Loon Lake (13 page)

While she showered I found a percolator and put up some coffee. She came out wrapped in a white bath towel with a big maroon
FWB
monogrammed on the front. She accepted a mug of coffee and sat on the couch with her legs folded under her and held the mug with both hands as if for warmth. She had washed her hair, which lay about her head in wet curls, she was no longer crying but the exercise had left her eyes glistening and as she looked at me I wondered how I could have found anything to criticize. I had never in my life seen a woman more beautiful.

“This place is getting on my nerves,” she said. “How do I get out of here?”

“I’ll take care of it, leave it to me,” I said without a moment’s hesitation. Without a moment’s hesitation. She glanced at me as she sipped her coffee. I waited for my justice. I wondered if I had taken her too literally if she would laugh now crack my heart with her laughter. But she said nothing and seemed satisfied enough by my assurance. Sun filled the room. She put her cup on the floor and curled up on the sofa with her back to me.

Drops of water glittered in her hair. After a while I realized she had gone to sleep.

I ran out of there determined not to be amazed. I should concentrate on what I was going to do next. Amazement would set me back. I wanted to sing, I was exhilarated to madness. But the way to bring this off was to think of my brazen hopes as reasonable and myself as a calm practical person matter-of-factly making a life for himself that was no more than he deserved.

T
hen Bennett himself was suddenly in full force in my life like a storm that had arrived.

I found myself that same morning with three or four of the groundkeepers, each of us with a pick or shovel on our shoulders, we were hurrying to a site in the woods off the main bridle path. Bennett was waiting. He was standing on a hill of some sort. His horse was tethered to a tree along the trail. “Come up here,” he called.

We climbed up the face of an enormous boulder imbedded in the ground. “I’ve always wondered about this,” he said. “I want it exposed.”

The foreman of us, an older man long in the Bennett service, took off his cap and scratched his head. “You want us to dig this rock up?” he asked.

“Dig around it,” Bennett said. “You see here? This is the top of it, we’re standing on top of it. That’s what this rise is. I want the whole thing uncovered, I don’t know why it’s here.”

The workmen had trouble believing what he wanted. Bennett didn’t get mad. Instead, he took one of the picks and started going at it himself.
“You see?” he called out, breathing hard between swings of the pick. “Work it away, like this. You see that, how it extends? Goes all the way over here.”

“Here, Mr. Bennett,” the foreman said. “Don’t you be doing that. You, you,” he said to us. “Get to work.”

So we started digging out a boulder that might be the size of a dirigible. Bennett watched each of us to see that we understood.

“That’s the way,” he said. “That’s what I want.”

He was sturdy and vigorous. Moved around a lot. A short wide-shouldered man with a large head. His hair was white but very full and combed as I combed mine, to a pompadour. He was well tanned. Blue eyes. A handsome blunt-faced old bastard in a riding outfit.

I had expected someone older, more restrained.

He climbed down off the rise and for several minutes crashed around in the woods nearby to see if he could find another rock like it. “You see,” he shouted, “it’s the only one. “Damnedest thing!” he called out as if we were all colleagues on some archaeological expedition.

Then he mounted his horse and rode off in the direction of the stables. As soon as he was out of sight the foreman leaned on his shovel, took off his cap and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Jesus Mary and Joseph,” he said.

We all sat down on the boulder.

But a while later two more diggers came along flushed from their dens, and soon there were a half-dozen of us standing shirtless in the woods swinging our picks and shovels at this mountainous stone.

It was interesting to me how the impulse of the man transformed into the hard work of the rest of us. By our digging we suggested something really important was going on, someone passing by would look at us and think it was serious—we ourselves were proof of the seriousness of the thing.

I had expected not to like F. W. Bennett. But he was insane. How could I resist that? There was this manic energy of his, a mad light in his eye. He was free! That was what free men were like, they shone their freedom over everyone.

I didn’t want to think what he did with Clara. I could not dream that
she could matter to him in any way at all that I would recognize. I swung my pick. All the intelligence I had of him, from his house and his lands and his train and his resident poets, had not prepared me for the impersonal force of him, the frightening freedom of him.

