The Night of Trees Read online

  “Charlie Gilman says you’re an excellent football player. He’s my nephew, by the way. Not a very bright boy, but honest as the day is long.”

  “I guess so,” Murray said. The old man’s fingers, wet and brown, looked like old rawhide.

  “The usual modesty, I suppose. I can see you’re bright—not like a football player. Excuse my prejudice, but I’ve tried to teach generations of football players how to distinguish between the eighteenth century and that other century that began with eighteen hundred. I always wondered how Charlie could remember all those complicated football plays.”

  “It’s hard sometimes,” Murray said, “especially when somebody’s just hit you on the head.”

  “Ridiculous pastime.”

  “Once our quarterback couldn’t remember anything but his high-school plays, so we played for ten minutes that way.”

  “But Charlie said you were an English major.”

  “I am.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you something, then. I played four years of football at Bowdoin.” He laughed, and waded back to shore for another stone.

  Mrs. Wilson called them in for lunch. She, like her husband, was lean, withered, and Yankee-looking. She was very easygoing, especially about her housework, and was usually rather disorganizedly preparing the next meal. When not doing that she hunted mushrooms, her mushroom book in hand, and she would scrupulously try each new kind (this day it was a strange hue of coral mushroom) a meal or two in advance before she served them to Murray and her husband. She also liked to cook such things as porcupine and woodchuck, which she stalked in the nearby woods and fields with an old singleshot .22 with a folding stock—something called a Marble Game Getter. The Wilsons nearly always read during meals, which they ate on the big screened porch of the main cabin, and next to each of their places was a wooden bookholder. When Murray expressed approval of this custom, Mr. Wilson made him a bookholder too. They all kept their places with table knives.

  This noon they had macaroni and cheese, which was rather conventional food, for them, but Mrs. Wilson swore that fresh-water clams, if she could find a book about them (was Murray going to the Baker Library by any chance in the near future?), looked awfully meaty. That evening they were going to have the legs of forty frogs she had gigged at night along the shore. Her hair was wispy and excited looking; her glasses were always dotted with spray of one kind or another, smudges and loose eyelashes; Murray wondered if she had ever heard that glasses could be cleaned. All through lunch she read a book about the hunting wasp. “Not something to eat,” she said seriously.

  Because the Wilsons were so casual about the work he did, instead of being diffident he found himself disapproving of their casual attitude toward maintenance; he changed things without asking, began projects he knew they would approve of with nothing but vague wonder. He moved the children’s play area—swings, teeter-totters, and sandbox—away from the parking area. He knocked down the big outdoor grill and built it again so that it faced the prevailing wind and the cook wouldn’t have to breathe smoke all the time. He hauled gravel for the parking area and filled in the potholes. He sanded and repainted the swing seats (after having received a large sliver from one of them). He found and removed the huge submerged rock that had shredded the bottoms of all the rowboats. Sometimes Mr. Wilson helped him, and when he did the old man worked right along with him, and in a wonderfully tactful, tacit way made it clear that he was there as helper only, and that Murray would give the orders.

  Murray’s main project was to limb the dead lower branches in a pine lot right behind the row of guest cabins; then, instead of a brittle jungle that was dangerous to your eyes if you walked into it, Winnicom would have a little park there, and a longer view. It might also help cut down the mosquitoes, which were terrible in the early part of the summer.

  He enjoyed the work, but much as he liked the Wilsons he did not always enjoy the long evenings. He didn’t have a car then, and one day he borrowed the Wilsons’ old Buick and was gone all day looking at secondhand cars in the little towns within twenty miles of the lake. In Leah he found a Volkswagen that was several years old but seemed to be in good shape. He needed five hundred dollars more than he had, wired to his father in New York, and the money came the next day. It took him three days to get the car registered and insured—he had then been at Winnicom only two weeks—and that night he went in to Leah to the hog wrassle.

  The women looked like women, and he danced with a hard young girl who looked sixteen but who informed him that she was married and had two kids. “What’re you, a college boy?” she asked him. The band was mostly accordion, and when a jumpy old man leaped to the raised platform, clicked his heels and began in a high, musical voice to call a reel, everybody went out for a beer. Murray went out, too, past the squashed-faced, aggressive lady who had, as he had entered, stamped his wrist with fluorescent ink. He didn’t go back.

