The Hair of Harold Roux (33 page)

But she wanted to go. She wanted to ride behind him with her arms around him. She wanted to see Lilliputown with Harold and Allard, her admirers, and to have dinner with the strange old Colonel and his lady. This was what she wanted to do; there was nothing else in the world she wanted to do more, so he knew she was going to break her promise to her father. He saw her looking at the Indian Pony and began to try to see it through her eyes.

“I really promised, Allard. I can’t break my promise.”

The long, red, rangy machine was misty and faded in places, in other places worn to the bright steel, in others a luminous blood color where oil shone. In deeper cracks and depressions the blood dimmed to the black of oil and grease, where the engine did its revolutions. A brutally strong chain was just visible beneath its worn steel guard. Wires and cables, uncovered and nakedly functional, proceeded from one dangerous mechanical place to another. The double saddle was shaped into concave human buttocks, where hers would fit the polished, used leather.

“I have the feeling it will be a suit-and-tie sort of dinner,” he said, “with candlelight and wine. Something out of Harold’s novel. He’d be terribly disappointed if Allyson Turn-bridge wasn’t there.”

Mary’s face grew unamused, so he hesitated. He didn’t
really want to make fun of Harold, either, though it was hard to resist. “Harold was upset about the unavailability of Matilda,” he said, hearing the flippant tones enter his words again. “He really wants us to come, Mary. He says the Colonel and his lady are ‘charming eccentrics.’”

She got up and touched the headlight of the Indian Pony, her hand sliding over it for a moment before she drew it away, as if the metal were hot. “You know I want to go, Allard.”

“This
is
sort of an emergency, isn’t it?” he said. “Doesn’t your promise have any contingency clauses somewhere in the fine print?”

“My promises don’t have any fine print. At least they never used to.”

Ah, that was better. Better, but a little sad to see desire sneaking its way into the intentions, as it always did. He could see that Mary felt this sadness, too. He put his arm around her and drew her up against him. “We’ll declare this an emergency,” he said. She leaned against him, her hands on his waist, her fawn-colored skirt touching the nether parts of the machine.

“All right,” she said.

“I’ll pick you up in an hour.”

“Now that I’ve said I’ll go, I think I am really a little afraid of your motorcycle.”

“It is but a servant to me, and obeys my every command.”

“Don’t have too much pride,” she said, smiling and turning away. He watched her graceful calves and ankles as she climbed the steps. They seemed to glow with an inner light that of course was in his eyes.

Back at Parker Hall he prepared for this strange visit. In his short life, “charming eccentrics” had more often been pains in the ass—on the order of, say, Gordon Robert Westinghouse, who stood gangling beside his desk when he returned from the shower, a single piece of typewriter paper clutched in damp, bluish hands.

“I have worked forty-one hours on this verse,” Gordon Robert Westinghouse said. “
Forty-one hours
.“

Allard found a clean pair of shorts, the olive-drab army-issue kind that tied with little olive-drab strings, and put them on. He thought, pleased, that he was no longer in the army.

“Forty-one hours of concentration unbroken except for certain prosaic human necessities.”

Presented with the piece of limp paper, Allard read:

Melifulous Aponatatus, wind spun
,

Grieves Our Silver Lady

Of the briny Moon
;

She sails on velvet o’er the wrack

Of trees and sere eye-hollows

Once fair men, now bones bleached white
.

Caught at a sad attention
.

“Who’s this ‘Melifulous Aponatatus’?”

“‘Mellifluous’ is an adjective. ‘Aponatatus’ is, so to speak, my
persona
, my alter ego.”

“Well, you spelled it ‘melifulous.’”

“Puh,” Gordon Robert Westinghouse said, brushing such a technicality away with a long arm that seemed to have an extra joint in it.

“I mean you might have taken two minutes out of those forty-one hours and looked it up,” Allard said.

“Why don’t you write it down that you said that to me?” Gordon Robert Westinghouse said. “It will show the difference in quality between the creative and the ordinary, or merely assimilative, consciousness.”

“Yeah,” Allard said, putting on a white shirt. When he turned around again, Gordon Robert Westinghouse was gone, having ambulated out on his strange joints, taking his worn page with him. Again Allard wondered what Boom Maloumian had in store for The Poet. Maybe he was so strange even Boom Maloumian’s creative consciousness couldn’t conceive of a proper reward for him.

