The Stone Loves the World

by BRIAN HALL

  Imogen waters the mare, gives her hay from the trailer and a carrot from her pocket, brushes her down, feels her legs, throws on a blanket, talks in her velvet ear. Two following riders show up—one is Fran—and their times recorded (71 and 77 minutes, ha!). All three horses and their girls ride back to Meadowbrook in the trailer.

  D-day happened two weeks ago.

  “Meadowbrook stands alone!” Fran intones in her best radio voice.

  All the girls laugh, even the driver, mannish Miss Evans.

  Imogen is having a wonderful war.

  * * *

  • • •

  Mount Holyoke College! Massachusetts! Many miles away!

  Imogen is in the class of 1950, whose symbol is Pegasus, which is perfect, as she spends her four years on horses flying over jumps. Technically she’s a chemistry major, but who cares about that? She lives in the stables with the other horsewomen, her best friends Mac, Birch, Smitty, Delph. They call her Imp. She’s the most fearless jumper of the lot, surpassed only by Mr. Nichols, Master of Equitation, who loves flying so much he levitates above the saddle at the top of every magnificent arc. (Look at the photographs.)

  The wonderful, valiant, liquid-eyed horses, so strong, so dear. Early mornings in the outdoor ring, afternoons on the hunt course, evenings with the warm electric light in the stables, the sweet hanging dust, the smell of horse and hay and muck and oats and leather, the currying and feeding, inspecting of hoofs, nuzzling, feeling the warmth rising from flank and neck.

  In jumping exhibitions, Imogen takes spills and pops right back up, undaunted. The crowd approves her spirit. She breaks a finger and rides with it splinted. Her wrists ache. She chews aspirin and ignores it.

  Her mother thinks she’ll spend the summers at home in DC, maybe working as a salesgirl in a clothing store, but she’s got another think coming. Imogen finds a position as riding coach and counselor at an all-girl camp in the Poconos. The girls are young and soft, the horses old and for the most part mild, with one or two malicious tricksters. It’s like her old school patrol days, shepherding her little sisters across fields and creeks, down wooded paths. Her parents visit, querulous and tired from the long drive, and Imogen can finally see that they were old when they married, old when they gave birth to her. That perhaps the reason her mother never gave her a baby brother or sister was because she couldn’t.

  Her mother does her yeoman job of making Imogen feel guilty. The house is so quiet . . . Poor Stubby doesn’t understand . . . It must be very exciting and free to get away from your parents . . .

  Her dad, holding the camera, escapes long enough to snap the big barn and the bridge over the creek (gladdening his engineer’s heart) before being corralled by her mother to do what he came for. She orders Imogen to stand here and there, hold this and that, try not to be so . . . maybe that hair is the style today, but honestly, who could . . . ? Imogen stands alone, because her mother no longer tolerates having her own picture taken. “I used to be the beauty of the family,” she says, sighing. Old photos prove it. Grammie Eula always chirpily conceded she was the prettiest of her daughters. “She got the beauty fairy, so the brains fairy looked elsewhere.”

  “Oh, the men were always—” and off her mother goes, reminiscing about balls and wintry wagon rides under compendious buffalo robes (but there was decorum and proper manners).

  Then why’d it take you so damn long to marry? Imogen wants to ask.

  “You’re still beautiful,” her husband avers, gesturing futilely for her to move into the frame. He means it. “How did I manage to catch such a beauty?” he’s often said. He’s a small man, five-five, bald at twenty-five, married at forty-four.

  Because she saw you’d put up with her.

  She looks at him standing there with the camera like a shield, the man her fellow counselors thought at first was her grandfather. You never defend me. He may marvel at her mother’s beauty, but on vacations he goes off on fishing trips with his buddies, never taking Imogen with him.

  She gets back on her horse, returns to college. Her hands hurt like hell, the doctor says she has congenital arthritis, exacerbated by the demanding exercise in cold weather. She keeps chewing aspirin, keeps jumping, stops playing piano. Her mother complains, Imogen tunes her out.

