There was, too, the dog escort problem. The house was somewhat isolated from transportation conveniences, and to get to the railroad station each day (where he left for his job in the city), Stern had to cross the huge, long-deserted estate old man Bagby had once skidded across in a sleigh. It was spread out over eighty acres and took Stern twenty-three minutes each way, much too long a walk to be brisk and refreshing. The train ride then would be an hour and six minutes, which meant that Stern would be traveling roughly three hours each day. When they had first considered the house, his wife had said, "Take the ride once. It may be too long. See how you like it." But Stern had answered, "I don't want to know about it. I love the house. If I take the ride, I may not like it and we'll never live in this house. I love this house and I don't want to know about any rides."
The estate was a lonely, windless, funereal place, terribly quiet, with many odd little buildings, and for the first weeks of walking its length Stern made it his business to investigate a different one of them each morning. On one such morning, he climbed the watchtower and stood on the second floor, looking out of the cracked windows onto huge, rolling lawns and at bushes that had holes in them, seemingly torn out at random by large fists. Stern wondered how the estate was when it was new, and then he walked over to the main estate building. On an impulse, he poked his elbow through a weak door panel and looked around innocently in the clear morning as though he, too, was surprised at all the commotion. Able to open the lock now, he waited till the echo had quieted and went inside the estate building, sweating hard, and then climbed the winding steps to the second floor. Doing everything in a hurry, he stood first in the elegantly constructed floor tub of the main bedroom and then went out to the circular balcony, extended his arms, and hollered, "Throw them to the lions," to imaginary throngs below. Then he decided to take something. The rooms seemed empty, except for a packet of newspapers tied with string. Stern worked a single paper loose and, tucking it under his arm, walked swiftly down the stairs. He smelled coffee burning and then ran out the door and kept running all the way to the train, running so hard he got a pain in his chest. He did not look at the dusty newspaper until he was in the coach. It was dated 1946, and its recent vintage somehow spoiled the whole estate for him; he never went into any of the buildings again. In any case, it was not the walk through the estate each morning that troubled him so much as the walk back at night.
At the farthest corner of the estate area, near the train, stood a loosely scattered group of houses in a heavily wooded thatch. They seemed at one time to be part of the estate and were still being lived in. In darkness each night, Stern had to cross this cluster of houses. There was no easily defined road in the area, and since it was not a real community, the only light was from an occasional window; Stern had to walk through using a pocket flashlight and not really sure whether he was on someone's property. On the second night of his estate-crossing, it was not quite so dark as it was to be later on, and Stern was able to see two thin, huge dogs vault a fence that encircled one of the houses and make for him with a whistling sound. They skimmed through the night and came to an abrupt halt at his feet, their gums drawn back, teeth white, both dogs reaching high above his waist. One took Stern's wrist between his teeth, and the two animals, hugging close to his side, walked with him between them, as though they were guards taking a man to prison. Stern went along with them, not crying out, not really sure he could cry out. The houses were fairly far off; it would take a loud cry to reach them, and Stern was certain only old people lived in them and wouldn't be able to make out voices in the night. He tried not to perspire, having heard you showed your fear that way, but he wasn't able to tell whether he was or not since it was chilly. They walked a quarter of a mile with him that way, hugging him tight on both sides, until the dog released his wrist, which was soaking wet; then both turned and went back, trotting swiftly through the night. The next day, Stern bought a penknife in the station, but when the dogs vaulted the fence that evening, he was taken aback by their speed and the whistling sound. He remembered hearing once as a child that you should never draw a blade unless you really meant to use it. Deciding the blade was probably too short, he succumbed meekly and allowed the lead dog to take his wrist again. There didn't seem to be anything he could do. He had heard too that you could break a dog's back with a swift judo chop on the spine, and he took his wrist out of the dog's mouth and tapped it lightly on its leathery back, but the dog made a sound and he put his wrist back. He thought of walking up to the house from which the dogs came, but he was certain the animals were trained to kill all people who passed through the fence and would get him in the throat before he reached the door. The houses were in a vague sort of grouping, not in any definite town or area, and there didn't seem to be any way to get close enough to the dog-protected house to see its address. The following day, Stern tried to guess what the address might be and called a number on the phone. An old woman's voice, hearing his, hollered, "Crumbie, crumbie," and hung up. There didn't seem to be any special police to appeal to; nor was Stern sure an ordinance was being violated. He was afraid of the police and did not want to call them anyway. He pictured the police in the section to be large, neutral-faced men with rimless glasses who would accuse him of being a newcomer making vague troublemaking charges. They would take him into a room and hit him in his large, white, soft stomach. So each night he continued to walk slowly through the estate, waiting for the dogs, almost a little relieved when they finally whistled to his side, never really sure they wouldn't decide one night to kill him in a muffled place where there would be no one to pull them off. He saw himself fighting silently in the night with the two gray dogs, lasting eight minutes and then being found a week later with open throat by small Negro children. Certain he would be killed, if not by the dogs then because his white, soft body did not seem capable of living past fifty, he called a broker one day and doubled his insurance.
There was no one to complain to. No one who could help Stern with that kind of problem. His only neighbor at the new house was an ancient man with a thin chest who was always being placed and arranged in different positions. He would be placed in the sun and then shifted to the shade when the heat got too intense for him. Then he would be moved inside and placed before the television set, great care being taken not to jostle him. In the wintertime he would be shifted to a train going to Virginia, where he owned a small farm. Stern later heard that once he touched down in the South, he would leap spryly out of his wheelchair and rarely be seen in daylight without two plump-chested young girls at his side.
