The Hair of Harold Roux Read online

  He goes to his study, where all his books and toys sit looking almost as they did this morning when they interested him, yet now devoid of life, dimmed out. On the other side of the room from his desk are his fly rods, his pack frames, his light ax, squash rackets leaning in the corner. Maybe they will never interest him again, but will hang there and sit there dusty and dim forever.

  There on the shelf above his desk are his books—his own, the ones he has written. They have been too often seen, too often examined and remembered for the ancient passion he once felt for each of them. Now they are faded other worlds, dim, yellowing.

  He would like to leave this place. He would also like to leave this time, but of course that is impossible, and without a movement backward in time he cannot recover energy and cannot cut those connections of use and love and custom that hold him here. No, he must, from this ancient base, work.

  Part of that work is memory, but memory is not always trustworthy, because here he is remembering one spring night, walking alone through the crowds of tattered people in Tokyo Station. He smells again the faintly acrid air of the great city. The spring wind is warm. All across the city in its rubble thousands of hibachi fires are burning, rice and delicately pungent foods are cooking. In his memory of Tokyo he is always hungry, nineteen, conscious of his resiliency and strength. He thinks all Japanese are tough, spare and beautiful. An old woman with sturdy legs carries on her back a gigantic bundle of fagots that must weigh a hundred pounds, her trim feet grayish in her geta, the taut cloth band of her tumpline shining across her forehead. The fagots themselves seem shaped by art, drawn in their delicate black twists by a fine brush. But he does not want memory to take him off into nostalgic moments of the past like this. Tokyo has nothing to do with the work at hand. Nothing. Nor has Paris, London or Rome, towns he knew in his early twenties when they seemed so ancient and he so modern. A small university town in New England is closer to his real present, his work now, than all those dreaming old cities. He must go back to that little town, feeling bad about it, not wanting to go there, having huge doubts that he has the will or the energy to make that journey back in time.

  On a clean page in his notebook he writes in block letters:

  THE HAIR OF HAROLD ROUX

  Staring at the words he feels something like despair. He’s got to disengage himself from people so he can get to work. He’s got to stop killing himself in various ways, large and small. Smoking and drinking, just for a start. Sure. The Hair of Harold Roux: he must begin quite simply, muster those facts that he knows, and build, arrange, populate that barren plain with trees and names. Allard Benson, Mary Tolliver, Harold Roux, Naomi Goldman, Boom Maloumian … There is a world there, partly of the past, that must sustain itself. All right.

  Our rather thinly disguised hero is one Allard Benson, and the story (a simple story of seduction, rape, madness and murder—the usual human preoccupations) seems to begin when he has reached the age of twenty-one. A veteran, though no war hero, his combat has consisted of earnest attempts to maim his fellow soldiers rather than the enemy. He doesn’t really approve of violence, and rather believes that he is always having to defend himself; his theory is that he is not so large that he overawes potential aggressors, nor so small that they might overlook him. There is some truth in most theories. There is also the theory that he wants to kill the world for girls like Mary Tolliver, and a certain raw look upon the faces of large, aggressive men suggests to him the causes of her unhappiness. Let us say that he believes that one human being should not cause pain in another, and that whenever he himself sins against this catchall bit of orthodoxy he is clearly aware of it; whatever it is that he has done is printed coldly and permanently upon his soul. This is Allard Benson’s voice, of course, masking certain things in an unfortunate flippancy.

  And then there is Harold Roux. Poor Harold. What visions did he have of college? The war was over at last, and no longer would this pale, thin, sensitive young man have to experience the crudity, the vulgarity, the sheer horror of barracks life. He must have thought longingly of ivy-covered walls in the bright autumn light, of formal elegance and wit, the life of the mind, of dignified professors in tweeds, of long, serious discussions of great issues in places like “Commons.” Also of the talented and beautiful girl who would be his companion. Allard always wondered if Harold got any further with this last dream than holding hands, perhaps, or a chaste kiss. Because on the day after his discharge from Fort Dix, New Jersey, Harold went to New York and made a strange decision, a magical decision which, like all choices in magic, contained its own dark laughter and the necessity of the third and last wish, the one that always erases the damage done by the first two. Harold made this Midas choice; he later paid and paid again the price that magic exacts from mortals.

