Remembering (15 page)

His hurry was over then. He walked, taking his time, around the boundary of the hundred acres. After he had done that he went back to the car and put on his overcoat and got in under the steering wheel again and slept. As soon as it became light enough to see, he started the car and backed it out of the lane.

When he walked into the house, his clothes fretted by briars, mud from the Harford Place still on his shoes, Flora was sewing.

“Flora,” he said, suddenly frightened, as if he did not know her, as if he might have mistaken her entirely, “we're going home.”

She looked at him with her mouth full of pins, and then she took them out. “Well, it's about time.”

“Well, don't you think we should? I mean, don't you want to know what I'm talking about?”

“Sure.”

He passes through the Gate of Universal Suspicion and is reduced to one two-hundred-millionth of his nation, admitted according to the apparent harmlessness of his personal effects. Or it is an even smaller fraction that he is reduced to, for all the world is here, coming and going, parting and greeting, laden with bags and briefcases, milling around piles of baggage, hurrying through the perfect anonymity of their purposes. And none may be trusted, not one. Where one may be dangerous, and none is known, all must be mistrusted. All must submit to the minimization and the diaspora of total strangeness and universal suspicion. The gates of the metal detectors form the crowd momentarily into lines, and send it out again, particled, into the rush of the corridor. Adrift, he allows himself to be carried into that eddying, many-stranded current.

A man to the love of women born, no specialist, he feels his mind tugged this way and that by lovely women. They seem to be everywhere, beautiful women in summer dresses beautifully worn, flesh suggesting itself, as they move, in sweet pressures against cloth. He lets them disembody him, his mind on the loose and rambling, envisioning unexpectable results, impossible culminations. What pain of loneliness draws him to them! As though ghostly arms reach out of his body toward them, he yearns for some lost, unreachable communion.
You. And you. Oh, love!
Loving them apart from anything that he knows, or might know, he is
disembodied by them: no man going nowhere, or anywhere, his mind as perfectly departed from his life as a lost ghost, dreaming of meetings of eyes, touches, claspings, words. He hears their music, each a siren on her isle, and deep in his own innards cello strings throb and strum in answer. He goes by them bound to his own direction. They flow past each other in their courses, countenances veiled, as though eternally divided, falling. They will not sing to him.

It seems to him that he is one among the living dead, their eyes fixed and lightless, their bodies graves, doomed to hurry forever through the abstraction of the unsensed nowhere of their mutual disregard, dead to one another.

All in the crowd are masked, each withdrawn from the others and from all whereabouts. The light of their eyes, the regard of their consciousness and thought, their body heat — all turned inward. And the faces of the women are the most closed of all. For fear. Lost to men by fear of men in the Land of Universal Suspicion. The good level look of their eyes lost.

The more he sees of them in this place, the less he can imagine them. Who are they? What are their names? Where are they going? Who loves them? Whom do they love? They appear and pass, singly, each in the world alone, the solitary end result of the meetings of all the couples that have made her, each the final, single point of her own pedigree.

He has heard the tread of his own people dancing in a ring, the fiddle measuring time to them, a voice calling them, through the steps of change and absence, home again, the dancers unaware of their steps, which only the music, older than memory, remembered. Now that dance is broken, dismembered in the Land of Universal Suspicion, where no face is open to another. Where any may be dangerous and none may be trusted, all must live in conflict, the fire of the world's death prefigured in every heart.

Here is the eye of the whirlwind of directions. These gathered here today, tonight will be in Tokyo, Delhi, Paris, Lima, where? Dead, perhaps, on an unseen mountainside? Or dead in the world's death? The long corridor stretches out ahead of him, a noplace to which all places reach, beyond the last horizon of the world.

A woman is walking ahead of him whose face he will never see. She is wearing a simple dress that leaves it to her to have the style. And she has it. How he would like to go up and walk beside her! How he would like to walk with his arm around her! He can imagine such a permission coming to him from her as would darken and stagger him as if blindfolded and turned round three times.

He will never see her again. He will never see her face. The dance that would bring her back again is broken. The hand that he would open to her is gone.

When he returned, bringing Flora and their children to live at the Harford Place, he returned to a country in visible decline. After his absence, he saw his native place as by a new birth of sight, and rejoiced in it as never before. But now he saw it also as a place of history — a place, in part, the result of history — and he began to see the costs that history had exacted: hillsides senselessly cropped, gullies in old thicket-covered fields that would not be healed in ten times the time of their ruin, woodlands destructively logged, farms in decline, the towns in decline, the people going to the cities to work or to live. It was a country, he saw, that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve. In the coal counties, east and west, they were strip-mining without respect for the past or mercy to the future, and the reign of a compunctionless national economy was established everywhere. Andy began to foresee a time when everything in the country would be marketable and everything marketable would be sold, when not one freestanding tree or household or man or woman would remain. Such thoughts, when they came to him, shortened his breath and ached in the pit of his stomach. Something needed to be done, and he did not know what. He turned to
his own place then — the Harford Place, as diminished by its history as any other — and began to ask what might be the best use of it. How might a family live there without reducing it?

He has come to the second gate now, that between earth and sky, where his plane is waiting. He goes into the waiting lounge and chooses a seat against the end wall where he can see everything. He is sure that he will see nothing that will be of any use to him, but he is an economizer of opportunities.

Directly across from him is a man in a Palm Beach suit, with rings on the ring fingers of both hands, hidden from the lap up behind a newspaper proclaiming: TRANSVESTITE's LIFE ENDS IN SHOOTING. Next there is a young couple — a young man in an army private's uniform, a young woman in T-shirt and jeans — who sit holding hands and do not speak. Beside them is a woman of perhaps sixty, in half-glasses, knitting a sweater, the yarn traveling upward in jerks from her large handbag. And beside her is a professional football player with his leg in a cast, chewing gum rapidly and reading a copy of
Keyhole
magazine. His showpiece lady is clinging to his arm, unattended. His injured leg propped on two pieces of leather luggage, the football player is wearing a warm-up suit with his team's famous name in block letters on the jacket. People recognize him and stare at him as they pass.

At the other end of the row, divided by an empty seat from the man with the newspaper, a woman in a tailored suit is sitting with a legal pad on her lap. She is talking to a tiny machine that she holds in her hand. She speaks, snaps off the machine to think, snaps it on again and speaks. She speaks almost inaudibly, but otherwise seems oblivious of the crowd around her. It is a wonder that she is of the same species and sex as the football player's lady, and yet both seem to have themselves in mind as types — symbols, perhaps, of historical epochs or phases of the moon. The businesswoman is austerely tailored and coiffured; her eyeglasses are severe. She lives, her looks imply, entirely by forethought, her beating heart nobody else's business. Her taste and bearing are splendid. She is impeccable.

And Andy would like to give her a little peck on her ear. His mind is calling out to her: “Hello, my Tinkerbelle, my winsome, weensy crocodile. Come out! Come out! I know you're in there somewhere.”

He says to his mind, “Shut up, you dumb bastard!”

And yet he cannot take his mind or eyes from her, for she is very beautiful. And who is she? Where did she come from? Where is she going? He knows that he is looking at her across an abyss, that if all the world should burn, they would burn divided in its flames. She is wearing the veil of American success, lost in the public haze that has covered the land from sea to sea. He is lost there himself, divided and burning. How would they break the veil? How call out?