Stillness & Shadows

by John Gardner

  After the recital they all went out to eat, Joan and Buddy’s mother and his aunt Mary—after whom, years later, their daughter would be named. They ate in the high-ceilinged, dark diningroom of some old hotel, and Buddy’s mother and Aunt Mary spoke over and over of what a beautiful recital it had been and what a shame it was that Buddy’s father and Uncle George had had to miss it. While they were eating Joan felt a sudden sharp pain, a pain so fierce she went white and almost fainted. It was exactly like the time her appendix had ruptured, and she was so frightened she couldn’t even cry out. She managed to say in a whisper, “Aunt Mary, I—” and Aunt Mary, who was a nurse—head of the maternity ward at Genesee Memorial—looked at her and said, “My dear!” and got up so quickly she almost knocked the table over. The next thing Joan knew, they were driving very fast to the Rochester hospital in Aunt Mary’s car, Joan lying in the backseat with her head on Buddy’s lap, and he was bent over her, looking white and frightened, touching her face gently, brushing away her tears and saying, full of concern, “You’ll be all right, Joan. You will.” As if because his voice was magical—that high-tone, flat eastern accent she loved—the pain shrank away and, after a moment, vanished. She was about to tell him, then changed her mind. Outside the car windows, streetlights and snowy trees flew by. She felt a flurry of panic at what she was about to do, then whispered, “Buddy, kiss me.” His eyes widened slightly and then, timidly, he obeyed.

  At the hospital, as at so many hospitals later, the doctor found nothing wrong. It was impossible, they told her, that her appendix could have grown back. “But it must be something” she said. Did they think she’d made it up?

  The doctor, who had a round head and a large brown moustache, merely smiled and looked at the middle of her forehead. “It seems to be just one of those things,” he said.

  “Just thank the dear Lord it’s gone and pray it won’t come back,” Aunt Mary said, and took Joan’s arm, severe as a sergeant—her normal way of showing affection. They returned to the room where Buddy and his mother were waiting.

  “Nothing?” his mother said, incredulous, prepared to be annoyed at the doctor.

  “Nothing they can find,” Aunt Mary said, with such finality that Buddy’s mother shook her head and said no more.

  As they walked back to the elevator, Buddy took Joan’s hand.

  Ten

  His uncle George was a short, dapper, big-jawed, quick man who wore gold-rimmed spectacles and three-piece suits, usually brown ones and fairly conservative, though his nature made them seem merrier than they were. (In no corner of his jubilant Scorpio soul did George Preston wear checks or flashy bow ties or a moustache; though he was a teller of stories and a first-rate salesman, he was serious about life, ready every day to be called to some delicate, important work, or a friend’s marriage, or a funeral.) He was full of pleasure and darting curiosity; there was nothing decent that he wouldn’t try his hand at, from butchering cows to leg-wrestling a Seneca Indian, and nothing he tried was he bad at except for English grammar, for which he had no flair. His house on North Lyon in Batavia, New York, was atoggle from end to end with ingenious devices he’d run across in his Popular Mechanics magazines—he kept a great stack of them by the toilet in his bathroom—strings, pulleys, and levers for turning lights on and off again, or for opening or closing or starting or stopping things. When his basement flooded, as basements in his part of the city did each spring, regular as the mail, he had a steamship’s pump that he’d built, himself, to empty it. On every door and window of his house and garage and potting shed, he had clever devices he’d constructed himself to keep burglars and mischievous children out. The arches he wore in his wide brown highly polished shoes were of his own design and basement manufacture.

  Given his talent and boundless energy, George Preston might have been anything; but his father died when he was still a young man and, though he wasn’t the eldest and thus wasn’t, by a certain line of reasoning, responsible, he threw himself into taking care of the family and sacrificed, pretty much without a second thought, whatever chances he might have had as an artist, engineer, or who-knows-what. He’d driven ambulance during World War I and had a thousand stories, most of them so funny that people laughed until they cried, sitting around the table in his crowded, brightly lit diningroom, or at the picnic table he had in back, behind his garden, by the horseshoes court, or at some other man’s table, for instance the long one in the high-ceilinged room in Duncan Orrick’s house. Dozens of those stories would show up in Martin Orrick’s novels. He had also, in certain moods, darker stories—and a darker streak in his character—stories of atrocities he’d seen at first hand, half-crazy Americans who drove tanks in to finish off wounded boches or took shots at the drivers of the German Red Cross. Though late in life he would come to believe he’d made a sad mistake, he resolved to bring no children into a world so bleak and dangerous, a world in which even the best of men, if the cards were right, could revert in the twinkle of an eye to murderous gorilla.

