STRANGE CHRISTMAS GAME BY CHARLOTTE RIDDELL
It was the middle of November
when we arrived at Martingdale, and found the place anything but romantic or
pleasant. The walks were wet and sodden, the trees were leafless, there were no
flowers save a few late pink roses blooming in the garden. It had been a wet
season, and the place looked miserable. Clare would not ask Alice down to keep
her company in the winter months, as she had intended; and for myself, the
Cronsons were still absent in New Norfolk, where they meant to spend Christmas
with old Mrs. Cronson, now recovered.
Altogether, Martingdale seemed
dreary enough, and the ghost stories we had laughed at while sunshine flooded
the room, became less unreal, when we had nothing but blazing fires and wax
candles to dispel the gloom. They became more real also when servant after
servant left us to seek situations elsewhere! when “noises” grew frequent in
the house; when we ourselves, Clare and I, with our own ears heard the tramp,
tramp, the banging and the chattering which had been described to us.
My dear reader, you doubtless are
free from superstitious fancies. You pooh-pooh the existence of ghosts, and
“only wish you could find a haunted house in which to spend a night,” which is
all very brave and praiseworthy, but wait till you are left in a dreary,
desolate old country mansion, filled with the most unaccountable sounds,
without a servant, with none save an old care-taker and his wife, who, living
at the extremest end of the building, heard nothing of the tramp, tramp, bang,
bang, going on at all hours of the night.
At first I imagined the noises
were produced by some evil-disposed persons, who wished, for purposes of their
own, to keep the house uninhabited; but by degrees Clare and I came to the
conclusion the visitation must be supernatural, and Martingdale by consequence
untenantable. Still being practical people, unlike our predecessors, not having
money to live where and how we liked, we decided to watch and see whether we
could trace any human influence in the matter. If not, it was agreed we were to
pull down the right wing of the house and the principal staircase.
For nights and nights we sat up
till two or three o’clock in the morning, Clare engaged in needlework, I
reading, with a revolver lying on the table beside me; but nothing, neither
sound nor appearance rewarded our vigil. This confirmed my first ideas that the
sounds were not supernatural; but just to test the matter, I determined on
Christmas-eve, the anniversary of Mr. Jeremy Lester’s disappearance, to keep
watch myself in the red bed chamber. Even to Clare I never mentioned my
intention.
About 10, tired out with our
previous vigils, we each retired to rest. Somewhat ostentatiously, perhaps, I
noisily shut the door of my room, and when I opened it half-an-hour afterwards,
no mouse could have pursued its way along the corridor with greater silence and
caution than myself. Quite in the dark I sat in the red room. For over an hour
I might as well have been in my grave for anything I could see in the
apartment; but at the end of that time the moon rose and cast strange lights
across the floor and upon the wall of the haunted chamber.
Hitherto I kept my watch opposite
the window, now I changed my place to a corner near the door, where I was
shaded from observation by the heavy hangings of the bed, and an antique
wardrobe. Still I sat on, but still no sound broke the silence. I was weary
with many nights’ watching, and tired of my solitary vigil, I dropped at last
into a slumber from which I awakened by hearing the door softly opened.
“John,” said my sister, almost in
a whisper; “John, are you here?”
“Yes, Clare,” I answered; “but
what are you doing up at this hour?”
“Come downstairs,” she replied;
“they are in the oak parlor.”
I did not need any explanation as
to whom she meant, but crept downstairs after her, warned by an uplifted hand
of the necessity for silence and caution. By the door — by the open door of the
oak parlor, she paused, and we both looked in.
There was the room we left in
darkness overnight, with a bright wood fire blazing on the hearth, candles on
the chimney-piece, the small table pulled out from its accustomed corner, and
two men seated beside it, playing, at cribbage. We could see the face of the
younger player; it was that of a man about five and twenty, of a man who had
lived hard and wickedly; who had wasted his substance and his health; who had
been while in the flesh Jeremy Lester.
It would be difficult for me to
say how I knew this, how in a moment I identified the features of the player
with those of the man who had been missing for forty-one years — forty-one
years that very night.
He was dressed in the costume of
a bygone period; his hair was powdered, and round his wrists there were ruffles
of lace. He looked like one who, having come from some great party, had sat
down after his return home to play cards with an intimate friend. On his little
finger there sparkled a ring, in the front of his shirt there gleamed a
valuable diamond. There were diamond buckles in his shoes, and, according to
the fashion of his time, he wore knee breeches and silk stockings, which showed
off advantageously the shape of a remarkably good leg and ankle. He sat
opposite the door, but never once lifted his eyes to it. His attention seemed
concentrated on the cards.
