Fathoms (Collected Writings)

by Jack Cady

  “I expect they’ll be all right,” Mrs. Perkins said. “But it’s just going to be Hail Columbia for the first few years.”

  “It surely ain’t a match made in heaven, plus he had another option. He could of learned to be a buffalo rider.”

  “It’s a match made in a teashop,” Mrs. Perkins said. “You’d be surprised how often it happens these days . . . no, nope, you wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “I tried to be a good daddy,” the jar whispered. “Take it easy, Spike.”

  “You have to cut them loose sometime,” Mrs. Perkins said. “Let them make their own mistakes.”

  “She’s too pushy,” the jar whispered, “and he’s a natural worrywart. A’course they’re both good kids.”

  And Mrs. Perkins and the jar stood looking onto the busy street, a street of sales and traffic where it may be that a beneficent eye hovers godlike in the sky, directing the affairs of men, the affairs of women, and of women and men who have affairs; and then Mrs. Perkins picked up the jar and stashed it beside her umbrella where it would be handy when she closed shop and went home. She heard a slight sound as she turned to attend to customers, but missed seeing the jar nearly tip from the shelf as it gave a small hop and a jiggle, while weeping only a little.

  The Sounds of Silence

  Donizetti is dead. Louis Armstrong is dead. Vancouver is another rainy city.

  Velma Middleton is dead. Mozart. J. B. Arban. Stravinsky. The ranks form in my mind. Composers, performers, all of them teachers. I stare into the rainy streets at a store front which advertises cheap boots. Galli-Curci is dead. The water pounds like nails. Jim is walking around out there someplace.

  The theme does not leave my mind and I do not try to dislodge it. The Firebird. The horns and trumpets have it on open bell and the music is wild and triumphant. We came to this motel a half hour ago, a fifty-year-old man with thinning hair and his nineteenyear-old son. How many journeys? How many miles? It has only been a few hours.

  Jim’s guitar is in the corner and his trumpet is by the bed. On my next visit I’ll bring the cello. For the last hour all of my memories have seemed less than one morning old.

  Because it is not yet noon. We left Seattle early. Jim slowed toward the end of the packing. He was discarding books and folding things that did not need to be folded. Always before the room was cluttered, the evidence of rebellious sloppiness never quite hidden. His mother and I have tried for order in our lives and have been successful. Jim will use those learned patterns later.

  He is a tall kid. This morning he was learning to become a man and he slumped under his decision. We had talked it out on an evening last week. After the defensiveness and flamboyance and third-world metaphor, his decision (stated quietly and almost with surprise) was a relief. He would refuse the draft. He would go to Canada.

  I hope I did well. Finally, even between husband and wife, father and son, there is a vacuum that cannot be bridged and I believe it is the first part of maturity to recognize this. I also believe it is the first part of wisdom to continually struggle against it.

  Jim’s new haircut is too short. He looked like a Marine home from boot camp. Last summer’s tan ran halfway up his forehead to a demarcation where the hair had thickened and curled, sometimes falling nearly to his eyes. His eyes are blue, touching toward green like his mother’s. He had been proud of his hair. I felt sentimental and then did not feel that way. What are these symbols? He could grow his hair down his back once we got into Canada.

  “I’ll bring those,” I said. He stood with a half dozen phonograph records and a puzzled look.

  “Now?”

  “When I come up next time.” His walls were covered with posters. It would be necessary for me to come back and clean the room. “Will you want these?” I motioned to them.

  “No.” He laid the recordings on the single bed and stared from a window. Short answers were all he had on tap. Over the past years the posters had changed. When he was a freshman he surrounded himself with hatred. Clenched fists, gutter words, lampooning and sarcastic statements. Now the hatred seemed temporarily stilled, either by mental fatigue or a change of perspective. I hoped for change. Of all things I feared, the hatred was the worst.

