Landscape: Memory (22 page)

Mr. Thwing held the blue slips back up to the light.

"July 23, Mr. Maxwell F. Kosegarten. And the same for you, Mr. Taqdir."

"Don't we have to register?" Duncan asked.

"It would be my pleasure," Mr. Thwing answered, holding a box of pamphlets up to our noses. "One each, please."

I took one, expecting a course catalog.

"Orestes," it said. "Euripides."

"For class," Mr. Thwing explained. "Read it by Wednesday. I'll have you set in an instant," and he took our blue slips and disappeared behind a foggy glass door. The pulling and slamming of various drawers and the flipping of pages leaked out from the small enclosure.

This registration procedure seemed most unorthodox. Mr. Thwing had not even asked after our interests.

"How do you know which courses we're to take?" I called out loudly, throwing decorum to the wind. I heard all activity cease, and then a heavy silence.

"This is not high school, Mr. Field," our queer helper called back finally. "Believe me, I know which courses you'll need to take." And he continued with his mysterious fiddling.

The long silence passed slowly by, filled with thoughts of fiddlehead ferns and that strange immediacy of moments so distant flipping suddenly forward.

(Succulent green stems, sturdy and small; that little fist of leaves so sweet and tender, balled up snug and sporting a soft red fuzz. Father played the fiddle when I was young but injured his back, leaning romantically over a drunken woman while fiddling a little to-do. We'd not even had breakfast yet.)

"Don't ask questions," Mr. Thwing cautioned, offering up two pink index cards crowded with numbers and "Aldredge Thwing" in florid script at their bottoms. "Without my approval you'll be dropped down into useless surveys."

"Dropped down out of what?" Duncan asked, looking at the indecipherable cards.

"Out of the seminars I've placed you in," he explained, as though it were obvious. "I take a special interest in some of our more promising entrants." This flattery was not lost on me.

"How do you know which seminars we'd like to be in?" Duncan asked. He seemed uncertain if Mr. Thwing's kind interest was a blessing or a curse.

"We have information," Mr. Thwing assured us, menacingly. "Report to Miss Tartaine tomorrow. In the Grove. She'll be expecting you."

"When?" I asked.

"Very early. Impossibly early. Nine or ten. You give her the cards, she'll give you your schedules."

"What if we don't like them?" Duncan pressed on fearlessly.

Mr. Thwing kept mum, sliding his hands nervously along the smooth countertop, evidently gathering his energies to reply.

"If you don't like them?" he asked back.

"Right," Duncan said, nodding yes.

"If you don't like them?"

I feared his melon head might burst.

"Then
change
them!" he thundered, spitting wildly with every consonant.

  * * * 

15 AUGUST 1915

We were late reporting to Miss Tartaine. Very late.

We caught a trolley train to campus and wandered a bit helpless and frazzled, everything going so terribly wrong as it was. There were all sorts of signs and directions leading all new undergraduates to a lovely grove near California Hall. There, spread out on a field of tables and charts, was the registration labyrinth.

Miss Tartaine sat far off to the north, at a large oak table set in amongst the eucalyptus, marked by a sign which said simply "Miss Tartaine. Thwing."

"You're late," she said. "Very late."

"Should we get in line?" I asked, gesturing back behind us at the long snaking rows of freshmen, all clamoring up to tables in the bright sunny grove.

"Do you have cards from Mr. Thwing?" she asked simply.

"Yes."

"No need, then." She took our crumpled pink cards and smiled pleasantly at the elegant script.

"Being late, of course, you're no appeal on this," and she inscribed our class lists carefully on heavy white paper, fixing our future with bold black lines.

"Of course," I echoed, wondering why we were the only ones in this dark dappled corner of the grove.

"Why have our schedules been set by Mr. Thwing?" Duncan asked.

"You're curious why this privilege is yours?" Miss Tartaine asked back, rephrasing.

"Yes."

She looked out into the sun and thought. "Your record in secondary school, a recommendation, some kind word. . . . Evidently something has impressed Mr. Thwing. It's a service he provides for a handful of bright young minds each year." She finished up and handed us the two carefully scripted lists. "It is one of life's mysteries," she mused.

I looked eagerly at the form and noticed some important errors straightaway. Miss Tartaine saw me start stammering out my objections and simply raised a soft hand of warning, tapping her pen to the offending list.

''That,'' she intoned, poking again at the paper, "is all ye know, and all ye need to know."

I must admit to being excited by "Memory," of course, and Kurtz, who taught Ruskin to the Upper Level.

I loosened the grip of my bow tie and let some air down my front, wiggling the baggy legs of my shorts too, for added ventilation. The hills rose up abruptly behind us, thick with lovely green trees and then topped by open grasslands. There were many houses clustered in amongst the trees, all along thin winding streets, wiggling up into the highlands. I fancied we'd find some suitable lodgings in one of them, owned by some kindly professor's family willing to let out the upstairs, it long ago vacated by their rebellious, fascinating children who'd run away to join some polar expedition.

