Aegypt, Page 3

  The Nash held them all, though just barely, the swollen sides and fat rear end of its prehistoric-monster shape bellied out (it seemed) with their numbers and their luggage. Sam called his car the Pregnant Sow. It was the first car Pierce knew well; the remembered smell of its gray upholstery and the plump feel of its passenger clutch-straps still meant Car to him. There was something penitential about those long trips in it that he would not forget, and though he held nothing against the Nash, ‘pleasure driving’ would remain an oxymoron for Pierce the rest of his life.

  Leaving the eroded and somehow unfinished-looking woods and hills of Kentucky, they would descend through country not much different though with now and then a further prospect of folded hills in sunlight that meant Pennsylvania; and then, by ritual passage through wide gates and the acquisition of a long ticket, they would enter onto the brand-new Pennsylvania Turnpike, and on its broad back be carried into country both new and old, country that was at once History and the gleaming clean Present as well. History and the blue-green distances of a free land, a new-found-land uncircumscribed and fruited, which Kentucky did not seem to him to be but which America was described as being in his school texts, was contained for him not only in the rolling hills they rolled through but in the roll of Pennsylvania names on his tongue and around his inward ear – Allegheny and Susquehanna, Schuylkill and Valley Forge, Brandywine and Tuscarora. They were never to see anything of Brandywine and such places, nothing except the turnpike restaurants located near them, clean, identical, sunlit places with identical menus and identical lollipops and waitresses – that were, however, not really identical at all, because each bore on its fieldstone front one of these lovely names. Pierce would ponder the difference between Downingtown and Crystal Spring as they sat around a long table breakfasting on exotic foods not found at home, tomato juice (orange only and always at home) or sausages in little burger-shapes, or Danish, and even oatmeal for Sam, who alone of them relished it.

  And then on, through land forested and farmed and seeming underpopulated and yet to be explored (this illusion of turnpike travel, that the land is empty, even primeval, was more strong in those days when cars first left the old billboarded and well-trodden ways for the new-made cuts) and – best of all – into the series of tunnels whose beautifully masoned entrances would loom up suddenly and thrillingly: all the children would call out the name, for each tunnel had one, the name of the intransigent geographical feature it breached and left behind so neatly, so curtly – there was Blue Mountain and Laurel Hill, there was (once Pierce could say them all, like a poem, he no longer could) Allegheny and Tuscarora . . . One other?

  ‘Tuscarora,’ Pierce said aloud, on his bus. O Pennsylvania of the names. Scranton and Harrisburg and Allentown were hard and dark with toil; but Tuscarora. Shenandoah. Kittatinny. (That was the last tunnel: Kittatinny Mountain! They plunged into darkness, but Pierce’s heart had been lifted as though by music into a height of summer air.) Never once had the Nash left the turnpike, never followed signs inviting it to Lancaster or Lebanon, though the Amish lived there, or to Philadelphia, built long ago by the man on the Quaker Oats box; they went right on, up the Jersey Turnpike, a pale shadow of Pennsylvania’s it seemed to Pierce, though just why he didn’t know: perhaps it was only that they drew closer to New York and his old reality, passing out of History and the splendid Present into his own personal past, pressing on toward the Brooklyn streets that he would take up and put on like an old suit of clothes, too well known and growing smaller each time he came back to them.

  There had always been other choices, up to the last minute, up to the Pulaski Skyway anyway and the hellish flats it crossed, after which the Holland Tunnel like an endless dark bathroom was inevitable. They could turn away (Pierce found the places on the map his mother held) to these strange Dutch-named places north, or south toward the Jersey Shore – the very word shore was for him full of the splash of salt surf, gull’s cries, bleached boardwalks. On the way there they could visit unimaginable Cheesequake. Or they could turn toward the Faraway Hills, which did not seem so far, they could leave the turnpike just here, and in not too long a time they would find themselves passing the Jenny Jump Mountains and entering the Land of Make-Believe. It said so on the map.

