Chapter One
In the summer of 1955 New England lay shimmering under one of the worst heat waves of the century. But don't try to verify this in any of the weather annals. No, this heat was intolerable not because of record-setting temperatures but because of what seemed like an unending succession of sweltering days. Swimming pools that summer were so swarming with people you couldn't swim a stroke, and beaches were so littered with bodies you couldn't walk fast enough to let the air move around you. Movie theaters, because they advertised their air-conditioning in icy blue letters, did record business, and stores that sold Popsicles, electric fans, or cold beer were certain to sell out. If you lived in a city and could leave, you left.
In 1955 my family was one of the lucky ones who could escape. My father, Robert Finley, was an editor at Harrison House, and he was not often required to be in his office during the summer. He frequently brought his work home to read and edit anyway. My mother, Doreen, taught English at Westcott College for Women -- as it was called then -- and always had the summer off. So, after the middle of June, when my sister, Janie, and I finished our week of French camp, our family headed for the cool green hills of Vermont and left behind our fellow Bostonians, stuck to the city and each other with their own sweat. That summer Janie was eight and I was eleven.
In Vermont we rented a large old Victorian house with a huge front porch that tilted toward New Hampshire. The house was in the middle of an empty, sun-struck field, and less than fifty yards away a stagnant pond steamed and stunk in the heat, but my sister and I were forbidden to mention the smell. Trees were ringed all around us, but not one was within a hundred yards of the house. Standing stupidly by itself, the house looked as if everything had been warned away from it.
My parents' friends, however, certainly heard no warning, for they came visiting in droves. From New York or Boston or Philadelphia, they ran toward Vermont and us like animals that know the forest is burning behind them. When they arrived at our house, they put down their bags, sighed, smiled, and set themselves to days and nights of unrelieved, slightly hysterical, drunken recreation.
Most of my mother's and father's friends were writers, artists, and intellectuals, and many of them were younger than my parents. The few who were married were childless. That naturally made Janie and me curiosities, yet still figures to whom obeisance had to be paid. These were people who worshipped the spirit of youth, if not children themselves. So when the visitors arrived that summer, they brought toys, games, or sporting equipment for us. The problem, however, was that these gifts quickly found their way into the hands of the adults. Late into the night they sat around the kitchen table and played with Janie's Chinese checkers; they used my football in the early evening touch football games; in the heat of the afternoon women and men pulled lawn chairs up to the small blue inflatable wading pool Avis Holman brought for us and sat with their feet in the water and sweating gin-and-tonics in their hands; they played badminton with our rackets and croquet with our mallets; three of my baseballs were hit into the pond; and others put as many miles on our bicycles as we did.
In the midst of all those adults having so much fun, Janie and I were never exactly sure of what to do. We were not invited to join in, and it was clear our presence would be inhibiting. Nothing makes adults more self-conscious about playing children's games than children standing on the sidelines watching.
So how did Janie and I behave that summer? Both of us were, to begin with, inclined toward silence and seriousness, and to that part of our natures we drifted even further. Janie began to lower her gaze (my memory of her is always of her walking with her head down), looking away from the faces of people and down to the earth's surface, to the grasses, plants, weeds, and wildflowers growing there. I, on the other hand, developed and practiced a skill that I continued to sharpen in all the years after: I watched others while trying to remain unnoticed myself.
But all this is backdrop and stage-setting, my attempt to set the time and place of that season's essential occurrence: in the summer of 1955 I met Laura Coe Pettit, and the moment of that meeting was the one from which I began a measurement of time. Clocks and calendars can try to convince us that time always passes in equal measure, but we know better. Our thirty-fifth summer passes five times faster than our seventh, and for years my life speeded up or slowed down according to my meetings with or departures from Laura.
In our rented house my bedroom was right over the kitchen, the room where my parents and their partying friends always ended up because it was the one room where air moved -- the night breeze from the north blew in through the small window over the sink, fluttered the lace curtains, and fanned out through the big, brightly lit space before traveling out the screen door and past the porch where those people who couldn't fit in the kitchen sat. The scene was always noisy; a porch-sitter would tell a story loudly enough so a cupboard leaner could hear it. Laughter was constant, and ranged from one man's slow bass "huh-huh-huh" (a sound like heavy boots climbing the basement stairs) to a woman's staccato, soprano "ih-ih-ih-ih" (a giggle that reminded me of a birdcall). After the phonograph was moved into the kitchen, it never returned to the living room. Beer bottles clinked, glasses rattled, ice tinkled, the refrigerator door opened and closed, and I did my best to sleep through it all. So why, if I could sleep through that commotion, would someone's silence wake me?
When I opened my eyes she was standing in front of my window, gazing out toward the pond. She was smoking a cigarette, and as she exhaled, the smoke billowed through the screen so it looked as though the night were steaming right outside my window.
Though I tried not to, I must have made a sound -- a whisper of sheets as I jerked awake or perhaps my snoring stopped -- and she turned to me quickly and said, "Please. Don't tell anyone I'm here." Her voice had that low, reedy sound of exhaustion in it.
Her request was so urgent I immediately told her I wouldn't say anything, though I didn't know whom I could tell even if I wanted to.
"The door wasn't locked," she said. "I just ducked in here to get away from the party awhile. I thought I could hide here without bothering anyone. I didn't mean to wake you."
I was afraid, but I knew I wasn't threatened, so my fear was the type that people -- children, especially -- feel in the presence of something that mystifies and confuses them. And, of course, I couldn't go back to sleep, so I lay quietly in bed and tried to study this person who had found her way into my bedroom. The moon shone on that warm, clear night, and my narrow, floor-to-ceiling window let in enough light for me to get a look at her.
It's difficult for children to judge someone's height (every adult is tall) without standing next to that person or seeing him or her in a group, but by the way she was framed in my window I could see she was not much more than five feet. I could also tell she was extraordinarily pale because she wore a white shirt and both the shirt and her face had the same bluish-white luminescence in the moonlight. The sleeves of the shirt were rolled to her elbows. Her dark hair was very short, and with the hand not holding the cigarette she ruffled her hair over and over again, a motion so agitated and methodical it seemed she was trying to work an unpleasant thought out of her mind. I couldn't see her features clearly, but I could tell they were small and fine. If it weren't for her voice, I might have thought another child was in the room with me.
She bent over and crushed out her cigarette in the space between the window ledge and the screen. Then, slowly and carefully, as if she were worried that in the dark she might step on a piece of glass, she walked over to my bed.
"Are you Paul?" she asked. "Have I stumbled into Paul's room?"
"Yes," I answered, concerned about how she knew my name when we hadn't met.
"You're going to let me hide in here for a while?"
