Prometheus Fit to Be Tied!
Paul Hawkins
Copyright 2011 Paul Hawkins, Smashwords Edition
"Water quenches a flaming fire, and alms atone for sins." Sirach 3:29
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Dedication: To Hillary, Scott, Allison, and Susan
Disclaimer:
All events and characters in this book are fictional. I blame all narrative inconsistencies on the faulty memories of the fictional characters. I am tired of trying to wrangle the truth out of them.
–Paul Hawkins, November 29, 2010
Chapter 1
1903
Ernest White was an odd duck from the day he was born. He was always indifferent to his parents' acts of kindness. He never played with the toys they bought him, and he told stories to himself – about himself – instead. He was nice enough to his mother, but when his father talked he acted like he didn't hear him, and even when his father punished him for his dreaminess or his laziness Ernest never cried and even laughed. He fulfilled none of his father's hopes for a productive and respectable son, and Ernest wasn't even three before his father had given up on him, handing the disappointment over to his mother and turning his attention to farming again.
From Otto's Journal, 1970
I used to work as his factotum years ago.
He called himself Mr. Perfect. He was semi-well-known to the famous and semi-famous in the whirlwind pre-war world. His money had opened many doors and he had rubbed shoulders with the best and brightest of his day, and if you look at group photos of the cultural elite on the Left Bank or the salons of New York or the French Riviera you can often see his tanned bright visage in the background smiling much more genuinely than the rest, because unlike them he was free from the guilt of sponging off the honest man to pay the tab, and he was the only one in the photos who didn't think he was smarter than everyone else. He wore white suits and tried to affect a degree of European culture, and was just successful enough to fool the small-town people he'd grown up with, but probably not anybody else.
August 1939
New York Times, August 13, 1939, page 48 B (beneath a lingerie ad):
"World Traveler Returns Stateside"
World traveler, theosophist, amateur archaeologist and art patron known in the expatriate community as "Mr. Perfect" stopped in New York City yesterday on his way home to rural Oklahoma after 15 years as a citizen of the world. Perfect, whose given name is Ernest White, is perhaps best remembered for the off-Broadway run of his scathing verse-drama "Prometheus Fit To Be Tied!"
During his stay in the city Perfect made sizable donations to several local cultural institutions, donated a self portrait to the Museum of Non-Objective painting, then stopped by the World's Fair and put his foot through a television being displayed in the RCA building. His valet stayed behind to pay for the damages.
Perfect would not disclose his reasons for returning to the small town of his childhood. His valet said he needed some rest.
*
It was a hot August day and rumor had it that White was on the next train coming into town. A rusted red sign creaking beside the tracks read "Welcome to Blaze" though the town had recently changed its name to ‘Progress’ in anticipation of damn great things. It sat at the end of a spur of the AT&SF line, nestled against the first small foothills of the Ozarks. It had sleepily passed several decades farming and milling ore but recently had begun to house hundreds of WPA laborers drawn from all over the USA to help build the world's largest multi-arch dam, a milestone effort of flood control, rural electrification, and feverish government spending to try to end the Depression.
It was late afternoon and the sky was brown and hinting of a storm. The air was heavy with a sweet smell underneath the stale summer heat, and the distant sky showed rags of rain dragging beneath the clouds but not reaching the ground.
A small crowd of people was gathered at the depot to await the arrival of their town's most famous personage. A rumble from the approaching locomotive started then swelled and soon its weathered cars were pulling into the station. The engine sighed and the passengers slowly began to depart, dragged their disjointed baggage and bodies down the steps. Off came a handful of farm workers, some oily salesman, a mother pinching two children by their ears, a fat lady carrying a garish parrot in a cage. But then all was quiet.
"Where is he?" one voice said.
"Why's he coming back anyway?" another inquired.
A dark young man lidded his eyes and hissed: "I heared he killed a guy."
"Lord, you and your bottomless thirst for the scandalous and seamy!" a large and florid woman chided.
They all hung fire and finally there was more motion in the car, and soon a stocky young man with a brown beard and a brown suit appeared in the doorway. This was not their famous prodigal, but maybe it was his lackey. He stood loaded down with suitcases of various sizes adorned with stickers from famous places all over the world. This overladen man picked his way carefully down the steps and dumped the bags on the platform. He then called back into the car: "Come on, Mr. White. Let's get moving."
"We're there already? All right, Otto, just a minute."
While Otto waited for his employer, a young man sidled up and handed him some telegrams. "For Mr. White," he said.
Otto handed the messenger some money and began leafing through the sheets. Squints and frowns crossed his face as he moved from note to note, then he folded them up and shoved them in his pocket.
He called back toward the train again. "Come on Mr. White! We've got to get the furniture moved to the house before it rains."
Shadows finally began to stir in the passenger car window, and then the town's famous personage appeared in the doorway. Those who remembered him compared him to their memories, and those that had never seen him looked closely to see if he lived up to the stories.
He was a tall man with gold hair and a deeply tanned face and blue eyes. His limbs were long and asserted their angles in the rumpled creases of his white linen suit. To the observers matching him up against the memories, his face showed the signs of youth finally on the decline. There were creases around his eyes and mouth, his eyelids were heavy, his chin had lost its angularity and his cheeks sagged. But the whole thing rearranged itself when his bright blue eyes fell right on you. Then the angles marshaled to attention, all the drooping and stress disappeared to pretend a chiseled alacrity with only you and he at the center. It was a face that had gotten him ensnared in a mix of European condescension and Eastern mysticism and led to him being convinced he was a golden child. This, in turn, had led to his being bilked out of a large part of his fortune, and he retained the moniker "Mr. Perfect" as a reminder of the experience.
