Part 20 (1/2)

So, as they fish the idyllic mountain stream, Harmon Liges regards Roland Shrikesdale III with a grave little smile. His pudgy child's face creased in concentration, his close-set eyes narrowed against the splas.h.i.+ng water as if he's frightened of it; his body taut with antic.i.p.ation of a fish snapping up his lure and yanking him off balance. (For many are the tales told of fishermen, fallen in icy-cold streams, whose thigh-high boots fill up with water and weigh them down to drown, if they don't die beforehand of hypothermia.) Now that he's begun to grow a beard Smith looks less vulnerable than he had; now that his skin isn't so pasty, and so mottled, he's begun to resemble . . . Harmon Liges.

Poor Roland: poor Robert! Casting out his line again, and getting it snarled; and now the thread is jammed in the reel; and the gaily colored little fly, a bit of red, orange and yellow feathers, is caught in the fabric of his trousers. Smith's face crinkles with an infant's despair as if, were he alone, he might burst into tears . . . but, fortunately, he's not alone, his friend and companion Harmon Liges has been watching him closely, and will come to his rescue.

Yes. It's time. Liges draws the gleaming stainless steel knife out of his waist sheath and makes his way carefully to Smith. ”Here, Robert,” he says, ”-I can fix that for you.”

”I BRING NOT PEACE BUT A SWORD”

So mysterious does young Darian Licht seem to his cla.s.smates at the Vanderpoel Academy for Boys, with his inward gaze, his dreamy frowning smile and fair light feathery hair, the way like a flame he appears, and disappears, and again appears out of the very air-his suitemate ”Tige” Satterlee (of Baltimore, Maryland; father an attorney for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad) one day asks him in the blunt bluff Brit style affected by the more sophisticated Vanderpoel students why he is the way he is.

Breathless Darian, only just returned from the school chapel where he's been playing the organ, turns baffled, blinking, ”But-how 'am' I? What do you mean?”

In the room with Satterlee are several other boys-all regarding Darian with quizzical stares. He'd be intimidated by them except why should they want to hurt him? Satterlee's soccer teammates.

Satterlee says, accusing, ”You're so G.o.d-d.a.m.ned happy.”

”I am?-I don't mean to be.”

”G.o.d d.a.m.n, you are happy, aren't you?”

Darian looks nervously at the other boys-”Chitt” Chesterson, ”Fritzie” van Gelder, ”Benbo” Morgan-and sees they aren't smiling. Husky boys with arms folded, facial hair beginning to sprout on their jaws and upper lips where, on Darian's, there's only the smoothest fairest down. All men are our enemies, as they are strangers.

Darian stammers, ”I don't know,” seeing that the unpredictable Satterlee may be in a dangerous mood, ”-I don't think about things like that. I was playing my-music.”

Has a lighted match been touched to Satterlee, causing him to flare up, contemptuous, grinning-”Your music! 'Your' music! What is this that makes you so happy, some place you go to?-like playing with yourself?-some place that isn't here?”

Satterlee stamps his feet, big feet for a fourteen-year-old, and the floor shudders. Here's here, and no mistake.

Uneasily Darian says, ”Well, I don't know.”

”Benbo” Morgan, who's J. P. Morgan's grandson, lurches forward with a threatening grin. ”Y'know-you act like nothing touches you. Like you're above it all, Licht.”

Darian protests, ”But everything touches me.”

He's backing off, smiling. They're going to hurt him, not just give him orders. Can he escape? Turn to smoke, so they're striking only the air? Disappear through the single mirror in the room, a gleaming slanted rhomboid atop a bureau? Or transform himself into a few bars of music, cascading treble notes like shattering icicles, flying into his head as his hands wandered over the organ's keyboards too swiftly for him to pause and jot them down- ”Touches you, maybe,” Satterlee says in his drawling mid-Southern accent, in which fury and hurt commingle, ”but goes right on through. Doesn't it! Eh!”

Shoving Darian back against a table, and the books in Darian's arms go flying, Bach's Two- and Three-Part Inventions, Chopin's Preludes, Scriabin's Piano Sonatas, and Darian freezes and goes inward and he's in his secret place in Muirkirk invisible as musical notes swirl about him as the boys, whooping and yelping, close in upon him.

WHAT IS THIS that makes you so happy and of such happiness he can't speak. He'd never inform on his tormentors, they know they can depend upon him, Darian Licht isn't going to crack like certain of the other targets of their animosity for whom they feel only contempt while for Darian, rumored to be a genius, they feel a grudging admiration, respect if not affection, there's something so . . . strange about him, a light that comes up in his eyes, luminous as a cat's.

Perhaps, he's beginning to think, he's Abraham Licht's son after all: a master of escapes, disappearances. Of things not quite what they seem.

It's a thought that fills Darian with dread. For though he loves Abraham Licht with a fierce, helpless love, he's old enough now and mature enough to know he can't approve of the man. And certainly I never understood him.

