Down a secondary blacktop route I drive through a series of small towns—Mosby, Richmond, Hardin, Norborne—until I find a deadend dirt road leading through puddles to the swamps and woods along the north side of the Missouri River. The track ends in two miles at the ruin of a vine-covered swaybacked barn. Nobody here. Not even a KEEP OUT THIS MEANS YOU sign. Looks like Lightcap territory. I steer the truck under an unpruned apple tree and shut off the works.
We sit there in the dark for a while, me and Solstice, hearing the toads chanting in the trees, the bullfrogs grunting in the bog, a whippoorwill singing deep in the woods, one lone screech owl muttering in the haunted barn. Our kind of place. Everything’s here but the fireflies—too early in spring for them. A couple of bluish security lights glare through the mist but they are a good half-mile away. I hear a dog yapping at the drift of our scent but his alarm sounds tentative, detached, and within minutes dies off altogether.
I get out and open the back of the truck. No need for a fire. The night is warm and I can see well enough by the stars to fill Sollie’s bowl with chow and open a can of beans for myself. The dog munches at her supper and goes nosing off in the dark to see what’s doing in this neighborhood. I light the Primus, warm the beans and eat if you call that eating. Not much appetite on my part anyhow. The gnawing bite in my guts seems worse this evening. I take a pill—old friend Dilaudid. I open my bedroll on the bed of the truck and lie down, my head out on the back where I can keep an eye on the stars. Drove most of the way across Kansas today and another sixty miles into Missouri. I am tired. I am more than forty-nine and a half years old. I am mortal as sin.
Claire!
20
1971-77:
Henry in Love—an Interlude
I
I am a scoundrel, he reflected, dialing the sacred number. This girl’s young enough to be my daughter. So what? Let’s make the most of it.
“Yes?” inquired a gentle voice on the other end of the line. She sounded sweet enough to eat with a spoon.
“Claire? This is Henry.” He felt the first drops of sweat begin to trickle from his armpits, the first involuntary twitching in his groin.
“Henry? Henry who?”
He hesitated. “Is this Claire? Claire Mellon?”
“No, this is Grace Mellon. Just a moment, please.”
Long pause. Must be her sister. Henry waited, gripped in terror. How to begin? Would she even remember? She must have got his letters. Letters she never answered. Must have read them. But then what? What then?
A second voice vibrated in his ear, a voice sweeter, younger, even more delicious than the first. “Hello, Henry.”
“Claire. It’s me.”
“Yes, Henry, it’s you.”
“Henry the Ranger. Remember?”
“Henry the Ranger. Yes, I remember.”
“I’m in Denver, Claire. Only ten blocks away. I want to see you.”
“That’s sweet of you, Henry. But we’re going to a concert. We have to leave in a few minutes.”
“Oh.” He stopped. Now what? “Well—I’ll go with you. I’ll buy the tickets.”
She laughed. An angel’s laugh, it seemed to him. “But Henry, I’m in the orchestra.”
“In the orchestra?”
“String section. Second violin.”
“Oh.” What now. “Well—I’ll come and watch.”
“You’re not supposed to watch, Henry, you’re supposed to listen. Both, rather. But yes, do come. Meet me at the reception afterward.”
His heart swelled with relief. She does remember me. Joyously he said, “I’ll bring my harmonica. And my Jew’s harp. And my Paiute foreskin fertility dance drum.”
“What?”
“Dogskin.” Giddy with sudden happiness, he barely heard her instructions. But he found the place, the concert hall—after a quick stop at a gas station to bathe, change shirt, whip on necktie and jacket—and bought a cheap seat high in the peanut gallery, among the music students. He noticed a few of them adjusting opera glasses. The orchestra had not yet come onstage. Henry hurried out to his truck and returned with his 7 × 50 U.S. government official forest ranger binoculars. The tympani leaped to his eyes. The harp stood five feet before him. He could read the lettering of the open score on the conductor’s podium: Leonore Overture no. 2. Henry was so excited he could barely restrain himself from turning to the young people around him and announcing in bold frank supercharged tones that he, Henry Holyoak Lightcap, was boldly frankly candidly in love with a girl, with a violinist, with the whole string section, with the entire Denver Fucking Symphony Orchestra, with Leonore too and Ludwig Whatshisname….
