Muttering Retreats of Restless Nights
By Robert Marton
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, ‘ What is it? ‘
Let us go and make our visit.
(from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot)
__________________________
At night, Thomas Carroll walked the streets of Mayefield.
Not that there were many streets to walk, but he covered many of them, including the alleys between the blocks, almost every night. Weather didn’t matter much. In fact, seasonal changes made the walk more interesting. Warm rain in the summer had a different texture and feel than cold rain in the winter. August’s hot, humid air was as difficult to breathe as January’s icy wind, but the heat tended to depress his body and spirit, while the chill energized him.
This was a chilly evening.
Thomas walked and thought and observed. As a Mayefield native and a reporter for the weekly newspaper, he knew this town and these streets better than most people, maybe better than anyone.
All of the town’s streets going south from Main Street were named after trees. Since the death of his father 15 years ago, Thomas and his mother lived at 485 Maple Drive. Before that, they lived two blocks south and east in a more modern home at 211 Pine Street. Their current Maple Drive house had at one time been a Mayefield showplace, but age and lack of maintenance had diminished its glory. But the rent was reasonable and it was convenient to his mother’s job at the pharmacy and Thomas’ job at the newspaper, both a block over on Main.
Every night when he reached the sidewalk in front of the house, Thomas faced a decision: turn right or left? What he encountered would be different depending on his choice. All of the town’s streets appeared quiet and serene, but upon closer examination, they were anything but. Various shapes lurked in the shadows, mostly believing they were unseen, doing whatever they did in the dark of night.
But they were observed, by Thomas, who referred to them as the Damaged Ones– those whom the “respectable” people of Mayefield didn’t know about or really want to acknowledge. The Damaged Ones included the homeless –those few in town who barely survived in the alleyways or on the riverbank; the friendless –the lonely who lived quietly in town without attracting much attention or affection; and the clueless –living what they believed were secret lives under the cover of darkness.
You almost never read of the Damaged Ones in the Mayefield Messenger, a “family” newspaper which weekly chronicled the town’s happenings. The lives of the Damaged Ones were out of place with the Messenger’s usual club news, school events, and announcements of births, engagements, and weddings. The clueless were exceptions: Their public lives may have been respectable and respected, but their private, shadowy lives at night would shock and disgust most Mayefield residents.
The Reverend Reginald Hill was one of the clueless, and he was out and about that night.
Reverend Hill was the rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, the primary place of worship for Mayefield’s Protestant establishment. He carried himself with a regal, dignified bearing that led many people to wrongly believe he was British. He had served at St. Andrews for over twenty years. He and his wife were fixtures in the town’s most respectable social set.
Tonight this man of God was on the prowl.
For a few months, Thomas had observed Reverend Hill on these nocturnal strolls. Not every night, but several times a week, Thomas watched him –hunched over as if trying to hide himself—slither along the dark streets. He always stopped at the same house on Sycamore Street, about two blocks from the rectory. He walked past the front of the house and just when he got to the far edge, he jumped behind a bush and worked his way along the side property line until he came to a lighted window in the rear. The window was just at eye level. The reverend gazed into the window for about ten minutes, and then returned to the sidewalk the way he came in. He walked around the block and back to the rectory.
On several occasions, Thomas observed this ritual from behind a tree across the street. From this vantage point, he could not see into the window. What was Reverend Hill watching? One previous night, after the rector left, Thomas sneaked into the yard and peeked into the window. It was a bedroom, but no one was there. One other time, Thomas ran ahead and tried to catch a glimpse before the reverend arrived. Again, it was an empty bedroom.
On this night, Thomas was determined to see what the reverend was seeing. After Reverend Hill went into the yard and positioned himself before the window, Thomas carefully and silently followed, and hid behind a bush, just a few yards from the peeper.
And he saw it.
Rather, he saw her.
Judith Hensler.
Blue smoke filtering through the pale television light.
Lying on a bed in just a white bra and panties.
Translucent, almost an apparition.
Judith Hensler. Wife of a prominent local lawyer. Her husband was an elder in Reverend Hill’s church; she, the leader of the ladies Bible study group.
Mrs. Hensler was smoking a cigarette, gazing at –but not really seeming to watch—a small black and white television set. She inhaled, held the smoke in her lungs for a moment, and slowly exhaled.
Judith gave no indication she knew she was being observed, but Thomas had a sickening feeling she did. Her forward focus seemed deliberate, purposely ignoring the gaze upon her.
Thomas fixated on the image before him for a few minutes, then walked away quite disturbed at seeing Mrs. Hensler’s nearly naked body on display that way – not disturbed that he had seen her body, but that it was on display for anyone to see.
