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ASHEVILLE: Chapter 1
The abrupt escalation of the mountains created in him a curious illusion of an uphill flight. Then from the limpid skies over the plateau the view was otherworldly as each time. Framed by sun-infused Mount Pisgah and the darkening shadow of Mount Mitchell, the town stretched among the hills along the twisting lines of the rivers over which migratory birds once oriented themselves. It was bigger than it was supposed to be.
Circling over the airport, circling, vibrating, circling, descending, his trepidation mounted. Perhaps, as all the times before, it was again a useless mission, after all another mistaken expectation.
Circling lower and lower, circling the surrounding hills and rivers and forests, nearly there, the ground rising toward him, he realized that it was the absolute necessity of making sense of the decades of his exile that had brought him back.
* * *
Parked on the lonely tarmac, he already felt adrift, again off course. It was because of the tangle of ungraspable memories, jumping backwards and forwards as memories do. And it was time, too. Since his last visit the town’s distance from him had widened, his detachment, deepened.
Once more, return was ambiguous, an equivocal undertaking based on elusive, ambivalent hopes. Return was expectation and elation, the quest for a new awakening to forgotten and abstract emotions. Return was disregard for the warnings of his detached self that this was not his place anymore.
Return should offer reward and fulfillment, surcease and relief. But this time his pilgrimage seemed distant from former considerations of hope and promises of intimacy. How easily his elation nose-dived into pessimism.
From afar the image of the town had regularly appeared in his mind as it was when he left it, taking its first steps out of seclusion, caught up by pains of progress and growing affluence, some people advancing into modernity, others clinging to their distinctness.
This time he had again come to observe, to collect evidence—to collect and to test. But he had also come to decide.
* * *
He crept along the Interstate, apprehensive about wrong exits to forgotten places, disoriented by the sound of the romantic place names inscribed on directional signs and by the legions of pounding SUVs with their secretive darkened windows.
Suddenly, as if he had dropped out of the drunken fog of the plains of Lombardy, miraculously plopped down at the cathedral in Milan, he was there. He had arrived. It was Pritchard Park, in his mind still the center.
He stopped and waited. Nothing occurred. Nothing at all. No revelatory sensations. No feelings of home, no comfort, no relief. It was a ghost town of vacant sidewalks, darkened windows and uselessly changing stoplights. Surroundings were frozen, the absence of people oppressive, the sensation of solitude eerie.
Lean over the steering wheel, face against the cold windshield, reach out, reach for it, as each time straining to meet himself walking along the alien streets once so intimate.
In answer only the still shadows pressed toward him, slinking down Patton Avenue. And the whispers, the hoarse whispers, that return, once more, was only cerebral invention, childhood fancy, a chimera of memory.
* * *
The mountainside above Manor Inn was eerie but strangely urban. Expecting the former stink, sweetish and sticky and mystifying, he sniffed the air. In boyhood the mere suggestion of the exotic odor had been frightening—the old TB sanitariums had long since disappeared but the ghost of the stench had still swirled and eddied among the trees.
Now, only the chilliness of the fall morning.
* * *
Smells have always had a powerful effect on his memory. Smells surge back, pungent, invasive—coffee roasting near the Pantheon in Rome and sausage grilling on Munich streets merge with the aromatic smells of wild strawberries in chigger-infested fields around this town and its smells of wet grass, clover and Southern cooking. The tourbillion of smells coalesced into the aphrodisiac he’d come for—the magical, magnetic, obsessive, sexual scent of Southern women.
Words can’t describe smells. Smells are completely unscientific. The words describing smells are on the tip of your tongue but you can’t articulate them. Tenacious autumn smells, foggy smells, summer smells … symbols of specific places and distinct times, fugitive reminders of indistinct places and blurred times, they lodge in your brain, part of remembrance.
Jeanette’s smell lingered on his fingers and on his body, the elusive smell of her female incense. All his life her particular smell has been with him. But how could he describe it? It was like, it was like … what? He couldn’t even think it. Smells are an essence, of something that once was. Complex concatenations of memories emerge from them, as from the sweetness of his father’s sleek black hair. His father at the kitchen table, his head bowed, his eyes closed, while the young Govar stands behind him and combs it slowly, methodically, mesmerized by the smell.
He lifted his nose and sniffed again.
