The Haunted Life Read online

  Peter waved a hand. “What is there in Galloway for a guy like him? He’s an anachronism—he should have gone West with the forty-niners, or sailed with Hanno or something. He has no roots, really, because he deliberately starved them. He’s left nothing behind, no mark of his sixteen or seventeen years in Galloway, and no regrets either . . .” Peter puckered his brow. “The truth is, as you know, I haven’t seen him since I was so high, and so I don’t know what sort of a fellow he’s grown into. I can’t even clearly remember him as he was ten years ago, and certainly not at all from the mature point of view. So I don’t know . . . But it is my idea that Wesley is doing what he wants to do—I mean, he is no exile, he’s not forced into that kind of life, of loneliness as you say. He’s just not the kind of guy who marries and settles down, so-called. He’s not domesticated. I guess he’s just a sailor, that’s all. We can’t understand it because we’re just a couple of mama’s boys . . .”

  Garabed shook his head slowly.

  “I still think it’s terrible,” he said. “Why—” Garabed fluttered his hand, a futile gesture to indicate all he believed in—“why, it’s tragic . . . and beautiful, but beautiful in a frightful way. Horrible! It wouldn’t be so bad for me, I would have my sapphire. But Wesley . . . he looked so sad and lost that night, long ago. Hello, he said. Somehow, I feel he is still the same, hasn’t changed a bit. Hello. Sad hellos all around the world, lost in the rain . . .”

  Peter laughed and pushed Garabed’s shoulder back.

  “Okay, Tourian. Save that for your collected works.”

  Garabed smiled sadly.

  Peter mussed the black curly hair. “Come on, you crazy Armenian, let’s go home.”

  UNDER A STREETLAMP at the corner of Wild and Henderson streets, Garabed Tourian—

  “‘So we’ll go no more a-roving so late into the night, though the heart be still as loving, and the moon be still as bright . . .’”

  Peter interrupting—

  “‘You to the left and I to the right, for the ways of men must sever; well may it be for a day or a night, well may it be forever—’”

  “Oh Pete, where the hell’s your taste?” Garabed raised his voice to its original pitch: “‘Though the night was made for loving’—Platonic, of course—‘and the day returns too soon, we’ll go no more a-roving by the light of the moon . . .’”

  “What time is it?”

  “About four—listen to this: ‘Forlorn! The very word is like a bell to toll me back from thee to my sole self! . . . Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades past the near meadows, over the still stream, up the hill-side—’”

  There was a burble of sound behind Garabed’s cries, coming from an open window across the street. Someone was shouting in a rasping, sarcastic male voice.

  “. . . and go to bed, or I’ll call the police by Christ. Go back to where you belong!” There was stunned silence.

  In answer, Garabed dropped on one knee and addressed the man in the window.

  “I’ll tell you where we belong . . . ‘The Isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung, where grew the arts of war and peace, where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung . . .’”

  “I’m coming down, you wise bastards!” The voice came almost quietly, thick with angry humiliation, slow with threat.

  “‘Eternal summer gilds them yet,’” replied Garabed, as Peter began to snicker uncontrollably. “‘But all, except their sun, is set . . .’” He knelt there, under the streetlamp, the far side of the street iron gray with the false dawn.

  For a moment, the man was stunned. Then, with weary decision—as though he were being assigned, thanklessly, to a task that must be done—he said: “Alright . . . I’m coming down.” The window was closed, slowly, a sound filling the silence that followed with abrupt brutality.

  “Just like that?” muttered Peter, turning to face the house. The rushing blood of fear overflowed in his breast, the ears boomed, his knees were drained. But Garabed broke out in a panicky giggle and scrambled to run; in a flash, the situation was comical. Laughing savagely, they galloped down Henderson Street and up North Street. The houses were still, the tree leaves hung silently in the graying calm, and far off a rooster crowed.

  Breathless, they paused before Peter’s home.

  “One more cigarette,” laughed Garabed, “and then I shall go home.”

  They sat on the porch steps, panting, and lighted up their cigarettes. They both looked up when the first bird uttered a tiny cheep from the branches above.