Mrs. Hensler was his mother’s friend, possibly her best friend. Although younger than his mother, Judith and Mrs. Carroll were much like sisters: sharing secrets, going on shopping trips into the city, gossiping over coffee on chilly mornings and sometimes a cold beer on warm afternoons. Judith spent many hours in Thomas’ home. She was almost like family. She seemed to fill a lonely gap in the widow Carroll’s life.
But Mrs. Hensler meant more than that to Thomas. She was the object of his deepest fantasies. As close to his age as his mother’s, Judith inspired in him a desire that occupied his thoughts throughout the day, and more so at night. These fantasies were not merely sexual. Judith represented an ideal as a modern, sophisticated woman. She was beautiful, educated, self assured – and a seemingly devoted wife and mother. A person of true quality – everything he hoped to find in a mate for himself.
In their private conversations, Judith often encouraged Thomas to reach beyond his grasp – to leave Mayfield, to go “on the road.”
“Thomas, you can be Sal Paradise,” she encouraged. “Like Kerouac said, ‘be ‘tremendously excited with life,’ explore the world.
“Life is out there,” she often said (usually pointing west for some reason). “Go get it; life’s not going to come to you.”
She schooled Thomas on the great artists and poets, introducing him to a world previously only a shadow to him. “Art, beauty, love,” she would exclaim, “these are the things in life that have meaning, that survive time. All the rest of it is trifling.”
Judith’s favorite poet was Emily Dickinson, and Thomas often viewed her as being Emily-like, a person of beauty and grace, pining for absent love (although she had a husband), writing flowing lines of poetry like those she quoted so often:
“Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”
“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul – and sings the tunes without the words – and never stops at all.”
“Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.”
Several Sunday afternoons she drove him to art museums in the nearby big cities. Once or twice, her husband came along, but he usually seemed bored and stopped going. Judith was knowledgeable about most of the famous artists, but her favorites –thus becoming Thomas’ favorites—were the Impressionists, particularly Monet. Judith lectured him on Monet’s light effects and atmosphere and the sensory experiences of his paintings. She even broke into French during these discourses, using terms like “en plein air” to describe Monet’s outdoor techniques and using the French titles of paintings (“La Femme à la Robe Verte” sounded so much more romantic than “The Woman in the Green Dress”).
Judith casually quoted from literary works. Some quotes made a permanent impression, and one or two highly influenced his thinking and view of the world, like the opening sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” For several years, that line influenced how Thomas looked at the people of Mayefield in his news stories and in his personal writings. He was bored with the happy and contented, focusing instead on those who lived on the fringe or appeared out of place. He wanted to look behind their public façade to reveal the “damage” they tried to hide. As Thomas realized more and more –and it was certainly confirmed on this night—the smiling faces we encounter (as in Prufrock’s “…prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet…”) may very well mask real pain and sorrow. He wanted to discover the “how” and the “why” of personal unhappiness.
He believed Judith. No doubt he loved her. And now … what is this he is seeing? Judith on exhibition like one of her beloved Monet canvases: pale flesh shown through a smoky veil. Was this the real Judith? Was this tawdry display her idea of art and poetry and beauty? Was this scene in her mind when she spoke so often and loftily of literature and art? Was there always sleaze behind the sophistication?
Judith on display for a leering hypocrite. She had to be a willing participant in whatever sick drama was being carried out. What lured Judith into that room to pose in her underwear night after night? What sickness possessed her to show herself in such a way? Was she was one of the Damaged Ones: one of the clueless – living a secret life under the cover of darkness?
How would Thomas regard Mrs. Hensler in the future? Would this experience enhance the fantasy or diminish it?
Would this push him a little further along a misanthropic path? Or would it make him wearily philosophical about people and passion?
And would he be back, on other nights, leering like the Reverend Hill at the image he didn’t want to watch but possibly couldn’t resist?
No answers, at least not on this night. Thomas didn’t know how this would change him, only that it would.
After a few minutes, Reverend Hill finished his peep show for the night, and started back toward home. Thomas waited at the corner, perspiring heavily despite the chill in the air. As Reverend Hill approached him at the corner, they stared at each other silently as if they shared a secret – or shared even more. Finally, Reverend Hill spoke.
“Oh, hello, Thomas. What are you doing out this late?”
“Just walking,” Thomas replied.
“Yes, it is a lovely evening for a stroll, isn’t it?”
Thomas’ walk home was depressingly dark. He noticed very little along the way, except the darkness and how the longer he walked, the darker it seemed to get.
(Robert J. Marton)