Life after Boro Park, Part 2

Sharing an old Cadillac

One of my roommates in Alfred owned a huge late 1930s Cadillac.  When I say huge I mean quite large and heavy, sort of like a military tank.  It had descended to him through some family connections and he thought it a good idea to bring to university.  This despite the fact that he really didn’t know how to drive and could not afford to pay for the gas to run it.    Nevertheless, it was an automobile that, in isolated, often snowbound western New York State was something not to be sneezed at, especially for someone in his early twenties and a college boy to boot.  Today someone might describe it as a girl magnet.

So my roommate and I made a deal.  I would keep the Cadillac filled with enough to petrol to facilitate our needs and in return I could drive it on certain days when he, let us call him George, did not require a vehicle.  Now to be most particular, the bargain also included that we both would drive to the big grocery store in nearby Hornell once a fortnight or so when we would stock up on food and other domestic items not available in the Alfred, which was then still classified as a fourth-class village.  Otherwise, as you can probably guess from other sections of my memoirs, that our needs, requirements and casual social activities were fairly minimal.  In brief, at best once a month, George and I would arrange to go with our friends, and even more rarely female persons, to the movie house in Wellsville on what we hesitated to call a date.  As the only one of us who could drive, I acted as chauffeur.  Having no other need for the car, it was theoretically mine all other days, meaning everyday, except that, because of the lack of funds to provide enough funds to fill up the tank for more than one or two excusrsions for shopping and going to the cinema, I had no reason to drive the Cadillac.  Or, to put it still another way, it remained unused for approximately 96% of the time. 

If anyone, such as the village’s one policeman ever asked who owned that big black monster parked outside on the street where we rented the small top floor of a house, the answer would be George. However, if this officer of the law should then request that the vehicle be moved in order for some sweeping of leaves to be effected or for the sake of pleasing an actual resident of the town who found it blocking his own driveway, it was my duty to drive the car to some other part of town for several hours, and George would have to explain, if he were alone when the doorbell rang, that he had loaned me the keys and it would be necessary to wait until I returned from some class or other.  As everything ground very slowly back in those days and in that neck of the woods, provided the car were actually shifted sometime in the next three or four days, all was well.  Aside from an occasion when, for reasons that need no explicit explanation, George found himself in need of a place to meet in private with a girl from a course he was taking, and invited her to discuss important intellectual matters while sitting together in the Cadillac for several hours one evening, our arrangements worked well.

Now I want to tell you about what happened one late autumn evening when I drove a whole gangful of our friends, mostly male but two females as well, to see a film.  The night was cold and dark.  You could feel that snow was going to fall, but first would come a kind of thin, pointed frozen rain.  After the film, we all piled into George’s old Cadillac for the ride back to Alfred.  With so many people in the car, it was pleasantly warm, though everyone could still feel the needles of ice that had punctuated our walk from the movie house to the street before we shut the doors tightly behind us.  The engine started up without a problem and the lights were working and the windscreen wipers clacked back and forth properly as we began the journey. 

But as soon as we left the little town and entered on the highway through the countryside, it seemd the darkness was thicker and heavier than we could recall from similar rides.  More than that, it seemed that the headlights were dimming slowly and could not pierce the icy air in front of us.  I drove slowly and carefully, glad that there were no other vehicles on the road, though I would have liked it if someone with good bright lights was ahead of us to guide the way.  Everyone was quiet in the car.  Boys and girls huddled up to one another, happy to be so close, and all I could hear was slow heavy breathing in the back and next to me. 

That is, until I started to hear a rumbling under the car and could feel a series of irregular bumps.  I drove even more slowly and tried as hard as I could to look out in front to see if there were something on the road.  The headlamps were now virtually out, a mere pale pair of yellow cones that barely extended a foot or two before me.  I could also hear the stinging pricks of icy rain falling against the windscreen.  The wipers flapped back and forth to no avail.  I slowed down to a halt.  Waited.  Listened.  Peered out with all my might.  Then, I turned off the engine. I listened to the sound of the rain.  Everything was pitch dark around us.  No one stirred in the car, as they snuggled up sleepily to each other.  Someone seemed to whisper « Whasa’ matter ? » Then total silence again.

