The Promise of Rest

by Reynolds Price

  It can’t all be charged up to TV or miserable schools that can’t even babysit murderous kids, much less teach language. What broke loose and why? In recent years Hutch had sensed the breakage in his own life and poetry. His emotions came and went with the same force as ever, but his writing hand could seldom move now in the close shadow-dancing it had managed before, the near-perfect fit of feeling and word. And despite a run of good new poems—some angry as hornets—just after Ann left him, Hutch had pretty much surrendered serious hope that the tide could be turned in the visible future, not for himself or for other balked Americans, not by human intervention. Now with the savage plague on hand, and the human body threatened with death at the mere touch of pleasure, wouldn’t language itself only go on withering and vanishing within us?

  Yet somehow the prospect hadn’t soured his teaching, partly because his students selected themselves for competence and partly because—despite his age—Hutch had never quite lost his family’s daily reborn taste for a given stretch of predictable hours, the time from here till tonight’s oblivion. No one he could think of in all his past, except his great-grandmother Kendal, had chosen to die (she’d swallowed lye and foamed to an agonized death on the floor). But no, that same great-grandmother’s father—Thad Watson—had shot himself and fallen on his young wife’s just-dead body (she’d died in childbed).

  That of course led Hutch irresistibly to Wyatt, Wade’s companion. A family member? All right, call him that, posthumously anyhow—a third family suicide, less grisly than the first but still an unpardonable wound to the living, the kin and friends. The next thought had to be And why not Wade? Has he thought of quitting on his own schedule, not waiting for agony? At that Hutch shook his head to clear it, then stood and walked quietly to Wade’s open door.

  At some point in the past two hours, Wade had waked, raised the head of his bed still higher and switched on the lamp; but now that he was far gone into sleep again, there was no sound of life. He was still uncovered, his body still carving itself to the bone from instant to instant.

  Let this be it, in his sleep, this easy. Hutch stopped at the foot of the bed to listen closely. Still nothing.

  Thank God. Hutch went to the edge of the narrow mattress. He freed the bruised feet from a tangle of cover (they had no more flesh than a hawk’s dry claw), and he drew the blue sheet up to Wade’s waist. Then he sat, his hand settling on Wade’s left arm. Warm, still soft. Hutch lightly touched the pulse in the neck. It was there, weak but game. Then it’s all come down to this, here now on a single dry bed. By all Hutch meant what he knew of his family, from old Rob Mayfield his great-grandfather and his grandmother Eva, till tonight—this young man tortured to death in sight of his father, the end of a line.

  Wade’s eyes stayed shut but he said “I’m just playing possum; ignore me.”

  Hutch’s thumb stroked the ridge at the crest of Wade’s eyes. It was handsome as the arc of a Chinese bridge in the mountains or the brow of a silver-backed gorilla, wiser than man. When Hutch stopped finally he saw that, gentle as he’d tried to be, his thumb had uprooted lashes from the dark brows. He carefully brushed them into his handkerchief and folded them neatly. They seemed worth saving; he didn’t think why. Then he slid a hand beneath the cover and felt Wade’s waist—still no diaper. Can I put one on him and not break his rest?

  Wade said “I’m giving you an incomplete grade.”

  “Sir?” Hutch chuckled.

  “You’re the only class member who didn’t recite.”

  “They’ve heard too much of me all term.”

  Wade said “Incomplete.”

  Hutch said “Pick a poem then—quick, as long as it’s not by me—I bet I can say it.”

  This tack was peculiarly urgent for Wade, “I told your class a very true story; so did young Maitland Moses—I could tell.”

  Hutch said “Did you like Mait?”

  “I thought he was bold for his age, yes sir. And he’s got good eyes, the best I could see.”

  “Mait’ll be calling on us this summer.”

  Wade said “You’re changing the subject, O Bard of the Pines. Recite me a story.” His voice was thin, high and drifting, as if he was teasing a child or had gone insane since sundown.

