October Light

by John Gardner

  From downstairs came a cooking smell, her father making something in Crisco. “I guess I’d better go check on Dad,” she said. Then, “Don’t you think we ought to take that gun down before something happens?”

  “Nothing’ll happen,” Lewis said, and went on working. “He ain’t even pulled back the hammers.”

  She looked up at the gun but was immediately distracted. There was a car pulling into the driveway.

  “Get it down, Lewis,” she whispered. “Someone’s coming!”

  2

  Estelle Parks had been a nextdoor neighbor of Sally and Horace Abbott’s in North Bennington. For years and years she’d been an English teacher in the local school, a spinster taking care of her irascible old mother—her name had then been Moulds—devoting her life to others with selfless good humor, beloved by her students and even by the crabby old woman, her mother, who loved almost nobody else. Estelle was as happy as a bluebird on a fence, a bird she distinctly resembled. She’d once had headaches, it is true, and acid indigestion, which had gotten her into the habit of taking Bromo-Seltzer and had eventually led to terrifying nightmares, the typical bad dreams of a bromide addict; but Dr. Phelps—who was her doctor still, though retired years ago, and was also Sally Abbott’s—had recognized the problem and changed her medication, and the bad dreams had stopped. It is true, too, that she’d had her share of sadness and frustration. She was a pretty woman, though a stranger might not notice it instantly, since her nose came to a point and she had very little chin; but sooner or later one could hardly help but see that Estelle had a pertness, a bright and uncriticizing eagerness of eye, a virginal sweetness and softness that made her almost beautiful. She’d always been careful of her appearance, not compulsively but strictly and dutifully, living as she’d been taught and believed to be right, and careful of her scent—which was stronger and more floral than absolutely necessary—just as she was careful about the appearance and scent of her house, which she kept, with her mother’s help (while her mother remained alive) spotless. It was a house of dark panels; gleaming, rather spindly but tasteful antiques; small, dark paintings of English landscapes and birds—she was a lover of birds and had several of them in cages, all with classical names, Iphigenia, Orestes, Andromache—antimacassars on her chairs; stained glass in the windows beside the door and in the bathroom; mirrors—in the entryway and at the foot of the stairs—with frosted fleur-de-lis borders. She slept on a high brass bed with a pink flowered coverlet.

  She was, a stranger might have thought at first glance, a classical type out of a certain kind of novel. She knew it herself. No one read more novels than Estelle Moulds Parks. Half the fiction in the town’s Free Library contained, engraved in blue, her EX • LIBRIS • ACCIPITRIS, ESTELLE STERLING MOULDS. But the stereotype, to Estelle’s discerning eye, was unjust and petty-minded.

  She had had, as the type was expected to have, her unfortunate enamorments. A young man, for instance, at Albany State Teachers’ when she’d gone there many many years ago. (She’d studied with the great Professor William Lyon Phelps, no relation, so far as she knew, to her doctor.) The affair—not, of course, in the modern sense—had been tender and sweet, they’d read poetry together and acted in a play, but its end had not been, as a novelist would make it, a devastation. He had chosen someone prettier, a friend of Estelle’s, and Estelle had cried half the night but after that it was over. He had not been, in fact, very handsome. That was the error in the fictional stereotype. All the handsomest, cleverest men were always taken by the cleverest, prettiest girls; people like herself got the seconds. Perhaps some young women, such as she’d been then—sharp nosed, small chinned, with a distinct overbite—wasted their affections on unattainable males; that would be sad, no doubt. But Estelle had never been that sort. She’d been quick to like people—had been gregarious all her life—but moderation was her essence: even with the finest man in the world she would not have been the first to fall in love. She’d gotten along comfortably with her second-bests, growing fond when all signs showed that the boy had grown fond, and landing on her feet, as a novelist would say, when it was over. Gradually the inclination to grow fond had passed. Life went on and, unlike the fictional character she resembled, she had been happy. She had loved teaching. She had loved not only the literature and the children but the money as well. Over the years, having only herself and her mother to support—and after the death of her mother, no one but herself—she’d gotten on dashingly, as Henry James might say, and had been able to take trips to Italy and England.

