The Night of Trees Page 17

  Well, he would read her letters. His hands were shaking just a little bit, and there was a slight, unnatural feeling in the back of his throat—a kind of negative pressure, if there were such a thing. Too much would depend upon her words, because a word could be so revealing and hard to excuse.

  How old was she? He glanced through the letters quickly, noting that all the dates were within the last year—her grandmother must, if she had saved them, have kept out any earlier letters. In those that were handwritten the writing was round but well formed, and very clear. The margins and the lines were straight.

  NEWTON, MASS.

  January 7th

  MY DEAREST (AND ONLY) GRANDPARENTS,

  So you want a great-great grandson, do you? And because I am now eighteen I should run (limping) into the marriage business! Your little verse was very funny, and I have one for you, but on a different subject, I’m afraid. It’s just another of my animal collection, and of course the moral doesn’t apply to you.

  THE MOA

  The moa, in a prosperous era,

  Traded his wings for a big viscera,

  Drumsticks nearly five feet tall,

  And a gizzard as big as a basketball.

  The dingo, eating moa raw,

  Might contemplate this circular saw:

  Talents are few, and talons are many,

  So keep the first if you have any

  (there might still be an outer bird

  if the inner bird had heard this word).

  I’m not sure that dingoes ever ate moas, to tell you the truth (Grandmother sure would have, though!). They may even come from different subcontinents. And of course dingoes may have claws, but not talons. So you see what an indifferent scholar I am?

  I love you,

  CHRIS

  NEWTON, MASS.

  February 16th

  PROFESSOR AND MRS. HUBERT WILSON:

  In response to your request for a recent photograph of Miss Christine Wilson, our publicity department yawned, rolled over and fractured its third cervical vertebrae (now don’t get worried—just a joke); however, we did manage to come up with this highly expendable Polaroid shot of Miss Wilson, in which she appears next to her sister’s leading man, Mr. Icky Collins (he thinks his name is Charles Joseph Collins; Sue calls him Icky and I call him Guano Joe….

  The suction in his throat increased. So bright, so charming, so silly! He read the letters; most were answers to questions he didn’t know, or talked about people he had never heard of. He was jealous of this other life of hers, and frequently had to remind himself that he didn’t know very much about her at all, whether or not she went to school, even how tall she was (this he tried to figure out by comparing her to the rowboats in the pictures, and wished he had Shelton’s protractor and compass). And she might not even like him.

  BOSTON, MASS.

  April 10th

  DEAREST GRANDMOTHER AND GRANDFATHER,

  Well, here I am again, in the hospital. I am absolutely certain (neither snow, nor rain, etc.) that the W. family faster-than-sound grapevine has informed you of all the details, so I won’t go into my symptoms.

  I include my latest poem. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don’t. You ask for copies of all of them, and Daddy volunteers to have them mimeographed at the office (you’d know that!) but honestly, I read them over and none are right. Some are silly, all are pompous, some are childish: “Dusk is my velvet curtain/Swishing across the stage.” Agh! Swishing Dusk? Sounds like a character out of Tennessee Williams. And then there was my Dylan Thomas period, which is best forgotten. Everything was green then, except grass, which was golden, or forked, or something like that!

  Thank you for the lovely book on George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. There is a line of Herbert’s I think is so beautiful: “Groans are quick, and full of wings.” I keep thinking about it, maybe because I hear them all the time here—unexpectedly from a door I’m passing, and the room that was all white and barren-looking suddenly becomes all full of a real person and real pain.

  The other day I went back to my old alma mater, the children’s ward, for a visit. Miss Pease, the head nurse, is still there; we had coffee and she got mad at me for being back in hosp. again. All the pretty young nurses and students have changed, and more have come in their places, just as pretty (Grandfather!).

