WHEN DR. BHATTA, THE Hindu “neurologist,” acquired the old Kuypers estate, which no one else would buy, and installed there his entourage of two faded, Western lady secretaries, a number of indeterminately transient guests, and a faintly rotten, saffron breeze of curry, the neighbors in the other old houses strung along the riverbank absorbed his advent with little more than mild comment. The river road, though deceptively near the city, was part boundary line of a county that brushed shadowy patroon-descended towns to the north, still sheltered, in its gentle ranges toward the west, tribal remnants with tattered Indian red in their cheeks, and had weathered many eccentrics in its time. Something about the county’s topography of rear-guard hills, pooled with legend and only circularly accessible, of enormous level-land sunsets brought up short by palisades that dropped the river road below into darkness at four, had long since made it a natural pocket for queer birds, birds of privacy. Many of these were still there, appearing at yearly tax meetings as vestigially alive as the copperheads that sometimes forked before the nurserymen’s neat spades in the spring. It was a landscape from which individuality still rose like smoke, in signal columns blue and separate and clear.
More than one of the houses along the river road had had a special history, of the tarnished kind that often clings longer than honest coats of arms. Houses of wood, white, with endless verandas and gabled bedrooms framed in carpenter’s lace, they had been built by the dubiously theatrical or sporting rich of seventy or eighty years ago, whose habit had been to leave their trotting races on the Harlem of an afternoon, and to come, with a change of carriage, up the river, there to pursue, in champagne and blood and scandal, their uncloseted amours. And the capricious summer palaces they had had the native workmen build for them, though sturdy of timber, still showed, even in a new age, the shaky regality of seasonal money. From turrets made without ingress, balconies soared and died away. Iron weathervanes swung unheeded over “widow’s walks” on which no rightful widow had ever paced, and at the ends of the grounds there was often a tiny pavilion, lodged like an innocent white afterthought among the romantically unpruned trees.
It was such a house that Dr. Bhatta had bought, acquiring it with some sleight of hand whereby the accompanying gunpowder pops of bill-collectors from the other places where he had lived were delayed for several weeks. When these too came, the neighbors were not surprised. Houses like the Kuypers estate had been harmonious even in decline. Descended through relatives who had not been deeded the income to keep them up, they seemed destined to be lost again by owners whose need of grandeur exceeded their incomes, often by those who needed grandeur in order to acquire income. Fakirs, healers, dealers in correspondence course faith—the river road had seen them come and go—all of them sharers in the circuitous faith that if one lived in a castle one could more easily attract devotees from whom one might then borrow money to pay for the milk. Idly the road decided that Bhatta’s title of “doctor” was more than probably self-assumed, but this did not really matter. Charlatans, if one made it quickly clear that one would lend neither money nor credulity, often made very tractable neighbors. They could not afford to be like old Mrs. Patton, who had half a million but never painted her house, and let her lawn grow as high as her hedge. They painted quickly, lavishly, at least in all the spots that showed, and kept their sites trim for trade.
Not much was seen of the doctor that winter. It was an open winter, a mild one, but the doctor’s tall, corpulent form only showed itself occasionally, on the broad steps underneath his porte-cochere, calling to his dog, Lili, or shuffling in his carpet slippers as far as the greened bronzed griffins that guarded the gate, where he always turned to look critically at the house, his long maroon overcoat flapping at his ankles, the sun running like brown butter on his dark jowls and on the bald pate with its muttonchop of black hair. Occasionally he was seen, still in the coat and slippers, in front of the chain-store in the village, waiting while his two ladies made their purchases inside. Of anyone else it might have been said that he looked, at times, disconsolately cold, but to John Garner, his immediate neighbor on the road, and to others who established a greeting basis with him, the doctor’s comments on the world were always showily serene. Either he was a man of inner peace, or else his trade constrained him to appear so.
Whatever his trade was—and this had not been quite established, it was of too large a dignity to allow him to help “the ladies,” as he always called them, load the car. These, Miss Leeby and Miss Daria, were both blond, both small, both of uncertain age, but life had faded them in different ways. Miss Leeby’s hair and accent had a New England thinness and respectability, her pale eyes and stubby, broken-nailed hands the absent look of a worker uncomfortably away from her task. It was she who was seen from dawn to dusk on the grounds, grubbing and cutting, on the roof of the barn, hammering, and once, painting away on the cupola of the house itself. When encountered, she had the stifled voice, the ducking ways, of a tweeny. Conversely, if, as rumored, the ladies were not the doctor’s secretaries but his consorts, then it was Miss Daria who gave herself the airs of the boss-wife. Her streaked hair fell to her shoulders in cinematic curls, her eyes were sunk in sockets blackened with experience, or kohl, or occasionally, as gossip had it, the doctor’s fist. Under her haggard fur coat she wore blouses of no illusion, through which one saw the bright satin points of her brassieres. It was she who drove the car, since the doctor did not work with his hands, and managed the finances, since the doctor never handled money—some stores had already begun to complain that they had not yet handled any of his. But, as regarded the two women, he made no other distinction that anyone could see. When the dusty old car had been loaded, and sometimes pushed into starting, he detached himself from his stance against the wall, seated himself in the front seat between the two ladies, gave a portly nod, and was driven away.
But, with the earliest March thaw, activity burst its pod at the doctor’s, in advance of any place else. Armies of crocuses snapped to attention on the vast lawn, burlap was unwrapped to display dozens of rosebushes that must have been planted the fall before and were already beginning to twine properly up the chipped columns of the veranda, and all over the grounds there were peeping green evidences that Miss Leeby had indeed grubbed well. A truck came and groaned up and down the horseshoe driveway all one afternoon, depositing a sparkling white carpet of crushed stone. After it came the two women, raking it smooth, bordering it with two lines of whitewashed rocks that they lugged from the barn. When the mailman’s truck stopped at the gate, Miss Daria called to him, and with his dazed help a large, ugly cement urn was eased up the cellar stairs and dragged to the center of the lawn. When he left, with her nonchalant thanks, he looked angrily over his shoulder, and slammed hard the door of his truck, before he drove away. For, all that time, with eyes squinting happily in the tawny air, with powerful arms and chest revealed by the short sleeves and Byronic collar of his shirt, the doctor had been sitting on the stoop.
It was only during the next few days, however, that John Garner, his neighbor to the north, began to take any consistent notice of what was going on next door. Garner was no gossip; in the city during the business day he was conversely rather proud of the lazy, non-suburban tolerance of the road on which he lived, but a man who owns property, or nearly, has a natural vested interest in that of his neighbor. Ten years before, he and his wife Amelia had been “that nice young university couple” whom the cautious local bank had entrusted with a surprisingly large mortgage on the big old house next to the Kuyper place. Now they were “the Garners,” with four children, two in school, and during all that time both the house and the mortgage had remained a little too big for them. Garner’s father had been a trial lawyer who had enjoyed to the full the strutting side of the law; Garner had passed for the bar, married, and been in practice as a modestly salaried subordinate of a small firm for some years before he had finally admitted to himself that there was no side of the law that he would ever enjoy, and that he would never be anything more at it than a respectable drone.
Each work day, carrying the briefcase that had been given him when he passed the bar, he took the seven-thirty bus to the city, a tall man with thinning sandy hair, with cheeks whose tired creases quirked pleasantly when he smiled, and each evening, at half past six, he returned, a little thinner on top, a little more creased than he had seemed the day before. His father’s father had been a farmer in the magnificently tilled lands above the Finger Lakes, and when Garner, in his private shufflings of the past, thought of what might have been, he always returned to the same boyhood image of himself and the old man, his palm in the old man’s fist, and the two of them standing to watch whatever might be going on at the moment on the farm. In the evenings, the old man would sit at his roll-top desk in his catalogue-lined study, poring over his accounts, and it was the image of this too that Garner had retained, even more than the memory of the plump barns, and the tractor grooving the hills. It was a feeling of not “going to work,” as his father had done, but of working where you lived, where you stood, and of standing on the land. But his father had made the break to the city all too well; the son, gentled to pavements and collars, listening to the valedictorian tell him that he was standing “on the threshold of choice,” would have been as incredulous as the father at the idea that the grandfather’s life might have been one such choice. Only, some five years later, during that same year when he had come to terms with his private assessment of himself, he had bought the property adjoining the Kuypers estate.
Both properties fronted on the river (although the Kuypers place had a seven hundred footage to his two), and the acreages of both places ran back in a straight line up and over the hill that rose sharply behind, and were lost in the woodland at the crest. Amelia, his wife, always assumed that they had made the move for the children’s sake, and because here, just barely within commuting distance of the city, their bit of money had stretched to so much more than it could have done in a newer, neater suburb. Over the years, Garner had come to believe this himself. But certain references in the deed, surveyor’s jargon that granted him a portion of ground under his feet, phrases like “riparian rights,” that ceded him certain calculable powers over the river, also gave him an immeasurable delight. It was, obscurely, because of this that, although he left all other civic duties to Amelia, he had allowed himself to be voted in as a member of the road’s zoning board, which met three times a year to ratify building permits, to consider and defer the problem of repaying the road, and to reaffirm its one holy gesture against the cellularly creeping city to the south—that no commerce, no multiple dwelling of any kind was ever to be allowed. He had long since forgotten that his own house, stolid relic of a history too colorless to survive, had once reminded him of his grandfather’s place, and that when, on fine Sundays, he walked up the back acre to his part of the hilltop and looked down over the cascaded tips of the pines that still grew here, the great blue stare of the river, deceptively motionless and foreshortened by other hills, had a look of Lake Seneca. He was an indifferent gardener; he had never learned to pull salvation, like a turnip, from the soil. But each evening, when he crawled back from the multiple of multiples, there was a moment when he rested the briefcase on the porch steps, and plowed the river with his eyes.
It was at such a moment, at dusk on a Friday evening, when, turning from the river to note that his lawn should receive its first mowing in the morning, he saw that, over at the doctor’s, they had boarded up the little hexagonal summerhouse that perched halfway up the hill. The tiny peaked roof fitted like a dropped handkerchief over the columns that formed the sides; it had been a simple job to fit long wooden shutters, of which most of the houses along the road had an abandoned stock in the cellar, in the airy spaces beneath. Between two trees, in a small clearing hacked out for it, above the ground-honeysuckle that matted the entire hill, it glimmered now like a wintering carousel.
Strange, he thought, for what purpose would they have done this now, in the spring, and as he did so, a figure came from behind the pavilion and started slowly along the skinny footpath that zigzagged down the hill. It was a woman, carrying honeysuckle cuttings, two big sheaves of them that lifted her arms at right angles and trailed behind her, dragging the ground like a train. She passed him, quite close on the other side of the hedge, coarsely cut gray hair, emaciated eyes in a face he had never seen before, and trailed on through the opening in the hedge, down to the riverbank, where she let the cuttings fall into the river, and stood while they were borne away. She wheeled, and came back up the path. Even as he nodded, tentatively, into the uninflected face, he saw, with an inner, breaking “Ah!” of pity, that she must be mad. The eyes told him first—set motionless, aghast, as in those drawings where the doubled face was wrenched apart, the full eye set staring in the profiled nose. But it was the arms that told him for certain, arms still extended, cross-like, above the empty shape of the honeysuckle, as she marched back up the hill. She made three trips through the darkening air, each trip preceded by the sound of her scythe up above. When Garner finally entered his house, she had stopped coming, but he could still hear the slashing of the scythe among the vines.
He said nothing to Amelia, eating in the kitchen with her and the four chattering children, grateful for the familiar, perky pottery dishes, for the room’s bright chromium sanity. But that night, as they were undressing for bed, in their room that faced the hill, he told her, and they discussed it in low, troubled voices. “It’s about the children that I’m…” said Amelia. She turned out the light, as she always did before she put on her nightgown, although there was no one up the hill to see. “Look!” she said, leaning on the window sill. The shutters that had been used to board up the summerhouse, Garner remembered, had been of the kind with a small half-moon cut out of the wood, and now, in each of them that made up the blank façade, there was a weak spot of light.