He waited, waited.
The members of the orchestra began to file in—first the percussionists (how he envied the man at the great copper bowls of the kettledrums) then the brass then the woodwinds then finally the string folk: the bass viols, the violincellos, the violas, the violins—including yes, yes, there she was a slender figure holding her dainty instrument (and later mine, hoped Henry) in one hand, plucking up the long skirt of her formal blue-black velvet gown, trimmed at neck and sleeve with snowy lace, as she picked her way on slick black glossy pointy shoes among assorted elbows, cellos, legs and feet toward her chair. Henry stood up, the better to see her—and as he did so a number of others around him also stood, following his lead, assuming the advent of an important personage onstage—and waved at Claire. Already tuning her fiddle, however, she failed to notice Henry, failed even to look up. Henry sat down, disappointed. Those around him sat down. He remembered the giant field glasses hanging from his neck. He raised the eyepieces to his eyes, adjusted the focus and grazed with greedy looks upon the radiance of her flowing butter-colored hair (no braids tonight), the rosy luster of her cheeks, the bare glowing flesh of neck, bosom, arms…
Entered the concertmeister and took his place. A man with a pickled face and a nut-brown oboe sounded his nasaline keynote. The other players took up the note, converged upon consonance, groped closer and closer until the entire Denver Symphony Orchestra was braying forth one sustained and mighty A. (Often the highlight of an entire concert.) Satisfied, the first violinist nodded his sleek rodentine Central European head. The musicians fell into silence.
Pause.
Then applause, beginning with a tentative few, catching on with more, bursting out from the entire hall as the members of the orchestra rose to their feet and the conductor marched onstage. Smiling, the maestro—a brusque fellow named Fritz—bowed once to the audience, turned briskly to his reseated orchestra, faced the music, uplifted his baton…
Now what?
Two hours of bliss, by the clock. An eternal moment, in Henry’s soul.
The question of temporal sequence hardly entered into the matter. With Henry H. Lightcap the dance of love began as a mad impulse followed, in due course, by leisurely regret. Events in between proceeded by quantum jumps, often without traversing the intervening space, sometimes jogging through time in reverse. Each particle indeterminate and unpredictable but the aggregate bound tighter than a bull’s asshole in flytime to the iron laws of probability. As Henry would have phrased it, composing his footnote to Plato.
He found the reception, smuggling himself in when challenged by affecting a Continental accent. Smiling, shrugging, spreading his hands—“Mein Hinklish”—an apologetic grimace—“iss how you say?”—tapping his skull, “Not zee best he could be, eh? Je ne c’est pas, non?” He drew a faded card from his jacket pocket, allowing the usher a brief glimpse: “H. Holyoak Lightcap, M.A.; Special Project Consultant.”
Working his way politely but firmly through the jostling mass of bald heads, black coats, lacquered hairdos and velvet gowns, he established himself at the vantage point of the punch bowl. He sloshed a champagne glass through the punch, avoiding the fruit, and looked about. Over a bobbing bubbling cumulus of svelte heads he looked for the golden radiant one he sought. And found her, after a moment, trapped within a tight circle of all-male music l
overs. Lecherous swine. Henry dipped a second glass into the bowl—the server busy with a queue on the other side of the table—and forged a path through the murmuring mob toward Claire. Light was her name, bright star of his soul. The cuffs of his shirt were wet but little he cared about that. Little he knew.
She smiled at his earnest approach, his uncombed head and padded shoulders rising above the crowd, his unsteady hands holding aloft two glasses of punch. He held one toward her, providing her with a pretext for escaping her admirers. My God she’s beautiful, thought Henry. The thought left him speechless. Him, Lightcap, speechless.
