Refiner's Fire (29 page)

A
LTHOUGH
A
L
was almost as strange as he was, Marshall had looked forward to rooming with him in a freshman dorm full of noise, conflict, water fights, and discussion. He hoped to make friends, to enter the mainstream, and (by ending his isolation) to have some years without a certain formless responsibility which he felt always weighing upon him. He would put up a Harvard flag in his room, join the canoe club, try to last through a dance, perhaps even buy a pewter mug with
Veritas
written on it. Marshall was happy that most of the freshmen on his floor had crewcuts like the brushes on waxing machines, and spoke with
as
so flat that they could slide them under the doors. He looked forward to constructive assimilation. However, though Al stayed in Weld Hall, Marshall ended up living alone in an organ loft.

After he had been at Harvard for two hours, his proctor sent him to a dean who sat behind a rosewood desk on an ancient oriental carpet of ruby red. The dean was Australian. He moved in slow motion as if he were thinking hard, and said to Marshall over the exquisite silence of the marbled room decorated with Sargents and battered Persian muskets inlaid with pearl, “There is a prince, you see, from a small country in the Himalayas. His father, the King, casts in the General Assembly of the United Nations a vote equal to that of the people of the United States, and he has sent the boy to us. We are glad to have him. He's smart, an Etonian. And (to be frank) chaps like this always donate a million-dollar chair for the study of some impossible little language. But he applied after the deadline, and we were crowded anyway. I'm afraid ... that ... we're going to have to give him your room.”

Marshall was displaced. He felt as if he were on a pastel road of royal palms, as if the room were full of halvah, marzipan, and jujubes, as if he were a slave who worked a fan and cracked nuts. “Why my room?” he asked.

“The Prince speaks Italian and wants practice. Your friend Alexander Pascaleo is perfect for that.”

“Where am I going to live? I thought you were all filled up.”

“That's just it, Marshall, there is no place for you ... except in the Phillips Brooks organ loft. It's not exactly a room, but you have our permission to fix it up any way you wish, and, should you so desire, you can remain there for four years.”

“Tell me something, sir.”

“Certainly.”

“When did the Prince apply to Harvard?”

“Yesterday.”

“Then why doesn't he stay in a hotel, or buy a house on Brattle Street?”

“He doesn't want to be alone.”

“Oh.”

It was reached by two flights of circular stairs around a pole. He had terrible trouble getting things up there and had to work for a week cleaning and restoring, during which time he fell behind in his reading by at least a thousand pages. It was worth it, just for the sloped ceiling, beamed and white, a dark wood floor, and an enormous circular window with a nice view. The room was about forty by fifteen and ten feet high at the peak of the roof. Opposite the window was an organ of light-colored wood. Marshall spotlighted it. He had an enormous butcher block desk and a straight Chiavari chair, beautiful lamps that he had shipped from Eagle Bay, and a used but still pretty Kazakh carpet. He had a brass bed, and after he had bought only a terms worth of books, they lined the wall like the start of a mosaic. On Sundays he had to let in the organist, a beautiful girl giant from Blessing, Texas, and he watched her from his desk as she played, her bracelets clicking against the old ivory keys and stops. The best thing, though, was the painting. A minister several stories below had felt sorry for Marshall, winding alone up the stairs after his morning lectures, and had lent him for as long as he wanted it an Eakins oil bequeathed a long time before to Harvard. It was entitled:
Prisoners at Bala Cynwyd Build a Bridge.
An early summers day on a glass-faced river held a score of men bent in consideration and service of the beamed bridge they were building. Though guards with shotguns in arms stood like windmills on the banks, the men working were no more prisoners than the painter himself. They were ecstatic over their bridge; they did not even notice the water lilies and the thick green banks. Once, Marshall, and Wendy from Texas, watched the painting for an hour after she was finished with her music and shaking from the beauty of it, and the rain came down and pattered on the gray slate roof above them.

His isolation complete except for Al, and Wendy the organist, Marshall developed a taxing routine—two books a day, furiously worked papers, and lectures from (among others) Professor Berry of Oxford.

