Disturbances in the Field

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “Wait.” I grabbed his arm. “I know you’re shocked. But please, will you please not just grunt and leave, okay? It gets me very upset.”

  “I have a lot of homework. I have a chemistry test tomorrow.” He turned away, tilting his jaw like Victor. In the adamant profile was a retraction of all the evenings they had spent talking together behind his closed door, one voice aggrieved, the other tempered with limitless, loving patience.

  “Phil!”

  “I could get a job or something after school. Can you manage by yourself?”

  “It’s not like that! He’s not deserting you. Just sit down awhile, all right? Finish your coffee.”

  “I’m finished.” He left the room.

  “I always thought you two had a fairly good relationship,” Althea said. “I realize there’s been a lot of stress. But still, it would seem to me that at this point he’d want to keep the stable elements in his life.” She lit a cigarette, bending her head over the flame on the stove. Your hair! Watch the hair that easily ignites!

  “I wish you wouldn’t smoke, Althea. This is the third night this week I’ve seen you smoking. Do you want to ruin your lungs?”

  “I don’t have an addictive personality. I can smoke when I choose and not smoke when I choose. Don’t you do the same? Anyhow, this seems to me very illogical on his part. It’s probably related to a mid-life crisis, in addition to everything else—he’s at that age. But I would think that being so committed to his work, he wouldn’t feel the same lack of …”

  On and on, like a TV documentary. The unexamined life is not worth living, Victor believed, and yet he needn’t have toiled. Teenaged children are only too glad to examine it for you. Finally I said, “I might as well tell you, since you say I should talk to you like a woman, you smoke and everything. … He has a … a lady friend.”

  She started coughing, not a very proficient smoker. “You mean like a younger woman?”

  “As a matter of fact, no. An older woman. Slightly older.”

  A long pause. “A mother figure,” Althea said.

  “Oh, come on. She’s not old enough to be his mother. I don’t know if he’ll mention that, but … well, you’re not a baby any more.”

  The hands of the self-possessed Althea began to shake. She prowled around the kitchen, puffing. “I don’t … uh … maybe I shouldn’t go away to college. I don’t want to leave you all alone.” For two years she had dreamed of going to Middlebury to study languages, an excellent choice—she has a verbal soul.

  “Oh no! You’re going no matter what. Besides, he’s not exactly out of my life, you know. It doesn’t happen like that. And Phil is here.”

  “Phil! What use is he? He hardly even speaks. Living with him you might just as well be alone.”

  “He is not here for my use, and I don’t like hearing you talk that way about him. It’s not right.”

  “It’s true, though.”

  “It seems true on the surface. It’s not really true. But even if it were, does the truth, what you think is the truth, need to be blurted out all the time?”

  “Yes.” We have discussed this before. She believes that any truth justifies its own utterance. Moreover, she claims it is her nature to speak the truth, like Cassandra. Woe to any who heed not. If I urge diplomacy in the exercise of her powers I am trying to stifle or change her personality, which is a crime. She will never change, she says proudly. She will be this way for life.

  “You of all people should understand. You’re close to his age. You know the kinds of things he’s going through. Besides—” My eyes measured the large empty kitchen.

  “It’s precisely because I do know. Why does he have to repress it all? He should learn to express his needs—then he might get some of them satisfied.” She grinned but quickly composed her face. “He also might be a little more sensitive to the needs of those around him.”

  “Oh, stop sounding like a social worker. What he needs is a little patience from those around him.”

  “He’s just acting out, Mother.”

  “Acting out?” I smiled. “Who isn’t? Look at your father.”

  “I am not.” She stubbed out the cigarette righteously. “I’m a reasonable person. I try to be governed by reason. I don’t see why other people can’t do the same.”

  “I wish you luck. Now would you help me clear the table?”

  “Sure.” Always willing and able. An oldest daughter, she sees responsibilities everywhere. And a true communal spirit, too—not one shirking cell in Althea. So when she speaks so ungenerously, I remind myself she is the most generous nature of them all, though she might not wish that particular distinction. Someday she may even allow herself some tolerance for human frailty, and then what an excellent person she will be.

