Too Far to Walk Read online

  Breed looked sharp as always. Not only did he have patches on the elbows of his brand-new jacket; the sleeve ends, also, were piped in neat-stitched cinnamon-colored leather. Crimson vest. That supercock tie. Blond hair declaratively long—not just let go, for the temples were trimmed and square-shaven, but a heavy straight combed mass going back and making an oval bulge of the occiput: a longhead. Steel-rimmed glasses, steel-ball irises. Breed just looked bright as hell—but what could you tell by appearances?

  —— You look as if you were going to a wedding.

  Breed, grinning: —— I made my eight-ten.

  John: —— What do you know? I cut a class.

  —— Hey, the over-achiever unlaxing!

  —— I feel great. (John pounded his chest, then mock-coughed.)

  Breed: —— What got into you?

  John felt himself beginning to bristle. Breed’s beautiful square teeth; that word, over-achiever. John had known Chum Breed for only a couple of weeks; he had glided out of nowhere to become some kind of intimate—the way, apparently, of sophomore year, when all the first-year relationships were subject to sharp review and new shallow enthusiasms drifted in and out. John was not even sure where he had met Breed—was it having lunch with a crowd over in the Forrestal Complex, or at a sérénade de merde in Ackercocke’s room? Shadowy man who wore jackets and neckties to classes, yet along with the sleekness there was energy, enthusiasm, an air of experience—name it and he had done it: surfing at La Jolla (“Hang ten,” he would sometimes cry when an argument was building like a comber), not bothering to riot at the second (i.e., best) Newport Festival, pooh-poohing the black humorists, sniffing airplane glue (at age fourteen), reading Jorge Luis Borges in Spanish. Not James Baldwin—LeRoi Jones. Not Lord of the Flies (my heavens!)—Pincher Martin. A hint of something way, way out; yet a mixer-attender, this dapper cover, this look of totally belonging—to what? Grotesquely inappropriate nickname. Disenchanted way of looking at things, a scoffing at any act the least bit tainted with college spirit or do-goodism—he had hooted at the Mississippi volunteers. In fact, scorn was Breed’s basic mode. John had a feeling of Breed’s having fastened on him somehow…. The accident the night before was at the back of John’s mind, and Breed’s driving so coolly away from it. Yes, the veiled note of derision, as Breed asked what had got into him, to cut a class.

  —— I decided it was too far to walk.

  —— Too far?

  —— When I first woke up, I just decided I couldn’t make it, not on foot anyway.

  —— Too far to where?

  —— Out to Humblesmith.

  —— It’s not that far out there.

  —— It’s far when you’re going to Hum Sock 23.

  —— Oh, Gawd.

  —— Overview. Helicopter hop across the Western tradition. Professor Orreman at the controls.

  —— I heard he was pretty good. (Scorn, but a reverse twist when needed.)

  —— Oval Ears? Oh, he’s good all right.

  Emil, the counterman, wearing an appetite-killer of an apron, slid two thick plates in front of Breed and John and said: —— How you want your coffee?

  Breed said: —— Tea for me.

  Emil, a heavy town man, a sincere college-hater, ducked his head, drew the bowstring of his eyebrows down to the tip of his nose, and fired a real spitball of a glance at Breed: —— Cream or lemon? (There was a lifted-pinkie lilt to the question.)

  —— Neither one.

  John took black coffee and tasted his eggs. Breed, this neat person, seemed to throw his arms around his plate and hug it, and he gobbled.

  Breed, his mouth full: —— Why too far to walk?

  John put his fork down. Where had all his hunger gone? He said: —— Ever read Washington Square? In those days it seems you had this hush downtown there so thick that nobody could do anything. Such a great distance between people. Whatshisname, the hero if you could call him that, I forget his name, could barely manage to kiss Catherine Sloper (I remember her name. Sloper! Zow! What a name for a feminine lead!)—whatshisname could barely bring himself to kiss her on the cheek. Today, my God, what a different story—so crowded. Take the Square itself. I used to go down there some last year, weekends, I was making the coffeehouses and the singing for a while there; it’s so crowded you’ve got nothing but jostling, high-pitched voices, sex right out there in the sun. The kooks are spilling over into the park from the—what do the Hum Sock boys call it?—the inner city? A boggle of women comes running over to the cops screaming: —— Look over there by the railing of the playground, there’s a big man exposing himself to the toddlers in the sandboxes. So the cops go over and start walking him away, and then a whole other set of women comes screaming: —— You beasts, what’re you doing to that poor man? Brutality! Brutality! Where are you taking him?

