Her name was Libby. She didn’t think of not answering any question that occurred to me.
This place was called Loon Lake. It was the domain of the same F. W. Bennett of the Bennett Autobody Works. Did I know the name? He was very rich. He owned thirty thousand acres here and it was just one of his places. He owned the lake itself, the water in the lake, the land under the water and the fish that swam in it.
“But not the dogs,” I said.
“Oh no,” she said, “those are wild-running, those dogs. It’s the fault of the people who own them and can’t feed them anymore. And then they go off and forage and breed wild and hunt in packs.”
“The people?”
“The dogs. All through the mountains it’s like that, not just here. Does it hurt?” she asked.
“It don’t tickle.”
A tremor went through her. She held her arms as if she was cold.
“Tell me, does your F. W. Bennett have a wife?”
“Oh, sure! She’s famous. The Mrs. Bennett who wins all the air races. Her picture’s in the papers. Lucinda Bennett?”
“Oh, her,” I said. “The one with the blond hair?”
“No, she’s a brunette.” Libby touched her own hair, which was brunet too. Like all her features it was ordinary. She was possessed of a sort of plain prettiness that caused you to study her and wish this feature or that might be better.
“Brunettes are my favorite,” I said.
She blushed. She was a simple innocent person, she granted me her own youthful face on the world without knowing who I was or where I came from. In five minutes I had her whole history. Her uncle, one of the groundkeepers, had gotten her the job. She made twelve dollars a week plus room and board. She was fervent in her gratitude. She spoke in what I could tell was the communal piety of the staff. How nervously lucky they would have to feel, how clannish in their good fortune exempt in these mountains from an afflicted age. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Bennett came or went separately or together or had guests or didn’t, but the place was maintained all year round including the dead of winter.
“Don’t you get lonely up here?” I said.
She thought a long time. “Well, I send six dollars to my father in Albany.”
Not realizing this was enough for me to feel chastened, she frowned and cast about in her mind for justification. “You’d be surprised who comes here,” she said. She brightened “You get to see famous people.”
“Who?”
“Why, big politicians, and prime ministers from England. And Jeanette MacDonald? She was here in the spring! She’s beautiful. I saw her clothes. She gave me five dollars!”
“Who else?”
“Oh well, I never saw him, it was before I came. But Charlie Chaplin.”
“Sure,” I said. “On roller skates.”
She looked then suddenly frightened. Who would doubt her word? She turned and left the room, and I thought to myself well that’s that. But a short while later she returned, softly closing the door behind her. She held a large leatherbound book to her chest and looked at me over the gilt edge with bright excited eyes. “I better not get caught,” she said.
It was the Loon Lake guest book. She fixed the pillows so I could pull myself up and she sat on the side of the bed and opened the book to a page marked “1931.” Her index finger ran down a list of signatures and stopped and she turned her eyes on me as I saw whose signature it was: Charles Chaplin had made an elegant scrawl, and next to it, where there was a space for comment, he had written: “Splendid weekend! Gay company!”
Vindicated, Libby watched with pleasure as I became absorbed by all the names, right up to the present: signatures of movie stars, orchestra leaders, authors, senators, all famous enough to be recognized by me, but also signatures I recognized only vaguely, or only sensed as names of magnitude, like the name F. W. Bennett, names that had been given to things, names painted on the big signs over factories or carved in the stone over the entrances of office buildings. I couldn’t stop looking at them. I felt I could learn something, that there was something here, some powerful knowledge I could use. But it was in code! If only I could understand the significance of the notations, I’d have what I needed I’d know what I’d always dreamed of knowing — although I couldn’t have said what it was. I touched the signatures, traced them trying to feel the ink. It was some mysterious system of legalities and caste and extended brilliant endeavor — all abbreviated into these names and dates of proud people from all over the world who had come here to this secret place in the mountains.
I became aware of this girl Libby in her pale green uniform. She sat very close to me, the starched front of her uniform rose and fell with her breathing. When I glanced up from the book I found her face near mine, her head bowed and her eyes on the page, but her consciousness all directed to me. Her full lower lip was impressed into a suggestion of voluptuousness by her front teeth. She had thick wavy hair. What sweet appropriate modesty of being. Her trust was part of it, or so I understood — the willingness of the others of us to find a place and live our lives within it, making our trembling alliances and becoming famous and powerful to each other.
I turned back to the book. Some of the people there were such big shots they needed only one name to identify themselves. Leopold, one of them had written. Of Belgium.
I said to Libby, “Hey, how long have I been here, anyway?”
“We were taking off the summer covers and putting the rugs down,” she said. “It was that night. I never hope to hear what I heard that night.”
“Well, when was it, please?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“Wasn’t someone here then? Didn’t you have visitors?” She looked at me and then looked away. She glanced at the book. She wanted it back.
“I saw the train, Libby. People were on it. Is anyone here now?”
She shook her head.
“Well, how come I don’t see anything that recent in the guest book?” She was silent a long while. I knew I was extending her loyalty. I gazed at her and waited for my answer. She looked discouraged. “Not just anyone gets to sign,” she said finally.
“Is that right?” I said. She wouldn’t look at me now.
“I think someone’s calling you, Libby.”
“Where?” She went to the door, opened it and listened. I leaned over with a painful lunge to the bedside stand. In the little drawer was a fountain pen. I unscrewed the cap, shook a blot on the floor, spread open the guest book and signed my name with a flourish.
“What are you doing!” Libby said. Her hand was on her cheek and she stared at me in horror.
“Joe,” I wrote. “Of Paterson. Splendid dogs. Swell company.”
I fell back on the pillow. By signing the guest book, did I mean to be going on my way? I felt the pretense, as well as any other, washed away in a wave of weakness and despair.
The girl grabbed the book and ran.
She had a friend, as it turned out, a man who lived on the grounds as a kind of permanent houseguest. He came to look at me later that day, peering in the door with an expression of wonder very odd in a full-grown middle-aged adult.
He was a large heavy man. He was bearded. His hair was overgrown and unkempt. His eyes were blue and set in a field of pink that suggested a history of torments and conflicts past ordinary understanding. His weight and size seemed to amplify the act of breathing, which took place through his mouth. His nose looked swollen, a web of fine purple lines ran up his cheeks from the undergrowth, and all the ravage together told of the drinker.
He said his name was Warren Penfield. He wanted to speak about moral responsibility.
He padded around the room in a pair of old tennis sneakers. He wore baggy trousers belted below his stomach, and an ancient tweed jacket with patches at the elbow. Beneath the jacket was what seemed to be a soft graying tennis shirt part of the collar folded under he didn’t seem to be aware of this.