Ernest White, or "Ernest" or even "E. L." to the folks who knew him growing up, paused unsteadily at the top of the stairs. He looked a little drunk. He tapped a cigarette against a silver case and then floated out a foot to conquer the steps. The people watching him braced for a tumble, but he did fine and the next thing they knew he was standing in their midst as if he had been poured there, all handshakes and smiles.
"Mr. Stevens, right? Is that your girl?"
The man smiled proudly. "Yes, Mr. White."
"She's certainly grown. I hear she's earned herself a scholarship in music for the Fall."
"Yes," the man replied, his face beaming with pride and surprise.
White walked further in. "John Harken – did you rebuild from that fire?"
"Yes, Mr. White – no more hired hands smoking in the hayloft for me!" the man answered.
"I knew you'd recover," Ernest White replied, and moved on, already welcoming another face and hand.
A tiny old woman with pale gray eyes and a blue shawl pressed herself forward to Mr. White's side. "I want you to know we are all so sorry about your mother's passing away," she said.
He looked down at her, and his eyes softened just a bit. "Thank you – you ladies were all such good friends to her."
"She was such a fine Christian woman."
"I appreciate your saying that."
The old woman felt bold enough to add. "And about those stories – we don't believe a word of them. We know you are a good man at heart."
Mr. White paused and looked at her. "Thank you. Only the bad news has the staying power to make it back here across the ocean, and only by being exaggerated out of proportion."
"Well, we're sure you'll make a good neighbor."
He laughed. "I'll try."
A dark-haired burly man in overalls and t-shirt came forward. "Mr. White?" he said. "My truck's ready to move your stuff. I wouldn't rush you, but it looks like rain."
"I understand." White said. He turned to the crowd. "It's time for me to get my things moved up to the house. I appreciate your coming out. I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of each other soon."
He turned back toward his assistant. He dropped the cigarette to the ground and crushed it with one toe of his stylish brogans.
"We're so glad you're home!" someone shouted.
He looked up. "Thanks so much. Thanks for coming out to greet me." He made a wave and then gave Otto a jerk of his head. Otto moved forward and Mr. White walked back up the steps into the train car.
The crowd began to break up, moving off across the platform and back toward town. Their footsteps and chattered faded and then drifted away. Otto closed quarters with the man they'd hired to move the furniture.
After the crowd had vanished Mr. White came back down the train steps and seated himself on a bench along the depot. His face was its tired, sagging self again. He took off his hat, pushed his sweaty hair back from his forehead, and lit a cigarette. A few puffs later he stretched out his legs, sighed, and took a drink from a flask. He watched the movers haul off the train all priceless furnishings he’d dragged here from every corner of the globe.
A little tow-headed girl in overalls came up and stared at him. She was blue-eyed but had dirty cheeks and feet. She was the mover's daughter and she, like he, was expected to stay out of the way while the work was done. She didn't say a word but stared intently.
He blew out some smoke. "Didn't your poppa tell you never to hang around strangers?"
"No," she answered.
He paused and ignored her for as long as he could, but she kept staring. Finally he said, "Good. I'd have never left this town if I hadn't met a stranger or two. A person's got to learn about the world from somewhere."
She ran off. Mr. White watched as her dust-red feet carry her away.
The movers finally finished their work. "Everything's loaded, Mr. White. We're ready to head out."
"Good," White said, "I'll drink to it."
Otto dragged a handkerchief across the back of his neck.
"Hop aboard," the mover called from the truck, "Let's go."
Ernest and Otto climbed onto the tailgate of the truck and held on tight. The furniture strained against ropes behind them. Mr. White sat oblivious, confident in the strength of the ropes to hold the load back, but Otto plucked them suspiciously like over-taut guitar strings. The truck rumbled and they held on tight as they rolled away from the train station and down the road, leaving the town behind and plunging into the countryside.
White waved some dust away from his face and Otto pulled a sheaf of papers from his pocket.
"Here are the telegrams that were waiting for you," Otto said. "Want to hear them?"
"Not particularly."
"The Duke of Hapsburg sends his regards."
"That's kind of him, considering what I did to his house."
"The Mesopotamian Society asks if you'll be joining them on their expedition."
"They mean will I be funding the expedition."
"Lady Anne asks if she'll meet you this next equestrian season."
He just coughed and took a drink from the flask.
"Look, why don't you give me that and take your medicine instead?"
"Because European psychiatrists are quacks."
"Sometimes they know more than you do. You turn into him when you drink."
"Him? Him who?"
"You know perfectly well. You lose your judgment."
Otto reached for the flask but Mr. White held it away. Otto sighed and stuffed the papers back into his pocket.
A mile or two down the road they took a right turn, and White craned around to see the beginnings of low rolling hills. The truck plunged down a gully, ducked beneath the shade of trees and crossed a creek on an improbably old bridge, then rose steadily. Ahead of them atop a knoll was an old gray house. It was boxy and three stories tall and had a large iron fence around it. There were about ten people waiting outside the gate.