  3

  Peter’s origins—the more recent ones—betrayed his intellectual convictions. Bent on lolling through the summer, he yet winced inwardly when passing by a group of workmen in the street, and avoided their eyes. His conviction was that history, as a drama, was an unparalleled production—acted by the princes of destiny; directed by that brilliant, envious, and colorless crew that forever sat at the hem of greatness; financed—in terms of blood and labor—by the numberless, nameless masses who paused, only occasionally, to look up from their work and watch; and written by the reality of the hour, the reigning combination of cross-events that was supreme, final, and unalterably history.

  His was the role of destiny’s prince. Not for him the whispered suggestion in the mad ruler’s ear; not for him the weary hand behind the scenes of splendor. Not for him also the plow and the weight of centuries, the stunned, wondrous look peering within the carnage that passes through. For him, Peter Martin—lately of the working class, the Canadian peasantry, and on back to a great-great-great-grandfather who, arriving in arrogance, with casks of Rochambeau, from a barony in Normandy, to forward the cause of the new French empire to the West, saw his fortunes blown up by Wolfe’s powder at Quebec and had to be satisfied with a tract of land near Fleur du Loup, which was transformed as the generations progressed from a baronial holding into a region of peasants—grim, muscular farmers—who worked too hard to survive to waste any time on lineage—for him, Peter Martin, the role of prominence on history’s stage. For him, then, the splendid leisure and the calm demeanor; the aristocrat of history, plucked from the vine at the right moment, made to burgeon in glory for all to see; he that can wait for his time, blandly assured.

  How this prominence was to be achieved he did not know. He only waited, as youth will, for the hour; he only knew he belonged to that great family of the earth whose destiny, whose one responsibility, was to act out a part in history, while the others directed, produced, financed, and stage set, and while supreme reality moved the pen that decided the plot.

  And yet, this young aristocrat must drop his eyes when the workingmen glance up from their toil—while they boil black tar in summer’s glaze, tear down, build, and repair the setting for the play, whereon the youth will soon perform his regal and tragic part. The prince of destiny is betrayed by the blood of a grandfather who saw fit to kill his own cows; and by a father who believed in work, and rose every morning to lay onto.

  Peter passed the workingmen and went on into Galloway. Suburbia at seven o’clock in the morning drifted, meliorated into the outer city; ashcans became more prominent, stood outside the wooden tenements. He passed filling stations and garages, the young sun already at work broiling up gaseous, shimmering fumes. The yellow buses passed. The mill whistles of Galloway called abroad, and it seemed then that the city hastened its pace, answering the call with a vague rummaging sound.

  A tenement door opened, slammed. The millworker stopped to light a cigarette, gripped anew the lunch bag, and then walked briskly toward the red brick mill stacks in the near distance.

  Peter walked on. Garabed would be sleeping by now; it would annoy him to know that Peter had not gone to bed, but had launched himself on a sleepy little adventure to the city at morning without him.

  But Peter had found it impossible to go to bed. The morning sun, the swift clean smell in the air had called him back to life, called him
back for more of the same—which at times held so much wonder that Peter deplored his physical limits. On a morning like this!—to be everywhere, be everyone at the same time, doing everything! To be a Danish businessman in Copenhagen—a brisk, attractive, middle-aged furniture manufacturer—crossing the cobbles at morning.

  Or to be an Arabian poet, like Ebn Alrabia, rousing at this very moment in Medina; breakfast, and a brief glance at the scrolls of writing, and a walk to the date grove on top of the hill, attired in those majestic robes and head scarfs.

  Or—a deckhand on a ship anchored in Trinidad; the steamy harbor, the sound of the native longshoremen beginning their work. Morning . . .

