Silent Retreats (25 page)

"We're awfully isolated."

"Isolation can be good sometimes, can't it?" He realized as he said it that he'd never lived in any real isolation in his life.

"Stephen thinks we're almost gone. He compares us to an endangered species—he says that at some point the animal gets the hint and begins to aid in the process of its own extinction." She stood up. "Want to look at the river?"

"Maybe I'll walk back to the barn," he said. "I think we should stay close."

"It
is
close," she said.

A cat came out of some bushes nearby, a small gray cat, carrying in its mouth a baby rabbit. The rabbit was kicking. The cat found some soft grass and sat holding the rabbit tight until finally the kicking stopped and it stretched out softly in a bent U-shape hanging from the cat's mouth.

"C'mon. It'll pass the time," she said, and she turned to the women who were still watching from the lodge. "I'm going to the gazebo," she called to them. She kicked off her leather sandals and tossed them toward the porch. The women disappeared inside.

The path arched around the pond and deeper into the woods. "The pond is quite important here at Geneseo," Clay City was saying. She was walking ahead of Jerome, her soft old dress flowing off her hips and down almost to the ground. It dragged among the burrs and scrub, and when something caught on the skirt it pulled away, revealing for a moment her bare feet, reddish and rough.

"Little places like this depend heavily on symbols, and the pond is one of ours. So's the bell, I guess. The pond is spring fed. The spring is back there in the trees somewhere. Stephen and some of the other early ones used to give talks at the pond. The idea was to inspire the group to the ideas that founded us. One guy taped most of the pond talks and typed them up. Some have actually been published in magazines. I've never read them, but so they say. This is the cemetery." She indicated off to the left of the path. "We don't mark the graves. One man got sick or something, way back when. There's two babies, and some others. We buried a soldier out here in 1974. He arrived in one of those aluminum cans. Nobody knows who he was. They had an extra body, I think."

As he listened, Jerome thought of the sad story of Clay City which Janet had told him. He sensed that the immediacy of the death of her sister was gone. He looked back into the woods. The dead mouldered under this ancient stand of trees.

"Owl," she said. A big bird lifted up out of the treetops to their right. Its shadow passed over. She was talking straight ahead of her. They came into an area of birches, a wonderland of white and yellow amazingly different from the part of the woods they'd just been in. The birchwood, she called it. Then they came out of the trees high above the river. The gazebo was a round, porchlike structure, covered, enclosed at the back. The walls were a gleaming white wood lattice letting the light through in small diamond shapes which gleamed on the green floor.

"We just repainted it last week. Isn't it stunning?" she said. "I wanted to show it to you because Will built it. He's our best builder. He has all the best ideas." From the gazebo platform, she pointed out over the river to the village of New Boston, and the other way toward what she called Lock 17, a dam.

Jerome sat on the bench in the gazebo and looked out on the river.

"Did you see the sign?" she said. There was a small hand painted plaque over the threshold of the gazebo, on the inside. It said "Save the Earth." "Seems a little dated now. When he came, he was one of these big ecology people. You can about estimate the date of his arrival knowing that—1972, right? He had T-shirts with that green ecology flag, remember? Turned out he was more complicated than that. But we're glad he came to us. For a long time he and Geneseo were very close—but he got worse. He beat her up." She looked at Jerome. "Janet—when things started coming apart with Will and all, so did she. She's an alcoholic. Has she told you all this?"

"No," he said.

"Maybe I should shut up. I'm sorry—I keep wondering how you fit in."

Good question, Jerome thought but didn't say.

She laughed. "You're friends with Janet? That's all?"

Jerome shrugged, feeling a little helpless. "I don't mean to be coy, but isn't being friends enough?"

"Yes." She said it quietly. "I mean," she said, "I guess. We'll see."

"I paint," he said. "I've been teaching some out at the college, in Tuscola. And I do a little carpentry with a local construction crew, to pay the rent. I'm not a craftsman like this guy, though." He indicated the gazebo.

"Well, you must have noticed that Janet drinks a lot. People die of it when they have it like she does."

Jerome stared out across the river from the bluff where they were standing. Iowa.

"Tell me," she said. "Do you think she's stable enough for Barbara to be with her?"

Jerome sat there. He did not answer her. He wondered if they hadn't now struck upon the whole reason for this walk.

