The Night Travellers

9. A Castle by the Sea

9 A Castle by the Sea December, rain and cool or cooler Try being on the run and there's bound to be a stop like this one if you get lucky at all. I'm elected to be in it anyway, even if I don't deserve it. It must be that somebody has the right connections as they say in that other world, the one we left. The woman up here in this fantastic house has turned out to be a beauty, a real old beauty, it's true, but if you could just see her and her place here. It's three-story, big stories, sort of Gothic design, built out over a drive-in garage, lion faces carved into the stone arches, windows open on the sea on every floor. "Charmed magic casements" . . . something I had to memorize once. She's the widow of a guy who used to be in the Orient, China, in foreign service, got every kind of rug and scroll, carved screens, bunches of jade ornaments, figurines and all that, put out in glass cabinets. (Fred Davis would have a fit. He'd hire two more servants just to dust.) This woman's for real though. She doesn't notice all that. She's got nearly white hair, short and brushed back, and goes around in wool skirts or pants and silk blouses with a shawl or some great-looking sweater. She calls me her "brave boy" (can't say I dig that) and gives me everything: breakfast downstairs, use of her library, lunch alone (she's usually out), and then in the evening we have drinks and dinner, just the two of us usually, but sometimes—here's the touchy part—she asks in other people , but it would be hard to know just who they are. I gather they're important. Art gallery people, making their kind of talk. 267 2 6 8 T H E N I G H T T R A V E L L E R S People into charities. She doesn't exactly tell them who I am. They don't ask her. They don't ask me. They know how to talk around things. Sometimes she doesn't ask me to meet whoever comes. She's making these judgments, choices. She writes a lot of letters. She has this servant who does everything, goes for the mail, has a fire lighted at night, serves the dinners. He's a Korean man, silent. I don't know if he speaks anything I could understand. Then there's a woman comes and cleans the house. There must be a cook, too. But it's too big for me to find her. I see the cleaning woman, she looks Mexican or something, but she doesn't say anything, either. It's like living in a beautiful palace where the people all walked out of it years ago, and now she's in it, and whoever built it is long forgotten. But this is just imagination. I know it was her husband built it for the two of them, a very wealthy guy. He got killed, drowned in a ferry accident up in Canada one summer, and their daughter with him. She decided on giving her life to what might be worth her life. So she says. First it was art museums, then it was work for women's prisons, libraries and better conditions. Then she took on better treatment for animals, and then she went to an antiwar rally and gave up the art and the animals to put more time on that. She's got Father T. into getting together an evening for me, flying Hayden out or some of the Madison bunch. She's even mentioned Berrigan, but I don't think it's going to work. Fr. T. will come, but the others don't think she's quite for real. If you have to tell stories about it, it's not for real. She went over to Alcatraz once before they shut it down as a prison. She inspected the library and set up some art classes. But if you tell about it it isn't real. Right now for instance I think she likes talking to me but how could it not cross her mind that here she is alone with a young man not so bad-looking and what if somebody made a move? (She must be seventy if she's...