This time I had nothing to say. I was in a hurry. But I did wonder silently, what could possibly be construed as a middle class in mid-nineteenth-century America? If I’d wanted to argue with him, I would have said something about an entire population of people—several populations of people—left out of the whole thing: Indians, Chinese, and Blacks, probably most of the immigrants who came to this country before the civil war, and most who came after.
“You see what I mean?” Bible wanted to know.
“I do,” I lied.
“Until this country came on the scene, the world was ruled by simple inheritance and force; by nothing but accidents of birth, or brute strength and mostly passion—since reason requires thought and less action, and action is the main component of power and force. But Americans are all about action, Ben. Do you see how important and ironic this idea of self-governance based on reason is?”
I didn’t know what he wanted me to do. Sometimes I think he liked it when I argued with him. But I was in a hurry, so this time I only said, “I see.”
It got quiet for what seemed like a long time, and then I tried to change the subject. “You should see George these days. He’s started working out with weights. I think he’s more confident.”
“Really.” He lifted his foot carefully out of the bath and wrapped it in a clean towel. He let it rest on the floor next to the basin of water. I carried the basin to the sink, emptied it and refilled it with warm water and salt. While I was doing this, I kept talking over my shoulder about George. “He’s started a sort of growth spurt, I think. He may be a little taller than he was the last time you saw him. I bet his bones are killing him.”
“His bones?”
“All that fast growth. Annie says that’s got to hurt.”
I came back to where Bible was sitting and put the basin of water in front of him. Then he unwrapped his foot, lifted his leg a bit and lowered the foot down into the water. “Not too hot is it?” I asked.
Alexis de Tocqueville was still in Bible’s hands; it was still open to the page he had been reading to me. I looked at it, and realized in some ways I was watching the book the way a man watches a sleeping baby, for fear it will wake up and start crying. I wanted Bible to put the book down.
“Listen to this,” he said.
“Do we have to?”
This seemed to take him back. He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he almost whispered. “I thought you were interested in this.”
“I am. But I can’t take the time today. I mean I don’t—I have to get going and I don’t want to get into an involved discussion of …” I didn’t finish the sentence. He got misty-eyed again. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not you,” he said. “It’s just that—you see it’s just that I am always very moved by human folly and all attempts to thwart and avert it.”
“Really.”
“It is the story of the rise of goodness in the world.”
I made a last attempt to change the subject. “Well, you talk about rising in the world, George is doing very well. Someday he will be taller than his old man and if he keeps working out he’ll fill out nicely. I hope he keeps it up with the weights.”
“Do you know what?” Bible said.
I looked up at him.
“I’ve been thinking about my time in this world. The time left to me …”
There was, of course, no adequate response to that. Often in these visits he would begin to talk about the end of his life, and I would listen simply because I didn’t know how to get him off of it. In truth, he was not very wise about his own life—or about life in general. For all his knowledge of history and the world, he could get pretty dreamy and romantic when he talked about the meaning of existence. Not that I know anything about it one way or the other, but I do know it doesn’t have a lot to do with any person. He would go on about the world as if it was this momentous and enlightening place; as if it was truly the miraculous garden of each man’s providence, the place where life teaches its eternal lessons. “We are temporary witnesses to God’s grandeur,” he’d say, “and in the end we will have to say what we have seen, and how we have added to it or changed it.”
I think of the world as this temporary patch of blue and green in a frozen, empty, almost lightless universe. In my soul I believe I have not got a soul, and neither does anybody else. I am a conscious creature, driven by mitochondria to go on eating and surviving so the mitochondria will survive, not so I will. I don’t matter. Nobody else matters.
You know where morality comes from? Not from God, or Allah, or Buddha or Marduk, or any other imagined deity. It comes from the simple human ability to imagine and perceive the future. That skill led to the compulsion to choose; to a little thing called human will. If we were driven by instinct alone, we would not have developed this idea of “good” and “evil.” Animals don’t have it. You don’t see animals writing legal opinions or arguing with each other about goodness or beauty, or right or wrong. If animals could talk, they wouldn’t have anything to say except “gimme gimme” and “stop that.” Every now and then, one might say, “Goddamn that itches.” Or, “Get away from me.” But they would have nothing whatever to say about goodness or evil, unless you gave them consciousness of the future and the capacity to choose their own behavior. Once we got those things—a great gift and a great curse, if you ask me—we were able to “choose” a thing and then decide if it was “good” or not. We crawled into our morality; slowly but surely we stood up and worked toward what we believed would keep us standing. From that, and from that alone, came this notion of good and evil, right and wrong. The world has no idea what we’re doing here, anymore than a large dog has any idea what the fleas are up to in its fur.