  While in the army Harold had gone bald. It was nothing pathological, just an inevitable shedding of his top hair—first a tonsure, then the lenghthening of the forehead, then the shiny top of the skull bare from brow to where the cowlick once grew and beyond, the whole process complete at the age of twenty-three. And in Manhattan he happened to pass the doors of an establishment whose necromancers claimed the undetectable restoration of Harold’s loss. He hesitated, he smiled, he began to walk on, he hesitated again. He looked through the display windows at pictures of men of forty (before) suddenly transformed (after) into dashing young men of thirty surrounded by luscious, though rather witless-looking girls. As far as Harold was concerned, they could keep that type of girl, but still …

  Allard brooded often upon Harold’s need, the desperate wishfulness that led him to enter. “Abandon all candor, ye who enter here.” Harold could never successfully deceive, never. But once he entered that place, the world and all its former values changed. He entered the place of believers, and for a while believed.

  Allard once knew an Arthur Murray dance instructor, and for minutes after talking with him felt himself shedding an odd feeling of the importance of the man’s gigolo enthusiasms. At one time in the army he had felt at home in a group of men whose enthusiasm was for the kill. He thought he understood Harold’s conversion. He had known people whose clothes preoccupied them, or whose automobiles, old bottles, or muscles, became central to their lives. Harold in his need was no match for the spell the hairmakers wove. But they wove their spell better than their hair; Harold could pass at a certain distance, yet the intimate distance, the one he had beautified himself to attain, betrayed his secret. Midas’ wish. He was afraid to bend over, and kept his shoulders level as though balancing a book on his head. Twenty-three, and he couldn’t run, jump, somersault, bend very far from the waist. Once he came to college and was seen and known, it was too late to take the last wish and wish with all his heart that the wig (or toupee, or hairpiece) had never happened.

  Harold was born in Berlin, New Hampshire, a northern town set among blue-green mountains covered with white birch, spruce, pine, beech and ash—great rolling forests of these and other noble trees. Into Berlin flows a beautiful river, graced with rapids, called the Androscoggin, a river hospitable to rainbow trout and salmon, those quicksilvery fish of clear cold waters. When the Androscoggin flows out of Berlin it is the color of lead, its surface frothed from bank to bank with puslike yellowish strings and globs of filth, a river so far beyond mere death its carrion stench takes the paint off houses. The great red brick paper mills of the Brown Company are here, towering out of the river gorges, their tall chimneys pushing out such volumes of smoke it seems the explosive density of the brown and gray billows could never have been contained in vents even as monstrous as these. At ground level huge conduits vomit whole rivers of sulfite wastes down ancient ledge into the Androscoggin. The massive heights and complications of the industrial fortresses, pulsing smoke and steam, gushing torrents of raw poison, awaken myths of the dark sulfurous glories of hell.

  Unsuspecting travelers who drive down from the mountains into this charnel reek have been known to accuse each other of unbearable fla
tulence; then, as they frantically crank down the car windows, the full force of Berlin’s miasma flows over them in all its claustrophobic power. It is a sweet stench, so nearly tangible one fears nausea and asphyxiation. It is said that the natives of Berlin and the towns downriver get used to it, but at what price, the traveler wonders, to the delicate senses through which life reveals itself and is judged?

  Aaron Benham hears his heart’s labor in his chest. Would Harold Roux use those sonorities, those ganged superlatives, he wonders. No, and he’d never mention farts. That voice is Allard Benson’s—one of his voices, for he is a chameleon of voices.

