Some kind of a clown, that’s what Henry Monk was, always had been, and, everyone reasonably supposed, always would be. It was his vocation. He was like a grotesque dwarf, thick-torsoed, powerful-shouldered as big men twice his size with long loose arms dangling down and ending in huge, hopelessly awkward hands—they seemed to move, to live without coherence or even much relation to each other or the rest of him. Like wounded birds or a couple of fish on a string. He had a dented cannonball of a head with short curly hair clinging to it like some kind of fungus, squint eyes, red-rimmed and muddy, forever blinking, his lashes fluttering like the quick wings of insects. His lips were pouting, nearly colorless, and formed in bold exaggerated curves like those trick ones made out of wax that people put on for a joke. And his nose was peaked and warped and broken. Legs? They were incredibly short and thin and frail. Bowed, rickety, like bent pipes, they seemed incapable of sustaining the weight and bulk of the man above them.
When you looked at Henry Monk, you had to laugh. You were supposed to laugh. And all through the green years of growing up it seemed clear enough that Henry had not only borne this and fully played his given role—slapstick comic—in the strict unyielding pattern of the town, but he had seemed to relish it, to find some form of joy or at least security in being, like an ugly mongrel pup, the occasion of jokes, the source of crude comment and speculation, and, too, the somehow beholden receiver of the town’s tousling, condescending, rough and curious affection. All that happened quite a while ago, way before the War. When the War came along and Henry went to it, there was only general amusement that he thought he could be a soldier and some amazement that one way or another he passed the physical examination and was taken.
“Hell, all they want nowadays is bodies. They lay hands on you to see if you’re still warm. If you are, they get a couple of doctors to look through you at both ends, both at the same time, and if they can’t see enough to wink at each other, well, old buddy, you ain’t nothing but a soldier boy.”
“Maybe they’re planning to use Henry for some kind of exper-i-ment.”
So they laughed about it, and with bare country wit Henry was fixed in their chronicles; and then they forgot about him. Later, when they heard how he got a medal for some brave, unlikely thing done in a far-off, foreign land, they felt neither surprised nor cheated on their expectations of him.
“Henry, he’s the kind that just don’t know no better.”
“What do he have to lose, anyway?”
“Most anything that happened to him would be in the nature of a im-prove-ment.”
That he stayed in the Army afterwards to make a sort of a life out of soldiering caused at most a brisk shrug. He wouldn’t be coming back. Well, what of it? There had been, and then only briefly, an empty place like a missing tooth. But, God knows, there were and always will be, world without end, amen, plenty of others to take his place—the strange, the weak, the drunk, the over- and undersexed, the feebleminded, the diseased, dwarfed, deformed, and dispossessed—to be offered up in propitiation, in true and perfect sacrifice, so that the safe, the sane, the whole might preserve at least some fragile notion of their self-esteem and human dignity.
Here then, after more than ten years, he was among them again, like the ghost of himself, and bringing with him a wife, a wife from Germany. Strangely, it was Ilse that the women hated. It was not just, not only that she was foreign. Even the perfect stranger has an allotted place here. It wasn’t, either, because she was beautiful. There had always been young girls among them who bloomed, brief and mysterious, in roundness, softness, theatrical color, in rich hazy languorous desirability like peaches or, better, like some rare tropical plant or fruit, heard of from envied travelers, read about in a magazine or storybook once, seen in a picture show. There were always the older women of the tribe, those who themselves had possessed beauty once before the rigors of childbearing and raising, the long slow weathering of hard work, and, at last, the limp slack knowledge not of the years, but of the pure monotony at the secret heart of things, waved over them like a magic wand turning them wholly from splendid princesses to sharp-tongued stepsisters, from swans to ugly ducklings once again. These were the ones who knew too well how beauty fades and what a long time there is to live afterwards, gnawing the memory of its haunting visitation like a bitch with a sour bone. They could have tolerated even her pitiful vanities, her fancy clothes, her high head, gold hair shining, as she passed right by them without any sign of recognition. They knew already, with a brutal disinterest, discovering, like a sudden, deep-thrust wound, that she was old, old, old. In the beginning it was not these things that turned them against her. Or certainly not these things alone.
It was Henry. It was that she was Henry’s wife. If Henry must marry at all, it was right, it was only natural, that he should choose one of his own kind, a girl clubfooted, crippled, cross-eyed, even crazy. Then together they could breed a whole family of genetic clowns. But this marriage asserted at least the possibility that he was in an obscure unguessed way a worthy man for any woman, even, maybe, for any one of them. Either it placed him on an equal status with their husbands, or, more urgent, more dreadful to contemplate, hauled down those husbands to his. Men, essentially brutes and beasts, of course, but good men and true still, could ogle her coming and going all they pleased, or, dozing after a big meal, drinking or dreaming, could summon up the swift incommunicable images of ecstasy, involving always and dependent on the myth of her imaginary naked perfection. Contemplating such a horn of plenty, they could whisper among themselves, joke, guffaw, or, for that matter, even speculate seriously, savoring it all they wanted to with vague lewd words on their tongues like raw oysters. That could be expected, countenanced, even encouraged; for that, after all, was to the eternal female consciousness at once a sly joke on the males and a bit in their teeth. But that they, husbands or lovers, should end up by having to envy Henry Monk…! What became of your human dignity then? What happened if, instead of being a jest that some dark god spat into the dust and raised up to walk on two legs like a man, Henry became a creature secretly, mysteriously possessed of divinity, like one of God’s chosen fools? Then the ugliness, deformity, bestiality—for beast he was—became things not for shame but for pride of any man, husband or lover, things they could strut for sharing. Then your human dignity, naked, dropped down on all fours and howled like a dog in heat.
