Dispersed, interrupted for a moment, disturbed, whirled aside like the morning fog on a current of air, in idly glistening and lazy convolutions, the indiscreet dream about Nora was turned away only to return again, all-surrounding, all-entering, all-coloring: its hands were his own hands on the rumbling carpet sweeper — the sweeper carpet, Buzzer called it, trotting behind him, pretending she was a horse — it maneuvered with him under the dinner table, bumped the gate-legs, rattled out from the faded Chinese carpet onto the bare black floor boards at the sides (for Buzzer these were oceans, very dark and cold and deep) and followed sinuously every familiar curve and slope of the ancient uneven floor. It licked up the breakfast crumbs — it was the breakfast crumbs. It was the Chinese embroidery of motionless birds and dragons, the silent but alert piano — ready at any moment to burst out in the C-sharp minor Prelude, or the Cathédrale Englouti, or the little Brahms waltz — it was the all-too-eloquent thump of Enid’s iron on the ironing board in the kitchen — it was the whole house, himself, everything. Strange — very strange — he must be hallucinated. Why should a dream be so damned persistent? It was everything, but also, subtly and dangerously, it changed everything. The near at hand, certainly — but the remote no less, too. The fireplace in the studio, with the wood ash neatly brushed back from the brick hearth, to make a soft ashen wave under the andirons; the red scaly pine logs, brought in from the woodshed in the fragment woven-wood basket; the crisp pine cones tucked under the crossed logs for kindling, the bright brass jug of the Cape Cod fire lighter standing as if expectantly in its corner — it was in all these as he touched them, watched eagerly by Buzzer, her hands flapping excitedly, but it was also just as importantly discoverable and discernible in the far-off or merely imagined. The river, moon-tide brimmed, hurrying down to the Sound, past the sand dune and the derelict breakwater (ah, what a wonderful nocturnal fire that had been), and then, beyond the iron-framed lighthouse, joining the sea in the quarrelsome tiderip — it was there, too, tossing Paul’s canoe, spanking the under bow of George’s catboat. It was the sea gulls screaming over Mr. Riley’s nets and bobbing lobster buoys, offshore; or, inland, at the head of the river, the harsh har-har-har — har-har-har-har of the crows, the high bright circling of the eagles. Somehow, through that luminous and all-permeating dream, Nora, who had never been to the Cape, never even seen this little village, had taken complete and magical possession of it. Possession — of course, the very word for it — it was possessed, he was possessed — it was a kind of witchcraft, a sort of effluence from the unconscious, a psychic wave which had washed over the world and given it a new and astonishing brilliance. Everything, in that current, looked suddenly more alive, glowed importantly in its own light and right, seemed to have taken on an added and peculiar significance: the grains of wood, the texture of the linen sheet as he smoothed and folded it, the pillow as he patted and plumped it, the fluttering and sucking of the muslin curtains against the fog-bright screens. And the lilac trees, as he looked down at them from the bedroom window, resting his hands on the low sill, the lilac trees in the fog, which Chattahoochee was now investigating with tolerant curiosity, were already as good as in blossom. It was June of another year — another summer, another love.
Another summer, another love. The slow pang, melancholy, delicious, recapitulative, filled his breast, extended down his forearms, even to his fingertips — it was a physical thing, as actual as pain or fear. In the Purington house next door someone had put on that everlasting record, the worn-out record, and the blurred magnified words added themselves satirically to the odd and exciting theme, the threat of a crumbling world.
In the morning,
In the evening;
Ain’t we got fun?
Not much money, but, O honey,
Ain’t we got fun?
The world was made, dear,
For people like us—
The words followed him, fading, as he went down the stairs, became a meaningless gabble, then reappeared stridently as he entered the studio again and turned the easel for a look at the half-finished painting.
The rich get richer and the poor get children.
In the meantime,
In between-time—
No, it was not a success; and now more than ever, in the light of the dream about Nora, it lacked the intensity, the intense simplification, at which he had aimed. The effulgence of this sun-blasted, blue-burning, ragged Cape Cod landscape, invisibly but passionately ablaze between the cruel reflectors of sun and sea, as if set on fire by a vast magnifying glass, was not really there, was only hinted at — and yet, if he could feel it so vividly, live into it so hard, and with all his senses, so love it, in all its roots and ruin, how was it that it could still continue to escape him? Where, exactly, was the failure? He looked, and looked again, stared through it, while the gramaphone squawked and ran down, and Enid’s iron, in the kitchen, clashed on its metal rest, and he found himself suddenly seeing the whole Cape Cod landscape as one immense and beautiful thing, from Buzzard’s Bay to Provincetown, from shoulder to sea tip, every detail clear, still, translucent, as in a God’s-eye view. The salt marshes rotting in powerful sunlight; the red cranberry bogs; the sand-rutted roads through forests of scrub pine and scrub oak, and the secret ponds that existed on no map; thickets of wild grape and bull-briar; fields of blueberry and hot goldenrod; grass-grown wind-carved dunes, inlets and lagoons, mudflats bedded with eelgrass, bare at low tide, haunt of the eel, the bluecrab, the horseshoe crab, the fiddlers; and the blown moors, too, with high headlands and dwarfed cedars and junipers, the dry moss and the poverty grass crumbling underfoot, the wild-cherry trees glistening with the white tents of the tent caterpillar under the dome of August blue: he saw it all at a glance, sun-washed and sea-washed, alive, tangled, and everywhere haunted by the somehow so sunlit ghost of the vanished Indian. The Indian names — and the English names — these, too, were a vital part of it — Cataumet, Manomet, Poppennessett, Cotuit, Monomoy — Truro, Brewster, Yarmouth, Barnstable, Shoot-Flying Hill, the King’s Highway — they ran through it like a river, ran gleaming into the past, ran too into the future. And the houses; the cottages of the sea captains — a mile of them in Dennis, the sea captains who had known St. Petersburg and Canton as well as Boston — or the porticoed and pagodaed mansions of the China traders; and the ruined farmhouses and barns, silver-gray ghosts, the sad shingles and clapboards smokelessly consuming, among wild apples and wild lilacs (like Weir Village) back into the burning earth from which they had risen — yes, it was all of a piece, all in one vision, it was in his blood, his eyes, his bones, he shook and lived and died with it. Christ, yes! But why, then, could his mystical and ecstatic vision of it be put to no better use? Ecstasy — someone had defined ecstasy as “farsight,” with the overcoming of the sensual perceptions of space and time.” As in El Greco — as in Van Gogh. But it wasn’t wholly true, for the sensual perceptions of space and time must be there, too — rarefied and essentialized, perhaps, but there. He could see that, he knew it deeply, it trembled in his hand just short of the canvas, and someday, god helping, he would get it. Someday — but, in the meantime, if there were only someone he could discuss it with, shamelessly! If it didn’t have to be so damned secret! Enid — impossible. Roth — too cynical, too urban, too superficial. Paul — too analytic, too much from the outside looking in. Jim Connor — well, perhaps!