took over only the science part; like many another son of scholarly religionists, he went after money. First off, he went after a wife with it; he was a thinskinned redhead with a profile which must have taken on quite a nimbus at the courting hour, and indeed stood him well otherwise, all his life. Her money, it was said, was his stake. And the business he went for was fresh and decent enough: garden seed and related products, arboretums to hog-chows to fertilizers, but the rumor was that he was not benevolent. He was said to have taken advantage of all the financial panics of the eighteen-seventies except the last one, foreclosures sprouting an empire in his pockets. Mrs. Riefel sweetened the scent of their money by acquiring—at first not in the home house but in a conservatory in a rented one on New York’s Fifth Avenue—one of the largest collections in the east of cattleyas, which she told the home garden club later was a
fancy
word for orchids. Then, at about the time of the last panic, though the Riefels were still unquestionably solid rich if no longer fancy, they came home to stay. People always wondered why, in Sand Spring this kind of change not being considered reason enough. Maybe the people Riefel’d grown used to taking advantage of out there had become his enemies—or his friends. He was still a young man, not even forty, younger than his wife. Maybe Swedenborg had bit him in the brain after all. Anyway, he came home.

Although Sand Spring social life wasn’t of any level for them to lord over, give the Riefels credit, they now and then visited the cousins they had in town, and now and then had them formally back. According to them, he was as polite as all get out with them and with everybody, with the staff that served the house (a cook and a man from the “east,” by which the cousins meant eastern New York of course) and with the rest of the neighborhood—he was even polite with his wife. According to these cousins, to whose social advantage if was of course to keep up the legend, anyone could see that formality was ingrained in Adelbert now. He had a library, so-called but also with books in it, in which he spent some time. His shirt collars sat out above his jackets in a way that none of those townsmen could match, even those who bought the best Rochester had to offer, and his cuffs were long. He was used to sitting in on committees and, it was suspected, champagne suppers, and though he didn’t take much of anything himself, kept a small cellar for occasional visitors from the East and sometimes farther, though compared to western New York’s groaning board his company dinners to anybody were very plain—the kind it took this sort of formality to be able to give.