Thirteen Moons (42 page)

I went from one to the other of the four parties saying exactly the same thing to them all: Stop this stupid shit you’re intent on doing to one another. When people get to the age you are, anybody that shares even a few of your memories is a treasure beyond price. Love them and forgive their foolishness and hope they’ll forgive yours.

I bore up under such responsibilities through three seasons, right up to the start of the next summer. And then I’d had all I could take. I fled, hitting the road once again, aiming for Warm Springs.

8

T
HE WARM SPRINGS HOTEL WAS A WONDROUS REFUGE DOWN IN ITS
remote river gorge, four days from the nearest railhead. A summer resort, mostly. For the better part of two decades—before and after the War—I was frequently a resident in all quarters of the year, including the depths of winter when the hotel was nearly empty and cold drafts blew through the dark ballroom and the lawn was blanketed in snow, marred by a narrow path down which only the bravest guests ventured to immerse themselves in the steaming water of the pools.

Even in the lowest of low seasons there was money to be made at late-night card games and unattached women to court. Wealthy young widows and their spinster-cousin travel companions. The sad and needy wives of wealthy old men who napped through the afternoon by the broad lobby fireplace with their hands crossed over their uprisen bellies and then, after a big pork dinner, retired immediately to bed. And of course the lovely governesses, smart and brittle and filled with resentment.

The healthful waters of the several springs rose from the ground heavy with minerals from down in the earth’s core. Thick-textured and buoyant. You could probably pitch a baby into any one of the pools and it would bob right back to the surface. And the water was nice and warm, a little better than a hundred degrees except after a hard rain, when it inexplicably became hotter. It carried a faint sulfurous odor, but only enough to seem medicinal.

The water was said to be both diuretic and laxative, and the guests were encouraged to drink freely. So the help went up and down the halls day and night carrying china chamberpots, the contents sloshing under domed lids. Some among the guests contended for bragging rights as to quantity of water imbibed. I remember, before the War, one stout and somewhat elderly woman, attired in maroon to advertise her availability as a widow beyond the bounds of the last degree of mourning, powder caked in the creases of her face, claimed to drink as high as two gallons a day to no apparent detriment—but with no diminution of the neuralgic pain in her right hip, which burned as fierce as ever. Others among us credited the waters with relief from rheumatism, migraine headaches, psoriasis, and certain cancers.

But the finest use I could find for the hot water was a good long chin-deep soak in the middle of the night. Watching the wheel of the sky turn overhead. Orion in winter swinging his blade below his belt. The Seven Sisters, once distinct but becoming a singular and blurry patch against the dark as my eyesight waned. Jupiter and Saturn and Mars scattered about among the stars, depending on the year. The moons arcing overhead in whatever slivers or orbs they were scheduled to show at that particular time on that particular night. Lovely, the way the sky works. The constellations and planets and moons. Enough recurrence to assure us of the probable continuation of the universe, but not so repetitive as to become boring during the limited span we have to watch it all spin around.

We went to Warm Springs in search of magical waters, fresh mountain air, amusements, adventures, relief from pain. It offered unlimited leisure for as long as you could afford to stay, which for most was the entire summer. The hotel accommodated upward of three hundred guests, and it would be full all through the hot months, when wealthy plantation folk from the steamy lowlands came up for relief from the relentless and wasting heat and also to wrench their sick bowels back to health in the midst of what they called wilderness.

Many of us while in residence at the Springs swore allegiance to various strict diets. The harshest among us claimed to live on just the extreme essences, pure spring water and fresh air. I was not immune to the fashions of the Springs. One summer before the War, I forbade myself the consumption of animal food for nearly an entire summer. I lived on salad greens and sliced tomatoes and red wine. But at some point I reckoned I could not face a life without sausage biscuits. My first meal of meat was chicken thighs soaked in vinegar and hot peppers and cooked to a char over hickory coals. I sat at one of the communal tables in the dining hall and had to hold myself from planting my face in the plate like a dog at its dinner.

On foggy evenings in midsummer when it was cool enough for a fire to be lit in the big hearth, the delight of the flatlanders knew no bounds. A wood fire feeling good in midsummer; who could imagine such a wonder? Anyone who ever stayed there remembered at least two hard facts: the ballroom was two hundred and thirty-three feet long and the gallery was faced with thirty-five fat Doric columns.