"Pagan! Theosophist!" an old woman shouted.
"Aw, don't listen to her, Mr. White," a man's voice said. "Now, if I could have just a second to interest you in an investment opportunity..."
But Mr. White ignored them and the truck lumbered through gate. Otto hopped off of the truck and closed the gate behind them.
"Nothing to see here," he said to the people that were gathered. "Mr. White's going to be here for a long time. You'll have plenty of time to visit with him later on."
"We don't need his kind of demon orientalism in this town," the quavery old woman continued.
"Don't confuse Mr. White with the folks who swindled him," Otto replied.
"Old habits," the woman retorted. "And," she said significantly, "He keeps the name."
She reached into her purse and pulled out a tattered small book. On the cover it read "The Eight Mysteries of Peace and the Ascent of Man in the Coming Hygienic Age," and on the back was a picture of a very young ‘Mr. Perfect’ sitting in the grass under some foreign-looking tree with his hands folded in his lap in an unnatural contortion.
"All that proves is that he was young and stupid once," another man in the crowd said. "And besides, give the guy a break – his mother just died, for Pete's sake."
With that, and with the persistence of the closed gate, the assembled crowd slowly and quietly departed.
A few moments later, Mr. White climbed down from the tailgate and looked up at the windows of the old gray house.
Otto walked up beside him. "Why don't you just sit here on the porch in this rocker while we get the things moved in?"
White agreed. He tested the old cane chair and it seemed sturdy enough, so he lowered himself into it. "I guess the most useful thing I can do is keep out of your way," he said. "Get me some water so I can take my pills."
Otto nodded and went off, and White sat in the chair looking at the familiar view from the porch of the house he’d grown up in.
Otto came back with a glass of water, but White already held two yellow pills in his hand and washed these down with a swig from his flask. Otto growled but set the water on a table beside him.
After a few moments White began to feel his stomach warm comfortably and his body relax. He gradually sank into the chair. He watched the men moving furniture until he dozed off.
At some point the little girl he’d seen at the depot came up to him, holding something.
Mr. White hoisted his eyelids a fraction to see her holding an old crystal radio set.
His eyes traced the cat's whisker and the copper coil. "Tune in the world," he mumbled. "Try to get the signals. Every day a parade."
The next thing he knew she was not there, and he had been asleep for some time. Night had fallen and he was chilly. Someone had placed a blanket over his shoulders. The unloading had ceased and twenty feet away he saw Otto standing in the truck's headlights, counting out some bills to the man who had helped them move.
"Thank you for your help," Otto said.
The man counted the bills twice. "It's nothing," he said. "We country people like to help each other."
Mr. Perfect looked past them at the stars in the wide sky. He drew himself up from the chair, clutched the blanket to his shoulders and thrust out his free hand. "Thank you for your assistance and for welcoming me back to this wonderful community! I look forward to many years of happy, quiet solitude as a productive citizen!"
The movers just looked at him. "You take care of yourself, Mr. White," one said. Then they climbed into the truck and the engine roared to life. The headlights slashed briefly across White and Otto and then slid past. The truck’s growl diminished out the gate and down the road.
"What was that all about?" Otto said.
"Hell, they were expecting a show," White replied. "Give the folks in town a little something to talk about." He tossed the blanket into the rocker and walked inside the house.
*
White's mother had died three weeks ago and it had taken him this long to get here from the south of France. He had crossed the ocean on a liner, stopped in New York to pick up some stored furniture, then made the rest of the long journey by train. It had been ten years since he'd been in the house, but he had never been here when it was this quiet and empty.
Once inside the doorway he looked at the familiar old dark moldings, the high ceilings, the narrow stairs and doors. He had grown up here. He kept expecting to turn around and see his mother waiting for him, but all he noticed was an old ticking clock on the wall. He then saw that someone had placed a picture of his mother smack in the center of the mantel, with flowers around it. As a shrine it did not impress him much.
"We put your things in the large bedroom upstairs," Otto said.
"Thanks - did they get you set up?" Mr. White asked.
Otto nodded. "Down here by the kitchen."
"Good, good."
Mr. White paused and rested his hand on a dark curio cabinet. He picked up a sculpture of a fawn and looked at it blandly. "Thanks for making this trip with me," he said. "I know you'd have rather stayed in Europe."
Otto shrugged and walked into the kitchen. He began inventorying the pots and dishes. "The more I started getting ready for this trip, the more I began to think maybe it was the right time for me to come back to America and make a career for myself. I can’t be a factotum forever."
Mr. White nodded. He had walked into the kitchen and was looking at a too-cute statuette of a cherub. He'd be damned if he knew why his mother had collected such things.
"Don't get to brooding over everything," Otto said. "Give it all time to sink in. You have an even bigger day ahead tomorrow with the reading of the will. I've made all the arrangements with the lawyer and the executor and the other interested parties. You just get some rest."
White agreed. "I'm off to bed then," he said. "And my notes, you know, my works in progress?"
"I've set boxes of the typed monographs on a table in your room."
"Good. I expect to resume my work in earnest and finish several significant studies very soon. There will be much less to distract me out here."
"Sounds good."
"We'll have to let my publisher know to expect drafts." White's eyes glowed suddenly and he stabbed a finger in his palm. "And we'll need to be ready to draw the line with the locals, if necessary, to ensure my solitude!"
