The Art of Living

by John Gardner

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “I do have a boyfriend, actually.” Quickly, as if for fear that he might ask the young man’s name, she said, “You know how when you meet someone you want to sound more interesting than you are? Well—” She looked back at her folded hands, and he could see her forcing herself up to it. “I do this tragic act.

  He sat very still, nervously prepared to grin, waiting.

  She mumbled something, and when he leaned toward her she raised her voice, still without looking at him, her voice barely audible even now, and said, “I’m what they call ‘terminal,’ but, well, I mean, it doesn’t mean anything, you know? It’s sort of … The only time it makes me scared, or makes me cry, things like that, is when I say to myself in words, ‘I’m going to …’” He saw that it was true; if she finished the sentence she would cry. She breathed very shallowly and continued, “If the airplane crashed, it wouldn’t make much difference as far as I’m concerned, just make it a little sooner, but just the same when we were taking off, with the lightning and everything …” Now she did, for an instant, look up at him. “I never make any sense.” Her eyes were full of tears.

  “No,” he said, “you make sense enough.”

  She was wringing her hands, smiling as if in chagrin, but smiling with pleasure too, the happiness lifting off as if defiantly above the deadweight of discomfort. “Anyway, I do have a boyfriend. He’s the one that plays viola, actually. He’s nice. I mean, he’s wonderful. His name’s Stephen.” She raised both hands to wipe the tears away. “I mean, it’s really funny. My life’s really wonderful.” She gave a laugh, then covered her face with both hands, her shoulders shaking.

  He patted the side of her arm, saying nothing.

  “The reason I wanted to tell you,” she said when she was able to speak, “is, you’ve really been nice. I didn’t want to—”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “Look, that’s how we all are.”

  “I know,” she said, and suddenly laughed, crying. “That really is true, isn’t it! It’s just like my uncle Charley says. He lives with us. He’s my mother’s older brother. He says the most interesting thing about Noah’s Ark is that all the animals on it were scared and stupid.”

  Nimram laughed.

  “He really is wonderful,” she said, “except that he coughs all the time. He’s dying of emphysema, but mention that he ought to stop smoking his pipe, or mention that maybe he should go see a doctor, Uncle Charley goes right through the ceiling. It’s really that spending money terrifies him, but he pretends it’s doctors he hates. Just mention the word and he starts yelling ‘False prophets! Profiteers! Pill-pushers! Snake-handlers!’ He can really get loud. My father says we should tie him out front for a watchdog.” She laughed again.

  Nimram’s ears popped. They were beginning the long descent. After a moment he said, “Actually, I haven’t been strictly honest with you either. I’m not really in business.”

  She looked at him, waiting with what seemed to him a curiously childish eagerness.

  “I’m a symphony conductor.”

  “Are you really?” she asked, lowering her eyebrows, studying him to see if he was lying. “What’s your name?”

  “Benjamin Nimram,” he said.

  Her eyes narrowed, and the embarrassment was back. He could see her searching her memory. “I think I’ve heard of you,” she said.

  “Sic transit gloria mundi,” he said, mock-morose.

  She smiled and pushed her hair back. “I know what that means,” she said.

  The no-smoking sign came on. In the distance the earth was adazzle with lights.

  In the lounge at O’Hare he spotted his wife at once, motionless and smiling in the milling crowd—she hadn’t yet seen him—her beret and coat dark red, almost black. He hurried toward her. Now she saw him and, breaking that stillness like the stillness of an old, old painting, raised her arm to wave, threw herself back into time, and came striding to meet him. He drew off and folded the dark glasses.

  “Ben!” she exclaimed, and they embraced. “Honey, you look terrible!” She pulled back to look at him, then hugged him again. “On TV it said there was a thunderstorm in L.A., one of the worst ever. I was worried sick!”

  “Now now,” he said, holding her a moment longer. “So how were Poppa and Momma? “

  “How was the flight?” she asked. “I bet it was awful! Did the man from the kennel come for Trixie?”

  He took her hand and they started, moving with long, matched strides, toward the terminal.

  “Trixie’s fine, the flight was fine, everything’s fine,” he said.

  She tipped her head, mocking. “Are you drunk, Benjamin?”

  They veered out, passing an old couple inching along on canes, arguing.

  “I met a girl,” he said.