"Yes."
"Yes, yes, oh, yes -- is that all you can say? Are you going to do anything I ask?" She laughed, a low, soft sound almost like a cough.
I didn't want to say "yes" again. "I guess so."
"You guess so. Well, I guess so too. We all guess so." She sighed and sat down heavily on my bed.
Asleep, I had slid down toward the middle of the bed, but now I pushed my way back toward the top, pulling my pillow under my head.
"What's the matter?" she asked when I moved. "Are you afraid of me, Paul?"
"Not really."
"You're not? That's good. I don't want people to be afraid of me. But maybe you should be. Maybe you should be a little afraid. Just a little."
She was drunk. She wavered as she sat on the bed, as if, without something to support her back, her spine couldn't hold her head straight, and her head moved back and forth slightly, nodding in time to music only she could hear. I could smell the liquor on her breath, that heavy aroma like something sweet about to go sour. I had learned to identify the smell from my father. He often tucked me in at night, and as he bent over to kiss me, I would sniff his breath and ask, "What's that?" "A fine scotch," he would say. Or "Gin, clear as water," "Vodka, Russia's only current contribution to civilization," "Beer -- and here's one of its kids," and he would belch. To this day I like the aroma of liquor on a man's or woman's breath. For some reason, it reminds me of death, but of a natural, welcome dying, like leaves decaying.
Her speech also told me how drunk she was. I had heard enough examples to know drunken talk when I heard it -- the repetitions, riddles, and pointless revelations, the wide loops and short circles of conversation, the way drunks will grab on to your name and wave it around to show how strong their grip is. It was important, I knew, to be patient with them and polite, and soon they would lose interest and leave you alone.
However, I did not want her to leave me alone. As bewildered, apprehensive, and uncertain as I was about her presence, I still wanted her to stay. At eleven, though baseball and the Boy Scout manual dominated my life, another part of me escaped their rule. This was the part interested in, among other things, romantic novels about errant knights and endangered maidens. And I did more than read about the subject. More than once I had climbed the stairs with an imaginary sword in my hand and a cascade of bloodied foes behind me. When I reached the tower (my room) I burst through the door, ready to rescue the diaphanously gowned woman who was lashed to a chair just the way the woman was on the cover of Montaldo's Revenge, a paperback lying around the house that summer. (The ropes crossed her breasts in an X, and high on her bare arm was the red mark of the lash.) No doubt this play was part of my awakening sexuality, but I wasn't yet aware of it. And now a peculiar version of my fantasy was coming true. A beautiful young woman was in my room, though I, without sword or shield, was probably the one in need of rescue. I slept in my underpants, and I tried to pin down the sheet that covered me by unobtrusively pressing down on one of its folds with my forearm.
After peering around the room, she said, "Are we going to keep this in the dark or can we have some light?"
"I don't care."
She reached over to my bedside table and groped around the lamp until she found the little chain that turned on the light. At the sudden brightness, she covered her eyes and turned her head. "Oooh," she said painfully, "maybe that wasn't such a good idea."
Wanting to please, I asked her if she wanted me to turn it off.
"No," she said, lifting her head, "I'll learn to live with it."
When she uncovered her eyes, I noticed something I hadn't seen in the dark. Under her right eye she had a thin red scar, a crescent that followed perfectly the bone of the eye socket. On another face, one not as unlined as hers, it might not have been as noticeable, since it was right where circles form. But on her small, pale, unblemished face it drew my attention and would not let it go. I liked the scar immediately; it was not disfiguring, and it gave her a look of danger and worldly experience. Here was someone, no matter how young she may have looked, to whom things happened, and she had a scar to prove it.
Does it go without saying I was already in love? Why wouldn't it have been so? Consider what elements worked together to move my heart. Here was an adult who had left the company of other adults to be with a child (that was my interpretation anyway). A pretty woman teetering on the ledge of who-knew-what drunken impulse. Moonlight. The sound of revelry below. My near nakedness. Sleep still in the corner of my eyes. How could I have resisted?
"Now that you've got me here," she said. "What are you going to do to entertain me?"
"I don't know." I had reached the point where my tongue-tiedness was the result, not of nervousness at saying the wrong thing, but of the fervent wish to say the right thing. The responses in either case might have been the same -- timid monosyllables and phrases of uncertainty -- but the motives were completely different, one rising from fear and the other from love. The truth was, I was shy, though that fact usually caused my parents more consternation than it did me. In fact, I had caught on to using it as an excuse to get me through uncomfortable situations. Rather than make the awkward attempt at conversation with people I had newly met, I held my tongue and waited for Mother or Father to say, "You'll have to forgive Paul, he's shy." But, oh, how I wanted now to be one of those unself-conscious, glib children who could yammer his way to endearment.
From the floor beside my bed she picked up my copy of Boy's Life. "Is this yours? Are you a Boy Scout?"
"Yes."
"And are you honest and trustworthy and loyal and true and always prepared, and do you help old ladies across the street?"
"Sometimes. If I'm around, I mean."
"But if you're not around, then they're on their own, right?" She began to page through the magazine.
"I guess."
She stopped when she came to the section in the magazine about a heroic deed a Scout had performed. The feature, printed like a comic strip, was my favorite in the magazine.
"Look at this," she said. "This boy rescued three of his friends when their boat tipped over. Wasn't that brave of him?" She closed the magazine but kept her finger inside on the page.
"Would you do that, Paul? What if I were drowning -- would you rescue me?"
"I don't have my Lifesaving Badge." What a terrible answer! Once again, I had allowed my literal-mindedness to get in the way of the heroic gesture.
"So you'd let me drown?" "No...I'd try." "What if I pulled you down with me? What if we both drowned? What then?"
I hated the turn this talk had taken. It had become the kind of conversation designed to show children they were wrong to be certain of anything. My father was a master at this -- the series of unanswerable questions that left you unsure of your own existence, which was exactly what he wanted.
"There are things you can do," I said, struggling to show her my authority, "if the person you're trying to save isn't...is fighting you -- "
She interrupted, "The best thing you can do is let go. Just let go and save yourself." She opened the magazine again and tapped the page where the Boy Scout was saving his friends. "And you can tell them I said so."
She flipped through the magazine until she got to the back pages and the advertisements for official Scout products.
"I love these," she said, pointing to a picture of a canvas belt with a gold buckle that had the Boy Scout fleur-de-lis stamped on it. "Do you have one?"
"I don't have it here. It's at home with my uniform."
"Your uniform? Oh, I bet you look wonderful in it. Men always look wonderful in uniforms. Soldiers. Baseball players...Mailmen...Boy Scouts...Milkmen...Janitors..." She let the magazine fall to the floor. "You can tell I'm running out of things to talk about, can't you?" She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hand, and then she smiled apologetically at me.