  —— This is why you cut Human Society 23?

  —— I feel crowded out there. Oval Ears gives his lectures in that amphitheater in Humblesmith. It’s jammed.

  —— How many?

  —— I feel as if the rejects are all there.

  —— Rejects?

  —— Five apply, one gets in? I feel as if the ones who didn’t make it are there, in spirit. All sardined in among the one-armed desks. They have to stand. We’re sitting.

  Breed really liked this. Those steel ball bearings of his behind the wire-rimmed glasses glistened, and his perfect upper lip curled: —— Wonderful!

  —— I feel as if they’re all looking at me. How the devil did I get to sit there?

  —— Don’t blame the devil.

  —— They make me feel as if I’d shouldered them aside.

  —— You’ve been getting good marks, haven’t you?

  Marks? What had marks to do with it? Marks were easy. A matter of figuring out what was wanted; catering service. Marks had never been much of a problem. In high school most of the teachers had been women, cinches all. Miss Edith Flan. Mrs. Curbelow. A moment’s picture in John’s mind: a corridor of Provender Annex, grayish tile walls, glistening rows of lockers, the floor a design of swoops of a rotary waxer; a whispered conference against the baffle of an open locker door with Jeremy Ferne about some skulduggery of Jerry’s, but an eye out, a yearning for Madeline to walk past, the desperate, everlasting wish that an indefinite “it” could happen, that she would give a sign, that somehow it would happen to one.

  —— Have I told you about my high-school friend Jerry?

  —— I don’t think so.

  —— We spat on the entire works—got on a kick of breaking up organizations, for one thing. Oh, we ruined the P. H. S. Dramatic Society in six weeks flat. Jerry was something—redhead through and through.

  But John had already lost interest in telling about Jerry. Had that dirty word, over-achiever, made him want to prove to Breed that he was capable of being against? The whole layout at Provender had been pretty standard, and presumably that was what Jeremy Ferne had hated: Parents’ meeting every once in a while on a desperate topic like Dating Patterns, really to talk about kids driving across the New York State line in order (as the parents saw it) to you-know-what first, in some cheap tavern, and then you-know-what afterward, right in the family car; that thirteen-year-old taken to Juvenile Court for handing out Seconal capsules, which he’d snitched from the bathroom medicine cabinet at home, to eight of his classmates; the boy named Upshur, son of a vice-president of a decorating-fabric company in the city, hauled up for breaking and entering four separate times—had a morbid weakness for hi-fi gimcracks and doohickies.

  But John had been Mr. Reliable, Jr., at least until Jeremy Ferne had come along. Jeremy—born in one of the years when those names were in the wind, Jennifer, Abigail, Deirdre, John spelled Jon; with that name he had to be a no-sayer. What fun they had had! The scenery for Outward Bound never got finished; the leading girl quit three days before the performance under the sting of Jerry’s direction; on the big night the lighting blew the fuses four times according to plan; Jerry and he took the ticket money and got tight on it….

  Breed wiped his mouth and said: —— You know what I think you should do?

  —— What’s that?

  —— I think you ought to walk out to Humblesmith. I mean right now. To see whether it really is too far.

  John was aware again of that electrical smell, and he called to the counterman: —— Hey, Emil, you got something shorted in here? Something’s frizzing.

  Emil shrugged and held the shrug a long time, until he had given John more answer than he had asked for.

  John felt irritable. He resented Breed’s suggestion. He had a suspicion that Breed was somehow trying to worm into his life.

  John said: —— Can we have our check, Emil?

  Breed: —— I’d like to come and talk with you some time when that fink Flack isn’t around. I’ve got a proposition I think might interest you.

  Breed’s eyes glinted with affectionate good humor.

