The Hair of Harold Roux Read online

  Allard was fascinated by all this. Christopher Robin at ten thousand feet in his Hurricane, being shot at by real guns, with real bullets. He couldn’t get over it. He’d think, My God, was the war fought by children? Hilary was like one of his own double exposures: Allard could accept the official certification of Hilary’s combat, and he could accept charming, candid, living Hilary, but how to believe the two together?

  Hilary spread the photographs out on Allard’s desk. “See this one. It’s got part of your motorbike in it, there on the left, but tant mieux it’s a lovely shot of Mary. Lovely! And here’s a smashing close-up of the two of you looking at each other. No, you Ve looking at something over the top of her head. I wonder what? It’s simply impossible, Benson, to snap a poor picture of Mary. I thought you’d like to have them!”

  Allard thanked him, wonderingly. He also thought, but didn’t say, Hilary, old chap, I have Mary; what do I need a flock of photographs for?

  “Hey, you bloody lime-juicer!” Knuck Gillis said. “Pass the mucking bubbly!” Knuck drank, his big pinky carefully cocked. “Pip pip, cheers and a jolly good show, what?”

  “Absolutely! First-rate!” Hilary said.

  In Knuck’s eyes the last pale shade of blue seemed about to fade away. He was all pale—his hair, his skin, his fingernails. Bloodless force. Nathan once wondered aloud if there could be such a thing as a partial albino. “I’m a white man,” Knuck informed him.

  Knuck had other strangenesses. Nathan and Allard studied him. He made little nests of soiled clothes on his desk and on his bed. His face would go dim, go away somewhere while his hands arranged the circular piles of cloth. His face assumed the faraway, instinctive, compelled expression of a beagle who turns around several times before lying down, even though the ancient grass has been a thousand generations gone. The big hands patted, changed, rearranged a jockstrap, a sock, a T-shirt, a pair of shorts until something deep inside said, Yes, that’s the proper order, now it’s all right.

  While Allard and Nathan studied him, Knuck was amazed that he lived among these strange new friends. He was a member of Kappa Sigma, a fraternity even more jock, then, than most, but he chose to live in a dormitory and have for friends a small Jew, a bewigged, flirty (probably) mackerel-snapper, and an intellectual-type English lit. major. He couldn’t get over it, because he knew who he was, and what he was just didn’t go with such types. The School of Hard Knocks was his college; he was a phys. ed. major. He couldn’t get over it. It was miraculous; it added another dimension to his life. “I like this little Jew here, for Christ’s sake! I even like that skinny pansy with the hair piece!”

  “I don’t think Harold’s queer,” Nathan said.

  “Pass the bubbly. Maybe not, but he surely does walk like a man with a paper ass.”

  “He’s afraid his hair’ll fall off,” Allard said.

  “I’d never noticed it until Mary told me,” Hilary said. “Pass the beluga, old chap. That’s a good fellow!”

  Nathan laughed his reverberating oogah. Other octaves, changes, tonal depths issued from his voice box. He seemed too frail an instrument to contain his sounds—a ukelele producing the deep tones of a cello. Later, as he vomited away his infatuation with sparkling burgundy, they would hear his voiced throes resonate throughout the whole floor, as though a Wurlitzer had been installed in the latrine.

  Meanwhile they were all getting drunk, Knuck more than the rest. He had a liver ailment contracted by drinking what he called “Jesus purple” in the Marines. He hadn’t known the difference between ethyl and methyl alcohol, and while on a hospital ship had nearly died of this error. He said he had the liver of a sixty-year-old lush and he could get drunk just by smelling his shaving lotion. Now, as he proceeded to drink the sparkling burgundy, an ominous theme began to be apparent in the few remarks he made between brooding silences. He plucked at a nest of laundry on his bed; his eyes had turned a sanguine pink around their wash of arctic blue.

  “Ruinin’ his life,” he muttered. “Makes him walk like a goddamn Powers model. No wonder the poor bastard can’t get him a broad.”

  “I think he even takes showers with the thing on,” Nathan said. “He’s probably got weevils under it.” Then his strange laugh.

