Nightwork

2

It had been overcast in New York, but when we passed Peek-skill, flying north, the skies cleared. The snow glistened in the sunshine on the rolling hills below. I had flown the little Cessna down to Teterboro Airport early to pick up the New Jersey charter, and I could hear my passengers behind me congratulating each other on the blue skies and the fresh powder. We were flying low, only six thousand feet, and the fields made clearly defined checkerboard patterns, with stands of trees black against the clean white of the snow. It was a flight I always liked to make. Recognizing individual farmhouses and road intersections and the course of a small stream here and there made the short voyage cozy and familiar. Upstate New York is beautiful at ground level, but on a fine day in early winter, from the air, it is one of the loveliest sights a man can hope to see. Once again, I was grateful that I had never been tempted to take a job on one of the big airlines, where you spent the best part of your life at an altitude of over thirty thousand feet, with the world below you just a vast sea of cloud or a remote and impersonal map unrolling slowly beneath you.

There were only three passengers, the Wales family, mother and father and a plump girl with buck-teeth of about twelve or thirteen called Didi. They were enthusiastic skiers and I had flown them up and back four or five times. There was a regular airline to Burlington, but Mr. Wales was a busy man, he said, and took off when he could find the time and didn’t like being tied down to a schedule. He had an advertising firm of his own in New York and he didn’t seem to mind throwing his money around. Flatteringly, when he called for a charter, he always asked for me. Part of the reason, or maybe the whole reason for this, was that I skied with them from time to time at Stowe and Sugarbush and Mad River and led them down the trails, which I knew better than they did, and occasionally threw in a little tactful instruction about how they could improve their performance. Wales and his wife, a hard-looking, athletic New York woman, were fiercely competitive with each other and went too fast, out of control a good deal of the time. I predicted to myself that there would be a broken leg in the family one of these days. I could tell when they were furious with each other by the different tones in which they called each other “Darling” at various moments.

Didi was a serious and unsmiling child, always with a book in her hands. According to her parents, she started reading as soon as she was strapped into her seat and only stopped when the plane rolled to a halt. On this flight she was engrossed in Wuthering Heights. I had been an omnivorous reader, too, as a boy – when my mother was displeased with me she would say, “Oh, Douglas, stop acting like a character in a book” – and it amused me to keep track of what Didi was reading from one winter to another.

She was by far the best skier in the family, but her parents made her bring up the rear on all descents. I had skied alone with her one morning, in a snowstorm, when the older Waleses were hung over from a cocktail party, and she had been a changed girl, smiling blissfully and fleeing joyfully down the mountain with me, like a small wild animal suddenly let loose from a cage.

Wales was a generous man and made a point of giving me a gift after each flight – a sweater, a new pair of fancy poles, a wallet, things like that. I certainly made enough money to be able to buy anything I needed, and I didn’t like the idea of being tipped, but I knew he would have been insulted if I bad ever refused to take his offerings. He was not an unpleasant man, I had decided. Just too successful.

“Beautiful morning, isn’t it, Doug?” Wales said behind me. He was a restless man and even in the small plane seemed always on the prowl. He would have made a terrible pilot. He brought a smell of alcohol into the cockpit. He always traveled with a small, leather-bound flask.

“N … not bad,” I said. I had stuttered ever since I was a boy and as a result tried to talk as little as possible. Sometimes I couldn’t help but speculate about what my life would have been like if I hadn’t suffered from this small affliction, but I didn’t allow myself to sink into gloom because of it.

“The skiing ought to be marvelous,” Wales said.

“Marvelous,” I agreed. I didn’t like to talk while I was at the controls, but I couldn’t tell Wales that.

“We’re going up to Sugarbush,” Wales said. “You going to be there this weekend?”

“I… I… b … believe so,” I said. “It… told a girl I’d ski with her up … up there.” The girl was Pat Minot. Her brother worked in the airline office and I had met her through him. She taught history at the high school, and I had arranged to pick her up at three o’clock, when school let out. She was a good skier and very pretty besides, small and dark and intense. I had known her for more than two years and we had had what was a rather desultory affair for fifteen months now. At least it was desultory as far as she was concerned, since for weeks on end she would put me off with one excuse or another and hardly notice me when we met by accident. Then suddenly she would relent and suggest we go off together somewhere. I could tell by the particular kind of smile on her face when, for whatever reason, she was entering into a non-desultory phase.