  “Will you look at that!” The sharp voice, the cutting consonants. “He left his plate, his glass, his dirty napkin, everything. Does he think we’re servants, to clean up after him? If I were you I would call him back and make him clean that up.”

  “Oh, Althea, one plate more, what’s the difference? I’ll do it.”

  “It’s the principle. No, get away from the sink. I’ll do the dishes.”

  “Don’t you have homework?”

  “It’s all right,” she said with impatience. “I’ll do them. You’ve done them the past two nights. Go on, go on, out. Practice. Read. Do something,” she ordered, so I obediently turned to go.

  “Mom? Will he still come to my graduation?”

  Should I go and put my arms around her or leave her dignity be? Leave her. “Of course he’ll come. What are you thinking of? We’ll come together.” I did go over after all. “Althea …”

  She shook her head, scrubbed the dish hard, and shuddered me off. “It’s all right. Go.”

  Victor phoned every evening except that first, but Phil would not go to the phone. In two days, Saturday, when Victor comes over to see them, Phil is planning to be out, as I am. If he ever marries this Montessori teacher I shall appear at the wedding like the bad fairy, like Clyde’s ex-wife Floral, and when they ask if anyone knows any reason why this pair should not be joined in holy matrimony I will stand up and shout, Yes, yes, because he walked out on his two remaining children, grieving children, and waited thirty-six hours to explain. Never mind me—I would have left me too, believe me I wish I could have, I was intolerable—but those children, whose eyes have never been the same … The formative years, I shall tell the assembled well-wishers, are never over.

  I get up from the floor and replace the telephone (which I still imagine to contain the voice of Miss Fosdick, like those toy phones that speak when you lift the receiver), turn over the “Trout” recording, and curl back in my chair with the coloring book and Crayolas. I think I’ll do the knights gathering for their tournament. I can give the six horses all the glossy horsey colors I recall from my race-track days with Nina. As I hold Burnished Gold poised above the page, the delectable fourth movement of the “Trout” begins, the theme and variations using the melody from that silly song about the fish: the ascending fourth, then third; the descending third, then fourth—the way up and the way down, syncopated and then even, making audible the idea of the teasingly indecisive, the reversible, the ambiguous. The crooked and the straight in dialogue, and finally in truce. The late Hephzibah, here immortalized, enters with supreme self-possession, with a controlled sweetness that never droops into sentimentality but instead has lightness and subtlety. One instrument after the other plays in turn with this delicious theme. What was first stated so simply they twist and invert, embellish, tickle, unravel and ravel again; they virtually torture that single sweet and faintly melancholy theme. They are so dazzling that I am drawn in, lifted away, and unraveled myself; unknotted, allowing the variations to be played in me and through me. It is almost like before. I almost forget. Something demonic still wants me to color the horses. Become a dribbling idiot, let’s see how far into idiocy you can go. But I won’t. I strain to hang on to the theme. For the truth
is, I’m not so young any more, I can’t afford to play games with coloring books. And I’m not ready to go yet, to forget these griefs in death; this organism insists on dying in its own time and in its own way, not when some chance angler throws down a trap. Which is to say, it insists on living. In any old way.

  For the first time in my apartment, Bobby starts to cry. Those small half-whimpers to begin with, then bigger gasps, rattling breaths, till he has worked up to the standard infant howl. I can’t see him from my chair but can well imagine the red face and round open toothless mouth, the fists battering air. Alone with a howling infant, to the brash, assertive last movement of the “Trout,” I grow cold. So cold I shiver. Outside, the raining sky is the color of dusty pewter. Across the room the carriage shakes eerily. I go over. He rolls his head back and forth, catches sight of me and pauses for half a second, then resumes howling. I get very hot. I don’t feel sorry for him, a mere red blot on the pillow, but I need that terrible noise, that noise as much a part of me as my own name, to stop! How? My past has been scraped off me with a knife; I can’t summon up how. I jiggle the plastic toy dangling from the hood of the carriage. Not the way. His howls keep filling my empty house like clouds of smoke. I reach down and touch his cheek with a finger. Spit slides out the corners of his mouth. I open my hand and slowly lower it like a wrecking ball, till it rests lightly on his face, then spread the hand wide so the sound comes through the lattice of fingers. The hand is large, veined and articulated, the fingers stretched beyond their natural potential, a hand with a use. The fingers rest on his forehead and temples, the heel of the hand at his chin, and I imagine pressing down, hard. For an instant it seems I will do it. Then I race back to my chair to huddle deep, hugging my knees to my chest, squeezing and punishing the murderous wet right hand.