In the late afternoon we knocked off work, having unearthed the boulder to its southern polar slope. It sat now in an enormous trench at the bottom of which were packed several other stones. It looked as if it weighed several tons. On the way back we stopped in front of the main house to report these findings. Bennett stood on his front porch. He was very pleased. “We’ll take it as far down as it goes, boys,” he said. “And tomorrow we’ll look for markings. I want to see if it has markings.”

Apparently as he gazed at these dirty and sweat-stained workmen he saw in the face of one something that might have been disbelief.

“You, Joe,” he said to me, “you think it’s just a rock, don’t you?”

I was so stunned that he knew my name I didn’t know what to say.

“Come inside. I want you to see something.” He turned and went in the house.

Someone reached over and took the pick from my shoulder. I heard a snicker. I followed F. W. Bennett into his front hall and went past the stairway of halved logs to the sunken living room.

There was a shimmering light on the ceiling, a reflection of the lake. But the floor was in shadow. In one corner, on a table, was a book with line drawings of primitive stone monuments: in all cases one large boulder rested on three or four smaller ones.

“You see?” he said. “I’m not as crazy as you think. They put down these megaliths, or dolmens, for their fallen chiefs.”

He strode around the room lecturing me on the burial practices of ancient Indian tribes of New England. He compared them to the ancient burial practices of the Western desert tribes. Indoors he seemed older. He was vigorous and moved constantly but his voice was somewhat hoarse, it suggested age.

I stood in my filthy dark greens wondering how I was going to get out of there.

A maid came in holding a phone on a long cord. She brought it to his side and held it for him on her palm while he picked up the receiver.
“Yes?” He continued to move about, and the maid in her light green uniform followed him dutifully where he went, dealing with the cord so that it wouldn’t snag on the furniture. He was getting information. He asked short questions—How many? What time?—and listened to lengthy answers. I looked out the bay wall of windows. The late afternoon shadows made the lake a brilliant dark blue water.

On the terrace a woman was arranging flowers in a vase. I realized I was looking at Lucinda Bailey Bennett, the aviatrix. The small shock of seeing someone famous.

“You don’t know how to work cameras, by any chance?”

The phone was gone. Bennett was talking to me.

“I’ve got all this equipment here but I can’t get the hang of it myself,” he said. “I want to take proper pictures of the excavation and send them out to see if I’m right.”

“I don’t know anything about cameras,” I said.

“I thought you were smart… Well,” he said, “I wanted to take a look at you, anyway, to see if you belong with me on a permanent basis. What’s
your
opinion?”

“You mean a job?” I said.

“That’s what I mean. You think you ought to be hired?”

I swallowed. “No,” I said.

“No?” He seemed amused.

“I couldn’t live here,” I said. “It’s not for me.”

He laughed out loud. “You seemed to have adapted well enough. From what I understand you’ve made the place your own.”

Something outside had caught his eye. He stepped onto the terrace, closing the glass doors behind him, and stood calling down the hill to somebody at the boathouse.

My muscles were tight and my hands clenched. I tried to loosen up.

Mrs. Bennett glanced through the window to where I was and said something to her husband. He turned to her smiling and said something back and she looked again in at me briefly, a half smile on her face. She was a very elegant, honest-looking lady, very well composed, with brown hair cut short, no make-up or anything like that, she wore a loose sweater and a longish skirt and low-heeled shoes. I thought you would not be able
to tell, if you didn’t know, that this slim handsome woman with her flowers knew how to fly the hell out of airplanes.

And then it came to me he was telling her who the boy inside was. The one and only Joe of Paterson. She was so elegant I realized that what I had written in anger and pride was from another point of view pathetic. I felt betrayed, like a child who gives out his most precious secret and hears it laughed about.

I turned to leave. I thought how powerful this Bennett was if I could be made to feel so bad from just a moment or two of his attention.

“Just a minute, Joe,” he called. “I’m not finished with you.”

