Pigeon Feathers (2 page)

“Escobar.”

“
I
knew his name. He was always trying to play basketball with his head.”

“And then Barbara, the gay divorcee.”

“Walter Barbara. Walter Ba, Be, Bi, Bo, Bu. He had a monstrous bill at the end of the summer, I remember that.”

But Claire was no longer waiting for the fat man. She danced ahead, calling into color vast faded tracts of that distant experience: the Italian family with all the empty beer cans, the tall deaf-mute who went around barefoot and punctured the skin of his foot on a chopped root in the east path, the fire hazard until those deadly August rains, the deer on the island that they never saw. The deer had come over on the ice in the winter and the spring thaw had trapped them. It made him jealous, her store of explicit memories—the mother at dusk calling “Beryl, Beryl,” the gargantuan ice-cream cones the boys on Murray’s crew served themselves—but she moved among her treasures so quickly and gave them so generously he had to laugh at each new face and scene offered him, because these were memories they had collected together and
he was happy that they had discovered such a good game for the car just when he feared there were no more games for them. They reached the region of small familiar roads, and he drove a long way around, to prolong the trip a minute.

Home, they carried the children to bed—Claire the tiny boy, as fragile as a paper construction, and Jack the heavy, flushed girl. As he lowered her into the crib, she opened her eyes in the darkness.

“Home,” he told her.

“Whezouh dirt?” A new road was being bulldozed not far from their house, and she enjoyed being taken to see the mounds of earth.

“Dirt in the morning,” Jack said, and Jo accepted this.

Downstairs, the two adults got the ginger ale out of the refrigerator and watched the eleven-o’clock news on provincial television, Governor Furcolo and Archbishop Cushing looming above Khrushchev and Nasser, and went to bed hastily, against the children’s morning rising. Claire fell asleep immediately, after her long day of entertaining them all.

Jack felt he had made an unsatisfactory showing. Their past was so much more vivid to her presumably because it was more precious. Something she had mentioned nagged him. The German boy’s making eyes at her. Slowly this led him to remember how she had been, the green shorts and the brown legs, holding his hand as in the mornings they walked to breakfast from their cabin, along a lane that was two dusty paths for the wheels of the camp Jeep. Like the deaf-mute, Claire had gone around barefoot, and she walked between the paths, on the soft broad mane of weeds. Her hand had seemed so small, her height so sweetly adjusted to his, the fact of her waking him so strange. She always heard the breakfast bell,
though it rang far away. Their cabin was far from the center of things; its only light had been a candle. Each evening (except Thursday, when he played right field for the staff softball team), in the half-hour between work and dinner, while she made the bed within, he had sat outside on a wooden chair, reading in dwindling daylight
Don Quixote
. It was all he had read that summer, but he had read that, in half-hours, every dusk, and in September cried at the end, when Sancho pleads with his at last sane master to rise from his deathbed and lead another quest, and perhaps they shall find the Lady Dulcinea under some hedge, stripped of her enchanted rags and as fine as any queen. All around the cabin had stood white pines stretched to a cruel height by long competition, and the cabin itself had no windows, but broken screens. Pausing before the threshold, on earth littered with needles and twigs, he unexpectedly found what he wanted; he lifted himself on his elbow and called “Claire” softly, knowing he wouldn’t wake her, and said, “Briggs. Walter Briggs.”

