More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Our telephone, a Bakelite dinosaur with a rotary dial, was on a table in the front hall. In the drawer beneath it was the Gates Falls phonebook, my mom’s address book, and a litter of writing implements.
Time goes by, Atlantis sinks deeper and deeper into the ocean, and you have a tendency to romanticize.
This was before Atlantis sank;
There were perhaps fifty people in the crowd when I joined it at the rear; in the five minutes I stood there rubbernecking, it swelled to seventy-five. By the time I finished wipedown-shutdown at one-fifteen and headed back to Chamberlain, there were probably two hundred people gawping in little clusters. I suppose it’s hard to believe now that any graffiti could have such a draw, especially on a shitty day like that one, but we are talking about a far different world, one where no magazine in America (except, very occasionally, Popular Photography) would show a nude so nude that the subject’s pubic hair was on view, where no newspaper would dare so much as a whisper about any political figure’s sex-life. This was before Atlantis sank; this was long ago and far away in a world where at least one comedian was jailed for uttering “fuck” in public and another observed that on The Ed Sullivan Show you could prick your finger but not finger your prick. It was a world where some words were still shocking.
Stoke only spoke once as we carried him up the walk to the infirmary door. “Let me die,” he said. “For once in your stupid greedy-me-me lives do something worthwhile. Put me down and let me die.”
In Atlantis even the doctors smoked.
The waiting room was empty, the television in the corner showing an old episode of Bonanza to no one at all. In those days they hadn’t really found the handle on color TV yet, and Pa Cartwright’s face was the color of a fresh avocado. We must have sounded like a herd of hippopotami just out of the watering-hole, and the duty-nurse came on the run. Following her was a candystriper (probably a work-study kid like me) and a little guy in a white coat. He had a stethoscope hung around his neck and a cigarette poked in the corner of his mouth. In Atlantis even the doctors smoked.
“He was in a car accident,” Nate said.
“Four years ago. His father, mother, and older sister were killed. He was the only family survivor.”
You might as well expect Atlantis to rise from the ocean, palm trees waving.
I never played another hand of Hearts in college. Many years later I taught my kids the game, and they took to it like ducks to water. We have a tournament at the summer cottage every August. There are no match points, but there’s a trophy from Atlantic Awards—a loving cup. I won it one year, and kept it on my desk where I could see it. I shot the moon twice in the championship round, but neither was a hold hand. Like my old school buddy Ronnie Malenfant once said, no one shoots the moon on a hold hand. You might as well expect Atlantis to rise from the ocean, palm trees waving.
Dearie took a deep breath and looked back at us. “We believe Stokely Jones was responsible for the act of vandalism and public obscenity which was perpetrated on the north end of Chamberlain Hall at a time we don’t know when this morning.” I’m telling you exactly what he said, not making a single word of it up. Other than “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it,” that was perhaps the most sublime example of honchospeak I ever heard in my life. I believe Dearie expected us to ooh and aah like the extras in a Perry Mason courtroom finale, where the revelations start
...more
Nick Prouty said he’d drawn peace signs on his favorite record albums: Meet the Beatles and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders.
“Not one of you had a peace sign on a single thing before Thanksgiving break, I’d swear to it, and I bet most of you never had one on anything before tonight.
There was a moment’s silence, and then Dean Garretsen spoke what could have been the epitaph of our brief age. “You fellows have disappointed me,” he said.
Atlantis sank but Stoke Jones is still in the swim, practicing law in San Francisco.
The suicide rate among surviving Atlanteans has been pretty high. No surprise there, I guess; when your continent sinks right out from under your feet, it does a number on your head.
one of the factors that made us powerful friends in those years was being raised with the same Yankee ideas, one of which was that you didn’t ask for help unless you absolutely had to, and maybe not even then.
