The Angel of Monadnock I
In 1955 Asa Thayer, a sixteen-year-old in the limbo between junior and senior years at Choate, spent his first summer in a decade at home in Cambridge rather than on his paternal grandparents’ farm outside Concord, New Hampshire. Staying had been a triumph over his parents’ insistence that he continue to help his grandfather chase chickens and turn, with large, corroded forks, the piles of compost at the bottom of the vegetable garden. Instead he was pumping gas at the edge of Harvard Square, in a station that issued inspection stickers without bothering to inspect. He made twenty-two dollars a week; he paid his mother ten, of which she banked five for his future and put five toward his board. “We cannot,” she said at the start of June, “simply carry you as part of the household while you waste your time.” He ate the eggs she cooked him every morning off blue Chinese plates plundered by a sea captain forebear; his bed, mahogany, with intricate and dusty pineapples on each post, had been the resting place for an infrequently remembered signer of the Declaration of Independence; when he walked down the stairs ancestors with noses and eyes like his watched from gilt frames. And the twelve dollars remaining to him on Fridays was the largest sum he had ever held in his back pocket.
The house was at the far end of Brattle Street. Asa’s father, a doctor, could not afford to live the four or five blocks closer to the center of town that would have been appropriate to his lineage. But the rooms were large, high-ceilinged, and many. Better, even in mid-July they maintained a dim, cool atmosphere perfumed with oils rubbed into wood, dust settled on books, and died-down fires of hard, slow-burning, sweet branches. It was a house that in no way admitted to the extreme seasonal changes of Massachusetts, as its inhabitants also ignored the fabulous February cold, the equally fabulous August doldrums. Its furnishings suggested a permanent early winter, and in this it reflected the climate of the three people who moved across the parquet floors.
It was a hot summer; the hoses ran all day on the lawns along Brattle Street, and Asa biked through the black pools collected at the curbs on his way to and from work. The hiss of his tires toward evening, when the sun was still high, was the whisper of the real evening, the dark evening coming, when he would move to the edge of his chair and say, “May I be excused?” His parents were propped like dolls at either end of the table, silent with incomprehension. They knew where he was going, they knew how he was spending his time, yet his life had become mysterious to them.
“Be home by ten-thirty,” his father ordered every night.
“Yes, sir,” Asa answered. He came back at one or three, when the stairs were a minefield of creaks and rattles.
“Going swimming at the Solas’?” his mother asked every night.
“Yes.”
But it didn’t satisfy them. They were unappeased. Sometimes his father telephoned there—“We’ll be at a movie when you get home”—and sounded piqued when Asa came to the phone. It would have been better to catch him out, drinking illegally in Central Square, busy on a sofa with a girl whose parents weren’t home. He was there. It was irrefutable. But what was he doing?
Asa biked back down Brattle through the puddles for a third time, accompanied by a thick slice of yellow moon. The trees leaned toward him, waving their soft leaves. It was a gauntlet he had to run. Seductive patches of gold windows held scenes of family life. Above, the sky was gashed by every color in the long, straight lines of summer sunset. He was headed for the intersection of five streets, a pentacle as potent as one drawn in chalk on a tiled floor in sixteenth-century Spain.
Overseeing this junction, but set back behind a wrought-iron fence and a stand of Colonial elms, was the Solas’ house. Fourteen black-framed windows dared a passerby to look in, but there was nothing to see. It was a most ungiving façade, entirely folded in upon itself; a hundred windows wouldn’t have changed that. Boxwood hedges crept up on it; wisteria as knotted as beech-tree roots veiled the porch that extended the length of the front. Someone, though not, surely, Professor Sola, had planted daylilies below the box, and their wrinkled orange heads fell on the lawn at dusk like falling stars. Hanging over everything was the rigorous unavailability of the house. It was absolutely a façade, because nothing could be like it. There was the echoing vacancy of a stage set: a twinkle of secrets from a light in a third-story room; a trill of curtains moving as a body made a breeze passing the long windows in front.
