2

At the head of one of those many lakes with Indian names in the Cherry Valley is a small town named Silverton. In winter it is buried in snow and isolated from the world; in summer it is hot, but its life enjoys an annual resurrection through the economic grace of the twenty-five or thirty families that come to occupy the large houses set on the sloping lawns above the lake. That, at any rate, was its situation in the first thirty years of this century, and I presume that today it is much the same. I have not been in Silverton for many years. In 1930 my father’s house on the lake was put on the block, together with other tangible remnants of the fiasco that was his life, and after that I had no reason to return. I was nineteen years old, I had moved far away, I had to use my summers to earn money, and I had by then drifted loose from the friendship that, for almost ten years, had been my summer life.

The beginnings of that friendship, how we first came together and came first to live so deeply in one another’s lives, elude me. They are lost in undifferentiated recollections of hot, insect-singing days and cooling nights, of thunderstorms over the lake and the tops of trees swaying heavily in the wind and meadow grass laid flat to the earth by rain, fragments of children’s parties—sticky hands and crepe paper and grass stains on starched white linen, of children’s lives when they are lost still in the giant lives of parents. Of those beginnings, nothing now coheres, but dissipates itself in memory like wisps of music or of smoke vanishing on wind. Being so near in age and our three houses standing side by side, Milly and Dan and I must always have been together, from our earliest years, yet nothing of the early years now shapes itself into event. Nothing coheres until that summer when Freddie entered, but from then on, in general outlines and in much of the detail, it is nearly all formed and clear to me.

Freddie was the outsider, a boy from the town, the son of a dentist who had many children, eight or nine. In a vague way, as summer people are of townspeople in a place like Silverton, we must have been aware of Freddie, but on a June day in 1924, he became, as it were, one of us. We were walking in a narrow, curving ravine between hills, along the dried-up gravel bed of a springtime stream. Birches grew up from us on both sides, their scarred white trunks thin and bright in the sunlight, leaves shuddering silver-green. There was a commotion of noisy birds above us somewhere, and we paused to look up through the patchwork of leaves, and then, as we stood together, three things happened in quick succession. Something whizzed through the air and up into the branches above us, there was a great fluttering in the branches and a crow plummeted to the gravel at our feet, flailing its wings, and Freddie Grabhorn came running around the curve in the hill ahead. He stopped suddenly when he saw us, stared and waited.

We stood with the dying bird between us, watching the final feeble efforts of its wings. The bird’s head was bloody where a stone had hit it, and the wings spread out slowly in the sun, on the clean gravel, like a fan of jet. We were silent. The wind stirred a feather. Beside me, Dan sighed deeply.

We looked up at the boy. He flicked a slingshot against the leg of his overalls with exaggerated idleness, and his eyelids flicked. Light leaf shadows wavered on his face like a mysterious mask and, perhaps, made that round and somewhat heavy face seem more sullen than it was. Then he smiled uneasily. Milly stepped round the bird and said to him, “Let’s see.” He handed her his slingshot, and she turned it over in her hands. “Show me how?” she asked.

He took it from her and when he had found a small round stone that pleased him, he placed it in the oval patch of leather that hung from the forked wood, pulled back on the rubber strips, and let the pebble fly up into the trees in an easy arc. Then he handed it back to Milly. Dan and I stepped round the bird and stood beside her.

“Aim it at something,” Freddie told her.

“The top of that tree,” she said, and aimed, and missed. She smiled at him, as if to apologize for her incompetence, and tried again. She missed again, and tried a third time. I said, “Let’s see it, Milly,” and she gave it to me. Dan and I studied it.

“Haven’t you ever seen a slingshot?” he asked us, and when Dan handed it back, he gave it once more to Milly. “You want it?”

“Oh!” she said with suppressed pleasure, but hesitated, her hands at her chest.

“Go ahead. I can make another.” He put it in her willing hands, and then he said to Dan and me, with a quizzical smile that seemed almost to say he was testing us, “Want to make some?”

“Sure!” we said together.

He dug in his pocket for a large knife with brown bone clasps. He opened its largest blade, sharpened to a blue gleam. “Come on then.”

We found a cluster of maple saplings that Freddie said were right, and we cut off three forked branches that he said would do, and while, under his instruction, we peeled the bark and notched the branch ends with the single knife, Milly practiced her aim. We sat in the sun on a grassy slope, and soon we began to hear her stones bouncing with light thuds off the tree trunks she was hitting.

“We need an inner tube, and some leather, like from an old, soft shoe, and some strong twine,” Freddie said.

