I did not move. I felt close to some overwhelming moment. In the dim light her shadow behind her consumed my own. I knew what was happening and I did not care to argue with the doctors of that knowledge. Let it be. Inside her was something splintered and bright, something that might have been left by the spiral passage of my own body. She was before me now, looking up, her hands on my shoulders. The sense of tightness I had felt in my room was beginning to yield to a promise of fantastic release. It was going to happen. Whatever would happen. The cage would open, the mad bird soar, and I would cry in epic joy and pain at the freeing of a single moment, the beginning of time. Then I heard my father's bare feet on the stairs. That was all.
We sat in the Aston-Martin inside the garage. There were still some traces of snow on the windshield.
'My father's name was Harkavy Clinton Bell. They named me Clinton Harkavy Bell. He made his money late in life. Not that we weren't comfortable early on. But it was his reputation that came first, before he started earning top dollar. He told me the story dozens of times. He was on a Union Pacific train somewhere between Omaha and Cheyenne. He was sitting next to a man named McHenry who owned a pajama company named McHenry Woolens. McHenry took out a bottle and he and my father got good and soused. He told my father he was on the verge of bankruptcy. So old Harkavy tells him what he needs is a catchy advertising campaign. You've got a good American name and you're not using it to advantage. McHenry. Fort McHenry. Where Francis Scott Key wrote 'The Star- Spangled Banner.' And with that my father takes out a pencil and starts making a layout on the back of a big manila envelope. He draws a battle scene, get it, ships, rockets, a fort, hundreds of troops and a big flag flying on the battlements. Then he writes a single line at the bottom of the layout.
About a week after the party Tommy Valerio and I went over to a deserted ballfield on the edge of town. The field was surrounded by woods. Only the bare outlines of basepaths and a pitcher's mound remained, and what should have been the skin part of the infield was covered with weeds. Tommy had a long thin fungo bat and we took turns hitting fly balls to each other. It was a cool day for September, generously blue, football weather really, and I ranged across the outfield making casual basket catches, hunching my shoulder and pounding the glove twice like Willie Mays, and trying to adjust to the sudden change of season; not sorry to see summer go because autumn was all gold and wine in the New Hampshire fields and I would be going into senior year at St. Dymphna's, where I would amble along the gray lanes in my tweed sport-coat. And yet something was coming to an end, not just summer but something like the idea of what I was, the time I occupied like space, that private time in which one moves and thinks and knows the questions. Time had been warped and I looked back to the week before and could not find myself. It wasn't until years later, in the period of the affairs, that I began to struggle against this disappearance; to give nothing to Jennifer Fine for fear there would be nothing left for myself. I drifted back to the edge of the trees and caught a long high drive.
'Let's switch,' Tommy shouted.
'Keep on hitting,' I said. 'I want to shag a few more.'
I stayed out there for a long time. Tommy got tired of swinging the bat but I kept telling him to hit a few more, just a few more. I didn't want to stop. The ball would rise from the bat and then I would hear the light crack of contact and it would go up into the cloudless sky, almost vanishing, black at its apogee, coming down white and bruised, an old ball bruised green from the grass. I began to get serious. I would crouch as Tommy went into his swing, meat-hand on my right knee, glove-hand dangling straight down. Ball in the air, I would break quickly, watching just the first second of its flight, and then run head-down to the spot where I knew it would land, the spot dictated by the memory of that first second and a knowledge of the wind and Tommy's power and the sound of ball on bat. Ball caught, I would fire it back as hard and straight as I could, as if a runner had been tagging from third. Tommy would let my throw bounce into the sagging backstop. It went on like this. I was nobody. I was instinct and speed and a memory that extended back for no more than seconds. That was all. I could have gone on all day. But Tommy got exhausted and finally called it quits. I went home, oiled my glove and put it away for the winter.
That night I left my room and headed toward the stairs. I passed Mary's room and saw my mother in there, small and blue, a question mark curled on the bed. I went downstairs. I sat on the rocker for a while. Then my father called me and I descended the steps into the basement.
Jane sat on a folding chair eating an apple. My father stood by the projector. He nodded to me and I switched off the light and then sat next to Jane. The first commercial lasted twenty seconds. A house stood on a quiet suburban street at night. Inside, a man and a woman were having an argument. A teen-age girl leaned against the TV set listening to them. She was very homely. Then she disappeared, returning seconds later with a small bottle of something. The man and woman looked at the bottle, embraced and began to sing. The next commercial was one minute long. A boy wearing thick glasses was practicing the piano. A hockey stick was propped against the wall behind him. In the distance could be heard the shouts and laughter of children his own age. The boy got to his feet, picked up the hockey stick and raced toward the door. A woman emerged from the next room. She was holding a toothbrush. She ran after the boy, waving the toothbrush and screaming. The boy opened the door and tripped. He fell down the steps and lay on the stone path, motionless. His glasses had been broken. Blood was flowing from a severe gash at a point directly above the bridge of his nose. He appeared to be unconscious. It was a beautiful night, a cool and clear and almost autumn night. The wind rushed across the grass outside the high basement window. The sky was howling with stars. I thought of old men playing violins and of women in white convertibles driving me to Mexico.
PART THREE
7
Passing them on the roads as they journeyed toward their own interior limits, one might easily be inspired to twist the thumb of a famous first sentence. It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. On foot they traveled, in old and new cars, in motorcycle packs, in trucks and buses and camp trailers, the young and the very young, leaving their medieval cities, tall stone citadels of corruption and plague, not hopeless in their flight, not yet manic in their search, the lost, the found, the nameless, the brilliant, the stoned, the dazed and the simply weary, shouting their honest love of country across the broken white line, faces lost in disbelief and hair, the drummer, the mystic, the fascist, an occasional female eye peering from a rear window, the noise at the back of her head a short song of peace.
We were nearing the end of the first week, determined not to stray even for a moment beyond the borders of our native land, carefully avoiding all those big footprint lakes and the specter of guiltless Canada. Sullivan slept up front, in the part of the camper that extended over the cab. Pike did most of the cooking. Brand did most of the driving. I yelled and read aloud from road maps.
With us all the way had been Sullivan's three-antenna marine-band hi-fi portable radio, a never-ending squall of disc jockey babytalk, commercials for death, upstate bluegrass Jesus, and as we drove through the cloverleaf bedlams and past the morbid gray towns I perceived that all was in harmony, the stunned land feeding the convulsive radio, every acre of the night bursting with a kinetic unity, the logic beyond delirium.
When it rained Sullivan put on her old buttonless trench-coat even though we were inside the camper. What a