The next morning, he was leaning on his new power mower (almost paid for now), and looking at his shaved lawn with a warm sense of satisfaction, when the doctor emerged for his morning tour. To date, his and Garner’s over-the-hedge interchanges had consisted mostly of Garner’s murmured assents to the doctor’s pronunciamentos on the beauties of what lay before them—Bhatta had a way of conversationally appropriating the glories of the universe, and pointing them out to his listener (as if the latter might not have noticed them without his help) that reminded Garner of some ministers he had known. Sometimes, at his approach, Garner, out of a shyness he would have phrased as not wanting to “get too thick” with neighbors, waved and moved on to a distant task, but today he stayed where he was.
“Good morning, Misser Garner.” Bhatta advanced majestically. “I see you have been up early, and worked well.” He waved an expansive hand. “Now comes the beautiful time, har? No fuel bills!”
Garner nodded, paying a moment’s silent tribute to the landscape, in accordance with the doctor’s gesture. “See you put in a fine lot of roses there.”
“Yars. In my country, the cultivation is very simple. Plenty of manure, plenty of roses. But here there is only chicken manure—and very expensive. A commentary, har?” Bhatta smiled broadly.
Garner smiled also—an overcompensating smile of the kind one used with people who spoke a foreign language. He could never get over a feeling, of the worst provinciality, he knew, that Bhatta was not speaking English, even at the very moment he so excellently was. “See you closed up the summerhouse.”
“Yars.” The doctor took another turn at the landscape.
“You, um…you moving your practice up here?”
“I do not have what you would call a pract-ice, Misser Garner.”
“Oh…I see.”
“Um.” The doctor smiled again. “When I come to America to study medicine, I am very young, very enthusiastic. But when I finish, I find after all that I am not sufficiently—assimilated. For me, neurology is only part of a philosophy. I find I cannot sit in an office and take mo-ney for making cures. A little surgical, a little pharmaceutical housework—bang bang, one hundred dollars.” He shook his head. “Unfortunately, I am not happy doing housework, Misser Garner.”
“But you do take some patients?”
“For a while I do many things. I give lectures, I write books, one time I even have a restaurant. But everywhere people say, ‘Bhatta, you have the secret of living, what is it?’ I tell them that it is only because in India, where life is hard, we have to learn early the connection between work and love. I tell them that it is only here, where mo-ney churns butter, that people have time to suffer, because they do not have this connection. But they do not believe me. So I let them come up here and learn.” He turned to look at Miss Leeby, who was standing on a ladder some yards away, clipping a hedge. “When they are grateful, they give gifts. For them it is therapy to give, and therefore it is possible for me to receive.” He turned back to Garner. “You understand how this is, Misser Garner?”
Garner had no immediate answer, but he saw, from the doctor’s expression, that a prompt one would have been a disappointment.
“Ah, you think it devious, perhaps,” the doctor said quickly. He turned away from Garner again, looking downriver with a benignant smile. “The air is so clear in America,” he said softly. “So very, very clear.” He beckoned suddenly toward Miss Leeby, who started obediently down her ladder. “Come and see Misser Garner’s beautiful new lawnmower,” he called. “How that woman works!” he said, sotto voce. “How she loves flowers!”
Miss Leeby came and squatted down over the lawnmower, her work-split nails moving expertly over it, her bun and prim, altar-guild face odd over her man’s shirt, dungarees, and dirty saddle-shoes.
“Is this not a beautiful machine, Leeby?” said the doctor.
“We ought to have one like it.” She looked up at him devoutly. “It would give me so much more time for the roses.”
“Well, perhaps Misser Garner will show you how to run it, one day.”
Garner nodded, half wondering whether the doctor would not suggest the wise therapy of his giving them the mower. Meanwhile, Miss Leeby had wandered over to Garner’s peony bed, and was kneeling there. “Why, you’re letting these choke!” she said, horror sharpening her high voice. “If you don’t thin them, the ants will be all over the buds!” She stretched a compassionate hand toward them, she had already taken a trowel out of a pocket, she was already beginning on them.
“Now Leeby,” said the doctor, shaking his head indulgently. “Cultivate our own garden, please.” He watched her move back to her ladder, chuckles shaking his shoulders, his considerable belly. “A happy woman, Misser Garner. When she first came to me, she was stone-deaf. Only a case of psychological deafness, as her hundred-dollar man took care to tell me.”
Over on the doctor’s driveway, Miss Daria had backed out the old car, and leaving the motor running sluggishly, was stuffing a battered peach basket into the luggage compartment. In the bright morning air, with her black net stockings and very short skirt, with her long curls bobbing above the withered femme fatale make-up and the embarrassingly evident underwear, she looked like a grotesquely debased little girl, but she moved with stolid competence. The doctor squinted at her appreciatively, but made no revelations as to the history of her cure. “Ah, they need me for the shopping,” he said. He waved. “They keep me stepping, those ladies. This morning, a lobster, no less, for the curry.” He caressed his belt buckle. “How they love to spend money, those silly girls!” With a salute to Garner, he started off, then paused. “You are a lawyer, eh, Misser Garner?”
Garner nodded. By a fraction, he felt, he had prevented himself from adding “Yars.”
“Ah, you must take curry with us some evening. I myself have a good many legal problems from time to time.”
Garner roused himself from the rhythmic sloth into which the doctor’s style of address had cast him. “Guess I’m like you, Doctor,” he said, with a grin. “’Fraid I don’t have my own practice either.”
But it was the doctor who had the last word. “Ah, how lucky!” he said. “How wise! You too have learned, then, how destroying it is to admit the connection between money and the work one loves!”
Garner watched him cross his lawn and enter the car. The car moved stertorously down the driveway and slowly past Garner. Bland between his two ladies, the doctor saluted once more. Garner leaned on his mower for a minute, then started rolling it toward his garage. It was not until he had emerged, empty-handed, looking absently about him for the next Saturday task, that he realized that he had not learned anything more about the woman on the hill.
That afternoon he went to the village to do the weekly shopping he and Amelia usually did together, leaving her immersed in preparations for the birthday party to be held for Sukey, their oldest, the next day. Ever since they had lived up here, a treasure hunt had been a traditional part of the children’s fetes; in the dime store he gathered together a collection of prizes of that familiarity imposed by the ten-cent limit—crayons, bubble pipes, harmonicas, string bags of marbles and jacks, packets of green paper play-money with which the children could play store in Sukey’s new cardboard grocery, some jointed plaster snakes, some rubber balls. At the last minute, groaning with lack of inspiration, he raised the limit to a quarter, and added some water pistols, and some pink plastic babies for the smaller girls. Then to the butcher’s, for the order Amelia had phoned in, and at last to the supermarket, where he scarcely needed Amelia’s list. The order was always roughly the same, it seemed to him—enormous renewals on the breakfast foods, the bread and the canned tomatoes (Grade C, the canny list reminded him), boxes and boxes of frozen vegetables (these were no longer an economy except of time, Amelia had worriedly said last Saturday—now that they needed two of a kind for enough servings at a meal), the same list of staples, the two dozen eggs. Not pullets, he remembered, although this was not down on the list, for he had been a good pupil, and he knew now, among other bits of lore, that the cheaper pullets worked out to no eventual good, because of their size. Poor Amelia, he thought, it was not her fault if her prideful instructions on the arts of domestic evasion had become repetitive—it was not her fault if the evasions had always to be the same. “Butter—or oleo,” the list said, leaving it up to him. Yes, perhaps it had better be an oleo week. He recalled the doctor’s phrase about money churning butter. A little dig at America. Where the living is easy, he had in effect said, it was often hard on people. Garner chuckled. He was a sharp one, Dr. Bhatta, even if one could not quite tell whether his manner came from a lack of the language or a way with it. And a nervy one—to deliver that kind of sermon from a seat on the stoop.
Garner had finished his list, pushed his overflowing wire basket to the end of the long queue at the cashier’s desk, and was idly betting with himself that his total would be somewhere between eighteen and nineteen dollars, when he saw, with a twinge, that he was directly behind Mr. and Mrs. Adrian Dee. The Dees were very thin, very old, and very poor—of a poverty that gentility held together like the black string tie that Mr. Dee wore to do his shopping, even in this weekend wilderness of sports shirts and dungarees. “Natives”—that is of the old Hudson Valley Dutch stock, as distinct from newcomers like Garner himself—they were, as cousins, both of a family that had given innumerable place-names to the county, but whose tenure had long since thinned with its blood. Mr. Dee had always worked hard in one of those clerkly jobs the exact nature of which no one ever remembered, other than that it had been in some outmoded business which had finally faded just as its outmoded employees needed it most. They lived now in the smallest house on the river road, a kind of baroque toolhouse, its tipsy turret supported by a wisteria vine thicker than either of the Dees, that was located on the edge of what probably had once been all Dee land. Cornered in this last briar patch of inheritance, Mr. Dee, county historian and fiercest member of the zoning board, upheld the conscience, ancient and present, of the road. For if he loved the town deeply, with the love that one gives only to the place that best knows who one is, he had an even more subterranean fright of the city, with whose approach his delicately guarded identity would no longer be known at all. And the town—and for this Garner too loved it—had been delicate with him indeed. It was aware that he had refused to register for Social Security, and no one had ever dared sound him on the subject of old age pensions. Quietly the town saw to it that he had a place on those important committees to which no suspicion of a fee could be attached; even more quietly it had made his name the sole contender for those still honorable civic duties for which he could be paid. He was a keeper of records, a taker of censuses, a watcher at polls. At one crisis in Mrs. Dee’s health, the historical society had found itself in sudden need of a commissioned sesquicentennial report; at another, the library had found itself similarly helpless without a part-time custodial appointee. But still, altogether, the fees must be very small. Once before, Garner had found himself in the aisle of canned goods, behind the Dees, and had averted his eyes, his ears, from the two pairs of hands, pale as thorns, hovering past the salmon to the sardines, from the two hatted heads bent in secret consultation over the price on the bottom of a tin.
Now, above Garner’s bulging basket and the Dees’ sparsely tidy one, their glances met. “Mr. Garner sir, good morning!” Mr. Dee offered his handshake, ghostly version of one that must once have matched the office with the fumed oak, the black leather davenport, the wine-dark cigars. Behind him, Mrs. Dee, gloved hands clasped, nodded only; she belonged, by both personality and era, to those women who enhanced their husbands’ dignity by echoing their actions but never equaling them.
“Well met, sir,” said Mr. Dee. “On the part of the zoning committee, I was just about to get to you on the telephone.”
Eighty, if he’s a day, thought Garner. Not the man for the latter-day “Ring you,” “Call you.” Or, more probably, no phone of his own.
Mr. Dee leaned forward. “You know, perhaps, of your new neighbor’s activities?” he whispered.
“Well…an unusual ménage, I gather.”
“Oh, that!” Mr. Dee smiled primly, raising a milk-blue finger. “Not our concern, of course. We are not that kind of meddler here. But of late years—I have had to acquire the habit of reading the Times’ real-estate section. Unfortunately, local transactions have grown beyond the local newspaper.” He coughed, remembering gently that Garner, a former city man, must have had a history of just such a transaction, and fumbling in the watch-pocket of his vest, held out a clipping. Garner bent over it. Under the heading COUNTRY BOARD, he read: Come to the house of the Pundit Bhatta. Great white house like castle. Crushed stone driveway. Roses everywhere you look. Build your own guest-house. Indian cookery and wisdom. Health through peaceable work. Contribution, $30 per week.
“I thought you and I might talk to the gentleman, first,” said Mr. Dee. “Explain to him that the tradition, in fact the law of the river road does not permit even two-family dwellings, much less any such communal development.”
“From what I know of him, he’ll do the talking,” said Garner. He felt annoyed, suddenly and sharply, less by the threat to his own property—although the thought of other poor creatures like the woman in the summerhouse, all sweeping the hillside like the seven maids with seven mops, was an unnerving one—than by the humiliated feeling that in this morning’s conversation with the doctor he had in some way been “sold,” been “had.” Some tricky sympathy in himself had responded to the kernel of what the man had said, had led him to conclude that if Bhatta sold nothing but confidence, he perhaps belonged, nevertheless, to that unique and complicated breed which believed in its own wares. He, Garner, had been “taken,” like those who listened to the talented swindler purely out of admiration for the spiel but ended up with the mining shares after all.
“I doubt if we can force the boardinghouse issue, Mr. Dee,” he said. “The road never has, you know. Because of the occasional hardship cases.”
