I felt sorry for the captive Stanley and several times tried to take him for a walk, to give him a chance to take the air and broaden his limited horizons. But this prospect alarmed him so much that I was always forced to return him to his stake in disgust while he fluttered, squawked and flopped.
So fun was a commodity in short supply. That is, until something interesting turned up during the first week of August. Grandma Bradley was dredging little watering canals with a hoe among the corn stalks on a bright blue Monday morning, and I was shelling peas into a colander on the front stoop, when a black car nosed diffidently up the road and into the yard. Then it stopped a good twenty yards short of the house as if its occupants weren’t sure of their welcome. After some time, the doors opened and a man and woman got carefully out.
The woman wore turquoise-blue pedal-pushers, a sloppy black turtleneck sweater, and a gash of scarlet lipstick swiped across her white, vivid face. This was my father’s youngest sister, Aunt Evelyn.
The man took her gently and courteously by the elbow and balanced her as she edged up the front yard in her high heels, careful to avoid turning an ankle on a loose stone, or in an old tire track.
The thing which immediately struck me about the man was his beard – the first I had ever seen. Beards weren’t popular in 1959 – not in our part of the world. His was a randy, jutting, little goat’s-beard that would have looked wicked on any other face but his. He was very tall and his considerable height was accented by a lack of corresponding breadth to his body. He appeared to have been racked and stretched against his will into an exceptional and unnatural anatomy. As he walked and talked animatedly, his free hand fluttered in front of my aunt. It sailed, twirled and gambolled on the air. Like a butterfly enticing a child, it seemed to lead her hypnotized across a yard fraught with perils for city-shod feet.
My grandmother laid down her hoe and called sharply to her daughter.
“Evvie!” she called. “Over here, Evvie!”
At the sound of her mother’s voice my aunt’s head snapped around and she began to wave jerkily and stiffly, striving to maintain a tottering balance on her high-heeled shoes. It wasn’t hard to see that there was something not quite right with her. By the time my grandmother and I reached the pair, Aunt Evelyn was in tears, sobbing hollowly and jamming the heel of her palm into her front teeth.
The man was speaking calmly to her. “Control. Control. Deep, steady breaths. Think sea. Control. Control. Control. Think sea, Evelyn. Deep. Deep. Deep,” he muttered.
“What the hell is the matter, Evelyn?” my grandmother asked sharply. “And who is he?”
“Evelyn is a little upset,” the man said, keeping his attention focused on my aunt. “She’s having one of her anxiety attacks. If you’d just give us a moment we’ll clear this up. She’s got to learn to handle stressful situations.” He inclined his head in a priestly manner and said, “Be with the sea, Evelyn. Deep. Deep. Sink in the sea.”
“It’s her damn nerves again,” said my grandmother.
“Yes,” the man said benignly, with a smile of blinding condescension. “Sort of.”
“She’s been as nervous as a cut cat all her life,” said my grandmother, mostly to herself.
“Momma,” said Evelyn, weeping. “Momma.”
“Slide beneath the waves, Evelyn. Down, down, down to the beautiful pearls,” the man chanted softly. This was really something.
My grandmother took Aunt Evelyn by her free elbow, shook it, and said sharply, “Evelyn, shut up!” Then she began to drag her briskly towards the house. For a moment the man looked as if he had it in mind to protest, but in the end he meekly acted as a flanking escort for Aunt Evelyn as she was marched into the house. When I tried to follow, my grandmother gave me one of her looks and said definitely, “You find something to do out here.”
I did. I waited a few minutes and then duck-walked my way under the parlour window. There I squatted with my knobby shoulder blades pressed against the siding and the sun beating into my face.
My grandmother obviously hadn’t wasted any time with the social niceties. They were fairly into it.
“Lovers?” said my grandmother. “Is that what it’s called now? Shack-up, you mean.”
“Oh, Momma,” said Evelyn, and she was crying, “it’s all right. We’re going to get married.”
