Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (38 page)

When I came in from the woods I had always to press the back bell or call out to her; this she said was for safety’s sake. But even within the routine of the house, we preserved a decorum of bathroom doors and bedroom ones, and if I never got into hers, she was equally observant of those courtesies which might yet help to make a man of me, and never came into the room she still called the “museum”—which was mine. Slowly, meanwhile, I built my picture of her. She was the most watchable of persons, who must never have known a time when she wasn’t being watched. In contrast, I suppose, my lack of definity was restful. And slowly, sent out artful-artless toward the quiet pink slope of my sympathy, her confidences came.

If she said “telly” and had other Anglicisms poking out like umbrellas from her storehouse of acquired patois and dialects, it was because Jamie her husband, a Scotsman who had required always and precisely to be termed Scottish—and who knew whether or not his profession-obsession mightn’t have started there?—had gone to Merton in his youth-time, and been a don there for part of hers.

“He’d had another wive?” I said—by this time, I knew about wives, up to a point, and never lost a chance to dwell on them.

She nodded, with an odd look at me that I never interpreted, but of this wive we spoke little more. I never saw Jamie either really, put his images together as I might, from grizzleskin to bush-moustache, as she told it. I never saw him except in the shadow of his small shadow—hers. They had met under a bush too. “Not a cabbage,” she said, laughing, having long since explained to me that context—but what was called a sparrowgrass bush, then a youthful evening haunt of hers, in a graveyard in Sunbury, Pa. I often made her repeat this story, I meanwhile standing proud and ever rosier, because of knowing all the contexts. How could she have known, she said, how many of
his
she had piqued and teazled, when she said to him afterwards—afterwards of what, I knew also
—“Oh, ja, ’ch wis was du bis.”
She had told him her tribe, and of her parents’ lapses—from wearing buttons to living in town and having the gas and electrisch, to her father’s drink and her mother’s earrings—for which they had been thrown off the grandfather’s farm. And how she herself had three languages. “
’Ch hab Deitsch, und Deutsch”—
how cleverly her dear little tongue must have made that turn—“und
’ch hab der good Englisch.”
And she even knew what
he
was.
“Ja, ’ch wis. Du bis
Scotch!”

On the television, she never liked to look at the news, or listen—too much quack-quack. Jamie hadn’t been much of a talker, but had made talking dolls of his wives. One was still living—somewhere; it was the second one, the Maori girl, who had died. And it was her son by Jamie who had given Janice the woodcarving tools she had at long last found such a use for. Jamie had sons all over, though never a daughter by anybody at all. Just as well, and said so himself; could never keep his hands off a young girl. Give him credit though, he always went back along the trail, even years later, picked up the sons, as one by one they popped up out of huts, long-houses or island waters, and popped them back—into a good church school.

“Oh these half-breed Englishmen,” she said, “half-breed Irish, Scotch—I mean
Scottish,
or American—queerishest of the queer!” She gave me a sharp look. “Queerish queer, you understand, Eli, not
queer-queer.
Or at least, not all of them.”

I would have nodded if I could, but anyway, she seemed able now to tell so well what I was thinking—though we were wary of false alarms—that I often thought she could smell.

“Always on the move, too,” she added. “But keep in touch, is their motto. And they don’t in the least mind—going back.”

Jamie himself, whenever he had deceived her—this context like all moral ones, took a while, but finally, by rote, I got it—did so only with older women, or those along the trail already. She hadn’t deceived him ever, instead merely cultivating a taste, when she could indulge it, for never going back. “Queerish,” she said again, with a sigh. And that was the end of Jamie, though since then she had not pushed much forwarder in her own history.

Sometimes, her quick chatter—in which drama, character and gender were all of them mixed up together—put a strain even on my extended reading. I had a question or two, one of which I put forward with some awkwardness. “Shall I be, do you think—one of those half-breeds?”

She muffled what I feared was a laugh—though it could have been a sob—then said, with an expression that of all her many I liked the best, so straightforward, nothing roundish, “Whatever … you’ll be a dear.”

I swallowed the second one—I was swallowing more frequently these days. A half-breed. Was:
Jack?