  Berlin’s pride is to call itself “Hockeytown, U.S.A.” It is a somber place of drab, mostly wooden buildings made to fit odd levels and corners. To the west a sheer granite cliff rises above the town, as if to crowd it down closer toward the sewer it has made of its river. And it was here, in August of 1923, Harold Roux was born. He grew up living above a small grocery store, where the crooked, soiled back windows of the apartment looked across the water to the cloacal bases of the mills.

  Harold had four older sisters—actually three sisters and a half sister, the child of his mother’s first marriage. That first husband had died beneath an avalanche of pulp logs. Harold’s father also worked for the Brown Company. A minor demon, he presided over a vast, jiggling tank of chemicals he was responsible for stirring and cooking properly. He was a borderline alcoholic, one of those who, though a terror at home, managed to keep his job. Quite often he beat upon his wife; random blows sometimes made it dangerous for everyone. Harold’s mother worked in the grocery store below, which belonged to her sister and brother-in-law, Tante Louise and Oncle Hébert. It was his mother who mainly supported the family; his father mainly supported his habit. With the precision of young surviving animals, all the children knew that beer was not too bad, but wine was dangerous and whiskey a disaster. Harold remembered something the youngest of his sisters once said when asked what sort of man she would like someday to marry: “I want to marry a man who won’t be drunk when I come home from work.” She was quite serious about that.

  When Harold was twelve his father disappeared. Much later his mother told him the story—not an uncommon one in its basic details. Somehow, it seemed, Harold’s father and his stepdaughter had been left alone in the apartment on a Sunday afternoon. Yvonne was sixteen, a sulky, rather stupid, buxom girl who had already left school. Harold’s mother came back long before she was expected to find them naked on the conjugal bed. Tante Louise came in then, too, and they both got a good look at the pale-skinned, wrinkle-necked man atop the spread-eagled sixteen-year-old. The two women just stood there for a moment. Allard clearly saw Harold’s mother staring at the naked buttocks of the man she’d slept with for twenty years, seeing them, white and hairy, driving with their goatish jerks that other thing into her own daughter. What licks of shame and hellfire must have singed her pious soul in those few seconds! And legally this was incest, statutory rape and what-all. Tante Louise had the presence of mind to grab an iron bridge lamp and bring it down across the man’s bare back. “Monstre! Animal! Va-t’en!” She got him a few more good ones before he made his escape. Yvonne, though scared, gave the two women a superior, languorous shrug and began to put on her panties and bra with the sang-froid of a whore. They gave her a few good lumps, a black eye and a split lip, but she never gave them back a sniffle or a tear.

  But when did Harold’s mother, whose life was composed of work and prayer and the avoidance of candor in such matters, tell Harold at least some of these details? Later, much later, when Harold was out of the army. They were both adults then, and he found that she had not, for instance, slept with the man every night for twenty years out of sheer duty. It was Harold who was shocked by her rueful humor concerning those ancient events.

  Of course Harold didn’t tell the story quite like this to Allard. There would be little crudeness, and not even a hint of the chill of irony. Allard was the first friend Harold had ever considered close enough, trustworthy enough, to reveal any of it to, and he spoke of these things as if he used an unfamiliar language.

  Harold and his sisters were told that their father had gotten a job in Manchester. Yvonne stuck around for nearly a year, though her mother would not speak a word to her and didn’t care whether she came or went. Harold thought she got married, but he wasn’t sure. He was surprised to find out later that his three sisters had known all about Yvonne, and that her bad reputation had commenced to grow when she was at least as young as seven.

  The store was barely profitable but Tante Louise and Oncle Hebert let them live in the building for very little rent. Harold’s mother worked nights as a waitress, as well as in the store. She was a saint, Harold said, always trying to raise her children up in the world, while she herself went to church more and more often. He remembered an encyclopedia she bought for them—later repossessed, but this was because of fine print in the contract and a smooth salesman. She fed them, she washed, she sewed, she prayed upon her rosary. Harold was good in school, perhaps because he had no friends—no real friends, he said, meaning real like Allard—and with his mother’s devout and nearly frantic aid he entered the seminary at seventeen. lie was not quite sure when, or why, it became obvious to him and to his teachers that he had no vocation as a priest. In 1943, to his mother’s sorrow and despair, he left the seminary and was drafted into the army.

