The Bobby-Soxer (36 page)

“Then I had a note from him, opening night of
The Troupe,
saying he thought I’d want to be there. I did. But I didn’t know I was to sit next to him. Long enough to hear him comment—cool as cool—that the young crowd in his film, that girl his wife and her silly friends—would never have done for a play. ‘I couldn’t have written it in a play,’ he said. ‘Goofy was their favorite word.’

“So I got up and left him—though I stayed to the end of his movie. And that was it. I see his son Tarquin now and then.” He nodded. Tarquin studies with him.

“Now—I’m being approached to be in the old play.”

“Because with you in it—he might get a production.”

“How did you know?”

“I know property. And will you?”

“I told them—that I’m too old for the part.”

He stops in his tracks. To laugh. I’ve never seen him laugh like that. “You always were. A bit too old for your position in life. But you’ve improved.”

“Have I?” I cry—but there are no witnessing porches here, only a path. “I asked Tim last night—why are we all acquiescing so? And Edward—why am I so—glad of it?”

“You’re in control. You’ve come into your own—authority.”

“Does that mean—that I’m not waiting anymore?” He doesn’t answer at once. The path gets steeper; many have complained. Though he is not puffing. “No.”

I stop on the slope. From here one can see the whole town too, but differently from the way Knobby will see it from his new tower, in leaf time or out of it. Up here one sees the town not so much entrenched as hollowed out of hills that of themselves aren’t much. “Craig Towle asked to use the town for part of that film. Not a year after that girl died. And the town let him.”

“We did,” he said. “I’m told the shots from up here were wonderful. And of the old factory. They renovated it you know. And Mrs. Tite’s bookshop and Hawvermale’s hardware. All for four minutes of a film.”

I’d forgotten he was on the town board, and that he serves there for love.

“Now—he wants to use
me,”
I say. “Again.”

“And night after night.” Mr. Evams says, his face averted. “But not just for himself. And do I hear—I think I do hear—that you will let him?”

“He’s—I haven’t seen the script. But he’s given out an interview. Heard about it?”

“In part.”

“Which?”

“I heard—that when he was asked about the sexual oddity in his play he said: ‘I tell them that there are no monsters. But that’s not what people need to believe.’”

My companion doesn’t use a cane, but he has a folding yardstick he uses in the classroom, to probe a subject with. He scratches the ground with it. “And I heard—that when he was asked about his private life he said that there he was as interested as any man, and as culpable.”

“You didn’t hear the rest?”

“That was all that caught Gilbert’s eye.”

Our hills are now looking at me. No hill is ever too trumpery to be a stage. Even if one hasn’t seen the script. Even if the script itself turns out to be trumpery. Across this valley, for instance, in the same stone so rough here in the path but on the heights so serene, there could be carved a sort of monument, not a face, but a body, like those grave ornaments with phallus and female lingam mixed. I had one once from Peru.

I can’t carve, nor can I paint, but there are other ways of handling the divisions in this world. Deferential as my own way has to be, always taking direction, it is mine. I think of Craig Towle, walking his gangplank of words, dreaming that he keeps this separate from what he does when on the ground. To him, I’m only a geisha of words, speaking to please, and by rote. But the real gangplank, the riskiest—isn’t that one’s life?

I steal a look at Edward Evams. Sometimes one steals from the blind without meaning to. They in turn have expressions the sighted must watch for.

“Want to hear the rest of what he said?” I say.

He has turned aside, but I gather he does.

“I have the clip in my bag. I’ll read it.” I have carried it around with me for a week. I could cite it by heart, but it would be underhand not to do as I say. Besides—he would know. “It’s headed: Towle Discusses Revival of Play Never Produced.’” My fingernail travels down the clip. “Here. He says—‘I wrote a play about the haunted provincialism in American life. And about the habit of grandeur that has been lost. But they wanted the little sociologies of the day—and little wisecracks about them. Little daily hauntings—but without legend. I was brought up on legend.’”

I waited.

When he does turn around he is staring straight at me. “So that’s why he’s selling his house. Grandeur, indeed. The town did him in; it’s daily too. I always thought it would. And you can shut your purse.”

