Steven Millhauser - Edwin Mullhouse - The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954

If the schoolday itself afforded few chances for intimacy, the long hours after school afforded none at all. For Rose Dorn always went straight home. Edwin himself was under strict orders to return from school at once, though I think he would have lingered if she had given him half a chance; as it was, all he could hope for was a final stare. In two different lines they filed out through the front doors and down the steps to the high sidewalk. There she turned left with her line on her way to the stone steps that descended to the side-street, while Edwin and I continued straight ahead with our line, descending another flight of steps to the wide sidewalk at the edge of the dangerous road with its blue policeman. Sometimes he would have to wait a long time before the policeman allowed us to cross. Then turning to the left on his way home, and hurrying along to the first cross-street on our side, where a patrol-boy with a white stripe and a silver badge stood like a miniature policeman, he would look across to Rose Dorn’s side, where sometimes he would see, beyond the tall cliff of the playground, in a perspective formed by a stone wall and a row of tall black trees, a patch of yellow over a bright red coat.

I SUPPOSE IT WAS INEVITABLE that he should follow her home. It happened after school one pale December day, when the sky resembled a vast frozen lake in which a cold yellow coin lay trapped. He had tried to get rid of me by requesting some preposterous favor that instantly put me on my guard. The three of us must have presented quite a sight to anyone spying from a distant rooftop: Rose Dorn skipping along beside her kitten and stopping now and then to write with a piece of chalk on the sidewalk; Edwin skulking along a block or so behind her, peeping out from behind trees and ducking behind garbage cans; and I skulking along behind Edwin. A block past Rapolski’s we entered the strange land that we had glimpsed through the wire fence: dark twisted trees, like grim giants, rose up on all sides to guard the tall pale black-windowed houses, separated by black driveways and thin strips of lawn, while big brown hedges with white gates between them shut up the little front yards. I felt as if I were being drawn into some old storybook with towering illustrations; when I looked back, the real world had dwindled to a strip of light between the cliff of the playground and Rapolski’s. At first the sidewalks on both sides were crowded with children going home from school, but as we proceeded the crowd thinned to a trickle; a last child turned; only Rose Dorn walked on. Her sidewalk chalkings turned out to be destructive scribbles over other people’s initials, or unpleasant and meaningless scrawls: circles that did not join up, backward S’s, uneven zigzags, fragments of stars. At last she turned to the right, looking back just as Edwin ducked into a driveway; I was stationed behind a tree. I waited for Edwin to turn the corner and then I hurried after them. When I reached the corner I saw a narrow street rising into the sky, flanked by peeling gray two-story houses with empty clotheslines stretched between them, as if they were being held up by ropes. They had tilted antennas on their roofs and staircases zigzagging down their sides; the sidewalks were full of garbage cans. I saw Rose Dorn at the top of the hill, silhouetted against the pale sky; she turned to the left behind a black drugstore as Edwin emerged from behind three garbage cans. Quickly I climbed toward the high black drugstore, which as I came closer revealed itself to be dark green; and stepping past the boarded window to a flight of cement steps at the corner of the store, cautiously I peeped out to the left. Rose Dorn and Edwin had disappeared. They had disappeared, I tell you, and all houses with them: under a pale sky the street dropped sharply between pale weedgrown fields, full of rusty objects and paper bags, that stretched on both sides into a distant mist. At the base of the sloping street, a thin black road stretched to the left and right; behind it, like a scribble of charcoal, a ragged black forest stood against the sky. The view of the forest was interrupted at the right by a high stony ridge that rose out of the hillocky field at the foot of the hill; at the top of the ridge, a little pointed tower on long metal legs perched like a vast spider. They had disappeared. It was like a turn in a dream, when you step out onto your back porch, hurry down the steps, turn the corner of your house, and find yourself on the brown sand of a deserted beach, with icy blue-black water stretching endlessly away. Overhead a white bird is crying, and when you turn back you discover that your house is a high white wall with pieces of colored glass on top. I wanted to turn back, but I feared that if I turned around I would see not the narrow street I had just finished climbing, but a strange new street, a nightmare street with dark pine trees on both sides and a broken white line down the middle. I wanted to wake up, I wanted to fall into a deep dreamless sleep, I wanted to be back in Edwin’s room sitting on the bed under the map of the United States; and suddenly Edwin rose from behind a rusty car-top lying upside down in one of the vacant lots, and I barely ducked out of sight in time. At the bottom of the hill he turned to the right. Over the black tree-line the sky was almost white, and as I made my way down the hill toward the trees and sky I felt as if I were being drawn into a world bleached of all color and existing only in tones of black and gray, as if the landscape were its own photograph. When I reached the bottom I saw Rose Dorn turn left into the trees, while Edwin emerged from behind some thorny black roadside bushes. To my dismay he soon turned in after her. I followed anxiously, fearful of losing Edwin and fearful of plunging into the forest; I was relieved to discover that he had turned onto a narrow dirt road. A tilted wooden streetsign, nailed to a black trunk, contained wavy black blurs made by the rain. The road was so full of hollows that it seemed to ripple like a stream. It was a somber afternoon, but here it was already evening. Far ahead I saw a spot of yellow over a spot of red; Edwin’s pale face peeped out from behind a tree; I followed. On and on I went, for minutes, for days; on the left, quite suddenly, the house appeared. It rose amidst the trees like some vaster and older tree: looming and gray and gabled, shuttered and shadowed, darkened by black windows: at once immense and lurking, like a giant trying to hide. Only a sense of Edwin’s imminent danger gave me the courage to proceed. I stationed myself behind a mossy tree, on spongy sod, and watched Rose Dorn walk along a weedgrown flagstone path among the trees. From where I stood I could see, through a tangle of trunks and branches, the front of the house and one side. At the corner of the roof rose a small hexagonal tower with a peaked black roof and two windows; along the front of the house ran a long sagging porch with square gray posts, a long gray railing, and long gray steps. The black trees seemed to press up against the house, hiding many of the windows; the long black branch of one fat tree crossed the porch rail at one end and traveled crookedly over the porch itself, stopping in front of a black window as if poised for a knock. Halfway to the front Rose Dorn turned left onto another path that led to the side of the house, where opening a gray door above three gray steps, and letting in her kitten, she quickly disappeared. Edwin then emerged from behind his tree and began walking toward the distant front porch. I do not know what he had in mind. I do not think he had anything in mind. As if spellbound he walked slowly and steadily along those crooked flat stones, among those crooked black trees. A cry of warning rose to my lips but I suppressed it, determined to remain hidden should help be needed. I was wondering just what sort of help might be needed when, with an abruptness that startled me, Edwin stopped. I had been watching him so intently that I had forgotten the house itself, and as I followed his gaze to the upper row of windows I saw that one of them was open. Silent in her black dress, her long black hair falling onto the sill, she sat in the window and gazed down at Edwin. She said nothing at all; but as if she had shrieked a witch’s curse he turned and began to run down the flagstone path, tripping suddenly and crawling wildly over the hard red stones, too frightened to think of getting to his feet. I glanced back at the house, fearful that she would come flying out after him, but she continued to sit there, silently watching. And as I watched, one of the windows in the high hexagonal tower opened, and Rose Dorn leaned out. She was stark naked. Her pigtails were undone, and her yellow hair streamed below the level of the windowsill. Grasping the ledge, and leaning on her belly, she looked down at Edwin without a word; while he, stumbling at last to his feet and running out onto the dirt road, turned to the right and passed me as I swiftly ducked out of sight. For a while she remained there, watching. Then she disappeared.