Old Men at Midnight

by Chaim Potok

  He turned to the epigraph in the front of the book.

  There was nobody left who had not experienced more misfortunes in four or five years than could be depicted in a century by literature’s most famous novelists: it was necessary to call upon hell to arouse interest.

  The words were the Marquis de Sade’s.

  He sat reading.

  Strange stories. Many situated on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Old World men with threadbare dreams entering the fearful midnight of their lives. Elegant pre–World War I apartments, tall ceilings, paneled rooms, dark-wood tables, upholstered couches, tasseled lamps. In the first story, “A Rainbow Costs 50 Cents Extra,” an elderly man orders a birthday cake from a bakery for his dying wife, and is infuriated by an unexpected fifty-cent-extra charge for the decorative rainbow he has requested to be added to the icing as a symbol of love and peace. He recalls rainbows he and his wife have seen in skies churned by storms, returns to the bakery with a .22 revolver, and shoots the storekeeper dead.

  In the story “Spring Gardens Only,” an aging artist who is also a gardener lives in a brownstone in the midst of the city, and in a patch of ground behind the house plants the gardens he paints. His watercolors are exquisite, famous. He starts his gardens in April, abandons them in July. One spring a visitor from his past appears, a male lover from a distant hungry winter before the time of fame. They renew their affair; they quarrel bitterly; the lover leaves. The artist, overwhelmed by memories of the original affair, installs a fountain in the garden wall. The water attracts songbirds, one of which on a lightning impulse he kills with a stone. He sketches it, paints it, a male cardinal, gorgeously feathered, and buries it in the garden.

  Some of the stories were about women. “Fresh-Cut Color” was a monologue by a once-famous lesbian film actress about to find out if her adopted daughter has been accepted into the first grade at a highly prestigious private school. The child is rejected. Memories flood the actress: her early rejections, her successes, her current fading career. The vengeance she wreaks upon the school.…

  A renowned architect returns to Cracow on a search for Holocaust memories; a former colonel of the KGB recalls his years as an interrogator and torturer; a professor of Western intellectual history faces a plagiarism scandal; an aging homosexual goes on a Russian roulette of cruising in the wake of the death from AIDS of his young lover—all nearing the end of their active lives, all tangled in memories of the past, which come to them too late and return nothing, not an echo, not a whisper, not a hope. Relentless, the cold tone of the tales; exquisitely baroque, the lush, alliterative language, the exuberant figures of speech. A grandeur of style painting lives sown with salt.

  Enough. Slightly unhinged by the language and dismayed by the lives, he closed the book and proceeded to pick at the food placed before him by the flight attendant. But the book, which he had inserted into the seat pocket before him, seemed to be sending forth tendrils that were sliding toward him. The stories were a presence. Quite understandable that Evelyn was teaching her work.

  He fell into a troubled sleep and was awakened by the bump of the landing gear on the tarmac. That late at night Newark Terminal was nearly deserted. He retrieved his car and drove along a foggy parkway and country roads to the town; the roads littered with branches, here and there dark puddles in the headlights of the Saab. Tired, very tired. Legs and arms aching, and now the back of his neck and his eyes.

  It was shortly after ten o’clock when he turned into his driveway, and saw the asphalt wet and strewn with branches. Lights burned in the living room and master bedroom. Oddly, the Tudor stood dark: no interior lights, no outside lights. The previous owners—elderly people, he an investment broker and she an interior decorator, who had gone to live with their only daughter in Phoenix—would set the house ablaze at night. “Tudors are built to be dark,” the man had once remarked to Benjamin Walter. “Spooky place without lights.” Advise her to put the exteriors on automatic. Not good to leave the house dark at night. The exterior floods had switched on each evening and off early each morning all through the year the Tudor had stood unsold and uninhabited.

  He parked the car in the garage behind his house and climbed out from the front seat, pain flashing in his legs, then went to the trunk for his travel bag and briefcase. The storm had done nothing to cool the air, which smelled of mist and sodden earth. The night was sultry, waterlogged, stirred by moist winds.

  A voice startled him. “Welcome back, Benjamin.”

