by John Gardner
Freddy’s Book
John Gardner
For Marcus
Contents
I. FREDDY
II. FREDDY’S BOOK
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
A BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN GARDNER
I.
FREDDY
I WAS IN Madison, Wisconsin, on a lecture tour, when I first met Professor Agaard and his son. I was there to read a paper, brand new at the time (since then, as you may know, widely anthologized), “The Psycho-politics of the Late Welsh Fairytale: Fee, Fie, Foe—Revolution!” The lecture was behind me, a thoroughly pleasant event, as usual, at least for me—a responsive audience that had laughed at the right places, perhaps here and there shed a tear or two, asked the kinds of questions that let a speaker show his wide-ranging knowledge and wit, and applauded with generous gusto when it was over. Now I was deep into one of those long, intense celebrations that put the cap on such affairs, making the guest feel gloriously welcome and the audience (those who make the party) seem a host of old friends. The whole first floor of the house was crowded; a few may have drifted to the second floor as well; and from the sound of things, there was another party roaring in the basement I think I never knew whose house it was; probably the elderly professor of antiquities who’d met me at the door, one of those bright-faced, bearded fellows with a great, hearty handshake, a thundering laugh, and a pretty, younger wife. I don’t mean I was indifferent to who my host was; not at all. I have been, from childhood upward, a gregarious, infinitely curious being, quick to strike up friendships wherever I travel, always more than willing to hear the other person’s side. It was no doubt those qualities that led me to my profession, history—or more precisely, psycho-history. In any event, as I was saying, the night was hectic, as these things always are, and the party was already under way when, trailing associate professors and graduate students—my face bright red, I imagine, from my long climb up the icy flagstone steps (I’m a heavy person, I ought to mention, both tall and generous of girth)—I arrived, divested myself of hat and coat, and began my usual fumbling with my pipe. Crowded as the house was, I couldn’t catch more than a smattering of the hurried introductions.
Whomever it belonged to, I remember thinking it a splendid house, elegant and fashionable: vaguely Tudor but exceptionally airy and, with its wide arches, its crystal chandeliers—a thousand reflections in the walnut panelling—a place wonderfully aglitter with cheerful light. Except for the kitchen and numerous brick islands of thriving plants, the whole first floor was carpeted in oystery light gray. Talk rumbled, oceanic; silverware clinked around the white buffet tables. I’d moved to my usual theater of action, backed against the drainboard in the large, bright kitchen, where I could be close to the ice in its plastic bag and, thanks to my height, could command every corner of the room. On every side of me, guests with their glasses were packed in so tightly that only by daring and ingenuity could one raise one’s own and drink. There were the usual smiling students, heads tilted with interest, eyes slightly glazed, possibly from drink but more likely from mid-term pressure and lack of sleep. Heaven knows it’s not easy for our graduate students—the competition, the scarcity of jobs; one’s heart goes out to them!
So I was holding forth, enjoying myself. It may be true, as occasionally someone will point out to me, treating the thing as an established fact, that for the most part the students and professors pressed around me are interested only as one is in, say, lions at the zoo; but I would stubbornly insist that there are always exceptions, even the possibility of some signal exception: some young Gibbon or Macaulay not yet conscious of how good he is, who hangs on every word of the sparkling-eyed, silver-haired visitor from Olympus (the lower slopes), hunting with ferocious concentration for what, in time, he’ll find he has inside him. One is always a little checked by that not-too-remote possibility—one tries not to speak too rashly, give bad advice—but I, at least, am never utterly checked. One plays the game, follows wherever drink and inspiration lead; what harm? I was the guest celebrity, every word worth gold; but I was only one in, excuse the expression, a galaxy of stars. Everything I said was sure to be contradicted next week when some other famous scholar zoomed in; and everything I said—no question about it—I emphatically believed for that moment. “You have such confidence, Mr. Winesap!” people tell me. Shamelessly I reveal to them my secret. On paper I say anything that enters my head, then revise till I believe it; but in conversation I count on others for revision. I rather enjoy being proved—conclusively and cleanly—to be mistaken. It’s Nature’s way, I like to think: the Devonian fish corrected little by little through the ages into the milkcow, the gazelle, the princess with golden tresses who refills my glass. Young professors poke my chest with their index fingers, their faces pocked and sweating, their bright eyes bulging. “Nonsense!” I sing out, or “Interesting! Good point!” Behind them, men my own age, with trim gray moustaches, smile knowingly at the floor. I can guess what they’re thinking. They’d like to know how I, a mere poet of a historian, have become what I’ve become, while they, so responsible and reasonable, so well-armed with evidence and fit to be trusted to the last jot, tittle, iota, and scintilla, are only what they are. I could tell them the answer: “You inspire no confidence, my learned friends! You don’t eat enough! You’re skinny!” No doubt in their heart of hearts they know it. “Never mind,” I could tell them in a gentler mood, “in a thousand years we’ll all be suppressed events in a Chinese history book.”