  “How,” someone had asked her, “can you stand to teach the same old poetry year after year?” Estelle had laughed, taken by surprise. “But it’s not to the same students every year,” she said, and then she’d laughed again, because it wasn’t that either. The poems grew and grew on her, richer with every decade—she was teaching, by then, her former students’ children, seeing faces she half knew, as a woman sees the face of her father in her son. Once a blond boy of fifteen had chosen, as the poem he would memorize, Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” and something rather odd had gone through her—déjà vu?, a premonition?, it was impossible to say—but then, weeks later, when he recited the poem, she’d heard distinctly the boy’s father’s voice, her student long before, and she’d covered her face with her hands, weeping happily, listening to the curious sweet irony in the lines, and she’d wanted to laugh aloud or sob, in love with flying Time.

  For I have learned

  To look on nature, not as in the hour

  Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

  The still, sad music of humanity,

  Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

  To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

  A presence that disturbs me with the joy

  Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

  Of something far more deeply interfused,

  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

  And the round ocean and the living air,

  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

  A motion and a spirit, that impels

  All thinking things, all objects of all thought …

  So years had passed. She’d sailed across to Europe on the Liberté with her old friend Ruth Thomas, the town librarian, and they’d spent a month in Florence and a month in Rye, in a cottage around the corner from Henry James’ old house, a cottage on the edge of the churchyard. She’d experienced unhappiness—the death of friends and friends’ parents and children, tragedies of her students—and innumerable disappointments; but all the same, life had been good to her. She’d gotten her teeth fixed, correcting the unsightly overbite, and she’d taught and read and traveled, keeping in touch with everyone she loved, and little by little she had grown, without knowing it, beautiful. She had realized it only when Ferris Parks, a professor of mathematics up at Bennington College and a widower, a man she’d seen often at Sage City concerts—he reminded her a little of Gregory Peck—had asked her, one night, to have dinner with him. She’d blushed scarlet, or so he’d told her later. There followed what she liked to call, mimicking bad novelists, a “whirlwind courtship,” then marriage. They’d been married eight years—the happiest of her life, playing bridge with friends, drinking sherry with Horace and Sally Abbott, traveling, when school was out, to Europe or Japan. Then one night coming across the mountains in midwinter, Ferris had been killed in a car accident. Her life reeled. If it hadn’t been for Horace and Sally, she might never have survived it.

  All that was, of course, many years ago. She was now an old woman: eighty-three.

  Estelle knocked again, firmly but not imperiously, at James Page’s door. A chicken watched her with its head cocked.

  3

  “Hello, James,” Estelle said, smiling. Tipping her head, she looked in past him. “Oh dear me, you’re having supper!”

  “No, I be finished,” he said. He backed away to let her in.

  Now his d
aughter Virginia was at the foot of the stairs, just opening the door into the kitchen. She looked white as a sheet.

  “Why, hello, Virginia!” Estelle said.

  “Oh! Hi, Estelle. How nice of you to visit.” She forced a smile.

  Estelle smiled back happily, though she was not such an old dim-witted fool as not to have noticed there was something peculiar going on. She made her way carefully, leaning on her canes, far enough into the kitchen that James could shut the door. “Mmm, how nice and warm it is,” she said. “Outside there it’s cold as the dickens.”

  “I know,” James said. “I been out.”

  She glanced at him, then smiled again. “Is Sally home, James?”

  “I’ll call her,” Virginia said—it was a little like a yelp—and turned back to the stairs.

  Estelle moved carefully, pushing down hard on her rubber-tipped canes, toward the table. James came along awkwardly beside her, reaching toward her elbow but not touching it. He looked glum as could be, she saw, glancing at him briefly. She gave him another smile.

  “Aunt Sally,” Virginia called, looking up the stairs. “Can you come down? You’ve got company.”