I loved that gallery, which a few among us called the veranda and a lesser few the piazza. It stretched the full length of the building. A long row of green rocking chairs—three to a column—looked across the lawn to the river and the ridge of the western mountains. Scattered across the lawn were big old oaks and poplars with their trunks whitewashed from the ground to the height a painter could reach with dripping upstretched brush.

One summer evening before the War, rocking with the men on the gallery and looking out at the view with just enough light to see the smoke from our cigars and the faintest distant jag of ridgeline above the black river, one of the cigar smokers and Scotch drinkers, a man who featured himself a seasoned traveler, opined that anyone with genuine taste would find Warm Springs as superior to Saratoga as a mountain stream to a tidal gut.

For close to twenty years, any time I was in residence, no matter the season, the help knew to bring my coffee and an ounce of Calvados out to the rockers at sunrise. Hardly any of the guests stirred before breakfast began to be served in the dining hall, so I had the place to myself to rock and read and watch the fog lift off the river. Of course, I could have sat and rocked and watched virtually the same view from my own porch, but at home I would have been a stationary target.

I TRAVELED THE FINAL LEG
of the journey to the Springs, riding from midday into night. The ferry at the crossing above Alexander was unaccountably delayed, but at least the roads were dry and the moon was coming on toward full, though its blue wash of light filtering onto the roadway through the fully leafed trees revealed barely more than I could have seen without it. The river was broad most of the way, the light falling on it like rubbed pewter, and the road in many places was hardly elevated above water level.

I did not make it to the Springs until nearly midnight, and the hotel’s day had wound down to a close. Out front, a groom remained awake to take my horse. A few night owls still smoked and sipped in the rockers on the gallery. I went inside and asked at the desk that the trunk of clothes and personal effects I kept in storage might be sent to the room. I collected forwarded mail and scanned the lobby. The lamps were dimmed down to flames no brighter than candles. Dinner was of course long over, and the doors to the dark dining hall were closed. A table of cardplayers gambled on. A couple in their early thirties, acting rapt with each other and apparently unmarried, began singing one of the new songs. They came together and danced a few steps, unself-consciously and pressed very close, and then the woman pulled away, laughing. She held out her hand and the man kissed the back and then the fingertips. And then he turned it over and kissed the cup of her gloved palm and then, above the button, her bare veined wrist. She looked at her wrist as if she had never seen it before, and then she wheeled with a becoming flare of skirt and walked across the lobby to the steps that led to the sleeping rooms. Her dancing partner and I both watched her go. The Gypsy palm reader still sat behind her little table, the hand of a grey-headed man in his sixties smoothed out flat in hers. She traced curves of lifeline and heartline very slowly with her forefinger, a calculated thrill running through every nerve of her customer and in itself worth the dollar her reading cost. As I walked to the bar, the Gypsy cut her eyes to me and went back to work. In passing, I heard a few of the words she said:
tribulation followed by final peace.

The fate of us all, I thought. The easiest of predictions. None of us escape it.

At the bar in the corner, three older men sat humped over their nightcaps. They had spaced out along the bar stools incommunicative, maintaining the etiquette of men urinating together. I sat in the seat that best corresponded with the prevailing isolation.

I ordered a ham sandwich and what I intended to be a lone Tanqueray with lime and sugar. And a light. The bartender moved a lamp from the other end of the bar and set it in front of me. I twisted up the wick and began sorting mail. Nothing particularly personal, only desperate business correspondence from several lawyers either saying why I urgently needed to pay their clients or why their clients couldn’t pay me. And several periodicals, among them the latest
Appleton’s Journal
and a
Cornhill Magazine
many months in arrears of its cover date. While I ate the sandwich, I scanned an article in
Appleton’s
on the state of recent fiction. Its judgment was harsh, on the grounds that we live in a happy, beautiful, virile age. And yet our stories are unnecessarily glum. We do not want sighs or tears. We are all seeking happiness, whether through money or position. It is our privilege to resent any attempts to force unhappy thoughts on us. We rightly object to being made sad by our reading matter.

I decided those sentiments were occasion for a few more drinks.

And then the younger man who had kissed the woman’s wrist sat down on a stool beside me, his elbow and hip brushing mine as he took his seat. He still hummed the last bars of their song, which had about its melody and lyric the drama of desire and youth.