The death stench on the lower sides of the mountain was once an essence, too, drifting down from the misty heights and settling into the city at its feet. A century after the disappearance of the sanitariums, a hint of the smells of a secret sickness hung permanently in the frosty air. His parents had been horrified that he delivered newspapers in the clinics. He did it mostly for the clamor, for he too had dreaded the collection passages. His customers occupied that other dimension, the frightening, risky dominion of Death. During the tepid summers, he imagined, the secret gas slithered among the rows of beds on the porches and during sunless winters it insinuated itself into the sick bodies and incredulous minds. The sweet stink was lethal. An empty bed left in his adolescent mind the still unquestioned mystery: the secret of death.
He circled the gatehouse where he and Clyde had shared the apartment. The windows were shaded, real estate signs on the doors, Old Glory on the front. Houses up the mountain were set back in the woods of pines and elms, oaks and maples. The impressionist mountains encroaching on the town were still as thickly populated with tangled masses of trees as when he was a boy.
The ubiquitous smell of resin recalled their Indian games—muffled steps on pine needle carpets, wild shouts through the woods, the shadows of oreads and satyrs and stalking pumas, soft zephyrs wafting across the highlands, the chilling thrill of slate escarpments dropping into an unknown world of nothingness.
Creeks—poisoned they had pretended—and waterfalls and cliffs and belvederes. In a concealed cavern or beneath a giant oak a treasure waited to be discovered. A wooden cross was a church symbol … or Ku Klux Klan.
Like an echo, the awe he had felt of the secret depths—black damp pits, the source of the mystery of the mountains concealed beneath the beguiling veil of trees and flowers and grass. Trees he had touched, the standing people of his Cherokee friend who taught him that a tree runs through the center of the world, linking heaven, earth and the underworld.
The fascination, the terror and the shame he felt the time he threw a rock at a squirrel—from a distance, symbolically, the instinct of the hunter, with no idea of hitting it. He could have thrown at it all day and never hit it. It fell over. A chance shot. When the boys gathered around its gray body, lonely and abandoned by the other squirrels, blood all over its head, he wondered if he really did it. Some kid said, ‘it’s in heaven now’—and they ran away from its death.
* * *
The contentment of the mountainside seemed sheltered from the uncertain world of war and social struggle outside. Southern distinctness still existed. Southern pride. Even the best people in the South were proud and also gullible—dreaming their dream of the Southern road to economic progress.
‘The South will rise again!’ they used to say.
But their ‘without Northern mistakes’ slogan proved to be disastrous fiction. For politicians kept easing air pollution controls and industries kept pouring out their invisible poisons into the forest, putting an end to the ecological Indian summer.
* * *
On the Square he stopped and gaped at the row of cafés and restaurants. ‘Looks like Amsterdam! The piazza at the Pantheon in Rome. Leopoldstrasse in the summer.’ Words and smells and places invoke other words and smells and places.
Waiters dressed in black were setting tables outside. The Square’s north-south and east-west axes once meant Public Library and Plaza Theater—Negroes in the balcony, Whites in the orchestra, ‘separate but unequal.’ The Ice Cream Parlor where white boys ate chocolate nut sundaes. The speakeasy where Clyde and he drank brownbagged whiskey. In the center, the obelisk named for town father, Zebulon Vance. In his mind he saw the two drinking fountains that once stood so proudly just next to Vance, with their big vertical letters, one marked COLORED, the other, WHITE.
In the valley his heartbeat quickened. The stadium was cradled among the hills. A bizarre scene from his sports days came to mind—he runs onto the field for the warm-up. When he sees her empty seat his heart stops. She’s cheating on him while he’s a prisoner in the stadium. Back to the locker room, take Clyde’s car keys, and dressed out in shoulder pads and helmet, drive up Valley Street to find a phone. In the grocery store no one even looks at him yelling: ‘Where the fuck are you?’ ‘It’s football or me,’ she says. But what did he know? His lips formed her name: ‘Jeanette.’
‘I will never leave you,’ he had promised. And he did. ‘I will always be near you,’ she had vowed. And she was not.
‘Wait for me,’ she once wrote. And he did not.
‘I will come back,’ she wrote. And she did not.
‘I will not look back,’ he vowed. But he did.
His head spins, thoughts dodging and swirling away when he tries to disentangle what has happened. He never understands what is happening while things happen. The landmarks of memory leave him dazed. Memory reels. Landmarks strangely provoke more nostalgia than do people. But then, how much of his existence is not his at all! The unknowing is the problem.
His nightmare was awakening from a dream and not knowing where or who he was. If he thought he was doing one thing, he was really doing something else, thinking something else ... and conscious of the nameless and formless thing hovering outside of him. He wondered if everyone feels that thing that explains all. At sudden rare times it seemed within reach.
