Читать книгу Jack’s Passion - Bill Kinsella - Страница 10

As a sophomore, Jack had been asked to escort entering freshmen around campus on their orientation day. He knew instinctively how to put the incoming freshmen at ease and liked being chosen for that. He could place himself in their shoes and anticipate what might interest or intimidate them. As a guide that day, in a friendly and effective way, he began their adjustment and made some friends doing it. It was always about making friends with Jack. One of the friends he made was Veronica.

Jack led his group of twenty-five freshmen to a hillside garden that displayed magnificent clusters of yellow roses. The roses spread around the garden in various beds of different sizes and shapes that interestingly complimented one another while accentuating the whole. Walking through the garden, it was impossible not to be pleased. The sheer number of roses presented such a powerful display of beauty that the freshmen were awed. It was a tangible treat-they smelled the sweetness of the roses and were dazzled by the odd and brilliant arrangements of them.

As a way of setting a tone for taking in all that was new to them, the garden walk worked marvelously. The new students forgot themselves amid the beauty Jack brought them to.

“These roses are unique and wonderful,” he’d pointed out. “They bloom the entire year. I come here when I’m fed up or overwhelmed. It’s far enough away from the rest of the campus so that I feel like I’m outside of myself and can get perspective and solace just knowing that, despite all that seems so monumental and insurmountable, these flowers still bloom.”

In the back of the group that day, anxiously listening, Veronica Cashmiris stood out. She was tall, slender, dark and lovely and Jack couldn’t help but notice her. She’d stood back, shyly, but clearly listening to Jack’s every word. He knew she was listening and had adjusted his talk to see if he could get her to smile. Eventually she did and he smiled back at her only to watch her look away in a nervous retreat from further eye contact, a slender finger on her demure hand twisting a strand of hair around and around. He continued talking calmly about school, his message resonating reassurance, his clear blue eyes fixed all the while on Veronica and at last her deep brown eyes warmly returned his gaze.

Veronica didn’t see Jack after that for several weeks. School took over. She was the first of her family to attend college and felt compelled to start out right. Caught up in the hectic pace of her first month, she’d been carried along by freshmen’s continuing obligations. Everything was unfamiliar and both exciting and intimidating. Things happened constantly that felt foreign and compelling. Veronica hoped for calm so that the fuzzy picture of her new world might come more clearly into view. For her, it was that groping time . . . that dumb beginning that takes you and, like an anesthetic, allows things to happen around you that you are only vaguely aware of. Then all of a sudden a month and a half had passed and midterms arrived, knocking loudly on her freshmen door with frightening prospect.

She stirred like a blender, she rushed toward midterms like a person running blindfolded down a city street. Churned up, hell-bent, fearful and determined, she felt a world away from being at ease. These were her first tests at Duke and she needed desperately to do well. It was not that she hadn’t studied or didn’t understand her courses. It was that she felt a burden as the first of her family to go to college. Also, she was worried that the grant she had been given by Duke might be reduced or eliminated if she didn’t prove herself worthy. Frazzled, she longed for a time out.

She remembered Jack. What was he doing? How did he handle it? And she recalled his talk at the garden.

He had mentioned swimming on the college team. She got up, dressed and headed to the Underwood Aquatic Center hoping to see him. It was as if Jack, because of his talk of solace, had become the solace he’d described. He wasn’t at the pool. She considered where he might be, those gardens.

She walked back past a row of sturdy Magnolias that with their waxy green leaves and bursting saffron flowers seemed a line of boutonnièred Generals, too sweet smelling to stand with such decorum in so grave a place. She walked beyond them and beyond all the august halls they seemed to guard. She walked down a small flight of stairs to a parking lot, crossed the lot and proceeded across a wide sun-filled meadow. The fall sun warmed her face. Then a slight breeze blew toward her and refreshed her. She felt the wind gently push back her hair that shone chestnut-colored in the sunlight. She walked on steadily and halfway across the field saw on the terraced ground above the field dots of color that were the flowers of the garden Jack had shown her group on orientation day. She gazed behind her. All the gray-stone lecture halls and buildings of the academic departments were bathed in a soft, golden light. From where she stood, they seemed less and less intimidating as they sat quietly back, like unused books on a library shelf.

