The girls look solemn. I take a drink of Early Times and fill my flask.
A simple matter to follow the weedy easement past the ice-cream restaurant to Ellen’s neat little Toyota electric parked between a rusted hulk of a Cadillac and a broken-back vine-clad Pontiac. No bullet holes in the windows.
Head out straight across the plaza making as big a show as possible, stomping the carriage bell and zigzagging the tiller — you sit sideways and work a tiller and scud along like a catboat. Ellen’s car is both Japanese and Presbyterian, thrifty, tidy, efficient, chaste. As a matter of fact, Ellen was born in Japan of Georgia Presbyterian missionaries.
No one follows. Then double back, circle old Saint Michael’s, bang the Bermuda bell — and head out for the pines.
Someone should follow me.
Now wait at the fork behind the bicycle shed where the kids parked their bikes and caught the school bus. One road winds up the ridge, the other along the links to the clubhouse. It is beginning to rain a little. Big dusty drops splash on the windshield.
Here he comes.
Here comes something anyhow. Rubber treads hum on the wet asphalt. He pauses at the fork. A pang: did I leave tracks? No. He goes past slowly, taking the country-club road, a big Cushman golf cart clumsily armored with scraps of sheet-iron wired to the body and tied under the surrey fringe. The driver can’t be seen. It noses along the links like a beetle and disappears in the pines.
There is no one in sight except a picaninny scraping up soybean meal on number 8 green.
Why not take the ridge road and drive straight to my house?
I do it, meeting nobody, enter at the service gate and dive out of sight under a great clump of azaleas. Then up through the plantation of sumac that used to be the lawn, to the lower “woods” door. It is the rear lower-level door to the new wing Doris added after ten years of married life had canceled the old.
It occurs to me that I have not entered the house through this door since Doris left. I squeeze past the door jammed by wistaria. It is like entering a strange house.
The green gloom inside smells of old hammocks and ping-pong nets. Here is the “hunt” room, Doris’s idea, fitted out with gun cabinet, copper sink, bar, freezer, billiard table, life-size stereo-V, easy chairs, Audubon prints. Doris envisioned me coming here after epic hunts with hale hunting companions, eviscerating the bloody little carcasses of birds in the sink, pouring sixteen-year-old bourbon in the heavy Abercrombie field-and-stream glasses and settling down with my pipe and friends and my pointer bitch for a long winter evening of man talk and football-watching. Of course I never came here, never owned a pointer bitch, had no use for friends, and instead of hunting took to hanging around Paradise Bowling Lanes and drinking Dixie beer with my partner, Leroy Ledbetter.
The carbine is still in the cabinet. But before leaving I’d better go topside and check the terrain. At the top of a spiral stair is Doris’s room, a kind of gazebo attached to the house at one of its eight sides. An airy confection of spidery white iron, a fretwork of ice cream, it floats like a tree house in the whispering crowns of the longleaf pines. A sun-ray breaks through a rift of cloud and sheds a queer gold light that catches the raindrops on the screen.
Here sat Doris with Alistair and his friend Martyn whom, I confess, I liked to hear Alistair address not as he did, with the swallowed n, Mart’n, but with the decent British aspirate Mar-tyn. Even liked hearing him address me with his tidy rounded o, not as we would say, Täm, but T?m: “I say, T?m, what about mixing me one of your absolutely smashing gin fizzes? There’s a good chap?” Where’s a good chap? I would ask but liked his English nevertheless, mine having got loosed, broadened, slurred over, somewhere along the banks of the Ohio or back in the bourbon hills of Kentucky, and so would fix gin fizzes for him and Martyn.
Alistair: half-lying in the rattan settee, tawny-skinned, tawny-eyes, mandala-and-chain half-hidden in his Cozumel homespuns, his silver and turquoise bracelet (the real article with links as heavy and greasy as engine gears) slid down his wrist onto his gold hand, which he knows how to flex as gracefully as Michelangelo’s Adam touching God’s hand.
Mar-tyn: a wizened Liverpool youth, not quite clean, whose low furrowed brow went up in a great shock of dry wiry hair; Mar-tyn, who gave himself leave not to speak because it was understood he was “with” Alistair; who mystified Doris with his unattractiveness and who when I gave him his gin fizz in a heavy Abercrombie field-and-stream glass, always shot me the same ironic look: “Thanks, mite.”
Doris happy though, despite Mar-tyn. Here in her airy gazebo in the treetops it seemed to her that things had fallen out right at last. This surely was the way life was lived: Alistair sharing with her the English hankering for the Orient and speaking in the authentic mother tongue of reverence for life and of the need of making homely things with one’s own hands; of a true community life stripped of its technological dross, of simple meetings and greetings, spiritual communions, the touch of a hand, etcetera etcetera.
“We’re afraid of touching each other in our modern culture,” said Alistair, extending his golden Adam’s hand and touching me.
“You’re damn right we are,” I said, shrinking away.
He would discuss his coming lecture with Doris, asking her advice about the best means of penetrating the “suburban armor of indifference.”
Doris listened and advised breathlessly. To her the very air of the summerhouse seemed freighted with meanings. Possibilities floated like motes in the golden light. Breathlessly she sat and mostly listened, long-limbed and lovely in her green linen, while Alistair quoted the sutras. English poets she had memorized at Winchester High School sounded as fresh as the new green growth of the vines.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,
said Alistair, swishing his gin fizz.
“How true!” breathed Doris.
“Holiness is wholeness,” said Alistair, holding in his cupped hand a hooded warbler who had knocked himself out against the screen.
“That is so true!” said Doris.
Not that I wasn’t included, even after Alistair found out that it was Doris, not I, who had the money. Alistair was good-natured and wanted to be friends. Under any other circumstances we might have been: he was a rogue but a likable one. Mar-tyn was a Liverpool guttersnipe, but Alistair was a likable rogue. We got along well enough. Sunday mornings he’d give his lecture at the Unity church on reverence for life or mind-force, and Samantha and I’d go to mass and we’d meet afterwards in the summerhouse.
They were a pair of rascals. What a surprise. No one ever expects the English to be rascals (compare Greeks, Turks, Lebanese, Chinese). No, the English, who have no use for God, are the most decent people on earth. Why? Because they got rid of God. They got rid of God two hundred years ago and became extraordinarily decent to prove they didn’t need him. Compare Merrie England of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A nation of rowdies.
“I greatly admire the Catholic mass,” Alistair would say.
“Good.”
“I accept the validity of all religions.”
“I don’t.”
“Pity.”
“Yes.”
“I say, T?m.”
“Yes?”