Gone to Soldiers (9 page)

As if he could read her mind, he wrote—when she opened the letter again in the overheated library with its faint serpentine hissing of radiators, waiting for the librarian to locate The Professor's requests:

I keep asking myself why I can't stick it here. The light is stark, the landscape monumental. The Tiwa call the mountain behind Taos holy, and surely they're right. Perhaps it's the ignominious grind of working for Quinlan, but this is not right for me. I can't seem to do anything original. I feel as if I'm looking through the eyes of artists who've already painted here. I can't seem to encounter the landscape freshly. For all that it's splendid and wild and compelling, I'm not compelled
.

Furthermore things with Dolores have got sticky. Speaking Spanish
—
and improving my Mexican Spanish which contrary to The Professor's opinion I view as a marvelously supple and electric tongue, quite superior to the lispy pansy tones of Castilian dialect
—
has proceeded apace, but so has Dolores's desire to view me as an incipient provider of rings, haciendas, babies
.

I could handle the Dolores situation if I felt as if I had arrived in my own proper landscape, but as much as I am moved by these handsomely colored mesas and mountains, the high painted desert, the ancient pueblos, this is not ultimately my promised land
.

Anyhow, I look forward to our time together. No doubt you will explain me to myself as usual and make all clear. I am dreaming of something more tropical. I need to follow the sun, but to something lusher, juicier. The mountains are not finally my holy places. This is not my palate. Too much ochre perhaps, too much burnt sienna. Or maybe just another social scene. Why do I feel so much more naturally and easily an artist in Europe than here?

love as ever
,

Jeff

She liked earth colors, herself, the world seen from a plane. She could still remember the first time Zach had taken her up, her alone, because Jeff was painting and would not go. First he had showed her Bentham Center from above, orderly, small, soon left behind, and then they had soared toward, up and over Jumpers Mountain and then onward to the Connecticut, swollen and muddy with spring runoff. Next Zach had begun to tease her, to try to scare her, pulling into great lazy loops and then short abrupt ones, rolls, dives. Finally he had realized she was not screaming, not afraid but eager, rapt, having at least as much fun as he was. He had leaned over and ruffled her hair, pulling it. “Do you want to learn, Bernie?”

She had nodded fiercely, unable to speak, unable to admit her desire.

“Say please.”

She did speak then. “Please, Zach. Please! Teach me.”

He seemed to consider it at length, frowning, prolonging and enjoying her agony, making her taste the wanting and the suspense. “Maybe I'll do it and maybe I won't.” But he had.

“Coming,” she burst out too loudly. Mrs. Roscommon had been whispering at her. Bernice hurried to the desk, where a stack of the requested books loomed near toppling.

She was embarrassed at having plunged in that way, out in the world. Now she was back in drabness. When she remembered those times with Zach and Jeff, it was that moment in
The Wizard of Oz
—a movie she had seen three times—when Dorothy passed out of Kansas into Oz, and black and white burst into glorious and radiant technicolor. As she did not care for musicals, she had seen few technicolor movies; that transition moved her enormously. That was what it was like to pass from Bentham Center into adventure. She had gone over and over those days so many times, she was not sure exactly how events had happened, for she had freely embroidered them until they were half fantastic. She felt crazy sometimes to think she spent so much time reliving and working over events that Zach himself and Jeff must have largely forgotten, working them over until she herself was no longer sure what she remembered and what she had pretended happened.

As she plodded home to dump the books and then to the butcher for lamb chops and to the greengrocer for broccoli, if he had it, cauliflower if he did not, she thought that perhaps cavorting with Errol Flynn pirate to pirate with a saber in her teeth was a shade more bearable than returning constantly to that brief paradise of permission to follow along with her brother and Zach. Often she dreamed she was flying. She dreamed herself back at the controls of Zach's Aeronca, banking it, diving, rolling it. One night last week she had wakened crying. How could she have explained to, anyone she was weeping because she knew how to fly but had no plane? The Freudians would say it had to do with sex hunger, but she knew nothing about sex, and flying was more real to her than broiling The Professor's chops.

