Part 46 (1/2)

”It was long ago,” I said, looking out at the long gra.s.ses up to their knees in water.

”We been out of the Bronx only ten minutes, that's the amazing thing. All new roads up around here that didn't use to be. Don't know the neighborhood, miss, or we wouldn't've got so lost. Sorry about that, miss.”

”It's all right.”

”You want me to wait with you, miss?”

”No, it's all right.”

”Perfectly fine with me, miss, whatever Mrs. Vand said. Maybe Mrs. Vand didn't realize what it was out here, swamp-”

”You'd better go, if she told you that.”

”Trouble is maybe they come by to pick you up and left, us being so late and n.o.body here,” he said, changing the position of Jus sweated cap and worrying over my mother's story. It was, of course, a bucolic; a false bauble; one of her fancies of what my life might be, if only I were free, if only I could have been what she called ”normal”-a squad of school friends coming down a sparkling little stream in a chartered excursion boat heavy with its party of incredibly eligible boys handsome as lords and loyal steadfast girls in b.u.t.terfly skirts hanging over the rail, shouting steering directions at the patient cheery captain, crowing out my name when they spotted me signalling with both arms aloft on a painted toy pier, surrounded by valises. ”You know maybe a boat couldn't get through any more, what with all them weeds growing around, or we got the wrong place could be.” He drew from his breast pocket a sc.r.a.p of inky map, which Enoch had made for him the day before, based on a gasoline-station highway guide and obscure sources of his own. ”Up there's the throughway, and we left the car here, up near the clover-leaf, which by the way we might get ticketed for, I told Mrs. Vand, and here's lis little road we just come by ... it looks right, miss. What with the dock, it looks like what they said. You sure you don't want me to wait a while, miss? Till they get you safe on that boat?”

”Not if my mother told you not to.”

He frowned at this, and walked for a step or two, and then took off his cap and let the line of wet dammed by it descend; he was an old man, and had an old man's chicken-neck, each crowded fold a limp ring of heat ”What if you're stranded, miss?”

”Ill be all right, really.”

”You're late now? Mrs. Vand said one o'clock positively?”

”You'd better go,” I told him, unwilling to accede to that tentative kindliness of his which, like much of the kindliness of people who find themselves servants of the old sort in a democratic republic, was subversive. He meant to enlist me against my mother's recklessness. He thought it wrong to leave a girl alone in a swamp, and the tender backward-twisting glimpse he s.n.a.t.c.hed of his boots scalloped with mud up to the heel was intended to entice me to conspire with him against my mother's idiocies. I watched him go up the thread of path, surprised there was a path at all; he vanished between spears of man-tall weed, and then re-appeared in parts, sometimes only a slice of pink neck meandering like a fly. He was circling to avoid the sudden ponds that sprang into reflections as soon as the ground was pressed. He was vain of his boots. Now and again he bent to wipe them with his handkerchief: I could see him dip and rise, dip and rise, the cloth sliding like a white face between the green high bars, and from the top hairs of the embankment heard him call down: ”There's a police 'phone up on the highway, miss, about a quarter-of-a-mile down aways, in case you get stranded in there-all right, miss?”

”Right,” I said-this leaped up briefly in the stillness like an animal bark and shamed me. He stood awhile, looking toward the water, squinting down under the awning of his cap. My mother had told him one o'clock because Tilbeck had told her two. She plotted to give me over un.o.bserved by anyone, even by her driver, who was less than anyone. Her driver lingered, not daring to call again, though his shadow less noon figure, the sun a bright blot in the middle of his chin, continued to grow curiously out of the hill into the sky. Finally he trod away without crackle or splinter; up there he had clean clover under his feet.