The Persistence of Desire

P
ENNYPACKER
’
S OFFICE
still smelled of linoleum, a clean, sad scent that seemed to lift from the checkerboard floor in squares of alternating intensity; this pattern had given Clyde as a boy a funny nervous feeling of intersection, and now he stood crisscrossed by a double sense of himself, his present identity extending down from Massachusetts to meet his disconsolate youth in Pennsylvania, projected upward from a distance of years. The enlarged, tinted photograph of a lake in the Canadian wilderness still covered one whole wall, and the walnut-stained chairs and benches continued their vague impersonation of the Shaker manner. The one new thing, set squarely on an orange end table, was a compact black clock constructed like a speedometer; it showed in arabic numerals the present minute—1:28—and coiled invisibly in its works the two infinities of past and future. Clyde was early; the waiting room was empty. He sat down on a chair opposite the clock. Already it was 1:29, and while he watched, the digits slipped again: another drop into the brimming void. He glanced around for the comfort of a clock with a face and gracious, gradual hands. A stopped grandfather matched the other imitation antiques. He opened a magazine and immediately
read, “Science reveals that the cells of the normal human body are replaced
in toto
every seven years.”

The top half of a Dutch door at the other end of the room opened, and, framed in the square, Pennypacker’s secretary turned the bright disc of her face toward him. “Mr. Behn?” she asked in a chiming voice. “Dr. Pennypacker will be back from lunch in a minute.” She vanished backward into the maze of little rooms where Pennypacker, an eye, ear, nose, and throat man, had arranged his fabulous equipment. Through the bay window Clyde could see traffic, gayer in color than he remembered, hustle down Grand Avenue. On the sidewalk, haltered girls identical in all but name with girls he had known strolled past in twos and threes. Small-town perennials, they moved rather mournfully under their burdens of bloom. In the opposite direction packs of the opposite sex carried baseball mitts.

Clyde became so lonely watching his old street that when, with a sucking exclamation, the door from the vestibule opened, he looked up gratefully, certain that the person, this being his home town, would be a friend. When he saw who it was, although every cell in his body had been replaced since he had last seen her, his hands jerked in his lap and blood bounded against his skin.

“Clyde Behn,” she pronounced, with a matronly and patronizing yet frightened finality, as if he were a child and these words the moral of a story.

“Janet.” He awkwardly rose from his chair and crouched, not so much in courtesy as to relieve the pressure on his heart.

“Whatever brings you back to these parts?” She was taking the pose that she was just anyone who once knew him.

He slumped back. “I’m always coming back. It’s just you’ve never been here.”

“Well, I’ve”—she seated herself on an orange bench and crossed her plump legs cockily—“been in Germany with my husband.”

“He was in the Air Force.”

“Yes.” It startled her a little that he knew.

“And he’s out now?” Clyde had never met him, but, having now seen Janet again, he felt he knew him well—a slight, literal fellow, to judge from the shallowness of the marks he had left on her. He would wear eyebrow-style glasses, be a griper, have some not-quite-negotiable talent, like playing the clarinet or drawing political cartoons, and now be starting up a drab avenue of business. Selling insurance, most likely. Poor Janet, Clyde felt; except for the interval of himself—his splendid, perishable self—she would never see the light. Yet she had retained her beautiful calm, an unsleeping tranquillity marked by that pretty little lavender puffiness below the eyes. And either she had grown slimmer or he had grown more tolerant of fat. Her thick ankles and the general
obstinacy
of her flesh used to goad him into being cruel.

“Yes.” Her voice indicated that she had withdrawn; perhaps some ugliness of their last parting had recurred to her.

“I was 4-F.” He was ashamed of this, and his confessing it, though she seemed unaware of the change, turned their talk inward. “A peacetime slacker,” he went on, “what could be more ignoble?”

She was quiet a while, then asked, “How many children do you have?”

“Two. Age three and one. A girl and a boy; very symmetrical. Do you”—he blushed lightly, and brushed at his forehead to hide it—“have any?”

“No, we thought it wouldn’t be fair, until we were more fixed.”

Now the quiet moment was his to hold; she had matched him failing for failing. She recrossed her legs, and in a quaint strained way smiled.

“I’m trying to remember,” he admitted, “the last time we saw each other. I can’t remember how we broke up.”

“I can’t either,” she said. “It happened so often.”

Clyde wondered if with that sarcasm she intended to fetch his eyes to the brink of tears. Probably not; premeditation had never been much of a weapon for her, though she had tried to learn it from him.