She supposed she should hate Zach for cavalierly teaching them to fly but she could not object; it was the only taste of paradise she had ever been permitted. She had had a crush on him then, but she had been aware she had no more chance with him than a large woolly dog. He enjoyed her company. It amused him to teach Jeff's smart ungainly good-tempered sister to fly. Her loyalty and adoration were pleasing to him as to any god offered incense.

Zach was a creature from another world, exiled to St. Thomas for the same reason many of the boys arrived. Zach was not terminally stupid; he got poor grades because he had little interest in anything academic. Classes did not move through the air fast enough. Zach had cracked up a car while blind drunk. At St. Thomas he did that again, demolishing a Morgan on the hairpin turn coming down from Jumpers Mountain.

Jeff had pulled him out of the car before it burst into flames. Jeff had been bicycling home from a rendezvous in the Garfinkles' hayloft with the middle sister. Pulling the unconscious bleeding Zach from the smoking wreckage, he had then returned to the Garfinkles and borrowed or stolen a horse, on which he loaded Zach and took him to Bentham Center Hospital. Then he returned the horse and peddled home, excited and pleased with himself, to tell her the story.

That injury had pulled Zach out of the sophomore football team and toned down his drinking. It had also made the two boys friends, and Bernice had tagged along when they would have her. Zach loved sporty fast cars, sporty fast yachts, but while he was recuperating from breaking four bones, he passed the time by learning to fly. When Zach learned to fly, his friends learned to fly—at his expense, of course. Solitude was for him a temporary state, to be mended at once. Call out the troops. Bring in the companions. Summon the loyal retainers. He wanted companionship, always, in his escapades, and flying had become her passion, her center.

Why did she imagine that earning a commercial license would free her? She would still have her duty to take care of her father; winning air races, testing planes like Jacqueline Cochran was remote as joining a pirate ship.

As she peeled potatoes she glanced at the calendar. Three more days till Sunday, the seventh, her next injection of movie drug. Twenty days till Christmas. When would Jeff arrive? Tonight, after she had cleaned up, she would write, pressing him to fix a date for his homecoming. For Christmas she had already persuaded Professor Horgan, who taught art history, to pick up a tube of cadmium red and cadmium yellow in Boston for Jeff, expensive paints he loved and often could not afford. He would be delighted.

With small bribes, small promises, with endless fantasies, she made herself continue. What else was there; what else would there ever be, for Professor Coates's daughter, who had inherited the care and feeding of her father, who kept house for him and whose house kept her?—Bernice who flew in her sleep and wept only upon waking, briefly, for she was too sensible to cry long over what could not be changed or shirked.

JEFF 1

Emplumado

It had been stupid to get into a fight with Quinlan and bloody his nose. Still it got Jeff out of Taos, and he felt a sweet relief in loosing some of the anger he had been hoarding over the past months.

How surprised Quinlan had been, always assuming that because Jeff was soft-spoken and artistic, he would swallow any insult. Jeff enjoyed a fight when he could no longer stay out of it. He liked pushing himself physically. It was the same as backpacking up into the mountains, which his acquaintances in Taos regarded as bound to end in falling off a cliff or getting lost. He had first climbed in Austria, and then in Switzerland. He had found the local mountains fascinating but not overly demanding. He had found Quinlan easy to knock down.

Quinlan had acted the bully from the beginning. He was managing the dude ranch for a combine that owned it, pocketing, Jeff suspected, as much as he could get away with and taking it out of the care of the animals, the accommodations and food of the hired help and little irritating economies such as there never being toilet paper in the latrine the help used.

What Quinlan had called him was not the reason for punching him, only the excuse. Quinlan, who lacked a gift for invective, called him a pinko fag. Jeff was a pinko because he supported Roosevelt's economic policies, although he felt that the President was not pursuing them hard enough. He was a fag because he had avoided getting into bed with Mrs. Terwilligher, who was rich, as obnoxious as Quinlan and could not possibly like him any more than he could endure her. Jeff had made a practice of pretending he did not understand the help were to be sexually available to the vacationers, that sexual service was expected from the waitresses, chambermaids and trail hands, as they were called, who shepherded the overfed along careful scenic routes.

