The Hair of Harold Roux (46 page)

And yet, he thought,
I
caused all this. He was the stranger who had caused all of this emotion, these screams and tears and the evocation of all this sympathy that was probably love, whatever that might be.

So could an assassin have caused all of it.

His Indian Pony could take him three thousand miles away from these complicated lives. He traveled light. He could be packed and on the moolit highway headed west in less than an hour. He could leave his footlocker with the housemother to be sent home, pack his saddlebags and roll the other things he might need in his poncho, roping the tight bundle neatly across his saddlebags—balanced, comforting, ready for speed. His new tires were crisp and round.

“Go ahead, Harold,” Nathan said. “Put it back on if you want. It’s not going to shock us or anything. If I was bald at your age I’d wear a hairpiece, too. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Nathan retrieved the wig from the coffee table and put it on Harold’s lap, where it sat, a furry hemisphere Harold wouldn’t acknowledge.

“Look, Harold,” Naomi said, “somebody’s got to straighten you out. You can’t just go into a cataleptic fit or something just because you found out a few things about life.”

“I’m worried about him,” Mary said. “We can’t just leave him all torn apart like this.”

“We won’t leave him like this,” Naomi said, “but we don’t seem to be getting through to him very well.”

“What can we do?” Angela said.

They were all so grave, these strange women who had revealed their naming harlotry to poor Harold and now wouldn’t let him go. Allard felt hysteria, or something near it, rise in him. He might suggest shock treatment: they could have a Black Mass, right now. Naomi would be the Christ-killing Altar Witch, playing the skin flute.
Amen. Sancti Spirituset Filii
. Mary would be the virgin deflowered by Beelzebub upon the altar.
Jesus womb thy of fruit
! Allard would play Beelzebub with mad relish. Then they would strip Harold naked and paint him blue, using that bottle of Quink right there on his desk, to prepare him for Angela, great naked spanking Angela, thighs like a wild mare, who would ponderously rape him while his slobbering friends chanted a High Mass backwards.

He didn’t suggest this; it barely flickered through his criminal mind, followed by pity. Shocking things were still happening to Harold, if Harold was listening.

Angela said, “I don’t suppose it would do anything to try to explain to Harold that Mary is not a ‘fallen woman’ just because she and Allard have had sexual intercourse. Personally, and I’m sure Nathan will agree, I think the act of physical love is a beautiful and natural thing, but I do think it wasn’t very nice of Allard and Naomi to have done it in front of Mary and Harold, even if by accident, considering Harold’s religious sensitivity and his protective feelings toward Mary. And poor Mary must have felt betrayed because Allard is, or was, or had strongly suggested that he might be, her intended husband.”

Allard looked around Harold’s room, at his sedate furniture, his framed Currier and Ives prints against the rich wallpaper, his books safe and orderly behind glassed cabinet doors. His friends had followed Harold here to Lilliputown, his sanctuary, even to this room he had made into a place of
calm and dignity—and proceeded to violate all of his sensibilities, even tearing the very scalp off his head. With friends like these, who needed Boom Maloumian?

Angela, with her good clear patrician eyes, had already seen the first ominous sign. Just after they crossed the narrow bridge on the way to the Town Hall, she had seen a tall person standing in the moonlight across the park. The figure was dark-clothed above the waist, but below were long, moonlit bare legs. This tall creature, caught in that bemused, half-hunched posture that is never mistaken for anything else, looked down at what it was doing, or at what part of its body was doing. And yes, there was the glittering, pencil-thin arc connecting a man to the earth.

She had thought it must be Hilary, who had probably awakened and followed them, and of course it wouldn’t have been good form to point him out at that moment. In any case, thinking that he would be along presently, she hadn’t mentioned it.

Aaron finds himself in his small study, standing there looking down at his notebooks. His desk light prints a warm yellow circle on the place where all of his thoughts should be directed. He should be working right now, but his family will be home soon and he has a sense of the preciousness of time, much like the last few hours of a furlough. Time is running out, including these last minutes before they all get home and demand his attention, guilt and acceptance.

