by Barry Hannah
Edgar looked bent, used and ill. In short, perfect, “one of ours” among the faculty, young and old. Even his former “rough time” with drugs and drink worked for him, and his jazz name was never forgotten. Those narcoleptic from two glasses of wine could hardly believe he was alive and were glad he’d got through to bring forth more good things. They trusted him more than he did.
Gradually, though, Edgar did get better. He took to running on the track in the hot sun and at night he slept like a babe. His cough disappeared and his ulcer was cured—he became near lotused-out by well-being. The people around him were good and nothing was ruined by irony, except for Auntie Hadley. He could shake hands and mean it. Little beautiful things. But watch your pious little disease, Edgar, the counselor’s voice had warned. It’ll leap in good times.
Edgar unearthed his notes on the bums. With an appalling gloom he found them well written, though barely legible. They were dangerous, like his horns. He was another man, then, in his whiskey insight. How long could he go on being a mute fraud among these good people? Well, he’d practically whispered to the chairman that he was going to write about bums for his thesis—whether Chicagoan, Russian, or Southern, he didn’t know yet. But were bums all right as a subject? The chairman thought it excellent. Think of the therapy for Edgar, too. This was his life’s inevitable opus, wasting nothing. Hardly any of the profs had experience with a big city. The man was so happy, Edgar felt even more guilty. He did not want to write about bums any more than he wanted to play trombone. This was not how he would be significant.
In the spring the social sciences party was held on the ground floor of a Victorian bed-and-breakfast hotel made over by two bored doctors’ wives who became livelier in the role of perennial hostesses. Both of the wives were flirts, sexually attractive but chaste, fired by their Perdido Bay suntans. They danced their narrow waists, merry calves, and clapping sandals over the swank oak-plank hallways and up to the “boudoirs” above. There Edgar dreamed he might surprise them with the salty fluids of his mouth: desire was grinding awfully on him now, the gates thrown open by his health. He’d have to watch it. The wives served wine and cheese on silver trays worth more than the annual salaries of most La Grange faculty. One wife when asked about her husband shouted, “Oh, that dumb old bum!” Edgar hoped the man would die soon from overwork so she could kneel in front of him with money in hand, dragging on his jeans—holy smoke. Quit. She would find Edgar “darned alive!” He’d show her deep, rare animal need.
Could he awaken her senses, perhaps in a shack by the railroad, with only a naked lightbulb and a soiled mattress on which she struggled rump up? Bum’s dream, sot’s hope. He was waylaid, beyond himself. The faculty men around Sally had looks of civilized attraction, he noticed. She seemed nothing but a pleasant ornament of a rousing spring day, something to break up shoptalk. Oh, Snooky, Snooky.
Edgar’s aunt was at the party, too, hopefully lost in a blockade of deaf people. She’d insisted on coming. He did not know what she expected from the event. Maybe to spy on him, the fraud.
Great hell—Auntie Hadley was six feet away, under the archway, staring straight at him. For how long? He’d been caught in point-blank lust for married Sally. The old woman bored into him with distaste. In his hand he held a glass of nothing, a lemon-lime drink at which he now sipped, mortified. He pretended an aesthetic view of the premises. Whom did she expect, Plato? Since she was not mixing, not having a good time, what exactly did she want? To stalk the territory until she found something appreciably awful, like him?
He slouched away to the cheese. What she liked best, he thought, were fools in authority. Maybe she’d find a dean and nail his moronism for Edgar later. While he was tracking décolletage and secondarily a man who could be a chum like Parton or Smith, anybody but another recovering chemical fraud stuffed with sincerity, their happiness right from the manual, he glanced over the crowd toward Hadley. She was holding her wine glass like a hatchet. Some old cowboy bum wisdom he’d once heard—“Small-breasted women are mean”—could not apply to her with her low great ones. No fury like a woman scorned: by her own parents, seeing their ugly duckling have no reprieve over time; by boys and men making rude comments; beaten back into her shell, sad little ducky, left to suffer among the natural beauties of Savannah; sad in the playroom with her gorgeous dolls, maybe beheading them, and her toy villages, setting them on fire. He was trying to achieve sympathy.
