It was in this week that Pierce began noticing distinctly the two special symptoms of his condition (he wouldn’t have named them thus then, but that’s what they were). One was the tap tap tapping of his invaded or infected heart, a tachycardia without any physical or physiological cause (he would eventually take himself to a physician, found in the phone book, who dismissed his fears). And the other was this image, or sensation, an inescapable feeling amounting almost to an assumption, that the world had become terribly small, that just above his head, not much higher than the tops of the Faraway Hills, a field of black clouds continually roiled and seethed, oppressing the land; and that just above them, pillowed on them, was the awful God of her socalled religion, the Lord God Jehovah and his interfering hosts. He actually caught himself looking up, not infrequently either, at the empty sky. It was not that he thought they were there; he just could not help but now and then look up. In the fat New York Sunday paper which he went to the Jambs every week to get, holdover from his city days, he read a schizophrenic’s memoirs: how for years, though she was well aware that she lived in a city apartment and then in a clinic, though she knew that she walked its streets and climbed its stairs, at the same time she had also known—had known—that she was crossing the Arctic on an endless voyage: because the world was that cold, that empty, the wind that incessant, the struggle that hard.
And O my God look at this.
In the local New York news a small story about the city college Pierce had formerly taught at, back in what today seemed to him a long-out-of-print volume of his life. The place had been taken over by an evangelical group, and from now on it would be offering courses in Bible Languages, Ethics and Morals for Today, Archæology (!) and Earth Science (!!), “in addition,” the article said, “to a full complement of college-level course work,” including a new pre-dental course.
Pierce rose out of his chair, the masses of the Business and Sports sections slipping from his lap to the floor.
Barnabas College. It had been a hardworking little place whose entrance requirements were low and study load high when Pierce first came to teach there, then became a rainbow-hued caravanserai at which the wandering young paused, to study astrology, new journalism, Eastern religious traditions, and ecology (Earth Science), and to get credit for courses of their own devising. It had then turned again, this time into a back-to-basics outfit, repainted in putty and white, about the time Pierce jumped ship, or was pitched overboard. Now look. The new Christian management declared that as soon as they took possession there would be a rededication of the school, staff and students to Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ. Secular Humanism could be studied in plenty of places, but here it would be de-emphasized. There was to be a dress code, said Dean of Students Earl Sacrobosco—a recent convert to the gospel group—and loving but watchful supervision of the students. “It’s a new age,” he was quoted as declaring. “All that stuff is coming back.”
Earl. If Earl Sacrobosco had gone over to them it was evident that they had, for the moment anyway and maybe for the indefinite future, the whip hand. Pierce could divine clearly the Barnabas gym, an evil-smelling place he had always avoided, now full of students in skirts and ties, a new cross over the stage. There was nowhere to run that way.
The one thing he could not have conceived, would not have believed if he had heard it predicted: that bigoted religion and willed ignorance would return in strength, and not even in new and outlandishly intriguing forms, just the same old wine, the same old bottles, people believing impossible things in the manner of athletes inuring themselves to pain or soldiers to bloodshed. And for what gain, what power or delight.
War in Heaven. A war of all against all; if you are not of one party they will make you of another.
No. No.
He sat again. He dropped the paper, unable to turn further pages. He laid his hands along the rough warm arms of his chair, the same napless wine-colored velveteen armchair that years before he had rescued from a New York street and repaired, the same in which he had sailed away to surprising climes once upon a time, his oldest friend now, its motherly clasp unchanged at least. The light in his house moved steadily from east to west; the rhomboids of sun that fell on and were broken by the furniture on one side were steadily withdrawn, after a time reappearing, to creep similarly over the stuff on the other side as Pierce watched unseeing.
11
Thick clouds moved low over the river and the hill, a clammy still day, and Pierce approaching his house across the stirred leaf-littered field noticed that his front door was standing slightly ajar. A weird dread passed through him at this, though he knew well enough that this door often refused to shut firmly behind him when he left the house, another small flaw in his rental. He stepped up the single step and with his fingertips pushed open the door fully.
