by John Gardner
The next time he visited Missouri, a year later, he stayed with another of the Missouri cousins—Joan’s first cousin Betty Lou—who lived in the country. Both their families, Joan’s and Buddy’s, were always very careful about being strictly fair. No one knew at the time, including the children, that some of the Missouri cousins were for profound reasons closer than others.
At Betty Lou’s, too, Buddy was happy, walking with her to the one-room country school where his mother had gone, and Joan’s father and mother, a generation before, or feeding the rabbits Betty Lou’s father raised, or simply sitting in a wide old dying tree, looking at the incredibly lush landscape, the blue, blue sky, and feeling all around him that special aliveness the Midwest always had for him and would have all his life, a “vast benevolent electric charge, a smell of the miraculous,” he would write years later in one of his novels—an aliveness impossible to defend, he would find, to anyone not emotionally persuaded already, since it meant of course not only lush growth, pools of sunlight you could cut like warm butter, but also ticks, chiggers, and copperheads, rattlesnakes and cottonmouths, cyclones and devastating floods. He was sublimely happy, soaking up a summer warmth New York State could never know, and if anyone had questioned him at just that moment, he might have said that it wasn’t his cousin Joan he liked, really, but the place.
That evening, however, he had an experience he would vividly remember all his life, in the sharpest possible detail, though it was one he would find, even after he’d become a famous novelist, impossible to put into words. Shortly after sunset, when the last of the whippoorwills were quitting and the heavy, wet midsummer air hung close, Joan and her family came driving out from town, piled out of their car shouting their greetings with voices that were like singing, and came rushing over to him, Joan and her two brothers, so wide-eyed, so charged with jubilant energy, sheer joy-of-life, that they seemed to be not of the same species as these good, slow country people, Betty Lou’s family, with whom he’d been staying. Though Joan was at the moment in her unbeautiful period, he had time only to notice it fleetingly and forget again, because for Buddy that night it was as if the world’s sound had been turned to full volume and its action sped up as in an old-time comic movie. She was the funniest girl he’d ever met. She amazed him. From the instant he first saw her getting out of the car (to borrow an expression from three decades later, but one which is here exactly accurate), he was high.
Despite her fears, it was not a time he forgot when their marriage was at its worst. Part of Martin Orrick’s trouble, and no doubt part of his strength as a novelist, was that he forgot very little. He could drop back to almost any period of his life and run it through his mind like an old movie; he could remember, for some reason, the furniture in houses he’d visited only once when he was seven years old, and he could remember in imagery as sharp as that in any photograph not only the faces but also the hands, the clothes, even the shoes of people he saw only once or twice when he was nine or ten. But though his memory was extraordinary, he had no faith. He could remember loving Joan and believing she loved him, but he believed, looking back, that their love was an illusion. Stumbling through the rain, choking with drunken self-pity and rage, falling, laboriously getting up again, the three big dogs circling him in distress and bafflement, he thought the foul weather fitting, an appropriate symbol of his existence, the lot of poor idiot mankind. His chief virtue had been, once, that he was reasonable, fair-minded. He’d learned—so now he told himself—that the universe had no slightest interest in such things. Joan dismissed people for faults they could not help—dismissed them utterly and finally because their eyes were too close together or their ankles too thick. She imputed selfish or malevolent intent to acts harmlessly foolish, even generous; and her friends applauded her as if viciousness, cruelty, and cynicism were the healthy breath of truth. All very well to say that her views were not Martin Orrick’s business, that she was one person and he another, and each had a right to his own identity. It wasn’t true—not that he thought all this out at this moment. It was a part of him, a roar in his chest. She poisoned his life at the source, accusing him of evil motives when his real ones were nothing of the sort, and shifting the grounds of her attacks with wild whimsy, revealing what was obvious in any case, as it seemed to him, that she attacked not from conviction but for the sadistic pleasure of attacking. His best friend when he was an undergraduate—a young man as intense and neurotic as Martin himself, one with whom he