“Let me show you the studio,” said Sharon. She hovered briefly by Sophia’s chair. “Comfortable, darling?”
“Yes, Sharon.” Sharon inserted a cushion or two to be on the safe side. She hooked a finger in my shirt so that I could walk, drink, and read the paper at the same time.
March 10. Daniel Walker, 34, a worker at the offices of the Organic Unity Party, jumped to his death late this afternoon from the thirtieth-story penthouse of party leader Joseph Max. Mr. Max told police that Walker had apparently suffered a nervous breakdown from overwork. Walker had called at the penthouse earlier in the day, in what Mr. Max described as a “distressed and incoherent” state. He was alone in a room of the penthouse while Mr. Max spoke on the roof garden with other visitors, among whom were Senator Galt of Alaska and video actor Peter Fry. Walker ran outside and climbed the parapet before the others sensed his intention. He stood there some moments; witnesses agree that his speech was incoherent. Then he either lost his balance or jumped, falling thirty stories to the Esplanade.
Mr. Walker was unmarried, a native of Ohio. He is survived by his mother, Mrs. Eldon Snow, and a brother, Stephen Walker, both of Cincinnati.
That was when I looked around the good sober studio and made my maundering contribution about a flower vase. “Nup,” said Sharon. “Ben, you’re acting different, as if something had happened. Come clean.”
“I found him.”
“Ah?” She whispered it, and caught hold of my coat lapels and stared up a long time, trying, I think, to learn without words what finding him had done to me. “He — is he mixed up the way you thought he might be, with those” — she nodded in distaste at the paper — “those people?”
“Yes, indirectly.” I told her everything — everything in the way of fact, that is. In trying to describe what Abraham Brown was like in this year 1972, I probably made a mess of it. “He heard your debut. He thinks you wouldn’t remember him….”
“Reform school — poor kid!” But I hadn’t made him real to her as a person: words can’t do that. She was still concerned with what might be happening to me, and though it was sweet and flattering, I wished she would abandon that preoccupation.
“I met Walker yesterday. A sort of greeter for high-class suckers, and rather good at it. He pulled a very small boner on Party slanguage, and I believe Billy Kell alias William Keller reamed him out for it.”
“So for that he jumps off the roof?”
“I had a glimpse of him when I was leaving the office. Keller’d had him on the phone. Walker looked as if he’d had it — between the eyes.”
“And this — Hodding?”
“I don’t know, sugar. And I’m sure Abraham didn’t. It’s like seeing only the tail of a beast vanishing behind a tree.”
She shivered, thrust her hands into her hair, looked for comfort to her other friend in the room, the piano. “Not that I know beans about politics, seems like a terrible lot of noise for small returns, but I did join the Federalist Party a while back. Infant school branch, seeing the lady’s under twenty-one. Card and everything, heck. Was that sense, Ben — I do mean Will, Will — or was I swope off my feet by good dialectic?”
“I like their views.”
“You’re going to try to get Angelo away from those neo-nazis?”
“He must get away under his own power.”
“And if he doesn’t?” She studied me with worried tenderness. “What if he’s sold on their stuff and spits in your eye?” Somehow I must make her stop thinking about me.
“He isn’t and wouldn’t. He hasn’t changed that much, not down inside. He’s tied by gratitude to Keller for practical kindnesses — as I don’t doubt Keller meant he should be. Trapped into loyalty toward something that’s foreign to him, a loyalty with roots dangerously deep in childhood. He’s still the boy who admired Billy Kell. Funny: I just remembered watching you and Angelo bury that little pup of his in the back yard. You probably didn’t know I was in my window. You were wrassling a chunk of paving stone — I remember the way your skinny little behind stuck up in the air—”
“Mister! My present dignity!”
“Well, previously you’d been sitting on something dusty, you and your white drawers. Yes, the old things come back.”
“Ah, they come back!” she said. “Or they’ve never gone away.”
“The cloud-capped towers — look at them again, Sharon.”
“Why, we had a country, Ben, one of our own. A year or so before you came to Latimer. It began at a special crack on the sidewalk of Calumet Street, a twisty crack that looked like S and A together….”
“Go on, Sharon.”
“We’d known for a long time that the country was there. And speculated about it. The population was primitive, or say quasi-medieval — mighty high percentage of kings and villainous viziers, afreets all the time monkeying around, heck, you couldn’t hold ’em…. Angelo drew a gorgeous map of the place, so I had to draw one too, only his was better. I had a river going right over a mountain range, he wouldn’t stand for that. It was my river, and I got mad, so” — she pressed light finger tips over her eyelids — “so he said, ‘Well, then it’s a river that goes underground, under the mountains.’ And redrew his own map to accommodate it, worked swell — caverns and subterranean lakes and stuff….”
“There might have been a blue-white light that came from nowhere, and your voices came back to you from the wet rocks.”
“Oh — you’d know! Well, one day we decreed that we’d step over that crack at last in a certain way, and remain in — the name of the country was Goyalantis — remain there as long as we chose. Of course to others it looked as if we were still in this world. A necessary convention. We felt quietly sorry for the poor souls because they’d look at us (and oh! even make us wash and comb our hair and eat oatmeal and not say damn) and they’d think we were with them when heaven knows we weren’t at all. We stayed — in fact I don’t remember any ceremony of coming back. I think we never did bother to come back.” She opened her eyes, and they were swimming. “Your hands haven’t changed. Play for me.”
Small stuff. One of Field’s sentimental nocturnes I happened to remember, because there was a warming night of March beyond the windows. And then the First Prelude of Chopin, as Sharon had taught me it might be played. She was looking down at me, but seeing Goyalantis too, never having left it, and though there were colored mists in Goyalantis, its air could be crystal, a crystal lens for observation of this other world which is not alone in possession of a special seeing we like to call truth. She said: “I wasn’t mistaken.”