4

It was dark when I awoke. I turned on all the lights in the sitting room. I would have dinner in the room, I thought.

There was an engraving on the hotel wall. Behind the TV antenna. It was an English hunting scene. I unhooked it from the picture hanger and took it down to examine it more closely.

Tom Moody, the caption said: The Whipper-In.

What was a whipper-in? Something to do with a fox-hunt. Old Tom, the Whipper-In, was dead. I read the verses:

Six crafty earth-stoppers in

hunter’s green dressed

Supported poor Tom to his last

place of rest.

I identified the six crafty earth-stoppers. They were the pall-bearers. On their shoulders was old dead Tom’s coffin.

His horse which he styled his

old soul next appeared

On whose forehead the brush

of his last fox upreared.

Brush, was it? Upreared, did it? I looked at the white horse. His old soul. I looked at the sylvan English scene. What woman wept, a child in her engraved arms, before the thatched cottage? She looked young. Old Tom’s what? Had he ever crouched at a window smoked from the burning turf and seen an obscene hand reach up and under to unhook her sylvan brassiere? Had Old Tom howled in his hunter’s green? Fled? Hidden? Sickened? Crippled? Finished?

Whip, Cap and Boots in a

trophy were bound

And here and there followed

an old straggling hound.

There was the hound. Definitely straggling.

Ah! No more of his voice yonder

vales will they trace

Nor the welkin resound with his

first burst in the chase.

Old Tom Moody. Lost his welkin. Shot his burst. Well: so had I. Goodbye, old whipper-in. If the bitches don’t get you, the welkin will. In small print, at the right-hand edge of the engraving, I read the farewell salute:

With Hei-gh over!

Now press him!

Tally-ho!

Tally-ho!

I hung the six crafty earth-stoppers back on the wall. I called room service and I ordered dinner. I turned off the lamp under which I had read the verses. I switched off all the other lights. The sitting room went back into darkness. Tally-ho! In the morning I’d go out. I could sense the city. Was I home? I closed my eyes. Lights, streets swept into me. The night outside teemed with assignations. I heard the home-bound trains. For it was, after all, my city. She had healed me in the past. Her crowds, like enormous blotters, had absorbed my life. Broken synagogue. Steaming manhole cover. Eternally revolving door. Asphalt chalked on with obscenities and children’s games and arrows mysteriously pointing nowhere. Decapitated, my floating head in the subway tunnel. Pressed, schoolbooks under my arm, lunch money in my corduroy pocket, secretive, moist with desire, in the morning rush-hour against some shopgirl’s warm impersonal breast. Thirty-five years. Yes. I’d given the city so much of my possible life. Surely, what was broken in me, the crippled sense of myself, would be restored. I’d heal among these brutal angles. I’d bathe in her like a spa. I’d convalesce in her indifferent arms. The waiter knocked on my hotel door.