Women and Men (238 page)

If he could help, would she call on him? She said she thought she knew where the Prince would go. She sounded different, as if telling some story.

In the street again, the Hermit found the Indian waiting for him, as if
he
had been following the
Hermit.
"Was she carrying her child with her when you saw her?" asked the Indian. The Hermit could not find the answer. "Is the child dead?" asked the Indian. The Hermit looked at the young Indian’s hands and then his face. "I know where she will be," said the Indian, and turned away.

Suddenly the Hermit said, "She will go to the Statue."

"Why do you say that?" said the Indian, but did not wait to be answered.

He had waited long enough.

Boxed in and watched by even the future she felt; hating all of us in her, but calm and so determined—she felt him in her very eyes, how she saw maple trees here in Windrow that he in fact had never seen, how she saw faces she had told him of; and she loved him and was sick of him and could have killed him if he would kill her. And wanted no bad thing to happen to Alexander, who had waited a long time for her but because he had chosen to, and who was so kind she had kissed him once on the mouth, and it was different and friendly, and there was a slight smell of tobacco and she wondered if Alexander had had any experience. He told her the family place in the cemetery looked good as new and she smiled at the phrase and lived a horror of it fixed somewhere beneath the skin of her smile, which Alexander told her sweetly was the light of his life.

Why did you go down to that woman’s apartment and buzz and walk right away before she had a chance to come to the door? I mean, did you know she wasn’t home? I mean Grace Kimball.

I heard people in there, and I knew I didn’t want to ask her anything after all.

About that old lady and the meteorologist you—

Yeah. That’s ended. It’s repetitious.

Isn’t that what your friend Ted said history was?

Like cancer cells. Like memory cells.

But
why
is history repetitious?

Take the Middle East.

It’s a hot potato, Jimmy.

Ted said he was pretty sure he would die before the world did. But he had an idea how
it
would end.

So your dream decided you about us. And that’s getting
back
to the subject.

So he walked miles and inspected the City from farmyards down to the Battery which had been a place of guns once. And he took a boat and thought the Statue threatening the more he looked. He could not stop the boat taking him to the island. He could not stay on the boat when it docked. He did not go in the Statue. He watched from a grassy lawn, with the harbor breeze turning him ever and anon to look at the great cluster of buildings on the Manhattan Island far off.

He knew he would go inside the body of the Statue which was made of metal and he smelled its cold, dead smell where he sat upon a stone walk, but he did not know when he would go on in, because the afternoon was getting on, and he knew the time would come when he would know what to do.

He was half-hidden from the Statue behind a large piece of stone that had been shaped; so he did not see from the harbor side a new boat approaching until it passed, and then he watched it dock, and his eyes hurt but he saw Margaret’s face shadowed by a large straw hat, was he asleep?, and she had on a long white dress, and when she got off the boat and the sun brought the wind on she was with another woman. He thought he had been asleep, so cold had the afternoon become. She looked around her and spoke to a lady who was not with her, and went with a group round out of sight, and the Prince thought he had been asleep and dreaming, because he had known she would come and that that would be the moment to go into the Statue. He looked keenly toward the group, who were far away from him, but she was not with a man, there was no young man with her.

Why would one nation receive such a giant carving from another nation? What could America give back? Would not the New York white people always be in debt to the nation that gave this Statue? He had thought about how he would go inside when he went. He had seen where he would track his way, the people he would have to pass.

He did not want to go in, but if he waited until she came out, he would have missed a chance he did not understand but must not miss.

In the Statue he waited below. He climbed some stairs and went deep inside. In the Statue he was far below, and he did not like the metal stairs. He heard the clatter of steps and the echoes of chatter, of women and of men. Of laughter. Of silent upstairs stepping. Or were they coming downstairs too? He wanted to give her a present, but he had nothing. He wanted to know if there was a child. He listened for an engine; there must be an engine in this Statue. He wanted to go outside to see what he was in again. He thought a woman might turn into many things here. As if here, far east of where he came from, it was later time. A woman’s laughter hooted up and down the tower, but her laugh was like a Navajo woman’s sometimes, surprised and unrelenting.