  Hutch had read stories to Wade, and reams of good poems, all through his boyhood. And through long repetition together, they’d painlessly memorized hundreds of lines. By the time Wade was nine or ten, he and Hutch would sit or lie most nights in this room and recite in unison a poem that one or the other had chosen as fit to close a particular day. Tonight as Hutch faced what had become of his son, the only lines he could hear in his mind were John Keats’s last poem, written in unflinching knowledge of the fact that Keats was dying of TB at twenty-six. Oddly the poem had been a favorite of Wade’s in adolescence. Maybe not so odd; adolescents are morbid. But we can’t say those lines, not tonight.

  Merciless, Wade raised his own left hand from the cool sheet and held it up in the air between them. Even in dim light it was nearly transparent; the fingers looked endlessly long and fitted with abnormal extra joints, knobby and bluish.

  Hutch reached to clasp the hand.

  But Wade took it back and hid it in cover. His eyes were smiling with a high glitter though; and in the new thin voice, he said “‘This living hand’—”

  It had never seemed strange on the frequent nights they’d stumble on the same poem at the same moment, but to have Wade read his mind this closely here was ominous for Hutch. He said “We couldn’t get through that tonight” and reached again to stroke Wade’s forehead.

  Wade rolled his head aside, then looked back at Hutch with the punishing smile. “Sure we could; we’re both realistic as apoplexy.” Wade started Keats’s poem again; and after three lines, against his better will, Hutch joined him to the finish.

  “This living hand, now warm and capable

  Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

  And in the icy silence of the tomb,

  So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

  That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood

  So in my veins red life might stream again,

  And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—

  I hold it towards you.”

  It took them a moment to weather that powerful shudder of words from a century when words served gladly, in utter perfection. Then knowing the gesture might seem soft or lurid, Hutch searched in the cover and found Wade’s hand.

  It was hot as a small fire; and this time Wade let him hold it, unflinching. Finally Wade said “More, please sir.”

  “More?”

  “Father, Father—I can ask for more now, and you can tell me safely.” His voice took on the conscious creepy tones of a ghoul in a forties horror film. “I’m beyond the grave, I keep all secrets, you’re safe with me.” Wade laughed but still he waited for Hutch to agree. When he got that permission through pressure to his hand, Wade went for the throat. “Hutch, I’m as grown as I’ll ever get. Tell me as much as I told the class.”

  So Hutch thought awhile and convinced himself that now might well be their last chance before Wade went past comprehension; then he gave Wade the story. And though he gave it for the second time tonight, to someone in a world as far from Maitland’s as the star Arcturus, it came more easily and felt still truer as it moved into words. “What you’re looking at, Son—whatever you see—is a sixty-three-year-old man who’s hauling a hundred and seventy-eight pounds round the world on a six-foot frame. He’s finishing up his thirty-fifth year as a college teacher and trying to write a few last poems for his fifth lean volume, a New and Selected. He’s well thought of in the minuscule world of American verse, a few of his poems have been translated into French and Spanish and Japanese; and he’s been tapped into most of the right self-congratulating clubs and academies, though they tend to give him attacks of the creeps if he goes to many meetings. But if he’d give you his honest guess, he’d reckon that not more
than six of his poems have a chance of being read, much less memorized, fifty years from now.”

  The strain of distancing himself from the story broke Hutch’s pose. When he started over he spoke as himself, in his naked intent. “Wade Mayfield, you’re still set to be the main thing I bequeath this starving planet; and whatever happens in the time we get, I know you’ll go on being that, among a lot else—a man that started life as a pleasure for everyone near him and who only gets better and better with time.”

  Wade said “Tell the truth.”

  “Wait—I am.” Hutch lost his grip briefly. “Hutch is hard up for knowing the whole truth tonight, not with his wife far off on her own and his son in trouble—”

  Wade said “Say I, if it’s you you mean.”

  “Am I telling this story or you?”

  “I’m starting to wonder.” Both their voices had veered into harshness, so Wade kept silent from then on and focused his mind to guide his father’s account toward what he’d wanted to know in all their adult years together and then apart.