  He couldn’t urge Sam to turn aside, really, the journey had too strong a logic, the Nash a juggernaut compelled by the turnpike habit. And he didn’t really want not to see his father in Brooklyn. Yet he would wish silently: I wish we could go now to this place, his finger touching it, covering it: even – closing his eyes and throwing all caution to the winds – I wish I were here right now: not actually expecting the car’s roar and his cousins’ hubbub to be replaced by silence and birdsong, or the smell of the sun-hot upholstery by meadow odors: and a moment later opening his eyes again to the turnpike still shimmering ahead with false pools of silver water, and the billboards advertising the attractions to be found in the city fast approaching.

  And a good thing too, on the whole, Pierce thought now, looking out at the meadows, ponds, and townlets of the place. It was all nice enough, surely, more than nice, desirable, and yet not really that otherwhere, that place where the grass is always greener. He couldn’t have known it as a boy – he didn’t always know it as a man – but wishing is different from yearning. Yearning, a motion of the soul toward peace, resolution, restitution, or rest; a yen for happiness, which momentarily is figured in that duck pond overhung with maples, that fine stone house whose lace curtains beckon to cool rooms where the coverlet is turned down on the tall bed – a hard-won wisdom distinguished between such motions, which had fleeting objects, and true wishing, which carpentered an object of desire with such care that it could not disappoint.

  Goshen. West Goshen. East Bethel. Bethel. A choice between Stonykill, three miles, and Fair Prospect, four, they chose Fair Prospect, good. I wish I were here right now, in Fair Prospect in the Faraway Hills: and there, or nearly there, he was, only a quarter-century later.

  But something meanwhile seemed to have gone badly wrong with the bus he rode. It was laboring to complete a long curving climb less steep than many it had already swept over; somewhere deep within it there was a hard basso rhythm, as though its heart were pounding at its ribs. The noise subsided as the driver sought a gear it could be more comfortable in, then began again as the way steepened. They had slowed to a creep; it seemed evident they would not make the grade, but they did, just barely, the bus snorted and blew like a spent horse, and there was the fair prospect, framed by a dark side-wing of heavy-headed trees like a landscape by Claude: a sunlit foreground, a zigzag silver river greenly banked, a humid distance blending into pale sky and piled cloud. Leaf shadow swept over them, and a terrible jolting twang shook the bus – a torn ligament, a stroke, they had not made it after all. The bus shuddered all along its length, and the engine ceased. In silence – Pierce could hear the hiss of the tires on the road’s surface – it coasted down the far side of the hill and into the village at the bottom, some stone and frame houses, a brick church, a single-span bridge over the river; and there, before the interested gaze of a few folks gathered on the porch of the gas station-general store, it came to rest.

  Well, hell.

  The driver let himself out, leaving his passengers in their seats, all still facing front as though traveling, only not traveling. There were sounds without of the engine compartment being opened, looked at, tinkered with; then the driver ducked into the store, and was gone some time. When he returned, he slid again into his seat and picked up his mike – though if he had faced them the fifteen or so people on the bus could have heard him well enough, maybe he was embarrassed – and said metallically, ‘Well, folks, I’m afraid we won’t be going any further on this bus.’ Groans, murmurs. ‘I’ve called down to Cascadia and they’ll be sending on another bus just as fast as they can. Be an hour or so. You’re free to make yourselves comfortable here on the bus, or get off, just as you like.’

  It had always astonis
hed Pierce how, no matter what inconveniences they thrust on you, buses and their minions never let drop the pretense that they were offering you comfort, luxury, even delight. He thrust his book of Solitudes into the side pocket of his bag, shouldered the bag, and got off, following the driver, who intended it seemed to hide out in the store.

  ‘Excuse me!’

  What a day this was though, really, what a day! The real air filling his lungs as he drew breath to call again was odorous and sweet after the false air of the bus. ‘Excuse me!’

  The driver turned, raising his eyebrows, could he be of any service.

  ‘I have a ticket to Conurbana,’ Pierce said. ‘I was supposed to catch a connecting bus at Cascadia. Will I miss it?’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Looks like it. Sorry to say.’