  His heart skipped, raced. He looked around, saw no one.

  “Over here.”

  He spotted her then, about thirty feet away, near the rhododendrons.

  “Hello,” he called. What was she doing there outside in the dark? And wasn’t the lawn sopping wet?

  “We had a very bad storm, Benjamin. Lost two trees over on the next street. No damage to your trees, though.”

  No damage to his trees? Had she walked through the woods, inspecting? The previous owners had never entered his section of the woods, not to his knowledge.

  Carrying his bag and briefcase in one arm, he stepped out of the garage, pushing the button that lowered the door.

  “A long trip?” he heard her ask.

  “Chicago.” She stood just beyond the rim of his exterior house lights, her face seeming to hover like a dimly lit globe beside the hedge. “I read some of the stories in your current collection on the flight back.”

  “Did you?”

  “An eagle’s language, a scorpion’s bite, if I may say so. You depict a unique hell.”

  “We live in a strange time. A different hell is called for, most definitely, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Aren’t you standing in a very muddy lawn?”

  “Oh, I don’t mind the mud. Actually, I’m watching the fireflies.”

  The lawn was ablaze with the tiny low-flying creatures, lending the dark air the appearance of a star-sprinkled sky.

  “Light without heat,” he heard her say. “Since early childhood, fascinated by fireflies. Did you deliver a talk in Chicago?”

  “On the Persian Gulf War.”

  “Ah, of course, the Professor of War discoursing on war. You must tell me what you said. Did you use anecdotes in your talk?”

  “Davita, it’s quite late.”

  “Like all writers, I am eager for good stories.”

  “I teach tomorrow.”

  “I didn’t mean right now. Over coffee, one day soon?”

  “It will be my pleasure.”

  “Good night, Benjamin.”

  He went along the side of the house and the flagstone front walk to the porch. Climbing the three steps, he looked briefly to his left and saw across the lawn the vague globe of her head still suspended in the darkness near the hedge.

  Inside, the nurse sat waiting. They talked briefly about the day—Evelyn’s progress, her response to the medications, her frame of mind—and the nurse then slipped quietly out of the house with a murmured good night. He turned off the lamps, leaving only the night-light burning, a faint greenish glow near the foot of the stairs. The house, once resonating with the buoyant mayhem of children, now sepulchral with silence. Slowly, he climbed the well of carpeted stairs.

  A wedge of yellow light from their room spilled onto the dim second-floor hallway. He entered the room, set down the bags. She opened her eyes.

  “Benjamin.” An effort, her whisper.

  “My dear,” he said softly.

  The pneumonia was deep this time, exhausting, but still treatable at home. Large shadow-rimmed gray eyes in a thin long face drawn pale and tight across the temples and cheekbones. The warm acrid odor of her sweat.

  “Is there anything I can get you?”

  She replied tonelessly, “Dear Benjamin, how about a dill-and-yogurt soup?”

  He lowered his head.

  “Don’t forget to add a generous grinding of pepper.” Her voice matter-of-fact, a near-whisper. “And veal alla marsala. Again, don’t forget the
pepper.”

  “My dear—”

  “Rice Creole, once again the pepper. And ratatouille.”

  “Dear—”

  “Shall I have a salad? Perhaps a string bean salad with vinaigrette?”

  “Dear, dear Evelyn,” he murmured.

  “It is all still very astonishing,” she said, and closed her eyes and turned her face to the wall.

  She lay very still, breathing with difficulty. He turned off the light and stood gazing into the deep blues and purples of the darkened room. The partly open windows faced the rear of the house and he distinctly heard the trees: the oaks and pines, the cedars and elms.