St. Joseph’s Hospital spread across the hills toward Kenilworth Lake. As a boy he was in and out of there. They’d rushed him to the emergency room with pneumonia after he went barefoot in snow and ice in search of enlightenment. Another time, an acute appendectomy and his father had him circumcised, too. ‘He’s asleep anyway. Two for one!’
Lamed for weeks.
Jeanette had floated in smelling of woman. His scream of pain. No matter! You can be dying, and the smell of woman revives you. It jolts you, the male. It regenerates you. Lying in the white bed he heard the sound of the cornet of Babylon! The flute. The harp. He was ready to worship the golden image. He would have leapt into the fiery furnace with his mother’s Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Erectile pain was nothing in comparison with fragile nape, narrow ankles, receptive thighs and the mesmerizing, magnetizing, evocative female scent of her sacred incense. She touched him. He, her. He would have done it then and there.
But was it true, was any of what he was recalling today true?
Time and detachment so clouded his memories of Jeanette and Clyde that at times the things he seemed to remember might or might not have happened. He stopped. He concentrated. But memory eluded him. Or as always he distorted previous distortions of distortions. Who knows what really happened?
In memory it is easy to be both hero and fool. A good thing, the past, if you can mold it to suit you … a consolation for the present. But it’s a treacherous affair. You shape it in such a way that excuses how you have become, and then wham!—it blows up in your face, shouting, ‘This is the way I really am.’
‘I’ll never go back!’ he had vowed. ‘I will never go back!’ But how easily it came back, the past, like oil to the surface. Yet, maybe, it was also a fiction. A sheen of unreality seemed to hang over everything. Around every corner, a new mystery; every street, terra incognita. Secrets were buried everywhere. New phenomena juxtaposed on indelible old places resurfaced from distorted memory. The town existed as a distant memory—a past, probably untrue, probably unreal. A dream. Yet, only a hairsbreadth away.
Driving south toward Biltmore he imagined what happened in these mountains ten thousand years ago, after the ice melted and the water retracted and the French Broad River was a residue.
The mountains and the forests and the vegetation and the animals were waiting.
What were the animals waiting for? Did they not sense what was to come? Did they not suspect that evolving man was their archenemy?
Indians on their trek from the west and explorers from the east wandered into paradise. The Tsalagi called the river Tahkeeostee or ‘racing waters.’ The Swannanoa was the Suwali Nunna, ‘the trail of the Suwali people,’ with their sun gods and earth gods and fire gods and rain gods and totems.
The adventurers and explorers, the Scotch-Irish and English and German and French Huguenot, found Paradise intact—they built wooden houses in the valleys and lit flambeaus, made liquor, danced on the hillsides to Celtic-Teutonic music, engaged in tribal debaucheries and settled into a vaguely syntactical dialectal speech.
It must have been a stunning view, the over flight of the crazed pigeons of paradise. Hordes of gray doves migrating along the green valleys. Myriads of birds in mystical formations over the Tahkeostee and Suwali Nunna. Fluttering flocks miles wide, multiple layers deep, millions of inseparable shadows darkening the skies and blotting out the heavens, the vibrations mellifluous and sacred to the earthbound listener, the pigeons ate anything, withstood anything, never died, cooing and lolling on warm summer breezes. They had seemed eternal but they departed, leaving behind only melancholy reflections on racing waters and the echoes of their wings.
Paradise lay in stillness. It hung onto the origins of time—the sun and the earth, the fire and the rain, the rituals of nature and the permanence of place. Creation seemed established and everlasting as time passed unnoticed even by the distracted eyes of God.
The Charleston planters arrived, fleeing from the delta heat. From the northeast Vanderbilt and Ford came to erect their Victorian and Greek Revival houses and Art Deco buildings. A hotel town was born. The Firestones and the Roosevelts frequented Grove Park Inn where Dorothy Dix wrote her columns to the lovelorn. Famous people stayed at the legendary Battery Park Hotel—Dutch Princess Juliana from her Canadian exile, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, Sergey Rachmaninoff and Fritz Kreisler and Jan Pierce and Richard Tucker and Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald who sang in the Opera House. Scott Fitzgerald came to be near Zelda in the Highland Hospital. Thomas Wolfe came to take a Saturday night bath. The Swannanoa-Berkeley Hotel, the Langren, the George Vanderbilt and Grove Park Inn all had their big bands.
—Gaither Stewart
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