  He remembered some of the people he had known in Leah from his winter in high school there, but all the friends he might have wanted to see were gone into the service or to summer jobs somewhere else, where there was more money. There was one girl he had seen off and on since then, but not since the previous fall—Gretchen Harris. When he called, her mother sounded shocked, even angry, and said that Gretchen was married. He didn’t really want to see Gretchen anyway, he realized as soon as he had picked the telephone off its rack in the telephone booth. That wasn’t what he wanted—what he’d always got from Gretchen. They had always disliked each other, she what she had called his “superiority” and he her avid little brain. She called him “Mr. Superiority“ and he called her “C.P.A.” They argued and fought; she resisted; she gave in but never gave in; he also called her “The Cake-Haver,” for in the face of what her literal little mind must have recognized as a fact, she still claimed chastity. Many facts. Many, many facts. Ah, well. In a forgiving, beneficent mood, now that Gretchen was no more, he hoped that she had married the kind of slob who drove the kind of car she wanted.

  He could drive over to Hanover to a poker game he knew of, but he didn’t want that either. He wanted nothing imperfect, nothing to be a compromise on this summer night. Whatever it was he did must be nothing ersatz, nothing vicarious. So he drove back to Winnicom, went to his cabin and changed into his trunks, then swam through the soft black water toward the float. The water was cold—but real, he thought; he let it slide over him, dived to the rocky bottom, the weedy, forbidden, shivery place where the oily weeds reached up for him with a touch that was almost tentative (tentacle, he thought, relishing some horror—that was real, too), and the weeds caressed his naked, tender skin. He turned and slid up toward the air, where starlight was the only light. One last long streamer touched the hollow of his foot—the last kiss from below—and he kicked hard until he reached the float and rolled onto the harsh dry wood.

  One of the drums bonged softly. What wind there was came down the dark mountain beyond the lake and crossed a mile of water before it touched him; it was cold. But real. The float creaked. The drums, slapped gently by the waves, hummed and bonged up through the resonant wood. The Milky Way swung (not from the movement of the float, but from its own haphazard design, the random, accidental course of the universe) precariously across the sky. Orion’s belt, the Big Dipper, and straight over Cascom Mountain the North Star: that was where the wind came from. He wished she were here to shiver with him, to shiver in his arms, not from the cold but from a shared and lovely awe, part fear, for their dangerous hold upon the overturning world.

  The raft was real—it hummed to itself as it rode on the dark water. The sisal mat beneath his shoulders scratched painfully—almost a substitute for heat, but not her sweet, tender heat—whoever she was.

  The lights from the Wilsons’ cabin shone, warm on the tops of the little waves. Around the lake few lights burned because it was too early in the season, and the dark lake seemed more primitive than it really was. The water itself was always deep and black at night.
/>   A screened door slapped against its frame. He could hear the buzz of the spring, and someone came walking down the path to the dock, then stepped onto the boards and came walking out to the end of it.

  “Murray, is that you? Are you alone?” A shy voice—Mr. Wilson’s.

  “Yes,” Murray said.

  “We just wondered…when you’re through swimming—isn’t it cold?—would you stop in for a minute, have a coffee or a beer?”

  “I’d like to,” Murray called, and he had a surge of affection for the old man. His hold upon the world was even more precarious; he was nearly seventy years old. But he’d held on all those years, and presumably hadn’t bumped too many other people off. They were very happy people, he was sure, and it seemed to him, as he considered the Wilsons, that such happiness had to be deserved. Or had he seen, or heard of, a happy boor, or a happy sadist or miser? One would have to discount a lot of propaganda, he supposed. He had certainly seen unhappiness in nice people; that was common enough.

  The wind had dried him off, and he didn’t look forward to the water again, but when he dived in it was surprisingly warm compared to the cold air, and he swam slowly, almost luxuriously in to shore. His chest scraped on the new sand, and as he stood up into the cold breeze he felt very strong and clean.

