Memoir From Antproof Case (13 page)

And then the Walloon sat in the empty seat next to me. "Be quiet," he ordered. "Put your foot down, and shut up."

His commands were tense and inexplicably full of hate. I was used to being suddenly wrestled to the ground, or to having a knife put to my throat. I knew how to deal with something like that, but not with gratuitous hatred.

I learned that he was a Walloon only after it was all over, although I understood immediately from his accent and dress that he was foreign. He was about six feet four inches tall. Well, he was exactly that, and he weighed 196 pounds on autopsy. Twenty-seven years old, he had close-cropped silver-blond hair and, though he looked pale and unhealthy, he was an accomplished athlete. Not pertinent, but for me unforgettable, was the fact that his intensely blue eyes were magnified by pewter-rimmed spectacles.

I weighed 117 pounds and was fully one foot shorter than he. I was used to being bullied. All boys are bullied by older boys. I would have swallowed my pride, taken my foot from the sill, and stopped my whistling, but for one thing.

He had in his hands a cup of steaming hot coffee. No one ever drank hot coffee in the summer on the trains. To this day, I don't know where he got it. The police and the trial lawyers couldn't figure that out either. The rather odd supposition of the detectives was that someone had handed it to him from the platform at Tarrytown.

I tried to be polite. I even downplayed my movements of avoidance. But after five minutes I couldn't help myself. The stench stimulated in me a reaction of utter revulsion and disgust. I stood, reeled, retched, and bolted into the aisle. In doing so, I spilled the coffee, all of it. Some fouled my suit, causing me to retch even more and stagger away in horror, as if a tarantula were clinging to the small of my back, but most of it went directly into the Walloon's lap.

It was boiling hot. Summer suits were then, as now, of very light and, more importantly, very porous material. He screamed at a volume that you would not, could not, believe unless you have had a boiling hot liquid poured on your lap, and he ripped open his fly—I suppose to let the cool air in—and fanned the area with both hands, desperately, all the while screaming "Ahh! Ahhh! Ahhhhh!"

This provoked amusement among the other passengers. In fact, it created hysteria. And when the Walloon, still screaming and fanning himself, got up to chase after me, someone, and then everyone, began to sing, "It's a long way to Tipperary, it's a long long way."

"It's a long way to Tipperary, it's a
long long
way!" they sang as I made my way down the aisle, half in uncontrollable laughter, half in unspeakable terror. And when I reached the vestibule, I heard someone say, "Go get him!"

My God! I thought to myself, he's going to beat me to a pulp. He might kill me by accident, or on purpose. There was hardly any difference—not for me, anyway. Should I use the gun? "No no no!" I told myself. "If I kill him, I'll be executed!"

I had to find a conductor. But the conductors had taken all the tickets. I knew they were at the rear of the train, in hot black suits like missionaries on their way to the Congo, huddled over books, papers, and money as they tallied the fares and bundled up tickets.

The cars seemed more and more empty the farther forward I was driven. I had developed a lead when the Walloon stopped to button his fly even though by that time no one else was around. As I would leave the car I had just dashed through, I would hear the door open at the other end.

He could run faster than I could. He could throw open heavy doors far more easily. He was gaining very rapidly, and he was almost on me. The train rushed past Scarborough. I knew that if I could last until Ossining, I might escape. But if the train made an unscheduled stop at Sing Sing, as it often did, the Walloon was going to kill me.

Naturally, the train began to slow for the stop at Sing Sing. This was where, winter or summer, condemned prisoners left cars full of prosperous commuters for a gray valley of stone that rose in steep walls on either side of the tracks.

If you didn't know how it went, you might think that I was safe. Even though no one met the party exiting at Sing Sing, the passenger there descending would, by definition, be accompanied by agents of the law. All I had to do was get off and run to them.

But the trains were fourteen, sixteen, eighteen cars long. If the prison party were in the rear, I would be almost at Ossining, too far away to be noticed. My only salvation lay with the engineers, or with disappearing into the warrens of the town I knew as well as a rat knows his tunnel.