“Well here you are,” she said. He nodded; they touched glasses. “Where’s your Smokey Bear suit?” He grinned and nodded, unable to take his eyes from her face, hair, the bare neck and shoulders. Take your eyes off my face for godsake, he imagined her thinking, unable for the moment to imagine what else he could do. “I was hoping you’d be wearing the big hat,” she went on.
“Crowded in here.”
“It’s supposed to be crowded. This is a reception. Our first concert of the season.”
“I didn’t know you were—so good.”
“I’m only a fiddle player. Second fiddle. Besides there’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
“I know. Let’s get out of here.”
“Don’t you want to meet my mother?” A smiling woman stood beside them, looking at her daughter, then up at Henry. She too was beautiful, more beautiful than her daughter: taller, elegantly slender, refulgently blond, with the patrician nose and dramatic cheekbones of an actress.
“Not really,” Henry said.
The woman laughed and elevated her little gloved mitt toward his lips. “But now you must.”
Blushing, he took the hand in his huge paw, looked down at the thing, squeezed it gently, bent and kissed the fingers.
“Such a gallant ranger. I am Mrs. Mellon. My name is Grace.”
Claire said, “Now aren’t you sorry? Wouldn’t you rather have a date with my mother?”
Slowly, with difficulty, Henry herded his wits together. “You’re both beautiful. Let’s all three get out of here.”
“That’s better,” the mother said. “Let’s do that.”
Shit, said Henry. Silently.
“Soon as I make my goodbyes,” said Claire, moving off. He watched her exchange a smiling kiss with the concertmaster, then bounce on to the drummers, the trumpeters, the little men with the slide trombones. Swine, all of them.
“Claire loves people,” the mother explained. “She’s the most popular girl in the orchestra.” Taking Henry by the elbow, she began guiding him toward the nearest exit. “We’ll wait for her outside.”
Under the portico, in the cool October air, she took a lengthy cigarette from a gold case in her handbag. She paused. Henry produced a wooden kitchen match from his pocket, ignited it with his thumbnail and lit Mrs. Mellon’s cigarette.
“Thank you.” She puffed and inhaled and expelled. “That was clever. What else can you do?”
Silently, Henry produced a second match, tautened his right trouser leg by lifting his right knee and struck the match on the seat of his forest green twill ranger pants.
“Dear me….”
He produced a third match and struck it on his teeth. They both stared at the yellow flame.
“You are a clever young man. And how young are you, Mr. Lightcap, if I may ask.”
About forty-four, he explained.
“About forty-four. Good. You don’t look a day over forty. My age.” For a moment she mused over the ironies of life. “Claire’s new young man. And I understand that you work as—a park ranger?”
Only in the summer.
“Only in the summer? Good. And in the winter…?”
He rested.
“I see. Marvelous. What a marvelous way to set one’s course through life. You have a family, Mr. Lightcap?”
He mentioned the Lightcaps of Stump Creek, West Virginia.
“Really? West Virginia? Why we’re practically neighbors. My people live in the Old Dominion.”
East Virginia?
She laughed. She had a fine grave well-modulated laugh. Highly musical. “And your wife, Mr. Lightcap?”
No wife, he said. Been divorced for many years.
“And her family?”
Henry mentioned the Mishkins of New Rochelle, later Weehawken.
Mishkin, he explained, was a well-known slumlord family in the waterfront district of that urban-surburban North Jersey complex. Or perplex, as they say.
She peered at her smoking cigarette. “I see….”
Claire came bustling up with her violin case, cashmere shawl upon her shoulders. The three walked under the trees, around the corner of the music hall, to a parking lot. Mrs. Mellon unlocked the door of a substantial gray motorcar of recent European extraction. She took the cased violin from Henry’s hands, stowed it on the passenger’s seat and kissed her daughter on the cheek. “Don’t forget, dear, you have classes in the morning.”
“I’ll be home in an hour, Mother.”
“It’s eleven already.”
“I know that, Mother.”
“And you, Mr. Lightcap—” She gave him a thin ironic smile. “I do hope that we meet again someday—perhaps in another of America’s splendid national parks or forests.”