For a time there was utter
silence in the room, broken only by the momentous counting of the game. In the
doorway we stood, holding our breath, terrified and yet fascinated by the scene
which was being acted before us. The ashes dropped on the hearth softly and
like the snow; we could hear the rustle of the cards as they were dealt out and
fell upon the table; we listened to the count — fifteen two, fifteen-four, and
so forth, — but there was no other word spoken till at length the player, whose
face we could not see, exclaimed, ” I win; the game is mine.”
Then his opponent took up the
cards, sorted them over negligently in his hand, put them close together, and
flung the whole pack in his guest’s face, exclaiming, “Cheat; liar; take that.”
There was a bustle and confusion
— a flinging over of chairs, and fierce gesticulation, and such a noise of
passionate voices mingling, that we could not hear a sentence which was
uttered. All at once, however, Jeremy Lester strode out of the room in so great
a hurry that he almost touched us where we stood; out of the room, and tramp,
tramp up the staircase to the red room, whence he descended in a few minutes
with a couple of rapiers under his arm. When he re-entered the room he gave, as
it seemed to us, the other man his choice of the weapons, and then he flung
open the window, and after ceremoniously giving place for his opponent to pass
out first, he walked forth into the night air, Clare and I following.
We went through the garden and
down a narrow winding walk to a smooth piece of turf, sheltered from the north
by a plantation of young fir trees. It was a bright moonlight night by this
time, and we could distinctly see Jeremy Lester measuring off the ground.
“When you say ‘three,’” he said
at last to the man whose back was still towards us.
They had drawn lots for the
ground, and the lot had fallen against Mr. Lester. He stood thus with the
moonbeams falling upon him, and a handsomer fellow I would never desire to
behold.
“One,” began the other; ” two,”
and before our kinsman had the slightest suspicion of his design, he was upon
him, and his rapier through Jeremy Lester’s breast.
At the sight of that cowardly
treachery, Clare screamed aloud. In a moment the combatants had disappeared,
the moon was obscured behind a cloud, and we were standing in the shadow of the
fir-plantation, shivering with cold and terror. But we knew at last what had
become of the late owner of Martingdale, that he had fallen, not in fair fight,
but foully murdered by a false friend.
When late on Christmas morning I
awoke, it was to see a white world, to behold the ground, and trees, and shrubs
all laden and covered with snow. There was snow everywhere, such snow as no
person could remember having fallen for forty-one years.
“It was on just such a Christmas
as this that Mr. Jeremy disappeared,” remarked the old sexton to my sister who
had insisted on dragging me through the snow to church, whereupon Clare fainted
away and was carried into the vestry, where I made a full confession to the
Vicar of all we had beheld the previous night.
At first that worthy individual
rather inclined to treat the matter lightly, but when, a fortnight after, the
snow melted away and the fir-plantation came to be examined, he confessed there
might be more things in heaven and earth than his limited philosophy had
dreamed of. In a little clear space just within the plantation, Jeremy Lester’s
body was found. We knew it by the ring and the diamond buckles, and the
sparkling breast-pin; and Mr. Cronson, who in his capacity as magistrate came
over to inspect these relics, was visibly perturbed at my narrative.
“Pray, Mr. Lester, did you in
your dream see the face of — of the gentleman — your kinsman’s opponent?”
“No,” I answered, “he sat and
stood with his back to us all the time.”
“There is nothing more, of
course, to be done in the matter,” observed Mr. Cronson.
“Nothing,” I replied; and there
the affair would doubtless have terminated, but that a few days afterwards,
when we were dining at Cronson Park, Clare all of a sudden dropped the glass of
water she was carrying to her lips, and exclaiming, “Look, John, there he is!”
rose from her seat, and with a face as white as the table cloth, pointed to a
portrait hanging on the wall. “I saw him for an instant when he turned his head
towards the door as Jeremy Lester left it,” she explained; “that is he.”
Of what followed after this
identification I have only the vaguest recollection. Servants rushed hither and
thither; Mrs. Cronson dropped off her chair into hysterics; the young ladies
gathered round their mamma; Mr. Cronson, trembling like one in an ague fit,
attempted some kind of an explanation, while Clare kept praying to be taken
away, — only to be taken away. I took her away, not merely from Cronson Park
but from Martingdale.
Before we left the latter place,
however, I had an interview with Mr. Cronson, who said the portrait Clare had
identified was that of his wife’s father, the last person who saw Jeremy Lester
alive.
“He is an old man now,” finished
Mr. Cronson, “a man of over eighty, who has confessed everything to me. You
won’t bring further sorrow and disgrace upon us by making this matter public?”
