A Subtle Reminder

As it happened, those three months of my life were pretty uneventful. For the most part, I kept to myself. In fact, my presence in Fair Haven was barely registered. I had little impact on the town and the town had little impact on me. But the Winter house, on the other hand, was not so forgiving. Every day, it sent subtle hints to my sub-conscious, elusive reminders of the stringy boughs that branched about its walls. Most of the time, I was unaware of its delicate impression.

But at night, just before my eyes fell closed and I drifted into slumber, that’s when I felt it: the rot spilling over, the roots climbing the walls of the house, seeping through the fibers of the wood and creeping their way furtively into the frayed strands of my thought.

At the time, however, I was so focused on just making it through the summer that I didn’t quite realize the obscure effect the house was having on me. And in the end, it wasn’t until I returned to Boston that the full effects of a long summer spent in that house - of an entire lifetime interred there in that wintry casing - finally became apparent.

Arriving back in the city that September afternoon, as I stepped inside the door of my apartment I expected to feel a surge of relief wash over me. I waited for it; stayed stony still at the doorway in anticipation of it, but it never came. Though my summer in Fair Haven had passed without incident, it had left me decidedly on edge, and I had hoped that coming back to Boston would garner some welcome reassurance. However, within seconds of my return that hope had already abandoned me. Immediately, my fingers released their tense grip and my bag dropped heavily to the floor, thudding gruffly on the carpet. The sound jolted me into movement. I stumbled to the couch where I sat, vacantly staring at the walls.

And there I lingered for the longest while. Evening fell, its failing light bathing me in a shadow of bewilderment as an air of deep disquiet filled the room.

The Silent Witness

Within days of my hesitant return, I started a job at the local video store in Fair Haven’s small town center. It was all I could think of to lessen the cruel longevity of three whole months at home, and as it turned out, Karl’s Video Shop did prove an enjoyably effective diversion.

The manager of the store, Karl McIntyre, was a local businessman in his early thirties, and he and his wife had been living next-door to the Winter family for almost five years now. Most recently, Karl had become the proud father of twin boys. On my first morning back in Fair Haven he spotted me as I was sneaking out of the house early morning - a desperate attempt to avoid breakfast accompanied by the rigid glare of the reverend.

I almost didn’t hear Karl calling out to me - the shrill sound of a newborn’s cry spilled brashly from the open door of the McIntyre home as he hurried down the driveway with what looked like a permanent shrug of perplexity dragging on his shoulders. Exasperation smothering Karl’s weary face, his glance shifted awkwardly from the bedroom window where most of the noise seemed to be coming from, before finally resting on me.

He explained the situation quickly: he needed someone to help out at the video store while he and his wife came to terms with the new members of their family. The work was undemanding and it paid minimum wage.
“You’d be doing me a huge favor,” Karl implored. “Rachel and I really got our hands full here. I’ll stop by the shop as often as I can but really, it’s nothing you can’t handle.”

I glanced back at the Winter house, its tired frame standing deathly still in comparison to the burst of new life rippling through Karl’s home at that very moment.

“Thanks Karl,” I said, decisively. “I’d be glad to help you out. In fact, you’re doing me a huge favor too.”
A surge of elated relief squeezed over Karl’s exhausted features.

Karl hadn’t lied - the work was anything but demanding, and that summer quickly turned into a movie house vacation. A constant supply of theatrical delights lay at my willing fingertips, ready to grab hold of my yielding attention. Any interruption was brief and occasional as the store managed only a sparse set of patrons. And with Karl ever an infrequent visitor, my pursuit of filmic diversion went gloriously unchallenged.

Indeed, so great was the distraction of the video store that it was only as I walked home that I remembered where I was headed, my feet coming to a grinding halt as thoughts of the Winter house suddenly occurred to me. Most days, rather than follow the straight path home, I opted for a detour. It only delayed the inevitable, but as far as I was concerned, the less time I had to spend in that house the better. And so, happily I wandered down to the lake just as the town center was shutting its doors, the sound of keys locking and shutters falling, drowsy chatter and shuffling feet, grazing my half aware ears as I walked the grassy path that diverted my course to the lake.

Once there, I stood in deep repose, a silent witness to the dying embers of sunlight fading in the water. I watched until the mirrored pool disappeared with the onset of darkness, and then began my journey home.

I counted it a good day if I’d managed to miss dinner, but I wasn’t always that lucky. Often I was forced to endure the unbearable - a meal punctuated by the reverend’s persistent lecturing. Every evening it was the same thing. I needed a plan, apparently. I couldn’t expect to be simply handed a job after graduation. These things had to be well organized, decisions had to be made, because I could be damn sure that he wasn’t going to tolerate a slacker for a son.