Another unanswerable question. "I guess."
"I want to talk to you. I want to be able to talk to children, but I can't, I just can't. I don't know what you care about. I never know." She pushed the sleeves of her shirt further up her arms. "You don't understand what I'm talking about, do you?"
At some point I realized I was, in a strange way, in charge of her and her emotions. With my new power I knew it was important for me to be careful about how I responded to her. "I think I understand," I said. Indeed, I believed I did. One of the ways I thought I was different from other children was in an ability to understand the problems of others, including grown-ups. It was not only a mistaken notion, but also an arrogant one.
"Do you?" she said. "I wish you did, but I don't believe you do. You can't."
Then, to show her I was capable of grasping adult difficulties, I said, "Our cleaning lady told me her husband's an alcoholic. She said he drinks every penny she earns." As I said that I imagined, as I always did, Ray, the cleaning woman's husband, emptying rolls of pennies down his throat.
Solemnly, she asked, "And did you advise her on how to handle this situation?"
"Sort of. I told her she should be patient with him."
"Oh, you did? Well, wasn't that wise. Maybe I should tell you one of my problems, and you can see what advice you have for me."
"Okay," I said.
She sat up primly, folded her hands on her lap, and looked straight ahead. "My problem is very simple. It's this: I came to Vermont to be alone with your father, and I can't seem to manage this arrangement."
She must have seen in my eyes what she had done, because immediately she said, "Oh, Jesus, did I say that? Oh, shit!" For myself, I wasn't sure what she had revealed, but from her alarmed reaction, I knew it must have been a revelation both imprudent and profound.
She slid off the bed -- I held on to the sheet -- and landed heavily on the floor. She thumped down so hard I thought they might hear her downstairs and someone might come. In spite of everything, I still did not want that to happen. She clapped her hand to her mouth so hard it seemed she was trying to stop her breath.
Then, quickly, she turned to me. "I didn't mean to say that, Paul. Believe me. I'm always opening my mouth and letting the worst, most outrageous things out. Do you know what I think of sometimes?"
I shook my head.
"Have you ever seen pictures of baby snakes? Of those crawling nests of newborn snakes?"
"Yes."
"Sometimes I think that's what lives in my mouth. A nest of snakes. Right under my tongue." She opened her mouth and lifted her tongue. I looked in, not expecting to see anything but wanting to take advantage of the opportunity to peek in where sight was usually not allowed. The talk of snakes and this furtive look into her pink mouth brought inexplicably to my mind blood and heat, the body's interior elements. She quickly popped her mouth shut and then went on talking. "See, I can't keep them from crawling out. Especially when I drink. When I drink I simply cannot keep them in. That's why I write. If I write I can keep them in, or I can let them out one at a time. But you shouldn't listen to me when I say certain things. You shouldn't."
"I won't," I lied.
"I did come here to see your father," she said in a blandly cheerful, unconvincing voice. "But I came because I work for him, in a way. He's my editor. Or he's going to be. He wanted me to come here so we could start working on the book I might do for him." She stopped abruptly and stared down at the floor for a long time. When she looked up again, it was with a different expression, very placid, almost blank. She put her elbows up on the bed like a child saying her bedtime prayers. "I think I'll stop now, Paul. I don't want to say any more, and I don't want to start lying either."
Downstairs someone whooped and shouted, "Azure! Triple word! Thirty-seven!" and I knew they were playing Scrabble, one of the few games I was good at. But right now, my thoughts were hopelessly scattered, like the tiles on a Scrabble board that will not line up to form a single word....
Even if I had the letters, I couldn't have made the word "extramarital" and perhaps not even the word "affair." They were not part of my child's vocabulary or comprehension. Yet for a while I had felt that something was not right in my parents' marriage. Now, with this woman's remark about wanting to be alone with my father and her subsequent consternation over letting that bit of information out, that "not rightness," like a photograph in the first stages of development, began dimly to define itself. I was not sure of the answers, but I thought I knew the questions: Did my father love someone other than my mother? Did he have girlfriends? Was this young woman one of them?
She pushed herself slowly up from the floor and sat again on my bed. She looked carefully around the room as if she had set something down and now couldn't find it. Finally, she looked back at me and let her gaze rest on me for so long I was almost forced into nervous speech.
"You can be quiet," she said softly. "That's good. So many people can't stand silence and they have to fill it any way they can. So we have all this talk, talk, talk." She sighed tiredly. "Don't ever be afraid to be quiet."
I wasn't sure if she was trying to make me feel better about my shyness, or if she was trying subtly to caution me not to tell anyone what she had said about her and my father. I remained quiet.
"Look at your hair," she said. "You must have slept on it funny. It's sticking straight up." She reached out and put her hand on the cowlick at my hairline. She didn't pat the hair or brush it down with her fingers; she simply held her hand there and exerted the slightest pressure. Her hand, like a child's, was small, damp, soft, and cool. I closed my eyes.
She took her hand away and stood up. "I better go downstairs before they start looking for me." She turned out the light. "And you better get back to sleep. Thank you for letting me hide in here."
Before she opened the door, I found my tongue in time to ask, "Are you staying here tonight?"
She didn't give me a satisfying answer; instead she issued an impossible command. "Forget me," she said, her voice even rougher in its whisper. "Forget everything."
x x x
Not knowing that the greatest danger lay in darkness, not in light, I got up early the next morning to protect my family. I wet my hair down so it was stuck to my head, put on a pair of gym shorts and a white T-shirt, and went downstairs. It was Sunday, and everyone in the house was still asleep, everyone except Hal Davenport, who sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee, smoking, and working a crossword puzzle.
The house had that quiet, morning-after-a-party feel that I always loved, perhaps because it meant my sister and I would have the place to ourselves. In the kitchen someone had lined up all the empty beer bottles on the cupboard, and in the bright morning they glistened like brown jewels. On the other side of the sink were the house's ashtrays, all of them full. They were a sign not of slovenliness but of concern. My father would never let anyone dump an ashtray into the garbage before bed. A live ash might begin to smolder while everyone slept. The sink was heaped with dirty glasses, and the room smelled of spilled beer and cigarette smoke.
When Hal Davenport saw me, he said, "Hey, Judge. What's the good word?" "Judge" was my family nickname, awarded to me in infancy because I never smiled. Hal Davenport and my father grew up together in Beckwith, a small town in upstate New York. Hal was starting forward and my father the center of their high school basketball team that took second place in the state their senior year. They were roommates at Dartmouth, and when the war broke out, my father was classified 4-F because of a perforated eardrum, and Hal Davenport was shipped to France, where he lost his right arm in a Jeep accident. After the war he moved to a small town in Maine, where he was sports editor for the local newspaper. "He's a damn good sportswriter," my father often said. "If he'd get out of there, he could do something."
