Then he recites some lines about the place, about Loon Lake. The glass in one hand, the bottle in the other, he sits with legs outstretched he is in his dirty sneakers with no socks his tweed jacket with the elbow patches his tennis shirt with the soft collar turned under on one side, he produces a deep melodious voice for his lines not his normal voice I was embarrassed by this sudden access to performance but she was not. She paid attention to his poetry as she had not to his conversation. But no audience was as responsive to Mr. Penfield’s words as he was. His red eyes grew large with a film of tears.
I augment my memory with the lines actually printed in a private edition, the last of his three privately published volumes all recording different times of his life in the different places the same person. “The loons they heard were the loons we hear today”—in his deep reader’s chant—“cries to distract the dying loons diving into the cold black lake and diving back out again in a whorl of clinging water clinging like importuning spirits fingers shattering in spray feeling up the wing along the rounded body of the thrillingly exerting loon beaking a fish rising to the moon streamlined its loon eyes round and red.”
And I, resonantly attuned to her, alive to the firelit moment — somewhere I had gotten at great cost, with the scars to show it, from such profound effort, the kind of unceasing insistence on my life’s rights that was only now so exhausting in my release from it. As this absurd fat drunkard sang his words they seemed the most beautiful I had ever heard. But perhaps any words would have done. I heard them and I didn’t hear them, I had no idea he had just written them I thought they were from some book already done, I heard the feeling they inspired in me, that I was living at last! That it was the way it should be, I was feeling Penfield’s immense careless generosity, the boon of himself which granted me without argument everything I was struggling for, all of it assumed in the simple giving of words, so moving to this scruffy boy.
It was the moment of dangerous specification of everything I thought worth wanting. After the loon flew off whose red eyes were much like his own he cleared his throat and he poured wine all around although I’d barely sipped mine. He emptied the bottle on his turn and struggled to his feet for another bottle which he uncorked while continuing to speak and again he sat down with the new bottle as attached to his hand as the old.
I tried not to look at her. I saw the glance from under her brows toward the ceiling, the impatience, and then I began to feel the force of the occasion which was that somehow I was enlisted to help divert, distract or pacify Clara Lukaćs. That was the meaning of the self-dramatization of the man, that we were in some overburdened instant, with our backs to it, grounding our heels, digging in.
And then he was telling us about the war, of all things, a veteran, migod, would he bring out the poppies? But soon we were inside his images, listening like children, the mule-drawn caissons sinking in the mud, the troops in greatcoats and tin helmets riding the mules’ backs, kicking their boots sharply against the mules’ flanks, the bracing of backs on six-foot wheels, spokes like baseball bats tires of steel, each soldier alone and miserable inside his coat, charred trees beside the road the sky showing through city hall, gusts of acrid air blowing from the front, and here is Corporal Penfield riding the signal wagon, flag tubes strapped to his back like quivers, a helmet tilting over his eyes because the strap is too loose, and on his lap the crate covered with a khaki blanket shifts perceptibly, the pigeons whirring with each dull boom lighting the sky like lightning miles ahead.
He was dangling a medal. He had taken it from his pocket. He handed it to me. The colors of the ribbon had bled, there was thread and lint attached to it, but it was a Silver Star and it was his.
I leaned forward put it in her hand leaning forward over the bear rug between us, our hands grazed I felt the heat of her hand.
And there in our minds as we looked at the palpable proof was Signal Corporal Penfield during the battle of the Somme dispatched urgently to semaphore the artillery to drop some heavy stuff on the encircling Huns.
“The field telephone didn’t work, there wasn’t even a damn pigeon left.” He paused to wet his throat. “So I took the old semaphore flags and went up to the top of a hill where I could be seen, because even though it was night the star shells were like the Fourth of July and it was brighter than day. I could see out over no man’s land. I sent my message”—here he lifted his arms, attached to the glass and bottle and did a half-hearted pantomime—“and a while later the artillery came in on target, and that’s what I got the medal for.”
“You’re a hero,” she said, smiling. She dropped the medal in his lap and then raised her glass to her lips.
“No, but, love, you haven’t heard the end.” He dropped his chin to his chest. “I was so terrified I didn’t send the message I was supposed to. What I semaphored was the first verse of a poem.”
“What?” I said.
“‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream,’ and so on,” he said. “And a while later the shells came in on target. It was very strange.”
She was laughing. “In the war — in the battle?”
“Surely you know it,” he said. “The Intimations Ode? Didn’t you have it in school?”
“But why?”
“I don’t know why. Maybe I thought I was going to die. Maybe it seemed to me the only appropriate thing to say. Anyway, after I got the medal I wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Army returning it and telling him it was more properly William Wordsworth’s.”
“But it wasn’t a medal for poetry,” I said, and immediately felt like a fool.
“Apparently not, Joe of Paterson. Apparently not. I had to go for psychiatric tests. They pinned the medal on my bathrobe. They kept me under observation for ninety days in Nutley, New Jersey.”
“Where?” she said, happily laughing. He looked up at her, victorious in her amusement. “Oh, Warren, you old fuck, where?” She threw back her head and laughed and laughed, I gazed at her throat, her neck, it was a moment in which I could look at all of her as she sat in her white satin robe, she bending forward now in her laughter, the robe unfolding like unfolding wings so that I could see her breasts.
Then I realized Penfield was looking at me, with his head lowered, with raised eyebrows, a characteristic expression, I knew at once, full of sadness, full of self-acknowledgment, and as she reached out and touched his head he too began to giggle, he was in love with her, and soon they were both laughing and I was laughing, but trying not to for some reason, feeling badly that I laughed, feeling ashamed.
I hadn’t realized how drunk they were. A few moments later, in silence, she put her glass down and reached out, holding his head in her arms. He looked up at her, and behind her shingle of hair he kissed her, his hand with the bottle going up involuntarily, another semaphore, and I heard her sob, and then both of them were crying.
I tried to leave, but they wouldn’t allow it. All at once they were very physical with me, placing themselves on either side of me and leading me back to the middle of the room. Penfield went to stoke up the fire. She led me to my chair and pressed my shoulders firmly with her small hands and then sat across from me and studied me solemnly. Until this moment her primary awareness had been of Penfield, she had not quite acknowledged me, as if one person at a time, and only one, could occupy her mind. She was always to be this way, intense and direct with whatever she fixed upon, and whatever the affront to those on the periphery. It was not snobbishness or anything like that — she was in fact reckless of her self-interest in a situation, and that I think was the center of her force and effect. She knew nothing about courtesy in the sense of not being subject to it. She blazed through her feelings and suffered the consequences.