But he is too tired, and where is his family? Where is the crunch of gravel, the slamming of the car doors, those voices that fill him with dread and love, that make his skin bunch up in knots and his eyes hurt? There has been an accident; they have all been killed and he is free. Free! And then the true meaning of that freedom comes over him like a wind from across the Arctic ice, a continent empty of all but white ice.

Maybe he’d better call Wellesley and find out when they left. A perfectly useless thing to do which would only make John and Cynthia worry. If they have been in an accident he will be notified. Along the ugly and murderous highway speeds a police car, blue lights frantic, siren screaming panic, guilt, death, and in the blood and oil and broken glass the number of this very telephone, the ugly black telephone in the hall, will be found.

The telephone screams. It screams out of his vision of its squatness so that at first it is only hallucination. But it is not hallucination and he is frightened into nausea; it is shock, that same coldness and vertigo. His body, still knowing how to function under adversity, moves toward the hallway and the screaming.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Dad?” It is Bill, who is fifteen, the deep voice still new.

“Bill! Where are you? What’s the matter?” He sees the strobic blue lights, the grotesque immobility of the wreckage.

“We’re going to stay over tonight. It seems you forgot to get the headlights adjusted and everybody was blinking their lights at us. Mom got blinded so we turned around and came back.”

“Oh.”

“We’ll start in the morning, okay?”

“Okay. Let me speak to Agnes. Is she there?”

“Hey, Mom?” The voice of his son is fainter yet louder to itself, directed into another room in another place. There is the feeling of depth over that distance, perspective through sound, dimming to the vanishing point.

“Hello?” Agnes’ voice is suddenly there, hard, mature, yet beneath is the echoing sweet sound of a girl. She has grown up no more than he has.

“How are you?” he says, feeling love for her.

“I was surprised you’d be home.”

No, no. His soul wilts at this short circuit, sickened by the old pattern of their discontents. It is so familiar and it
never fails to make him angry or despairing and it is unanswerable.

“I thought you’d probably be out comforting Helga,” she says.

Helga! But he hasn’t… It was George he was to comfort! But of course Agnes knows because it is her only business to know. He hasn’t and wouldn’t, but that is never enough, never enough. His most suppressed inclinations are as guilty as flagrant acts. So why not act, then? asks his anger.

“That makes me unhappy,” he says.

“Well, good night,” Agnes says, and hangs up.

He wants to speak to Janie, and to say more to Bill. Her hostages? No, not that simple. She has as hostages all those years with their moments, her joy that can be unalloyed, her duty toward her children that is born of love and can’t be faulted. For richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health. History as hostage. He wants to break down a wall. He could drive his fist right through this wall, but it is too late to do that because he has already located the two-by-four studs and would aim in between them, so his rage is not pure, is it?

Allard would not have had it end this way. Perhaps as an allegory, purer and simpler, evil against good—that would have been nicer to be in, provided it ended well and he was neither maimed nor killed. More like the Second World War, for instance. And here was Lilliputown, the very name suggesting allegory.

Whom had Angela seen?

And if it were Robert Gordon Westinghouse, the Poet of the Lady of the Orbiting Moon, Mellifulous Aponatatus, who always let down his pants to urinate, how did he get there? They had seen no extra cars in the parking spaces in front of the Town Hall—only Harold’s Matilda, Nathan’s Ford, Knuck’s newly acquired ancient Plymouth rumble-seat coupe and Allard’s motorcycle. Was the Poet a highly improbable scout? A spy?

In Harold’s room they still surrounded Harold with their earnest care for him, touching him, loving him back to life. Little by little Harold overcame the conviction that his life had been ruined by their betrayals. Naomi turned in his mind from harlot to doubtful person, just as Mary, in time that heals all, or nearly all, resumed something of the status of angel. Fallen angel. She, after all, had been betrayed by Allard—seduced and then again betrayed. Angela, whom Harold had always admired for her class, seemed to have lost none of it despite her shocking admission. As for Allard and Nathan, they were the brutal seducers of innocence—men, their filthy minds in the sewer. Yet they had been kind to him in the past and were trying to be kind even now. A great gray curtain seemed to descend between him and their force, their ability to threaten him. All right, they were all merely men and women, imperfect sinners. What matter that they had torn away his faith in them as well as the secret from his head? He would quit school and spend a calm life here at Lilliputown with Colonel Immingham and Morgana, who did live with grace and dignity. He would read, yes, great books that spoke with gravity and honor. Goodbye to these false friends who had once seemed so charming and good. Goodbye, goodbye; he no longer needed any of them.