“You believe that?” said my grandmother. “You believe that geek is going to marry you?”
“Thompson,” said the geek, “my name is Thompson, Robert Thompson, and we’ll marry as soon as I get my divorce. Although Lord only knows when that’ll be.”
“That’s right,” said my grandmother, “Lord only knows.” Then to her daughter, “You got another one. A real prize off the midway, didn’t you? Evelyn, you’re a certifiable lunatic.”
“I didn’t expect this,” said Thompson. “We came here because Evelyn has had a bad time of it recently. She hasn’t been eating or sleeping properly and consequently she’s got herself run down. She finds it difficult to control her emotions, don’t you, darling?”
I thought I heard a mild yes.
“So,” said Thompson, continuing, “we decided Evelyn needs some peace and quiet before I go back to school in September.”
“School,” said my grandmother. “Don’t tell me you’re some kind of teacher?” She seemed stunned by the very idea.
“No,” said Aunt Evelyn, and there was a tremor of pride in her voice that testified to her amazement that she had been capable of landing such a rare and remarkable fish. “Not a teacher. Robert’s a graduate student of American Literature at the University of British Columbia.”
“Hoity-toity,” said Grandmother. “A graduate student. A graduate student of American Literature.”
“Doctoral program,” said Robert.
“And did you ever ask yourself, Evelyn, what the hell this genius is doing with you? Or is it just the same old problem with you – elevator panties? Some guy comes along and pushes the button. Up, down. Up, down.”
The image this created in my mind made me squeeze my knees together deliciously and stifle a giggle.
“Mother,” said Evelyn, continuing to bawl.
“Guys like this don’t marry barmaids,” said my grandmother.
“Cocktail hostess,” corrected Evelyn. “I’m a cocktail hostess.”
“You don’t have to make any excuses, dear,” said Thompson pompously. “Remember what I told you. You’re past the age of being judged.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” said my grandmother. “And by the way, don’t start handing out orders in my house. You won’t be around long enough to make them stick.”
“That remains to be seen,” said Thompson.
“Let’s go, Robert,” said Evelyn, nervously.
“Go on upstairs, Evelyn, I want to talk to your mother.”
“You don’t have to go anywhere,” said my grandmother. “You can stay put.”
“Evelyn, go upstairs.” There was a pause and then I heard the sound of a chair creaking, then footsteps.
“Well,” said my grandmother at last, “round one. Now for round two – get the hell out of my house.”
“Can’t do that.”
“Why the hell not?”
“It’s very difficult to explain,” he said.
“Try.”
“As you can see for yourself, Evelyn isn’t well. She is very highly strung at the moment. I believe she is on the verge of a profound personality adjustment, a breakthrough.” He paused dramatically. “Or breakdown.”
“It’s times like this that I wished I had a dog on the place to run off undesirables.”
“The way I read it,” said Thompson, unperturbed, “is that at the moment two people bulk very large in Evelyn’s life. You and me. She needs the support and love of us both. You’re not doing your share.”
“I ought to slap your face.”
“She has come home to try and get a hold of herself. We have to bury our dislikes for
the moment. She needs to be handled very carefully.”
“You make her sound like a trained bear. Handled. What that girl needs is a good talking to, and I am perfectly capable of giving her that.”
“No, Mrs. Bradley,” Thompson said firmly in that maddeningly self-assured tone of his. “If you don’t mind me saying so, I think that’s part of her problem. It’s important now for you to just let Evelyn be.”
“Get out of my house,” said my grandmother, at the end of her tether.
“I know it’s difficult for you to understand,” he said smoothly, “but if you understood the psychology of this you would see it’s impossible for me to go; or for that matter, for Evelyn to go. If I leave she’ll feel I’ve abandoned her. It can’t be done. We’re faced with a real psychological balancing act here.”
“Now I’ve heard everything,” said my grandmother. “Are you telling me you’d have the gall to move into a house where you’re not wanted and just… just stay there?”
