I Sing the Body Electric (14 page)

He raised the rifle.

The tower fell with the first bullet.

All of them, he thought. All of the towers in this town will have to be cut apart. I've forgotten. Too long.

The car moved along the silent street.

A phone rang.

He looked at the deserted drugstore.

A phone.

Pistol in hand, he shot the lock off the door, and entered.

Click.

“Hello, Barton? Just a warning. Don't try to rip down all the towers, blow things up. Cut your own throat that way. Think it over…”

Click.

He stepped out of the phone booth slowly and moved into the street and listened to the telephone towers humming high in the air, still alive, still untouched. He looked at them and then he understood.

He could not destroy the towers. Suppose a rocket came from Earth, impossible idea, but suppose it came tonight, tomorrow, next week? And
landed on the other side of the planet, and used the phones to try to call Barton, only to find the circuits dead?

Barton dropped his gun.

“A rocket won't come,” he argued, softly with himself, “I'm old. It's too late.”

But suppose it came, and you never knew, he thought. No, you've got to keep the lines open.

Again, a phone ringing.

He turned dully. He shuffled back into the drugstore and fumbled with the receiver.

“Hello?” A strange voice.

“Please,” said the old man, “don't bother me.”

“Who's this, who's there? Who is it? Where are you?” cried the voice, surprised.

“Wait a minute.” The old man staggered. “This is Emil Barton, who's that?”

“This is Captain Rockwell, Apollo Rocket 48. Just arrived from Earth.”

“No, no, no.”

“Are you there, Mr. Barton?”

“No, no, it can't be.”

“Where are you?”

“You're lying!” The old man had to lean against the booth. His eyes were cold blind. “It's you, Barton, making fun of me, lying again!”

“This is Captain Rockwell. Just landed. In New Chicago. Where are you?”

“In Green Villa,” he gasped. “That's six hundred miles from you.”

“Look, Barton, can you come here?”

“What?”

“We've repairs on our rocket. Exhausted from the flight. Can you come help?”

“Yes, yes.”

“We're at the field outside town. Can you come by tomorrow?”

“Yes, but—”

“Well?”

The old man petted the phone. “How's Earth? How's New York? Is the war over? Who's President now? What happened?”

“Plenty of time for gossip when you arrive.”

“Is everything fine?”

“Fine.”

“Thank God.” The old man listened to the far voice. “Are you sure you're Captain Rockwell?”

“Dammit, man!”

“I'm sorry!”

He hung up and ran.

They were here, after many years, unbelievable, his own people who would take him back to Earth's seas and skies and mountains.

He started the car. He would drive all night. It would be worth a risk, to see people, to shake hands, to hear them again.

The car thundered in the hills.

That voice. Captain Rockwell. It couldn't be himself, forty years ago. He had never made a recording like that. Or had he? In one of his depressive fits, in a spell of drunken cynicism, hadn't he once made a false tape of a false landing on Mars with a synthetic captain, an imaginary crew? He jerked his head, savagely. No. He was a suspicious fool. Now was no time to doubt. He must run with the moons of Mars, all night. What a party they would have!

The sun rose. He was immensely tired, full of thorns and brambles, his heart plunging, his fingers fumbling the wheel, but the thing that pleased him most was the thought of one last phone call: Hello,
young
Barton, this is
old
Barton. I'm leaving for Earth today! Rescued! He smiled weakly.

He drove into the shadowy limits of New Chicago at sundown. Stepping from his car he stood staring at the rocket tarmac, rubbing his reddened eyes.

The rocket field was empty. No one ran to meet him. No one shook his hand, shouted, or laughed.

He felt his heart roar. He knew blackness and a sensation of falling through the open sky. He stumbled toward an office.

Inside, six phones sat in a neat row.

He waited, gasping.

Finally: the bell.

He lifted the heavy receiver.

A voice said, “I was wondering if you'd get there alive.”

The old man did not speak but stood with the phone in his hands.

The voice continued, “Captain Rockwell reporting for duty. Your orders, sir?”

“You,” groaned the old man.

“How's your heart, old man?”

“No!”

“Had to eliminate you some way. so I could live, if you call a transcription living.”

“I'm going out now,” replied the old man. “I don't care. I'll blow up everything until you're all dead!”

“You haven't the strength. Why do you think I had you travel so far, so fast? This is your last trip!”

The old man felt his heart falter. He would never make the other towns. The war was lost. He slid into a chair and made low, mournful noises with his mouth. He glared at the five other phones. As if at a signal, they burst into chorus! A nest of ugly birds screaming!

