Stillness & Shadows

by John Gardner

  “I have to go, Joan,” he said. “Have to pick up the kids.” He moved toward the door.

  “Would you kiss me good-bye?” she said. “Out of pity, I mean, because I’m sick.”

  He almost smiled, hesitated, then decided to obey.

  “I love you, Martin,” she said, searching his face.

  He nodded, noncommittal.

  She had an image of him, all at once, living with Neva, growing weirder and weirder, dirtier, smellier, wilder of eye, and she had a flash of understanding, as if from outside herself, that she did not want him to destroy himself, and that finally it had nothing whatever to do with her own desires. “So you imagined,” he would say later, scornfully, when she told him of the feeling, and there was no way she could prove it was the truth. But she knew. It was like the free will argument he was always on about. For all his reasoning, for all his fancy logic, all his long-winded quotes, you knew when you were free and when you weren’t, it was as easy as that. Some things were certain—many things, in fact—and if reason undermined those certainties, it was best not to listen.

  “Nevertheless,” she said firmly—she could not know until he told her later, that her tensed cheeks, her sternness made it seem like tyrannical assertion, an attempt to command his feelings—“I do love you.”

  After he’d left, she asked herself in panic, “What in hell am I going to do in the godforsaken Ozarks?”

  That night, because of the drugs, perhaps, she had a brief, frightening memory of the man she’d seen coming toward her through the rain, just before she’d fainted. He had his head slightly tipped, his arm stretched toward her as if he was greeting her, had been looking for her. His skin was gray, and for a moment it seemed to her that she remembered seeing Death. She toyed with the idea, knowing all the while that he’d been only an old man, perhaps an old man alarmed by her cries and hurrying to help her; and she remembered something she hadn’t thought about in years, that her Grandma Frazier was supposed to have seen Death many times. She’d seen him one day when she was a child, in church—or so she claimed and obviously believed. They were singing a hymn, and a stranger came into the back of the church—an elderly country man in a shabby black Sunday suit, his hands folded limply in front of him, his head just perceptibly moving, as if with palsy, his lips touched by little involuntary tremors—and he’d come timidly down the aisle, no usher noticing him or coming to his assistance, and he’d come to a bench where there was room to sit and had stopped there. He didn’t join the hymn, merely looked, with a somewhat curious, intent expression at a cousin of hers, a girl named Dora McClaren. When the congregation sat down, he too sat down. Then the sermon began—the message from the Lord, they’d called it then—and she’d stopped watching the man, though she could still feel his presence, still feel the oddity of no one at all’s having noticed him. Whenever she happened to glance over at him, he was still gazing as if thoughtfully at Dora. And then once when she glanced over, he was gone. She started as if from a dream and looked all around her and back down the aisle behind her, but it was as if the boards of the church floor had opened up and swallowed him. That night Dora McClaren took a fever; three nights later she was dead. No one believed Lulu Thompson’s story of the man she’d seen in church.

  Joan pushed all that away, as she’d always done, or had always done at least since the age of twelve. She would never understand those misty times, she’d decided long ago, the days when Missouri was like a tropical jungle, full of snakes and vines and rich, dark green grasses, Indians, riverboat Negroes, dour, bushy-bearded Germans, lanky Scotchmen with eyes like flint—a time when every voting day meant murders and riots, when the Mississippi River had no bridges, only ferries, and the houses, like palaces, in downtown St. Louis were centuries apart from the cabins where country people chopped down trees and sank ploughs into the land and shot snakes. It was possible, perhaps, that her grandmother had told the truth about what she saw in plain daylight, walking along Halls Ferry Road, or sitting half asleep under a shade tree near Coldwater School. Looking at the faces in old photographs, the buildings sharp-edged, as if cut out of paper, the sky oddly luminous, she had the feeling, sometimes, that things might have been visible then that were visible no longer.

  But what she mainly felt now, and only partly because she’d remembered again the stories of her grandmother’s second sight, was revulsion at the thought of returning to that place. It was a feeling she could never have explained to Martin—he demanded logic, reason, possibly because if she worked by those rules he could always win—and her feeling about Missouri was the very opposite of logical. She loved the place, loved her family, and did not want to be there. She could say no more. Where was it, then, that she wanted to be? That was the kind of question Martin would ask. Paris, perhaps. Geneva. How was she to know? For now, San Francisco. He would think it immoral that she had no idea where she wanted to live, what she wanted to become. It wasn’t immoral, it was good—but what was she to say? When he told stories of adventures he’d had with the children, things they’d said or seen, she felt cheated of a natural right. That too she wanted, to play with them as Martin did, let the hours slip by as a child’s hours do. She wanted everything, all of it—but not return, not roots, not a life she’d lived already.