Hal Davenport was one of the few of my parents' friends with whom I felt comfortable. He was talkative, sad, funny, and friendly, and since he didn't fit in particularly well with the rest of their group, he always had time for my sister and me. He wasn't married, and he loved to talk to children in ways that their parents wouldn't approve of, which of course endeared him to children. He had the ability to ask questions that encouraged you to talk about yourself, and he was interested in your answers. And he remembered what you said. If I told him I was playing third base for my Little League team, then the next time I saw him he would ask me how things were on the hot corner. I sat down at the table across from him.
"What's the matter? Couldn't sleep?" he asked. "Was I making too much racket down here?"
Hal Davenport was freshly shaved, and among the room's stale, morning-after smells his aftershave was like perfume. He wore a long-sleeved white shirt, and he had the right sleeve neatly folded and pinned with a small gold safety pin to the front of his shirt. The left sleeve was buttoned at the wrist. On the table next to him were two horseshoes. Even after losing his arm, he continued to play what sports he could; he bowled, he pitched horseshoes, he ice-skated, he even played one-armed golf. When my father introduced Hal Davenport to people, my father called him the world's fastest one-handed typist.
I was tempted that morning to tell Hal Davenport what had happened in my room the night before and to see what advice he had to offer. I decided against it, not because I didn't think he would be sympathetic, but because I still wanted to hoard the experience. Walking about in the sunlight with the previous night's secret gave me a sense of romantic self-importance. I felt very adult that morning, and the scene -- two men sitting at the kitchen table with the remnants of the previous night's party all around them -- only heightened that feeling.
For a while we talked about baseball, inevitably coming around to our favorite topic: who was the better center fielder -- Mantle or Mays? I argued in favor of Mantle; he played in the American League, and I was an American Leaguer through and through. Hal Davenport, a lifelong Giants fan, argued for Willie Mays. "Better arm and more speed on the bases," he said.
Gradually I left baseball in order to creep up on the subject in which I was more interested. (I must have passed, without knowing it, a threshold -- something actually interested me more than baseball.) Pointing upstairs in the direction of the household's sleeping occupants, I casually asked, "Who's here?" "I'm not sure. I arrived late last night. I had to cover an American Legion doubleheader. The party was already going pretty good when I got here. Some folks were planning to stay over in Hartley."
Hartley, a small resort town, was twelve miles away.
I said, "There were a lot of people I didn't know either."
"That bother you? Strangers in the house?"
"Not really."
"It would me. But maybe I don't adjust as easily as you do."
"There was one person I was wondering about. She was real short...." I tried to say this as nonchalantly as possible, hoping Hal Davenport would answer without thinking there was anything unusual about my inquiry.
"Short, you say?" He was looking intently at his crossword puzzle, and I was afraid he wasn't paying attention to me at all.
"I bet she wasn't much over five feet."
"Uh-huh."
"I never saw her before. I was just wondering if you knew who she was."
"Oh, yeah." He was still staring at the paper.
"You do? You know who she is?"
He set his pencil down deliberately, picked up his pack of Chesterfields, and shook one up to his lips. He took a book of matches from his shirt pocket, bent a match in half, and scratched the match aflame without removing it from the book. It was a routine I had enjoyed watching him perform many times; now it seemed a delaying operation calculated to torment me.
"I think you are talking about Laura Coe Pettit."
He exhaled smoke through his nostrils, and I let her name run through my mind as many times as I could before he spoke again. Laura Coe Pettit, Laura Coe Pettit, Laura Coe Pettit, Laura.
"And," Hal Davenport said, "she will soon be famous across this land, known by everybody. Well, perhaps not everybody. Everybody who reads poetry. A hundred, two hundred people, maybe."
"She's a writer?"
"Not a writer, Judge. I'm a writer. I get paid for what I write. She's a poet.
That's different. Much higher class. Poets don't get paid for what they write, and nobody reads their stuff. You can see what an exalted plain that puts them on."
I must have looked both pathetic and uncomprehending, because he changed his tone and said, "Okay, I was having a little joke. Don't pay any attention. Yeah, she's a poet. Very hot right now, I guess. Big write-up in The New York Times and even an article in Time, and Time never writes up poets unless they're the old, lovable kind. I can't remember the name of her book; Dreams Women Have, or something like that. I haven't read it, but a lot of folks are talking about it."
"She looks so young."
"Well, she is. Twenty-two, twenty-three, something like that. A real child prodigy. And that's what I thought when I first met her -- a cute, quiet kid. Then she got into it last night with Leonard Shelter, and that changed my mind about her pronto."
I was eager to hear what happened, yet I was a little hurt, too. I wanted her only performance to have been for me. "What happened?"
"You know who Leonard Shelter is?"
I had a vague recollection of meeting a skinny man with a pencil mustache and a big Adam's apple, but mostly I knew him as a name in my parents' conversation.
"He's a writer too, isn't he?"
"Judge, you know too much. Is your dad his editor? No, that wouldn't be right. Leonard's with Random House." Hal Davenport stubbed out his cigarette and got up to get himself more coffee.
I was always fascinated with the way Hal Davenport did things, how the simple, everyday actions that other people were able to perform simultaneously, he had to do serially: first, put the coffee cup down; pick up the coffeepot; pour the coffee in the cup; put down the pot; pick up the cup. Ordinary routines received a special emphasis when he did them, like someone speaking your native language with a foreign accent. Sometimes when no one was around, I would put one hand behind my back and do everything the way Hal Davenport would.
Back at the table he continued with his story. "Someone asked your friend Miss Pettit if she'd read Leonard's stories. She was standing right over there by the sink. Smoking a cigarette and drinking ice water or gin, who can tell? She said yes, she'd read them. I don't think she wanted to say any more, but someone kept pushing her, asking her what she thought, and Leonard was right there too, waiting with his tongue hanging out.
"Finally she said it was obvious that Leonard had talent -- and Leonard beamed a little more -- and then she let him have it, really lowered the boom on him."
"What did she do?"
"She didn't do much of anything. Kept leaning on the cupboard just the way she was before anyone noticed her. It was what she said. Right after she said he had talent, right after she complimented him, she took it all away: she said it was too bad he used that talent to advance the most ridiculous ideas. His ideas were so ridiculous, she said, they would be funny if they weren't contemptible. You know what 'contemptible' means, Judge?"
"Sort of," I said.
