by John Gardner
Buddy Orrick would remember all the rest of his life certain moments from those times Grandma Davis had spent with them, talking of Jesus and heaven’s golden streets and angels. He would remember her reading of the story of Samuel, and how deeply impressed he had been by its message: if ever he should hear a voice call his name in the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep, he should answer, “Here am I, Lord.” Joan would remember not the briefest flicker of those pleasant times—perhaps she’d experienced fewer of them; more likely she’d seen past Grandma Davis’s opinions instinctively and, when the old woman talked, let her mind wander. What she remembered—not clearly, but with the greatest pleasure—was a book her mother had read to her, a large book with pictures that had a great deal of purple in them, the story of Mr. Mixiedough, a story that somehow involved the whole world’s becoming dark.
Though most of her old Missouri friends were dead, Grandma Davis could count on seeing those who were left, or at least all those within driving distance of Florissant, Missouri, because they came to the meetings of the Cemetery Association.
Long before Joan and Buddy’s time there had been, on an abrupt, sunlit rise in a hollow—a place unreachable now except by an overgrown farm lane—a square, white church with plain glass windows and a bell tower built like a wooden box with a well roof over it. In the yellowed photograph on Joan Orrick’s wall, the church is a clean, well-carpentered building as sturdy and simple as a Shaker chair, so pure of line, so right in its proportions, so decorous—even the hitching posts as strong and direct as good sculptures—that the mind is teased toward wonder at the taste and common sense of the long-dead farmers, blacksmiths, storekeepers, and carpenters who built it. Two of the hitching posts remain, and the tree that in the photograph was a ten-foot-high sapling by the square front door is now a large maple, beginning to split and die. Around where the church was in former times, the high thin burial stones still stand, cocked this way and that by the shiftings of the earth, bearing the names—some of them mere shadows—of the people who were once Grandma Davis’s kinsmen and neighbors: Patterson, Weimer, Jones, Hughes, Thompson, Frazier, Carrico, Davis, Kilpatrick, Burke. One finds there first names the world no longer hears, names Joan and Martin would jestingly consider when trying, years later, to think what to call their children: Lycurgus, Ezekiel, Asanath, Thester. Where the trees at the edge of the cemetery begin—some of them in among the trees, in fact, since the woods have begun to reclaim the land—stand the smaller, simpler headstones of family slaves. Though it’s hard these days to get a casket in, people still bury there. The Cemetery Association pays the taxes and mows the grass, or did until Donald Frazier, who used to do the mowing, had a heart attack, and Joan Orrick arranged for the formation of a chapter of the DAR and got the hollow declared—rightly enough—“historic.”
They would meet, Grandma Davis and her elderly friends, in the centrally located house of one of the most ancient of the members, in the heart of St. Louis. The pictures had oval, carved oak-leaf frames, the chairs were plush and wobbly, two loud clocks ticked, the glasses with ice water were dark, dark green or the deep red of candlelit blood.
“Pretend it’s a roomful of ghosts,” Joan whispered, and giggled behind her hands, sitting with Buddy on the cushioned window seat in the corner of the parlor—behind them, stiff, yellowing lace curtains.
They were receiving, no doubt, the same impression—the familiar faces of Donald and Emmy, John Elmer and Cora (the youngest in the room, but gaunt, transmogrified by the age-blackened wallpaper, the dark, cracked furniture, vases and mirrors, fringed table covers and piano runners), the more ominous faces of Joan’s grandpa and grandma and Buddy’s Grandma Davis, and the faces of strangers, pale and liver-spotted, people in dark, strange-smelling clothes, with canes against their knees, or wooden crutches with rubber end-plugs, people who gestured or lifted their glasses with snow-white trembling hands. But though Joan was amused, pleasantly alarmed (if she let herself be) by the hint of mortality in every gleam of wood or old silver or glass, every dull, fading plane of upholsterer’s cloth—she thought of shining caskets, the gray of old bone—Buddy was inclined to be frightened.
“I don’t want to,” he said.