He went past me into the front hall and then down the corridor of the other wing of the house. He opened a door and beckoned to me.

A large room filled with books, cabinets with silver cups, photographs of Mrs. Bennett standing in front of airplanes, Mr. Bennett in a railroad engineer’s cap waving from the controls of a steam locomotive, photographs of cars and horses and presidents and governors and film stars. There were globes on stands and big dictionaries on lecterns, a ticker-tape machine under glass—a whole life of glory was in this room.

Bennett sat down behind his desk and took a manila folder out of a drawer and studied the papers in it for several minutes while I stood before him.

Without looking up, he said, “Are your injuries healed?”

“I suppose.”

“Have you been in touch with your parents?”

“My parents?”

“They signed a waiver,” he said, removing a document from the folder. “You mean you haven’t talked to them? I am not at fault for the injuries you incurred on my property. They received two hundred and fifty dollars.”

“How do you know my parents?”

“We looked through your billfold. You might have been on your way out.”

I was too stunned to speak.

“They haven’t called or written to see how you’re getting along?” He shoved a paper along the desk and I saw at the bottom the shaky signature
of my father. “I’m not lying to you,” Bennett said. “By rights that’s your money.”

I shook my head.

“You don’t want to work for me. Fine. You can go home and if you’re smart you can use that money to make money. Buy something and sell it for profit. Anything, it doesn’t matter. Some of the great fortunes in this country were built from less.”

I pictured my father in the kitchen, coming to terms with this legal paper that had to be signed. Finding my school pen somewhere in a drawer and the bottle with Waterman’s ink. Testing the penpoint on the oilcloth that covered the table and then rubbing the ink off with his thumb before it dried. My mother standing at the sink, washing the dishes, disguising the moment of the waiver in their lives as one more ordinary moment.

“No,” I said. “It’s theirs.”

“I’ll tell you,” Bennett said. “I always respect a man’s decision. Never try to argue him out of it. You’re not staying here and you’re not going home. That leaves you back on the road, doesn’t it? Back on the bum. Well, I say why not, if that’s what you want. But be sure you can handle it. Just be sure you’ve got the guts. So that if you have to steal or take a sap to someone’s head for a meal, you’ll be able to. Every kind of life has its demands, its tests. Can I do this? Can I live with the consequences of what I’m doing? If you can’t answer yes, you’re in a life that’s too much for you. Then you drop down a notch. If you can’t steal and you can’t sap someone on the head when you have to, you join the line at the flophouse. You get on the bread line. If you can’t muscle your way into the bread line, you sit at the curb and hold out your hand. You’re a beggar. If you can’t whine and wheedle and beg your cup of coffee, if you can’t take the billy on the bottoms of your feet—why, I say be a poet. Yes”—he laughed at the thought—“like old Penfield, find your level. Get in, get into the place that’s your nature, whether it’s running a corporation or picking daisies in a field, get in there and live to it, live to the fullness of it, become what you are, and I’ll say to you, you’ve done more than most men. Most men—and let me tell you, I know men—most of them don’t
ever do that. They’ll work at a job and not know why. They’ll marry a woman and not know why. They’ll go to their graves and not know why.”

He was standing at the window gazing out with his hands behind his back, gently slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other. “I’ve never understood it, but there it is. I’ve never understood how a man could give up his life, give it up, moment by moment, even as he lives it, give it up from the second he’s born. But there it is. Bow his head. Agree. Go along. Do what everyone’s doing. Let it leach away. Sign it away. Drink it away. Sleep it away.”

He was standing at the window meditating, eclipsing the window light so that the dark bulk of him was apparent. He was stocky and short-legged with a large head, like a mountain troll. “Well,” he said, “you’re brash enough. Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. As far as I can get.”

He came back to his desk and wrote something on a piece of paper. “You happen to need something—this is a private number, not to be given out, you understand?”

He folded the paper and handed it to me. He gave me a quick glance, one eyebrow arching over the lighted eye of shrewdness. “But don’t leave until I’ve got my dolmen,” he said, turning and picking up his telephone.