506
JAMES MERRILL
her various features, testing their firmness. Soon she was intently
painting her mouth.
Without a word I pressed the starter. They were watching,
waiting to bind me closer and closer to them, but I kept gazing
straight ahead, mile after mile. I had borne all I could. I already
believed.
I believed, too, at the deserted rural airport where I deposited
my passengers and waited with them. I believed well after they had
exchanged that single faintest of frowns with which one tries to
shake a stopped watch into running. When I left at their insistence–
as
if
my presence had thrown the wrench into the works!-I drove
away still believing.
The road climbed. At one turning I was able to look back and
distinguish, in a dream's deepening light, the two figures motionless
outside the locked hangar.
Something glittered on the front seat; the Princess had left her
mirror. I peered at myself in it-I am nearly sixty-and threw it
down. Phony, hysterical pair! There was no more to be learned from
them than from those fat 'psychical' studies of the last century,
with
titles like "Footsteps behind the Veil of Life" and "The Nine Stages:
Dante's Vision Corroborated." Though I had never opened one, I
have only to think of their Victorian embonpoint, their black or
purple bombazines, to invent that whole day with the worst kind
of dowdy ineffectuality. Uncle Sam indeed! Would the American
Way of Life save mankind from annihilation? Was
that
the level of
arcane innuendo from beyond the grave? One thing I knew, though
no prophet: their plane would be a long while coming. They might
have gone further by horse and buggy.
If
I am angry now it
is
because I still believe, but not in them.
Driving, I kept glancing skyward, prepared, in spite of every–
thing, for the glint of wings. Cross with myself, miles from my road,
how gladly I would have hailed an order of machine superior to
mine. To this day I cannot see a plane without stopping to wonder,
to reenter those last lonely hours in the car-the mirror, face up
beside me, shooting provocative flashes into the bare heavens.
