The Lone Pilgrim (7 page)

I would have felt my life to be entirely unremarkable and happy if it had not been for Honnimer. He was studying me. He knew what sort of dolls I liked—ones with real porcelain heads, hands, and feet. He knew about my collection of arrowheads and animal bones, and that I had tried to carve myself a bow from a willow branch. He dedicated a children's book to me. He used my name in a poem, “A Day in Pastures with Bernadette Spaeth.” When he came to play chess with my father, he watched my every gesture. He singled me out. I felt that there was nothing worse he could do.

At fifteen, I was a relatively accomplished skater. I went to the rink every afternoon and during the winter to the pond every weekend, always at odd hours to avoid crowded ice. For playing around, I liked the pond. I liked to see trees when I spun. For serious skating, the rink was best.

One afternoon at the rink, I saw an older girl doing a complicated turn. I shut my eyes and tried to duplicate it in my mind. Then I looked up. Almost hidden in the darkness at the top of the bleachers was Honnimer, staring at me. You are the inspiration for a poet, he seemed to say. If you think you are being spied on, tell your parents. They will think you are silly and hysterical. They will tell you how great art is made.

Of course he wrote a poem called “A Girl Skating.” That was the title of his next collection, which my parents kept on the table in the study, with all his other books. My parents admired his work and did not mind his writing about their daughter. They knew that his Bernadette was not me but a transformed Bernadette.

There was no way I could duck him. If I withdrew, I felt him appreciating my withdrawal. If I stayed away from anywhere he might be, my absence interested him. If I ever spoke to him, he listened intently, as if my voice revealed some new side of my nature. Everywhere I turned, Honnimer was there. He was visiting my parents the night of my senior prom. As I came down the stairs, I saw the familiar plume of his cigar smoke above the wing chair. I was only a girl going to a prom, but that prom, I knew, would live forever. If I forget the color of my dress, I have Honnimer's poem to look it up in.

I felt I had another life besides the one I was living—a life in Honnimer's mind—but no idea what that life consisted of. Certain bonds are primitive, and so was Honnimer's with me. He counted on the kind of pull you feel toward someone who has seen you asleep or has dreamed about you and told you so. He made me wonder what he knew. He deprived me of the right to know when I was alone.

His last book was called
The Black Bud.
I had just started my final year of college when it came out. Honnimer had his publishers send it to me. I kept it on my desk for weeks, unread. It reminded me that for three years I had been praying—praying that Honnimer would never come to read his poems at my college. It reminded me of the intense, literary girls who had tried to grill me about him; of the freshman-English instructors who had sought me out; of the general assumption that I had been, and was still, Honnimer's lover.

I finally read the poems late one night. I did not understand modern poetry and I especially did not understand Honnimer's. The black bud seemed to be a young girl. In the title poem, as I understood it, the poet took the bud home with him and kept it close to see what sort of flower it would form. In another, the bud emerged—half flower, half girl wearing a dress that I realized was the one I had worn to my parents' Christmas party the year before. In the last poem, the poet took the flower to what appeared to be a motel, and removed its petals, one by one. By that time in my life, I had not yet been in love. I had never had a lover or a love affair. Honnimer's poems made me feel how my legs might move, what words I might say, how my mouth might look after hours of kissing. I could not accomplish the end of my own innocence. Honnimer had done it for me.

He shot himself ten days after my twenty-second birthday. My parents sent me the clippings of his obituaries, a few of which quoted from “A Day in Pastures with Bernadette Spaeth” and some poems in
The Black Bud
to show Honnimer's poetic journey from light to darkness. I read these clippings in a cottage overlooking Casco Bay—I had been given a fellowship to study flight behavior in young seabirds—and when I finished reading, I took my parents' letter, my field glasses, and a notebook, and went down to my observation point, an outcropping of rocks near a cormorant's nesting ground.

The letter said that Honnimer had been increasingly depressed. He and Lucy had separated. He began to cancel classes—something he had never done in all his years of teaching. When he came to play chess with my father, he was distracted and quiet. Finally, the only person he seemed to want around was my mother, who took him dinner and sat with him. The last day of his life he had spent at the Bergmeister Collection—a small and beautiful group of paintings left to the college by a tin magnate. Honnimer shot himself at home, my parents said, leaving no note.

The last time I saw him was at the Bergmeister Collection. Each time I came home from college, I traced my childhood. I went to the town rink. I sat in the tree where I had read
The Biography of a Grizzly.
I went fishing and to my favorite spot in the pasture to watch hawks. Then I went to the Bergmeister Collection.

Bergmeister had left the college some Dutch florals, some English landscapes, a big Corot, examples of the Hudson River school, a German altarpiece. In one very dark room hung four small paintings—two Sienese, two Tuscan. These were the paintings I always came to greet and say goodbye to. One was a Pietà, one of a Crucifixion. Two were Nativities. In these the baby Jesus looked elderly, and Mary looked childlike beside him. All four paintings were framed in gilt and lighted by brass lamps. The figures were painted on backgrounds of gold leaf. Each figure had a halo of worked gold. If you looked at these paintings for a while, the room around you appeared to take on the texture of black velvet. You had to blink to get the gold out of your eyes. You turned away, into that black velvet, and waited for another painting to gleam at you out of the darkness.

I was standing in front of the Pietà, gazing at the stylized, grief-stricken faces, which never looked to me like the faces of real people until I moved close enough to see the tiny details, like the teardrop on Mary's face. I turned away, toward one of the Nativities, and realized that someone was standing next to me. It was Honnimer.

“They're my favorites, too,” he said.

I could barely see him. My eyes would not adjust to the darkness. My heart sounded very loud to me, and the tips of my fingers were suddenly cold.

Slowly he took shape: his long, fine nose; his oval eyes, which in the light were hazel; his crisp mane of hair and beard. He was very near me. I could smell the spice that cigar smoke leaves on clothes, and I was more frightened than I had ever been. What could I have said? He moved closer; He said: “I know you're going back to school soon. I always miss you, but I keep you by me in my mind.” Then he bent down and kissed me on the forehead. He seemed to stand beside me for hours, but it must have been seconds. Then he was gone, leaving a warm circle where his lips had been. As soon as I was sure he was out of the building, I walked home, rubbing the spot on my forehead where he had kissed me.

An Old-Fashioned Story

The Rodkers had a son named Nelson, whom all the world called Nellie. The Leopolds had a daughter named Elizabeth. Marshall Rodker and Roger Leopold had been at college and law school together and courted wives who had been roommates at college. Nelson was two years Elizabeth's senior, and he was a model child in every way. Elizabeth, on the other hand, began her life as a rebellious, spunky, and passionate child, but she was extraordinarily pretty, and such children are never called difficult: they are called original. It was the ardent hope of these people that their children might be friends and, when they grew up, would like each other well enough to marry.

In order to ensure their happy future, the children were brought together. If Elizabeth looked about to misbehave, Elinor Leopold placed her warm hand on Elizabeth's forearm and, with a little squeeze Elizabeth learned to dread, would say in tones of determined sweetness: “Darling, don't you want to see nice Nellie's chemistry set?” Elizabeth did not want to see it—or Nelson's stamp collection or his perfect math papers or the model city he had built with his Erector set. As she grew older, she did not want to dance with Nelson at dancing class or go to his school reception. But she did these things. That warm pressure on her forearm was as effective as a slap, although her compliance was not gained only by squeezes and horrified looks. Elizabeth had begun to have a secret life: she hated Nelson and she hated the Rodkers with secret fury. While she was too young to wonder if this loathing included her parents, she felt that if they forced Nelson upon her and chose the Rodkers for their dearest friends, they must in some way be against her. At the same time she realized that they were foolable to an amazing extent. If she smiled at Nelson, they were happy and considered her behavior impeccable. If she was rude, she spent weeks in pain—the pain of constant lectures. Thus, she learned to turn a cheerful face while keeping the fires of her dislike properly banked. The fact of the matter was that an afternoon of Nelson's stamp collection was good for two afternoons hanging around the park with her real friends.

Elizabeth's friends came down with measles, chicken pox, and mumps, but Elizabeth considered Nelson her childhood disease. As she got older, she began to feel that he had ruined her early years, but in her twenties she realized what an asset he had been. Without him she would never have learned to shield herself entirely from her parents. She learned from him how little it took to please: Nelson wrapped himself up warm when it was cold. He baked cookies for his mother's birthday. He played chess with his father. That, it appeared, sufficed—a very instructive lesson that was not lost on Elizabeth, who felt that beneath Nelson's clean, wavy hair lived a rat, a suck-up, a traitor to all children.