Or sometimes, as she sat down with the tray, and flicked the switch to a story or a dancing, she remarked that she didn’t really care for more news of a world she was leaving—and out of the complicated reasons she might have had for this, gave me one. “I’d like to move on forever. But not get any particular where.”

That was Ours, all right. I myself was all for progress, more and more. I felt I would do well here. But more and more it had to be at my demand that we had a Voco-Phono lesson; almost it seemed that she had lost interest, not in me, but in my getting on. Often I had to plead for it, with what I hoped was a little joke. “Well, let’s, eh—since we can’t play cards.” Was this piteous, tedious, or my worst bugaboo—coyful? Even from reading, I couldn’t quite get right all the attitudes. But, for a proper joke here, I did see that serious attitudes had to be taken seriously—and if my growthing went as predicted, I fancied I’d make good use of how to give and take a proper joke. I hadn’t yet puzzled out what was needed for the tragic sense of life, or even quite what it was, or whether people really wanted it. More to the point at present was that, evening by evening, I could see that my darling—she called me dear, but I had advanced ahead of her—was drifting. Was it tragic or comic, that nobody could know better than I—what and where she was drifting toward?

In the lessons themselves, now that my speech had advanced from the grammars, catechisms, recordings and verbalization tables she had first devised, I found it harder to keep her attention, and sometimes even had to resort to making old mistakes which had once amused her, saying “has-been” for instance for husband, or “woeman” for wooman, not expecting her to laugh, but hoping only that she would notice what I was doing, or perhaps even give me a beating for some reason—I was reading Dickens, de Sade, and Krafft-Ebing at the moment and could have given her any number of reasons—but all that occurred was my own recognition that I no longer amused even me. Which has not stopped me from trying; this is called a sense of humor. Meanwhile, more and more often, she went with me to my evening library stint at an hour she once would have thought dangerously early.

It was quite simple, the way we did it. There was a way across the fields, and she carried a woodsman’s lantern which when vigorously swung effectively reflected me out. We never had to cross the agora I had hit upon on arrival, but it could be seen in the distance, and remembering those cries of the aurora borealis, I hunted up manuals on camouflage, magic illusion, protective coloration, and like any young thing growing here, found many a little trompe l’oeil trick which helped me blend with my surroundings. One or two rainy evenings now and then kept us in, or she did, citing how the first Indians here on the continent had died of measles contracted from the Europeans, and how there was no need as yet to take chances with my unknown hardihood. Curious, how none of you ever think of
yourselves
as the aborigines—not even, I presume, the aborigines. How she could think we would not have primed ourselves with all the immunities was another of her innocences, but I kept my own counsel—and the weather marvelously held. Terrestrial nature sometimes does that, before it stretches toward another adventure. So we two traversed the fields in our own light, and a lantern’s. She was always and ever staring upward on the dark map she had set her sights for, but to the traveler of many crossings, the night sky is sufficient if it but be known to be above him. So, an affair of two worlds had narrowed down almost to that idyll of a man and a maid—and a field—whose authorship is generally ascribed to the ages. So, at least, I had read. And so I hoped.

Then, at the library, in the door we went, via her key, up the backstairs, and into the stacks. Once in her cubicle, while she raided the shelves for me, I was safe, even against any possible scholar as late as we. And there, reading everything from Anthropology to Zoology—and though my rate of speed slackened slowly, slower ever slower, until toward the end I couldn’t read faster than a volume of Blackstone a minute and a good novel in forty—I spent the sea-green incorruptible hours of my Here youth. So I set myself to read your universe through, haunted only by the fear that I should too soon finish. A young person’s fear! Nature has its own ways, in retrospect all nobly simple. What slowed me down, ever more irreparably—until near the end I could read no more than the day’s supply of the ten or fifteen books she could load into two book bags—was of course my own delight, that first touch of the bibliophile’s hunger. Everything I read, or almost, was still pornography to me!

Then, at four o’clock or so we betook ourselves home again quickly, I glowing hot as the dawn itself, stuffed as I was with all the splendors to come, and she pale as Diana disappearing—each to our own daydreams.

