Old Glory (42 page)

“Oh, shoot!” she said, looking at her husband’s face. Then: “Is that an English word or an American word?”

“It’s American.”

“Oh, dear. I don’t like to use American words. But I get them mixed up now, sometimes. I say things now, I know they’re American, but I can’t help it. Living here, you just hear that American talk. That’s why I like listening to you; you don’t talk American at all; you sound just like people did at home. You’ve got ever such a nice voice, dear.”

She had never met, or even heard of, Betty Asquith. They lived a mile apart, but they were divided by the Atlantic Ocean. It was probably just as well that no one had tried to introduce them; in very different ways, the existence of each could only have distressed the other.

With Jerry, I prowled through the upper stories of the house. It was a sordid warren of deserted rooms. There were broken padlocks on the doors. Stairs, banisters and floorboards had gone for firewood. The roomers themselves had left years before, but their bedsteads and leaky chairs remained behind, along with the pathetic tide wrack of old newspapers, fusty trousers, a rusted Gillette razor, a tin kettle … the last traces of people who had learned to travel light and disappear without fuss.

“You can find things up here,” Jerry said. “Oncet, there was a whole sack of Confederate money up in the attic.… I never did see it, though.”

The landlord had been as kind as he could to Ivy. He had let her stay on as “caretaker” after the roomers had gone. He had then tried to arrange for her to move to a decent apartment in a city-owned building for indigent old people. She had refused to go. Arthur was coming. She was about to fly to England. If she could just stay on a few more days … So she had squatted in her corner of this miserable house, with her blinds pulled and her possessions ready to be packed at a moment’s notice, waiting.

Jerry was staring moonily through the cracked pane of a room on the top floor. The flaking paint on the walls was lime green, the color of a prison or a hospital. “You heard of Jesse James,” he said. “He was in
my family. That’s what folks say, anyhow. I ain’t got no direct proof of it.”

The wind blew on all afternoon. Bored, idling through the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, I read:
TREE CLUE BRINGS
5
ARRESTS IN RAPE CASE
.

I had heard many bad things about St. Louis. I had been told that “the blacks” had “destroyed” it. A woman in a Fort Madison bar had said, “In St. Louis, hell, you’re liable to be killed
walking.
” I’d taken such remarks lightly, thinking that they were part of the conventional stock of received ill-feeling that people who live in small towns have for big cities. This story of the tree was different. It gave St. Louis the horrid particularity of a city in a nightmare. What kind of place could this be, where the glimpse of a tree through a window was as telling a clue as a license-plate number or a fingerprint? The newspaper reporter didn’t even sound faintly surprised as he told of how squad cars had quartered the streets of North St. Louis, searching for that telltale tree. I had been to plenty of cities built on desert sand. I’d seen trees from my window in Kuwait and Abu Dhabi and Aleppo and Cairo, and thought nothing of them; but a tree growing in St. Louis had imprinted itself as an oddity on the mind of a woman while she was being raped by a thug in an attic. No wonder that St. Louis was almost universally regarded as an object of fear and dislike. Listening to the surflike sound of the trees outside my own window in Louisiana, I felt a bristle of excitement at the thought of this next stage of the journey. It was like being on the road to an accursed biblical city.

At 8
A.M
., the trucks on Route 54 outside the motel were still driving on their headlights. Down by the river, the sun showed as a tarnished dime in the mist. It was so still that the moored boats looked frozen solid in the water. I tucked myself into the edge of the channel and headed for St. Louis, with the Mississippi peeling cleanly away in a fantail from my stern.

I didn’t mean to touch the shore today. I had food and coffee on board. My gas tanks were full. If I kept going steadily, I could make the ninety-five miles to St. Louis in ten hours; but I would have to race
reach the city and lay up for a while; I felt too hypnotized now by the river to be able to see it properly. Even when I was asleep, I was still traveling on it, dreaming of waves and dark sloughs and the endless scribble of the current on the top of the water. In the last few days I had noticed that every time I stopped at a town it was like going to a movie. One watched and listened, and knew that what one was seeing and hearing wasn’t for real. Actual life was the river itself. It was the roll of a wake lifting the boat and slamming it down. It was the monotonous stutter of the motor at my back, the buoys, mile markers, sandbars and the trick the river had of always fading, miles ahead, into the sky, so that one had the illusion of being able to drift right off the surface of the earth into pure emptiness. The river had, quite literally, put me into a trance. In St. Louis, I would sleep it off, wake, and come alert again.

