Everyone in the village remarked the fall as the warmest in memory. Promptly on the school’s dismissal bell I left the building and walked north along the town’s tree-shaded main street to the river. Buying the New York newspapers at a drugstore, I went to a river-front saloon, where, sitting “over the water” at the far end of the bar, I sipped Schaeffer beer while reading the book reviews and football news, occasion ally lifting my eyes from the tiring newsprint to look through the wide picture windows and watch the St. Lawrence flow by. Across the way, I saw the hues of the islands go from green to yellow to brown to almost black, the waters from deep blue to slate gray. When by the last days in November the river had gone to the latter color, such was the unseasonal warmth of the weather that one could still see a frequent boat under sail, its flying jib and spanker hard, taut, and lovely to the wind, its bow cutting effortlessly through the slate waters and throwing up a furious white spray that spat itself to pieces. At six I walked to my apartment, where, against a thousand resolutions to begin cultivating a more delicate palate, I invariably dined on broiled Delmonico steak and butter-pecan ice cream, sometimes just topping the meat with the cream. A pleasant bachelor’s apartment, its living room had once been an upstairs sun porch. On three sides its walls were made up entirely of muslin-curtained windows which brought to the room a continuously felicitous light. Tastefully furnished, it had beige carpeting; weighty, comfortable leather chairs; and the inevitable television set, to whose flickering image and drone I used—as other people use music—to fall asleep. To the room I added a Degas print framed in gold leaf and depicting a middle-aged beatnik and his long-suffering, “milk-imbibing” spouse (Patience and me?); a half-dozen prints of Paris street scenes rendered by a sentimental Scandinavian; a clear-finished pine bookcase I had made from an old china cabinet; and my cynosure and source of pride: a much-knotted pine coffee table made from an ancient ironing board. One night I picked up the telephone, dialed information, and asked the girl if there were a phone listed for F. E. Exley. The girl told me there was, gave me the number, and I felt fine. At thirty-three, it was the first telephone listed in my own name. Serenely content, I believed my dream of coming to terms with home was being realized.
In late September Frank Gifford once again began to en gage me. Having dropped his pugnacity by admitting that “it” —on his back on a stretcher— “had been a hard way to go out,” he had the year before come out of retirement; after a year’s layoff spent nursing his concussion, he had had a better year than anyone had a right to expect, a season which had encouraged him to play still another. When it came time for him to leave finally, if not to the adulatory roar of the crowd, I was sure he wanted to walk out of the stadium with his legs under him and his wits functioning. In the same way that I yearned to be able to go from this place without rage, he wanted to go out without the bitter memory of that Bednarik tackle. He was thirty-three now; at times his speed and his timing seemed unreservedly gone; and watching him began to wonder if it weren’t his destiny to go out on his back, more remembered for having been the victim of that Tartarian tackle than for anything else. Because he was so ungraciously trying to negate time’s passing, I couldn’t feel all that distressed for him. What did distress and send me back to him with a passion was the glibness with which fans dismissed him. As the season got into its third and fourth weeks, from down the bar I heard strangers in what came to be a continual conversation about the Giants, and whenever Gilford’s name came up, I immediately heard, spoken with disarming and chilling certainty, “He’s had it!” Had I known any of the men and had they not been such rugged-looking bastards, fishing guides and farmers and construction workers, I would have turned to them and snapped, “Aw, for Christ’s sake, let him be. He wants to go out like a man!” I’m sorry now I hadn’t the guts to say as much.
The following Sunday, weaving full speed down the middle of the field, Gifford reached back between the two defenders flanking him, even as he was losing his balance took a Tittle pass over his left shoulder, toppled furiously over in a forward somersault, and ended flat on his back in the end zone, the ball still clutched precariously to his stomach. It was an artful, an astounding, a humbling catch; and I can’t say whether it or the studied avoidance of his name at the bar the next week pleased me more. Hunched up on the edge of one of the apartment’s leather chairs, I watched him intently from that week on. The story became somewhat absurd. Week after week he made one after another catch more incredible than its predecessor; and in the final week of the season he made that one-handed catch against the Pittsburgh Steelers which gave the Giants their divisional title and sent them into the NFL championship game. I laughed with glee. Oh, how I laughed and jumped up and down, exclaiming, “Oh, good, Frank! Good! Very good indeed! I mean, swell! Really swell!”
One had to hand it to the guy, his gift for living out his dreams. As much as for any other reason, I was jubilant because of the irony. By that time my own naive dream of coming to terms with home had already gone sour.