  She would learn, later, a metaphor for the helplessness she felt, when Martin and Paul would talk of the right and left lobes of the brain, the left one intelligent and verbal, tyrannical, the right a poor ignorant womanish thing, too stupid to say pencil when the hand it controlled had a pencil in it, but a lobe that understood music instantly and totally, without words, and took paintings to heart, without knowledge of perspective or schools or strange jargon like “pointillism.” Though their thoughtful, intellectual conversations almost never got through to her, almost never penetrated her defensive wall of jokes and suddenly remembered chores—escapes from the room in which the talk went on—their talk of the poor, sad, miserable right lobe had stirred her to attention. It was the lobe that controlled the left side of the body, the sinestre, the lobe that had to do with intuition, mystical leaps, with her own ability—or so she translated their talk—to guess the first names of people she’d never met. She’d discovered it first at her father’s factory. She could look at a man who worked for her father and know immediately that his name was Ray, or Virgil, or Ben. She’d probably been wrong more often than she remembered, she realized, but that wasn’t what mattered. Often she was right. And in the same way she could look at a woman and know what kind of house she lived in, what the furniture was, what kind of children she had. Martin had been telling her since before they were married that she ought to be a novelist, and for all his own novels he got her to help him with what people should be called, what their houses should look like, what games they should play. They talked of the right and left lobes of the brain, Martin and Paul, soberly reasoning, saying to each other that what both of them needed, as writers of fiction, was a more highly developed right lobe of the brain, and they would hold out their hands to the light from the fireplace in the Vermont house she’d lately gotten Martin to buy, observing to each other how both their left hands were blotchy and poorly defined, weakling in comparison to their deeply lined, muscular right hands, proving that their right lobes were sickly, unable to assert themselves; and she’d realized they were talking, without meaning to, about her. She’d felt a partisan’s sadness for the sickly right lobe, and she’d realized, sitting in the flickering light in that huge Vermont house without furniture, that she was all both Martin and Paul were not, could do all they futilely demanded of themselves; and she’d realized, in the same flash of insight, that like the right lobe they spoke so admiringly of, she was mute, inarticulate, couldn’t possibly make clear what she was and stood for, because as soon as they gave her the freedom to speak she would forget what it was she’d intended to say, would laugh and blush, like her father, and make some joke.

  All that was in the future. What she knew as she lay
in the Kaiser Hospital was that leaving San Francisco to return to Missouri was like a death. Why was she doing it? —There had never been any question about her not doing it. But for all her pain and sorrow and confusion, the question was locked into her flesh like some medieval instrument of torture: Why am I doing it? It would present itself even more dramatically later: he would beat her senseless, chase like a vacant-lot puppy after bitches, and though she was the proudest woman in the world, she would cling to him. Why? Neither the stupidest woman she’d ever met, a faculty wife for whom all the world was a sorry comedown from Lincoln, Nebraska, nor the shrewdest and most powerful woman she knew, one of her two closest friends in San Francisco, the Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn, would have put up with such nonsense for an instant. The longer she endured it, the more she saw of salvation by divorce, the more her pride should have pushed her away from him. But it was never a question. It wasn’t reasonable, and at times she would admit it was hard to call it love. But she’d decided. Why? She had decided.

  I’ll go with him, she thought. I’ll take him for every fucking penny he ever earns.

  Then the pain struck again, and she forgot her rage. She rang for the nurse. No one came. She became frightened and rang again, then again. Still no one. The pain came out of nowhere, possessed her in a flash, and then was gone again, leaving no trace but a rawness, a feeling exactly like a skinned knee, but inside, and everywhere. A shadow fell across her, though there was no one in the room. “Martin,” she cried out, “don’t leave me here!” Then the nurse came, fat, stupid. Joan couldn’t have a shot for at least another hour. “Doctor’s orders,” she said. “I’ve got to,” Joan said, but the nurse shook her head, sublimely boss. “No use to playact. That’s the doctor’s orders.” Joan saw at once what she was dealing with and threw the pitcher across the room, screamed with all her might, raised the hospital roof. They at once called the doctor, who told them sternly that they should have called him sooner. She got her shot. She slept.

  To Martin she said nothing of her horror at the thought of returning to Missouri. Her father had had a light heart attack; that was one of Martin’s reasons for wanting to return, or so he told her now. He wanted Evan and Mary to know their grandparents and cousins. What could she say? He was telling the truth about his reason for wanting to go back, though not all of it.