"I'll arrange everything," Otto said.
"Good – when everyone else is out to swindle me, I've always been able to count on you, Otto. Good night then."
"Good night, Mr. White."
White turned and ascended the stairs. At the top he went into the first room on the right. It was a small square room overcrowded with his exotic furniture. He laid his wallet, watch, and cufflinks on a low dresser, shut the door, then he lifted the window open. The night stretched wide and purple and a cool breeze blew in. He looked far across the plain. He looked to the farthest end of the horizon and saw flat country and the dark starless shapes of small hills.
He reached into his coat pocket, took out his bottle of pills, and poured them out the window. They clattered softly down the eaves and disappeared into the night. He got undressed and lay down on the bed.
Though he was tired beyond tired, White's eyes snapped open from his first attempt at sleep. He saw his white jacket and hat on a rack in the corner – a shell of himself but now purple in the shadows. Then he glanced at the dresser whose mirror was wedged with snapshots and postcards of places he'd been: Paris, London, Giza; Cairo, Venice, Tarsus, Moscow, Tibet, Hollywood. The photos often showed the people he had been there with. Where were they now? All they had left were Cheshire smiles and expenses on his accounts.
He lay awake and the advent-tinted world drained him just as it'd done when he was a boy, when his father had been just another farmer but Mr. Perfect was never content to be just another farmer's son, when he was still a boy but already old enough for his heart to beat faster thinking that there was a wider brighter world out there that he was missing.
When he had been coming home on the train, with the locomotive jostling relentlessly beneath him and with lots of time to think, White had come to believe that the world was dying. Television and totalitarianism and bad ideas with catchy slogans would hammer all the world's pieces together, with small stupid jobs for everyone and a bureaucratic engine to force health, harmony and hygiene onto a should-be-grateful populace, grinding them into a predictable paste that met some quota for machinated productivity and left no room for stuff that wasted time and made folks happy. It made him sick. And within a generation or two people would be too stupid to know what they were missing, too numb to care.
Mr. Perfect had always thought that when he finally found the real world, it would turn out to be a marvelous place. He used to think that everyone was made for something wonderful.
When the breeze had cooled a few more degrees he felt the muscles of his brow and back relax, and he fell asleep.
*
The next day was the reading of his mother's will. Daylight came and chased the purple from the corners of the house.
He came down the stairs looking resplendent in his usual white suit, accented today with a black tie.
"They're all waiting on you."
"Let them wait a little longer," he said. "Were you able to get that kind of coffee I asked for?"
"Overnight? I got the local brand, same as I told you I would."
"It'll have to do." White said. He took the cup, sniffed at it suspiciously, but then sat down on the top stair and took a sip.
"And you're going to drink it here when there's people downstairs waiting to meet you?"
White shrugged. "Why not? It's my house now."
"They haven't read the will yet."
White frowned at his valet, but after a minute he got up and handed the cup to Otto. "All right, let's go."
He walked down the narrow stairs and into the parlor. Ten men sat around a dark wood table. White moved to the end, pulled his chair out noisily, then sat as tall and upright as he could.
A pinched-looking man in a black suit adjusted his spectacles and began reading in a droning voice.
Ernest White reminded himself that it was his mother's will, and not his father's, and that he had always gotten along much better with her. He and his father had never seen eye-to-eye on much of anything. His father by all appearances had been an honest, God-fearing, hard-working man, and had sacrificed much for the boy he had taken into his home. Some felt that Mr. White had never acknowledged the debt.
The executor was speaking in an aside now. How humble and benevolent Ernest White's mother had been. How loved by all – a pillar of the church. Missed but in a better place.
White heard this and found his mind comparing the platitude to his actual memories, then felt an odd emotion open in his head, an unexpected type of affection that was new, not a reminted sensation from youth. He turned his mind to it and thought about his mother and the love of superfluity which she had taught him, and the ability to laugh at absurd stories, the love of beauty in excess.
Now the executor's digression continued, a veiled lecture perhaps to soften the blow. How his parents had had a hard road, how they had both sacrificed convenience to live decent lives, how they had not let sudden wealth sway them from what was important in life, and how if they had one lesson to pass on, it would be the opportunity to prove one's self through hard work.
White twisted tight a black button of his jacket. The sphinx etched on the button would have yelped if it could. Ernest felt suddenly lonely and old, far removed from the colorful distraction he had packed into his last twenty years. Everything in the small sparse room felt more hard and real than his pan-chromatic experiences. He wondered what he would do with the rest of his life.
Finally the man had given up orating and was reading again. He pushed his glasses down onto his nose. Mr. Perfect looked up and caught his own reflection in the man's glasses, and he recognized his mother's smile in his own. He felt a tightness let go in his chest.
Of course he inherited everything.
*
Mr. Perfect and Otto waved farewell to the sympathizers from the screened porch, watched the Fords and Plymouths and DeSotos wheel away. It was a bright Saturday afternoon. They turned back inside, and the house was big and quiet.
Otto went to change out of his suit. Mr. Perfect opened the entranceway closet. He slid the black tie out from underneath his collar and knotted in its place a length of red silk with white palm trees. He pulled on his panama hat as Otto came downstairs.
