News from the World (17 page)

In the early years of the nineteenth century S. T. Coleridge spoke out against the formulas of his time. What he said seems to me as applicable now as it was then. He thought a good deal about writing and reading for children, and he writes in
Biographia Literaria
:

Don't worry about the apparent terror and bloodshed in children's books, the real children's books. There is none there. It only represents the way in which little children, from generation to generation, learn in ways as painless as can be followed, the stern environment of life and death.

BY THE SEA

T
HE SAND CASTLE
the three children had made was already toppling into the up-reaching tide so that, in their efforts to save it, they would hardly have noticed the old man as he slid down the low dune to the beach if he had not been holding a large hen that nestled comfortably on his arm. Just behind him followed an old woman and several young people, each of whom carried some article, a sack of charcoal, a grill, towels, a folded canvas chair, and so forth.

The old man set the hen down and at once it began to cluck, to scratch and scatter the sand with a busy foolishness that delighted the children whose castle had by then been completely washed away. Murmuring among themselves a few yards away, the children were hardly aware that the pleasure they were feeling at the sight of the hen on the beach was due to the way it stayed close to the old man as he stooped to balance a grill on a semi-circle of stones gathered by one of the young men.

This apparent attachment between hen and man which soothed the children—chilled by having spent so much time squatting in the damp sand, and who had all but forgotten their parents in their absorption in building their castle, but who were now, although unconsciously, longing to be embraced by them—made their shock all the more rending when the old man seized up the hen and wrung its neck.

The children clutched each other's cold flesh, their mouths opening in mute cries as they saw blood seep from beneath the old man's twisting hands to dye the russet feathers red. As he suddenly crouched and began to pluck away the feathers with increasing rapidity, the children, whimpering, saw advancing upon them, the sun at his back, their father whose enclosing arms they had only just been yearning for, and they recalled, as though it was from a time long gone, that he was coming to carry them out into the deep water beyond the waves—as he had always done at the end of their mornings by the sea—but now, as he drew ever nearer, he seemed to them a ravening beast.

NEWS FROM THE WORLD

N
OTHING MUCH USED
to happen around here. In summer there were more car accidents and fires and scandals. Dying went on year round, and in our village by the sea, most people breathed their last in the early hours of the morning. I'd heard that was so elsewhere.

There was no sound from the world in the winter. The snow and the sea closed us in. We had our own news. But in June, in the kitchens of the houses where we worked, we heard the babble of other places. In time, I learned that the people who came here expected something more than they could find in stories of soldiers burning villages far away, or of thieves stealing governments, or of the killing of politicians.

During the long evenings, we villagers went to the sea and collected the things they had thrown away or lost, bottles and change, rings and toys, and as we sifted through the sand, we found traces of their secret lives, their vices and wishes.

Last June, a vast pool of oil formed a mile from our shore. The summer people stood in groups on the edge of the sea, their faces flamed in the sunset as though they were seeing paradise.

That same June, I fell in love with an old man. I cleaned his kitchen, did his shopping, sniffed at his tubes of paint, touched his damp canvases, ironed his fine linen shirts and, each morning, straightened his scarcely rumpled bed.

When, at an early hour, he came to drink the coffee I had made him, I felt as though my eyes had fallen out of my head, and in their sockets, there was only light.

He was a thin old man, as limber as a youth. His hair was nearly white but his beard was black. His clear, pale voice flowed like a brook over a shallow bed. His slight stammer assured me he was shy despite the paintings of naked men and women that hung in the room where he painted. He spoke to me only of the weather.

“Is it a good morning?” he would ask, as though he weren't standing right in it.

“There's a mist, but it will be gone in an hour,” I might say.

“A thick mist? A sea mist?” he would press.

“A ground mist,” I'd reply, “just over the dunes and already lifting.”

To describe him is to say nothing of what stirred me. It would be as foolish as to say the sky is blue and the sand is yellow. Words are nets through which all truth escapes.