She was a popular girl, stubbornly unmarried; at one time or another, according to her brother, almost every friend of his had made a pass at her. With what success I never did find out. I have always been shy and uneasy with girls and I could not say that I pursued her. I couldn’t say, either, that she had pursued me. It had just, well, happened, when we found each other skiing together on a long weekend at Sugarbush. After the first night, I had said, “This is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

All she had said was, “Hush.”

I never made up my mind whether or not I was in love with her. If she hadn’t badgered me continually about curing my stutter, I think I would have asked her to marry me. The coming weekend, I felt, was going to rise – or fall – to some sort of climax. I had decided to be cautious, leaving all options open.

“Great,” Wales was saying. “Let’s all have dinner together tonight.”

“Thanks, G … George,” I said. He had insisted from the first time I met him that I call him and his wife by their first names. “Th … that w … would be very nice.” Dinner with another couple would postpone decisions, give me time to sound out Pat’s mood and re-assess my own feelings.

“We’re driving up as soon as we land,” Wales said. “We can get in a few runs this afternoon. How about you? Should we wait for you at the inn?”

“I … I’m afraid n … not. I have my six-m … month physical checkup at the doc’s and … and I don’t know when I c … can split.”

“Dinner, then?” Wales said. “D … dinner.”

“Doug,” Wales said. “Do you ever get three weeks off at a time? In the winter, I mean?”

“N … not really,” I said. “It’s a busy season. Wh … Why?” “Beryl and I’re going over on a charter flight to Zurich the first of February.” Beryl was his wife. “We always try to manage three weeks in the Alps… You ever ski in the Alps?”

“I’ve never b … been out of the country. Except Canada for a f … few days.”

“You’d flip,” he said. “The slopes of Heaven. We’ve been talking it over and we’d love to have you with us. There’s this club I belong to. It’s surprisingly cheap. Under three hundred dollars round trip. The Christie Ski Club. It’s not just the money, of course. It’s the people. The nicest bunch of people you could ever travel with and all the free booze you can drink. And no worrying about a baggage allowance or Swiss customs. They just wave you through with a smile. You’re supposed to belong at least six months in advance, but they’re not sticky about it. There’s a girl in the office I know, her name’s Mansfield, and she fixes everything. Just tell her you’re a friend of mine. They have nights just about every week in the winter. We made St Moritz last year and we’re doing St Anton this year. You’ll dazzle the Austrians.” I smiled. “I b … bet,” I said.

“Think it over,” Wales said. “You’d have the time of your life.”

“S … stop tempting a working man,” I said.

“What the hell,” Wales said. “Everybody needs a vacation.”

“I… I’ll think it o … over,” I said.

He went back to his seat, leaving the smell of whiskey in the cockpit. I kept my eyes on the horizon, sharp against the bright blue of the winter sky, trying not to be jealous of a man who was as untalented on the slopes as Wales, but who could take three weeks off from work to spend thousands of dollars to ski in the Alps.

After I checked into the office and confirmed that there was nothing for me that weekend, I drove into town in my Volkswagen for the biannual ritual of the physical examination. Dr Ryan was an eye-specialist, but kept up a limited general practice on the side. He was a slow-moving, gentle old man who had been listening to my heart, taking my blood pressure, and testing my eyes and reflexes for five years. Except for one occasion when I bad come down with a mild case of grippe, he had never prescribed as much as an aspirin for me. “In shape for the Derby”, he would say each time when he finished with me. “Ready to run for the roses.” He shared my interest in the horses and was an impressive student of form. Every once in a while he would call me at my home when he would discover a horse that was outrageously underpriced or carrying, in his opinion, much too little weight.

The examination followed its usual routine, with the doctor nodding comfortably after each stage. It was only when he came to my eyes that his expression changed. I read the charts all right, but when he used his instruments to look into my eyes, his face became professionally sober. His nurse came into the office twice to tell him that there were patients in the waiting room with appointments, but he brusquely waved her aside. He gave me a whole series of tests that he had never used before, making me stare straight ahead while he kept his hands in his lap, then slowly lifting his hands and asking me to tell him when they came into my field of vision. Finally, he put away his instruments, sat down heavily behind his desk, sighed, and passed his hand wearily across his face.

