But relief was approaching. We came to the crest of Cough-drop Hill, the second, and steeper, of the two hills on the way to Alton. At the bottom, the road to Olinger went off to the left and we would have to let the hitchhiker out.
We began the descent. We passed a trailer truck laboring toward the crest so slowly its peeling paint seemed to have weathered in transit. Well back from the road, Rudy Essick’s great brown mansion sluggishly climbed through the down-slipping trees.
Coughdrop Hill took its name from its owner, whose coughdrops (“sick? Suck an essick!”) were congealed by the million in an Alton factory that flavored whole blocks of the city with the smell of menthol. They sold, in their little tangerine-colored boxes, throughout the East: the one time in my life I had been to Manhattan, I had been astonished to find, right in the throat of Paradise, on a counter in Grand Central Station, a homely ruddy row of them. In disbelief I bought a box. Sure enough, on the back, beneath an imposing miniature portrait of the factory, the fine print stated made in alton, pa. And the box, opened, released the chill, ectopiasmic smell of Brubaker Street. The two cities of my life, the imaginary and the actual, were superimposed; I had never dreamed that Alton could touch New York. I put a coughdrop into my mouth to complete this delicious confusion and concentric penetration; my teeth sweetened and at the level of my eyes, a hollow mile beneath the ceiling that on an aqua sky displayed the constellations with sallow electric stars, my father’s yellow-knuckled hands wrung together nervously through my delay. I ceased to be impatient with him and became as anxious as he to catch the train home. Up to this moment my father had failed me. Throughout our trip, an overnight visit to his sister, he had been frightened and frustrated. The city was bigger than the kind he understood. The money in his pocket dwindled without our buying anything. Though we walked and walked, we never reached any of the museums I had read of. The one called the Frick contained the Vermeer of the man in the big hat and the laughing woman whose lazily upturned palm un consciously accepts the light, and the one called the Metropolitan contained the girl in the starched headdress bent reverently above the brass jug whose vertical blue gleam was the Holy Ghost of my adolescence. That these paintings, which I had worshipped in reproduction, had a simple physi cal existence seemed a profound mystery to me: to come within touching distance of their surfaces, to see with my eyes the truth of their color, the tracery of the cracks whereby time had inserted itself like a mystery within a mystery, would have been for me to enter a Real Presence so ultimate I would not be surprised to die in the encounter. My father’s blundering blocked it. We never entered the museums; I never saw the paintings. Instead I saw the inside of my father’s sister’s hotel room. Though suspended twenty stories above the street, it smelled strangely like the lining of my mother’s fur-collared winter coat of thick green-plaid cloth. Aunt Alma sipped a yellow drink and dribbled the smoke of Kools from the corners of her very thin red lips. She had white, white skin and her eyes were absolutely transparent with intelligence. Her eyes kept crinkling sadly as she looked at my father; she was three years older than he. They talked all evening of pranks and crises in a vanished Passaic parsonage whose very mention made me sick and giddy, as if I were suspended over a canyon of time. Down on the street, twenty stories below, the taxi lights looped in and out, and that was abstractly interesting. During the day, Aunt Alma, here as an out-of-town children’s-clothes buyer, left us to ourselves. The strangers my father stopped on the street resisted entanglement in his earnest, circular questioning. Their rudeness and his ignorance humiliated me, and my irritation had been building toward a tantrum that the coughdrop dissolved. I forgave him. In a temple of pale brown marble I forgave him and wanted to thank him for conceiving me to be born in a county that could insert its candy into the throat of Paradise. We took the subway to Pennsylvania Station and caught a train and sat side by side as easy as twins all the way home, and even now, two years later, whenever in our daily journey we went up or down Coughdrop Hill, there was for me an undercurrent of New York and the constellations that seemed to let us soar, free together of the local earth.
Instead of braking, my father by some mistake plunged past the Olinger turnoff. I cried, “Hey!”
“It’s O.K., Peter,” he said to me softly. “It’s too cold.” His face was impassive under the cretinous cap of knitted blue. He did not want the hitchhiker to be embarrassed by the fact that we were going out of our way to take him into Alton.
I was so indignant I dared turn and glare. The hitch hiker’s face, unfrozen, was terrible-a puddle; it mistook my motive and moved toward me with a smear of a smile and an emanation of muddy emotion. I flinched and rigidly cringed; the details of the dashboard leaped up aglitter. I shut my eyes to prevent any further inwash of that unwelcome unthinkable ichor I had roused. Most horrible in it had been something shy and grateful and girlish.
My father reared back his great head and called, “What have you learned?”
His voice strained under a high pain that bewildered the other. The back seat was silent. My father waited. “I don’t follow you,” the hitchhiker said.
My father amplified. “What’s your verdict? You’re a man I admire. You’ve had the guts to do what I always wanted to do: move around, see the cities. Do you think I’ve missed out?”
“You ain’t missed a thing.” The words curled back on themselves like offended feelers.
“Have you done anything you like to remember? I was awake all last night trying to remember something pleasant and I couldn’t do it. Misery and horror; that’s my memories.”
This hurt my feelings; he had had me.
The hitchhiker’s voice scribbled; maybe it was a laugh.
“Last month I killed a goddam dog,” he said. “How’s that?
Damn suckin’ dogs come up outa the bushes and try to grab a piece of your leg, so I get myself a hell of a big stick and I was walkin’ along this cock jumps out at me and I cracked him right between the eyes. He drops down and I thump him a couple times more good and boy there’s one suckin’ dog won’t be tryin’ to grab a piece of your leg just because you ain’t got no car to go haulin’ your ass around in. Christ right between the eyes the first crack.”
My father had listened rather dolefully. “Most dogs won’t hurt you,” he said now. “They’re just like I am, curious. I know just how they think. We have a dog at home I think the world of. My wife just worships that animal.”
“Well I fixed that one bastard good I tell ya,” the hitch hiker said, and sucked back spittle. “You like dogs, boy?” he asked me.
“Peter likes everybody,” my father said. “I’d give my eyes if I had that boy’s good nature. But I see your point, mister, when a dog comes up to you in the dark along a strange road.”
“Yeah and then nobody picks ya up any more,” the hitchhiker said. “Stand there all day your balls freezin’ off and yours was the first car in a hour stopped for me.”
“I always pick ‘em up,” my father said. “If Heaven didn’t look after fools I’d be in your shoes. You said you’re a cook?”
“Annh-I done it.”
“My hat’s off to you. You’re an artist.”
I felt within myself like a worm hatching the hitchhiker beginning to wonder if my father were sane. I cringed with the desire to apologize, to grovel before this stranger, to explain. It’s just his way, he loves strange people, he’s worried about something.
“There’s nothin’ to it except keep the griddle greased.” This response came cautiously.
“You’re lying, mister,” my father shouted. “There’s a fine art to cooking for other people. I couldn’t learn it if you gave me a million years.”