America America (17 page)

“Cold enough to piss icicles,” came Gil McKinstrey’s barely audible voice.

“Ready tears are a sign of treachery,” Henry Bonwiller called back in his operatic bass. “Not of grief.” He was speaking now as though addressing a crowd, looking left and right while one of the cameramen exploded a last flash from deep in the trees. With his chin the Senator gestured at me cloaked in his elegant jacket, and with his broad hand he pointed at the folded bumper of the car.

“They can also be a sign of cold,” said Liam Metarey, coming down to toss me a blanket from the back of the station wagon. I guess I must have been shivering. I should say that still nothing anybody was saying struck me as funny—it all seemed like some kind of mannered English stage play instead, acted not just by the Senator but by the photographers, too, who continued to laugh heartily as they began to pack up their instruments, and watched by Liam Metarey and Gil McKinstrey and me. I could make no sense of the mood. All I knew was that I wanted to be part of it.

“I’m not blaming you, Gil,” I finally called out, in a voice so loud that to my own ears I sounded drunk. “But you were the one who taught me to drive.”

Henry Bonwiller let out his booming laugh. You can imagine how that felt. And I could hear the photographers chuckling, too. But then my eyes went to Gil himself, standing at the edge of the lantern light in his slouched posture by the door of the car. He merely raised his head a bit and looked at me.

THREE

I
WENT TO COLLEGE
at Haverford, just west of Philadelphia. A month after my eighteenth birthday the draft ended, and in September of 1973 I stepped off the R5 Paoli Local at Haverford Station with Liam Metarey’s bag over my shoulder. By then, the country was already turning away from its anger. Kent State was in the past. SDS had disappeared. Nixon was on the run then, but we were out of Vietnam and the feeling across the country on the day I stepped off the train and made my way across the street to find a taxi to take me to college was that the years of unrest were over. The trees were turning. By the cab stand, a brilliant cardinal was whoop-whooping in the top of an elm.

When I think back on those days, I realize that they were the fulcrum I used to lift myself away from my upbringing; to finally push myself, really, by dint of education, into a social class that I at last belonged to by accomplishment, even if not by wealth. I’m not proud of that and I’m not ashamed of it. It’s just a fact, which with the years behind me I can see. I loved college. Haverford was dotted with the same kind of students I’d seen at Dunleavy, the offspring of privilege who fancied themselves rebels according to the amount of dope they smoked or the numbers of classes they missed to play Frisbee on the rolling lawns by the duck pond. I won’t deny that I felt superior. A strange thing to say for a boy who’d spent the previous two years feeling like a charlatan, even among Dunleavy’s laggards, but either I was growing up by virtue of years or by virtue of the things I’d seen at Aberdeen West. Those things had toughened me faster than most kids get toughened, and made me wiser, too. One night in the Metareys’ dining room I’d seen Melvin Laird—Nixon’s relentless attack man against Henry Bonwiller’s opposition to the war—enjoying a long and jovial dinner with the Senator. I’d seen plenty of other things, too. It was difficult for me to get excited over the prospect of missing classes.

So I did just what I’d done at Dunleavy. I studied. Right off the bat I met a girl, from Bryn Mawr. I was living in a dorm, a four-story stone building with old wooden windows that had to be slammed with the butt of a hand to open, but that looked over a plush lawn, dotted with oaks and maples, running down a long slope to the duck pond. You can imagine what took place around that pond among a group of nineteen-year-olds who’d just found out they wouldn’t have to go to war. At a barbecue there one night, when most of the crowd was drinking spiked punch out of quart mason jars, I met Holly.

Holly Steen. She was like me. A freshman, too, and the first in her family to go to college. She’d already declared an English major, with the idea of going to law school when she was done. She was from Memphis. Her father was a mechanic at the Ford dealership and her stepbrother was a long-distance trucker. She worked in the dining hall for her student aid, and I worked in the library.

