Cynosura Read online

  Cynosura

  by

  Tito Perdue

  Books by Tito Perdue

  Lee (1991)

  The New Austerities (1994)

  Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture (1994)

  The Sweet-Scented Manuscript (2004)

  Fields of Asphodel (2007)

  The Node (2011)

  Morning Crafts (2013)

  Reuben (2014)

  The Builder: William’s House I (2016)

  The Churl: William’s House II (2016)

  The Engineer: William’s House III (2016)

  The Bachelor: William’s House IV (2016)

  Cynosura

  by

  Tito Perdue

  Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.

  San Francisco

  2017

  Copyright © 2017 Tito Perdue

  All rights reserved

  Cover image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, A Sea-Spell, 1877

  Cover design by: Kevin Slaughter

  Published in the United States by

  COUNTER-CURRENTS PUBLISHING LTD.

  P.O. Box 22638

  San Francisco, CA 94122 USA

  http://www.counter-currents.com/

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-940933-85-6

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-940933-86-3

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-940933-87-0

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Perdue, Tito, author.

  Title: Cynosura / by Tito Perdue.

  Description: San Francisco : Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd., 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017028524 (print) | LCCN 2017032886 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781940933870 (electronic) | ISBN 9781940933856 (hardcover : acid-free

  paper) | ISBN 9781940933863 (softcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN

  9781940933870 (ebook)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Love stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3566.E691225 (ebook) | LCC PS3566.E691225 C96 2017

  (print) | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028524

  This book is dedicated to its subject, to that certain kind of woman who knows why she exists. How rare such people be! I personally have heard of women who

  imagine that they dropped to earth in order more or less to do what men are designed to do.

  The more dispositively unlike are men and women, the more electrifying their encounters. Spartan soldiers, it is reported, were only seldom allowed to visit their own wives. Try to imagine the quality of those interviews, strangers from outer space hungry for each other.

  Would like to have been there.

  One

  As you consider these first pages (assuming that you will), try to understand that the information came to me secondhand. Even so, I am confident that I have rendered the dialogue at least as accurately as the original speakers, if not indeed more so. My sources were consistent, however, and I am perfectly confident of the truthfulness of this account, which I now offer to those willing to receive it.

  Two

  Born under the sign of Saturn, he came forth on a dark and rainy night in that part of Tennessee whence a person can distantly see the gorgeous mountain range that distinguishes that exceptional state. Dark and rainy night? We have no proof of that or even that the boy had aught to do with Saturn or any other such matter. He did come forth, however, and in Tennessee, and we know the date within a few months of the actual event.

  Nothing could have been better than the small-town South in those days, nothing more propitious for the intellection that he was to exemplify later on. By the age of nine, he had already had three girlfriends, had visited the Gulf Coast, and had caught his full meed of flounder and speckled trout. He played baseball, a failed effort that brought him to football in which he proved uniquely willing to bring down, or try so to do, even the most intimidating of ball carriers. It is remarkable that at so young an age, he had determined that it were better to die immediately than fail to make the best efforts available to him. It yielded him a broken nose (broken three times) and a boxer’s profile that kept any possibility of handsomeness completely out of reach.

  His father was not especially handsome either, and in fact really had been a boxer in his college days. They used to spar with each other in comradely fashion, until the child turned fifteen. You will look in vain for any aspersions against those parents of his. They lived and died, as did the girl shortly to be described, before the full onset of the postmodern age. In any event, we wouldn’t have known it even if his parents had been the worst in the world. But they were not. As between the worst and best, they ranked much nearer the last-mentioned.

  He was given a series of ever-larger dogs as his own size also grew larger. Desperately in love with each of them, yet he never taught a single one even the barest minimum of English speech. By twelve he played the trombone, but had to wait till fourteen before his instructor took him off to one side and described in depth how the boy had no talent whatsoever. Having failed at that, he jumped into stamp collecting.

  More than dogs, he adored girls, especially those with oval faces that held so many lips and eyes and so many unpredictable expressions. He had seen how these creatures could produce the most realistic-looking smiles even when they didn’t feel like it, an enormous problem for parents, teachers, and males in general. With more stamps than girls, he had kissed only one of them (girls, not stamps) before 1949. Other of his misbehaviors included the theft of a wallet, a yo-yo, and a good number of fishing lures from a downtown store managed by a middle-age woman of unusual naïveté. Some of that merchandise—and this is perhaps the most implausible part of the story—he was said to have returned.