Daytime excursions she had decreed were impossible. Yet, once, we dared it, for what she called dreamily an ice-picnic—her choice. She wanted—as she said—out. The state park, she said, would be deserted even of keepers, on the farthest side of the winter lakes. While she took her air there, I could start my own test of endurance—it was time I started something, unless I planned to remain forever a monstrous bookworm—and if I was not soon to develop a figure, or some fas-simile of a bifurcation which would allow me to be clothed, I would have to learn to brave the elements as I was. She spoke somewhat harshly, and though I thought of such things as a manteau or a toga, offered me nothing. “If you could only learn to
sit,
” she finished, “I could hire a car!”

Scarcely knowing why, I still was hiding that talent, as well as—another. Only a day or two past, on the excuse of my weakness, she had kept me from the rain. Must I mistrust her, or did she want me somehow both weak and strong? And how varying she was herself; surely the authorities had done right in sending me to her to complete my variation. As we went together through the numb woods, aglide and atrudge on a dull day that hadn’t a spark of orange fire in it, I felt what even the rebel, the revolutionary must often feel, and perhaps he most inwardly—a secret restfulness, near resignation, in the thought that the authorities may after all be right. Was this why, on the very edge and crux of the adventure, he might turn about and betray his own kind? I stopped, in horror—what hateful insight was this?—then went on blithely, saved by the reminder that none of either world could now tell for sure what my kind was. Here and there along the path, an iced puddle was haunted with blue. Station by station, these
suggested.
And in my first sight of the lake, that gray rainbow even on this cloud-wrapped day, I accepted it, the nature of this universe. I was seeing better and better, the doubleness of things here. And how it was managed, that one admired it.

She had brought her skates. So, for an hour or so, while I trembled but bore it, I watched her twirling over and over, along the black and white geometry, so single, of her hope. So as not to gloat over me perhaps, she wasn’t too heavily clothed herself, in short skirt and jacket. Was she rounder in form, not so slender? I feared so, and that just as she must be inspiriting me—so that all my inside must be swelling, buzzing and sporing, and spoored all over with the black print of her enigmas—so all the while my dull One-ness of spirit must be having its effect on her also. How differently folk watched here, I thought, recalling the constant bowing and acknowledgment of the obligatory life scene at home. Or how differently—when beings were folk. I had posted myself against the frozen sedge before a long promenade of bathhouses, ending nearest me, in the bareswept ticket stall. On the surface of that lake—so wild a wondershape to me—she was describing over and over a pear-shaped oval. But what I saw upon the lake was its name, dragging its great swallowtail wings over the whole of it,
Tiorati,
in black-netted brown and plush-orange, and butterfly-white. That of course was because of my poetic nature, which gratefully insisted on spanning both worlds. But she had turned her back on the bathhouses. And though no human could have been sure of it, I knew I was facing them, and that in my longing second sight they were a-tumble with people, a-Dickens and a-Daumier and a-Rowlandson with these beings I had seen so little of except in their own illustration—and of course a-Malinowski and a-Lombroso, a-Krafft-Ebing, de Sade, Machiavelli and a-de Montherlant too. My tastes were perhaps still cartoon. But people could not be had by hearsay alone.

Yet I froze with the sedge as I stood there, and not from the elements, not with cold. The inflections of two-ness were more versatile than I thought. The one being with the two-heads—any of us would have thought that the final elaboration—and enough. But was there another?

She was taking off her skates now, her hands clumsy in her mittens, surely only from cold? I couldn’t help her, and had never before thought to. In all that was daily done here. I watched her, from this afar. There is a foreshortening that intimacy brings. I hoped it was nothing else but that, for my one-ness was now a disease I feared to bring her. Yet—oh these halves that never match here!—I wanted to engulf her with the I that was now me.

She came and stood by my side, the skates dangling. When she came that close, could I really see her?

“I was watching you,” I said. In the cold, her face blurred. Though it was still a face—as much of a one as ever I would hope to have, and more. “From afar,” I said. And from near too, though you cannot see it.