by John Gardner
His religion was obvious to anyone who looked. His company was one of the first in St. Louis to insist that the union take Negroes in, though Donald had no doubt that all Negroes are lazy. He stood at the top of the main-shop stairs with a four-foot boltmaker wrench in his hands, saying nothing (but everyone knew his opinion), and it cannot be denied—whether one calls it a good thing or a bad thing—that his intellectual position and his position in the way of the shop’s only exit had influence on the Poplar Bluff poor whites who worked for him and did the voting four times before he casually stepped aside, the vote finally having gone as he thought right, and allowed them to go on home. It’s at the same time true that he thought of blacks as niggers (though more often, respectfully, as “coloreds”), tended to believe them transitional between the ape and man—so he’d many a time heard said in church, not that he believed all that churches told him; but he’d given it some thought, standing by the bars holding Joanie’s hand, looking at the gorillas at the St. Louis Zoo: he could come to no conclusion, but though he dismissed the supposed similarity of a colored’s nose and a gorilla’s nose—a blind man feeling with a stick would see the difference—he was struck by the way gorillas’ seats stuck out and by the pinkness of their palms. Once when he and Joan were standing there, watching the gorilla take listless swings at the truck tire that hung from a chain in his cage, a middle-aged black man who stood watching beside them smiled and shook his head and said, “He looks just like my mama.” Donald giggled and blushed and looked down and said heartily, “Yea-uh!” On the authority of coloreds he’d known as a child, he believed firmly—until one morning when he was fifty and it suddenly occurred to him his leg had been pulled—that by some quirk of nature every colored child born was conversant with the language of mules.
Whatever all this may say of him, he was, like every true religious man, every man’s friend and no man’s judge. He joked with whites about blacks and with blacks about whites, not from hypocrisy but because in St. Louis one did not at that time—and does not now, except with great caution—make fun of whites to whites (except of course for Jews, who are fair game for everybody, especially Jews), though one might sometimes joke with blacks about blacks, since part of their charm was the fact that they seemed to encourage it. He knew his world, though he had no conscious systems, and could move around in it easily, safely, doing nobody damage. He was generous and trusting, though he locked his car doors and rolled up the windows in the darker parts of town and in Castlereigh Estates took precautions against burglars. Despite his Baptist raising, he did nothing from duty but acted by virtue of his fundamental love of life and the optimism, deeper than reason, that religion and parents who had loved each other—however they might snap or lash out from time to time—had built into him.
His religion, in short, was middle-class Protestant, a religion for the street. It contained no angels, no clearly defined heaven, certainly no hell. His chief pleasure, when he went to church, was picking up the gossip and seeing people dressed up in their Sunday clothes. Many years later his son-in-law Martin—no Christian by any stretch of the imagination—would defend Donald Frazier’s religious nature with angry fervor; but Martin, for all the care with which he wrote, for all the precision with which he tried to think things through, would have no faintest inkling of the real secret behind his father-in-law’s character. Donald Frazier remembered his mother in a way the old photographs in Joan Orrick’s upstairs hallway neglected to record: as a fanatical idealist, a woman too intelligent by a mighty leap for her time and place, as cruel and misanthropic as Martin Orrick himself, but wildly optimistic, determined to kill the Devil, in whose existence she believed as firmly as she believed in her left foot. He remembered certain instants when his mother seemed to him a dazzling beauty: more such instants than a few. She had four sons, one daughter; and like all lively women who raise handsome, quick-witted sons in a house half governed by a handsome and quick-witted, playful man, she developed, quite unconsciously, ways attractive to men—a laugh, a glance, an occasional sudden gentleness, that softened for her children the bigotry, cruelty of tongue, and uncharitable suspiciousness that tainted her character. She loved music, especially the old Scotch songs and the more lively Baptist hymns (Joan and Buddy, when Lulu Frazier was in her nineties, would sing Irish songs, claiming they were Scotch, to tease her; whenever Joan played hymns and the assembled three generations sang, it was a rule that they must sing all the verses); she loved poetry, for the most part terrible poetry; and she loved fine clothes and festivities—a family reunion, a country Christmas with a huge tree and all the family around her, or every Sunday’s dressed-up, chattering, wonderfully horse-scented buggy ride three miles over hill and dale, through dark hollows, past Negroes’ cabins, past neatly kept fields of wheat and cane, to the Coldwater Baptist Church. Though her sons did not share her belief in the Devil, they had, at odd moments, her unearthly, eagle-sharp eyes. So, of course, had Joan. They could flash like sheet lightning if some affront, some slight to her pride made her furious, so that for many years Martin would be afraid of her, would even imagine she might someday kill him, though occasionally he saw that same flash in the eyes of his gentle son, Evan, and was unsure of himself, unsure of everything. At the darkest time of his life, it must be said, he was at his feeble best when full of doubt and irresolvable confusion.
