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child as her I.Q. might suggest. But if I managed to establish that
background of shared secrecy and shared guilt, I was much less successful in
keeping her in good humor. Every morning during our yearlong travels I had
to devise some expectation, some special point in space and time for her to
look forward to, for her to survive till bedtime. Otherwise, deprived of a
shaping and sustaining purpose, the skeleton of her day sagged and
collapsed. The object in view might be anything--a lighthouse in Virginia, a
natural cave in Arkansas converted to a caf, a collection of guns and
violins somewhere in Oklahoma, a replica of the Grotto of Lourdes in
Louisiana, shabby photographs of the bonanza mining period in the local
museum of a Rocky Mountains resort, anything whatsoever--but it had to be
there, in front of us, like a fixed star, although as likely as not Lo would
feign gagging as soon as we got to it.
By putting the geography of the United States into motion, I did my
best for hours on end to give her the impression of "going places," of
rolling on to some definite destination, to some unusual delight. I have
never seen such smooth amiable roads as those that now radiated before us,
across the crazy quilt of forty-eight states. Voraciously we consumed those
long highways, in rapt silence we glided over their glossy black dance
floors. Not only had Lo no eye for scenery but she furiously resented my
calling her attention to this or that enchanting detail of landscape; which
I myself learned to discern only after being exposed for quite a time to the
delicate beauty ever present in the margin of our undeserving journey. By a
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paradox of pictorial thought, the average lowland North-American countryside
had at first seemed to me something I accepted with a shock of amused
recognition because of those painted oilclothes which were imported from
America in the old days to be hung above washstands in Central-European
nurseries, and which fascinated a drowsy child at bed time with the rustic
green views they depicted--opaque curly trees, a barn, cattle, a brook, the
dull white of vague orchards in bloom, and perhaps a stone fence or hills of
greenish gouache. But gradually the models of those elementary rusticities
became stranger and stranger to the eye, the nearer I came to know them.
Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow
suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm,
peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray
cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. There might be a line of spaced
trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a
wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into
misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral
swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon,
pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer,
and all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water and harsh green
corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas.
Now and then, in the vastness of those plains, huge trees would advance
toward us to cluster self-consciously by the roadside and provide a bit of
humanitarian shade above a picnic table, with sun flecks, flattened paper
cups, samaras and discarded ice-cream sticks littering the brown ground. A
great user of roadside facilities, my unfastidious Lo would be charmed by
toilet signs--Guys-Gals, John-Jane, Jack-Jill and even Buck's-Doe's; while
lost in an artist's dream, I would stare at the honest brightness of the
gasoline paraphernalia against the splendid green of oaks, or at a distant
hill scrambling out--scarred but still untamed--from the wilderness of
agriculture that was trying to swallow it.
At night, tall trucks studded with colored lights, like dreadful giant
Christmas trees, loomed in the darkness and thundered by the belated little
sedan. And again next day a thinly populated sky, losing its blue to the
heat, would melt overhead, and Lo would clamor for a drink, and her cheeks
would hollow vigorously over the straw, and the car inside would be a
furnace when we got in again, and the road shimmered ahead, with a remote
car changing its shape mirage-like in the surface glare, and seeming to hang
for a moment, old-fashionedly square and high, in the hot haze. And as we
pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called "sage brush"
appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red
bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading
into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady
gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking
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