The Throat Read Free

on his nose, as if even his skin
was breathing hard, stoking in air like a furnace. He was panting by
the time he got to the top of the stairs. The stench of cigarettes
followed him like a wake.
    "That priest smokes too much," John Ransom said.
    We reached the top of the steps just as the door slammed shut again,
and we walked through the vestibule, hearing running footsteps on
Vestry Street and the priest's yells of Boys! Boys!
    "Maybe we should give him a minute," John Ransom said. He put his
hands in his pockets and ambled off toward the arched entrance to the
interior of the church.
    "Give him a minute?" I asked.
    "Let him catch his breath. He certainly isn't going to catch them ." John Ransom was gazing
appreciatively into the long, dim length of Holy Sepulchre. He might
have been in a museum. I saw him take in the font of holy water and the
ranks of flickering, intermittent candles, some new, some guttering
nubs. Ransom looked into the depths of our church as if he were
memorizing it: he wasn't smiling anymore, but his evident pleasure was
not in any way diminished by the reappearance of Father Vitale, who
came back in through the Vestry Street door and huffed and puffed like
a tugboat through the gray air. He did not speak to either of us. As he
moved down the aisle, Father Vitale almost instantly lost his
individuality and became a scenic element of the church itself, like a
castle on a German cliff or a donkey on a dusty Italian road. I was
seeing Father Vitale as John Ransom saw him.
    He turned around and inspected the vestibule in the same way, as if
seeing it was understanding it.
He was not the supercilious tourist for
whom I had mistaken him. He wanted to take
it in , to experience it in a
way that would probably not have occurred to any other Brooks-Lowood
boy. I thought that John Ransom would have taken that same attitude to
the bottom of the world.
    Later, John Ransom and I both went to the bottom of the world.
    When I was seven years old, my sister April was killed— murdered.
She was nine. I saw it happen. I thought I saw something happen. I
tried to help her. I tried to stop whatever it was from happening, and
then I was killed too, but not as permanently as April.
    I guess I think the bottom of the world is the center of the world;
and that sooner or later we all see it, all of us, according to our
capacities.
    The next time I saw John Ransom was in Vietnam.
3
    Ten months after I graduated from Berkeley, I was drafted—I let it
happen to me, not out of any sense that I owed my country a year of
military service. Since graduating I had been working in a bookstore on
Telegraph Avenue and writing short stories at night. These invariably
came back in the stamped, self-addressed manila envelopes I had folded
inside my own envelopes to the New
Yorker and Atlantic Monthly and Harpers —not to mention Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review,
Antaeus,
The Massachusetts Review, and Ploughshares .
At least I think it was Ploughshares. I knew that I
did not want to teach, and I had no faith
that teaching deferments would hold (they didn't). The more that my
stillborn stories came back to me, the more discouraging it became to
spend forty hours a week surrounded by other people's books. When my
2-S classification was adjusted to 1-A, I felt that I might have been
given a way out of my impasse.
    I flew to Vietnam on a commercial airline. About three-fourths of
the passengers in tourist class were greenhorns like me, and the
stewardesses had trouble looking at us directly. The only really
relaxed passengers in our section of the plane were the weatherbeaten
lifers at the back of the cabin, noncoms, who were as loose and clubby
as golfers on a weekend flight to Myrtle Beach.
    In the first-class cabin at the front of the plane sat men in dark
suits, State Department functionaries and businessmen making a good
thing for as long as they could out of cement or building supplies in
Vietnam. When they looked at us, they