  The Wilsons had a hot little fire of pine slabs going in their fireplace, and he sat down on the rug in front of it, conscious of their age and his muscular, healthy youth. They examined him, he felt, and found him quite a specimen. Rarely did such narcissism come unaccompanied by a little guilt, but now they seemed to examine him in just that fashion. Mr. Wilson got him a beer, and Mrs. Wilson found a huge Turkish towel and carefully draped it over his shoulders. “You’re so healthy, Murray,” she said, then sat in her deep wicker chair and looked at him admiringly. On the table next to her chair was an incredibly snarled ball of fish line, and she took it, adjusted her hazy glasses (as a surprise, a few days before, he had cleaned them for her, but she never noticed) and began to pick away at it with her hard, slightly arthritic fingers. She pulled out a long loop, looked vaguely around in the air, then hung it over one of the curved metal pieces on her bridge lamp. He was sure she would forget where she put it, and expected that when she next got up the lamp would go over. He made a note to grab the lamp when she got up. But he was wrong; soon she followed the line, a perplexed expression on her face, up and over the bridge lamp. “How on earth!” Then she remembered that she had put it there.

  Mr. Wilson smoked his pipe, a straight meerschaum with an old-fashioned running horse carved along the stem—old-fashioned in that the front legs and back legs were fully extended at the same time. His dark fingers caressed the horse’s shiny rump. After a while, with the same shyness in his voice, he said, “Murray, we want to ask you something.”

  Murray hoped he knew the answer, or could give it. Because of the Wilsons he wanted to do well in any examination they might give him.

  “In a way, it’s a favor,” Mr. Wilson said, “but I don’t suppose it really should be….”

  “Now, get to the point,” Mrs. Wilson said.

  “Well, it’s a little plot, in which you’re involved—but you don’t have to be. Oh, it’s all quite tentative. Forgive us old busybodies!”

  “Get to the point,” Mrs. Wilson said, but she wouldn’t look up from her untangling.

  “Well, let me! Now: we’ve got a granddaughter….”

  “We’ve got five granddaughters and two grandsons.”

  “Please, Mary! Now you won’t let me get to the point.”

  Mrs. Wilson did look up. “It’s not really this bad, Murray.”

  He could only look and listen.

  “We’ve got a granddaughter about your age, Murray,” Mr. Wilson said, “and we’re thinking of asking her up here for a visit. Usually she doesn’t come until July. But she’s been ill and we think it would do her good—but we don’t want her to be lonesome! She’s a very good-looking girl.”

  “Good-looking! Why she’s as pretty! She’s as pretty as a picture,” Mrs. Wilson said.

  “Christine’s her name, Murray. She’s had polio—left her just a little bit awkward in her walk. Well, let’s say she limps a little bit.”

  “The tiniest little bit!”

  “Well, one of her calves is smaller than the other….”

  Mrs. Wilson broke in: “Murray, would you, if we asked her here, be kind to her? She’s never had much to do with boys. Just be kind to her?”

  “I’ll try,” he said immediately. Yet he remembered with some fear another time when he’d been asked for help, and had none to give, when his cousin Sophie had been in trouble.

  “Her picture. Show him her picture—the one from last summer,” Mr. Wilson said.

  Mrs. Wilson got to her feet and the lamp went over; she’d looped some more fish line over it. She also had some tangled around her feet. While Murray untangled her, Mr. Wilson went upstairs for the picture. Murray felt as though he were being sold something—that feeling and a half-pleasant, half-fearful curiosity. It did seem a little crass, somehow, to be shown a picture of the merchandise. By the time he’d untangled the fish line from the hooks of Mrs. Wilson’s quail-hunting boots, Mr. Wilson was back with a framed picture—one of the kind with a little triangular foot on the back so that it could be stood up on a bureau. Cautiously, he looked at it.

  A figure standing at the bow of a rowboat: slim, in a dark, one-piece bathing suit. Narrow waist—yes, and the leg with the thin calf was the one placed up on the gunwale; the gesture looked deliberate.