And in the beginning of our discussions, I would say these things to Bible in the secret—maybe not so secret—hope that he would talk me into his view of things; that he might induce me to believe that life really did have meaning. I always wanted it to have meaning. And he was always trying to convince me, but he never did, and I soon tired of his oddly provincial ideas about God and Man and the universe. He was too educated for those beliefs, frankly. That’s what I believed. How could an educated man, a man who knew as much as he knew, still believe in the ancient fairy tales about God and heaven? How could he believe he would survive his own death and then get to mourn his own loss? When you’re gone, you’re gone.
At any rate, that day when he said again that he had been thinking about “his time in the world” I knew where he was headed. I said, “You’re not going to die from this.” I had told him that many times in the past.
“I know,” he said. “But you will admit that I’m near the end of things.”
“No, I won’t admit it.” I stood up and looked at my watch.
He was sitting back in his chair, and his white shin and calf seemed to reflect the dim light that came through the windows. His foot looked stony and immense in the gray water. When he saw me look at my watch, he got this hurt look on his face. “You got another cigarette?” he said.
I gave him one and he lit it. I stood there, my arms folded across my chest.
“You’re so young,” he said, picking at his lips as if a bit of tobacco had gotten stuck there.
“I really do have to get going,” I said.
“So young.” He was sort of wistful now.
I said, “You ever been married?”
“Once, long ago.”
I waited but he didn’t go on so I said, “What happened?”
He shrugged. “Divorce.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“We did nothing but argue.” There was no affection or melancholy in his voice. He may as well have been talking about a Buick he had sold years ago.
“How long ago were you married?”
“You mean when did I do it, or when did it end?”
“Both.”
“I got married right out of law school, and divorced six years later, when I started teac
hing.”
“You never wanted children?”
“Oh, I had so many every year teaching. In the fall they come back, Ben. Remember? I always had children.”
It was quiet for a long time, then I said, “You went to law school?”
“Yes I did.”
“Were you a lawyer?”
“I was.”
“That’s what I want to do.”
“Really.” He shook his head slowly, the ruddiness in his face seeming to increase a bit. I was certain he was getting ready to say something else, but he didn’t. He looked out the window and sighed. Then he turned back to me and said, “The law wasn’t a lot of fun, you know? Not for me. It was hard work and I hated it.” He said nothing to advise me one way or the other about it—which was definitely not his attitude toward teaching, or my life in it.
“You don’t think I should be a lawyer?”
“I believe you should do what makes you happy. You should especially do that. Then, when you’re on the threshold—when you’re getting ready to leave this life and go on to the next …”
“You’re not getting ready to leave this life.”
He shook his head, but he was smiling.
“Sometimes I wonder how you can think what you think,” I said.
“About what?”
“God and all that nonsense about an afterlife, and … you know.” Feeling superior to somebody so much older than I was felt really creepy, as though I was confronting God and letting him know exactly how I felt about cancer and cobras. “I’m sorry.”
“I shouldn’t be afraid to die,” he said quietly, almost as if he was talking to himself. “I’ve been dead before. We’ve all been dead before. It wasn’t so bad.”
“I thought you were going to heaven.”
“I hope I am. I pray for it every day. I was trying to console you.”
“I’m fine.”
“I know you think that,” he said. “But it’s not the afterlife that I’m worried about with you.”
“What are you worried about with me?” I asked, and immediately regretted it.
“This won’t take a lot of time,” he said, smiling.
I really did have to get going, and I realized my interest had faded with the smile. I was afraid this was going to be an evangelical conversation, and I hated having to listen to one of those for five minutes so I said, “Can it wait until Friday?”
“You know,” he said. “Life is a misleading tramp of a girl, and she seduces you for all the wrong things.”
“Friday, then?” I said, getting up. “I really should …”
“Listen here,” he said. “We are always tricked by life—I want you to understand what I mean by this.”
I stood there in front of him, waiting.
“You’ve got to understand it. I’m not talking about the afterlife. That’s one thing. I’m talking about life. Right now.”
“Okay,” I said. “But I’m kind of in a hurry.”
He looked hurt—as if I had ridiculed something he was proud of—so I sat down again and settled myself.
He said, “Human beings carry the future, Ben. They have it in themselves as they go into it. They cast out and go on through the days with something in mind up there in the future.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s what I’ve been saying to you …”
“It’s where we’re going; what we want; a place, maybe, or a condition; a way of being, even—a desire for knowledge or position, or simply more comfort; more time to play. Always something in the future, something up there in front—striving for, or lazily heading toward—it’s there, for everyone. And then we get to a certain age—it happened to me with this infection, in my midsixties—but perhaps others go on a little longer before it happens to them. You get there, Ben. You arrive.”
I struggled mightily against a yawn beginning to stretch and awaken in the back of my throat. He looked right at me, and waited for me to say something. I watched him reach over and snuff the cigarette out in an ashtray. He had barely puffed on it. Finally, I said, “You’ve arrived then?”
He made a slight chop through the air with his hand, for emphasis. “Yes,” he said. “I have. And do you know what?”