Automatic receivers popped up.

The office whirled. “Barton, Barton, Barton!”

He throttled a phone in his hands. He choked it and still it laughed at him. He beat it. He kicked it. He furled the hot wire like serpentine in his fingers, ripped it. It fell about his stumbling feet.

He destroyed three other phones. There was a sudden silence.

And as if his body now discovered a thing which it had long kept secret, it seemed to sink upon his tired bones. The flesh of his eyelids fell away like petals. His mouth withered. The lobes of his ears were melting wax. He pushed his chest with his hands and fell face down. He lay still. His breathing stopped. His heart stopped.

After a long spell, the remaining two phones rang.

A relay snapped somewhere. The two phone voices were connected, one to the other.

“Hello, Barton?”

“Yes, Barton?”

“Aged twenty-four.”

“I'm twenty-six. We're both young. What's happened?”

“I don't know. Listen.”

The silent room. The old man did not stir on the floor. The wind blew in the broken window. The air was cool.

“Congratulate me, Barton, this is my twenty-sixth birthday!”

“Congratulations!”

The voices sang together, about birthdays, and the singing blew out the window, faintly, faintly, into the dead city.

I
hadn't been in Dublin for years. I'd been round the world—everywhere but Ireland—but now within the hour of my arrival the Royal Hibernian Hotel phone rang and on the phone: Nora herself, God Bless!

“Charles? Charlie? Chuck? Are you rich at last? And do rich writers buy fabulous estates?”

“Nora!” I laughed. “Don't you ever say hello?”

“Life's too short for hellos, and now there's no time for decent good-byes.
Could
you buy Grynwood?”

“Nora, Nora, your family house, two hundred rich years old? What would happen to wild Irish social life, the parties, drinks, gossip? You can't throw it all away!”

“Can and shall. Oh, I've trunks of money waiting out in the rain this moment. But, Charlie, Charles, I'm
alone
in the house. The servants have fled to help the Aga. Now on this final night, Chuck, I need a writer-man to see the Ghost. Does your skin prickle? Come. I've mysteries and a home to give away. Charlie, oh, Chuck, oh, Charles.”

Click
. Silence.

Ten minutes later I roared round the snake-road through the green hills toward the blue lake and the lush grass meadows of the hidden and fabulous house called Grynwood.

I laughed again. Dear Nora! For all her gab, a party was probably on the tracks this moment, lurched toward wondrous destruction. Bertie might fly from London, Nick from Paris, Alicia would surely motor up from Galway. Some film director, cabled within the hour, would parachute or helicopter down, a rather seedy manna in dark glasses. Marion would show with his Pekingese dog troupe, which always got drunker, and sicker, than he.

I gunned my hilarity as I gunned the motor.

You'll be beautifully mellow by eight o'clock, I thought, stunned to sleep by concussions of bodies before midnight, drowse till noon, then
even more nicely potted by Sunday high tea. And somewhere in between, the rare game of musical beds with Irish and French contesses, ladies, and plain field-beast art majors crated in from the Sorbonne, some with chewable mustaches, some not, and Monday ten million years off. Tuesday, I would motor oh so carefully back to Dublin, nursing my body like a great impacted wisdom tooth, gone much too wise with women, pain-flashing with memory.

Trembling, I remembered the first time I had drummed out to Nora's, when I was twenty-one.

A mad old Duchess with flour-talcummed cheeks, and the teeth of a barracuda had wrestled me and a sports car down this road fifteen years ago, braying into the fast weather:

“You shall love Nora's menagerie zoo and horticultural garden! Her friends are beasts and keepers, tigers and pussies, rhododendrons and flytraps. Her streams run cold fish, hot trout. Hers is a great greenhouse where brutes grow outsize, force-fed by unnatural airs, enter Nora's on Friday with clean linen, sog out with the wet-wash-soiled bedclothes Monday, feeling as if you had meantime inspired, painted, and lived through all Bosch's Temptations, Hells, Judgments, and Dooms! Live at Nora's and you reside in a great warm giant's cheek, deliciously gummed and morseled hourly. You will pass, like victuals, through her mansion. When it has crushed forth your last sweet-sour sauce and dismarrowed your youth-candied bones, you will be discarded in a cold iron-country train station lonely with rain.”

“I'm coated with enzymes?” I cried above the engine roar. “No house can break down my elements, or take nourishment from my Original Sin.”

“Fool!” laughed the Duchess. “We shall see most of your skeleton by sunrise Sunday!”