I was confounded, however, when I discovered that the car I was just about to enter was locked. Three cars back from the engine, I could no longer go forward. Turning to look behind me, I saw the Walloon opening the door of the coach I had just been through.

I opened the door that faced him, and stepped through. He halted. Even in the midst of his anger, caution got the better of him, and what seemed to be my bold and inexplicable move stopped him dead. Perhaps I shouldn't use that word, yet.

I had had no urge to heroism, and this he discovered as he saw me desperately yanking at the handle of the bathroom door. They were steel, they had locks. In this, my first mortal combat, I sought a toilet compartment as a citadel. And in this, my first mortal combat, I was uncontrollably singing to myself, and the song—I could not help myself—was: "I'm a Yankee Doodle
dandy,
I'm a Yankee Doodle
boy!
"

The bathroom was locked solid. A spirit exists throughout the land that locks the bathroom doors on trains and in city parks, and it existed even then. I went back into the vestibule and tried to pull open the door to the outside, but in my desperation I jammed it into the hinged platform that covered the steps leading down, and the two fused into an angular barrier.

As I was trying to disengage them, the Walloon appeared. I jumped back. Even had I time to explain, I would not have bothered: he had murder in his eyes. "You spilled coffee on me!" I shouted with fading indignation.

At this apparent taunt, his eyes widened and he bared his teeth. I thought of taking out the .45 and shooting him, but it was too horrible to imagine, even more horrible, I discovered, than the anticipation of my own disfigurement. By that late moment I had revised my estimates and was hoping that he meant to punish rather than kill me.

I shrank into a corner and covered my face with my hands. The train was beginning to move again. The Walloon grabbed me by the lapels and the neck, and started to beat my head against the steel partition. This was when I knew, even in the fume of combat, that my latest estimate had been a futile hope. The more he banged my head against the metal, the purpler he grew, the tighter he clenched his fists, and the more he cursed in Walloon.

I tried to get to the gun. I might just as well have tried to sing a Walloon lullaby. It didn't work. The gun was in the Stillman and Chase bag, banging nobly against the partition half a second after my head. My gun, I thought, is mocking me as I die.

I wondered if I were sustaining multiple concussions to my brain, and I had the nauseating thought that, eventually, the skull would be smashed and the brain would be crushed. I felt guilty for not having shot him. I tried to say something. Nothing came out.

Then, one of the many small gifts of God that shower upon the earth like a misty rain. The train went over a bump, the kind of obstruction or unevenness that leaps through the dragonlike segments in the rail like a whiplash. Drinks must have been spilled, and hands of gin and poker tossed into the air like roosters.

It is likely that a juvenile delinquent in Ossining had put either a spike or a metamorphic rock on the rail. The door and the hinged platform disengaged explosively, and the air rushed in.

The Walloon hesitated for an instant, turning to see what he had just heard. In this long, long moment, which passed before my eyes as if life had stopped and I was viewing it from afar, I actually felt that I was the recipient of a question slowly voiced by a miraculous higher presence.

Do you want to live, or do you want to die?

My fear vanished. In the fog and the roar, I was no longer aware of fear, but only of this simple question. I cried, or at least I felt what you feel when you cry, for I hadn't the time for a tear to roll from my eye, and then I smiled.

"Live!" I said from deep in my chest, as strongly as I've ever uttered any single word. And the word was not merely beautiful, it was electric, it was full of sound and light, it had history, it smiled, it was like the greatest blast of the greatest organ in the greatest cathedral, and, on second thought, it made even that seem undramatic.

Your eyes narrow when you take blows, and widen when you deliver them, and just the opening of my eyes served to call forth strength that then called forth other strengths and then exploded into one single movement. With a roar like that of a beast on the savannah, I rose with the Walloon, lifted him in the air, and pushed him with ineluctable force through the opening to the outside.

As a body in motion tends to remain in motion, and nothing was in his way, he sailed out of the train like an astronaut blown from an airlock. As he flew backward, his expression was that of amazement. He had not quite synthesized the thought, or at least it had not yet made its way to the muscles of his face. What he might have wanted to think, had he the time, was, "How did he do that?" For, indeed, I had made him airborne.

