Lakeside, Second Visit

He has worn the wrong shoes again. Last year it was loafers, which sank into the duff around the cabins and came out gray. This year he has chosen the brown boots from the L.L. Bean catalog, and they are stiff at the heel, and by the time he reaches the lakeside path he can feel the beginning of a blister on his left Achilles. He keeps walking. The man beside him — a Houston attorney whose name he has now forgotten twice — is talking about a daughter at Dartmouth.

The path is lit by torches at thirty-foot intervals. He counts them, because he counts things when he is uncomfortable, and there are forty-one between the dining circle and the lake. Last year there had been forty-one as well. He is not sure why he remembers this.

At the lake the crowd is already three deep along the near shore. He finds a place at the back where he can see between two shoulders. The water is black and very still. On the far shore, where the trees come down to the edge, the chapel is lit from below in red. He can hear the choir tuning, the low cellos finding each other in the dark.

His host from the previous evening — a man from one of the older San Francisco firms, gracious, watchful — finds him in the crowd and puts a hand on his elbow. Glad you came back, the host says. The second one is the one that takes. He does not know what this means. He nods and says something about the weather, which has been mild. The host smiles and moves on.

The procession begins at the chapel side. He cannot see the figures clearly from this distance — they are robed, hooded, their torches small and orange against the trees — but he can hear the chant beginning, the long vowel of it carrying flat across the water. The effigy is brought down to the lake on a low cart. It is the size of a child, or of a very small adult folded at the joints. It is wrapped in something pale.

The boat is poled out from the chapel shore. The chant rises. He can feel it now in his sternum, a sub-audible pressure that is probably just the cellos but does not quite feel like the cellos. He shifts his weight to his right foot, off the blister. The Houston attorney has gone quiet beside him.

The boat reaches the middle of the lake. The robed figure at the prow lifts the effigy, and there is the moment when it is held against the red light of the chapel and the black of the water, and the chant stops, and there is a silence that is the silence of seven hundred men not breathing, and the effigy is lowered into the pyre on the raft, and the raft is lit.

It goes up faster than he expected. The flame is white at the base and orange above, and the reflection on the water doubles it, and for a moment the whole far half of the lake is on fire.

He feels it then.

It is not a thought. It is closer to the sensation of a joint going back into its socket after years of being slightly wrong — a small structural correction, somewhere behind the breastbone, that he had not known was available. He has the brief, absurd impression that he has been holding his breath since he was a child and has just now exhaled. The light on the water is very bright. He can hear, with a clarity that the acoustics of the lake do not justify, the individual voices of the choir, and underneath them another sound, much lower, that he understands without deciding to understand is not coming from the chapel.

It lasts perhaps six seconds. Then it closes. The joint, whatever it was, slides back to wherever it had been, and he is again a man in stiff boots with a blister, watching a fire on a lake in California, slightly embarrassed by the theatricality of the whole thing.

The Houston attorney exhales beside him and says, Christ, that’s something, isn’t it. He agrees that it is something. His mouth is dry. He realizes he is gripping the back of the folding chair in front of him, and he lets go, and he flexes his hand.

Walking back along the torchlit path he resolves, with the clean firmness of a man making a decision that costs him nothing, that he will not accept the invitation next year. He will write a polite note. He will plead the board calendar. He has nothing against these men, but it is not, in the end, for him.

The blister has opened. He can feel the sock sticking. He counts the torches on the way back. Forty-one.