Now there’s a sadness that attaches to these old river and lake ports that were once bustling and important. Before the railroads took over, this Hudson River and Erie Canal system were the main shipping route to the Great Lakes and the West. Now there’s almost nothing, just an occasional oil barge. The river is almost abandoned.
A depression always came over him when he came East like this, but the oldness and abandonment weren’t the only reasons for it. He was a Midwesterner and he shared the prejudices of many Midwesterners against this region of the country. He didn’t like the way everything gets more stratified here. The rich start looking richer and the poor start looking poorer. What was worse, they looked as though they thought this was the way things ought to be. They had settled for this. There was no sign it was going to change.
In a state like Minnesota or Wisconsin you can be poor and still feel some sense of dignity if you work hard and live fairly cleanly and you keep your eye on the future. But here in New York it seemed as if when you’re poor you’re just poor. And that means you’re nobody. Really nobody. And if you’re rich you’re really somebody. And that fact seemed to explain 95 per cent of everything else that went on in this region.
Maybe he was just noticing it more because he’d been thinking about Indians. Some of these differences are just urban-rural differences, and the East is more urban. But some of these differences reflected European values too. Every time he came this way he could feel the people getting more formal and impersonal and… crafty. Exploitative. European. And petty too, and ungenerous.
Out West among the Indians it’s a standing joke that the chief is the poorest man in the tribe. Every time somebody needs something he’s the one they go to, and by the Indian code, the generosity of the frontier, he has to help them. Phædrus didn’t think you’d see much of that along this river. He could just imagine some strange riverboat man pulling up at Astor’s mansion and saying, I just saw a light on and thought I’d stop in and say "hello". He wouldn’t get past the butler. They’d be horrified at his impertinence. Yet in the West they’d probably feel obliged to invite him in.
It just got worse and worse around here. The rich got glitzier and glitzier and the poor got scuzzier and scuzzier until you finally got to New York City. Homeless crazies hovering over ventilator grates while billionaires are escorted past them to their limousines. With each somehow accepting this as natural.
Oddly it’s this valley that’s the worst. If you cross into Vermont or Massachusetts it starts to weaken. He didn’t know how to explain that. Something historical maybe.
New England was settled by a completely different pattern of immigration. That was it. In the early days New England was all one big WASP family staying put, but this valley was everybody on the move. Dutch, English, French, German, Irish — and their relations were often hostile. So right from the start there was this aggressive, exploitative atmosphere. Maybe they had just as much class distinction and exploitativeness in New England, maybe even more, but they muted it so as not to upset the family. Here they just flaunted it openly. That’s what these Castles on the Hudson were: an open flaunting of wealth.
He supposed maybe some of Rigel’s morality this morning was Eastern too… No, that wasn’t it. It was something else. If he were a true Easterner he would have just kept quiet about it and increased his distance. Why did he want to get involved? He didn’t have to. He was angry… The celebrity thing maybe.
Once you become a celebrity it satisfies some people to try to tear you down, and there’s not much you can do about it. Phædrus hadn’t seen any of that all summer: where someone suddenly jumps on you for no reason at all just because they think you’re a celebrity. Maybe that’s what it was. In the past when it occurred it was usually at parties when someone had a few drinks in them. Never at breakfast.
Usually you get a warning when they’re all over you with praise. Then you know they’ve got some false image of you they’re talking to. Rigel was that way in Oswego, but it had been so far back Phædrus had forgotten about it.
That celebrity business is another whole phenomenon that’s related to Indian—European conflict of values. It’s a peculiarly American phenomenon, to catapult people suddenly into celebrity, lavish praise and wealth upon them, and then, at the moment they at last become convinced of their worth, try to destroy them. At their feet and then at their throat. He thought the reason was that in America you’re supposed to be socially superior like a European and socially equal like an Indian at the same time. It doesn’t matter that these goals are contradictory.
So what you get is this tension, this business executives' tension, where you’re the most relaxed, smiling, easy-going guy in the world — who is also absolutely killing himself to beat the competition and get ahead. Everybody wants their children to be valedictorians, but nobody is supposed to be better than anybody else. A kid who comes out somewhere near the bottom of his class is guilt ridden, self-destructive, and he thinks, It’s not fair! Everybody’s equal! And then the celebrity, John Lennon, steps out to sign an autograph for him. That’s the end of the celebrity, John Lennon.
Spooky. Until you’re the celebrity you don’t see how spooky it is. They love you for being what they want to be but they hate you for being what they’re not. There’s always this two-faced relationship with celebrity and you never know which face will appear next. That’s how it was with Rigel. First he was smiling because he thought he was talking to some big shot and that satisfied his European patterns, but now he’s furious because he thinks the big shot is acting superior or something like that.
The old Indians knew how to handle it. They just got rid of anything anybody wanted. They didn’t own property, they dressed in rags, some of them. They kept it down, laid low, and let the aristocrats and egalitarians and sycophants and assassins all look on them as worthless. That way they got a lot accomplished without all the celebrity grief.
This boat was good for that. When you’re moving along like this on these old abandoned waterways you can relate to people on a one-to-one basis, without all the celebrity business standing in between. Rigel was just a fluke.
Some noises came from the cabin. Phædrus wondered if something had broken loose. Then he remembered his passenger. She was probably getting dressed or something.
There’s no food on this boat, Lila’s voice said.
There’s some down there somewhere, he answered.
No, there isn’t.
Her face appeared in the hatchway. She looked belligerent. He’d better not tell her he’d already had breakfast.
She looked different. Worse. Her hair wasn’t combed. Her eyes were reddened and lined underneath. She looked a lot older than she did last night.
You didn’t search around enough, he said. Look in the icebox.
Where is that?
That huge wooden lid with the ring in it by the post there. Her face disappeared again and soon he heard some more noises of her rummaging.
There’s something near the bottom, it looks like, she said. There are three boxes of junk food and one jar of peanut butter. The jar is almost empty… That is all. No eggs, no bacon, no nothing…