I came out of memory as I came out of the woods at a fine popping glide and slowed because the very friction of beauty stayed the heart, the mind, the blood, and therefore the foot upon the throttle.

There under a blue-lake sky by a blue-sky lake lay Nora's own dear place, the grand house called Grynwood. It nestled in the roundest hills by the tallest trees in the deepest forest in all Eire. It had towers built a thousand years ago by unremembered peoples and unsung architects for reasons never to be guessed. Its gardens had first flowered five hundred years back and there were outbuildings scattered from a creative explosion two hundred years gone amongst old tomb yards and crypts. Here was a convent hall become a horse barn of the landed gentry, there were new wings built on ninety years ago. Out around the lake was a hunting-lodge ruin where wild horses might plunge through minted shadow to sink away in green-water grasses by yet further cold ponds and single
graves of daughters whose sins were so rank they were driven forth even in death to the wilderness, sunk traceless in the gloom.

As if in bright welcome, the sun flashed vast tintinnabulations from scores of house windows. Blinded, I clenched the car to a halt. Eyes shut, I licked my lips.

I remembered my first night at Grynwood.

Nora herself opening the front door. Standing stark naked, she announced:

“You're too late. It's all over!”

“Nonsense. Hold this, boy, and this.”

Whereupon the Duchess, in three nimble moves, peeled herself raw as a blanched oyster in the wintry doorway.

I stood aghast, gripping her clothes.

“Come in, boy, you'll catch your death.” And the bare Duchess walked serenely away among the well-dressed people.

“Beaten at my own game,” cried Nora. “Now, to compete, I must put my clothes back on. And I was so hoping to shock you.”

“Never fear,” I said. “You have.”

“Come help me dress.”

In the alcove, we waded among her clothes, which lay in misshapen pools of musky scent upon a parqueted floor.

“Hold the panties while I slip into them. You're Charles, aren't you?”

“How do you do.” I flushed, then burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. “Forgive me,” I said at last, snapping her bra in back, “it's just here it is early evening, and I'm putting you
into
your clothes. I—”

A door slammed somewhere. I glanced around for the Duchess.

“Gone,” I murmured. “The house has devoured her, already.”

True. I didn't see the Duchess again until the rainy Tuesday morn she had predicted. By then she had forgotten my name, my face, and the soul behind my face.

“My God,” I said, “what's that, and
that?
”

Still dressing Nora, we had arrived at the library door. Inside, like a bright mirror-maze, the weekend guests turned.

“That,” Nora pointed, “is the Manhattan Civic Ballet flown over on ice by jet stream. To the left, the Hamburg Dancers, flown the opposite way. Divine casting. Enemy ballet mobs unable, because of language, to express their scorn and vitriol. They must pantomime their cat-fight. Stand aside, Charlie. What was Valkyrie must become Rhine Maiden. And those boys
are
Rhine Maidens. Guard your flank!”

Nora was right.

The battle was joined.

The tiger lilies leapt at each other, jabbering in tongues. Then, frustrated, they fell away, flushed. With a bombardment of slammed doors,
the enemies plunged off to scores of rooms. What was horror became horrible friendship and what was friendship became steamroom oven-bastings of unabashed and, thank God, hidden affection.

After that it was one grand crystal-chandelier avalanche of writer-artist-choreographer-poets down the swift-sloped weekend.

Somewhere I was caught and swept in the heaped pummel of flesh headed straight for a collision with the maiden-aunt reality of Monday noon.

Now, many lost parties, many lost years later, here I stood.

And there stood Grynwood manse, very still.

No music played. No cars arrived.

Hello, I thought. A new statue seated by the shore. Hello again. Not a statue…

But Nora herself seated alone, legs drawn under her dress, face pale, staring at Grynwood as if I had not arrived, was nowhere in sight.

“Nora…?” But her gaze was so steadily fixed to the house wings, its mossy roofs and windows full of empty sky, I turned to stare at it myself.

Something
was
wrong. Had the house sunk two feet into the earth? Or had the earth sunk all about, leaving it stranded forlorn in the high chill air?

Had earthquakes shaken the windows atilt so they mirrored intruders with distorted gleams and glares?

The front door of Grynwood stood wide open. From this door, the house breathed out upon me.

Subtle. Like waking by night to feel the push of warm air from your wife's nostrils, but suddenly terrified, for the scent of her breath has changed, she smells of someone else! You want to seize her awake, cry her name. Who
is
she, how, what? But heart thudding, you lie sleepless by some stranger in bed.

