The Centaur (32 page)

There is a little catch that holds the clue to fastening the chains. He finds this catch and, reading with his fingertips,
deduces how it operates. Almost he succeeds in snapping it. Only a tiny gap remains to close. He applies a pressure that makes the prostrate length of his body tremble; his kidneys ache sweetly; the metal bites deep into his fingers. He prays; and is appalled to discover that, even when a microscopic concession would involve no apparent sacrifice of principle, matter is obdurate. The catch does not close. He squeals in agony,
“No!”

His father calls to him, “The hell with it. Get out from under.”

Peter obeys, stands, shakes the snow from his jacket. He and his father stare at each other in disbelief. “I can’t do it,” he says, as if it could be denied.

His father says, “You did a damn sight better than I did. Get into the car, we’ll go into Alton for the night. Once a loser, twice a loser.”

They put the chains into the trunk and try to lower the car on the jack. But even this piece of retreat proves impossible. The small lever supposed to reverse the jack’s direction swings loose and useless. Each shove on the handle lifts the car a notch higher. The fluttering snow pesters their faces; the whine of wind distends their eardrums; the burden on their tempers becomes unendurable. The whole soughing shifting weight of the storm seems hinged on this minute mechanical refusal.

“I’ll fix the bastard,” Caldwell announces. “Stand clear, kid.” He climbs into the car, starts the motor, and drives forward. For a moment the jack upright is caught in the tension of a bow and Peter expects to see it go flying like an arrow into the storm. But the metal of the bumper itself yields under this instant of stress, and the next instant drops the car onto its springs with a sound like icicles snapping. A lip-shaped
dent along the lower edge of the rear bumper will always remember this night. Peter gathers up the jack parts and throws them into the trunk and gets into the front seat beside his father.

Aided by the tendency of the rear wheels to slither, Caldwell turns the Buick around and points it toward Alton. But in the hour since they came onto this road another inch of snow has fallen and the packing action of traffic has utterly ceased. The little rise that takes the road out of the trough at the bottom of Coughdrop Hill, a rise so slight that on a fair day it whips by beneath the wheels unnoticed, proves too steep to negotiate. The rear tires never cease slithering. The slits of vision in their windshield go furry and close; the heavenly bin from which the snow has been sifted now bursts its sides. Three times the Buick sloughs forward up the shallow slant to have its motion smothered. The third time, Caldwell grinds his foot into the accelerator and the crying tires swing the rear of the car into the untouched snow at the side of the road. There is a small depression just off the shoulder. Caldwell shifts down to first gear and tries to lift out, but the snow holds them fast in its phantom grip. His lips make a quick silver bubble. Crazed, he shoves the shift into reverse and rams the car backwards so they are hopelessly stuck. He switches off the motor.

A certain peace settles upon their predicament. A delicate friction, like sand being swept up, moves across the top of the car. The overheated motor ticks tranquilly under the hood.

“We’ll have to walk,” Caldwell says. “We’ll walk back to Olinger and stay the night at the Hummels’. It’s less than three miles, can you make it?”

“I’ll
have
to,” Peter says.

“Jesus, you don’t have any galoshes on or anything.”

“Well neither do you.”

“Yeah, but I’m all shot anyway.” After a pause, he explains, “We can’t stay here.”

“Gah-dammit,” Peter says, “I
know
it. I know it, stop telling me. Stop telling me things all the time. Let’s go.”

“A father who was half a man would have gotten you up that hill.”

“Then we’d have got stuck someplace else. It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault; it’s God’s fault.
Please
. Let’s stop talking.”

Peter gets out of the car and for a time, of the two, is the leader. They walk in their own ruts up the Jewish Cemetery hill. Peter finds it difficult to put one foot directly ahead of the other, as the Indians were said to have done. The wind keeps tipping him. There is a screen of pines here and though the wind is not powerful it yet has an insistence that penetrates the hair on his head and fingers the bone underneath. The cemetery land is held back from the road by a retaining wall of gray stone; each protruding stone wears a beard of white. Somewhere deep in the opaque smoke Abe Cohn lies snug in his pillared mausoleum. Peter draws comfort from this knowledge. He glimpses an analogy with the way his own ego is sheltered under the mineral dome of his skull.

