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

Why was Edwin late? He was late because I kept on reminding him of the time. He was late because it was cold outside and warm inside. He was late because, although on the one hand he wanted to run away with Rose Dorn and live with her forever on a green island and never grow old, on the other hand he wished she would disappear. He was late because she was always late. He was late because he had not yet had his milk and M & M’s. He was late because he was happy, and seeing Rose Dorn always made him miserable. And perhaps, in an important sense, he was not late at all. For during those vital minutes, he had been living in a world where Rose Dorn simply did not exist; so that he could no more be said to be late for an appointment with her than she could be said to be late for an appointment with Mickey Mouse.

As we turned through the opening onto the crowded playground, some ten minutes before the bell, it was evident that she was not at the appointed place: the wide oak in the angle of the wire fence. Edwin insisted on looking behind the tree; of course she was not there. “Maybe she’s sick,” he murmured, but even as he spoke I saw, far away across the playground on the grass slope beside the willow, a patch of red, a glitter of yellow, a spot of black. I tugged at his arm and pointed. He began to run, and I ran after him, and she too began to run — not toward us, but along the far sidewalk toward the front of the school. She quickly disappeared behind the side of the building. When we turned the corner, just past the green entrance door over the single step, we saw only the thin empty strip of playground between the doorless brick wall on our left and the sidewalk on our right. Straight ahead, the tree-grown front lawn sloped to the busy street; through the bushes I saw dangerous cars rushing both ways. Suddenly I saw her red coat disappear beneath the hideous wheels of a honking car.

The back wheels passed over her, and she blew up into the air, revealing herself to be a red kerchief.

Edwin was running along the side of the building ahead of me; he turned to the left and disappeared around the front, into forbidden territory. I turned the corner, hot on his heels, and saw Rose Dorn at the top of the tall front steps, tugging open one of the big forbidden doors. As the door swung shut behind her, Edwin took the steps at the bottom two at a time; as he reached the top I reached the bottom; and suddenly I stopped. How can I convey to the unknowing reader the awesomeness of those high front doors? To climb the steps was unthinkable, impossible: it was like continuing along a strange sidewalk after seeing in the distance three unknown older boys, who already have noticed your approach and are all looking at you. One of them is leaning against a telephone pole with his hands in his pockets, one of them has just stopped throwing stones into a vacant lot, and one of them is combing his wavy blond hair. And so I hesitated, unable to follow Edwin, whom a slow door was already shutting out of view. Far away, across the busy street, a crowd of waiting children stared. Someone was pointing; the blue policeman turned, hand on hip, as if to draw his gun. Above, the door swung softly shut. Without informing my mind, my body reached a decision. Up the long steps I flew, not at all surprised to see Gray lying at the top with a big smile on his face and his front paws tucked under his chest. Inside I could at first see only brown darkness, which resolved itself into two brown doorless windowless walls leading to the main hall; in the stillness I heard a sound of running footsteps. Twice a day we passed out of school this way, but I had always stood in a screaming crowd; the silence and emptiness changed everything, as if a vital piece of furniture had been removed. I hurried down the short hall and turned right, in the direction of the footsteps. At the far end of the hall I saw Edwin disappearing down a staircase. Behind me stretched the half-familiar part of the school, where the first- and second-grade rooms were located; before me lay an identical brown hall that was utterly strange, filled with doors and dark spaces that to this day inhabit my dreams. As I flew along, it seemed to me that I was passing room after room, dozens of them, each thrusting at me through an open door a sudden and quickly vanishing vision of strange desks, a window, a yellow shade; in one room I saw a tall white-haired lady writing on the blackboard, who turned as I rushed past.