would talk for hours, working out the structure of a Henry James story or a Shakespeare play, learning in the best way possible (he would have said) one of the essential ingredients of his art—was, according to Joan, a homosexual. Ah, what evil she could wring out of that stuffy, ladies’-mag word! Useless to cry out in righteous indignation, “That’s not true!” because the next moment, according to Joan, Martin only liked him because, like all his superpious family, he had a penchant for sickies, and the next because he was Martin’s “first Jew.” In the end she’d made the friendship too painful to keep up. It was not that she didn’t want Martin to have friends—he told himself in rage—merely that she preferred to choose them. It was a part of her character not likely to change. Martin, hating scenes—being, in fact, afraid of scenes, not overloaded at the best of times with self-confidence—had retreated to his study, putting his emotion where it was safe, into fiction; but it was inevitable that sooner or later he must emerge, and that the character of their war must change. He fought her with reason, but the battle was absurd: she would not reason, fired wild shots like a troop of circling, yodeling Indians, and he would drink and grow bold and full of hot self-righteousness and would try once more to fight her with reason and would be beaten to silence and crackling woman hate and flight. Running, slipping and sliding in the clay mud she hated as she hated everything on this farm he’d chosen as his place of retreat from cities—his battleground, pirate’s cove, hermit’s shack—stumbling and falling in erosion ruts, scratching his face on the branches of trees, he fled toward a place she’d never dare look for him, the creek, the pitch-dark caves along the farm’s back fence. The dogs ran beside him, whimpering as if they knew what stupidity he was guilty of, his children back in the house, probably awake, frightened, beginning to learn the hopelessness he’d gladly have protected them from if protection were possible in this hellhole world. He was not crying, as he would have done when he was younger, when there was, he thought, still a chance for him. It was as if he had seen one death too many, had lost utterly the power to feel grief—as if he had finally understood that this was the world’s essential nature: idiotic conflict with no prayer of resolution—raving Arabs, raving Jews, raving blacks, raving whites; destruction of the innocent, Evan and Mary lying in their beds, listening. “Let’s not drink anymore,” he and Joan would say in the morning when they woke up and couldn’t remember what had started it; but his hatred would still be there, burning like a coal, and her absolute insistence on her rightful ownership of his every emotion, and he would drink, yes yes yes, Christ yes!
He could hear the water now, deep and slow-moving, weighed down by silt, dragging dark masses and branches like the bodies of old men toward the Mississippi. He moved toward the sound, the dogs running closer now, perpetually circling, herding him back. He came to the caves, the smell of foxes, and he stopped, leaning on the slippery rock, panting. When he crawled in, the air was icy cold. The dogs came in after him, shook off water, pressed against him and settled. He listened to the rain, thinking of his children, thinking of his own childhood, the people who had shaped him and those who’d shaped Joan, or damned them, more like, though they’d meant no harm and though finally it was nobody’s fault but his own, not even Joan’s. He shivered, closed his eyes. The ground under him was smooth and cold, like a coin.
He couldn’t remember, waking up shivering and numb in the morning, why it was that he’d come there.
Three
Both families were religious. Joan’s went to church, did wh
at was asked of them there and more, and never spoke, even in church, of religion. Someone who knew nothing of the lives of ordinary religious people—someone who knew only lapsed Catholics or lapsed fundamentalists, some unlucky member of that great unlucky class Martin Orrick would describe (with typical rancor and the plain injustice that served as his main form of irony) as “cynic-intellectuals, keen-eyed analysts of the interface subtleties of shit and Shinola, finger-wringing, foot-stamping, failed Neoplatonists,” or, in another place, as “the gentle libertarian who curls up his lip when he says ‘Wasp,’ ”—might perhaps have dismissed Joan’s parents as hypocrites or trimmers, or—finding no disparity between their regular, seemingly mechanical and unreasoning attendance at the Ferguson First Methodist Church and their generally upright, warmhearted, and generous everyday behavior—might have put them down, simply, as two more credulous, pitiful ciphers in that vast majority whom Thoreau alleged to live “lives of quiet desperation.” Nothing, in fact, could have been farther from the truth.