“Yes,” said Thompson. “And I think you’ll find me quite stubborn on this particular point.”
“My God,” said my grandmother. I could tell by her tone of voice that she had never come across anyone like Mr. Thompson before. At a loss for a suitable reply, she simply reiterated. “My God.”
“I’m going upstairs now,” said Thompson. “Maybe you could get the boy to bring in our bags while I see how Evelyn is doing. The car isn’t locked.” The second time he spoke his voice came from further away; I imagined him paused in the doorway. “Mrs. Bradley, please let’s make this stay pleasant for Evelyn’s sake.”
She didn’t bother answering him.
When I barged into the house some time later with conspicuous noisiness, I found my grandmother standing at the bottom of the stairs staring up the steps. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said under her breath. “I’ve never seen anything like that. Goddamn freak.” She even repeated it several times under her breath. “Goddamn freak. Goddamn freak.”
Who could blame me if, after a boring summer, I felt my chest tighten with anticipation? Adults could be immensely interesting and entertaining if you knew what to watch for.
At first things were disappointingly quiet. Aunt Evelyn seldom set forth outside the door of the room she and her man inhabited by squatters’ right. There was an argument, short and sharp, between Thompson and Grandmother over this. The professor claimed no one had any business prying into what Evelyn did up there. She was an adult and had the right to her privacy and her own thoughts. My grandmother claimed she had a right to know what was going on up there, even if nobody else thought she did.
I could have satisfied her curiosity on that point. Not much was going on up there. Several squints through the keyhole had revealed Aunt Evelyn lolling about the bedspread in a blue housecoat, eating soda crackers and sardines, and reading a stack of movie magazines she had had me lug out of the trunk of the car.
Food, you see, was beginning to become something of a problem for our young lovers. Grandma rather pointedly set only three places for meals, and Evelyn, out of loyalty to her boyfriend, couldn’t very well sit down and break bread with us. Not that Thompson didn’t take such things in his stride. He sauntered casually and conspicuously about the house as if he owned it, even going so far as to poke his head in the fridge and rummage in it like some pale, hairless bear. At times like that my grandmother was capable of looking through him as if he didn’t exist.
On the second day of his stay Thompson took up with me, which was all right as far as I was concerned. I had no objection. Why he decided to do this I’m not sure exactly. Perhaps he was looking for some kind of an ally, no matter how weak. Most likely he wanted to get under the old lady’s skin. Or maybe he just couldn’t bear not having anyone to tell how wonderful he was. Thompson was that kind of a guy.
I was certainly let in on the secret. He was a remarkable fellow. He dwelt at great length on those things which made him such an extraordinary human being. I may have gotten the order of precedence all wrong, but if I remember correctly there were three things which made Thompson very special and different from all the other people I would ever meet, no matter how long or hard I lived.
First, he was going to write a book about a poet called Allen Ginsberg which was going to knock the socks off everybody who counted. It turned out he had actually met this Ginsberg the summer before in San Francisco and asked him if he could write a book about him and Ginsberg had said, Sure, why the hell not? The way Thompson described what it would be like when he published this book left me with the impression that he was going to spend most of the rest of his life riding around on people’s shoulders and being cheered by a multitude of admirers.
Second, he confessed to knowing a tremendous amount about what made other people tick and how to adjust their mainsprings when they went kaflooey. He knew all this because at one time his own mainspring had gotten a little out of sorts. But now he was a fully integrated personality with a highly creative mind and a strong intuitive sense. That’s why he was so much help to Aunt Evelyn in her time of troubles.
Third, he was a Buddhist.
The only one of these things which impressed me at the time was the bit about being a Buddhist. However, I was confused, because in the Picture Book of the World’s Great Religions which we had at home, all the Buddhists were bald, and Thompson had a hell of a lot of hair, more than I had ever seen on a man. But even though he wasn’t bald, he had an idol. A little bronze statue with the whimsical smile and slightly crossed eyes which he identified as Padma-sambhava. He told me that it was a Tibetan antique he had bought in San Francisco as an object of veneration and an aid to his meditations. I asked him what a meditation was and he offered to teach me one. So I learned to recite with great seriousness and flexible intonation one of his Tibetan meditations, while my grandmother glared across her quintessentially Western parlour with unbelieving eyes.