One morning at the end of July, as I was passing by his chair, he placed his hands directly on my buttocks. I stood like a statue in the hollow center of which an animal flutters and scrabbles frantically to escape. When I got home that day, my children looked like strangers, and my husband's name tasted in my mouth like metal.

All through August, while I cleaned his little house behind the dunes, we spoke of mist, fog, wind, heat and rain. But when he rested his hands on various parts of my body, I waited in silence until he went back to his coffee. During those moments, I burned with a flame that was both hot and cold.

When I thought of the winter months, when the old man would be gone, the little house shuttered against the freezing wind, I knew what it would be like to feel death creeping around my feet.

I began to read the newspapers from the city which you could only buy in my village during the three months of summer, but what I read was weak and sickly. It had not the power to turn me from this terrible love that had struck me down and crushed me in my fortieth year. I longed only to submit to the torment of that light which filled my head those mornings. I watched him walk toward me with his youth's light step across the rag rug of the parlor.

“Good morning,” we each said, and it was as though my heart burst loose from its nest of blood and flew like a bird toward the sky.

All summer, the pool of oil had moved closer and closer to the shore. Men came in boats and tried to bait it as though it was a wild beast. There were always fires on the beach at night, and around them people sang and embraced, their faces turned away from the dark sea.

“Will you accompany me to the shore?” the old man asked me one noon, just as I had tucked my apron away in a paper sack. We sat on the sand among the crowd who called out to each other as they pulled thick, oily strands of devil's apron from the water.

We sat, each with our arms around our knees; our shoulders touched. Mixed with the smell of salt was his own fragrance, linseed oil and laundered linen, and the green pine soap I bought for him at the store.

Dying birds lay around our feet, and an arm's length away was a sand shark whose jaw opened and slowly stiffened.

He rose to his feet so lightly, I thought he had only sighed. Before I could cry out, he was waist high in the oil and water, flinging seabirds out upon the beach, while all around people laughed and clapped their hands.

I reached him as he fell. I carried him through the crowd whose faces had gone cold and angry.

I undressed him in the kitchen. In the narrow tub that stood on claw feet, I bathed him in warm water. I washed the oil from the wings of his hair and rinsed away every drop of it from the most tender and private parts of his body. Then I dressed him in fresh clothes I had ironed myself, and I tied the laces of his shoes and combed his damp beard.

In the kitchen, I fed him whiskey and coffee. At last the color came back to his cheeks.

He wanted me, he said, to leave the village and my children and my husband, to return with him to the city he came from. He said that there, each night, we would hear music in a different place.

I listened to him for an hour, hearing parts of his voice I'd not heard before. While he spoke, he often gripped his fine old hands together as though he were pressing something out of himself. He said there was no future for me in the village.

“You live on the edge of things,” he said.

When he had finished, he lay back against the chair, his eyelids fluttering. I stood up. I folded my apron and said I wouldn't go with him although I loved him better than my village or his city or anything that walked or flew or crawled.

This winter I have often gone to look at the house where he lived. It is blowing away, a board here, a shingle there.

Inside the scarf which I wrap around my throat and jaw, I can taste my own moist breath. Inside the sleeves of my coat, where I've drawn them against the cold, my hands form cups to hold the balls of his feet, the joints of his kneecaps, the small cheeks of his behind, the angel's wings of his narrow shoulder blades.

No one will come back this summer to his house or any other house. Our beach is black with oil. Our birds are dead or gone. The fish lie frozen beneath the ooze. The dune grass cannot grow. Officials come every week and note down what news they can find in the tides of black muck. They speak only among themselves in the dunes, the wind pressing their coat collars against their clean-shaven jaws.

It is too late for reports. We are starving here in our village. At last, we are at the center.

SITTING DOWN AND ALONE

B
EVERLY
T
INKER HANDED
the letter to her husband as he came through the door of their apartment on Riverside Drive in New York City. He took it eagerly, sure it was from their son, Daniel, in his senior year at the University of Wisconsin.