“You saw that lady?” came a girl’s voice below. It was the grad student who had touched him in the hall. He liked her looks, all fresh faced in her green party chemise, above the mode of faculty wives and her peers, who were deliberately nondescript. “She dresses so well. Must be somebody. An older Jackie Kennedy, except for the hump and the dog-ugly face.”
The girl was naughty but risking it, touching Edgar’s arm again for the first time in months, eyes bubbling, needing discipline.
“Ow, I’m sorry. Real rude. I’m half drunk.”
“It’s my aunt. My landlady, too. She’s making things easier for me here.”
“Truly sorry. Let me tell you something better. My friend knows two deaf-mutes who were looking at Pres Reagan one day on television. They began laughing like crazy. Friend asked them what it was. ‘He’s lying!’ they signaled. They knew.”
As for décolletage, this girl Emma Dean was well fixed. Either that or boosted. Her cleavage practically spoke to him and he was positive she knew it. It made him happy.
“I work with the deaf. Lifelong dissertation there, Edgar boy. They know many secret things we don’t.”
“I believe you.”
“I know some of your secrets, too. I’m a busybody, probably bound for sociology, and I can see that you’re not too happy here, believing it’s beneath you and not Northwestern. You know too much about music and life, and worst of all, poor you, fame. You’ve got an honest, seasoned face. But with your slump and the hair in your face, you’re so . . . morose. Like you’re expecting defeat any second . . . Hate me, then. I’ve been improving the world since I was a little tapper.”
“No. You seem kind.” He straightened up and pulled back his forelock. “I’ve hardly seen you,” he lied, spying her every other day, wishing.
“You looked drunk. That’s why I came over and embarrassed myself. I’m drunk. My glasses are all fogged up, too.” She was even more friendly when she took them off. “Do you expect a lot from yourself ?”
“Maybe just the rote stuff, for a while.”
“My parents were nothing. Daddy at the dry cleaners his whole life, and mother had to work—white domestic help. Imagine that in La Grange. We’d drive past all the great white mansions and spreading magnolias. I wanted to be somebody. Even now, I’m not going to be just . . . sociology. They’re not going to be able to study me, class me. Hey, I was a virgin till I was twenty-five. You heard of that lately? Not because I was any holy-roly, either. I knew I’d enjoy sexual intercourse with the right person. My orgasms come very easy and I cry out like a panther. But . . .”
Her lips were dry and she stopped. She licked them and took a breath. Edgar noticed her eyes were moist. She was almost crying.
“Get me some more wine, please.”
He got it posthaste, hoping she wouldn’t use up her drunkenness on somebody else. He hadn’t been near a woman in five years.
“I’m all ears.”
“See,” she wept a little. “We lived in a brick bunker on a bare yard at the edge of town. There were eight of us with about the money and room for two. I wore my brother’s awful brown shoes in ninth grade when it really, really mattered.”
Edgar guided her to the big front porch. Good, nobody else was around. It was a wonderful bluish-yellow and green here in mid-spring. They sat on the steps facing east. She wouldn’t say anything. He was afraid she would go off in a sick fog.
“What about those doctors’ wives that run this place?” he asked.
“Society cows looking for an audience anywhere. I’m s
o direct today.”
“I don’t mind. I like you. You look good.”
“How did you fail? Were you poor?”
“Fail?”
“You’re here, I mean. You don’t have any money. Nobody really means to be in sociology, do they? You’re older. You look delayed or off track—I can tell. I can spot true success a mile off.”
“Fail, really . . .”
“See, if my mother and father hadn’t had to, if they hadn’t . . . they got married when she was fourteen. My mother was beautiful and at forty she looks as old as your aunt. But they just had to . . . couple, see, they’re blind as swamp rabbits. Two of my brothers are deaf, but they kept on keeping on. I was sick one day at school my senior year and walked home. We hardly ever had a working car. I walked in and tried to get on my pallet before I threw up again, and from their room I suddenly heard this ruckus. I couldn’t bear it. It was noon and he was home from the cleaners. They were in there mating, cursing each other, awful curses. I went out to the front yard and vomited, all dizzy, then looked up. Right on the road in front drove these rich boys in my class who were out for a restaurant lunch. They were hanging out the windows laughing at me. I never told that to anybody, Edgar.”
