The Savage Innocent

Then father had gotten her pregnant and everything started to unravel bit by nasty bit.

Catalogues from military schools started coming in the mail; Madeleine disappeared in the middle of her senior year – early admission to a very special college my mother had told me. Father soon away on business trips all the time, mother spending long afternoons at a doctor's office every Monday and Friday. Then Jack had come calling.

I had missed it all, never had a clue. Now I felt like I was falling into a well.

I listened that night in a little downstairs den while my mother bared all. There was a small fireplace glowing, and a window in the room was styled much like the larger stone and timbered Tudor inn, a leaded glass window of dense, diamond-shaped panes, and just outside, framed by dark pine branches, a first winter's snow had begun to fall. Snow fell as her words fell on me; fat white flakes sticking to sagging branches as her words fell on my soul. In time they began to sag under the weight of too much snow, too soon, and I wondered when the branches would snap and fall. It was very pretty.

But we were both up against the wall, as it turned out. Snow or no snow, her facts ran dry, her eyes too, and she looked to me for absolution.

And yet I had none to give her. Nothing whatsoever to give her, as it turned out. In this her moment of need I turned away and left her to the silence of embers and falling snow.

In time she stood to leave, utterly defeated and at a loss to explain how all this could have come to pass in the withered shadow of love, and she disappeared up a small winding staircase. I would not see her again for many years.

Shipman came in some time later and took her seat. I guess he had been in on it from the beginning. He didn't say a word, didn't even look my way. When I think about that night now maybe he was ashamed of me, disgusted with my lack of humanity, but I doubt it. Somewhere along the line he must have made his peace with the world; spoiled rich kids probably didn't upset his apple cart anymore.

Anyway, we talked a little then he dropped me outside my dorm sometime after midnight; Rand was waiting up for me, his eyes still all burning and red. I walked listlessly about our room and got ready for bed by the tenuous light of a tiny desk lamp, and I guess Rand must have taken it all in while trying to take the measure of what had come to pass in my long night.

"How did you and Madeleine get along?" I asked him – finally, tentatively. I had nowhere else to go, you see.

"I think I shall never love another soul but hers," he replied gently, poetically, if a little theatrically.

I nodded my head. "Good."

"She told me."

I heard his voice breaking and I turned to look at him. He was, I think, trying pretty hard not to cry.

"What? What did she tell you?"

"Everything, I guess."

Silence came for us and held us quietly for a while.

"Good."

"Good?"

"Yeah, good. I don't want to live with this shit staining my life for one more goddamn minute, but I'm not sure I'll ever be able to talk about it. So, yeah. Good."

"Do you think it would be stupid of me to, well, want to marry her someday?"

"Stupid? No, Rand, I don't think that's stupid. I think maybe it's the most wonderful thing I've ever heard in my life." He was looking at me now, his eyes clear and bright and full of majestic truth, then he just barely nodded his head and smiled.

"You ready to turn off the light yet?" he said.

I walked over to the desk and flipped the little switch, my mind still burning brightly.

Oh! How I longed to die even then.

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Rand didn't go to Florida for Christmas, or to Zurich to be with his father; he flew home with me to my grandparent's place on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. The warmth of California in December held us and nurtured us while we walked the hills and wharves of North Beach; we made it across to Berkeley to gawk at the freaks and hippies, took the cable car to Haight-Ashbury where we drank coffee and listened to beat poets and Jim Morison and Janis Joplin, and a couple of days before Christmas we all drove down to Palo Alto to pick up Madeleine. No one mentioned parents of any sort that day; we were too busy walking on eggshells.

Yet it was clear from the moment Rand and Madeleine saw each other that second time something very unusual had passed between them during in October. Rand was, of course, then just sixteen; Madeleine had been seventeen, I think, but would turn eighteen that Christmas Eve, and I remember those numbers rolling around mightily in my grandparent's heads when we went out to dinner that first night. We walked to a place just down the hill called The Shadows, and bohemian/German hangout known for Sauerbraten and potato pancakes and a bar on the third floor with a view of the Bay that was simply nonpareil. Though still sixteen I had a dark-rum Collins and was in love with life by the time our salads arrived. Grandmother insisted we order the roast duck with Bing cherries and spaetzle; she was as usual spot on.

My grandparents were, I might add, pretty cool cats. The next afternoon they took us down to the marina and out on the bay for a beautiful sail on Grampa's old wooden yawl, the Antigone. Rand had never been on the water and was instantly taken with the whole thing; after that he and Madeleine grew closer still and the Gramps just let 'em go. We had all been surrounded by so much deceit, and at that for so long the two of them came along as a breath of fresh air. And don't get me wrong here; while there was much hand holding going on, I honestly don't think they so much as kissed even once before we were dropped off at SFO for the flight back to school. There was, you see, no point standing in the way of the inevitable. Besides, all those goo-goo eyes were fun to watch.