“It's not from Danny,” she said. “It's your Boston friend.” He thought she sounded derisive. In the near darkness of the small foyer, she stood unmoving, blocking his way to the living room.

“Are we to receive letters from Daniel only?” he asked.

“I didn't say that.”

Gerald hung his coat on a wire hanger and pushed it into the coat-crowded hall closet. Then turning to her, he asked, “What's the matter? Does it strike you as odd—an old friend writing to me?”

“Old friend—you haven't seen him since you were twelve.”

“Next time I'm in Boston, I'll call up a girl I knew when I was twelve.”

“Fine.”

He leaned against the closet door and stared at her.

“Fine,” he repeated. “Just fine. Why are you behaving like I called up a woman instead of aging Jack Crowder?”

She suddenly clasped her hands. “I don't understand why you can't go to a movie or read a book when you go on these trips,” she said. “It's the picture of you I have—sitting on the edge of a hotel bed,
idly
dialing the phone because you've
idly
recalled someone from your past. But you've always been that way. Walking the streets all night rather than spend even three minutes just sitting down, alone.”

“I haven't
always
been any way. If you'd been with me, I wouldn't have even thought of calling Jack.”

“That's exactly what I mean!”

“He wasn't in! All I did was leave a message I'd called.”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“I'm going out!” he shouted, opening the closet door and dragging his coat from the hanger.

“Where?” she asked. She bent to turn on a small lamp on the foyer table.

“To find that old gang of mine,” he replied angrily. They fell silent. He stood there holding his coat, thinking how burdensome they could be to each other sometimes—just burdens, nothing else.

“What's the matter?” he asked in a subdued voice. “You didn't even say hello to me.”

“I'm sorry,” she replied. “Hello.”

He hung his coat up again. Then he held out the letter to her.

“No. I don't want to read it,” she said. Her anger had gone, and he knew she wouldn't take the letter now because she was mortified by her own behavior.

After dinner, Gerald set his portable typewriter on the coffee table in the living room and opened Jack's letter. The small distinct handwriting struck him as somewhat inhuman. He picked up the first sheet.

“Dear Gerald,” it began. “When I have finished my day's work I grow aware of a painful silence. I begin to listen to my own small noises. I cap my pen, shut a drawer, drop a paper clip which I don't trouble to find, move an ashtray or two. I've done the reading, gone over notes, marked papers. I pick up a journal, hoping to find some item that might have escaped me the first time around. I chew my eyeglass stems as I walk from the windows which front Beacon Street to the rear wall of the room. I am carrying the journal which I've rolled into a tube. The paper is slick and expensive. The pages are filled with the dissembled panic of professors who are writing, writing, all over this country and saying nothing at all. I suppose I have to eat soon. I'm not hungry. What I'm thinking about is the untracked snow lying upon the slope behind the house I lived in as a boy. I inhale deeply as though I were outside on a clear cold day instead of inside this room with its close smell of my life.

“It's not people I remember. Only places. How I miss my senses! And I'm confounded by this
thing
in me that continues to live, to gather impressions, to crave, if infrequently, its supper. Do you ever wonder about the past? I mean—regard it with wonder? Do you like your work? How is your life?”

Gerald put down the page and began to type.

“You ask me if I like my work,” he wrote. “To be frank, I don't think about it. It's what I do. Fund-raising has its tedium, although I do get an occasional trip from it. But doesn't everything have tedium. I seem to have a flair for what I do. My family often suggests they could use my talent on the homefront. Ha-ha. Still, we manage. Of course, I think about things, too. But there's no point in brooding, is there? Although at our age, I suppose we're more susceptible to it. After all, the choices we have thin out, don't they? Incidentally, you don't mention a family. Have you one? Children?”

He considered the last few sentences. They were too personal: they might provoke intimate revelations he had no interest in.