Again his pale blue eyes had the dead look, though tonight there was no sign of rage in them. He puffed at his pipe every three or four words, as if drawing what little life he had from it, his left hand closed lightly around the pipe bowl, his right around the rim of his martini glass. King Rolf, the Alsatian, lay beside him, his head on his paws; Evan’s black-and-tan, as large as a lion, lay by the sliding glass doors that went out to the pool. You could hear the drone of the television coming from upstairs, where the children were watching God knew what—nothing worse than their life. He said:
“We’ve got to talk, you say. But it’s futile to talk. There’s no reason left in the world anymore, not even the illusion. It’s like Johnson saying with the greatest sincerity, ‘Let us sit down and reason one with another,’ and lying about everything from Tonkin Bay to the price of a Job Corps T-shirt. Not that he didn’t ‘mean well,’ understand. But it’s over, that’s all. No trust left, no faith. Why talk fairly with someone who obeys no rules, intends to destroy you? Better we trade insults, see if we can give each other heart attacks.”
“It must be terribly painful to be the last honest man,” she said. She lit another cigarette. Though her voice was calm as steel, her fingers trembled.
“You have a sharp eye. Yes indeed, my suffering’s a rare and splendid thing.”
“We don’t suffer, of course.”
“ ‘We’ being, I presume, you and the children, the great united front.” He rolled his eyes up, as if in brief prayer to some ferocious, bored god, no doubt some half-wit god jugged to the gills.
“You could try to talk,” she snapped. “You’re supposed to be this marvellous lecturer, the finest in your department, as you so frequently remark.”
He pushed his chair back angrily and stood up, not to leave but to be farther from her, free to pace if he should need to. “When in hell am I supposed to have called myself a marvellous lecturer?”
“Except of course when you don’t bother to show up.”
His eyes widened, enraged but also baffled. He looked terrible—scratches all over his face from his rampage last night, bleary, baggy eyes. “Name one single time since I left San Francisco—”
“You’ve forgotten. You can’t remember anything anymore. You drink and drink—it’s a wonder you can sometimes still remember your name.”
“God damn you,” he roared, “stay on one subject for fifteen seconds, will you? What are these classes I’m supposed to have missed?”
“Plenty, Martin! Do you really think everybody doesn’t know? I’ve tried to get hold of you a dozen times—ask Georges Fauré, ask John Porter. Nobody can fi
nd you. You’re supposed to be in class, they say, but there’s nobody in the room.”
“That’s impossible!” But he was staring at her, perhaps trying to remember, perhaps trying to judge whether or not she’d found something out.
“Does she massage your shoulders? Does she like to be fucked in graveyards?” She smiled, mock-sweet.
