Various Miracles (21 page)

It must have been that the intensity and heat of this gathered happiness produced a sort of gas or ether or alchemic reaction—it’s difficult to be precise—but for a moment, perhaps two, the walls of the aircraft, the entire fuselage and wings and tail section became translucent. The layers of steel, the rivets and bracing and ribwork turned first purple, then a pearly pink, and finally metamorphosed to the incandescence of pure light.

This luminous transformation, needless to say, went unnoticed by those in the aircraft, so busy was each of them with his or her private vision of transcendence.

But there was, it turned out, one witness: a twelve-year-old boy who happened to be standing on a stony Greenland beach that midsummer night. His name was Piers and he was the son of a Danish Lutheran clergyman who had come to the tiny Greenland village for a two-year appointment. The boy’s mother had remained behind in Copenhagen, having fallen in love with a manufacturer of pharmaceuticals, and none of this had been adequately explained to the boy—which may have been why he was standing, lonely and desperately confused, on the barren beach so late at night.

It was not very dark, of course. In Greenland, in the middle
of the summer, the sky keeps some of its color until eleven o’clock, and even after that there are traces of brightness, much like the light that adheres to small impurities suspended in wine. The boy heard the noise of the motors first, looked up frowningly and saw the plane, shiningly present with its chambered belly and elegant glassy wings and the propellers spinning their milky webs. He was too dazzled to wave, which was what he normally did when a plane passed overhead. What could it be? he asked himself. He knew almost nothing of science fiction, a genre scorned by his father, and the church in which he had been reared strictly eschewed angelic hosts or other forms of bodily revelation. A trick of the atmosphere?—he had already seen the aurora borealis and knew this was different. The word
phenomenon
had not yet entered his vocabulary, but when it did, a few years later, dropping like a ripe piece of fruit into his consciousness, he found that it could usefully contain something of the spectacle of that night.

Such moments of intoxication, of course, quickly become guilty secrets—this is especially true of children—so it is not surprising that he never told anyone about what he had seen.

Like his father, he grew up to become a man of God, though like others of his generation he wore the label with irony. He went first to Leiden to study, and there lost his belief in the Trinity. After that he received a fellowship to the Union Theological Seminary in New York where his disbelief grew, as did his reputation for being a promising young theologian. Before long he was invited to join the faculty; he became, in a few short years, the author of a textbook and a sought-after lecture, and in his late thirties he fell in love with a nervous, intelligent woman who was a scholar of medieval history.

One night, when wrapped in each other’s arms, she told
him how women in the Middle Ages had pulled their silk gowns through a golden ring to test the fineness of the cloth. It seemed to him that this was the way in which he tested his belief in God, except that instead of determining the fineness of faith, he charted its reluctance, its lumpiness, its ultimate absurdity. Nevertheless, against all odds, there were days when he was able to pull what little he possessed through the ring; it came out with a ripply whoosh of surprise, making him feel faint and bringing instantly to mind the image of the transparent airplane suspended in the sky of his childhood. All his life seemed to him to have been a centrifugal voyage around that remembered vision—the only sign of mystery he had ever received.

One day, his limbs around his beloved and his brain burning with pleasure, he told her what he had once been privileged to see. She pulled away from him then—she was a woman with cool eyes and a listening mouth—and suggested he see a psychiatrist.

Thereafter, he saw less and less of her, and finally, a year later, a friend told him she had married someone else. The same friend suggested he should take a holiday.

It was summertime, the city was sweltering, and it had been some time since he had been able to pull anything at all through his gold ring. He considered returning to Greenland for a visit, but the flight schedule was unbelievably complicated and the cost prohibitive; only wealthy bird watchers working on their life lists could afford to go there now. He found himself one afternoon in a travel agent’s office next to a pretty girl who was booking a flight to Acapulco.

“Fabulous place,” she said. Glorious sun. Great beaches. And grass by the bushel.

Always before, when the frivolous, leisured world beckoned,
he had solemnly refused. But now he bought himself a ticket, and by the next morning he was on his way.

At the airport in Acapulco, a raw duplicity hangs in the blossom-sweat air—or so thinks Josephe, a young woman who works as a baggage checker behind the customs desk. All day long fresh streams of tourists arrive. From her station she can see them stepping off their aircraft and pressing forward through the wide glass doors, carrying with them the conspiratorial heft of vacationers-on-the-move. Their soft-sided luggage, their tennis rackets, their New York pallor and anxious brows expose in Josephe a buried vein of sadness, and one day she notices something frightening; 109 passengers step off the New York plane, and each of them—without exception—is wearing blue jeans.

She’s used to the sight of blue jeans, but such statistical unanimity is unnerving, as though a comic army has grotesquely intruded. Even the last passenger to disembark and step onto the tarmac, a man who walks with the hesitant gait of someone in love with his own thoughts, is wearing the ubiquitous blue jeans.

She wishes there had been a single exception—a woman in a bright flowered dress or a man archaic enough to believe that resort apparel meant white duck trousers. She feels oddly assaulted by such totality, but the feeling quickly gives way to a head-shaking thrill of disbelief, then amusement, then satisfaction and, finally, awe.

She tries hard to get a good look at the last passenger’s face, the one who sealed the effect of unreality, but the other passengers crowd around her desk, momentarily threat-ened by her small discoveries and queries, her transitory power.

In no time it’s over; the tourists, duly processed, hurry out into the sun. They feel lighter than air, they claim, freer
than birds, drifting off into their various inventions of paradise as though oblivious to the million invisible filaments of connection, trivial or profound, which bind them one to the other and to the small planet they call home.