We were discussing monsters. I’d written a trifling, amusing little piece on the roots and rise of the American big-foot legend, and the people around me were asking me now, though it had nothing much to do with the article I’d written, to explain my ideas on the popular appeal of monstrosity (“from monstrum: a showing forth,” as a wiry little graduate student pointed out—a young man worth watching, as I mentioned at the time). I was carrying on in the highest spirits—needless to say, I’d had a good deal to drink—and just as I was making a particularly interesting point (I felt), a bespectacled, doll-like professor at my left broke in loudly, peering with fierce attention at the sherry in his glass, the corners of his mouth twitching nervously outward, “I have a son who’s a monster.”
I smiled, quite thrown, glancing at the faces around me to see what response I ought to make. The man was either mad or in deadly earnest, and in his presence my casual spinning of theories seemed indelicate to say the least. No doubt those around me felt the same embarrassment, but from their looks one would have thought they hadn’t heard him. I stroked my moustache and looked back at the professor just in time to see him roll up his large, glinting eyes at me—fierce blue pupils trapped in red and white webbing—then look back as if in terror at his sherry. He raised his hand, not looking up, timidly inviting a handshake. “We haven’t met,” he said. He had, like so many university people, the queer habit of making his words just a touch ironic, and sometimes, as now, he would close off his phrase with a curious little baa of a laugh, a sort of vocal tic. “I’m Professor Agaard,” he said. “Baa.”
It was an odd introduction. Among other things, one rarely hears anyone at these gatherings call himself “Professor.” I studied the top of his head with admiration: a large, pale, liverspotted dome; frail wisps of hair. He was older than most of us, surely past retirement; probably professor emeritus, I thought.
“How do you do?” I said, grasping his small, rigid hand. Awkwardly, hardly knowing what else to do—smiling and bending my head to show interest—I said, “Your son, did you say—?”
He glanced at me in horror, as if only now did he realize that he’d spoken it aloud. The others were all studiously g
azing at their drinks.
I smiled harder, throwing him help. “I imagine all our sons can seem monstrous at times.” I laughed heartily and gave his small fingers another earnest squeeze.
“Oh no,” he said, looking at me sternly, almost indignantly, focusing hard through his thick, tinted glasses, “I mean it literally.” Then he glanced at those around us—blank faces, frozen winces. It was clear that even he, for all his singularity, was aware that he’d broken the polite conventions, darkened the tone of things. No wonder if he was flustered; he must have been as painfully aware as I was that his colleagues did not like him. Perhaps he scorned his students and graded too fiercely, with the result that his classes were smaller than other people’s, stirring his colleagues’ resentment. Perhaps he was believed to give out a crushing excess of information—he looked like that type—or shirked committee work, or consistently took the wrong side in things. Whatever the reason, he was clearly unpopular, and now, as often happens to people in that plight, having made a small mistake—perhaps not even knowing what mistake it was he’d made, he was evidently thrown into a panic. Unable to think of a way to back down, and having missed my invitation to make light of it, he looked to left and right, his expression grim, then back at me, his eyebrows lifted, eyes wild, and made his radical decision. “Ah!” he said, and then, loudly: “Excuse me!” Without another word, he snatched back his hand, ducking and turning at the same time, found a small opening in the crowd, and fled. I stared after him, no doubt with my mouth open.