When Jack's first letter followed his Boston trip by a few days, he had been surprised. He hadn't been sure Jack would remember him, much less track down his address and start writing to him. When Gerald had discovered his phone number in the Boston directory and dialed it, he had found that Jack was living in a residential club. He had been relieved Jack wasn't in. The impulse to call him had been fleeting.

Jack had been “grieved” to miss his call, he had written in his first long letter. It included a lengthy description of Jack's vacation in Greece last summer. Gerald had skipped most of that. The word “grieved” made him uneasy. He felt obliged to reply. He had written a brief note, asking Jack if he ever saw any of their old classmates from the Boston school they had both gone to. About himself, he wrote only that he had one son who was in college, that he enjoyed living in New York and that he raised funds for an adoption agency.

And now this second letter had arrived from Jack with its intimacies and speculations. He picked up the last of the sheets and read it through.

“Yesterday,” Jack had written, “I left my office to go to my sophomore class. On the way there, I forgot completely what I had intended to lecture on. Forgot everything! Even where I was! I felt faint and I stretched out my hands to support myself on the walls of the corridor. Of course I couldn't reach them both at once so I bobbled from side to side. I was staggering along in this fashion when I met the chairman of my department on his way home, as I learned later, because of a viral attack. He held up his briefcase in such a way that I couldn't get past him. He seemed enraged! I couldn't explain why I was feeling the walls like a giant fly. I couldn't speak at all! I lowered my arms. He lowered his briefcase, and we went our separate ways. I recalled what I was to lecture on, and he, I suppose, went home. It was an intense confrontation. Why was he so angry? How can I explain my muteness? Shouldn't I write him a note?”

Jack had ended the letter then with only his name. Irritably, Gerald struck at the keys of his typewriter.

“Jack,” he wrote, “you must not get so stuck in incidents that mean nothing. We all have these flurries of confusion. One must simply stick to one's purpose. The obvious explanation for the situation you described is that your chairman was ill and wanted to get home in a hurry. Can you have forgotten that your arms were stretched out as though to prevent him from passing you? Think how it may have appeared to him. I'm making more of this trivial incident than it merits only in order to suggest that what was so strange about it was that a simple explanation didn't occur to you instantly.”

Gerald took the page out of the machine and inked out the questions about Jack's family life. He inserted another page.

“That's a long letter,” observed his wife who put a cup of tea for him on the table.

“It's double-spaced,” he said.

As children, Jack and he had been more or less friendly in school. They had often gone to the movies on Saturday afternoons when Gerald had enough money to pay for his ticket. Gerald had sometimes visited Jack's house.

Jack's family had been well-off. He had lived in a big house with white clapboard siding. At the front there was a well-tended lawn with hedges and flowering shrubs, and in the back, a narrow meadow on the slope of a hill where the family kept a saddle horse which Gerald had been told he couldn't ride. Recollecting now his fear of animals in those days, he laughed to think how humiliated he'd been by Mrs. Crowder's admonition concerning that lousy horse. He wouldn't have ridden a saddled rabbit in those days.

Gerald's family had lived in the more deteriorated half of a two-family dwelling. Because the walls had been thin, Gerald in remembering the house was not sure he was recalling his parents' quarrels or the neighbors'.

He began a new sentence.

“After all,” he wrote, “your life can't have been so tough. I recall your house quite well. You had a window seat in your bedroom and a horse of your own in a meadow.”

He read over what he had written, noting that his last sentences were inconsonant with what had preceded them. He was suddenly bored.

Beverly called him to come to the bedroom and watch television. A comedian they both liked was defending ethnic humor on a panel discussion. He didn't write anymore that evening.

The next morning before leaving for his office, he finished the letter hurriedly. He wrote:

“Work piles up at this time of year. Our spring drive is on. You can imagine how little time I have for such relaxations as writing to an old acquaintance. It was nice to hear from you.”

He mailed the letter in the apartment house slot and forgot about it. A reply came within a few days. Beverly had left it on his plate as though it was his dinner.