He was tall and handsome. He was so clean that dust flew to him as if it abhorred a vacuum, and it was rumored that he changed his shirt three times a day, shaved twice, and brushed his chalk-white teeth as the clock tolled each hour. When he entered a room the air began to glow and it smelled like an herb meadow or a pine forest. A shiny and bejeweled gold watch that was hypnosis itself dangled from a spangling chain. Because its face was so clean and clear, even from across the cavernous hall, nearsighted students could see time twirling on its chain.

Professor Berry taught exploration, but spent most of the time in digressions informally delivered in response to casual questions. Marshall awaited him in the midst of several hundred cynical students reading newspapers and eating anise cookies cut into the shape of trees. After he entered, he limped up to the pulpit and banged his leg against it for silence. He unfolded a small scrap of paper upon which were inscribed the notes for that year's lectures, and said, “Well!” as he slapped his hands together. He knew that his students—mainly athletes with cataracts of the intellect—made it impossible to proceed as planned, by deliberately asking tangential questions (they called his course “Boats” and they boasted of having “thrown the commodore off the track”), but he took up their challenge, since his lectures were about taking up challenges diverse and tremendous—none too small, none too large, as he might say.

He began that morning with great enthusiasm, hoping to teach them about Pizarro and the Incas. Chuck Wazeel, a shotputter, spoke. “Professah Berry?”

“Yes?”

“I don't mean to lack a propos, but yesterday you grated me into action with your mention of one Cosmas Indicopleustes. I harrowed the library, and of references to the aforementioned individual I found none. Were you in fact creating a Potemkin Village in your mention of this quaint individual, or has history obliviated each of his memorials? I would appreciate an answer to rectify the vistula in my yesterdays transcrible. And could you also tell us about rattlesnakes?”

“Well, Chuck,” answered Berry very crisply, abandoning the podium to pace to and fro on stage, “I'm glad you asked that. I'm afraid, though, that I don't know anything about rattlesnakes.” He spoke clearly, since most of his students had difficulty understanding British English. “Cosmas Indicopleustes, or the ‘Indian Traveler,' was the author, in 550
A.D.,
of a geographical treatise entitled
Christian Topography,
which, according to Gibbon”—he looked skyward past the busts—“was ‘to confute the impious heresy of those who maintain that the earth is a globe and not a flat oblong table.'” Wazeel laughed like a monster, for he had fathomed Gibbon's joke, even if he did think that Gibbon was a Civil War photographer.

“Although Cosmas had visited Abyssinia, Socotra, and the Persian Gulf (he never did reach India), he envisioned the universe as an arched rectangular box under a vault of crystal. On the floor rested Asia, Africa, and Europe, with Mount Ararat rising from Asia. Circling Ararat were the sun, moon, and stars—a sweet picture though not accurate. If only the world were such a simple glassed-over box. Cosmas rebelled against nonbiblical geographical hypotheses, saying: ‘Of what use is this or that knowledge of this earth, if by it our Faith is not enhanced?'

“He was particularly adamant about the flat-earth theory. When a child, I had to memorize his works. About the roundness of the earth he said in derision: ‘For if men, on opposite sides, placed the soles of their feet each against each, whether they chose to stand on earth or water, or air or any kind of body, how could both be found standing upright? The one would assuredly be found in the natural upright position and the other, contrary to nature, head downwards. Such notions are opposed to reason and alien to our nature and condition.'

“You see, Chuck, Cosmas was right. Newton was more than a thousand years in the future, the theory of gravitation and mass completely unknown.
Logically,
Cosmas was entirely correct. Rain does not fall upward. Nor do trees grow on the ceiling.” He paused; the room was hushed. “That is why logic and science are not the final arbiters of
any
question. And that is why you must not bend like a flight of starlings when your leaders, antileaders, or abstainers call for you to do so. The self-righteous as often as not go the path of Cosmas Indicopleustes, encased in the suffocating box of logic, not knowing the airy wonder of future discovery.”

Another athlete spoke up. “Uh, Professah Berry?”

“Yes, Fletcher.”