Asa slid his old black Raleigh behind the rhododendrons that flanked the door. It was his spot. Reuben’s Peugeot, as young as the summer, leaned against a laurel bush now past blooming. Further down the drive two other bikes sprawled on the gravel. These belonged to Parker, a classmate of Asa’s at Choate, and Roberto, Reuben’s older brother. Asa, with the care that comes of relative poverty, checked that no glint of metal showed through the gloss of leaves, then rang the doorbell.
He felt the lightening of his blood that followed the far-off, clocklike dongs of the bell. He was sixteen, and for the first time he loved someone. New muscles in his arms quivered, his back became alert, and his stomach pushed against his diaphragm, nauseating him slightly with anticipation. He wondered who would answer the bell. It was Roberto.
“We’re upstairs,” he said, and turned down the hall, leaving Asa to shut the door. From the back he resembled Reuben. They shared a beautiful posture, womanly in its grace and length. Asa followed him up the back stairs. On the second floor Roberto began to whistle. This annoyed Asa, but he knew it was to cover their footsteps for the father who was behind one of the twelve closed doors that ringed the stairs. Roberto whistled constantly, breathily, to interject himself into events, to protest his position. Suddenly he stopped and turned his fox face over his shoulder.
“Did you get them?”
“Not yet. I have to wait for the weekend, when my father brings his bag home.”
“Doesn’t he keep a cabinet? I thought doctors kept cabinets of emergency medicine at home.”
“It’s locked.”
“Break in.”
That was it, thought Asa, that was the difference, the reason he felt himself always lacking and yearning. They lived in a simple universe. Their desires dictated their actions, so that their lives had the quality of purity, unreflection, unswerving faithfulness—to themselves. He had lived so long for responsibility, consideration, and compromise that beside the Solas he felt polluted and deflected. For whose pleasure was his life? Roberto’s tapered hand opened the door. Haziness from cigarettes and young sweat interfered with the view. But Asa could see some bare legs and the beaming box of the television. This door Roberto was willing to close, and as he did, the gust of cooler, clearer air from the hall lifted the atmosphere a little, revealing a bed, with an obscured occupant, and the torso belonging to the legs, which were kneeling in front of the television. It was Parker, fiddling with the dials, wearing white boxer shorts and a waterproof Rolex on an alligator (and not waterproof) band. Asa thought the alligator ostentatious; he sported a flat gold pocket watch when dressed for school and not, as now, dressed in farm-faded denim and a T-shirt. His eyes were adjusting; the bed rumbled and he saw Reuben rise from the foaming white of the sheets, naked, a cigarette between his thin, pale lips.
“Hey, baby,” Reuben said.
Tracks of ice ran down Asa’s back and he turned from Reuben to the television. Unwatched, but knowing himself perceived, Reuben stretched his arms above his head and arched himself toward the ceiling. All four boys had the same coloring, but what was healthy, pink, and blond on Asa and Parker, and somewhat sallow on Roberto, on Reuben burned white and terrifying in clarity. His hair crested back in a triangle from his forehead in near-silver streaks. All the skin of his body, as Asa could plainly see were he to leave off watching a policeman chase a crook, was a pearly unmarked acreage stretched tight against his veins, which showed their purple mileage. His muscles and bones were prominent and his limbs were monkeylike, active and inquisitive-looking. This was especially true of his feet. Pointing to his
left toe, his penis, pale and thin, lay with authority against his body. He was not naked, but a nude; in this he was different from his friends. They were unformed and uneasy enough to feel themselves exposed when stripped. He was finished, perfected, and above all, pleased.
“Get dressed, Sola,” said Parker, the only one brave enough to express their common embarrassment. “Get your pants on.” Turning to Asa, who sat dumbly staring at the screen, he asked, “Did you get them?”
“Jesus, why don’t you say hello first? Roberto asked me the same thing. When I’ve got them, I’ll give them to you.”
“We want them,” said Reuben, “so get them.” He had put on his pants.
“I’ll get them. I’ll get them. Leave me alone.” But Asa was reluctant to get them and furious that they caught his reluctance. “I have to wait for the weekend, when Father brings his bag home, and then I have to wait for them to go out to dinner or something. But I’ll get them.”
Nobody said anything. Everybody looked at Asa. Reuben took the situation in hand. “Let’s swim,” he said, and opened the door.
