The Haunted Life Page 8

  “No,” said Dick. “You let circumstances drag you along. Be like Hamlet . . . baffle circumstances.”

  They sat on the hammock.

  “My father would split a blood vessel,” Peter said, “if I left college. He’s banking all his hopes on me after Wesley took off. He wants me to go places.”

  Dick opened his mouth in contempt.

  “Go places!” he echoed. “And is it you going places? Not you . . . Wesley! I was reading Lawrence of Arabia this morning in my office. Why, hell—”

  “You’re a hopeless romantic,” broke in Peter.

  “So?” Dick asked, pausing for effect. “The romantics have more on the ball than the others. Those who laugh at the romantics are just jealous bank clerks and unsuccessful writers who become critics. A romantic is a realist who digs in and lives so that he can learn more about everything. Who really knows more about realism than the romantic? Will they ask you that question at Boston College, heh?”

  “Pertinence, wisdom, Dick, and allied virtues.”

  “Sure! I’m your uncle, just stick close on and you’ll learn all about it. You haven’t learned a thing since you went to college. I was going to phone you the other night and tell you.”

  Diane Martin came up the street with a high school classmate. Peter watched them, two girls carrying books, walking beneath the richly leaved trees in attitudes of complete insouciance, oblivious to everything but Galloway and its school-world, dates and dances and a new outfit for Easter.

  “The Philippines, Pete,” Dick was saying. “Just the ticket, and I got it straight from my brother. He’s in California and he knows what’s brewing . . . the Japanese are hot for war. It’s a natural chance for us.”

  Peter shook his head slowly, a gesture he used whenever he was made conscious of the mysterious contradictions in life. His sister Diane, and her world; and Dick, who had always thirsted for the fantastic and dangerous. A girl whose main concerns were so incomprehensible to Peter, and yet so easy to define, that he sometimes thought all women were essentially like Diane and that he would always know and recognize, yet never understand, the ways of women. And here, Dick sat thinking about things, and hungering after things, that Diane would never understand and—because of that—would never accept as part of the design of life, while Dick could only ignore her and her world in the fury of his imagination and creative energy, and if made cognizant of hers, the smalltown girl’s world, could only scoff and carry on with his concerns.

  Diane and her companion mounted the porch steps and swung open the screen door. Dick looked up briefly and called a greeting typical of his well-rounded dash.

  “The ladies have arrived . . . hiya Diane!”

  “Hello, Richard,” said Diane gravely, ignoring his gallantry while the other girl giggled and turned her head away. “How’s Annie?”

  “Swell,” Dick smiled.

  And with that, Diane went into the house followed by her bashful classmate.

  “All you have to do is make up your mind,” Dick was now saying. “I know how it is. Your decision concerns more than mine did. With you, it’s ‘shall I leave college and join the Army?’ With me, it’s just ‘shall I join the Army?’ By the way, I’ll be over Sunday night for that odd game of chess. You owe me two bucks and a half!”

  Peter nodded, watching Dick.

  “If the strike lasts all week, I’ll be over some night and we’ll go swimming at the Brook, maybe Garabed the mad poet will come, huh?”

  “He will; he’s always wandering around nearby.”

  “Well,” said Dick. “As they say in the cowboy pictures when the villain leaves the honest rancher’s house, think it over!” He laughed and got up, swinging the hammock back and forth to rock Peter. “I’m a bad influence. Look out for me. Remember the time I egged you on to go on that chicken coop roof during the flood and we almost didn’t get off when it started floating down the rapids?”

  “Do I!”

  Dick went to the door and stepped out onto the porch.

  “I’ll walk you down to the bus,” Peter said. “And as for you being a bad influence, who was it started you on an alcoholic career? I was the first one to get you drunk . . . remember that quart of Calvert’s?”

  Dick grimaced. “Not for me. I keep myself in shape for the future . . .”

  They walked down North Street toward the bus stop. The sun had by now lost its afternoon fury; heavy clustered leaves overhead seemed to sigh with gentle relief, hung in green profusion waiting for an ebbing of the heat and sunfire.

