automobiles. Cedar occasionally ate lunch alone in the park, but always took the 4:30 bus and went home, except once a week, when she went to the grocery store. She seemed not overly friendly with either the owner of the nursery, Mrs. Bridewell, or the other saleslady, Mrs. Ondell. After a month, Will gave up going to the nursery altogether.
To Will’s unexpected fascination he found a large stack of old letters and newspaper clippings in the bottom drawer of Cedar’s bureau. With these, and the help of letters from and to her father and sister in Burlington, which he opened by holding above a boiling pan of water, reading and replacing back in the mail box, he was able to compose a skeletal outline of her past. This he arranged and wrote in a notebook. Born, 1927, on a farm outside What Cheer, Iowa. 1933, pet robin died from an accidental overdose of table salt. 1939, spanked by father for negligence toward younger sister — afterwards it was decided that Cedar was too old. Starred in two high school plays; The Cherry Orchard, the other unknown. Broke high school track record in girl’s 50 yard dash, time, 6.02 seconds. Enrolled in Iowa State Teachers’ College, Mt. Vernon, Iowa, 1947, majoring in Botany. President of Audubon Club in 1948. Remained in college two years — grade point, 3.14. July 14, 1950, at age of twenty-two-and-a-half married an ex-Marine and insurance broker. They had no children (assumed by their doctors to be her husband’s fault). Divorced, 1951, husband claimed mental cruelty, not verified. Charges of homosexuality withdrawn by Cedar. Ex-husband returned to Marines and was stationed in Korea. Moved to High Street and began collecting animals, fish, and plants. Mother died in 1952, cause of death attributed to unknown reasons. Younger sister married in 1953, presently with two children, living on a farm.
Will traveled to What Cheer and searched for Cedar’s childhood in the barns and fields and white house outlined with intricately carved panels of wood set along the porch and hanging from the roof: latticework. He imagined how these things would be to a child — how they would be even if they were not noticed. He sat in the rooms of the house and imagined how it must have been, with clocks and davenports and human smells. He smoked opium to help him imagine. In a high-school building — dormant then, a rezoning leftover — he surrounded himself with Cedar’s class pictures, old photographs of her standing with her physical education instructor in the gymnasium; he visualized parking lots, gum wrappers, and small throngs of teenagers where buttonweeds and marijuana (left over from the rope industry of the War) grew. He tried to wedge together those fragments of recorded facts into a continuously coherent, rounded spiral . . . a feeling for the young Cedar Stern that was at once intelligible and self-contained — nothing untouched — no part of Cedar’s youth would escape him. He experienced her high-school years, walked up the stairs to the bathroom with her, helped her comb her hair in the girls’ room, read the messages written on the metal stalls surrounding the toilets, looked out into the parking lot from the typing room and wondered if Larry Murphy would ask her to the game, screamed obscenities at the enemy basketball players in the sweating gymnasium, accepted a trophy for record time in the one-hundred-yard dash, hated study halls and hall monitors, hesitantly tried on the masks of sentimentality, brutality, indifference, tolerance, rebellion, sainthood, and blind faith to see the effect they made on her environment — keeping those masks that were pleasurable and discarding the rest, riotously acclaiming her womanhood while secretly resenting it, finding her mother’s religion finally inadequate and untrue, discovering that the adults around her were constantly telling her lies about the nature of the way things really were — believing that her generation would finally right the wrong and rock the world in a magnificent apocalypse in which she was to be the principal mover — bringing mankind once more into the divine order of nature. Will helped Cedar write poetry about young women with hair blowing in the winds, and running along lakes and in snowstorms, and of love; helped her buy clothes, lived on potato chips and soda in a land with no middle ground — everything was ecstatic or drab, waited in a car behind the liquor store while some old man from downtown that one of the boys had commissioned to buy sloe gin was signing away another section of his Blue Book for the price of a six-pack of beer, found that the ideas her teachers were occasionally talking about were fascinating and repugnant, was attracted to debauchery, unsure what it was but in every frantic action believing that she was moving toward it in some mystical, religious way . . . afraid of scorn from her friends, but desiring it secretly more than anything.
Will stayed in What Cheer for three weeks and then returned to Des Moines, satisfied. His image of Cedar Stern had a beginning. Safely, he could now begin his total construction of Cedar, complete to the last detail. Babyhood did not interest him. What came before the adolescence was irrelevant to Will because he was only concerned with Cedar as a woman, specifically with the kind of woman she was in contrast to the kind of woman she pictured herself to be; therefore, her earlier years — those spannings of time when her most frightening nightmares could at best only make generalizations about what insanity might be like — were of no concern to him. In his notebook he wrote:
Today I have seen the beginning of a pattern, a living obsession, a metaphysic. And like all patterns in their earlier stages it is impossible to know the precise nature of that pattern. I have before me (within me) a collection of seemingly unrelated symbols, like the numbers 3.14 that on first observation might appear sporadic or merely coincidental without the awareness that the series π is in actuality an infinitely repeating series just as definite as the series .3333. . . . I shall painstakingly continue to uncover the other numbers of the series until I arrive at the common repeating series 142857142857142857 . . . and so arrive at the simple fraction 22/7. The mistake of the morons I have known is anticipated in their belief that the chaotic actions of a young girl (and a woman, though less pronounced) are indeed chaotic. They have failed to see that every woman is held together by a central series, an obsession or metaphysic that orders that chaos. There are no ambiguities in a woman. They are simple . . . prevented by their partial awareness of themselves and by the man-oriented world to contain any discrepancies. “Women are infinitely shallow.” It is only our greedy acceptance of the unexplainable that renders them complex. It would be banal to attempt to possess a young girl in that her pattern, or obsession, has not been fully developed. They, the girls, will eventually grow out around any estimation of them because that estimation will always be incomplete. A young girl cannot conceive of what it means to be permanently deranged . . . is not aware that anything internal to herself stands between her and the good life. I will come to know Cedar Stern’s obsession better than she does herself. I will possess her. She will cease to live but through me. My lungs will breathe air into her body. I will know love.
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