She came to a rise in the field at the far end where it swept upward to meet the garden. Now the tiny dots of color she had seen at a distance enlarged before her into yellow roses, extending toward her like welcoming bouquets. She gazed around the garden into the maze of beds. What at first seemed a confusion of colors had settled into an articulate pattern of beauty—balanced, accented, and amazing. Here, the gardener’s design had met God’s so that grace and beauty bloomed together in a brilliant spectacle. It seemed a symphony of color that she could all but hear. She turned and paused.

At the intersection of two lines of roses, recumbent on a patch of earth just large enough to hold him Jack rested, his arms stretched at right angles from his sides. He looked as if he might be sleeping until he sat up. He wore headphones and in one hand held a book. Veronica thought to move away, afraid she might be intruding. But he saw her.

“Hello,” he yelled, forgetting the headphones.

Veronica laughed. Jack understood why and removed the headphones. Then in normal volume he said hello again. A long silence followed within which Veronica’s mood turned like a weather vane blowing in the wind. At one moment she felt comforted by Jack’s presence and in the very next disturbed by it. What’d been really only a momentary silence seemed an eternity until Jack focused on her and spoke.

“Midterms,” he said.

His one word summed up everything. Veronica realized he knew exactly how she felt. She’d been understood.

“Do you get used to all the work?” she asked, rushing her words.

“I come here quite a bit,” he said.

There was an easy going attitude about Jack and it worked like a charm. In his presence she felt less frazzled, more optimistic. It was pleasing and peaceful to be with him in the same way it was pleasing and peaceful to be in the garden. Jack made a gesture toward a bench in the garden and they went and sat down together.

They sat without speaking and with little need to. But rather than causing additional apprehension the way silence between two people new to each other sometimes can, the quiet moment contributed to their affinity.

Next to each other the two made a remarkable looking couple. Veronica, half Lebanese and half Italian, was as dark in complexion as Jack was fair. She had long dark brown hair that shined chestnut colored in the sunlight. Untied, it fell down over her shoulders in a luxurious wave. Her eyes were almond shaped and deep brown, lending an exotic and alluring look. If those two people had been flowers, they would be a yellow rose and light brown orchid. But they were a young man and woman, beautiful as they were. Glowing in their beginning, radiant in their freshness and magical in their natural state-no more was needed for them to be all there was and ever could be.

“You know what amazes me,” Jack said after a while, scanning the garden. “We can get these flowers to grow all year, but we never take the time to smell them.”

“Sometimes it does seem to me that everything is a mad rush,” Veronica said, gazing around the garden too.

“We have to slow it down. Each person has to regulate their own clock to keep a more even pace,” Jack added.

“How’s that even possible today the way we live? I mean everything we do is done at warp speed. To do otherwise is to be left behind,” Veronica countered, still talking quickly as if to reinforce her point.

“I think it’s as Gandhi said,” Jack went on. “We have to be the change we want to see in the world. There’s no other way. And as I see the world today, no other choice.”

“You’re an idealist,” Veronica said, turning to Jack with a skeptical smile.

“God,” said Jack. “I hope so; I don’t want to be anything less.”

“Okay, but what do you do now? How do you slow it down and reduce the constant tension? I mean we all take midterms, even dreamers, right?” There was a certain street wise quality to Veronica’s analysis.

‘’I’ll show you how I do it. Come on,” Jack said, getting up.

Veronica followed Jack across the field to the student parking lot. Jack’s maroon jeep was far down in the lot in the sophomore section. They got in and he sped out of the lot and off campus onto the open road. Veronica, bemused, sat beside him with childlike curiosity about where they were going, happy to be getting away from the intensity of campus, instantly trusting Jack.

“Where are we going?” she asked after a moment, her dark hair pushed back by the wind blowing at her with the Jeep’s top down, her intensity abating, giving way to the animated interest of a fun-loving kid.

“Does it matter?” Jack questioned.

“No, not really,” Veronica chuckled, her dark eyes drinking in the open road.

They took a drive out into the country. They did not go very far, just far enough so that you could feel the pace change. All the activity of campus passed away behind them. It was as if they had been listening too long to music played too loud and now, with the drive out into the country, that annoying music stopped. The country was slow-paced, unobtrusive, and open. No uproar-no rush, toned down, nothing but open space. It was the perfect antidote to the tumult of campus before midterms.

The sun shone brightly on the road before them; the air was clear and pleasant. Long stretches of road rolled under the jeep’s wheels in an easy, rhythmic flow. And Jack drove on, apparently without any specific destination-relaxed, just going with the road.