“Oh, no. Awful. You poor girl.”
Edgar took her hand. She had long fragile fingers with a class ring from Emory on one. It was still a teenager’s hand.
“Nine months from then I had a new baby sister. Mama all crumpled up and thin and lined. But I had a bright inner life and I went away on scholarship. Made A’s in almost everything, and Atlanta hardened me up.”
The party inside seemed a dim fraud, with Emma and her feather-light hands out here.
“I won’t tell you his name, but I had an affair with a married man—a wealthy important senator in Atlanta. The upshot was it ruined my life. He and his wife ‘reconciled’ and they named me a call girl he’d only seen a couple times during their marital stress. He’d promised me marriage, of course, but I never asked for it or wanted it. I took some money and shut up. My pop cursed me. My mother just died. They had principles, you know. But I gave him all the money for the four kids still at home.”
“Rough.”
“You might ask somebody in Atlanta who the senator was. Not me.”
“I believe you.”
“The man would put me naked in a silver Norwegian fox coat and work me over good, half a day at a time. He took poppers. We frolicked up where you could see all Atlanta. I liked him. We played backgammon. He cried when he lost me.”
“Were you ‘somebody’ then?”
“No. You know what I was—mainly dumb.”
“You don’t hear many people being truly ‘ruined’ anymore.”
Now there was another voice behind them and above. Edgar quailed.
“That was very nice, Edgar. Perfectly stranded, and I barely knew a soul.” His aunt stood peeved, he guessed, though her voice had some teasing in it, maybe in deference to Emma. He and Emma rose.
“Aunt Hadley, this is Emma Dean, one of my . . . colleagues in the department.”
“Can anyone tell me, please, what sociology is? I’ve asked four or five times and got the silliest stares.”
Clearly she did not want an answer. Emma smiled, blinking her eyes dry.
“You’ve a lovely suit!” said Emma.
The old woman did not acknowledge the comment.
“I guess I’ve had enough ‘higher education’ for a day. Are you done?”
“Yes, ma’am. We’ll go then?”
Edgar was forlorn and felt infantile. The old woman demoted everyone, he knew. Suddenly he wished that he had vast wealth.
“I’ll ride home with you. My home, I mean,” said Emma. “I don’t even have a car, Edgar. Can you believe it?”
“Oh, the poverty-stricken bohemian student is rather a tradition, isn’t it?” Hadley said, bright with scorn.
“Then I’m very traditional, ma’am.”
“But you go to honky-tonks.”
“Ma’am?”
“Your dress. Those see-through shoes.”
“Would these be like what the ‘flappers’ wore in your day?” Emma remained kind, without strain.
“‘In my day’? I’m not dead, young lady. Surprisingly, I believe I’m still alive enough to pay all the bills.”
They were quiet going to the car, calmly elegant like the old lady. Edgar noticed with some horror that Emma promptly opened the front door and sat down. Auntie Hadley just stood there, flaming. Edgar froze, with gloom and awkwardness. She knocked his hand away when he tried to help her in. They rode a piece in hard silence until Emma instructed him as to where she lived, sounding drunk. It was way out south of town on a tarry country road, Edgar found out slowly. When he finally got there and drove into the “park” it became clear she lived in a long redwood mobile home in a group of pines. There was a man sitting barefoot on wooden steps at the front door.
“That’s Michael the Math Monster. He’s deaf,” laughed Emma.
“You have a husband?” asked Hadley.
“No, just a friend. Another grad goob. Shares the rent.”
“And all the fun, I’d imagine.”
Edgar was vilely impotent. Emma did not seem so attractive and remarkable anymore as she hit her leg (“Ow! Gee!”) getting out. She was common and messy. He winced when she stumbled in the pine straw. His aunt would not be missing a stroke. Emma had become the thing Hadley knew her to be. But it was not Emma. He wasn’t himself either around this poison. A gutless lackey at thirty-five, losing worth by the minute.
How many people become what they seem to be to harridans and wags? He was furious as he drove. Then he recalled his aunt was still in the back seat.
“Wouldn’t you like to ride up front?”
“Might as well continue on back here. They’ll think I’m domestic help or some retarded person not let near the wheel.”