“But it’s not that!” Mr. Dee pointed again to the ad, looking agitatedly around him, as if here, on this Rialto of screaming children, harried mothers, packhorse husbands, there were the very signs of the urban beast that waited, alert for the tip on a house that might be converted, a property that might be acquired as a wedge, a sudden amalgamation that might be made. “Build.” he whispered. “You see what he says right here. Build!”
Back of Garner, the long line murmured, ahead of him the checker shrugged her impatience. “Oh I do beg all your pardons,” said Mr. Dee. With a “No, allow me, dear,” to his wife, who had once again moved a tentative glove, he emptied his basket on the counter. He took a five-dollar bill from his wallet, and paid. “Perhaps I could walk down to see you tomorrow, sir, after church?”
Garner nodded, busy emptying his own basket. Then, as the Dees filed out, he called after them. “Care to wait, I’ll be glad to drop you and your things on the way.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Mr. Dee, “but Mrs. Borden has already been so kind.” He raised his hat, including the checker in his nod, and went out, followed by a clerk carrying the small box of goods. Behind him, Mrs. Dee turned once, and smiled.
Mrs. Borden, Garner thought. That would be the old Mrs. Borden, whose vintage car and chauffeur were often to be seen parked only in front of those grocers who still sold over the counter. After he had lived in the county for a while, he had gradually become aware of some of the old, still traceable bloodlines, and although, in the course of things, he would never become acquainted with Mrs. Borden, or want to, there was somehow, because he did live here, a more than antiquarian or social interest in the knowledge that she had been a Van Schaick, that the Van Schaicks had held on to their land. No doubt she took care of the Dees quite regularly, in many little ways. For, below the stratum of couples like Amelia and himself, there was still discernible, in the bedrock of that very village which they would someday overwhelm, a faint vein of that other antique world of allegiance, still banding together against the irresistible now, still, in resentment or noblesse, taking care of its own.
That night, after the children were asleep, he and Amelia walked up the back hill, he swinging a lantern along the path, she carrying a basket of the toys for the treasure-hunt, which she had placed in the printed cotton bags they kept from year to year. Above them, the wood rose sharply, darkened even by day by an undergrowth of maple seedlings, dogwood, fern, by an ominous spreading of bush and brush whose names he did not even know. Thirty years ago, in the feudal time of gardeners and servants, the hillside had been worked and terraced, a carefully husbanded sampler of grape arbors and cold frames, of neatly curtailed dells. But now, in this suburban renaissance where people bought for the sake of the houses and the land was only extra and ignored, almost all the places along the road backed up against a dark encroachment like this one, where, here and there in the spring, an occasional old planting sparked with stunted fruit, or a sentinel iris pushed its spear through the honeysuckle, the sumac and the grass.
Just back of the house there was a large plateau where the garden officially ended, and it was here, in scuffed, already traditional places—in the hollow tree that held the swing, in the ledges behind the children’s tent, in the dry channels of last year’s squash vines, that he and Amelia cached the bags, not too well hidden, where the children might find them the next day. They looked lovely in the starlight, with their dim paisley scrolls and freckles—like the fey nesting of some wild and improbable bird. He swung the lantern in an arc above them—an efficient department store lantern, bought for those evening hours when he cadged a bit of time to chop wood, to fix the fan-belt on the pump. Silly or not, with its fake oil-lantern shape, it felt good to swing it in this ritual that their years here had already built for them, above these places which for the children were long since familiar and old.
Back at the kitchen door, Amelia stumbled in ahead of him, murmuring that the children had worn her to a frazzle, in and out of the house all day. He doused the lantern, and sat down on the porch steps, looking out at his acre, his back hill. At times it made him feel like an interloper, a defaulter. It came scratching at his door, not like the wilderness, but like a domestic animal, crying to be tended. This year he would have to burn back the brush, for sure.
Sometime before morning, he got up from bed to latch back a banging shutter. For a moment he thought he saw a figure move across the grass and merge behind the summerhouse. He waited, but saw nothing but the movement of the trees, stirring in the pre-dawn wind. He was about to go back to bed when he saw, down the long hall that led to the front windows, the first eastern flake of light. This was one of the privileges that went with living where he did, one dearly bought and seldom used, the privilege of watching the sun rise on the river from his own window, his own realm. He watched the yellow light shake itself into prisms on the leaves of his horse chestnut trees, waited until the red ball heaved itself out of the river at a spot where, if he remembered correctly, he had the right to seine shad. Then he went back to bed.
When Mr. Dee presented himself the next morning, Garner was alone, Amelia having gone to pick up Sukey at Sunday school, taking the others along for a ride. Neither Garner nor Amelia was a churchgoer, but Sukey’s recent request to go had been acceded to at once, lest she be damaged in her natural craving “to belong.” All the other city émigrés along the road were always making these little forays into the art of belonging—for this too was felt to be one of the privileges of living here. Watching as Mr. Dee picked his way toward him, carefully setting his freshly blacked shoes between the mud squelches that winter had raised on the poorly surfaced road, Garner wondered what it would feel like to be he, inhabitant of that lost steel-engraving world into which one had been born with all one’s affiliations incised.
On the doctor’s porch together, a few minutes later, they waited while the door chime sounded somewhere inside. It was an elaborate chime—a four- or five-tone affair.
“Dear me,” said Mr. Dee, shaking his head. He stared up at the cathedral-like architraves of the front door. “My understanding is—someone gave him the place!” he whispered.
A second sound, of steady hammering, blended with the repeated peal of the chime. Mr. Dee blenched. He looked side-ways at Garner’s Sunday morning garb of T shirt, army surplus slacks, and sneakers, dropped his glance covertly to his own dark vest, carnelian seal. “I understand also, however,” he whispered, “that his own credit is very infirm.”
Miss Daria opened the door. Her gaze met Mr. Dee first, approximated him. “Good morning,” she said, in a businesslike voice that went oddly with her waxed lashes, her dazzling blouse. “You’ve come to see about the rooms?”
“Indeed not!” said Mr. Dee, in a high voice. Garner, intervening, asked for the doctor.
“Come in,” she said, unsmiling, and led the way like an usher, through a hallway formed by the first arc of a spiral staircase, into a vast double room, where, in an oasis of furniture set against portieres that divided the regulation sitting room and parlor of such houses, the doctor sat, drinking tea. He had, Garner thought, almost an air of being “discovered” drinking tea. Indeed there was an air of theatrical arrangement, a floridly seedy, “rented” flavor to the whole scene. Garner looked about him, reminded that Amelia would want to know. Kemtone paint, in a number of purposefully intense, but somehow failing colors—pink, orchid, acid green—had been applied to the imperially molded ceiling, the high, cracked walls, and had been wreathed, like tulle around the ravaged throatline of an old beauty, up the underpinning of the spiral stairs. On a hotel-Moorish table, set among several baronial but battered plush chairs, incense bloomed suddenly from a pot, as if it had just been set burning. There was a determined attempt at Oriental mystery, but except for two huge ivory-inlaid teakwood screens, it remained a fatally auction-room Oriental. It was, Garner decided, remembering Miss Daria’s blouse, perhaps “the ladies’” idea of mystery.
“So, Misser Garner, you come to see me after all.”
Garner introduced Mr. Dee, in the latter’s capacity as board chairman.
“Ah, zoning,” said the doctor. His nod was sage, managing to indicate that he drew upon a vast, physicianly stock of unsurprise. He shook Mr. Dee’s hand, looked down at it searchingly for a moment, then gave it back to him. “Good arteries,” he said. “You will probably live forever.”
Mr. Dee, withdrawing slightly, bent down, not without a certain pride of spryness, to detach a bit of dried mud from his shoe.
“Very bad, yars, the road in front of my house,” said Bhatta. “Perhaps now it is spring, the village plans to repair.”
“On the contrary, sir.” Mr. Dee straightened, squaring his frail shoulders. “Last thing we want here is the heavy, beer-truck kind of traffic. Let them go round by the state road.”
“Ah?” said the doctor. “Of course, here in this house we do not smoke or drink. Alcoholism is a very characteristic symptom of Western neurosis. But I do not think it responds to superficial restraints.” He moved a hand toward his cup. “Darjeeling. A very soothing type of addiction. You will join me?” He clapped his hands together, but the sound was barely audible above an increased din of hammering in the rear of the house. He looked sideways at Garner, veiling a brown gleam of amusement with one lowered eyelid. “T-t-t. Those busy ladies.”
“You mistake me, sir,” said Mr. Dee. “We guard only the community, not its, er, personal habits. This is a unique preserve we have here. No coastal railway, one minor factory. On an international waterway, if you please, and dangerously near the city. One false step—why there are garden-apartment interests that watch us night and day. You have only to look at the other side of the river—”
Bhatta nodded, impressed not so much, Garner thought, by the phrase “the other side of the river,” whose weight of local scorn he might not realize, as by Mr. Dee’s competitive flow. He waved a slow hand toward the back of the house. “Well, as my unfortunate ears inform me, we are building our own Eden here. All night Miss Leeby insists on finishing the new bathroom, for the arrival of some guests. We have this evening a double celebration. First, the anniversary of Indian independence. Second, the arrival of my nephew from Allahabad, who comes to study medicine. I will get Miss Leeby to stop and bring tea.”
“No, really we can’t stay,” said Garner. A fluttering endorsement of this came from Mr. Dee. “We came merely to—”
“To be delightful and neighborly, of course. So you must allow me. Meanwhile make yourselves at home—there is material here and there that may interest you.” Bhatta motioned toward the piano, toward a pile of books in a corner, various framed papers on the walls. “Also, I must hear more of this zoning. Like this gentleman, I am also an enemy of progress.” He chuckled, and rose slowly. The plush chair fell backward from him, its withered ruffle exposing its bowed legs, like the comedy sprawl of an old character actress. “Not with his admirable structure, however.” He tapped the back of one of his hands sadly with two fingers of the other. “Adipose. Hypertensive. Probable final history—embolism,” he said, smiling, and left the room, leaving the chair upended behind him.
Mr. Dee moved closer to Garner. “Slippery,” he whispered. Chin sunk in his hard collar, he meditated, delving further, perhaps, into the penny-dreadfuls of his boyhood. The carnelian seal rotated slowly. His peaked face came up, triumphant. “Very slippery article. We’ll get nowhere with him. An injunction, I fear. If we can only find out precisely what his activities are.” He moved along one wall, examining. At an exclamation from him, Garner followed. He was reading a long card, in elaborate but somewhat amateurish print, held to the wall by passepartout. It was a restaurant menu. Under the title NEW INDIA RESTAURANT, a long list of curries followed, using a number of badly spaced different kinds of type. Maharajah Curry (for two) $3.50 headed the array. Leaning closer, Garner deciphered an italicized notation to the right. With Turban $5.00. The list declined in rank, price, and size of print as one neared the bottom, where it rose again with a final entry added in typewritten capitals: Mahatma Ghandi Curry—One Dollar.
“Good God,” said Mr. Dee. “Do you suppose he’s running a restaurant?”
Garner, his mind full of turbans—would they be in the curry or on the customer?—was already standing in front of the next display. It was a very ordinarily framed diploma, granted in medicine to one Pandit Bhatta, from Iowa State University.
“Dear me,” said Mr. Dee. He looked up at Garner, his wrinkles focusing shrewdly. “There is an Iowa State University?” On Garner’s reassurance, his head sank. “Dear me.”
Above an old upright piano there was a large poster drawing of a veiled woman in an attitude of prayer, seated on a pedestal formed by the block letters DESIRES. On the music rack below, a single sheet of manuscript music lay carefully open, its many migratory arpeggios blackening the page. Both poster and music were signed Bhatta.
They had reached the pile in the corner, fifty or more copies of the same book, a small volume, again by the Pandit, published by the Nirvana Press, with a flyleaf of other titles by the same author. Entitled Rose Loves, it seemed to be half poem, half paragraphs of meditation, apostrophes which had, here and there, an oddly medical turn of phrase. A description of the circulatory system swelled into diapason: So the phagocytes swarm in my veins, stars eating stars; the ganglia make little rose-connections along the capillaries of the brain. I rise above. Swung by my dervish blood, I can return to the tree-towns of childhood, suspended above the city’s begging bowls I swing like a monkey from tree to tree.