  Graduation Day. Of course her parents are there, and maybe there’s a bit of her mother in her, the foolish vain part, because she doesn’t wear her glasses for the procession, although she’s blind as a bat, and her dad snaps furiously as she marches by. Somehow she was off a horse long enough to get good grades and win an academic prize. She’s been accepted for the physics program at the University of Chicago, the first female physics graduate student in its history. (She switched to physics in her senior year to get away from her chemistry professor, Miss Edwards, who praised her and encouraged her and it turned out was in love with her and wanted to control her.) She’s proud and excited and secretly worried and in mourning for the loss of her horses, her stable, her fellow riders, irreplaceable every one.

  Why graduate school? She wonders this herself. It seemed either that, or go back to live with her parents, or get married. Imogen assumes she will be married someday because she wants children, sweet little ones, like the younger siblings she never had. And goddamnit she’ll have more than one, she won’t do to any child what her mother did to her. But that’s off in the future, on the far side of more achievement and more horses and years of freedom and traveling.

  On the last day in the dorm, her best friend of all, Mac, gives her a framed keepsake, a photo of Mac on rearing Baker Man. The stallion is nearly vertical, Mac poised and calmly smiling into the camera, heroic and in command. She has signed it, “To Imp, with love,” and scrawled across Baker Man’s chest a catchphrase from the Rubaiyat popular among the sisters working in the stables late into the night: “The idols I have loved so long . . .”

  * * *

  • • •

  Six months later Mac marries, with Imogen as her maid of honor.

  A year after that, Imogen marries and Mac returns the favor.

  1926–1996

  When Vernon worked at the Hanscom Field lab years later, Don and Mike would joke about the accident that burned his fingers. “I can see it perfectly,” Don would say, while Mike started laughing, and Don would put on a shit-eating grin, hide his eyes with one hand and stick the fingers of the other into an imaginary wall socket. Vernon would laugh, too. Don, Mike, and he were always popping into each other’s offices with a good joke they’d just heard. It kept the tedium of lab work and the inanities of dealing with the Air Force brass from killing them. The fingers haven’t hurt much for decades, but he has reduced sensitivity, especially in the middle finger, which lost its nail and half an inch of length. Women like to claim that nature spares them from remembering labor pain so they’ll go on to have more children, but that sounds like female mystification to Vernon. He considers it more likely that all pain is difficult to re-experience through recollection. He “remembers” it hurt like nothing else, but that’s just a word.

  He was in the Secondary Radio School at Navy Pier in Chicago, working to earn his EMT rating so he could ship out to the Pacific and get killed. In late May 1945 he was a week away from finishing the program, and they were conducting the umpteenth speed trial. He and three other seamen were lined up in front of identical units. When they started the timer you were supposed to switch off the power, take out the drawer, replace the faulty tube, put the drawer back in and switch the power back on. Vernon did all that, then noticed he’d slid the drawer in cockeyed, so he pulled it out to feed it in straight, only he’d forgotten to turn off the power again. These were your typical electronics racks with no bottom. His right-hand fingers slipped up inside the frame, the juice hit him, and as he convulsed, the heavy drawer settled farther down, frying the holy crap out of index, middle, and ring finger while maybe he screamed or maybe he just v
ibrated and grinned until someone thought to switch the power off.

  His hand was the biggest mess you ever saw, and for six weeks the Navy doctors pulled surviving skin around flesh and bone, dressed and undressed, cleaned and repeated, and during that time his unit shipped out. Some of his classmates saw action, a few were killed in his place. Once his fingers had more or less healed, it took the Navy the usual dog’s age to reassign him. All that time he stayed in the hospital up at Great Lakes, playing gin rummy with other grateful malingerers. They had just issued his new orders when the war ended.