Though both of them were ten, he was—thanks to his country background, his Grandma Davis, and his tendency to moon-gather—an incredible innocent, which made her laugh and feel, rightly, much older and wiser than he. She told him now of a funeral she’d been to, teasing him, delighting in her power to frighten or soothe him, exactly as she pleased. She whispered in his ear, “The eyes were open. People tried to close them, but they wouldn’t stay closed!” She watched eagerly, waiting for his reaction.
He looked out at the sunlit street, a cat moving slowly toward a tree beside the sidewalk. It would be cool there. Here inside, the room was overheated and smelled strongly of kerosene. He sat perfectly still, wondering if the things she was telling him were so, his expression as solemn as an old man’s. To Joan he looked that moment like her grandpa’s old brown dog, sitting with his head tipped, waiting, sad as could be, for someone to pet him. He turned from the window, threw a worried look around the room, and said seriously, “I hope you never die,” and glanced at her.
She laughed, and saw that her laughter had hurt his feelings. “Everybody dies,” she said, and smiled, making up.
“I know,” he said doubtfully, “and goes to heaven.”
She smiled sadly. “And has to switch to harp.”
Once when they went to Missouri to bring Grandma Davis home, Joan’s parents showed home movies. They were, of course, the only people he knew who had a movie camera. They all sat down in the livingroom in Joan’s father’s house, Grandma Davis’s armchair pulled up close to the screen, because her eyes were bad, Joan’s mother and his parents in dining-room chairs along the side of the room, looking oddly prim, John Elmer and Aunt Cora against the wall behind Grandma Davis’s chair, he and Joan by the back wall with her two brothers and his own brother, Gilbert, four years younger than himself. They were all talking, Aunt Cora leaning over toward Grandma Davis. Joan’s father fussed with the machine, trying to get the square of light to hit the square of the screen—he had the projector set up on the piano bench and was poking magazines under the front, trying to get the right angle.
Joan’s mother reached up for the lightswitch on the light green wall behind her, and Joan’s brother James yelled, “Show the cartoons!”
Her younger brother echoed, “Cartoons! Cartoons! Felix the Cat!”
Buddy glanced over at his brother, who grinned.
“No cartoons!” Joan’s father said, and laughed and blushed as if to say, “You little monkeys!” and started the projector. The lights went off. The projector whirred and clicked, and numbers inside targets showed jerkily on the screen. In burning summer light Joan’s father’s car appeared, halfway on the screen and moving across it. It stopped, and after a long time in which nothing at all happened and no one spoke, the doors opened, and Emmy got out of the driver’s seat, while John Elmer and Cora got out of the back, followed by their son Bobby, and then Joan and her brother James, who’d gotten out the other side, came walking around the front.
“There they are!” John Elmer said. Everybody laughed.
They all waved, looking at the camera, and Joan’s mother slowly put the back of her hand to her face. Suddenly the picture was of someone’s backyard, much darker, and Joan’s youngest brother, with white, white hair, was walking toward the camera, smiling from ear to ear, moving awkwardly, like a calf, his legs in shiny steel braces.
“Look at ’im go!” John Elmer said.
Before they could laugh, Joan was in front of a large building, wearing what looked like a Sunday dress and holding flowers.
“That’s after Joan’s recital,” Emmy said, partly pleased, partly apologetic.
Joan walked toward the camera. The picture suddenly stopped jerking, as if the moment was important; but nothing came of it, she wa
lked on out of the picture without once looking up. Instantly she was back, the same dress, the same flowers, but now she was looking at the camera, smiling.
“That’s a mighty pretty girl,” Buddy’s father said.
His mother said, with conviction, “Isn’t she.”
“Looks like Sonja Henie,” John Elmer said.
“Oh, John,” Aunt Cora said.
