Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (7 page)

Lids lowered, she was accepting both the praise and the squeeze. “I so look forward to the time down there,” she said.

Linhouse thanked them once more for dinner and pamphlet, promising to send on a small publication of his own. “Wish yours were all in Greek, Might have more chance of understanding it.” The dedication caught his eye.
To my Wife,
followed by: ay
^M
+ n = bx
^M
(a—x
^N
)

“You understand that, I suppose,” he said to Rachel. She nodded on her long neck, her eyes very wide. He waited. She didn’t tell him. He said good-bye rather brusquely. When he turned again at the door, she hadn’t moved and seemed still to be staring at him, as in some primitive or else very sophisticated drawing, from one long Etruscan eye.

The following week he saw his mother safely through her successful operation and contentedly ensconced in a nursing home where she could settle down to being “the pretty American who is really more like us”—a role she’d been playing most of her life, and was now, except for the prettiness that had lasted best, getting harder and harder to define on both sides. She’d spent her life getting away from that same State of Maine which had provided her with enough stamina to do so, this energy of hers in turn having been mistaken by his father for that sexual one of which later performance had shown him to be so in need.

“The Americans have an orgiastic climate, a Puritan heritage, and whole infusions of mixed bloods,” his father had written happily—and finally. “They want most to be a political nation but their own climate and distances have outwitted them. The subsequent melee is wonderful. No, I won’t come back.”

Privately, Linhouse knew his parents had gotten away with blaming temperamental differences on national ones. His father, correspondent for a London newspaper and circuit lecturer, had always been careful to send very good maintenance, to keep a respectable housekeeper for visiting progeny, and never to be seen with young women who had too much fringe. Meanwhile he had sent volumes of Chesterfieldian advice to all, those letters to his wife usually ending on a sharply human note: “Send for Betty, I’ve had enough of her,” or “Time for Patrick, isn’t it? Good God, he’ll scarcely remember me!” His wife in her own meanwhile had kept her calendar full, her causes and acquaintances visited, a circle of admirers of the opera-escort type dancing round the Maypole of a lively establishment, and almost certainly no lover. So, with the help of Atlantic crossings almost as common as mailings, the personal facade of the family had been preserved.

It followed that of the four children conceived before it had become a facade—while his mother no doubt was thinking of dynasty and his father wasn’t thinking—all had emerged like Linhouse, with a strong sense of the personal quotient. None had been too shaken about psychically to make good enough use of a dowry so suspiciously regarded by the century; all, within the aberrations of that century, were leading exactly the dull to vivid lives of people brought up exactly otherwise. Perhaps they hadn’t yet made full use of it.

Linhouse, who by his and his grandparents’ preference had been reared by them, was the quiet one; no one had ever said dangerously so. As one of the sawed-in-half who more normally came of divorce, he found himself no more reserved in the face of experience than was wise, still open to it with enough of the élan that most probably was meted out in the egg. Maybe he
was
a divided man. He accepted differences between nations, between people, between the sexes—and on this last score, was rather certain of his own. This seemed to him comfortable. As a human being, exclusive of his larger social obligations, he expected to itch, to weep, hopefully to love, and regretfully to die.

Particularly re the itch, of course, the words of Linhouse senior, deceased, now reverberated. “If the children are to spend that much time in England with you, they must be made to understand what a marvelously topical people they are among. Politics is
not
the full explanation of my countrymen. Early in life we are taught to sympathize rather than to feel, and we have absolutely no short-term talent for domestic drama, i.e. ‘scenes.’ That’s all right, the children will get enough of that over here.” After some digression, to the effect that Americans rarely had sympathies but always thought they had feelings, he continued. “As to summer plans. Our personal system, like any, was simpler when the children were young. But advantages still accrue. Summer romance, for instance, is particularly pretty in England, or used to be. The English are by no means sexless, indeed are well able to produce downy-rose girls and Anglo-Greek boy babies in moments of absentmindedness, especially if there is a touch of Irish in the family. But their deepest emotional shock is after all sunlight, and it is no wonder that in the long, greenish instances between they are forced to develop the pools, the literature and the society, and an addiction to warm drink. One must never forget also that ‘chaff’ is merely their natural defense; such a range of sympathy demands a constant cutting down of the candidates for it. The result of all this being that it is absolutely the ideal place to get rid of an emotional encumbrance!” As usual, the letter had a postscript. “N.B. Though Patrick is acquitting you admirably at Harvard—June marks splendid!—he’s a little under the weather otherwise and is joining you shortly. Send Jack.”