"Have you got your list?" he asked Otto. They were going into town. Otto had retrieved his list from the top of his dresser, and Ernest fished his from a jacket pocket. The lists read:
Mr. White:
alligator house slippers, if available
cufflinks shaped like oil wells
A cream-colored sixteen-foot Cadillac with a red interior was part of the inheritance. It was in perfect shape since his mother had only driven it to church and bingo. Although Mr. White was not a particularly good driver, he climbed behind the wheel and leaned across and opened the passenger door for Otto. White looked over his shoulder to back out of the garage, cut a circle across the lawn, and then pointed the vehicle toward the road.
"I hope you're not making a mistake coming back here," Otto said. "I wonder if this is the right kind of environment for you."
"Well, here in America people tend to divide things into polar opposites: right or wrong, good or evil, sickness or health. It's too simple here. There's no room for the comfortable middle ground that you enjoy. Europe's more tolerant."
Mr. White smiled. "Ah yes, Europe - the place that's getting ready to go at it hammer and tongs again. When it's put to the test all Europe's middle ground rolls up and disappears. It's just a convenient fiction to license misbehavior in times of excess."
"Well, that's certainly a new tune coming from you," Otto said. "Maybe you're ready to come back here after all."
But Mr. White did not respond; instead he settled back in his seat and let his eyes scan the countryside and the town, sifting the old from the new, the decrepit from the still bright and hopeful.
They rolled into town and parked along the main row of street-front businesses. A crowd of gawkers awaited them and shadowed them as they went from store to store.
"Why’d he come back anyway?" a billowy lady in a loud-print dress stage-hissed to anyone within earshot.
"He’s always acted like his birthplace was the armpit of the earth," a red-faced farmer said. "And now he says he wants to settle here for good?"
"He must’ve pissed off everyone in Europe."
"...or felt the stab of a broken heart..."
"... or spent all his money..."
"Spent all his money?" a slick-haired salesman moaned.
"Relax," a sharp-faced young man said. "He couldn’t go through all his dough in a million years, even with a dozen con-men bilking him. But mark my word: there’s some shadow hovering over him – you can see it in his eyes, his footsteps. His joy of life’s been stolen. He has come back here to atone - to atone, and then..." he paused for effect, "to die."
The larger woman fanned herself. "Mercy!"
The young man smiled. The rest of the folks gathered around were not sure that they believed him, but if pressed would have admitted that his theory sounded rather fine.
If White overheard any of this, he did not show it. He made their shopping trip brief and efficient. He then returned to the old prairie mansion for a simple supper and engaged himself in study for the rest of the evening. It all went more quietly than Otto had expected.
Chapter 2
After doing all his necessary shopping and settling into the house, Mr. White and Otto walked the grounds of the farm. Aside from the windmill, generator, and phone line (the latter of which he had had installed for his mother at considerable expense), the place showed general neglect. An old tractor sat tilted and rusting in the tall grass not 20 yards beyond the back door. It was a favorite perch for an ancient rooster that was, as near as they could tell, completely feral.
"Tilling the soil, the purest form of work and the most honest," White said like he'd read it off a match book. He devoted the morning to inventorying the tools in the shed and cleaning and sharpening them. Then in the afternoon he picked up the phone and called around, asking what would be the best crops to grow for his soil and for this time of year. Someone, recognizing his voice, tried to convince him to raise mink.
But just three days later, with huge bags of seed in the barn and catalogs cluttering his desk, he was tired of it. Otto looked out the kitchen window in late afternoon to see White sitting on an overturned bucket near the horse trough, attempting a sleight-of-hand card trick. Two mules with wet muzzles stood on either side of him, watching with expressions of calm but persistent concentration. White came in later that night and ate like a horse and then went promptly to bed.
The next day Otto got up early to find Mr. White already dressed and seated at his desk. His red suspender hung loose at his sides. One of his hands was buried in his golden hair and the other dashed a pen through a stack of papers, some yellowed but some new. When Otto walked into the room Mr. White looked up, and Otto could see that his face was transfigured.
"I knew this move to the country would do me good!" he declared. "I'm finally making progress on that treatise of western civilization I've worked at for so long. I hope the Professor's plans come soon."
The "Professor" was a dubiously-tenured old man from New York who wore cloth gloves with finger-holes even on the warmest days. In earlier years he and White had collaborated on a project to explain all of world history. It was a perpetual work in progress.
But by afternoon the project was forgotten and White had left his desktop covered with papers. He wandered about the house gloomily, spinning the yellowed globe each time he walked by and finally settling himself on the back porch, lazily smoking cigarette after cigarette. When Otto creaked open the screen door, White took one last drag then stubbed out the butt and looked up. "Come on, Otto," he said, "I want you to help me with something." Otto followed him off the back porch and out a few yards to the car parked slantwise in the red dirt and faded grass. Mr. White climbed behind the wheel and turned the key. The engine purred to life, and Otto was still pulling his door shut when White set the car rolling down the road.
"Where are we going?" Otto asked.
"You'll see," White said. "I just need you to stand behind me while I do this."
"Do what?"
His employer waved a hand and demurred.
It was a bright afternoon. They drove along the dirt road and ducked around curves where the road accommodated stunted hills and clumps of trees. They rose from a sudden dip to cross a creek and a clutch of houses came into view in the distance. Mr. White pulled up in front of one of the houses and got out. Otto followed him.
They walked up to the mint-green facade of a craftsman-style house framed comfortably by a scattering of elms. White knocked on the door. They heard a child laughing inside, but then quiet, and footsteps.
