Braddis knew he was playing a game of narrow chances, but he was playing it under some compulsion, and he knew he had certain things going for him. Above all, he knew this passage of the terrain inch by inch in light or dark, and he had determined the exact point where he would make his move, if the chance was given. It had to be far enough out, and not on the doorstep of safety, to be plausible, and it would have to offer some blind cover back to his lines. His firing occasional shots off from here and there in the course of the withdrawal was designed to produce a kind of edginess to the proceedings, and break the rhythms; the men, he knew, would want to speed up and get back quicker to safety; and Dodds, he hoped, as he was responsible for covering for his men, might take some extra seconds to check that the area was, indeed, all clear. If you’re watchful yourself, you can do a lot with a few moments of distraction. What he needed was a short gap separating Dodds from everyone but himself.
Braddis was a lucky man, as we know, and he got his gap. The place he had chosen was a curiously compact walled crater about fifty yards from the line, off to the side of the well-trodden path, offering a kind of private rampart, a hooked hiding place for a crouching man. Sure enough, Dodds came on, rifle at the ready, but moving faster than he normally would, trying to rejoin his section ahead. Braddis had a heavy German officer’s pistol, a Luger—that treasured war-trophy of Allied soldiers—with its original ammunition; he had put it in his pack in the morning, and transferred it to the right-hand pocket of his fatigues in the pause before the order for withdrawal was given.
The moment Dodds passed, Braddis moved silently into the path behind him. His quarry was not more than six feet ahead— quite far enough for no powder burns to show on his uniform— and Braddis fired one shot from level ground, standing up. He considered it important that the trajectory of the bullet should not have an upward course, in case a medical officer was led to speculate that this was a round fired at very close quarters by an enemy in hiding just off the path. Braddis shot Dodds in the back, quite high up and to the left of the spine; the powerful, large-caliber bullet shattered the bone of the rib cage front and back, and tore out a piece of the heart on its passage through the chest. Braddis stepped aside and threw the gun into the standing water at the bottom of the crater, and fired his rifle off in no particular direction. He was with his man as he slowly crumpled and hit the ground on his back. Dodds was still conscious, but blood was pouring out of his chest, with a thin trickle also from the mouth.
Braddis raised him in his arms, and the young man stared up at him puzzled and trying to focus.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Braddis said quietly. “You was shaping up to be a proper officer. But you see, sir, I couldn’t run the risk of being put down again. That would have been intolerable to me.”
“Braddis, I’ve left—” Dodds began to say, but the trickle from his mouth had grown to a flood, and he could not go on. He was finished.
Braddis stared at him, and then expertly frisked the body. He could not believe his luck. He pocketed what he had found, slung his rifle over his left shoulder, picked up his young platoon commander, and carried him back to his line.
CHAPTER 10
The Promise Canceled and Restored
MacIver knew he should concentrate on supper; he was not merely sick, but weak, and he had now fainted, if he remembered right, three times; and the fainting spells were starting to interfere with his writing. Furthermore, despite his fever, he was cold almost all the time, and he was now prepared to attribute a piece of that to his own lack of body fuel, and not merely the condition of the house. He had gone to bed last night in sweatshirt, sweatpants, two pairs of socks, and his vast navy greatcoat, precisely to stoke his fever into overdrive, so he could experience once more the increasingly rare sensation of actually being hot; and indeed, during the night he felt at least pleasantly warm—not quite the same as the wound-seeking, warmth-bestowing gift of Demerol, cocooning one’s hurt into a heated and blessed oblivion, but certainly as good as one could expect at this stage of the game. So now it was on to supper, and here a touch of appetite had made its suggestion during the day, for what he had dubbed Sweet Gruel—the ancient secret MacIver clan recipe for toothless old men with blocked esophagi.
