Winter Count (2 page)

By the time I arrived the next morning the first visitors had already been through. Seraut was at work in shirt sleeves. Not wishing to disturb him, I began to read the titles of books on the shelves, examining a few at random as I went along. One I pulled down, on the classification of European butterflies, was interspersed with thin sheets of paper on which were written notes in French—I assumed in René de Crenir’s hand—about Hermes, Atalanta, and others from Greek mythology. Similar notes in other books referred to the Eddas, the
Bhagavad-Gita.
Those books not concerned with natural history bore mostly on religion, philosophy, and Catholic theology.

Underneath a pair of tall casement windows there was an empty table. With an enquiring nod to Seraut, who looked up expressionless from what he was doing, I laid out several volumes and began to make notes of my own. I worked through a long morning, looking away occasionally only to study the older man. His fingers were crooked slightly with arthritis but moved deliberately and adroitly over his materials. In the bright sunlight slanting into the high-ceilinged room the thin skin of his forearms appeared glassine. He seemed, even in this library, an anachronism.

From what I could discover, de Crenir was an anti-rationalist, at odds with the Age of Reason, a champion of Montaigne. Once or twice I engaged Seraut in conversation, briefly sharing my ideas and enthusiasm. He directed me to other volumes; though he was taken up with its restoration, his interest in the contents of the collection seemed as intent. From these titles, their chapters and marginal notes, I gleaned that de Crenir believed a cultural and philosophic bias had prevented nineteenth-century European naturalists from comprehending much of the plant and animal life they saw in North America. The resulting confusion, he believed, had kept them in ignorance of something even more profound: de Crenir had written in the margin of Maximilian’s
Reise in das innere Nord-Amerika,
“Ici les bêtes sont les propriétaires”—in North America the indigenous philosophy grew out of the lives of animals.

De Crenir was largely correct—as subsequent work by anthropologists made clear. What was so startling was that in the whole of his library there were only eight or ten books that bore in any way at all on native American philosophy, only such things as the works of James Hall. De Crenir had apparently reached these conclusions alone.

From here, I did not know where to go. If de Crenir thought animals the owners of the landscape, or even, in theological terms, equal with men, whom might he have spoken with about it? Whom had he written?

Mr. Seraut and I had a late lunch together by one of the large windows. He seemed pleased by my findings. I said, out of a rush of ideas, that I might work on here for several days if that was all right and then possibly contact a friend who spoke excellent French. He showed me a book he had just taken out of the press. When I hesitated to hold it because of its beauty, he urged me to take it, to listen to the rattle of its pages, to examine the retooling. When he took the book back he said he preferred the older traditions. Where gold tooling was now restored with the aid of shellacs, he still used egg whites and vinegar, as had been done for four hundred years. His glues were still made from wheat flour. They would outlast the paper in some of the books.

I asked him over our sandwiches if he had ever read any of Montaigne. Oh yes. Once, in Leningrad, he had restored a bound collection of Montaigne’s letters. He had read Montaigne’s misgivings about his work in his own hand. He spoke in a genial way, as though misgivings were a part of everything.

Out the window we could see several miles across the rolling brown hills. In a draw below the house there suddenly appeared six antelope, frozen so still they seemed to shimmer in the dry grass. I saw sunlight glinting on the surface of their huge eyes, their hearts beating against soft, cream-white throats, the slender legs. Surprised by the house, or by us in the window, they were as suddenly gone. At the end of the room, beyond a blue velvet rope strung between polished brass stanchions, a line of tourists passed. They stared at us and then looked away nervously into the shelves of books. A girl in yellow shorts was eating ice cream. In a shaft of window light I could see the wheat paste dried to granules under Seraut’s fingernails and the excessive neatness of my own notes, the black ink like a skittering of shore birds over the white sheets.

H
E KNEW THAT THE
azure blue skies above New York in October, the unassailable purity of the color, could release tears in him if he watched long enough. Seated on black marble, its darkness cool under his palms, the stone itself racketed as he looked deeper with ganglia of white neurons, he imagined he stood alone farther north, as in a Sung painting; stood beneath black skies with the white heartbeat of stars overhead and that rip tide of light, that Tai-chi extension of otherly grace, the northern lights.

“I have no idea,” he had told her once, “why I long to be in that landscape, but I do. Maybe it is only being alone, infinitesimal. I can look at a whimbrel, the long-legged, hesitating movement, as if the bird were waiting for thoughts to enter its mind, and understand why in that vast tundra it chooses as it does precisely one lonely place to sit.”

She had smiled at him. She knew he was right. She had never heard of a whimbrel.

In the faces that moved past him now, over the purling of footsteps, he saw distortion, greed, subterfuge—predatory expressions; but more often he saw veiled faces, passing quick as sparrows or deer, unrevealed. In eyes, gray and brown and green, whose averting he caused with his staring, he felt affability just out of reach. He did not think there was more distrust here than on the streets of other cities, as he had always heard. More tension, perhaps. He regarded his shadow breaking up in the clothing of passersby, the sun coming over his shoulder down the long corridor of a crosstown street. Then the fandango of bright skirts and trousers parted, like a sudden upwelling of wood ducks, and the shadow of him rung on the sidewalk like the gnomen of a sundial.

He had asked her to go north with him in June, when the light would hang over the land in unending compassion, when evenings were cool, before the mosquitoes came—at one in the morning the sky would still be too bright to hold stars; and she had arrived at the airport, the tiny airport, on a flight from Denver, and they had driven out to his aunt’s ranch to stay the week before going up.