What the hell. He had been intruded on. Four no five guys sat around his dining table, calmly expectant, having taken seats there obviously to await him. Pierce, intimating that something large and perhaps dangerous was afoot, didn’t demand an explanation or order them out in a dudgeon. He greeted them, cautiously. “And you are?”
But he had already begun to guess. Rose.
Yes, they said. Rose Ryder. She had been quite upset by Pierce’s words and his letter, one of his guests declared, placing a hand slowly on Pierce’s table as though there were a weapon in it, though there wasn’t. She had been hurt, hurt and weeping even. And he raised his eyebrows at Pierce.
They were actually an unprepossessing, even somewhat scruffy bunch. Not the pink-cheeked Bible robots that Rosie Rasmussen described but more deeply anonymous than that, he would not remember later the color of a single piece of clothing any of them wore or any other mark of distinction, except a pair of rimless glasses and hair unexpectedly shoulder-length on one. Pierce assumed they would beat him or worse. One began talking in a prefatory sort of way about how little, how little Pierce knew, who thought he knew everything; and Pierce was thinking how to reply (it wasn’t he who knew everything, he was quite sure he did not; knowing everything was not his claim) when the door between the dining room and the kitchen, which stood open, whipped shut untouched with a startling bang.
Bang.
They continued to stare at him, not triumphant or satisfied but clearly done with their lesson: and Pierce felt a cold terror.
Good Lord they can do what they say. What Rose implied they could. They all together had moved his thick real wooden door by mental or some other force and slammed it shut. He hoped for an instant it might be some dumb trick but knew absolutely that it was not, they had done it. They had done it to show Pierce that they could do it, and that they could do much more and worse too. Did he see?
Pierce opened his mouth but he could not say what he saw. Even as he pondered some hopeless evasion or apology that could save him from them, he understood that they could exercise this power because they had given up everything else to have it, and if he joined them and subjected himself to them he could have it too: what he would have to do was to merge his soul or mind with theirs (he felt a piercing loathing) just as she was doing or had already done (an even sharper loathing). And if he wouldn’t share in that power, the only power, he would have none and it would be used against him, defeat upon defeat, until his pride was erased entirely and his selfhood scrubbed away, which is what they wanted if they wanted anything at all from him.
That’s what he saw: that was the lesson they had come to teach, and had taught in the instant of his dining room door’s slamming shut. He would not escape, for there was nowhere to escape to.
But he was sure as hell going to get as far from them as he could. He turned and walked away (this part was hard to remember later) walked away fast across his lawn knowing they would not pursue, that they felt no need to pursue, were ultimately unconcerned with him and his like; he glanced back to see them now at play in his landlord’s fields, tossing from one to another a slab of shaped and lettered stone, as lightly as though it
were a length of board, and the dumb obvious symbolism struck him. O Grave, where is thy victory. Just then he came out to the boulevard that would, he knew, lead him back to the city, whose dim towers could be made out rising over the trees far off; he immediately saw, and hailed, a big yellow taxi with a stripe of black-and-white checks along its flank. He climbed into the leather-odorous darkness, he pulled shut the door; he called out Manhattan, and woke.
Night and silence. He was alone. They were not here, he wasn’t there. The dream-film unrolled into his consciousness backwards, from the taxi to the beginning, which was only the end of something earlier, unremembered.
He thought: I don’t even have a dining table. The big room and big door of his dream were an archway and a small room, where there was only a desk and bookcases, where his papers and Kraft’s novel were piled. He could see into that room dimly when, just to be sure, he raised his head.
From in there as he lay came a sudden summons, the phone ringing harshly. Pierce could not imagine who and wasn’t sure he wanted to respond.
“Hello.”
“Oh Pierce, thank God.”