He had finally found a use for Margaret’s mortar and pestle, those weighty and complementary stone utensils designed by Henry Moore, which he had found in a corner of the cupboard. To a base of lukewarm water (adjust temperature to taste), add three Pepperidge Farm lemon cookies, and mash them in the bowl to the smoothest paste. Swallowability is the key criterion of consistency. Add three heaped spoons of honey and as much single malt as your heart desires. Stir all together, and then spoon the concoction in small mouthfuls into the expectant gob. Follow each mouthful with a chaser of more warm water. MacIver followed the recipe assiduously and found it not at all bad. He even thought it aided the act of swallowing, which might well be due to the anesthetic effects of the Lagavulin— a point worth bearing in mind for future applications. He was so pleased with his patented concoction that he repeated it on four successive nights, until he found that the packet of cookies was empty. So after that he narrowed the recipe to Lagavulin and warm maple syrup. He was not at all sure he didn’t prefer it in this simpler version. But Lagavulin with maple syrup! My God, how sick he must be.
After supper it was back to the rocking chair, with Beethoven’s lovely late quartet, opus 132, and the slow movement that he called “A reverent song of thanks from an invalid made well”—the gentle laying down of large, sonorous chords, safe, weighty, well-spaced stepping-stones that lead you up and down but which will eventually rise inexorably, one on top of the other, on and on, up and up, to the most insistent climax. It is all gravely paced to the recovered invalid’s discovery that at last he can rise from bed and walk confidently again. MacIver and Margaret had always thought it justified its title perfectly— it breathes out not only consolation, but a sense of having been consoled. MacIver wondered now whether Beethoven had known at the time that he was not actually fully recovered, though he had almost two years to live (an eternity, of course, compared with the brief number of days being counted in the Night Heron House). He did not live well in those two years, persecuting his nephew Karl in the most predatory way. But the force of the hymn acknowledges that we all achieve a touch of innocence in our simple gratitude for any alleviation of our condition.
The death of David had been the worst thing that had ever happened to either of them, and well over half of the year that followed it (MacIver was ashamed to remember just how bad and for how long) was certainly the worst extended period either of them had lived through. He knew that if blame was ever fairly apportioned for their fall from grace and ease with each other, most of it must come to him. If David were to appear sitting opposite him and listening to the music, he would tell him gently but firmly that he had nearly lost for all time the greatest blessing he was ever given.
The trouble had started as soon as they came back from the funeral at Arlington. In fact he had started an argument about that before they went: why would they put their private grief in the context of the great national charade, the flags, the rifle shots, the bugle calls, which in another, seamier, context—one they strongly disapproved of—had demanded their son’s life? But Margaret had said they had to go: “These are the people David chose to live among, and this is the way they pay their respect to a fallen comrade and friend. David wouldn’t reject their kindness and nor should we. And Stafford Dionne has said he will be there, and I wouldn’t do anything to hurt that boy for the world.”
And, of course, as always Margaret had read it right. Stafford was there, and in fact commanded the honor guard, and brought to Margaret at the end the swiftly, neatly folded triangle of flag. There is probably a well-worded message that the soldier speaks on these occasions, but Stafford with tremulous voice said simply, “Mr. and Mrs. MacIver, this comes to you with the love and thanks of David’s friends, and the greatest
sorrow for your loss.” It was all he had to give. And Margaret with eyes brimming but voice composed said: “Thank you, Stafford. We will fly it at our house at the Cape, and think of David and you and all your friends. You must come and see us.” And he, fighting his emotions but returning to script, had saluted and rejoined his unit. They had flown the flag briefly, before they started falling.