Though they were silent, both Joan’s father and mother were more deeply religious than the official policies of the churches they’d grown up in. Joan’s mother had been a Roman Catholic, and in a sense was still. When she settled her heart on marrying a Baptist, a boy she’d grown up with and loved from the beginning, whose virtues and defects she’d come to know like the back of her hand, she quietly scrapped the opinions of her church—not without some stress, even superstitious fright—asserting and affirming that the God she worshipped could not conceivably be such a narrow-minded fool as to despise Donald Frazier for the doctrinal persuasions of his parents. Religion for her had always consisted, essentially, of two things: a timid but deep love of ritual—an appreciation, fundamentally aesthetic, of the gestures of the Mass, of music and vestments, of statues and wide convent lawns (there was a convent in Florissant, not far off)—and, secondly, an unostentatious devotion to basic goodness, the quiet morality, fair-mindedness, and general optimism she observed in her parents and in her older brothers and sisters, some of whom were grown up and had moved away when Emmy—Emily—was born. Though she was by no means unintelligent, she had never especially concerned herself with theological questions—no more than had the rest of the countrified Catholic congregation she grew up with, or the dirt-poor, absentminded priest who served them. But she understood fairness: it was unfair to make a husband switch to Catholicism and break his mother’s heart, and unfair to her family that she shift to the camp of those who most openly denounced them. Forced to leave the Church or else renounce Donald Frazier, for reasons not even her father was sure of—as he all but admitted, turning from her sternly, pulling at his beard—she quietly moved her Catholicism to another building, the bland, friendly House of God as the Methodists understood him, and no one was especially troubled except, of course, Donald’s mother. Emmy was robbed, in the Methodist Church, of ritual, and sometimes even here she must sit through tirades against the religion of her parents; but even in middle age she would look over at Donald, who sat with his head tipped up, as if politely listening, or sat with his elbow on the wall of the pew, the inside of his hand across his forehead, eyes closed—he was fast asleep—and she would decide again that she’d been right, that God was Love, simply; it was as plain as the nose on Donald’s face. In her later years she would seldom go to church, but nothing had changed. She found her ritual in the comings and goings of birds, the rise and decline of her roses, in sunrise and sunset, the exactly punctual five o’clock phone call from her sister Cora, and the ten o’clock news before she and Donald settled down to sleep. As for basic goodness, her children were a great satisfaction to her—even James. For all the unhappiness in his life, he was happy in his work, and good at it. And Donald, with hair now whiter than snow, was an amazing man, a saint. When you came right down to it, she asked herself—or meekly asked God—how many parents (not that she’d dream of mentioning her opinion to a living soul) had a daughter like their Joan?
Joan’s father’s religion—or at any rate so Martin Orrick would describe it in one of his later, more unreadable novels—was “of a sort virtually impossible to defend in a world which finds its fundamental verities in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, or the St. Louis Post-Dispatch”—the world Martin Orrick would howl at with all the volcanic rage of his convulsive, misanthropic soul (much to his profit, ironically, so that the rage would grow more fierce, more unjust and cruel, the prose more eccentric and bizarre).
Joan’s father was a more or less classic Midwestern Protestant. He’d been raised in the Coldwater Baptist Church not far from Possum Hollow, a house of rabid Scotch-Irish fundamentalists where even those who were inclined to moderation must sooner or later be swept into the current of avid self-righteousness and cowering self-hate by loose talk of heaven and the slime of the earth, God’s abundant love and wild-animal rage against all who offended his dignity or law. Martin Orrick would write: “Such churches have grown rare in America; not, one suspects, because people have grown wiser but because the weather has changed. Such churches thrive—not cynically, but in answer to ancient human needs—on extreme poverty, ignorance, and the unhealthy certainty that can come from living too far from books, too close to nature, whose laws are not ours; they thrive on a high rate of infant mortality—cholera, diphtheria, scarlet fever, plague—and a profound distrust of strangers. It is a curious fact that for the most part the warnings and admonitions of such a church, however dire, however vivid the imagery that engulfs and enflames them, are not aimed at the present congregation at all but at those who have stayed home on a given Sunday morning, breaking the community’s phalanx wall, or the warnings are fired, like shots into a woodlot in the middle of the night, at the prowling, potentially dangerous unfamiliar—the German, the Frenchman, the Negro, or the sharp-eyed Injun boy over by the woodshed. It was the stranger, not the Baptist, who drank, swore oaths, and did no work. It was marriage to the stranger that led to madness or idiocy or the rolling-eyed human mule. It was only when they slipped into the stranger’s ways, taking to drink, or taking into bed some gentile wife (as an earlier breed of intransigeants had it) that the wrath of the Fundamental Church came down like an axe on the heads of its own. When Donald Frazier set his mind on marrying a Catholic, the staddle on which his mother’s church was built had already begun to crumble, the walls inclined to lean, the dark-stained windows were beginning to crack and let light in. In short, he understood what they were saying, but did not believe them.