—Nice hotel, he said, after he had hummed to the end of the chorus.

—Yes, nice, I said.

—Nice guests, too.

—Nice.

He introduced himself, and I shook his hand and gave my name.

—Not the noted colonel? he said.

I said, That war’s over.

—Well, damn, he said. Nice to meet you.

He put out his hand again and I shook it again.

The other lonely drinkers were drawn to his excess enthusiasm. They circled around, drinks in hand. Soon we were a group, old pals. Our conversation touched upon all the chief occupations at the Springs: eating, bathing, riding, drinking to excess, dancing, playing cards, walking to certain nearby rocky prominences to take in vistas, flirting to a dangerous degree, and gossiping without cessation.

One of the relentless topics of talk recently had been the Woman in Black, a widow who dressed in the first degree of mourning, though some said knowingly that the required year and a day had long since elapsed. She had apparently come to the Springs to regain her health but seemed indifferent whether she gained it or lost it entirely. Her mind ran only in doleful channels. She took meals in her room rather than in the dining hall and, of course, never appeared in the ballroom. From morning to late afternoon, she was given to solitary walks along the river road. She was seldom seen by other guests except during her gloomy passages through the lobby on the way to the sleeping rooms, her hem dragging dusty or muddy depending on the weather. One of the drinkers said his wife held the opinion that for the Woman in Black, all clocks had stopped at the moment of her husband’s death, never to start again.

I speculated that she would surely die of heartbreak.

One of the older men snorted back a laugh. And all the others—men even more middle-aged than myself, with well-earned bellies rising plump under bright-colored expensive waistcoats, and also the young romantic—ganged up against me and agreed ruefully that no woman had ever died of grief. Not a one of their gender in all the history of the world. Men die of heartbreak. Women die of old age. That’s why we always precede them in death. Just study the language of obituaries for proof.

I raised a toast to heartbreak.

And after a reluctant pause, they all raised their glasses with me.

At that down note, the other men drained the bottoms of their glasses and called it a night. The bartender made exaggerated motions of wiping up and closing down. I ordered a last double and carried the glass with me out the door and onto the gallery. The moon stood above the far ridges, a ring of light around it in the hazed milky sky. The night was damp and cool, and the fog was beginning to gather in the low-grounds. I put my riding coat back on and stuffed the mail into one of the deep pockets.

I crossed the river on the wooden bridge and walked in the dark along the river road and turned onto the steep path up the mountain leading to the jump-off, an overlook, a vista popular among the younger guests for a flirtatious scramble in groups up the rocky trail to watch sunset. And then scramble down in the twilight and quickly change from walking attire to evening dress for dancing, any occasion for a wardrobe change being always welcome among the young.

I climbed the steep trail, meticulous in my effort to keep gin level to gravity and not to the pitched ground. Huffing and blowing, I attained the well-worn rock ledge, a projection of mountain into space, a sharp angle aimed off to a far western prospect. I tipped the glass to my mouth and swallowed it all down. Drew back and threw the empty glass at the moon.

Failure, of course. Proven by the festive sound of breaking glass faint against the rocks below.

Then, off to my right, a polite clearing of throat. A woman’s throat. I supposed I had interrupted a tryst.

—Excuse me, I said.

I looked along the ledge, expecting a couple. Bodies pulling a discreet distance away from each other.

Instead, silhouetted, sitting with feet dangling over the edge of the jump-off, a lone black figure.

—Again, I said, Excuse me for interrupting.

BACK AT THE HOTEL,
I climbed the stairs from the lobby to the Palm Court, a small private upper lounge around which, on three levels, the better sleeping rooms were arrayed. Two men sat in red-painted rattan chairs. They wore expensive-looking suits, one grey and the other black. They both had on collars and ties of the most current fashion. The one in grey was young and big-chested. He sat thumbing a magazine. Despite being indoors, he kept his hat on, but tilted far to the back as if in grudging concession to the requirements of etiquette. A pale stripe of untanned forehead shone yellow in the uplight from the lamp flame. The one in black was considerably older and thin and bald. He bent forward in his chair, holding his hatbrim delicately two-handed, watching with fascination as his fingers rotated it slowly by small degrees around its circle.