The problem was that grief carried the two of them in orthogonal directions, apart. But a harsher view would say that it was the indiscriminate, omnivorous rage of MacIver that was sundering them. It flashed, apparently out of quiet, onto all and sundry, including people for whom normally he showed great respect—handymen, craftsmen working on the house—and even his students. One day, in the first-year humanities class that he always insisted on teaching, he found, as is often the case in the class after a midterm, the section sluggish in its interest and vague in the details of the text of the day, which happened to be Lear. After yet another question fell silently to the ground unanswered—where would you say the first moment in this play occurs, when Lear is interested in anything but himself?—he stared out balefully at the class, letting the silence thicken around them all to induce discomfort, and then quietly but witheringly raked them with his rage:
“Allow yourselves to feel something, you smug little spastics. Or at least concentrate to the point that you may stumble over some disturbing passage or fact, which, considered in the small hours over the years, may finally agitate you into being a little more human.”
At which a good student, with dignity and some hurt, asked quietly: “Why are you so angry at us, sir?”
The malignant energy, operating willfully to alienate them, immediately drained away, and MacIver said wearily, “Oh, I don’t know. I’m very sorry. Personal disappointment, perhaps.” (He would never call it grief, but his desolation must have been obvious to them.) “But I hope that it’s a little larger than that. There seems such a disproportion between what actually happens in the world, and keeps on happening, and the way we talk about it, and have always talked about it, here—in this sort of setting. We just, contentedly for the most part, lay words on things, and let them lie.”
The dean, who liked him, and whom MacIver admired, heard about some of these exchanges and suggested they have lunch. They went downtown, to be anonymous and uninterrupted.
“I hear things, Robert,” the dean began, sipping his merlot appraisingly, “that go beyond MacIver impatience and irritation to something heavier. Shall I recite?”
“No need,” said MacIver. “They’re true. They happened. I’m not good at controlling them right now.”
“You’ve never really got the hang of the academy—you’re a little too large and raw-boned for it. You make people nervous. For your average academic the institution serves as a tepid bath of ease and discontent. Out of the discontent sometimes comes a little ferment, which is brought to focus, and lo! an original piece of science or scholarship pops out. Then over the hill, blotting out the sun, comes stomping your heavy Highland Prophet, full of denunciations and roiling of waters, flipping a couple of little sharks from his bucket into the bath. You can see how gentle people might find this unnerving rather than bracing?”
“I’ve always admired how, in your narration of a situation, you always cling to the strictly factual.”
“Even a dean has to keep himself amused, Robert.”
“Are you suggesting that I should give up history, and go into, say, road construction?”
“There you go. Perfect. You can line up all your enemies in the sticky tar, and then run them over with your steamroller; in fact, while you’re at it I’ll send you a couple of dozen of mine. No, I’m suggesting that you take a leave of absence next term. It’s all right”—holding up his hand to stop MacIver’s interruption—“I can fund it for you—so that you and Margaret can help each other come through this awful thing that has befallen you. As it is, you’re frayed too thin, and it looks to me as though you’re in danger of coming apart.”
“It may be too late,” said MacIver. “I’ve been impossible at home, and I think I may be driving her away from me.”
“That would be the saddest thing I’ve heard yet,” said the dean, and MacIver could see he meant it. “In the meantime,” he went on, “there are only nine classes left in the term, and you have to keep the lid on through those. I have always wanted our students to be taught by your passion, but they can’t be shredded in the process. They’re not to be treated as though they were some sort of scabs; we actually don’t want them to be in Vietnam, right? We want to keep them safe right here. Remember the students you gave a charge to—Katherine Corton, Phil Ogden, dozens of them. That’s the way to go: spark them, don’t scorch them. Make it so.”
“You’re a good friend to me, Andrew.”
“Ah, well. We bloody-minded men should stick together.”
At home on Riverside Drive, the situation was as bad as MacIver had described, and he knew he made it so. He would go to his office in Fayerweather and sit there most of the day, idly turning pages and penciling spidery notes on a legal pad, a few usually caustic words, trailing behind a row of dots into inconsequence. The youthful verve with which he had assembled a coherent argument in the past was gone—the piles of books with pencils stuck at the relevant page with the telltale quotes detailing the most flagrant examples of Schnorkelbaum’s error on this side, reams of articles with savage double tracks of marker-pen down the side of the page showing Fitz-Fotheringay’s most absurd overstatements over there, while down the middle, in a blaze of humane moderation, went sailing the Scottish center MacIver cutting through another over-extended line to another luminous score.