I opened the door carefully, twisted around, took out a flashlight from the glove compartment, and got out of the vehicle.  As quietly as I could, I shut the door : clump !  « Who’s’at ? » and then again silence.  The rain fell in almost invisible strings of ice.  The ground seemed hard but strangely uneven.  I turned on the torch and looked down.  There was no road.  This was dirt, hard, thick dirt.  I walked a few steps, stretched out my hand with the light, and tried to see something.  The thick, hard dirt went on and on.  This was no road.  This was a field.  A few naked stalks of last autumn’s corn dotted the ground. 

The car door opened.  Someone stepped out. The door slammed. 

 « Whas’ going’ on here ? » a sleepy voice said.

It was George.

The darkness is so deep I would not have recognized him as other than a strange silhouette carved into the air except his voice, his intonations, are unmistakable.  He is, I know, a brilliant young man, well-read, and aware of many things about culture ; but also he is more shy than anyone I have ever known,  In a sense, he has come to depend on me for many things, but at the same time, he is aloof, vague and mysterious. 

« We left the road somehow and now we’re in the middle of somebody’s field. »

« Just imagine, » he said.

I stamped my foot on the hard ground.  Little cracks of ice appeared.

When I do such a thing, to stamp my foot, it is, I think, to test if the world is really there still, and I often find myself wondering if the universe would continue to exist if I closed my eyes and kept them shut for a long time.  I fear that somehow everything will disappear and open my eyes quickly, stamp my foot on the floor of a room, in the middle of the street, or, as here, in the middle of a field where for some strange reason the car has planted itself.

« What should we do now? » asked George.

His voice is plaintive.  But I am never sure, when he says such things—and he does often, always unexpectedly—on which word he places the emphasis, or perhaps he has no emphasis to make at all.  When he says « we » in such a statement, I don’t think he means we two, the roommates that have found each other after two years at college ; nor does he mean the whole pack of boys and girls still in the car, those whom I know come together often, partly out of our shared need to remind ourselves we are New Yorkers and Jews and not at all like most of the students at Alfred who are so very different and never let us forget that, even if they have long since saying so out loud.   There is another « we » somewhere else in his mind.  It is a hidden identity.

« Where is the road ? »

My question, of course, is plain and simple.  No one needs to decipher the words.  The fact that we are lost is evident.

The icy rain has stopped.

« It’s really cold.  I am going back in. »

When he says this, George seems like a normal person because it is cold and the best thing to do to keep warm is to go back inside the car, to be close to the others ; and yet, I don’t think that’s what he means at all. He feels a different kind of cold.  The place he wants to go back inside does not mean the car, or at least not in any simple sense. 

« We need to find the road. »

« In the morning, » he said. 

The door opened and shut.

« I’m going to find the road. »

Everything was silent again.  Now that I know that we are on solid ground and that we are in  some farmer’s field, I am pretty confident the road is not too far away.  I point the torch on the ground, so that I walk in a circle of dim light and proceed slowly in one direction.  It doesn’t matter.  Eventually there has to be a fence, and beyond that a road, if not the highway then some other that will lead us to where we can drive back to the university. 

Then off in the distance I see a light.  It seems to appear and disappear and yet get brighter for a while, and then it goes out altogether.  It was a car and the road goes up and down and when the light disappears the car has turned away.  But, yes, I realize, there is a road out there. 

So I walk back the way I came from only a little fearful that the Cadillac with my friends will have disappeared into the blackness, that I may have miscalculated my turn, that the the world is not as solid and real as I hoped.  But in a few moments, I come upon it, a large black mass, and I shine my torch on it to find the door, open it slowly, and want to announce my discovery : we are safe, the road is nearby, so we can go home.  They are all asleep, even George.

When I turn the ignition, the engine splutters a little, but we are safe.  I switch on the headlamps and they are there, albeit a bit dim, so I release the brakes, put the car into gear and turn the wheel hard.  I gingerly go around so it faces the way we came from and then proceed cautiously forward.  The ground rumbles underneath, now in a comforting way.  No one stirs, not even to say « Whasa’ matter ? » or « Whas ‘ g’on. » 

I see the clouds parting, or rather, I see the cliuds, because before the sky was all dark and continuous with everything else.  Now that I can see greyish lumps against the black I know we are going to be home soon. There is a fence and it has an opening which I drive through.

In half an hour, we come to the little village of Alfred, with its street lamps and its paved streets.  Everyone wakes up.  I leave them off in front of the post office, so that everyone can find their way back to dormitories or the houses they rent.  Then George and I drive down to our place just around the corner.

As we separate for the night, I ask George.  « Well, did you like the movie ? »

« Someday, » he says, «  you must tell me what it was all about. »

« Good night, » I say.