  A key in the door. Hide the coloring book and crayons under the cushion and huddle up again.

  “Hi.” Phil tosses his book bag onto the floor. “What’s wrong with him?”

  I frown.

  “Shouldn’t you pick him up or something?” Pushing six feet, he stands slumped, yet his boy’s body is tight under the corduroy pants and baggy sweatshirt. His hair is damp. His hands seem tense and chapped. “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “Mm-hm.” What with the final jubilant bars of the “Trout” and the howls, my silence and Phil’s tangled presence, the room is oppressive, crammed to bursting. Phil casts me an odd, reproachful look, takes off his sweatshirt, and reaches into the carriage with his long gangly arms. He holds Bobby on his shoulder in the correct position, and as he paces, gently patting the baby’s back, the howls diminish. Phil pauses to stare out the wide front windows at the park and the river. In a moment the record stops, all is quiet. He looks at the baby with a kind, amused gaze I haven’t seen on his face in months. He touches Bobby’s chin and cheeks, pinches his plump feet, and makes shy cooing noises at him. Then Phil looks at me and grins. He actually smiles! When the doorbell rings I jump up. “I’ll get it.”

  “I’m sorry it took longer than I thought,” Patricia says. “There was such a crowd at the butcher’s. I should have asked you if you wanted any meat. Did you?”

  “No, I shopped before.”

  Phil brings the baby out into the hall. Bobby is happy to see his mother—he smiles and vaults his body into her arms. I guess he is not brain-damaged after all.

  “How was school?” I ask when they’ve gone. His smile is gone too.

  “Okay.”

  I follow him, limping, to the kitchen, where he opens the refrigerator and regards its contents with the obscurely dissatisfied air he has perfected.

  “We have some good apples. Also banana bread. Or would you like some hot chocolate? It’s raining so hard—you must be chilly.”

  “I’m not hungry.” He lets the door swing shut and takes a glass of water. He is once more armored, and the scene painted on his armor is resentment of the world. For the moment I represent the world. It is quite some time since I have heard his natural tone of voice, which was rich and combative. He is withholding his voice, himself, all but his body, from this house. As I watch him drink the water, with head back and eyes half-shut, I grow angry. I feel exactly as Althea does: living with him I might as well be alone. “Phil,” I say sharply. “I think you might speak to me when you come home. Just a few civil words would do. We’re still a family. And to Althea when you see her. And—” I stop to soften my tone. “I’d like you to speak to your father when he calls.”

  “But if I have nothing to say to him …”

  “Yes you do. You can tell him you’re furious with him.”

  “He must have figured that out for himself.”

  “Come on now. Not speaking is so silly.”

  “Can I go to Boston in two weeks with Henry for the weekend? There’s a Bruce Springsteen concert. His father got tickets and is driving us there and back and we’ll sleep in his uncle’s basement.”

  I see the future—Cassandra! More and more time away, and soon he won’t feel he needs to ask. Two weeks: that will leave Althea and me. “I guess so.” I must arrange something to fill the space, though. The best one for this job is Esther. Tomorrow I will call her in Washington and request my semiannual visit, long overdue.

