Different Seasons(169)

Two shelves down from the set of Seville novels was a large folio volume which contained careful step-by-step plans for Erector Set enthusiasts. Next to it was another folio volume which featured famous scenes from famous movies. Each of these pictures filled one whole page, and opposite each, filling the facing pages, were free-verse poems either about the scenes with which they were paired or inspired by them. Not a very remarkable concept, but the poets who were represented were remarkable—Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Louis Zukofsky, and Erica Jong, to mention just a few. Halfway through the book I found a poem by Algernon Williams set next to that famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe standing on the subway grating and trying to hold her skirt down. The poem was titled “The Toll” and it began:The shape of the skirt is

—we would say—

the shape of a bell

The legs are the clapper—

And some such more. Not a terrible poem, but certainly not Williams’s best or anywhere near the top drawer. I felt I could hold such an opinion because I had read a good deal of Algernon Williams over the years. I could not, however, recall this poem about Marilyn Monroe (which it is; the poem announced it even when divorced from the picture—at the end Williams writes: My legs clap my name:lMarilyn, ma belle). I have looked for it since then and haven’t been able to find it... which means nothing, of course. Poems are not like novels or legal opinions; they are more like blown leaves, and any omnibus volume titled The Complete So-and-So must certainly be a lie. Poems have a way of getting lost under sofas—it is one of their charms, and one of the reasons they endure. But—

At some point Stevens came by with a second scotch (by then I had settled into a chair of my own with a volume of Ezra Pound). It was as fine as the first. As I sipped it I saw two of those present, George Gregson and Harry Stein (Harry was six years dead on the night Emlyn McCarron told us the story of the Breathing Method), leave the room by a peculiar door that could not have been more than forty-two inches high. It was an Alice Down the Rabbit-Hole door if ever there was one. They left it open, and shortly after their odd exit from the library I heard the muted click of billiard balls.

Stevens passed by and asked if I would like another scotch. I declined with real regret. He nodded. “Very good, sir.” His face never changed, and yet I had an obscure feeling that I had somehow pleased him.

Laughter startled me from my book sometime later. Someone had thrown a packet of chemical powder into the fire and turned the flames momentarily parti-colored. I thought of my boyhood again... but not in any wistful, sloppily romantic-nostalgic way. I feel a great need to emphasize that, God knows why. I thought of times when I had done just such a thing as a kid, but the memory was a strong one, pleasant, un-tinged with regret.

I saw that most of the others had drawn chairs up around the hearth in a semi-circle. Stevens had produced a heaping, smoking platter of marvellous hot sausages. Harry Stein returned through the down-the-rabbit-hole door, introducing himself hurriedly but pleasantly to me. Gregson remained in the billiard room—practicing shots, by the sound.

After a moment’s hesitation I joined the others. A story was told—not a pleasant one. It was Norman Stett who told it, and while it is not my purpose to recount it here, perhaps you’ll understand what I mean about its quality if I tell you that it was about a man who drowned in a telephone booth.

When Stett—who is also dead now—finished, someone said, “You should have saved it for Christmas, Norman.” There was laughter, which I of course did not understand. At least, not then.

Waterhouse himself spoke up then, and such a Waterhouse I never would have dreamed of in a thousand years of dreaming. A graduate of Yale, Phi Beta Kappa, silver-haired, three-piece-suited, head of a law firm so large it was more enterprise than company—this Waterhouse told a story that had to do with a teacher who had gotten stuck in a privy. The privy stood behind the one-room schoolhouse in which she had taught, and the day she got her caboose jammed into one of the privy’s two holes also happened to be the day the privy was scheduled to be taken away as Anniston County’s contribution to the Life As It Was in New England exhibition being held at the Prudential Center in Boston. The teacher hadn’t made a sound during all the time it took to load the privy onto the back of a flatbed truck and to spike it down; she was struck dumb with embarrassment and horror, Waterhouse said. And when the privy door blew off into the passing lane on Route 128 in Somerville during rush hour—

But draw a curtain over that, and over any other stories which might have followed it; they are not my stories tonight. At some point Stevens produced a bottle of brandy that was more than just good; it was damned near exquisite. It was passed around and Johanssen raised a toast—the toast, one might almost say: The tale, not he who tells it.

We drank to that.

Not long after, men began slipping away. It wasn’t late; not yet midnight, anyway; but I’ve noticed that when your fifties give way to your sixties, late begins coming earlier and earlier. I saw Waterhouse slipping his arms into the overcoat Stevens was holding open for him, and decided that must be my cue. I thought it strange that Waterhouse would slip away without so much as a word to me (which certainly seemed to be what he was doing; if I had come back from shelving the Pound book forty seconds later, he would have been gone), but no stranger than most of the other things that had gone on that evening.