"What's Janet doing to eat? Does she have a job?"

Again he said nothing.

"Look," Clay City said, "we love this little girl. She's frail, like her mother. She has a lot of friends here who are as close as brothers and sisters. We can take care of her. Don't take her if Janet isn't ready yet." When he didn't say anything, she pressed on. "I'm trying to talk sense with you. We love Barbara very much. We don't know where she's going."

"I understand you," he said. He held up his hand for her to stop. She stepped away from the gazebo and stood looking out on the river. He wanted her to trust him, and he knew she didn't at all. He felt accused of being a party to Janet's problems. He had to think about that one. He realized he would like to have been a friend of Clay City, wouldn't ever be.

"There are only twenty-seven on this land now," she said. "Nine children. There are eleven men and seven women. We've lost eight in two years. We're definitely the whooping crane."

Jerome looked at her. He tried to imagine her, how she'd look and what she'd be like if this commune had not been part of her life.

"A couple of the originals are here. Stephen is the main one. He says he'll be the one to close the door and turn off the lights." She smiled, perhaps having noted that Jerome's guard was up and trying to relax him. "Well, anyway, that's the Mississippi. There are other pretty places I could show you if you had the time. A painter could love this area. I suspect you don't have time, right?" Her tone was cooler now.

Down below, the river stretched before them. At that distance there was no sense of the water flowing, although in the sunlight it gleamed and flashed between colors of blue and brown. She was leading him back toward the lodge, a different route. For some distance, they were climbing uphill. At one point, she passed between Jerome and the sun. He caught a flash of her brown hair in the wind and saw the silhouette of her legs through the veil of thin cotton she wore around her. From the top of the high bank they had climbed, he saw that the Camaro had pulled up to the edge of the trees. Stephen and Janet were sitting on the log next to the pond. Standing off from them, along the edge of the pond, was Barbara. On the hood of the car was a large cloth bag.

When they got to the pond, Clay City hugged Janet, held her a long time. Janet had been crying, and now she was again. Her hair was messed. She was utterly apart from Jerome—it was clear that he didn't belong there at all.

"They'll be taking Barbara," Stephen said.

Clay City looked at him. "Of course they will," she said.

She took Janet's arm gently and they walked together toward the lodge, the other women coming into the yard to meet them. Janet's blue jeans were a contrast to the long old dresses. Jerome was standing several feet from Stephen, and neither of them said anything. Barbara was on the bench, her arms folded tightly around herself. She was taller than in the picture Jerome had seen, and her nose was sunburned and peeled. Some of the other children had gathered there, too. Jerome could see Janet talking with people in the lodge. All he could hear was the wind.

When they came out of the house, Janet and Clay City were arm-in-arm, walking close, talking quietly. They went down to the edge of the pond and bent down over Barbara.

"How did it go?" Jerome asked Stephen.

"This is his daughter."

Jerome tried to hear friendliness in the tone, but he wasn't sure there was any.

"Will knows it's better this way. He's been confused for days, you know. Not because of this. He had a bad war." Stephen bent down, pulled a long blade of grass. "Janet's terrified of him. He's in a room and won't come out. She tried to talk to him. Forget it. It's a bad time, everything at once." Stephen paused a moment. Then he said, "You're an artist, didn't Janet say?"

Jerome nodded.

"We have several here, artists. Quite a number through the years. One older gentleman here helps the whole community financially with his work. He sells through a gallery on the near northside, New Town, in Chicago."

"Is he the one who did the Lennon on the barn?"

"Nah, one of our people put that up there when John was shot." He turned so that he could see it, and Jerome looked back that way, too. "I always think of the eye-doctor billboard in
Gatsby
. The way it stares out across the field. 'In Memoriam.' I guess I haven't really looked at it for a long time. We aren't ordinarily grim around here. Listen," he said then, talking straight at Jerome but not looking at him, speaking quieter to keep from being heard by anyone else. "We want this girl taken care of. If Janet has problems, you let us know, will you? We can come down and get Barbara. We can come and get them both, although I don't think Janet wants to come back. This little girl—she's part of us almost as much as she's part of Janet. We care about her, I'm trying to say. You must let us know. Call me—I'll send money—anything."