So Jack had been sent. In actual presence, his father hadn’t seemed nearly as wise—or perhaps had known quite well that his wisdom was of the epistolary kind. Certainly he’d done better with whichever children and countries happened to be at a distance. And now, from the severest distance, he was doing best of all.

For it was true, Linhouse thought, lounging on a summer’s day, at his mother’s flat, near one of her bell-glasses—the spirit of ridicule ran through this land like rheumatism; it was impossible to die of love here. Shelley, who hadn’t, slept Victorianly, his marble limbs sprawled in a crypt at the Oxford which had thrown him out in the body and readmitted him in the statue, surely the most naked thing in England. After that visit and other weekends, sailing-club or walking-tour, alone or accompanied and all as friendly as field, stream, and pub could make them, Linhouse sat for some days in the park with his mother, who was now convalescing.

Watching the pigeons, he understood even less why birds were the favorite fauna of the English, but more about the local attitude toward what might be phrased monosyllabically: Hop. The girl he’d chosen for his trip down the Thames danced at the Windmill Theatre but had turned out to be a bishop’s illegitimate daughter; her mother, it appeared, had remained in the vestry of life. The girl and he spent the night together, not without some political conversation.

He began to seek the company of other children of misalliance like himself. Almost everybody these days seemed to think himself or herself one of them—it was too simple. The days passed with a rubble and a twink, from furnace-groan—they had central heating in a way—to cufflinks and all the other knickknack medley of domestic sounds and routines that so easily became the permanent nostalgias of life. If he were to choose the coziest, it began to be the crowd of teacups waiting in the pre-dark of the kitchen cabinet in Wiltshire, in the house he would never again see. His vocabulary changed again with a natter and a patter and the echo of dozens of words a man could never decently use but kept hearing, the wireless keeping up the class war anxiously, Cockney on the Underground like two whelks talking, and the toy talk of two homos in Soho, two somos in Oho saying, “Oh all that sort of thing and tiddly-pom.” England redivivus. He was no longer in agony. Travel had cured him, or repatriated him. Like a good native son, he began to think of France for a change, but since money was ever more pressing—returned to the States.

On his return, by boat, the skyline smashed his teacups. Ah, stunning life, he thought, as the cab sped him from the docks, and he waited with respect for this land to assault him. The torn selvage of all coastal cities fluttered by him, all estuaries of the same debris, of what rust could and did corrupt, shot through with a nostalgia of oceans deserted for the single dull thud of land. He passed under the very mammoth that had brought him. Brave flashed the luxury bric-a-brac shops—stores. He thought with dread of his long-sealed flat—apartment. All along, he knew quite well what was happening.

In the naphtha gloom of the garage where he waited for his storaged car to be brought down to him, he was assailed by a sudden vision of the real, the right and the primeval—some copper beeches he’d once seen, kneeling with them in their own root mast, their tops several golden heavens away, in the profound air of Sussex. The grass there, so green. He forced himself quickly to think of sequoias, trees on this side of the water, and only as far as next summer’s adventure. He promised himself; as an experienced traveler, he knew what he was dealing with. The movable fantasy—already on the move. In the melancholic of other returns, he applied honesty. To all the vanitie of space, he now replied. That no country really waits for one personally, on any side of the water, that the home one is the most topical of all. That all-travel—no matter how palmy, or how upflung the finny sail—is only an outer bruise on an innerness that speeds with light. He wasn’t thinking of, preaching to, anyone in particular, elsewhere.