A folded piece of paper dropped from between the leaves of the book. Garner picked it up, reinserted it, placed the book on the pile of others, and pretended to be studying the ivory inlay in the nearer of the screens, as the doctor entered, followed by the two women carrying the tea things, and a young man, who ran to pick up the fallen chair.
“Ah, Misser Garner, you admire the screens?”
“Yes, very beautiful work.”
“Yars. Very valuable…Miss Daria here wants me to sell them. For three hundred dollars, although they are worth much more than that. Eh, extravagant miss?” Miss Daria, engaged with Miss Leeby in settling Dee and Garner in chairs and passing round the cups, kept her face bent, expressionless. The doctor shook his head at her, including his guests in his mirth. “Probably for…two hundred, she would sell them, that girl!”
It was remarkable how, even as the two women served out the tea, the doctor, with fluently hospitable gestures, maintained the impression that he himself dispensed it. He introduced the young man, his nephew, with a flourish that gave the effect of the latter’s having been created on the spot for this purpose. The nephew, a slender brown young man in neat Western clothes, exhausted his cup in two rapid inhalations, and was quickly served again.
“He is very enthus-iastic,” said the doctor, looking at him meditatively. “Very anxious to get on.”
“Gate on,” said the young man, nodding repeatedly, with the grinning intensity of the foreigner who wishes to make it known that he understands. He rolled his eyes in an exquisite spasm of comprehension. “Gate on!”
The doctor looked at Garner. Again his eyelid drooped. “It is a Pres-byterian college—Allahabad.”
Mr. Dee picked up his cup. “Indeed?” he said, with a vague, reflexive politeness perhaps engendered by the cup. “Mrs. Dee and I are of course communicants of the Dutch Reformed.”
“Of course,” said the doctor, with an equal flexion. At a signal of his hand, the two women departed, followed by the nephew. “Very interesting,” said the doctor, turning back to Mr. Dee. His eyelid lifted suddenly. “Reformed—from what?”
Mr. Dee set down his cup, at which he had but sniffed. “It refers to the Dutch settlers, sir. This is an early settlement. Very early.”
“Ah, ah,” said Bhatta. “And I come to it so late.”
Mr. Dee lifted his chin above his collar. Under his parochial gaze the doctor’s little pleasantry vanished, incense into ozone. “You understand, therefore, the board’s concern over your plans?”
“Plans?” The doctor’s shoulders vibrated to his smile. “They sprout around me like roses—these plans. But I myself—”
From under Mr. Dee’s carnelian seal, the newspaper clip was withdrawn, and laid on the Moorish table. “Yours, sir?” he said. He sat back. A thin pink elated his starved cheek. He coughed once, and then again, and the cough had a dry, preserved tang to it, an old flute long laid away in the musty confabulations of lost authority.
“T-t-t,” said the doctor, studying the clipping. “Always in such a hurry, those terrible ladies.” He chuckled. “A man’s castle is not his house, har?” He leaned forward to place the paper back on Mr. Dee’s side of the table, studying him. “You would like yourself to build a guest-house here, Misser Dee?”
“Garner—” said Mr. Dee. It was a measure of his feelings that he did not append “Mr.,” and of his arteries perhaps, that they held.
“Dr. Bhatta—” said Garner. “Perhaps you’re not yet…aware of the road’s laws on this.” He hesitated, then, squirming like a boy under the tutorial glare of Mr. Dee, he repeated them: no commercial enterprise, no subdivided renting, no double dwellings. “And no additions to existent buildings,” he concluded. “Except of course for members of the same family. It’s a—” He stopped. “Well—it’s a hopeful attempt to keep things as they are.”
“It is a real phil-osophy, this zoning,” said Bhatta. “How lucky for me that Indian families are so large.”
“Not large enough, sir, I think, to include all the readers of the Times,” said Mr. Dee.
“What a peaceable world that would be,” said the doctor. He sighed. “Then, perhaps the Tribune. But certainly, first the Times.” He cast a sudden glance at Garner; it was the practiced side glance of the dead-pan joker, that mere facial cracking by which he chooses to honor a chosen auditor. “But you need not worry, Misser Dee. Miss Leeby is very talented—you should see the new bathroom. But she is not yet capable of a gar-den apartment.”
Mr. Dee stood up. He bowed, and his bow too had a stored flavor, like the cough. “As Mr. Garner would have to tell you legally, it’s the principle of the thing.”
“Prin-ciples,” said the doctor. He studied his hands, as if he had a number of such concealed there. He sighed, looking up at Garner. “The distance from a priori to a posteriori, that is the history of the world, har, Misser Garner? That is what I keep telling the ladies. Love is infinite; therefore its services should be. Then they come running from the kitchen to tell me the curry is finite.” He stood up, turning to Dee. “It is a Christian dilemma also. You have had experience of this, perhaps…in the Dutch Reform?”
“Do I understand sir…?” Mr. Dee’s voice dropped to the whisper reserved for indecency. “That you charge for meals at these celebrations?”
“No, no, Misser Dee. It is like the party some people ask us here at New Year’s. The ladies to bring casseroles. The men to bring bottles. It is the same with us. Only without bottles.” He paused. “Perhaps you will stay today. A special occasion. No casserole required.” He too bowed, with a plastic gesture toward the rear of the house, and Garner became aware that the noise from that region had been replaced by a powerful, spice-scented breath of cookery.
Mr. Dee flushed, and moved stiffly toward the door. In the nacreous light from its one high pane, his nostrils quivered once, membrane-pink, and were pinched still. “I thank you, sir. But Mrs. Dee has something very specially prepared.”
As the doctor opened the door for them, Garner spoke. “Matter of fact, Dr. Bhatta…my wife and I did want to ask you. It’s, er…it’s about the lady who seems to be living in the summerhouse. Because of the children, we were—naturally a bit concerned.”
“Ah, Miss Prager. Yars.” The air coming through the door was balmy, but the doctor’s face seemed to Garner for a moment as it had seemed on their winter encounters in front of the stores—as if it denied any imputation that it could suffer cold. “Tell your wife there is no cause to be concerned,” he said. “Miss Prager will not touch anybody.” His voice lingered on the word “touch,” and with this his glance returned to Garner, its customary air of inner amusement regained.
“Summerhouse!” Mr. Dee pecked past both men and angled his head outside the door. Turning from what he saw, he confronted Garner. His chin sank into his collar. “So you already knew, sir, that we had a case in point there!”
An elderly limousine rolled slowly up to the doctor’s gate. It stopped, motor running. Its klaxon sounded once—not with the tut-tut of present-day horns, but with an “Ay—ooyah” Garner had not heard for years.
“Ah, how kind of them!” Mr. Dee waved a gay, an intimate acceptance toward the car. He nodded stiffly at the doctor. “If you don’t mind, Garner, perhaps you’ll walk me to the car?”
Going down the path, his military gait made it clear that it was not assistance he required. At the car, the chauffeur, stooping, held open the rear door. He and Mr. Dee seemed of an age.
Mr. Dee paused. “From the board’s point of view, I find this unaccountable of you, Mr. Garner. Personally, I can see that man’s engaged your sympathy.” He put a hand on Garner’s arm. “Let me give you a warning my father gave me: Beware of the man who won’t admit he likes money—he’ll end up with yours.” He turned to get in the car, then paused again. “Darjeeling!” he whispered angrily. “If that was anything but plain pekoe, I should be very much surprised!”
Garner watched the car disappear up the road, half amused, half impatient over the way he had wasted the haven of his Sunday morning like a schoolboy dangling beneath the concerns of his elders. He had been interrupted in his soothing routine of those repetitive acts of repair for which his house, blessed incubus, had an endless appetite. Out of habit, he looked at the river, pouring along south as private and intent as the blue skeins one remembered to notice now and then in one’s wrists. How far up it did one have to go, these days, before one came to the real places, short-summered and Appalachian-cool, where a broken window was vital to life, a lantern was a lantern, and the ground woke every morning to its own importance? Too far for him, staked to the city like a dog on a string. This was as far as he could go.
Turning to go, he faced the doctor, who had followed him down the steps.
“He has much mo-ney, this Misser Dee?”
“No. Actually…almost none. The car was a friend’s.”
“It is not his own property he defends then, this little dragon?”
“Well—no.”
Bhatta burst into laughter. Silent chuckles shook his belly, tinted his jowl. “Excuse me, Misser Garner. Really I am laughing at myself—for not yet being assimilated.” He mopped at his eyes with a large ocher silk handkerchief. “So—he is only a proxy dragon, har?” He swung around for his usual appraisal of his own house. His eyes flicked past the summerhouse, and he bent to probe a heavy finger into a rose. “Well…every man has to tell himself some little tale in the dark, har? So as not to really see himself in the mirror the next morning.” The rose sprang back, released. “Even in this clear air. Even an early set-tler.”
Over at the far edge of his own property, Garner saw Amelia turning their car into their driveway. Children tumbled out of the car—his own, and several of the neighbors’—and ran into the house. He waved, but Amelia followed them in without seeing him. And perhaps because she had innocently not seen him malingering here, and because, although he rarely saw his children romantically, he had for a moment caught them aureoled against the silent witch-point of the summerhouse, he spoke in sudden anger. “It’s Miss Prager’s story I’d like to have. And if you please—the facts. I’m not much for metaphor.”
“Really?” The doctor squinted. “I would have said otherwise. But, as you say. Do not blame me if the facts are odd.” He motioned to a bench, on which they seated themselves. Bhatta buttoned the top button of his shirt, shot a cuff, making, as it were, professional corrections to his appearance, and began to speak, with astonishing briskness. “Last year, a patient is very grateful; he gives me a house. Before he sails for Europe, he says to me, ‘Bhatta, between us mo-ney would be an indelicacy. Take from me this house, which I have bought unseen for taxes, near the beautiful section of Brooklyn Heights.’”
Bhatta paused, shook his head mournfully, and went quickly on. “But when the ladies and I go there, I think probably he is not so grateful after all. Not a rescuable house. Even Miss Leeby shakes her head. We are sadly locking the door, so the wind will not blow it into the harbor, when Miss Leeby goes down cellar to look once more at the pipes. And there, in a room at the back, is Miss Prager. Fainted, we think. No—it is catatonic, and malnutrition. We talk with the neighbors; only one old lady is there who remembers. And what she tells us—”
The doctor spread his hands. His voice had become measurably softer. “Imagine, Misser Garner. A family has been mildewing in that house for twenty years. Years ago, there were three people, the father, the mother, the daughter. Lutherans, very strict, very distant. The father absconds from his bank—he was president—taking with him much mo-ney. Later on, gossip says that he comes secretly back, but no one is ever sure. Only the old woman we speak to remembers—the neighborhood is no longer Lutheran. Only Miss Prager, the daughter, is seen, night and morning for years now, coming from the bank, where she has always been cashier. The neighbors know of an invalid upstairs in the house, but not whether it is a man or a woman. There is never a doctor. At night, one light upstairs, one down. Then, some months before we come—a fire in the house next door. Prager’s is only smoked out, but the firemen remove for safety an old person from the top floor. Hugely fat, this person, too fat to move, long hair, and a dreadful sore on the leg. From the description—maybe diabetic ulcer. Even in the smoke, the neighbors say, they can remember the smell from the leg. After that—nothing. They do not remember when Miss Prager stops going to the bank. They do not know her. The house is closed. They do not remember when they no longer see her at all. It is a busy neighborhood, Brooklyn.”
Garner shivered in spite of himself, and shook himself to cover it, to shake himself free of the doctor’s persuasion, which, even in briskness, had a soft insistence, as if on some central metaphor to which his listener must be privy too. The wind had become more positive than the sun—and Amelia would be wanting him in. But he had been a boy in neighborhoods not too far from such as the doctor had described, and he was remembering, with the self-induced chill of childhood, crabbed parlor recluses candled fitfully between curtain slits, dim basement monks whose legend, leaking from the areaways at dusk, scattered the children from the stoops. “Was it…it was the father then?” he said.