  Peter was very tired, naturally; but so great was his excitement, a slow, sultry feeling stirring against tired nerves and muscles, that he knew he would last out until noon or so before succumbing to home and bed. He planned his morning carefully. First, a bracing strawberry ice cream soda to remove the hot dry all-night taste in his mouth. Later, around ten, a few cold beers at the bar near the Square. Then lunch at the White Star diner, pork chops and Coca-Cola and rhubarb pie à la mode. And during all this, he would watch the people of Galloway, note the color of the sun and sky and the quality of the air among the old dark red buildings downtown, where the sun slanted its rays into law offices and revealed roll top desks, sagging uncarpeted floors, and an occasional cuspidor. Also, he would wander into the five-and-ten-cent stores and see what there was to be seen there, tamper at the toy counter, and perhaps—with grave irony—steal a typewriter ribbon or two.

  Peter knew, from past experience, what his sustained mood would be this fine morning. Sleepless, dazed, he would walk around in a sort of fatigue-intoxication, enjoying the subtlest impressions the morning and the city held stored for his mild feeding. By noon, he would be drunk with weariness—perhaps sway a trifle as he walked. Acquaintances would respond to his casual mood and engage him in slightly irrelevant, slightly goofy conversations of his own making.

  “Hello there, Socko!”

  “Jesus! Martin, you look drunk.”

  “You don’t look so hot yourself.” At this point Peter looks over the Square with raised eyebrows.

  “Where are you going, you crazy bastard?” Socko asks.

  “I’m looking for an honest man.”

  “You have money to lend?”

  “Honest men don’t borrow money. They mint it themselves. Did I ever tell you about that?”

  “Save it, Martin. I’m a working man. I’m not a college jerk like you. I got to be going. What’s the old rose doing in your shirt pocket?”

  Peter glances at the rose: “It’s a relic, as they say, of the buried past.” Here Peter giggles.

  “Where did you swipe it?”

  “Pick it? I didn’t . . . I exhumed it.”

  Socko shakes his head, slaps Peter on the back: “A few more and you’ll be making a speech on the Square. Well I’ll be seeing you, you tanked-up track star. By the way, how’s prospects for next winter? Think you’ll be beating Thompson in the fifty yard dash for dear old B.C.?”

  “There is no doubt about it, Socko.”

  Socko grins with admiration. “Not if you keep this up!”

  “A good man,” Peter says nonchalantly, “can do everything.”

  Peter had done this many times before, that is stay up all night long and through morning until noon. It represented, for him, an act of faith he was surprised to find each time it returned. If, with Garabed, he exhibited a cynicism designed to counteract—or perhaps interact with—that young Armenian’s idealism, it only returned to him, in moments like these, as a shallow affectation. For the truth was, he loved life and was fond of building it up. Mornings like these, his senses heavy, his thoughts lucid, he found that he could assume a charming attitude to life . . . and he repeated the procedure periodically, like a Christian who goes to church each Sunday to strengthen his belief.

  He saw Judge Michael Joyce cross the Square, hatless, a notorious political cad with the sun dancing on his graying hair. The sun, the glistening hair removed all doubts in Peter’s mind as to the ultimate good nature of life. Morning intoxication dismissed the political and social fact that the judge was the meanest man in town. In a soberer mood, Peter would have watched the judge with contempt and indignation, would have muttered “bastard!” and turned to frown at the rest of the city.

  Now he grinned goofily and entered the drugstore to order his strawberry ice cream soda.

  Over the straw he considered. Life was good, it was too good to last. Intuitively, he knew this would be one of the happiest summers of his life. The first year at Boston College had been a harrowing commuter’s existence—up at the crack of dawn, the bus to the depot, the train to Boston, and then the trolley to Newton Heights and the Gothic pastoral campus. Classes; the smell of liniment in the lockers; the limping clean feel of the athlete after practice; the returning home by trolley, train, and bus.

  Now Peter was confronted with three months of summertime leisure. It was going to be good. There were thrilling times ahead, mad happy adventures with Garabed; bucolic lollings with George Breton on ball field, beach, and riverside; ballroom caprices in the sultry nights on the lake; stoic evenings with Dick Sheffield over chessboards, pamphlets, and plans that never materialized; and, most exciting of all, bi-weekly visits to Eleanor the wide-loined, Eleanor the passionate and laughing.