I promised him I would keep
silence, but the story gradually oozed out, and the Cronsons left the country.
My sister never returned to Martingdale; she married and is living in London.
Though I assure her there are no strange noises in my house, she will not visit
Bedfordshire, where the “little girl” she wanted me so long ago to “think of
seriously,” is now my wife and the mother of my children.
Kierkegaard
Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;… In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all. – Søren Kierkegaard
John Cheever
Cheever’s
main themes included the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption,
and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody
the salient aspects of both – light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his
works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life, characterized by
abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to
the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia.
The Swimmer
It was one of those midsummer Sundays when
everyone sits around saying, “I drank too much last night.” You might have
heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church,
heard it from the lips of the priest
himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium, heard it from the golf
links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader
of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover. “I drank too
much,” said Donald Westerhazy. “We all drank too much,” said Lucinda Merrill.
“It must have been the wine,” said Helen Westerhazy. “I drank too much of that claret.”
This was at the edge of the Westerhazys’
pool. The pool, fed by an artesian well with a high iron content, was a pale
shade of green. It was a fine day. In the west there was a massive stand of
cumulus cloud so like a city seen from a distance—from the bow of an
approaching ship—that it might have had a name.
Lisbon. Hackensack. The sun was hot. Neddy
Merrill sat by the green water, one hand in it, one around a glass of gin. He was
a slender man—he seemed to have the especial slenderness of youth—and while he
was far from young he had slid down his banister that morning and given the
bronze backside of Aphrodite on the hall table a smack, as he jogged toward the
smell of coffee in his dining room.
He might have been compared to a
summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one, and while he lacked a tennis
racket or a sail bag the impression was definitely one of youth, sport, and
clement weather. He had been swimming and now he was breathing deeply,
stertorously as if he could gulp into his lungs the components of that moment, the
heat of the sun, the intenseness of his pleasure. It all seemed to flow into
his chest. His own house stood in Bullet Park, eight miles to the south, where
his four beautiful daughters would have had their lunch and might be playing
tennis.
Then it occurred to him that by taking a
dogleg to the southwest he could reach his home by water. His life was not
confining and the delight he took in this observation could not be
explained by its suggestion of escape.
He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s
eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across
the county. He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he
would name the stream Lucinda after his wife. He was not a practical joker nor
was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea
of himself as a legendary figure. The day was beautiful and it
seemed to him that a long swim might
enlarge and celebrate its beauty.
He took off a sweater that was hung over
his shoulders and dove in. He had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not
hurl themselves into pools. He swam a choppy crawl,
breathing either with every stroke or every
fourth stroke and counting somewhere well in the back of his mind the one-two one-two
of a flutter kick.
It was not a serviceable stroke for long
distances but the domestication of swimming had saddled the sport with some
customs and in his part of the world a crawl was customary. To be embraced and
sustained by the light green water was less a pleasure, it seemed, than the
resumption of a natural condition, and he would have liked to swim without
trunks, but this was not possible, considering his project. He hoisted himself
up on the far curb—he never used the ladder—and started across the lawn. When
Lucinda asked where he was going he said he was going to swim home.
The only maps and charts he had to go by
were remembered or imaginary but these were clear enough. First there were the
Grahams, the Hammers, the Lears, the Howlands, and
the Crosscups. He would cross Ditmar Street
to the Bunkers and come, after a short portage, to the Levys, the Welchers, and
the public pool in Lancaster. Then there were the Hallorans, the Sachses, the
Biswangers, Shirley Adams, the Gilmartins, and the Clydes.
The day was lovely, and that he lived in a
world so generously supplied with water seemed like a clemency, a beneficence.
His heart was high and he ran across the grass. Making his way home by an
uncommon route gave him the feeling that he was a pilgrim, an explorer, a man
with a destiny, and he knew that he would find friends all along theway;
friends would line the banks of the Lucinda River.
He went through a hedge that separated the
Westerhazys’land from the Grahams’, walked under some flowering apple trees,
passed the shed that housed their pump and filter, and came out at the Grahams’
pool. “Why, Neddy,” Mrs. Graham said, “what a marvelous surprise. I’ve been
trying to get you on the phone all morning. Here, let me get you a drink.” He saw
then, like any explorer, that the hospitable customs and traditions of the
natives would have to be handled with diplomacy if he was ever going to reach
his destination. He did not want to mystify or seem rude to the Grahams nor did
he have the time to linger there. He swam the length of their pool and joined
them in the sun and was rescued, a few minutes later, by the arrival of two
carloads of friends from Connecticut.
