E. Doctorow - Loon Lake

He kept talking this way.

I had the uncanny feeling that he was translating what I told him into another language. Yet I could hear everything he said. He rose, he seemed to gain strength, he strode back and forth from the window to the door. “Yes, of course, there is more than I knew. Yes. I want this for her. It’s just. I put my faith in you, Joe. Yes, take her away from here. Two young people! It’s right. Yes, it’s the only way.”

“I’ll need money and a car,” I said.

“Of course. Leave it to me. I’ll help you. I’ll get you both out. You’ll see, you’ll see. I have resources. Yes. You’ll find Warren Penfield comes through. I have resources. I have allies.”

He seemed joyful. He clapped his hands together and glanced heavenward to express his joy. In this moment he would rather have died than reveal his anguish.

As I was leaving he stood at the door and pulled back the sleeve of his robe. “Look here, Joe.” he said. He held up his right arm. “The sign of the wild dog! Right?” He gave me a wan but demonstrably brave smile. I had to smile back. I rolled up my sleeve and showed my arm.

“That’s right,” he said. “You know what two men do who share the sign of the wild dog?” He touched his forearm to mine so that they crossed. “That’s right,” he said in a husky voice. “My pain is your pain. My life is your life.”

Data linkage escape this is not an emergency

Come with me compound with me

A tulip cups the sun quietly in its color

Dixie cups hold chocolate and vanilla

Before the war after the war or

After the war before the war

A man sells me a Dixie cup for a nickel in a dark candy store.

The boy stands on the sidewalk in the sun

Licking the face of Joan Crawford free of ice cream.

A boy enjoys ice cream from a wooden spoon in the sun

before the war in front of the candy store on the corner

while he waits for the light to change. At this moment several

things happen. A horse pulling the wagon of a peddler

of vegetables trots by smartly golden balls of dung dropping

from the base of its arched tail. Then there was a whirring

in my ears and over the top of Paterson Grade School Three

a monumental dirigible nosed into view looming so low

I could see the seams of its paneled silver skin

and human shadows on the windows of its gondola. It was not

sailing straight through its bow but shouldering the wind shuddering

dipping and rising in its sea of air. It soared over the roof

of a tenement and disappeared. At the same time

the traffic light turned green and I crossed from sun to shade

noting that the not unpleasant odor of fresh horse manure

abruptly ceased with the change of temperature. In front of

the shoe repair on Mechanic Street at the sidewalk’s edge

between a Nash and a Hudson parked at the curb a baby girl

was suspended from her mother’s hands her pants pulled down.

It was desired of this child that she relieve herself there and then

schoolchildren going past in bunches peddlers at their cars

mothers pushing strollers and an older boy with ice cream

stopping shamelessly to watch. And this beautiful little girl

turned a face of such outrage upon me that I immediately

recognized you Clara and with then saintly inability to withstand

life you closed your eyes and allowed the thin stream of

golden water to cascade to the tar which was instantly black and

shone clearer than a night sky.

In the morning hacking away at the Indian-chief monument, I saw him going down the bridle path, going right by without so much as a glance at the strange work on the rock, walking a few steps, running, walking again hurriedly, on the trail through the woods.

I waited five minutes and then I dropped my shovel and sauntered off. “Where you going!” someone called behind me. I raised my hand to show I knew what I was doing and that I’d be right back.

This was the trail the riders took to get to another shore of the lake, a mile down from the main house. It was hoed regularly to keep it soft — I had done some of that myself. It went through stands of towering pine and over small clearings where the grass was turning tan and gold in the autumn, and then it dropped down into an area where the leaves were falling like snowflakes. I felt the same turning season in me.

Where the trail cornered, along the shore of the wide lake, was an airplane hangar with a concrete ramp. Mr. Penfield sat on the ramp with his arms around his knees. He was looking at the water. The wind had whipped up a small white chop. Wavelets slapped at the concrete. He didn’t seem to notice Lucinda Bailey Bennett coming out of the hangar and walking toward him. She pulled a big red trainman’s handkerchief from the pocket of her overalls and wiped her hands.

I ducked around through the underbrush and came within a few feet of them. I could see inside: an engine was suspended from pulleys. A man was guiding it to a workbench.

“What do you do, Lucinda,” said Mr. Penfield in a petulant tone. “Paint the innards like a new toy?”

“No, old bear. When I’m through, its innards will be dark and oiled, and refitted to tolerances that will take me to the top of the sky.” She stuffed her handkerchief into the pouch of her overalls. “Why are you sulking? I thought you loved me.”

“Since I gave up manhood to live here, I make no claims of that sort on anyone.”

She smiled. “That’s not the report I have.”

“Oh, Lucinda,” he said with a groan, and he turned to look up at her.

“So much suffering.” She touched the back of her hand to his temple. “Poor Warren.”

“How much better for me if when I came here my throat had been ripped out.”

She sighed. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose so.”

After a moment she turned back and he lifted himself grunting to his feet. He lumbered after her. “Forgive me,” he called.

“Oh, Warren, it’s such a bore when you whine.” She went into the hangar.

“Yes,” he cried out bitterly. “Indeed. My agony does not divert.” And he followed her.

I couldn’t hear them now. The hangar was lit by electric lights that glimmered very faintly through the brightness of the morning. But I saw them moving around, she working and he talking with grand gestures. Every once in a while I heard the sound of his voice, and I knew Mr. Penfield well enough to know he was in good form, eloquent in his self-dramatization. I hoped so, because he was talking for me.

The man who’d been helping came out, lit a cigarette and went off along the trail. I moved to the hangar itself, staying out of sight of the doorway. I leaned my back to the wall.

“You have a good nature,” I heard Mrs. Bennett say.

“Oh my dear!”

“Would you like to go on a flight? Probably not. But a really long flight. Just the two of us. Would you consider it?”

“What? Where?”

“I don’t know. The Far East. Shall we do that? Fly across the Pacific.”

“The Far East?”

“Yes, pooh bear. A long flight. You and I. Oh, that’s a good idea! Who knows what might happen.” She burst out laughing. “Warren, if you could see the expression on your face! The dismay!”

“Lucinda, what — How is it possible? Am I misunderstood?”

“Oh, foolish thing — I don’t mean that! Good God!” She was merry now. “It’s a practice made too thoroughly disreputable by its devotees, don’t you think?”

That evening the four of them met for dinner. I stood on the terrace just out of the light cast through the windows and I watched them at their drinks. A fire blazed in the huge fireplace. Mounted prey gazed down at them. Clara was wearing a gown of sequined silver. She looked cheap. She sat staring at the floor, cowed, maybe even stunned into silence, by the nuances of civilization in that room. The gentlemen wore black tie, in which Mr. Penfield managed to look as rumpled and ill-prepared for life as ever. With his characteristic expression of appeal for love and understanding he glanced habitually at the others, but especially Clara. Lucinda Bennett smiled faintly and kept up her end of the conversation. Only F. W. Bennett seemed to be enjoying himself. He became so animated he stood up to deliver his sentences. He went to a table behind the leather sofa and held up a large flat book opened, and resting on his arm, and he read from it and laughed and looked at the others for their reaction.