It was beyond midsummer; the crickets made a wonderful racket in counterpoint with the plosh of the pool’s water. Parker dove in straight and vanished without bubbles, still wearing his boxers. Roberto began to skim the surface of the pool with a long-handled net and to whistle. Reuben took his pants off again and draped himself at the shallow end, his toes curling and uncurling around the water. Parker’s sleeked head, almost white in the queer luminescence of July (stars, lights they’d left burning on the third floor, the pink blur of Boston smeared on the southern rim of the sky), came up near Reuben’s feet. Roberto stood beside Reuben, armed with his net.
But Asa lingered on the flagstones, watching his friends. The night had pressed up to them and to him, confusing their shapes. They seemed to have lost their faces and become statues. Even, thought Asa, they were momentarily manifest gods. Reuben sat with a leg drawn up to his chest, his hands linked across the knee; Parker and Roberto flanked him like guards. Parker had leaned his head on Reuben’s calf to steady himself in the water. Their eyes, in the dark, were also dark. Asa had a sharp understanding of the future—that is, a time when this would be the past. Time was rushing through and around him, he almost heard it whistling, and this awareness rounded the world somehow and made it sweet. Everything had a sweetness, a momentariness that captivated; behind him the rose trellis hummed with bees who were now asleep but would be there buzzing in the morning and so buzzed now. The circularity of things! He was safe in time, he was slung in a mesh of inevitability. And then his feeling of safety began to ebb. The whistle got sharper, almost hurt; it was a disinterested, determined sound, not made for his delight but the byproduct of gears as big as galaxies that turned for their own satisfaction. He—all of them—could be flung up anywhere, beached at misery, repetition, early death. The trio at the edge of the water was still fixed, as though they knew themselves to be well posed, but the glow of the perceived moment was gone; now they looked stuck. Nothing will stay the same, thought Asa, and this sad, simple idea calmed him. It returned him, somewhat battered, to his knowledge of the perishability of the present. He wanted to be rid of the whistling, the largeness. The present, with the promise of six more weeks of itself (the pool, the party Reuben would give on Saturday night, the twelve dollars he would pocket on Friday), was firm ground. He landed with relief.
On Friday night Parker turned up for dinner at the Thayers’. He was a cousin—his mother, Emily Graves, now Whiting, was the younger sister of Uncle John’s wife. “Not a blood cousin,” Asa’s mother had muttered at ten-thirty on another evening after Parker had shown up unexpectedly and eagerly eaten seconds. “Julia, what difference does it make? Ten generations ago we were all William the Conqueror,” Dr. Thayer said. “Robert, Robert,” said the mother. Asa loved his father in these moods. Too often he behaved as though he were himself William. “This family thing can be carried too far,” he said to Asa, who had planted himself in a chair hoping his father would continue. “It cannot,” said Julia Thayer. “In the end, everyone except the family is a stranger.”
“What’s wrong with strangers?” asked Asa. His parents turned toward him. His father coughed. “They don’t understand,” said his mother.
“Pure xenophobia,” said Asa to the mirror at midnight. It was a word he had learned recently. “I suppose I am to marry a cousin as well, a third or fourth cousin so as not to be inbred.” He thought of the Solas, who were not even the same race—whatever that was—and the girls who appeared at their house on weekends, who had long white necks, pressed linen shorts, no curfews. Some of them were cousins of his, probably; some of them were not at all, not possibly.
So, Friday night, the night before the party at the Solas’, Parker sat with the Thayers in the dark dining room with mauve walls and red-purple wood furniture, and ate six thin slices of roast beef, five boiled potatoes, and a few string beans. Both he and Asa drank milk from cobalt glasses; the Thayers drank a fair red wine. For dessert there was pound cake and strawberries. Dr. Thayer ate white grapes, his passion. He never shared them. They were placed before him by his wife every evening, in a small cut-glass bowl rimmed with silver.
“How’s school, boys?” he asked, between grapes. Asa and Parker didn’t say anything. “Harvard or Yale?” persisted Dr. Thayer.
“Oh, Harvard for sure,” said Parker. He kicked Asa gently under the table.
