The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind (16 page)

When the drapesack was empty I flew home, knocked the dust from my cleats, rubbed neat’s-foot oil into the soft heart of my glove—checking to see that its webbing was cinched tightly—and then I pulled my cap down low and ran up to Adams Field, where the Cardinals worked out through the late afternoon, where I stretched and warmed up and threw batting practice while the infield dust drifted low across the bleachers and the clean white chalklines were erased by the base runners. The catcher in his shinguards and facemask and chestpad sent me signals from under his well-worn glove. I learned to throw a breaking ball hard that summer; I got my slider down, privately dreaming of a shot at the majors, and followed Whitey Ford, Warren Spahn and Don Drysdale in the boxes. The sun flooded richly over the backstop and diamond, and when I turned to watch the high flies crest in the outfield a halo of pink light engulfed the spinning ball. I saw little else but what could be seen from the pitcher’s mound at Adams Field. The view from there was of the game whirling magically around me, holding me delicately in its order and process and symmetry and motion, a fragile web of rule and action—myself at its center—that
fended the world off perfectly, thwarted it completely, muted its terror with something as simple as a drag bunt laid neatly out across the infield.

In July new houses were added to my route, and Anna Lewis—who had black ringlets of hair at the nape of her neck, and a pair of dark moles at the base of one cheek, and blue eyes that could not be disturbed by commotion—lived in one of them: a three-story white clapboard colonial near one end of Tullis Street, a tall shuttered house set back behind hedges. Sitting cross-legged on a bench made of cool gray stone beside a sundial on a tapering pedestal, she read
War and Peace
and
Persuasion
and
Dead Souls
in its flower garden, which bloomed from May until the end of September with at least sixty species of perennials.

That first day on Tullis Street I trudged up the flagstones beyond the clasped gate in the perfect hedge, wedging a paper together as I went and smelling the honeysuckle, and then in a bend in the garden path I came on Anna, who frowned gravely up at me from out of the pages of the book she cradled in both palms, thumbs weighing the pages down, blue eyes casting me in the mold of intruder, her face tanned a clear sharp brown and the black tangled gloss of her hair framed in yellow sunlight. All around her, in a half-moon surrounding the stone bench and sundial, were flowers in sloped beds that rose to a high picket fence; beach stones lined the garden paths, and shade trees grew where the paths converged, in the midst of the garden at a raised gazebo beside a miniature fountain. With Anna behind me I tossed my paper, lofted it onto the high, broad porch, then turned again and passed her on the flagstones. As I did she glanced up at me, and a smile of amusement formed beneath the frown; her face seemed strong and
brown, broad from ear to ear and gleaming as she held her book shut, marking her place with a forefinger. While I watched her black hair seemed to ripple in the sunlight and her wary eyes moved to the book once more. She shook her head once, briskly, not lifting her eyes, and the mane of her hair spilled over her forehead like a woven shield, iridescent and beautiful.

I was struck there and then I know now—the point of something sharp seemed lodged against my breastbone—not so much by beauty or romance but by my need and a nudging dread of it: dread of everything I would have to say and do against my will and yet precisely as my will wished. I knew about war from the baseball diamond—the private, intimate war of pitcher and batter in which subtleties of action are either gratifying or horrible—but not of the inner battle in which, even at seventeen, we recognize within desire the necessity of suffering. That comprehension of possible loss—of compromise, perhaps—and Anna’s beauty filled me as I stood there, though Anna was not exactly beautiful—the bones in her face were too large somehow, and the chin a bit too narrow—her beauty had no being unless you were me and the time twenty-one years ago.

“Looks like a nice spot to read,” I pointed out, mostly because I was no master of words and yet words seemed necessary.

“It is nice,” she said. “It’s very nice.”

There was that odd frown again, that sobriety and calm. I fell charmed by two traits: good posture and courteousness. They did me in as they had done in boys before me who in time had become husbands.

“What are you looking at?”

“This?
Madame Bovary.”

She’d said it this way:
Ma-dahm Boo-vah-ree
. I only nodded, though. “I haven’t read it,” I admitted.

“It’s worth reading,” said Anna. “I love it.”

“That’s good,” I answered and, because I’d lost the vaguest connection to my natural brand of thought, because my disorientation in her presence felt so horribly complete, I changed the subject instantly. “These flowers are something. They’re everywhere.”