  Arms and legs throbbing, he undressed and slipped into pajamas. Skeletal underpinning slowly but irreversibly splintering and fracturing; Humpty-Dumpty in slow motion. In the bathroom he washed and took his medications and gazed at himself in the medicine-cabinet mirror. Not yet the ravaged midnight features of W. H. Auden. He thought of the face of I. D. Chandal. The two faces, the one on the lawn and the other in the book. It occurred to him that his wife’s library must have old hardback copies of works by I. D. Chandal, and he went quietly through the bedroom and crossed the hall into her study. Undisturbed the past two weeks, the air inside musty. Six novels by I. D. Chandal, and two short-story collections. He found her photograph on the back of only one of the books, a novel four years old. The same photograph as the one on the book he had purchased in Chicago—and which, he now realized with dismay, he had forgotten on the airplane! Annoyed over that. He put back on the shelf the novel with the photograph and, as he turned to leave, glanced out the study window, which faced the side of the Tudor, and noticed a ground-floor room, the kitchen, earlier dark, now lit. At a table sat a woman, her face concealed by her hand. The rhododendron hedge did not extend that far down the length of the lawn, and he was able to see clearly her pale-blue nightdress and portly form and graying hair.

  Fatigued now beyond easy measure, and the sleeping pill he had earlier swallowed beginning to take hold, he returned to the bedroom. Cool sheets, moonlight on the windows, the trees murmurous. Evelyn breathing steadily. She’ll wake at least once. From the woods the hooting of an owl and before his aching eyes the sudden image of the picked-clean skeleton of a squirrel on the front walk one morning. The children gaping at it, shrinking back, fascinated, horrified. Tiny, delicate, glistening bones: spinal column, feet, all neatly splayed, as if pinned for dissection. Owls do that, he said, pick you clean to the core. Evelyn said, No, dear, that was not an owl, owls eat everything, even the bones, and if it’s eating a bird it will leave only the feathers. More likely the work of our neighbor’s cat, she added in that wondrously amiable way she had of imparting knowledge without the least display of conceit; the Tudor people’d had a white tabby in those days. He scooped up the skeleton of the squirrel with a shovel and tossed it into the garbage bin near the garage, the children watching, shocked, unnerved. Were they thinking: Will this happen to us too, one day reduced this way to bone? Should’ve talked to them about it afterward but they went off to school and the incident was never brought up and why was he remembering it now, oh, yes, the owl. He thought, woozy from the medication: How tedious and commonplace, this business of mortality. Infrequently considered, and when considered, too quickly put aside. What returns it to remembrance is irony. A war trench repeatedly shelled is soon lost to recollection. But bomb a sleepy town—the irony will nail it solidly to memory. There, the owl again, from the woods or the cemetery. Oh, yes, an explosive device ravaging an innocent airliner is the very guarantor of memory. Is that the reason we remember forever the biblical Amalekites who attacked Israelites during the exodus from Egypt? The assault upon helpless, fleeing people a bitter irony. What would that strange man, the trope—cantillation—teacher, have said to that? The trope teacher! Why have I suddenly recalled the trope teacher? A quickening beat of the heart in the swiftly gathering clouds of sleep.

  His wife woke him later that night, and he went to her. Feverish again and soaked with sweat. Gently, he raised her, dried her with a towel, helped her into a fresh nightgown. He murmured to her reassuringly: she would come out of this as she had before. She coughed and belched. He helped her to the bathroom and supported her so she would not tumble off the toilet. She lay on his bed as he changed her sheets.

  “Actually, dear, I would prefer lunch in Davy Byrne’s with Leopold Bloom,” she said.

  He laughed softly.

  She murmured, as he helped her into her bed, “One can hardly believe that one’s own body could become such an awful enemy.”

  She fell asleep.

  He remained starkly awake and after a while went to the bathroom for another sleeping pill. But he decided not to take it; the aftereffect would smother him in a wooly blanket of exhaustion that would linger into the morning and he had a full day awaiting him at the university. Spend an hour or so now working on the memoirs, fall asleep over that.

  He entered his study and, looking out the window at the Tudor, saw I. D. Chandal in her kitchen, yellow-lit, framed by the window, obese. All the rest of the Tudor had melted into the darkness. She sat hunched over a pad, writing. He watched until he grew sleepy and then returned to his bed.

  The nurse arrived punctually, as always, in the early morning. A hot, cloudy day, more storms predicted. His wife was still asleep when he left the house. The oaks behind the house, silent. And hushed, too, the woods.

