Loon Lake by E. L. Doctorow Page A

surprisingly small, a small-boned slight thing with narrow shoulders. There was nothing stately about her except the alarming size of her moods. I studied her face with a fervent rush of recognition, a fair skin with a rouge of chapped cheeks, quick green eyes prominent upper lip everything framed in marcelled bleached blond hair I had friends playing as a child with such faces in Paterson I heard the fluent yowl of injustice from this face.
    Mr. Penfield speaking of injustice explained how much more modest were his own rooms over the stables than this full cottage in the rustic log style. On the other hand he wrote well there he said in his way of negating his every point of view by obliging himself to express its opposite.
    Then he recites some lines about the place, about Loon Lake. The glass in one hand, the bottle in the other, he sits with legs outstretched he is in his dirty sneakers with no socks his tweed jacket with the elbow patches his tennis shirt with the soft collar turned under on one side, he produces a deep melodious voice for his lines not his normal voice I was embarrassed by this sudden access to performance but she was not. She paid attentionto his poetry as she had not to his conversation. But no audience was as responsive to Mr. Penfield’s words as he was. His red eyes grew large with a film of tears.
    I augment my memory with the lines actually printed in a private edition, the last of his three privately published volumes all recording different times of his life in the different places the same person. “The loons they heard were the loons we hear today”—in his deep reader’s chant—“cries to distract the dying loons diving into the cold black lake  and diving back out again in a whorl of clinging water clinging like importuning spirits  fingers shattering in spray feeling up the wing along the rounded body of the  thrillingly exerting loon  beaking a fish  rising to the moon streamlined  its loon eyes round and red.”
    And I, resonantly attuned to her, alive to the firelit moment—somewhere I had gotten at great cost, with the scars to show it, from such profound effort, the kind of unceasing insistence on my life’s rights that was only now so exhausting in my release from it. As this absurd fat drunkard sang his words they seemed the most beautiful I had ever heard. But perhaps any words would have done. I heard them and I didn’t hear them, I had no idea he had just written them I thought they were from some book already done, I heard the feeling they inspired in me, that I was living at last! That it was the way it should be, I was feeling Penfield’s immense careless generosity, the boon of himself which granted me without argument everything I was struggling for, all of it assumed in the simple giving of words, so moving to this scruffy boy.
    It was the moment of dangerous specification of everything I thought worth wanting. After the loon flew off whose red eyes were much like his own he cleared his throat and he poured wine all around although I’d barely sipped mine. He emptied the bottle on his turn and struggled to his feet for another bottle which he uncorked while continuing to speak and again he sat down with the new bottle as attached to his hand as the old.
    I tried not to look at her. I saw the glance from under her brows toward the ceiling, the impatience, and then I began to feel the force of the occasion which was that somehow I was enlisted to help divert, distractor pacify Clara Lukaćs. That was the meaning of the self-dramatization of the man, that we were in some overburdened instant, with our backs to it, grounding our heels, digging in.
    And then he was telling us about the war, of all things, a veteran, migod, would he bring out the poppies? But soon we were inside his images, listening like children, the mule-drawn caissons sinking in the mud, the troops in greatcoats and tin helmets riding the mules’ backs, kicking their boots sharply