I could soon deliver, “A king must go when his time has come. His wealth, his friends and his relatives cannot go with him. Wherever men go, wherever they stay, the effect of their past acts follows them like a shadow. Those who are in the grip of desire, the grip of existence, the grip of ignorance, move helplessly round through the spheres of life, as men or gods or as wretches in the lower regions.”
Not that an eleven-year-old could make much of any of that.
Which is not to say that even an eleven-year-old could be fooled by Robert Thompson. In his stubbornness, egoism and blindness he was transparently un-Buddhalike. To watch him and my grandmother snarl and snap their teeth over that poor, dry bone, Evelyn, was evidence enough of how firmly bound we all are to the wretched wheel of life and its stumbling desires.
No, even his most effective weapon, his cool benevolence, that patina of patience and forbearance which Thompson displayed to Grandmother, could crack.
One windy day when he had coaxed Aunt Evelyn out for a walk I followed them at a distance. They passed the windbreak of spruce, and at the sagging barbed-wire fence he gallantly manipulated the wires while my aunt floundered over them in an impractical dress and crinoline. It was the kind of dippy thing she would decide to wear on a hike.
Thompson strode along through the rippling grass like a wading heron, his baggy pant-legs flapping and billowing in the wind. My aunt moved along gingerly behind him, one hand modestly pinning down her wind-teased dress in the front, the other hand plastering the back of it to her behind.
It was only when they stopped and faced each other that I realized that all the time they had been traversing the field they had been arguing. A certain vaguely communicated agitation in the attitude of her figure, the way his arm stabbed at the featureless wash of sky, implied a dispute. She turned toward the house and he caught her by the arm and jerked it. In a fifties calendar fantasy her dress lifted in the wind, exposing her panties. I sank in the grass until their seed tassels trembled against my chin. I wasn’t going to miss watching this for the world.
She sn
apped and twisted on the end of his arm like a fish on a line. Her head was flung back in an exaggerated, antique display of despair; her head rolled grotesquely from side to side as if her neck were broken.
Suddenly Thompson began striking awkwardly at her exposed buttocks and thighs with the flat of his hand. The long, gangly arm slashed like a flail as she scampered around him, the radius of her escape limited by the distance of their linked arms.
From where I knelt in the grass I could hear nothing. I was too far off. As far as I was concerned there were no cries and no pleading. The whole scene, as I remember it, was shorn of any of the personal idiosyncrasies which manifest themselves in violence. It appeared a simple case of retribution.
That night, for the first time, my aunt came down to supper and claimed her place at the table with queenly graciousness. She wore shorts, too, for the first time, and gave a fine display of mottled, discoloured thighs which reminded me of bruised fruit. She made sure, almost as if by accident, that my grandmother had a good hard look at them.
Right out of the blue my grandmother said, “I don’t want you hanging around that man any more. You stay away from him.”
“Why?” I asked rather sulkily. He was the only company I had. Since my aunt’s arrival Grandmother had paid no attention to me whatsoever.
It was late afternoon and we were sitting on the porch watching Evelyn squeal as she swung in the tire swing Thompson had rigged up for me in the barn. He had thrown a length of stray rope over the runner for the sliding door and hung a tire from it. I hadn’t the heart to tell him I was too old for tire swings.
Aunt Evelyn seemed to be enjoying it though. She was screaming and girlishly kicking up her legs. Thompson couldn’t be seen. He was deep in the settled darkness of the barn, pushing her back and forth. She disappeared and reappeared according to the arc which she travelled through. Into the barn, out in the sun. Light, darkness. Light, darkness.
Man Descending Page 2