"Well, it means not just stupid or wrong, but worthless, maybe even bad. Jesus, it's hard to explain. See, Leonard's book is full of stories about men who find themselves during the war. They find out what they're made of, so to speak."
I remember how she had paged through my Boy's Life the night before and how unimpressed she was by the Scout who saved his friends from drowning.
"One of the things the men in Leonard's book find out," Hal Davenport continued, "is that they liked the war, or the excitement of it anyway. Remember now, I'm summing up very simply a whole collection of stories."
I didn't care how he represented or misrepresented Leonard Shelter's themes. I wanted to hear more of what she said. I said, "I kind of know what you mean."
"What I liked," Hal Davenport said, smiling, "was the look on Leonard's face when she was talking. He got all puckered-up, like maybe this was supposed to be a joke and he wanted to be ready to laugh. But he couldn't even if he wanted to. Maybe he could have cried. And she didn't slow down once she got started. Said she couldn't believe how someone could glorify anything that cost millions of lives. Or wasn't he aware of that? she asked. Maybe he thought World War Two was just an excuse for men to get together out of the house, like the Harvard-Yale football game or something. Then she said -- well, I won't tell you what she said next. Your mother would boot me out of the house if I told you that."
"Please," I said. "I won't tell anyone you told me."
"You promise?" Hal Davenport held up the palm of his left hand, indicating I was to take a vow.
"I promise."
He leaned over the table and lowered his voice. "She told Leonard Shelter that if he thought war was so glorious, then why didn't he take one of his souvenir Japanese bayonets and" -- his voice went down to a whisper -- "and stick it up his ass. Then maybe he'd have some idea of the pain of war. So you see," Hal Davenport said, his voice coming back to its normal volume, "she ain't no kid."
"What did Mr. Shelter say?"
"Not much. Stammered a bit about how she hadn't understood what his book was about, how many critics had compared him to Hemingway. And she said, as cool as can be, that Hemingway could stick a bayonet up his ass too!"
I whistled softly between my teeth. My father had met Hemingway a few times, and my father loved to tell a story about a lunch he once had with the great writer. At the time, Hemingway was so angry with a particular literary critic that he wanted to buy a spiked dog collar and put it on the critic so everyone would know "what a vicious cur the man was." My father told the story in a way that mocked Hemingway.
Hal Davenport snapped his fingers and said, "That's right! I almost forgot the best part. Leonard had to find some way to save face, so he turned to your dad and said, 'I don't think I should have to take this, Robert.' And your dad said, 'You're right. Bye-bye, Leonard.' Oh, I tell you, Judge, it was something to see."
I approved of my father taking Laura's side, yet it was also more evidence of a connection between them. "What did my mom do?"
"Your mom? Now, where was your mom? I don't remember her being around when that was going on."
"Maybe she was sleeping."
"I don't know, Judge. Could be." Hal Davenport finished his coffee in a long swallow. He was serious now, as if he was suddenly aware that he had been taking too much pleasure in telling it all. "I guess adults can act pretty foolishly, can't they?" That summarizing remark was supposed to convey a moral to me; it was also a signal that we were not going to spend any more time on the subject.
I looked around the kitchen again, now seeing it as the scene of the confrontation between Leonard Shelter and Laura Pettit. Last night, I imagined, the overhead light would have been on, and mosquitoes, gnats, and moths would have clustered around the globe the way they did on evenings when someone was always opening the screen door. The room must have flashed with light, noise, and anger, and it contrasted in my mind with Laura's hushed presence in my dark room.
"What do you say, Judge?" Hal Davenport said. "This is too nice a day to spend indoors. Let's get out there and move around. What do you want to do -- pitch horseshoes or play catch?"
Since I couldn't tell him that all I wanted to do was to sit in the house and wait for Laura Pettit's appearance, I told him we could play catch. We got gloves and a scuffed, gray baseball from the woodbox next to the back door.
Hal Davenport's light blue Nash was parked in the yard, and he rolled down its windows and positioned himself with his back to the car so that if he missed the ball or if I threw wildly, it would be blocked by the car. Of course, if the ball rolled under the car, I had to retrieve it.
Playing catch with Hal Davenport was awkward. He wore his glove on his left hand, and after catching the ball, he had to hold the ball between his legs, let the glove fall to the ground, grab the ball again, and then throw it. His throwing was ungainly and distorted, not only because he was not a natural left-hander but also because he didn't have the other arm available for balance and leverage. He refused to let the stump of his right arm come free of the pinned shirt. He threw weakly but accurately, almost as if he were aiming a dart at a bull's-eye.
After we played for a few minutes, Hal Davenport became frustrated with taking the glove off and putting it back on. He dropped the glove to the ground and left it there. "Go ahead, Judge," he called out across the fifteen yards between us, "fire them as hard as you like. I can handle them bare-handed."
And perhaps he could, but I didn't dare do anything more than lob the ball to him. If he had so much as jammed a finger, he would have been incapacitated, and I didn't want to be the one responsible. So, our activity in the Sunday morning sunshine was not spirited and invigorating, but tentative, restrained, and, I think for both of us, halfhearted.
Soon he was throwing high, head-tilting fly balls that shortened the distance between us but had me ranging back and forth across the yard. He said he wanted to give me practice catching pop-ups, but I believe the real reason was to allow him to toss the ball underhanded and not worry about accuracy.
I dropped one of his fly balls, and when it came down, it hit a stone and skittered off through the patchy, dry, unmowed grass. I chased the ball down, and when I turned back to Hal Davenport, I saw her standing on the porch.
Laura Coe Pettit was leaning on the porch balustrade. She was wearing an oversize white shirt and a dark blue skirt, and her hair was wet and combed back from her face. Her eyes were puffy, and she squinted in the morning light. Next to her stood my mother, one hand resting on Laura's shoulder, her other hand pointing toward the trees far beyond our yard. My mother was wearing a long, white, satiny robe, and the glasses she didn't really need hung around her neck from a thin gold chain. Both women were smoking, and my mother was laughing as she directed Laura Pettit's attention.
My heart quickened as I stared at them and tried to decide which woman was prettier.
My mother was thirty-five that summer, and she was, by anyone's standards, a lovely woman. Her hair, dark blond and threatening every year to become brown, was brushed and hung to her shoulders. Her laughter was, as usual, bright and easy, perfectly suited to Sunday summer mornings. She was graceful, tall, and slender, and though she had a fair complexion, her cheeks always had a streak of color that made her look slightly sun -- or wind-burned. Although she was completely unathletic, she had a glowing, breathless quality that made it seem as though she had only moments before finished some physical exertion. As she smoked, she threw her head back to exhale.