As a group, the instructors were a lot more sympathetic than I ever would have guessed; most bent over backwards to help us not only pass, but pass high enough to hold onto our scholarships. Only Skip’s calculus teacher was completely unreceptive, and Skip was doing well enough there to skate by without any special help. Years later I realized that for many of the instructors it was a moral issue rather than an academic one: they didn’t want to read their ex-students’ names in a casualty list and have to wonder if they had been partially responsible; that the difference between a D and a
...more
The story’s headline read: 6 INJURED, 14 ARRESTED AS DRAFT OFFICE PROTEST TURNS INTO MELEE.
The story’s headline read: 6 INJURED, 14 ARRESTED AS DRAFT OFFICE PROTEST TURNS INTO MELEE. The photo was in stark contrast to the one in the Derry News where everyone, even the cops and the construction workers who had started their own impromptu counter-protest, looked sort of relaxed.
Although it was written twelve years ago, I sort of think it’s about Vietnam. Even if it’s not, it’s full of information.
Somewhere I think I still have that card . . . as I’m sure that somewhere “Red Carol” Gerber has still got her little snapshot of her childhood friends.
I opened the package. Inside it—and in jarring contrast to the cheery Christmas paper and white satin ribbon—was a paperback copy of Lord of the Flies, by William Golding.
I opened the package. Inside it—and in jarring contrast to the cheery Christmas paper and white satin ribbon—was a paperback copy of Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. I had somehow missed it in high school, opting for A Separate Peace in Senior Lit instead because Peace looked a little shorter.
What about hearts in Atlantis?
My eyes filled with sudden unexpected tears. I put my hands over my mouth to hold in the sob that wanted to come out. I didn’t want to wake Nate up, didn’t want him to see me crying. But I cried, all right. I sat there at my desk and cried for her, for me, for both of us, for all of us. I can’t remember hurting any more ever in my life than I did then. Hearts are tough, she said, most times hearts don’t break, and I’m sure that’s right . . . but what about then? What about who we were then? What about hearts in Atlantis?
I don’t know how many of us the cops swept up outside the convention center on the night Hubert Humphrey was nominated, but there were a lot, and a lot of us were hurt—a blue-ribbon commission would a year later designate the event a “police riot” in its report.
Then I remembered Stoke plunging toward Holyoke with his head down and his hair hanging in his eyes, Stoke muttering “Rip-rip, rip-rip, rip-rip” under his breath.
“What the fuck was a cripple doing on the third floor?” I asked out loud.
A little guy with a huge mass of golden hair—a kind of Peter Frampton dwarf, if you could dig that—looked around. His face was pale and pimply. Blood was drying beneath his nose and on one cheek. “What, man?” he asked.
“What the fuck was a cripple doing on the third floor of a college dorm? One with no elevator? Wouldn’t they have put him on the first floor?” Then I remembered Stoke plunging toward Holyoke with his head down and his hair hanging in his eyes, Stoke muttering “Rip-rip, rip-rip, rip-rip” under his breath. Stoke going everywhere as if everything was his enemy; give him a quarter and he’d try to shoot down the whole world.
“Man, I’m not following you. What—”
“Unless he asked them to,” I said. “Unless he maybe right out demanded it.”
“Bingo,” said the little guy with the Peter Frampton hair. “Got a joint, man? I want to get high. This place sucks. I want to go to Hobbiton.”
Skip became an artist, and he’s famous in his own way. Not like Norman Rockwell, and you’ll never see a reproduction of one of Skip’s sculptures on a plate offered by the Franklin Mint, but he’s had plenty of shows—London, Rome, New York, last year in Paris—and he’s reviewed regularly.
Skip became an artist, and he’s famous in his own way. Not like Norman Rockwell, and you’ll never see a reproduction of one of Skip’s sculptures on a plate offered by the Franklin Mint, but he’s had plenty of shows—London, Rome, New York, last year in Paris—and he’s reviewed regularly. There are plenty of critics who call him jejune, the flavor of the month (some have been calling him the flavor of the month for twenty-five years), a trite mind communicating via low imagery with other trite minds. Other critics have praised him for his honesty and energy. I tend in this direction, but I suppose I would; I knew him back in the day, we escaped the great sinking continent together, and he has remained my friend; in a distant way he has remained my paisan.
