Well, screw them, they couldn’t even understand that I wanted no part of it. When I was strong enough, a day or two, I’d be on my way down the railroad track and leave it to them to work out why. I still had the dollars I’d come with, stained brown with my blood but no less negotiable. Nobody here, not even Libby, knew my full name or had asked where I came from or where I’d been going.
The force of self-distinguishing which I found so foolish among stiffs and hobos was what I ran on. When you are nobody and have nothing, you depend on your troubles for self-respect. I had paid heavily for the bed and board. I wasn’t one of them, I was a paying guest.
I finished and walked out while they were still drinking their coffee. I’d be damned if I’d lift a rake or anything else. What could they do, fire me? I stood on the porch and thought about leaving right away, immediately.
And it was at this moment that I saw over the rise to the meadow two people on the tennis court — one of them a girl with blond hair.
I fixed my eyes on her and walked forward already confirmed in expectation by the agonized heave of my heart.
Mr. Penfield the resident poet, an absurd roundish figure in white shorts and a shirt stretched dangerously by an enormous belly, was showing from his side of the net the proper form of the forehand. Once twice three times he stroked the air. His lithe student, trim in a tennis dress, watched him while holding her racquet on her shoulder.
Penfield now hit a ball to her. Careless of all his advice, she swung at it with a great wild lunge and poled it far over the fence across the meadow. I saw tennis balls lying like white flowers everywhere.
He reached into a round basket for another ball and hit it gently, and again she took a furious swing and the ball flew over the fence. Once more he hit to her and she spun herself around missing the ball entirely. He said something to her. She glared at him, dropped the racquet and left the court.
She strode across the grass toward the main house. She tossed her visor away unpinned her hair fluffing it to the breeze ignoring him as he stood on the court and called after her in a voice half reproach half apology, “Clara! Clara!”
But she went over the crest of a slope and descended by degrees until only her head could be seen moving toward the house. Mr. Penfield hurriedly collected the tennis balls lying about the court. I did the same thing in the grass. We met at the court gate. His large bleary face gazed upon mine.
“She can’t bear to be taught,” he said, admitting me with a stunning lack of ceremony to his thoughts. “All I said was Take a level swing, don’t worry about hitting hard.’” He looked again in the direction she had gone. He smiled. “But what game can it be, after all, in which one doesn’t hit one’s hardest!”
He thrust into my hands the racquet and pail of balls and hurried off after her, moving lightly on the balls of his feet with that ability of some fat people to be quick and graceful. I stepped onto the court and picked up her racquet. I took everything to the shack not even thinking of it as the site of my grisly misfortune. I had forgotten misfortune. I headed back to the staff house, from one moment to the next, a worried probationary in my dark green shirt and pants no thought further from my mind than leaving. I wanted a job! Their job! Just as they knew I did. I would take up the rake or any other tool they had in mind oh God it was Clara, that was her name, Clara the girl on the train, no question about it, twice now the sight of her had stopped my heart.
14
I didn’t know what would happen in my life but I knew whatever it was it would have to do with her, with Clara. I thought even having her name was an enormous inroad of intelligence. Was she a Bennett? But wouldn’t they know their games, weren’t they trained to their tennis and their riding? This one, so blazingly beautiful and pissed-off, knew nothing, this one standing pigeon-toed and swinging stiff-armed at balls so incredibly breath-takingly awkward and untrained — no, she was not a relation. Was she a guest? If so, where were the others, she had come with a train, maids in waiting! an entourage! but they were nowhere about, only the resident poet Penfield ambled after her like her pet bear. Was she related to Penfield?
I would do anything be anything to know her and know about her. Dressed in dark green, a spy! I worked to show them how worthy I was, how useful, to show them how I admired what they were and how I wanted to be like them and one of them. How much time did I have? Only until the big man arrived, I had only that time to prove I shouldn’t be thrown out on my ass.
Of course I couldn’t express to Libby even the most idly curious question about this princess living on the grounds. But she had loved showing me the guest book and I thought from her same peasant identification with Bennett wealth she would enjoy the wonder on my face as she secretly showed me the main house, where they lived and had their lives and Charlie Chaplin and the one-named kings sat down to dinner.
The Bennetts not at home there was a bending of the rules: on Saturday night two Loon Lake station wagons pulled out leaving a skeleton staff.
On Sunday afternoon with the sun coming through the trees at low angles to light the rooms, through rectangles of sun along dark corridors, Libby and I tiptoed about the vast upstairs with its hall alcoves of casement windows and window seats and bookshelves and its suites of rooms, each with its generous shade porch, and Adirondacks chairs and sofas.
Whatever empty room I saw led my mind to the next room, the next turn in the corridor, everywhere the light off the lake cast its silvery shimmer on the walls or in my eyes as we passed open doorways.
One wing was closed off. “We can’t go there,” Libby said.
“Why not?” I asked, casual as I could be.
“It’s the Bennetts’ wing, where they stay.”
“Is someone there?”
“No. But I wouldn’t feel right about it. Rose and Mary take care of it,” she said.
She led me down a back stair through a kitchen with two black steel ranges and pantries of provisions and several iceboxes each crowned with its humming cylindrical motor.
Through a room of glass cabinets filled with sets of china and drawers of silver service.
Through the hexagonal dining room, three walls of glass and a table hexagonal in shape to seat thirty people.
To the huge living room, the grandest room of all, with tan leather couches built into the walls, the walls hung with the heads of trophy. There were two different levels of game tables and racks of magazines and clusters of stuffed chairs all looking out enormous windows to the lake.
I found myself tiptoeing, with a sense of intrusion, my chest constricted — and something else — the thinnest possibility of destructive intent, some very fine denial on my part to submit to awe. “Of course this is just one of their places,” Libby said. “Can you imagine?”
One or two steps up and we were in the entrance hall. The walls were of dark rough wood. We stood under a chandelier made from antlers. I gazed up a wide curved staircase of halved logs polished to a high shine, with balusters of saplings. I gazed at this as at the gnarled and swirling access to a kingdom of trolls.
“Don’t you love roughing it?” I said to Libby, running her up the staircase. “What!” she cried, but laughing too, entirely subject to my mood. In the long upstairs corridor I placed her hand on my arm and strolled with her as if we were master and mistress. I led her into one of the suites and flinging open the glass doors of the porch, I extended my arm and said, “Let us enjoy the view that God in his wisdom has arranged for us, my deah.” She swept past me giggling in the game and we stood in the sun side by side looking over the kingdom.