What people I had contact with in the area were fringe people, and there was one couple whose situation (the man older and married, the girl young and attractive) was such an agony to themselves that it often resulted in name-calling and face-swatting. I’d like to say that when such a scene took place in my apartment one night, I jumped to the girl’s defense. But I had seen the show before and knew that, by way of making it up, they might be in the bedroom fornicating within five minutes. What upset me was that the fencing and face-slapping were taking place over my ironing-board coffee table, and it suddenly occurred to me that if that table should get broken, then somehow the entire order I had given my life would be shattered with it. Jumping up, chest out, I broached the battle, took an indiscriminate though fierce punch, and ended with a whopping shiner which brought about a temporary truce. By the time that black eye got to the school board, it had been incurred in a barroom brawl in the water-front saloon I frequented, and in its imaginativeness the accompanying cause of the fight was quite praiseworthy: I had been—lord forbid! —fighting for the favors of the girls’ physical education teacher. Within two weeks, for what it was worth, and that I might attend if I chose and attempt to protect myself, I was told by the nose-picking principal that certain parents were gathering at the next board meeting to discuss the feasibility of keeping me in their community. Though I didn’t attend, I learned that one of the key complainants was the mother of a girl I was failing. That was the first indication I had that my students, or their parents, weren’t adjusting to my academic demands as readily as I had supposed. The reason I didn’t attend the meeting or attempt to protect myself was that I no longer cared.
Teaching was not my call. Accepting as a dictum of classical tragedy that the spectator must experience the sorrow of both the hero’s ruin and his inevitable death, I had never felt comfortable in offering the flawless and self-righteous Brutus as the protagonist of Julius Caesar; because, oddly, I was invariably more moved by Cassius’ death, over the years in gleaning from the text this suddenly revealed clue, this “brilliant” deduction, this “startlingly penetrating” insight, I had developed the perhaps gimcrack theory of Cassius as co-protagonist, a complement to Brutus, passionate where Brutus is passionless, fierce where equable, brilliant where dull, complex where simple, devious where direct, sensible where unfeeling. Having completed a rapid reading of the play, having at tempted merely to dazzle the kids with the Bard’s poetry, with ever so much scholarly caution and hemming and hawing, I was one day starting back through the text elaborating this theory when a point eluded me, I looked up and off into the class, and my eyes came to rest on a girl who was smiling and weeping simultaneously. A stunningly salubrious and tall maiden with glittering teeth, brilliant blue eyes, and a wondrous complexion, the smile was with her a perennial characteristic—though it was not in the least insinuative or licentious. If a teacher is in the least a man, he soon comes to imagine that his female trusts spend half their nocturn
al hours masturbating to his summarily called-up and glamorized image; her smile had never seemed of that kind. An abstract of guileless amiability, as though her heart were large and airy and glad, hers, rather, had always seemed the smile of an innocent as yet unprepared to determine what should penetrate that heart.
A poor student, her countenance exuded remarkable intelligence; both her modish dress and fine carriage intimated “background”; when she finally surmised what I demanded by way of examination answers, I had thought her grades would
improve. Above the smile on this day, above the lovely Grecian nose and vigorous-colored cheeks, were two great limpid pools of astonishingly blue tears. My first impression was that it was her time of the month, my first impulse to hurry her discreetly to the girls’ room. With an alarming suddenness, though, and accompanied immediately by an almost feverish remorse, the blood rushed to my face, I turned away from her, and my eyes fled back to the text: she was frightened to death of me.
Terribly vexed and distraught, I was furious with myself for not before having seen that that smile was not in the least a harbinger of friendliness. That distended mouth was as cold and practiced as one on a marble frieze, one of those grand and touchingly brave little smiles with which women confront the impregnable. Understanding it now for what it was, and imagining how she must be envisioning herself failing and being left behind by her classmates, surmising that she was standing apart from and seeing herself as a despicable dunce, I abruptly claimed a headache. Rising, I went out of the room and walked to the guidance office where, for the first time since I began teaching, I checked an IQ. So awful in its mathematical finality, and as I had known it would be, the girl’s was dismal. To the ignored tut-tut’s of the guidance instructor, I lighted a cigarette, took a drag that must have billowed to my toenails, and asked for the “folders” of a number of pupils about whom I had been concerned, going solemnly through them and despairingly eying all those tragic 83’s and 85’s and 88’s. When I had finished my cigarette, and had gravely closed the last of the folders, I was left with the inescapable conclusion that my obligation to the girl and these latter was every bit as holy as it was to the others; and though it made me melancholy, I knew then that I’d never be a teacher. I had neither the patience nor the wit nor the wherewithal to give students less than I knew; worse, whatever intelligence I possessed was of that savagely unsympathetic kind which didn’t allow me to understand the student’s difficulty in grasping: sadly, I lacked the intelligence to simplify, and with an utterly monolithic and formidable pedantry I thought nothing of demanding that my students feed me back my own quackery. For the girl I felt something like love and wanted to explain that what I had to give had little to do with life, tell her that it would be no time at all before she’d be carrying some goon, lying between those long and luxuriant thighs, into blissful regions; indeed, tell her that if I were younger and she willing, I’d carry her off to some split-level and that there we’d produce a whole race of gargantuan, white-toothed, and shiny-cheeked truck drivers. Thinking thusly, I laughed rather sadly; for that really wasn’t—was it?—quite the point. Seeing no sensible reason to save a job I neither wanted nor could properly do, I didn’t attempt to protect myself at the board meeting. Determining then to pass everyone who was making,
or who appeared to be making, an effort, I ended by being guilty of that which I had so vigorously condemned at Glacial Falls. Hence, too, and as it had been at Glacial Falls, time once again became merely something to be got through.