Hearts can break. Yes. Hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don’t.
“We tried,” he said in my ear. “Don’t you ever forget that, Pete. We tried.” I suppose we did. In her way, Carol tried harder than any of us and paid the highest price . . . except, that is, for the ones who died. And although we’ve forgotten the language we spoke in those years—it is as lost as the bell-bottom jeans, home-tie-dyed shirts, Nehru jackets, and signs that said KILLING FOR PEACE IS LIKE FUCKING FOR CHASTITY—sometimes a word or two comes back. Information, you know. Information. And sometimes, in my dreams and memories (the older I get the more they seem to be the same), I smell
...more
6:15 A.M.
He wakes to music, always to music; the shrill beep-beep-beep of the clock-radio’s alarm is too much for his mind to cope with during those first blurry moments of the day.
He doesn’t envy the fact that she can stay in bed until nine—hell, until eleven, if she wants—but he envies that ability of hers to wake up, talk, then drift off again.
The grime on the glass makes it look like some filthy, gargantuan ruin—dead Atlantis, maybe, just heaved back to the surface to glare at the gray sky.
Reagan is king of America, stocks and bonds have turned to gold, the death penalty is back in vogue. Life is good.
He comes out of Grand Central with a thousand other topcoated men and women, mid-level executives for the most part, sleek gerbils who will be running full tilt on their exercise wheels by noon.
His office—one of two he keeps in this building—is at the far end of the hall.
He took my hand, Willie thinks as he stands there in his sixth-floor office with Bill Shearman now a floor down. Above the studio portrait and his discharge is a poster from the sixties. This item, not framed and starting to yellow at the edges, shows the peace sign. Below it, in red, white, and blue, is this punchline: TRACK OF THE GREAT AMERICAN CHICKEN. He took my hand, he thinks again. Yes, Sullivan had done that, and Willie had come within an ace of leaping to his feet and running back down the ward, screaming. He had been positive that Sullivan would say I know what you did, you and your
...more
He only writes for ten minutes or so this morning, pen scratching busily, sticking to the basic fact of the matter: I am heartily sorry. He has, to the best of his reckoning, written this over two million times . . . and is just getting started. Confession would be quicker, but he is willing to take the long way around.
There is a kind of silent, half-humbled pride in the tanned face, something people won’t look at too long. It hurts them if they do. Willie knows this is so; he has seen it. He doesn’t ask why it should be so. He has made himself a life pretty much without questions, and that’s the way he likes it.
“I can’t kill him,” he says in a low, nagging voice. “I’ll be fucked if I kill him.” Only fucked isn’t what he’s worried about. Damned is what he’s worried about. Killing was different in Vietnam, or seemed different, but this isn’t Vietnam, isn’t the green. Has he built these years of penance just to tear them down again? God is testing him, testing him, testing him. There is an answer here. He knows there is, there must be. He is just—ha-ha, pardon the pun—too blind to see it.
Here’s Carol Gerber in her graduation gown; Spring 1966, it’s marked. On the next page is a news clipping from the Harwich Journal marked Fall 1966. The accompanying picture is her again, but this version of Carol seems a million years removed from the young lady in the graduation gown, the young lady with the diploma in her hand, the white pumps on her feet, and her eyes demurely downcast. This girl is fiery and smiling, these eyes look straight into the camera. She seems unaware of the blood coursing down her left cheek. She is flashing the peace sign. This girl is on her way to Danbury
...more
According to this scenario the fiery girl with the blood on her face and the sign in her hand is probably now just a bag of bones cooking in the desert someplace east of the sun and west of Tonopah.
Except the cops believed Carol, at least, was dead. The piece made that clear. At the time, Willie had also been convinced it was so. All that blood. Now, however . . .
