One day, at least ten years ago, he reckoned, Margaret had appeared in his little summer study from across the yard, with a beautifully lettered poster she had made of a line of Blake. “This is not just for you, it is you,” she said. The line read:
THE TYGERS OF WRATH ARE WISER THAN THE
HORSES OF INSTRUCTION.
“If I was a simply adoring nineteenth-century wife, I would have made it a sampler for you, sighing over every stitch, but I don’t have the time. But I feel just as she does.”
“What a wonderful thing!” exclaimed MacIver. “But what exactly is the wisdom of the Tyger, do you think?”
“Isn’t that the question? I think Blake would say, if you are as beautifully balanced and symmetrical in every way as the Tyger (and only if you have a y in your name, remember), then your hair-trigger instincts bring you out ahead of any amount of laborious calculation.”
“I’m going to spell MacIver with a y from now on, I think. But I once met a tiger, who told me his wisdom consisted in the perception that the world is full of shit and assholes, and the only judgment that stands up is the one that declares ‘It’s all crap!’—which were incidentally the ‘Angelic Doctor’ Thomas Aquinas’s dying words.”
“I doubt if Aquinas said exactly that, but that is exactly the sort of disreputable tiger you would meet. And I notice you spelt him with an i.”
“I noticed he was very, very popular with the tigresses, however.”
MacIver sat on rocking in his chair, drowsing now and then, on another blessed day of absolution from pain, and sipping the last of the warm maple syrup and the Lagavulin in the glass beside him when he remembered. Now the exchange with Margaret over the Blake poster pushed him still further back, before they were together. There had been a brief period in the thirties, when MacIver had been doing research in Paris, and arrangements were made for him to play rugby for the Paris University Club, whose cheer was, and is, Allez PUC! (pronounced with a long French u and hard c), and whose public address system introduced him as L’Ecossais Sensationnel, which, as people were fond of pointing out to him, sounded a whole lot better than “the Sensational Scot.” The point of the memory, however, was the character of the physiotherapist who helped him with various muscle tears and other things over this short season. Her name was Claudine, and she came, she said, from Provence, and was a half gypsy (une demi-tzigane). This exotic makeup, according to hearsay, accounted for her uncannily knowing hands and touches over the human body, though her sister Ariane had told MacIver that she did not have a drop of gypsy blood in her, but had adopted the persona when she was five to annoy their mother, a very proper lady from Seville. MacIver preferred Claudine’s version and filled in details of her history for himself: he imagined that when the colorful, painted caravans pulled over onto the deserted field beside the stream, and the stocky horses, mongrels, and healthy, dirty children were all released to crop grass and play, the young women would gather around the ancient, far-seeing, and vaguely menacing grandmothers, and there learn the secret uses of herbs, lotions, unguents, and incantations, where and when to be applied, to what parts of the body, at which phases of the moon.
Claudine certainly liked playing on the mysterious aspects of her work, and MacIver was crazy about it. He never stepped on a rugby field in better fettle than after he had been tended by her. She was striking to look at, but not conventionally beautiful. Long and lean would be a summary phrase, applying to face, arms, hands, legs, feet, and the whole assemblage of the parts (she cannot have been more than an inch under six feet), but it does not convey one jot of how womanly she was. A torrent of black hair and eyes almost as dark under jet-black eyebrows, surprisingly delicate nose and lips. Smoothly shaded complexion and skin, unhelpfully described as a rosy olive color. She had very little hair on her body.