During the uproarious reunions he was able
to slip away. He went down by the front of the Grahams’ house, stepped over a thorny
hedge, and crossed a vacant lot to the Hammers’. Mrs.Hammer, looking up from
her roses, saw him swim by although she wasn’t quite sure who it was.
The Lears heard him splashing past the open
windows of their living room. The
Howlands and the Crosscups were away.
Afterleaving the Howlands’ he crossed Ditmar Street and started for the
Bunkers’, where he could hear, even at that distance, the noise of a party.
The water refracted the sound of voices and
laughter and seemed to suspend it in midair. The Bunkers’ pool was on a rise
and he climbed some stairs to a terrace where twenty-five
or thirty men and women were drinking. The
only person in the water was Rusty Towers, who floated there on a rubber raft.
Oh, how bonny and lush were the banks of the Lucinda
River! Prosperous men and women gathered by
the sapphire colored waters while caterer’s men in white coats passed them cold
gin.
Overhead a red de Haviland trainer was
circling around and around and around in the sky with something like the glee
of a child in a swing. Ned felt a passing affection for
the scene, a tenderness for the gathering,
as if it was something he might touch. In the distance he heard thunder. As
soon as Enid Bunker saw him she began to scream: “Oh, look who’s here! What a
marvelous surprise! When Lucinda said that you couldn’t come I thought I’d
die.”
She made her way to him through the crowd,
and when they had finished kissing she led
him to the bar, a progress that was slowed
by the fact that he stopped to kiss eight or ten other women and shake the
handsof as many men. A smiling bartender he had seen at a hundred parties gave
him a gin and tonic and he stood by the bar for a moment, anxious not to get
stuck in any conversation that would delay his voyage. When he seemed about to
be surrounded he dove in and swam close to the side to avoid colliding with
Rusty’s raft. At the far end of the pool he bypassed the Tomlinsons with a
broad smile and jogged up the garden path. The gravel cut his feet but this was
the only unpleasantness. The party was confined to the pool, and as he went toward
the house he heard the brilliant, watery sound of voices fade, heard the noise
of a radio from the Bunkers’ kitchen, where someone was listening to a ball
game. Sunday afternoon. He made his way through the parked cars and down the grassy
border of their driveway to Alewives Lane.
He did not want to be seen on the road in
his bathing trunks but there was no traffic and he made the short distance to
the Levys’ driveway, marked with a private property sign and a green tube for
The New York Times. All the doors and windows of the big house were open but
there were no signs of life; not even a dog barked. He went around the side of
the house tothe pool and saw that the Levys had only recently left. Glasses and
bottles and dishes of nuts were on a table at the deep end, where there was a
bathhouse or gazebo, hung with Japanese lanterns. After swimming the pool he
got himself a glass and
poured a drink. It was his fourth or fifth
drink and he had swum nearly half the length of the Lucinda River. He felt
tired, clean, and pleased at that moment to be alone; pleased with everything.
It would storm. The stand of cumulus
cloud—that city—had risen and darkened, and while he sat there he heard the percussiveness
of thunder again. The de Haviland trainer was
still circling overhead and it seemed to
Ned that he could almost hear the pilot laugh with pleasure in the afternoon;
but when there was another peal of thunder he took off for home.
A train whistle blew and he wondered what
time it had gotten to be. Four? Five? He thought of the provincial station at
that hour, where a waiter, his tuxedo concealed by a raincoat, dwarf with some
flowers wrapped in newspaper, and a woman who had been crying would be waiting for
the local. It was suddenly growing dark; it was that moment when the pinheaded
birds seem to organize their song into some acute and knowledgeable recognition
of the storm’s approach. Then there was a fine noise of rushing water from the
crown of an oak at his back, as if a spigot there had been turned. Then the
noise of fountains came from the crowns of
all the tall trees.
Why did he love storms, what was the
meaning of his excitement when the door sprang open and the rain wind fled
rudely up the stairs, why had the simple task of shutting the windows of an old
house seemed fitting and urgent, why did the first watery notes of a storm wind
have for him the unmistakable sound of good news, cheer, glad tidings? Then
there was an explosion, a smell of cordite, and rain lashed the Japanese lanterns
that Mrs. Levy had bought in Kyoto the year before last, or was it the year
before that?
He stayed in the Levys’ gazebo until the
storm had passed. The rain had cooled the air and he shivered.