  He always wondered why he thus catalogued the figure of the girl while the face was there, laughing at him. He didn’t yet look directly at the face, a pale disc surrounded by black. Long, slightly protrusive collarbones, immature-looking breasts—hard to tell. Some slender grace in the waist, the way the hips were canted, her arms akimbo, pale hands pressing upon the shiny cloth. And the one calf deliberately in profile. The knee looked bigger than it should have because of the nearly straight line from thigh to Achilles’ tendon.

  The face laughed, but he didn’t feel like laughing back. A smudge for each large eye, but a wide mouth with even lips and teeth. Sadness about the eyes, maybe. The black hair looked soft, and whisked her shoulders as she turned toward the camera.

  He didn’t know what to say. She had struck him. She seemed possibly the most beautiful girl he had ever seen; perhaps it was that the expression on her face exactly called out to his sadness now. He handed the picture back to Mr. Wilson, and while the two old people looked at him, suspense in their faces, he was afraid. He was close to childhood, closer than he had thought, childhood where wishes are possible but where, forever and ever, a wish carries with it its own ironic penalty. The child knows all about that, and soon figures out that it is better not to make a wish at all.

  The old faces still looked at him, were still ready for disappointment.

  “I was afraid she’d be fat,” he said.

  “Fat!” Mrs. Wilson was so relieved. “Heavens, Murray, nobody in our family’s fat’.”

  “She’s very skinny,” Mr. Wilson said. “We’re always trying to put some meat on her.”

  “Skinny!” Mrs. Wilson said.

  “Well, slender, you might say.”

  “She looks very nice,” Murray said. “She looks like a very attractive girl.”

  “She’s a lovely girl,” Mr. Wilson said, and in his voice there was some kind of strain. “We love her so much,” he added quickly, and he turned and carried the picture out of the room.

  Mrs. Wilson didn’t look up for a few seconds, then she looked brightly at Murray and said, “We have some other pictures, and some of her letters—would you like to see them?” Her voice was strained, too, yet determinedly bright. He said yes, and when she got up the lamp went over again. “Oh, hell!” she said. “My grandson is responsible for this!” And quite angrily she took a pair of scissors out of her apron and snipped the fish line apart in several p
laces, then wadded it up and threw it into the embers of the fire. She apologized: “I don’t know why I bothered with it; it’s only a hand line worth about twenty-five cents.”

  Mr. Wilson didn’t come downstairs again, but Mrs. Wilson went upstairs and brought down a thick manila envelope. “You can take these along with you if you’re interested, Murray,” she said, and he thanked her and went back to his cabin. He didn’t open the envelope until he was in bed, then dumped everything out of it onto his blanket and went first to the photographs, expecting to see something about the girl that might break the strange mood her picture had put him in. In a way he looked for relief from such a strong feeling; she couldn’t be all that lovely. Photographs were great liars. And of course she could be stupid and insensitive, or a blabbermouth or something like that, or have a fantastic ego. People who had been sick could be impossible.

  But the snapshots he found among the letters did not dispel his first infatuation at all. Here were her large dark eyes, serious this time, beneath the harsh line of a bathing cap, and they looked right at him, intelligent and wide open. No self-consciousness in that face; it just observed. Her nose was a little flatfish, maybe, but whatever variations there were upon the conventional idea of beauty seemed, in context, just right. And of course they would, because intelligence and humor shone out of that face, he was sure, and not only because of that, but because he was almost in love with Christine already. He could tell he was, because whatever blemishes he found on her came into his consciousness already half excused. That, for instance, was definitely a pimple on her forehead. See? It didn’t appear in this one where the sun made a plane of her forehead and darkened the hollows of her eyes. Her breasts were small. In this one she chose to hide her bad calf and recline self-consciously, like a starlet, on the dock, and even the act was graceful. She was so spare, so slender. The visible leg was perfect; it seemed a monstrous way to put it: “The visible leg.” She was full of grace, and her presence in each photograph belied such dissection. Yes, her foot turned in a little, but (here it came, love’s rationalization) it seemed quite endearing, like the awkward helter-skelterness of a very young girl.