The decline of summer
It’s
August.
There
is a long calm that comes in and permeates the bricked halls and low dormitories
of Tower College now, coming down from the wide northern vineyards and the lake
country, settling in the rolling hills where the college sits like a sentinel
between tangled Otherwood and the city of Norton.
It’s a calm of late summer, long heat, quiet days.
Only a few students, serious and scholarly, attend to the business of
their studies at this time. Afternoons
resound with the lull of insect song, lazy and mindless, a sound with all the
pervasive qualities of silence, stretching into evenings that come late and slow
and with reluctance.
Norton
is an old town, old without precious quaintness. It is a bookish college town that seems to tolerate the
encroaching newness of its neoned streets with amused detachment, as an
eccentric professor might put on some flashy garment by way of humoring his
pupils. These days, even the
city’s most urban districts are quiet more often than not, as in their spare,
cloistered rooms at Tower the students turn in early or spend their evenings in
studious contemplation. Night life
here is a handful of hours over coffee and poetry in the corner of some half-lit
café, or haunting the used-book shops along Morgan Street as the sun sinks over
the wooded hills to the west.
It’s
August. Here already the living
green has started to fade, hinting at the harvest browns that will come with
autumn. It’s August, and summer
has begun its slow decline, making the long days into a kind of bright perpetual
twilight, melancholy and pale. This
is in-between time, ending time, dying time.
Before the leaves fall, long before the first killing frost, the dry
fields are preparing for death, and over them comes an air of hushed
unearthliness.
It
is at the threshold between afternoon and evening in this season that the long
gray bus pulls into the terminal and discharges its few passengers.
One of these is a young man who is carrying, by way of a suitcase, a
single large bag over his shoulder, and an unwieldy leather portfolio in his
hand. He has a ten-day growth of
beard, a new development for him. His name is Ian. He
has come to his new home.
As
he stops at a station bench for long enough to check the address scrawled on a
piece of yellow paper kept safe in his trouser pocket, elswhere in the city a
woman is kneeling on the floor of her second-story walkup, in a room that smells
of sandalwood and cigar smoke, and she has just taken off her glasses to rub her
eyes in frustration and fatigue, as she tries to decipher the complex spread of
cards in front of her that seems to hinge on three potent trumps: the Magician,
the Emperor, the Fool . . .
And
in another room, in another part of the city, where the curtains have been drawn
against the descending sun, a man lifts a long black cigarette to his lips and
lights it, filling the air with a sweetly spiced smoke. He looks at where the
heavy draperies are half-illumined from the other side, translucent and golden,
and sighs.
From
the massive carved chair in the corner, where the diffused sun cannot unknit the
shadows, a voice speaks, low and deep; it is a voice made of winecasks and
weathered oak. “What are you
thinking, old friend?”
The
man with the spiced cigarette turns from the curtained window.
His head is an unruly tangle of long, slender dreadlocks.
“I’m thinking of summers and how they end.
I’m thinking of cello music played in dusty rooms.
I’m thinking of the songs of frogs, and starshine on leaves, and a
beautiful boy in Greece who loved me for three days once.
I’m thinking of crows, gathering like clouds over the fields.”
He pauses to draw on his cigarette.
“Does that answer your question?”
The
shadow in the chair stirs a little, to the sound of old wood creaking.
“Ah, I think I can unriddle you there. ‘Love that which the sun loves
in the sun’s time, and walk in kindness the paths of winter.’
Is that it?”
“Something
like that. Or just run-of-the-mill
melancholy. I don’t know.
I think I’ve just been dancing on the fringes for too long, and find
I’m unprepared for . . . all this.”
A
long pause, where the only sound is the drone of the insects ouside, hidden in
their secret places in the wood. And
then: “We are the stewards, Jack. This
is our charge. We made that
decision a long time ago.”
“Maybe.
I thought I made a different one. I’m
not sure now.” Another pause. “Either
way, it’s a terrible responsibility.”
At
this, only silence comes from the shadowed chair. And this could be assent, or it could be something else
entirely.
Now
Ian is making his way through the maze of Norton’s streets to where Tower
stands overlooking the woods, his bag slung across his shoulder.
Here the avenues are paved with brick as often as not, between buildings
that seem to have selected their architecture at a kind of banquet. Styles and
elements combine in a strange alchemy of Classical, colonial, modern, Baroque.
And many of the buildings seem to have been oddly designed, or expanded
in unusual ways, with wings or turrets or gables sprouting from them in a marked
disregard for balance or symmetry.