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By Root 6089 0

mouth slightly open. Her long elegant head grew golden hair and she parted it evenly, like the curtains of a neat house. Hers was the sort of face you might have seen in a Conestoga wagon a century ago, a pioneer face, a very white sort of face. But I fell first for her legs. They were extraordinary. And these beautiful legs had an exciting defect—her knees touched and her feet were turned outward so that when she walked’fast the taut silk of her stockings made a slight sound of friction. In a cocktail crowd, where I met her, I could scarcely understand what she was saying, for she muttered in the incomprehensible fashionable Eastern lockjaw manner. But in her nightgown she was the perfect country girl, the farmer’s daughter, and pronounced her words plainly and clearly. Regularly, at about 2 a.m., her nightmares woke her. Her Christianity was the delirious kind. She had unclean spirits to cast out. She feared hell. She moaned in her sleep. Then she sat up sobbing. More than half asleep myself, I tried to calm and reassure her. “There is no hell, Demmie.”

“I know there is hell. There is a hell—there is!”

“Just put your head on my arm. Go back to sleep.”

On a Sunday in September 1952 Humboldt picked me up in front of Demmie’s apartment building on Barrow Street near the Cherry Lane Theatre. Very different from the young poet with whom I went to Hoboken to eat clams, he now was thick and stout. Cheerful Demmie called down from the third-floor fire escape where she kept begonias—in the morning there was not a trace of nightmare. “Charlie, here comes Humboldt driving the four-holer.” He charged down Barrow Street, the first poet in America with power brakes, he said. He was full of car mystique, but he didn’t know how to park. I watched him trying to back into an adequate space. My own theory was that the way people parked had much to do with their intimate self-image and revealed how they felt about their own backsides. Humboldt twice got a rear wheel up on the curb and finally gave up, turning off the ignition. Then in a checked sport jacket and strap-fastened polo boots he came out, swinging shut a door that seemed two yards long. His greeting was silent, the large lips were closed. His gray eyes seemed more widely separated than ever—the surfaced whale beside the dory. His handsome face has thickened and deteriorated. It was sumptuous, it was Buddhistic, but it was not tranquil. I myself was dressed for the formal professorial interview, all too belted furled and buttoned. I felt like an umbrella. Demmie had taken charge of my appearance. She ironed my shirt, chose my necktie, and brushed flat the dark hair I still had then. I went downstairs. And there we were, with the rough bricks, the garbage cans, the sloping sidewalks, the fire escapes, Demmie waving from above and her white terrier barking at the window sill.

“Have a nice day.”

“Why isn’t Demmie coming? Kathleen expects her.”

“She has to grade her Latin papers. Make lesson plans,” I said.

“If she’s so conscientious she can do it in the country. I’d take her to the early train.”

“She won’t do it. Besides, your cats wouldn’t like her dog.”

Humboldt did not insist. He was devoted to the cats.

So from the present I see two odd dolls in the front seat of the roaring, grinding four-holer. This Buick was all over mud and looked like a staff car from Flanders Field. The wheels were out of line, the big tires pounded eccentrically. Through the thin sunlight of early autumn Humboldt drove fast, taking advantage of the Sunday emptiness of the streets. He was a terrible driver, making left turns from the right side, spurting, then dragging, tailgating. I disapproved. Of course I was much better with a car but comparisons were absurd, because this was Humboldt, not a driver. Steering, he was humped huge over the wheel, he had small-boy tremors of the hands and feet, and he kept the cigarette holder between his teeth. He was agitated, talking away, entertaining, provoking, informing, and snowing me. He hadn’t slept last night. He seemed in poor health. Of course he drank,