Old Glory (12 page)

As we started to climb the steps at the front of the living room, Alma called, “You want to take a shower?”

“No, thanks—”

“Anytime you want a shower, go take one. Make yourself at home. You want me to look you out a towel?”

“Thanks, but—”

“How’s your drink? Dick, freshen his drink, will you?”

“His drink’s fine,” said Dick.

“What do you specialize in … medically?” I asked.

“Internal diseases.” The slightly exaggerated emphasis he gave to the word “internal” suggested that he held all externals in some disdain. I wondered if he only found people interesting when he opened them up with a knife.

In his wheelhouse, his character suddenly changed. We were high over the top of the parties now; we’d climbed out of the small talk, and Dick was free. He showed me his deck of instruments and named them for me one by one. I once spent some time on a modern cargo ship: its bridge was only slightly more elaborately equipped than the wheelhouse on Dick’s houseboat. He had ship-to-shore radio, ship-to-ship radio, a depth-sounder, a wind-velocity gauge, a compass floating in gimbals and enough dials and switches to fuddle the mind of an airline pilot. On his chart table were dividers, rulers, T-squares, pencils. With all this gadgetry, he should not have found it too difficult to make his way to Samoa or the Seychelles.

“You must be able to go a long way in a boat like this.”

“Oh, you
could
. Yes, I’d go to Florida … the Bahamas, no hesitation. She’s got a good deep draft, too. She could take on some weather. Yes, she’d make it on the ocean okay.”

“How far have you actually gone so far?”

“Oh, well …” Dick’s anchoritic face went suddenly sad again. He went into one of his long, thinking pauses. I wished that I hadn’t asked the question. “A week or two back, not so long ago, we went up to
beyond Hastings.” I had passed Hastings earlier that afternoon. “Then other times we go down to around Lake City.…” He looked at me with the expression of a miserably compulsive truth-teller. “That’s twenty miles, I guess. Could be a mile or two short of that, even.”

“I expect the hospital keeps you too busy for anything more than day trips.”

“One gets vacations,” said Dick, not a man to let himself too easily off any hook.

“It must use up an awful lot of gas.”

“Oh, she’s about average.” Dick turned over the pages of his charts. Another imaginary traveler. “You must have come through Boulanger Slough today.” He pronounced it “slew.”

“Was it rough up there?”

“I thought so, but I’m not used to the river.”

“All those wide places, you ought to watch them when it’s a day like today. When the wind’s from the south, blowing up against the current, that’s when it’s worst. I was up here around lunchtime, it was gusting up to twenty-five miles an hour. You ought to reckon, with a boat the size you’ve got, anything from the south at more than fifteen, the best place for you is indoors. With a northerly, it’s different. Twenty’s fine. But a southerly wind … ten’s okay, twelve’s kind of choppy and fifteen’s your limit.”

My head was beginning to fill with pokerwork mottoes about riding the river. Dick’s had been the most explicit and useful so far. I was cheered, though, to learn that my fear earlier in the day hadn’t just been cowardice.

We went back to the party. Encouraged by the idea that I had actually behaved rather heroically under the circumstances, I told the story of how I had crossed Boulanger Slough.

“In foreign climes,” I recited, “there are at times some moments quite appalling; but none too fraught to set at nought by a stiff drink mixed with Rawlings.”

“Say that again?”

I did.

“That
Rollins
, I guess that’s kind of like a club soda, is it?”

“Would you say that was a typical British commercial?” asked Jay. “Sounds kind of old-fashioned to me.”

“Look,” said Walter, “anytime you want I can give you a ride up to the St. James.”

“He can stay on the boat,” Alma said. “We’ve got plenty of room. There’s a spare cabin. I can make up the bed …”

“Thanks so much—” I said, but Walter cut me short.

“Hey, let the guy make his own decisions. He wants to stay in the St.
James. He wants to see
Red Wing
. You want to see Red Wing, you stay in the St. James. Like I said, it’s living history up there.”

“He can save himself some money …” Alma said.