  Estelle heard the rumble of a man’s voice above. Virginia, standing on the stairs, pulled the door to behind her, talking with him.

  James had now brought over a chair for Estelle. She hooked the two dark, wooden canes together and leaned them against the table, then lowered herself carefully to the edge of the chair. “That’s it,” he said behind her, “that’s got it.” She felt on each side with her gloved hands, got herself lined up, and carefully, heart fluttering, fell backward. “Oop!” she said, but all was well. She smiled. James pushed her, as though she were sitting in a wheelchair, closer to the table. “My goodness,” she said, and laughed.

  He went around the corner of the table to where his plate and glass were and picked them up. He said, “Your nephew bring you over?”

  “My great-nephew, yes,” she said. “Terence.”

  James studied the glass and plate, scowling. “He oughtn’t t’ave to wait in the cah,” he said. He carried the glass and plate over to the sink and turned the water on. He stood bent, washing them in hot water from the tap—rinsing them, rather—and Estelle smiled thoughtfully at the wide, gray X of suspenders on his back. She said, “Don’t you mind about Terence, James. He’s got the radio, you know.” She listened to the hum of conversation beyond the stairway door. “Is Sally sick?” she asked.

  “No, just cranky,” he said.

  It was not so much the words or the way he said them as the way he stood, like one of her twelfth-graders feeling picked on and furious, years ago, that made her ask, full of sympathy, “You mean she’s cross with you, James?”

  “Gone on strike, that’s the fact of the matter,” he said. He put the dish and the glass and some silverware in the strainer beside the sink. “Locked herself up in her room. What you think about that?” He turned to glare at her, wicked as a donkey. When Estelle only smiled, hardly knowing what to say, he reached down into his shirt pocket and got his pipe and tobacco, a bright red foil package, and clumsily, as if his fingers were wood, began poking the tobacco into the bowl. Estelle pulled her gloves off, delicately letting him know she was here to set things right, if she could, and no use his resisting. Her fingers were small and crooked but still supple, still usable, even on the piano, though hardly what they’d once been. He came toward the table. He was bent at the waist. Old.

  “Poor Sally,” she said, thinking what he’d done to her television. “—And poor James, too! How long has she been on strike?”

  “Two nights and two days,” he said.

  Estelle’s eyes widened. “My my!” she said.

  The door to the stairway opened just then, and Virginia looked out, smiling falsely. At once the smile faded. “Dad?” she said. Her eyes shot guiltily toward Estelle.

  “She asked how’s Sally,” James said, “so I told her. There somethin wrong with that?”

  “Now don’t be ashamed, Ginny,” Estelle broke in quickly, “these things will happen. You mustn’t blame your father—and you mustn’t blame your Aunt Sally either. That’s one of the things I learned in teaching. Trying to lay blame is a huge waste of time. No matter how it comes out, someone’s going to feel cheated—and so would you, if you were in that person’s place. It never fails.” She smiled first at Ginny, then at James. “So let’s agree no one’s to blame and just try to get this settled.”

  Ginny looked doubtful, something between guilty and petulant, but came a step farther into the room.

  “That’s all very well to say,” James said, “and I’m sure it works fine on schoolchildren, but it won’t work here, I give you wahning.” He lit his pipe.

  “Why, James!” Estelle said, as though he were a favorite pupil in whom she was disappointed.

  “Dad,” Ginny said, “be reasonable.”

  The old man said nothing, his flat mouth shut tight, the bowl of his pipe sending clouds up. There were footsteps now on the stairs behind Ginny and after a moment Lewis appeared and came around her into the kitchen.

  “Good evening, Lewis,” Estelle said brightly. She’d always been especially fond of the Hicks boys. They’d patched screens and painted and mowed lawns for her for years.

  Lewis nodded. “G’devenin, Mrs. Parks.” He picked with two fingers at his moustache.

  “What a mix-up!” Estelle said, and gave a little headshake.