  In September 1950, he left home and ventured into the ten-acre woods that bordered the neighborhood on that side. There an abandoned three-storey schoolhouse extended above the treetops, a brick structure that two generations earlier had served the town’s white youths of high-school age. No one went there anymore, save only occasionally a hobo seeking shelter or neighborhood children using the place as a fort. Never was he to forget it, that fading inscription still to be seen on one of the blackboards, a piece of information about the War of 1812 written by an earnest teacher now rotting in the grave. He could imagine the tumult that once had filled these halls, the pushing and shoving and the love affairs that had endured for perhaps a month or so before dwindling down to nothing save a few faint, random memories fading away in ageing brains. How strange all things were! When a person dies, that person is either dead, or else he goes on to some other tenure somewhere else. In the first instance, a man ought to do what he can in his brief time. In the second, he may hope to be welcomed by cheering crowds.

  These were heavy thoughts for a twelve-year-old, but bringing into play his general indifference to anything relating to his own far-away death, he walked to the edge of the roof of that multi-storey structure, a half-acre expanse littered with tree branches and pine cones, two exhausted whiskey bottles, and a dozen dead birds, an excellent platform whence he could survey that fraction of the city that mattered to him. His own home he saw, and his morose father stooped over in the yard severing crabgrass roots with his pocket knife. A pipe hung from his mouth, and his glasses sat slightly askew his largish nose, a genealogical feature that also afflicted the boy on the roof. He could identify the home of Glenda Blight, but any hope that she would come to him someday, saying, “I love you so much, I really do,” any such hope as that had long ago withered away in the darkness of his bedroom.

  Just then he noticed a kite flying over the golf course three blocks away, a bright blue one with a human face on it. From somewhere a half-dozen dogs were barking at some cause too inconsequential to hold their attention for very long, while nearer he could hear
the resonating voice of a well-known reporter addressing himself by radio to America and ships at sea. News about Korea, the boy had to suppose. His mind turned then to the map of that region and some of the stamps in his two-volume collection. He was thinking too rapidly now and about too many different subjects all at once. In the fullness of time, this was the peculiarity that would finally ruin him.

  Three

  If you’ve come this far in my account, I hope you’ll not turn back now. He said he used to run home from school to listen to his radio and to those voices that came from so far away. But mostly they came from New York City where the speakers, as he pictured them, were well-dressed men and women standing around a microphone. Afterwards they would retire to a favorite nightclub and drink drinks while listening to a beautiful singer—such was his knowledge of New York City and its things.

  Those were the days. But the best was yet to come, coming when his father, tired from a hard day’s work, entered through the back door with some little gift in his jacket pocket. He was a wistful man, that one, somewhat older in appearance than he should have been. He would go quickly through his newspaper and then give a few minutes to the radio, skeptical of most of what he heard. Half an hour later—it never failed—the man was sleeping and the ash on his cigarette was threatening to fall into his lap. And did sometimes fall, whereupon the man would come to his feet and brush the sparks from his trouser pants.

  His father had possibly four suits in total, but they all looked just alike. His pockets flared out, filled to the limit with a cigarette lighter, a half-pound of silver change, an engineer’s eraser, a pocket knife, and a hazelnut of peculiar shape.

  And all this time the boy’s mother had been working in the kitchen. She might serve them boiled chicken with dumplings and gravy, cornbread and buttermilk, okra, biscuits with butter and jam, etcetera, the result of her hours at the stove and sink. At first she wore an apron with a picture of a cow on it, and in later years a cartoon character dressed in a yellow hat.

  The boy would then waste a few minutes with his homework, simpleminded stuff that he could finish within minutes while getting it perfect. Of course his parents had to admonish him from time to time, but had trouble finding cause. He had friends, girlfriends even, and was remarkably good at football, despite being so untowardly small for his size. For the other part, what secret evils did the child harbor in his tetrahedral head? These are to be described at greater length later on.

  Four

  Obviously this is to be a focused account, made so in the hope that those with narrow attention spans will remain “on board,” as it were. Not that I could do otherwise with my limited information.

  The boy must have possessed a thousand stamps by now, selecting them as if for an art gallery. Want the key to his life? Beauty, beauty, beauty, conduits, he was eventually to say, to life on higher planes. Eruptions in the fabric of life that offer a view of the ineffable. Or offers it anyway to those who earn it.

  He so loved the night, he would wallow in it, postponing for as long as he could the onset of sleep. His room permitted the introduction of light beams from the outside traffic, a source of problematic shadows seen by him as men slaughtering each other with knives, or cats and dogs, or lightning sticks, or naked women with good physiques.

  Five

  He grew and developed and sometimes took a step sideways or in the wrong direction. Lest he be accused of cheating, he began making deliberate errors on his tests and homework. He hadn’t reached the stage, not yet, of acknowledging his superiority, far less of letting it be seen. He was still able to have friends, therefore, and to land himself in trouble along with the best of them. He never lost a fight and therefore didn’t need to have many.