Next to my mother, Laura Pettit's shortness was emphasized. In fact, as they stood side by side, they seemed a study in contrasts. Unlike my mother's cheerful expression, Laura Pettit's was solemn, almost frowning, and in Laura Pettit's pallor there was no hint of vitality or vigor; she looked tired, almost wasted, and though she was more than ten years younger than my mother, she was the one who carried age's weariness. She was as thin as my mother but more compact, and while my mother looked as though she got up every morning and stretched wide-eyed toward the sun, Laura Pettit looked as though she bent toward the earth and listened.
As the women competed unwittingly in the sunlight, I tried to make my choice. And how would I choose? There was my mother, with the hold on my heart that all mothers have, and there was Laura Coe Pettit, with that new grip on me that mothers never have. But the choice, of course, was not simply between new love and old, between a boy's mother and the first of many women who vie to replace her in his affections. This was more complicated. Laura Pettit could also have been my mother's competitor for my father. Perhaps I should have called out a warning at that moment; perhaps I should have told my mother that the woman upon whose shoulder her hand rested was a danger to her, to all of the family. But I kept silent, and at that moment began to learn the long lesson of how we can hate someone we love, love someone we hate, and how each feeling wraps around the other and becomes a new inseparable thing, stronger than either.
So, though I still had some of the small boy's bias that sees his mother as the most beautiful woman in the world, I had to admit that Laura Pettit was the more compellingly attractive of the two. Have you ever looked at a photograph of a crowd and noticed that one face out of the many demands your attention? Perhaps it is because he or she is the only one staring directly at the camera and so seems to be gazing right back at you. No matter what the reason, something keeps bringing you back to that face.
That was true of Laura Coe Pettit. As she stood alongside my mother, my mother's beauty seemed to fade in degrees from conventional to ordinary to uninteresting, while the mystery of Laura's looks deepened.
"Hey, Judge!" Hal Davenport's shout brought me out of my reverie. "Come on! Let's go, let's go. Throw the ball."
But playing catch became impossible. It was difficult enough to concentrate when my attention (and eye) kept wandering to the porch, but I couldn't even show off as we played. I couldn't throw the ball hard to Hal Davenport, and his tosses to me came lower and softer and were embarrassingly easy to catch.
Finally, my mother saved me by calling, "Paul! Could you come here a moment?"
I shrugged at Hal Davenport as if to say, what can I do -- it's my mother.
My mother said, "Paul, I have someone I would like you to meet."
I wasn't sure how I should handle this introduction. Should I say we had already met and have my mother question me about the circumstances? Or should I say nothing and risk having Laura reveal our meeting and thereby make it seem as though I was concealing something? I kept quiet, and Laura did the same. The knot of our conspiracy tightened.
My mother told me why she had interrupted my ball playing. "Laura is going to borrow Jane's bike and go for a ride this morning, and I told her about that lovely lane over on the other side of the highway. You know which one I'm talking about? Where they're building those two new houses?"
I said I knew which one she meant.
"I hope you don't mind," my mother said, "but I told Laura you'd show her the way. Is that all right? Did you have something else planned this morning?"
The last question was part of the pretense my mother and father upheld about our summers in Vermont. They pretended that the vacations were not for them and their friends but for Janie and me -- "the children" -- and that our days were full of so many exciting activities there weren't enough hours to hold them all. The days, in fact, were often long, boring, and blank as sunlight.
"No," I told my mother. "I don't have any plans."
Laura said, "I'll be ready in a few minutes. I just need some coffee." That deep voice, well suited to my dark room, was startling in the light.
I excused myself to Hal Davenport and told him I had to do a favor for my mother. He looked relieved.
I brought both bikes up from the shed to the house, leaning them against the porch. My heart was pounding but not from exertion.
Janie's bike was an old, rattling, rusty-red Schwinn, and mine was a somewhat sleeker blue Raleigh with a missing front fender. My parents bought both bikes secondhand when we came to Vermont, and although Janie seldom rode hers, I often went for long excursions, pedaling up and down the blacktopped county highways, the gravel roads, and the dirt paths of the fields. I wiped the dust from Janie's bike with a rag, and then I sat on the porch steps and waited for Laura.
She took longer than the few minutes she promised, and I filled the time by concocting a fantasy about Laura and me on our bike ride.
I imagined us riding along a high stretch of rocky road that I knew, a road arched over by giant elms on each side. The road wound around a small swamp. Laura insisted we stop so she could gather scraggly, brilliant wildflowers that seemed to blossom right out of the summer air. As she edged her way down a slope to pick a purple violet, she lost her footing and began to slide down toward the scum-green water. "Paul! Help! I can't swim!" She clung desperately to the loose strand of a tree's exposed root.
Without worrying about my own safety, I jumped off the road and reached out to her. "Take my hand," I said. "I'll pull you up."
She hesitated, but I told her not to worry; I could hold her.
Just as the root she was holding gave way, I grabbed her wrist, and with one great pull, brought her to her feet and back up to the road.
In relief and gratitude, she threw her arms around me and sighed, as only someone in a fantasy would, "Paul, you saved me! How can I ever thank you?"
There my fantasy ended. Perhaps because it was enough for me simply to think of being in a grown woman's embrace, and perhaps not even my imagination dared go any further.
After about half an hour, Laura returned. She was smoking and carrying a small paper bag. The screen door slammed behind her, and she said, "Okay, I'm ready, Which one is mine?"
"The red one."
"Then you take this," she said, dropping the bag into my dented wire basket.
"Lead the way."
"Where do you want to go?"
"You decide."
I pedaled off down our long unpaved driveway and out onto the county highway. Laura followed, how near or far I could tell by the clatter of the loose chain guard on Janie's bike. Now that I had what I wanted -- to be alone again with Laura -- I was too nervous to take advantage of it, and that was why I stayed ahead. It made conversation impossible.
After going less than a quarter of a mile down the highway, I turned off, ran down a ditch, and came back up again next to a large hayfield. I had to stand up to pedal through some weeds and tall grass, but soon I was at the field's edge and onto a smooth two-wheel path worn down to dirt by a farmer's truck. When I looked back at Laura, I expected to see her walking her bike through the hard-going grass, but she was also standing up on her pedals and moving steadily along. "This is a shortcut," I called back to her.
We rode silently up the length of the field until it ended in a row of field-cleared rocks and boulders. Then we turned west and followed the same path through a heavy stand of scrub oak and elms until it came out in the sunlight next to a cornfield. We were not far from the home of the farmer who owned this land nor even from my parents' house, but the configuration of alternating fields and forest made the area seem isolated and remote. Except for Janie, who occasionally rode here with me, I never saw another person in my wanderings along those trails. When my parents went walking along the country road that was Laura's and my destination, they always took the car, drove the long way around, and parked along the shoulder of the highway before their stroll.