This last detail was a known fact from the final procedure in any session with her, for which she would undress and lie next to MacIver, who first lay on his stomach with his arms stretched out above him, and then on his back with his arms still raised. Claudine stressed that her nudity was essential for the protocol to work, because it reduced the dangerous “tension of reserve.” Her procedure was to touch his body all over, with variations of pressure, from feathery light to stressful sharpness with fingertips, hands, sometimes lips, but mostly with her long nails, which she would slide under the hair on his belly and chest and down all the slopes and planes of his body. But the most important and dramatic element of the procedure was the repeated chant of the single injunction “No, don’t hurt this flesh” (Non, ne blessez pas cette chair), invariably starting low and whispering gentle, but then rising through every variation—urgency, agitation (Non, non, non, non, ne blessez . . .), low moaning, harsh cries, and sometimes sobs, before touching down again in gentleness. Sex was never mentioned by either of them, let alone discussed, but it was often enacted, and sometimes more than once, in the course of this unvarying ritual. MacIver always tried to get Claudine to talk about the chant, but she would look at him in some consternation and say, “But it is quite obvious—it’s a song to ward off evil (une chanson apotropaïque)!”
Margaret loved Claudine, whom of course she never met, and she loved her procedures, at which she became a talented practitioner. But she loved her most for what she called her “generous playacting, so wholehearted that both of you were caught into the drama, and probably believed it. So don’t belittle it now. I can assure you that ‘Don’t hurt this flesh’ is a mantra every woman says, at least to herself, from the time she is bathing her baby, to holding her lover, to sending her man off to war.”
“I have to conclude, MacIver said to himself, that Margaret was the only completely passionate, completely gentle person I ever met. And to think I almost lost her.”
That evening, perhaps undeservedly, MacIver, who had had some recognition in his life, was given a final award. He had dozed, tottered off to see if he could squeeze a few more drops out of the empty Lagavulin bottle into his glass, added some warm water, and managed to climb back into his rocker without spilling it. He was now inhaling its peaty vapors, rather than drinking it. All of this took some concentration, and it was only by accident that his attention was suddenly caught by something on television. The sound was on just loud enough for him to catch a particular voice and recognize it. And upon inspection, it turned out that he knew that woman on the screen.
He had the TV tuned to the public channel, and there was a book program on. The interviewer, dapper but determinedly faceless, was skillfully feeding his guest lines without comment or judgment, giving her enough rope to soar or hang herself on her own. The young woman was doing wonderfully well. She was a former student of his, Katherine Corton, a quiet beauty. MacIver did not know her well. She had taken his course on World War I in graduate school, but her own field was American history. She had excelled for him, and he had been happy to be added to her dissertation committee—she had asked for him, because her work, like his, had made use of oral history. The thesis had been on the Depression, called Together in Hardship; and its boldest claim, as he remembered it, was that that decade, far more than any periods of prosperity, had reawakened the country to its founding document, the Constitution: Americans at the lowest ebb, living hard, rediscovered after a long sleep, that not only did they have rights, but they were meant to be bound together in solidarity against whatever assailed them all; they should all have a sense of personal entitlement, and had been given strong words to insist that the miserable conditions of their world should change.
The big sweep of this thesis, MacIver remembered, had caused grave consternation among the microspecialists at the time Ms. Corton defended it. But she had disarmed them all by the subtlety of the qualifications she had shaded in, and by the wonderful profusion of instances of collective enterprise and mutual support she had gathered in that period, from the unlikeliest sources. It certainly had not hurt her with her dissertation committee that she was soft-voiced and beautiful:
whatever the supposed erudition and objectivity of their research, these were at root, he knew, fairly primitive men, like himself.
Once past the hurdle of the defense, the thesis had immediately won attention and awards: it offered both optimism and a long continuity of positive purpose in the country, and thinking people were glad of both. She was well on her way, and it turned out that the occasion for the present interview was the Bancroft Prize for outstanding work in American history, which she had just received for her latest book. MacIver was glad to see her, a lovely visitor from his former world; she seemed quite unchanged and unspoiled—the same gracious consideration of each question she was answering, the same appreciation of the complexity of things, the same obvious humanity, and with all of it, the same capacity to make firm, telling judgments. She told you things you did not know. A brilliant woman. MacIver felt absurdly proud and happy for her.