On the flat beyond the cemetery the pines fade away and the wind blows as if minded to pierce his body through and through. He becomes transparent: a skeleton of thoughts. Detached, amused, he watches his feet like blinded cattle slog dutifully through the drifted snow; the disparity between the length of their strides and the immense distance to Olinger is so great that a kind of infinity seems posited in which he enjoys enormous leisure. He employs this leisure to meditate upon the phenomenon of extreme physical discomfort. There
is an excising simplicity in it. First, all thoughts of past and future are eliminated, and then any extension via the senses of yourself into the created world. Then, as further conservation, the extremities of the body are disposed of—the feet, the legs, the fingers. If the discomfort persists, if a nagging memory of some more desirable condition lingers, then the tip of the nose, the chin, and the scalp itself are removed from consideration, not entirely anesthetized but deported, as it were, to a realm foreign to the very limited concerns of the irreducible locus, remarkably compact and aloof, which alone remains of the once farflung and ambitious kingdoms of the self. The sensations seem to arrive from a great distance outside himself when his father, now walking beside him and using his body as a shield against the wind for his son, pulls down upon Peter’s freezing head the knitted wool cap he has taken from his own head.

M
Y LOVE, LISTEN
. Or are you asleep? It doesn’t matter. In West Alton there was the Alton Museum, set among magnificent flowering grounds where every tree was labelled. Black swans drifted preening in pairs upon the surface of the opaque lake created by damming the small shallow-bedded stream here called Lenape. In Olinger it was called Tilden Creek, but it was the same stream. My mother and I on a Sunday would now and again walk to the museum, the only treasury of culture accessible to us, along the lazy shady road that kept the creek company and connected the two towns.
This mile or so, then, was a rural interspace, a remainder of the county’s earlier life. We would pass the old race track, abandoned and gone under to grass, and several sandstone farmhouses each accompanied, like a mother with a son, by a whitewashed springhouse of the same stone. Quickly crossing the harsh width of a three-lane highway, we would enter on a narrow path the museum grounds, and an even older world, Arcadian, would envelop us. Ducks and frogs mixed flat throaty exultations in the scummy marsh half-hidden by the planted lines of cherry, linden, locust, and crabapple trees. My mother knew the names of every plant and bird, would name them for me, and I would forget, as we walked along the gravel path that widened here and there into little circlets with a birdbath and benches where, often as not, a linked pair of humans would break apart and study our passing with darkened, rounded eyes. Once when I asked my mother what they had been doing, she replied with a curious complacence, “They were nesting.”

