The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride (22 page)

“Why do you suppose I ever suggested that trip?” the mate asked, long after it was over.

“For old time memory’s sake,” Jim replied.

By that time, like most people, they were pretty good at memory, and each was able to swallow Jim’s He—for what they had gone for was to help shake from them the real death of youth, of the mate’s son—not to remember their own. And from that trip Jim did bring back a huge terrestrial globe, lighted from within and girdled with half-life size figures clasping it, the gods of antiquity, holding it up with their spread arms and thighs. He found it in a stationer’s in the Strand and had it sent home in sections for his collection: sometime back, he had gone on from his towns, and from America too, to globes. But when brought home, though it glowed as magnificently in the home as in the shop, instead of adding to his collection it ended it, for here the thing was, great with history and glass jewels too—did I say it was sixteenth-century and Venetian?—and even in Sand Spring it was only a globe. That ended all his collections except—as he said to the mate, spinning the globe for him, interpreting its yellowed mapskin by its own inner light, at dusk of a cold Sunday—except for one. From now on, he said, he would collect only the intangible, where a man had more chance.

“Will you look at that expression of his!” said Emily, watching him. “Worse than the children!” How she always watched, and the mate too—and how they knew him! For himself, he could decide best who and what he was, he always said, in the way
she
spoke to him. For, though often she said to him exactly what she had said to the mate and the mate’s baby, on the day when they all had first to face up to things—over the years she had reversed these in tone. When she said, “Don’t fret, don’t fret now,” it was as if to a wise child who knows that beforehand, but when she said, “It can’t be helped, can it,” she spoke as if to a strong man who bore with the world. As for the children, Jim always said they loved him too much, that likely if he had done more in the world, they wouldn’t have. He often said it. So here, maybe if only to help complete the circle within which a family is always judging itself, he was for once heard to participate in his own measurement.

And here we all are now: the four of us—two old men accountably present, and two women accountably absent—plus a listener or two now dogging their footsteps, from the crowd of them once upon a time at their knees. Between a last ride and a first memorial, the distance never changes, though opinions vary on the length of it, some memories going by wheel, others by wing. But all of us are here now, and ready to go back.

T
HE DAY THE TWO
old men went back was a day un-colored by water or breeze, tempered only with its meaning to them. As one gets older, this happens to days generally, but on that particular one the friends were driving back upstate from the glassmakers’ studio in New Jersey, where they had gone for that private viewing, and now, no matter the weather they passed, the window’s high, fragile rainbow overhung the highway in front of them. There is one stretch of the New York State Thruway that nine times out of ten is leaden with Catskill storm-weather, and this they did finally comment on—that neither had ever seen it in sunshine. Then the miles and the signposts took over again, and the silence—and always up ahead of them over the car’s hood, above the spot where small figureheads were once attached at the radiator caps, that high transparency at the prow.

“Glass,” said Jim. “I’ll never understand how it’s made. From
sand.
”

The mate didn’t answer at once. He was driving the Cadillac, in which he always kept the air-conditioner going, and the air they breathed was as pure and excellent as an engine accessory could make it, but voices were hollow. On Jim’s side, a sign said
NEXT EXIT
and gave the number of miles.

“Want to stop?” asked the mate. They had been driving for some time.

“No, not unless you do,” Jim answered, and the mate nodded. One of the latter-day satisfactions of their friendship, and no longer the lightest, was that physically they had kept pace with each other, neither’s digestion or bladder being weaker than the other’s.

“This exit we’re coming to,” said the mate. “We go off it, we could go on over to Skaneateles, have one of those big dinners at Krebs, and still get home.”

“Krebs,” said Jim. “Haven’t heard that name in maybe—must be twenty-five years.”

“Neither have I, come to think of it; maybe it isn’t there.” They drove on, and in a short time, too short if they met a cop, went by that exit.