  After the war he’d bumped around for six months, then worked for a while in the family dry-cleaning establishment, the Sunshine Cleaners, a long, airless place sweet-smelling as a bakery, except the smell was of starch and warm cloth and soap and cleaning fluid—a small establishment just off an alley across from the furtive back entrance to a bank and next door to a farm-implement repair shop. The rooms behind the cheerful, plant-filled front lobby were as filled with steamy windows as a winter snowstorm has flakes of snow, the walls between the windows painted dead-man gray, all the rooms crowded with bagged and loose laundry with yellow or blue tickets, and antique machinery, workers without faces, and the noise of the equipment—the woof and hiss of the big steam presser, the clush of washers, the rattle of hangers as they slid along their long wooden bars.

  Later, though he still kept an interest in the place, he took on various selling jobs—as a Watkins man serving the local farmers, small-townsmen, and villagers from Rochester to Buffalo and from the shore of Lake Ontario to the hill towns of Warsaw and Perry, then as an independent “grocer on wheels” serving, among others, the people of the Tonawanda Indian Reservation, with whom he learned to speak a little Seneca and whose virtues he would admire, and whose stories he would quote, in sombre imitation of the Seneca manner, for the rest of his life; still later as a furniture salesman in one small-town furniture store after another.

  Everyone liked him and he was famous for his honesty, though that was not true of the people for whom he worked. He read books about salesmanship and personal magnetism, whatever came to hand, also books that might help him judge the character of his customers—books on phrenology, palmistry, and astrology—and if he made a mistake in attempting a sale he made a careful note of it in a ledger he had, and made an effort never to repeat it. (He had once chanced upon a book about calligraphy and wrote, even when he was seventy-two and could barely hold a pen, in an elegant, tasteful hand. He used the slanted, hyperlinear hand of a nineteenth-century professional scrivener.) He was not, for all that, a hard-sell salesman but a man who believed that business was an honorable and responsible profession and, indeed, in a democracy of ordinary men, as noble a profession as a man could turn his hand to. He wouldn’t sell shoddy goods to any man if he could find him something decent for a price he could afford, nor would he lie about the value of the goods he sold—wouldn’t even lie by keeping silent. To his bosses’ displeasure, he resisted selling what he knew in advance the customer would have trouble making payments on: he would talk with the man in his merry, joking way, trying to make the man see sense and perhaps, incidentally, selling him something else he had equal use for and could more easily afford and might someday be glad he’d gotten hold of. Not at all that he was a pious moralist who delighted in butting in on other people’s business. His judgments of the customer—however merrily he talked, ducking and weaving and feinting like a boxer, rubbing his hands like a man undecided about what to eat first at some splendid potluck—were complex
and serious-minded, and he understood that, when a family buys furniture, practical considerations are not always of the first importance. Occasionally people have urgent need of what they cannot afford, and the salesman’s just business is to get the sale made in the way least likely to do damage. It was not from arrogance or the wish to play God that he drew that opinion. He saw business as a service, and even used the word. Though he did not believe and would not say—except jokingly, after he’d lost a sale—that “the customer is always right,” he saw the customer as his only true employer, himself as the customer’s agent and faithful servant. He believed that if he proved himself a trustworthy servant, the customer would return when he needed George Preston’s services again, and would mention the name, or pass on the card, to people they knew who had need of him.

  As a general rule, the stores for which he worked didn’t share his philosophy—not surprisingly, of course: it was late in the day for an old-time Yankee peddler. The stores for which he worked were owned by people interested in making money quickly, people who knew about interest rates and inventory shift, but nothing about gluing or angled joints or fabrics. They were in “business,” not “furniture.” They were strangers who came to the hardware-store and tourist-court villages of western New York from the high-pressure clip joints of Syracuse, Rochester, or Buffalo, where volume was the not very carefully guarded secret and where the customer expected to be cheated and was. Personal relationships between salesman and customer were unheard of in such places, if only because the customer was forever on the move, chasing down leads on the American Dream in Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, leaving in his wake a great flutter of unpaid bills. George Preston hated his employers and made no bones about how he felt; but he was easily the best furniture salesman in the area, and after a little unpleasantness his employers invariably let him go his way until, despite his efforts, their shoddy business failed and another stranger bought up the inventory and the battle began again.