  The children have changed, too. Please don’t be unhappy if I get morbid, but I want to explain about the poem. Two little boys, about five or six years old, were shooting each other with toy guns (looked just like real guns, too) and having a wonderful time taking turns shooting or being shot. They maybe even enjoyed the being shot part more than the other! They were both very, very sick, especially one of them, but I won’t go into that. But the shot one would fall back into bed so relaxed and so happy! And a little girl was watching and asking them to shoot her, too, and they did, even if she couldn’t fall down just right. She had cancer, and was in such pain—you could tell by her eyes. I’m sorry. But they played and played, and I remembered playing the same game on the lawn at home with Sue and David. We used to call it, “Bang, you’re dead!”

  BANG, YOU’RE DEAD

  by Christine Wilson

  In the bush there jumps a wren

  Nervous about the shot children

  Who gaily clutch their hearts and fall

  Upon the soft grass by the wall.

  “Bang, bang!” they call, in happiness;

  The killed are happy as the quick

  To fall to rest with such lightness.

  The summer grass is cool and new,

  The summer sky is warm, is blue;

  The wren may jump and disapprove,

  But the gray clouds ever move,

  And children wake unto a day

  When grass has weathered to the quick:

  It is a game the children play.

  I don’t particularly like the gray clouds—sounds rather ordinary, don’t you think? I’m working on that line. I hope the poem isn’t too morbid for you. I try not to be, really. Then, I think, Grandfather will say (not you, Grandmother!) that I’ve been pretty cruel to dig a poem out of those poor sick children. But what can we do? Sit around and weep and weep for all of them—all the sick children? When I get like that I don’t do anything, and I get irritable. Yesterday I was very rude to Mother. She didn’t do anything, particularly; she just looked so stupid and helpless standing around my bed. I told her to sit down, for Christ’s sake. Would you tell her I didn’t mean it? If I do she’ll create one of her love scenes, and then I’ll get mad at her again. Poor old Ma. She insists that what I have is undulant fever, because she had it at my age!

  Well, maybe I am getting morbid. I would love to see you both and exchange wisecracks or something.

  Love to you dear old fuddyduddys,

  CHRIS

  In another letter, dated back in February, she had written, “…so I don’t just sit around waiting for what Sue insists upon calling a ’dream boy.’ But, yes, I have visions and daydreams just like anyone else….”

  How would I do? he thought. I’ll be man enough for you, Christine. We can exchange wisecracks, too. And I know a few other things besides “the gray clouds” I’d question in your poem. What about the wall, there in the fourth line? Isn’t that just there for the rhyme? “But“—he spoke out loud, now, but softly—“I like the line, and the rhyme, ’To fall to rest with such lightness.’ Oh, what a light and lovely feminine rhyme that is, Christine!”

  The bare pine boards, the open studding of the cabin made his aloneness too obvious—they were so bare and functional! And he was only talking to himself. Moths fluttered softly against the screens, their little eyes gleaming green and orange.

  He would have to be very careful with her when they first met, and not reveal himself too much. He wouldn’t let her know that he had read her letters, of course. She certainly wouldn’t like to know that they would meet on unequal terms. And the leg, how would she want him to act about the leg? And then he
thought, Too much of this planning business is stupid; he would do what he would do. He might not even like her. What if she had a shrill, hard voice, and never shut up? But she wouldn’t. She would know (she knew so much!) what she seemed like to other people. She would know she was pretty, but not that she was beautiful. And this, really, was his most perfect secret and power, and he felt very lucky, supremely lucky, to have it: she just happened—psychological, aesthetic, whatever causes had made him react to this particular girl—to be beautiful to him, probably to him alone. She would be too bright for most boys, and would probably not bother to hide it—perhaps in defense of her awkward leg.

  “Not too bright for me, though,” he said out loud, and recognized in his voice a kind of threat. “This one is mine,” he said, gloating this time, “so keep your cotton-pickin’ hands off, Guano Joe and Tom Terrific and whoever!” The idea that she might settle for someone less than he frightened him, and he had a pang of jealousy. And then, gloating some more, “No, she’s coming here!” Vanity, vanity, he thought; all right, so what? She goan love me, Ah goan have her!