But walking on, I can’t help looking back.

“What do you keep looking at?”

He seldom asks that of a student. It’s an honor. “At a ghost town.”

He takes my hand. “That’s already here. Up top.”

Shortly we are there. It’s a fine plateau, but the parking is bad. As many local people have complained. And for strangers, collecting epitaphs is not the pastime it was. So we are alone.

“You ever been here?”

“There’s one grave I used to visit.”

I’m not sure he’s heard me.

“Our plot is right along here,” he says, and when we get to it lets go my hand.

“I don’t hold with the afterlife,” he says after a bit. “I come for the continuity.”

Mrs. Evams’s grave has only a plain marker on it.

“She doesn’t need more,” he says, as if I have commented. “She knew I would come. But her dog—I had to put him down.”

Many of the nearby graves have paper flowers on them, rustling like talk.

“She loved color,” he says. “She used to say that holding onto me she could feel I had once been sighted.”

“I remember.” The white cameo they made between them, on that chaise.

“Ah yes—the sweater you knitted her. She was the sighted one—inside,” he says, bending to the grave but not touching. “When she was dying she said: ‘My heart is beating—blue, white, blue, white.’”

They are dunning him to put up a stone, he says; perhaps he’ll have that inscribed on it. “Because it doesn’t matter. And that’s why I can’t decide.” He straightens up. “We can go now.”

I ask why some of the newer graves around us are marked simply
L’Envoi,
underneath which is the name and the date, but no text—and he says the current stonemason is a French-Canadian, and many families leave it to him.

The way out is by another gate, cannily leading one from the newer plots to the old. It is polite to falter, to halt at least now and then.

The Towle plot, one of the oldest, is in bad disrepair.

“He had it done up when he first came back here,” Edward Evams says. “But not since he left. I suppose Hollywood is legendary enough.”

I stamp my foot, luckily not on anyone. The old ground may be disheveled but it is crammed. “Some differences one copes with as one can. He did what he did. So did we. But on there being divisions in what one or another part of this country can give us—I don’t hold with that. I’ve toured too much.”

“You tour a lot, don’t you?” he says. “For someone who can choose.”

Sometimes running away, yes—if that’s what he’s hinting. Sometimes not.

There are plots here that have blank headstones waiting. If Craig Towle’s were already here I would address it. “I never did agree with him—about the legends. I never did—about ours. But I didn’t know how to say it.”

I still don’t—except that the legend never stops, or waits to huddle in one place in a country. Greyhound bus stations, cinder tracks. Or first-class lounges with the Chivas Regal being drunk like a prescription for the afterlife. Dried snot on the marijuana pipe tossed into the cowpool built with government subsidy on a Vermont commune. Or Daniel Webster on some lost village green, ten feet high among the trailer trucks and to most nameless—and still talking in stone.

It never stops. It’s we who tour.

“There’s one grave I want to see,” I said.

He has been round them all. When we get to it, he says: “Yes—that one.”

It’s the largest up here, a full crypt with a door, inscribed above:
See the immortal faces go down, through that portal.

My grandfather put up that inscription, taken from some Latin that we have never found. The door is opened only for the dead, but the names of those who have entered are on the outside, each in his or her space. I walk around the crypt to its far side; he follows. Our plot is as well kept as ever.

Until the children came, gripping the present in their strong, death-defying fists, I used often to come up here. Leo’s inscription is next to the blank space on which will be Nessa’s. Towle had said to look, and I faithfully had, studying the two chiseled lines, never satisfied. The top line says,
I live your life,
the one below,
Do you live mine.
Perhaps it was a stonecutter’s mistake. An omission. Or an inversion. If it had declared
I lived,
or observed
Now you live mine;
if it had commanded,
Do Ye …
if it had said that. But it says what it says.

Today, on the flat ground below, there’s a small nosegay of twigs and grasses mostly, which don’t wither as quickly or as dolefully as blooms. Knobby used to do this at Nessa’s instruction. Now that she is past it, he keeps up the practice as he can. He has harbored that obligation all the way from Japan. Who would not approve of his having her house?

