E. Doctorow: Loon Lake

But it was all in my mind, it was the furthest thing from everyone’s mind except mine. She had not come back, he had not thought of bringing her back, the world had gone on and only I, like Warren Penfield, mourned its going. The ant on the twig was at my eye and I saw no plane and in fact knew I wouldn’t, in fact felt the wolfish smile of secret satisfaction on my face, a simple mindless excitement just being back at this place, redballed home in comprehensive correction of my life, more comprehensive than the wild hope of seeing Clara again or the desire to take revenge. No simple motive could fill the totality of my return.

Following job description fall into sea: fighter pilot naval

bomber pilot naval, navigator bombardier gunner naval

carrier-based Pacific Fleet World War Two

with or without parachute drowned strafed dead of exposure

or rescued one thousand and eight six.

This is apart from individuals going down in their aircraft

shot down or deprived of carrier landing

from attack of Divine Wind or heavy seas

collapsing their landing gear or snapping constraint cable

or sailing into lower deck amidships or

otherwise stippling the sea like rain like the hammers of sculptors.

I thought oddly of eviction, a city street miniaturized in one cell of the remembering brain, a cityscape of old cheap furniture piled on the sidewalk and an old woman sitting on one of the chairs looking at old photographs of Paterson in an album. The chair arm had a doily. She showed me the picture she was looking at, herself as a girl, and she smiled. She smelled of urine, her hands were frighteningly swollen and twisted, she was totally unashamedly in residence on the sidewalk with her furniture, in some state of dreamy peace, careless of the cold, the first snowflakes came down toward evening and there was no derision from the tough kids on the street because she didn’t weep or bow her head or display grief or fear in her misfortune and so not misfortune itself, but sat and thought her chin in her hand, her elbow propped on the armchair doily, while the snow turned her hair white. What frightened them off was the triumph of her senescence, only a stickler for custom would demand that such a lady of property be required to have four walls around her a ceiling above her a light in the lamp and tea in her cup.

I had this same mind, unhoused but triumphant coming off the streets through the dogs up the mountain to Loon Lake. And I greeted him like a complicitor while he stared at me quite astonished and then turned nodding as if he understood and continued to make his lunch in the spring sun. I was given Penfield’s old room. That night I heard the sound of surging power, some transformed connection, an electric pungency and pop, and everywhere around all the houses of the compound great flood-lights came on, over every bit of space, the courts, the boathouse, the staff house, the stables. And a while later I heard the dogs but they came this time on leashes pulling three men with shotguns broken in one hand and leash straps in the other woven like reins, a dozen yelping matched hounds and uniformed guards with Sam Browne belts and boots.

I read the Penfield papers at his window from this outside light a peculiar bright amber night, and I heard the Poet’s voice and saw his large debauched pleading eyes and tried to understand his death, what it was, what was terminated, if the voice and the face remained, if the presence lay in the rooms, and the faint winy redolence of his being was sniffed on my every breath. A wineglass still sat on the mantel, the dregs evaporated to a glazed scab in the bottom of the petal.

I mourn all change even for the better and in the days of my return I measured what I had known as the injured intruder against what I saw now as the sole guest. I mourned the absence of terror, the absence of hopeless desire, the absence of betrayals still to come.

I thought of Sandy James asleep in the train coach, curled on the seat and from the wrist under her cheek the trembling droop of her five-and-ten charm bracelet, a tiny tarnished lady’s shoe, a tiny tarnished bottle, a tiny tarnished steam engine.

Bennett had changed too, he was in an interesting derelict state of mourning. A gray stubble grew on his face and he wore the same plaid flannel shirt day after day. The white hair of the careful shining pompadour was uncombed, shocked forward over his forehead and suggesting from a flash of boyishness what he might have been had he not been a Bennett — a farmer perhaps, a logger, or heavy-chested stevedore of some honest life. We took our meals together, the two of us alone, with a manservant serving heated canned food. All the women of the light green were gone, as if having lost Lucinda Bailey Bennett he wanted the race expunged. A couple of the outside men were now doing the household work and the cooking. In the kitchen the dishes were piled unwashed. I saw roaches going along the floor. It was as if the establishment was in some accelerating state of decrepitude, beginning with Bennett’s heart and working outward. The grounds were immaculate as ever, Loon Lake was groomed for its spring. The stables were clean and horses shining and fit. But if he went on like this, the men of dark green too would be sent away and the boats would sink in their berths, the earth around the dolmen would grow back and the fence around the tennis court would fall and the clay court would crack like the surface of a blasted planet. Mourning had illuminated the natural drift of his life to isolation, and if it was not corrected it would go on, outward in all directions, spreading out over the universe in some infinite looming reclusiveness.

But his eyes were curious when they lit on me for a moment or two at each measured meal. And the days were, after all, timed just as they had been, the hours appointed for drinking and eating, and naps, and exercise. He looked at me as if he were waiting. I met him each day in a renewed wonder of my own. I had seen his kingdom and I appreciated him almost more for the distracted humanity he displayed, broken as easily as anyone by simple events. For men all over the country he was, finally, a condition of their life. Yet he wandered about here in his grief, caring for nothing, barely raising his head when the phone rang. He moved slowly, almost listlessly, which brought out the natural lurch of the short-legged top-heaviness of him.

In the mornings I heard the horses stomping in the stable, and looking out the window, saw Bennett come out galloping, having spurred his horse from the very portal.

At noon we took lunch on the terrace if the day was fair and he’d glance at the sky over the lake as if expecting a plane to appear.

At night while the guards in their belted uniforms walked the floodlit grounds with their dogs I heard him playing his phonograph records, his favorites, I heard the song of the night of my arrival.

I know why I’ve waited

Know why I’ve been blue

Prayed each night for someone

Exactly like you.

He began to talk of Lucinda Bennett, imparting confidences that at first excited me inasmuch as I was there on the terrace in the sun at Loon Lake, in all the world the only one privileged to receive them. His voice lacked regret, his delivery was thoughtful, he chose his words as someone does who wants in as orderly a way as possible to impart information. So I hoped he was giving these thoughts to me , as instruction, and I trusted that his reasons would be forthcoming, that he had some plan, and that by being patient and attentive I would eventually learn what it was. Then I wondered if the confession itself was the gracious means by which I would pass through some subtle imperceptible moment of assumption from being something to being something else. But he went on, and the obsession of the subject became so apparent to me, and the confidences so intimate, I couldn’t believe he was aware that I listened or that he would seriously divulge them if I did not lack all importance to him. Day after day I listened. I watched the white clouds disembowel themselves in the high pines across the lake. His man served canned soup, canned spaghetti, canned peaches. Bennett grew shaggier and smellier, looking more like a troll every day. I watched his beard grow. While I waited for a place in his mind I tested my status with the staff. I rode a horse one day with the stableman beside me showing me the elementais. I went upstairs to the storerooms that the maid Libby had shown me so long ago and took several outfits for myself, white ducks already cuffed, argyle sweaters, saddle shoes, shirts, ties, a pair of boots. I had the man in the boathouse bring out the mahogany speedboat and hold the line while I boarded her. I got the hang of it soon enough. I cruised around looking at the beaver lodges, the islands where the loons made their nests, and saw from the water the concrete ramp and hangar where Mr. Penfield and Mrs. Bennett began their round-the-world flight.