  In a way he was already a veteran. He has been beaten twice, once by a policeman and once by a carload of drunks who caught him on the street late at night. The posters were of trees and beaches and birds. I wondered if he really watched those things. I did not at nineteen, and now I doubted that Jim did either.

  “About ready?” It is hard to make your voice kind. Your intention clouds the natural kindness.

  “You go ahead. I’ll be right down.” His voice was harsh.

  It was good-bye to a particular place and it seemed strange to me that he was learning this. Both my wife and I are musicians. We’ve said good-bye to a lot of places and felt sad; and some of those places were not as good as this. I turned from the small room in the off-campus house and descended the old stairs. The station wagon, which I trade every three years and which has become a symbol of suburban America, had the seats kicked down and was loaded with suitcases and paraphernalia. It is an expensive car and an indulgence. For so many years I had to own junk, nurse it along, be grateful to a piece of machinery because it did not break down when I could not afford to fix it. Jim scoffs, but I remember. Money went for other things. From the very first lesson he played on instruments of concert quality. You build with good tools.

  Already the fog was lifting and commuter traffic was in the streets, taillights popping above the mist-slickened pavement with short darts of brilliance. Traffic lights shifted and clicked, the one at the corner buzzing and staccato like a small computer. The sky was lowered by the fog and the buildings of Seattle’s university district were sharply halved as they disappeared into the overcast. This gloomy place. We have lived here for five years and it suddenly seemed time to go. Perpetually clouded beauty is as difficult to live with as ugliness.

  Two girls walked past chattering. Their hair was long and casually tied. Jeans, light jackets, notebooks held carelessly. They were headed for restaurant coffee and an early morning class. Was Jim saying good-bye to his bed? He is respectful of most other people. Even with little experience he will care for his women. I started the car and in a couple of minutes he joined me. His face was set like cast metal. The anger and hatred that I had not seen for a while was back. His sneer was so tight that his teeth showed. It was a wrong way to say good-bye. He climbed in the car.

  “Is there anything else?”

  “Nope.” His voice was telling me that he hated me, the university, the chauvinistic super-establishment; and that, child-like, he was asking for help and getting none. He did not realize that for this there was no help.

  Sometimes you talk. Sometimes you listen. Sometimes you shut up. I pulled into traffic, waited for a light, and in five minutes we were on interstate and headed north. If there is pain in living there are also lessons. One does not file as a Conscientious Objector and believe that indignation and good intent are sufficient. During the last part of the interview he was pushed so hard that he yelled manifestos at the draft board.

  During the second war the decisions were different but I do not think the men were essentially different. How to explain? I turned the radio on for the noise. There was a lot of it. Pop clanged like untuned cow bells.

  Then news. We were still at war.

  Then rock, with a perennially breathless, thrust-throated D.J. Jim turned the radio off, perhaps as a concession to me, perhaps for himself.

  I looked at him and thought of his mother who does not need to be told that evil exists. She, who reaches beyond the usual perceptions to particularly translate her genius and the genius of others. I have seen two thousand people hang breathless on the spaces between the perfecting and visual strokes of her interpreting bow. She, tall and auburn haired. Happily laughing. A master who teaches a discipline of music so strict that it is transcendental.

&nb
sp; “About two hours,” I said. “We’ll take it easy.”

  No answer. I think he will begin work now. It has been sporadic. Like poetry, music makes nothing happen. His legs are so long that he propped them against the dash. It dents the padding and makes it crack. I’ve told him before. This time I did not tell him.

  I remembered and must remember. His mother comes from a small town in Wisconsin. The town had no standard of excellence but her teachers did. We met in Baltimore in forty-six at the conservatory. I had just lost four years with the Army. There was a choice for me. My own father’s business had leap-frogged during the war. My embouchure was gone, my ear no longer trained, and the manual dexterity was imprecise. A French horn operates in four octaves. At first I worked mostly in two of them for six, eight, sometimes more than that hours a day. She was impressed and did not ask why, although from someone else it would have been a good question.