The steps were made of black metal. Overhead the white ceiling sloped like an attic. In a small dusty window I saw, in quick succession as I descended, the bottom of the wire fence, the top of the tree, the empty sky. The copper-colored rail, crawling above a row of green metal posts, turned suddenly at a landing, slithered down another row of posts, and terminated abruptly by curling under itself. I was staring down a long windowless hallway that narrowed like railroad tracks and ended in a tiny black metal stairway. The high walls, painted a pale shiny gray, and broken here and there by brown doors, stretched up to a white ceiling hung with bright glass bowls at the ends of black chains. The un-painted floor was like the floor of a cellar. The hall was deserted except for a single aluminum snowshovel leaning against the left wall partway down. I half-walked, half-ran along, stopping at open doors to look inside; one dark room on the right was dimly illuminated by a dusty stripe of light that fell from a single barred oblong window at the top, through which I could see the shoes and legs of children on the playground. As I advanced, listening intently, and fearful of shouting in the bright silence, I heard noises as of moving furniture in a nearby room on the left. I followed the sounds to an open doorway, and as I stepped inside, suddenly behind me, over me, on all sides of me, the first bell began to bang.

The room was dark and windowless, but light from the hall rolled along the floor through the open door, breaking into pieces against a dark jagged pile of old desks. The room seemed to be full of them; I could see that they were piled up on one another higher than my head. There was a narrow passageway between the desks and wall. I heard the sounds of moving furniture from the dark back of the room and began to make my way along the narrow dark corridor to my right. My eyes, adjusting quickly to the dark, turned the blackness to shades of blackness, so that by the time I turned left with the turning wall I could see the desk-shapes rising over me with their metal bars sticking up and I could see, not far from me, Edwin standing on his toes with his back pressed against the wall, trying to peer over the pile. I did not understand what he was doing. The desks shifted loudly, and nearby a heavy desk-cover came softly sliding down. Only then did I realize what the wooden noises were. Above us, invisible, Rose Dorn was somehow making her way across the dark sharp rickety jumble. In my mind’s eye she crawled with bare knees over edges and screws. The heavy desk-cover crashed at my toes; I leaped away. “Rose!” cried Edwin. “I hate you!” she screamed, as from the doorway a deep voice called: “Hey! Who’s in there?” and shrilly, as if without mercy, the second bell began to ring.

EDWIN’S RESPONSE to all this puzzled me at first: he blamed himself entirely. The vehemence of Rose Dorn’s resentment, far from affecting him as a typical bit of nastiness, convinced him beyond all possibility of dissuasion that he had wounded her deeply and unforgivably. Endlessly he envisioned the pitiable scene that I assembled from his sighs: Rose Dorn standing with her kitten by the tree, eagerly searching for Edwin through the wire across the rush of traffic. The fact that she had never once been on time for an appointment did not weaken this vision; on the contrary, it increased his guilt by making him seem to abuse her very first fidelity. Perhaps she had had something special to tell him, something grave and unimaginable that would change his life forever. Perhaps she had wanted to share with him some sorrow or trouble; perhaps she needed help. Perhaps she had brought something to show him, something she had found, like a book of matches, or something she had made, like the potholders some girls made on metal frames. Perhaps she had had a wonderful surprise for him, a gift — a licorice pipe, or a whistle, or a flower. Perhaps she had wanted to invite him to a party, or make a plan to meet him on the weekend somewhere. Perhaps she had wanted to ask him if she could come home with him, and have dinner with him, and spend the night in the extra bed in his room, telling him things in the dark. On and on he went, spinning out one piece of wretched nonsense after another; and always he would end with the vivid picture of Rose Dorn’s face growing sadder and sadder behind her cage of wire, until her large pale eyes became bright with heldback tears. Slowly they trickled down her cheeks in two wavering trails, running into the corners of her quivering mouth. This last picture was so vivid in Edwin’s mind that it was as if he had been present at the scene of the crime, looking up at her as she stood staring hopelessly through the wire fence, her fingers curled through the diamond-shaped spaces. When I tried to modify his picture by pointing to past instances, he did not argue, but looked at me with gentle sadness, as if he forgave my failure to understand. The picture became for him the very proof of his iniquity; having treated her like that, how could he expect forgiveness? No, he was completely, irrevocably unforgiven; there was no hope for reconcilement at all. And dragging himself forlornly up the stairs, in silent sadness he would lie upon his bed, wise beyond his years.