The Lighthouse

He replaced the stack, got to his feet, and paced the room. The smoke from his pipe formed an undulant line, like marshy vapor, just below the low ceiling. He felt restless now, disinclined to work, disinclined to do anything and yet in need of movement, activity. After a time he stopped pacing and began to rummage manically through the file boxes of research materials he had brought from home. Photostats of old newspaper, magazine, and book articles. Books and pamphlets of utilitarian value, some of them quite rare-A. B. Johnson’s The Modern Lighthouse Service, for one, published by the U.S. Government in 1890. Annual reports of the U.S. Coast Guard. Departments of Treasury and Commerce lists of Lights and Fog-signals, 1900–1954. Lighthouse Service Bulletins, 1866–1939, and Lighthouse Board Reports, 1920–1939. Transcriptions of taped interviews with four men who had worked as lighthouse keepers in various parts of the country-one of them Anderson-and two others who had worked under George R. Putnam, U.S. Commissioner of Lighthouses in the 1930s. Copies of the Journal of American History, the New England Historical Quarterly, the Oregon Historical Quarterly, National Geo graphic, and several other publications-all with articles by him on various lighthouses and aspects of lighthouse history that he planned to incorporate into Guardians of the Night. An extra copy (why had be brought an extra copy?) of the small-press edition of his Ph. D. dissertation, Lighthouses of the Upper New England Seaboard, which in revised form would comprise from one-quarter to one-third of Guardians.

He thumbed through some of the material, but the words seemed to blur together like ink under a stream of water. He paced some more. He sat down, pulled the sheet of paper out of the Underwood’s platen, rolled in another.

The Romans built many lighthouses, none of the splendor or size of the Pharos. Beacon towers for ships, which appear to have been in use long before the Pharos was constructed, although there is no record of when such lights were first adopted, were revived by the seafaring Italian republics in the twelfth century. There were few such beacons in the world, however, when the first lighthouse in America was erected at Boston in 1715 no 1716

Bulging. Bulging.

On his feet again, pacing the room. It seemed to have contracted, the walls to have bent sharply inward. Claustrophobia-a byproduct of the pain, the tension, the restlessness. He had experienced it before; there was no use fighting it. Open space was what he needed. Fresh air, cold air.

He went out along the hall to the staircase, down into the living room. The place was still: Alix was in her studio with the door shut, working on the first of her illustrations for Guardians — the Pharos, her conception of what it must have been like. She had shown him the preliminary sketch earlier, after supper. Good, very good. So much better than the crap he’d written tonight.

In the middle of the living room, he hesitated. Alix. He felt a sudden need to go to her, talk to her, tell her what was happening to him. It was a need that came over him more and more often lately, and yet one that he could never quite act upon. In the past few years she’d changed so much. Not that he hadn’t been pleased about that. When he’d met her she had been at loose ends, not sure of who she was or what she wanted to do-needing someone like him to help give her life direction. She didn’t need him anymore; her decision to buy into the graphic arts firm next year proved that. What if she couldn’t or wouldn’t stay with a man who was totally dependent upon her?

He was afraid, and being afraid angered him and drove him deeper inside himself. He had always been self-reliant, had had to be. Wisconsin farm kids learned early on about the harsh realities of life. The early loss of his mother, the later truth about her disappearance, had taught him about pain; his father’s death while he was still at the university had left him completely on his own. He could deal with any sort of crisis alone. Even now. Especially now.

He went to the door, got it open, felt the cold sting of the wind as he walked out into the darkness. He had forgotten to put on his coat, he realized, but he did not want to go back inside yet. He moved away from the watch house, steered by the wind-across the grassy area on its inland side, around past the shed that housed the well, across humped, barren ground toward the cliffs on the north side of the headland, Wind-twisted cypress trees grew along the edge, half a dozen of them; he stopped alongside one, took hold of a low branch to steady himself against the pull of the wind.