  He went along the driveway toward the garage and saw I. D. Chandal, shovel in hand, bent over a wide length of raw earth she had dug from the end of the hedge to the border of the woods. Her blond hair was covered with a bright-yellow bandana. Firm breasts, shapely hips. A dizziness came over him.

  She said, straightening, “Good morning, Benjamin. It will storm again today.”

  He was fighting off the sensation of being slightly unhinged.

  “Benjamin?”

  A pause. Two or three deep breaths. Then, “Good morning. You’re up early.”

  “A wonderful day to plant. Earth soft from yesterday’s rain, and put the flowers in before the next rain.”

  He climbed into the Saab.

  She said, “How is your wife?”

  He closed the car door, rolled down the window, and started the engine. “My wife had a bad night.”

  She raised toward him slightly the hand that grasped the earth-encrusted shovel: a gesture of sympathy.

  “Davita,” he said through the open window of the car. “Your ram in the bush?”

  “Yes?”

  “Where is it?”

  She gazed at him without expression.

  He moved the car along and glanced at her in his rearview mirror. She stood, shovel in hand, watching him turn onto the street. Even from that distance he could see clearly the look of ferocity on her face.

  He drove cautiously along the winding country roads and the curving corrugated parkway, sticking always to the right lane, watching out for the potholes, aware of the cars in the center and left lanes racing past him. On both sides of the parkway tall trees with infant leaves silhouetted against the cloudy sky. Broken patches of road jarring the steering wheel and his fingers and hands. The upper deck of the bridge nearly lost in a yellow fog and the wide river dull gray and running into mist and the city endlessly bleak beneath a blockade of low, dense clouds. Tiresome this drive. Still, the Max Weber Chair in Sociology sufficient reason to have moved here. But to live in the city—unthinkable. Yet the travel time. And Evelyn’s commute to Princeton. And the costly private schools for the children. Poor choice in the end? Maybe. Hindsight always the winner in the war of wits. Hardly the streets of Oxford and the bike rides to Balliol. Destitute England like a wheezing invalid then, my mother secretly sending the food packages, my father utterly mute. That old bike with the basket in front and the dead metallic sound of its warning bell. Riding down the road and turning left and passing the playing fields of Magdalen. Cool sweet-scented air and flowers spilling over onto the sidewal
ks, houses pink in the early light and the gravel path to the residential street and on into the park with the broad fields and the cricket matches on Saturdays. And just inside the entrance to the park the tall thick-trunked tree with the haven of greenish shadows beneath its branches. How I loved that tree. And flowers lining the gravel path and the river running narrow and slow to my left along the water walks until it opened out into the wide water where Evelyn taught me to punt. Trees green and dense along the banks and the shadows of leaves on the dark mirror surface of the water. Putting the pole in, feeling it slide into the muddy bottom, pushing, punting. And Evelyn reading aloud from Auden about seas of pity lying locked and frozen. Why am I suddenly remembering that? Seas of pity locked and frozen. She taught me a great deal, my Evelyn: how to truly read and write, how to blissfully forget. And the gravel path led to the road that ran past the museum and the Bodleian and the pub and into Broad Street and Balliol, the quadrangle, the stone archway, the dining hall, the dorm rooms, the open green with the garden outside the chapel, and trees, lovely trees. Evelyn on her bike; long russet hair trailing in the wind. Color on her high-boned flushed cheeks and sweat on her face even in winter and the musky smell of the sweat between her breasts and under her arms. And the perpetual look of surprise in her eyes; surprise that she and her parents and her two brothers had survived the war; surprise that she had gone from nursing soldiers to reading literature; surprise that she had fallen in love with a Yank, an ailing Yank, a Jewish Yank, she being vintage Church of England stock and a descendant of William of Waynflete, who had been Bishop of Manchester, a loyal minister of Henry VI, and founder of Magdalen College. True, I wore a different face then: lank and pallid from the illness and not a little apprehensive, but handsome, and eyes glittering with a hunger to take in the world. And the infinite wonder each time the seeming fragile thinness of her would turn fiery and tumescent during the turbulence of sex.