Looking round the garage, he reconvinced himself of the ultimate fantasticality of right-where-one-is. Carefully, for himself, he rehearsed the small fantasies of the route home: first the guilty twilight of Harlem—a dream of which had sometimes stopped him in his tracks in Paddington, then the all-purpose plaid handkerchief of suburbia, and finally the dark, polite verdure—nowhere near so savage as Scotland, of his adopted hills. When the attendant came with the car, he tipped him. Sinking but resigned, he refitted himself into the car. The man leaned on the window to give him a friendly warning. Be sure to avoid midtown traffic; the latest astronaut was being welcomed home there, with confetti.

She was in the back room. When he entered her house, several nights later, letter in hand, he was almost convinced of it. To be haunted it is necessary only to feel oneself the ghost. He had come in from that doorstep at last. Inside the little downstairs with its steps going straight up, the two sitting rooms, bowing at each other from opposing mirrors, were as neat as a “restoration” from some Williamsburg of memory. The curtains were impossibly clean—he heard her word for them, “priscilla,” rustle again in her mouth, and saw how she looked at them with a touch of the farmgirl’s satisfaction in having what one is supposed to have. Once (the day he’d suggested a drive to Pennsylvania) she’d told him about the severe house-habits of the “Dutch”—what kind of housewifery had been going on here, in this sealed house? And once, going on into the back room, he’d at first thought himself alone with all that welter of stuff, then caught sight of her, asleep he thought, on that long New Guinea couch, but when he bent over her there’d been a sudden gleam in the lashes and she’d murmured a bit of Dutch talk at him.
“Wann dich ime busch ferlore hoscht, guk ame bam nuf.”
He’d made her write it down for him afterwards, meaning to have it engraved on a Christmas bangle. “When lost in the woods, look up a tree.”

It was all he had of her, except for the letter he was holding. Carrying this, he tiptoed toward the back with stilted step, unable to keep out of his gait a dream that princes were still needed here. And with his hand on the light switch, he’d made his discovery—rather early for a philosopher, circumstantially sad for a man. He knew what it was for which he did care.

Still in the dark, he pondered it, as if he hadn’t a world of time to do it in, or, since he was surely going to find her asleep there, he had to get it straight before he turned on the light. Was it in her difference from other women—that in the dark all cats weren’t gray? Perhaps, a little. But he’d known women who were far more different—novelties against whose planes, mental or physical, a man was hard put to it to recline. Was it only sexual choice then, merely sex, that ess-shaped giggle of the cosmos, which held him here to hope against hope that when the lamp glowed she would be standing between the cherubs, a median, white-budded plant just enough different, at the small fork of her, for him? Perhaps—a little. Or more than either, that man even in his psyche was only a part-time Narcissus? Was it that he loved—as men had learned to call it—because in one final way, and a number of frivolous ones, she was different from him?

The answer he got was the worst: that he was still speaking of her to himself in the present. At the flip of a switch he would see straight ahead through a window, out where a light made a coastline of trees. If, by a similar projection, he could be his last winter’s self walking by, it could know who was inside here. In a way he could. For he understood what he cared for. And he knew who was here. The pain of being thus double was ugly. There, in the dark, his own memorial service was long.

When he snapped on the light, it was no longer needed; dawn was growing, entering the room with its gray usurper’s stride. The room seemed unchanged, holding the same host of immoderate objects still covered by the same moderate dust—as if in this most miniature time lapse, each had been awarded its exact pinch of the dust of time. Nearest him, a poggamoggan—
War Club of the Plains Indians, Authentic
—lay crossed with a small archeological steal,
Gold Armband, Sutton Hoo—
fake. Carefully his glance edged toward the corner where lay all New Guinea. Alone there, the long couch still sailed. He turned his head slightly to the right, toward the mantel wall. The cherubs still flew. She wasn’t standing between them. Even if he hadn’t had the directions in her letter, or had been a newcomer to all the wild wrack that floated this room like a Sargasso, he couldn’t have missed what was.

It stood there under the glassy shape which was so clearly only its covering, and it had only the one quality. Everything else here strained or pleaded under a confusion of so many, the smallest shard in some way beating upon the world, on with it. If the total medley here could have been heard, it would have been an irregular one of all kinds of human loops and eddies stretching to be heard above and outside the concentric itself of sound.