Determined not to rock the boat, I listened to him grudgingly, but with only one thought at the back of my mind: the only plan I had that summer was to get through it, one agonizing day at a time, until I returned to Boston - hopefully in one piece.

Going Home

The summer before my final year of college began I went home, back to Fair Haven. I had been back on a number of occasions since I’d moved to Boston - weekends here and there, a few days during the holidays. But not since I’d left for college three years previously had I spent such a lengthy spell in Fair Haven with only my parents and the Winter house for company.

It was an onerous prospect, one which doused all my thoughts with a bitter aftertaste and sent darts of apprehension bursting through my core as that final semester came to a heady close.

In spite of my unease, I had little option but to go. It had been my mother's idea. She had called me late one night to make an earnest appeal on behalf of her loneliness - though she would never admit to this. Instead, she claimed that this summer would be my last opportunity to spend some time at home. Next Summer I’d get a job, settle down in Boston for good, who knows when I’d make it back to Fair Haven then? It was only a suggestion, she had said, she was only thinking of me.

But there was a hint of desperate pleading in her tone, its stain was undeniable, her sorrow so insistent that it caught hold of me, wrenched a reluctant acceptance from my begrudging throat, and I went back; took one last tentative step onto the arid sands of home.

A Cruel Monotony

Often, I escaped to the harbor. Whenever things got too hectic, too frenzied, the waterfront offered a gentle diversion from the chaotic hub of the city.

Many long hours I spent wandering up and down that peer with an aimless sort of concentration about me, as if any kind of slow, monotonous behavior might force the hand of time to linger.

And gradually, time suffered a slowing down, just as I had hoped it would. But to my dismay, this brought with it a new torment, as now, rather than hoping to spur time onward, I became increasingly obsessed by a need to pull it back.

I couldn’t bear the thought of semesters ending because their conclusion meant only one thing: a return to Cedar Hill, to the Winter house. And every time I went back there I started running again, racing through my time at home until a new escape arose with the commencement of another semester in Boston.

Only then could I return to the harbor, to the eternal ocean deep. There where I was comforted most; there where the boats lived as I did: heading out to sea, only to return to port.

It astonishes me still how long I continued in this vein. All I was ever conscious of was time and how much slow passing was left to me before I would be forced to accelerate once more. But that was time’s great deception: I supposed it would pass any way that I let it. That it was I who controlled time and not the contrary. And it was only in my final year of college that I began to feel otherwise, to sense the cruel monotony of seeing nothing else, the cold isolation of thinking of nothing else.

And little by little an unsettling thought crept after me: I knew only the tedium of time’s solitary company.

Bustle and Peace

Many things had changed for me in Boston, but many more remained untouched. The very first day I arrived in the city, sitting at the wide open port of Boston harbor I
felt my perception alter, felt the clenched fist that had held me in its grasp for so long, loosening its grip into an open palm.

There was something about the vastness of open space that induced a soft untying of the knot in my chest.

The sea posed an eternity I’d never before been aware of, and I thought it only right that I should savor every moment of this new found freedom, feel the very essence of the open air as it breathed about me. And for me it was freedom; at least I thought it was.

Back then, the city struck me as gloriously dissimilar to the small town experience. My solitary demeanor, which stood out so markedly in Fair Haven, went largely unnoticed here. Boston itself became like a new glass case for me to live in, all the better than the previous one, for this one was real. Here I could be free of the lie that had plagued me in Fair Haven, for the anonymity offered by a busy metropolis protected me - it ensured the lie would not be discovered. Free to live amongst the outside world, I settled quietly into my new life, maintaining always a focused distance from the people and the world around me.

I existed only on the cusp of life, my thoughts invariably occupied, inhabited by something else, by something other than me, and by some time other than my own.

Boston surrounded me with an inconspicuous air, had a de-sensitizing sort of effect on me. The distraction was too great to refuse: it lured my willing feet in and I lost myself in its foreign seas. Deep in the city’s core there gushed a constant current of sights and sounds to swamp me, to bathe me in a shroud of concealment. And it was the dichotomy of the place that intrigued me most; how it defined itself in opposites.

The bustled activity of bars and coffee houses had the same hypnotic effect as the soft lilting of the Charles River. The soaring sight of skyscrapers shifted abruptly to the towered peaks of gothic church steeples. While the gray concrete of building and street morphed freely into the green grass of park and tree.

The city impressed a sweeping aura on me, that somehow it could be all things at once. And while it encapsulated all things, I could be none of them.

I could sink into an ambiguous background where rather than living in the city, the city lived in me. There was a life in there somewhere - my life. But in amongst all that bustle and peace, where was I to find it? It quickly got lost, and so did I, in the smell of coffee beans and sea salt.