“Let the guy do what
he
wants to do, for godsake!”

Caught in the crossfire, I tried to signal Alma in dumb show that I’d love to stay on her boat; but Walter now had my suitcase in tow and was walking fast up the plank that led to the shore. The whole idea of the journey was, I thought sadly, to follow the current of things, and no current that I had yet met was stronger than Walter marching me off to his car.

The moment we were inside, he said, “Hey, give me a cigarette, will you?”

“Are you sure you want one?”

“
Sure?”
his voice was a millimeter away from rage.

“But after thirty-six hours … thirty-seven now … surely …”

He raped the packet. Cigarettes spilled over the floor.

“Jesus,” said Walter, lighting up.

“So it’s defeat,” I said.

“Look. I lie a little, okay? Everybody lies a little. I lie a little for my wife. I lie a little for Dick. Hell, I’ve had one or two. I smoked one this morning. I had one after lunch. You don’t know the
pressure
I’m under. Hell, look, I’m even lying to you right now. You know when you went off with Dick and Alma, right? Alma left a pack behind. I sneaked one out of it. I smoked it in the john. I
hate
Kools. I can’t stand them. And there I am sitting on the john with a goddamn Kool, for godsake. Oh, Jesus.”

“I tried giving up myself once. I lasted for three weeks. I couldn’t work. Then I just had to write a piece, and I was back on two packs a day.”

“This giving-up-smoking. Oh, my God. Look, I’m an honest man. This business, Jesus, it’s turning me into a liar and a thief.”

We drove along the bumpy track on the levee.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” said Walter. “We could go back. You could’ve changed your mind … but you’ll like the St. James, you really will. It’s living history.” He switched on the air conditioner. “Now, if you were smoking a Marlboro too, I wouldn’t have to do that. But you’re smoking your pipe. If Bonnie smelled those two kinds of smoke, sure as hell she’d
know
. You see what it’s making me do? I’m getting to be a goddamn criminal!”

The St. James Hotel was more like a waxwork museum than a piece of living history. The desk clerk sat behind an antique cash register
with wrought-iron eagles on it, his credit-card stamping machines kept discreetly out of sight. The hallway was lined with polished brass spittoons. I wondered what would happen if I actually expectorated into one of these objects, but decided not to try.

There was no shortage of rooms: I could put up in “The
Natchez,”
“The
Robert E. Lee,”
“The
Buckeye State,”
“The
Ben Franklin,”
“The
General Pike,”
“The
A. L. Shotwell,”
“The
Belle of the West.”
I can’t remember which of these dead steamboats I finally moved into. Everywhere there were steamboats. Brown photographs of their pilots, in wing collars and top hats, decorated the landings. Livid chromos from the 1880s showed steamboats battling through sloughs of whitecaps with black thunderclouds sitting on their masts. More chromos displayed these famous stern-wheelers from a technical draftsman’s point of view; with every portico, every balustrade, every detail of rigging and trelliswork scrupulously etched in, while the boats themselves floated in a ghostly white element, neither air nor water.

The place was a monument to the age of steamboat Gothic. It smelled not, as one might have hoped, of sweat, beer, oil and coal, but of little china bowls of potpourri. In my room there was, as Walter had promised, a miniature four-poster, spread with a hand-crocheted quilt. A newspaper had been left for me on the scroll-top escritoire, and I seized it hopefully. The
St. James Journal
. Everything in it turned out to be exactly a hundred years out of date.

What I wanted, though, was the weather forecast for tomorrow, and this cute facsimile with its jumpy typography was no use to me at all.

I thought that all American hotel rooms had television; this one
apparently refused to acknowledge that the instrument had been invented yet. There was a telephone of sorts, though. I unhooked the trumpet-shaped earpiece from its fluted stand, fearing that all I’d hear would be the cracked recorded voice of Rutherford Hayes or Mark Twain. But a girl’s voice came through, singing, “Hi, there!” a century out of sync with the apparatus we were using.

“Is there a TV anywhere in the hotel? I want to see a weather forecast.”