He did not wish to hurt her. If he knew she would stay here, he would go to Maine to see the Anasazi before the cloud dispersed, but meanwhile he pictured how the dollop of noctilucent cloud which was also the Anasazi might move in his own blood and flesh. The Statue here inside was not like that dream of hers that the Hermit had told. It was not blue and yellow boulders gathering their caves together. It was more like his own dream of being invisible that the Iroquois healer had called a wish to best his father. Inside the Statue were cold steps and walled-in tower, a cave like an engine. No one knew enough of what was happening to keep silent. The voices hung downward toward him. He started up. He was strong. He saw he was sad in this damp shadowy space. He put his hand around the bison flesh and wondered if it did have a secret after all. He forgot where he was going and remembered. He was sad not to have Margaret any more. What was sad? Maybe it was just the buzz in the ears and that he could not move and was chilled and removed so he could not hear his thoughts living. He had come into the Statue but a new thing had come into him. He met shiny shoes and shrill voices coming down. He heard himself identified as Indian. His climb reached a small side place where he could sit down; and he waited, looking neither upward nor downward, and people passed and he did not look at them. He wasn’t going to the top; he did not care to be in the head of the Statue. He would see the top when he got outside. He heard Margaret’s voice and stood up as it swung closer. He thought of the second dream he had taken to the Iroquois, and instantly forgot it. He sat down again and the holy man’s old straw hat slipped over his forehead and he wanted to sleep but could not, and he smelled Margaret’s body and some flower on it.

And remembered the flower from the beginning but not from later, as if it had gone out of season while she stayed with him and his people but now she had it with her again. And he felt light come down the stairs to him but closed his eyes and wished he had a brother near and remembered clearly when he had had his body inside Margaret’s, her knees hugging, and her fingertips pressing, and her life needing whatever he had to give, and she had said, "The sky and all the stars, the sky and all the stars."

And he slumped on the bench, his gift hat down half over his face, and he felt his held breath whine like an engine in his chest where
she
still lived like a naked soul that is now more than one person.

Their skirts rustled, he glimpsed their shoes, a mist came across his eyes from within him and he held within him the soul in his chest and thought he would die of the engine in his ears. The woman she was with said, "He’s an Indian, see his hair." Margaret, invisible except her shoes and ankles through the mist of his narrowed eyelids, paused, and with some minor sound agreed, and when her friend said, "Seeing the sights, I guess," as they passed on down the steps, Margaret said, "Probably sees more than we did right there on that bench." Her companion laughed and said she didn’t see what she meant.

He felt for the pistol in his bag and with his other hand he gripped the greasy and dry cut of bison meat and he pulled it from his overall pocket and put it there on the bench. When he got to his feet and straightened his hat, he knew that what was bursting inside him was her heart as well as his, and he knew that she had recognized him as she passed.

Then he fainted.

And so your dream decided you about us? we already can foresee Jean continuing—very slightly bothering her mid-forties beloved.

I would be a fairly old father but a humorous one.

And you already have children, though where this son of yours fits in I "haven’t the slightest," as my mother used to say. I think you’re a romantic about marriage but who would ever guess it?

Ted said that.

Ted said how the world would end, I seem to remember.

Yes, with a digression.

But what in the dream persuaded you?

The humor of nothing but life.

Amy thought the dream was great.

A female colleague of mine thought we might see a family therapist.

Suppose we make it up as we go along.

Far out.

The Hermit’s second call came as Alexander entered the printing office and Margaret’s lately somewhat shaggy-haired gray-bearded father was at the back with the pressman and Alexander strode to answer.

What will Flick say?

She’s Sarah now. I think she is getting into family history, what there is of it. She’s welcome.

But Spence the other night—he was coming across the cemetery like what he had to ask was . . .

You’re right; it was scary. I thought he had gone nuts. Which is better than what my opinion of him
had
been.

Alexander hung up the phone and asked his future father-in-law if he had seen Margaret and ascertained only that she had discussed her future with her father who had found it, as always, enlightening; her father had hoped she would go on writing for the
Democrat
when she got settled. They had reviewed several topics and one she had particularly cottoned to was revisiting the Statue of Liberty, having never visited the fully
assembled
"monster." Alexander observed that of course he and his cousin had paid a visit to the Statue last autumn when Margaret was still in the West. His future father-in-law observed that the spiral stairs had made him dizzy. Going up or coming down? asked the future son-in-law. Both, I think, was the answer. The men chuckled. Alexander said he must find out where Margaret had gone.