Before we started back to my father’s house, where we could find these necessities, we stood around and watched Milly in the ravine. “Now I’m going to get a bird,” she said, and as she looked around in the treetops, her lifted face was thin and tight with determination. We waited quietly. Freddie put one hand cautiously on her shoulder and pointed to direct her eyes. She took aim, the stone whizzed, there was a noisy fuss in a tree, birds scattered in the sky, but no bird dropped. We waited again until a number had once more assembled in the branches. Then Freddie took the slingshot, fitted in his stone, aimed with one eye wickedly closed, and let fly. A threshing about in the leaves, and then a bird dropped heavily to a slope of hill and rolled over and down a little. I felt Dan jerk in a spasm of sympathy, and “Ah!” we all said, and again, but from a distance, we watched a glossy crow stretch its wings and fold into death; and going back, and always after that, there were four of us, not three.

The summer of 1924 became a summer of constant rain.

Freddie and I were thirteen, Dan and Milly twelve. I have observed since then the fickle shiftings and alterations of all friendship among children, how a group of children, small or large as it may be, is never long equal and unanimous. Three always push out one, and cruelly; four one, then two; then presently the whole alignment of loyalties changes again. This is the normal pattern, yet it was never ours, and ours was to be the consequent loss. Freddie merged his life in ours with a hungry passion, and if he had friends in the town or a life there, he hardly told us, and we, who had no curiosity about the village, did not, I suppose, ask. Our friendship and our life were what he wanted, and he wanted them from all of us, not from only one or two. He wanted, perhaps, not us at all, but what together we represented for him: the alien, the urban, and, through village eyes, the rich. He owned a bicycle which he had earned the summer before by delivering a city newspaper up and down the lake shore, and almost every morning, as the leisurely life of the lake houses was just beginning, Freddie would have finished with his papers and appear for the day. He had had a job as caddy at the golf club, too, but now he gave that up; he told us that it took too much time.

Milly had a special, feminine respect for his country wisdom and for his array of devices, of which the slingshot and the big knife were only the first two; and she welcomed him: if he felt some hunger to be one of us, she felt some reciprocal hunger to have him. Milly’s mother was dead. She had two brothers who were eight and ten years older than she, and a father, Gregory Moore. The brothers, triumphant young gods from Princeton who drove a Marmon and were perpetually in the center of those sporting and social activities which comprised adult summer life on the lake, were without interest in her, and that summer Gregory Moore almost never came to Silverton from the city, even for week ends. He was a man in his mid-forties then, with black hair turning white, and hot black eyes, and a remote speech and manner, so abstractedly gentle that gentleness was not at all the point; a romantic figure, if only because popular opinion held that for the seven years since his wife’s death he had lived in that death entirely, his grief and his sense of the gross injustice that had been done him, transformed into energies fiercely concentrated on his Albany law office. He opened his summer house for his children, and let the management of it rest solely with a housekeeper, Mrs. Colby, the capable, good-natured widow who likewise managed his household in the city. Mrs. Colby was professionally tolerant of us, and we had the run of the Moore house in a way that we did not have of our more conventionally organized houses. This laxity was no doubt arranged by Gregory Moore’s orders, issued perhaps from some vague feeling of penitence, since he gave Milly little besides his houses. Once Milly showed her friendship for Freddie, Mrs. Colby accepted him, too, with the same placid tolerance. In every real sense, of course, she was totally indifferent to all of us, and that did not matter—was, indeed, our advantage, except that most particularly she was indifferent to Milly. Or should I say that Milly alone needed something more than indifference from her?

And therefore Milly bound us, held us to her and held us to one another, and in Freddie, with his different motives, she found her perfect ally. I am wrong if I seem to suggest that either of them so early in life made any real calculations about friendship (although we later learned there was at least deliberateness in Freddie), but I am as sure that they both felt equally strong although different needs as I am that those early needs grew into their later, calculated, enmeshing deeds.

Milly dressed like a boy then, in dungarees or, more frequently, in shorts like ours, and a striped jersey. She insisted to Mrs. Colby that her straight blond hair be kept cut ruthlessly short, almost like a boy’s, with a fringe of it always falling across her eyes, but since this was not unlike the prevailing fashion among young women, it did not seem as remarkable as it was. She had serious, gray-blue eyes, and even though her white skin turned golden tan, her face had the lean look of the underfed with, sometimes, a strange translucence. She was a small child, small-boned, shorter than most girls of eleven and twelve, and thin besides; yet physically she was inexhaustible, the most able of us, the last to rest, and of a perfect grace. She held her head high even then, and she had a kind of presence, an authority that had nothing to do with her sex. She never argued or quarreled, even then, and when the rest of us began an argument, she had a way of taking charge and shifting the ground of discussion to gain a frozen peace between us.