  Phil retires to his bedroom and I to mine, with one of the thick-skinned expensive oranges I bought at the Korean store earlier, plucking as I go a paper napkin from the blue napkin holder made two years ago by, I think, Alan. It is five-thirty. I change into old clothes, and for a most indulgent treat, turn on the TV to The Electric Company, but not too loud, so Phil won’t hear. I’ve missed it. They had all outgrown it except Vivian, who happily shared certain of my regressive tastes. This last December, her last December, she was shut in with a cold and bored. I came home to find her stretched out on our old bed, her fine hair in braids and decorated with a tiara of Woolworth’s pearls. Wearing my blue velours robe with high-heeled shoes, as well as lipstick, iridescent eye shadow, and several ropes of beads, she raptly watched Jennifer of the Jungle swing from tree to tree in a leopard-skin costume while below an entourage sang, “Who looks so fine hanging on any vine? Jennifer of the Jungle. Who brings a smile to every Nile crocodile … I stretched out beside her, tucking her under my arm like a baby. She smelled sweet and chocolaty and was warm with fever. When Jennifer was over I tapped her lightly on the chin and teased, “I think you may be getting too old for this.” “So are you,” she replied.

  Well, just for old times’ sake—I wonder, do they still do Jennifer of the Jungle? Fargo North, Decoder? Your Rich Uncle Died and Left You All His … ? Starts with an M. Marshmallows? Yes indeed they do. And here comes Vivian’s and my favorite: “Punctuation.” Rita Moreno sings in a heavy Spanish accent, “Now a period is just a little dot, But it occupies a very special spot,” and Victor Borge intersperses popping and slurping mouth noises to illustrate the period, the question mark, the comma, and his piece de resistance, the exclamation point. How on earth does he do that, she used to marvel.

  When I’m done eating the quartered orange I start on the rinds, a slow process with small bites, since the rinds are so acidic. To Althea this habit verges on the disgusting; to Althea many innocuous things verge on the disgusting—they need only be things she has no inclination to do. “That’s no great accomplishment,” she once said in irritation. “Watch this.” She cut a lemon in quarters and sucked one quarter dry without wincing, though tears rolled down her cheeks. “Very good, Althea. That is an accomplishment. But I happen to like the orange peels. I was eating them long before you were born. I’m not trying to prove anything.” Vivian would stick up for me. Like Voltaire, she did not share my taste for orange peels but would defend to the death my right to eat them, and did.

  After “Punctuation,” the Electric Company kids sing “Hard, Hard, Hard,” to demonstrate the “ar” sound, as I start on another stinging peel. “Oh yes, it’s hard, hard, hard, Nothing’s easy in this life, you see.” The song has barely begun when
the telephone at my bedside rings. Rosalie, her hello as exuberant and breathy as if she has won a race. Who would ever suspect she is at her best in the plangent, exalted Andantes of Beethoven and Brahms?

  “So, have you made up your mind?”

  “Not yet. I listened to Hephzibah Menuhin do it this afternoon.”

  “And?”

  “Well, it’s a big job.”

  “Yes, that’s what we need. Enough of this futzing around.”

  “Mozart is futzing around?”

  “You know what I mean. We need something with a broader line. For this concert anyway—we need to show some range. Maybe one of the Brahms. Faure. We have to work it out with Jasper very soon.”

  “I’d rather do something by Telemann.”

  “Playing it safe, aren’t you? Listen, I understand about the Romantics, but really, Lydia—”

  “All right, all right.” She knows me too well. That music demands something different. Not simply emotion, as my floundering student would call it, but a consciousness of its infinite span. A certain expectant, welcoming embrace extended to emotion, in all its possible variations and modulations. To perform them with willing hands.

  “Anyhow, you’ve done the ‘Trout’ before, you told me. Haven’t you?”

  “Years ago.”

  “Well, then it should be easy. What is that awful noise?”

  (“Oh yes, it’s hard, hard, hard, If it’s good then you can bet it isn’t free”—they sound like a hard rock group, something Rosalie loathes.)

  “Nothing. The TV. Hold on, I’ll turn it down Rosalie, did you know they’re using the fourth movement of the ‘Trout’ in wine commercials? I heard it on WNCN yesterday.”

  “So what?”

  “Maybe it’s becoming trite.”

  “What do we care about wine commercials? You know very well it’s not trite. For a pianist you can’t do much better. It has everything.”

  “I know, but … I had this strange time listening to it. I could hear all the separate parts but they wouldn’t come together in my ear. I couldn’t get the mix right.”