He stared. His breathing was growing calmer; he was thinking something, she had no idea what. Finally he said, swirling his drink around and around, speaking as if to his glass, not her: “You fight with great spirit, but your stupidity beats you. Beats me too, in the end, but never mind; it doesn’t matter.” He raised his glass, extended it toward the darkness outside, to the right of the swimming pool, where the trees began to circle out, as if offering a toast to evil spirits. “Behold here the ruin of centuries of Nature’s blind plodding. I give you, in this lady, the glorious culmination of a bold experiment, homo non sapiens: centuries of careful evolution in clans, selective breeding until the last trace of judgment was eradicated, nothing in the universe right or wrong but by virtue of its plaid and the loch it had the honor to get born beside; then a final bit of polish in the American South, magnificent Eden of noninterference, though black men turn on lynchers’ ropes and trash eat clay: all argument abandoned, debate forsworn, no action permitted to the human mind but sad empty songs about love grown colder and heaven’s six gates—oh yeah, my Lawd—”
“Martin, you’re sick. You’re really sick.”
“That’s true.” He waved his glass. “And over here I give you this gentleman, or rather this specimen, this noblest achievement of modern teratology, born with a gavel and Robert’s Rules of Order and a bachelor of science in Talmudic law, no hasty construction, this monster of angular good sense, this tremulous howl in the wilderness of lies, this gibberish singer of decaying Truth—”
“You think this kind of talk makes me look stupid?”
He turned to look at her. “You remembered the subject! How’d you do that? You must’ve wrote it down.”
Though he mocked her, there was no anger in his eyes now; even the dead look—or maybe possessed look was more accurate—had sunk away. She was suddenly aware of the pain in her right leg and midsection, from her pelvis to lower chest. It had been there, she realized, for a long time. She felt a touch of panic, as she always did when she thought about the pain, and got up abruptly to fix herself another drink. It was stupid to have another one—it meant Martin would, too—but she didn’t care, tonight. Liquor was better than the drugs were, Dr. Crouse had said.
Martin said behind her, “You hurting?”
She dropped ice into her glass and glanced up at his reflection in the window. She saw her own there too. They didn’t look like two people who would hate each other. How strange it was—how strange everything was, she thought fleetingly. People called them a handsome couple. The pain licked up sharply into her chest, then died down again. “I’m all right,” she said. “It makes me mean, that’s all.” She carried the pitcher of martinis to him. He held out his glass and she poured. Smoke from his pipe spiralled upward. “Let’s not get drunk tonight,” she said.
He shrugged. “Whatever.”
They sat down again, across from each other at the round formica table. She lit a cigarette, pushed the matches toward him. “You feel better when you’re writing. You should try,” she said.
“Tomorrow, maybe.”
“What’s wrong? Really, I mean.”
He said nothing, looking into his glass.
“I love you,” she said. “You don’t believe it, but I do.”
He smiled, politely scornful.
She said, more crossly than she’d meant to, “How can you stand it, not believing in anything?”
“Oh, I believe things,” he said. “I just don’t think any of them will help.”
She watched him puffing gloomily at his pipe, following drops down the side of his glass with one fingernail.
“Do you want a divorce, Martin?” she said calmly, full of fear.
He pursed his lips, seemed to think about it. “Makes no difference,” he said. “No.”
“Because of the children,” she flashed angrily.
“Partly that,” he said. “Mainly because the whales are going extinct, and I don’t have much faith in the life after death, and we haven’t yet run out of gin.”
“Jesus, you do rave on,” she said.
“I do?” he said.
