father seemed oblivious of the horrible territory we had entered. “A friend?” he asked.
“Yeah. Kinda.”
“What happened? He pull the old double-cross?”
In his delight the hitchhiker lurched forward behind me.“That’s right, buddy,” he told my father. “That’s just what that fucking sucker did. Sorry, boy.”
“That’s O. K.,” my father said. “This poor kid hears more horrible stuff in a day than I have in a lifetime. He gets that from his mother; she sees everything and can’t do a thing about it. Thank God I’m half-blind and three-quarters deaf. Heaven protects the ignorant.”
I dimly appreciated that my father had conjured up Heaven and my mother as a protection for me, as a dam against the flood of vile confidences with which our guest was brimming; but I vividly resented that he should even speak of me to this man, that he should dip the shadow of my personality into this reservoir of slime. That my existence at one extremity should be tangent to Vermeer and at the other to the hitchhiker seemed an unendurable strain.
But relief was approaching. We came to the crest of Coughdrop Hill, the second, and steeper, of the two hills on the way to Alton. At the bottom, the road to Olinger went off to the left and we would have to let the hitchhiker out.
We began the descent. We passed a trailer truck laboring toward the crest so slowly its peeling paint seemed to have weathered in transit. Well back from the road, Rudy Essick’s great brown mansion sluggishly climbed through the down-slipping trees.
Coughdrop Hill took its name from its owner, whose coughdrops (“ SICK ? Suck an ESSICK !”) were congealed by the million in an Alton factory that flavored whole blocks of the city with the smell of menthol. They sold, in their little tangerine-colored boxes, throughout the East: the one time in my life I had been to Manhattan, I had been astonished to find, right in the throat of Paradise, on a counter in Grand Central Station, a homely ruddy row of them. In disbelief Ibought a box. Sure enough, on the back, beneath an imposing miniature portrait of the factory, the fine print stated MADE IN ALTON, PA . And the box, opened, released the chill, ectoplasmic smell of Brubaker Street. The two cities of my life, the imaginary and the actual, were superimposed; I had never dreamed that Alton could touch New York. I put a coughdrop into my mouth to complete this delicious confusion and concentric penetration; my teeth sweetened and at the level of my eyes, a hollow mile beneath the ceiling that on an aqua sky displayed the constellations with sallow electric stars, my father’s yellow-knuckled hands wrung together nervously through my delay. I ceased to be impatient with him and became as anxious as he to catch the train home. Up to this moment my father had failed me. Throughout our trip, an overnight visit to his sister, he had been frightened and frustrated. The city was bigger than the kind he understood. The money in his pocket dwindled without our buying anything. Though we walked and walked, we never reached any of the museums I had read of. The one called the Frick contained the Vermeer of the man in the big hat and the laughing woman whose lazily upturned palm unconsciously accepts the light, and the one called the Metropolitan contained the girl in the starched headdress bent reverently above the brass jug whose vertical blue gleam was the Holy Ghost of my adolescence. That these paintings, which I had worshipped in reproduction, had a simple physical existence seemed a profound mystery to me: to come within touching distance of their surfaces, to see with my eyes the truth of their color, the tracery of the cracks whereby time had inserted itself like a mystery within a mystery, would have been for me to enter a Real Presence so ultimate I would not be surprised to die in the encounter. My father’s blundering blocked it. We never enteredthe museums; I never saw the paintings. Instead I
“Yeah. Kinda.”
“What happened? He pull the old double-cross?”
In his delight the hitchhiker lurched forward behind me.“That’s right, buddy,” he told my father. “That’s just what that fucking sucker did. Sorry, boy.”
“That’s O. K.,” my father said. “This poor kid hears more horrible stuff in a day than I have in a lifetime. He gets that from his mother; she sees everything and can’t do a thing about it. Thank God I’m half-blind and three-quarters deaf. Heaven protects the ignorant.”
I dimly appreciated that my father had conjured up Heaven and my mother as a protection for me, as a dam against the flood of vile confidences with which our guest was brimming; but I vividly resented that he should even speak of me to this man, that he should dip the shadow of my personality into this reservoir of slime. That my existence at one extremity should be tangent to Vermeer and at the other to the hitchhiker seemed an unendurable strain.
But relief was approaching. We came to the crest of Coughdrop Hill, the second, and steeper, of the two hills on the way to Alton. At the bottom, the road to Olinger went off to the left and we would have to let the hitchhiker out.
We began the descent. We passed a trailer truck laboring toward the crest so slowly its peeling paint seemed to have weathered in transit. Well back from the road, Rudy Essick’s great brown mansion sluggishly climbed through the down-slipping trees.
Coughdrop Hill took its name from its owner, whose coughdrops (“ SICK ? Suck an ESSICK !”) were congealed by the million in an Alton factory that flavored whole blocks of the city with the smell of menthol. They sold, in their little tangerine-colored boxes, throughout the East: the one time in my life I had been to Manhattan, I had been astonished to find, right in the throat of Paradise, on a counter in Grand Central Station, a homely ruddy row of them. In disbelief Ibought a box. Sure enough, on the back, beneath an imposing miniature portrait of the factory, the fine print stated MADE IN ALTON, PA . And the box, opened, released the chill, ectoplasmic smell of Brubaker Street. The two cities of my life, the imaginary and the actual, were superimposed; I had never dreamed that Alton could touch New York. I put a coughdrop into my mouth to complete this delicious confusion and concentric penetration; my teeth sweetened and at the level of my eyes, a hollow mile beneath the ceiling that on an aqua sky displayed the constellations with sallow electric stars, my father’s yellow-knuckled hands wrung together nervously through my delay. I ceased to be impatient with him and became as anxious as he to catch the train home. Up to this moment my father had failed me. Throughout our trip, an overnight visit to his sister, he had been frightened and frustrated. The city was bigger than the kind he understood. The money in his pocket dwindled without our buying anything. Though we walked and walked, we never reached any of the museums I had read of. The one called the Frick contained the Vermeer of the man in the big hat and the laughing woman whose lazily upturned palm unconsciously accepts the light, and the one called the Metropolitan contained the girl in the starched headdress bent reverently above the brass jug whose vertical blue gleam was the Holy Ghost of my adolescence. That these paintings, which I had worshipped in reproduction, had a simple physical existence seemed a profound mystery to me: to come within touching distance of their surfaces, to see with my eyes the truth of their color, the tracery of the cracks whereby time had inserted itself like a mystery within a mystery, would have been for me to enter a Real Presence so ultimate I would not be surprised to die in the encounter. My father’s blundering blocked it. We never enteredthe museums; I never saw the paintings. Instead I
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