It seems such a distance from the delicate raisin moles below Gail’s immortal collar bone, while Gail says to Annette (as in the October night they start up the librarian’s porch steps, then step aside hoping Al will go first, but I do), “I want to have at least three, maybe four”—
Such a seeming distance to those close coördinate diagrams joining me to Bob on one hand and Al on the other, or to my parents, or to Al and his father, or to Tracy and her prodigal legs, or to Bob and the former Perpetua Pound whose court-tennis-curating “pappy” (the tidy-minded author of monographs on Ryder, Marin, and Dallin) once urged my father to enter me at Groton and who herself was delivered of a third boy the Easter of 1960. Well, must the custodian always contemplate the secret things he protects? And I am no almanac.
But I know that the polio epidemic in the Newtown, Pennsylvania area came right around the Japanese surrender. In our dorm at the family “camp” Bob and I were ready to take on four yokels from Philly over whether or not the Japs would give up, and the tall basketball big shot had called me a damn New York son of a bitch and said I didn’t know a Jap from a Jew, the Japs wouldn’t give up while there was two of them alive, it was too fucking bad that B25 last week hadn’t completely destroyed the Empire State, and Bob and I had moved close to the tall one when his chocolate-milk-drinking friend with bad breath who’d come here straight from a Presbyterian conference at Lafayette and had his bureau drawers stuffed neatly full of Westminster Fellowship hand-outs, said to the tall one, “Don’t use language, Hank, there’s no need to use language.” But how else can I get up past the librarian’s amicable porch pillars and through his outer door, his vestibule, his inner door, and through the evening to perhaps Annette and one thing she may know? How can I without damning myself? I don’t ask for any help, though. Not for the phone number of her waitress schoolmate Maureen whose father is a telephone lineman; not, Dom, for your instant excuses posted above the phone box here; certainly not for some vile transition, though I might end your phone’s endless busy signal tonight and resourcefully take whatever voice first calls. After all, that false busy signal quarantines our space tonight, Dom. And our time, too. Recalling suddenly years later that nasty Barataria Bay incident in the Blue Moon, Al tips down the last of a martini. He’s on a crowded, smoky lawn and he says into his smiling wife’s ear that if you leave out the prefix the Greek root of “epidemic” means “people.” But now he wheels laughing toward someone—“I heard that”—and his wife takes his arm and says loud enough, “We have to go, dear,” which was what he wanted her to say. A flashbulb blinks in the corner of his eye, a colleague’s engaged daughter gently screams; again the flash cube flares, the hostess says, “Gotcha, Allie,” and Al shields his profile with his large brown hand then turns to his chronicling hostess — and his wife sees he’s decided not to go quite yet.
When I shook your hand at the opening last week and couldn’t hear if the hostess said “Dom” or “Don,” I told you I’d had an odd sense about your suicide book, to which you too quickly replied (winking over my shoulder at someone) that some of the critics had had an odd sense too. The runner-up for Miss Utah materialized at my elbow and gave you a floppy, vinyl-lined canvas goblet, saying, “One Topaz Neon,” and you shrugged. Then later, as I was looking at a styrofoam much like this one of yours here, you were dragged away to a party in Harlem by your former girlfriend the beautiful archaeologist Kit Carbon. You keep late hours. But one evening a week, namely tonight, you’re apt to be home.
The atom bombs didn’t make much impression on the big basketball player. Maybe they din’t remind him of anything. He doubted the Japs would surrender but he was concerned with the nightly game in the gym, where he hipped anybody that came near the key and even though I hit seven times from outside he spent a very satisfying two hours being fed the ball by his friends from Philly. Early in the morning the local farmers let the camp office know how many, and often which, boys were needed; and when I was in the same group as tall-ass I heard nothing all day long but his bellyaching judgments. I was there that summer because Bob’s father had told mine, and my father thought it would be an education. Bob was sent because his parents knew of the famous Quaker boarding school where the camp was located; to Bob’s mother the tennis courts and ivied dorms made a reassuring base from which to make each morning’s foray against the acres of rutabagas and carrot weeds, though Bob was there because he wanted the hardest possible work to toughen him up for the Poly wrestling team. Evenings over that heavy rich earth were dull. No one cared when you got back so long as you got up for work in the morning. We hitched to a fair one Wednesday night. I met a fine girl in a gypsy skirt and one of those loose blouses with the embroidered yolk. Eventually Bob left, and I walked her two miles home to her farmer-father’s dark dewy back yard. I was unnecessarily afraid of knocking her up.
Well, the basketball player, who’d been at the camp the summer before, kept saying day after day he was waiting for the tomatoes, that was where the money was. But he didn’t make it, and neither did I. One gray August morning he and I and two others went in the back of a pickup to weed an acre or two of something green and heavy, I forget what. And the big leaves were so wet the six-five potentially all-state center called the conditions brutal and walked off the job with the two others. When I went on bending my muddy way through the rest of my first row, thinking I knew what was coming, the big shot as I expected started calling to me that I was a gung ho chicken shit afterbirth of a Japanese gang fuck, a coward and a traitor, and the other two told me I better stop work if I didn’t want to get them all in trouble, and the tall one said they were going to notify the authorities the conditions we were made to work in and he said something I couldn’t hear about the tomatoes coming in, but when I said Nobody’s making you work in these conditions, he started in on me again, and then I stood up at the end of my row, my Levis wet from the knee down and told him he was too dumb to do even this job much less pick ripe tomatoes piece-rate, and then he started toward me. He looked even taller there diagonally across the rows because you knew he wouldn’t step on the plants, and I started walking toward him, though indirectly down my row. But there was the farmer in his roomy overalls marching a long pigeon-toed stride down from the house with his little girl bustling beside him. He said if we wouldn’t work, there was plenty fellows would at one-fifty an hour, and anyhow he didn’t want our foul mouths on his property for his little girl to hear, and when I turned to go back to my rows he said, “You too, Charlie,” and that was the end of that, I wasn’t going to explain. It was eight-fifteen, a Thursday. The start of a long morning of a long day, especially since the head of the camp told me I’d have to pack my bag. He said he wouldn’t send a letter home to my parents but for public relation’s sake I had to go. Well, I wasn’t about to explain.
Richard your actuary son didn’t wish to explain either, though in a way he did and in a way he couldn’t. Well, ye gods I couldn’t protect you by monitoring your own outgoing phone calls! But Richard’s most recent missive said enough for me to know: “you shouldn’t have phoned like that”: in your present state “a composed letter is to be preferred to an accusing person-to-person call at midnight. And that is not true about not receiving my letters. I have written you. And you have received them.” Then a quiet, abrupt “Yours ever” (and percentally appraising), “Dick.”