by John Gardner
Tom Garret said, standing in the wings of the conversation, “What about discipline? I always liked the argument ‘The study of Greek is good discipline for the mind’?”
“You’re kidding!” Tillson said.
Garret shrugged, grinning, his glasses blanking out his eyes. “I never know until I see if people laugh.”
Old man Meyerson shook his head, too deaf to hear more than every fifteenth word. “Greek tought iss the foundation,” he said. He raised his long, crooked finger.
“Long before the Greeks there was algae,” Tillson said, “but nobody makes us start with algae.”
Mickelsson raised his martini and gazed down into it, looking for water separation. “Are you seriously proposing,” he asked, “that we stop encouraging our majors to take Greek—for fear we might lose a couple?”
“God save me from people with standards,” Tillson said. “Better dead than ill-read, right?” His eyes widened. “Listen, don’t get me wrong! I have a personal fondness for Greek. Heck—”
“So long as I’m advising, I’ll keep pushing Greek,” Mickelsson said. “Harder than before, since my view’s in the minority.” He raised his glass to drink.
“I hope when it comes right down to it you’ll ease up,” Tillson said, tipping his head, weakly smiling. “Some students, sure. But a lot of these kids—” He put his hand on Mickelsson’s arm. “I realize you’re bull-headed. I like that about you, up to a point.”
Rage moved up through Mickelsson, starting under the tips of Geoffrey Tillson’s fingers. “I’ll push. Count on it,” he said. Quickly he turned and left the kitchen.
Stupid, Mickelsson whispered now, meaning himself, not Tillson. Dr. Rifkin would no doubt be interested in that rage. “What,” he would say, “does Greek have to do with the Great Cryptogram? Is it possible that God still speaks Greek?”
It was true that that night, more than a year ago now, he had begun to hate Tillson, or perhaps, more precisely, that night he’d found a hook for the hatred that had risen in him spontaneously, right from the beginning.
It was true that his anger made no sense. One could always tell one’s students, “Learn Greek,” and the best of them would do it. Why should he be threatened by a timid little hunchback who controlled nothing, commanded no one, hardly even published? What could it mean, this animal fury that rose up at sight of the man? He thought of the Marxists in Jessica’s department, real nuisances, simultaneously dolts and maniacs, programmed, it seemed, to fly into rages at the mention of certain words. “Feminist!” one of them had suddenly shouted at a party last year at the Bryants’, bursting like a whale out of a serene, pale sea. “If she’s a feminist, I’m Napoleon!” Everyone had looked at the man, or at the envelope of space around him, their eyes dulled, expressions patient. Only Mickelsson, the newcomer, had been surprised.
Was it true that in the plays of Shakespeare, Seneca rumbled down underneath, and beneath that Aeschylus? And beneath that the creature who once slept, restless and brooding, in the Giant Bed of Og? Maybe one of Garret’s real-life dragons?
Craziness. From Greek, Latin. From Latin, French Spanish English and the rest. From the top vertebrae of some ancient beast, the grossly enlarged, holed bone that made the human head.
It had to do with the house. It had been, once long ago, something else, perhaps just a saltbox—the room he meant to make into a dining-room and the dark, ravaged attic above it. Should he make it what it was—tear off the whole immense addition, spacious rooms, spreading porches? By some act of not quite unthinkable magic bring back the world as it had once been?
Dream thoughts. Foolishness. Cunning evasion of present grief. How pleasant it would be to call Ellen on the phone, talk to her awhile as if nothing had changed.
He seated himself in a chair beside the acrid-smelling woodstove in the livingroom and stared at the Dutch door leading to the kitchen. All at once in his drunkenness, as it would seem to him later, all he could see was that large, neatly painted hex sign: tulips and oakleaves and birds not found in nature, around them a black band harshly unornamental. Was it meant to keep out evil, he wondered, or to lure it in?