A woman opened the door. She was tall with blonde hair pulled back from a poised middle-aged face. Her eyes were bright and green. The faces of two teen-ish girls could be seen watching from within the house. They whispered to each other and laughed quietly.
Otto looked from White's face to hers and weighed the restrained familiarity between them.
"Ernest – I thought you might drop by," she said.
"Hello Constance. I couldn't very well not do so."
She scowled at him. "That's because you're foolish enough to think you've come back for good. But you need to know that whatever your intentions are, I don't want to get caught up in them."
"I just came by to apologize to you for being such an ass so many years ago."
The woman shifted her weight to one foot. She cut her eyes from White’s face to Otto’s, to the cars parked recklessly on her lawn, then looked back at him. "Look, you don't need to. Your mind was always someplace else back then. Even when you were looking at me there was part of you that was always someplace else. You’re still someplace else and you always will be."
Ernest frowned. "Your memory is too selective and too harsh. Remember when I brought that band in town for you?"
The woman's face froze. "That was for her."
"No..."
But she persisted. "Yes - I'm sure. She wanted to learn to dance ballroom style and you told her `that's nobody's style these days' but she persisted and so you brought in an entire band just to teach her some damn lessons."
Mr. White's jaw fell and he stared into space a moment. It did sound like something he might have done.
Constance hardened her stare. "Good Lord - even now you’re your own worst witness. Of all the things to bring up."
He reached into his jacket. "Look, in any case I'd like to do something for you now, to make up for all the nuisance I caused, to help take care of you." He began to take out his checkbook.
Constance put her hands on her hips and laughed. "We don't need anything. A few months after you left I found a man who actually loved me. He was a good man and saw to it that we were taken care of. He helped design some of the biggest oil buildings in Tulsa. He would be proud of the way I am managing with the kids."
White looked into the house past her at two faces peering from the kitchen doorway. "Are those your children?"
"Yes, two girls – almost grown. That's what happens when you have a regular life. People change, babies get born and raised – life moves on. But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you, what with your hopping the globe so that not too much dust can settle on you at any one place, and packing the moments with diversions as showy and meaningless as confetti. I guess that’s this guy’s job - to sweep up the floor after every meaningless parade?" She looked at Otto. "Poor sap. Listen, Ernest, I don't know what you came back for, but I sincerely hope it's not to bother me."
White looked at her, but she stared back at him until he felt every last empathetic impulse of his mind retreat. He put his checkbook back in his pocket and straightened his tie.
"I wish you well," White said and walked back toward his car. "Come on, Otto."
Otto thanked the woman for the time and gave a little deferential bow, but she just stared at him until he was glad to turn and follow his employer. The air felt cooler once they were off the porch and walking across the soft bluish grass.
Ernest started the car in silence and they drove away. As they shot between stands of trees and yellowed fields Otto turned to see Mr. White take something out of his wallet. It was a picture of Constance as she had been years ago. Otto could see she was poised, happy and beautiful, with a spark of irony and intelligence in her eyes.
White tore it up and tossed it out the window. "Thanks," he said to Otto.
"For what?"
"For standing behind me. If I hadn't known you were there, I might've run off screaming."
"It was nothing," Otto said.
"No," White said, stabbing his finger at the dashboard. "It was something I had to do. There are some things a man must forcibly put behind him if he's ever going to get any work done."
"So, that was you putting her behind you?
He shifted gears roughly as they climbed a shallow hill. "I had to be certain there were no mixed signals."
"She seemed sure enough."
Ernest lit a cigarette, puffed some smoke, stared at him, but then looked back at the road. "Message delivered - duty done. I've made one crucial advancement in defusing the larger problem of returning here."
He drove roughly but not unhappily the rest of the way home.
*
The next day Mr. White and Otto went into the west end of the house and opened a door into a long-unused room. It was dusty and dark. Otto parted the gray curtains so that the air lit with dust motes. The room was spartan - one small desk against an empty wall, with two walls of shelves loaded with farm implement catalogs, give-away almanacs and county extension tomes.
"Let's get some air in here," White said. "This used to be my father’s study."
Otto struggled at a window until he finally hoisted it with a loud cracking noise that made him think he had broken it. He repeated the process on the other window and then a slight breeze began to stir. Mr. White set a book on top of some old papers to hold them down. Then he turned to Otto.
"We’ll have to clear this place out, clean it up, and put a real desk in here. Then it will do well enough for my research."
Over the next several days Otto got the room in order, and then Mr. White sealed himself inside it to make a run at his scholarly project. He sat walled in by box after box of his monographs-in-progress and his codices of ancient tongues. After an initial burst of energy, however, he found himself mostly staring out the window, and when an embossed invitation from the Ladies' Guild arrived in the mail, he practically leapt at the opportunity to give a talk on the designated topic: "Many Races, Many Places, Many Faces." He spent days cribbing notes for his speech. He stomped up and down the hall practicing the cadence of his delivery, its fervor, its candor and emotion. But when the event actually arrived and he had delivered his oration ("Key Indicators of an Indo-European Ur-Kultur and the Potential for Revitalization of a Dignifying World View in a Post-Industrial Millennium"), the only reaction was a smattering of polite applause followed by the clattering of forks on cake plates and then complete and utter silence.