Soon we were past the cornfield, and we pedaled to the top of a small treeless rise. To show her I knew where I was going, I shouted over my shoulder, "It's not much farther. The highway's just over there."
"Wait," she said.
I stopped quickly. "Is something wrong?"
She was straddling Janie's bike and pointing to a stand of tall pines on a ridge off to our left. The trees were on high ground too, but a steep downward slope and another hill separated us. "I want to go over there," said Laura.
"But the place my mom was talking about is the other way."
"Over there," she repeated.
I shrugged and turned my bike around so we could go back along the path we rode in on.
"Let's go straight over. Down the hill," Laura suggested.
I looked again down the steep, grassy, pathless hill. "It's not that far to go around."
"Oh, come on," said Laura. "Let's try going straight down the hill."
I wasn't only afraid we would rocket down the hill so fast that we wouldn't be able to control our bikes and would tumble down the hill in a tangle of handlebars, wheels, and bicycle chains, I was also concerned because I was supposed to be Laura's escort and to see that no harm came to her. "I don't think we should," I said. "These bikes are kind of old."
"Fine," she said. "You go around the other way. I'm going down the hill." She straddle-walked her bike over to the hill's crest, and just before she pushed off, she looked back over her shoulder at me and said, "Chicken."
It's strange, but in trying to decide my course of action, I asked myself what my father would do. I had an adult's duty in guiding Laura that morning, so I wanted to behave as an adult would, and since I also wanted her to love me, it figured I should be like the man I believed she loved. And there was no question, my father -- whom everyone regarded as headstrong and fearless -- would go right down the hill after her.
Laura leaned out over her handlebars and pushed hard down the hill. As she picked up speed, she let out an undulating, drawn-out shriek that was half fear and half exhilaration.
Just as I did the first time I jumped feet-first from the high diving board, I held my breath so hard my ears plugged; then I took off after her, keeping my foot pressed back lightly on the brake. I was in trouble already; you can't decide to rush headlong down a hill and at the same time put on the brakes.
Ahead of me, Laura was again standing up on her pedals, and her white shirt filled with wind and ballooned around her body, making her look ridiculously fat. The track her tires made in the high grass was perfectly straight, like the precise part in a fastidious man's hair.
I was not doing as well. I had swerved to avoid a rock, and that sideways motion slowed me down and gave me the idea of going back and forth down the hill like a skier slaloming down a mountain. I hoped that might give me more control.
But the wheels of a bicycle are not like skis, and as the hill steepened, my wheels began to slide out from under me, so I was rolling sideways across the hill but also skidding slowly down it. I wrenched the handlebars hard to try to get back on track, and that made matters worse. I fell, so hard and swift I couldn't even get a bracing leg under me.
I landed hard on my left side, my arm and shoulder slamming into the hill. But since I was still on my bicycle, the worst of my injuries were actually the result of my body banging against the bicycle's unyielding parts. The chain took a bite of my bare calf, the cross brace of the frame bruised its way hard into my thigh, and the spokes of the front wheel somehow twisted my foot between them. But none of these injuries was severe; in fact, I didn't even notice them at first. What I did notice was the way the end of the handlebars landed under me. The handlebars didn't have any rubber grips, so it was like landing on the open end of a length of pipe. Into my left side, just under my heart, the handlebar gouged, and when it did, my breath blew out of me.
As soon as I could breathe again, I rolled onto my back and lay very still, the way you do when you're afraid you might be hurt seriously and you don't want to take a chance of aggravating any injury -- the slightest movement might cause that broken rib to puncture a lung, or the stray vertebra to sever the spinal cord, or the torn vein to start leaking blood so fast it won't stop. And that was exactly the way my thoughts ran. As a child I was so sensitive to any injury or illness that I worried a bump could break a bone and a fever signal the start of a fatal disease. A few years earlier, I had lain in bed night after night systematically moving my toes, feet, and legs, checking for any sign of the oncoming paralysis of polio. I knew it could happen. In school there were three or four children, victims of polio, who clumped up and down the halls in their heavy shoes and leg braces. Worse were the films we saw of people fated to spend their lives in iron lungs, those awful cylinders that looked like oversized water heaters. Until the vaccine, I was terrified I was going to contract the disease.
Lying on the ground still tangled in my bicycle, I took short breaths because I was afraid of the pain if I fully expanded my lungs. Then, while I lay believing I was seriously, perhaps critically injured, I heard laughter.
At first I thought the sound must have some source in natur a bird with a deep, chuckling call, the wind shuttling its way through the pine boughs, a dog barking another hill away, but finally there was no doubt it was human laughter; it was as clear and joyful as the blue sky above me.
I turned in its direction and saw Laura halfway up the hill across from me. She was off her bike and laughing without restraint. When her laughter subsided, she turned and began to walk up the hill. With her back to me she shouted, "Hurry up, Paul. I want to go up there."
How dare she? I was hurt -- who knew how badly? -- and she was laughing! I was so angry that I resolved to get up, no matter what it cost in pain. And I hoped that once I got up I would immediately collapse, thereby demonstrating to her just how serious my injuries were. Let her kneel over my unconscious body and weep, "Oh, Paul. I'm sorry! I had no idea it was this bad!"
I did not collapse, however. I rose shakily to my feet and began to take small, hesitant steps down the hill. My side, where I landed on the handlebars, hurt, and I kept my left arm pressed against my ribs and maintained my shallow breathing. A strand of blood rolled down my leg from the cut on my calf.
When it became clear that I was not going to pass out from pain, loss of blood, or internal injuries, I decided on a different plan. I would play the stoic and hide my wounds from Laura. Later, that night perhaps, when I would have to be taken away by ambulance, she would be forced to say, "My God, I had no idea he was hurt so badly! He never let on!" One way or the other, I would get the sympathy I thought I had coming.
From the crest of the hill Laura called down to me, "Do you still have the bag?"
Miraculously, the bag was still in my basket. "I've got it!" I shouted angrily. At first, I was stunned that she was more concerned about what was in the basket than what had happened to me, and then another thought, even more stunning, pushed that one aside: She was having fun.
All of it, the changed route, the wild ride down the hill, had only been an attempt to have fun. She was not trying to sabotage me or humiliate me, or put me through any trial; she only wanted a little excitement out of a Sunday bike ride. She was the adult and I was the child, yet she was the one who tried to find some pleasure, some amusement, in the dull day. The ride down the hill was not a test of skill or courage; it was merely an experience, a grassy roller-coaster ride. I was learning something about Laura and what she wanted of life, and if I could have looked inward as easily as outward, I could have learned something about myself as well.