  Hutch sensed the guidance and was all but relieved to bow to it finally. “You asked the class to witness this world we’re caught in here, where love can kill you as sure as gunfire. I think close watch is the main thing my work has tried to offer since nearly the start, once I’d given up trying to draw and paint things anyhow. And if I’ve really seen anything at all in these years, and passed it on, it’s been just this—the only thing that matters a whit in human life is using your mind and body, throttle-out as long as you last, to spark the gaps and to hook you to people you need and can give to.

  “I well understand I’m the ten-billionth watcher that’s seen as much and said it legibly, but I’m fairly easy these days with the fact that I’m not Wordsworth or even Frost and likely won’t be. I know this though—the single really good thing I’ve done, apart from helping get you underway, is to tie myself to a few human shapes too beautiful to resist for long and then to give them at least as much nourishment as they give me. All but one of them arc still dear friends—as near as Strawson, you’re bound to know—and the only one I’ve lost is dead, not abandoned by me: a likable baffled young man named James, an Oxford stonemason with a prison record who treated me kinder than a convent of nuns in swansdown gloves. You surely must have known for years that, before you were born, a reasonable number of my intimates were men.”

  Wade’s eyes were still shut. “I’ve estimated as much, yes sir.”

  “Since when?”

  “More or less from the first, I guess, when I was maybe eight or nine—soon as I looked out and really knew I was watching other bodies too.”

  Hutch laughed. “Whoa here, I resisted you at every age. I’ve been many things but no child molester—”

  “Easy, I’m not on the vice squad yet. I wanted you to touch me more ways than one, but you were a gentleman round the clock always and a knockout to boot.”

  “I’m a blighted cabbage leaf to what I was. You’re pretty grand yourself.”

  Wade said “—If you’re drawn to the human skeleton.” But he smiled at last before he went silent and lay still so long he seemed asleep. Then in a thin voice, he said “You’re saying you’re the worst thing of all—the unhappiest anyhow?”

  Hutch said “What’s that?”

  “One of the all but nonexistent genuine bisexuals.”

  Hutch laughed. “I was talking about that mythical species earlier tonight.”

  “Who with?—the walls?”

  “No, Maitland came back once the others left and stayed awhile—you remember you walked in on us, in the living room?”

  “I don’t,” Wade said. He let that pass. “You weren’t telling Mait you’d been bisexual, I pray to Jesus.”

  Hutch laughed again but gave the question a minute’s thought. “Not at all, no. I honestly think I’ve always been sexual, nothing any more focused than that—though for more than thirty years, I was aimed at no one but your mother.”

  Wade’s eyes were still shut. “What was the one thing you liked to do most—whoever you loved, wherever you were, whatever hour of day or night or sun or snow?”

  Hutch thought Wade’s far past dead; tell the truth. But then he half hedged. “Without getting down to the sweaty home movies, I always aimed to give real pleasure to who I was with. That was always the best reward for me. Remember what Blake said?

  “What is it men in women do require?

  The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

  What is it women do in men require?

  The lineaments of Gratified Desire.”

  With his eyes still shut, Wade hacked out a chuckling that lasted longer than his breath. When he’d eased again, he said “Billy Blake was the craziest coot; but he hit that one, didn’t he? For me anyhow. I could look, a whole year, at a body I loved and the mind that drove it. Then all I asked was to let my hand do the necessary pleasing on that loved body—my hand or some other piece of my skin that wouldn’t repel or sicken my love.” Wade waited, then abruptly turned to his father and tried to see him. When he failed, he asked Hutch a genuine question. “Still, where does that leave the Poor Local Blind Boy?”

  It went more than halfway through Hutch’s whole body, but he smiled on the chance Wade could see him at all. Then he told him “Like me, I guess, you’ve got your memories.” He’d sung those last four words like a sob song from a twenties operetta.

  Wade eventually shook his head, a firm No; but he offered no more explanation.

  Hutch thought He’s blind in his mind as well. It was so hard to think, he smoothed the cover and moved to rise.