The force of the wind had stripped a maple
of its red and yellow leaves and scattered them over the grass and the
water. Since it was midsummer the tree must be blighted, and yet he felt a
peculiar sadness at this sign of autumn. He braced his shoulders, emptied his
glass, and started for the Welchers’ pool. This meant crossing the Lindleys’
riding ring and he was surprised to find it overgrown with grass and all the
jumps dismantled. He wondered if the Lindleys had sold their horses or gone
away for the summer and put them out to board. He seemed
to remember having heard something about the Lindleys and their horses but the
memory was unclear. On he went, barefoot through the wet grass, to the
Welchers’, where he found their pool was dry.
This breach in his chain of water
disappointed him absurdly, and he felt like some explorer who seeks a
torrential headwater and finds a dead stream. He was disappointed and
mystified. It was common enough to go away for the summer but no one
ever drained his pool. The Welchers had
definitely gone away.
The pool furniture was folded, stacked, and
covered with a tarpaulin. The bathhouse was locked. All the windows of the
house were shut, and when he went around to the driveway in front he saw a for
sale sign nailed to a tree. When had he last heard from the Welchers—when, that
is, had he and Lucinda last regretted an invitation to dine with them? It
seemed only a week or so ago. Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined
it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the
truth? Then in the distance he heard the sound of a tennis game. This cheered
him, cleared away all his apprehensions and let him regard the overcast sky and
the cold air with indifference.
This was the day that Neddy Merrill swam
across the county. That was the day! He started off then for his most difficult
portage. Had you gone for a Sunday afternoon ride that day you might have seen
him, close to naked, standing on the shoulders of Route 424, waiting for a
chance to cross. You might have wondered if he was the victim of foul play, had
his car broken down, or was he merely a fool. Standing barefoot in the deposits
of the highway—beer cans, rags, and blowout patches—exposed to all kinds of
ridicule, he seemed pitiful.
He had known when he started that this was
a part of his journey—it had been on his maps—but confronted with the lines of
traffic, worming through the summery light, he found himself unprepared. He was
laughed at, jeered at, a beer can was thrown at
him, and he had no dignity or humor to
bring to the situation.
He could have gone back, back to the
Westerhazys’, where Lucinda would still be sitting in the sun. He had signed
nothing, vowed nothing, pledged nothing, not even to himself. Why, believing as
he did, that all human obduracy was susceptible to common sense, was he unable
to turn back? Why was he determined to complete his journey even if it meant
putting his life in danger? At what point had this prank, this joke, this piece
of horseplay become serious? He could not go back, he could not even recall with
any clearness the green water at the Westerhazys’, the sense of inhaling the
day’s components, the friendly and relaxed voices saying that they had drunk
too much. In the space of an hour, more or less, he had covered a distance that
made his return impossible.
An old man, tooling down the highway at
fifteen miles an hour, let him get to the middle of the road, where there was a
grass divider. Here he was exposed to the ridicule of the northbound traffic,
but after ten or fifteen minutes he was able to cross. From here he had only a
short walk to the Recreation Center at the edge of the village of Lancaster,
where there were some handball courts and a public pool.
The effect of the water on voices, the
illusion of brilliance and suspense, was the same here as it had been at the
Bunkers’ but the sounds here were louder, harsher, and more shrill, and as soon
as he entered the crowded enclosure he was confronted with regimentation. “all
swimmers must take a shower before using the pool. all swimmers must use the
footbath. all swimmers must wear their identification disks.” He took a shower,
washed his feet in a cloudy and bitter solution, and made his way to the edge
of the water.
It stank of chlorine and looked to him like
a sink. A pair of lifeguards in a pair of towers blew police whistles at what
seemed to be regular intervals and abused the swimmers through a public address
system. Neddy remembered the sapphire water
at the Bunkers’ with longing and thought
that he might contaminate himself—damage his own prosperousness and charm —by
swimming in this murk, but he reminded himself that he was an explorer, a
pilgrim, and that this was merely a stagnant bend in the Lucinda River.
He dove, scowling with distaste into the
chlorine and had to swim with his head above water to avoid collisions, but
even so he was bumped into, splashed, and jostled. When he got to the shallow
end both lifeguards were shouting at him: “Hey, you, you without the
identification disk, get outa the water.” He did, but they had no way of pursuing him and he went through the reek
of suntan oil and chlorine out through the hurricane fence
and passed the handball courts. By crossing the road he entered the wooded part of the Halloran estate. The woods were not
cleared and the footing was treacherous and difficult until
he reached the lawn and the clipped beech hedge that encircled
their pool.
The Hallorans were friends, an elderly
couple of enormous wealth who seemed to bask in the suspicion
that they might be Communists. They were zealous reformers but
they were not Communists, and yet when they were accused,
as they sometimes were, of subversion, it seemed to gratify and excite them.