I arranged my suitcase flat side up and sat on it. The dock stirred with an indoor creak like a rocking-chair, and I thought of the Pink Lady, salmon-s.h.i.+ning, clicking its vigorous optimistic engine, arriving to meet the landing with a proud and caressing exact.i.tude, and William-an aggrieved William already not very young, made patient by hopefulness, and neither patience nor hopefulness the natural properties of his mind-that early sorrowing William driving right off her back onto a once-upon-a-time road as buried now as Caesar's, ”the paving worn to pebbles and woven over by an irreversible plait of reeds and rushes and mud and years. Years, years, covered that place. The quiet was tumultuous with insect chatter: the works of a perpetual-motion machine which had been going on forever and ever, from beginnings no one remembered or believed in: the gra.s.ses had sung out their riots for my girl-mother on this spot while she waited to cross the water home to Duneacres. My lique-maniacal grandfather had kept motor-launches for that purpose, each maneuvered by a butler of its own: and, after that stupefying climax of abundance, came the practical puritanical Pink Lady stuttering back and forth to serve my grandfather's museum, which never was or would be. There were two waters: the far and the near. The far was a streak of white brilliance; the far was a shawl of lightning pinned down. The near was fecund, a black skin pinched and mottled by barnacles of glitter, tranquil except when something-a frog? a gra.s.shopper?-jumped. The near was teased by leggy eels half an inch long, and gauze flies like fragile volant tubes of gra.s.s, with green wings like gra.s.s, and just-visible green feet like separate airy gra.s.s, beings.

In the middle of this the tree blazed. Lens upon lens burned in the leaves with a luminosity just short of gla.s.s and nearer to vapor; the veins were isingla.s.s ducts swarming with light, running knife-bright into stems, and the stems pursuing twigs, and the twigs branches, and the branches hurtling into the bole like rays recaptured, undoing refraction: the whole short powerful trunk a prism in remorse gathering in its tribes of beams, all imaginable exiled light flowing and flowing home to the mother-light.

In the penumbra of its anti-shadow I felt myself an object of meditation. It seemed I was watched. It seemed I was contemplated. A consciousness dangled. An eye pondered. I viewed; I was viewed. A radiance lifted itself from the shoulders of the tree and hung itself, by some unknown manner of pa.s.sage, close against my face, so that, to see, I had to stare through a tissue of incandescence, and saw in a spontaneity of concentration the lit water, the far and the near, the far stream of white and the glint-pointed near, the revolving veil of mites and motes in their inexorable gold whirl, and showering the swamp's edge with elusive sparkles, the extraordinary little tree. The tree was an eye. It observed me. The tree was a mind. It thought me. The tree lived because I lived. It burned for me, it leaped all whiteness and all light into being, and for me; for me it consumed itself, because I had made it, I was its G.o.d, my gaze had forced its fires, the sanct.i.ty of my wonder had quickened its awe; it had found me out in that grove of gra.s.ses, and knew me as a holy interloper; I appeared like G.o.d or G.o.ddess on a platform in that waiting water, a miraculous preparation, unaccountable in that place, undesignatable and unlooked-for in that place, and I came to the wooden lily-leaf to sit upon it and stare, as once the Buddha sat and stared, and, seeing, showed himself divine; I was nymph, naiad, sprite, G.o.ddess; I had gifts, powers; and the tree wors.h.i.+pped, because I could conjure flame in it, I could snuff it, I could bore it through with a devouring torch, I could deliver it into its own night, it was in my hand, having aroused it to transparencies I could at will shadow it and snuff it.

Then it was snuffed. The light went out of it. The sun slid down and away, and leaned a long leaning, so that the far water and the near water were the same; and the light went out of the tree. It stood there drab as toad's skin, and commonplace, already browning with autumn intimations. Its posture was undistinguished, it had an awkward foot with a rooted burly toe, it climbed out of the bank of that marsh-if a marsh, that most gradual of ideas, can be said to have a bank-a larger and more ragged yellow weed in a habitat of weeds. It did not notice me. I knew myself to be profane. It neither reverenced nor perceived. It was blind, it was dumb, it was a dwarf which could hallow nothing. The gazing light was dead in it. The sun had carried off its consecrations. On the rooted dock that had survived the Pink Lady I sat all the afternoon, waiting for my father. I equipped myself to converse with him. I began by introducing myself, and discovered an embarra.s.sment, not in him, over William's surname. To counteract this I spoke to the tree (which out of convenience represented Tilbeck) of the tree: ”A dryad,” I said, ”is an optical effect.” But this was false, and not to the point. ”A dryad,” I said, ”is one of us, ourselves. I have been,” I said, ”a dryad. I have given life,” I said, ”to a tree. Today. Here. In the swamp. At the ferry dock. Before the late afternoon.” But this was fey, and full of spells, and uncertain to attract a thief and crook. Or perhaps he would not remember how they threw darts in olden times at the Brighton dryad, Allegra and himself, or how the Brighton dryad was extinguished by a cry exactly in the moment the baby's howling head was born, so that it seemed the Brighton dryad had died of her own cry. To the tree representing Tilbeck I said (but none of this aloud: solitude, so as not to be self-suspect, makes dignity), ”You are not punctual. It was early afternoon when I arrived, now it is late afternoon. I have observed the pa.s.sage of the day's center from a point just behind this recently looking-gla.s.s tree, silver-backed by the sun, in which I nearly saw myself, and would in fact have seen myself had I not been distracted by suddenly turning holy, to a hollow over there behind those very high, very erect cattails. And still you have not come. And the tree is now perfectly opaque, and even drops a shadow. Clarity has waned.” This was better; it was at least explicit, and left out dryads, which he might, after all, think a stupidity if not a madness, never reminded of that Brighton dryad of his own discovery, or invention, or more probably plagiarism; but I had the fresh advantage of my mother's letters. For memory, he might apply to me. Old imaginings I could provide, but if he had no new ones he would likely not recognize the old. Perhaps through thievery, through crookery out and out, through blackmail perhaps, imagination had left him and play had left him and all the woodland flowers listed in the ENCHIRIDION had leaped with their limp stalks safe out of his b.u.t.tonhole.