  It is a good question now. I could answer it now.

  But what would the answer mean to Jim, this passionate American who is committed to a nebulous notion of change in a world that is changing so fast that the young cannot keep up while still believing that they must. After the war there were greater decisions. I do not want to explain. Only this, that in the middle of chaos a man may still concern himself with beauty.

  I drove and the speed kept easing upward. That also is an American pattern. Jim rushes everywhere.

  After a half hour of driving a thin rain started. It rarely rains very hard in the Northwest. The interstate runs through a variety of land forms and the expressions of towns. Lumber processing plants, knobs, pasture land, high countryside not even good for grazing. To the east are mountains. West lies the sea. It is always green and the interstate runs black and gray between great trees, smokestacks, small businesses whose owners are living out of the till. More fish are dying. More people are dying.

  More people are also living.

  “You heard nothing this week?” I referred to his inquiry at a Canadian university.

  “They hate Americans.”

  “The university is under-enrolled. I think it will be okay.”

  “I think so too.” He wanted to be friendly and did not do well. “I guess they’ll wait until the last minute just to sweat me.”

  “Paperwork takes time.” I thought not of Canada but of this country and sent an imaginary note to a mythical heaven. Dear Sir, when you instituted the New Deal did you realize how dangerous a bureaucracy could become?

  The most horrible vision that my mind ever conceived was of my son holding a brick and screaming, his open mouth a fury of hate, his eyes blind with ignorance.

  Hey Jude, Hey Jude . . . . I am critical of one thing with these kids. They do not listen to their own music, really listen. Try asking any of them to write down all the lyrics to any popular song’.

  How can you explain? There are so many great moments. Universal Judgment. The bass rumbles in my mind. Would Jim understand if I told him that I once saw Krupa run a syncopation with both feet, tight roll with the right hand, and flipping the stick in the left high over his head to come down with rim shots; in blue light and cigarette smoke, to a lounge filled with sophisticates who were not listening. When I was Jim’s age I also played a trumpet.

  There was nothing to say. I wondered if my insistence had been too great. In the beginning the practice. Later, the discipline. After an hour of driving I wanted coffee. The road is wide and too straight. It lulls the mind with a false tranquility. Jim was terribly tense. He was startled when I eased down for an exit.

  “Trouble,” he asked.

  “I just want to take a break.”

  “I can drive.”

  “If you want.” He would not be driving for a long time. He would be studying, if the school accepted him, and also working at a job. Political theory and pumping gasoline, probably. Pumping gas in a world where there is Aaron Copland.

  It is hard to think of Jim walking washed-gray Vancouver streets; sleet in winter, automobiles firing through French and English marked intersections like corks popped from bottles. He is correct in some respects. He will not always be welcome, not if he is only another displaced American. He will have to work hard.

  I found a restaurant and parked. The place seemed a monument to plastic and luminescent paintings on black velvet. A construction crew sat in one booth, the men with strong shoulders and weather-beaten faces. Eloquent hands and eyes. I have seen workmen in this country hit the fine line on a grade using little more than a bulldozer. In Europe they would use grading rakes and take a week. The crew did not know that they were improbable people, only that their competence was assumed. Jim almost certainly filed them in the category “hard hat” and took a seat at the opposite end of the room. He sat facing them. It was not easy to watch him finding strength in hatred. With the fresh haircut he seemed nearly hatchet-faced. His youth dissolved the impression while his intolerance increased it.

  “You’re going to have to do better than that,” I told him.

  “What?”

  “You don’t know their politics.”

  “Coke,” he told the waitress. I ordered coffee. Jim watched her move away. Young girl.

  “It’s not the politics, it’s a whole rotten value system.” He stopped, apparently resolved not to end in dialectics. His face worked to control his hate. Then he was sanctimonious. “They’re victims.” He tried to smile.

  Outside a truckload of new automobiles roared into the parking lot. Plastic ferns in a plastic pot sat by the doorway. The waitress returned with our order. A cash register purred and spit electrically.