Do I read this back into an unwarrantable past? I think not. Listen—That summer the rain became incessant, days and nights of it together, and trees and shrubs grew with a sickening vigor, crowding the shore and the houses, defeating gardeners, and gardens turned into fecund, unflowered jungles, sable green in the rain, and, when the sun broke through, steaming with damp, cloying smells of sodden earth and mould. We spent the rainy hours in the big attic of the Moore house, an enormous area under a multishaped roof, containing among other relics that provided distraction, a spinning wheel, a series of large plaster heads of German composers, a wood-burning set, a collection of naval flags, and, most remarkable, a suit of armor. At the center, the attic was high enough to support a hoop through which we could toss baskets, and for a week we amused ourselves with an abandoned volleyball net that we succeeded in stringing up from the uncovered beams. Yet as the rain continued, we grew irritated by our confinement, and after increasingly desultory play, we would settle down gloomily at the low windows just above the floor, as if they were squashed down by the ends of the steeply slanting beams, and stare out with desperate boredom on the drenched world below, the leaf-crowded, swaying trees, the naked, skeletal piers and diving floats, looking so impermanent from above, and the rain-glazed, empty gray expanse of lake that yielded us nothing.

Then one week end toward the end of the summer Gregory Moore appeared, and he brought Milly a present—a manual on the collection of butterflies and insects, a net, and a cyanide jar. This was a glass cylinder with a screw top, and it brought death without mangling. A half inch of gray powder covered its bottom, and over that was a layer of porous plaster which kept the powder in its place. We were told not to breathe over the jar when it was open, and after Milly’s father demonstrated the fascinating effectiveness of the jar with a fly he caught, further admonition was unnecessary. The fly died with a most durable and dizzying leisureliness, a lesson in finality. We spent a happy day with flies alone.

For a few days the sun held, but instead of swimming at last, we caught grasshoppers and June bugs and crickets and various butterflies. There were some large sheets of heavy paper in the Moore attic that we had planned to use for mounting, and it was over these that Freddie and I quarreled and began to fight. I do not remember how this came about, but I suppose, because of its size or condition or some merely imagined advantage, we both wanted the same sheet. Dan was there, but Milly had gone below for a moment, and Freddie had just pulled out the best sheet and given it to Dan, whom, I suppose, he favored. Then we both had hold of the next best sheet, and suddenly we were glaring at each other with resentment, and then anger, and in a minute the paper had been dropped and we were struggling. I can remember now the sensation of my curious, consuming rage, and I can remember feeling the fury of his. It was a battle, and what deep resentments it concealed or what it meant I am unable to say. We were on the floor of that attic, gripped together, rolling back and forth, and slashing out ineffectively until suddenly Freddie hit me maddeningly on the nose. Then, just as my nose began to bleed, I wrested myself free of his arms and, with a lurch, managed to straddle him and pin his arms down with my knees. Purposely I let the blood from my face spatter on his, while he helplessly wrenched his neck back and forth to escape it. His legs were kicking up and down behind me, but I had him firmly on the floor and he could not reach my back. I would have killed him then, if there had been any means, and wildly I thought of the jar, which stood on a table a little away from us, wondering how I could get it and, while he was helpless on his back, press it over his nose and mouth. It was a mad and murderous impulse that I could not attempt to execute since I had to hold him down. He was spitting and shouting with rage, and his face and hair were grotesque with my blood, which had fallen even into his eyes and mouth. Then he gave a great heave, and managed somehow to unseat me, and just as he began to pommel me again, there was another shout—Milly’s, a shriek of consternation and her own kind of fury. She seized a broom and with the flat end of it began to beat at both of us. “Help me!” she cried to Dan, who stood by paralyzed with fright, but Freddie and I had already separated, and suddenly our emotions were as limp as our bodies. We looked at each other without feeling anything at all but shame.

Yet what is gained by such an encounter is difficult to estimate: a kind of intimacy of the body, of flesh and breath, that binds as well as severs. I knew him for the first time, with the kind of knowledge one has later of a lover, where hate is intimate and deepest and impossible to abstract. And that was the chief source of our shame.

Milly said curtly, “Go down and wash,” and we went down together, and we helped each other, and at the last he looked at me with tears blurring his light brown eyes and said, roughly, “I’m sorry,” and I said, “So am I,” and the image of his face wavered in my vision. “Here’s a comb,” he said, and I took it, and handed him a towel.

We went back to the attic slowly and when we got there, Milly merely glanced at us. “We’re doing this together, not separately,” she said. “The sheets are for different kinds of things, not people. We’ll have committees. Grant,”—her eyes moved coldly and then kindly over my face—“you’re in charge of collecting. I’ll be in charge of killing. Freddie is in charge of mounting. Dan prints best, so he’s in charge of labeling.”

“Fair and square,” Dan said shakily, and how dark his eyes were in his still frightened face!

There were two weeks left before Labor Day, and on every one of these days we were together. The collection grew, and we even achieved a semblance of order and science on our mounting boards, but as the days dropped away, one after the other, Freddie sank into a gloom. With every hour summer was dying. I remember Labor Day. We were coming in from a row on the lake. Dan and I were at the oars, and when we reached the pier, we got out to make the boat fast. Milly and Freddie still sat in the back of the boat. He was staring gloomily at the floor while she explained to him with urgent sweetness that in winter the rest of us did not see each other either. Over the shimmering water, a flock of swallows dropped, and shot away, and we all thought the same thought. Another summer seemed impossibly distant, you could hardly believe that it could come at all.