Evening Performance

by George Garrett

“She was right,” the farmer said. “You done the right thing to come and see us. There’s nothing to say, but you done right to come here and meet me face to face like a man.”

  The two men shook hands. When the Captain had finished drinking, the farmer took the dipper. He sloshed water around in it, splashed it on the ground, then dipped himself a drink. He sipped it and spoke to the Captain over the shiny edge of the dipper.

  “That boy,” he said. “I sure am going to miss him. He had a wild streak all right. No use pretending he didn’t. But, you know, he had a light heart and a light heart is a rare thing in this world. He could make you laugh with his tricks and jokes and all. We used to go hunting sometimes. He used to be good with a gun. I don’t see why he was afraid of a hand grenade. I don’t see why—”

  Quite suddenly the dipper slipped out of his fingers and fell with a splash. He seemed to sag on his feet. The Captain put his arm around his shoulders and held him while the farmer leaned against him and wept.

  It was over in a moment. He blew his nose and drank some more water. He hung the dipper back in its place.

  “I’m sorry to bust out like that,” the farmer said. “It’s a shame to have to watch a grown man crying.”

  “It’s not the first time I’ve seen a man cry,” the Captain said.

  “Pray God you don’t end up crying yourself.”

  The Captain walked back to his car. He went along slowly, taking his time. He loosened his necktie and opened his collar button. Near the stream he heard a rustling. It was the other boy. He grinned at the Captain. He was a very thin boy with a pale, pinched face, a face that was used to some dull steady pain. But except for that sense of pain, like a shadow cast on the face, and except for the game leg and the crutch, he was the image of his father.

  “What’s that thing?” the boy said, pointing to the shiny little parachute badge the Captain wore above his breast pocket.

  “It’s my jump badge,” the Captain said. “It means I’m a paratrooper.”

  “So was my brother. He was a paratrooper in the Army.”

  “Is that right?”

  “That’s how come he joined up. So he could jump out of an airplane. He told me so.”

  Jesus! the Captain thought. If he froze with a live grenade in his hand what the hell would have happened with him all hooked up and standing at the door of a moving airplane?

  “A lot of them join up so they can be paratroopers,” the Captain said.

  “Did you know my brother?”

  “A little.”

  “I wonder how come they didn’t send his badge home along with the rest of the stuff? I went through all the stuff they sent us and there wasn’t no badge like that.”

  “Maybe they made a mistake,” the Captain lied. “Sometimes they make a mistake like that.”

  “Maybe they lost it.”

  “Here, you take this one.” The Captain unpinned the parachute badge and handed it to him.

  “Can I keep it?”

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s yours.”

  He stood there for a moment watching the boy hobble away on the path, using his crutch well, moving along quick, holding the small badge carefully in the cupped palm of his free hand, looking at it. Then he turned back to the path.

  For some reason he remembered something that had happened to him quite a while ago. He was a young recruit himself then. The training company was about to move out on their first twenty-mile hike with full field equipment. He remembered standing in ranks with the gray dawn just beginning to come over the camp, hearing a radio playing in the lighted mess hall, thinking about the sun that would be coming on soon. It was going to be a scorcher. The steel helmet felt heavy on his head and the pack was already cutting into his shoulders. His feet in his boots felt small and detached. Small-boned and separate from the rest of him. Then on the Orderly Room steps the First Sergeant was standing in front of them looking them over. Hard, tough, with the face of a clean-shaven prophet. An articulate man who pronounced the message the Captain now lived by.

  “All right,” the Sergeant said. “When I tell you to, you going to pick up your feet and move out smartly. I don’t want to catch nobody worrying about when we going to get there. You ain’t got nothing to worry about. All you got to do is keep picking ’em up and putting ’em down.”