“Mr. Grimes,” he said finally, “I’m afraid I have bad news for you.”

The news old Dr Ryan had for me on that sunny morning in his big, old-fashioned office changed my whole life.

“Technically,” he said, “the name of the disease is retinoschisis[1]. It is a splitting of the ten layers of the retina into two portions, giving rise to the development of a retinal cyst. It is a well-known condition. Most often it does not progress, but as far as it goes it’s irreversible. Sometimes we can arrest it by operating by laser beam. One of its manifestations is a blocking out of peripheral vision. In your case downward peripheral vision. For a pilot who has to be alert to a whole array of dials in front of him, below him, around him on all sides, as well as the horizon toward which he is speeding, it is essentially disabling… Still, for all general purposes, such as reading, sports, et cetera, you can consider yourself normal.”

“Normal,” I said. “Boy, oh boy, normal. You know the only thing that’s normal for me, Doc. Flying. That’s all I ever wanted to do, all I ever prepared myself to do…”

“I’m sending the report over today, Mr. Grimes,” Ryan said. “With the greatest regret. Of course, you can go to another doctor. Other doctors. I don’t believe they can do anything to help you, but that’s only my opinion. As far as I’m concerned, you’re grounded. As of this minute. For good. I’m sorry.”

I fought to hold back the surge of hatred I felt for the neat old man, seated among his shining instruments, signing papers of condemnation with his scrawly[2] doctor’s handwriting. I knew I was being unreasonable, but it was not a moment for reason. I lurched out of the office, not shaking Ryan’s hand, saying, “Goddamnit, goddamnit,” aloud over and over to myself, paying no attention to the people in the waiting room and on the street who stared curiously at me as I headed for the nearest bar. I knew I couldn’t face going back to the airfield and saying what I would have to say without fortification. Considerable fortification.

The bar was decorated like an English pub, dark wood and pewter tankards on the walls. I ordered a whiskey. There was a thin old man in a khaki mackinaw and a hunter’s red cap leaning against the bar with a glass of beer in front of him. “They’re polluting the whole lake,” the old man was saying in a dry Vermont accent. “The paper mill. In five years it’ll be as dead as Lake Erie. And they keep putting salt on the roads so those idiots from New York can go eighty miles an hour up to Stowe and Mad River and Sugarbush, and, when the snow melts off the salt goes into all the ponds and rivers. By the time I die there won’t be a fish left anywhere in the whole state. And nobody does a goddamn thing about it. I tell you, I’m glad I won’t be around to see it.”

I ordered another whiskey. The first one hadn’t seemed to do anything for me. Nor did the second. I paid and went out to my car. The thought that Lake Champlain, in which I had swum every summer and on which I had spent so many great days sailing and fishing, was going to die, somehow seemed sadder than anything that had happened to me for a long time.

When I got to the office I could tell by the look on Cunningham’s rough old face that Dr Ryan had already called him. Cunningham was the president and sole owner of the little airline and was a World War II vintage fighter pilot, and I guess he knew how I felt that afternoon.

“I’m ch… checking out, Freddy,” I said. “You know wh… why.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He fiddled uncomfortably with a pencil on his desk. “You know, we can always find something for you here. In the office, maybe … maintenance…” His voice trailed off. He stared at the pencil in his big hand.

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s nice of you, but forget it.” If there was one thing I knew it was that I couldn’t hang around like a crippled bird, watching all my friends take off into the sky. And I didn’t want to get used to the look of pity I saw on Freddy Cunningham’s honest face, or on any other face.

“Well, anyway Doug, think it over,” Cunningham said.

“No n … need,” I said.

“What do you plan to do?”

“First,” I said, “leave town.”

“For where?”

“Anywhere,” I said.

“Then what?”

Then try to figure out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. I stuttered twice on the word life.

He nodded, avoiding looking at me, deeply interested in the pencil. “How’re you fixed for dough?”

“Sufficient,” I said. “For the time being.”

“Well,” he said, “if you ever … I mean you know where to come, don’t you?”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” I looked at my watch. “I have a date.”

