In Window Tree: a Novel and Three Fables

Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2020 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2020 In Window Tree: A Novel and Three Fables Jack Pagliante Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2020 Part of the Fiction Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Pagliante, Jack, "In Window Tree: A Novel and Three Fables" (2020). Senior Projects Spring 2020. 285. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2020/285 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. In Window Tree: A Novel and Three Fables Senior Project Submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College by Jack Pagliante Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 2020 Acknowledgements Thank you Robert for believing in fairies and elves and magic with me for being my wizard in the lonely tower for your boundless wisdom and effortless compassion, your kindness and quiet enthusiasm for the Grasmere gingerbread Mom and Dad for encouraging my writing, my passions, my life to be the best it can Reese for going on those first rare adventures to Narnia in our yard Rain for listening and loving and wanting to hear for patience for more patience Berlin, where I started it, Prague and Bard, and Red Hook, where I finished it for giving me a place to set my feet Schubert, Mozart, Mahler, Beethoven, Ravel, and Brian Eno for the music to write to David Bowie, Curtis Mayfield, Kate Bush, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and The Beatles for the music to keep me going COVID-19 for making it all so much harder 2 In Window Tree 3 THEY HAD BEEN gone for some time already when I looked up and found the curtain whose window would burn. It stood asleep, eye closed, below the shade of the roof, half-hidden by ivy and dust, unopened. But unlike doors, no window ever opens upon where you want to be, and so I turned the other way, went back inside, alone, hearing rain in the distance, just starting to fall. The owners of the house, both distant family, had said little about that part of the place when I arrived. From what I gathered, the house was really two houses, more or less divided in half. The half that I was staying in was built sometime in the sixties, but the other side, brick and stone, was colonial—had housed a small family whose portraits still hung on the walls and mantles. On that side, the walls were thicker, not as flat or straight, and the floorboards were loud, the stairs slender and steep. “I don’t see why you’d want to come over here,” was all they’d said, as they directed me about. “Just thought we’d show you.” It was very kind of them to allow me to spend the summer there. They were older and were to be taking a vacation somewhere up north, along the beach. I would watch the house, being in between leases myself and not wanting to stay with either of my parents. Shortly after I’d moved out each one in their own way had called to tell me they were getting a divorce. They never said why exactly, 4 but that things between them, the threads they’d once used to connect them, had frayed, had split and spilled off to where they could no longer retrieve them. And I didn’t know what that meant. I was not shocked, though, as I maybe thought I would be, or broken, upon hearing it, but took it as something that I was glad not to have happened sooner. I had never known or seen my parents in love, never seen them kiss other than in parting when my father left on long trips; and knew very little about them, the people they were before I showed up. When the owners of the house asked me how my parents were, I lied and said they were doing fine, both happy. As I drove them to the train station later, in parting, they said my parents were good people, and that they’d raised a fine son. They told me I had been to their house once before as a child too, but not this one. This one was new, they said, and asked if I remembered the old one. “A little,” I said. “It was a long time ago,” they admitted, and began to explain a party and good food I had no recollection of. I nodded politely, watching the road. I remembered very little of my own childhood. It was a subject I did not like to talk about, and sometimes, secretly, was even convinced that it had never happened; or if it had, that it must have happened to someone else. So much of it, when I tried to remember, was simply not there. Other people could recall whole stories, and I would sit there listening to them, wondering whether they were lying or if there was something wrong with me—something that had happened that erected a wall or net that let nothing else pass—and even if there was such a thing, if I could ever remember what it was, or would want to. 5 I walked with them to the platform, waved goodbye as they boarded. It was a hot, humid day in early June. The tracks quivered in the heat, and the old brick station was not crowded. A few people, but no more than four, stepped off and wandered away through the glass doors. The train left. By then I had been living with them for two days—just the weekend, to sort things out. But alone, standing there, with the tracks empty and burring, it seemed as though I had only just arrived as well. Very little of what happened was memorable, and mostly our conversations over dinner concerned other distant members of the family dying or about to die. Sometimes they would talk about the house and the people who lived there before, but not often. It was a family of three: one child like me who went off on their own and the parents decided not to live there anymore. “They used to live near you,” they told me. “What town was that again?” I told them and they smiled. “Yes, I think that was the one. Yes. Isn’t that funny? Out of everywhere, your little town. I was only ever there when you were born, but I can still see it, faintly.” There had been a pause as they chewed. Their brows jumped up. “Do you remember them at all?” I shook my head. Down came the brows. “You weren’t friends?” they said, leaning forward, telling me vaguely about what they looked like, what they did, whatever they could remember. Again, I shook my head. “Maybe.” Most of the friends I remembered making moved away soon after I made them. They moved away to other states or towns and I never saw them again, 6 never told them the endings to stories I had once promised them. I remembered that much. “Pity,” they said, knitting the food with their forks, and then, out of nowhere: “But that would be something…the world making its way back around to you. Wouldn’t it?” When I got back into the car it had started to rain. The sky was bright and clear, though, and it was only a summer shower, misting down so as to make the world crammed inside a vast crystal or jewel. Halfway back it stopped and then started, then stopped once more as I parked the car in their driveway and went for a short walk, sat for a time under the old tree in the backyard where the grass was dry, reading. There was a little breeze, swirling, and I had to hold the pages flat. The ivy that scrawled up the old stonework of the house flashed with the sun all the way up to the chimney and around the windows and then back down to the garden below. A cloud of insects foamed and fuzzed about the leaves and flowers. The oak tree hummed in its trunk. It was a small, quiet neighborhood with the houses spaced far apart. Behind the single tree there stretched a field, and a hill, prickled with tall transmission towers that marched off into the sky. They reminded me of people, tall giants turned to steel and metal instead of stone, like the stories I had read and been told. Turning back, my eyes met upon the window. It was thinner than the others. Nothing else distinguished it: the shudders were old and open with the rest; the hinges were rusted; the frames needed new paint. And yet it drew me. Half-obscured by ivy, by leaves, the curtain flat and long and black as the hooves of a horse. I did not go up to investigate. I took it to be a closet, or storage room, 7 or liked the mystery, perhaps, and had at that time nothing I needed from it.

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