  Though still devout—his doubts were of his own character, never of the Church—he had thought to make a complete break with the things of the seminary, but after basic training he was assigned as an assistant to the Catholic chaplain of the 3rd Infantry Replacement Training Command, where he spent the rest of the war. In 1946 he was discharged as a technician third-class.

  One fine spring day of sharp borders, when the trees were yellow-green against an unmoving, enameled blue sky, Allard, Mary Tolliver and Harold Roux sat on the grassy bank overlooking the tennis courts, where girls sweatily chased white fluffy new balls, laughing at their own awkwardness. Allard was talking about a play he was writing, called The End. And he was writing it, of course, back to front.

  The day was so warm and benevolent Harold had actually removed his coat and tie. The long white points of his shirt collar, unused to such informality, still held themselves together. The sunlight seemed to disappear into his pale skin, and his immaculate wig (or toupee, or hairpiece) rode too perfectly his smooth forehead.

  Mary wore a white tennis blouse and shorts. Tiny golden hairs gleamed along her slim thighs; the slightest dew was on her upper lip. Her hair gleamed light gold, though her eyes were a startling dark brown, dark and soft to look into. In the brown radiations of her left iris was set the smallest shard of green, like a splinter of jade. She had been decorated at birth with this surprising little jewel. Now, she expressed her happiness in each limb, each motion. Even the wrinkles and folds of her clothes seemed to draw smoothly toward excitement and contentment. It was so obvious that of all the places and times of the world, here and now was where she most wanted to be, and was. Allard watched her, thinking how each cell of her body must be operating in harmony with that happiness. She was eighteen; she would be nineteen in the fall.

  While she and Harold listened, Allard explained that in his play the last scene would take place in a restaurant with booths all along the back and sides of the stage. On each table was a lamp containing several bare flash bulbs. Just before the final curtain, all lights would dim into total darkness long enough for the audience’s retinas to open to maximum diameter. Then all the bulbs would go off at once. In the ensuing stunned mass blindness, the actors would run down the aisles sobbing and screaming that they were in agony, blind and dying. The end. For the curtain call (after the audience had regained its sight, and whether or not there was any applause), the curtain would open not upon the happy actors arm in arm, but upon a huge movie screen on which was projected in full color the blinded, ravaged, pus-laden face of a victim of Hiroshima or Nagas
aki. Silence. The audience could stay or leave. No actors or attendants would be visible in the theater.

  “Whew!” Harold said in admiration.

  “I wonder what the audience would do.” Mary said.

  “Lynch the author?” Harold suggested.

  “No,” Allard said. “They’d be masochists or they wouldn’t have come to the play in the first place.”

  “But maybe it would be a little cruel,” Harold said.

  “Cruel?” Allard said. As if in answer, he leaned over and bit Mary lightly above the knee, her skin sun-warm and salty to his tongue. Laughing, she took him by the ears and shook his head. Harold smiled painfully.

  “You taste good. You’re edible,” Allard said. “I knew you were edible.” As he turned onto his back she blushed, but let his head down in her lap and lightly held it there. He looked up at her breasts and chin against the clear blue, the tall college elms framing her. As she looked down at him her hair fell around her face, sunlight seeming to be inside it, and her expression was suddenly private, the two of them alone within the arbor of her hair. A straight, grave look, her eyes wide, said that he was the one. He knew that.

  Harold wanted to be with them, they knew, so she let his head go and he sat up, the three of them again facing each other, now including Harold, who had introduced Allard to Mary a week before. He was a companion, good company, almost an official observer of their relationship. He was also something of a confessor, like the priest he might have been. When he looked at Mary it seemed to hurt his eyes, and he quickly looked away at the green campus. They sat there, the three of them, Indian fashion, the cool moisture from the grass meeting the hot sunlight.