The business of the choice of a tie faced him. He had three: one a mauve gift he had never worn, another somberly
maroon, the third his old school tie. The Dexter-Benham orange, blue and black stripes seemed a trifle gaudy, but perhaps the Colonel would go for that sort of thing. Harold certainly would. The cheap gray suit and brown army dress shoes completed his costume, the disguise in which he would go to Lilliputown. This visit seemed a digression from the present direction of his life—as did final exams, for that matter. What he really wanted to do was to create in Mary Tolliver the perfect receptor of himself.
The perfect receptor of himself
; that had a sort of ring to it. He went to his desk and wrote it down, not without his traitorous inner eye’s ironic squint at whatever gods observed this pretentious popinjay. The perfect receptor of himself, huh? Yes. First chaos, the total destruction of certain deeply held beliefs, followed by calm sadness and then the careful, loving (yet stern) reconstruction. Of course.

When he picked her up at her dormitory she was pretty and sophisticated-looking in a dark blue dress she had made herself. He noticed that once she had made up her mind to violate her promise to her father she didn’t hesitate, but with his help in arranging her dress so it wouldn’t touch the dirtier parts of the Indian Pony, and with some conquered apprehension, she mounted the beast and put her arms firmly around him.

He rode slowly through the warm afternoon, not over thirty-five miles an hour, and soon she indicated by the reduced pressure of her arms that she was getting used to the earth’s tilting. She didn’t say a word until the five miles had passed and he had stopped, carefully, in front of Lilliputown Town Hall, across the narrow-gauge railroad tracks from the station. As he helped her off, his eyes were struck by a flash of smooth thigh and white silk. She turned to him as she arranged her hair with her hands. She had seen and wondered at the perfectly miniature buildings, but first she said, looking at him as though he had done something wonderful, “I loved riding. I really loved it!”

That gaze of admiration and gratitude made him feel as
though he were full of virulent microorganisms that would somehow cure, or fulfill, or raise up both of them when he entered her by the glimmering path of the smooth thigh, the immaculate silk. But wait, wait. Lilliputown, the old Colonel and his lady, however irritating and digressive they might be, must now be suffered. Down, he said to his mindless intensities. Be patient. This dangerous project he was entering upon was too important to risk because of impatience. He must wait. Remember that, and walk coolly with Mary toward Harold Roux, who now appeared like a giant before the opened, startling, wall-sized door of the Town Hall.

Behind Harold a tall man appeared. He was over six feet tall, and the first impression of him was of a nearly voracious pleasure. He smiled using all of his head, even the rigid gray bristles of his cropped hair. All of the lean, wrinkled flesh of his face and neck smiled. His ears seemed to cup forward into that smile. Each of his tanned ivory teeth expressed hungry pleasure.

“Colonel Immingham, may I present Mary Tolliver and Allard Benson,” Harold said with high seriousness.

“Oh, how do you do!” Colonel Immingham said. He took Mary’s hand as if to kiss it, but merely patted it with his other hand. “Charming!” he said. He reached for Allard’s hand and gripped it with the sudden rigidity of a wooden vise—not hard, but with the firmness of great strength. “Young people!” he said. “How nice to have young people about! But now come inside and meet my Lady!” He bent from the waist, a welcoming half-bow. His ancient brown tweed suit looked if it it had been worn at grouse shoots before the First World War.

Inside the building they went down three unexpected steps and found themselves in a house of ordinary dimensions, the foyer a small office with a desk and the sort of upholstered chairs that are obviously for public use. Beyond the foyer, through a draped portal, was a cluttered, comfortable living room, with fireplace, bookshelves, bridge lamps and chintz-covered furniture. Installed in a rattan peacock
chair, its flared back a frame for her, was a lady of fifty or so with the body of a child. She too smiled intensely, and held out her delicate little hands. Her hair was dyed a frizzled reddish orange, and on each little cheek was a spot of red rouge.

“Such a pleasure!” she said, her voice strangely loud coming from such a small person. Allard had half expected her to squeak like a Munchkin. “I am Morgana Immingham. And what a handsome couple you are, Miss Tolliver and Mr. Benson! Won’t you all sit down for a moment before Hamilcar takes you on his tour? His
inevitable
tour,” she added, beaming at her husband, who beamed back at her from his height. Mary, Harold and Allard sat in the deep chintz chairs, while the Colonel leaned against the mantel. “So nice of Harold to get you to come out for a visit,” she said. “We do enjoy young people, yet we hardly ever see them. Nearly everyone we know has grown up and turned old! But, as Hamilcar says, I never have grown old at all, possibly because, as you can see, I’m only four feet, five inches tall!”