And then, with mild horror, Buddy realized that he himself was in this movie. His parents’ car was parked beside the curb, and they were all getting out. He remembered before his picture appeared on the screen that as they walked toward the house Joan’s father was running the movie camera, and he remembered that as he passed he, Buddy, had made a face. Only now did he realize the implications, and the skin of his face began to sting. His mother and father went past the camera—Joan’s father had made them come one by one—and then Gilbert came by, smiling shyly—he had dark, slightly curly hair and eyes like his father’s, a little mysterious, as though, perhaps, he’d been a child once before and had not been happy, though he was happy now. He seemed wiser, gentler than the rest of his family—or was that, perhaps, a trick of Martin Orrick’s memory, thinking back to that image on the screen long afterward? His brother Gilbert moved out of the picture and he saw himself coming, with none of his brother’s confidence, though he was older, and he knew the stupid, obscene face must come, and waited, sick at heart, and it came—he stuck his tongue out, put his thumbs into his ears—and was gone almost instantly (Life is fleeting, Martin Orrick would write, long afterward, even the worst of life is fleeting), and everyone laughed. The screen was darkened by an image of Grandma Davis in a black dress. She seemed in the picture unnaturally large, somehow frightening. She moved very slowly on her heavy cane, smiling in a way that seemed not at all like her, and Joan, in the darkness beside him, laughed. As if the laugh had been a signal, her brother James, in the darkness just beyond her, said, “Here comes the Queen,” and their father turned and gave him a quick look. Immediately, as if miraculously, the image was replaced by one of Joan in a white tennis outfit, white shirt, white shorts.
“That’s a mighty pretty girl,” Buddy’s father said.
Her red hair swirled around her shoulders like fire, like copper, like a flying mane.
He glanced at his brother beside him, who caught the glance and grinned.
She was moving toward the camera. Perhaps her father, holding the camera, said something funny. She smiled.
John Elmer said, trying to be funny, “Here comes the Queen!”
They politely laughed.
The image went lighter, and still lighter, then froze, and suddenly she vanished like a ghost.
“Lights!” Joan’s father said.
Her mother reached up to the wall switch and turned on the lights.
Six
It would be a strange thing, she often thought, to have second sight, as her Grandma Frazier was supposed to have had, and Martin’s uncle George. It occurred to her, for instance, one day when she was forty, when Martin stopped the car to wait for a light at the corner of Olive Street and Grand, in St. Louis. What would she have thought—sometime in the late 1940s, standing on this corner, on her way to her part-time accompanist’s job at the Duggers School of the Dance—if she had suddenly had a vision of what downtown St. Louis would be like just twenty-five years later? What would she have thought—what would she have felt—standing on that crowded, noisy corner—if the crowd had suddenly thinned to just three or four hurrying figures and the buildings had gone solemn, like prison or mausoleum walls? She imagined the vision coming as pure image, like a photograph or drab documentary film, with no hint of explanation—saw herself, in her 1940s schoolgirl’s clothes, pleated skirt and short-sleeved sweater, a dark green coat and simple, light green head-scarf, bobbysox and loafers, her hair in a permanent, shiny and curly and a trifle stiff, books in her arm—since she came in directly from school on the bus, or on a chain of buses that shuttled her from Ferguson to Normandy to Wellston to downtown. There had been—was it on this corner?—a wonderful ice-cream place, the Park Plaza, where for a dollar you could get a parfait two feet high, and all around this section there were magnificent theaters, as colorful as circuses, with high, bold marquees on which yellow, red, blue, green, purple, and white lights (lightbulbs, she remembered, and even then some that had burned out weren’t replaced) went racing around titles four feet high —Rope, The Return of Frank James—and inside, the theaters were like palaces: great gilded lions; red-velvet-covered, three-inch-thick ropes on golden posts; majestic, wide stairways that made everyone an instant king or queen; ushers in uniforms from the days of the Empire (God knew which empire); and in the great, domed theater itself a hush that was patently religious, the boom of voices from the people on the screen coming from all sides and from within, or so it seemed, oracular. All the great stores had been downtown then, Famous-Barr, for instance, glittering, high-ceilinged, ceremonious inside its towering, gold-framed revolving doors, the aisles choked with shoppers, most of them white, the counters and high walls vending wonders—coats and solemn-toned, stately dresses with the sleeves pinned out, far overhead, like hovering angels—and everywhere draped artificial-pearl necklaces or ruby-red or