Henry agreed. For a moment, holding the car door open and observing her form as she eased gracefully into the driver’s seat, he imagined the lady spread-eagled on an Indian blanket, nude beneath a canopy of whispering pines as he, Ranger Lightcap, performed his manly duty. Having Grace under pressure.
They watched her drive away.
“Did she give you a hard time?”
“Your mother is a concerned woman.”
“She’s a prig and a snob but I love her anyway. Let’s walk.”
They walked through the park near the concert hall. They shared the banalities of tentative love. Whom did she love most? Mozart, she said, and after Mozart, Stravinsky. I don’t like either of those guys much, he admitted. I can tell, she said, but if you ever want to be a gentleman you must learn to admire them both. What about Minnie Pearl? he inquired. Minnie’s all right in her way, she said, but for real country give me Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn. They’re good, he agreed, but I like Dmitri better. Shostakovich? she asked. No, he said, Kabalevsky. Oh bland, she said, bland as tapioca, oh Henry you must be kidding. I’m kidding, he said.
He slipped an arm around her waist. She leaned toward him. Thigh against thigh, they walked beneath the well-groomed elms. Her moving hip, beneath his hand, felt like warm black velvet. I love this dress you’re wearing. It is rather sexy, isn’t it?; but all the women in the orchestra were wearing black; you must have noticed. Can’t say I did. What a liar you are. Come with me, he said. Where? Anywhere. (Oh my God, Claire, anywhere, he thought, anywhere.) Can’t you be more specific, Henry? South, he suggested; let’s go down to Tampico, lay on the beach all winter long. Can’t, she said.
That was that.
They walked in silence for a while, under the trees, around and around in a meandering loop before the muted glow of the concert hall. Beyond, illuminated by hidden floodlights, the dome of the state capitol shone against the night sky.
You’re wondering why I came here? Not at all, she said, not at all. How come you never answered my letters? I apologize; I didn’t really think you were serious. Those others? Other men write me letters. Do you think I’m serious now? Yes, right now I think you’re serious. What does that mean? It means that I think you’re serious right now. You’re right. It’s a now thing. What does that mean? What else could it mean, Henry?
He stopped at the side of a sycamore, leaned his back against the smooth bole of the trunk and drew the girl gently into his arms. She looked up at him, no longer smiling. He kissed her.
Why did you do that?
That’s what you said last time. He kissed her again, seriously. She responded by putting both her hands on the b
ack of his head and pulling down, pressing herself against him, arching her body like a bow.
Let’s go somewhere, he suggested. Make love.
Love?
Get this agony over with.
Oh no, Henry, I can’t do that. Please don’t ask me to do that. One hour together and then I don’t see you again for—how long? Six months? A year? Ever?
I could stick around for a few days. We could go camping in the mountains. The aspens are turning gold now. The sunflowers are in full bloom—and the purple asters and the globe mallow. It’s beautiful up there, Claire. Cattle gone. Bull elk bugling in the high meadows. Brown trout jumping in the lakes.
She smiled up at him, her eyes misty with pain. No, I can’t do it. That would make it even worse for me. I’d be miserable all winter long, thinking about it. Missing you.
It’s a now thing, he said.
It’s too much of a now thing.
He walked her home, a mile over the sidewalks under the trees through shadowy residential streets. She lived with her mother—father gone—in a fine old brick-and-stucco house, three stories high, behind a wall, in a well-groomed neighborhood of fine old grave Victorian houses. She turned a key in the gate, they said goodbye and kissed once more. She entered and closed the gate, they touched hands through the iron bars, she withdrew. Henry watched her walk to the deep porch of the house, unlock and enter the front door, disappear.
Henry walked back to his pickup truck through the Denver night. At two o’clock in the morning, too restless and agitated for sleep, he started the engine and headed home. Whatever that was. Weehawken? No more. Stump Creek? Not really. Albuquerque, El Culito, San Francisco, Edinburgh, Naples, London, Paris, Madrid? Those days were gone. Back to the park in Utah? That season was over.
He realized with a shock of horror that he was at liberty to go anywhere he wished. Nobody cared where he went.