. . . She woke up first, now broad daylight, nine-thirty on the carriage clock, still windy outside, but the storm much reduced, from a bully to a bluster. She was still feeling stiff, but very clear-headed. She could hear his regular breathing from the couch. He had thrown off the blanket in the night, and was lying on his back with the belt of his robe loosely tied. She went and sat on the edge of the sofa, gently undid the belt, and folded back the robe. He was lying peacefully, and the gash on his forehead seemed healthier, though his mustache gave him a stern look. She stroked the hair on his chest, and then let her hand slide downwards and play idly with his pubic hair, and finally slip under his balls. At once she felt things tightening as she maintained her gentle touches, and his lengthening cock started rotating counterclockwise across his thigh, towards a solid twelve o’clock; its tip quivered an inch below his navel. She glanced up to see what effect this was having on the sleeper, and noticed that he hadn’t opened his eyes yet, but the mouth under the mustache seemed less severe than before. Indeed, as she watched, the lips parted.
She slipped out of her sweatpants and mounted him, and gave a little gasp of pleasure as she felt him reach inside her. She sat for a moment looking down on him. He opened his eyes.
“Take off that shirt,” he said. She did, and it was his turn to look.
“Aren’t you lovely?” he said, and began playing with her breasts.
They started moving athletically now, and it was not long before other waves swept over them.
“Have you gone to sleep,” MacIver said into Margaret’s hair.
“Far from it,” she said. “I want to do just what they did.”
So they did, and then slept happily and equally deeply, curled together.
Well, thought MacIver, wild nights and wild mornings too; you’re certainly allowing yourself some fine, hammy moments. But oh! the lovely depth and easy lassitude of that sleep after love, dearly remembered. Like Orpheus and Eurydice making the long glide down to the Underworld together, always a following wind without resistance. Aristotle says that every animal except woman and the rooster are sad after sex. Speak for yourself, ’Tootles! Shatter the myth. Orpheus-Morpheus. If you pay attention, you can always bring her back with you, every time. Or so he had thought.
So they had good times, each healing whatever hurt the other had had, almost without noticing it. They were married within a year of their first meeting, on Christmas Eve 1947, and in the next spring, after wonderful sales from Margaret’s show, they bought the Night Heron House, to be their summer refuge at the end of the academic year. And just after the fall equinox in 1948, they had their boy, David.
CHAPTER 8
Going Down in the Mud (Part 1)
The worst night yet, the one that promised there would not be many more. A lot of pain, and somehow more constant and diffused, and the fever now also constant, stoked to a high burn and holding. But the worst part was a recurrence of the waves of nausea, which once more drove him to the bathroom for the most painful retching, productive of only very small streams of bile, not enough in some cases to reach the bottom of the basin, but producing great agony through his throat at each surge, which literally drove him to his knees as he stood there. And in the course of the day, there would come another dark dagger of pain, whose beginning he remembered vaguely, but which apparently knocked him sideways off his chair and out, until he came to himself, after God knows how long, lying on the floor. However, the odd thing about all this persecution of him was that, in the periods of intermission from the most violent attacks, he found himself more lucid than he had been in recent months.
He was more determined than ever to press on with his damn story; three days would finish it, and he fully intended to finish it. But today he would invert his procedure. His focus would be the story of his son, David, and he wanted to set the lines of it perfectly straight in his memory: the events here were in his mind the very hub to which everything that happened before was pointed, like spokes that shone brightly out on the perimeter, but darkened as they approached the center. And everything that followed seemed somberly colored in his mind, in mood and significance. It was not that he was never happy again; he had just lost the expectation of happiness, so that his memories of his son and of what happened to him came to serve as categories of grief, rage, yearning, through which everything else would pass. Thus the dark side of MacIver’s nature was reinforced by the death of David. The young men would enter their last battle in the grim light of what he had learned from his early fallen child.