pool-ball-green or -blue or -yellow costume baubles, bracelets the color of copper in flame, and everywhere the scent of perfumes and talcums, newly printed books, the leather of new shoes, a smell as exciting and at the same time cloying as a vault of roses in one of the big downtown flowershops, or the thick, sweet incense in a Catholic church. Suppose in the twinkling of an eye, Joan imagined, that whole world vanished, and the girl on the corner, herself at fifteen, looked, stunned and afraid, at a city gone dark and empty, at least by comparison with the teeming, bright, jubilant city she knew: there came a silence, as if all the gay sounds of the world had been abruptly turned off, like the music and static on a radio; and there came the same instant a visual stillness, as if a heart had stopped—no motion but three or four hurrying Negroes, strangely dressed, dangerous, with hair grown long and puffed up like that in a Tarzan picture; nothing else stirring but two pigeons overhead and a newspaper blowing along the pavement. “I’m in the future!” the imaginary Joan would have thought, “and there’s been some awful war, or a plague, and the world’s been ruined.” Who’d await the future if she could see it in advance? No use to tell the girl on the corner, “We’re happy, Joan. Don’t be afraid! There are beautiful places, though this one may be gone.” She’d have backed away, frightened and betrayed—yes, terrified, of course, it came to her now. What else could she be, addressed by a strange, wild woman in dark glasses such as Negroes wore then in the most dangerous parts of East St. Louis, a fur coat that looked as if the animal had died at an instant of terror, every hair on end—a woman whose beauty was like fine cutlery, hair falling plain as an Indian’s, except red, as brightly burnished and fiery as her own—leaning from the window of a dark blue Mercedes Benz driven by—how weird!—a sorrowful, baggy-eyed man with silver hair that swept down like angelhair past his heavy, hunched shoulders—a monster who was, she had a feeling, suddenly, someone she was meant to recognize. The girl would have stepped back in fear and anger, raising her hand to the braces on her teeth, and the real Joan would have called to her, shouting past the years in pity and anguish, “Child, child, don’t be silly! We’re as harmless as you are, we’ve betrayed nobody, nothing! Look at us!” Now the child did look, and recognition came into her eyes: the rich, wildly eccentric lady (who had beautiful teeth, Joan thought and smiled, feeling a surge of affection for the big-nosed innocent on the corner), the lady in the fur, with emeralds and a ruby and a diamond on her fingers, was herself—or her own “child,” Wordsworth would say—and the driver was Buddy Orrick, grown sadder and crazier, but still alive, and married to her: so they’d made it, they’d survived! She came a step nearer, her face eager, full of questions (we could drive her to Duggers, the real Joan thought; it’s only a few blocks) and her smal
l hand came cautiously toward the real Joan’s hand on the Mercedes’ wing-window, both hands equally pale and solid, the child’s and the woman’s, until suddenly the child’s hand was gone and Joan Orrick was gazing at cracked sidewalk, a piece of dirty cardboard.
Martin glanced over and saw her tears. “Hurting?” he asked.
And yes, she was hurting, as she nearly always hurt, these days, sometimes such pain that she passed out for a moment—hurting even when the drugs were at work, as now, causing visions—but she said, “No,” and gave him a reassuring smile, “just thinking.”
He reached over, touched her hand. The light changed, and the big car glided forward without a sound.
She said, “Duggers School of the Dance was just up ahead. Remember?”
“Which building?” He ducked down over the steering wheel to look up.
She pointed as the car came abreast of it. It had been gutted by fire, like most of the buildings in this neighborhood. He scanned the boarded-up, blackened storefronts. She could see he wasn’t sure which one she meant.
Jacqui Duggers was tiny, the classic teacher of ballet but in perfect miniature, hair so tightly drawn back you might have thought from a distance that it was paint, as on a Japanese doll. She spoke with the accent all ballet teachers use, even those raised in Milwaukee or St. Louis, wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist like an actress, called Joan “dahling” with perfect seriousness and unfeigned affection, though one might not have noticed the affection at first glance, since she was always hurried, always slightly tense, as if she had to catch a plane for Munich or Paris in half an hour. She was—or so it seemed to Joan—a superb dancer, though Joan never saw her dance more than a few steps; and old photographs suggest that Joan’s impression was right: the Jacqui Duggers in the pictures has that indefinable look—authority perhaps—that one sees at a glance in all real professionals, and she had danced with good companies of the so-called second rank in both the United States and Canada. “Ah-wone,” she would say, and Joan’s hands would move automatically on the keys of the piano.