"So you see," he said, "the idea of charity, which heretofore had been a goal only, or worse, a maxim inducing obedience through guilt, will, through our advancements in science and economic prosperity, guided by new revelations of social interaction via the World Spirit, of which democracy has been but the first, faint foreshadowing of true Emancipation, will become, in fact, a reality, a new age of peace, leisure, and a consequentially greatly expanded time for altruistic introspection and Self-discovery."
Silence.
"I’m sure you’re right," an old lady said.
"My but that’s a handsome tie."
"Did you bring any pictures?" asked a woman hopefully. "Or maybe some slides?"
"Of what?" he asked. "Of Nirvana?"
"Oh yes - or of the Eiffel tower. Of anything." Her jolly visage glowed hopefully.
"Or pictures of India, or the Himalayas, or Egypt?" a timid bird chimed in.
"I’m sorry no - no pictures, no slides."
They groaned, but only softly, because they had been raised to be polite.
He sat puzzled and fuming while they finished their punch and cake. Finally he heard his own voice squeak, "I did meet Hemingway once."
Several sets of octogenarian eyes suddenly sparked to fiery life. "Yes? And..?"
"He was a classless drunk. A cad to the ladies. And yes... a bastard."
They gasped and were shocked - such strong language! - but could not wait to hear more. So he spoon fed them gossip about the world’s most famous bearded self-promoter, his love life, his vices, his charades and secret contempts - and they ate it all up. They loved it, but he hated himself with every sentence, and with some effort he finally extricated himself and bid them good afternoon.
All the way home he felt the sting of shame for sinking to their level, for going the easy route of gossip, and he sent himself back to his study more determined than ever to wrest even one inspired idea from his papers and the brown walls and the solitude. Deep down he knew he had needed to come back here to unclutter his mind, to unpack the turmoil and the convolution that had accumulated during his long years in Europe. Almost too late had he realized the debilitating gloomy pressure that Europe had been imposing upon his mind, the need to trivialize the novel and aggrandize the trivial, the need to be pedigreed and bored. He must shake it all off.
And so he sat and worked and tried, but he knew that too much hurrying of the process would only wind his psyche tighter. And so he waited. He tilled. He hummed. He learned to whittle. He tried 1000 things to distract himself enough to let his brain sneak up on him with one inspired idea that would cut loose the logjam of his creativity.
One afternoon he suddenly got an idea of something to write - an aphorism - a thought for his book of important thoughts - but discovered he was out of ink. He went around the house and found three bottles, all dry. He shouted for Otto but then remembered he had sent him to the County Extension office, and that meant the car was gone, too. So he decided he would walk in to town and get some ink himself. He walked out the porch and pulled the straps of his red suspenders back onto his shoulders and paused to smooth the hair he had been harrying all day. He set off on the road to town, repeating the saying over and over lest he forget it by the time he purchased the ink:
"Habit is the watchdog of the Sacred. Train it young."
"Habit is the watchdog of the Sacred. Train it young."
But soon he found himself thinking about dogs, including a big shambling sheepdog he had befriended for three days as a boy before it ran off mysteriously into the hills forever, and so by the time he got to town the aphorism was somewhat garbled in his mind, at best. He entered town and made his way to the few blocks of the businesses. It was late afternoon and people were heading home for the day. They passed him on the road, and some nodded and tipped their hats and some did not. Yellow and pink light spread out ahead of him. He rounded a corner and walked to the print store.
The doorbell jingled as he walked into the dark shop. He saw a man working in the depths of the store behind the counter so he coughed a little then announced, "I need some ink, please."
A lanky, slim-faced man in a smudgy white smock and a green eye shade turned and squinted at him until a look of recognition lit his face. He was the son of the lanky, lean-faced man who had run the shop when White was a boy. The fellow came forward, wiping his hands on his smock and smiling. "Oh, Mr. White, we have those cards you requested."
He had forgotten all about them.
The man reached to the shelves behind the counter and picked up a small box. "Flown in from New York like you asked." He opened the box and handed Mr. White one of the cards. White held it at arm's length and examined it:
philanthropist, theosophist, expeditionary
He turned it in his hands, bent and bowed it, ran his thumb over the embossed blue letters. It looked rather fine.
"Well, that should be enough. Can you have them delivered?"
White paid him, took his ink and one small box of the cards, and walked back out into the remainder of the day, but not before writing what remained of his aphorism on the back of one of the cards and sketching a picture of a sheepdog.
As he put the store behind him he faced the aspect of a nearly-empty Main Street at dusk. Here and there a motor hummed or hooves clopped, then faded again. Mothers' distant voices called their children to supper. He looked up and down the wide street at the few tall storefronts and then crossed the green square in the middle of town to get to the post office before it closed. It was hot and dingy and brown inside, with dustmotes adding to the stultifying sensation. A gaunt man in a striped blue shirt gave him some letters then also reached into a pigeon-hole and extracted a long mailing tube. White took it from his hands and knew instantly what it was – the preliminary sketches he'd commissioned for the museum while in New York had arrived.