He was one of those people who are forever wan, pale, tense, and unlucky (law firms have had worse names). I have encountered them all my life. Something gray about their souls drives off all the sweet and colorful things that they might otherwise pick from the air like fruit. If they travel to Hawaii, it will snow. If they cut hay, it will rain. If they have to fight a battle, it will be at the juncture of four map sections.

Ah, but he was unlucky, unlucky supreme. The platform in Ossining was in the midst of revision. Part of it had been torn up, and the debris piled just south of the station, toward Sing Sing. Perhaps the blessed delinquent had obtained the magic steel or holy rock from this pile: I don't know.

I do know, purely from hindsight, although the prosecutor went so far as to suggest that I had arranged it, that a section of iron fence had been torn up and cast upon this pile. It was a row of iron spears sunk into concrete, now pointing at a perfectly martial 45-degree angle. At some point in history, fences must actually have been made of spears.

The unlucky gray Walloon flew backward through space, puzzled in his last moments, until he was perfectly impaled upon the row of spear points that were exactly perpendicular to the plane of his body during its final trajectory.

For more than three years, the Belgians had been held up to the world as its greatest martyrs. Witnessing the impalement, even I suddenly felt a spur of guilt, and reached into the air to check for a sharp Hun-like spike growing from the helmet that was my head. It did not help that the judge was himself a Walloon-American. Throughout the trial he made many not-so-subtle inquiries, the obvious objective of which was to determine if my forebears were Huguenots. At each one, my uncle had to kick Jack Daniels from behind, and operate him like a puppet, so he would object. We very badly wanted to change counsel, but were advised that doing so would somehow imply that we were guiltier even than charged, and, besides, Jack Daniels was the dean of the Ossining criminal bar, and any lawyer not a native of Ossining was, of course, doomed.

The case for self-defense was so clear-cut, however, that I probably would have gotten off despite all the irregularities and despite Jack Daniels's brilliant summation, which began with the words, "Sir Honor! Surely, this was a clorse of surf de-florse!" and went on for an hour or two like that, with the jury at the edge of its seats, straining forward, trying to understand what he was saying.

My outburst and attack at the end of the proceedings was what did me in. I suppose I should have known, I suppose I should have been expecting the provocation, because at the end of trials in Ossining it was customary to serve coffee to the judge in an effort to sober him up for his soliloquy.

Thus, I was launched from childhood in the New World into the beginning of manhood in the Old. This was a great and salutary shock to my system. For despite the fact that I was wrenched early from my home, which I loved, and shamed in the streets of Paris on my way to confinement in an asylum high in the mountains, I was blessed by the great light of civilization.

Granted, it was then, as the smoke of war began to clear, a muted light, but its weakness allowed me to look straight at it without being overwhelmed. And as it grew in strength, I followed, so that my education, though idiosyncratic, was nonetheless perfectly timed.

Though taken from my home, I was given Miss Mayevska, the emblem of my heart. Though removed from the Hudson, I was given the Alps. Though separated from my native idiom, I was presented with the languages of Europe. Though summoned for punishment at an early age, I was given, perhaps by the shock of events, a most wonderful gift. The great loves of my youth—for my parents; my home; Miss Mayevska; for God Himself, undoubted, untarnished, immediate—remain.

(If you have not done so already,
please return the previous pages to the antproof case.)

 

I
T MAY BE
silly, but when I remember Constance I often think of a little red plastic hat, no larger than my hand, bobbing up and down in front of me on a clear and frigid night in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The hat rode upon the massive head of curly hair atop an economist walking in front of me over a log bridge that led to a conference room.

He held it in place by clasping the tiny brim between thumb and forefinger. The hat would block out some stars and then let their light through to my eyes, and before he went in, he rested it on a bank of powdery snow.

Amidst the conversation once we were inside, the bluff, too-deep, artificially jovial speech that conceals men maneuvering for position like warships at the Battle of Trafalgar, no one gave a thought to the hat. We had filed into a room overlooking a snow-covered field, there to discuss monetary policy and the rebuilding of Europe. Who cared about a tiny plastic hat that was made in Japan?