Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“Amazing,” said Frank, and I could see he was impressed. He treated the photo with a new reverence.

Long after that day in New York I tried to read Lawrence. I found him dull, repetitive, laboriously vile and evasive. And, as with most fiction I attempted to read, I gave up after a few pages, wondering at its importance, because it was so much less interesting than my life. I suspected that my work was touched with that same failure, for I knew I was nowhere in it.

Frank said, “How about a bite of lunch?”

YES, enough — away — forget the picture palace. The sight of Lawrence’s tiny head had shaken a mouse out of my mind. But Frank’s mention of lunch uncoiled a thrill in me that took ten spins, then jammed and made me want to jump. I got an urge — the push of the picture, the pull of the sun — to drop everything and get moving out of memory’s undertow. Besides, I heard the noon siren begin to scream at the Bass River Firehouse, cutting the day in half, and that was always a shrill provocation to feed my face.

I said, “Let’s go to Provincetown.”

“Fine by me,” said Frank.

And we were on the road, breezing along the Mid-Cape Highway. I gave Frank a friendly slap on the thigh and he caught my mood and gave me a chattering laugh.

“Funny,” I said, poking my toe on the gas, “I only like Creedence Clearwater Revival when I’m doing seventy.”

The radio was going boopy-boop , making the dashboard rattle, and I rolled down the window so I could mingle the music with the tires sucking at the road and the whup of passing trailer trucks. Blue skies, sakes alive! I sat back and basked in America’s most underrated pleasure, the big car on a straight road with the radio on and the sun beating in and out of the trees, gold pulses between the boughs, all the light and speed more calming than a square meal, and a kind of glory-bounce of joy in it, too.

I liked the sky’s bottom edge flat and far on the fast-lane ahead, and just stamping the throttle into low and letting it whine for half a minute made the car seat vibrate with a massaging drone and drained my ears of worry. Delicious: and I was thinking, America even at its most grotesque is more fun than anywhere else on earth, so who wouldn’t feel like a sinner and make guilt a duty to pay for that rumble of pleasure? Up the pike for twenty miles I was humming and working the power steering like the dune-buggy freaks on Sandy Neck, with my hands crooked over the top of the wheel and turning it with my wrists, having a field day changing lanes and roaring past a pausing oldster at the Harwich exit.

What is the past then, when you are cruising at seventy in a new Chevy? It is distant and simple and so small it barely belongs to you. One year is so much like another; one season is ten minutes on a bike, the next is a single swing of a sailboat’s boom, another a meal or a face. Try hard at that speed and all you hear is the sound of the Cape in summer, which is a screen door straining its spring and slapping shut with a clatter of sticks and wires; the skirl of gulls, bare knees in wet sand and Miss Dromgoole saying, “More jam?” When I was ten I had fried clams, and that memory of the Seltzers is just a chilly twilight and a quick muscle of fear in my leg. Fragments and double exposure, and not one clear picture but an endless roll of blurs: two seconds of this year, a minute of that one in a train, youth in small pieces, childhood dust. Perhaps there was nothing else?

No. Because past Orleans the highway gave out and my memory became mobbed and I was returned. We weren’t flying anymore and the car slowing on Route 6 caused a stir in my mind. I thought: How impossible it is to be near home and do anything and not repeat a motion of the past. We were approaching Wellfleet, but I might as well have been back at my house on Grand Island and approaching a patch of familiar wallpaper at the turning in the staircase and pausing and going under. And just as a chance word in the parlor I grew up in never fail ad to rouse a ghostly echo, the unerasable wrinkle on the wall, touched with the eye, toppled me headlong into my retrospective. On that wall, in that room, a whiff of winter and how that mirror sees outside to a whiteness in the windmill — this is where memory lies.

There was a yellow blinker. I braked and the planet began to stall and cloud up. Then there was that unmistakable sign that the road had narrowed for delays ahead. The going would be heavy — there was the proof, a wooden-roofed shed with its front flap wide open and its counter stacked with tomatoes and spindles of corn. The roadside stand, snarling traffic, and on a grassy bank, WELCOME TO WELLFLEET, PENALTY FOR STEALING HOLLY $500 OR SIX MONTHS.

“Wellfleet,” said Frank with satisfaction. “Maybe we’ll see some clamdiggers.”

I wanted to punch him in the mouth. This was supposed to be my afternoon off. He snatched at the dashboard as I kicked at the brake again.

It was a Friday, years after the Lawrence episode. But the date wasn’t important: it was the sequence that mattered.

We hadn’t gone to the school in Switzerland, and it wasn’t me, it was Phoebe who had first refused, then taken sick. She sat down pale and wouldn’t budge. Miss Dromgoole was kept on, and I was glad it had all happened that way, because I had never wanted to leave Orlando. “Maude can’t go alone,” Papa said, and that was that. He said to Phoebe, “But if you’re too sick for Switzerland you’re too sick for Florida,” and they went to stay with a rich crazy man — his friend Carney — who played at being Lorenzo the Magnificent in a fake palace near Verona, on Florida’s Gulf coast. They left Phoebe and me at home with Miss Dromgoole and Frenise, the pair of them fighting most of the time about what we should eat: “greens,” said Frenise, “stodge,” said Miss Dromgoole. “People in China would be glad to have that,” said Miss Dromgoole, using the hunger of these poor people to get us to eat. It was illogical and cruel: she was in fact threatening us with starvation.

Then Orlando — who was certainly at Harvard, because he had his driver’s license — Orlando showed up one Friday afternoon like an angel and said he was taking us to a party. He was red and out of breath and stamping from the cold and looked snorting and healthy in his fur coat.

“The roads are bad,” said Miss Dromgoole.

Orlando took no notice of her. When she repeated it he simply smiled and sort of leaned toward her like a bright light until she left the room. The next thing we knew she was shouting at Frenise, who was muttering “basset” and “bidge.”

Phoebe started to cry. She said, “I wish Papa was here.”

Her tears gave her color and made her look like a saintly doll with a pure face and a crumpled dress. Orlando put his arm around her and hugged her and I felt like weeping, too.

“Look,” I said. “It’s snowing again.”

It seldom snowed hard on the Cape — a few inches, no more, was all we got. But that day it made pillows on the lawn and was piled against the house, and though I had not gone out I had spent the day photographing icicles at the window. From my room the great stiff scooped-out drifts at the windmill were like the chalky curves of sea-worn clamshells. There were dragons of ice on the drain pipes and glassy gargoyles bunched at the gutters, and white sugarloaf mounds over the flowerbeds. The property was subdued and rephrased by the snowstorm, and none of my pictures came out, which was why I remembered it so clearly. I took them from inside the house; I hated the cold — it stung my toes and froze my eyes.

Orlando said, “It’s beautiful out.” Now it was darkening and the flakes were shifting slowly past the parlor window, made gold by our lights and swaying like feathers as they fell.