Different Seasons(166)
But it’s funny how I saw Ace Merrill again. My friends are dead but Ace is alive. I saw him pulling out of the mill parking lot just after the three o’clock whistle the last time I took my kids down home to see my dad.
The ‘52 Ford had become a ’77 Ford station wagon. A faded bumper-sticker said REAGAN/BUSH 1980. His hair was mowed into a crewcut and he’d gotten fat. The sharp, handsome features I remembered were buried in an avalanche of flesh. I had left the kids with Dad long enough to go downtown and get the paper. I was standing on the corner of Main and Carbine and he glanced at me as I waited to cross. There was no sign of recognition on the face of this thirty-two-year-old man who had broken my nose in another dimension of time.
I watched him wheel the Ford wagon into the dirt parking lot beside The Mellow Tiger, get out, hitch at his pants, and walk inside. I could imagine the brief wedge of country-western as he opened the door, the brief sour whiff of Knick and Gansett on draft, the welcoming shouts of the other regulars as he closed the door and placed his large ass on the same stool which had probably held him up for at least three hours every day of his life—except Sundays—since he was twenty-one.
I thought: So that’s what Ace is now.
I looked to the left, and beyond the mill I could see the Castle River not so wide now but a little cleaner, still flowing under the bridge between Castle Rock and Harlow. The trestle upstream is gone, but the river is still around. So am I.
A WINTER’S TALE
For Peter and Susan Straub
The Breathing Method
I.
The Club
I dressed a bit more speedily than normal on that snowy, windy, bitter night—I admit. It was December 23rd, 197-, and I suspect that there were other members of the club who did the same. Taxis are notoriously hard to come by in New York on stormy nights, so I called for a radio-cab. I did this at five-thirty for an eight o’clock pickup—my wife raised an eyebrow but said nothing. I was under the canopy of the apartment building on East Fifty-eighth Street, where Ellen and I had lived since 1946, by quarter to eight, and when the taxi was five minutes late, I found myself pacing up and down impatiently.
The taxi arrived at eight-ten and I got in, too glad to be out of the wind to be as angry with the driver as he probably deserved. That wind, part of a cold front that had swept down from Canada the day before, meant business. It whistled and whined around the cab’s windows, occasionally drowning out the salsa on the driver’s radio and rocking the big Checker on its springs. Many of the stores were open but the sidewalks were nearly bare of last-minute shoppers. Those that were abroad looked uncomfortable or actually pained.
It had been flurrying off and on all day, and now the snow began again, coming first in thin membranes, then twisting into cyclone shapes ahead of us in the street. Coming home that night, I would think of the combination of snow, a taxi, and New York City with considerably greater unease... but I did not of course know that then.
At the comer of Second and Fortieth, a large tinsel Christmas bell went floating through the intersection like a spirit.
“Bad night,” the cabbie said. “They’ll have an extra two dozen in the morgue tomorrow. Wino Popsicles. Plus a few bag-lady Popsicles.”
“I suppose.”
The cabbie ruminated. “Well, good riddance,” he said finally. “Less welfare, right?”
“Your Christmas spirit,” I said, “is stunning in its width and depth.”
The cabbie ruminated. “You one of those bleeding-heart liberals?” he asked finally.
“I refuse to answer on the grounds that my answer might tend to incriminate me,” I said. The cabbie gave a why-do-I-always-get-the-wisenheimers snort... but he shut up.
He let me out at Second and Thirty-fifth, and I walked halfway down the block to the club, bent over against the whistling wind, holding my hat on my head with one gloved hand. In almost no time at all the life-force seemed to have been driven deep into my body, a flickering blue flame about the size of the pilot-light in a gas oven. At seventy-three a man feels the cold quicker and deeper. That man should be home in front of a fireplace... or at least in front of an electric heater. At seventy-three hot blood isn’t even really a memory; it’s more of an academic report.
The latest flurry was letting up, but snow as dry as sand still beat into my face. I was glad to see that the steps leading up to the door of 249B had been sanded—that was Stevens’s work, of course—Stevens knew the base alchemy of old age well enough: not lead into gold but bones into glass. When I think about such things, I believe that God probably thinks a great deal like Groucho Marx.
Then Stevens was there, holding the door open, and a moment later I was inside. Down the mahogany-paneled hallway, through double doors standing three-quarters of the way open on their recessed tracks, into the library cum reading-room cum bar. It was a dark room in which occasional pools of light gleamed-reading-lamps. A richer, more textured light glowed across the oak parquet floor, and I could hear the steady snap of birch logs in the huge fireplace. The heat radiated all the way across the room—surely there is no welcome for a man or a woman that can equal a fire on the hearth. A paper rustled—dry, slightly impatient. That would be Johanssen, with his Wall Street Journal. After ten years, it was possible to recognize his presence simply by the way he read his stocks. Amusing... and in a quiet way, amazing.
Stevens helped me off with my overcoat, murmuring that it was a dirty night; WCBS was now forecasting heavy snow before morning.