  It was, obviously, too good to last. Intuition told Peter that this was the last of his magnificent summers, and all of them had been magnificent. This was the last. Something grave and perhaps terrible was impending, the war maybe, or some violent change in the structure of his Galloway world.

  This perfect morning—crystallized in the foamy rose ice cream soda—would also end, and bring the noon. Who was the maker of Peter’s noon?

  He remembered another perfect morning, when he was twelve years old. It was a Saturday morning in May, no school and cherry blossoms. Aunt Marie had given him Wheaties with cream and sugar for breakfast. A picture of Jimmie Foxx, the baseball slugger, on the back of the Wheaties package. Peter had eaten the cool breakfast in the gladed blue air of morning, had studied the picture of Jimmie Foxx. Outside, the gang—numbering nine to complete the ball team—played catch and bunted and shouted for him to finish his breakfast and come on out: the other team was already on the ball field. Peter, finished, picked up his glove and bat and sallied forth to join his men. They trooped raucously to the field, warmed up, played, and won 26–18—with Peter hitting two homeruns!

  A symbolic noon had somehow since intervened. No longer a boy, a homerun hitter, Peter was now a youth—a youth who loved to sit in the Boston Common with his comrade and write bits of verse about the pigeons, the old guns, the monuments and trees and soap box orators.

  We shall remember this moment

  Where that squirrel, bright-eyed

  Eager peanut-loving, shall not.

  Oh remember!

  Frozen sculpture and war machines,

  The perishing green of lawn and leaf,

  Two souls recumbent on Common ground.

  But remember!—

  And now—another noon was approaching. Youth, at some unsuspected moment, would give way to young manhood. That would bring to an end an unbroken series of splendid summers. That would precipitate a ragged shower of bills, summonses, tax estimates; in brief, payment would begin to be exacted. There was a price to bliss, brief summery rose-red morning-cool bliss. It was coming.

  Peter finished his soda and lighted a cigarette. He leaned back with what he hoped suggested content and counted the money in his palm: there was a price to the soda too. He paid the bill and walked out. The sun beat down on the Square with nine o’clock intensity. Traffic had grown heavier. He walked.

  The coolness still prevailed in the narrow street of old dark red buildings. Here nestled the coolest looking bar in Galloway, with potted palms in the window and an inviting shade within, broken only by the gleaming bras
s. It was McTigue’s; even the name held promise.

  Peter passed on, mindful of his morning’s schedule. He walked up Center Street, a traffic jam of commerce, lined on each side with clothing and shoe stores, an occasional theater, candy shoppes, and jewelry stores. The sun beat down warmer by the minute; it was the crucial moment of the morning. Peter blinked his heavy eyes and staggered imperceptibly.

  He knew now his casual goofiness was gone. Life now pressed for a graver attitude, weather, temperature, the city’s mounting activity. Now it was time for the beer. He retraced his steps slowly.

  Before entering the bar, he saw fit to gather one last impression from the broken structure of his morning. He glanced up and down the street. The traffic cop in the Square, seen from this side street with his back turned and his arms in motion, seemed either like a conductor presiding over the rhythms of the city or like a madman standing in the sun orating wordlessly. Peter shrugged and was about to enter the shady bar when he saw Eleanor.

  She carried her purse at arm’s length as she swung toward him, padding on sandal shoes she wore without hosiery. A bandana wound her bobbed hair within.

  “There you are!” she sang.

  Peter stood tentatively before the bar entrance and blinked a smile. He took in her cool green and white print dress with as much urbanity as he could muster; he noted, with unconcealed admiration, the low cut of the waist that brought out her splendid hips.

  “What are you doing at this wee hour of the morning?” she smiled. When she smiled Peter invariably felt a recurrence of their nocturnal excitement. Their eyes met craftily as the traffic rasped unknowing about them.

  “I haven’t been to bed yet.”

  Eleanor struck a pose of simulated disapproval. Peter took her arm: “I’ll walk you. Whither bound?”

  She strolled in stride with his own.

  “Shopping.”

  Peter winced. “No dice—I hate shopping. I’ll drop you like a hot potato at the nearest bra shop.”