  He was a fiercely energetic salesman, one who would drive miles after the store had closed to look at a piece of furniture reported as failing to hold up—he would do a little carpentry or tacking or sewing and then a better sales pitch than he’d offered the first time, this time for free—and he would personally look into the problems of a customer who couldn’t pay the installments, yet he had abundant energy left over for other things. He had a vegetable and flower garden that was the envy of all who knew him—a picket-fenced, rose-gated square of land behind his ordinary house, a garden with pebble paths and neatly lettered signs, flowers and vegetables arranged to suit the markings on an intricate map he kept in what he called his den. He had at one time done beautiful pencil and charcoal sketches, mostly pictures he’d copied out of books and magazines; and though a professional artist would eventually have noticed that he’d never had a lesson, no ordinary eye could have discerned the fact. In their small, thickly over-furnished house, he and his wife, Buddy’s aunt Mary, had charcoal sketches of hunting dogs, landscapes, horses, old mills, barns, cattle in a pasture, forests; and though they were amateur, and some of them copies, they were the work of a man who had an eye. One sees the same thing in the photographs he took. He’d begun because, working in his garden evenings—with his sister Hattie, who lived with them—he had loved sunsets, the special green light that came over the garden and the vacant lot behind, the cloud formations and depths of red, yellow, blue, orange, violet that would blossom for an instant and never be repeated. He worked up to a two-hundred-dollar 35mm Kodak with all the trimmings—tripod, lenses, lens brushes, carrying case—and took hundreds of pictures of sunsets and roses, later boxes and boxes of pictures of the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, and the South Dakota Badlands, wherever he and his wife chanced to spend their once-a-year two-week vacation; also hundreds of pictures of places in Pennsylvania and New York State that they could reach— sometimes with Buddy and Joan—on a weekend. He took the usual photographs, trying for the world, not artistic innovation—the arches at Watkins Glen, the Bridal Veil at Niagara Falls, the waterfall and trestle at Letchworth Park—but the photographs he took had unusual power. He understood light—understood the single beam that comes slicing through the darkness of a vine-hung grove, the ripple of light in a brook as it emerges from an overhang of roots, the polychrome haze above a factory. Toward the end, he took photographs only of people, always people he loved and understood. Some of them would hang on Joan Orrick’s upstairs wall.

  Despite the fact that he read all he could find about astrology, phrenology, palmistry, and the rest—and tried to make practical application of what he learned—he was never a credulous, superstitious man. As he explained to Buddy Orrick once, leaning toward him, taking his arm in his right hand, the way salesmen do, and gesturing with his left, “Pontius Pilate was right: ‘What is truth?’ That’s the question. Yet it exists, we all know. The real moral of that horrible story is, Pity the bastard that guesses wrong!” He had no use for organized religion. He’d once been cheated in a business deal by a minister at the Batavia Presbyterian Church, and it was a thing he could never forgive or even be persuaded to try to understand. He could have forgiven almost anything—fornication, sacrilege, theft, even murder—but never dishonesty in business. Business was precious; its laws were the holiest laws he knew. A man who could defile the laws of business could do anything, and the fact that such a man could occupy a pulpit put God’s special interest in churches in the gravest doubt. “God was a businessman,” he used to say merrily when ministers came to call. “Big funny-lookin brown-eyed Jewish fella. Matter of fact he was in the furniture business. Did cabinetwork.” He didn’t scorn churches; he dismissed them with a wave, as he dismissed flying saucers. His wife was a faithful churchgoer, and that was fine with him, but as for himself he’d never again darken a church door, or rather, brighten it, since everywhere he went people smiled and traded jokes with him, mostly off-color ones, or spoke of their families and latest strokes of luck, and thinking back later to his wonderfully beaming bald head, they would smile again.

  Though he was not credulous or superstitious, he was interested all his life in magic and psychic phenomena and had in his library, which later went to Martin Orrick, books ranging from the works of W. W. deLaurence to those of Swedenborg. Both his father and his father’s brother Bill, who lived with them, had been turn-of-the-century amateur magicians who attended experiments of the notorious Dr. Luther Flint, witnessed escapes by the incredible Houdini, and bought every magic book or illusionist’s device they could afford. Like Flint himself, they were fascinated by the possibility that, despite the certain fraudulence of nearly everything they saw in the theaters or the upstairs séances of sharp-eyed old Rochester ladies, something in all that mumbo-jumbo might be true. It was, perhaps, the safety valve of their rationalism. George Preston’s father was, by profession, an animal trainer: he broke horses for the coach or wagon or “the ladies’ pleasure” and, on the side, trained dogs, cats, and mice. Men had at that time fewer books on the training of animals than we have today, and a trainer earned his reputation by learning to analyze an animal problem and solve it. Though “behaviorism” was a word that had not yet been perpetrated, all nineteenth-century animal trainers were behaviorists, and those who were religious, as was George Preston’s father, sooner or later confronted the greatest and oldest of philosophical problems.

  Men had of course special reasons, at that time, for suspecting that there might be more to the occult than the ordinary skeptic would admit. Mesmerism was still new and shocking, and though the Académie Franchise had denounced Mesmer as a charlatan, anyone who troubled to learn the technique knew that “animal magnetism” was real. George Preston’s father and uncle Bill learned the art and were soberly convinced that the only reason they couldn’t mesmerize people who were miles away was that they were doing something wrong. They had long discussions of these mysteries and attended every experiment they could get to. Also, on the side, less for simple p
leasure than as insurance against the chance of bunkum, they learned tricks with cards, goldfish, rabbits, nickel-plated pistols, and mirror boxes. Many of these George Preston learned, some only when his father and uncle were dead and he inherited their books. At his own death he passed them on to Buddy, through whom they reached Evan, who made them the backbone of his wonderfully skillful, ridiculous act. (“Goldfish?” he would say, raising the handkerchief behind which he was supposed to find the ace of hearts. “Oh well,” he would say to the audience, smiling and blushing with pleasure, exactly as his grandfather would do, “it could be worse. Once I got chickens.”)