  ‘Well, would they hold it?’

  ‘Oh, I doubt that. Lots of folks on that Conurbana bus, you know. They got to make their connections too.’ A small smile, facts of life. ‘There’s another though, I believe, from Cascadia, about six.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Pierce, trying not to get testy, not this guy’s fault as far as he knew; ‘I have an appointment there at four-thirty.’

  ‘Hoo,’ said the driver. ‘Hoo boy.’

  He seemed genuinely grieved. Pierce shrugged, looked around himself. A breath of breeze lifted the layered foliage of the trees that overarched the village, passed, and restored the noontide stillness. Pierce thought wildly of hiring a taxi, no, there would be no taxi here, hitchhiking – he hadn’t hitchhiked since college. Reason returned. He walked toward the store, rooting in his pockets for a dime.

  Up until this summer, Pierce Moffett had taught history and literature at a small New York City college, one of the little institutions which following the upheavals of the sixties had come to cater chiefly to the searching young, the scholar-gypsies who had seemed then to be forming into a colorful nomadic culture of their own, Bedouins camping within the bustle of the larger society, striking their tents and moving on when threatened with the encroachments of civilization, living hand-to-mouth on who knew what, drug sales and money from home. Barnabas College had come to be a caravanserai of theirs, and Pierce had for a time been a popular teacher there. His chief course, History 101 – nicknamed Mystery 101 by his students – had been heavily subscribed at the beginnings of past semesters; he had the knack of seeming to have a great, a terrific secret to impart to them on his subject, a story to tell that had cost Pierce himself not a little in the learning, if they would only sit still to hear it. Lately, it was true, fewer and fewer had been sticking to the end; but that was not, or not chiefly, the reason Pierce would not be returning to Barnabas College in the fall.

  Peter Ramus College, where he had been headed, was a rather different affair, as far as he could judge; an aged Huguenot foundation that still enforced a dress code (so he had been told, it couldn’t be so), inhabiting smoked stone buildings in the suburbs of a declining city. Its picture was on the dean’s letter, which Pierce pulled, somewhat crumpled and sweat-stained, from his pocket, the letter inviting him for an interview there: a little steel engraving of a domed building like a courthouse or a Christian Science church. Pierce could imagine the new poured-concrete dorms and labs it was now immured in. Below the picture was the college’s phone number.

  A tin sign advertising bread, the blond girl and her buttered slice much faded, was attached to the screen door of the little store; Pierce hadn’t gone through such a door with such a sign on it in years. And inside the store was that cool and nameless odor, something like naphtha and raisins and cookie crumbs, which is the eternal smell of stores like this one; stores in the city which sold much the same goods never seemed to have it. Pierce felt swept into the past as he dialed the number.

  There was no one alive at Peter Ramus at this August noon hour except other people’s assistants; no one would reschedule his appointment, but he didn’t dare cancel it outright; he left a number of vague messages that were only half-heartedly accepted, said he would call again from Cascadia, and hung up, in limbo.

  By the front counter of the store he found a soda cooler, one of the sarcophagus kind that had used to stand in Delmont’s store in his old hometown: the same dark red, with a heavy lid lined with zinc, and inside a dark pool of ice and water and cold bottles that clanked cavernously together when he chose one. He took a pair of dark glasses from a card of them by the roundel that held postcards; he considered buying a copy of the local paper, also piled there, but did not. It was called the Faraway Crier. He paid for the Coke and the glasses, smiling at the placid child who took his money as she smiled for him, and went back into the day, feeling weirdly at liberty, as though he had been set ashore, or had struggled ashore. He donned his new dark glasses, which turned the day even more into a landscape by Claude, amber-toned and richly dark: serene.

  He had broken his journey, and with a lot maybe at stake, and a lot no doubt to pay for it in tedium or worse; it didn’t matter, he couldn’t for the moment care, since he neither much desired to go where he had been headed, nor much desired to return where he had started out from. If he wanted anything, it was simply to sit here at this wooden picnic table in the shade, to be not in motion, to sip this Coke and the deep peace of what seemed a still and universal holiday.