  4

  HERE the town was thinning out. The flaky slate slabs of the sidewalk, heaved by the frosts of many winters, were tilted and lip-cracked, and John saw chisel marks along the edges of the stone. Yellow and orange leaves were falling through a windless air, and a wonderful luminosity, too, seemed to be drifting down from the maple trees, so that the faces of students who were striding both ways along the sidewalks, holding books against their swinging thighs, murmuring and sometimes laughing, glowed with an unearthly healthiness.

  As he walked John fell into a mood of yearning. He saw the deep copper of a spindle tree at the corner of a lawn; his father, who in the years of his di
sappointment had clung to yard work as if he had a desperate stake in all that was tame in nature, had drummed the names of the domesticated shrubs and trees into John’s ears: spindle tree, Euonymus alatus, here, with the little wings on the branches and these glorious dark red leaves in the fall. John could not have accounted for the vague familiar desire he had begun to feel now, longing, wanting to find something: a cosmic, all-embracing, doctrinal, permanent something (far beyond red leaves, at which he suddenly felt a little tug of anger) that would be worth working for—worth walking for.

  Too far to walk? Was it a matter of objectives? Walking out to Humblesmith in this air that was like ginger ale—there was no lecture waiting for him from Orreman of the Greek Ideal. He had, he remembered, once walked halfway across New Hampshire. That had been a time (three years before?) when he had been irrepressibly eager and earnest. The Presidential Trail. The great thing about that kind of hiking had been that there had never been any particular objective, for the tramping itself was what mattered, the pull of the knapsack shoulder straps, the serene dappled shade along the paths. He remembered now, though, a moment of fury: a knob of Mount Madison, a natural picnic spot with a broad view of green and purple hills, huckleberry bushes close at hand, ironwood, outcroppings of gray lichened rocks—and a litter of Schlitz beer cans on the pathside, Saranwrap blown into sprigs of juniper, an aluminum pan for Sara Lee brownies left beside blackened stones set up to grill Roesseler franks, as the carton lying there testified; the filthy, selfish carelessness of those who thought the American mountains were simply theirs to enjoy and besmear.

  With the fanning up of that old out-of-the-way flicker of outrage John found himself now very annoyed with Breed. The idea that he, John, was actually walking out here, as Breed had suggested, to see whether it really was too far, galled him, and so did the thought that Breed liked to watch people; sat with his head tilted and that faint smile on his lips—watching.

  John heard himself saying out loud: —— Let’s see now.

  He looked quickly about—could not perceive that anyone was laughing at a midmorning sidewalk deadhead muttering to himself.

  He crossed Seminary Road, and on the right the broad expanse of Planique Fields opened up, the chewed-over gridirons of intramural clubs, at a level somewhat below that of the streetway, with useless, waist-high, paint-peeled wooden fences all around and two rows of goal posts standing like so many reproachful fresh-air-mad Christers on parade. Beyond there was a slum of lush swamp trees festooned with murderous honeysuckle. Humblesmith, the stadium, and the new gray buildings of the Institute were ahead, after these fields.

  He felt that he was on the edge of a dangerous state of mind. Breed had stung him. A reckoning? should he make a reckoning? All right, to begin with, he who yearned to be different wore a Sheldon College uniform—corduroys, plaid shirt with button-down collar, pullover sweater, more-or-less white sweat socks, one loafer sole bound, around and around, with dirty adhesive tape; a look of caring about not caring about appearances, which were, on principle, deceptive anyway. Underneath—he took showers. He was thin; he knew that the strain of the Sheldon overload showed in the rigidity of his neck muscles. Although inwardly not exactly dynamic, he tried at least to be equable most of the time, kept up a steady cheerful front, which was more than a lot of these self-consciously surly types did. He could talk—in a rhythm of pauses and little explosions—but he felt he was shy and reserved (like his father?), and perhaps because of this diffidence Flack, on two beers, once, had called him supercilious, a superior bastard. But Flack was a retarded child, everyone knew that. One problem John felt he did have: an evasive eye. He sometimes found himself, offsetting this, gazing deeply into the eye of the person with whom he was talking.