Four
Martin’s parents, in contrast to Joan’s, were noisily, articulately religious. Often, when Martin was very young, they would gather after sermons at his grandfather’s house and debate the veracity of what was said by the man behind the pulpit. Martin’s grandfather was a farmer and country schoolmaster with a brilliant, stubborn, morose mind (a child of Sagittarius) and a photographic memory with which he merely made trouble. At the age of forty-five he’d been tricked into marriage by the first lady lawyer in New York State, an Irishwoman (Protestant) as stubborn as he was, a determined red-head who by wily manipulation had put Luther Doane Orrick—such was his triumphantly gloomy name—into a position that threatened foreclosure on his two-hundred-year-old farm, but she offered (she was just twenty-eight at the time, a partner in the office of her father and uncle) the alternative of her not very noticeably gentle hand in marriage. He was flabbergasted, a confirmed bachelor, though a handsome man with coal-black hair that swept and curled out, edged with silver, fierce as his opinions, at his collar and around his ears. In his black top hat he was a man to reckon with (he was not, by any means, an advance-guard dresser), and the way he gripped his cane when just walking along—his arthritic knuckles bulging like the knuckles of an eagle at the moment of the strike—gave every living creature that stood within range of his eye or ear stern warning.
Caroline Slaine was by all this not greatly impressed. Though Anglo-Irish and a lawyer, she had no more scruple than a butterfly, no more fear of his bluster than a fox in a chicken house. Though she couldn’t so express it in that sober time, not even secretly, he was a sexy old bastard and she wanted him. She summoned him therefore to her small, dark green, cluttered, book-and-map-filled office and, with a sweet imitation of feminine sternness, presented Orrick with her foreclosure threat. Luther Doane Orrick, breaker of horses, harrumphed twice, struck the floor with his cane, and denied her on grounds of principle, the principle being that he did not love her, not her nor no other Irishwoman, madam—no sir, by thunder, not even though she dared to declare herself of Protestant persuasion. From his positions, he told her, she would find him unmovable, no gilded rooster on a barn, that will turn with every wind. “Nonsense,” she said, and at once set in motion the foreclosure proceedings.
When it appeared that the fool would rather give up his land than relinquish a principle, she trumped up an incredible criminal charge—yet was it so incredible after all, one wonders, considering the causes he was willing to support, the secret meetings he thought it honorable to attend?—at which point he said, or is said to have said, “Woman, what the devil are you after?” to which she is said to have responded—salaciously, considering the age in which they lived—“Children.” She started, with easy Ram-child firmness, proceedings on the criminal charge against Orrick, and he hastily gave in. He could part with the ancestral estate (at the outside, nine hundred acres), but not with his good name. He was a ceremonious man, a high-ranking member of the Society of Freemasons (he would be buried with terrifying Masonic ritual, his grandson Buddy watching with wide, alarmed eyes), he was a titled officer in the local Grange League Fellowship, and he was, it would be discovered soon after his death, an officer in the Ku Klux Klan. What the Klan was up to in western New York in the late 1930s has never been certain. As an abolitionist and dedicated Yankee, Luther Orrick had nothing against the Negro race, of which Genesee County had then no representatives; but there were Catholics aplenty, a dangerous brood of drunken vipers, speakers of a wickedly ungrammatical English, suivan
ts of a foreign potentate, the pope, hence a knife aimed directly at the heart of the American Experiment.
But mockery is always an easy thing; it brings down republics, schools of philosophy, and personal reputations without regard for truth or justice. “If the world ends in fire,” Martin Orrick would write (though he was himself among the worst offenders), “it will surely be the arsonous fiery indignation of the stupidly self-righteous.” Luther Orrick’s hatred of the pope and all he stood for was perfectly earnest, perfectly sincere, and not a case of mere whimsical malice. He’d read certain accounts, some of which were true, about unruly Irish and Italian workers; he weighed them against the personality and character of that papist-deist Alexander Pope, who, though dead these centuries, was a man he might justly have said he loved, had love been one of the words he ever used; he considered the role of the Church in European history—the Children’s Crusade and the Glorious Crusade of the Bishop of Norwich, the papal debasement of public morality which outraged Dante, the Vatican’s making and breaking of kings, the cruel persecutions and mass exterminations—not that he entirely neglected the crimes of Protestantism; he considered the evil of idol worship, and the far greater evil of mindless superstition, with which even his own church had dangerously toyed in the days of Cotton Mather. He considered these things, weighed them, and made his judgment, characteristically severe.
