So well did he adapt that it always came as a surprise when two groups who got along with him did not get along with each other. For example, he had fallen in with an interracial group which met at a writer’s apartment in the Village on Friday nights. It did not strike him as in the least anomalous that on Saturday night he met with the Siberian Gentlemen, a nostalgic supper club of expatriate Southerners, mostly lawyers and brokers, who gathered at the Carlyle and spoke of going back to Charleston or Mobile. At two or three o’clock in the morning somebody would sigh and say, “You can’t go home again,” and everybody would go back to his Park Avenue apartment. One night he made the mistake of bringing a friend from the first group to the second, a Southerner like himself but a crude sort who had not yet mastered group skills and did not know the difference between cursing the governor of Virginia, who was a gentleman, and cursing the governor of Alabama, who was not. Thereafter the Siberians grew cool to him and he dropped out. Nor did he fare much better with the interracial group. On his way home from the Village, he was set upon by Harlem thugs in the park and given the beating of his life. When he related the incident at the next meeting his friends frowned and exchanged glances.
He fared a little better with the Ohioans. Some winters ago, he found himself at a ski lodge near Bear Mountain in the company of seven other employees of Macy’s, three young men and four young women, all graduates of Ohio State University. Like him, they purchased their outfits complete from cap to boots at a discount from the sports department. They all smelled of new wool and Esquire boot polish and were as healthy and handsome as could be. He hadn’t been in their company a week before he became one of them: he called a girl named Carol Kerrell, said mear for mirror, tock for talk, ottomobile, stummick, and asked for carmel candy. The consonants snapped around in his throat like a guitar string. In April he went to Fort Lauderdale. In short, he became an Ohioan and for several weeks walked like a cat with his toes pointed in, drank beer, forgot the old honorable quarrels of the South, had not a thought in his head nor a care in the world.
It did not last. As they sat this night around the fire in the ski lodge, he and his fellow Ohioans, eyes sparkling, cheeks rosy, Tom and Jerries in hand, heads on laps, the Southerner felt a familiar and disastrous sinking of heart. The little scene, which was pleasant in every respect and which any normal person would surely have found to his liking, suddenly became hateful to him. People seemed to come to the point of flying apart. Though his companion was an attractive and healthy brunette named Carol (Kerrell) Schwarz and though he had reason to believe she liked him and would not repel his advances, the fact was that he could think of nothing to say to her. She was long of leg and deep of thigh and he liked having his head in her lap, but he experienced a sensation of giddiness when she spoke to him. Once he took her for a walk in the park. She picked up a cat. “Hello, cat,” she said, looking into the cat’s eyes. “I can see your name is Mehitabel. I’m Kerrell and this is Billy. Billy, say hello to Mehitabel.” Try as he might, he could not bring himself to speak to the cat.
Now at Bear Mountain he lay with his head on her thigh and she leaned over him and said: “I’m a people-liker and I think you’re my kind of people. Are you a people-liker?”
“Yes,” he said, his cheek going stiff, and thought what a pity it was he might not have sport with her without talking to her.
His knee began to jerk involuntarily and at the first opportunity he extricated himself and rushed out of the lodge. Outside, he ran through the snowy woods and threw himself into a brierpatch like a saint of old. Shivering with pain and cold, he gazed up at the shadowy knoll associated by tradition with Mad Anthony Wayne. He muttered to himself: “Barrett, you poor fellow, you must be very bad off, worse than you imagined, to have gotten things so mixed up. Here you are lying in a brierpatch when you could be lounging with young people like yourself, people against whom no objection can be raised, your head pillowed in the lap of a handsome girl. Is it not true that the American Revolution has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of Wayne and his friends, so that practically everyone in the United States is free to sit around a cozy fire in ski pants? What is wrong with that? What is the matter with you, you poor fellow?”
When he was with Ohioans, he found himself talking like an Ohioan and moving his shoulders around under his coat. When he was with Princetonians, he settled his chin in his throat and stuck his hands in his pockets in a certain way. Sometimes, too, he fell in with fellow Southerners and in an instant took on the amiable and slightly ironic air which Southerners find natural away from home.
It was shortly after the weekend at Bear Mountain that he lapsed into a fugue state which was worse than the last.
But now he had developed an even more alarming symptom. He began to get things backward. He felt bad when other people felt good and good when they felt bad. Take an ordinary day in New York. The sun is shining, people live well, go about satisfying their needs and achieving goals, work at creative jobs, attend cultural attractions, participate in interesting groups. This is, by every calculation, as it should be. Yet it was on just such a day as this, an ordinary Wednesday or Thursday, that he felt the deepest foreboding. And when his doctor, seeking to reassure him, suggested that in these perilous times a man might well be entitled to such a feeling, that only the insensitive did not, etc., it made him feel worse than ever. The analyst had got it all wrong. It was not the prospect of the Last Day which depressed him but rather the prospect of living through an ordinary Wednesday morning.
Though science taught that good environments were better than bad environments, it appeared to him that the opposite was the case.
Take hurricanes, for example, certainly a bad environment if ever there was one. It was his impression that not just he but other people too felt better in hurricanes — though it must be admitted that he had studied only four people and one hurricane, evidence hardly adequate to support a scientific hypothesis. One real robin does suggest a spring, however.
The summer before, he had got caught in hurricane Donna. A girl named Midge Auchincloss, none other in fact than the daughter of his father’s old friend, had invited him to drive her up to a jazz festival in Newport. During the same weekend a small hurricane was beating up along the coast but giving every sign of careening off into the North Atlantic. Nobody took much notice of it. Friday afternoon, nothing was very different. The old Northeast smelled the same, the sky was hazed over, and things were not worth much. The engineer and his friend Midge behaved toward each other in their customary fashion. They did not have much to say, not as a consequence of a breakdown in communications such as one often hears about nowadays, but because there was in fact not much to say. Though they liked each other well enough, there was nothing to do, it seemed, but press against each other whenever they were alone. Coming home to Midge’s apartment late at night, they would step over the sleeping Irishman, stand in the elevator and press against each other for a good half hour, each gazing abstractedly and dry-eyed over the other’s shoulder.
But a knoll of high pressure reared up in front of Donna and she backed off to the west. On the way home from Newport, the Auchinclosses’ Continental ran into the hurricane in Connecticut. Searching for Bridgeport and blinded by the rain, which hit the windshield like a stream from a firehose, the engineer took a wrong exit off the turnpike and entered upon a maze of narrow high-crowned blacktops such as criss-cross Connecticut, and got lost. Within a few minutes the gale winds reached near-hurricane strength and there was nothing todo but stop the car. Feeling moderately exhilarated by the uproar outside and the snugness within, dry as a bone in their cocoonof heavy-gauge metal and safety glass, they fell upon one another fully clothed and locked in a death grip. Strange Yankee bushes, perhaps alder and dogbane, thrashed against the windows. Hearing a wailing sound, they sat up and had the shock of their lives. There, standing in the full glare of the headlights, or rather leaning against the force of the hurricane, was a child hardly more than a babe. For a long moment there was nothing to do but gaze at him, so wondrous a sight it was, a cherub striding the blast, its cheeks puffed out by the four winds. Then he was blown away. The engineer went after him, backing up on all fours, butt to wind like a range pony, reached the ditch and found him. Now with the babe lying as cold as lard between them and not even shivering, the engineer started the Continental and crept along, feeling the margin of the road under his tire like a thread under the fingertip, and found a diner, a regular old-style streetcar of a restaurant left over from the days before the turnpikes.