All that was over. His colleagues were compassionate, mostly, and for a while tried to divert him from his grief by inviting him to do this or that manageable piece of work—contribute to a Festschrift for this retiring scholar, give a short address at the principal conference on oral history, join a group planning a new sequence of electives for majors—but he rejected everything, and usually churlishly: the scholar was a mountain of pedantry, the conference had long ago fallen into the hands of the self-promoting brainless, and the proposed sequence of courses had no internal rhyme or reason, amounting to no more than a smug parade of political certainties. He made it clear that he wanted to be left alone, so they left him alone.
Back at the house, waiting for Margaret to get back from the studio she had taken downtown, he made himself tea, and stood looking out at the gaunt tree branches of Riverside Park, seeing the seams and grooves of the bark absorbed into stark, black silhouettes as the afternoon wore down. He knew he had stated the matter accurately to the dean: Margaret might well be taking a leave of absence of her own; he could feel it coming, and could not blame her for it, and didn’t seem able to take steps to stop it. He stood there pondering this state of total aporia. One step farther out from their high windows, the great river still caught the light, with plates and lozenges of ice herded into a side stream by the current and the tide, welded here and there into barriers to enclose a glassy lagoon away from the chop of the stream. Margaret found him still looking down there when the thin horizontal clouds over the Palisades had been turned into angry red splinters by the sunset.
“Any great battles, rejections, put-downs, or altercations today?” she asked, looking at him, he knew, dispassionately and seeing a man in deep despair.
“Not today. Today a quiet one of harboring diminishing resources for future frays. You know, the cruel thing about depression is not that it makes you see the world darkly; God knows at my jauntiest, I’ve always looked on the world darkly. How else should one look at the bloody thing? The real debasing role of depression is to remove all flashes of energy or concentration, to ensure that you can never complete anything. Depression as depth fatigue. It takes a particular zest in grinding you to immobility, so that you have no smidgeon of self-esteem left. It’s my kind of guy—no half-measures, takes no prisoners.”
“Yes, I think that sounds true. How did your lunch with Andrew go?”
“It was good. He’s such an unusual mix—a picture of wry disengagement, and a kind of effortless caring to do the right thing at the same time. He wants me to take a leave of absence next term, to stop strafing all and sundry and leave the university some wholesome happiness—he will pay for it.”
“He’s such a nice man. What do you think of that?”
“I’m inclined to do it. As long as I keep going through the same motions, they seem imprisoning to me; they’ve already proved to me that they can’t sustain me in my present state, so they have become incrementally demoralizing. I need to go through some different motions, and I’m going to look for a pill dispenser.”
“Really?” She was surprised.
“Yes. Do you think Andrew dispenses pills? The trouble is I don’t want to do too much talking to get pills. I don’t want to sit around analyzing why my father went up in the air, so he wouldn’t come down in the mud, and the terrible stain it left on me.”
“No, I know you wouldn’t want to do too much of that. Even if Andrew doesn’t dispense himself, I’m sure he would know someone who does. And he could always convey to the person that, in your present state of mind, the therapist will not want to be in the same room with you for any longer than it takes to write a prescription.”
“Shall I take you out to dinner so that we can talk more about this and us? The food won’t be as good as you make, but we can think of somewhere quiet and private, and settle in.”
“What a great idea! What about going back to Anita and Jen’s? They’re better than I am, and they keep a lovely quiet place.”
So they went and ate and drank well and talked till they were alone in the restaurant. MacIver liked premises stated in advance in this sort of discussion, which always amused Margaret—it seems a male prerequisite to state the obvious, as though needing to clear the ground first of the very few propositions you won’t get around to fighting over.
Rules for Old Men Waiting Page 13