He moved across the linoleum to sit on the bench beside her. “I can’t tell you,” he said, “how much, of all the people in this town, you were the one I wanted to see.” It was foolish, but he had prepared it to say, in case he ever saw her again.

“Why?” This was more like her: blunt, pucker-lipped curiosity. He had forgotten it.

“Well, hell. Any number of reasons. I wanted to say something.”

“What?”

“Well, that if I hurt you it was stupidity, because I was young. I’ve often wondered since if I did, because it seems now that you were the only person outside my family who ever, actually,
liked
me.”

“Did I?”

“If you think by doing nothing but asking monosyllabic questions you’re making an effect, you’re wrong.”

She averted her face, leaving, in a sense, only her body—the pale, columnar breadth of arm, the freckled crescent of shoulder muscle under the cotton strap of her summer dress—with him. “You’re the one who’s making effects.” It was such a wan, senseless thing to say to defend herself; Clyde, virtually paralyzed by so heavy an injection of love, touched her arm icily.

With a quickness that suggested she had foreseen this, she got up and went to the table by the bay window, where rows of overlapping magazines were laid. She bowed her head to their titles, the nape of her neck in shadow beneath a half-collapsed bun. She had always had trouble keeping her hair pinned.

Clyde was blushing intensely. “Is your husband working around here?”

“He’s looking for work.” That she kept her back turned while saying this gave him hope.

“Mr. Behn?” The petite secretary-nurse, switching like a pendulum, led him back through the sanctums and motioned for him to sit in a high hinged chair padded with black leather. Pennypacker’s equipment had always made him nervous; tons of it were marshalled through the rooms. A complex tree of tubes and lenses leaned over his left shoulder, and by his right elbow a porcelain basin was cupped expectantly. An eye chart crisply stated gibberish. In time Pennypacker himself appeared: a tall, stooped man with mottled cheekbones and an air of suppressed anger.

“Now what’s the trouble, Clyde?”

“It’s nothing; I mean it’s very little,” Clyde began, laughing inappropriately. During his adolescence he had developed a joking familiarity with his dentist and his regular doctor, but he had never become cozy with Pennypacker, who remained, what he had seemed at first, an aloof administrator of expensive humiliations. He had made Clyde wear glasses when he was in the third grade. Later, he annually cleaned, with a shrill push of hot water, wax from Clyde’s ears, and once had thrust two copper straws up Clyde’s nostrils in a futile attempt to purge his sinuses. Clyde always felt unworthy of Pennypacker—felt himself to be a dirty conduit balking the smooth onward flow of
the doctor’s reputation and apparatus. He blushed to mention his latest trivial stoppage. “It’s just that for over two months I’ve had this eyelid that twitters and it makes it difficult to think.”

Pennypacker drew little circles with a pencil-sized flashlight in front of Clyde’s right eye.

“It’s the left lid,” Clyde said, without daring to turn his head. “I went to a doctor up where I live, and he said it was like a rattle in the fender and there was nothing to do. He said it would go away, but it didn’t and didn’t, so I had my mother make an appointment for when I came down here to visit.”

Pennypacker moved to the left eye and drew even closer. The distance between the doctor’s eyes and the corners of his mouth was very long; the emotional impression of his face close up was like that of those first photographs taken from rockets, in which the earth’s curvature was made apparent. “How do you like being in your home territory?” Pennypacker asked.

“Fine.”

“Seem a little strange to you?”

The question itself seemed strange. “A little.”

“Mm. That’s interesting.”

“About the eye, there were two things I thought,” Clyde said. “One was, I got some glasses made in Massachusetts by a man nobody else ever went to, and I thought his prescription might be faulty. His equipment seemed so ancient and kind of full of cobwebs—like a Dürer print.” He never could decide how cultured Pennypacker was; the Canadian lake argued against it, but he was county-famous in his trade, in a county where doctors were as high as the intellectual scale went.