Raintree County (116 page)

Her name was Phoebe, and that was sixteen years ago. And her name was Laura Golden, and that was sixteen years ago. The price went up right after that. In America, the price kept rising all the time.

—We're always having fairs, the Perfessor said. And they keep on moving West. New York, Philadelphia, and now Chicago. A few years from now, you can probably meet me in St. Louis. And then they'll go clear out to San Francisco, and then start all over again. And each time they'll build bigger buildings and sell more bellyaches.

—But the blondes will be the same as ever, Mr. Shawnessy said.

—Yes, but the price keeps rising all the time, the Perfessor said. It's awful what you have to pay these days for the bare necessities of life. Are you the way I am? I remember everything by the women I've had. And it's a good thing I have a retentive memory.

—I remember things the same way, Mr. Shawnessy said. If I wasn't in love, I wasn't alive.

—Of course, I generally paid my way, the Perfessor said. You
idealists are the real thieves of love. In a business civilization like our own, everything should have a price.

—It all had its price, Mr. Shawnessy said. The tags just weren't marked in advance. I paid my way too, but with a different coin.

Meet me in Philadelphia, or New York, or in Chicago. Meet me in St. Louis. Meet me at the Fair. Hotdog, mister? Buy the lady a pink lemonade, mister. And here's a flower for your coat lapel.

Meet me in the City of Brotherly Love (and Sisterly Reserve), meet me in the station where the faces pour out smiling from the hollow cars forever. I shall be waiting for you there. We shall catch a horsedrawn car and go through crowded streets and find again the city of the lost, exciting domes, archaic domes beside a river.

O, shall we live again the birthday of a nation, shall we walk again beside the river, shall I yearn again to touch my lips to yours in the City of the Love of Brothers (and the shy reserve of sisters)? O, shall you ever meet me, meet me at the Fair?

O, shall we ever find again green pinnacles beside the river, that were new as the shining new republic, and yet no sooner built than old—old, old incredibly—the oldest minarets in all the world, the buildings of the oldest fair that ever was, in the oldest of all the Raintree Counties?

Come back, come back, to that most crude of Raintree Counties, come back to that great fair. O, meet me, meet me once again, and let us walk again, retracing all our paths, and finding others that we never dared to take. O, let us saunter down the Avenue of the Republic and see the brave exhibits.

And you will have your green dress on, asserted by a saucy bustle, the floating island of your parasol will ride on rivers of exultant heat. O, you will be the stateliest exhibition of all the exhibitions.

O, meet me at the Fair, and let us walk together, arm in arm. What have we builded here beside the river in a hundred years? And is everything marked with a price-tag, including you?

O, inventory of progress, o, general store of humanity, I passed your loaded counters one day of ancient summer. I hunted love and wisdom in the guidebook of Centennial Summer. I studied maps of cities that are gone. Babylon was fair, and they say the walls were built to last forever. But Babylon is not more buried in Ozymandian sands than the city by the river in the summer of the Fair.

My God, do no trains run backward, and no clocks counterclockwise? O, let us have dispatchers that make the trains of sixteen years ago run into stations of sixteen years ago, and punctual on the hour.

O, great Dispatcher of the Cosmic Trains, Arranger of the time schedules of the Republic, Deviser of smoothly running overland expresses, do no trains run backward and no clocks counterclockwise?

—Say, what's holding up the eastbound express? the Perfessor said to the head of the station agent jutting from the window.

—Hot box in the Roiville siding, the agent said. She'll be along in a few minutes.

She'll be along, and then we'll go together to the Fair. For they had great fairs in ancient days, that aspiring and erecting people. They built so big they dwarfed all buildings ever built, and yet they never could build big enough. They built a thousand rooms and filled them full of dolls and clocks and pots and arrowheads, typewriters, sewing machines, kitchenware, steam engines, Krupp guns, locomotives, harvesters, telephones, livestock, paintings. But they left something out.

It must have been a dream that I was dreaming. It must have been a huge, disordered dream that rose from the little brick womb of Independence Hall in the middle of the City.