When he came, he had no b.u.t.tonhole. He had no s.h.i.+rt. In surprise I heard the crisp plummeting of oars-I had thought he tillered a motor. Plash followed plash. The middle water chirped at the slap of the blade and trilled at its lift. Steady margins of interlocking whirlpools touched at my raft. I stood to see over the gra.s.ses. A naked back glided, tensed, again glided. Naked arms slowly propelled themselves up and around and down in a cleverly timed, infinitely leisurely, superabundantly self-possessed orbit, and at each rise I spotted an arc of unexplored skin reaching from under the armpits to the waist, where no pa.s.sion, not even the sun's, had ever lain.

I was no private visitor. The boatman was a boy.

5.

He was not a very large boy, but he was master of his craft. He drew one oar in and raised it dripping over the side and set it down in the hull, doing all this with a single competent thin-wristed hand; the other held on to the second oar. Then he took the second oar by the handle and altered its angle to that of a paddle, and turned the boat efficiently within the narrowest possible radius, and coaxed it toward the dock, whispering it through the gra.s.ses, and blinking out now and then an eager little nose supporting eye-gla.s.ses twinkling light like semaph.o.r.es. He moved in his craft, like a Viking child, or like a sort of Norse centaur, the top half human, the lower half presumably the parts of a boat; his arms circled as though air were a familiar kind of pool, and his boat circled skimmingly, as though water were as yielding as air.

Twice I heard my father's name. Was it boy's voice or water's voice? ”Tilbeck,” I heard. And again it came: ”Tilbeck.”

”h.e.l.lo,” I called.

A scared green frog no longer than a hairpin landed in front of my feet, gave me a primordial glance, and shuddered into a flying arc when the boat b.u.mped.

”You want me?” I said.

”Mr. Tilbeck does. He said to look for a lady on a dock and yell his name so you'd know who I came instead of.” He stood up; he had legs after all. He said critically, ”He didn't mention a valise or anything.”

I handed it down all the same. ”In that case he doesn't think very practically. No, if you take it that way you'll overturn.”

He took it that way and did not overturn. ”Yes he does. He's very practical. That's why in the end he decided to let me come. You don't have to be afraid. I'm a good rower. Put the other foot in first. Hold on to that old rusted ring sticking out from the side there. Of the dock. That's all right, don't worry if she tips a little. She'll be fine once you're in. That's the way. You'll be safe with me. I'm a good swimmer too. I've already got my junior lifesaver's certificate. I don't mean with me. Next year I get my senior lifesaver's certificate. That's the one that says carry on person at all times to prove competence. You have to be thirteen to qualify. My birthday isn't till next April. Actually I can qualify for it right now, if you don't count age requirements. I'm not saying that for self-praise though. My father says never indulge in self-praise except when absolutely necessary for the purpose of rea.s.suring others. I just thought you'd like to know you'll be pretty safe with me. Safe as if Mr. Tilbeck came himself. He didn't on account of the motor.”

”Safer maybe,” I said, settling on the plank seat in the bow, next to the suitcase. It was crowded.

”Well, I wasn't thinking of that.”