He listened, for some reason, as if he’d let some sound pass unregistered. But there was nothing, inside or out. Unsteadily, he rose and made his way to the hex to study it. One eye on each of the two birds looked out at him, vaguely hypnotic. When he squinted he discovered that the design made a blurry, disturbing face. He thought about that. Was it simply his drunkenness, or was it possible that the face was meant to be there, perhaps had some occult use? He squinted again. It did seem to have a hypnotic quality. Was that possible? He’d read something somewhere about the cobra’s gaze, some disorienting effect on the balance of the brain’s two lobes. He had no faith or particular interest in witchcraft, but by all accounts something went on in these mountains, presumably something one could identify with physical causes, once one figured out the tricks. Was the shadowy face intended to, in some way, give special powers to occupants of the house? Or on the other hand to harm them? He thought of the gray cast to Dr. Bauer’s skin.
It made sense, he thought, feeling a stir of excitement. The dark reputation of the Sprague place was solid; everyone around seemed to have heard of it. And no theme in folklore was older than the notion of the deadly sign or magic writing, bearer of some curse. Perhaps the whole secret of the Sprague place was right here on this door!
He was no doubt thinking foolishly, melodramatically, but he groped his way to the kitchen, where in increasing excitement, as if rising to some formidable challenge, he sharpened a butcher knife. The image he’d seen through half-closed eyes was fixed in his head, reminding him of something, nothing he could put his finger on, but unpleasant. He tested the blade against the palp of his thumb, then returned to the livingroom and decisively, scrape by scrape, cut away the hex sign, leaving a halo of ragged wood. When he was finished, he carefully cleaned off the knife, using soap and water, as if even the wood and paint shavings might be dangerous, put the shavings in the garbage, then put the knife back in its drawer, neatly aligning it with the other knives, all good cutlery, sharp. These too, for some reason now obscure, he’d bought almost immediately after leaving his wife. He found that his glass of whiskey had disappeared, no doubt set down someplace. He was in no condition (turning slowly around, looking in all directions) to think out where he’d left it. He fixed himself another, definitely the last. The image of the face was still clear in his mind, still proffering its challenge. Now it reminded him of Tillson.
He stood wide awake, still looking around, grave, firmly planted. He was aware of the emptiness of the house, and its foreignness. He found himself moving again from room to room, bare dry walls, bare dry floors, most of the house devoid of furniture, stark. His shadow moved beside him, head lowered, large back round. Because the light fixtures had offended him—cheap, machine-etched fleurs-de-lis, a fake antique wooden-wheel chandelier, machine-painted globes hung from phoney brass—he’d removed the fixtures, leaving bare bulbs. Every stipple and crack in the ceilings called attention to itself. His footsteps, however carefully he walked, resounded. When he leaned close to one of the curtainless windows, cupping his hands against the light of the room, looking out, he saw nothing, just the dark, low curve of mountains. There was no evidence that anyone was alive but himself.
In the workroom, prospective diningroom, he absent-mindedly made an incision with his thumbnail, then pulled off a small swatch of wallpaper. Once he’d pulled it from the wall, the wallpaper divided magically into separate layers, dusty-backed, light, as if they’d never been glued. He held in his hand nine separate dry pieces, all queer to the touch as dead moth-wings. He drew them nearer, to look at them more closely. The first one was gray with a faded pink flower design, more like stitches than like paint, the whole thing so carefully made to look like cloth that it struck him now for the first time that in the old days, maybe the eighteenth century, it must indeed have been cloth, not paper
, that people put on walls. He was vividly aware all at once of not just the age of the house but the time it contained: generations of people who had made lives in it, had periodically pored over samples of wallpaper, debating, arguing, finally choosing; and then new people coming in, as he had done now, people who had perhaps laughed scornfully at the wallpaper they found there, or had touched it wistfully, regretting its age and dinginess, knowing they would never find anything as nice. The next piece of wallpaper was light brown and dark brown, again made to look like cloth, and the next was what had probably once been wine-red, with an intricate stripe and flower pattern. All three of these oldest pieces had been, almost certainly, paper for a livingroom. It was perhaps at this point that the room had begun to change functions: the next two pieces might be either livingroom or bedroom (one green, one blue), and the next two seemed patterns one might pick for a diningroom. The most recent, no longer at all like cloth—a bright pattern of chickens, corncobs, and yellow dots, then another of teapots and salt-shakers—could only be paper for a kitchen.
