In this vagrant mood I boarded that first train, the one people took to work. They got off - their train-trip was already over. I stayed on: mine was just beginning.
And at South Station, my skin crinkling into crepe from the dull cold, some friends appeared. Vapour billowed from beneath the train; they were like people materializing from mist, their breath trailing in clouds. We drank champagne out of paper cups and hopped to keep warm. My family burst into view, pumping hands. In his excitement, my father forgot my name; but my brothers were calm, one ironical, the other squinting at a trim young man on the platform and saying, 'A dash of lavender, Paul - watch out, he's getting on!' I boarded, too, and waved goodbye to my well-wishers. As the Lake Shore Limited pulled out of Platform 151 felt as if I was still in a provisional state, as if everyone was going to get off soon, and that only I was riding the train to the end of the line.
It was a nice conceit, but I kept it to myself. If a stranger asked me where I was going, I said Chicago. It was partly superstition - it seemed unlucky, so early in the trip, to give my precise destination. It was also to avoid startling the questioner with a ridiculous place name
(Tapachula, Managua, Bogotá), or arousing his curiosity and setting off an interrogation. Anyway, this was still home, still familiar: the bent backs of city brownstones, the preposterous solemnity of the Boston University spires, and across the frozen Charles River the white steeples of Harvard, each one in its frailty like a failed attempt at an ivory tower. The air was cold and clear, and it carried the cry of the train whistle through Back Bay. American train whistles have a bitter-sweet change in pitch, and the most insignificant train plays this lonesome note perfectly to the dreamers along the tracks. It is what is known in music as a Diminished Third: Hoo-wee! Hoo-wee!
There was some traffic on the salted roads, but no pedestrians. It was too cold to walk anywhere. The outskirts of Boston looked evacuated: no people, every door and window tightly shut, and the dirt-flecked snow piled beside the empty streets and covering the parked cars. We passed a television station bricked up to look like a country mansion, a solid duck pond, an armoury with grey fake battlements that was about as convincingly military as the kind you see stamped on the back of a cornflakes box to be assembled with scissors and glue. I knew the names of these suburbs, I had been here many times, but because I was headed so far away I saw every point we passed as important. It was as if I was leaving home for the first time, and for good.
Realizing how well I understood these places, I clung to what was familiar and was reluctant to surrender it to the distance. That bridge, that church, that field. There is nothing shocking about leaving home, but rather a slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window, and disappears, and becomes part of the past. Time is made visible, and it moves as the landscape moves. I was shown each second passing as the train belted along, ticking off the buildings with a speed that made me melancholy.
Here in Framingham, I had eleven cousins. There were bungalows and tame woods and ice-covered porches on hillsides; cleaner snow than I had seen in Boston. And some humanity. On this winter afternoon, children skidded hunched-over on skates on a frozen rink between derelict buildings. A moment later we crossed a class barrier: big pink, green, yellow and white oblongs of houses, some with swimming pools filled with snow. The Lake Shore Limited stopped traffic on Main Street, where a policeman whose puffy face was chilled the colour of salami, held the cars back with gloves like a bear's paws.
I had not come far. I could have hopped off the train and quite easily found my way back to Medford on a bus. I knew these places well, and yet I saw new things: a different texture in the suburban snow, the pally names on storefronts - 'Wally's', 'Dave's', 'Angle's' -and, repeatedly, American flags, the Stars and Stripes flying over petrol stations and supermarkets and in numerous yards. And a church steeple like a pepperpot. I could not remember having seen it before, but I had never rushed headlong from home like this. The length of the trip I intended allowed me to be attentive to detail. But the flags puzzled me - were these the pious boasts of patriots, or a warning to foreigners, or decorations for a national holiday? And why, in the littered yard of that rundown house, was a pretty little flag flapping loyally from a pole? On the evidence here it seemed an American obsession, a kind of image-worship I associated with the most primitive political minds.
The snow was bronzed by the setting sun and now I saw factories flying the flag, and advertising their products on their tall brick chimneys: SNIDER'S DRESSED BEEF, and on another the single word ENVELOPES. And like the armoury earlier, with its fake battlements, a cathedral with fake buttresses and a bell-less bell-tower, and some houses with columns which offered no support to the roof, purely decorative fakery repeated in a gingerbread villa. There was no pretence that it was not bogus, only an insistence on cuteness so common in American buildings, which have promoted fakery as legitimate in styles of architecture.
And between the small factory towns - now farther and farther apart - the dense woods were darkening, and the trunks of oak trees were black and forbidding, the shape of pulpits. As we neared Springfield night was falling on the bare hills, and in the snowy valleys the phosphorescence of the deep snow slipped towards black brooks, their surfaces roughened by the current. Since leaving Boston, water had been constantly in view: frozen lakes and ponds, half-frozen rivers, or streams with conches of ice at their banks and the moving water turned to ink by the twilight. Then the sun sank and the light which had moved down the sky drained into the hole where the sun had gone, and the window specks showing in the woods seemed to brighten. Far down on the road, a man in mittens stood alone by his gas station pumps, watching us pass.
Not long afterward we were in Springfield. I had clear memories of the place, of getting off the train at that very station on a winter night, and crossing the long bridge over the Connecticut River to Route 91, to hitch-hike the rest of the way to Amherst. There were ice-floes on the river tonight, too, and the dark slopes of woods on the far side, and the same knifing wind. Memories of school are always to me like memories of destitution, of inexperience, the joyless impatience I had suffered like poverty. And I had had some sadnesses there. But the movement of travel is mercifuclass="underline" before I could remember much -before this town and river could toss me a particular memory - it whistled and rushed me into the amnesia of night. We travelled west, the rumble of the train muffled by snowbanks, through the forests of Massachusetts. But even in that darkness I recognized it. It was not the opaque night, the uninterrupted dark, of a foreign country's hinterland. It was the darkness that only baffles strangers. It was an average evening for this time of year in this place; and I knew all the ghosts here. It was the darkness of home.
I was still sitting in my compartment. The champagne at South Station had left me groggy, and though I had a copy of William Faulkner's The Wild Palms in my lap, I had done no more than read three pages. On the back cover I had scribbled, policeman's face like salami and inky water and flags. And the rest of the time I had spent with my face turned to the window. I had not seen any other passengers - I hadn't looked. I had no idea who was travelling on this train, and in my listless state thought there would be plenty of time for socializing further on-if not tonight, then tomorrow in Chicago, or the day after in Texas. Or I could leave it all for Spanish America or another climate -just sit here reading until the weather changed, and then go for a stroll. But I found the Faulkner impenetrable; my curiosity overcame my listlessness.