  “Yes’m,” Lewis said. He looked over at Ginny for signals, but she was staring sullenly at the center of the table—or perhaps at Estelle’s folded, liver-spotted hands—and didn’t even glance at him for a sign that he’d taken the gun down. It was as if she’d turned everything over to Estelle, though she showed no great confidence that Estelle could do better than she’d done. Head bowed, Lewis glanced over at James. The old man looked as mean and firmly planted as an old white-headed billygoat.

  Estelle was asking, “Why do you say it won’t work here, James?” She asked it gently, and though it was clear she was trying to manage him, it was clear, too, that she would listen fairly and thoughtfully to whatever he might answer.

  The old man seemed to consider whether or not he ought to speak. His eyes tightly narrowed, he took a puff from his pipe, then abruptly brought out, “Because she stotted it, that’s why. It’s all very well to say we’ll lay no blame, but Sally knew the rules when she come here, and she wouldn’t abide by ’em. It’s all very well to say we’ll stot right here from where we are, as if they want no past to the matter. But the fact is they do be a past to it. I told her the rules as plain as day and she wouldn’t abide by ’em.”

  “I can see how you feel,” Estelle said. She moved her left hand across the table as if to touch his hand and comfort him, though he was standing and too far away, his left hand hooked in his pocket, the other on his pipe. “Of course none of us likes to obey rules he didn’t help make,” she added.

  He said nothing—not for lack of an answer, Estelle Parks knew. We’re all born subject to laws we have no say about, starting with gravity. He was wrong all the same, but there was no point arguing that now. “It hasn’t been easy for you, James,” she said. “That we all know.”

  Ginny said, blushing suddenly, glancing at Estelle and then down again, “It has been terrible for Dad, that’s true.” Tears came to her eyes. She was remembering his tirade in the barn, discovering again the emptiness and bitterness of her father’s life, his anger at the shoddiness of everything these days, at least as it seemed to him. “I know how Aunt Sally loved her television, but you have to see it from my father’s side. Here he’s worked all these years, living by his convictions—”

  “Of course he has,” Estelle said. It was all even clearer to her, it seemed, than to Ginny. “Perhaps if I could just talk with Sally—”

  “She won’t talk,” Lewis said, then quickly shut his mouth and raised two fingers to his moustache.

  “She won’t talk?” Estel
le echoed, not at all judging, simply interested.

  Ginny said reluctantly, flustered and annoyed that Lewis had mentioned it, “When we try to talk to her she won’t answer. I guess her feelings are hurt.”

  Estelle drew herself up a little. “Well my goodness,” she said. She began to struggle to get out of her chair. Automatically, looking worried, Lewis came around beside and a little behind her to see if he could help.

  “You’ll never make it up the stairs,” James stated flatly.

  “We’ll see about that,” Estelle said. “Thank you, Lewis.” She gave him a slightly absentminded smile, standing now, fussing with her canes. She seemed unaware that she still had her coat and hat on. “Ginny,” she said, “be a dear and come over beside me here. That’s it, yes, good. Just steady me a little, like that, yes. And Lewis, you come over on this side.” Before they could protest, they found themselves laboring up the stairs with her, Estelle Parks smiling with a look of slight alarm, telling them what to do, tortuously climbing toward Aunt Sally’s room, calling ahead once or twice, “Yoo hoo! Sally!”

  When they reached the top (the gun and the strings of the trap had vanished, nothing remained but the tack-holes in the wall), Estelle called more brightly than ever, “Sally, are you there?”

  They waited.

  “Sally?” Estelle called again.

  Still no answer. Estelle—tiny and absurd in the hallway, standing, bent with age, in her blue coat and hat—looked over at Ginny, pursed her lips and then, all at once, smiled impishly. “Well, I’ll just talk with her anyway, keep the poor dear company, you know, let her see that she’s still got friends.” She turned back to the door. “May I come in, Sally?” She tried the knob, then shook her head, smiling again as if delighted, but squinting, thinking. To the door she said, “Well my my.”