"I understand," Jerome said. Again, as with Clay City, he had the impulse to show Stephen that he could fit in here, that he was likable in the terms of this community. But it was a futile notion. He watched the women at the edge of the pond.

Stephen spoke in a southern accent, strong and steady. "They call this an anarchist community." Now he was looking right at Jerome, smiling. "To my way of thinking, you got most of the anarchy out where you live."

"No argument on that," Jerome said. He and Stephen shook hands.

The women walked back up to them, bringing Barbara along, their hands on her shoulders. Barbara had the same kind of wide-open face and level stare, but she also had that pale, frail blue-white skin, blue veins in her forehead and temples, at the corners of her eyes.

"I'll be coming back, won't I?" she was asking her mom.

"Maybe so," Janet said.

"No," Stephen said, and he squatted down to her. "You stay with your mother. We love you, but you stay with your mom, Barbara. Okay?" She was crying, and Stephen hugged her. The bell, far off, was ringing again. "I've got to go," Stephen said, standing up and turning to Janet. He embraced her, saying something to her no one else could hear. Then he waved again and jogged toward the hams, heading for where the tolling sound of the bell had come from.

"Will I see Daddy anymore?" the little girl said.

Janet put Barbara's cloth bag in the front seat of the car. "You will," she said. "Of course you will." She and Barbara both got in the back seat. Jerome started the car and slowly, driving on dry leaves, pulled out from under the oaks. In the rearview mirror there was Clay City waving. Barbara was waving, too, through the back window.

Suddenly Jerome was thinking about where they were going. A time or two he'd stayed the night at Janet's rented trailer when they'd dragged in late from Gabby's. The feeling was desperate and temporary. The trailer was dark inside, and damp—so damp that the borrowed couch smelled and the dark walnut-print contact paper on the bathroom wall was peeling off in a sheet. The little grass that might have separated Janet's from the next trailer down had long ago been fried away by the sun.

"What did Stephen say to you?" Jerome asked.

"He said good-bye. He said Geneseo's going down. It was like he was apologizing. He said it isn't a failure just because it doesn't last forever."

Clay City came forward out of the shade into the afternoon sun. As they went down the long two-rutted grassy path toward the gate, Jerome could see her, still waving. The children had taken a shortcut and met the car near the gate. One of the older boys swung it open wide. He said "See you, Barbara" as the car went by him.

Barbara was crying quietly, her head down in her mother's lap. Once on the road just beyond Geneseo's gate, Jerome looked back toward the clump of trees, and now he could see where the lodge was, and down the hill to the shacks where the visitors stayed, and deep in the trees he saw Clay City one last time, watching them drive away toward the main highway.

For my friend Craig Sanderson

When I run, like now, I head down Court Street because of its grassy boulevard. I turn west on Prairie so that I approach the University Park fountain bronze dancing girls with the sun behind them, a vast and holy prism of spray breathing out toward me. Then I face the dark welling up in the north, orange setting sun to my left, and do intervals, fast and slow, two miles uphill to Patterson Springs, the old chautauqua ground.

I've been battling depression this whole summer. It's the price I pay in middle life for living lies and harboring secrets. I've waged the battle with daydreams (I conjure, for instance, Skidmore, waving as he drives by, 1963, in the old Ford Victoria his dad had saved for him). When daydreams don't work, I lapse into the mindless, subvocal recitation of memorized prayers, or I surrender to music. Mainly, though, I've learned to depend on the faddish but nevertheless helpful practice of running six miles a day, rain or shine.

In running, I set my mind to the rhythm of my stride and think of things positive and hopeful. I remember, for instance, Ann Hollander, in church nearly twenty years ago (Father Casey in the pulpit lecturing in gravelly Irish on the topic of fund-raising for the new school)—Ann sat in the stained-glass shadows of her father, his mind on God and democracy, her eyes trained on the statue of the Virgin, his shoulders slouched toughly forward, her back straight, her body new and lovely beneath a pretty cotton dress. This was a sweet, sweet girl—she'd slip away through moonlit backyards to love the neighbor boy, she'd dance through dry shadows, across the driveways of sleeping doctors, lawyers, dentists, through the sleeping flowers of their sleeping wives (I'd see her coming, through speckles of light). Through dry grass and cicadas buzzing she came.