  As reported, he wasn’t especially handsome, not yet nor ever, and could pass through a crowd without accumulating the sort of female attention he wanted. He could, however, venture downtown whenever he wanted; it was 1950 in the South, and half the people he encountered were long-term friends of his. Movies were eleven cents, no matter how long he remained in his seat. And he could stroll home alone in the dark provided he arrived no later than ten o’clock. Those were the days.

  All this nostalgia says nothing, however, about his growing bitterness, namely that life was not nearly as good as it should have been. Throughout his whole life, it was always the present moment that was bad, never mind what the rest was like. He had seen films and read books in which life was at full force all the time, in the days of Achilles for example, or Robin Hood and the others. There was something wrong with a world that wouldn’t allow these sorts of experiences to attend him always, forever, permanently without end. He craved to be put to sea in an ocean of everlasting bliss, beauty, and heroism, adored uselessly by millions of girls. Knowing he would never have it, or not all of it anyway, he grew morose and turned away from his one-time friends.

  “You think you’re better than everybody else. Don’t you?”

  He nodded sadly.

  He remained so small that by the age of thirteen, he was still able to get into the movies for eleven cents. His grades were perfect save only in demeanor, which he despised. He had taken an interest in mathematics, but only by dint of hard effort was he able to do well in it. Neither in music nor in mathematics did he boast any special talent, though he respected both of them from a certain distance. His real destiny was scheduled for elsewhere, in necromancy perhaps, or, as he was beginning to believe, within one of the new parallel universes coming all too slowly into focus in the country’s best heads.

  He was growing up meantime, and by age of fourteen was just ten or fifteen percent smaller than his colleagues. Even now, he had never lost a fight. He had a chemistry set and sixteen model airplanes hanging by threads from his bedroom ceiling. Had a dog and a great many East European postage stamps. Could swim a mile without stopping. He had become an Eagle Scout and had gone on camp-outs unaccompanied by others. He detested all things that interfered with his radio programs.

  Enough of this, you have the general idea.

  Six

  Adolescence came down on him like a crowd of Assyrians clad in purple and gold. He woke up tumescent and went to sleep that way. His mental facilities were likewise extended, and he had hardly entered the 1950s before he had become one of the library’s most pestilential visitors.

  “You again! So what’s it going to be this time?” She did smile, however. (It was here, he believed, that he first learned to make himself acceptable to older women.) Normally he would proceed to the rear of the building where the little bit of light bestowed a mysterious quality on the books themselves. He preferred fat books with dark blue bindings, assumed by him to be especially profound. At first, he confined himself to fiction and had a high opinion of everything he read. It awed him that anyone could write so many words in just one lifetime. But primarily it was the people portrayed in those books, serious individuals with thoughts and emotions that he had thought were his alone. Whatever his own mind invented, it had already occurred to his favorite authors, problematic men a great deal like himself. His silence increased and his face took on a hooded expression.

  His eighth-grade class did have a smattering of girls in it, but only two were beautiful. And yet he was also polite to the others. More polite, in fact.

  Seven

  Next to be considered is the girl referenced in the title. Some people are born to be exceptional and, urged by Time, become continually more so. Thinking back on it, she was to remember the thunder and lightning and the patter on the wall of the branches that around the thatch eves ran. A conjunction of misperceptions had, however, led her to believe that her two different parents were one and the same. And: “Must I indeed be an only child,” she wondered, “or are others on the way?”

  Later she began to have experiences of music on the radio, trucks moving down the highway, the yard crowded with red chickens, and not much else.

  Years went by, three of them to be roughly precise. Began
now her twenty-two-year assignment of beauty and nose-grinding work. Already she was pretty and already smart. Nothing worried her parents more.

  Eight

  Truth was, she craved to be a bird. Often in those days she could have been seen standing out in the Sun, eight years old, her milk-colored hair already fetching comments from the townspeople. She could write on paper, do mathematics all the way to long division, silent as a caterpillar as she later described herself to me. It was yet another truth that she wanted to be done with childhood and to fulfill her earthly assignment as soon as possible. Of course, I didn’t know what to make of such talk at that time.

  Unhappily for happiness, she had two sisters and a brother, one of them technically an imbecile and the others so ordinary they could have dissolved away forever in any good-sized crowd. The eldest of the lot, our Cynosura (I call her), had overall charge of these people whenever their mother was busy in the cafeteria of the downtown tractor parts manufacturer, or when cleaning someone’s house, or minding someone’s children. All their lives, this mother and her husband were to give more to the nation than ever the nation even thought about giving back to them, the essential precondition of the American system. Already she saw, their precocious child, that it was money that commanded effort instead of the other way around. Fourteen years later it was I myself who said: “We reward people in accord with their economic value. Better we rewarded them in accord with their value.”

  And she who said: “People like that don’t need much reward.”