She looked at me with an astonishment so subtle I noted it only as a refraction of light in her eyes, a drawing inward of the corners of her lips. She looked at me and let her forefinger slide from where all along it had been marking her place in
Madame Bovary
. Anna rose and loosed upon me a grace such as I had never witnessed, becoming as she emerged from her seated posture an extension of my pathetic and absurd delusions. All of that hair. The exactitude, the coolness of her back’s repose. I noticed, too, the length of her fingers. She was a girl composed of striking odd details. Take them as a whole and nothing matched precisely.

“You like them?” she said.

“Sure. How can I help myself?”

“You do?”

“Of course.” But I didn’t, not especially. I was lost in a conversation that impelled itself beyond the boundaries of my true thoughts. I was merely talking, saying things that did not necessarily reflect what was in my heart, because I wanted to be speaking with her; I knew that much.

“They’ve been a job,” said Anna. “Constant work. But if everyone helps, and you do a bit each day, and don’t get
behind or let them get ahead of you, you don’t notice it. Let things go and it becomes a miserable chore.”

“Like a lot of things,” I said.

“Everything,” Anna insisted. “So many things are like that.” She smiled, somewhat sage, and then both of us lowered our eyes.

I can tell you how I left there: light-footed and ecstatic and sick to my stomach all at once, rolling my papers too tightly and conjuring up futures in which Anna and flowers figured prominently. Within that madness I began to run, leaping up stairways and crashing over lawns, flipping my papers at porches breathlessly while the old stony men in their yards looked on in silence, mystified, betrayed by memories that no longer reached back into boyhood.

This is how it went: I would find Anna in the garden almost daily, reading or culling bouquets or pinching the tops of the annuals off between her fingers, and on the days she was not there I felt strongly the weight of time, which seemed to languish between our encounters, and eventually she taught me the names of all the flowers and how to identify them in bloom—gaillardia, sedum, loosestrife, feverfew: one by one I came to know them separately, according to the shapes and colors of their petals, leaves and stems. It was the sort of esoterica I had never had an interest in but which now composed a whole world. We would linger at the stone bench, I would pull my drapesack of papers off, and Anna would put her book down and quiz me on the flowers I had memorized. We worked our way around the paths, kneeling at the beds beside the blooms, and there was something perfect and athletic, rolling, natural, in the way Anna’s arms and hands moved through the plants and bushes, pushing stems back or cupping petals while the bees flew in and out
among the stalks and leaves. The more carefully I noted her gentleness and the ease of her knowledge the more agitated I became, and I would eye her as I eyed the flowers, secretly. When I found her pulling weeds—balanced on the balls of her feet, crouching and leaning into the flower beds—she looked up at me with pinpricks of sweat along her hairline, where the skin was whiter, and the black tendrils at the base of her neck seemed slick and oily. She rose smoothly and brushed the dirt out of her summer dress—she wore one every day, and they were all many sizes too large—and then she clapped the dust from her hands and stood with her fingertips poised against her hips, looking out over the flower garden. She wore sandals bound behind the ankle and over the flank of the foot with flimsy straps, and her calves shone in the sun and her brown shoulders and neck shone, and she might scratch her throat or cheek thoughtfully, leaving a smudge of dirt behind, and then she moved down the path in that fluid yet controlled way of hers, smooth and long-boned and utterly at home among the flowers. And all of that made me sentimental, which I knew was a weakness but couldn’t help.

Occasionally I saw Anna’s mother—who was thin and narrow in the face, wore a gardening apron everywhere and parted her hair severely down the middle—moving along the flagstone paths and dragging a hose behind her, or darting about with a can full of fish fertilizer, and whenever our eyes met she smiled faintly and cryptically, but hardly ever said a word to me directly. Anna’s father, Doctor Herbert Franklin Lewis, was thick and ruddy and wore coarse suits. On Saturday afternoons he worked in his garden, or sat in the gazebo with his heavy legs crossed and smoked a cigar meditatively, clutching a glass of iced tea between his hairy
fingers and whistling unrecognizable tunes. He paid his bill for the newspaper promptly and tipped me twenty-five cents magnanimously, flicking his bow tie and caressing the great red wattles of skin that fell over his throat in separate flaps. He was a large, difficult and serious man who spoke to me often of the vagaries of baseball, wiping his face all around with a handkerchief and exuding a domestic, comfortable confidence. I often think of him now as one of a dying breed of men, who want, really, nothing for themselves, who have effaced their innermost desires without self-flagellation, and—in order to avoid the desperations of solitude—have given themselves over completely to their wives and to their children, and ultimately to their children’s children, and done it with a magnificent serenity.