I must bring the children up here. I grow tired of the separate time sense of those who live too much by their secrets. More than that, I’ve been warned. Of those many who like me straddle the city and the town, the town and the nation, or like Knobby, two nations. I will strain with all I have—to keep the connection here. I would sin for it—and possibly already have. Would I love for it?

“Maybe I’ve toured too much.”

“And I’ve stayed here,” he says. “Which grave are you looking at?”

“Only an inscription. Not really a grave.”

“None of them is.”

“That one on the left.”

He doesn’t like to be read out what he himself can touch. He bends to smooth the carved stone, with those fingertips that can map skin. “Oh yes. I knew Leo.”

“You—you what? But how could you have?”

As we near the age of those whom we knew first as adults when we were adolescents, they begin to appear more equal to us, or we to them, as we approach. He is surely not that old—as I am now too old to play nineteen.

“I was seven. And losing my sight. A person named Leo often visited me. And ultimately found me the school where I was sent to be trained. Saved. And where I found—” He gestured back toward the grave with the marker on it, Mrs Evams’s now lost to sight. The blind gesture has more circumference.

“What was Leo like?” I am canny, not saying “he” or “she.” “Describe.”

“That’s curious.” His face lifts, as it often does for the past, nosing it into being, in pictures of what kind? “Towle asked the same. So I told him. That the year I was seven, I was living in a mist. Half-blind, or near-blind as I then was, is the worst. One doesn’t yet understand the growing keenness of one’s other perceptions. Yet I had noticed that people seemed not to characterize by sex the person who visited me, who said to me often, ‘You can hear. You can touch. You can walk. You can—love.’ They always just said:
Leo.
So one day I asked. ‘Are you a woman? Or a man?’ The person took my hand and said: ‘Half-blind is the hardest, isn’t it? When you are blind, I may tell you.’ No one had ever recognized that I was so fiercely waiting to be. But by the time I was, I was already away at the school. And Leo perhaps was dead. I wasn’t visited again.”

So Leo remains—Leo. No one now would ever know Leo better than Edward Evams. Except me. How quickly we lose the mysteries we solve; how beautiful the rest remain.

I bend to that inscription. We must touch as we can. If he can bring himself to put up a stone, he may in time be able to stop visiting—which is what stones are for.

When I straighten, I see how much taller I am than him. Still, we resemble. We are both waiting. We are both able to find that good.

“Would you like to read my face?”

“I don’t need to,” he says after a minute. “Your ears won’t have changed.”

It is beyond rudeness to ask to finger-learn a blind face. Very lightly, I touch his.

Down below are the porches. Descent is always easier, or so we are told. We stop in front of his house. The fanlight is not lit. No one is expected. I will go on to my own house. What a straddler I am. It was the hayloft I really bought, not the house. A hayloft can be a stage. That one was my first. Now I can sell.

Walsh’s is dark. They haven’t changed our yard; they are not concerned with gardens. Neither were we. In winter, the same stiff weeds will be knocked about and still come back to plumb. It’s not only the wind, no matter what Knobby says. It’s not always the wind.

“That porch tonight—” I say. “What an envoi.”

“Ah—” he says, “—was it that?”

Up these few steps is a house where the foot must step most surely, even if one enters there only for a cup of tea—which if I ask him for he will give. I am thinking that if I do, must I wait until winter? Perhaps I haven’t toured enough, haven’t yet run far enough toward the running world. He is teaching Nessa at her age only what he teaches us all. He cannot vary what he is or says, and those are the lessons which are dangerous.

I look up at this house, which has not yet been vandalized, and at a curtained window or two that I see Brenda still leaves carelessly wide. Across the way, the porch that once was ours is dark, though the birds return. I am standing at the double knot of my own legend, as we all are, in every part of every nation, and most of all in the nation of the dead. All lives are legendary. I haven’t yet gathered in all the threads of my own, nor will I ever. Others will do that for me. This is the cued house where I learned that the hours flow under the hand like holy braille. That we are all one flesh—and that the flesh has eyes until the end.

He says, “Will you read my face?”