  “What’s a friend for, by God?” Knuck asked himself. “I don’t know why, but I like that poor, pansyfied little bastard. Oughta do it, by God.”

  “Do what?” Allard asked, his receptor of danger not quite dulled by the wine.

  “Snatch that poor fuck bald, that’s what,” Knuck said. “Get rid of it.”

  None of the rest of them was drunk enough not to be disturbed by the violence of this solution.

  “A toast!” Nathan cried. “Gentlemen, to the future!”

  “Snatch that goddam piece of mattress stuffing right off his fuckin’ head, flush it down the toilet.”

  “I say,” Hilary said. “Pretty drastic, don’t you know? No end of psychological ramifications, eh?”

  “You bet your sweet limey ass it’s drastic!” Knuck said, getting up from his bed.

  “Now, Knuck,” Nathan said. “Let’s think this over, huh?”

  Knuck pretended to confront Harold at the door of Harold’s room. With his left hand he grasped an imaginary thin neck. With his right hand he slowly, carefully unscrewed the top of an imaginary jar. The top removed, he carried it to the wastebasket and at arm’s length let it fall.

  “Now I’m going!” he shouted and ran for the door. Little Nathan Weinstein tackled him, fortunately just as Knuck’s drunken balance was off-center. He actually went down and slid into the doorframe with percussive, crunching jock noises. “Hup! Hup!” he said. Nathan held one of Knuck’s legs with his whole body, like a frog in amplexus, knowing that one of Knuck’s big legs was about as much of that halfback he could even attempt to immobilize.

  “Help! Help! Allard!” Nathan screamed.

  Allard jumped on the struggling bodies. Knuck kept saying, “Jesus, what’s on me. Jesus, what’s on me.” Allard tried to get a full nelson on Knuck but it was like getting a full nelson on an oak tree. His arms couldn’t make Knuck’s arms move. He and Nathan could change the direction of Knuck’s slow contractions, but they couldn’t stop them. Knuck would begin to get a knee under him, or an arm, and at just the right moment they could manage to collapse him to the floor, whereupon the great slow heaves began again. “Jesus, what’s on me,” Knuck kept saying. Allard and Nathan were beyond speech—with them it was all desperate breathing and a few small cries. Knuck’s giant muscles couldn’t quite break him loose. This slow struggle went on too long for Nathan, who crawled away and vomited first in the wastebasket on the imaginary toupee and then on the way to and in the latrine. Hilary came back to say that Harold wasn’t in his room anyway. And then Allard remembered that they all knew Harold wasn’t there. If he had been, of course Nathan would have invited him to the party. So Knuck had known all the time, too. Allard lay gasping on his bed while Hilary observed these savages and Knuck continued to drink the wine. Nathan’s brash, wracking throes could be heard down the hall—strangled coughing amid bronze gongs.

  “Jesus,” Knuck said. “Is that poor little Nate?”

  “Nathan is tossing his cookies,” Allard said.

  “He better hope nothing green comes out,” Knuck said. “There ain’t a long-handled spoon in the house.”

  After a while Nathan came back into the room, talc-white, staggering weakly. “My God! Help me! I’m hemorrhaging!”

  “You’re a goner, Nate,” Knuck said. “I can tell. Seen it too many times.” But it was only the burgundy, of course. Knuck drank a whole glass of it in one draught, which sent Nathan groping back to the latrine, moaning in despair. They kept an eye on him, though, and when he was empty of all but colorless strings of bile they carried him back to his bed, where the dry heaves shook and bounced him. They all decided they had never heard more mournful sounds.

  “Was it him that tackled me? That little banty rooster?” Knu
ck said admiringly. “How d’you like that balsy little fuck? God damn!”

  “You knew Harold wasn’t in his room,” Allard said.

  “Heh heh.”

  “Sheer madness,” Hilary said. “Sheer lunacy.”

  Knuck counted the remaining bottles of burgundy. “I got an idea where a body could buy six bottles of this rotgut dirt-cheap,” he said, looking over at poor Nathan.

  Nathan moaned and something inside him went off like a released bowstring. They could almost hear the twang. “Oh, God!” he said.