Bhatta’s broad lips curved in a sudden Eastern symmetry. “A fact we do not check, Misser Garner. When we bring her home with us she is…” He shrugged. “She carries her cage with her, and we cannot persuade her out of it. To humor her fears, the ladies fix her the little place there.” He pointed up the hill. “But I find the bank, Misser Garner. Natur-ally,” he drawled, “if she has resources, we must find them for her. And what they tell me there, although they do not realize they are telling me it…” Bhatta paused, hands outspread. “Picture it, the same bank, but so modern, so airy now. At each desk, young ladies with hair like brass bowls. It is hard to imagine Miss Prager there. And the manager, in his cage that everyone can see is real—such a new young man, in a suit the color of chicken skin, and a bump in his throat that moves like a bobbin. He knows nothing of Miss Prager’s father. Such a man does not deal by memory. Such a place cannot afford a memory. But ‘Miss Prager,’ he says—‘until a year or so ago?—quite so. There is the Social Security index, the personnel file—and on the card there, yes, a little record of something that was not—quite so.’ Two or three telephone calls, two or three moves of the bobbin, and there on the manager’s desk—although of course he does not see her—lies Miss Prager and her twenty years.”
Bhatta paused again. There was no defense against his pauses, Garner thought with violence—one pushed against them in vain, as one resisted a concert conductor who inexorably took his music slow.
“Banks are so jolly in your country,” said Bhatta. “Like the one in the village here—a little white cottage with window boxes. And when your ladies take the children inside, the children do not hang on their mothers’ skirts. They slide on the floor, and sometimes the manager gives them a little plastic penny bank—the way the baker gives them a cookie. Banks should be like the English bank in India, when I was a boy. A stern place, full of dark whispers, where the teller scoops up the mo-ney with a black trowel, and weighs it on a swinging chain-scale from Manchester. Then, at least, a child can be warned.”
“You mean Miss Prager had embezzled?” said Garner.
Bhatta whisked out his handkerchief again, flirting it as if it concealed something maneuverable behind. “I forget you are a lawyer, Misser Garner. And so direct—like all Americans. Your honest men and your crooks—all so direct. It is a pity. You lose much.” He touched the handkerchief to his lips. “No, I do not mean. Miss Prager was true to the bank. She herself owed them nothing. And alas, they owed her nothing. She had embezzled—only herself.”
Across from them, the back door of Garner’s house flew open, and eight or ten children rushed pell-mell from it and ran up Garner’s hillside. Behind the high rhododendron and barberry, their creamy voices scuttled excitedly, belled by the loud, authoritative birthday voice of Sukey.
“I must go,” said Garner, getting up. “My kids are having a party. They’re up there now, having a treasure hunt. You see—our hill’s kind of their playground. Even if you gave me your assurance that Miss Prager is not…dangerous…I’d hate to think she might frighten them in any way.”
“She will not go near them, Misser Garner. She will not touch them.” The doctor rose too, placing a hand on Garner’s arm. “You see—literally she will not touch anything. She is afraid of her own hands. That is what the bank tells me. One morning they find her at the cashier’s window, in a daze. Her hands will not touch the mo-ney, she says. She is resting her hands now, she tells them. Naturally, what can they do? A cashier who will not touch mo-ney! That must be why she is starving when we find her. She tells us too that she is resting her hands. But actually she is afraid of them. She does not like to touch herself with them.” Bhatta smiled, releasing Garner’s arm. “Pitiful, har? Actually, rather a common form…but developed to the extreme. We have done pretty well with her. Now she feeds herself, and she will work at clearing the brush. But you have seen how sometimes she forgets, and holds her arms?” The doctor cocked his head, listening to the children’s voices. They were chattering excitedly, and syrupy wails came from the younger ones.
“Charming,” said Bhatta. “What is this game they are playing?”
Garner explained.
“But how charming! And what is in the little bags?”
“There’s my wife, coming after me I guess,” said Garner, and indeed Amelia was advancing toward them. Through the opening in the hedge, the children trooped after her and surrounded her. “Daddy! Daddy!” shrieked Sukey.
Amelia quieted her with a gesture. She nodded briefly to the doctor, and knitted her brows meaningfully at Garner. Her face was pink with reproach. “John! The bags are gone from the hill. Every one of them. There’s not one!”
“Somebody stole them! Somebody stole them!” Sukey danced up and down with excitement.
The other children took up the refrain and the dance. Garner looked at his youngest, Bobbie, who was aping the others with improvisatory glee. “You don’t suppose that he—?”
“John, he’s not capable of it. They’ve disappeared. Besides, the children have been with me every minute. We only put the bags out last night. You know what I think?” She took a step toward Bhatta, her mild face dilated. Taking their mood from her, the children clustered round her, staring at the doctor. There was no brood-hen room for them in her narrow tweed skirt, but she pressed them against her with her prematurely knuckled, detergent-worn hands. “I think it’s that person you—you have up there!”
“Thought I saw someone moving around up there this morning,” said Garner. “Before it was light. Forgot all about it.”
“Pos-sible,” said the doctor. “If so, remarkably interesting. Why do we not go and see?” He bent benevolently toward Sukey. “You are really having your hunt, har? Let us go and see.”
“Indeed not!” said Amelia. “You children come back to the house with me.” But led by Sukey, the children had already escaped her, and were running up to the hut. It was clear that the presence there was no news to them. Garner and the others reached them just as they drew back at the railing of the pavilion, their little ferreting noses arrested in uneasy obedience.
The doctor knocked gently at the center shutter, to which a knob of wood had been crudely affixed. Behind his bulbous, stooped form, the blind pavilion, little more than man-high, and puzzled together from old splinters of the past, had the queer coyness of a dollhouse in which something, always on the run from the giant thumb, might be living after all.
“Miss Prager?” said the doctor softly. “Miss Prager?”
There was no answer from within, nor did the doctor seem to expect one. He pushed inward the unlocked shutter, and stepped inside. For a moment they could see nothing except the small, swelling flame of a hurricane lamp. Then he opened a shutter at the back and daylight filtered in, neutering the lamp, winking it into place on a chain hung from the roof-point. Half the rough wood hexagonal table that had once filled the place, paralleling the sides, had been cut away, leaving room for a small pallet. Behind it, on part of the window seat that encircled the room, there was a pile of underclothes, a mackinaw, a pitcher, besides some cracker boxes still in their bright paper. Next to these, a pair of black house slippers with curled silk pompoms glistened unworn, as if presented by hopeful nieces to an intractable aunt. Behind the other side of the table sat Miss Prager. In the current of air between the two shutters, compounded of the hot funk of the oil lamp and the tobaccony damp of wood-mold, she sat motionless, upright, arms spread-eagled on the table, in front of all the little gutted bags.
Sukey cried out sharply, “There it—!” and hushed. But they had all seen the dime-store money, neatly rectangled in piles, the toy snakes and babies tumbled to one side.
At Sukey’s cry, Miss Prager wilted into consciousness. Her elbows contracted to her sides. She was working in a narrow space, the elbows said. Her hands moved forward, picked up a packet of the money and shuffled it expertly, counting it out. One two three four, thump. One two three four, thump, the hands went, moving of themselves. The middle right finger flicked the bills like the spoke of a wheel. At each fifth thump, the spatulate thumb came down. Miss Prager stared fixedly at the lamp, but all the while her hands moved so lucidly that one almost saw the red rubber casing on the middle finger, the morning business sun, glinting on withdrawals and deposits, behind the freshly wiped bronze bars. Beneath her fixed gaze, her hands went on transacting without her, and came to no conclusion.
This was what they saw before the doctor closed the door, and stood with his back to it. He looked over the children and picked out Sukey, who was standing well forward, one arm pressing her small brother to her stubby skirt, in angular imitation of her mother. The doctor beckoned to her, as to the natural leader of the children. And she was, she would always be, thought Garner, seeing his daughter in that quickened outline which drama penciled around the familiar. Here was no city febrile, here was none of that pavement wistfulness of tenure such as Amelia and he, even middle-class as they had been, had known as children. She was more intrepid, more secure, because they had grounded her here.
“She’s got our bags,” said Sukey.
“So she has,” said the doctor, smiling. “She has been ill, and did not know they were yours. I tell you what—suppose you all come back after lunch, har? Meanwhile, the ladies will put all the things back in the bags, and hide them on our side of the hill. That will be exciting, har, to hunt in a new place? And in each bag, for each child—there will be a prize from India!”
And so it was arranged. Garner, following behind Amelia to herd the children inside, saw Miss Leeby enter the summerhouse, and shut the door behind her. Later, after lunch, as he carried the debris of cake and ice cream into the kitchen, while the front of the house rang with the shrieks of blindman’s buff, he saw two figures through the kitchen window, which had a view of Kuyper’s hill as well as of his own.
It was the nephew and Miss Daria, stooping here and there on their part of the hillside, to hide the bags. He barely knew them, that ill-assorted pair, and it could be assumed that they scarcely knew each other, but he found himself looking at the two figures, rounded over in the blameless posture of sowing, with the enmity of a proprietor watching his boundary lines, his preserves. It was not, surely, that he resented the foreigner, the alien. He and Amelia were of the college-disciplined generation that had made a zeal of tolerance. But for the first time, watching these two figures from a ménage that had suddenly bloomed next door to him like an overnight morel, he felt a shameful, a peasant creeping of resentment, almost an abdominal stiffening against persons that different—and that near. Let them keep their difference, but at a distance, he thought. At closer range, a foreign way of life, wrong or right, posed too many questions at one’s own. Questions that he was not up to answering as yet, that he was not interested in having answered. Bhatta no doubt made a career of posing questions at the uncertain, holding out the bait of answers to be rendered at a stiff fee. “Way of life” was a flabby phrase perhaps, thought Garner, but since he and Amelia were conducting themselves as thousands of well-meaning couples all over the country were, he presumed that they had one, although its outlines might be obscure. If their affiliations—he thought of Mr. Dee—were still too vague to bear perspective, he supposed that time would sculp them clearer, doing for the contemporary what it had done for all others. Perhaps his own affiliation to his way of living was not old enough, not deep enough, for self-scrutiny. “It doesn’t do to get too thick,” he muttered to himself. “It won’t do.”
So, when Miss Daria came to the door, with the message that “the Doctor would receive them now”—there was no doubt that the doctor’s ladies thought him the personage to others that he must be to them—Garner relayed the message to Amelia. She came into the kitchen, shunting the children before her, herding them with an abstracted tongue-lash here, a pat on the buttocks there, showing her own physical sense of herself as still their nursing center. All the neighborhood mothers of younger children had this; it was in the tugged hang of their daily clothes, in the tired but satiate burr of their voices, it was no doubt what grounded them.
“You’re coming too, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Thought I’d like to get that drain dug.” He heard his own tone, the plaintive bleat of the weekend householder.
“John—it’s Sukey’s birthday.” She went out the door without saying anything more, but he knew from her voice, her face, what she was thinking, was silently saying to him. “More contact with the children,” she was saying. Fathers must have more contact with their children. All the mothers prated this to one another, and to the husbands, bravely arranging weekend excursions in which fathers had the starring role, taking the briefcases from their deadened arms at nightfall and handing them the babies sleeked from the bath, sidling the older children nearer for advices, ukases from the giant combat world of downtown. “Touch them, put your arms around them more,” Amelia had once said to him. “Get down on your knees and play with them more,” all the conniving mothers said, trying to give substance to these vague father figures that flitted from home at something after seven and returned at something before. And the mothers had other fears, Garner thought, fears that they shared, squirming self-consciously in the naked antiseptic light shed upon them by the magazines they all read, the books by female anthropologists who warned them of momism, of silver cords, of sons turned feminine and daughters wailing in a Sapphic wilderness.
Now that he thought of it, the remarkable thing was that in this modern world—supposedly of such complexity, such bewilderment that one could only catch ideas, precepts, on the run, and hold on to them no longer than the draining of a cocktail—people like Amelia and himself and their friends here, people who would be referred to as the educated classes in any country less self-conscious than America, were actually all the time imprisoned in a vast sameness of ideas. It’s a loose theology we’re in, he thought, a jelly-ooze littered with leaflets, with warnings and totems, but it holds us, in its invertebrate way, as firmly as any codex thundered from those nineteenth-century pulpits from which we have long since decamped. Even the phrase “nineteenth-century,” which he had used without looking at it, as one spent a coin—was it anything more than a part of this, an old examination marker, a paper flag stuck in a bog?