Mostly, though, Anna and I were alone in the garden, and I began to linger there, late for practice. Eventually we lay in the grass that fronted the gazebo, where one day I pressed myself over her at last, locked my forearms against her cheeks and curled my hands through her hair. She was pensive, uncertain, her face paled slightly and silence overtook her; she seemed to be studying my face, searching its features for a truth that stubbornly remained hidden, and her hands only rested below my shoulder blades, waiting and plaintive and still. In time, though, I saw that her eyes were no longer wary, and when I pressed myself over her I felt her back arch and her hips swell to meet mine. It was a form of paradise and I knew it even then: the depth of the sunlight as it glowed through the garden, the bitter, private, fleshy taste of Anna’s lips and mouth, the warm abrasiveness of grass against my arms and legs, and the choking scent of flowers everywhere, all around us, shutting the world out forever.

Yet at times, at the core of bliss, I would feel a dread I’d never felt before; I would dream through my ears the clack of a bat, resonant and crystalline, but when I lifted my head up to listen for it, it ceased to exist altogether. My chest tightened, seized up in knots, and Anna peered into my eyes suspiciously: I got up suddenly and hurried away from there with my eyebrows knit and my jaw jutting, saying I was late for baseball practice. And, in hurrying away, alone and loping along the streets effortlessly, I felt a transformation taking place; the further I got from the flower garden and the closer to Adams Field, the more ecstatic I became, until before long Anna seemed like a dream, beautiful and tranquil and surrounded by flowers, but far from the stuff of which my real life was made. By the time I reached the pitcher’s mound I felt no dread anymore, could not remember dread at all, and I would throw batting practice with a soaring heart, at the hub of the wheel of the baseball field.

That summer season came and went, the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series, the flowers knit themselves up against winter, and everywhere I took my papers that fall maple leaves rattled drily in the windy streets, curled like fists and skating in hordes along the asphalt. With school again—my last year of it—I brought the papers around at three; Anna was no longer in the garden (the air had turned too sharp and cold) but in the evenings I walked up and we sat by the fire with the television on softly and our schoolbooks open. Doctor Lewis hunkered down beside us in his thick padded armchair and eventually slept peacefully with a cold cigar between his fingers, and Mrs. Lewis seemed always to be
padding back and forth stealthily behind us in her slippers and awkward chenille bathrobe. The wall clock ticked like thunder and the fire popped and fizzled and Doctor Lewis wheezed through one nostril and exhaled his breath like a clogged bellows, and Anna and I leaned together in the calm purple wash of the television’s light, not asleep and not awake, in a trance of sorts until the clock belled eleven and the late-night news came on. With the news Doctor Lewis stirred and perked up, lit his cigar again and watched in a daze with his arms folded across his belly. “Sports report,” he said to me. “Let’s all be quiet now.”

Irrelevant football scores perhaps, or meaningless trades in distant cities, or the retirement of a gladiator no longer filled with the requisite bravado, the requisite innocence and awe. “He was a superb ath-alete,” Doctor Lewis commented on the occasion of some obscure player’s slide from the fields of glory. “Absolutely superb. A whiz.”

On another occasion, as we sat through a round of advertisements, he waxed candidly prophetic. “Don’t be frightened by failure, son,” he warned me out of nowhere, from no source—just sudden words spoken boldly. “The world is filled with men who dream of their own importance. No, don’t be fooled by the prospect of failure. You’ve a fine, fine arm. A fine arm. Who knows? The true loss would be in not trying a ’tall, with one so young as you are.… ” But I don’t think he knew how to finish, or even quite what he meant to say. Doctor Lewis was a lost and sentimental man; he went off to bed when the news was done without any further advice. I had the sense that the confusion and mystery he’d left me with were purposeful.