Their beech hedge was yellow and he guessed
this had been blighted like the Levys’ maple. He called
hullo, hullo, to warn the Hallorans of his approach, to palliate
his invasion of their
privacy. The Hallorans, for reasons that
had never been explained to him, did not wear bathing suits. No explanations were in order, really. Their nakedness was
a detail in their uncompromising zeal for reform and he stepped politely out of his trunks before he went through the
opening in the hedge.
Mrs. Halloran, a stout woman with white
hair and a serene face, was reading the Times. Mr. Halloran
was taking beech leaves out of the water with a scoop. They
seemed not surprised or displeased to see him. Their pool was perhaps the oldest in the country, a fieldstone
rectangle, fed by a brook. It had no filter or pump and its waters were
the opaque gold of
the stream.
“I’m swimming across the county,” Ned said.
“Why, I didn’t know one could,” exclaimed
Mrs. Halloran.
“Well, I’ve made it from the Westerhazys’,”
Ned said. “That
must be about four miles.”
He left his trunks at the deep end, walked
to the shallow end, and swam this stretch. As he was
pulling himself out of the water he heard Mrs. Halloran say, “We’ve
been terribly sorry
to hear about all your misfortunes, Neddy.”
“My misfortunes?” Ned asked. “I don’t know
what you mean.”
“Why, we heard that you’d sold the house
and that your
poor children . . .”
“I don’t recall having sold the house,” Ned
said, “and the
girls are at home.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Halloran sighed. “Yes . . .”
Her voice filled the air with an unseasonable melancholy and Ned
spoke briskly.
“Thank you for the swim.”
“Well, have a nice trip,” said Mrs.
Halloran.
Beyond the hedge he pulled on his trunks
and fastened them. They were loose and he wondered if,
during the space of an afternoon, he could have lost some
weight. He was cold
and he was tired and the naked Hallorans
and their dark water had depressed him. The swim was too much
for his strength but how could he have guessed this, sliding
down the banister that morning and sitting in the
Westerhazys’ sun? His arms were lame. His legs felt rubbery and ached
at the joints. The worst of it was the cold in his bones and
the feeling that he might never be warm again. Leaves were
falling down around him and he smelled wood smoke on the wind.
Who would be burning wood at this time of year?
He needed a drink. Whiskey would warm him,
pick him up, the swimmer carry him
through the last of his journey, refresh his feeling that it was original and
valorous to swim across the county.
Channel swimmers took brandy. He needed a
stimulant. He crossed the lawn in front of the Hallorans’ house and went down a
little path to where they had built a house for their
only daughter, Helen, and her husband, Eric
Sachs. The Sachses’ pool was small and he found Helen and her husband there.
“Oh, Neddy,” Helen said. “Did you lunch at
Mother’s?”
“Not really,” Ned said. “I did stop to see
your parents.”
This seemed to be explanation enough. “I’m
terribly sorry to
break in on you like this but I’ve taken a
chill and I wonder if
you’d give me a drink.”
“Why, I’d love to,” Helen said, “but there
hasn’t been anything in this house to drink since Eric’s operation. That was three
years ago.”
Was he losing his memory, had his gift for
concealing painful facts let him forget that he had sold his house, that his children
were in trouble, and that his friend had been ill? His
eyes slipped from Eric’s face to his
abdomen, where he saw three pale, sutured scars, two of them at least a foot
long. Gone was his navel, and what, Neddy thought, would the roving hand,
bed-checking one’s gifts at 3 a.m., make of a belly withno navel, no link to
birth, this breach in the succession?
“I’m sure you can get a drink at the
Biswangers’,” Helen said. “They’re having an enormous do. You
can hear it from here. Listen!”
She raised her head and from across the
road, the lawns, the gardens, the woods, the fields, he heard
again the brilliant noise of voices over water. “Well, I’ll get wet,”
he said, still feeling that he had no freedom of choice about his
means of travel.
He dove into the Sachses’ cold water and,
gasping, close to drowning, made his way from one end of the
pool to the other. “Lucinda and I want terribly to see you,”
he said over his
shoulder, his face set toward the
Biswangers’. “We’re sorry it’s been so long and we’ll call you very soon.”