  She remembered fishing with her own grandfather, in one of the sinkholes on his farm. He’d sit on the log that ran down into the water, in a patch of leafy shade, yellow sunlight all around him, and he’d give her advice on baiting the hook or casting toward the middle, or he’d tell her stories of mules he’d had, or his odd Dutchman neighbors, or stories of barns that had burned, or crazy fellers—there’d been one that lived right behind his place, used to come and steal eggs, same as a fox—and all at once, while he was talking, Joan would get a bite, and she’d jerk the pole upward, and he’d yell, “Thar ye go! Haul in now!” and out of the still water, glittering and flashing in the air like something dangerous, or anyway startling, after all that quiet, would come a sunfish with an eye like a frightened mule’s, and her grandfather would tell her if the fish was big enough to eat.

  Meanwhile the hospital tests dragged on. A month passed, then two. There was nothing they could find.

  “Mr. Orrick,” the last of the neurologists asked Martin, “has your wife ever experienced psychological problems?”

  “Not that I know of,” Martin said. “You mean you think her pain’s—imaginary?”

  “That’s a possibility we’re inclined to consider,” the doctor said.

  Martin looked at him thoughtfully, looked up at the ceiling, then once more looked into the doctor’s eyes. “You’re wrong,” he said.

  Fourteen

  They moved to the Ozarks, a stupid university, a stupid little town, or so she thought at first, though she found a nice house, miraculously—a large old farmhouse with pillars, five miles from the village. It rained all winter long. The roads turned to gumbo, occasionally glazed with ice. Martin bought wormy old horses for himself and Evan and Mary, then wormy old dogs, and he tried to make the children learn to ride, though they were afraid of riding, and his yelling made them cry. The so-called university had no buildings yet, though construction was in progress, huge box-shaped horrors towering above weeds. He had his temporary office, with six other people, in a small, white house, the kind poor people live in in drab Ozark towns, a partly fallen chimney, a rusty porch glider on the sagging, peeling porch. Hippies with squeezed-shut hillbilly faces came and smiled and hunkered on the ground and talked, asked to borrow the horses, fucked their pale-eyed, long-haired girlfriends in the woods, the mow, the garage, the bathroom, and if no one was looking stole hayforks, grain, even lightbulbs speckled with whitewash from the barn, and drove up in their vans, when Martin’s Rambler wasn’t there, and emptied the gas tank by the barn. When Martin came home from work, if that was where he’d been, he would saddle up one of the wormy horses and ride off by himself into the gray, cold woods, and the wormy black-and-tans would run behind him. She couldn’t go with him, couldn’t ride at all. Either she was in too much pain to sit up, or she was light-headed with drugs. She tried again and again, stubbornly, but it was useless; as soon as they’d begin to go fast, she would fall, cracking her ribs, wrenching her back, bruising herself from head to foot. There was very little she could do, in fact, except sleep and hate herself and read. The children came up to her bedroom sometimes, trying to cheer her, and they partly succeeded, sitting beside her, reading or drawing pictures, or playing with stuffed animals. Evan was beginning to learn card tricks now. She hated card tricks with a holy passion—she wasn’t sure why, perhaps it was because of the kind of people she’d known who’d done them when she was in high school and college—but Evan was funny, his hands small and clumsy, so that complicated tricks that went smoothly in his mind came out through his fingers with a charming clunkiness, as if done by a small clown in gloves. Mary would watch him admiringly, sometimes playing straight man or accomplice, and she, Joan, who was supposed to be watching very carefully, would close her eyes and be glad they were beside her and would wonder what was to become of them. They never seemed to fight—as she and Martin did constantly, the little he was home, not teaching or riding or sealed away from reality in his study. She should do something, he kept telling her. She laughed, furious. What a fool he was! She had too many years of experience to get a teaching job. The state had made a law against the schools’ exploiting her, with the result that the schools, miserably poor and hopelessly backward, could afford to hire only inexperienced, young teachers. They might not have hired her in any case. The one time she’d mentioned to the county superintendent—she’d been driven by desperation into bringing it up—that she’d once won the California Teacher of the Year Award, he’d looked up at her over his spectacles with undisguised loathing and said, “You don’t say. Well I declare.” She knew his kind—maybe they were all his kind, here in southern Missouri. Crooked politicians; not educational dimwits, worse than that: indifferent, even hostile to schools and teachers and children. He’d fussed with papers, waiting for her to get up and leave, and so at last she’d stood up. At the door she’d said with a Missouri drawl and a sweet smile she knew he would understand, “You ought to get some air freshener in this office, Mr. Creed. Ah b'lieve they sell it in the dimestore.” —It didn’t matter, of course, that no one would hire her. She was on drugs all the time now. She frequently wondered if she’d ever again be able to think clearly, clearly enough even to write one really good, funny letter to her San Francisco friends.