He felt a thrill of excitement. He walked over to a table and opened the tube and shook out its rolled documents. These he spread out quickly, one upon the other. His eyes traced their blue lines lovingly. These represented the first real stab at his big idea, its first intersection with reality. His idea, which he had arrived upon in the last few years, was this: he would build a museum of the history of Mankind in the World (Menschheit in der Welt as he liked to call it because things sounded more important in German), and he would build it here, in the former Indian Territories, to commemorate this as the place where the myth of the ultima thule had finally petered out and the Western appetite had turned back upon itself to pick among the scraps it had hurried past in its march to the Pacific, to search for clues to its Identity in mental geography rather than physical space, to gobble up what it has discarded and then eye its other cast-offs hungrily. It would be a history of the world to rival Orwell's, writ with pot shards and totems and weapons and tools and utensils and more - the older and dirtier the better. The exhibits would be arranged in concentric wheel-like shapes that were navigable in infinitely unique ways, according to the visitor's whim. There would be a hundred entrances to the museum, but only one exit. Each artifact would be accompanied by an explanatory block of text; each block of text would have an accompanying poem; the museum visitor would be able to compose his or her own grand epic poem about the history of the Western world depending on the way he chose to navigate the museum and punched out the corresponding holes in the guide book. There would be visitors' remembrance books for sale in the lobby into which the blocks of poems could be printed and configured. Each one would be a masterpiece. He would sign as many as he could. It would take at least ten years to build; he would have to call in all his collected treasures from around the world and have them packed in by plane, by crate, by mule, by boat.
As White hunched over his plans and pondered them, he felt a sudden fear that the idea was turning to ash even as his mind examined it. He rolled the documents back up quickly and stuffed them in the tube. He reminded himself that a mind mustn't touch the highest ideas lightly, lest they lose their savor in familiarity and idle introspection.
He had walked half way back to his house when there came a half-hearted clap of thunder and a light rain began to fall. He ducked beneath a grove of trees along the side of road and immediately thought he saw someone deeper within them.
"You brought the band in for her, not for me."
He felt a bright shudder go through him. The figure he saw, in the trees or in his mind, was young and lithe like a deer.
"Hello!" he said.
But he did not see her anymore, though all the rest of the way home he felt like he was being watched.
Chapter 3
One whole side of town, which had formerly been farmland, was now lined with row after row of hastily-constructed houses, cheap flat shacks to hold the many workers who would help scrape the land and build the dam and flood the valley for the highly-touted lake. And alongside the road into town was a sign in hues of sun-bleached teal and orange announcing the lake itself and reading "Welcome to Progress, Future Home of the World’s Largest Multi-Arch Dam!" And in the foreground images of ideal families hugged the shoreline of the lake, picnicking, fishing, and boating on its too-blue waters, while in the background was a second image of a family in their living room enjoying the dam’s Promethean gift of electricity - Dad reading the paper by lamp light and the family listening to the radio (save for mother, who was busy cooking dinner with about 14 electrical appliances). And in the lower right corner of the sign were the names of every politician connected with approving the project or funding the project or overseeing the project or in some other way interested in re-election.
Otto found himself driving through this part of town to settle in gentlemanly fashion a rather ungentlemanly breach of agreement between the men who erected this housing and White’s mother’s estate. White’s mother had actually owned the land that had undergone this sudden, bleak conversion, but she had sold it to men only because they had misrepresented their intentions – they had promised the old lady their goal was to erect an Indian Mission and an orphanage.
And so Otto parked outside of one shack one notch nicer than the rest and walked up to meet with two men who were dressed one notch more nicely than the rest and who smiled the sort of oily smile that said they knew what they had done was unethical but also that they stood tentatively protected inside one traced loop of the law.
Otto nodded to them and they all walked into the office and left the door open because it was a warm day and the room was small enough as it was. Some legal documents had been prepared in advance and rested on a table in the middle of the room, and the three men hovered around these and Otto bent down to scrutinize them while the two oily men made small talk about the weather and how nice it was to have Mr. White back. Otto mumbled nothings in reply and looked carefully over the papers that waived White’s claim to injury in exchange for an agreement to sell him back the land, at a fixed price that was too generous, when the dam construction was complete.
As his eyes scanned the lines, Otto heard a small crowd of the workmen conversing outside. They had gathered at the appearance of his fancy car and had reckoned who he represented. Their talk turned to his newly-returned employer:
"So how’d he get so rich? I suppose it’s oil money, isn’t it?"
"Oil, sure – he owns oil now – but the money comes from something his uncle invented years ago – some part that makes every last engine that comes out of Detroit run like clockwork. And by "uncle" I mean his natural born father – that’s right – this fellow’s real dad died when he was young and left his sour old brother and his wife a ton of money and the job of raising his son. The woman was as good as gold but his "father" – that man always had some bitterness in him. No wonder that when he came of age the boy grabbed his inheritance and left as soon as he could."
Otto found himself signing the papers a little more forcefully than he’d intended. The other men smiled and Otto turned and left the shack quickly. The crowd gave way a little to let him through, and as he climbed back into his car he could not help but think he had overheard one of the more accurate and succinct biographies of his employer uttered on either side of the Atlantic in recent years. He was glad to slip the car into gear and leave.
When he arrived back at White’s tilting gray house and announced the results of the meeting, White waved him off perfunctorily. He sat cold and stony in his chair. Soon after acquiring the tube with plans for the museum, his mental block had returned with an absolutely oppressive paralysis. All curiosities lost their savor. He had tried to exorcize it by chopping wood, doing calisthenics, and blasting tree stumps with dynamite. But none of it worked.
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