Ragtime (6 page)

9

In New Rochelle, Mother had for days brooded about her brother. He had called on the telephone from New York once or twice but would not say why he had gone away or where he was staying or when he would return. He mumbled. He was close-mouthed. She was furious with him. He did not respond to anger. Since his calls she had taken the extreme step of going into his room and looking around. As always it was neat. There was his table with the machine for stringing tennis racquets. There were his scull oars in brackets on the wall. He kept his own room and there was not a speck of dust even now in his absence. His hairbrushes on the bureau top. His ivory shoehorn. a small shell shaped like a thimble, with some grains of sand stuck to it. She had never seen that before. A picture from a magazine pinned to the wall, the drawing by Charles Dana Gibson of that Evelyn Nesbit creature. He had packed nothing, his shirts and collars filled the drawer. She closed the door guiltily. He was a strange young man. He never made friends. He was solitary and impassive except for a streak of indolence which he either could not hide or did not care to. She knew Father found that indolence disturbing. Nevertheless he had promoted him to greater responsibility.

She could not share her worries with Grandfather, who had sired the young man at a late age and was now totally separated from any practical perception of life. Grandfather was in his nineties. He was a retired professor of Greek and Latin who had taught generations of Episcopal seminarians at Shady Grove College in central Ohio. He was a country classicist. He had known John Brown when he was a boy in Hudson County in the Western Reserve and he would tell you that twenty times a day if you let him. More and more since Father’s departure Mother thought of the old Ohio homestead. The summers there were gravid with promise and red-winged blackbirds flew up from the hay meadows. The furnishings of the house were spare, and county-made. Ladderback chairs of pine. Polished wood floors of wide boards fastened with dowels. She had loved that house. She and Young Brother played on the floor by the light of the fire. In their games she always instructed him. In winter their horse Bessie was hitched to the sleigh and bells were tied to her collar and they skimmed over the thick wet Ohio snowfalls. She remembered Brother when he was younger than her own son. She took care of him. On rainy days they played secret pretending games in the hayloft, in the sweet warmth, with the horses snorting and nickering below them. On Sunday morning she wore her pink dress and the purest white pantaloons and went to church with a heart beating with excitement. She was a large-boned child with high cheekbones and gray eyes that slanted. She had lived in Shady Grove all her life except for four years at boarding school in Cleveland. She had always presumed she would marry one of the seminarians. But in her last year at school she had met Father. He was traveling through the Midwest to make local sales connections for his flag and bunting business trips. When they married and she came East she brought her father with her. And then because Brother had not been able to settle himself he too had joined the household in New Rochelle. And now in this season of life, alone in her modern awninged home at the top of the hill on fashionable Broadview Avenue with only her small son and her ancient father, she felt deserted by the race of males and furious with herself for the nostalgia that swept through her without warning at any hour of the day or night. A letter had arrived from the Republican Inaugural Committee inquiring if the firm would care to bid on the decoration and fireworks contract for the inauguration parade and ball the following January, when Mr. Taft was expected to succeed Mr. Roosevelt. It was an historical moment for the business and neither Father nor Young Brother was on hand. She fled to the garden for solace. This was the late September of the year and all the heavy swaying flowers were in bloom, salvia, chrysanthemum and marigold. She walked along the borders of the yard, her hands clasped. From an upstairs window the little boy watched her. He noted that the forward motion of her body was transmitted to her clothes laterally. The hem of her skirt swayed from side to side, brushing the leaves of grass. He held in his hand a letter from his father that had been posted from Cape York in northwest Greenland. It had been brought back to the United States by the supply ship
Erik
, which had transported to Greenland thirty-five tons of whale meat for Commander Peary’s dogs. Mother had copied the letter and thrown the original in the garbage because it strongly suggested the smell of dead whale. The boy had retrieved the letter and as time passed, the grease spots on the envelope were worked into every fiber of the paper by his small hands. The letter was now translucent.