  “The head looks like a goddam massacree. So don’t the hall,” Knuck observed. “I guess none of us make it any easier for Harold. Specially those salmon eggs all over the place.”

  But later on, after Hilary had gone, Harold knocked softly on the door. When it opened he slipped furtively into the room and shut the door himself. He wore a trench coat with elaborate shoulder loops, rain flaps and Sam Browne belt accessories. “They’ve gone to supper,” he said. “Will you help me get out of here? Allard? Nathan? Knuck?” He was so upset he could hardly whisper.

  Nathan came to life a little bit. “Whaa?” he said.

  “I’m leaving. I can’t stand it any more and I’m leaving.” Harold’s eyes were full of tears, brimming with small ridges that sloshed and spilled as he moved his head. “I’m at the end of my rope,” he said. “I’m sorry!”

  Then they were all full of concern. Nathan was too weak to help much, so he kept watch. They weren’t exactly certain whether Harold wanted to evade Boom Maloumian, the housemother, the police, or what, but in their assumption of this common concern for Harold they would go along with whatever fears he thought he had. Soon they’d loaded Nathan’s 1941 Ford with everything but Harold’s chintz reading chair, which they put in a far corner of the downstairs lounge to be retrieved later. Nathan considered Knuck and Allard far too drunk to drive, and himself too sick, so Harold drove. Allard and Knuck sat in the back seat with Harold’s rolled rug across their knees, boxes between them and under their feet. They drove north, out of town altogether. As they hissed pleasantly along through the rain, Allard and Knuck passed a bottle of sparkling burgundy back and forth over a box of Harold’s precious books. It was cozy in the car, smooth and nice to travel through the rainy day with the trees in their fresh new leaves passing like green globes in the mist. He was a separate warm life, unique, independent of all this, yet moving along.

  Nathan had slumped down out of sight, and Knuck was elsewhere, only appearing to be present when the bottle was offered, the big white hand gently taking it and carefully giving it back.

  “Hey, Harold?” Allard said, not really caring. “Where we going, to Berlin?” He calculated that trip to be over a hundred miles, but he didn’t care. The bottle, however, was getting low and he was nearly out of cigarettes.

  “No,” Harold said. “We’ll be there any minute.”

  That was too fast, too quick. He liked it in the moving car, seeing the trees go by so smoothly, the wine smoothing out everything. To move and not care was what he liked.

  They were about to arrive at Lilliputown Motor Inn, owned by friends of Oncle Hebert and Tante Louise. It had been arranged that Harold would live there and help take care of the place—the model town with its church, saloon, barbershop, library, jail, etc., which was more of a compulsion on the part of its owners than a commercial proposition. While one could rent, for instance, “The Little Brown Church in the Vale” and within its sanctified walls fornicate, one must not presume to be part of the real population of Lilliputown, because the real population of Lilliputown was imaginary. Its people walked its fictional streets to church on Sunday mornings, went about their lives within a rapt fog of creation.

  On that first visit to Lilliputown all Allard saw was the Railroad Station and the Town Hall. They didn’t stay longer because all the while they were taking Harold’s possessions over to the station platform, where they would be out of the rain, poor Nathan lay across the front seat of his car uttering sharp sounds like the breaking of sticks. The owners of Lilliputown were in Boston for the day, Harold said.

  The Town Hall was a Doric-columned edifice of some grandeur, even when a giant human figure passed before it and reduced its scale. The columns across the front of the building were only a little taller than a man, and the main doorway seemed in all its paneled elegance about two feet square until, as Allard later found, its real dimensions turned out to be much larger, containing first- and second-story windows and expanses of wall. He saw at once that Lilliputown was no mere gimmick to lure tourists who liked that sort of cuteness, but a labor of real craft and care. Across from the Town Hall was the Railroad Station, the only other building visible from the parking area. From this marvel of nineteenth-century architectural mixes a single narrow-gauge railroad track led through a wall of Lombardy poplars into the rest of Lilliputown. The station itself was painted dark red—cupolas, Gothic and Romanesque arches, spreading eaves over an asphalted platform containing an iron bench, a metal-wheeled baggage cart of varnished wood, a mailbox, a miniature circus poster in its frame against the station wall. As though it had been especially airbrushed on, over everything not recently polished was a real railroad station’s patina of coal dust, along with the familiar sooty, peppery odor. The platform gritted slightly under Allard’s shoes, reminding him of all the days and miles trains had taken him. Switches, signals, polished steel rails—there had to be a train, too, somewhere, with a black engine leaking steam along its flanks where the bright steel of its pistons and rods slowly flashed and plunged. Along the deserted tracks’ crushed cinders and spiked crossties was the expectation of that energy.