He crossed some fields to the Biswangers’ and the sounds of revelry there. They would be honored to give him a drink, they would be happy to give him a drink. The Biswangers invited him and Lucinda for dinner four times a year, six weeks in advance. They were always rebuffed and yet they continued to send out their invitations, unwilling to comprehend the rigid and undemocratic realities of their society. They were the sort of people who discussed the price of things at cocktails, exchanged market tips during dinner, and after dinner told dirty stories to mixed company. They did not belong to Neddy’s
He crossed some fields to the Biswangers’ and the sounds of revelry there. They would be honored to give him a drink, they would be happy to give him a drink. The Biswangers invited him and Lucinda for dinner four times a year, six weeks in advance. They were always rebuffed and yet they continued to send out their invitations, unwilling to comprehend the rigid and undemocratic realities of their society. They were the sort of people who discussed the price of things at cocktails, exchanged market tips during dinner, and after dinner told dirty stories to mixed company. They did not belong to Neddy’s
set—they were not even on Lucinda’s
Christmas-card list. He went toward their pool with feelings of
indifference, charity, and some unease, since it seemed to be
getting dark and these were the longest days of the year. The
party when he joined it was noisy and large. Grace Biswanger was
the kind of hostess who asked the optometrist, the
veterinarian, the real-estate dealer, and the dentist. No one was
swimming and the twilight, reflected on the water of the pool, had a wintry
gleam.
There was a bar and he started for this.
When Grace Biswanger saw him she came toward him, not
affectionately as he had every right to expect, but bellicosely.
“Why, this party has everything,” she said
loudly, “including a gate crasher.”
She could not deal him a social blow—there
was no question about this and he did not flinch. “As a
gate crasher,” he asked politely, “do I rate a drink?”
“Suit yourself,” she said. “You don’t seem
to pay much attention to invitations.”
She turned her back on him and joined some
guests, and he went to the bar and ordered a whiskey. The
bartender served him but he served him rudely. His was a
world in which the
caterer’s men kept the social score, and to
be rebuffed by a part-time barkeep meant that he had
suffered some loss of social esteem. Or perhaps the man was new
and uninformed.
Then he heard Grace at his back say: “They
went for broke overnight—nothing but income—and he showed
up drunk one Sunday and asked us to loan him five
thousand dollars. . . .” She was always talking about money.
It was worse than eating your peas off a knife. He dove into the pool, swam
It was worse than eating your peas off a knife. He dove into the pool, swam
its length and went away. The next pool on his list, the last but
two, belonged to his
old mistress, Shirley Adams. If he had
suffered any injuries at the Biswangers’ they would be cured here.
Love—sexual roughhouse in fact—was the supreme elixir,
the pain killer, the
the swimmer brightly colored pill that
would put the spring back into his step, the joy of life in his heart. They
had had an affair last week, last month, last year. He couldn’t
remember. It was he who had broken it off, his was the upper
hand, and he stepped through the gate of the wall that
surrounded her pool with
nothing so considered as self-confidence.
It seemed in a way to be his pool, as the lover, particularly the
illicit lover, enjoys the possessions of his mistress with an
authority unknown to holy matrimony. She was there, her hair the
color of brass, but her
figure, at the edge of the lighted,
cerulean water, excited in him no profound memories. It had been, he
thought, a lighthearted affair, although she had wept when he broke it off.
She seemed confused to see him and he
wondered if she was still wounded. Would she, God forbid, weep
again?
“What do you want?” she asked.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I’m swimming across the county.”
“Good Christ. Will you ever grow up?”
“What’s the matter?”
“If you’ve come here for money,” she said,
“I won’t give
you another cent.”
“You could give me a drink.”
“I could but I won’t. I’m not alone.”
“Well, I’m on my way.”
He dove in and swam the pool, but when he
tried to haul himself up onto the curb he found that the
strength in his arms and shoulders had gone, and he paddled to
the ladder and
climbed out. Looking over his shoulder he
saw, in the lighted bathhouse, a young man. Going out onto the
dark lawn he smelled chrysanthemums or marigolds—some
stubborn autumnal fragrance—on the night air, strong as gas. Looking overhead he
saw that the stars had come out, but why should he seem to see Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia?
What had become of the constellations of midsummer?
He began to cry.
It was probably the first time in his adult
life that he had ever cried, certainly the first time in his life
that he had ever felt so miserable, cold, tired, and bewildered. He
could not understand the rudeness of the caterer’s barkeep or the rudeness of a mistress who had come to him on her knees
and showered his trousers with tears. He had swum too long,
he had been immersed too long, and his nose and his throat were sore from the
water. What he needed then was a drink, some company, and some clean, dry clothes, and while he
could have cut directly across the road to his home he went on to
the Gilmartins’ pool.
