I myself was hunched like a skater, still gripping the railing, and I was filled, suddenly, with a sense of rightness and truth — flooded and becalmed in the wake of an insight: I recognized that every one of these skaters wore my face.
For precisely four years I’d hovered like this around my own past. A ghost moving in the mist. Circling, attending, ministering to the great beshrouded monolith. And coming back to the slave’s drawing almost daily, as a disfigured actor might be drawn repeatedly to the mystery of his face in the mirror. Now its lesson came clear: As I followed my own round over and over I wandered farther and farther from its core, my course less and less beholden to the central shape. For a long time now I’d really had little to do with the source of my grief. I was in fact quite free of it. Yet my devotion remained.
Nothing was required of me. I just had to put one foot in front of the other, and one day I’d wander wide enough of my dark cold sun to break gently from my orbit.
I belted my overcoat, but with difficulty, my hands senseless by now with cold. I twisted my scarf under my chin and pulled on my gloves. I turned away from this revelation and toward the world, hungry to get the news about myself. What would happen to me now?
I can’t say this next thought simply occurred to me, because in fact it stayed with me constantly. It surfaced now as it often did, that’s alclass="underline" In a few more years my daughter would have gone to college. I would have loved for her to whirl to a stop by this railing and laugh the sweet laughter of old movies on television. Above all I would have loved for Elsie to have turned out something like…but I couldn’t remember the cellist’s name.
My eagerness stayed fresh for a while, a few days, better than a week. Then, oppressed by low gray clouds, low temperatures, it faded. But I waited.
A breath of change in late February gave over to a succession of blizzards in early March. The meteorologists couldn’t help themselves and repeated the phrase “blanketing the Midwest” over and over. The town took on the breadlike curvatures of Alpine villages in photographs. The skaters went away. The skating pond, and even its railing, disappeared beneath several feet of snow. The red sculptures at the top of the monolith went under, too. Roofs imploded, vehicles and livestock were buried, travel stopped, everybody suffered, and we were well into April before the skies cleared and the white fields began to thaw.
The weather defeated all of us. With the difficulties, the delays, everyone fell behind. By the time I got around to visiting J. J. Stein at the Forum for Interpretative Scholarship, I thought it possible he’d forgotten we’d ever met.
I’d never before seen the Forum grounds, an odd piece of our University settled a dozen miles outside of town, in a compound that had been an insane asylum in the days when they were called exactly that. This day of my visit to the Swan’s Grove Campus the weather felt new. Winter’s edges had been pushed back, the sidewalks were clear and the roads were dry. The deep snow in the fields had collapsed into dimples that had become, at last, here and there, craters with soaked gray pasture at their bottoms.
“The Grove,” as J. J. Stein called it, was one of those academic backwaters into which state money miraculously and secretly finds its way, the kind of place some enterprising state legislator, I thought, would someday expose and ruin. As if to protect the place from attacks on its irrelevance, the University Hospital ran its small Head Trauma Rehabilitation Unit out here. Also, in one of the old buildings once full of madness, a charitable foundation housed a printing press. Dr. J.J.’s Forum for Interpretive Scholarship had a small L-shaped structure to itself.
He showed me all around the grounds, steering me by the arm as if I were decrepit. Others were out taking the air as well. Some of them looked drunk, probably patients from the Rehabilitation Unit. We toured the grove of elms that gave the place its name, the various buildings, the creek, the handball court. None of this was necessary. We just wanted to stroll in the wet sunshine.
Coming up from under the terrible winter, it all looked dismal. Ripe for haunting. Colossal, unwieldy crows congregated in the bare branches of the elms. “Seventeen acres,” J.J. said. “It was bought in the thirties for nothing. The College of Medicine did experiments out here on animals for several decades. That big smokestack is the crematorium.” He pointed to a hundred feet of brick rising out of a small concrete structure. We were crossing the central field diagonally, using a wide paved walk. “They’ve still got a facility over by the creek. Most of us stay away from it.”
Plainly the place’s creepy history was much enjoyed by some of the people who used it now. J.J. brightened as he talked about it, although none of the folks we crossed paths with seemed to be enjoying anything much, and many put me in mind of the former denizens. In the strangeness of spring, finally without hats, our jackets open, inhaling the warm air suspiciously, I’m sure we all looked like lunatics. It didn’t help that some of us staggered or shuffled, wearing open galoshes and pajamas under overcoats, practicing simple movements with rehabilitated heads.
Just such a person as I’ve described blocked our path — a smiling man with one hand raised high above his head — and said to me, “I’d like to give you my address.”
J.J. spoke up and said, “That’s fine. But do we need your address?”
The man leaned unsteadily to one side as if fighting a strong wind, his left hand raised and the fingers curled around an imaginary baton, or a small invisible torch. “I’d like to give you my address.”
“Okay,” I said. “Go ahead, if you want.”
“I’d like to give you my address,” the man said. “I’d like to give you my address.”
He stood before us for a while with an expectant and inquiring slant to his eyebrows, as if the next move were ours. As we walked around him, he continued on his way with his left hand held aloft.
After J.J. had shown me the grounds and everything else, the offices available to such as me, the copying facilities and coffee lounge and rest rooms, introduced me to Mrs. Towne, the gray-headed secretary in the flowered dress who served all the Forum members (but I saw no Forum members; the place was a morgue), after this short tour, he invited me into his office, sat us both in chairs, put his feet up on his desk, and said, “We don’t have anything for you, I’m afraid.”
“Well,” I said, feeling stupid, irritated, and relieved. I really didn’t want to work here anyhow, not unless I was shooting a horror film. “It’s certainly been a pleasure looking the place over.”
He brushed this off and started a long explanation about funding and so on that almost started to interest me, or rather his discomfort and his unexpected and charming inability to handle it did.
“Look, Michael,” he said finally, getting up. “I’m bullshitting you. It’s the politics. The Foundation people are all affluent lefties. You had to work for Senator Thom!”
I laughed and said, “I didn’t have to.”
And he said, “Michael, I could use a friend. Let me take you to dinner.”
I hesitated too long. He must have known I was hunting for an alibi.
“My divorce is final today,” he said.
I’d heard about it. His wife, a campus beauty, had been pursued and seduced by a visiting author, the famous novelist T. K. Nickerson. She’d managed the final details of the divorce from the flat she and the author shared these days in Rome.
“Okay. Let’s get a bite,” I said.