“Shit,” he said loudly. Then stood up and shook my hand. I didn’t say good-bye to anyone else.

I parked the car and got out and waited. There was a peculiar muted hum coming from the big, red-brick building with the Latin inscription on the facade and the flag flying above it. The hum of learning, I thought, a small, decent music that made me remember my childhood.

Pat would be in her classroom, lecturing the boys and girls on the origins of the Civil War or the succession of the kings of England. She took her history seriously. “It is the most relevant of subjects,” she had told me once, using the word that cropped up in every conversation about education in those days. “Every move we make today is the result of what men and women have been doing with each other and to each other since before recorded time.” As I remembered this, I grinned sourly. Had I been born to stutter or lived to be a discarded airman because Meade had repulsed Lee at Gettysburg, or because Cromwell had had Charles beheaded? It would be an interesting point to discuss when we had an idle moment to spare.

Inside the building a bell clanged. The hum of education swelled to a roar of freedom, and a few minutes later the students began to pour out of the doors in a confused sea of brightly colored parkas and brilliant wool hats.

As usual. Pat was late. She was the most conscientious of teachers, and there were always two or three students who clustered around her desk after class, asking her questions that she patiently answered. When I finally saw her, the lawn was deserted, the hundreds of children vanished as if melted away by the pale Vermont sun.

She didn’t see me at first. She was nearsighted, but out of vanity didn’t wear her glasses except when she was working or reading or going to the movies. It had been a little joke of mine that she wouldn’t find a grand piano in a ballroom.

I stood, leaning against a tree, without moving or saying anything, watching her walk down the cleared walk toward me, carrying a leather envelope that I knew contained test papers, cradled against her bosom, schoolgirl-fashion. She was wearing a skirt and red wool stockings and brown suede after-ski boots and a short, blue cloth overcoat. Her way of walking was concentrated, straight, uncoquettish[3], always brisk. Her small head with its dark hair pulled back was almost half obscured by the big, upraised collar of her coat.

When she saw me, she smiled, a non-desultory smile. It was going to be even more difficult than I had feared. We didn’t kiss. You never knew who was looking out of a window. “Right on time,” she said. “My stuff’s in the car.” She waved toward the parking lot. She had a battered old Chevy. A good part of her salary went for Biafra refugees, starving Indian children, political prisoners in various parts of the world. I don’t think she owned more than three dresses. “I hear the skiing’s great,” she said, as she started toward the parking lot. “This ought to be a weekend to remember.”

I put my hand out and held her arm. “W … wait a min … minute, Pat,” I said, trying not to notice the slight strained look that invariably crossed her face when I stuttered. “I have some … something to tell you. I … I’m not going up there th … this weekend.”

“Oh,” she said, her voice small. “I thought you were free this weekend.”

“I am f … free,” I said. “But I’m not going skiing. I’m leaving town.”

“For the weekend?”

“For good,” I said.

She squinted at me, as though I had suddenly gone out of focus. “Has it got something to do with me?”

“N … nothing.”

“Oh,” she said harshly, “nothing. Can you tell me where you’re going?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know wh … where I’m g… going.”

“Do you want to tell me why you’re going?”

“You’ll hear s … soon enough.”

“If you’re in trouble,” she said, her voice soft now, “and I could help…”

“I’m in t… trouble,” I said. “And you can’t help.”

“Will you write me?”

“I’ll try.”

She kissed me then, not worrying who might be at a window. But there were no tears. And she didn’t tell me that she loved me. It might have been different if she had, but she didn’t. “I have a lot of work to catch up on over the weekend anyway,” she said, as she stepped back a pace. “The snow’ll last.” She smiled a little crookedly at me. “Good luck,” she said. “Wherever.”

I watched her walk toward the old Chevy in the parking lot, small and neat and familiar. Then I got into the Volkswagen and drove off.

I was out of my small furnished apartment by six o’clock that evening. I had left my skis and boots and the rest of my skiing equipment except a padded parka, which I liked, in a duffel bag to be delivered to Pat’s brother, who was just about my size, and had told my landlady that she could have all my books and whatever else I left behind me. Traveling light, I headed south, leaving the town where, I realized now, I bad been happy for more than five years.

I had no destination. I had told Freddy Cunningham that I was going to try to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life and one place was as good as another for that.