Here, for the first time in his life, he did not dive but went down the steps into the icy water and swam a hobbled sidestroke that he might have learned as a youth. He staggered
with fatigue on his way to the Clydes’ and
paddled the length of their pool, stopping again and again
with his hand on the curb to rest. He climbed up the ladder and
wondered if he had the strength to get home. He had done what
he wanted, he had swum the county, but he was so
stupefied with exhaustion that his triumph seemed vague. Stooped,
holding on to the
gateposts for support, he turned up the
driveway of his own house.
The place was dark. Was it so late that
they had all gone to bed? Had Lucinda stayed at the Westerhazys’
for supper? Had the girls joined her there or gone
someplace else? Hadn’t they
agreed, as they usually did on Sunday, to
regret all their invitations and stay at home? He tried the garage doors
to see what cars were in but the doors were locked and
rust came off the handles onto his hands. Going toward the
house, he saw that the force of the thunderstorm had knocked
one of the rain gutters loose. It hung down over the front
door like an umbrella rib, but it could be fixed in the morning.
The house was locked, and he thought that
the stupid cook or the stupid maid
must have locked the place up until he
remembered that it had been some time since they had employed a
maid or a cook. He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to
force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows,
saw that the place was empty.
the swimmer
Thomas Merton's prayer
“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your
will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire
to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all
that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may
know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always, though I may seem to
be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”
– Philip Whalen
I
can’t live in this world
And
I refuse to kill myself
Or
let you kill me
The
dill plant lives, the airplane
My
alarm clock, this ink
I
won’t go away
I
shall be myself—
Free,
a genius, an embarrassment
Like
the Indian, the buffalo
Like
Yellowstone National Park.
Frank O'Hara, Joe’s Jacket
Entraining
to Southampton in the parlor car with Jap and Vincent, I
see
life as a penetrable landscape lit from above
like
it was in my Barbizonian kiddy days when automobiles
were
owned by the same people for years and the Alfa Romeo was
only
a rumor under the leaves beside the viaduct and I
pretending
to be adult felt the blue within me and light up there
no
central figure me, I was some sort of cloud or a gust of wind
at
the station a crowd of drunken fishermen on a picnic Kenneth
is
hard to find but we find, through all the singing, Kenneth smiling
it
is off to Janice’s bluefish and the incessant talk of affection
expressed
as excitability and spleen to be recent and strong
and
not unbearably right in attitude, full of confidences
now
I will say it, thank god, I knew you would
an
enormous party mesmerizing comers in the disgathering light
and
dancing miniature-endless, like a pivot
I
drink to smother my sensitivity for a while so I won’t stare away
I
drink to kill the fear of boredom, the mounting panic of it
I
drink to reduce my seriousness so a certain spurious charm
can
appear and win its flickering little victory over noise
I
drink to die a little and increase the contrast of this questionable moment
and
then I am going home, purged of everything except anxiety and self-distrust
now
I will say it, thank god, I knew you would
and
the rain has commenced its delicate lament over the orchards
an
enormous window morning and the wind, the beautiful desperation of a tree
fighting
off strangulation, and my bed has an ugly calm
I
reach to the D. H. Lawrence on the floor and read “The Ship of Death”
I
lie back again and begin slowly to drift and then to sink
a
somnolent envy of inertia makes me rise naked and go to the window
where
the car horn mysteriously starts to honk, no one is there
and
Kenneth comes out and stops it in the soft green lightless stare
and
we are soon in the Paris of Kenneth’s libretto, I did not drift
away
I did not die I am there with Haussmann and the rue de Rivoli
and
the spirits of beauty, art and progress, pertinent and mobile
in
their worldly way, and musical and strange the sun comes out
returning
by car the forceful histories of myself and Vincent loom
like
the city hour after hour closer and closer to the future I am here
and
the night is heavy through not warm, Joe is still up and we talk
only
of the immediate present and its indiscriminately hitched-to past
the
feeling of life and incident pouring over the sleeping city
which
seems to be bathed in an unobtrusive light which lends things
coherence
and an absolute, for just that time as four o’clock goes by
and
soon I am rising for the less than average day, I have coffee
I
prepare calmly to face almost everything that will come up I am calm
but
not as my bed was calm as it softly declined to become a ship
I
borrow Joe’s seersucker jacket though he is still asleep I start out
when
I last borrowed it I was leaving there is was on my Spanish plaza back
and
hid my shoulders from San Marco’s pigeons was jostled on the
Kurfurstendamm
and
sat opposite Ashes in an enormous leather chair in the Continental
it
is all enormity and life it has protected me and kept me here on
many
occasions as a symbol does with the heart is full and risks no speech
a
precaution I loathe as the pheasant loathes the season and is preserved
it
will not be need, it will be just what it is and just what happens.