Duncan took the piece of paper from my hands and held it up to his:

I looked up from the schedules with a bad feeling in me.

"We don't have any classes together," Duncan said, confirming my suspicions, and sounding very mad like they'd done it to us on purpose. "Except Military Training."

I looked again at my list. "Pm not going to attend Military Training."

"It's required. Max. 'All able-bodied young men.' " He held the paper up to my face.

"I'm
not
going to Military Training. I'll cut my leg off and send it to them."

"You're so open-minded. Max." Duncan looked like he was about to burst. "I
hate
this place," and he dropped the two lists onto the dirty ground.

We walked downhill through the cool shade of a tall stand of eucalyptus. The trees crowded round a small creek that cut a gully through the middle of campus. Some of the buildings reminded me of the Fair, huge tan stone buildings, pillared and symmetrical, sporting doors and windows far beyond human scale. A collar of decorative ornamentation ran round their tops, thick with jutting gargoyles, Greek names and pithy sayings.

I thought about our situation, us shuffling along in silence, dragging our toes down the dirty hill as slow as could be, and tried to think what could make things better. Really I wanted to be back in Bolinas, even back five years ago in Bolinas.

"Let's go to a ballgame," I suggested, as a way of getting over this horrible morning. He looked out across the bay as we walked along, turning toward me as he thought.

"I don't know. Max," he started, as if apologizing. He stopped for a moment, keeping on with his own thoughts, evidently pursuing demons that even baseball could not dispel. "A ballgame doesn't sound right just now."

He cocked his head, hoping I'd understand.

I imagined, for a moment, that he was mad at me and that made me angry and a little panicky, like if he left right then I'd be so confused and nervous I'd curl up and cry. But that thought was far too complicated and I couldn't imagine ever finding words to get it right. So I just nodded yes, I understood, not wanting to risk speaking what I felt, and he nodded back.

"I kind of want to go running," he continued. "Just running by myself. It helps when I'm mad."

The sun sat still in the sky and the air was silent, the trees halted by the absence of wind, motionless. There really was no one around, no cars or trolleys. I could feel the wide green hills rising up behind me, looming large enough to make me feel a slight pressure on the back of my head and neck. I walked all the way to the ferry without really stopping to think, and rode across the open blue bay looking back at Berkeley, thinking I might see Duncan if I looked hard enough.

I imagined I could just think him back near me. Not that I could think so well he actually would appear, but just, I imagined, that I had so many and such particular thoughts about him that that would be enough to make me feel the same as if he were with me. I'd think them all as intently as I could, each tiny touch and tone of his presence. I'd remember so vividly, as I truly did, every possible feature of him being with me and then I'd feel the same as if he were with me.

If memory could hold him completely I'd not feel this sudden loneliness. But it couldn't and I did, and I could only lie there on the worn carpet of our little front room and cry over some elusive failure. Our failure to get classes together, or my failure to say "Don't leave me now," or his failure to understand that that is what I meant, though I couldn't find the words to say it.

16 AUGUST 1915

We made wonderful friends with an old Latvian woman and her daughter, and They've invited us for dinner this Wednesday. They live on Hillegass off Parker in a towering thin, three-story, some hybrid strain of row house with nothing else in its row. It must've been built by someone who fancies windmills, and needs only the blades to complete the picture.

Their rooms are full to bursting with Latvian doo-dahs: ornately carved little mushroom boxes, mammoth swaddling boards and wooden toy birds with articulating wings and dangerously sharp beaks. Mrs. Meekshtais, for that's her name, explained that these were intended for the Latvian exhibition at the Fair but then the plan was scuttled by the war and political squabbling among the Baltic states. Unt, her daughter (who'll be going to Berkeley as well), performed a quaint folk dance accompanied by the melodic howling of Mrs. Meekshtais, who also played the harmonium.

They offered us a tiny little room off the kitchen, as that was the only space available in the house. It really was far too small but we promised we'd take it if nothing bigger came up in the next two days and indeed we would have, had this other special place not been available.

This other place is nestled on the hill north of campus, set back amongst a grouping of young cedars. Its steep pitched roof rises to a crest above the trees. We found it by accident, calling at any house that appealed to us as we wandered around east of Euclid. The southern wall has a window stretching two stories high. It opens up on a vast living room with nothing but wooden beams and a rich wood ceiling overhead. There are two other wings, one running east, very squat, with stone walls and a fat thatch roof, and the other jutting out to the west.

We knocked on the heavy wooden door.

Mrs. Dunphy answered. It was dumb luck.

"Oh, dear," she said. "Oh, my, dearie. What a shock." Duncan wasn't sure what to make of this display of familiarity and looked to me for the introductions.

"Maxwell," I reminded her, "Maxwell Kosegarten. The Fair in late May?"

"Oh, yes, of course. Maxwell, of course. That awful night at the Fair. Your terrible dizzy spell." We both clucked with reminiscence: