Loon Lake

15

There being no sign of her in the main house I knew she was staying in the smaller lodge perhaps a hundred yards west, into the woods and halfway down the hill to the lake.

I think I must have spent some while calculating how to get there, figuring out a pretext and then a script for the conversation we would have. But one evening, during the staff meal, one of the woodfolk, a grandmotherly one, said to me, “That Penfield called. You’re to go over to the cottage.”

“Who, me? What for?”

“How should I know?” she said. “I’ll be glad when you’re gone and them with you.”

I finished my meal as slowly as I could, feigning the attitude of the workingmen of dark green. I washed my tray and lit a cigarette and sauntered back to my room.

I latched the door and changed from my work clothes to the knickers and shirt and sweater and ribbed socks and saddle shoes. Poor Libby, all happiness drained like the color in her face when I told her I was keeping these things. Shouldn’t she have known that the fellow who’d write in the guest book would do that? Anyway, she understood the firm basis of our relationship, that whatever trust she placed in me I would betray.

And as for Mr. Penfield I knew in my bones I didn’t have anything to fear from him. He had a way of canceling himself out if you let him talk long enough.

I washed my face and combed my hair and got out of the staff house without being seen.

Already dark on the path, the first stars coming out. Joe drew a sharp breath and tried to calm himself. He was trembling. He had followed her, navigating by her star, and by that means had been sleeping in a bed and eating well and indulging his self-regard for several weeks. An edited view but fervently held.

In his mind, his feelings were enough. He didn’t need intentions, plans, the specificity of hope. Presenting his heart was enough.

“Here he is — and look at him!” Penfield said at the door. He held a bottle of red wine in one hand and a glass in the other. “Come in, come in!”

It was a low-ceilinged cottage with a living room and kitchen and stone hearth all in one. I tried not to look at her she was sitting on the sofa Indian style wearing a robe of white satiny material and it had fallen open across her thighs. I tried not to look she was not looking at me but taking a mighty pull from her wineglass head up neck beautiful pulsing neck.

“Here he is, Clara — Joe of Paterson, the man I wanted you to meet.” A glass was put in my hand.

“Miss Clara Lukaćs,” he said.

Pointing me at a chair, he crossed his ankles and sank his bulk down on the floor at her feet.

They were both facing me and to my right and their left a fire was going in the fireplace. The light flared and dimmed on their faces as some kind of wavering attention, I thought, especially from her she had not asked to meet me how absurd to have thought that. I sensed some purpose not entirely complimentary in the summons. Yet Penfield was smiling amiably indicating to me to drink and so I did, with the odd conviction that I had never tasted wine before. I had ridden the cars with the bums of three states worked with freaks and was wicked and shameless but in this moment it was my inexperience that shone.

What was the conversation? Mostly his, of course, the brilliant singsong of the failed poet, but how could I have been listening with the attention such beautiful words demanded, people from my world didn’t talk with such embellishment such scrollwork. I had never before met someone who admitted to the profession of poet but believed it by the way he spoke. I kept my eyes on his face but it was her I looked at, this restless cat of inattention sitting quite still and staring into her wine careless of exposed limbs the inner thigh the rounded knee small cream cracked hummock of the underknees she sat quite still but her mind pacing from one wall to another, an expression on her small fair face of grief or petulance I couldn’t tell. But how she felt was of overriding importance to me, how she felt! — then and every moment after — was my foremost concern, what I lived by. This was her quality and I think she was unconscious of it, that her presence occupied great moral space around her though she was surprisingly small, a small-boned slight thing with narrow shoulders. There was nothing stately about her except the alarming size of her moods. I studied her face with a fervent rush of recognition, a fair skin with a rouge of chapped cheeks, quick green eyes prominent upper lip everything framed in marcelled bleached blond hair I had friends playing as a child with such faces in Paterson I heard the fluent yowl of injustice from this face.

Mr. Penfield speaking of injustice explained how much more modest were his own rooms over the stables than this full cottage in the rustic log style. On the other hand he wrote well there he said in his way of negating his every point of view by obliging himself to express its opposite.

Then he recites some lines about the place, about Loon Lake. The glass in one hand, the bottle in the other, he sits with legs outstretched he is in his dirty sneakers with no socks his tweed jacket with the elbow patches his tennis shirt with the soft collar turned under on one side, he produces a deep melodious voice for his lines not his normal voice I was embarrassed by this sudden access to performance but she was not. She paid attention to his poetry as she had not to his conversation. But no audience was as responsive to Mr. Penfield’s words as he was. His red eyes grew large with a film of tears.

I augment my memory with the lines actually printed in a private edition, the last of his three privately published volumes all recording different times of his life in the different places the same person. “The loons they heard were the loons we hear today”—in his deep reader’s chant—“cries to distract the dying loons diving into the cold black lake and diving back out again in a whorl of clinging water clinging like importuning spirits fingers shattering in spray feeling up the wing along the rounded body of the thrillingly exerting loon beaking a fish rising to the moon streamlined its loon eyes round and red.”

And I, resonantly attuned to her, alive to the firelit moment — somewhere I had gotten at great cost, with the scars to show it, from such profound effort, the kind of unceasing insistence on my life’s rights that was only now so exhausting in my release from it. As this absurd fat drunkard sang his words they seemed the most beautiful I had ever heard. But perhaps any words would have done. I heard them and I didn’t hear them, I had no idea he had just written them I thought they were from some book already done, I heard the feeling they inspired in me, that I was living at last! That it was the way it should be, I was feeling Penfield’s immense careless generosity, the boon of himself which granted me without argument everything I was struggling for, all of it assumed in the simple giving of words, so moving to this scruffy boy.

It was the moment of dangerous specification of everything I thought worth wanting. After the loon flew off whose red eyes were much like his own he cleared his throat and he poured wine all around although I’d barely sipped mine. He emptied the bottle on his turn and struggled to his feet for another bottle which he uncorked while continuing to speak and again he sat down with the new bottle as attached to his hand as the old.

I tried not to look at her. I saw the glance from under her brows toward the ceiling, the impatience, and then I began to feel the force of the occasion which was that somehow I was enlisted to help divert, distract or pacify Clara Lukaćs. That was the meaning of the self-dramatization of the man, that we were in some overburdened instant, with our backs to it, grounding our heels, digging in.

And then he was telling us about the war, of all things, a veteran, migod, would he bring out the poppies? But soon we were inside his images, listening like children, the mule-drawn caissons sinking in the mud, the troops in greatcoats and tin helmets riding the mules’ backs, kicking their boots sharply against the mules’ flanks, the bracing of backs on six-foot wheels, spokes like baseball bats tires of steel, each soldier alone and miserable inside his coat, charred trees beside the road the sky showing through city hall, gusts of acrid air blowing from the front, and here is Corporal Penfield riding the signal wagon, flag tubes strapped to his back like quivers, a helmet tilting over his eyes because the strap is too loose, and on his lap the crate covered with a khaki blanket shifts perceptibly, the pigeons whirring with each dull boom lighting the sky like lightning miles ahead.

He was dangling a medal. He had taken it from his pocket. He handed it to me. The colors of the ribbon had bled, there was thread and lint attached to it, but it was a Silver Star and it was his.

I leaned forward put it in her hand leaning forward over the bear rug between us, our hands grazed I felt the heat of her hand.

And there in our minds as we looked at the palpable proof was Signal Corporal Penfield during the battle of the Somme dispatched urgently to semaphore the artillery to drop some heavy stuff on the encircling Huns.

“The field telephone didn’t work, there wasn’t even a damn pigeon left.” He paused to wet his throat. “So I took the old semaphore flags and went up to the top of a hill where I could be seen, because even though it was night the star shells were like the Fourth of July and it was brighter than day. I could see out over no man’s land. I sent my message”—here he lifted his arms, attached to the glass and bottle and did a half-hearted pantomime—“and a while later the artillery came in on target, and that’s what I got the medal for.”

“You’re a hero,” she said, smiling. She dropped the medal in his lap and then raised her glass to her lips.

“No, but, love, you haven’t heard the end.” He dropped his chin to his chest. “I was so terrified I didn’t send the message I was supposed to. What I semaphored was the first verse of a poem.”

“What?” I said.

“‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream,’ and so on,” he said. “And a while later the shells came in on target. It was very strange.”

She was laughing. “In the war — in the battle?”

“Surely you know it,” he said. “The Intimations Ode? Didn’t you have it in school?”

“But why?”

“I don’t know why. Maybe I thought I was going to die. Maybe it seemed to me the only appropriate thing to say. Anyway, after I got the medal I wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Army returning it and telling him it was more properly William Wordsworth’s.”

“But it wasn’t a medal for poetry,” I said, and immediately felt like a fool.

“Apparently not, Joe of Paterson. Apparently not. I had to go for psychiatric tests. They pinned the medal on my bathrobe. They kept me under observation for ninety days in Nutley, New Jersey.”

“Where?” she said, happily laughing. He looked up at her, victorious in her amusement. “Oh, Warren, you old fuck, where?” She threw back her head and laughed and laughed, I gazed at her throat, her neck, it was a moment in which I could look at all of her as she sat in her white satin robe, she bending forward now in her laughter, the robe unfolding like unfolding wings so that I could see her breasts.

Then I realized Penfield was looking at me, with his head lowered, with raised eyebrows, a characteristic expression, I knew at once, full of sadness, full of self-acknowledgment, and as she reached out and touched his head he too began to giggle, he was in love with her, and soon they were both laughing and I was laughing, but trying not to for some reason, feeling badly that I laughed, feeling ashamed.

I hadn’t realized how drunk they were. A few moments later, in silence, she put her glass down and reached out, holding his head in her arms. He looked up at her, and behind her shingle of hair he kissed her, his hand with the bottle going up involuntarily, another semaphore, and I heard her sob, and then both of them were crying.

I tried to leave, but they wouldn’t allow it. All at once they were very physical with me, placing themselves on either side of me and leading me back to the middle of the room. Penfield went to stoke up the fire. She led me to my chair and pressed my shoulders firmly with her small hands and then sat across from me and studied me solemnly. Until this moment her primary awareness had been of Penfield, she had not quite acknowledged me, as if one person at a time, and only one, could occupy her mind. She was always to be this way, intense and direct with whatever she fixed upon, and whatever the affront to those on the periphery. It was not snobbishness or anything like that — she was in fact reckless of her self-interest in a situation, and that I think was the center of her force and effect. She knew nothing about courtesy in the sense of not being subject to it. She blazed through her feelings and suffered the consequences.

I began to realize as we talked that she was no older than I was. I was stunned — I was not yet twenty — I equated power and position in the world with age.

“You live here?” she said. “How do you stand it?” I rubbed my palms on my knickers. I looked with alarm at Warren Penfield, who said, “Clara, he’s my surprise for you,” and came back to his place on the floor.

She had a throaty voice with a scratched quality. Her diction was of the street. “Whats ’at mean!” She gazed at me, her eyes widening, and I was certain, as if a chasm were opening around me, that she was as fraudulent in this place as I was. I drank off my wine.

“You remember the night you heard the dogs?” the poet said to her, and leaned forward to refill my glass. “Joe here is taking each day as it comes — like you, Clara.”

I saw realization light her eyes. She went to the fire and sat down before it with her back to us. I don’t remember much of what happened after that. I drank more than I should have. The fire looming her shadow across the low-ceilinged room. Later we heard the rain falling, a heavy rain that seemed to do something to the draught. Wood smoke came into the room on gusts. At this point we were all standing, I had removed my shirt, and she was tracing the scars on my chest and arms and neck with her fingertips.

I could smell her, the soap she used, the gel of her hair. The firelight flared on our faces as if we were standing with the poet in his war.

“He told me it was a deer, that they took a deer,” she said. “That was a lie.”

“Yes,” Penfield said, watching her fingers.

“What class,” Clara said. Tears were suddenly coming down her cheeks.

“I could help you leave,” Penfield said. His eyes closed and he began moving his head from side to side like someone in mourning. “I can get you out of here. We can leave together.” His sentences became a hum, a soft keening, as if he were listening to some private elegy and had no hope of an answer from her.

“That son of a bitch,” she said with the tears streaming. “I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.”