WHEN HAROLD AND SALLY TRAVEL
, Sally keeps a journal, and in this journal Harold becomes
H
. She will write down such things as “H. exclaimed how the cathedral (Reims) is melting away on the outside and eroding into abstract lumps—while the interior is all fluidity and smoothness and grace, a seemingly endless series of rising and arching.”

Has Harold actually
exclaimed
any such thing? The phrase
seemingly endless
sounds out of character, a little spongy, in fact, but then people sometimes take on a different persona when they travel. The bundled luggage, the weight of the camera around the neck, the sheer cost of air fare make travelers eager to mill expansive commentary from minor observation. Sally, in her journal, employs a steady, marching syntax, but allows herself occasional forays into fancy.

Both Harold and Sally are forty years old, the parents of two young children, boys. Harold possesses a mild, knobby face—his father was Swedish, his mother Welsh—and the
natural dignity of one who says less than he feels. After he and his wife, Sally, leave the cathedral, they walk back to the Hotel du Nord where they are staying, down one of those narrow, busy streets which the French like to describe as
bien animé
, and everywhere, despite a thick mist of rain, people are busy coming and going. Since it is close to five o’clock, they’re beginning to gather in small cafés and bars
and salons du thé
in order to treat themselves to glasses of wine or beer or perhaps small cups of bitter espresso. A
quotidian quaff
is the tickling phrase that pops into Harold’s head, and it seems to him there is not one person in all of Reims, in all of France for that matter, who is not now happily seated in some warm public corner and raising pleasing liquids to his lips. He experiences a nudge of grief because he does not happen to live in a country where people gather publicly at this hour to sip drinks and share anecdotes and debate ideas. He and Sally live on the fringe of Oshawa, Ontario, where, at the end of the working day, people simply return to their homes and begin to prepare their evening meal as though lacking the imagination to think of more joyous activities. But here, at a little table in France, the two of them have already gone native— “H. and I have gone native …”—and sit sipping cups of tea and eating little pancakes sprinkled with sugar. Harold feels inexpressibly at peace—which makes him all the more resentful that he can’t live the rest of his life in this manner, but he decides against mentioning his ambivalent feelings to Sally for fear she’ll write them down in her journal. (“H. laments the sterility of North American life which insists on the isolation of the family rather than daily ceremony of… “)

The Hotel du Nord is much like other provincial hotels in its price bracket, possessing as it does a certain dimness of light bulbs, rosy wallpaper printed with medallions, endless
creaking corridors lined with numbered doors and, especially, a proprietor’s young brown-eyed son who sits in the foyer at a little table doing his homework, his
devoir
as he calls it. It’s a lesson on the configuration of the Alps that occupies this young boy and keeps his smooth dark head bent low. The angle of the boy’s bent neck sharpens Harold’s sorrow, which has been building since he and Sally left the cathedral. (“H. was deeply moved by the sight of… ”)

Their room is small, the bed high and narrow and the padded satin coverlet not quite clean. Between coarse white sheets they attempt to make love, and almost, but not quite, succeed. Neither blames the other. Sally curses the remnant of jet lag and Harold suspects the heaviness of the bedcovers; at home they’ve grown used to the lightness of a single electric blanket. But the tall shutters at the Hotel du Nord keep the little room wonderfully, profoundly, dark, and the next morning Harold remarks that there’s probably a market in Canada for moveable shutters instead of the merely decorative Colonial type. (“H. has become an enthusiastic advocate of… ”)

It seems that the hotel, despite its great number of rooms, is almost empty. At least there is only one other guest having breakfast with Sally and Harold the next morning, a young man sitting at the table next to theirs, drinking his coffee noisily and nibbling a bun. Out of pity—for the young, for the solitary—they engage him in conversation. He’s an Australian, hungry for cricket scores, scornful of New Zealanders, and illiterate in French—altogether a dull young man; there’s no other word for it. (“What a waste, H. says, to come so far and be so dull! !”)

Rain, rain, rain. To cheer themselves up, Sally and Harold drive their rented Peugeot to Dijon and treat themselves to a grand lunch at an ancient
auberge
. (“Awnings, white
tablecloths, the whole ball of wax.”) Sally starts with a lovely and strange salad of warm bacon, chicken livers, tomatoes, lettuce and parsley. Then something called
Truit Caprice
. When she chews, an earnest net of wrinkles flies into her face, and Harold finds this so endearing that he reaches for her hand. (“H. had the alternate menu—herring—which may be the cause of his malaise!”)

Sunshine, at last, after days of rain, and Sally and Harold arrive at the tall gates of a château called Rochepot, which their
Guide Michelin
has not awarded the decency of a single star. Why not? they wonder aloud.

Because it is largely a restoration, their tour guide says. She’s middle-aged, with a broad fused bosom, and wears an apron over her green wool suit. Stars, she says, are reserved for those things that are authentic. Nevertheless, the château is spectacular with its patterned roofs and pretty interior garden—and Sally and Harold, after the rain, after yet another night of sexual failure, are anxious to appreciate. The circular château bedchambers are filled with curious hangings, the wide flagged kitchen is a museum of polished vessels and amusing contrivances, but what captures Harold’s imagination is a little plaque on the garden wall. It shows a picture of a giraffe, and with it goes a brief legend. It seems that the King of Egypt gave the giraffe to the King of France in the year 1827, and that this creature was led, wearing a cloak to keep it from the chill, through the village of Rochepot where it was regarded by all and sundry as a great spectacle. Harold loves the nineteenth century, which he sees as an exuberant epoch that produced and embraced the person he would like to have been: gentleman, generalist, amateur naturalist, calm but skeptical observer of kingships, comets and constellations, of flora and fauna and humanistic
philosophy, and at times he can scarcely understand how he’s come to be a supervisor in the public school system on the continent of North America. (“H. despairs because … ”)