“My remembrance of things past deposes the incunabula of a certain personage mentioned in the last lecture, a personage by the name of Atawalpa. After breathtaking scans of the library, I could not unveal mention of this personage. Could you be so kind as to further exchequer along the lines of his existitude?”

“I'm glad you asked that question, Fletcher,” said Berry, and so it went until they all exited into chilled puddingesque streets of wet snow—visions of globes and maps, ships and apples, ancient geographers and sugar cookies dancing in their heads like basketballs.

Marshall returned to his loft and hung from a beam by a Whillans harness, slowly swaying back and forth. He imagined a school called “The Cosmas Indicopleustes School & Academy of Opposites” in which pupils were taught from babyhood that up was down, stop was go, red was blue, and so on. Though most would wilt from the agony of opposition and some would be struck down in simple accidents at traffic lights and stop signs, perhaps a few would survive, and throw some light onto modern conundrums descended from the flat-earth theory and other such things.

Wendy came up the rounding stairs, her hair shining, and Marshall reddened with floods of affection. He was not tall enough for Wendy, and he knew that she loved Al. If only he had been a foot higher, or she a foot lower. Hanging from the beam, red as a plum, he returned to dreams of geographers and blue seas on which to sail, although when her bracelets clicked, he felt hopelessly in love.

H
E ROSE
one perfect day in May to run fifteen miles. In white shorts and shirt, his keys hidden under a painting of Teddy Roosevelt, he set out in the strong sun. After a little distance, he decided to get a drink of water in Memorial Hall. It was dark inside but for the sunlight through stained glass which struck wood walls and pale marble. By the time he was halfway across the darkness, alone on a day when not a soul wanted cathedrals or silent halls, he was taken by the light and he lost his balance, falling to one knee. He fell to the side, but put his hand out and pushed up. He thought that he had been a fool to walk amid those sparkling lights, and he was angry, as well as fearful that someone would discover him. At Harvard he had been all right. The dull boxy diet, compulsory exercise, and steady hard work had always kept him from falling. He reached out in emptiness to find balance; his face was bent in pain. It came upon him in waves, a massacre by the allpowerful panes. The blue of a woman's robe, and the red light in a crown, the white from an emperor's name, the gold edging of a cloak, and even the muted coat of a hart—cut him down as if there had been firing squads in the galleries. He felt himself hurtling through the ray-pierced black until he came down hard and unfeeling on smooth stone.

Then the characters and colors seemed to come alive, running and flowing throughout their lighted circles. The entrapped dead women, having held still for so long, began to move their limbs, and they smiled, and they rose and floated to the center of the room busying themselves naively in ancient movements and courtesies. There was no way to stand the light coursing through them in their glowing. It was so strong that they were silver at the edges. And then their movements took shape in the vastness of the hall. The decorative equations of suspended angels appeared above, magnetic and enveloping. Christianity, or its symbol (but it was one), swayed him to the West—a gleaming crown of white, crystals shining, a blinding aura and fast blue rivers, fire and ice and shocking energy. If by its art it were to appeal it would certainly enliven. It appeared to his left a round, white, silver, and blue halo suspended on a plane in space, circulating and flashing gently. He loved it longingly, as in a dream of opening waters and the freedom of the sea.

But then in a graceful movement both a smile and a sway, the suspended angels turned his eyes, and on his right the space was filled by a red and green attraction of soft colors like the view into an Easter egg. This was the Jewish East, a loyalty and love which had reached into him like a strong hand and pulled at his heart. It was the softness and memory of a windy palmed coast, the enveloping heat of history. The images—and he regretted that he had been schooled profoundly in images and light—glowed on either side to the obliteration of all other sight. He was rent by the power of their pulling, and afraid that the two would come together. The chiefest woman among them smiled a third time with charity, and the images did begin to move together. Marshall was shaking in terror, but she looked gently at him from above, and the lights met in front of her. When they did, their power was a great spark, a void of white, and every part and piece was saturated with rich red fire. He awakened into a quiet smooth-running world, exhausted but full of quivering energy as if he had just lasted a mortal combat, as if he had just been beaten, and just been born.