“On the other hand,” said the mate. “On the other hand, I’ve had to do a lot of driving around in our part of the state recently. Looking for a factory site. Cheap unoccupied land is getting harder and harder to find.” He laughed. “I told the company directors—‘I got a couple of farms you can have, at a price. I’ll never live on ’em.’” By now the corporation drawl he adopted for business had become almost natural to him, and he could say a thing like that about farms without blinking. But he could surprise himself still, and Jim too. “Anyway, struck something when I was going around—came upon something I want to show you. You game?”

“Sure, why not. Just say how far, if I should phone. That housekeeper will wait dinner otherwise.”

The mate moved his head to look at him, turning on him the bachelor stare of a man who ate in restaurants, and had argued housekeepers and other points too, with Jim.

“Guy behind you wants to pass,” said Jim, but it wasn’t the mate’s driving that bothered him; the mate always had one eye on the road.

“Let her cook it,” said the mate, “we’ll get there. Though how you can want to tie yourself down like that—” He increased the speed which momentarily he had let slacken. “No, it’s not far. Given a decent road—” He gave a short laugh. “Well, if it had one, I wouldn’t have gone there and found it. Even so, in this thing, can’t be more than an hour from home. Just that you have to go round it.”

Where, to two natives of the district, could anything unknown to them be so close? But Jim didn’t ask it, as the signposts traveled by. The mate drove on silently, until the definitive one, where they left the highway. Then he spoke, when it was no longer needed.

“It’s on the way to Batavia,” he said.

When they got there, they sat in the still car for a moment, then with one accord each opened the door on his side, stepped out, and turning on his heel, regarded it—sky, tumbled-in roofs, mossy underbrush to treetop glory—all. The windshield of the Cadillac was extra-wide, but there was too much ruin and growth here ever to be encompassed by it. Was cheap land for progress always so beautiful? They numbered it with their eyes—here outbuildings whose flat tops had melted into moss, there a great curved hangar of swallows’ nests, on whose leaning timbers only fantasy tipped a weathercock, pointing not crazily, into the wood. All the facilities were here. And here was the hill, all the inhabitants of that village-for-a-day—except these two—long since piped back into it. It stood there like the massive bulk of their lives. Only those others were gone—and the steel rails.

The Little Otselica was running. One of the men—it didn’t matter which—leaned down to it as if to stroke it for choosing to, then when his knee cracked, stood up shamefaced.

“Must have had a wetter season than we thought,” said the other, but it didn’t matter who, or if both saw the impress of a bather, her piled hair floating the water. The time had now come for memory to be the same.

Each of them found a stony stump to sit on, or a porous stone.

“Going to put your factory here?” said the one.

The other shook his head. With a wrist flick he waved aside the hill, annihilated it. “No problem there. But still the same trouble. Place still doesn’t go anywhere.”

But this was only the preamble. In the uneasy stillness, the nose of the Cadillac, parked in grasses, reared alert. And after a while, one of the men began at the beginning.

“‘Rushing the growler,’” he said. “Know what a ‘growler’ was? Came across it only the other day.”

“No. Never even heard the word, except from you.

“Must have used them when they wanted to get there in a hurry. Eighteen-sixty-five, the dictionary said. Funny how it leaped right out at me. It’s a horse-drawn cab.”

The other tinkled his car keys against the stone. “It’s all transport,” he said, and drew a flask of brandy out of a hip pocket.

They had a tipple.

“Applejack weather,” said the one holding the flask, staring behind the trees, where should be a sunset. Though there wasn’t, the other nodded agreement; he too could smell the air of youth here, that pure autumn alcohol.

They had another.

The one got up from his seat, rubbed his backside and took off his coat to spread it on the ground.

“Damp,” said his companion.

“Got me a sweater on.” This was plain enough, but he looked at the Coat on the ground a long while, before he finally sat on it, hugging his knees. “Tell me something,” he said then. “Surely now it’s all right for me to ask—and you to tell it.” He looked down at ground between his legs. “It was her, wasn’t it, you really wanted, Emily.” He looked up at the other, asking it maybe only for her memorial.