I shook my head.
“It’s, nowhere, Ben. I’ve arrived finally—I’m in my future and it’s nowhere. I realize now, only now when it is too late, what I should have been doing all those years of getting here: I should have been paying attention to all those days that I let pass, one right after the other, on my way here. All those days I paid almost no attention to, because they were not exactly right, or because it wasn’t ready to be summer, or fall, or a perfect day; all those non-perfect days that I rode down to the last hour, not ready to enjoy them because I was on my way here.” He was almost laughing, but I could see again the slight mist in his eyes. “It’s nowhere. Bloody nowhere. When your future runs out, and it shrinks to a small fraction of all the time you’ve lived, it hits you then—by God, it hits you then—well here I am, and I’ve got no place to go. And really, no place I want to go. This is it. And it’s nowhere.”
I was as silent as I could be. I think I might have been holding my breath.
“Doesn’t that make you sad?”
“Yes it does.” I believed he was done too, but I hated that he was thinking like that. It would do him no good; it meant a loss of the one thing he needed to keep taking his shots and working to get better: hope. And anyway, no one really knows if they are done in life, right? He might find other uses for his talents; he was smart and charming and highly educated. He would not end up a crossing guard or telemarketer. Still, a person has to eat so the goddamn mitochondria can go on.
It was quiet for too long, then like an idiot I said, “Well,” letting breath out with it, as though we’d been chatting about football and it was time to go. I tried to recover from it. “You’ve done wonderful things with your students, though. You didn’t waste your time.” My voice shook. “You didn’t waste your time.”
He nodded, half-smiling at me. Then he said, “Remember this, Ben. Remember it. Life’s not about getting anywhere; it’s about being somewhere, all the time. Figure out where you are and be there, Ben. Be there.” He clasped his hands across his stomach and turned to stare out the window. “Thanks for coming to see me today,” he said. “If you can find it in your heart to come back I would be grateful. Every day, I thank God for you. I hope you know that.”
“I do,” I said. Then I told him I’d see him in a few days and turned to leave. I looked back his way when I got to the front door but he was still gazing out the window.
I tried to open and close the door as silently as I could. You’d have thought I’d just put Professor Bible down for a nap.
27
The Whips and Scorns of Time
After that day, thinking about what Bible said to me, it was pretty goddamn awful for a while being anywhere. The school year was over by then, and what kept going through my mind was this stifling, churning passage of time. Bible at the end of things, Mr. and Mrs. Creighton approaching it, the faculty, including me, in the middle, and our students—all these young faces—embarking on their own passages—toward what? Professor Bible did what he wanted in life. And still there he was at the end of it with nothing. Nothing. I couldn’t get his sad visage out of my mind. He was always there, sitting in that beveled shaft of sunlight, staring out his window, saying, “I’m there, Ben, and it’s nowhere.”
The mind is a damned nuisance and cruel jokester sometimes. As I’m sure I said earlier, I admired Professor Bible. I think he was a truly good human being—a person I cherished and looked up to, and for good reason. I admired his vast knowledge, his skill with people and his work with students. As I told Annie many times, I wanted to be the kind of teacher he was. But I was absolutely terrified I would “end up” like him. I thought about that, and almost nothing else, and then one day it hit me like an express train what I was really afraid of: I was terrified that
I would live. I would get to be Bible’s age and be conscious of the end of whatever life I had led; of whatever work I chose. How do you deal with that kind of fear? When I told Annie about it, and how my mind would suddenly give me the grand finale of my life, she told me, again, that I was sick.
“What, you’ve never had your mind give you something like that against your will?” I asked.
“I just did, when you said it.”
“Well?”
“But my mind didn’t conjure it. Jesus.”
We were walking on a beautiful spring morning, down to the end of our street to get coffee. There was a small, fragrant bakery there, on the corner that we discovered the second day it opened. We’d leave our apartment before anybody was ready for work—the sun just beginning to bleed over the horizon, in perfect red weather on clear days—and only the joggers and newspaper delivery boys were out and about. It was our time together, before she went her way and I went mine, and it was usually wonderful and pleasant sipping coffee with her and talking about what we were going to be up to in the coming day. We got to the corner on this particular morning when she called me sick and then we had to stand there, waiting for the traffic to thin out so we could cross. My feelings were hurt but I didn’t want to let on.
“I don’t conjure it on purpose,” I said. “My mind gives me those things.”
“It’s sick.”
“Stop calling me sick.”
“Well it is.”
“You never have thoughts that come to you unbidden.”
“Unbidden?”
“You know what I mean.”
She saw an opening and began crossing the street and I followed. Inside the bakery, after we got our coffee and a piece of vanilla pound cake, and we had seated ourselves, she said, “I’ve never imagined myself old and used up, I can tell you that.”
In the Fall They Come Back Page 20