  MORE GEESE THAN SWANS

  THE FIRST PERSON to come and see us when we got back was Sam Browne. Good old Sam. It would be Sam, wouldn’t it? Weeks later, after we were all unpacked with everything safely back on shelves, in closets and cupboards and drawers, the whole place looking as if we had never really been away at all, the others would begin to call and come over to welcome us back to the college. Not Sam. He arrived the very first night as soon as he saw the car in the driveway and the lights on in the house. Our trunks were still unpacked, trunks and suitcases with the usual labels of sabbatical travel in Europe were clogging the hall. White dust covers still shrouded most of the furniture. We were exhausted and the children, equally exhausted, were sound asleep upstairs in their room.

  Sam would have waited until we got them safely to bed, partly out of his instinctive discretion, partly because he didn’t like children, little ones, at all.

  “Before it has reached a stage of decent articulation,” he used to say, “the human animal is a bore.”

  He rang the chiming bell in front and stood there grinning, holding a bottle of good bourbon behind his back in the classic pose of the bashful lover with candy or a bouquet of violets.

  “This house is not safe for habitation, not blessed,” he said. “You can’t sleep here until there have been proper libations and rites. I have here the essence of the corn.”

  So we cleared away a few dustcovers in the living room, threw them in a corner like a pile of forlorn ghosts, and drank his bourbon out of our thermos cups and talked. Sam, ever tactful, asked us a few of the usual questions, then with his customary agility vaulted the hurdle of our complete ignorance and plunged into the subject of all we had missed at the college while we were away.

  Sam can be a fine storyteller, given a certain kind of material. He can invest an anecdote, even a shabby one, with the magic cloak of myth or cosmic import. He can turn snatches of a brief conversation into a conspiracy. Seeing these things through his eyes can be a real pleasure. He’s a kind of magician, able to turn the simple grays of reality into black and white or, at his best, into fabulous technicolor. He always reminds me of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (the movie with Judy Garland) when she has just been suddenly deposited by the tornado into a beautiful, improbable, exotic, colorful scene.

  My wife doesn’t like Sam much. Oh, she enjoys him and is often amused by him, but she just doesn’t like him. Sam is a big man, ruddy from good food and drink and indestructible health, a very handsome man who has gone to seed and doesn’t mind it much. He is a bachelor and always will be, I guess, one of that special breed of bachelors who seem to thrive in the taut, little, insular world of the Academy, free to drink with fraternity boys or the undergraduate poets or be a fourth for bridge or a lastminute escort for somebody who wants to go to the Spring Faculty Dance. He is a good teacher. But even though this is his environment, the one soil in our society where he can bloom and does, he manages to remain somehow a kind of spectator, a detached and mildly amused observer of the scene. It would be vulgar, the original sin in his vocabulary, to permit himself to become involved in anything that goes on. Maybe that is what my wife doesn’t like about him, finally, his peculiar transcendence over us all.

  He told us who had married and who had died. He described in eloquent, mock-heroic terms the funeral of an old emeritus professor at which some very funny things involving two drunk gravediggers happened. He spoke of the birth of children, of failures and promotions, and of what happened when he had to introduce a well-known young poet who had come to give a reading of his poems.

  “The thing is,” Sam said, “the thing none of us knew is this—he stutters. H
e has a terrible stutter and he has to drink if he is going to talk at all. This particular evening he had indulged in a little too much fortification. When I introduced him, he rose, took one step, and fell flat on his face. All the students cheered and whistled—they loved it. When he began to read his poems the stutter was worse than ever. Then he fell down several times. What a catastrophe! Dean Marlowe nearly had an apoplectic stroke.”

  Sam chattered along aimlessly, and soon we were stifling yawns, not so much out of boredom as pure fatigue. Sam would notice something like that. A very well-controlled, well-squelched yawn would not escape him.

  “You people, you weary world travelers, will have to trot off to bed,” he said. “But I can’t send you off to bed with my blessings on your very first night home without at least mentioning the Story of the Year. You’ll be hearing about it again and again, to the point of tedium. But I do think you should have the Browne Version first.

  “The truth is,” he lowered his voice to a mock stage whisper, “we have had a scandal while you were away. A real scandal.”

  “Not a real scandal,” Mary said. “Tell us about it.”