But the other couldn’t give it. “No,” he said. Whether this was true or not, nobody would ever get anything else out of him. “I knew from the first … that it—” He finished the swallow left in the flask, and tossed it on the ground. “But it was Lottie I heard.”

Then he shifted on his stone and looked down at his companion. “Anyway, I always thought—You and she. When you went off into the woods like that.”

The other glanced up at his friend, then away. Did his friend really want to listen, to what he almost yearned to tell him? “I don’t mind telling you it,” he said at last, scoring the grass at the coat’s edge with a forefinger. “Don’t we almost have to tell it, now?”

He told it, putting in as well all he could of what had passed through his mind then, or had been huddled over through the years later—all he wanted to understand and had waited for. Was this its moment?

When he had finished, the other wasn’t staring at the trees any more, but at him. “‘
I
can wait,’ you said,” he said. “I always wondered why you said it. When you already had it.”

And maybe that was part of her memorial. But the man on the ground, on the coat, sat wondering how friendship, even with the help of wars and time and family, could ever have knitted him to this other so different one.

And the man on the stone swung the car-keys in the arc of a surveyor’s instrument, thinking the same.

“And the time
she
came,” the one on the coat finally said. “To our door. We always wondered, of course. What really happened between you.” He paused. “You don’t have to tell it. Not even now.”

The man on the stone got up then and walked away, stretching his arms, presenting his back. “No, I want to. Somebody should know. And maybe, even if I got marked early by it—maybe that was something.”

“Sure is,” said the man on the ground, staring at his own greed to know, to be marked out—against which even happiness, or even its memorial, were not quite enough.

The other came back to his stone and sat on it again. He leaned forward confidentially, as over a business deal, but it was a time before he spoke. “It wasn’t so much that she wouldn’t do it. Couldn’t. For love—or for sex either. Though I made her. Or even that she had to … to eat … even
during.
I caught her with a candy in her mouth—the first time.” He paused, easing his collar, “I think I even knew how it would be, before I ever touched her. The night before the wedding, I knew. Even though, up to the wedding, I’d never done any more than put my tongue in her mouth. She liked that. But there was never any—we always went to restaurants. But I knew, that night. The minute you touch another woman, you know. But the night before—what can you do?” He fell silent.

The other nodded quietly, until something else occurred to him. “But—it
wasn’t
that?”

His friend leaned his white forelock on his hand. “It can make you want it that way, that kind of—a man can form a taste for it. Or some could say he had it all along. A man doesn’t always know his own tastes in that direction. Though I thought I did.” He rubbed his face between his palms, and thus cleansed, clasped them again. “It was because I found out—how she
would
do it.” He cleared his throat. “For a treat,” he said. “For food.”

The words echoed, though there were other sounds all around and over them, the soft, meaningful sounds of man-deserted country, that cracking of twigs with which the woods take over, the callings of birds.

“That day she came to you,” he continued. “That day, I’d locked her in. Starved her. She could afford to. At nighttime, I unlocked her. And that—was that.”

“She told us that she started to walk over by herself,” said the other, “and that after a while she heard a car behind her, and it was you. Never another word why. That’s all she said, ever.”

The other man stood up again, hands gripped in his pockets. His rich voice, a singer’s voice, was small. “I unlocked her. And she
came
to me. She offered it.” A red went up his throat, to his cheeks, to the blue dent at his temple line. “I threw her out,” he said in his natural voice. “I couldn’t stand it. It was like training up a dog. That was it. It was like training up a dog.”

Up the hill, on the crest of it, the very tips of the trees were barely but persistently moving, exchanging the continuous secret of green. He gave it a look, then walked over to his friend sitting on the ground there, and put the old hand on the shoulder, as always, as if the figure on the ground was the one to be consoled. He always had to do it that way, always. “There was nothing else to her … except what one could see,” he said, as he sat down on his stone again. “Nor maybe, I sometimes think it … to me.”

“All of us,” said his friend, getting up from the ground. “Nor to all of us.” He picked up his coat, stiffly put it on, and sat down on his own stone. He was silent on his own part for a while.