  Dick and Peter stood at the bus stop. Dick had produced his thick wallet and was examining a piece of paper.

  “I have a prospect here, Pete, that might come in handy—should we decide to hold off the Army for a month or two. It’s a good paying job . . .”

  “What kind of work?”

  “The best! Laboring in the sun. That French contractor from Riverside has the contract. Building a wire fence around the Portsmouth Navy Yard in New Hampshire—just near Kittery, Maine. I could get the old Buick in shape and drive up every morning—at least forty bucks a week. How would you like that? Good for you, m’boy, get hard as nails and brown to a crisp.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Here comes the bus. Well, Pete, I’ll drop over maybe this week again. Think everything out.”

  “You know,” Pete said, “your family should never have moved away from North Street. Up there in West Galloway the only thing they do is go to church. We never see each other anymore—remember when I’d call you every night after supper? Those were the days . . .”

  Dick put his hand to his mouth and called their secret cry, a single yodel. The bus pulled up and yawned open its doors and Dick dashed in. He paid his fare and hastened to the back of the bus, where he stuck his head out of the window and yodeled again, waving goodbye. The bus growled cityward.

  Peter grinned. Dick was the kind who cared very little what strangers thought of him or his antics. Occasionally, he still displayed the braggadocio and swagger of his boyhood. Now, Peter imagined, Dick was settling himself in his seat, and toward those in the bus who were watching him with the ironic detachment of the spectator to emotional excitement, he was more than likely directing a frank and good-natured glance.

  Such was Dick, nodded Peter to himself as he returned up the street. Nervous, energetic, he still threw his hand up convulsively when someone made a motion with his own hand, as though Dick were yet a boy given to warding off blows, imaginary or otherwise, a gesture he had developed while a member of the North Street gang. There was a boyish quality he would never lose, the swagger in his walk, the way he might tilt his hat if he bothered to wear one, and the nervous hand darting up to ward off the blows that were no longer intended.

  Dick Sheffield was the “outline” type. He occupied many of his hours outlining projects that were destined never to come about, he drew diagrams, and as was the case when a boy, he made maps of projected journeys. It was not that he was a failure, that his “plans” became rather a series of abortive attempts; it was only that he apportioned too much to himself, that his vast congeries of projects fallen-through presented a bizarre picture of one man trying to live one hundred lives.

  The truth was, Dick had done more quantitative living than any youth in town. A small percentage of his vast program served up a nonetheless huge and varied activity. He had, in the midst of earning his keep at home by working at jobs no other would have dreamed of, assistant radio mechanic at the radio station when he knew very little about radio, and currently a silk inspector at the silk mills in downtown Galloway when he really knew nothing about silk—another youth from his quarter and caste would have applied at the silk mills in the capacity of a common workman—he had, during these highly specialized occupations, contrived to try almost everything the town offered. For the Actor’s Guild, he had written several short scripts and played supporting parts, in what he termed a preliminary to Hollywood; he had voyaged to Boston the previous
summer with Garabed Tourian and convinced the Dean of the small college which Garabed attended—Greenleaf College, mainly concerned with dramatics and the arts—that he splendidly filled the requirements for a scholarship, and, when the Dean had written encouragingly later in the summer, marking the triumph of Dick’s brilliant personality, Dick had by then launched himself on new projects and completely ignored the scholarship offer. For several months, bewildered theatergoers at the National Theater—Galloway’s cheapest cinema, frequented by children and old tramps—were set through the paces of a gaudy, awkward Amateur Show by a certain tall, blond, and smiling young master of ceremonies, name of Richard Reynolds (Dick’s first two names). Later, at the Paramount Theater, Galloway’s best, Richard Reynolds Sheffield presided backstage among the settings and props for the annual Devon Association show—although, to Peter’s knowledge, Dick knew very little about these things, certainly much less than the stage man from Boston who had supervised the backstage work every other year previous since 1932.