Unfamiliar Worlds

I aimed to spend as little time on campus as I could muster. Classes, however, often got in the way of this objective, and many an instance I found myself staring despondently into a barren table as one of my professors delivered their insipid lectures.

My classics teacher, Professor Stevens, recognized my weak attempt at feigned interest as early as the first day of class. “Your thoughts please, Mr. Winter,” I heard him bellow half way through the lecture. The mention of my name sparked a sudden surge in my awareness and I jerked awkwardly in my seat as I struggled to compose myself. He had been discussing the range of classicists we would be reviewing over the year to come, that much I’d gathered at least, and so I offered him my thoughts on the selection, as he’d requested.

But as I was speaking, the professor began to scratch irritably at his graying beard, his frustration growing with each passing syllable. I was sure that somewhere in his head an imaginary black mark was being crossed against my name. It seemed he’d been looking for the polite answer, the one that failed to deviate in any way from his own, superior opinion. He called me back after class that day to offer a friendly word of advice: “If you want to get far in this class, Mr. Winter, you’ll do well to heed my opinion and not attempt to undermine it.”

I couldn’t help but scoff, though it aggravated him all the more. “I don’t think the likes of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky would agree with that sort of single minded analysis of their work,” I insisted. He glared at me - another black mark crossed against my name. I left quickly before I acquired any more, while in future, Professor Stevens refrained from inquiring after my opinions.

My relationship with other professors followed a similar pattern, but for one or two who enjoyed the challenge of a dissenting voice. In most cases, I was argumentative in class purely for the sake of my own stimulation, for I loathed being told what to read and how to analyze it. Couldn’t help but approach the rigidity of curriculum and reading lists with little more than contempt. To my mind, the library was the only redeeming feature on campus, the one place where I felt boundless and unrestricted.

In between classes, and after too, I withdrew to the respite of the stacks, often abiding there long into the dark night, seeking out unfamiliar worlds within the pages of books, books that no one had recommended, books I’d never heard of before.

The vast halls of Boston City University library were transformed in an instant into the diminutive haven of my Winter house bedroom, and poised in a quiet corner at the back of the hall (preferably beside a window where some welcome offering of natural light could illume the pages) I gradually worked my way through an ambitious pile of select titles, anything that had sparked a measure of slight intrigue in me. But for all that time I spent in concentrated study, a small corner of my attention was continually given to monitoring the clock at the far end of the hall as it counted down the minutes till closing.

The light grew dimmer in the great library hall as evening wore on and the room emptied - table lamps switching off one by one as each person left, time passing as a gradual fading of light.

And later, when finally I arrived back at the apartment, more often than not I was greeted by a noisy gathering of Eric’s friends. Strangers stumbled around me, the campus bleeding of its occupants, their drunkenness an effective aid to the ongoing pretense, while I held one eye firmly on the window scene, watching intently the darkening and the brightening of the sky, one day at close and another at dawn.

The Hooded Wood

As those first few weeks in Boston progressed, it became increasingly clear that the college experience was to be of little interest to me. Campus life became much like an empty frame I stepped in and out of - it housed a certain aspect of my life, but it would never encompass it. Its initial draw as an escape route was quick to diminish, and soon I felt this narrow campus world descending rapidly into an exercise in the banal.

In an effort to counter this, I studied literature. Though the reverend dismayed at my choice, no amount of heated argument would force me into a world of business or law or anything else. The written word engaged a great fondness in me, in a way that nothing else could. After all, I had spent much of my young life immersed in its dreaming, and now, once again I was content to live in the cradle of its reverie, for it made drowning out the bothersome hum of campus life all the easier.

Eric had been right - the grounds of Boston City University admitted little semblance of real life and often reflected only a mirage of youthful experience, a playful veneer that dutifully hid the reality existing behind the eyes of its students. Our years at university would prepare us for the real world, we were told. But in actual fact, college was merely a brief pause in that real world, an act of pretense that we all readily participated in.

Like a hooded wood entombed in the bowels of a man-made city, I felt as though the college grounds sheltered me unnecessarily, shielded me in a way I didn’t need or want to be, and so I committed to the charade with notably less zeal than my fellow students.

There were days during that first semester when I just sat and watched them as they ambled hesitantly by, each of them congregating in their chosen groups, subsuming into a general appearance that perhaps described a particular identity they wished to portray. But I listened as each party passed and all their talk, so full of arrogant adjectives and plagiarized assertions, and from one group to the next it all sounded much the same to me. It didn’t take me long, however, to block them out completely.

I bunkered down, erased them from my perception, this moving throng of people like a hovering line of ghosts the rest of the world forgot.