“I don’t know yet,” said Asa. “We don’t have to decide until November. Maybe I’ll go to Princeton, Dad.” He had no desire to go to Princeton.
“Playboys.”
“No, sir, it’s really become a serious school.” Parker, earnest and confidential, leaned toward Asa’s father. Asa hated this transformation of his friend and dreaded the cynical post-conversation comments he would hear as they biked to the Solas’ later. “I think Asa might really enjoy himself there. Very good English literature courses there—”
“Not your interest,” Dr. Thayer said. He did not meet Asa’s eyes. “Southern atmosphere, not conducive to study.”
“Much too far away,” put in Asa’s mother.
“It’s just a thought,” said Asa.
“Parker, do have some more cake. I’m afraid we seem to have finished the strawberries.”
The Thayers were going to a piano recital given by a niece of Dr. Thayer’s, at Paine Hall. Julia Thayer stood in front of the hall mirror patting her hair while Parker downed his cake. “You’ll clear, won’t you, dear,” she commanded, lifting her voice into the dining room. “Robert.” Dr. Thayer rose. Grape stems wiggled on the damask in front of his place.
“Going swimming, boys?” He sounded hopeless; Asa felt a surge of strength. He would go to Princeton, he would go swimming, he would marry a Phoenician.
“It’s a hot night,” said Parker.
“Give my love to Lilly,” Asa said. He did like Lilly, the pianist. She hadn’t gone to college at all, nor married, and lived in a bit of a slum near the river.
“You ought to have come,” said his mother, “but it is a hot night. It must be lovely,” she went on, turning to her husband, “to have a pool.” He wasn’t paying attention to her; he was putting his black bag into the coat closet, on the shelf next to the hats.
“Ah, Friday,” he sighed. “Summer. Let’s go over to the island next weekend, Julia?”
“We’ve got the Whitings for dinner Saturday. Not yours,” she called hastily to Parker. “Your Uncle Johnny.”
“Who gives a damn?” Parker muttered into his cake.
They left. Beyond the curtains the sky was pale, pale blue and changing. The boys sprawled in their chairs, silent, hot. Asa rummaged through the stems, looking for just one grape. None. The crickets began to whir, then stopped. The clock in the hall clicked into place and boomed the half hour. Parker poured himself a glass of wine. Asa, nervous, wanting to protect the remaining food, cleared the table.
“Do you always do what the
y tell you?”
“What else is there to do?” Asa held the roast on its silver platter in one hand and a clutch of linen napkins in the other. “I’m not here most of the time. I hate arguing with them. They’re so”—his eyes shut—“sort of dead, you know? They just go dead. It makes me feel awful. Hell with them. I clear the table, they don’t tell me when to come home.”
“But they do. You say they do.”
“Yes, but they don’t mean it.”
“Don’t mean it,” repeated Parker. He drank some wine.
“It’s a reflex, I think.”
“Let’s get them now.” Parker looked around for more wine, but Asa had taken it. “Do you know where the bag is?”
“In the coat closet.” Asa didn’t want to do it, he didn’t want to have anything to do with it, but Parker was staring at him like a conscience—a bad conscience—and he was trapped. “Let’s forget it,” he said, brave for an instant.
“Come on, chickenshit. Come on.”
Asa went to the hall, lifted the bag down, and slammed it onto the table. Then he turned his face. Parker opened it. Inside a stethoscope glittered, bottles jingled against each other, bright, full of colors. There were also a pipe, an extra pair of glasses, an Agatha Christie novel, a bone-handled brush. Asa felt sad to see his father’s mute possessions strewn on the tablecloth. Parker rummaged with determination.
“Hey,” he said, “codeine.” He pocketed a brown bottle.
“No, you said just the amyl nitrite.”
“Come on.” Parker didn’t stop poking through the pockets. “There.” He held up a small glass vial winking a flicker of violent yellow. “That’s one.”
“I don’t know if there are any more.”
“Sure there are. We need at least four, one for each of us. Or don’t you want any?”
Asa said nothing. Parker seemed to be taking hours finding them. Asa heard the ghost of his parents’ car in the driveway, the door opening. The clock boomed again. Eight-fifteen. Parker had found another ampule.