His father, it was said, had been in his youth a happy-go-lucky, footloose man who might have come to no good; but he married Lulu Thompson, who seems to have been, judging by old photographs, a stunningly beautiful woman except that she had deep-set, evil eyes. (Joan and Buddy, when they visited—she was then over ninety—would hear from her stories of hammer murders and the lynching of “coloreds.”) But photographs lie, and country wisdom is sometimes worth crediting. The children she reared, with John Frazier’s help, were all secure, decent people. The eldest died a hero in World War I, and John Elmer, the least successful of the sons financially, was a man Martin Orrick would years later describe, borrowing from Homer, as a man “such as men were then and are not now.” She was a religious fanatic, apparently; but she lived in harsh times. A central story in the family legend is that once they had a neighbor, a no-’count Frenchman, who would go on drunken benders and come shoot at the house with his gun, also at their chickens, sheep, and mules. According to one version—the version Joan Orrick was inclined to believe (her father wouldn’t speak of it, would only chuckle and blush and look down and say, “Well, you hear a lot of stories”)—the neighbor came one night into her grandpa’s pitch-dark barn, and her grandpa was up in the mow with his rifle, waiting, and shot him through the head when he walked through the door. Then her grandpa took off on the horse he had waiting and rode to the house of William Burke, a mile away, who was sheriff at the time, and turned himself in. “What John,” William Bur
ke is supposed to have said, blinking the sleep away, rubbing at the roughness of his thick red neck, “you didn’t, John! Aw shit!” and got out of bed and woke up his sons, and while John Frazier sat smiling, sipping at William Burke’s whiskey (to calm his nerves), they rode half the night, to every neighbor for miles around, and they all congregated at John Frazier’s farm and shot holes upon holes into the dead man. Though they might’ve lawed John Frazier, they could hardly law the whole county, so they left the thing lie.
It can be said in defense of Joan’s evil-eyed grandmother that it was mostly thanks to her that Joan’s father and his brothers and sister got whatever education they got, whatever feeling they developed for hard work and duty, and a good part of whatever notion, mostly generous, they got of God. Though Donald and John Elmer were as afraid of their mother as were Emmy and Cora of the Catholic Church, they put their fear behind them with the same abandon their father had showed, the night he shot the Frenchman, and turned to Methodism. Joan’s father, all through the years of her childhood, listened to the sermons with gentle tolerance and no particular interest, viewing them simply as the opinions of one man (and a man with the mouth of an elephant, at that). When it was time to sing a hymn, he ran his eyes over the words, too shy to sing, perhaps a touch ashamed of the noisy part-singing of the church that had raised him, a church where Christianity was not always what it might be, where money was gathered for foreign missions but no charity was left over for Catholics like Joan’s mother, to say nothing of Negroes, with whom he had all his life a curious affinity, though he would never deny, looking back as an old man, that he had a prejudice six miles deep; or he thought about the things he had to do this afternoon—in large part chores an intelligent theologian would describe as Christian acts: visits to sick friends and relatives, or to lonely people whom no one liked but who were, in Joan’s mother’s phrase, “real good people” (always based on evidence with which Joan was unacquainted) ; or he thought out problems—for instance, some necessary modification of the threading machine at St. Louis Screw and Bolt; or he would wait for the hymn’s too hurried “Amen” (as it seemed from Buddy Orrick’s Presbyterian point of view), so he could once more sit down and get to business catching up on his sleep. When Emmy had things to do or felt unwell and was unable to go to church, he went alone, a fact on which neither of them commented, since they both understood it. It was in a sense his salute to something he believed in; only an enemy, a cynic, a fool would demand that he explain what it was that he believed. Though he slept through the service as often as not, he loved it. To scorn him for sleeping through a thing so holy would be like scorning a man for sleeping through his daughter’s twentieth recital.