He felt a pang of regret that he’d so casually violated those generations of decisions: happy renovation, then gradual, almost unnoticed declines; regret even that he’d scraped away the hex sign on the door between the livingroom and kitchen. “Well, no matter,” he told himself aloud, then stopped to listen.
The house around him was as still as a dried-out seashell.
He looked at the pieces of wallpaper again, startled for some reason. A tingling came over him, some chemical change that increased rapidly, then came rushing up his spine like a spring bursting out into the light through the side of the mountain. The room changed its color and a rumble filled his ears: it was as if he were fainting. He reached out to steady himself and had the illusion, all at once, that he was seeing the whole history of the house: weddings, funerals, births, deaths, battles. … In the rush of images one detail stood plain: a boy with gloved hands throwing a poisoned, apparently dead rat into the stove, then widening his eyes, covering his ears against the animal’s screams. Pain shot through Mickelsson, as if he himself had become the burning rat—but it was something else, something that doubled him over and filled him—filled the whole room—with a high wind of emotion, something like insane rage. Almost at once, the feeling subsided, the vision passed.
He stood blunt-witted, motionless, staring at the vivid bits of wallpaper. All was well; silent. He could hardly believe the thing had happened to him—certainly nothing like it had ever happened to him before. He felt frozen, as when one awakens from a nightmare unable to move a finger—the body’s memory of ancient millennia, someone had once claimed; the stillness that saved our small forebears from passing sabretooths.
It came to him that he must have fallen asleep on his feet. It was a dream.
Now he was able to move again, first his hands, then his shoulders and head. His spine felt icy.
He shook his head, staring hard at the pieces of wallpaper, sorting them like cards, unconsciously testing, he realized after a moment, like a child fearfully teasing a snake behind glass to see if it will strike. Nothing, not the faintest stirring now. He closed his eyes, reaching up to rub the back of his neck where it ached as if from a cramp, and remembered Tim Booker’s joke about the man who’d stayed in the house all night “and his hair turned white.” For some reason—as if, without his help, his mind were snatching at alternatives to the nightmare—he thought of the swan-and-water-lily wallpaper in his bedroom when he was a child. Blue, white, and silver. He remembered his grandmother combing her long hair, then remembered his bachelor uncle’s cough, at six in the morning, when he got up and dressed and, grumbling to himself in Swedish, went out to start chores.
Still a little shaky, but oddly sober, Mickelsson wandered again to the livingroom, squinting, trying to call back more. It was as if he’d buried the nightmare already, deep in the gloomiest room of the brain’s ancient dungeon. He sat down, sucking at his pipe, unaware that it was out. His stomach was filled with dead butterflies.
He thought of Jessica Stark, the remarkable way she’d smiled when he took her hand, reopening possibilities. He must tell her about all this—the two men on the road, the trucks, the hex that was a face. …
He remembered something more: his grandfather, one gray afternoon, standing in his black suit at the rural mailbox, a package of newly arrived books under one arm, probably more volumes of Martin Luther. His head was tilted, listening to faraway, muffled thunder as if he imagined the thunder to be speaking.
Suddenly the thought broke through again: What was behind that sudden, dreadful nightmare? Just some childish image of death? Small-boy idea of Hell?
What of the possibility he’d been stubbornly refusing to acknowledge all this while: that it had not been a nightmare? He raised his drink.
When he’d sipped, he check-reined his head back, trying to work out the crick in his neck, and the next thing he knew he was sitting on the couch with his two hands closed lightly around the whiskey glass, and outside the windows it was mid-day. He’d been dreaming something, some room full of beautiful colors. Someone had said, “I’m sure you’re not guilty!” Moving his head by accident, not yet awake, he’d shattered the dream, scattered it back into electrons. He would never dream that exact same dream again.