Dead or alive? Alive or dead? Sometimes his heart whispers to him that the blood doesn’t matter, that she got away from that small frame house long before the final acts of insanity were committed there. At other times he believes what the police believe—that she and Fiegler slipped away from the others only after the first shootout, before the house was surrounded; that she either died of wounds suffered in that shootout or was murdered by Fiegler because she was slowing him down. According to this scenario the fiery girl with the blood on her face and the sign in her hand is probably now just a bag of bones cooking in the desert someplace east of the sun and west of Tonopah.
When someone dies, you think about the past.
That’s right, Art, people are funny. Also, kids say the darndest things.
Sometimes she showed up in a muumuu like the hostess at some nutty luau, sometimes she came wearing one of those grisly green golf-skirts and a sleeveless top that showed off her scrawny arms . . . but mostly she wore what she had been wearing on the day Malenfant killed her—the green pants, the orange smock, the red sneakers with the Chinese symbols on them.
His old girlfriend and her hippie pals had killed a bunch of kids and job-recruiters back in Danbury. His old girlfriend was now “Red Carol.” His old girlfriend was a celebrity.
He lived in Milford now, a town about twenty miles north of Harwich on I-95 and light-years away in most other senses.
He lived in Milford now, a town about twenty miles north of Harwich on I-95 and light-years away in most other senses. Harwich had been a pleasant, tree-filled suburb when Sully lived there as a kid, chumming with Bobby Garfield and Carol Gerber. Now his old home town was one of those places you didn’t go at night, just a grimy adjunct to Bridgeport.
Whenever one of Sully’s old Nam buddies died (well okay, they weren’t buddies, exactly, most of them dumb as stone boats and not what Sully would really call buddies, but it was the word they used because there was no word invented for what they had really been to each other), it always seemed to be cancer or drugs or suicide.
Pags had died of cancer. Whenever one of Sully’s old Nam buddies died (well okay, they weren’t buddies, exactly, most of them dumb as stone boats and not what Sully would really call buddies, but it was the word they used because there was no word invented for what they had really been to each other), it always seemed to be cancer or drugs or suicide. Usually the cancer started in the lung or the brain and then just ran everywhere, as if these men had left their immune systems back in the green. With Dick Pagano it had been pancreatic cancer—him and Michael Landon. It was the disease of the stars. The coffin was open and old Pags didn’t look too shabby. His wife had had the undertaker dress him in an ordinary business suit, not a uniform. She probably hadn’t even considered the uniform option, despite the decorations Pagano had won. Pags had worn a uniform for only two or three years, those years like an aberration, like time spent in some county joint because you did something entirely out of character on one bad-luck occasion, probably while you were drunk. Killed a guy in a barroom fight, say, or took it into your head to burn down the church where your ex-wife taught Sunday school. Sully couldn’t think of a single man he’d served with, including himself, who would want to be buried in an Army uniform.
Nam vets all seemed to carry Zippos.
Andy Hackermeyer said he was going to kill himself by jumping from the top of the Statue of Liberty.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Sully wasn’t much of a book-reader, never had been (his friend Bobby had been the book-reader), but the rehab librarian had given him The Sun Also Rises and Sully had read it avidly, not once but three times. Back then it had seemed very important—as important as that book Lord of the Flies had been to Bobby when they were kids. Now Jake Barnes seemed remote, a tin man with fake problems. Just one more made-up thing.
Cigarettes were Agent Orange that you paid for.
He was okay in elevators and crowded lobbies at intermission and on rush-hour train platforms, but when traffic clogged to a stop all around him, he got dinky-dau.
Some people were afraid of crowds—agoraphobia, it was called, fear of the marketplace—but the only time Sully ever had that sense of too much and too many was at times like this. He was okay in elevators and crowded lobbies at intermission and on rush-hour train platforms, but when traffic clogged to a stop all around him, he got dinky-dau. There was, after all, nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide.