As the boy watched his mother she came out of the dappled shade of the maple trees, and her golden hair, which she wore piled on her head in the style of the day, flared like the sun. She stood for a moment as if listening to something. She brought her hand up to her ears and slowly, by the flower bed, dropped to her knees. Then she began to paw the ground. The little boy left the window and raced downstairs. He went through the kitchen and out the back door. He found himself following the Irish housemaid, who was running through the yard wiping her hands on her apron.

Mother had dug something up. She was brushing the dirt from a bundle which she held on her lap. The maid let out a scream and crossed herself. The little boy tried to get a look at it, whatever it was, but Mother and the maid were on the ground, brushing the dirt off, and for a moment he couldn’t get past them. Mother’s face had turned so pale and suffered such an intense expression that all the bones of her face appeared to have grown and the opulently beautiful woman he revered was shockingly haggard, like someone ancient. He saw, as they brushed the dirt away, that it was an infant. Dirt was in his eyes, in its mouth. It was small and wrinkled and its eyes were closed. It was a brown baby and had been bound tight in a cotton blanket. Mother freed its arms. It made a small weak cry, and the two women grew hysterical. The maid ran into the house. The boy followed his mother to the house, running alongside her as the small arms of the brown baby waved in the air.

The women washed the baby in a basin on the kitchen table. It was bloody, an unwashed newborn boy. The maid examined the cord and said it had been bitten. They swaddled it in towels, and Mother ran to the front hall to phone the doctor. The boy watched the infant closely to see was breathing. It barely moved. Then its tiny fingers grasped the towels. Its head slowly turned as if through its closed eyes it had found something to look at.

When the doctor came in his Ford Doctor’s Car he was shown into the kitchen. He held his stethoscope to the small bony rib cage. He opened the mouth and poked his finger down the throat. These people, he said. He shook his head. The muscles of his cheeks pulled in his mouth at the corners. Mother described for him the circumstances of the discovery: how he had heard a cry coming from her feet, from the earth, and thought at the moment she had heard it that she had not heard it at all. And what if I had walked on, she said to herself. The doctor asked for some hot water. He removed an instrument from his bag. The maid tightly clutched the small cross that hung from her neck on a chain. The doorbell rang and the boy followed her into the front hall. The police had arrived. Mother came out and explained the circumstances once again. The policeman asked if he could use the telephone. The telephone was on a table near the front door. He removed his helmet, picked up the phone and put the receiver to his ear and waited for the operator. He winked at the boy.

Within an hour a black woman was found in the cellar of a home on the next block. She was a washwoman who worked in the neighborhood. She sat outside the house in the police ambulance and Mother brought the baby out to her. When the woman took the baby in her arms she began to cry. Mother was shocked by her youth. She had a child’s face, a guileless brown beautiful face. She was the color of dark chocolate and her hair looked chopped and uncared for. She was being attended by a nurse. Mother stepped back on the sidewalk. Where will you take her, she said to the doctor. To the charity ward, he said. And eventually she will have to stand charges. What charges, Mother said. Well, attempted murder, I should think. Does she have family, Mother said. No, ma’am, the policeman said. Not so’s we know. The doctor pulled down on the rim of his derby and walked to his car and put his bag on the seat. Mother took a deep breath. I will take the responsibility, she said. Please bring her inside. And despite the best advice of the doctor and the remonstrations of the police, she would not change her mind.

So the young black woman and her child were installed in a room on the top floor. Mother made numbers of phone calls. She canceled her service league meeting. She walked back and forth in her parlor. She was very agitated. She felt keenly her husband absence and condemned herself for so readily endorsing his travels. There was no way to communicate with him any of the problems and concerns of her life. She would not hear from him till the following summer. She stared at the ceiling as if to see through it. The Negro girl and her baby had carried into the house a sense of misfortune, of chaos, and now this feeling resided here like some sort of contamination. She was frightened. She went to the window. Every morning these washwomen came up the hill from the trolley line on North Avenue and fanned into the houses. Traveling Italian gardeners kept the lawns trim. Icemen walked alongside their wagons, their horses straining in their traces to pull the creaking ice wagons up the hill.

