“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Well, you’re representing all of us down there, so you really should look your best. I’ll darn those other socks while you’re gone.”
“I’ll get to that, Brother Quillon, I was just putting it off, I meant to—”
“Yes, yes,” he said, “I know all about that. I’ll just darn them while you’re gone, and then they’ll be done.”
“Well — thank you.”
“It’s nothing really.” He handed me the packed bag and sniffed; from the head cold, I suppose. “Don’t have any — disasters or plane crashes or anything,” he said.
“I’ll try not to.”
I left after dinner, at around nine o’clock. The last thing I did before departure was get Father Banzolini’s tear sheets and give them to Brother Peregrine, asking him to return them for me when Father Banzolini came tomorrow night. He promised he would. “Tell him I found them very interesting,” I said. “And fact-filled.”
“I’ll do that,” he said.
I patted his arm, encouraged by him. “You’ll know what to say.”
Eleven
What did I feel as I walked up Park Avenue in the darkness, past the Boffin Club and the, uh, shop and around the corner onto 52nd Street, putting the monastery out of sight behind me? What did I feel? Nothing.
I did not feel frightened, apprehensive, uncertain, insecure, inadequate to the demands of Travel. I had Traveled so much in the last two weeks that I felt a seasoned campaigner by now. Why should there be terrors in the simple transitional movements of a Journey?
I did not feel excited, expectant, curious, agog at the anticipation of adventure. I had never craved adventure, so why should I embrace it when it was thrust upon me?
I did not feel tender, flushed, earnest, ardent, eager to be in the presence of Eileen Flattery Bone. Like adventure, I had not craved her existence, so why should I embrace her now that—
Well. The phrasing may be unfortunate, but the point is, I did not want Eileen, or at least I did not want to want her. What I desired from her, or what I desired to desire from her, was two salvations, and no more: I wanted her to save the monastery, and I wanted her to save me for the monastery. I had a round-trip ticket in that nicely packed bag, and I very much wanted to use all of it.
I suppose, in truth, I really was feeling all those emotions I’ve just denied, and more as welclass="underline" self-doubt, cosmic rage, a slight digestive disturbance. But the result of all this was an emotional overload, a mutual cancelling out, the same effect you get if you throw a little paint of every possible color together in a vat and mix; it all blends down together into a neutral and not very interesting gray.
Protected, I suppose, by that coat of gray, I set off on my Quest.
Is the subway always full of such people? When I boarded that E train at Lexington Avenue and 53rd Street — having previously boarded an F train and then hopped off it again as the doors were closing on the skirts of my robe — it was full of scruffily neat people who gave the impression they had dressed themselves up to attend a public execution. Since it was now nine-something of a Friday evening, they were undoubtedly provincials from Queens coming into Manhattan for a night on the town, but did they absolutely have to look as though their parents had been first cousins?
Over the next several stops most of these people left, to be replaced by a shabbier and yet more appealing group: older men and women, many of them stout, who were finishing work somewhere and were on their way home. (Three of them were Santa Clauses.) This transition was complete by 14th Street, and the very next stop was mine. West 4th Street, just as the long detailed printed directions in Brother Eli’s crabbed whittler’s hand had promised.
This was a much larger station, with two long concrete platforms, each flanked by a pair of tracks. Along both platforms, flights of concrete steps led down into the bowels of the earth where, signs informed me, D and F trains were to be found. F trains? Hadn’t I rejected an F train back at Lexington Avenue and 53rd Street? Then what was it doing here?
Well, perhaps there were complications with the F train and Brother Eli hadn’t wanted to confuse me. I was here, that was the important thing.
But where was the A train? Trains kept coming into the station, all with letter codes and destinations spelled out in little windows on their sides, roaring in by both platforms — and from the bowels of the earth came the occasional rumble and grumble of restless D and F trains as well — but where was my A train? Perhaps it had been stolen in Harlem.
No, here it came, covered with nicknames and numbers in brightly colored spray paint. It stopped, the doors slid apart — that kept startling me, doors opening with no one touching them — and I stepped aboard. I sat next to a young black man in wide-cuffed plum trousers, chartreuse platform shoes with red-and-white-striped laces, a mustard-colored shirt that zipped up the front with a pair of dice dangling from the zipper tab, a pinch-waisted long coat in panels of two shades of green, and a big floppy cap in a black-and-white check design. He was also wearing sunglasses, for which I did not blame him.
This train was more full, and the occupants more varied. I looked at their faces and their clothing, still not being used to masses of strangers, while the train lunged from station to station. After a few stops I began to notice the station names, beginning with Jay Street-Boro Hall, then Hoyt-Schermerhorn. The people were strange, the names were strange, everything was already alien and foreign and I’d barely left Manhattan. I held my bag tight on my lap and felt myself drawn irresistibly away.
When I emerged from the train at the end of the line, signs informed me the Q10 bus would take me to Kennedy Airport, but I saw no point in wasting either the money or Brother Eli’s directions. They had done very well by me so far.
My only trouble on the subway ride had been with the names of the stations. Kingston-Throop? Euclid? Ralph? Perhaps the City of New York had hired Robert Benchley to name its subway stops.
A more serious problem had been names that echoed Brother Eli’s instructions. Soon I was to walk on Rockaway Boulevard, for instance, and it had been a momentary shock when a station emerged out of the night — the subway had become an elevated train by that time — calling itself Rockaway Boulevard. (Previously, while still underground, a station named Rockaway Avenue had given me a similar start.) Liberty Avenue also figured in my walking instructions, and had also blossomed along the way into a place where the train stopped and the doors slid invitingly open. In retrospect, it seemed as though I’d done nothing all the way out but paw through my robe for the instructions, clutch at my bag, half-rise from my seat, and not quite dash out to the platform.
Von Clausewitz once said, “The map is not the terrain,” and he was right. Brother Eli had been working from maps, of course, in preparing these directions, and when I now descended to the street I learned that Lefferts Avenue had become Lefferts Boulevard. Being by now a seasoned Traveler, however, I ignored the anomaly. Turning to the right, as per my marching orders, I marched.
This was a working-class residential pocket of the city’s fringe, blocks of narrow two-story houses packed closely together, all of them with front porches that had been enclosed into rooms years and years ago. Some of them had separate garages in back, with one narrow driveway frequently serving two neighbors. Most of the tiny lawns were defended with metal fencing, and there were lots of “Beware the Dog” signs. There was also a lot of lawn statuary, about evenly divided between geese and Blessed Virgins. The time now was around ten P.M., but a number of the houses were already dark, and most of the rest showed wavering blue television light in their front windows. I was the only pedestrian on the narrow sidewalk, though in the street there was a steady pulse of automobile traffic.