  But with tenderness, strength, whatever she wants. And then he thought, My goodness gracious sakes alive! Let’s face it, Murray Grimald, you have done rather well with girls; you are tall, dark, and handsome, not to mention intelligent, funny, brave, sensitive, well coordinated (modest?). Not only that, but you have a real date-bait type car, a dashing Volkswagen with a cracked muffler and some ancient puke etched into the upholstery.

  She was eighteen (some time in December or January), and in spite of a certain brash worldliness, which probably covered up for the tender skin all intelligent people had (a tenderness that approached cowardice but never had a chance to get there), she would be really naïve; a virgin, no doubt, but a virgin neither out of fear nor out of avarice. How wonderful, he thought, to come to love knowing so much, perceiving so much about the world, yet inexperienced in it, unhandled and unpawed by it.

  And only his gentle, almost worshipful? no, appreciative, but in some strong, even selfish way, deserving hands should touch and caress her.

  “Christine, Christine,” he whispered, and the moths at the screen fluttered their talcum wings and gleamed their eyes. He put the photographs and letters back in their envelope, and turned off the light. As he went to sleep, curiously vivid visions appeared—the girl in the photographs moved, and touched him; he and Chris out in a rowboat on the dark lake, Orion turning in the sky; he and Chris, her slender arm just touching his, lying on the float in the late afternoon sun, the drums gently bonging; he and Chris in his Volkswagen, driving down a road in a green and rolling land, a road that led them far away, far away to a new country; he and Chris in bed together, her narrow hands sliding coolly up his ribs, and her…no, that one would not continue. That one was to be deserved, and must be waited for with piety and modesty.

  In the morning, before he had remembered Christine, he awoke with a strange sense of joy, as if whatever he would do that very day would no longer be a part of his long wait for real life; as if his vicarious childhood were over. And as he rubbed his eyes he did remember Christine, and that she was coming. At breakfast he lied, and said he hadn’t finished looking at her letters. But he felt that they saw his excitement. Why hide it from them? All he could think of to say was, “She sounds like a wonderful person.”

  Oh, you don’t know, he thought, that she is practically mine already.

  Mrs. Wilson poured his coffee, and with the percolator still in one hand, ran her other hand down his biceps. “You’re so strong, Murray! No wonder you can work so hard.”

  And he did work hard that day, pruning the pine grove behind the cabins and piling the brittle dead branches. He foresaw a time when he would (though somehow dishonorably, because they would still be paying him) want to spend much time with Christine, and he wanted to finish the job first. She might come with him and they could talk as he worked, but that might get rather boring for her. Of course he would have to figure out something to do so that she wouldn’t suspect that he was a kind of paid companion. And he couldn’t go to the Wilsons and ask them not to pay him; his job should not be given such businesslike status, and it would make the Wilsons unhappy to think of it that way—unhappy, at least, to know that he thought of it that way. He worked hard all morning, and in the afternoon Mr. Wilson came and helped him.

  “We called, and we think she can come,” Mr. Wilson said. Something about his voice worried Murray, and he tried not to show it.

  “Think she can?” he said as he threw an armful of branches on the pile. He said it casually and immediately started back, adding over her shoulder, “Is she still sick?”

  “Well, she’s not very strong,” Mr. Wilson said. “Not like you, Murray.” That sounded a little happier, a little hopeful, for some reason.

