Dancing would have helped, but there wasn’t any. Al wanted to go to the librarian’s house but it was only eight and he didn’t want to be even a minute early. Gail was telling Annette about her job working for the Boston representative of a Washington hotel, and how she went to B.U. two nights and was waiting to go to stewardess school. Her fingernails were painted the cleanest pink. Annette put her hand on Al’s.
I was back not quite so far as the encyclopedia. I’m quite a fair geographer. After the accident in ’48 there was no more talk about the Pittsburgh tryout, only a note from the Pirate front office that Al should get in touch when he was ready again, and they’d see. The scout may have heard the truth from someone at the Heatsburg Legion. Gail wrote me that their father got on Al pretty badly over that accident even with insurance, and Al merely said it was kind of late for his father to be interesting himself in baseball. Al blew his two-hundred-dollar bonus that winter; then he’d suddenly graduated, and that summer he waited on at the inn.
He spend the winter bartending in Florida. One day I got a Metropolitan Museum card postmarked Cape May, New Jersey, where Al was a Coast Guard boot beginning a four-year hitch.
I couldn’t speak privately to Annette on the way over to the librarian’s either, nor during our not entirely happy evening there. So I’ll simply have to tell you, Dom. Or what’s relevant, anyway. Over my left shoulder is that giant painting of your face which I need not describe; but I would like to know what time it is. I had indeed told Al there was an encyclopedia at the Old Blacksmith Shop; and partly because I hadn’t been around most of that summer of ’45, I had a hunch he’d quietly act on my information. He was making six dollars a day suckering corn. I did indeed say that if I hadn’t another in Brooklyn I’d buy it myself. As you’ve probably guessed, my Uncle Coolidge had given it to me for my twelfth birthday, if you’ve been paying attention to the dates I’ve mentioned so far tonight in this more and more comfortable living room. But now, three summers later I’d sold the frigging books to Caesar Bemis before I knew Cooley was coming up the next weekend (which as it happened he’d forgotten was my birthday), and I knew that even in a mellow state at two-thirty in the afternoon he wouldn’t leave the Old Blacksmith Shop till he’d seen every last thing there from the eighteenth-century well-sweep Caesar had across the rafters the length of the main room, to the last blue bottle in the last of the four dark corners. So it would be wrong to judge me in any clear sense responsible for the blow-up between Al and his dad. Not that you would.
Al was easy with people and after he got out of high school he liked a drink. Bartending in Daytona and Miami seemed to come easy. But his charm with customers was sometimes jolly pedantry which in turn made him interrupt his own view of them and despise them not always secretly for “graduating college” without having read a book. On the Barataria, where he was transferred about the time I got my B.A. he was called by two Georgia boys in his berthing compartment “Professor.” He spent a month’s Search and Rescue in St. George, Bermuda, reading my copy of Breasted, yet if his letters suggest that at sea when not on radar watch he studied German down on the messdeck with the Chief Electronics Technician from whom he began by learning the Greek alphabet, and discussed the Founding Fathers and early American landscape painting with the funny, spoiled little Reserve ensign from Richmond who had a box of oils in his stateroom on the boatdeck, Al if I know him at all spent as much time as I would have at the rail following the sea’s gray molten life. Unlike Bob, he never tried to hide the difference between what he thought he wanted and what he thought he was, except to insist on this “story of my life” a bit hard. He never knew it wasn’t honesty of that kind I wanted from a friend. I rarely trust a man’s account of his own weaknesses, but my doubt may itself be a weakness and on this Ted grimly agreed one night having just come from his three-credit Group Dynamics where they’d all finally gotten “to” the one married woman who they’d all sensed had been holding out on them — and it had been horrible and wonderful, Ted said. Al got looped one night in New London when he was at radar school across the river in Groton, and he failed to make it to Mystic, where I was staying with Tracy Blood. He was lucky the bartender was a moonlighting cop who was impressed by Al’s Pirate tryout and didn’t want the two OCS boys to get into trouble because of their fight in which over some matter of collegiate fact Al intervened. But at two in the morning back in Groton Al broke into the mess hall and took a half-gallon can of peanut butter, and for this, though he didn’t short out of radar school, he got a captain’s mast. So three weeks later he really couldn’t make the weekend party Tracy and I had at her parents’ so-called farm.
By the time he got transferred from Norfolk to Maine and a ship full of Georgia farm boys who’d never had it so good, he was wondering what he’d been thinking of in ’49 enlisting for four years. On the ship a favorite remark about him which, he wrote me, he couldn’t be bothered after a while to contradict, was that he’d had two years of college: because of his encyclopedia and getting through a few USAFI German lessons with the Chief ET who came from near Galveston, Al was supposed (yes) to have had Two Years of College (the phrase went), always Two Years, something to do with requirements for state cop or some insurance training program or some state college aggie qualification.
Well, Dom, I did my farming in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and don’t you forget it. Six almost solid weeks, and so did Bob.
My letters helped Al. In port the ensign from Richmond went to Boone’s wharfside lobster house with the exec or a Bowdoin cousin, or he was playing tennis at Prout’s Neck. Gail’s jibes about money that October weekend late in Al’s hitch were just her way of letting him know she understood. He did the best he could on Saturday afternoons not to leave the Public Library. It was where he really wanted to be, but to stay there was like some key abstinence. He browsed. When he walked the streets it was a city; he was living in a city. Not like liberty in Norfolk, when he didn’t know yet what he was going to try to get, and where he’d never quite slipped beyond the dragging enclosure of the sailor circuit. Nor like those cramped, soiling sojourns in a bus to get to New York for a stupidly random set of beginnings interrupted by the loneliness that forces boredom — during which I was rarely in New York and Al had no idea what he’d say to my parents if he got them on the phone except (say) that he was going to see the Unicorn tomorrow morning. Perhaps dull Portland was the right site for the meditative end of a certain attenuated loneliness that I now see may have arisen those early summers when he and I were the simplest of friends.
Leaving the ship he gave the Blue Moon on Commercial a miss. Ditto the shipmates there, who poured down eight or ten gassy drafts as soon as they got off the ship, then went up town and ate cheeseburgers and french fries at the chrome-tuned skirt-and-sweater center just below Congress Square, but after all that beer they weren’t fresh enough to do more than clamp their fresh white hats over their brows and trudge up to the movies and drowse for three reckless hours before making it back to State Pier for a night’s sleep. Once he did get caught in the Moon and had to act. But as a rule, it was up India Street to Congress, then the curving length of Congress — I’m boring myself, Dom, but maybe not that little pre-Annette student nurse from the boondocks who liked Al too much and, he told me, had worked for E.B. White’s family one summer — yes, and I’m no nearer Bob’s white-knuckled fist and my stolen Corona junior — all the way, yes, along Congress (he bought his mother a wool stole in Porteous, Mitchell & Braun) up and then down the main municipal hilclass="underline" past the High Asia, the bus terminal, the Columbia Hotel and its lounge patronized by local magnates and visiting salesmen (Al too, when he was feeling he’d like some authentic service), down past the stale hotel he stayed in during the liberties before he and the two yeomen from the Coos Bay splurged on the tree-screened room on Franklin Street.