And so it came to pass that when Ilse descended from the train and stood for one moment in the sun, wavering on those ridiculous heels, surveying the town with its clump of houses and small buildings like carelessly thrown-away cracker boxes, its dusty trees with leaves as limp as soiled money, its flags of washing on clotheslines signaling labor, monotony, and all the dreary sighs of lost and unfulfilled (not forgotten) desires, they (only faces then, pressed into gridded moons against the window screens) saw themselves for that instant wounded in her stranger’s eyes, and since she was Henry’s wife, they had to hate her from that time on.
“What on earth do you suppose she sees in him?”
“I wouldn’t have the first idea. I’d hate to think about it.”
“Of course, now, most of these foreign girls are just looking for a way to get to the U.S.”
“There’s plenty of soldiers to pick from. I mean it seems kind of crazy to single out somebody like Henry Monk.”
“Oh, she’s pretty, I’ll say that for her. But if you get up close enough to her, you can see she wears a whole lot of makeup to hide the little lines around her eyes and on her neck.”
“I never stood that close to her. I hardly ever see her, except once in a while at the store or in church.”
“Who has, except by accident? I mean she’s kind of distant, standoffish, don’t you know?”
“I’ll tell the world she don’t look wore down and wore out, though. She looks as fresh as a young girl to me.”
“It’s the work, hard work and the cares of this world that wears you down, honey child. The lifting and be
nding and scrubbing and worrying, that’s our cross to bear. She don’t trouble much about that kind of thing. Did you know that Henry’s the one that cleans house?”
“I wonder what she did before she met up with Henry?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I know he couldn’t have very much, but she must have some money from some place to own all those nice clothes and things.”
“I can just about imagine the kind of work she done before she got ahold of Henry. Some folks call it play, even if you do get paid for it.”
The months of the first summer bled away, and the leaves paled and fell from the shedding trees like old wishes, were raked up into piles and transformed in gray shafts of smoke to dance briefly like genies released from magic lamps or bottles, or like some wild tongueless ghosts. And all that time, over fences, on back porches, over cool jelly glasses of buttermilk or lemonade or iced tea, in living rooms while sewing machines whirred like a field of locusts, while knitting needles clicked like cruel shears, gossip whirled around their unwitting heads like a cloud of insects around a light bulb. They couldn’t have dreamed their names so much on everyone’s tongue. The season changed under and around them, but they might as well have been on some remote seasonless island for all they knew of the climate, or the weather, or anyone else for that matter.
Henry worked at the garage and they lived in his family’s (all dead now, gone to glory) little old house. The Army had someway taught him to calm his hands and use them well with tools. Ilse stayed at home, wandered about vaguely in her wrapper all day long—for there were those who watched, keen-eyed, to see what she might or might not be doing, what she might or might not be wearing—playing the radio softly, watching the game shows on TV, drinking coffee and eating rich little cakes and cookies someone sent her regular as rain from Germany (who could picture her baking?) and shuffling the pages of the fashion magazines Henry brought home by the armload from the drugstore, shuffling the pages with a blurred speed like a deck of cards, then throwing them aside. Henry had little to say nowadays to the men who came to the garage or just loafed there. He did whatever work he had to do steadily, efficiently, and without complaining about anything, as if it didn’t really matter what it was he was doing with himself and his time to make a living. Promptly when the five o’clock siren shrieked from the Volunteer Fire Station, he stopped whatever he was doing, packed his tools away, picked up his tin lunch pail, and started walking home like a shambling sleepwalker, passing known men, women, children without so much as a flicker of recognition on his face to prove he knew they were there. It wouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone who saw him then, if he had simply walked through a house, a building, a tree, a parked car, any obstacle in his way that at least they believed in, just like you sometimes see in the movies. So, blindly he went home, stopping only occasionally at the drugstore to buy one copy of every picture magazine on the flowing rack, magnetized, hypnotized; and at his house he’d turn a sharp corner, a military corner, and without breaking the same restless pace move up the path splitting the now shaggy and weed-happy lawn (“Ain’t it a crying shame the way he lets that old place just go to pieces?”), open the door, slam it, and lock it tight behind him. Then, seeming to happen all at the same time, in deft improbable furious simultaneity, all the yellow window shades came down and the radio was turned up full blast like the brass bands of doomsday over the aghast reverberating neighborhood houses.
“I expect you can about imagine what it’s like for us, living right next door to them.”
“Well, it’s one thing to imagine something, and another to be right there with the radio booming and all.”
“Thank the Lord for that radio! Think of the sounds it spares our ears.”