I walked. I sensed my image caught in a thousand windows moving across the grass to stand over a silent Nora.

A thousand of me sat quietly down.

Nora, I thought. Oh dear God, here we are again.

That first visit to Grynwood…

And then here and there through the years we had met like people brushing in a crowd, like lovers across the aisle and strangers on a train, and with the whistle crying the quick next stop touched hands or allowed our bodies to be bruised together by the crowd cramming out as the doors flung wide, then, impelled, no more touch, no word, nothing for years.

Or, it was as if at high noon midsummer every year or so we ran off up the vital strand away, never dreaming we might come back and collide in mutual need. And then somehow another summer ended, a sun went
down, and there came Nora dragging her empty sandpail and here came I with scabs on my knees, and the beach empty and a strange season gone, and just us left to say hello Nora, hello Charles as the wind rose and the sea darkened as if a great herd of octopi suddenly swam by with their inks.

I often wondered if a day might come when we circled the long way round and stayed. Somewhere back perhaps twelve years ago there had been one moment, balanced like a feather upon fingertip when our breaths from either side had held our love warmly and perfectly in poise.

But that was because I had bumped into Nora in Venice, with her roots packed, far from home, away from Grynwood, where she might truly belong to someone else, perhaps even to me.

But somehow our mouths had been too busy with each other to ask permanence. Next day, healing our lips, puffed from mutual assaults, we had not the strength to say forever-as-of-now, more tomorrows this way, an apartment, a house anywhere, not Grynwood, not Grynwood ever again, stay! Perhaps the light of noon was cruel, perhaps it showed too many pores in people. Or perhaps, more accurately, the nasty children were bored again. Or terrified of a prison of two! Whatever the reason, the feather, once briefly lofted on champagne breath, toppled. Neither knew which ceased breathing upon it first. Nora pretended an urgent telegram and fled off to Grynwood.

Contact was broken. The spoiled children never wrote. I did not know what sand castles she had smashed. She did not know what Indian Madras had bled color from passion's sweat on my back. I married. I divorced. I traveled.

And now here we were again come from opposite directions late on a strange day by a familiar lake, calling to each other without calling, running to each other without moving, as if we had not been years apart.

“Nora.” I took her hand. It was cold. “What's happened?”

“Happened!?” She laughed, grew silent, staring away. Suddenly she laughed again, that difficult laughter that might instantly flush with tears. “Oh, my dear Charlie, think wild, think all, jump hoops and come round to maniac dreams. Happened, Charlie, happened?!”

She grew frightfully still.

“Where are the servants, the guests—?”

“The party,” she said, “was last night.”

“Impossible! You've never had just a Friday-night bash. Sundays have always seen your lawn littered with demon wretches strewn and bandaged with bedclothes. Why—?”

“Why did I invite you out today, you want to ask, Charles?” Nora still looked only at the house. “To give you Grynwood. A gift, Charlie, if you can force it to let you stay, if it will put up with you—”

“I don't want the house!” I burst in.

“Oh, it's not if you want
it
, but if it wants
you
. It threw us all out, Charlie.”

“Last night…?”

“Last night the last great party at Grynwood didn't come off. Mag flew from Paris. The Aga sent a fabulous girl from Nice. Roger, Percy, Evelyn, Vivian, Jon were here. That bullfighter who almost killed the playwright over the ballerina was here. The Irish dramatist who falls off stages drunk was here. Ninety-seven guests teemed in that door between five and seven last night. By midnight they were gone.”

I walked across the lawn.

Yes, still fresh in the grass: the tire marks of three dozen cars.

“It wouldn't let us have the party, Charles,” Nora called, faintly.

I turned blankly. “It? The house?”

“Oh, the music was splendid but went hollow upstairs. We heard our laughter ghost back from the topmost halls. The party clogged. The
petits fours
were clods in our throats. The wine ran over our chins. No one got to bed for even three minutes. Doesn't it sound a lie? But, Limp Meringue Awards were given to all and they went away and I slept bereft on the lawn all night. Guess why? Go look, Charlie.”

We walked up to the open front door of Grynwood.

“What shall I look for?”

“Everything. All the rooms. The house itself. The mystery. Guess. And when you've guessed a thousand times I'll tell you why I can never live here again, must leave, why Grynwood is yours if you wish. Go in, alone.”

And in I went, slowly, one step at a time.

I moved quietly on the lovely lion-yellow hardwood parquetry of the great hall. I gazed at the Aubusson wall tapestry. I examined the ancient white marble Greek medallions displayed on green velvet in a crystal case.