  Serenity. Now you could wish for that, naming no conditions: a permanent inner vacation, escape made good. To somehow have this motionlessness which he drew in with the sweet air he inhaled for his inward weather always.

  But there were problems too with wishing for moral qualities, serenity, large-mindedness. The interdiction (which Pierce thought obvious) against wishing for such things as artistic abilities – sit down at the piano, the Appassionata flows suddenly from your fingertips – applied in a way to wisdom too, to enlightenment, to heart-knowledge, useless unless earned, the earning of it being no doubt all that it consisted of.

  The best thing. Pierce breathed deeply, he had come to these conclusions before. The best thing would simply be to refuse the offer altogether. Thanks but no thanks. Surely he was already wise enough – or at least well-read enough – to know that there was very likely something corrosive to common happiness in the very nature of granted wishes. He did know it. And yet. He could only hope that when the wishes came he would be wise, and not yearning; in good case; not transfixed by some object of desire; not in some dreadful circumstance from which he desperately needed relief: not, in other words, just now.

  Then, even if he could not refuse altogether, he might at least be able to take the next-wisest course, an option he had long since worked out that was sensible, usually all too sensible for him: and that was, his first two practical wishes for health and wealth having been asked and granted, to use his third wish simply to wish that he might forget the whole thing had ever happened; his safety and ease magically assured, to forget he had ever known wishes could be granted, to be returned to his (present) state of ignorance that such irruptions of power into the world, power placed at his unwise disposal, were really truly possible at all.

  Really truly actually possible at all. Pierce drank Coke. From a side road beyond the church, a sheep wandered out onto the highway.

  And of course it could be that just such a thing had already happened. That wisest set of wishes might right now be in the works, already granted, the genie having retreated into his lamp and the lamp into the past and the whole process into oblivion, Pierce ignorant now of his great good fortune and still toying with possibilities. On the face of it it seemed unlikely, considering his joblessness, and his mental health, which did not seem to him ruddy – but there would be no way to tell. He could have been visited this very morning. This day, this blue day, might be the first day of his fortune, this moment might be the first moment.

  Several more sheep had come out from the side road and were wandering along the highway, huddling and bleating. One of the locals from the porch, who had seemed immovab
le, got up, hitched his pants, and walked out onto the highway to stop traffic, waving a warning hand at a pickup truck that was just then approaching, stay there, be patient. A dog circled the flock, barking now and then in a peremptory way, guiding the sheep (there were dozens now, more and more coming out from the side road as though conjured) toward the bridge over the river, which they seemed reluctant to enter upon. Then there strode out, amid the rear guard of the flock, a tall shepherd, crook in his hand, broad broken straw hat on his head. He looked toward the impatient pickup, grinning, as though not displeased to have caused this fuss; he crooked back into his fold a lamb that had thought to flee, and marshaled his charges with a call, bustling them over the bridge.

  Pierce watched, aware of a chain of associations taking place within him without his choosing, inner files being gone through to a purpose he didn’t know. Then the conclusion was abruptly handed to him. He rose slowly, not sure whether to believe himself. Then:

  ‘Spofford,’ he said, and called: ‘Spofford!’

  The shepherd turned, tilting his hat up to see Pierce hurrying after him, and one black-faced sheep turned too to look. The driver of the bus, coming out of the little store to gather and count his belated flock, saw one of his passengers wander off, meet the shepherd in the middle of the bridge, and fall suddenly into his arms.

  ‘Pierce Moffett,’ the shepherd said, holding him at arm’s length and grinning at him. ‘I’ll be damned.’

  ‘It is you,’ Pierce said. ‘I thought it was.’

  ‘You come to visit? Hard to believe.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Pierce said. ‘I didn’t even plan to stop.’ He explained his predicament, Conurbana, thrown rod, canceled appointment.

  ‘How do you like that,’ Spofford said. ‘Buswrecked.’