“You must’ve got to him,” a fat, bearded red-head beside me said. He was laughing, his two plump, small-fingered hands closed fondly around what looked like a glass of straight bourbon. His hair was parted in the middle and curled up sharply on each side; if we hadn’t been so crowded, I’d have glanced down to see if he had satyr’s hooves. He let go of his glass with one dainty hand and gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Never mind old Agaard,” he said, laughing again. If I’d been startled by Agaard’s look of woe, I was even more startled by the red-head’s look of merriment.
Before my friend the red-head could carry the matter further, one of the people I’d been talking with earlier broke in again, poking between us with his nose like a chicken, and, like it or not, I was caught up once more in the scholiast’s game, paring popular notions of the “queer” and “unearthly” from notions of the “monstrous.” Time slipped out from under me; I forgot all about Professor Agaard and his son, and at last, when there were only a few of us left, the clean-shaven, neatly combed graduate student who’d been assigned to my service made signs that, really, we ought to be on our way, if I was willing. I hated to leave such a sociable haven, even now that most of the others had gone home; but reluctantly I finished off my drink, found my hat and coat, and followed him down the steps and the icy, buckling sidewalk to where his car sat, alone under a streetlight at the corner. It was a foreign car, trim and new, the kind that makes a person of my size hug his knees. But I was in a mood to hug myself. Wonderful creatures, all of them! A splendid occasion!
It was just as we were pulling in at my motel—one dim light in the office, the sign turned off—that I remembered the brief, peculiar conversation with the doll-like old man and asked, “What is this business about Professor Agaard’s son?”
“Agaard?” the young man echoed, ducking his head, peering past the steering wheel, making sure he was approaching the motel in exactly the right way—that is, approaching where the sign said ENTER, not EXIT, and driving very slowly to outwit the malevolent ice.
“I believe he said his son is a ‘monster,’” I said.
The young man glanced at me as he’d have done if he believed my revealing the truth about the Agaards would bring ruin on the Department—throw him, with his degree now made worthless, to the wolves. It was nothing of the kind, I knew; nothing but the alarm of a young man uncomfortable where the rules turn vague, drawn against his will toward the fogbound marchland where honest concern and the gossip’s ingress merge. Surely the personal affairs of his professors were not his business, his eyes said, though his lips remained thoughtfully pursed. I knew him then; should have known him all along by the stiffness of his elbows as he drove: he was one of those good second brothers in the fairytales, the one you could almost but in the end not quite put your money on. Out of virtue, he believed, come success and security; turn aside for an instant, and the abyss will leap around you with a shout. Poor devil, I thought, trying to put on charity—“third and mightiest of the three magic rings,” as I like to say at meetings. (No one is amused.) Nevertheless, his look somewhat chilled me. I remembered the look of distaste all around me, those cobra glances, when the old man had spoken about his son. I half wished now that I’d made Professor Agaard stay longer and tell me what he meant. The young man stopped the car; wed arrived at the door. “I don’t think I know a Professor Agaard,” he said, and gave me a cool little smile. “I’m in American.” With two fingers he adjusted his glasses.
“I see,” I said. It was an interesting solution. My young friend would go far in this icy-hearted, ethical age. But then, of course, the poor fellow wanted to get home to his wife, be able to get up for his classes in the morning. It’s easy to be harsh; take the bolder way! I nodded, smiled again. Overhead, the stars shone like tiny bits of frost. I was depressed a little by that sudden reminder of the immensity of things, universe on universe, if the Hindus are right—giant after sprawling giant, each pore on each body a universe like ours. I opened the door. “I’m sorry to have kept you so late,” I said.