  She checked his eyes. “Pretty?” she asked—laughingly, teasingly; but part of her was watching like a hawk. And why not, of course. He’d been married twice before, and they were as different, she and himself, as day and night. Why should she have faith? He thought again of the conviction he’d momentarily felt that the girl was her daughter. Sooner or later, he knew, he would find himself asking her about it; but not now. Scared and stupid, he thought, remembering, and the tuck at the corner of his mouth came back. He got an image of Noah’s Ark as a great, blind, dumb thing nosing carefully, full of fear, toward the smell of Ararat.

  “Too young,” he said. “Practically not yet of this world.”

  They were walking very fast, as they always did, gliding smoothly past all the others. Now and then he glanced past his shoulder, hoping to spot Anne Curtis; but it was absurd, he knew. She’d be the last of the last, chattering, he hoped, or doing her tragic act. Arline’s coat flared out behind her and her face was flushed.

  Almost as soon as she stepped off the plane, Anne Curtis found out from her father who it was that had befriended her. The following night, when Nimram conducted the Chicago Symphony in Mahler’s Fifth, she was in the audience, in the second balcony, with her parents. They arrived late, after the Water Music, with which he had opened the program. Her father had gotten tickets only at the last minute, and it was a long drive in from La Grange. They edged into their seats while the orchestra was being rearranged, new instruments being added, the people who’d played the Handel scrunching forward and closer together.

  She had never before seen a Mahler orchestra—nine French horns, wave on wave of violins and cellos, a whole long row of gleaming trumpets, brighter than welders’ lights, another of trombones, two rows of basses, four harps. It was awesome, almost frightening. It filled the vast stage from wingtip to wingtip like some monstrous black creature too enormous to fly, guarding the ground with its head thrust forward—the light-drenched, empty podium. When the last of the enlarged orchestra was assembled and the newcomers had tuned, the houselights dimmed, and as if at some signal invisible to commoners, the people below her began to clap, then the people all around her. Now she too was clapping, her mother and father clapping loudly beside her, the roar of applause growing louder and deeper, drawing the conductor toward the light. He came like a panther, dignified yet jubilant, flashing his teeth in a smile, waving at the orchestra with both long arms. He shook hands with the concertmaster, bounded to the podium—light shot off his hair—turned to the audience and bowed with his arms stretched wide, then straightened, chin high, as if revelling in their pleasure and miraculous faith in him. Then he turned, threw open the score—the applause sank away—and for a moment studied it like a man reading dials and gauges of infinite complexity. He picked up his baton; they lifted their instruments. He threw back his shoulders and raised both hands till they were level with his shoulders, where he held them still, as if casting a spell on his army of musicians, all motionless as a crowd in suspended animation, the breathless dead of the whole world’s history, awaiting the impossible. And then his right hand moved—nothing much, almost playful—and the trumpet call began, a kind of warning b
oth to the auditorium, tier on tier of shadowy white faces rising in the dark, and to the still orchestra bathed in light. Now his left hand moved and the orchestra stirred, tentative at first, but presaging such an awakening as she’d never before dreamed of. Then something new began, all that wide valley of orchestra playing, calm, serene, a vast sweep of music as smooth and sharp-edged as an enormous scythe—she had never in her life heard a sound so broad, as if all of humanity, living and dead, had come together for one grand onslaught. The sound ran, gathering its strength, along the ground, building in intensity, full of doubt, even terror, but also fury, and then—amazingly, quite easily—lifted. She pressed her father’s hand as Benjamin Nimram, last night, had pressed hers.

  Her mother leaned toward her, tilting like a tree in high wind. “Are you sure that’s him?” she asked.

  “Of course it is,” she said.

  Sternly, the man behind them cleared his throat.

  REDEMPTION

  One day in April—a clear, blue day when there were crocuses in bloom—Jack Hawthorne ran over and killed his brother, David. Even at the last moment he could have prevented his brother’s death by slamming on the tractor brakes, easily in reach for all the shortness of his legs; but he was unable to think, or, rather, thought unclearly, and so watched it happen, as he would again and again watch it happen in his mind, with nearly undiminished intensity and clarity, all his life. The younger brother was riding, as both of them knew he should not have been, on the cultipacker, a two-ton implement lumbering behind the tractor, crushing new-ploughed ground. Jack was twelve, his brother, David, seven. The scream came not from David, who never got a sound out, but from their five-year-old sister, who was riding on the fender of the tractor, looking back. When Jack turned to look, the huge iron wheels had reached his brother’s pelvis. He kept driving, reacting as he would to a half-crushed farm animal, and imagining, in the same stab of thought, that perhaps his brother would survive. Blood poured from David’s mouth.