  Yet everything was small. He felt like a giant, a freak; the details here had that power. Even the grass along the roadbed seemed to be narrow in its blades, and short, as if it too had come under the influence of Lilliput. He stood for a moment trying to blink away the mirage of scale, then walked back to the giant automobile and his huge friends.

  Nathan’s agony made them hurry. They decided to take him back to the university and deposit him at Brock House, the infirmary, where Knuck claimed they’d have something to calm his forlorn and desperate nausea.

  As they left, Allard looked back at the Railroad Station, its gilt-lettered signs on the station eaves saying LILLIPUTOWNwith such believable authority. The two buildings, so complete in their setting before the living green wall of the Lombardy poplars, seemed to recede in finer focus than the surrounding landscape, as though he watched them through a fine lens. When they were out of sight he leaned forward toward Harold’s neat, upright head, its sober verticality so different from Nathan’s and Knuck’s that he and Harold seemed alone in the car.

  “Is the rest of the place like that?” he said.

  “Maybe even more so. It’s a very strange place.”

  “Who’d make such a thing?”

  “Colonel Immingham. He’s quite a person, Allard. I’ve told him about you and he wants to meet you.”

  “Why me?” Allard said quickly, surprised by his defensive response. “I mean, what the hell would you tell him about me?”

  “I don’t know. We just got to talking about the university and who I knew there, and from what I said about you he thought you might be interesting, that’s all.”

  Just for a second Allard had the feeling of dread, of being hurried, manipulated. Harold’s opinion of him did not seem based upon valid evidence.

  Aaron sits at his desk remembering, changing what he remembers, picking and choosing. But nothing stays, nothing is written. Here he is, at the place where he was once able to do his work. He can remember when his hours here, at this desk, were the most vivid of his life, when all that generous energy was there.

  But how intolerant we are of people who won’t do what we are certain they could do if they only tried. Hasn’t he told George Buck that he must finish his dissertation? It seems such a mechanical task, as easy as adding a downstairs bathroom. And the fatal thi
ng, the hellish thing about all this is that he is right. He is absolutely right and therefore can’t sympathize with George at all. But he does recognize George’s immobility. He recognizes it in himself, right now. Lately, whenever he is asked for advice, especially when he is in fact paid to give advice, he has wanted to avert his face and mumble, “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know,” he says, trying it out. It’s so relaxing. But there should be a certain uncaring lilt to the phrase that he can’t quite manage to get into it. He can’t quite get it right, so he should get himself together and simply tell George to do his work or get out, and tell Mark Rasmussen that his despair is the hurt ego of a self-indulgent little boy, that the system of our planet is rape and murder, not love and reason, that he is a fool weeping for Eden.

  Aaron belches and his own brimstone fumes from his body, from his mouth and nose. He doesn’t believe anything, not a word about anything. Can’t remember what he thinks from one moment to the next. The only thing that might be true is paradox and he is sick to death of all these dramatic simplifications, these sanctimonious fictions. Everyone’s. Nothing can stop a lie whose fashion has come, so why bother to try?

  Upstairs in a small room is a functioning television set. He knows that in five minutes a baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees will begin. He is not much of a follower of the game, but he played it all through his youth and knows its rules, dangers, sweats and moments of frantic grace. There is no one to tell him he can’t spend the rest of the afternoon watching that perfect drama, that classically framed and disciplined story, unfold again before his eyes. The rigid form of the game is its art. There is always an outcome, always a total end, and the characters suffer humiliation or triumph, each moment of action framed by anxious immobility. This folk-created simplification is bound as if by steel within its rules, and its rules are known.