  “Here of all places! As a matter of fact it is the place that makes all the difference. Any other place, in any other milieu, it would have been just another little tale of woe and folly. Because it happened here, it is almost raised to the level of high comedy.”

  “Don’t tease us,” I said.

  “Doubtless you will remember,” he began, “that when you left there was some loose talk about founding a College Madrigal Group. Well, we did it. Hardeman got it going in September. You can consider yourselves lucky you didn’t have to hear us. Naturally I joined to play the recorder. I really couldn’t miss out on a thing like that. Something amusing was bound to happen sooner or later. Well, the truth is, it was always amusing, rehearsing or performing. Something always went wonderfully wrong. There were fine, fierce clashes of temperament, sudden attacks of hoarseness, plenty of tears and feuds. I couldn’t have asked for a better way to wile away a few evenings. It was every bit as good as I had hoped. I tootled away on my recorder, Jane Strong plucked on a lute, and everyone la-la-laed and hey-nonynonnied. But, of course, I hadn’t anticipated that anything real could happen in our little nest of songbirds.

  “No doubt you still remember dear Susan Langdon?”

  “Bunny?” my wife said.

  “Alas, aptly named.”

  “Bunny, involved in a scandal?”

  “Please, I’m getting there.”

  “Let Sam tell the story.”

  “Susan Langdon, called Bunny, model wife of the chairman of our History Department, Bunny of the long dark hair, the lovely cameo complexion, full-bosomed, voluptuous Bunny like a great, soft, spoiled cat.”

  Mary tossed her head with laughter.

  “Who but Sam would ever describe Bunny that way?”

  “We have to try to see things through her eyes, as she saw herself. You’ll have to admit that she has always been amply proportioned and that she tended—I use the past tense advisedly—to favor exotic costumes, peasant blouses and full skirts, especially the Latin look.”

  “She dressed a little young,” Mary said.

  “She was young, young at heart anyway. We all saw her as you did, the faithful, respectable housewife, mother of three children, pourer of weak tea at the President’s reception. Her only folly was the way she dressed, as if she were just about to sing Carmen or something. None of us could see that truth for a woman is exactly in her costume. Truth is not nudity, but its disguises. Truth for a woman is all in appearances.

  “So the seven veils are the most important thing about Salome. So a woman is or becomes the perfume she selects to wear. Grant me that much as a working hypothesis anyway. I was as blindly naïve as anyone else. I saw Bunny in the conventional way. I never dreamed that any passion or discontent smoldered in that—I’ve already acknowledged it—significant bosom. Besides, she had such a sweet singing voice.

  “It all began, as they say, when we decided to ask some townspeople to join us. They had displayed some interest and we were short of voices, recorders, and funds. Believe me, the latter was the deciding factor. For the high, stated purpose of improved town and gown relations, and with the idea of a new source of dues in mind, we asked some people from town if they would like to join us. The response was gratifying. Among these was Ernest Cooley, Cooley of all unromantic names, the lawyer.”

  “Cooley! But he’s so young.”

  “Not so young, dear, but younger than Bunny.”

  “Come on, Sam, you can’t mean it.”

  “Let him tell the story, Mary.”

  “Cooley, a short, thin, handsome man, nervous, one with great ambition and energy. Successful already, president of the Jaycees, director of the United Fund Drive, member of the Planning Board, active in the PTA. A veritable Roman candle out there in Real Life. He, too, married. In this case to a delicious little blonde with the improbable name of—I swear it’s true—Queenie. A lovely unlikely triangle—Bunny, Queenie, Ernie—three babes in the woods.

  “It did not begin as a triangle, and, simple, trusting soul that I am, I never dreamed it would be one. I introduced them the first time Ernie came to rehearse with us. He had been doing some legal work for me, some of the endless shoring up I have to do because of the ghastly state of Mother’s will. Poor Mother! And it isn’t as if there were any money involved. Over the years with all the lawyers and such I imagine I have lost money, but then, I’ve never been good at figures. I trust in the Lord and the lawyers. But I digress.