I dropped through Lock 24, skipped Clarksville and came into a long stretch where the channel snaked past a series of low white sandbars. They lay in the river, hundreds of them, like whalebacks, leaving a narrow artery of deep water hissing between them. It was a tight squeeze to cross an upstream tow here; perched on a wave, I could see the inside of its engine room and hear a deckhand hollering something about a can of paint. Farther down, a real steamboat blocked the channel. Unlike the
Delta Queen
, this one was not a fancy piece of restoration work. Rusty, half blackened, it had been converted by the Corps of Engineers into a dredger. It looked splendid. Encountering it in midstream, steering clear of its thrashing stern wheel as it swung broadside, was like spotting some famous old society beauty across a crowded room. Its ravaged magnificence reminded me of Lady Diana Cooper towering over the small fry of the young set in an amazing hat: it was a genuine survivor, and it brought a whiff of 1920s high life to the water.

Islands, islands, islands. Tangles of green willow, mounds of white powder like spilled flour, they repeated one another with the confusing regularity of the box-hedge walls of a maze. Was I really moving? Surely I’d been here before. There always comes a point in traveling when motion itself has become so habitual that it breeds its own deep stillness. There was no wind, no cloud; nothing except the imperceptible velocity of the current. My wake was fixed on the water like a piece of molded plaster; it supplied the illusion of movement to a journey that had stopped dead still.

The channel looped suddenly northeast, as if the Mississippi had changed its mind and were going to head off for the Atlantic instead of for the Gulf. Somewhere behind the forest on the left-hand shore, the
Illinois River was emptying itself into the mainstream. As the twin currents merged and the banks spread out, I could feel the water bulge, straining to be free of the confinement of locks and dams. There was just one dam to go now, at Alton, Illinois, less than twenty miles on. Then the Mississippi would swallow the Missouri and run unchecked for more than a thousand miles to the sea. That was a figure which, for the moment, I couldn’t afford to think about. All I needed to watch was the scratched-glass surface ahead of the bow and the sun as it began to settle in the sky behind me.

Below Portage des Sioux, Missouri, an obelisk was sticking queerly out of the water off the channel. It turned out to be a fifty-foot-high fiber-glass Madonna. Our Lady of the Rivers. Driftwood had piled up around its base. There was a prayer, and a plaque which announced that the effigy had been put up in 1951 after the Missouri and Mississippi had joined together in a disastrous flood.

On land, the Madonna must have looked gigantic. She would have made any civic statue look like a mere figurine by comparison. People must have expected her to loom monumentally over the river and radiate her intercessionary grace for miles. They had made a bad miscalculation. Far from dominating the Mississippi, the Madonna looked as if she had narrowly escaped from drowning in it, and was now clinging to a pole and waiting for the air-sea helicopter rescue service to arrive. If an innocent pagan had seen her, he would have been able to draw only one conclusion from her presence here: that this weak, synthetic woman-god had been given up in sacrifice to the big river-god, and that the river-god had spurned her as too trivial an offering.

She was abruptly lost to sight as the river made a southerly swing into Alton and the swiveling sun blackened her halo before it disappeared into the trees. At Alton Lock, there was a warning, violet tinge in the sky, and the deep chamber was cold enough to make my fingertips go white. It seemed an appropriate irony that my own feeble circulation should expose itself at just the moment when the river was gathering its power to course through America as fast as it could go.

It didn’t meet the Missouri. It crashed into it. The navigation channel was posted with warnings to cling close to the Illinois bank. Four hundred yards out, there was a line of hound’s-tooth breakers as the two rivers struggled with each other; and even in the channel there were whirlpools to show that something really big and dangerous was happening in the middle. Whatever it was, it was forbidden to boats to see it. The line of buoys led one to an exit door behind an island, and a long, dull ship canal. For ten miles, the Missouri and the Mississippi
were left to thrash out their differences in private along a reach called, for good reason, the Chain of Rocks.