“Hello, Axel.” Only his father. Pierce sat, and breathed again. Axel Moffett at least was changeless: in trouble as usual, it sounded like; at sixes and sevens; buffeted by life, and at sea. As usual. As usual he seemed to be calling from a bar. It was past midnight.
“Pierce, Gravely is dead.”
“Oh Axel. Oh I’m so sorry.”
“He died in my arms.”
There was a long wet silence filled with the far-off sounds of talk and laughter. Gravely was the super of the building in Brooklyn which Axel owned and lived in; though it always took him a long time, there was nothing Gravely could not fix, or fix up. He was far older than Axel, and Pierce knew that Axel had nursed him through some bad stretches lately, illnesses he gave names like grippe and bad blood to; and that while he languished the building had declined.
“I went to his funeral,” Axel said when he recovered. “Today. Oh it was so touching. Pierce mine was the only white face in a sea of black. Very, very simple people, Pierce, most of them quite elderly, a kind of Negro I remember in New York long ago. So different from these, these hunted animals you see now.”
“I think I know.”
“Well they were very kind to me. A stranger among them.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He had no family, you see—none but this huge congregation. They sang. It was impossible not to weep; you expected any moment a band of woolly-headed angels would descend to carry him home to hebbin.” He was laughing, a liquid snuffle. “Oh I sobbed.”
“Huh.”
“I thought of Blake,” Axel said. “‘For I am black, but Oh my soul is white.’”
“Oh for heaven’s sake, Axel. Really.” He found he was leaning on Kraft’s manuscript, his palm pressing down on the first page. He stared at it, yellow paper friable and edge-darkening already. He had the momentary impulse to start a fire with it, burn it like infected bedclothes, it seemed to him the source of his troubles somehow, whatever precisely his troubles were.
“Well faith like that,” Axel said, “is a wonderful thing. Isn’t it.”
“Is it?”
“We can’t live in doubts continuously,” Axel said. “Even Einstein.”
“You still going to Mass?” Pierce asked.
“Not every week. Of course not.” Axel sipped from his funeral libation and swallowed gratefully. “Do you know the story of the Methodist minister and James Joyce?”
“Axel, listen. I’m standing here stark naked. The stove’s gone out and it’s cold as hell.”
“Naked?”
“I was asleep. I’ve really got to go.”
“Naked! Naked came I, and naked will I go hither. Naked. Oh dear.” His voice had grown wet again. “Naked came I from my mother’s womb. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Oh Lord Pierce what will I do.”
It was a while before Axel could relinquish the connection; Pierce listened to the far-off city where once he too had lived and walked with his father, his mad father. Though he could still hear both clearly enough, and said Huh and Really now and then, he felt them move away from him, too far away already to help him, or to hide him.
“Love and death,” said Val to Rosie Rasmussen. “That’s how I always think of it.”
Rosie and Val sat together in the big central courtyard of Butterman’s. They were both wrapped up against the raw cold, and Rosie had a thermos of tea. Val had Rosie’s natal chart in her hands, the chart she herself had drawn and explicated for Rosie. Sun in Pisces, a sign nobody particularly wanted, it seemed: a bigotry that Val noticed was widespread, and that she sort of shared even as she tried to combat it. Love and Death was how she named the impulse which it gave to the soul, even though she knew well enough it entailed more than that, far more actually than a commonsensical Virgo like herself could see into. The ends of things, that contained their beginnings. The dark waters.
“Love and death,” said Rosie. “That’s a little heavy.”
“Well it’s just the way I characterize it. I mean Judas is supposed to be a Pisces. Chopin was a Pisces. You know?”
“Ha,” said Rosie. “Judas!”
“But Love,” Val said. “It’s a big word. And Death too. They can mean lots of things. Sometimes Death isn’t death.”
“Sometimes,” Rosie said, “love isn’t Love. So tell me more.”