“And perfect in every detail,” the Colonel said.

She squirmed with pleasure beneath his prideful regard. “Now, Hamilcar, I know how much you want to show these attractive young people your work, so I won’t keep you.” She turned to the young people. “I’d join you, but actually I haven’t been feeling up to snuff lately, so I’ll just sit here and read my magazine. Now go along and have a good time!”

The Colonel told them to meet him on the platform of the Lilliputown Railroad Station. Being guests of the Lilliputown Railroad they wouldn’t need tickets: “But you might look into the ticket window and say hello to the Stationmaster for me!” His enthusiasm was at a level just above their wondering response, his grins and suppressed laughter demanding more awe than Allard thought he could quite manage, yet the Colonel didn’t seem to mind this, if he noticed it. He went quickly out another door, and Mary and Allard followed Harold back out through the foyer.

“He’s so excited,” Mary said. “It
is
exciting.”

“He loves to show people what he’s done,” Harold said. Harold seemed fondly proud of the Colonel and his creations. “Be sure to look into the ticket window.”

They crossed the tracks, stepping over the shining rails and the little two-by-four ties with their perfect spikes the size of twenty-penny nails. Allard bent down to look at these and Harold said the Colonel made the spikes in his workshop. “You like tools, Allard. You’ve got to see his workshop.”

They walked up the properly gritty ramp to the station platform. In the late afternoon sun the perspectives of platform, dark red arches, rounded windows with their clean glass, seemed to waver in Allard’s eyes between the real and the created. Was that a one-foot drop to the roadbed or a four-foot drop? Only his enormous shoe at the edge confirmed the smaller dimension. The wooden arches were high enough so there was no danger of hitting their heads, yet they still seemed in scale.

“The man’s a wonder,” he said. “There’s a principle here I can’t understand.”

“He’ll want to talk about that,” Harold said.

Bending over, they looked into the ticket window to be startled by the Colonel’s grinning, vivid face. Because the small face looked up at them instead of levelly at a person of its own height, it almost seemed, for one frozen second before immobility proved the figure a model, that the Colonel had tricked them by turning himself miniature and scooting around ahead of them to install himself as Stationmaster.

“That’s a little frightening,” Mary said.

“He’s got himself in that face. Christ, look at his grin,” Allard said. He didn’t understand how a man could be that much aware of his own strange facial paroxysms. Could he grin into a mirror and copy himself? As he turned away from the ticket window it seemed an ungracious thing to ignore the avid attention still beamed upward at his back.

Soon the earth gave the faintest tremble. From somewhere behind the Lombardy poplars came the high call of a steam whistle, then the whoosh-puff of a locomotive. They
looked down the track to see a green semaphore on a pole move up to the horizontal, yet no train appeared. Squeaks and grinding noises could be heard beneath the huffing of the engine—the secondary clamor of a train—but the train did not appear. A small apprehension, then the startling appearance of the train behind them, coming the other way, having circled around back of the station. There it was, ponderously swaying on the narrow curve. Smoke and black iron, bright steel and brass, it came toward them, bell clanging, with the slow momentum and harsh clatter of a real train. The engine’s wheels seemed too close together to keep the bulk of the machine from tipping over. It swayed, huffing dark smoke from a flared chimney as tall as the Mad Hatter’s top hat. Three brass lanterns on its front end didn’t assume to stare like eyes, but the brass valve in the very center of the boiler did, so that the engine seemed to peer straight ahead with the powerful yet slightly moronic, clownish intensity of a Cyclops. Other hatlike protuberances and odd tanks connected by pipes were bolted and banded along the short barrel of the engine. It stopped with a metallic shriek from the brakes—locomotive, tender, two passenger cars and a red caboose. The Colonel wasn’t there at all; in the cab of the engine a ruddy, weathered-faced railroad man in a striped denim uniform stared forward into the distance, his head no bigger than an apple. Then the whole top of the tender rose up, its imitation coal not spilling, and the Colonel clambered out, chuckling and grinning at their obvious appreciation.