  “I introduced Ernest Cooley to Bunny and I remember quite distinctly that no signals flashed between them. I remember being amused. They looked so incongruous, she in her heels was much taller than Ernie, taller and rounder. I remember thinking as they smiled and shook hands and said the usual things I had never noticed how thin and wan Cooley was. Alongside that lovely ripe peach he looked like a lime twig.

  “Nothing at all happened. He sang and she sang. I tootled. We all had a drink afterwards and drifted off our separate ways in the night. A few days later I happened to be in his office and he asked me casually about a few of the people, including Bunny. His tone was neutral, polite rather than interested. The name, Bunny, was just one of the others. Bunny did the same thing. I was having coffee with her in the Faculty Lounge while she was waiting for Everett to come along from a committee meeting. They were going to a cocktail party or something and I recall thinking how pretty she looked, all dressed up with everything just so. I don’t think I had ever seen her look so pretty. She asked me all about the people from town. I was the link, you see, the liaison man. Ernie was mentioned, but not seriously.

  “You can imagine how foolish I feel now. All that an aging bachelor has to call pride is his ability to make fine distinctions. I prided myself that I could tell the meaning behind the gesture. I was, of course, quite wrong. So let us say none of it was in vain. Like Job I have had the last stitch of my pride taken away, but I’ve learned that it isn’t as bad as all that to know one’s own inabilities. I was proud then and thought nothing of it.

  “I was a long time learning. When the First Incident occurred I missed the point completely. We had been giving a little concert in the Parish House at St. Luke’s. During the concert a few things, just the ordinary amateurish things, went wrong. They always did. After the concert Ernie Cooley was in a state, a rage. He was especially furious with Bunny, who, it seems had done something or other that made him feel foolish. He berated her unmercifully. Poor Bunny burst into tears. She couldn’t understand what he was talking about at all. The curious thing, though, was the way that she stood there and let him carry on. He stormed out of the Parish House and I had to comfort her. Later on he came back, apologized to everybody, and took Bunny and me out to a little bar in the country for a nightcap to patch everything.

  “Bunny called me the next day, puzzled, and I explained to her that Ernie was a bundle of
nerves and temperament and that she shouldn’t take him seriously. She said she understood that, but that after all was said and done his bad manners were inexcusable.

  “Things went merrily along. Ernie Cooley grew a little beard. I thought it was rather odd at the time, but probably some kind of defense mechanism against us. Ernie likes to be a chief in any group and it was a little awkward for the townies, mixing with the inbred academics. People started to tease him about his beard and how it was growing. He usually laughed and matched quips and insults with them. Bunny only teased him about his beard once. Quite by chance and in the spirit of things, she made some comment. To everybody’s surprise it hurt his feelings. He turned on her.

  “ ‘What’s wrong with my beard? If there is anything wrong with it, if you don’t like it, just say so. Don’t needle me about it.’

  “Bunny had no recourse but to turn away from him. I saw a little film of tears in her eyes and might have wondered about that, but I assumed it was merely her hurt feelings and the memory of the other time that bothered her. Over and done with as soon as it had begun. Afterwards everybody seemed very amiable and happy.

  “Then came the picnic. Spring, time of the cuckoo and the turtledove. April, the cruelest month. The Madrigal Group had become very chummy by this time, folksy would be the word. We had even taken to wearing pseudo-Elizabethan costume for our concerts. (You can imagine how that was. I’m not at my best in Elizabethan costume.) We decided we had to have a picnic. Not the hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches kind of thing by any means. I held out and won my point for a really nineteenth-century kind of show, good food, good wine, under the trees, and not at an ordinary place. We finally picked Indian Springs. Maybe you know it? The forlorn ghost of a watering place about thirty miles from here. Very Gothic, a spring bubbling out of a rocky grotto, the ruins of an old hotel blending into the woods, shreds of an elegant bathhouse and pavilions. No doubt you people were basking in the sun at Positano or some such, but for us stay-at-homes Indian Springs seemed like a real adventure.