The two of us, in our earnest ways, set out to separate ourselves from both our classmates and our backgrounds. Kids then were listening to the Who and Jefferson Airplane, but Holly and I made a point of taking the train into the city to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra. I’d never been inside a concert hall before in my life. When the rest of campus was crowding onto buses to go to Lancaster to watch Haverford play baseball against Franklin and Marshall for the league title, we were on the same train into the Philadelphia Museum of Art to look at the oils of Thomas Eakins. You can’t underestimate the determination both of us had. These days, of course, I’m reminded of Trieste—although her resolve is in the form of vigorous originality, and ours, if I have to put a word on it, was in the form of
hunger
. We wanted the things that the kids around us had by birthright, kids who’d grown up in the ivied suburbs that we could see from the windows as the train swayed and clacked its way into Philadelphia. I’d seen those things at the Metareys’, of course, but I’d had to leave home for good, I think, had to travel not just the hundred miles to Dunleavy but the full length of a state before I felt free enough—and deserving enough—to try for some of them myself.

Those weren’t easy times to go against the crowd, but I should add that we weren’t alone. There was a group of students at Haverford and Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore then who ran contrary to the common attitude, and soon enough we’d found one another. That fall we decided to form a group, united by the fact that we took our studies seriously. Over my time there we reliably numbered about thirty, and we met at night in one of the campus houses over apple cider to talk about art and music and history; we staged mock debates between nineteenth-century philosophers and presented oral reports on our visits to museums and monuments. We invited professors to speak to us. I think most of us were deeply grateful—I might even say giddy—to find ourselves among libraries and pianos and unabridged dictionaries on stands. Those were the things we wanted.

Holly was our leader. She was a small girl, and I remember her smallness as important. She wasn’t slight, but she was compact, and when she spoke she lifted herself just perceptibly on her toes and tilted her head up, and there was such sincerity and eagerness in her pose that I believed any man who spoke to her for any length of time would fall in love with her. This put me in a constant state of urgency. When I’d met her myself for the first time, at the barbecue alongside the duck pond, and she’d raised herself on the front of her feet in that particular way, I understood instantly that I’d found what I was looking for.

A
FTER THE ACCIDENT
in the Senator’s car, sleep ran away from me. Every night I lay in my childhood bed waiting for it, and every morning my eyes twitched open still in darkness to the memory of frantically steering as we plunged down the hill. We were halfway through the Christmas break now, and in two weeks I would be heading back to school. There was something about returning to Dunleavy that seemed particularly final to me; but even so, I hadn’t yet begun to steel myself for it. And I hadn’t yet called my old friends from Roosevelt, either. I was beginning to realize that I wasn’t going to. They weren’t going to call me, either. Maybe not ever again.

What was odd was that nobody at the Metareys’ had said a word about the accident. Clara would certainly have chided me if she’d been there, and Christian might have comforted me, but they were both still skiing with their mother. Every day, I was going over the incident in my mind, and perhaps as a result, the specifics had already become a jumble. Obviously it had been a mistake to lean out the window, but Senator Bonwiller had ordered me to—hadn’t he? Also, it had warmed briefly in the morning before cooling again: there might have been ice under the snow. On the other hand, the car might easily have flipped when it came over the lip of the embankment; but it hadn’t. This could have been because I was driving so reasonably when we went in. But the truth was, if somebody had told me a twelve-point buck had hit us, it wouldn’t have been long before I believed it. That was the kind of condition I was in.

More than anything, I wanted to be working again. Work was a cure for anything. But as Christmas neared, Aberdeen West seemed to go into a sort of hibernation—a peculiarity of the Metareys that I would come to know later—the house emptying rather than filling, and all the busy commerce of the place slowing nearly to a halt. And although serious tests were coming for Senator Bonwiller in little more than a month, the campaign appeared to have moved elsewhere, as well. The whole estate was quiet. Since the day I’d crashed the car, I’d only been called to work a couple of times, once to cart in a cord of firewood and once to fix a gate hinge that had come loose in the barn.

Beyond that, there seemed to be no jobs for me. I spent my time in the overheated front room of my parents’ house, trying to study for the exams we would take when we returned. Every morning I called the estate to say I was available. Sometimes I called again in the afternoon. I always hoped to reach Mr. Metarey, of course; but I never did. Although I knew he was home—I’d seen him in his upstairs study—after the accident occurred he’d seemed to withdraw from public; at least, he withdrew from me. This was unsettling.