  * * *

  • • •

  John Vernon Fuller—J. V. to his family and few acquaintances, Vernon to his wife and self—grew up in Durham, North Carolina. His mother was an agoraphobe, his older sister a dim bulb, and his younger brother fancied himself an artist whom the world unaccountably failed to appreciate. He loved his father, who endured the weight of them all in their underbuilt little house on First Avenue, just inside the city limits. Their front porch looked across scrubby fields and farmland. There were no other numbered avenues, as though, after taking the measure of this one, the planners had thought better of it.

  Dad sold life insurance from an oak desk in an office downtown for thirty years. Vernon and he shared a sense of humor, an interest in baseball teams and a love of playing catch, all of which his brother, Julian, lacked. Julian decided he was superior to that, and everything else besides. Dad didn’t understand him and maybe Julian felt rejected. He was closer to their mother, whose mind was vacant enough that she could wander in it freely, fearing accidents, decisions, ideas, plans, and changes of plans. She’d grown up as the assigned companion of a disabled sister who couldn’t even attend to her own toilet. She had never spent a moment alone, never gone to a dance or movie, never dated a man until she met Dad. Some of his mother’s neuroses young Vernon managed to forgive, but one of the many things she would not allow her children to do, on grounds of intolerable risk, was ride a bicycle. To this day, Vernon resents that. His father seemed never to lose patience with the old ninny, but would occasionally trade a glance and a wink with his older son.

  One night when Julian was in his late twenties—this must have been the summer of ’55—he telephoned their father from jail. He’d been caught in Wilmington soliciting sex from a sailor. Vernon rode buses all night down from the University of Chicago, where he was a graduate student, and witnessed how devastated his father was. Julian, out on Dad’s bail, stood shaving in the bathroom in the old house and had the gall to say to Vernon that the discovery was a relief. He even smirked, “You wouldn’t believe who else we know—”

  Vernon recoiled. Their father had aged a decade and here Julian was gloating, floating free, as always. “Julian,” he said, “what on earth makes you think I want to hear who you’ve fucked or been fucked by?”

  Vernon had to hurry again down from Chicago less than a year later, when his father died of a heart attack. Vernon has always wondered if Julian’s disgrace helped to kill him. He has also wondered if his father might have survived the attack if there had been someone around other than his worthless mother and his dimwitted sister to get the poor man to the hospital faster.

  * * *

  • • •

  Growing up, Vernon was at the top of all his classes. Later he said to his own son, Mark, when Mark was burning through high school, “I was always being told by one teacher or another, ‘You’re good at this, you ought to make a career of it.’ You can’t let that influence you. You can’t say to them, even if it’s true, ‘Hey, I’m an ace—I’m good at everything.’”

  Mark is even good at music, which Vernon isn’t. Mark must have gotten that from his mother. Vernon played sax in a high school jazz band, honking through big band numbers written out in simplified form. Improvising was way out of their league. He has a photo somewhere of his band playing at the senior prom. He’s sweating, sporting a pompadour that looks like a possum, leaning into his sax as though engaged in unrewarding work with a shovel.

  The mood at the prom was somber. It was June 1944, and most of the boys had an idea they might die soon. All those “best of lucks” written to him in his yearbook took on a deeper meaning. Only one classmate made a direct reference: “I hope you sink the entire Jap navy. Remember the fun we had in Itchy’s class?”

  Vernon had taken the Eddy Test in electronics that spring and received notice of passing in May. That allowed him, upon induction, to choose the Navy. His military strategy was to maximize the likelihood of his survival, and the Army looked like cannon fodder on the ground and clay pigeons in the air. He’d prefer to take his chances being a sitting duck. The Navy needed thousands of radio and radar technicians, but the technology was so new that few people had been trained in it. The course of instruction was long. After six weeks of boot camp at Great Lakes, there were four weeks of pre-radio school in Chicago, twelve of primary materiel school in Gulfport, and twenty-eight of secondary back in Chicago at Navy Pier. Vernon did the math. In fifty weeks the war just might be over. He accepted that it had to be fought, he understood society required him to be part of it. He would not shoot himself in the foot or—fuck you, Don and Mike!—deliberately stick his fingers in a high-voltage socket, but he assumed he was like most other people in preferring, on the whole, that somebody else die.