“I managed to decipher your inked out lines,” it began. “I was most interested in what you would cross out. But somewhat disappointed at your question. I have had several families. I have three children. I'm alone now.

“About the incident with my chairman. I want to tell you that it's the instant explanation you suggest that I want to resist. All my life, I've rushed to explain things within the second, like an addict grabbing up a narcotic. My two divorces for instance.”

“All his life,” Gerald said aloud. “For God's sake . . . all anyone's life . . .” He looked up and across the table at Beverly. “He irritates me,” he said.

“After that letter arrived this morning,” she began, “I found the other two on your night table. I read them.”

“You did?” he asked, surprised. “I thought I'd thrown them out. I can see myself throwing them in the garbage.”

“Why don't you do that now? Throw them all out?”

“Yes . . . but I'll finish this one. Then I'll put a stop to the whole thing.”

After supper, Gerald went back to Jack's letter.

“I fear you think I'm looking for a companion in misery. I'm not,” the letter continued. “It's because we are, as you said, old acquaintances, that I write you now. My friends and I are used to each other. There's something else, too. You're the only person I know from my true past, my childhood. Perhaps that's the main thing. When I found your message here at my club, my heart began to pound! It was nearly like the excitement of hope. I don't know what about. But there it is. And I can't tell my friends I don't understand anything. Money, for example. Sex. Death. What is goodness?

“One of my students came to my office to tell me she was in love with me and couldn't concentrate on the course work. She said my face was so interesting. Interesting! I insisted she turn in her overdue term paper. She burst into tears. Later, I was so distressed, I cancelled a dinner engagement and went home and made myself sick drinking brandy.

“I've been trying to finish a piece on Andrew Marvell. It's simply not worth finishing. I thought of having the girl transferred to another section. Maybe I should suggest marriage to her, steal her away from the young men. That girl shouldn't be in college. She wants to live! Do you remember what that means to an eighteen-year-old?

“Are you well-off? What's your wife like? Have you had just one wife?”

Gerald put down the letter. “He's insulting,” he said. “He knew how to be patronizing when he was a kid.”

“I wonder why you called him in the first place,” Beverly said. Gerald was bothered by a note of sadness in her voice. It was as though some sorrow from an unknown source were reaching out to touch them both.

Later on, he replied to Jack's letter.

“Jack, you are too self-involved. Don't you realize I might find some of your questions offensive? Why the hell did you end up living alone in some crummy residential club? You write as though a decent place to live is nothing. Did you ever trouble yourself to come to
my
house when we were kids? No. You
knew
you had everything. What are you complaining about? What's wrong with being a teacher? You think you've been singled out for special suffering? Look around you! Why
should
that girl care about
Beowulf,
or whatever dead stuff she's supposed to read in your course? You're damned right, she wants to live!”

That night Gerald lay awake in the dark, his hands clasped behind his neck, staring up at the ceiling. He tried to recall with great particularity what Jack had looked like. It had been over thirty-five years since they had last seen each other. All he could recall was a round face and pale eyes above the collar of a navy blue coat. The only detail that occurred to him was the way the coat buttons were so tightly sewn on. His own jacket was always scarred by the jagged tears where his buttons had been.

An answer came by return mail. Gerald opened the letter with dread. “Yes!” Jack began without his usual greeting. “That's what I wanted! What a good letter! Now I'm beginning to remember you. And other things. Who was it made you wear those black stockings? I especially noticed them when you bent over to make a snowball. I think I must have made some snotty remark about them because it seems to me you got very angry. Do you recall? The sky was nearly black, probably January. The snow had been on the ground for days. We were in the schoolyard. The janitor had scattered cinders all around. You and I were the only children there. You were shivering. Those bitter cold days! Do you remember Miss Hamilton who taught 3rd grade? Do you remember Janet Lee who had little breasts when all the rest of us could hardly tell male from female? Janet wore a locket. By the way, I don't teach
Beowulf.
I'm really glad we're making this connection. It helps me to think.”