Whenever Gil McKinstrey answered, I tried to ask in my usual, offhand way if he had anything for later, or for the next day. But so far, he had almost nothing. And for the rest of the time at my own house, really, all I did was wait for the phone to ring. I guess what I wanted was to prove myself again. To prove that I wouldn’t let them down.

Two days before Christmas, Mr. Metarey himself finally did call, asking me to come over and help Gil with the lights on the Lodge Chief Marker. These days, of course, the big tree is lit by Thanksgiving; but back then, they waited until Christmas Eve, a ritual guided not just by Liam Metarey’s frugality, no doubt, but by the frugality of the whole county as well. I hurried over. Among the townspeople, the lighting of the Lodge Chief could not have been more elemental to the family’s renown. Eoghan Metarey himself had started the tradition sometime around the turn of the century—that’s when he’d hired Westinghouse—and a good many of Saline’s older families still made the trip out on Boxing Day to sing carols under the lights. I should add that I’ve seen similar situations since then—the way workers or townspeople or even the most miserable inhabitants of third-world shantytowns will cleave to some slight gesture of cordiality from the capital class, as though it superseded all questions of rank and wealth and justice. Sometimes I think Mr. Metarey thought so, himself. Clara later told me that he had to be reminded every year to light it. I think he felt the paltriness of the ritual and was embarrassed at how important it had become to the citizens of Saline.

Nevertheless, he lit it every year. It wasn’t until late afternoon, though, that he finally called, and by the time I made my way on foot through the woods I found the tree already ringed with its mantle of lights. Gil McKinstrey was at the top, finishing up. I walked over and stood on the far side of the underbranches. I’d seen these same decorations every year of my childhood, but never from so close: now I saw that the insulation around the plugs had been repaired over and over, and that whole stretches of cord were wound in electrical tape. Maybe a fifth of the bulbs were burned out, too. Of course, this was characteristic of the Metarey thrift that I was now so familiar with. But the tree itself, despite the raggedness of its wrapping, had already begun to glow, its lights twinkling faintly in the waning light.

The truth was that I was afraid of seeing Gil. I knew there was a reason he wasn’t calling me. From behind the branches I watched him. The great pine was twice as tall as the house itself, and now he was within his own height of the top. He gripped the narrow trunk with climbing spurs and leaned out into the air. He swung a short coil of lights a couple of times in his hand, then lobbed it to the end of a drooping limb, where it caught. From where I stood, he looked like a fly fisherman casting a luminescent jig into the heavens. Finally, I shouted up to him.

“Get on out of here,” he called back. He clapped his gloves against the trunk and a cloud of frost drifted into the air. “Colder than a well digger’s balls up here.”

“You sure you want to be working with the stuff plugged in?”

“It’d be a relief is what it’d be. Warm me up half a degree.”

“Mr. Metarey sent me out to help.”

“Don’t need you.”

“I’m happy to do it.”

“Don’t need you,” he said again.

The next day, I knew, he would stand there at sunset while the townspeople gathered in the descending dark, waiting for Mrs. Metarey to flip the oversized throw switch that was banded to the trunk. He was just testing everything for now. The wind had died down, as it always does here after sunset, but still it was blowing a bit, and I can only imagine how cold it must have been in the top of those branches: I wonder what thoughts went through his mind, too, as he leaned out eighty feet in the air to do the hard work that someone else, the next day, in a fox-fur winter coat, would get credit for.

“You sure?” I called up.

But either he didn’t hear me or he didn’t bother to answer. I turned and walked back home through the trees to my parents’ house.

At that time of year, my mother made samplers for all her sisters and their families, and that evening after dinner she sat down on the couch across from me with her embroidery needle. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

“Please.”

“You’re thinking that you missed us at school. But now that you’re home, you realize that you miss being at school.” She smiled at me. “Isn’t that right?”

“It’s nothing like that.”

“I see.”

After a few moments, she said, “You can talk to me about your life, you know, Cor. I won’t bite.”

“There’s nothing to say, Mom.”

She picked up her handiwork then. And I’m ashamed to say that the sight of her there in her thick slippers, holding the needle at arm’s length so she could see the threads as she embroidered
Peace on Earth,
was more than I could take. I was already in my undershirt, which was as far as I could go in our house, and I’d already called the Metareys’ once that day, but I opened the back door anyway, pulled the phone out to the stoop on its long cord, and dialed again.