  Their father was nearly destroyed by it. Sometimes Jack would find him lying on the cow-barn floor, crying, unable to stand up. Dale Hawthorne, the father, was a sensitive, intelligent man, by nature a dreamer. It showed in old photographs, his smile coded, his eyes on the horizon. He loved all his children and would not consciously have been able to hate his son even if Jack had indeed been, as he thought himself, his brother’s murderer. But he could not help sometimes seeming to blame his son, though consciously he blamed only his own unwisdom and—so far as his belief held firm—God. Dale Hawthorne’s mind swung violently at this time, reversing itself almost hour by hour, from desperate faith to the most savage, black-hearted atheism. Every sickly calf, every sow that ate her litter, was a new, sure proof that the religion he’d followed all his life was a lie. Yet skeletons were orderly, as were, he thought, the stars. He was unable to decide, one moment full of rage at God’s injustice, the next moment wracked by doubt of His existence.

  Though he was not ordinarily a man who smoked, he would sometimes sit up all night now, or move restlessly, hurriedly, from room to room, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes. Or he would ride away on his huge, darkly thundering Harley-Davidson 80, trying to forget, morbidly dwelling on what he’d meant to put behind him—how David had once laughed, cake in his fists; how he’d once patched a chair with precocious skill—or Dale Hawthorne would think, for the hundredth time, about suicide, hunting in mixed fear and anger for some reason not to miss the next turn, fly off to the right of the next iron bridge onto the moonlit gray rocks and black water below—discovering, invariably, no reason but the damage his suicide would do to his wife and the children remaining.

  Sometimes he would forget for a while by abandoning reason and responsibility for love affairs. Jack’s father was at this time still young, still handsome, well-known for the poetry he recited at local churches or for English classes or meetings of the Grange—recited, to loud applause (he had poems of all kinds, both serious and comic), for thrashing crews, old men at the V.A. Hospital, even the tough, flint-eyed orphans at the Children’s Home. He was a celebrity, in fact, as much Romantic poet-hero as his time and western New York State could afford—and beyond all that, he was now so full of pain and unassuageable guilt that women’s hearts flew to him unbidden. He became, with all his soul and without cynical intent—though fleeing all law, or what he’d once thought law—a hunter of women, trading off his sorrow for the sorrows of wearied, unfulfilled country wives. At times he would be gone from the farm for days, abandoning the work to Jack and whoever was available to help—some neighbor or older cousin or one of Jack’s uncles. No one complained, at least not openly. A stranger might have condemned him, but no one in the family did, certainly not Jack, not even Jack’s mother, though her sorrow was increased. Dale Hawthorne had always been, before the accident, a faithful man, one of the most fair-minded, genial farmers in the country. No one asked that, changed as he was, he do more, for the moment, than survive.

  As for Jack’s mother, though she’d been, before the accident, a cheerful woman—one who laughed often and loved telling stories, sometimes sang anthems in bandanna and blackface before her husband recited poems—she cried now, nights, and did only as much as she had strength to do—so sapped by grief that she could barely move her arms. She comforted Jack and his sister, Phoebe—herself as well—by embracing them vehemently whenever new waves of guilt swept in, by constant reassurance and extravagant praise, frequent mention of how proud some relative would be—once, for instance, over a drawing of his sister’s, “Oh, Phoebe, if only your great-aunt Lucy could see this!” Great-aunt Lucy had been famous, among the family and friends, for her paintings of families of lions. And Jack’s mother forced on his sister and himself comforts more permanent: piano and, for Jack, French-horn lessons, school and church activities, above all an endless, exhausting ritual of chores. Because she had, at thirty-four, considerable strength of character—except that, these days, she was always eating—and because, also, she was a woman of strong religious faith, a woman who, in her years of church work and teaching at the high school, had made scores of close, for the most part equally religious, friends, with whom she regularly corresponded, her letters, then theirs, half filling the mailbox at the foot of the hill and cluttering every table, desk, and niche in the large old house—friends who now frequently visited or phoned—she was able to move step by step past disaster and in the end keep her family from wreck. She said very little to her children about her troubles. In fact, except for the crying behind her closed door, she kept her feelings strictly secret.