When I finally got to the top of the hill, I couldn't see Laura. She was not there waiting for me, as I hoped she would be.
I rested my bike on its kickstand and began to look around, wondering how she could have vanished so quickly. Could I have made some mistake -- climbed the wrong hill? Failed to hear her say she was going on ahead? Now I was not afraid that I would be in trouble for failing as Laura's escort; I was afraid that I was going to be left alone, injured and far from home.
Then I heard her call, and at her voice my heart flooded with relief. "Paul! Over here!" Her voice came from the stand of pine trees that thickly grew twenty yards back from the hilltop. "And bring the bag!"
Once I stepped into the shade of the pines, it felt as though I had entered a cool, dim room. Underfoot was not the rocky clay of the hilltop but a cushioned carpet of pine needles. Sunlight had to struggle through layers of branches, and the heat remained outside as well. And then another season intruded. The clean Christmas smell of evergreen rose to my nostrils as each of my steps crushed more needles. In the center of this half-lit area sat Laura, waiting for me on the trunk of a long-ago fallen pine. She was smoking, and in that windless interior, the smoke rose straight up.
I held out the bag with my right hand, my left arm still pressed tightly to my side.
She took out a red and white can of Budweiser, the brand my father always bought. She also took out a can opener.
Just as she was about to lever open the can, I said, "It really got shook up. When I fell."
She acknowledged my warning by turning her head slightly to the side and holding the can farther out in front of her. It opened with a metallic gasp, and beer sprayed out explosively in the air between us before settling down to a bubbling foam in the can's open triangle. Laura made another, smaller opening in the top of the can before bringing it to her lips for a long swallow. "God," she said, "I've been thirsty since I got up this morning. I must have had six glasses of water before we left the house."
I remembered something my father said to me one Saturday morning after a long, loud party the night before. He was standing in his bathrobe by the kitchen sink, drinking glass after glass of water. "Whiskey," he said to me, "the more you pour in, the more it dries you out. Crazy, huh, Judge?"
Laura held the can out to me. "Do you want a sip? It's not very cold, but it's wet."
"No thanks."
"Never touch the stuff?"
"I do sometimes." Which was true. My father always encouraged Janie and me to sample his drinks. "It takes a long time to learn to like the stuff," he would say. "You might as well get an early start." The only alcoholic beverages I liked were sweet, the cordials, liqueurs, or the occasional old-fashioned my father drank. "I don't like the taste of beer," I told Laura.
She shrugged. "You're better off."
I wanted to draw attention to the fact that I was hurt, but I couldn't simply announce it because that would have made it seem as if I were whining. I settled for limping in a small circle in front of the fallen pine, flexing my leg as if I were worried it would stiffen up.
Laura finally took her cue and said, "You went down pretty hard, huh?"
Now I had my opportunity to be brave. "I'll be okay."
"Your leg's bleeding."
I looked down as if I were surprised. I reached down and lightly touched my fingertips to the blood that was already drying and turning dark. "It doesn't hurt."
"Any other injuries?"
"My side."
She motioned for me to come closer. "Should I take a look?"
My bravery had limits, and as badly as I wanted to impress her with my courage, I wanted even more to know if I was seriously injured. I stepped meekly forward to let her diagnose me.
"Which side?" she asked.
In response, I wordlessly pulled up my T-shirt, exposing my pale, rib-skinny torso for her inspection. By now I felt like crying, not because of physical pain, but because I knew how diminished I must have become in her eyes. It was hopeless -- I was a child, and after this behavior there was no pretending otherwise.
She winced slightly when she looked at me. "Oooh. Yeah, you got it all right."
Her expression made me look down. On my chest, just under my left nipple, was a dark purple ring, exactly the circumference of the bicycle's handlebar. The skin was slightly raised where the blood was welling up beneath. The contusion frightened me -- it was an ugly little wound, more so for its perfect geometric shape -- yet it also satisfied me. See, I really was hurt.
"Can you take a deep breath?" she asked.
I inhaled gingerly, letting my lungs gradually fill. It hurt, but the pain was not markedly worse. "It's okay," I said, my stoicism creeping back.
"I don't think anything's broken." She put her right hand, palm out and fingers pressed together, toward the injury on my chest. Less than two inches from my flesh, she stopped her hand. "Do you want me to heal you?" she asked.
Standing this close to her I smelled her beery breath and something else. It must have been her body, sweating from the heat and the bike ride, and it was the smell of sweat and a flowery fragrance mingled, as though someone had poured perfume on freshly dug dirt. "I don't know what you mean," I said.
"You know, should I heal you? Like Oral Roberts. Don't you ever watch that program?"
Was there anyone in 1955 who hadn't seen Oral Roberts lay his hand on the afflicted and make goiters disappear, arthritic fingers straighten, and blind eyes blink into sight?
At that moment, however, what tempted me was not any promise of a miraculous cure but simply the possibility of her touch. I could not move forward those scant inches to make the contact myself, no matter how I longed for it, yet all I had to do was give her my permission.
"Okay," I said. "Heal me."
I must have closed my eyes, for I have no recollection of what her hand looked like on my chest, yet I remember the feeling exactly.
She touched lightly, only the heel of her hand and the tips of her fingers making contact, and her touch was cool, as if her hand, like the grass, could not hold any of the summer's heat.
Her hand was perfectly still, while it seemed my skin was quivering, my muscles twitching, ribs vibrating, and heart lurching.
It was a moment of knowing and not knowing. I was having an erotic experience -- the first my memory can reach -- but since I didn't know what an erotic experience was, I was going through something without having any awareness of it, without having a name for it or a category to put it in. It was happening only on the level of feeling -- my mind was not ahead of what was happening on the five-inch span of flesh on my left side, and although I have had physical experiences more intense than that moment, nothing has ever approached its purity.
"Do you believe?" she said. "You have to believe." On the last syllable of "believe" her voice rose like a television evangelist's.
"Yes," I said. "I believe."
"And what do you believe in?"
I searched for something to say and then blurted out, "Water."
I have no idea why I said that. Perhaps the green, swaying light in the pines made me feel as though I were underwater. Or the air, warm and humid, seemed to resist and slow our movements. Or my inability to breathe easily....Or perhaps you can always find a reason to say "water."
"Water?" Laura said. "You believe in water?"
"I guess."
With the hand that was on my chest, she pushed me gently away and began to laugh. "I don't believe you," she said, shaking her head. "Water!" Now she was laughing so hard she began to cough.
I pulled my T-shirt down. "I didn't know what to say."
She stopped laughing long enough to take another swallow of beer. When she brought the can down, she had a foamy little mustache on her upper lip, a