THERE'S DARIAN LICHT in his navy blue woollen blazer and school tie (dull rust-red stripes upon a dull gold background). Darian whose eyes are watering with a sinus headache. Darian whose heart pounds with excitement as the sonorous old bell in the bell tower tolls calmly and ma.s.sively reverberating through the chatter of hundreds of boys in the dining hall like the very speech of G.o.d, wordless. There's Darian frowning over problems in plane geometry, there's Darian in baggy s.h.i.+rt and shorts trailing after a screaming pack of boys on the soccer field, shuddering with cold and his lips and fingernails purple yet stubbornly or out of futility he continues to run, trot, stagger, stumble actually managing as in a dream of comical implausibility to kick the ball once, twice, a third time . . . and to make a goal. There's Darian silently obeying the commandments of upper-form boys, military-style orders barked in raw adolescent voices Attention! Sweep up in here, Licht. Attention! Polish my boots, Licht. Attention! But his attention is elsewhere, that place to which he escapes, Muirkirk, music, the wind in the marsh gra.s.ses, the high whistling wind out of the Chautauqua Mountains, the gentle touch of his mother's fingers at the nape of his neck what is this that makes you so happy so happy released in the late afternoon from cla.s.ses running breathless and graceful as a deer across the school's back acre to the gravel road and to Academy Street and so to Twelfth Street where his piano instructor lives upstairs in a tall narrow putty-colored row house, Herr Professor Adolf Hermann, lately of Dsseldorf, Germany, eyes awash with rheumy tears behind gold-rimmed gla.s.ses, droplets of sweat easing down his fatty cheeks and neck, he says not a word to any of his (American) pupils of the grief festering in his heart, the hope that Germany will crush her enemies, the terror that Germany will crush her enemies . . . and then? What will be the fate of Germans in North America? Darian Licht, his most gifted American student, perhaps indeed the most gifted student Herr Hermann has ever had, sees newspapers scattered about the steam-heated parlor, the war headlines GERMAN SUBMARINES SINK FOUR U.S. MERCHANT s.h.i.+PS, WILSON VOWS WAR, the newspaper photographs, averts his eyes and goes at once to the piano and adjusts the stool to his height (still short for his age, he despairs of growing), begins nervously with his warming-up scales, his technical exercises, today it's F-sharp minor, harmonic forms, melodic forms, contrary motion, triads solid and broken. Darian is always nervous, always falters initially, Professor Hermann grunts in sympathy, he quite understands, you are a servant of the piano and of the music that rushes through it, you will never be its equal.

At the conclusion of a feverish hour spent mostly in fragments and repet.i.tions (Chopin's Prelude no. 16, Presto con fuoco) Darian is shaking with exhaustion and Professor Hermann, dabbing at his oily face, gives off an odor of angry excitement, or excited anger. To be equal to such music! To be equal to . . . G.o.d! No other pupil is scheduled to follow Darian, for Professor Hermann's pupils are few, their numbers dwindling, so the lesson continues for another hour . . . or more.

”A pity, my boy,” Professor Hermann says, wiping his face with a soiled handkerchief, ”-that you didn't come to me until now, when it's almost too late; you, at your age, with your bad keyboard habits; and civilization itself coming to an end.”

In Abraham Licht's judgment, the world certainly isn't coming to an end but to a new beginning.

War began in Europe on 1 August but Abraham Licht, like numerous others, had been shrewdly antic.i.p.ating it for weeks, reading all the newspapers he could get to seek out confirmation of his sense of a rich, chaotic Destiny. He tells Darian that the past and the future will be divided; the old, the worn-out, the dead, will rapidly fade into extinction; those who live now will have the privilege of being reborn, if they are but strong enough.

As he himself is strong, and as Darian must be strong.

”We Lichts have been cheated of our birthright in the past,” Abraham says, vehemently, ”-but the future is ours, I vow.”

YES, IT'S A very good time; an opportune time; many citizens are gazing hypnotized (with dread, with fascination) across the Atlantic Ocean, and have relaxed their vigilance here. It's an era of plans; almost too many plans; one must narrow one's focus; one must move slowly, cannily, with care . . . .In the autumn of 1914 as a student at the Vanderpoel Academy, Darian Licht has the opportunity should he wish to cultivate it of befriending the sons, grandsons, nephews and young cousins of such ill.u.s.trious Americans as F. Augustus Heinze, Edward H. Harriman, Elias Shrikesdale, Stuyvesant Shrikesdale, Rear Admiral Robley ”Fighting Bob” Evans, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, the Reverend Cornelius Crowan, J. P. Morgan. When Darian protests that he doesn't like these boys, Abraham Licht replies testily that that hardly matters-”Get them to like you, my boy.”

Tuition is high at the Academy, despite the grim appearance of its neo-Gothic granite buildings and the notoriously combative atmosphere of its cla.s.srooms, dormitories and playing fields, for, as Abraham Licht has explained to Darian, the school is one of the oldest private schools in the United States, founded 1721; it's closely modeled upon Harrow, though football rather than rugby is played, and boys aren't required to wear top hats and tails on Sundays; and there are so many distinguished gentlemen (in business, politics, religion) among its graduates, to list them would be exhausting.

The very name ”Vanderpoel” (like ”Harvard,” ”Princeton,” ”Yale”) is invaluable, in the right quarters.

”So the cost of the school is hardly an object,” Abraham Licht says, ”where your education is concerned.”

Darian hadn't wanted to leave Muirkirk; he hadn't wanted to matriculate at Vanderpoel, despite its reputation; the very look of the old, dignified, forbidding buildings dampened his spirits. It was a notion of his that, away from Muirkirk, he would lose his mother forever; he would lose his soul; he would, at the very least, be stricken with homesickness. Yet once at school in his drafty, unadorned third-floor room in the dormitory known familiarly as ”Fish” (Marcus Fish Hall, 1844), thrown together with a fourth-form boy named Satterlee who's sometimes cruel, sometimes condescending, sometimes unexpectedly friendly, even teasing, Darian has discovered that, much of the time, he's happy after all. For Muirkirk is my music, to be entered at any time. Even silence is a kind of music. His cla.s.smates seem to respect him even when they don't seem to like him; there's a stubbornness in him that discourages bullies, the banes of such private schools.

”But you must try to make friends pragmatically, Darian,” Father tells him, ”-and not leave things to blind chance. You must make the effort, son, as we all do.” Father raps his fingertips on a tabletop; nicotine-stained fingers with slightly swollen knuckles.

”Yes, Father. I suppose.”

”It isn't always easy, you know: you must swallow your natural Licht pride and your inclination.”