Rosie’s ball had been announced, and her court case scheduled, and so she had consulted Val. Val was also buying the liquor for her party, cases of bottles with names Rosie’d never heard of but that Val said were perfectly all right. Around them, young people whom the caterer had hired (the same kids, Rosie thought, who had come to Arcady in July, to set up and serve Boney’s funeral reception) carried tables and set up lights, laughing and teasing. Sam ran among them, studying them and in them her own future. Rosie had wanted flags to fly from the towers, but they couldn’t be seen at night, and so she had at last rented a generator, being set up now out in a shed on the island’s back side by the same old river rat who had first ferried them over here; and as long as there was light there might as well be heat, and the marina’s pleasure-boat had brought over some fridge-sized blowers, and altogether her do was becoming less the spooky nocturne she had at first imagined and more like a Hollywood movie. On her invitations (which she had pondered long) she had added a line at the bottom: Come as you aren’t.
“Well. I don’t like this month,” Val said.
“It’s so cold and dreary,” Rosie said. “Death for sure.”
“I meant for you. I don’t like the sky for you this coming month.” “Great,” said Rosie.
“It just means you should be careful,” Val said. “That’s why I’m telling you.”
“So why don’t you like this month for me?”
“Well. Mars is going to be in Taurus,” Val said. “For one thing. That’s Mike’s sign.”
“Is that bad?”
“Not for him.” She uncapped the thermos.
“Well if you just say I’m supposed to be careful,” Rosie said. “I mean I always wonder what people think they communicate by saying that. Be careful.”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“Of Mike?”
“Of all of them.”
“No.” Sam had come back to where they sat, and took the thermos from Val to inhale the hot fumes, closing her eyes in pleasure. “No I am not afraid. I have to do this and I will do it.”
“I’d be sick. Just sick.”
“Allan said the original agreement was a good one and there were no valid arguments he could see for changing it. Unless there was something he didn’t know.” She thought of Spofford. You were supposed to be chaste as a single mom, or at least very discreet. She’s a whore, your honor, and unfit to be a mother. More than once, Sam had slept in the bed with her and Spofford; once while Sam slept he and she had even, oh well oh well.
“You t
alked to Allan?”
Rosie nodded. She had called him, and after a cool question or two had begun to panic, and though she wouldn’t retract her decision to do this all by herself she asked him to explain some things, and he answered unwillingly—he told her that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, did she know that one? Did she know what they say, that a person who acts as their own lawyer has a fool for a client?
Send me a bill, Allan, she said, and hung up.
“He said they might have a lot of money. He said he couldn’t really predict what they might do.”
“That group?” Val said.
“The Powerhouse. Mike’s new thing.”
“God they’re everywhere.” Val raised her eyes to the towers and battlements of Butterman’s that rose around them. “How can you think of giving this up? It is so. I don’t know what. Amazing.”
“Yeah? You should see the taxes.”
“Well if this place were mine,” Val said fervently, “I’d never give it up. I couldn’t. I’d come here and live.”
Rosie said nothing in reply. For there was a sense in which it was Val’s, at least as much as it was Rosie’s, if what Val believed was true: that she was Boney Rasmussen’s bastard daughter, conceived when Mama had been not only Boney’s lover but the madam of a part-time semipro whorehouse centered on Mama’s Faraway Lodge.
Her father. So unlikely had the story seemed to Rosie, and yet so circumstantial was it, lying alongside Rosie’s former and familiar world and the familiar persons she had known, that it required a choice, this world or that one. And now she was unsure what her obligations were to Val, or if she even had any, her sort-of cousin or aunt. Impossible to know Boney’s intentions because he’d left no will. Val believed that was because of her, Val’s, unadmitted existence; Rosie thought it wasn’t Val but death itself that could not be admitted or named. The Curse of the Rasmussens.
Val glanced at Rosie sidelong. “You know,” she said. “You’re really pretty tough.”