  Wade looked out and found his father’s face, a momentary milky patch on the air above him. “Wyatt told me, the first night he met you, that you’d cut your heart off from the world the day you got married—he knew it on sight.” Before Hutch could answer, Wade grinned out wildly to the room in general. “You’re worried about my diaper, I know. I promise if I mess up these sheets, I’ll wash them myself.” Both of them knew Wade could never manage that; he was weakening daily.

  But in spite of the posthumous thrust from Wyatt, Hutch agreed, smiling; then gave a slight wave as he faced the door.

  Wade wasn’t done. “Hutch, you know it was Wyatt between us, don’t you? You and me—nothing bigger than Wyatt?”

  “Wyatt loathed me, Son; I mainly knew why—partly at least, though I knew he was wrong: half wrong at least. Some of his reasons were understandable, though he distorted my meanness unfairly. I had very little to do, you must know, with importing black Africans to these cruel shores or fueling the torture machine built for them. I was honest to God, never Simon Legree; not even a genial white-country-club member.” Hutch knew it was too late to add the other fact—that Wade had let Wyatt stand between them and had never once tried to wave him aside or bring him to heel, not so far as Hutch or Ann ever knew. Before he could go on, Hutch heard his own thought—Bring Wyatt to heel. But Wyatt was dead, cold dead underground. He scares me still; I’m not cured yet.

  As if eavesdropping, Wade said “Wyatt’s reasons were fairly sound, yes sir” as calmly as if he’d said Evening or Rain. He took a long silence, though his eyes stayed open. Finally he said “You understand I’m totally blind now.”

  Hutch said “You were seeing this afternoon, out on the terrace. I could tell you were.”

  Wade said “I get little spells of sight—somebody’s outline, the taste of the light as it’s dimming for evening.”

  Hutch said “Surely you saw Mait Moses.”

  “I could tell he was lively; he was giving off streaks like the northern lights—mostly blue and blood-red.”

  Hutch said “But you’re not seeing me here with you?”

  Wade’s face slowly sought out his father, and the eyes moved slightly as if they were stroking a welcome object. Finally he said “You’re there, I can tell.”

  Hutch had returned and was standing at the foot of the bed. He took two steps back, farther away, and s
aid “How can you tell?”

  Wade said “I’m not sure—just some sort of radar that I’ve slowly got as my eyes went out. It’s an interesting skill, one I wish I’d had in my architect days. Things almost seem to be playing a music nobody can hear till they’re blind as me; even now it’s faint, but I mostly can hear it. I bet you could lead me to the strangest room right now, stand me on the threshold; and I could tell you where they’ve placed the bed, where the windows are, which chair is the oldest inhabitant’s favorite.”

  Hutch had stayed in place, between the foot of Wade’s bed and the door. “Do you get any feeling of me?”

  “Oh sure.”

  “What’s it like?”

  Wade knew at once. “You’re somehow separate from the rest of the dark. You’re—what?—embossed, slightly raised from the background, a kind of bas relief but there.”

  Hutch said “No, here. And I’ll be here as long as you need me—God couldn’t make me quit.”

  Wade grinned. “I’ll pretend you didn’t say that. Friend God can shut you off like a flashlight, any instant he chooses, O Seer Blest!” The grin survived a few seconds more; then Wade was gone like a shot-down quail.

  These instant vanishings were badly unnerving, maybe even too convenient for Wade. But Hutch sat there another few minutes, hoping the boy would come back again and work his way past the last low hurdles left between them to some kind of justice on both their actions in the past ten years. There’s almost no time, Son—come back.

  Wade needed rest more or was overwhelmed by the gulf still between them.

  So Hutch tried to find a way into prayer, a kind of thinking he’d more or less ignored through the past four decades. How does a sane human being address the mind that conceives—and goes on conceiving—the walls or infinite reaches of space, the real or unreal nature of time and the purpose, if any, of a species as infinitesimal as Homo sapiens, not to speak of a single man, woman or child? Quite aside from the mystery of whether any such speech could rouse that unimaginable mind and hold its attention for a private request smaller (say) than the hydrogen atom, for Hutch the quandary came down to words as most quandaries did—what words in what order? The Buddha says only Consume me utterly. Jesus says Your will be done. Dante says In your will is our peace.