”You weren't thinking of what?”

He said proudly, ”I never get sick on water.”

”I hope that doesn't count as indulging in self-praise,” I said. ”Does Mr. Tilbeck?”

”Well, I'd hate to say. I think i've heard him say things that sound like self-praise now and then, but I might be mistaken. It's hard to tell what's just plain self-praise and what's rea.s.surance for the safety of others. Anyhow my father hasn't mentioned it to him.”

”I meant does he get sick on water.”

”My father never gets sick. Oh, I see. Mr. Tilbeck you're referring to. Once in a while he does. He told my father. He said 'I get sick on water, but never on anything stronger.' Actually ”that's a sort of joke because even though my father didn't laugh my mother did. She says all ministers are humorless. When my mother laughs at anything it means it's Over My Years. The first time I ever heard her say that I thought she meant ears. I used to feel up around my ears to figure out what was over them. I was afraid something funny was growing there, that's why people were laughing.”

”Is your father a minister?”

”Oh no, but I'm going to be, D.V. D.V. stands for Deus Volens, it means G.o.d willing. Don't you know my father? He's not very obscure. He's Purse the paleontologist. Oh wait, you'd better not. She's kind of puddly down there.” I was lifting the suitcase with an uneasy jerk, setting it down on the bottom, out of the way. ”Here,” he ordered, ”I'll put that right up with me, there's plenty of room. I'm very narrow at the hips. That's all right, I've got it. I'm very strong.”

I said, surveying the damp-darkened floor, ”She is pretty wet, I didn't really notice. Have we sprung a leak?”

”It's just general splas.h.i.+ng from before. Kick-back from the motor.”

”But there isn't any motor.”

”That's the whole point. They've been trying to fix it all afternoon. They oiled it and everything. It starts and sort of splashes all over and then stops. When it stops it makes this very peculiar noise. Mr. Tilbeck told me it's just exactly like the sound eunuchs make between their teeth once a month to convey a message to the sultan. That's just a figure of speech. He's never really been to Turkey or any place like that. Of course there are very few sultans any more. He was referring to a time before they had modern democracy. I don't know if they ever had sultans in Pakistan though. You've heard we're going to Pakistan, haven't you?”

”I don't remember your mentioning it,” I said, ”so far.”

”It was in the Times. Do you read the Times? It's this very famous dig they have out there. This bunch of archaeologists found these very interesting humanoid bones. They nearly went crazy. Jotham-you know Jotham? Jotham the anthropologist?-well he said Piltdown all over again. Fraud. Of course they don't know. They're having this terrific argument about this toe-bone they found. You know you can tell by the toes what their posture was. Do you read Popular Ancients? It's having this terrific argument with National Antiquity because National Antiquity had a special color photograph of this toe-bone and under it they had 'Creeping s.h.i.+karpur Man.' Popular Ancients put 'Bending s.h.i.+karpur Man.' Anyhow that's why we're going. For all they know it could be a marsupial toe. They have to have my father out there right away. He got a speed-up on his Ford. Do you know what a Ford is? It's money. I bet you thought it was a car. s.h.i.+karpur isn't even where the dig is, it's only near, but we have to start out from there. It's a city. They named the bones they found after it. All nine of us are going, even Dee. The visa man said we've got the longest papers of 1957. Two feet at least Dee's my brother but only a baby so my grandma thinks ifs awful.”

”Is she going too? Your grandma?”

This made him laugh. ”She never goes anywhere except to meeting. She's too old. She had to have this wheelchair, so my mother built her one. It's an invention. It can climb stairs one by one all by itself. It's got a motorized ratchet on it. It's set for an eight- by six-inch step. The thing about our meeting-house is it has all these stairs.”

I leaned to search over the water for the dock: it existed as an invisible point, a platonic hypothesis, below a small smudge of decaying cabbage-head, which I took to be the little far tree. A white line of highway sat like a rigid hat on top of the swamp. Where we had been yielded to distance. Where we were throbbed with progress. The boy rowed his toy. His feet were wedged against its sides as if in stirrups. He commanded it the way a rocking-horse is commanded. We pursued our arc of advance seriously and without whimsy, fitting the crescent of our keel to hollows beneath us, the water rapidly vacating like a cheek drawn in. ”She's moving beautifully,” I told the boy.

”I'm a very fast rower,” he acknowledged.