Tom Jefferson, John Adams, John Hancock, George Washington, Ben Franklin, come back, you ancient flingers of democratic seed, behold the thing you did. Behold the buildings out of buildings, behold the words erected out of words, the faces out of faces.

John Adams, and John Hancock, George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Tom Jefferson, old fathers, founders of myself and founders of us all, come back and see the city on the river, the City of the Love of Brothers (and of the silent and the sweet reserve of sisters), come back and meet me, meet me, meet me

John Shawnessy awoke in a hotel room in Philadelphia, to the sound of guns saluting the sunrise of the Centennial Day. He awoke with a sensation of jubilant aloneness and independence, as if he and the Republic had been reborn together.

He went to the window and looked down on Philadelphia. The street, fragrant with the horsy summer smell of the City and empty of people at this early hour, looked like a vaudeville backdrop. Every doorstep, sign, cigarstore Indian, scrap of paper, cigarbutt, burst firecracker was bathed in a painted stillness. But soon hooves would be clanging on the cobbles, horsecars would go clattering by, surf of human voices would batter him with an old excitement that was always new. And somewhere at the farthest end of the wide and sleepy street of summer, eastward on a fabled water, lifting fair banners to the day, the Centennial City waited.

By the time he reached the train station at eight o'clock, the streets were jammed with people. Two hundred thousand Americans had come to Philadelphia for the great Fourth of July Celebration.

From the sunlight of the morning, he stepped into the depot. Out of this vast brown shell, webbed with girders, filled with the sound of trains arriving and departing, faces gushed endlessly to sunlight. In tides they had been moving toward this appointment in the Centennial City. They had won through. They were the most fortunate beings who ever lived. They had come out beside the river in the dawn of the Nation's second century. Each one had a name, wore clothing, had paid the price of a ticket on the railroad. And each one clutched a guidebook to assure his safety in the City.

He found a bench and sat waiting for the train from New York, and to while away the time glanced through a letter that he had received just before leaving Raintree County.

Dear John,

Meet me in the City of Brotherly Love (and Sisterly Reserve) on the morning of the Fourth. I'll arrive at eight o'clock on the Centennial Special from New York, not unaccompanied. Wear shoes, country boy. Ladies (by an enlargement of the term) will be present.

Remember that actress you almost met in Washington eleven years ago? Perhaps—what with the long gap in our correspondence—I have omitted to tell you that that young lady—then known as Daphne Fountain—is today none other than the celebrated Laura Golden, whose name and fame (and shame) have surely penetrated even to the borders of Raintree County. Well, I've always regretted that the assignation of that far-off day was never assignated, and I have put a flea in her ear for you, my boy, hoping that she may do something for you in the Big City. She's being beaued about the town these days by—among others—your old friend and mine, that distinguished financier, Mr. Cassius P. U. Carney. They're planning to come with me, and I'm bringing a little creature comfort of my own.

It will be good to see you again, my boy, after eleven years. At eight o'clock in the station, an old man, drooling and decrepit, will accost you. Do not spurn the poor old dotard. ‘Twill be I.

J
ERUSALEM
W
EBSTER
S
TILES

The Centennial Special from New York slid by him breathing softly, its power couched in massive metal haunches. The long line of coaches, buntinghung, shrugged to a stop. Instantly, young people sprang from the doors into the arms of lovers; whole families disembarked, waving flags and rushing to get out of the station as if a door might slam shut and cut them off from happiness forever.

He was repeating to himself with a curiously deep emotion the name ‘Laura Golden.' Since the receipt of the Perfessor's letter he had been busy fitting out this name of notoriety with fictitious faces like so many masks. He was deeply moved too by the thought that he was about to see again the Perfessor and Cash Carney, neither of whom he had seen since the Civil War.

Was it really possible, then, that the tide of the indifferent years, passing blindly through a thousand gates and sluices, could cast up again these discarded faces?

—Mr. John Wickliff Shawnessy, I presume? said a familiar voice.

He had come suddenly face to face with the Perfessor, Cash Carney,
and two women. Blinking and embarrassed, he began to shake hands around.

—My God, boy, the Perfessor said, catching him by the arm, you've aged a little!

