Surely you’ve heard of the cervical vertebrae.”
“She spoke, and, turning-”
“As she turned.”
“As she turned, her rosy neck blushed.”
“Very well.”
“And, and coma, coma-sleep?”
“Hair, Peter, hair. Surely you’ve heard of the derivative word comose? Think of comb, as a rooster’s comb.”
“And, uh, turning again-”
“Oh, no. Dear child, no. Vertice here is the noun, vertex, verticis. Vortex. A vortex, a whirl, a crown of hair, of what kind of hair? What agrees?”
“Ambrosial.”
“Yes, ambrosial meaning, properly, immortal. Applied most often to the food of the gods, and in that sense descending to us with the meaning of sweet, delicious, honey-like. But the gods also used ambrosia for anointment and perfume.” She spoke of the gods with a certain authority, Miss Appleton did.
“And her whirl, her tangle-”
“Crown, Peter. The hair of the gods is never tangled.”
“And her crown of ambrosial hair breathed out a divine odor.”
“Yes. Good. Fragrance, let’s say. Odor rather suggests plumbing.”
“… a divine fragrance, her vestment, her robe…”
“Yes, a flowing robe. All the goddesses save Diana wore a loose flowing robe. Diana, the heavenly huntress, wore of course a sensible tunic, perhaps with leggings, probably of a heavy green or brown cloth such as what I am wearing. Her robe flowed down-”
“I don’t understand ad imos.”
“Imus, a rather archaic word. The superlative of inferus, below, down below. Ad imos, to the lowest extremity. Here, literally, to the lowest extremity of her feet, which makes little sense in English. It is used as emphasis; the poet is astounded. Some rendering such as ‘her robe flowed down, ah, down to her very feet’ might be equivalent. The sense is of ‘all the way.’ She was totally naked. Please proceed, Peter. This is taking much too long.”
“Down, down to her feet, and in truth opened-”
“Was opened, was exposed, made manifest as vera. Vera dea.”
“As a true goddess.”
“Quite so. What does incessu have to do with the sentence?”
“I don’t know.”
“Really, Peter, this is disappointing. College material like yourself. Incessu, in stride, in gait. She was in gait a true goddess. Gait in the sense of carriage, of physical style; there is a style to divinity. These lines brim with a sense of that radiance, breaking in upon the unknowing Aeneas. Ille ubi matrem agnovit; he recognized his mother. Venus, Venus, with her ambrosial fragrance, her swirling hair, her flowing robe, her rosy skin. Yet he sees only as she is avertens, as she is turning away. The sense of the passage being that only as she turns to leave him, does he perceive her true glory, her actual worth and her relationship to him. So it is often in life. We love too late. In the next line he cries out to her, most movingly, as she fades away, ‘Oh why, why may we never join hand to hand, or hear and give back speech truly?”‘
Iris Osgood replaced her; the girl was crying. Tears streamed down her cheeks, soft and bland like the sides of a Guernsey, and she did not have the wit to wipe them away. She was one of those dull plain girls who was totally unfashionable in the class and yet with whom I felt a certain inner dance. That half-shaped fatness of her figure secretly roused the hard seeds in me; I showed it by being quick and bantering of tongue. But today I was tired and wanted only to pillow my head upon her low I. Q. “Why the tears, Iris?”
Through a sob in her throat she brought out, “My blouse: he tore it. It’s ruined and what can I tell my mother?”
And now I noticed that indeed the downslipping silver of one breast was exposed to the very verge of its ruddy puckered coin; I could not tear my eyes away, it looked so vulnerable.
“That’s all right,” I told her, debonair. “Look at me. My shirt is totally disintegrated.”
And this was true; except for flecks and glutinous threads of red, my chest was bare. My psoriasis was made manifest. A line had formed and, one by one, they walked by, Betty Jean Shilling, Fats Frymoyer, Gloria Davis suppressing a smile, Billy Schupp the diabetic-all my classmates. They had obviously come together in a bus. Each for a moment studied my scabs, and then moved on in silence. A few shook their heads-sadly; one girl pressed her lips together and shut her eyes; a few eyes were thick and pink with tears. The wind, the mountaintops, had fallen still behind me. My rock felt padded and there was a tangy chemical smell all but smothered in the artificial perfume of flowers.
Last came Arnie Werner, the president of the senior class and the student council, captain of the football and baseball teams. He was a hollow-eyed boy with the throat of a god and heavy sloping shoulders all shining from the shower. He bent way over and stared at the scabs of my chest and touched one fastidiously with his index finger. “Jesus, kid,” he said, “what’ve you got? Syphilis?”
I tried to explain. “No, it’s an allergic condition, not contagious, don’t be frightened-”
“Have you had a doctor look at this?”
“You won’t believe this, but the doctor himself-”
“Does it bleed?” he asked.
“Only when I scratch too hard,” I told him, desperate to ingratiate myself, to earn his forgiveness. “It’s kind of relaxing, actually, when you’re reading or in a movie-”
“Boy,” he said. “This is the ugliest stuff I ever saw.” He frowningly sucked his index finger. “Now I’ve touched it and I’ll get it. Where’s the Mercurochrome?”
“Honest, cross my heart, it’s not contagious-”
“Frankly,” he said, and from the solemn-dumb way he said that one word I could see that he was probably a good president of the student council, “I’m surprised they let you bring a thing like that into the school. If it’s syphilis, you know, the toilet seats-”
I shouted, “I want my father!”
He came before me and wrote on the blackboard,
C6H12O6 + 6O2 = 6CO2 + 6H2O + E.
It was the last, the seventh period of the day. We were tired. He encircled the E and said, “Energy. That’s life. That little extra E is life. We take in sugars and oxygen and burn it, like you burn old newspapers in the trash barrel, and give off carbon dioxide and water and energy. When this process stops”-he Xed through the equation-”this stops”-he double-Xed out the.E-”and you become what they call dead. You become a worthless log of old chemicals.”
“But can’t the process ever be reversed?” I asked.
“Thanks for asking that, Peter. Yes. Read the equation backwards and you have photosynthesis, the life of green plants. They take in moisture and the carbon dioxide we breathe out and the energy of the sunlight, and they produce sugar and oxygen, and then we eat the plants and get the sugar back and that’s the way the world goes round.” He made a vortex with his fingers in the air. “Round and round, and where it stops, nobody knows.”
“But where do they get the energy?” I asked.
“Good question,” my father said. “You’ve got your mother’s brains; I hope to hell you don’t get my ugly face. The energy needed for photosynthesis comes from the atomic energy of the sun. Every time we think, move, or breathe, we’re using up a bit of golden sunshine. When that gives out in five billion years or so, we can all lie down and rest.”
“But why do you want to rest?” His face had gone quite bloodless; a film had been interposed between us; my father seemed flattened upon another plane and I strained my voice to reach him. He turned slowly, so slowly, and his forehead wobbled and elongated with refraction. His lips moved and seconds later the sound came to me.