“And what do you do when you are not dancing?” his aunt had asked.

“I think about dancing!” she burst out, as if for the first time in years she could speak without fear of repercussion. “I think of dances, my head is full of dances!” Then she brought her napkin to her lips, slightly embarrassed.

He smiled into his plate, contorted inside with his own ebullience, and said nothing.

They had made love that afternoon beneath cottonwoods, whose leaves swirled and roared in the wind above them, and later, as if the day had detached itself and them from the passage of time, they watched a flight of cranes lumbering over the short grasses into the distant gray-blue skies of Canada.

She did not go with him. It frightened her too much, she said, this unending sky. (He remembered the first time he had seen her dance at the Metropolitan Opera House, the arch of the proscenium so high that no movement onstage could carry the eye to it.) And she said almost whispering that she was afraid she would find nothing to hold her mind, that she was different from him. He watched her out of a powerful singularity from the center of the bedroom, and then he flowed again so he seemed as she always remembered him, generous and surrounded by a haunting reverence.

They rode in the hills around the ranch for three days. He thought of the elk he had killed the year before, wrapped carefully in brown butcher paper in the freezer; he couldn’t trust the relationship that far, he thought. He filled her hair with Indian paintbrush and told her that when he was a boy he had ridden a Galapagos tortoise at the San Diego Zoo, that years later it had occurred to him the tortoise could have been more than a hundred and twenty, could have seen the
Beagle
at anchor, watched cow-eyed as Darwin approached over the rocky shore. The only way to have told how old it was would have been to kill it.

The sunlight seemed to tighten his jacket across his shoulders. They rode across the hayfields and she could not stand the thought of leaving, or staying on without making a change that eluded her.

He had gone with her mother once to lunch at a French restaurant in the east eighties. The graciousness of everyone there, that there were only four tables, and the thick linen napkin and the simple food pleased him. Her mother was very fond of him. His education, his teaching, his ingenuous inquisitiveness all undermined her fear that he was without ambition, that he might inherit a ranch in Montana and never leave it. She realized as she watched him, as he unraveled a story she was not listening to, that she loved him because there was nothing in him that awakened memories of her husband. Other men had done that. It was like the sound of mice running across a hardwood floor in the middle of the night.

He looked up at the green glass and aluminum wall that rose sheer for two hundred feet above the words
BANK OF JAPAN
, fading sunlight rattling weakly on the aluminum, the green like a river, impenetrable as jade. His father was a breaker of horses, who had died of cancer from smoking, a kind of stupidity that made him sit suddenly erect and turn away from the building and look at the people again. He wished to touch their clothing with the tips of his fingers—burnished silk, coarse tweed, ribbed wool; burgundy, gray-brown, deep blue. Pass your hands over winter wheat heading up, lay them flat against the rough bark of an ash tree. The night his father had died he had broken his right hand punching a board in the dark barn where only baled hay should have been.

He’d gotten lost like this before, he thought. The memory of his father was like a ground fog that would not quit him. He looked down the dimming avenue to the Helmsley Building, to the baroque announcement, the distant, resolute, autocratic hands: 6:15. He had told her six.

They had gone to a party once, after a performance of
Les Sylphides.
He had met a man there, a choreographer who had studied with Balanchine, who wore half-glasses over which he stared as if in anticipation of directions. He asked the man, had he ever seen sandhill cranes dance? No, why would one? He tried to explain with hands and arms and head, a contained display, how it worked. The man asked, what other birds do this? “Grebes. I have a friend who is filming the mating of grebes, then he will choreograph the movement for friends, a company.” Remarkable. He could find no entry with him and wanted to get away quickly. He told him about fishing for cutthroat trout in the headwaters of the Yellowstone, and hated himself for having given grebes to the man.

The hum and click of electric switches in a drab traffic box on the corner carried eerily over the sounds of cars, as if there were strata of sound, some of which had evaporated and left silence, and others that did not penetrate each other. He studied the land sloping away to the west toward the Hudson River, and to the south and it seemed relinquished, covered over with buildings. He wondered what creeks once slipped here, what pines had sighed on such fall evenings. He thought of lines from somewhere in the journals of Kosai, traveling among the Ainu, the very same colors of this image before him, severely muted greens, silver of moonlit water beneath white high clouds; but Kosai’s haiku was lost to him in a way he found frightening.

Once, the same summer they were going to go to the Romanzof Mountains and camp in the ethereal light among nesting plovers and horned larks, watch caribou calve and rough-legged hawks hover in the wind, he had taken her to an island in the Sagebow River. The first night he had ever slept out alone had been on this island. That day she stood at the river’s edge with her arms folded across her bare chest looking down the river with a chin line hard enough for that country. She had tied a flicker’s feathers in her hair.

The marble had lost its warmth. He stood up and aligned his boots carefully with the sidewalk’s hatching. Even in this city you could tell, he thought: frozen creeks, snow, gray mornings—strands of all that were in the wind. You would know putting your face into it, remembering as well as a harvest mouse, perhaps even salmon.

One winter evening in New York he had had dinner with a classmate from Amherst, on 56th Street. When they emerged it was to find it had been snowing. They were dressed for it. They were full of food and wine and did not care to get away anywhere. They stood on the corner of 54th and Park and talked. The falling snow obliterated their footprints and left them standing in a field of white illuminated by a street lamp before the friend finally caught a cab uptown. He watched the cab until it was only red taillights. He did not want to hurry away. In the chilled air and falling snow was some universal forgiveness and he did not want to disturb it. He stepped slowly off the curb, headed south.