At the end, it turned out they had a surprise for him. It was hard to tell with an interviewer so systematically inscrutable, but MacIver thought he betrayed his delight in his guest by concluding with a fat question she could play with: which scholars would she consider she was most influenced by, in her scholarly methods and her writing? She could make or dash reputations with her answer.
A pause to consider, and then, of course, another generous reply. She had been very fortunate in her teachers; and she named them. “But,” she continued, “I would have to say that far and away the most important lesson I learned for my profession was taught to me by Robert MacIver.”
The interviewer had to dig far down in his memory, but, clearly surprised, came up with the right man: “The historian of the First World War?”
“Yes, I only had one course with him, but I had some conversations with him after class, and when I was writing my dissertation, and they made a strong impression on me.”
“What was the most important lesson you learned from him?”
She smiled. “Mr. MacIver always insisted that, whatever I was learning about historical methods in the course of my degree, I should never surrender the conviction (they were his words, I can still hear the Scottish burring of his r’s scornfully on the word surrender) that a historian must involve himself passionately in the lives of the people he is studying. He has to understand the minute variances that are the real prime movers of historical change: the choices an individual can make, from the identical background as everyone around him, to crave something for himself and his family that is entirely different from the ‘popular’ choice. He was a notoriously passionate man himself, and I think quite a few of his colleagues disapproved of him or were afraid of him.”
“He sounds quite a character. Is he still alive?”
She looked embarrassed for a moment. “I don’t know. I remember hearing that his wife had died sometime last year. But I’m ashamed to say I don’t know if he’s still alive.”
“Me neither, Katherine,” said MacIver to himself as he switched off the program and shuffled off to bed. But he was very grateful to her. As he lay on the bed under the navy greatcoat waiting for sleep, if it ever came, he thought: “You’ve been wrong so many times, but you can’t have been wrong every time.”
EPILOGUE
Release
It turned out Katherine Corton was visiting friends in Wellfleet two days later, and decided to inquire about Robert MacIver; her embarrassment in the interview proceeded from her sense that she had been negligent towards her old mentor. She should find out about him. She was a good researcher, and decided to start at the hub, the local supermarket, and particularly with Bonnie, the checkout clerk.
“Do you know Robert MacIver?”
“The old Scottish professor? Sure.”
“Do you know if he’s still alive?
“Oh, good heavens, yes, he must be. He’s a good, gruff friend to us all here, and we would have heard if he’d died. But come to think of it, I haven’t seen him for months. He did a huge load of shopping well before Christmas—October, even September— and that’s the last time I saw him.”
“Do you think he could have gone to Florida, or somewhere?”
“I really doubt it. One winter in filthy weather I said to him, ‘Will you be going south, Mr. MacIver?’ and he said, ‘Never, Bonnie, never. Scotsmen should never be cooked in the sun.’ But this is really worrying.” She asked around the store, and no one had seen him.
Bonnie was persistent, and phoned her boyfriend, Matt, a fireman. Matt said that in his rounds snow-clearing, he had noticed Mr. MacIver’s driveway was not plowed. He had assumed he was away. He would come with his pickup in an hour, and they would go and check on him. Would Katherine care to come with them? Katherine introduced herself, and said she would.
Matt turned up promptly with his big Dodge truck, with plow attached, and they climbed up next to him. They went down the back roads, through the woods, and found the remote MacIver driveway blocked with a mountain of icy and gritty snow cast aside by town plows from the road. Matt went to work, bulling the truck in and out, left and right. Once past the first barrier, it was easier through the trees and up to the house. They saw a car mounded in snow, and they saw the porch of the house collapsed. Matt gave three loud blares on the horn.
“This could be grisly,” he said in warning. “But we should go in.”