Certainly his father, the lawyer, and Amelia’s, the professor in a minor college, both born in roughly the late eighties, had been holdovers from that century, and he remembered, with fair accuracy, that they had been, if anything, more remote from their children than he, Garner, was from his. He could hear their voices, his father’s, self-sufficient and nasal, spewing authority, and the professor’s, taciturn and weighty, but with the same mantle of importance. That is what these men had had, he thought, a sense of their own importance, a sense of their own identity, solidity, in a world where the enterprise rested with them. When they had entered the dining room, heavily, of an evening, they had brought with them an illusion of a larger, a giant world of combat, but—and this was the point—it had not been an illusion either for them or their wives. And this, thought Garner, this was really what Amelia and the other mothers were after. They were trying to recast the fathers of their children in the image of their fathers. They wanted this authority for their husbands, they wanted them to exude this importance to the children. Poor Amelia, Garner thought, biting his lip, but laughing inwardly, for it was funny, and what could one do, when afflicted with thoughts like these, except get into perspective, or out of it, and laugh? She didn’t want to let the children see, she didn’t want to see for herself that father thought of himself as only a dog on a string.
He slipped out the back door. In a few minutes he’d go up the hill, where he could hear the children, already hard at their hunting. He’d roughhouse with them, get down on the ground with them, anything Amelia prescribed. Through the leaves he could see her watching the play, preserving a certain distance from the doctor’s ladies, who were also watching, and the nephew, who was running and cavorting with the children—he could not be more than eighteen or twenty.
Above them, in its small clearing, the pavilion was quiet, as usual; there was no telling whether or not the doctor had removed his charge to the main house. How incredible it was, in hindsight, the calm way they all had acted, after that one fell glimpse into the private pit of that poor thing in there! For that is what it had seemed like—the tiny black core of the place, the one flame lighting the objects displayed there (he remembered the slippers—like the amphorae set beside graves), and outside it, above it somehow, the white, saved faces of the children, peering over the crater at the clockbound movements of the damned. Then the doctor had closed the door, and immediately they, the conniving adults, had all acted so very naturally—the doctor, of course, with that composure of his which was more than professional, almost artistic, and he and Amelia, acting at once in concert, on another tenet of their theology, the leaflet that said “Never show fears before children. Never communicate anxiety to the young.” In time of atom, in time of death and possible transfiguration, act secure, and they will take security from you. He sighed, and without meaning to, walked around to the front of the house, the river side. The leaflets never told you what to communicate, what to show.
The river was in a quiet mood today, scarcely breathing, one of those days when its translucence gave a double depth to the air and moved like a philosophy behind the trees. He often thought of it as it must have been four hundred years before, when its shores, not yet massed with lives like pinheads on a map, had been hunting grounds for other Indians. Any gardener who went deep enough along here turned up their flints, their oyster shells. It must have moved along much as now, in the aboriginal silence, beneath an occasional arc of bird, the warning plumes of human smoke still countable above the pines. For almost two hundred of those years now, it had passed to the sea only through the piling cumulus of the city, that Babel of diversity so much feared by Mr. Dee. And now the people were returning north along its current—the diaspora of the pins—sailing northward on the frail skiffs of mortgages, wanting to take strength from the touch of the ground, from the original silence. For diversity had at last scared them, scared us, Garner thought, who were born to it. It is a busy neighborhood now, Brooklyn and all the other places, where birth and death are only a flicker of newsprint, and a life can embezzle itself, without a neighbor around to know. So we radiate, but only twenty miles or more at best—for there is still father’s string. But we’re all up here looking for identity, he thought, for a snatch at primeval sameness, and if we haven’t got it yet, if so far we have nothing but the looseleaf, newsprint theology that we brought with us, who’s to say what an emigration, what a man’s century can bring? He took a deep breath, and it seemed to him that the breath contained a moral effluence from the river, a clean draught of the natural beauty and goodness of the world.
So armed, he walked up his neighbor’s hill. Up at the crest, the hunt was over apparently; most of the children in view were squatted here and there, chattering and swapping over their loot. Some of them were waving the tiny silk flags and brilliant kerchiefs that must be the doctor’s prizes. They had certainly started something with their innocent hunt, their bread-and-milk birthday game. Wherever there were children, of course, it was always difficult to avoid interchange, keep one’s distance, but he imagined that Amelia, who managed their social life up here so efficiently, would find some firm way of maintaining the distance. Certainly she, like himself, would want to fend these people off, this extraordinary household whose difference, exhaled like the incense floating in its parlor, had invaded their calm, routine-drugged Sunday and made of it this lurid, uneasy day.
And that there was a fraudulence, too, about these people—he would bet on it, on his sense of something beyond the mere fact that incense always had a certain fraudulence to Western nostrils. If he, Garner, for instance, had seen part of his army service in India, instead of sweltering in the rum-and-Coke familiarities of Fort Bragg, he might at least have been able to judge better whether Bhatta’s rope-trick style of utterance came merely from that other way of life over there, in which Bhatta himself quite naturally believed. But even if Bhatta’s manner was actually only the stock-in-trade of those yogas who coined temples from California pensioners, or conned elderly occult-seekers in Fifty-seventh Street lecture halls, then, according to the storekeepers down in the village, Bhatta must be an unsuccessful specimen of that breed. “Beware of the man who won’t admit he likes money!” old Dee had said, having the advantage of his theology there. It was no trouble to place people, if you had long since been placed yourself, and Mr. Dee was like a clean old piece of litmus paper preserved from that simple experimental era when answers were either pink or blue. Bhatta, an intelligent man, whatever else he was, had tipped to this at once about old Dee, had immediately bypassed him in favor of more impressionable material like Garner himself perhaps, member of a generation that had been schooled so tonelessly free of prejudices that it had nothing left with which to anneal its convictions.
Gaining the crest of the hill, Garner saw the doctor talking to Amelia, who was listening politely, soothed enough, evidently, to have dropped for a moment her eternal watchtower count of the children. He was just in time, too, to see the doctor dismiss the two ladies and the nephew with a lordly sweep of the hand. They came down the path toward him, the nephew skipping ahead. He had one of the little flags in his hand, and he nodded and grinned like a jack-in-the-box as he skipped by, gurgling something in what Garner supposed to be Bengali, or Hindustani, or whatever the boy’s native language was—until the syllables separated themselves in his ear, and he realized that the boy had said, “Jollee good fun. Jollee good.” The doctor’s two secretaries followed behind. Their smallness, their washed out once-blondness suggested, if village rumors about their real status were true, that the doctor might have a certain predilection for type, but beyond this Garner noted again what scant similarity there was between them. Miss Daria’s short, surprisingly heavy legs stumped down the rocky path on high heels, her hair was sleazily girlish on her shoulders, and her dirty satins had the dead-beetle-wing shine of party clothes descended to daytime use. Beside her Miss Leeby, although earth-stained, looked cleaner; she had the inaudible gentility of a librarian whom some climacteric had turned gnome of the garden, and her hands were full of plant cuttings. Both women smiled vaguely on Garner as they passed, and he fancied then that there was a similarity—of smile. These were nun-smiles that they had rendered him, tokens floated down from a shared grace, and shed upon the unsaved. It was clear that the doctor’s ladies, at least, had found their messiah. What was less clear was whether the messiah believed in himself. There were these suddenly contracting glances of his, these graceful circumlocutions about money—certainly he couldn’t keep away from the word, if only to decry it—these heavy sighs over the gap between practice and principle. Were they the honest man’s ennui with the world—or intended to suggest such? Or if Bhatta was a swindler, was there some little subcutaneous grain of honesty that weighted him down? For at times there was certainly a suggestion that, although the doctor might climb his rope-ladder, even pull it up after him in full view of the spectators, at the last moment he could not quite make himself disappear.
“Oh there you are,” said Amelia. “Dr. Bhatta has been telling me about Miss Prager.” Garner picked up Bobbie, who was squatted over some private game in the middle of the path, and set him on his shoulders. Bobbie tightened his knees around Garner’s neck, hooting, then squirmed to be let down. Under Amelia’s quizzical look, Garner set him back on the path.
“Dr. Bhatta has given us a prize, too,” said Amelia. Glancing at it, he saw that it was one of the books that he had seen at the doctor’s house. He nodded his thanks to Bhatta, and slipped the book in a pocket.
“A few prin-ciples,” said Bhatta. “They would interest the little man, har? This Misser Dee?”
“He was more interested in your restaurant,” said Garner. “The menu on the wall.”
“Restaurant?” said Amelia.
“We had, at one time,” said Bhatta. “On Twenty-sixth Street. The ladies’ enterprise.” He smiled at Amelia, with a touch of the manner he had used to cozen Sukey. “All you American ladies have the desire to open a shop, har? The hat shop, the tea shop. You are remarkable ladies.”
“I gather you served both hats and tea,” said Garner.
“Har?”
“I mean, uh…‘Curry with Turban.’”
Bhatta chuckled. “My friend who gives me the house in Brooklyn, you remember. He is such a very smart businessman. A middleman, you call it. He tells them, ‘Package it. That’s what sells. The package.’ So they package it. Forty-two turbans in linen and silk, forty-two glass Kohinoors from Dennison’s. Special trays for the turbans. A special boy to carry, and to wind them on the customer.”
“What a clever idea!” said Amelia.
Clever enough to feint her away from dark thoughts of Miss Prager and the children, Garner thought, and for a moment he too smiled down on her, though fondly, with a touch of Bhatta’s condescension.
“Yars,” said the doctor. “But for our own friends, who have not the tourist mon-ey—I think that we must do something for them too. So we fix for them a nonprofit item.”
“Oh…‘The Mahatma Ghandi Curry,’” said Garner.
The doctor nodded, swaying happily in an undercurrent of the private merriment that seemed to dash him constantly between the joke on others and the joke on himself. “They are very enthusiastic. So, at the end—” He spread his hands. “We have all this Ghandi trade—and no Maharajahs!”
Garner and Amelia smiled, as they were plainly meant to do. It was really impossible not to be warmed, won, Garner thought, by the doctor’s disarming habit of making game of himself.
“Curry—with Loincloth?” said Garner.
The doctor threw back his head in a gust of laughter that set him jiggling from belly to cheek, with a violence almost alarming in a man of his weight. He laughed until his eyes watered; a tear overflowed and ran, mud-tinted, down his dark face. How seldom one sees that happen these days, thought Garner, meanwhile grinning with the sheepishness of the man whose quip has received more than its due.
Bhatta poked him in the ribs. “Now you are making the metaphors, har?” He mopped at the tear, loosened his belt a notch, easing his mirth as a woman might ease her girdle, and bent toward Garner and Amelia, meanwhile gazing absently out over the river, which was spotted with a flotilla of small boats, the larger craft of the professional shad-men who came every year under some immemorial right, and here and there a solitary fisherman, one of the householders from shore, sinking his long-handled net for the first early crab of the season. “You understand, of course,” said Bhatta, lowering his voice with mock secretiveness, “underneath the names and the trimmings—it was all the same curry!”
This time it was the Garners who, after an instant’s gap, exploded into laughter, while the doctor’s lips only curved in the slightest of smiles, his head nodding and nodding, his veiled eyes presiding above their laughter as if he had known all along that he would be able to nudge them toward friendliness. And this was the man’s talent, Garner thought, whatever lay beneath it—this talent for flipping the absurd and the serious over and over like a coin, a shell-game perhaps, at which the onlooker was dazzled, confused, but so warmed and joined that here were the three of them standing together, in a circle together under the gently dropping evening-light—three friends who have kindled, sighed, and lapsed into end-of-day quiet, each looking inward for a moment at the same tender picture, at the faiblesse of man, poor homunculus, with his absurd nets and boathooks, grappling for fish and for flashing non-fish in the salt wave-shadows of living.
It was Amelia who recovered first. “Where do you suppose Bobbie’s gone off to?” she murmured, indicting herself for this moment’s indulgence, in which she had forgotten to keep tabs. For as Garner knew, as she had often confessed, her servantless immersion in the children’s days, her almost never being apart from them, had somehow resulted in her being unable to enjoy without guilt those personal pauses which were every human’s need; it was as if she felt that her constant, tensed awareness of the children was the placenta through which they were nourished still, and at the second she truly forgot them, they would as surely die. “Doctor Bhatta—” she said. “Do you plan to…will you have other people like Miss Prager up here? To live?”
The doctor was looking up in the air. “Such a day!” he said. “Like a magnifying glass!” He pointed to one of the hemlocks, one of the great trees which always seemed to Garner to lift this region bodily out of the suburb into the misty realm of the uncorrupted, the undiscovered. “High as a church, har, that tree? Yet one sees the three twigs at the top.” He turned to Amelia. “Other people?”