“I’d be taken more for the chauffeur. Here I am with tie and suit.”
“Eyes on the road. You drive like an old man from Nester Switch. Slow, but dangerous.”
“Don’t want to ruffle you.”
“You and those mummies I saw at the party couldn’t ruffle me if you tried. You tell me what sociology is and why it is necessary they draw salary.”
“It is the study of people in groups—money, trends, codes, idols, taboos.” With his rage still hot, he wanted to focus on her case, but subtly, subtly. “Class distinction, or sometimes just ordinary meanness.”
She was quiet until they almost got to her big shaded Tudor redoubt. He wanted two quarts of Manhattans just for starters.
“In other words, nosy parasites without a life of their own,” she said.
“All kinds, great and low like anywhere. Could I ask you”—Edgar flipped by money, the room, the car, the stamps, clothes—“has there been anything . . . unusually terrible in your life?”
“What? Why no!” He noticed in the rearview mirror that when she scowled she was twice as ugly. “You’re not using me to study. You stick with the bums.”
A man twelve years in prison wouldn’t take a rim job from you, he thought.
But he tried to set things back to the ordinary, crabbed as it was. He parked out front. He’d run for supper. Hadley liked Chinese food, Mexican, or something from the deli. She liked cream and pickled herring best, curious for an old Protestant woman. Edgar wondered if some Jew in Savannah had given her a kind word once, maybe he’d even loved her. Auntie’s wild loss.
“Well phooey,” she said, out before he could help. “You were supposed to drive into the garage. There should be something in there for you by now. It’s something that looked good for you. I had some advice.”
Edgar walked to the garage. What would need a garage—lawn mower, weed eater, leaf blower? Something meek and janitorial.
When he nicked on the light, he could hardly reckon on it. It was a showroom-new, cream-colored BMW motorcycle. He was knocked dumber when he recalled
what they cost. The keys were in it and he had to get on and drive, ho neighbors! But first he must see his aunt.
She was at her Manhattan, watching the television news.
“Thank you. What does it . . . mean?” That she projects I’ll kill myself. But a new one wasn’t required. He’d almost done it on that piece of rolling bones an era ago.
“I thought about you lumbering in to park that Chrysler on campus. Not really fit. I’m told these motorcycles are ‘hot’ with your young professionals.”
“I’m staggered. Thanks again.”
“Get on the thing. Drive it, Edgar.”
“Yes, I will.”
“It must be a great fight, staying sober.”
He was trying to see something of his father’s face in Auntie Hadley’s: a long-nosed projection of the nostrils, a gathering of the lips into a plump rabbit bite. Another animal was present, too, in the forehead and eyes: a monkey. Some breed rarefied by spite and terror, squawling from a nook in a rain forest. But his father’s face was pleasantly usual, as in one of those old ads of a bus driver inviting you aboard, happy hills and vales ahead.
“Frankly, boy, I wish you were more interesting.” She studied him back. “Your father really didn’t give you much to shoot for, did he?” Could the troll guess he was thinking of his father? His regular face. His father was deferential, almost unctuous, and uncritical. He was all right, was his father, Oliver. He should see him soon.
His father was a newspaperman—no, that was too strong a word—whose regular column in the local paper was, essentially, one timid paragraph of introduction to a reprinted item of obscure history. The articles illustrated that people of the past were much like ourselves. He had little money, few other interests except choir, and viewed himself as a meek servant of the Big Picture. His only small vanity was in seeing his articles reprinted elsewhere every now and then. Edgar knew that outside the small-town antiquarian South, a larger newspaper would have pulled the trapdoor on his father and his monkish library work. His father had wanted to be a history teacher but could not face the classroom. In the forties, in fact, a huge bully of a student, smelling out his fear, beat him up. Hadley had dutifully reported this to Edgar when he was newly in the house. He was also informed that Sue, Edgar’s mother, had always made more than her husband, doing the books of shops around town. She was a CPA. They were faithful moderate Methodists. His father—he hated this—sang in the church choir. He did not like him forming the big prayerful O’s with his mouth, his eyes on the director, a sissy. The BMW was coming with a great tax. He felt murderous. He should have known.