  Among other things, Dick had, with a West Galloway comrade, painted a huge swastika on the cotton mill’s smokestack in 1940 that had reached the front page of the Galloway Star and created wild speculation in the city for weeks thereafter. Police were still investigating the case long after the workmen had erased the paint . . .

  Peter resumed his seat on the porch hammock and listened to the closing moments of the baseball game. The air had imperceptibly cooled, there was stillness on North Street presaging the suppertime bustle.

  Dick’s visit had aggravated some lurking doubts in Peter’s total makeup. He knew now that he was about to undergo a long re-examination of his life’s direction. It was inevitable; small things pointed in the wrong directions, events commingled not smoothly but rasped.

  Yesterday, for instance, in the bar with his father, Peter had felt no small resentment at the talk of his future as a Boston College track athlete. Actually, what were those things to one who read Faust with envy in his heart; to one who answered, word for word, with Hamlet, the indignities, hypocrisies, and challenges of life in Elsinore a thousand years ago. Track star, indeed!

  Dick’s stirring taunts added salt to an opening wound—a wound in the curriculum of circumstance. An indignity, to be driven ahead, like an ox, by the stick wielded in the name of “make-something-of-yourself.” Make what? “Go places!”—indeed, what places, if not Arcady. “Be a success.” Was that not the phrase common to those who would never achieve inward success, who, because they could not come to terms with themselves on spiritual and moral grounds, had to cloak themselves in social garb, so as not to be complete failures, in most cases, in fact, so as to seem supremely victorious?

  But here, Peter detected signs of youthful revolt, something quite dissociated from reason. He readjusted his conceptions and emerged with what seemed the truth of the matter: some people wanted to “go places,” wanted what he had just fatuously termed “outward success”; simply, he wanted not to “go places” but to find some way of life that could answer his every exertion, that could react to his kind of activity, which, though he had no idea as yet as to the nature of this exertion and activity he accounted to himself, would certainly offer richer and more honest rewards than the way of life opening up before him like some portal to Limbo.

  Yes, this would not do. Limbo was the word, a place where souls yearned at a vacuum. He, Peter Martin, who loved the things of the mind and soul, attended a college—certainly no worse than any other American college—which countenanced only mathematics and metaphysics for the mind, and the Roman Catholic church for the soul.

  Inward success he desired and—as youth will—he saw no reason for admitting that inward success could only be won at the expense of outward success. Both were within reach, both were available, as far as he could see. Why not?

  Now he pondered Dick’s proposal. He felt a stirring of the intestines, and, since he had read somewhere that the Chinese consider the intestinal tract the seat of creative excitement, he knew that Dick’s were creative proposals. He knew that without having to refer to the Chinese. Dick was a living artist, that is, he was a master at the art of living. His constant cheerfulness, maintained despite an intelligence comparable to that of some who sorrow their “knowing too much,” indicated he had, by some Mephistophelean ruse, triumphed over cynicism and doom sense, and was thus prepared to accept life and to undertake its living with quite gay charm.

  Or was Dick just a sappy smalltown kid who thought the world was anybody’s oyster? His proposal to Peter to throw college out of the window and join the Army was a good and a creative idea, filled with a million subtle promises . . . or so perhaps it was for Dick alone.

  For now Peter beheld, in his mind’s eye, the enormous complexity involved in what had at first seemed a simple decision. The question Dick had posed, “Shall you leave college and join the Army?” now assumed a dozen interweaving phases.

  Peter smiled in his bewilderment. What would his father say? And Aunt Marie? What would it be like to leave home at last and plunge into the regimen of the Army, where one lost the right to exercise his own prerogative? Would America enter the war? And if so, how would he, a dreamer, a ponderer, become a killer and a soldier? And if not war, for how long would the peacetime Army charter his service? A number of years? And if so, how many years would he spend away from a pattern of living he needed—the pattern of study and preparation for a career vaguely leaning toward letters—which he had fashioned by studying for a scholarship at Boston College while still in high school.

  His life, he now realized, had so far been simple. It was an astonishing thought for one who had lately considered himself vastly complex.