“Sometimes I think the dynamos out of control,” he said.

“We do seem a tormented lot,” Veronica agreed.

“Not out here, we’re not,” Jack said. “We have to get back here to the country and, somehow, we have to take it with us wherever else we go.”

As he said that he slowed down to make a turn. They had come to a ridge where a dirt road crossed their road. A vista of burgundy grass extended away from the intersection toward hills in the distance on both sides. The grass swayed in a mild breeze so the field looked like a crimson wave moving toward, then away from them from north to south, the wave broken only where the road cut into it. He turned right, off the road, onto the dirt road and headed south toward some hills. He drove three or four miles over dusty roads, like a boat sailing through a choppy red sea until he came to a second ridge. He climbed the ridge and then started slowly down the other side. As the ridge dropped down they could see, well before the hills but framed by them, a crystalline lake. The lake sat like a blue jewel in a sea of blood red grass. It was a narrow but long lake fed by a small river that entered and exited in the middle on both sides. Jack looked at the lake in awe.

“It’s something, isn’t it?” he said.

“It looks like a Cross,” Veronica commented.

“I know,” Jack said.

“Are you religious?” she asked.

“The Cross means something to me,” he said.

“What?” she asked, looking at the lake.

“Sacrifice, renewal,” he said, “and goodness.” Jack continued gazing at the lake.

“God, I love the outdoors. That’s why I like it here so much. I guess you could say this place is my church and my religion.”

“Meaning?” Veronica asked.

“Meaning this lake with its shape and with its own special beauty is my symbol. We all need working symbols,” Jack said.

“Is it just symbolic for you, then?” Veronica inquired.

“No. It’s real, as real as you are,” Jack said, “and it kind of blows me away, like you do.” Jack shifted his gaze from the lake to the sky and back. “It’s starting,” he said.

“What is?”

“The show, look.”

With light playing over the field and lake, first illuminating, then muting both, a magnificent display occurred. All in an instant the wide field flamed a burning red and then the flame diminished to a ruddy glow. The blue lake sparkled and shined, then darkened, subdued to navy in the shade. Jack had been here before and knew the light and how it changed and how the colors did. He pulled the jeep to the side of the road and stopped. For several minutes the entire scene played out­ repeatedly, as the light came and went, shined and died. It was like watching a magical stage from perfect seats where not a nuance could be missed and the stage genius operating the lights, with utmost dexterity and keenly aware of his guests attention, did not fail to put on his best show. There was such ineffable magic going on in such a golden silence. And through it all, Veronica, with Jack beside her, felt a child’s sense of wonder. Never had she felt so immediately attracted to someone and not nervous about it, but joyous.

“This is amazing,” she said.

“If you get too close it’s not the same. You have to know how to look at it,” Jack said, “and it’s the same with school. It’s probably the same with everything. You just have to know how to look at it.”

Veronica thought about everything they’d seen: the ride out, the rolling country road and the quiet, beautiful, hills. She thought about campus, subdued by distance and mood now. She thought about seeing things with Jack. She looked at Jack and couldn’t stop looking.

In the afternoon’s falling light he glowed intermittently-like a flickering candle. His tousled hair was burnished gold, his bright blue eyes warm and clear with kindness and attention. His eyes were the eyes of someone who had just given a special gift and couldn’t help being a little delighted. Delightful is how she saw him. There is magic in the world. That is what she knew. He proved it. There was never any rush. It all came naturally after that. Two hands, warm together.

Once they had met, their life together felt as if it were lived outside of time with the only urgency their love. Their seasons were seasons of affection and they followed an orbit that had them revolving around each other.

But now, at the hour of their departure to Taylor Island, an alien quality emerged, a tension hitherto unknown. It was as if Time had caught up to them and they heard at last the inevitable tick tock of its breath.

Veronica had readied herself according to Jack’s desire and met him outside her apartment. Jack’s reassuring smile put her more at ease and he loaded her bags into the jeep. Then he got behind the wheel and Veronica took the passenger seat.

“I feel like we’re escaping from something,” she said with a look of still unsatisfied curiosity. Jack squeezed her hand in his.

“Not escaping, embarking,” he answered, aglow with anticipation. “Other worlds than this await us.”

“Do they?” Veronica worried.