He was very calm now. He took his toupee from his lap and placed it back on his head, smoothing it down as best he could without comb and mirror.

“I’m all right now,” he said. He got up and went to the door. “I just don’t want to see any of you again.” His mouth trembled at this momentous declaration, but he meant it.

“I’m so sorry, Harold!” Mary said. She was crying.

Harold said nothing. He stood at the door waiting for them to leave, his gray face set by pride and justification, his hair slightly askew.

They walked quietly out of Harold’s room, through the foyer and out into the night, where they stood looking at each other in the moonlight. “Do you think he’s okay now?” Nathan asked no one in particular.

“I don’t know,” Mary said. She still wanted to cry and Allard put his arm around her. She moved her shoulders and stepped away from him.

“We’d better go collect Hilary and the bottles,” Nathan said. “God knows about Knuck and Vera.”

“You’ve got to change out of your bathing suit,” Naomi said to Mary, who didn’t answer but started walking up the path along the railroad tracks. They followed.

When they passed through the line of Lombardy poplars they became aware, one by one, of a muted sense of motion within Lilliputown, as if the town were a ship moving at anchor, its timbers making deep, half-heard noises. Small creaks, a shutting door, muffled laughter? A clink. People moved among the small buildings—people or animals or things, but they could not pick out, in the elm-shaded moonlight, any single entity. They stopped, close together, watching and listening.

“What the hell is it?” Nathan said in a hushed voice.

“Lilliputians?” Allard said.

“I saw someone earlier,” Angela whispered. “I thought it might have been Hilary.”

“Weren’t the streetlights on when we came down?” Naomi said. Now the town was dark between islands of moonlight. Across the park and the brook with its narrow bridges, somewhere near the Little Brown Church in the Vale, a bottle smashed, the secondary noise of its shards proving its reality as they sprayed along the cement sidewalk.

“I doubt if it’s Knuck or Hilary,” Allard said.

“We ought to tell Harold,” Mary said.

“What did you see earlier?” Allard said to Angela.

“A tall man without any pants on, urinating.”

“You thought it was Hilary?”

“Yes, but now I don’t think it was Hilary. There was something peculiar about his neck, the way he was looking down at himself.”

“Peculiar?”

“Freaky, rather. Anyway, I didn’t mention it because I
thought at first it was Hilary and I didn’t want to embarrass him.”

Allard looked at Nathan, who was looking back at Allard —the same odd surmise. Nathan said, “Were his pants off, or just down around his ankles?”

“What? I don’t know. He was standing way over by the First National Bank or whatever it is. A long way, you know.”

“If it was the Piss Poet I suspect the fine Armenian hand of Boom Maloumian,” Allard said.

“Did he know about the party?” Nathan said.

“God knows. Knuck was in Litchwood with Maloumian tonight. Maybe he let out where he was going.”

The girls were frightened. Allard and Nathan were not too calm either, and the girls had heard it in their voices.

“If it is him, he’s after Harold,” Nathan said.

“But what will we
do
?” Mary said, her voice breaking. “Poor Harold! Should we call the police?”

Allard thought they should find out a little more about the situation first, suggesting that the bluecoats, for Harold’s sake, be avoided if possible. Anything of that sort might offend the Imminghams and hurt Harold’s position here. They decided that Nathan would take the girls to the Livery Stable and get Mary’s clothes, then get Hilary and try to find Knuck and Vera. The girls, following Nathan, walked away with quick, fearful steps.

Allard would scout out the noises over by the Little Brown Church in the Vale. He waited until the others were out of sight and hearing. He stood quietly for a while, listening, trying to see across the park in the pale light that was deceptively bright but could hardly penetrate the blue-black shadows. Lilliputown was not his creation but it was a creation, another’s idea of perfection, or near perfection. And of course Harold, having renounced his friends, had nowhere to be but here.