  That night after supper Murray went to his cabin and looked at all of her pictures again. He became nervous and impatient, and walked along the shore for a while, slipping along over the mounds of roots, between the pines whose needle-covered hummocks jutted out over the water. On his way back he went into the barn that was the camp’s recreation hall. It wasn’t wired for electricity, and he lighted an oil lamp in the huge room beneath the notched beams and hand-formed purlins. The loft was high above and silent; an old shelf-paper sign drooped between its thumbtacks: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR HARRY! and the small, original barn windows reflected the amber lamplight. Idly he wound up the old Victrola, set it low, and put on the first record he found in its warped cabinet. It was an old song, “Long Ago and Far Away,” and as it played (a smooth old band from the days of World War II, he thought, and a sweet-voiced woman who stayed on the note from beginning to end), the song, in the weird way old and maudlin songs do, became forever afterward the touchstone, the crazily magic, nonsensical cause for complete memory of his love for a girl he had never met.

  Every day he worked hard at the stand of pine, and little by little between the trees a small park grew of soft little humps all covered with long, tan needles. But Christine didn’t come, and as the days passed the Wilsons seemed to grow very cool toward him. At lunch one day late in the month Mr. Wilson looked at his hamburger steak and said evenly, “If you’re through with that envelope of pictures and letters we’d like it back.” Mr. Wilson never came to help him with the work any more, and rarely even read at meals, just looked at his food, ate it, and went upstairs.

  “What’s the matter?” Murray asked Mrs. Wilson.

  “Why, nothing’s the matter,” she said, trying to look bright about it; not managing. Once, from his cabin, he heard them shouting at each other, but couldn’t understand the words. He grew afraid to ask about Christine, and his worry about the immediate relationship between himself and the Wilsons tended to make Christine’s power over him lessen—at least during the day. At night he often went to the barn and played “Long Ago and Far Away” softly on the old Victrola, sad in the high old room. He dreamed about her once—they stood together on a ridge and watched a line of clouds so brilliant it hurt his eyes. The clouds all looked like camels far away over Cascom Mountain, and in back of the ponderous and dignified clouds the sky was black, like a curious negative, for the clouds should have been dark, and then he looked at his lovely Christine and her hair was blinding white.

  At times he found in himself a silly remnant of his Jewish paranoia: was it because they had found out that he was half-Jew that they had grown cold and hard in his presence, these Wilsons, these Anglo-Saxons he liked so much?

  Then the day came when he had to leave for his construction job. When he was ready to go the Wilsons came out to his car.

  “Goodbye,” they said. He looked at them, knowing the worry his face reflected, and Mrs. Wilson came running up to the car, her Bass boots crunching on the new gravel, and she tried to put her face inside so that she could kiss him, but the window wasn’t open wide enough, and her bony cheek was creased white by the edge of the glass before he could open the window all the w
ay. She reached in and squeezed his arm as hard as she could and kissed him on the cheek. The old man had turned back, and then she did, too—stepped back away from the car so that he could go—and stood with her skinny arm, the lumps of her elbow bluish, raised to wave goodbye.

  He was very upset, and felt like crying. His throat hurt. He didn’t want to leave them that way (and yet his hands and feet worked competently enough, and the little car climbed smoothly up the long driveway toward the main road), and not only did he want his parting with the Wilsons to be affectionate and understandable, he felt deeply sorrowful, almost self-pitying, as if he had been cheated of Christine and her soft arms and steady eyes. But he had to go. All right, they would see. He would scheme a little, and he would meet her somehow.

  It was good to see some of the team again, those good-natured goosing numbheads, and he was in much better shape than they were. That summer they worked jackhammers, dismantling the concrete foundations of an old National Guard armory, then built forms for pouring another foundation. He was tired at the end of each of those long summer days, but healthy and deeply tanned, his hands hard as rocks. Occasionally they went into the little town and had a few beers; occasionally they played rather unimaginative poker with the permanent construction crew, but mostly they ate, worked, and slept.

  Back at school in September he cornered Charlie Gilman in the field house, one rainy day, and asked him about the Wilsons and about Christine. Charlie, the ex-athlete, his thick waist always tightly belted, half turned away as though he had something he really had to do at exactly that moment. Murray side-stepped with him, though, and faced him. Why the guilt? He had been chosen, hadn’t he!

  “Why, they’re all right, I guess,” Charlie said.