The lock gate at the end of the canal opened on St. Louis. I should have been able to look across at the face of the city; I couldn’t, because the river on which I now found myself was utterly different from the Mississippi that I thought I knew. In this new river, the water boiled up from the bottom in convex mushroom shapes. The boat kept on sliding and skidding as I tried to set a course for the line of bridges downstream. I hardly had time to register the fact that it was there before I was shooting through the arches of the Merchants Railroad Bridge, frighteningly close to the piles. Unnaturally forced into a narrow conduit little more than a quarter of a mile wide, the river was “shoaling,” ruckling into ugly little waves three and four feet high. Then the smooth humps of the boils began again, and the lurching, slithery motion of the boat as the motor did its best to keep a grip on the crosscurrents of these greasy swirls of spinning water.

Wharves, cranes and smokestacks were going past in a blur of black type. I caught a momentary glimpse of the Gateway Arch, its scaly steel turning to gold in the sunset, but it was an irrelevance beside the whorling surface of the river. The water here was thicker and darker than I’d seen it before; all muscle, clenching and unclenching, taking logs as big as trees and roiling them around just for the hell of the thing. The Mississippi was on a binge. It had tasted freedom, and was celebrating it with a display of elephantine pirouettes.

There were no small boats in sight. Mine felt fragile and facetious as I ran it jerkily from bridge to bridge, afraid of being swept aside and smashed into the piles, or swamped in the heavy shoals under the arches. I made a bad landing on the cobblestone foreshore where some old steamboats had been converted into restaurants, convention centers and cocktail bars. Stepping over the massive hawsers that moored the
Robert E. Lee
, I noticed my jittery knees. I had difficulty striking a match to light my pipe. My fingers were skidding like my boat.

WELCOME FUNERAL DIRECTORS OF AMERICA
. The sign over the steamboat’s covered gangway was faintly cheering. I found a big, empty cocktail lounge in the stern. The funeral directors were busy elsewhere, presumably discussing rouges and foundation creams. Nursing five dollars’ worth of neat whiskey, I watched the river from the window. No one seeing it from here could have guessed at the inward, pent-up turbulence I had felt from my boat; it looked lazy and innocent. Those fierce boils were gentle eddies; the breakers beneath the bridges were pretty ripples. People came here from the city to calm their shredded
nerves by looking out over water which was monotonous and tranquil. The Mississippi had us all fooled. No angle on it was the right one. It was dexterous and deceitful; and I saw it through the steamboat window with an increasingly drunken mixture of regard and revulsion.

H
 e had just
called his wife long-distance. He had listened to the phone pealing in the empty apartment, counted twelve trills, and hung up. For several minutes he had stayed indecisively in the booth, his head full of numbers. He thought about calling her mother. Then he thought of calling Jake and Debbie, but he knew that his voice would betray his unreasonable panic. He collected the little pile of quarters which he’d put beside the phone, bought last week’s
New Yorker
at the newsstand, and went through to the scaffolded green coffeeshop-cum-bar, where the air was mushy with taped music and there were a dozen or so men looking exactly like himself: all alone, all in business suits that had been worn a day or two too long, all nipping at cocktails which they purchased by showing the number on their room key and signing a card that was beginning to read like the index to a bartender’s handbook.
1 Whiskey Sour. 1 Manhattan. 1 Vodka Martini. 1 Highball
 … All these men were pretending to read. Some were studying the minutes of meetings whose proceedings they already knew by heart. Others were looking at
Newsweek
, turning its pages backward. Every few moments, someone would glance up, without hope, on the crazy off chance he’d spot a girl in the lobby whom he’d known at college.…
Hey, excuse me, but aren’t you Cathy Silver?
In these quick, sly twists of the head there were dreams of rescue, of not dining alone, of a miraculous flood of unbuttoned talk in a strange city, and perhaps … but then the eyes of the men would drop to their watches. It was already eight-thirty. In ten minutes they would go separately and alone to the restaurant, where each would build a little theater around himself. He would engage the
waiter as his audience and do his third-rate vaudeville turn as a regular guy having a darn good time on his ownio.