“Well, I—I mean…”
He knows what you mean, thought Garner. And now the evasions will come twinkling down again, from the trees, from the air, from anything handy—a rain of silver, of silver-paper, on us, who are so regrettably direct.
“I mean—disturbed people,” said Amelia, bringing out the phrase with an unhappy flush.
“Disturbed?” said Bhatta. “Miss Prager has the importance to be mad—in an age that does not take its mad people seriously. A man splits in two? Shhh—he is only upset. He must learn better how to swallow his century. If not—a very sad case of hic-coughs.” He turned to look at the summerhouse. “And all the time,” he said softly, “there are these sealed-off lives, these pieces of crystal—” He turned back to the Garners. “You have seen her. You would say she is—how old?”
Garner thought of the leathered skin, the dead hair hanging like a ledge from the over-articulated skull. “Perhaps—fifty?”
“And you, Missis Garner?”
“Well…yes…about that.”
“She has worked in the bank, they say, about twenty years. And according to the employment records, the Social Security, there would be almost another thirty before the retirement. She is thirty-six.” He nodded at their stricken faces. “Think of it. She would be about sixteen, when placed in the bank. Maybe a couple of years older when the father absconds. The bank lets her stay on; she is innocent, she has the mother to support. An ordinary story.” Bhatta clapped his hands together. “But from then on…imagine. The father sneaks back; the two women hide him. Sometime later, perhaps, the mother dies. Miss Prager goes back and forth to the bank, night and morning. And all those years, while she is working to keep the secret, the city is taking her secret away. The neighborhood changes; the old neighbors are blown away. Even in a bank, the city blows things away. Who is to notice, to remember, if an old man were to come out of his door, to come out on his stoop, among a hundred other stoops, and sit in the sun?”
The Garners were silent. Then Garner spoke. “You’re convinced it was the father, then?”
“A lawyer could perhaps check better,” said Bhatta. “But as for me, I am innerly convinced.” He looked down his hillside, wider and steeper than Garner’s, but as wild, although here and there old terraces had been brought into view. On the road at the bottom one of the long, red motorcoaches from the city came to a wheezing stop. “Such a pure case,” he said. “Such a classic of money-injury. All for a reason that no longer exists.”
“You’ll…keep her indefinitely?” said Amelia.
The doctor shrugged, threw up his hands. “Someone must. In any case, do not worry, Missis Garner. The ladies will soon build some places on the far side of the hill. Then we will put her there.”
“There’s a very fine state hospital. Quite near by.” At the doctor’s look, Amelia paused, again with a flush.
“And you say she has no resources?” asked Garner.
“None. I am sure.” Bhatta’s tone was almost one of pride.
“Quite the responsibility!” said Garner, and immediately regretted his own dry tone, its edge of disbelief, which the doctor was too subtle not to have caught. Ashamed, he told himself that it was a low envy which made one disparage in others the charity one had not got oneself. For after all, what did he have on the doctor, other than the mutterings of a few shopkeepers and his own carping intuition, both of which might be vulgar sides of the same thing, that fear of the stranger which was worse than vulgar, which college and International House and all that had taught him was the curse of the world? And which was against the very laissez faire of this place, which he had so boasted about in town.
Down at the bottom of the road, the bus moved off, with the familiar air-brake groan that was the only city noise along here, discharging a flood of exhaust gas on the passengers it had left at the stop. There were fifteen or twenty of these, and from the direction of their slow assault on the hill, it was apparent that they were the doctor’s guests. Even at a distance they seemed a strangely assorted group—a periphery of nervous colors moving with brio around a more portly center of navies and browns. As they climbed nearer, Garner thought that they indeed resembled the lecture crowds he remembered from the days when he had had to squire his mother through her spiritualism period after the death of his father. In the center, there were a number of women very like his mother, vigorous elderly matrons, seemly in corsets and Footsaver shoes, wearing the flowered toques he had heard Amelia call “New Jersey hats.” A few sallow young women were with them, and several elderly men. Among these latter, one wore pince-nez attached to a heavy black ribbon, and there were two or three shocks of melodramatic white hair. The color that framed the group was Asian; it came from a mélange of brown skins, orange and yellow scarves, vanilla pongee suits topped here and there with a creamy turban, and the gauzy saris of three interchangeably lovely girls.
The doctor raised an arm, and saluted the people below.
“We must go, John,” said Amelia. “And Dr. Bhatta—I don’t want you to think that we…It’s certainly a very fine thing of you to do.”
“Har?”
“I mean, about Miss Prager.”
The doctor’s glance was on his guests, who had lingered below to admire the garden behind the main house. “You think?” he said, turning, and his face, softened by a question, was for once, almost open. Then it closed. “After all,” he said, looking down the hill, “I receive so much. Possibly for me also—it is therapy to give.” He made them both a little bow, but his smile was pointed at Garner, and one eyelid drooped again, as if he had just offered him something very special, very risible indeed.
“Yes, we must go,” said Garner. “But I do want to…it’s only fair for me to tip you off—” He was careful to make his voice friendly, surprised at how much he wanted it so. “If you do build without consulting the board…I’m afraid you’re in for a spot of trouble.”
“Ah, in that case—” Bhatta’s voice was gay. He put a comforting hand on Garner’s shoulder. “In that case it will be good to have a friend at court.” He released Garner, waved again to the crowd below, and started off down the hill, carefully shuffling his carpet slippers along the narrow path. The grades were not easy to negotiate and the doctor’s slippers must have made it harder, but with each turn that brought him nearer his guests his carriage heightened, his demeanor expanded. A ridge of shrubbery obscured the moment when he met the group, then he emerged, borne along in its chattering center, his tonsure inclining, his arms stretched in greetings papal and serene. At a point just below the little summerhouse, the doctor turned suddenly, waved up at Amelia and Garner, and then went on. The three Indian girls, who were nearest him, stood arrested too, looking inquisitively upwards—three fays, peacock, citron and lapis, fox-printed in gold. One of them said something, giggling, and the strange words, rebutted by the air and the river, traveled upward to the couple on the hill. Two answering chirps came from the girl’s companions, then the three of them turned their backs, and a jingle of laughter wove between them as they ran after the doctor, who was just disappearing around the corner of the main house, his bald head shining well above the clustered others, a dark stamen in the declining sun. It was late that night, long after the slow evening which daylight-saving time had prolonged, when Garner, drowsing over the Sunday paper, raised his head, realizing that he had been asleep and had been startled awake. What he had heard must have been the wheeze of the last bus to the city, the voices and farewells of the doctor’s departing guests. Amelia had gone to bed early, as she so often did these days. “Never can understand why you insist on sitting up,” she had said, kissing him good night, “just to fall asleep in a chair.” He could not have said why himself, unless it was perhaps that by so doing, by this small intransigence against the wise routine for a man who had to get up at six, he was prolonging an illusion, a weak midnight illusion that time, undictated, was his own.
He got up, kneading his eyes, and went to the window. Down the way, near Petty’s, the one faint roadlamp made a crooked pearl in the glass. Apparently there was a moon, from the look of the shadows on the road, but it must be high over the house already, and not large. It was the winter moons up here that were enormous, riding so close and intimate in the black air that the cornea felt itself naked against them. He remembered the first one of these they had seen their first winter up here—the great disc rising heavily from the water, as if unseen hands were having trouble pushing it upward, then the white path-shine on the water, and Amelia standing at the window, saying, “Look John…look! It’s coming in the window…If I opened my mouth…it would float right in.”
Well, they’d come a long way since then, ten years, and his moments of such lyrism were not many. Before him, in the light of the single reading lamp under which he had fallen asleep, the house stretched, doubled in the gloom, but still such a large house—the sitting room where he stood now, the parlor, the dining room, all furnished with relics of both their families, and looking almost regal in shadows that obscured the raffiish touches of the children, the farm-size kitchen where they all really lived, the study off the hall. In the half-light, with the little Victorian effects with which Amelia had placated it here and there, it was true that its ancient purpose sometimes revealed itself too starkly, and it stood declared for what it was, a home that belonged with those feudal servants, that stipulated, at the very least, one of those vanished households of accessory spinsters and aunts. At these times, it was true, sometimes at the very moments when he and Amelia and their friends were congratulating each other on their living in a place where one did not have to keep up with the Joneses in the usual way, he had a sense of unease, as if the grain of their lives had too suddenly appeared, revealing them all in another silhouette—keeping up with the shadowier Joneses of the past.
Late voices came again through the night—the remaining guests of his provocative neighbor, no doubt—he could hear one of the women calling the dog. “Lili…Lili…come on in, Lili…” the voice said. The air of America is so clear, Bhatta had said that morning—so very, very clear. Certainly the man had a passion for clarity, or else an irony for it—it ran through his conversation like a motif. One wondered what he was like at home, when not playing to the gallery. Perhaps he was a man who could never be at home—a strain on anybody, that. Hindu, Brahmin, whatever he was, with his hybrid education there would still be a kind of Eurasian sense of values—no harm to that, perhaps good. But if so, Bhatta would be sure to make capital of it. Yes, that would be his pitch, was his pitch. “We are none of us at home in the universe, lads—lords and ladies. I can show you how to handle that better than most. Meanwhile, let us share our amusement at our dilemma. And let us also share—” No honorarium to be required, of course. But, the universe being what it was, it was probable that the secretaries would pass the plate.
Garner left the window, hesitated with his hand on the switch of the lamp, sat down again in the chair. Yes, that could be how the cult might be formed, the coterie. He found himself thinking of such, not this one, but some other suited to oneself—some warm little member-world, banded together in a decameron of talk.
Stretching in his chair, he felt the small book in his pocket, the one Bhatta had given Amelia. He took it out, idly thumbing through it. This was for the gallery for sure, the power of print for the flowered toques. It was not in these fluent pages that one would find out where, in the happy slang phrase, Bhatta “lived.” He read on. Stone in the grass, I must examine you very carefully. You may be a piece of the North Star, cast upon the grass. No, not here. He snapped the book shut. A folded paper fell out of it, the same he had replaced in the book at the doctor’s this morning; Bhatta must have taken the same copy from the top of the pile. He hesitated; in general, though fallible, he’d managed a normal decency about such things. But probably it was only a grocery list, or perhaps the recipe for that inimitable curry. And in Bhatta’s case—case was a word that might well be used; the man himself went out of his way to present himself as a brief full of tantalizing pros and cons, teasing one to make of it what one could.
Unfolding the paper, he saw that it was a letter addressed to Bhatta. Dear Dr. Bhatta, the letter said, I beg of you not to say that I must stop wearing my glasses at meetings or else pay the $700 fine. What I paid last time exhausted my funds until next quarter, and the family will not consider it. They will not realize what the meetings mean to me. I know that you do not agree about the glasses, but the truth is I cannot get about without them. I ask you please to reconsider. If you will ask Miss Daria to write and say I can come to the next meeting, it will make me very happy indeed. The letter, typed, was signed tremulously, almost indecipherably, in ink. Then there was a typed postscript: At the very next quarter I will pay what I can.
So, thought Garner, so. So that’s where Bhatta lives. The old son-of-a-bitch. Underneath all that diversionary laughing gas, or tear gas—or rather, some formula that managed a sparkling precipitation of both—there had been only something as bare as this. If the letter had said “my crutches” for instance—well, one had heard of neurotic symbols which a doctor might reasonably be pressuring a patient to discard. One had heard also of the psychiatrists’ disarming emphasis on the importance—to the client, of course—of the latter’s psychic need to make payment. But eyeglasses! The letter postulated some sad fool, an old fool perhaps, with the aching, grave-humble naiveté of the old. Or one of those sclerotic old business eggs, who addle without warning. It would be a rich simpleton, or one at least with access to some money. No one knew better than Garner, a lawyer, how wistfully ingenuous the sudden simplicities of the rich could be. The worst of it was that Bhatta had at no time, in no sense given any of this the lie; if confronted he was quite capable of roguishly pointing this out. One taught the therapy of giving, quite naturally, Misser Garner, to those who could.