Nelson had an older brother named James. James was eight years Elizabeth's senior, and she regarded him as veritably ancient. James had been sent away to a progressive school for the brilliant and unmanageable children of the well-to-do. Here he learned to smoke, drive a car without a license, and play cards for money. When these traits became manifest, James was plucked from the libertine environment and sent to one of the nation's oldest and finest establishments for one last crack at making him an eventual leader of men. In this setting he drank beer, set off cherry bombs in trash cans, and hung around with town girls. By the time he was ready to graduate, he added to this sort of hell raising a penchant for seditious literature and came home spouting Marx, Mao, and Huysmans.

At college he learned a great many more bad habits, including how to spend money, drink wine, seduce young women, and break some bone or other right before Thanksgiving vacation called him back to his family. In spite of this, he did extremely well and graduated with honors. The night of his graduation he was arrested with some of his unwholesome friends for disorderly conduct and was made to spend the night in jail. This was meant to scare him. The next morning he was released, his fingerprints in a manila envelope that he might know the kindness doled out by the police to young men who will someday be their elected leaders.

Elizabeth was kept abreast of James's evil career by her parents, who said that James was killing Marshall and breaking poor Harriet's heart. Nelson spoke of his brother as if he were some pathetic sort of animal.

Over a game of Scrabble, which, of course, Nelson was winning, he commented on the arrest.

“Poor Daddy and Mother. Jimmy got arrested, you know. They gave him back his fingerprints, but it will always be on his conscience, and if he's ever asked if he's been arrested, he'll have to say yes.”

“Why will he?” Elizabeth said.

“Because it's true,” said Nelson. “Besides, it's adolescent and silly. It's just as easy not to get arrested as to get arrested.” Nelson at the time was almost sixteen. He was a nice-looking, somewhat expressionless boy whom Elizabeth found more and more repulsive. All his clothes were clean. His hair was combed. Elizabeth knew that he underlined passages in books, a habit she found disgusting. When he read, he sat upright in his leather chair, under proper light with his book held at a proper angle. Elizabeth, who read under the covers with a flashlight, found his posture disgusting as well.

After a brief contemplation of the Scrabble board, Nelson made an ingenious play using the word “vugh,” about which Elizabeth was doubtful but did not challenge. It was pointless to challenge Nelson. He was all-knowing and he never cheated. In fact, one of Harriet Rodker's favorite stories about him concerned a point of honor. Nelson, at seven, told his father that he had stolen two gum erasers from Mrs. Williamson's candy store. His father advised him to take them back. “But I can't,” Nelson had said. “I was so upset about stealing them that I threw them away.” Marshall Rodker then asked his son how he intended to make reparation—
if
, of course, was never at issue. Nelson had said, “I'll go to Mrs. Williamson and tell her what I did and pay her.” This he did, and Mrs. Williamson swore she never knew a better boy than Nelson Rodker. Elizabeth was sure this was a true story but for one detail. She was certain that Nelson had not thrown the erasers away; she knew that he had eaten them. She was convinced that when his parents were out he made mashed potatoes from the
Joy of Cooking
so that he could eat them with his hands.

Nelson and Elizabeth went to brother-and-sister schools where Nelson distinguished himself. He won the Latin prize, the good citizen's award, the math medal, and scholar of the year. Meanwhile, James Rodker had dropped out of what little sight he permitted his parents by going to England, where it was thought he was studying economics or history. Only the Leopolds knew how scanty information was about James. At dinner parties his name and the subject of economic history were twined, but during Rodker-Leopold bridge games all was revealed. As Elizabeth stood with her ear to the library door, she learned that whenever the Rodkers went to London to see him, they found that he had just gone abroad, or, if he was in town, he turned up with Hindu or Oriental girls who were clearly his mistresses. Elizabeth longed for these bridge parties. James's career filled her with admiration. With Nelson constantly held over her head, it was hard for her not to have outright affection for anyone who behaved like a punk.