Her father said that it was interesting what she had said about Indian language having a word for water in a pitcher for drinking and a word for water in rivers, harbors, lakes, and so forth, but not a bunch of words to distinguish
among
those various bodies of water as we do.

Alexander politely rejoined that he believed the word for "geyser" was the same as the word for "waterfall." He had to go, he said, and bade his future father-in-law goodbye.

"The Hermit-Inventor—
he
said that," said Mayn loudly as the first dark figure moved toward him among the gravestones. "If you can describe something, you must take responsibility for it. My grandmother must have told me."

Jean was calling to him, she was horribly upset—what had he meant by leaving like that after some aria of Gertrude’s?, she kept waiting for him to come back, she thought he was sick, and then the dumb show aborted and before anybody could leave the police came in to ask questions because that Chilean de Talca had disappeared and there was blood and one of his handmade English shoes lying on its side in the theater vestibule if you call that a theater, and it was being said that de Talca had either murdered someone or had been murdered, the flurry had begun about ten minutes or so after the end of the show when no one was sure it
had
ended, and she had looked outside and couldn’tymd him, and from what Spence had said—she was crying somewhat tensely, not sadly—she had guessed from what that Spence had said that Jim had returned here of all places, she was crying excitedly and he held her so close she grunted into humor and ran her hand over his grass-and-gravestone-clammy back, and he said he had been intensely tired and had lain down and dropped off and had had an incredible dream and he was sorry he had put her through this, and she said As long as he was sorry, while he half-wondered how she had obtained a car to drive the fifty miles.

But three other figures were making their way across the turf and gravel of Maplewood Cemetery, and it was God knows two in the morning almost.

We already remember his dream, since, thinking to find being in it, we had encouraged trace matter to beam it up to him where he lay hoping to window what would come, until, like queer turns of coast weather, we found we had
been
the trace but knew this only after we had passed from it to being its effects so much less bodied we hardly recalled tracehood except the glow so red-orange in the cold, cold ground it might have been a heart.

He was coming across the Windrow burial ground, he knew he had come as fast as the wind and he had not actually passed all the places between the Statue and here. He could see himself by the misty force of a Moon that was turned mostly to another world and gave this one tonight only its doubts. He kneaded the vermilion clay in his pocket. Her ancestors lay here and he knew the place was by a field on the far side with a short hedge on the field side and two maple trees on either side of the family stone, with small stone markers also here. And so he found the place and smelled the recent turn of earth against iron and found this trace of digging a few feet apart from a stone whose name his fingertips and eyes read to be that of Margaret’s mother who had taken to her early-hastened grave secrets in letters known to have come to her—confiding in her—from a great man in Washington who "lost nothing save honor," Margaret once said, when he sold railroad bonds to friends in Maine, where even now the Anasazi healer might have arrived and found what he had voyaged the continent to see. The pistol was as warm in his other pocket as the lost bison cells had been precious. He wanted to be with the Anasazi seeking those small famed foam volcanoes that form below waterfalls when it has warmed up and then gets cold again, towers like buildings, though two or three feet tall only. The Hermit-Inventor had doubted such existed, but the Prince had wondered if the Anasazi needed to go so far to find them. He heard pressures upon the ground at a distance and knew the dead do not walk and he crouched to the place that had been dug, and his hands felt the shape of his child there in the New Jersey soil. He felt the pistol again and remembered the Anasazi saying he would give it to the right person when the time came if he had patience. The pistol was outside him and he outside it; but long time had entered him, he knew his people were thinking of him as best they could, and he recalled what Margaret had liked best in him, his way of thinking about objects they would contemplate together and after a long time he would say what they made him feel. But there was a thing in him she had said she did not like, and she scarcely told him what it was, it didn’t matter because she loved him, yet it
would
matter. He saw the figure nearer, and felt the steps in his very fingers, and it was not Margaret coming across the burial ground but a person he knew as well as the thousands-of-years-past people he had seen join into one, descending from the north straits toward better country. But the long time that had entered the Prince was now new, it was not back in time but forward but as if not so far ahead in time from that old Bering Strait crossing that it passed beyond this moment: as if nothing strange should happen to him.