MacIver meanwhile was still there, but barely. He had fallen out of his rocking chair, and was now lying, slightly dazed, on his side, with one hand under his head—reclining, really. Suddenly, he thought, the door opened. There were people there, and it seemed light and cold had come in with them. They were still over by the door, uncertain what they had found. He summoned the last ounce of graciousness he had left to greet them: “Hello,” he said. “I think I may need some help.” His words released them, and they rushed towards him. But he had been quite quick in his day, and slipped away before they reached him.
FOR KATHERINE
she brought him well
to his remembrance
Acknowledgments
For a quick man, MacIver has taken a long time coming to light, and many have urged him forward over the years and should now be recognized.
I want to thank Amherst College, and in particular two successive deans, Lisa Raskin and Gregory Call, who have been generous to me with research grants and computer assistance; the Imperial War Museum in London and its library staff, who supplied me in short order with essential information on World War I gas production and casualties; and Columbia University, and especially Professor W. Theodore de Bary, for admission to its genial Society of Senior Scholars.
Two close friends have given me expert advice—Paul Raymond-Barker, a great rugby player, and a soldier and forester besides, and Captain E.H.M. Orme, RN, who provided details of naval gunnery and procedures. And many other friends have read all or part of the book and commented on it knowingly. The most long-suffering of these should be named: Michael Rosenthal and Daniel Dolgin heard so many MacIver stories at so many lunches that by the end they both indicated a defensive preference for making up their own. But MacIver believed that old friends should be tested. I want to thank them here, and a host of others who gave focused comments and help at key times; you start to write a first novel with doubt, but I became conscious of a resonant chorus in the air around me, strong with the insistence that the time comes when you stop talking and finish what you have begun.
The oldest story is that a book goes nowhere unless it is adopted or espoused, and then advanced, and here I have been preternaturally lucky. My friend Elisabeth Gitter read the manuscript and showed it to Molly Friedrich, who cannily sent it to Ileene Smith to read and edit, who in turn urged Alison Samuel to allow it entry into England: never in this game was a man so blessed with such a stylish quadruple play.
Unless it was in his family. My children, Chris, Maggie, and Emily, and their sweet consorts, Victoria and Matt, have recognized, I fear, pale facets of their lively selves in some of these pages but have still generously accepted
the story and encouraged me. But the whole thing must be for Katherine, because, even through its faintest days, she kept willing it into life.
Rules for Old Men Waiting
PETER POUNCEY
A Reader’s Guide
A Conversation with Peter Pouncey
Question: Is it true that this novel was twenty-five years in the making?
Peter Pouncey: Twenty-three, actually. The first part I can remember writing can be dated to early fall 1981: the story of a boy taking his mother rowing on a lake in the highlands of Scotland. The boy, as far as I remember, had no name. The sequel to the rowing in the present book is the same boy taking (and putting back the next day) a golden eagle’s egg from its nest on a cliff above the lake, which was not written till 1991 at the earliest; by then he was called MacIver. So it was all a slow evolution and a complex series of layers and accretions. There was no particular agitation, or even urgency, about the slow rate of progress. I was heavily engaged elsewhere at the time, studying the writings of the ancient historians or being a college dean or president, and I looked at these escapes into my imagination as a relief and relaxation from sometimes more stressful preoccupations. In the end, there was a chest filled with pages to draw on. And when you are two thirds of a century old, it is borne in on you that this may be the last chance to complete what you most wanted to do.
Q: You mentioned your work on the ancient historians. What influence have the classics had on your writing generally?
PP: A strong influence, beginning with my efforts to master two precise languages, Latin and Greek. In these heavily inflected languages (i.e., they have many cases, extra tenses, moods, etc.), the form of words is altered to convey exactly the function that the word plays in the particular sentence, and one’s attention to each word, to its ending, to the rhythmic contribution it makes in its context, is a very good spur to paying attention to one’s own language. In England, we were schooled from an early age in trying to write in both languages in prose and poetry, and it was useful. There is no doubt that an only averagely educated citizen of antiquity would have a more nuanced eye and ear for how language behaves than his modern counterpart.
Rules for Old Men Waiting Page 19