  Too far to walk? What had happened to the zest he had had during those years in Provender Annex? Third in his class—only Jerry and a girl ahead of him; president of the Senate; editor of Falling Leaves; tennis team. Nex! Nex! Rah Rah Provender! What a shock to land in a whole bog of class presidents and valedictorians at Sheldon. His father, himself once a class president, but once more than just that, too: sensitive, bursting with ideas—and now, $38,000 per annum, wheeler-dealer in a big reproduction-of-colonial-furniture company in Worcester, Massachusetts; disappointed, disappointing man. His mother—she’d given up teaching in the dim past to apply her firm attention to the brood; she called it the brood. They lived in a house with a glass wall staring into the teeth of a house without a glass wall across the street….

  Oooh, the way Breed had driven away from that sound of screeching tires. How did one deal with that? By saying “Brother”?…

  How did one deal with Sheldon College?

  What a struggle it had been to get in! And then: He had been on the Dean’s list as a freshman, but progressively through the first term he had felt let down and in the second simply bored. During his last year at Provender he had at least had a couple of really exciting courses—a Shakespeare seminar of only six kids, and Mrs. Curbelow’s acid and lucid bit on the patterns of American mentality. But as a freshman at Sheldon he had caught three graduate students as instructors, all dull typicals, one fairly good full-fledged but brand-new Ph.D., and one full professor, a dodo with copper-coated arteries, a (barely) living reproach to the theory of tenure who had obviously been sloughed off onto freshman duty-courses by his sharper departmental colleagues. The assignments of freshman year had been either indigestible gobbets of rote learning which the instructors distastefully regarded as remedial, or monstrous chores of reading—for every Sheldon teacher seemed to believe that the paperback revolution had been achieved precisely in order to enable his students to read everything ever written about his discipline. Five to seven endless tomes a not-endless week. If it was Publish or Perish for the profs, it was, for the students who encountered the fruits of that policy, a choice of Skip or Flip.

  But this year all that had faded into something completely different and very hard to put a finger on: a kind of life-fuzziness, a feeling of being immured from the bright outdoor light of reality. John now had begun to wonder why he was at Sheldon at all, for he wasn’t getting one tenth out of the place, or putting one hundredth into it, of what he should be. Above all, he felt like a popgun that wasn’t being aimed. Any minute there might be a pointless muffled bang, aimed at nothing, at absolute random, and the cork would fly to the end of the string. Why? What the hell was he doing here?

  Here? John found himself standing on the granite steps of Humblesmith. How far had it been, walking out here? Students were entering and leaving, and the brass latch bar of the door rattled again and again. The building was heavy, dark, fortified, Norman. John turned, to start back, all the pleasure of cutting the class drained away. He felt his arm gripped by strong fingers.

  The rostrum voice: —— Walk along with me a bit.

  —— Oh, good morning, sir.

  Orreman. A drift of silver-white hair, which always looked newly shampooed; goldfish-bowl glasses, undoubtedly post-cataract; the famous ears of the nickname, thick wrinkled parabolic slabs of purple next to the white. The grip eased from a cop’s move-along-buddy hold into a pseudo-parental caress, and the old man’s hand stayed embarrassingly there. From the end of the off arm dangled an ancient brown leather briefcase held together by straps of frayed webbing.

  Orreman: —— Enjoy that this morning? I love that lecture!

  John: —— Yeah, that was great, sir.

  Yes, Oval Ears loved his old nuggets. (Take these down, take ’em down and memorize ’em and live by ’em—the Seven Wise Men. Cleobulus of Rhodes: Moderation is the chief good. Periander of Corinth: Forethought in all things. Pittacus of Mytilene: Know thine opportunity. Bias of Priene: Too many workers spoil the work. Thales of Miletus: If you go on a man’s bond, ruin is near. Chilo of Sparta: Know thyself. Solon of Athens: Nothing in excess.) His love of these old, old lectures, which he must have pieced together long before Scotch Tape was invented, really his self-love—this was what made him so good: integrity, seeing nothing through those thick lenses, absolutely no fear of death. It was thrilling to listen to such a hero—the timbre, not the substance. Right now as they walked he was kneading John’s arm, feeling out the rubbery fullness of a youth’s muscles. The old philosopher’s pace, intended to be springy, was a kind of rhythmic lurch, for Orreman rose far up on his toes with each step, giving himself good reason to hang on to a student.