John Shawnessy's first impression was that the Perfessor had decayed considerably too, but on a second look it seemed to him that he recovered entirely—or almost so—the pattern of his old friend's face—the black busy eyes, the still black hair slicked back hard from the middle part, the trim, tall, erect figure. The vivid, hacking motion of the face remained invincibly the same and the highpitched crackling voice with its cutting edge. Meanwhile the Perfessor, resuming his old manner of genial showmanship, stepped back and motioned grandly with his cane.

—And now, folks, it gives me great pleasure to present Miss Laura Golden of New York City to Mr. John Shawnessy of Raintree County, Indiana.

—So this is the Gentleman from Indiana!

The woman who spoke, though only a little taller than middle height, somehow gave the impression of gazing down at him from a queenly eminence. Her face—this entirely unforeseeable face—wore an indefinite mocking smile fixed upon it like a mask, its habitual look, its hovering essence. The cheeks with their unusual fullness, the eyes with their drooping lids, the wide cheekbones, the full-lipped mouth, the nose delicate but receding too quickly to the bridge, the pointed chin gave this face an oriental lushness at variance with its pale, clear skin. The tawny gold hair was parted precisely in the middle, pulled flat, and gathered into a heavy ball behind to show the ears. The face, thus thrust forward, as it were, and nodding on a slender neck, this face—inescapable, fullorbed, calm with its disdainful smile—abruptly destroyed all the imprecise masks he had been fashioning.

At first he thought the smile was from the eyes—wideset, long, fountain-green—halfclosed under languid lids. But on looking directly into them, he saw that they did not smile at all, that they had a kind of jadelike impassivity. The smile then came from the mouth. It was lushly fleshed, mobile, beautifully formed, but just at the left corner a faint scar twisted the upper lip. Perhaps this scar made it impossible for the face not to smile its imperial smile.

—This is a long deferred pleasure, Miss Golden, he said. I have been waiting at the stage door eleven years for the purpose of making your acquaintance.

She pointed one smoothly sculptured shoulder at him, and in a voice mocking, lowpitched, thrillingly distinct, said,

—That makes you the most persistent stage-door Johnny of all time, Mr. Shawnessy.

Her mocking laugh reverberated in the hollow shell of the train station, blending with the murmur of wheels and voices. Smiling his pensive, innocent smile, Mr. John Shawnessy made a stately bow, and Miss Laura Golden (as if they had rehearsed their parts) gracefully extended her white hand, softfingered, with lacquered nails, and with one green jewel blazing on the ring finger. He kissed her hand, surprised at its warmth; he smelled the perfume of it vaguely disturbing; the great jewel blazed in his left eye.

The Perfessor's creature comfort, a Miss Phoebe Veach, was a monumental blonde, ripely thirty-five, with a healthy, appealing face and marvellous hair, the color of ripe corn, full of yellowness and life.

Back at the hotel, where the whole party had reservations, the ladies spent some time in their rooms, while the gentlemen waited in the lobby reviewing the years between.

—I suppose you're running the country now, on the sly, Cash, John Shawnessy said. You've gone fast and far since you hitched your star to a locomotive—and your locomotive to a star.

—I barely keep ahead of my creditors, Cash said.

He pulled out his palmsmoothed gold watch. Eleven years had faintly stained and yellowed him and fixed the rapt abstraction of his eyes.

—This business recession, he said, has had us all humping. The layman has an erroneous idea of wealth. What you fellas call wealth is only an increased ability to go into debt. You heard of the man who was boasting about his speculations: Two years ago, he said, I didn't have a nickel. Now I owe two million dollars. Ha. Ha.

He said the laughter flatly without humor. He went on to explain how his various interests were still suffering from the Panic of '73 and how important it was for Hayes to get the nod in November. After a while, he said,

—I got to keep some business appointments here. Good chance to see the Republican nominee and the men around him. Hope you boys'll pardon me if I don't go to the program. Maybe John'll look after Laura for me.

—Sure. Be glad to, Cash.

—The ladies already know, Cash said. See you at the Centennial Ball tonight, boys.