When the sun set that evening it lay at the bottom of the hill as if it had rolled there. It was blood red. Late at night the boy woke and found his mother sitting beside the bed looking at him, her golden hair plaited and her large breasts soft against his arm when she leaned over to kiss him.

10

Actually Father wrote every day during the long winter months, letters for delayed transmission which took the form of entries in his journal. In this way he measured the uninterrupted flow of twilight darkness. The members of the expedition lived in surprising comfort aboard the
Roosevelt
, which had been lifted in its berth by the winter floes until it sat like a walnut in icing. Peary lived the most comfortably of all. He had a player piano in his stateroom. He was a large man with a heavy torso and thick red hair turning gray. He wore a long moustache. In a previous expedition he had lost his toes. He walked with an odd gait, a kind of shuffle, pushing his feet along the floor without lifting them. He pedaled his player piano with toeless feet. He was supplied with rolls of the best Victor Herbert and Rudolf Friml numbers as well as a medley of Bowdoin College songs and a version of
The Minute Waltz
of Chopin which he could pump out in forty-eight seconds. But the winter months were not given to idleness. There were hunting sorties for musk ox; there were sledges to be built, and the base camp had to be set up ninety miles away, at Cape Columbia, the point from which the actual polar dash across the sea ice would be made. Everyone had to get used to handling dog teams and building igloo shelters. Peary’s Negro assistant, Mathew Henson, supervised the training. After numbers of expeditions, Peary had developed a system. Every last detail of their lives in the Artic represented his considered judgment and was part of the system. The material and designs of the sledges, the food that was to the eaten, the tins in which the food was to be carried, the manner in which the tins were to be lashed to the sledges, the kind of under- and over-clothing that was to be worn, the means of harnessing the dogs, the kinds of knives and guns to carry, the kinds of matches and the means of keeping them dry, the design of the eye guards to be used against snow blindness, and so on. Peary loved to discuss his system. In its essentials—that is, in the use of dogs and sledges and the wearing of fur clothing and the living off local fauna—Peary’s system merely adopted the Esquimo way of life. Father realized this with a start one day. As it happened he had been standing on the quarter-deck observing Peary soundly scold one of the Esquimo men who had not done his assigned chore properly. Then Peary shuffled back along the deck, passing Father and saying to him They’re children and they have to be treated like children. Father tended to agree with this view, for it suggested a consensus. He recalled an observation made in the Philippines ten years before where he had fought under General Leonard F. Wood against the Moro guerrillas. Our little brown brothers have to be taught a lesson, a staff officer had said, sticking a campaign pin in a map. There was no question that the Eskimos were primitives. They were affectionate, gentle, emotional, trustworthy and full of pranks. They loved to laugh and sing. In the deepest part of the winter of continuous night, when terrible storms tore rocks from the cliffs, and winds shrieked, and it was so desolately cold that Father hallucinated that his skin was burning, Peary and most of the men withdrew to the theoretical considerations of his system and so protected themselves against their fear. The Esquimos, who had no system but merely lived here, suffered the terrors of their universe. Sometimes the Eskimo women would unaccountably tear off their clothes and run into the black storms howling and rolling on the ice. Their husbands had forcibly to restrain them from killing themselves. Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through

But there seemed in this icebound winter night a force that gripped you by the neck and faced you into it. The Esquimo families lived all over the ship, camping on the decks and in the holds. They were not discreet in their intercourse. They cohabitated without even undressing, through vents in their furs, and they went at it with grunts and shouts of fierce joy. One day Father came upon a couple and was shocked to see the wife thrusting her hip upwards to the thrust of her husband. An uncanny animal song came from her throat. This was something he could not write in his journal except in a kind of code. The woman was actually pushing back. It stunned him that she could react this way. This filthy toothless Esquimo woman with the flat brow and the eyes pressed upward by her cheekbones, singing her song and pushing back. He thought of Mother’s fastidiousness, her grooming and her intelligence, and found himself resenting this primitive woman’s claim to the gender.

The spring came, finally, and it was Peary’s assistant, Mathew Henson, who called to Father one morning and pointed aft. A thin ray of light was in the southern sky. In the days that followed, distinctions in the kinds of darkness could be made, and these became more and more pronounced. Finally one morning there rose above the horizon a blurred and blood-red sun, not round but elliptically misshapen, like something born. Everyone became happy. Glorious colors, pink and green and yellow, lay upon the snow peaks, and the entire bleak magnificent world offered itself to who would take it. The sky gradually turned blue and Peary said the time had come to conquer the Pole.

The day before the expedition was to leave, Father went along with Mathew Henson and three of the Eskimos to the bird cliffs half a day’s journey from the coast. They climbed the cliffs with sealskin bags hung over their shoulders and collected dozen of eggs, a great delicacy in the Artic. When the bird flew up, chattering and circling, it was as if a portion of the rock cliff had come away. Father had never seen so many birds. They were fulmar and auk. The Eskimos held out nets between then and the birds flew into the nets and became entangled. The nets were taken up at the corners and became sacks of immobile weighted feathers chirping piteously. When the men had caught all they could carry, they made the descent and straightaway slaughtered the birds. The fulmar, about the size of gulls, were wrung at the neck. But what amazed Father was the means by which the small and inoffensive auk was done in. One simply nudged the tiny heart in its breast. Father watched it done and then tried it himself. He held an auk in one hand and with his thumb gently squeezed the beating breast. Its head slumped and it was dead. The Eskimos loved the auklet and customarily pickled it in sealskins.

On the way back to camp Father and Mathew Henson discussed what the men under Peary always discussed—who would have the honor of actually going to the Pole with him. Before the embarkation from New York the Commander had made it quite clear to everyone that he and he alone was to discover the Pole: their glory would be in support. I’ve spent my life planning for that moment, Peary said, and I’m going to have it for myself. This seemed to Father a reasonable point of view. He had the diffidence of the amateur before the professional. But it was Mathew Henson’s view that someone besides Esquimos would have to go to the top with the Commander, and he thought, with all the respect, it would be himself. Actually Father believed Henson had a good case. Henson had been with Peary on his previous expeditions and he was an astute and formidable Artic explorer in his own right. He knew how to drive the dogs almost as well as an Eskimo, he knew how to repair sledges, build camps, he had great physical strength and boasted many skills. But Father found himself unaccountably resenting Henson’s presumption and he asked the Negro how he knew he would be chosen. They had breasted a ridge along the trail and stood resting the dogs for a moment as they looked over a great white plain of snow. At that moment the sun broke through the overcast and the entire earth flashed like a mirror. Well, sir Mathew Henson said with a smile, I just know.

The next day the expedition set out due north across the polar ice. They were arranged in separate parties consisting of a white man or two, a group of Eskimo boys, a pack of dogs and four or five sledges. Each party except Peary’s was to serve for a week as pioneer or trailbreaker to the rest of the expedition. Eventually, each of them was to peel off and head back to land, leaving Peary and his boys to make the last hundred miles or so in fresh, relatively rested condition. That was the system. The big work was in breaking trail. This was hazardous and backbreaking labor. Ridges of ice had to be hacked away with a pickax, heavy sledges had to be hauled and pushed up ice inclines and then held against precipitous descents. Each sled carried over six hundred pounds of tools and provisions. When it broke, it had to be unloaded and repaired by lashing the broken parts together—work that required an ungloved hand. There were leads of water that had to be crossed or waited out. The ice floes came together with great cracks, like the sound of cannon, and rumbled underfoot like the voice of the ocean itself. Inexplicable fogs blocked out the sun. Sometimes there was nothing to do but crawl across thin sheets of forming ice; no one wanted to be caught on a drifting ice floe. The weather was a constant torment, the wind blowing so sharply at fifty or sixty degrees below zero that the air itself seemed to have changed its physical nature, being now unassimilable crystals in one’s lungs. Each breath left its solid residue in the beard or on the frozen edges of the fur hoods. Everyone wore the prescribed soft sealskin shoes, the bear fur trousers and the hooded caribou jackets, but even these indigenous materials turned brittle in the frost. The sun now stood above the horizon twenty-four hours a day. At the end of a day’s travel, perhaps fifteen miles of arduous effort, the pioneer group would make camp, build igloos for the pursuing expedition, feed the dogs, untangle their iced-up traces, light the alcohol cooker to brew tea, and fall to a meal of frozen pemmican and crackers. Slowly through the month of March the Peary expedition made its way due north. One by one a party would turn back, its obligations now to beat the return trail as thoroughly as possible to make it easier for the parties who would follows. Peary would bring up the lag each day on the outgoing run and immediately occupy one of the igloos built for him by Henson. In the meantime Henson took care of Peary’s dogs, repaired broken sledges, made supper, dealt with the Eskimos, many of whom were now becoming difficult. Peary defined the virtues of Eskimos as loyalty and obedience, roughly the same virtues one sought in the dogs. When the time came for the final run for the Pole, now only a hundred miles away, Peary did indeed choose Henson to go with him, and Henson chose the Esquimos who in his judgment were the best boys, the most loyal and devoted to the Commander. The balance of the party was turned around and sent home.

Father had long since gone back. He has pioneered the very first week. He had proven not the sturdiest member of the expedition. This was from no lack of heart, as Peary told him before sending him home, but from the tendency of his extremities to freeze easily. Father’s left heel, for instance, froze every day, no matter what he did to protect it. Each evening in camp he would thaw it out painfully and treat it as best he could, and each morning it would freeze up again. So too with one of his knees and a small area on the top of his hand. Pieces of Father froze very casually and Peary said this was the fate of some men in the North and nothing could be done about it. Peary was not an unkind commander, and he liked Father. During the long winter months aboard the
Roosevelt
, they had discovered themselves members of the same national collegiate fraternity, and this was no light bond between them. But after a lifetime of effort Peary was impatient to get his task done. Father’s society had paid a good sum into the Peary chest, and for it they got their man to seventy-two degrees, forty-six minutes, a very respectable way. Before he left, Father presented the Commander with an American flag he had manufactured for the occasion. It was pure silk and a good size, but when folded had no more bulk than a large handkerchief. Peary thanked him, put the flag inside his furs and, after warning Father to look out for the leads, sent him on his return journey to the
Roosevelt
in the company of three bad-tempered Eskimos.

But now Peary was within a day’s travel of his lifelong goal. Driving Henson and the Eskimos mercilessly, he had refused to let them sleep more than one hour or two at the end of each arduous day. Now the sun shone brightly, the sky was clear; there was a full moon in the blue sky and the great ice thighs of the earth heaved and shuddered and rose toward the moon. At midmorning of April 9, Peary called a halt. He ordered Henson to build a snow shield to protect him while he took his observations. Peary lay on his stomach and with a pan of mercury and a sextant, some paper and a pencil, he calculated his position. It did not satisfy him. He walked further along the floe and took another sighting. This did not satisfy him. All day long Peary shuffled back and forth over the ice, a mile one way, two miles another, and made his observations. No one observation satisfied him. He would walk a few steps due north and find himself going due south. On this watery planet the sliding sea refused to be fixed. He couldn’t find the exact place to say this spot, here, is the North Pole. Nevertheless there was no question that they were there. All the observations together indicated that. Give three cheers, my boy, he told Henson. And let’s fly the flag. Henson and the Esquimos cheered loudly but could not be heard in the howling wind. The flag snapped and rippled. Peary posed Henson and the Eskimos in front of the flag and took their picture. It shows five stubby figures wrapped in furs, the flag set in a paleocrystic peak behind them that might suggest a real physical Pole. Because of the light the faces are indistinguishable, seen only as black blanks framed by caribou fur.