Garner looked at the letter again—it was a definitively good address, midtown Park, engraved, and on thick bond. The signature, three-named, was shaky—William Something Bertram, or Benthan; added to the letter, the humility of the postscript, it did suggest some old gaffer hanging to the fringe of his family, of the world, some poor old mottled pear that would not fall. A person sick with nothing more than loneliness, perhaps even persistently healthy (if Bhatta had found nothing better than the glasses to fix on) and driving his family crazy, as such people often did. Wanting nothing more than still to be involved, to be one of the member-world.
Garner stood up and pushed the book well back on a high shelf, the letter inside it. He’d been right about the fraudulence then—from the first. It was ugly to find oneself so handily corroborated. And to have been one of the simpletons, too. He had never examined the term “confidence man” for what it said, for what it shouted plain. He had merely lightly appraised Bhatta in the humorous terms of the sellers of gold bricks, of shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. Not as trafficking on the frozen-out, on people who only wanted to come in by some fire, to belong. No, this is too real, he thought. It sins somewhere, he thought, bending his head to an obscure inner heat, surprised at his own use of a word from which the leaflets had long since emancipated him.
He turned out the light, and in the darkness the moment of the three of them by the river suddenly formed again, as if he had turned on another lamp that shed the triple-enclosed, mauve light of dusk. He saw the three of them again, he, Bhatta and Amelia, in that pause so warmly joined, laughing there by the river. Wasn’t that to be weighed in the scale for Bhatta? Or was it to be taken out of context as one of the good mysteries—exempted from its origin as was the true-love poem of the poet who frequented whores? “Ah, the hell with it,” he said aloud. To hell with it, whatever it was—living in the country, the long Sunday—whatever had made him feel the way he did. As he went up the stairs he still tasted it—acid, greensick—the feeling of the man who had been proven right.
In bed, he could not sleep. It was that over-alert, hypertensive hour of the night when the tireless free-associational sheep ran on and on, one idea carrying another’s tail in its mouth, and still another part of the mind hallooed behind, catching, concluding, with a fake brilliance from which nothing ever could be salvaged the next day. The sheets were cool; he could be grateful for that, for in another few weeks, although the thick-ledged downstairs areas of these old houses would still be damply chill, the dormered top stories filled slowly with a summer-long hot must, through which one moved weakly, cramped for breath, regretting the flesh on one’s bones. Someday, when he had the cash, he would insulate. Yet, even as he lay here, flinching before the anticipated river-valley heat that would arrive, sometimes in June, inexorably in July, he felt a submerged pleasure at knowing how the summer nights would be here—the hot pall under the eaves, the languid spiders woven suddenly out of nowhere—each year. It was a satisfaction to a man not brought up to houses or the firm groove of the seasons, to be able to say, sighing with the heat, that it was this way every year. His hand was in his grandfather’s; his grandfather was saying, “Tomorrow’s the twenty-eighth of August. Tomorrow the locusts will be here.” It corroborated something. It—
He got up, swearing under his breath, and hunted for a cigarette. If his mind hadn’t circled him back to that word he could have been asleep by now, and he had, he had to get up at six. Noiselessly, he crossed past Amelia’s bed and opened the window from the bottom, so that the drifting smoke would not wake her. No moon just now. One sound, the faint tweaking of the river, heard only if one knew it was there. Nobody plying the hill tonight. He crept back to bed and sat listening, smoking. No sound from Miss Prager, the small and sealed.
Curious that he did not believe that the doctor had lied about her, even in the light of the letter downstairs. He was a man who would not bother to lie. Rather, he was a man who had grasped the mordant advantages of telling the truth as he saw it—aware that he told it well, and that a peculiar vision was a prize for which people would pay. Tapping his paradoxes like a set of metaphysical tumblers, he would make a coaxing music that set his audience agape, and their pockets too. And always careful to remind them of the great paradox that was money, such a man, coming upon Miss Prager, that “classic of money-injury,” might carelessly keep her to remind himself.
Creaking, the river moved against the land. Is all the evidence in, in? There was something that Bhatta had said—Ah, you think it devious, perhaps…from a priori to a posteriori—the history of the world…how wise of you, Misser Garner, not to admit the connection between money and the work one loves…banks should not be so jolly…Miss Prager has the importance to be mad.
Garner put out his cigarette and lay back, tightly closing his eyes. No, there was something else—but with a man like that, the evidence would never all be in. Lucky for himself, no doubt, that he had found that letter—not having Mr. Dee’s prescience about tea. For Bhatta’s tunes were catchy indeed. His phrase for Dee, for instance. “The proxy dragon,” he had said, smiling—and there, for all time, was little Dee, fixing his small, gorgon face against the future, advancing like a lone stockholder waving a proxy from the past. And every now and then, in an aside as Elizabethan as the doctor’s handkerchief, there was the deliberate trail of a phrase pointing the listener to Bhatta himself.
Garner sat up, straining forward. The doctor had been above him, on the steps. Behind him, the river lay like a thick darning needle; in front of him the wind had been making its shot-taffeta changes on the lawn. Once more the yellow kerchief whisked; the heavy finger probed the rose. “Well…” said the doctor’s voice, “every man has some little tale he tells himself in the dark, har? So as not to really see himself in the mirror the next morning.” Or had it been—so as to be able to look at himself in the mirror the next morning.
No matter, thought Garner, leaning back on the pillow; it was Hobson’s choice. For, once you saw how much the man might want to be caught, you saw much indeed. “Perhaps for me also it is therapy to give.” How delicately, satirically he could have been showing them the irritating little wound of honesty that held him up by the heel! For then the storekeepers would be right, in a way—as, no doubt, storekeepers, until the last trump, always would be; Bhatta was not a successful swindler. Devious man that he was, it might be that life had withheld from him only the power to be consistently so. It would be no wonder then if he talked so much of clarity—this hoist illusionist who could not quite make himself disappear. And Miss Prager could be the tale by which he hung. Suppose that, a swindler, he still set a secret table for one of the swindled, for Miss Prager, hoaxed by someone greater than he? Suppose that he kept Miss Prager, for whom no funds would come next quarter, and this was the tale that he told to himself in the dark?
Now certainly I should be able to sleep, thought Garner. But time passed and he did not. Lying there, he listened to the river moving against the land. I’m just past forty, he thought, and my own evidence is already more or less in. What would it be like for him and Amelia if they lasted to eighty, for people like them who, leaning against the leaflets, might find that they leaned against wind? Or did age always come, stripping the critical function with gentle narcosis, making of any past, because it was the past, a good backbone? He turned on the pillow. Lucky Bhatta, lucky Dee. Who each has his tale for the mirror, and therefore no doubt sleeps well. Less lucky Garner, who has so many tales to tell himself for the daytime—of Amelia, the house, the children—but for the six o’clock mirror has none.
After a while he looked over at Amelia, a dark shape of comfort sleeping, but it was the hour past love, the courtroom hour of the night, when the soul, defending, shrank to the size of a pea. So, after a while, when he had reached that black level below pride, where one need no longer pretend that one was not pretending, he began cautiously to tell himself a tale he might once have had.
He was walking along the river, according to the tale, and he was very near the place where he belonged, the real place—in fact he had only been away from it a day. It was just before dawn, and along the opposite shore there was a narrow stencil of light. He was up before it, because it was natural to be so when one worked the land, and he was wearing a thick sweater, because this was a short-summered region and the mornings were Appalachian-cool. Before him, as he walked, there was a whiteness along the grass that was sometimes hoar, sometimes the wind at the underside of the blades, but whatever the season, he always thought of it as the waking power of the ground. It ran ahead of him, leading him to the real place, and when he got there he stood for a moment, as he always did, standing on the land. This was the moment of safety, of a wholeness something like the moment after love. For although he was up a trifle earlier than the other people, he knew that they were somewhere nearby, and that they would soon be up and about with him in the simple member-world. All day long he and they would be working, in a nearness past need for arranging, and the land and the river worked with them, weaving them all the good backbone.
This was where the tale always ended, whether it failed him or brought him through until morning. But tonight, just before he came to the end, there was a sound that brought him suddenly back to the real world outside. It was the sound of something soft brush-brushing across the grass, and at first, thudding with night-terror, he thought it was the whisp of a scythe. Then he heard, blended with it, the light scampering of an animal, and breathing, he took it to be the sound of someone walking a dog—the dog scratching here and there on the gravel, and behind it, the shush-shush, soft and irresolute, of carpet slippers on the grass.
He stole to the window again, but nothing could be seen on the hill. Telling himself that the night made special fools, he crept downstairs and stepped outside his door.
The doctor was standing still, his back to the stone urn in the center of his moonlit lawn, looking up at his house. His dog stood behind him, its eyes glinting like glass, waiting as it often waited during the doctor’s morning inspections—although it was always the women who walked the dog. Whining now, it tugged with its muzzle at the hem of the doctor’s coat. The doctor put a hand back of him to quiet it. “Eh Lili…shhh Lili…” he said. He had moved to face the hill, and was looking up at the summerhouse. Still the dog whined, bracing its hind legs in the direction of the gate, and at last the doctor turned. “Poor Lili…you want to take me for a walk, har?” he whispered, and the river brought his words to Garner’s ear. “Better take me, har. Better take your old man for a walk.”
At the word “walk” the dog bounded, ran a few paces toward the gate, then stopped to look over its shoulder to be sure that the doctor followed, and in this way, with the dog alternately trotting and checking, the two of them came to the gate. The moonlight brought out the ungainly lines of the old bitch and the fallen-in silhouette of her master, his head prolapsed on his chest above the downcast belly, the long coat dribbling behind him like a nightshirt, making of him that poor show which any man might be at this hour, alone. I ought to get a dog again, thought Garner, hankering suddenly for the old mongrel, dead of age, whom they had not replaced last year. Nights like this, when a man can’t sleep, he can walk his dog. Or the dog can walk the man.
Outside the hedge, the dog trotted north, along the road toward Garner’s house. Garner leaned into the shadows of his doorway, but the dog, head to the ground, nosed him out, snuffed familiarity and dismissed him, and intent on some trail now, trotted on. The doctor raised his head, and in the thin light of the roadlamp the two men looked at one another. By day, it was always the doctor who spoke first, and Garner, taken at a loss in his shadows, awaited the florid greeting. But Bhatta said nothing. Gravely he nodded, and again, and the nod was like a touch. Then, doffing a hand against his temple in mute salute, he bent his head and moved on.
Garner listened to the sound of his shuffling, soft and hesitant and human, until it melted into the dark. It is the sound that ends the nightmare, he thought. Not the sound, necessarily, of mother or nurse or brother. Just the sound of other, of someone awake too, and dealing with the dark. A warmth crept up his throat. That the old man had not said anything, he thought—that was the thing. That such a man, so wedded to talk, should have signaled only, as between two who shared the freemasonry of mirrors, and have said not a lingering word.
Sleep hit him then, a dead salt-wave, and only habit brought him back up the stairs, to his bed. Sinking down, he doffed two fingers against his temple, in the general direction of north. Let the night make its fools, their gestures, that daytime might well rescind. It was a good thing. Let it. It was a good thing—to have a friend at court.
In the red-black landscape behind his lids, he sank down, down, watching the retinal images—tiny black dots circled with red—that swarmed ceaselessly upward only if he did not quite look at them, of whose origin he had wondered about since a child. They swarmed on; they were pinheads, they were people bent over the hillsides in the attitude of sowing; they were pulling salvation like turnips from the soil. Among them was a man, not Garner, somebody else, poor homunculus, and he was bent over too, hugging his image, his foolish tale. As he bent, his string dragged behind him, but he did not see it, for his chimera was strong. He was building a world, a little antique world of allegiance, where he would be hailed by name on the main street, neighbored in sickness and until death, and there were roots for the commuter’s child. The people around him pretended not to see the string, for they had them too. Even as the fences went up, same on same, and houses burst upward like sown teeth, same on same, he and the people pretended, for they were building themselves into an antique perfection, into that necklace of fires upon the brotherly dark where once life burned steadily from farm to farm to farm.
Watching them, Garner slept. His knees curled to his chin, like a child who had world without end before school, and in his dreams he smiled too, a child snailed in sleep. All around him were the unguided missiles of sleep, of dream, but he flew between them, above them, with his story. Across his still face the night moved at bay, harmless against this impermanent marble, so intact and warm. Whatever there was in the mirror, he would not have to look at it until morning, not until morning, world without end away. Until morning.