David MacIver, a quick and blithe spirit, Ariel light, took after his mother physically, and in much of her gentle understanding of things, though he had and showed his father’s temper from an early age, and the same way of reaching a sticking point of stubbornness. He produced the same range of vivid expression of all small children who observe closely and like to play with words (“Why does Mickey Mouse have a squash ball for a nose?”), but could lose himself happily like his mother for hours on end with a crayon in his hand. (“What is that a picture of, David?” “It’s not a picture. I’m making color marks, to see which ones I like best.”)
As he grew up, thin as a rail, he became a graceful athlete, taking to games MacIver never played, like tennis and baseball. MacIver cleared some more ground to the side of the woods, so they could have fielding practice; he might not play baseball, but he had at least a good arm, having thrown the javelin for Oxford in his off-season. (“Do you have good technique?” his rugby friend Terry asked. “Fuck technique, Terry. It’s amazing how far you can make the thing go, if you imagine someone you really dislike on the receiving end.”) Between them, father and son evolved a game of graded difficulty in fielding, to be played each summer evening before supper. They would begin with the Tame Bunnies, essentially simple warm-up pitches, in which Margaret was invited to participate—she always declined. At the further end were the Zingeraccis (fast balls), the Hairy Pops (major-league pop-ups), and the Wild Wicked Ones (difficult grounders, delivered at pace, and bouncing with great irregularity on the uneven ground). MacIver always threw, and David always fielded. He would have the right to order up à la carte the number of each kind of throw he wanted to receive, “eight Zs, Dad, six HPs, and another eight WWOs,” and the point of the game was for him to have an error-proof round, including the throw back to his father, who refused to stretch more than two feet in any direction. Which is where some ugliness would enter, the father pigheaded for perfection, the son not beyond patronizing: “You’ve never played this game, Dad, you don’t know: ask anyone who does, and he would say that I almost made an impossible play, and that in fact it was an unreachable ball, and no error.” Sometimes Margaret would be appealed to, but she would rebuff them. “You’re as bad as each other. If a Martian watched the two of you playing games, and was asked at the end what he thought sportsmanship meant, he would have to say that it was the art of taking weaselly advantage of one’s opponent.”
Inside, however, Margaret held sway and peace reigned. The lovely meals, not just delicious by the mouthful, but so graceful in the setting and serving, lulled the house down to calmness; good talk around the table—the day, the work and the joke, sports, politics, film, music, art, people—a bonded trio, listening to each other. Again, the boy and his dad would have good times, with every sort of chat, while they did the dishes, and then very often the three of them would read to each other, first children’s classics, and later a wider sweep of novels and poetry, and sometimes all of them taking parts in plays. Margaret’s beauty cast its spell, and so did her voice. “Read some more, Mom,” David would say, when she paused; and MacIver would second him: “Yes, do, love.” They were both in love with her.
Everything went on, it seemed, in easy rhythms, even in New York in their Riverside Drive apartment, even through the teenage years. Try as he might, MacIver could not recall phases of tantrums, of rebellion, even of acne in the boy. David did well in school and seemed well liked. The girls he
brought home were all beautiful, slim and graceful with gorgeous hair and quiet measured voices. MacIver was staggered at this profusion of grace: “Goddammit,” he said in bed, “he brings home nothing but your daughters.” “I certainly wish they were,” said Margaret. “Perhaps we could adopt them all.”