One bright day, the man sat vegetablelike in a folding chair, having recently been placed there by his wife. Stern, in a shining burst of weekend hope, had run out of doors with a two-pronged shovel and was loosening the earth around one of his half shrubs, hoping that the sun's warmth would get through to it and make the cancerous side blossom and start to flourish. Across a low fence, he saw his thin-chested neighbor and told him about the dogs. "They wait for me each night," he explained. With frail wrists, the man drew from his wallet a commissioner's badge and said, "I was very powerful when I had my health. I was able to get stop signs put up. Forget the dogs. I'll take care of them. Do you want to get me around a little to the east...." Stern shifted his neighbor around, hardly able to suppress his joy; he was thrilled to have commissioner-type power on his side and wanted to hug his neighbor's thin chest with delight. Actually he was a little afraid of him now, convinced that as a onetime commissioner he had weapons nearby and probably knew judo holds, ones you could deliver despite a thinness at the wrists. Stern looked forward to swift action, but the dogs continued to slip through the night to Stern's side until he decided the man had done nothing after all. To get any action out of him, Stern imagined his neighbor would have to be carried to the police station and placed before the chief.
The man's wife was of little help. A short woman who wore loose-flowing Alpine dirndls, she had a garbage problem and was always carrying a bagful out to a wire basket in front of her house to burn it. "I don't know where it all comes from," she would say to Stern as she made her endless pilgrimage to the basket. Often, on her way back for another load, she would see Stern across the fence, working silently to bring life back into his halves, and say, "I can remember when your house was really beautiful." Once she invited Stern and his wife into her own home. She took them into the kitchen and said, with arm extended, "This is my kitchen." Then she took them into the living room and said, "This is my living room," and so on through the house. She pointed to her husband, who had been placed in front of a fishbowl, and said, "This is my husband." Then she bid them goodbye, saying, "There was a time when your house was so lovely." She never asked them in again.
Since the summer had been cruel to him, Stern looked forward to cold weather, when he would at least not have to bother with neighbors and to face the half shrubs each day. In the winter your shrubs were not supposed to be beautiful, and Stern watched with delight as the grass faded and the leaves dropped and his half shrubs fell in with the bleakness as though their black cancer shapes were the fault of the cold and not a caterpillar miscalculation. The snow came on fast that first winter. One night it built up to eight-inch drifts and was still dropping heavily when Stern, in low-cut Italian rubbers, left the train. The dogs did not clear the fence, hanging back instead to make cold choking sounds at him in the night—as though aware that the snow would make them clumsy, unable to terrorize Stern. He was halfway across the estate when the snow piled up knee-deep and stung its way into his eyes. He bent his great back, lowered his head, and shuffled into the wind; when he had walked far enough to get to his house and still could see no lights, he knew that he had lost his way. A great pain pounded through his nose, and he could not feel his face or catch his breath. With no knowledge of the stars, he saw himself making an endless circle in the snow and then falling silently asleep in a drift, to die of frostbite yards from his new home. The wind and snow flew at him with bitterness and his face seemed to belong to a stranger. He was unable to go further and stopped, defeated by the wind, not after a forty-day trek from Point Barrow, but twenty minutes from his commuter train. Feeling ridiculous, he sat down in the snow, but then he quickly became frightened and shouted "Get me!" into the night. He napped that way for a moment, and when he awakened things were not too much better. He urinated in the snow, feeling giddy and dangerous in this white place more private than a thousand bathrooms. When the wind hit him in his open fly, he imagined himself freezing up swiftly, breaking off with a quick snap like winter wood, and he withdrew quickly with drops remaining. Then, pulling his collar together and making a serious face, he bent to the snow again, as though, by being very businesslike about it and pretending he knew exactly where he was going, the fates would somehow carry him to his door. Later, he came out of the estate, not opposite his house, but in a new part of town. He had to walk three steep hills to his house, but then, turning a corner, with everything wet upon him, he saw it suddenly, as though through a curtain drawn open quickly. It was bathed in frosty light and all its diseased half trees and shrubs were cloaked with mounds of jeweled snow. It was an enchanted candy house, the loveliest in all the world, and Stern, standing wide-hipped and breathless as though beneath a spell, enjoyed what was to be his finest moment of the winter.
Stern thought that in the cold weather he would turn his thoughts inside to family and home, creating a handsome interior that would make up for the cancer garden. He would then lead visitors swiftly through the mottled shrubs, entertain them in interior splendor, and rush them out under cover of darkness. The paint-store owner delivered gallons of paint one Saturday morning, and then, when Stern raised his brush to deliver the first dab, the owner hollered, "Don't paint." Stern lowered the brush and the man continued to shout: "Never paint. Lay your brushes aside and, for Christ's sake, don't paint. You paint and you're a fool. Uh-uh. No painting, don't paint, never paint." And then he lowered his voice to a whisper and added, "Until you're ready to paint." He then imposed a long list of conditions which would have to be met before it would be all right for Stern to paint. "Scrape your walls, scrape your floors, paper your halls, drape your dainty pieces, test your tones, check your temp, dress properly. But, for Christ's sake, don't paint. That is, until you're ready to paint."
Stern and his wife set all the paint in the corner of the room and waited until the ideal day came along, but it never did, and they gradually lost interest in painting. It was decided they would get rolling by laying tile, and Stern's father sent Crib, an ageless Negro with great strength in his wrists, to help them lay it, his services a moving-in gift. Stern's father, a small, round-shouldered man who always wore slipovers, had worked most of his life in a shoulder pad concern for his brother, Uncle Henny, expecting to be made a partner or to take over when Henny, a coronary patient, passed on. When Henny did expire, however, the business went instead to a distant nephew who had always worked in civil service positions, and Stern's father had to continue in a subordinate position, his life more or less gone up in smoke. Crib, a sweeper and handyman, had supported Stern's father for head of the business, almost as though it had been an election, and now, years later, remained a faithful supporter of his.