Jeff had nothing in principle against the setup. When he had accompanied his father The Professor's charges on their cultural rounds, he had viewed them as a harem from which to choose bedmates. He did not think The Professor had ever caught on, although Bernice knew. She was surprisingly broad-minded for a virgin. Poor Bernice. His Bird in a very plain cage.

He shipped the two paintings he considered the best to Bernice along with his French easel, after paying off his local debts with canvases and leaving three at the gallery just in case. If they did sell, he was sure he'd never see the money, but at least they'd display them. As a landscape painter who worked relatively small, he was definitely unfashionable, but not unsellable. Still, he had not done his best work in Taos. He kept seeing work by other painters that seized the formal essence of the landscape, as O'Keeffe or Dasburg, or the tumultuous changes of sky and mountains, as Marin had done, always the Sacred Mountain. He had not made Taos his own. Its clarity had not crystallized him. He walked out of town and hitched a ride to Denver.

He carried his few things on his back in a rucksack, easier to tote than a suitcase, but no Americans seemed to use them. In Denver he found a flop near the station. He fished a newspaper out of a trash can. The Russians were supposed to be counterattacking in the suburbs of Moscow. Zach had written from London, where he had gone with the idea of enlisting in the RAF, but they had turned him down. Too many ancient injuries? They might have considered Zach over the hill at twenty-eight. It was not that Zach hated the Nazis. His own family's run of political ideas was not dissimilar. Jeff could easily imagine Zach's father, Zachary Barrington Taylor the third—as Zach was the fourth—saying, “That Hitler is a trifle crude but he knows how to keep the workers in line,” and contributing to the party coffers. Zach simply was going where things looked lively. He loved flying. He had grown up on dreams of fighter duels from the World War and he wanted to take on the Red Baron. In recent years Zach had been doing something boring in the family insurance business in Chicago; that is, the Taylors had a controlling interest in that combine as well as numerous others, not to mention the Barrington domain of textiles and sugar. Zach had done his family duties, marrying and fathering a child. Jeff had nothing to do with the respectable side of Zach's life. He would hardly be received there.

Zach urged him to come over to England, but neglected to send tickets, which meant he was not serious. Zach must know Jeff had not the money to get himself home, let alone to Europe. What had the Depression meant to Zach: more riffraff in the streets? Jeff, whose life had been chopped up by the Depression into segments of manual labor and unemployment in diverse cities and landscapes, who was sleeping in a cubicle in a fleabag hotel for the hundredth time, who had worked for the CCC and worked for the WPA and broken stone building a highway and harvested wheat, experienced a moment of resentment so strong he felt it could pierce his friend like a dagger of ice.

But Zach did not get on with his own father any better than Jeff did with The Professor; Zach had early fallen into the second son, bad son, black sheep role. He had never fitted into the life laid out like a suit of formal clothes by a valet. Had he finally escaped?

Jeff wanted to go home. Not to his father, who was a cold compulsive preoccupied with his own work and his own comfort, and who made him feel like a bad child who played truant. For all the years The Professor had spent dragging charges through the museums of Europe, he had no understanding of a son who painted. Jeff wanted to go home to Bernice, who was and wasn't his mother. Of course she wasn't, because they had had a real mother, that creature of flesh and intellect and humor and fussiness, the best faculty cook, who loved poetry and read it to them instead of silly children's books, who read them the Pope translation of the
Iliad
and sometimes recited for them the Greek, whose lap never failed in its size and warmth.

In another sense Bernice was his mother, because she was all he had had thereafter. They had raised each other. If only she had been his twin, a boy growing into man, they would roam the world together. Bernice would have made a handsome man. As it was, she was too tall for a woman, five nine, big-boned, a woman who could pull a plow. In another era, she would have been more appreciated, he thought. Picasso's big squarish nudes of his recent classical period made Jeff think of his sister.