“You’ll find one in your room, sir.” She made it sound as if this were a cozy game of Hide and Seek that the hotel usually organized for its customers.

“
Where?”

“You just try that old wardrobe right across from where you’re sitting, sir.” She must have been the queen tease of Red Wing High; I imagined her in frilly pants and fishnet tights, twirling a drum majorette’s baton.

I tried the wardrobe, a handsome reproduction piece of pine Colonial. The drawers, when I pulled at them, turned out to be doors, and opened on an enormous color television. I found my weather report. Nothing does so much justice to the gargantuan scale of American life as its national weather maps. In Europe, one is allowed to see the weather only as scraps and fragments: a cake slice of a depression here; a banded triangle of a ridge of high pressure there. In the United States, every morning and evening, I was enthralled by the epic sweep of whole weather systems as they rolled across the country from the Pacific to the Atlantic, or coasted down from the Arctic Circle, or swirled up from Mexico and Cuba. The weathermen tapped their maps with sticks. Without betraying the slightest flicker of wonder or concern, they announced that people were being frozen to death in Butte, roasted in Flagstaff and blown off their feet in Tallahassee. Each day they rattled off every conceivable variety of climatic extremity in a blasé drawl. I’d never seen so much weather at once, and was deeply impressed. I shivered vicariously for the Montanans, sweated for the Arizonans and ran for shelter with the Floridians.

Tonight, though, Minnesota was the one place in the nation with really boring weather. Our local man from Minneapolis foretold moderate humidity, low precipitation and winds from the south at ten to twelve miles an hour. By American standards, he might reasonably have asserted that for the next day we would have no weather at all.

I closed the false drawers on the TV. I peered down at Main Street through the dinky white plywood shutters on my bedroom window.

There was nothing going on. I tried to distract myself with the
St. James Journal:

I went to the bathroom. The toilet cover had been fastened to the seat with a paper seal
FOR YOUR PERSONAL SAFETY AND CONVENIENCE
. That, I thought, neatly expressed the general spirit of the St. James. The era of the Mississippi steamboat had not, on the whole, been notably hygienic. In this expensive piece of “restoration,” American history had been marvelously disinfected. It had been robbed of its vitality and given a smooth patina of fake antiquity. In the St. James version of things, the post-Civil War U.S.A., with its railroad scandals, the Tweed Ring, scallywags and carpetbaggers, had been got up to look as if it was as quaint and remote as the never-never land of Merrie England. With history so thoroughly sanitized, no one need fear for his personal safety or convenience as he sat thoughtfully at stool in its purlieus: here, the past had been rendered incapable of passing on any intimate diseases.

At ten thirty on Sunday morning, everyone in Red Wing was going to church. The town was built around a long rectangle of green which sloped sharply up the bluff, and the churches were dotted around this open park. I went past the Methodists, took a path across the green through an avenue of maple trees, hesitated over the Episcopalians and the Catholics, and finally joined the biggest line, at the door of the First Lutheran.

With its pale stone and crenellated spire, it was a perfect model of a German country church. It might easily have been built in the seventeenth century; in fact its headstone said
A.D
. 1895. Inside, a hanging scroll was blazoned with the message
HE CONQUERED DEATH—THANKS
,
O LORD
. To my ear, that “Thanks” sounded a shade casual.

I sat on a pew and bowed my head; not praying, just thinking and hoping. I wanted to get down the river safely. I was frightened of the weather, the waves and wakes, the simple loneliness of the trip. I thought of the people I’d left behind in London and named them to myself. I wondered what would happen to my mail. I worried about the strength of the lock on my outboard motor, and whether it was likely to be burglarized. I thought about laundry: it would be another five days or so before I ran out of clean shirts.… Then I thought of my father, a parson in England; for him it was now 4:30
P.M
., an age since his first, dismally attended early Communion. I wondered if “praying” was really like this for everyone else—a random stream of anxieties, communicated to no one in particular, but sanctioned somehow by the mere fact of sitting under these high arches with the organ wandering quietly up and down among the holy chords.