On returning to the farm for yet another summer, I discovered that Christie III was dying of some unidentifiable and painful respiratory ailment (emphysema?), having already suffered a half-dozen attacks resembling strokes. Occurring in the gray hours of the morning, just before the summer sun jumps the horizon and explodes in brilliance, these attacks are heralded by a violent coughing. During the attack itself Chris tie’s howl is so terrifyingly human that one early morning on hearing it I was quite lifted from my bed—my naked body seemed to jump free of the sheeted mattress, the hair on my neck coarsened, and chillingly frigid goose-pimples arose all over my skin. Furiously pulling on my undershorts and jamming my feet into my sneakers, I went out of the room and three steps at a time down the stairs. On reaching the living room I found that my mother and stepfather were already standing over Christie’s stricken and prostrate body. My mother no sooner began to wail (it was absolutely Biblical!) than Christie III abruptly rose to her grief. Standing uncertainly a moment, he then walked erratically, pathetically round and round the hooked rug, his hind legs falling gelatinously away beneath him. Then as suddenly he stopped, sat down, licked his chops, and stared bewilderedly at our half-naked humanity towering above him. For the life of him he couldn’t fathom our concern or why we stood at that ungodly hour in that room washed in its deathly morning glow. In unison we ordered him to walk again; and when he did so, we laughed with relief, seeing that he had recovered the use of his legs. According to that soi-disant veterinarian who, in order that he might treat it, can’t even name the disease, Christie Ill’s death is imminent: he has a week, a month, six months.
If it comes at all, Emerson has cautioned that one’s call might not come for years. If it doesn’t, he remarks it as only a reflection of the universe’s faith in one’s abstinence, nothing to move the heart to fret. And if, moreover, one is unable to do the world’s work, sell its murderous missiles or cigarettes, as a poised, mute, and motionless man, one need not propagate the world’s lies. Thinking I’d like to allow what time I could to whatever gods bestow these gifts, and what with Christie Ill’s coughing a constant clarion of death’s imminence, on hot summer days, attempting to get back into some kind of shape, I have been walking ten, twelve, twenty miles a day, waddling my fat ass up and down Route . Jammed into its Chevrolet, “America at Play” has roared by me at eighty per and has reacted to this solitary, pudgy, and morose wayfarer in the most peculiar way. Tousle-headed, freckle-kissed little boys have pressed their faces to the cars’ windows, looked cross eyed, and stuck out their tongues at me, their tongues pressed against the windows and steaming them, the tongues appearing like minute human hearts framed and engulfed by life’s mysteries. College boys have made fungoo signs, laughingly screamed obscenities, and hurled beer cans at me. Even pruny, respectable-looking older couples, grams and gramps, have shrieked and hooted and given me the old razzamatazz. Thinking that the age had become so clockwork that a lone walker could arouse such mischievous incredulity, I was at first bewildered and stunned; but as the insults continued, I grew aggravated and made obscene gestures in return, giving grams and gramps an up-yours finger.
One evening scanning the Watertown Daily Times I discovered it wasn’t my walking that awakened such nutty aggressions. Our farm lies hard by Camp Drum, a military reservation to which the State Guards of Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York come summers to play soldier, and to which there have drifted the past weeks a number of people who call themselves “Walkers for Peace.” In protest to the militaristic posture of America, they have been picketing the camp; and the Times’s story had to do with their being mucked about by the state police for loitering or disturbing the peace or making themselves a public nuisance. Studying the accompanying art, I realized what was wrong with my walking. A bewitched, rum-looking, and unkempt bunch, the “walkers” wore dirty tennis sneakers and outsized, loony-looking sun helmets and bore protest signs of sticks and cardboard. Directed at peanut-brittle salesmen, bricklayers, Harvard divinity students, and professional athletes who had joined the Guard to evade the draft, and who would have been hard-pressed to find the safeties on their rifles, the signs were touchingly and quixotically misdirected: “thou shall not kill.” The getups looked not unlike the singular, sweaty outfit in which I waddle and trot up and down the highway, even to my walking stick, which might easily be taken for a sign’s handle. “Ah,” I thought, “so that’s it!” The fierce hoots and jeers were emanating from local cars, and
their occupants were taking me for a “Walker for Peace.” Attempting to laugh, I found that the spittle tasted of blood in my mouth. What if I were a “Walker for Peace”? Did that give these goons a right to curse and hurl things at me? Of what were they so afraid? Quickly working myself into a rage thinking of it, I contemplated making my own sign and pilgrimage to the camp. But presently reason set in, and I saw that in a pique of passion I was only once more allowing myself to be drawn into the world’s work, knowing that settling down on the piles-inducing dampness of Piccadilly with Bertrand Russell was not my call. Hence I kept walking, the obscenities kept coming, and during the past days I have found that in sleep I have become the victim of a recurring nightmare. And unlike Goodman Brown, who didn’t know whether his dark some diorama was real or spectral, though I know mine is but a sanguinary dream, still I can’t repress the queasiness it in stills in me.