Now the coolness of air off the dammed lake and the swans’ vulgar brackish cries would touch us, and up high through a gap in a mythic black-leaved beech a pale ochre cornice of the museum would show, and a sunstruck section of the raised skylight with its pistachio-green leading. We would pass through the parking lot that made me covetous and ashamed, for at that time we had no car; pass along the gravel pedestrian path among children bringing bags of breadcrumbs to feed the swans; pass up the wide stairs where a few people in clean summer clothes would be snapping cameras and unwrapping sandwiches from waxpaper; and pass into the high religious hall of the museum itself. Admission was free. In the basement, indeed, free classes in “nature appreciation” were held in the summer months. At my mother’s suggestion I
once enrolled. The first lesson was to watch a snake in a glass cage swallow a chattering field mouse whole. I did not go for the second lesson. The main floor was given over to scientific exhibits for the benefit of schoolchildren, stiff stuffed creatures and Eskimo and Chinese and Polynesian artifacts, case after case, categorized, dustproof. There was a noseless mummy, with always a small crowd around him. As a child this floor filled me with dread. So much death; who would dream there could be such a quantity of death? The second floor was devoted to art, mostly local paintings that, however clumsy and quaint and mistaken, nevertheless radiated the innocence and hope, the hope of seizing something and holding it fast, that enters whenever a brush touches canvas. There were also bronze statuettes of Indians and deities, and in the center of the large oval room at the head of the stairs a naked green lady, life size, stood in the center of a circular black-lipped pool. She was a fountain. She held to her lips a scallop shell of bronze and her fine face was pursed to drink, but the mechanics of the fountain dictated that water should spill forever from the edge of the shell away from her lips. Eternally expectant—with slight breasts, a loosely swirled cast glory of verdigrant hair, and one foot lightly resting on its toes—she held the shell an inch away from the face that seemed with its lowered lids and parted lips asleep. As a child I was troubled by her imagined thirst, and I would place myself so I could see the enduring inch that held her mouth from contact with the water. The water fell as a thin varying ribbon, pearlish green, spiralling as it left the scalloped edge, splaying before it struck the surface of the pond with a ceaseless gentle impact whose splash was sometimes flung by the subtle variations of accident as far away as the rim of the pond, deckling with a tiny cold prick, like the touch of a snowflake, my hand resting
there on the black marble. The patience of her wait, the mildness of its denial, seemed unbearable to me then, and I told myself that when darkness came, and the mummy and the Polynesian masks and the glass-eyed eagles below were sealed in shadow, then her slim bronze hand made the very little motion needed, and she drank. In this great oval room, which I conceived as lit by the moon through the skylight above, the fall of water would for a moment cease. In that sense, then—in the sense that the coming of night enwrapped the luminous ribbon of downfalling water and staunched its flow—my story is coming to its close.

The irritable traffic pecks soothingly at the windows of our loft, those windows whose thin glass has so long needed dusting that their delicate graphitic grayness seems internal, a shade of cathedral glass. The cafeteria neon two stories below rhythmically stains them rose. My vast canvases—so oddly expensive as raw materials, so oddly worthless transmuted into art—with sharp rectangular shoulders hulk into silhouette against the light. Your breathing keeps time with the slow rose. Your solemn mouth has relaxed in sleep and the upper lip displays the little extra racial button of fat like a bruise blister. Your sleep contains innocence as the night contains dew. Listen: I love you, love your prim bruised mouth whose corners compress morally when you are awake and scolding me, love your burnt skin ceaselessly forgiving mine, love the centuries of being humbled held in the lilac patina of your palms. I love the tulip-stem stance of your throat. When you stand before the stove you make, all unconscious, undulant motions with the upper half of your body like a drinking hen. When you walk naked toward the bed your feet toe in as if your ankles were manacled to those of someone behind you. When we make love sometimes you sigh my name and I feel
radically confirmed. I am glad I have met you, glad, proud, glad; I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoons, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.

Hey. Listen. Listen to me, lady. I love you, I want to be a Negro for you, I want to have a wised-up shoe-polish face taut as a drum at the cheekbones and wear great opaque anonymous-making sunglasses at three a.m. in a dim lavender cellar and forget everything but the crooning behind my ribs. But I cannot, quite. I cannot quite make that scene. A final membrane restrains me. I am my father’s son. In the late afternoons while the day hangs in distending light waiting to be punctured by the darkness that in arrows of shadow rides out from the tall buildings across the grid of streets, I remember my father and even picture—eyes milky with doubts, mustache indecisive and pale—his father before him, whom I never knew. Priest, teacher, artist: the classic degeneration.

Forgive me, for I do love you, we fit. Like a Tibetan lama I rise out of myself above the bed and see how we make, yin and yang, a person between us. But at the hour in the afternoon when my father and I would be heading home in the car, I glance around at the nest we have made, at the floorboards polished by our bare feet, at the continents of stain on the ceiling like an old and all-wrong discoverer’s map, at the earnestly bloated canvases I conscientiously cover with great streaks straining to say what even I am beginning to suspect is the unsayable thing, and I grow frightened. I consider the life we have made together, with its days spent without relation to the days the sun keeps and its baroque arabesques of increasingly
attenuated emotion and its furnishings like a scattering of worn-out Braques and its rather wistful half-Freudian half-Oriental sex-mysticism, and I wonder,
Was it for this that my father gave up his life?