“Have you heard them, really?”
“John has. You know how he is. Like a naughty little boy. Once in a while he tiptoes over there and puts his ear to the wall and listens.”
“Men!”
“Oh well, that’s just the way they are. There’s no changing them.”
“You can say that again.”
“Do you know what John heard him call her one time when they were together like that? John says Henry called her ‘my pretty birdie, pretty birdie in my cage.’ ”
“Would you believe it!”
Now this is a part of the strange truth about these two, these two lost ones, this beauty and this beast. Ilse has never been able to master more than a few words of English. It’s no more translatable than birdsong to her. She has never learned to read much even in her own language. She has the mind of a young child. And who is Henry to teach her, anyway? All his life he’s lived without knowing much of the brittle puzzling buzz and signal of words, inhabiting, instead, a dreamy place where images and feelings, even the vaguest of sensations, flicker with unheard-of swiftness like the first named birds of Paradise. And seldom these things coalesce, fall or fit into patterns like pictures or puzzles; and even when they do, they fly apart, fall to pieces because this world goes by so quick. He is one for whom reality is forever fluid, molten. And curiously, considering what the town thinks of him and what it has done to him, he’s owned still by a kind of eyeless innocence that could convert even a sponge of vinegar into something sweet and inexpressible as the juice of a plum on the tongue. Besides, when he speaks, his tongue trips over words like a pratfalling clown. So he keeps quiet. Ilse, for all her sculptured conventional beauty and all her pretty clothes, is, or was anyway, as inwardly deformed as he is outwardly. She was stupid and bitter, brimming with hate. He sensed this right away, the first man to know it, when he stumbled upstairs with her to her room in Munich, when she was still a whore and any man, even one like Henry, could dare, could try and find out who she really was for a price. This knowledge of the truth of her lay between them like a shining blade for a long time, but now Henry has converted her and when they are together the flesh speaks for both of them and the grappling of love is joy. Why then have they come here? It’s Ilse’s idea to return to the place of his first wounds and try to heal them. And Henry’s vision of this world is too complex to allow for something so dangerously simple as a rational malice or perverse jealousy. It would never occur to him that anyone would envy him, just as he’d never imagine that his wife’s shy stupidity, bafflement, her wounds and weakness, so lightly disguised in wiles of languor and vanity, are not at once apparent to any observant beholder.
The winter settled in. The sky was a splash of dirty water. The days were shorter and needled by chilling rains. The trees shivered, some of them as nude as picked bones. Dogs huddled by fireplaces, slept close to the ashes and fading embers and dreamed, gold-eyed, while late, late, the passing freight trains cried out into the frosty night the names of places, towns and landscapes and climates, no one here except perhaps a few hopeful children ever dreamed of seeing or would see. Grumbling, uttering, sometimes calling out, husbands and wives in chilly sheets, cold flank to flank, slept the troubled sleep of the dead.
Toward the end of the gray season the words of the women had a cutting edge.
“Why did Henry Monk ever have to come back here?”
“He used to be such a nice boy, funny-like. He could make you laugh.”
“He ain’t funny anymore.”
“Maybe he just came back here to show off his fancy wife.”
“If that’s so, why does he keep her shut up so tight in the house.”
“Thank the Lord the last of his kin have gone to glory!”
“Pity his poor old mama if she’d had to live to see what become of her boy.”
“It’s the wife that changed him. You can bet on that.”
“I wonder what their children will look like—him or her?”
“Who said anything about children?”
“She’s not the type. Having kids is hard on the figure.”
Spring came like a fierce beast, clawed at the frozen earth and turned up a nest of buried treasures and desires. Everywhere wildflowers
spread like a rash, a plague. The trees were on fire with new leaves and blossoming, and bird songs rang in the air like dropped coins. Wind came from the south, through the dense, pine-dazed woods, over the river where the fish sometimes flashed and glittered like surgical blades in the fresh sun. Those winds were like new wines. Even the sky tugged at its breezy moorings like a gas balloon. Transformed, blood and sap, in bush and flesh, rose and burned together. Flesh rode hard on spirit like a cruel horseman. March was a tidal wave. By the middle of April the town was wholly submerged. And now they stumbled like divers in vague green precincts of the deep sea. And they drowned.…
Every year at just about this time there was a picnic. All the little town, everyone who was able, left in a procession to go over the roads and through the pinewoods to a quiet cleared place by the river. That was a day for you! All day the men played games and fished and, furtively, drank, and the women cooked and prepared huge tables of food. Before that evening meal was served it was the custom for the women to leave together to bathe in the river. Then, after the numbing satiety of the meal, late at night just this once a year, there was dancing—lovemaking and fighting in the shadows—and there were fireworks, the wild antic arcs of skyrockets bursting overhead in incandescent perfect stars as if all the least and lost wishes of the heart were new and known again for once and all, and to be had for the asking. Now even a preacher would turn up a bottle and dance like the devil was pinching his joints and bones. There was always time enough for regret later.
“Do you think they’ll come too?”
“Who?”
“Henry and the German woman.”
“Not liable to.”
“Maybe we ought to call on her and invite her.”
Evening Performance Page 33