But the bubble of the idyll, if that’s what it was, was pricked on a point of principle, so devastating in its outcome that MacIver could never fully believe in the possibility of real happiness ever again. David had spent three semesters at Yale, liking the place and pondering the questions on war and race; he did not like so much the bowwow theater around the questions, the effigy burning, the slogan bashing, or even the big set-pieces, the austere Kingman Brewster on the Green, the eloquent and humorous William Sloane Coffin in the Chapel, but he liked finding the beginnings of stirring and shaping, perhaps for the first time in his life, actual convictions—not just gut feelings— among his friends and, more important, further down, in his own soul. He was waiting for the still, small voice, like Elijah at the mouth of the cave. The war was easy—who would not repudiate the bully-boy rectitude, the beef-fed certainties about the good we could do for this poor country and many others, shoring up the dominoes, whether we spoke their languages or not, the parade march of ignorance and arrogance once more in step behind the hardware? But there was the missing piece— what about those herded against their will into the swamps, the featureless estuaries, the booby-trapped jungle paths to work their country’s will so stated? Never been away from home before, most of them. “I got nothin’ against them Cong.” All these were victims too.
One day in Sterling Library, with a rally going on outside, slightly muffled by several thicknesses of neo-Gothic stone, he came upon a tattered copy of the Welsh poet and artist David Jones’s In Parenthesis, the difficult prose poem he wrote about his own experiences in World War I, the great folly that set the century reeling on its catastrophic way. The war, David remembered, in which his unknown grandfather was killed, and his father’s chosen field. The poem, which David found difficult in its allusiveness, is dedicated in a beautiful inscription:
THIS WRITING IS FOR MY FRIENDS IN MIND OF
ALL COMMON AND HIDDEN MEN AND OF THE
SECRET PRINCES . . . AND TO THE ENEMY FRONT-
FIGHTERS WHO SHARED OUR PAINS
AGAINST WHOM WE FOUND OURSELVES
BY MISADVENTURE.
And at the back of the book is a drawing of a young ram, with a delicate face, standing transfixed by a bent spear and enmeshed in barbed wire; on the facing page quotations mostly from the Old Testament, but leading with Revelation 5:6 in Latin, Et vidi . . . agnum stantem tamquam occisum, which David could translate: I saw the lamb standing, as though slain. . . . He saw the wealth of imagery in the lines of the drawing, going back to Abraham and the ram caught by his horns in a thicket of thorns, who would die for Isaac, and forward to Jesus, the Lamb of God, who would die for the sins of the world—the whole notion of the scapegoat and the old simile “sent like a lamb to the slaughter.” David looked and looked, and a determination grew inside him.
And the next day he saw something that sealed it ineradicably in place. He was walking down Chapel Street and passing York, when he looked down and saw there had been a terrible crash—a truck had almost demolished a small car, which was on fire. He walked towards it. An ambulance and a fire truck were there, and there was clearly an urgency: the car’s gas tank might well explode soon, and there was someone still in the car. While he watched, an enormous black fireman—a rarity in himself— seized the buckled door on the driver’s side, ripped it off its crippled hinges, and threw it aside. Then quietly to the hovering ambulance men, he said, “Set the stretcher right here at full height,” indicating a position just behind him parallel to the car. “We’ve got to be careful—I think his back may be broken.” Without more ado, he reached into the car, sliding his right arm behind the man’s back and under him, keeping it as straight as possible as a kind of splint, then cradling his legs with his left arm, and seemingly effortlessly lifting him free of the car, as though he were a child, and laying him very tenderly on the stretcher behind him. The man had moaned softly once, and the fireman had said gently, “It’ll be all right, sir.” Then the small chorus of Well dones, and a nod from the fireman as he returned to his engine, while his mates proceeded to blast the car with foam and water and extinguished the blaze before it could explode.
But as he walked away from the scene, only one thought was hammering in David’s head: “That fireman may well have a son, as unquestionably hundreds of thousands of mothers and fathers do, without a student deferment, who is in Vietnam right now, without ever having wanted to be there, and who deserves every bit as much devoted service as that fireman just gave.” And there and then he resolved that he would go to Vietnam as a medic; he would not lawyer it up, he would not play the new lottery number game, he would not even seek the status of conscientious objector: he would join the medical corps if they would have him, and as soon as they would have him.