  As for his two years in the military, if you’d asked him pretty much at any point during it, he would have sworn he hated it. Obeying people who were by and large dumber than he was came hard. But his memories in later years have had a certain warmth. Maybe, as with physical pain, one remembers only the intensity of unpleasantness, and maybe intensity in retrospect just looks like being fully alive.

  At Navy Pier, Vernon and his classmates slept in triple-tiered bunks in a warehouse as large as an airplane hangar, with seagulls in the rafters that shat on the men in the top bunks. They would line up after breakfast and be marched in formation to class, marched back to lunch, marched back to class, marched to dinner. He had always been heavy, like his father, but now he slimmed down. A street photographer snapped a candid shot of him one Saturday night on a Chicago sidewalk, and he’s kept it for fifty years tucked into the glass door of his secretary at home. He’s in uniform, complete with Dixie cup hat, his ears sticking out like Andy Griffith, counting change in his palm. A person looking at the photo might think this lanky lantern-jawed sailor is heading off to a bar or a cat house. In fact, he was on his way to a sheet music store. He was a small-town boy, high school president of the Baptist Student Union, glad to be away from his mother. It was enough that Chicago was big and bustling, he didn’t need it to be sinful, too.

  In later years, when Susan or Mark asked for a song at bedtime, he would either give them “Asleep in the Deep” or the ditty he’d learned at the Pier to the tune of Mess Call:

  Soupee, soupee, soupee,

  without any bean!

  Bacon, bacon, bacon,

  without any lean!

  Coffee, coffee, coffee,

  without any cream!

  He hated every minute of it, but he kept his watch cap, his Dixie cup, his duffel bag; he kept his Bluejacket’s Manual and his Radar Fundamentals. In the Navy hospital, he read Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, traded jokes, played gin rummy, practiced the faro shuffle. His fingers healed and the Navy made him hurry up and wait. By that point it was clear the Japs weren’t going to give up until every square foot of their country was a smoking ruin. The fact that they wouldn’t face reality, that instead of surrendering now, they were going to make hundreds of thousands of people die, including his one and only self, and then surrender, made it pretty easy to hate their guts. His reassignment came through on August 5, so the banner headline across the front page of the Chicago Tribune on August 7 might as well have read Physics Miracle Saves J. V. Fuller.

  Retired and ill, listening to Beethoven in his study, looking back,
he wonders if his gratitude at being thus gratuitously handed his future explains his choice of career and, later, his stint at RAND. After the Navy discharged him in July of ’46, he heeded the urgings of his father and enrolled at Wake Forest College, near home, where he could be for a while longer the tender chick his clucking mother wanted. (He supposed that, as a woman who’d lost her son in the nation’s service every night for two years, she deserved it.) He majored in physics, then did graduate work in nuclear physics back in Chicago. Several members of the U of C faculty, like Fermi, had been part of the Manhattan Project, and they talked of Los Alamos like the Garden of Eden. Sure, at the end, they’d had to drop a couple of apple cores on a couple of Japanese cities, but bliss it was in that atomic dawn to be alive, and to be scaling the Tree of Knowledge was very heaven.

  After the war, the Air Force, wanting an institution similar to Los Alamos to continue working for it, dreamed up RAND—a safe little collegial place where scientists and analysts could have fun designing Armageddon weapons and strategies. Anyone working in nuclear physics at the University of Chicago in the 1950s heard a lot about that shining establishment by the sea. To some of the graduate students—the hawkish on the one hand, the naive and sentimental on the other—RAND looked like the Lord’s work. Vernon wasn’t hawkish, but he was still a small-town Southern Baptist who’d been saved by the Bomb. In the summer of 1956, diploma in hand and wife and daughter in tow—he’d gotten married five years previously—he signed on with RAND and moved to Santa Monica.