8
Thomas’s Hardware was the most prosperous business, possibly the only prosperous business, in Susquehanna. Owen Thomas, the proprietor, was shy and retiring, fine-featured, scholarly, a man of forty or so, with a daughter majoring in art at Penn State, whom he mentioned proudly, with careful restraint, whenever reasonable opportunity arose. The store was a pleasant place, bright and airy, for though it was crammed with goods—tools, rope, pipefittings, hasps and hinges, woodstoves, picture frames, drawer after drawer of bolts, screws, nails, racks and display cases of fishing equipment, Coleman stoves, hunting knives and guns—it had sixteen-foot ceilings of light gray stamped tin and large, uncluttered front windows. It looked out on the parking meters, broken asphalt, and worn red brick of Main Street, beyond that a waist-high stone wall and then nothing, a sunlight-filled drop-off where thirty years ago one would have seen the grand vaults and arches of a turn-of-the-century depot, at one end of it a restaurant of glass and wood, said to be one of the finest in America. In the failing antique store a block up the street, there were yellowing pictures of the restaurant: grand Victorian gables and cupolas, tables so elegant they seemed to float, and beyond the far windows a spectacular view of the river. Studying the pictures in the dust-specked dimness of the antique store, Mickelsson had understood, in a kind of daydream, exactly what the town had been like in those days, how the huge old houses on the side of the mountain—now gray and warping, every shutter askew—had been mansions then; how the brick streets had rung with the tock of horses’ hooves and the whispered chatter of early cars. Susquehanna had been, he’d heard somewhere, a repair station for steam locomotives. Money had poured in, and pride of place. It must have seemed to the people of the town that it could never change, a settlement so glorious and well-to-do, so solidly established. Those who worked for the railroad, whether as linemen or as railroad engineers or as officials in sunlit offices filled with large, brass-studded leather chairs, had been heroes; it was the weak younger brothers who ran the post office, the barbershop, the hardware store. Now those heroes—except for the richest, who’d moved away—were employees of their once-humbler neighbors, the pharmacist, the man who sold household appliances, the people who ran the declining lumberyard, the real-estate office, the dry-goods store. “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!” the preachers sang here as in other towns, or so Mickelsson imagined, recalling the great, spare church of his childhood. He imagined the people all nodding in solemn assent.
Mickelsson looked through wallpapers, borrowed four books to take home with him and think about, then bought white latex paint and two rollers, a dropcloth, and a plastic mixing pail. While the woman at the register rang them up, he cau
ght sight of the tools on the wall along the left-hand side—saws, hammers, files, such a wealth of power-tools that for a moment, somewhat to Mickelsson’s surprise, farmboy greed leaped up in him. His father and uncle had spent all their lives building and unbuilding, converting barns from one use to another, horsebarn becoming chickenhouse, sheepfold becoming pig-shed—or constructing inventions of one sort or another, first drawing pictures far into the night at the round oak diningroom table: a heavy wooden frame with a track-slide loader for the buzz saw, a double-gated contraption for loading sheep, clunky wood-and-iron gadgets to fit on tractors or trucks or to lift his grandmother’s wheelchair onto the porch. It occurred to him only now that all that labor had been play, however solemn their faces, however they complained about time and the work still awaiting them. Lifting a sabre-saw, feeling the heft of it, Mickelsson recognized his hand as his father’s hand. They were the same size and shape and had much the same freckled redness; the only real difference was that his father’s hand had always been barked, scabbed, cracked, and calloused, always at least one fingernail discolored by some mishap. He remembered a chest his uncle and father had let him help them make when he was seven or so, a pine chest longer and deeper than a coffin, no nails or screws, just wooden pegs, locust. It had served as a windowseat through most of his childhood; later they’d used it to hold cow-feed. In the bright, pleasant-smelling hardware store, the discovery that his father and uncle, all those years, had been playing, enjoying themselves—making art, in a way—came over Mickelsson like an awakening. He felt an extravagant inclination to pity himself. What foolishness his life was, in comparison to theirs! But the likeness of his hand to his father’s hand distracted him, made him feel, almost unwillingly, a surge of joy.