  Every Saturday that year he drove her the ninety miles to St. Louis, to see her psychiatrist, though neither of them believed for a minute that the pain was psychological. At the end of the year the psychiatrist was convinced that Joan Orrick was as sane as anyone, except perhaps for that peculiar devotion, even now, to her long-haired, cave-eyed husband. The psychiatrist shook his head, pursing his lips. He was young, and
in a weak way, good-looking. Joan had changed his life. When she’d begun her sessions he wore dowdy clothes, talked pompously, like the Oklahoma boy he was, and never read a novel, sent back bad food at a restaurant, or attended a concert. She’d given him advice on what he ought to wear, what he should read, where he ought to go. Toward the end of her year of work with him she discovered—or rather Martin pointed out to her—that the notes he took during their long, rambling sessions were all on phrases she’d used that he wanted to imitate, musicians she’d mentioned that he wanted to hear, or interesting art shows, places to eat. On her psychiatrist’s advice, she checked into Barnes Hospital for more tests. The bill was enormous. They found nothing.

  Martin kept writing, as he’d always done. It was the one thing in their lives that was stable, invariable. He would get up before dawn and would write until it was time for him to go teach his classes—he’d have no breakfast but coffee and would hardly notice either her or the children—and he’d write when he came home, far into the night. Those were the only things he cared about, it seemed sometimes, his writing and his teaching. But that wasn’t quite true. He cared about the place. It was the one way the children had of reaching him. The three of them would walk through the pasture, holding hands, or would explore the woods, finding caves and waterfalls, learning where the foxes and skunks kept their dens, where the beavers had dams, where the rattlesnakes crawled out onto rocks to get the sun. Whatever he loved, they loved, automatically, without question. They learned the names of birds—far more names than he knew, born and raised in the east, where one never saw a cardinal, a purple waxwing, a prairie chicken or mockingbird. They learned the names of trees—Evan brought home books from the school library, and they’d search through them together, or huddle around them in the woods, trying to make out what kind of tree it was they stood under. And circling around the farm with him, talking about things, they learned his ridiculous, tortuous way of reasoning about things, judging, weighing, pondering what-ifs, until the supper table became what it had been at Martin’s father’s house, an endless debate of—nothing. Once in St. Louis he bought an old French horn—he’d sold his long ago, when they’d needed money in graduate school—and he began to play it a little now and then. Evan too began to play, though only casually, tentatively, as if testing to see if his playing the horn was what his father really wanted. And again and again, though they were terrified, they tried to learn to ride the horses. It broke her heart, watching them, their lips pressed together, their eyes full of fear, their blond hair streaming out behind them as they cantered around the yard. Couldn’t he see that they were terrified? She tried to tell him, begged him to wait till they were older, but the children pushed as hard as he did. Once when he had Mary on the green-broke Arab he’d bought for her, a rabbit jumped up in the path and thundered off, and the horse bolted. Mary clung to the saddle horn screaming with fright, Martin galloping behind her, unable to overtake her, and she made it all the way from the bottom of the pasture to the old peach orchard behind the house before she finally fell off. She could have been killed, even Mary must have known it, but that very afternoon they’d caught her luring the horse to the high wooden gate, so she could get on again, and that same night, in spite of everything, there the three of them were at the kitchen table, studying once more the books on horsemanship they’d inherited from Uncle George, things he’d gotten from his horse-trainer father. Paul Brotsky would say years later, lying beside her, smoking a cigarette, Martin on the other side, “It’s a strange thing to think about. We keep the dead alive. We carry on the things they cared about whether we like it or not. They’d be nothing without us—that is, nothing but dead—but on the other hand, without them, we’d be nothing. I guess if you like that means we’re determined—you know, chained by the past. Or you can look at it another way: the things they were interested in, the things they were, give us our possibilities.” Martin said nothing—she could feel him smiling, gloomy in the dark. He understood though, she knew. It was Martin who’d brought it up. She said, “Do you realize William Shakespeare never heard a Mozart string quartet? Isn’t that incredible?” Paul groaned in mock-agony. “Jesus, Joan, must you keep screwing up the syllogisms?” “You keep telling me to stick to the facts,” she said, “and I tell you a fact and you yell at me.” They had walked in the old Vermont cemetery that day, reading the names. It was interesting that you could know without anyone’s telling you what a man looked like, even how he thought and talked, if his name was Nathan Harwood. “Course, you have to bear in mind the date of birth,” Paul said, gently making fun of Martin’s thoroughly uninformed and slightly too fashionable interest in astrology (but it was Paul who had memorized the zodiac characteristics, Paul who knew that, born November 5, 1804, Nathan Harwood was a Scorpio). “Exactly,” Martin said. “Also helps to know if his mother was an Indian.”