We'd historically exchanged gifts on Christmas Eve and Rand was anxious he didn't have an appropriate gift on hand and grabbed my grandmother by the arm the day before – most bright and early, I seem to recall – and off they went. He came back from Tiffany's with a little sky-blue sack in hand and a smug look on his face, and what today would pass for a 'shit-eating grin', and not another word was said about the matter. We all went out and got the Christmas tree early next morning, the morning after our sail on the bay, and we spent the afternoon hoisting the thing up three flights of stairs and into an ancient cast iron stand before hauling out boxes of ornaments and dressing it up while Granma worked her magic in the kitchen. By the time dinner was over I had the sneaking suspicion Rand was going to propose to my grandmother instead. The woman knew how to cook.

I'd opted for a much more original gift for one and all; pennants of the most valuable Taiwanese felt and with my school's name emblazoned in diminishing letters and rest assured I felt pretty smarmy when Grampa gave me a new pair of skis. In fact, skis were had by one and all with the intent of heading out before sunrise the next morning and making it to Squaw Valley in time to claim first tracks down the Palisades. That was the intent, I believe, before Rand handed his little blue sack to Maddie.

I guess I had expected an ID bracelet or some such nonsense; I in no way – not even in the wildest flights of my still very juvenile imagination – would have considered it possible for my high school roommate to give my sister an engagement ring, but that's exactly what the son-of-a-bitch did. He called it a friendship ring and proclaimed that Granma had been instrumental in his choice; Gramps and I had in effect been clubbed over the head like baby seals and now sat quietly on the sidelines looking over the proceedings like a couple of pre-frontally lobotomized orangutans. Simpering in our drool, perhaps, might best have described our appearance. Anyway, to dwell on our bewildered reaction would be to gloss over the more salient features of the evening.

Notably my dear sister's reaction.

And again I think now, looking back on such things from the vantage of forty years on, that I expected Madeleine to laugh in his face or at the very least blush politely while she stood and helped clear away the mounds of wrapping paper that surrounded her like vast peace offerings, but no, no, that's not what happened. No, not at all. Far from it.

No, it was more like Rhett and Scarlett, but maybe Fred and Ginger would take us a little closer to the point. They were like two lovers circling each other on a grand dance floor; they were each lost in one another's eyes, two hearts yearning for union in something more vast than just the oneness of becoming.

Like I said, all this nonsense had been plainly a foregone conclusion. She was as much in love as he; the rest of us simply had had no clue.

So no, it was I that picked up the discarded wrapping paper and carried it down three flights to the curb. Rand and Madeleine sat on the terrace that looked out over San Francisco Bay; there they sat, hand in hand on the threshold of a dream as the setting sun slipped behind the Golden Gate, a Moody Blues album setting the mood that defined the coming days. Watching and Waiting. Whenever I hear that song I think of them silhouetted by an amber-purpled sky, watching them as they discovered the greater truths waiting for them out there on the far side of the sky.

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Winters in Indiana aren't for the faint of heart. The word bleak comes to mind but singularly fails to convey the utter desolation and ruin one feels sitting in a classroom while sleeting ice coats the outside world in warped sheets of grey, face-splitting misery. Unless of course one had to stand at parade rest for an hour each and every morning on the aforesaid mentioned warped sheets of ice waiting for your room to be inspected before you could march off merrily to breakfast. Not to say the experience probably didn't have its fine points – I'm sure there are and were many – but let me just say in all politeness they were lost on me. But more to the point of this story, they weren't lost on Rand that long, dark winter.

It was like a sense of American Responsibility had come looking for Dalton Rand after Christmas – and found him waiting, and ready. Having lived in Europe his whole life America came up on him like a fast train in the night; the experience was overwhelming, maybe just a little disorienting. The rebelliousness that seized America's youth when Richard Nixon turned his attention on Laos and Cambodia seemed pointless to Rand; he had bigger fish to fry and thought the protestations we read about in Time and Newsweek were little more than the runny-nosed bleatings of just so many spoiled sheep. I think he longed to strap on an airplane even then and drop bombs on power plants and munitions dumps in deepest night. I think he longed to be an American, to put on a Green Beret and stand beside John Wayne and sneer maliciously at hippies.

But perhaps, perhaps and just for a while, he didn't really understand the hidden depths of America, of what the word truly means. The inclusiveness of the word, all those varied shades of grey, were lost in the absolute blacks and whites of the Cold War weltanschauung we had been cocooned in. Some of us were bound to come out sooner than others, however, and I hope again you'll pardon me here as another digression is now in order. We need to talk a little about Tom Shipman, about a frozen lake in Korea, about orange-robed monks and a Japanese lady, so bare with me a little longer, would you?