  The complexity had only found play within him. In the actual sense, his life in the last few years had been only as purposeful and humble as the life of the young bank clerk who works year in and year out and awaits periodical promotions. The bank clerk sought next a promotion to Assistant Chief Teller; Peter sought next to rise to the status of sophomore, and gain a foothold on the varsity track team. Where was the difference?

  It was the same plodding, cheerless ratiocination.

  Peter was depressed. He went into the house and upstairs to fall on the bed. Those questions, and many more, overwhelmed him: he knew they led to other questions of a more abstract nature, questions culminating at the general “why?” philosophers ask of life.

  It was hot in the bedroom, the sun pierced through the oven atmosphere with a shaft of sharper, fiery heat, and the breeze was like a warm breath. Peter took off his light shirt and flung it away.

  He was angry. It was time to stop thinking, to hurl off encumbering preconsiderations, to wallow in action. Maybe Dick was right, but right or not, this was no time to think about anything, no decisions, no mulling.

  Tonight, after dusk, coolness would steal into the air. Especially in South Galloway, where lived Helen O’Day, in that house by the Concord River where yet the oars of Thoreau haunted the summer night. This was the last of the splendid summers for Peter. Very well, then, no time for self-torture and doubt and the stirring deep premonitions of change . . . Time for joy and insouciance! Time for Helen O’Day, and time enough for Eleanor; time for anything and everything . . .

  Aunt Marie was home. The suppertime bustle had begun downstairs. Peter roused himself.

  In the kitchen, Aunt Marie was pattying up hamburger while Diane peeled the potatoes. Peter drank a glass of water.

  “I’m hungry,” he said.

  “What have you been doing all afternoon?”

  “Nothing . . . I listened to the ballgame. Dick Sheffield was here . . .”

  “Here,” said Diane, “put these potatoes on the fire. I’ve got to make a phone call.”

  Peter stood by as Aunt Marie applied a match to the gas flumes. She said, “I got some nice fat strawberries at Bingham’s . . .”

  “Short cake!” smiled Peter, setting the potatoes on the stove.

  “What’s D
ickie doing this summer?” she inquired.

  “He’s working in the silk mill office. But he told me he’s thinking of joining the Army . . .”

  Aunt Marie peered suspiciously at her nephew and paused over the stove. “Army!” she said. “What’s he up to now? That child is as crazy as a loon. Always doing the most unexpected things . . .”

  “He might not, you know,” grinned Peter.

  Aunt Marie shook her head and compressed her lips. “Peter, don’t you dare listen to him. He’s always getting himself into trouble. Did he? . . .”

  “No,” grinned Peter, taunting her. “No. Did I say I was going with him?”

  “You didn’t say you weren’t!”

  Peter chuckled.

  “Did he try to put any ideas in your head?”

  “No,” said Peter, stamping his foot. “Didn’t I tell you?—it was just an idea he has. I didn’t say I was going with him.”

  Aunt Marie was still suspicious. “Doesn’t that child realize we might be in that war sooner or later? Now what would he do in the Army if war came—what would he do?”

  “Fight,” grinned Peter.

  “Doesn’t he know what might happen?” she went on, ignoring Peter’s remark. “What kind of fool child is that? Running off at a dangerous time like this! What does his poor mother think?”

  “She doesn’t know . . .”

  “You’re right, she doesn’t know what fool ideas run through his head. Now you listen to me, Peter Martin, I don’t want you to take that boy seriously! All his life he’s been getting himself into messes . . . like that time he ran away with his little brother and the police had to search the woods for days . . .”

  Peter laughed: “He was going up the river in a rowboat. They were doing alright . . . Dick knows how to take care of himself.”

  “Peter,” said Aunt Marie in a tone suggesting the termination of the subject, “you’ve no time to listen to any of Richard’s crazy ideas. You’ve got your work to do, a little studying this summer and keeping yourself in trim for athletics. Dick Sheffield has no other thing in the world to do but hatch up his crazy plans. You’ve got your college career to worry about. Do you hear me?”