Gratefully, mindful of his manners, he stuck out his hand. I shook it. “Good-night, Jack,” he said.
“Good-night,” I said, and, after an instant, “Good luck to you, my boy!” I got out and carefully shut the door. He waved as he pulled away; I waved back. I went up to my dim, comfortable room, staggering just a little—increasing instability of the planet, no doubt; also too much gin—drew the covers back, undressed, went to bed and, at once, slept like a bear.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, rising late, I found a letter awaiting me at the desk. I opened it on my way to breakfast in the sun-filled café-restaurant, puzzled for a moment over the wobbly, old-man handwriting, awkward and full of starts as a minnow’s trail, dropped down to the signature, and felt a shock of something like morning-after guilt. The letter was from Professor Sven Agaard. With the full name before me, I realized at once that the queer old man I’d met last night was the well-known Scandinavianist, easily one of the most respectable historians of our time, though only for one fat book, published some thirty-five years ago. In fact, I’d assumed he was dead.
It was a long letter, and at first I could do nothing but stare at it in distress, though technically, of course, I’d done nothing wrong. Try as I might, I could make no sense of this guilt I was feeling, but there was no mistaking that it was guilt. It did not seem to me, though perhaps I was mistaken, that it was anything so simple as my not having recognized his name.
At last, seated with my tea, awaiting my toast and scrambled eggs—small groups of chattering diners all around me, having mid-morning coffee or perhaps early lunch—I flattened out the somewhat wrinkled letter on my placemat, glanced around me once, then hastily read through it. The first two pages were a long, serpentine, and, it seemed to me, quite mad apology for the way Professor Agaard had intruded with his personal affairs. He was a silly old fool, he assured me. (I mused over that one. False modesty? Some old-world politeness I was not understanding? Something about it made my skin crawl, to tell the truth; I set it down, tentatively, to my sense that I’d wronged him. I read on.) He would not blame it on the wine he’d drunk, though the wine had no doubt had its part in the business. Nevertheless, having intruded so far, he could see that it was only right that he invite me to his house, if I was interested, since it was wrong to introduce some teasing suggestion and then refuse to say more. He was not, like me, a traveller, he said, a man who could be comfortable in any world he entered.
(That too seemed over-modest. I knew for a fact that he’d been born in Sweden and had at one time travelled widely; but this too I let pass.) If he’d erred in life, he continued—winding cautiously in toward his point—it was probably in giving in too easily to this weakness, keeping himself too aloof from things. Indeed, it was entirely possible that, concerning certain matters, he’d made grave mistakes; perhaps I could advise him. Needless to say, he said again, he was profoundly sorry for having troubled me, and if he was wrong to write this letter, as some would undoubtedly say he was—“rude heads that stare asquint at the sun,” as Sir Thomas Browne so aptly put it …
My breakfast arrived. I ate without noticing, reading through the whole thing again more slowly, and then yet again, wondering what under the sun I’d stumbled into. It was a pitiful letter, there was no mistaking that, but there was also something else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, an elusive hint of anger, at very least an edge of nastiness.
The letter had a repeatedly-copied-over look. Considering its length, the professor must have worked at it half the night. On the final page there was a telephone number and the word unlisted, underlined twice, then directions to his house, somewhere on the outskirts of the city.
I had at first no intention of accepting the invitation. I was scheduled to fly down to Chicago that afternoon—I had a lecture in two days, and a number of old friends I was hoping to visit, former colleagues at Northwestern—and even if I were free, it was clear that the invitation had caused Sven Agaard such distress, such a torture of close reasoning on morality and social responsibility, that to accept might well be the act of (there it was again, that ridiculous, empty word) a monster. On the other hand, I thought—frowning and pressing my fingertips together—the letter had something like an anguished plea in it. Perhaps, for all his apology and hesitation, and in spite of the hint of ridded wrath that escaped him, the old man was urgently hoping I’d visit. He was not an immediately likeable person, but distress is distress.