He phoned Margaret up and said that he would be coming home the next day, and that he had made a big decision. “I have felt this coming,” she said, “though I am fairly sure your father hasn’t. Come home.” He went home, and they sat talking about it deep into the night. The trouble was they could not argue with any sort of principle on the other side to his, except the almost unutterable principle of their fear of losing him. They tried to urge on him that he would certainly give his life to service, but he did not have to give it this instant; he could prepare himself in any number of useful ways right now, and give a lifetime of necessary and specialized service to untold numbers of people. Why now? Anything to buy time. But he had answered that the emergency was now, and it came earmarked for his own peers and age group, and he must meet it now, or despise himself. As the conversation went on, MacIver felt he had less and less to say. Noticing his glumness across the table, David came round and hugged him: “It’s all right, Dad, I’m not going to get killed.”
“That’s what my father told me,” said MacIver, and before he could help himself, tears were pouring down his face. When he’d managed to gather himself, he said, “I don’t want you to feel bad, but you should know those tears were not for my father.”
“I know, Dad, I know. But I will be back.” Hugging him again.
Later, finally in bed and holding each other, Margaret said: “It’s probably our fault: we wanted him to be good, and he’s just turning out to be better than we wanted.”
The next day things cheered up a bit. The two men went north in the big Oldsmobile station wagon to bring home David’s stuff. They had urged Margaret to come, but she declined.
“Come on, Mom, you can do the judgment of Solomon on what we bring back and what we give away.”
“I’ll leave the two of you to argue that out. I’ll be making a wonderful supper for you both here. Be back by seven-thirty.”
David drove, and MacIver lounged in the corner of the big front seat, looking back towards his son. The boy said he was worried about his greenness—that he would find himself for the first time in the presence of something truly shocking, and simply freeze instead of immediately engaging with the problem.
“That won’t happen with you, and I’ve worked out why,” said MacIver. “I was once in a car crash—nothing like as bad as the one you described last night—in the thirties sometime, when I was doing my Ph.D. I was not badly hurt, but I didn’t function properly, and I worried about it right into World War Two.”
“What happened?”
“It was late November, I think, thin drizzle close to freezing, fall having an early stab at winter. I was somewhere near Dan-bury, probably on what became big Route 84, but then just a well-traveled road through the country. I was going too fast, conscious of having difficulty holding the car to the road— skinny little tires back then, remember. I’m on a right-hand bend up onto a bridge, and as I reach the top, bingo, there’s a sta
tionary oil truck, which has clearly been having the same difficulties, spanning pretty much the whole roadway not twenty yards ahead.
“Jam on the brakes, and in the screaming sideways glide out of control, I know I’m going to hit the truck. So afterwards I wonder, if I hadn’t frozen and seized, as the brakes had, whether I could not have snuck the car more maneuverably round the back end of the thing. The corner of my eye detected a small gap, but my reflexes couldn’t take me there; somehow the car and I were together magnetized or attracted to the predicament of the laborious damn truck. There were impressions and questions, I remembered afterwards, flicking through the mind, like—oil-truck: conflagration? Hit tires rather than truck’s metal body: more forgiving. Blind curve: pileup from traffic behind? In the event, I could do nothing; I sat there and let it all happen.”
“How bad was it?”
“Not so bad, really. The car somehow slid parallel to the truck and, with the brakes locked, kept closing on it, my guess is still doing about forty. It hit half against a tire and half into metal ahead of it, and seemed to ride up and then tilt back to the right from its momentum. The driver’s door was banged in about half a seat’s width, and I ended up in the middle of the car with some impressive bruises down my left side. Windshield cascaded past me leftwards in a shower of glass, and two pieces gashed the back of my right hand and my forehead on their way by. But I wasn’t trapped in any way—I was able to crawl out the door on the passenger side, and face the music. Spookily quiet, I remember; the engine had been slammed off on impact, I suppose: just dripping sounds from various liquids seeping onto the road. No pileup: drivers behind driving more sensibly able to stop.
Rules for Old Men Waiting Page 10