  But for all his mother and her friends could do for him—for all his father’s older brothers could do, or, when he was there, his father himself—the damage to young Jack Hawthorne took a long while healing. Working the farm, ploughing, cultipacking, disking, dragging, he had plenty of time to think—plenty of time for the accident to replay, with the solidity of real rime repeated, in his mind, his whole body flinching from the image as it came, his voice leaping up independent of him, as if a shout could perhaps drive the memory back into its cave. Maneuvering the tractor over sloping, rocky fields, dust whorling out like smoke behind him or, when he turned into the wind, falling like soot until his skin was black and his hair as thick and stiff as old clothes in an attic—the circles of foothills every day turning greener, the late-spring wind flowing endless and sweet with the smell of coming rain—he had all the time in the world to cry and swear bitterly at himself, standing up to drive, as his father often did, Jack’s sore hands clamped right to the steering wheel, his shoes unsteady on the bucking axlebeam—for stones lay everywhere, yellowed in the sunlight, a field of misshapen skulls. He’d never loved his brother, he raged out loud, never loved anyone as well as he should have. He was incapable of love, he told himself, striking the steering wheel. He was inherently bad, a spiritual defective. He was evil.

  So he raged and grew increasingly ashamed of his raging, reminded by the lengthening shadows across the f
ield of the theatricality in all he did, his most terrible sorrow mere sorrow on a stage, the very thunderclaps above—dark blue, rushing sky, birds crazily wheeling—mere opera set, proper lighting for his rant. At once he would hush himself, lower his rear end to the tractor seat, lock every muscle to the stillness of a statue, and drive on, solitary, blinded by tears; yet even now it was theater, not life—mere ghastly posturing, as in that story of his father’s, how Lord Byron once tried to get Shelley’s skull to make a drinking cup. Tears no longer came, though the storm went on building. Jack rode on, alone with the indifferent, murderous machinery in the widening ten-acre field.

  When the storm at last hit, he’d been driven up the lane like a dog in flight, lashed by gusty rain, chased across the tracks to the tractor shed and from there to the kitchen, full of food smells from his mother’s work and Phoebe’s, sometimes the work of two or three friends who’d stopped by to look in on the family. Jack kept aloof, repelled by their bright, melodious chatter and absentminded humming, indignant at their pretense that all was well. “My, how you’ve grown!” the old friend or fellow teacher from high school would say, and to his mother, “My, what big hands he has, Betty!” He would glare at his little sister, Phoebe, his sole ally, already half traitor—she would bite her lips, squinting, concentrating harder on the mixing bowl and beaters; she was forever making cakes—and he would retreat as soon as possible to the evening chores.

  He had always told himself stories to pass the time when driving the tractor, endlessly looping back and forth, around and around, fitting the land for spring planting. He told them to himself aloud, taking all parts in the dialogue, gesturing, making faces, discarding dignity, here where no one could see or overhear him, half a mile from the nearest house. Once all his stories had been of sexual conquest or of heroic battle with escaped convicts from the Attica Prison or kidnappers who, unbeknownst to anyone, had built a small shack where they kept their captives, female and beautiful, in the lush, swampy woods beside the field. Now, after the accident, his subject matter changed. His fantasies came to be all of self-sacrifice, pitiful stories in which he redeemed his life by throwing it away to save others more worthwhile. To friends and officials of his fantasy, especially to heroines—a girl named Margaret, at school, or his cousin Linda—he would confess his worthlessness at painful length, naming all his faults, granting himself no quarter. For a time this helped, but the lie was too obvious, the manipulation of shame to buy love, and in the end despair bled all color from his fantasies. The foulness of his nature became clearer and clearer in his mind until, like his father, he began to toy—dully but in morbid earnest now—with the idea of suicide. His chest would fill with anguish, as if he were dreaming some nightmare wide awake, or bleeding internally, and his arms and legs would grow shaky with weakness, until he had to stop and get down from the tractor and sit for a few minutes, his eyes fixed on some comforting object, for instance a dark, smooth stone.