  “It’s not the end of the world,” he told me, telling himself.

  I agreed and said nothing more. It was the end of one of his worlds. He will never be the same. The flame of his own country’s hatred may follow him for the rest of his life. The possibility of being better is the only one he can afford to consider. The coffee was tasteless. I handed him the car keys.

  He drove. Jim has always told me what he thinks. He has never asked what I think.

  I think that I once carried a rifle and that the business of an army is to take and hold ground.

  I am proud of my son and I know that he wants to know that, but he does not know how to ask and I do not know how to tell him. He is both theoretical and ignorant. To one without historical sense explanation means excuse. It increases hatred.

  My generation had few philosophers. It came from small towns and cold beds, hell-shouting preachers, petrified morality and depression. After a global war it was a generation concerned with never having to live that way again. My short-haired revolutionary is not a revolutionary at all. We were. He is an exponent of the new Reformation.

  “Half an hour,” he said, and I was surprised. Thinking. Time was lost, but time to say what?

  “You’ll do well,” I told him. “In a few years the C.O.’s will be repatriated.”

  “To this God-damned place?” His lips were white and thin.

  I stepped on my anger, the anger which he has never asked about. It is a question not of government but of morality in transition. The old is gone, the new not yet arrived, and the average man finds himself more immoral than usual. There are many people who will harm my son. He harms himself.

  “A government is not a nation.” He is going to find that out, but does not know it now. If there are illusions perhaps it is best that they be kept until he gains strength.

  “It all stinks.” The tension was so great that his temples were bloodless.

  “Have it your way.” I wanted to remind him of the many hours of his own practice, remind him of the magic time when the instrument is no longer a problem but an extension. This kid has an instrumental voice that sings, one that needs only authority, and there is no authority in hatred.

  His great grandfather was a bugler who played the cornet in the evenings to his troop’s horses.

  “I just want to get out. I can handle it all, but I just want to get out.�
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  He was defending with hate. Argument was wrong. When we reached the border I leaned back in the seat and stayed silent. There are no guards. It is an open road to Canada, a road easy to plug but I do not think the government wants it plugged. A way to alleviate dissent is to allow it to leave. In less than a mile, past the monument to friendship between two nations, Canadian customs lay in a low-sprawling building with roofs like wings over the road lanes. Jim parked the car. We entered. It was there that inquiries had to be made.

  Jim was nervous to the point of trembling. Behind counters men in the uniform of another country were busy. The one who approached us was muscular with a florid face, washed blue eyes, and a conservative and untrained smile. He looked at me, carefully looked at Jim, and guessed the obvious.

  “Political asylum?”

  It sounded like a spy movie. It sounded unreal.

  There were forms. There were questions, places to apply, procedures. It took a long time. Jim was allowed in on a point basis and my function was past. Finally, I did not even function as one who reassures. When I became unnecessary I sat on a bench and waited. Jim talked. The officer talked, called questions to another officer, turned again to speak to Jim. I thought of a ten-year-old awkwardly wrapped around a cello and knew that it was a specifically wrong and stupid thing to do.

  The interview ended. Jim turned. We were free to go. Free to find a room, make applications, plot directions toward a continual and, at this time, provisional standard of success.

  Jim turned back. His shoulders were hunched with tension. Thin, like a tall child. The officer pointed and Jim walked to an alcove where there were restrooms.

  I stood automatically, took one step, waved pointlessly and like a fool to the officers, then reversed my direction and walked outside to the car. His guitar was on top of the load. I pulled it out, the music already beginning like a thin, strong exclamation in my mind.

  It’s to his credit that there was no sound. Even outside, waiting, I know that there was no sound. He took his time because he had to, and I wondered, holding the guitar and not chording it, if he thought of my unfair anger at some of his practice, at his reasonable foibles. It is certain he thought of his mother, and because of her he thought of the music.