Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

by Lydia Davis

  3

  My sister with thighs like pillars. She eats her potatoes as though she would make a revolution among them, as though they were the People. No, then what is this passion of hers? It is terrifying to see her cloudy eyes become sharp when my dinner is put on the table. I am afraid she will devour not only the dinner but me and my poor life too. Beside her laughter, mine is like the cheeping of a bird in the ivy. No, she never laughs. I never laugh. Her silence, though, is so much greater than mine that mine is like a wisp of smoke in a raincloud.

  4

  One day the younger sister smacked the older sister in the face. She did it out of frustration and boredom with her life. She regretted it immediately. Not because she had hurt her sister, who stood paralyzed, her hand to her cheek and her hat rolling over the floor, but because now her sister would weep and moan and speak of the incident for months, to the younger sister’s shame and anger. She had wanted to diminish her sister in some way, even destroy her, but instead she had given her new dignity.

  5

  Two sisters, like stone, who do not speak to one another. They have nothing in common but their parentage. One rises early and the other late; one will not eat animal products and the other will not eat whole grains; one has a rash in the summertime and the other cannot wear wool; one will not go to the movies for fear of strange men and the other will not watch television; in every election their votes cancel one another, and they are as no one. Only in their mutual distrust are they alike.

  The Furnace

  My father has trouble with his hearing and does not like to talk on the phone, so I talk on the phone mainly to my mother. Sometimes she abruptly stops what she is saying to me, I hear a noise in the background, she says my name, and waits. Then I know my father has come into the room during her conversation and asked who she is talking to. Sometimes, at that point, he interjects a question for me, but often he asks her something that has nothing to do with me, while I wait at the other end of the phone. After she and I have gone on talking, he may come into the room again, having thought of something else he wants to say. When I hear his voice in the background I stop whatever I am saying to my mother and wait.

  Sometimes she forces him to get on the phone. “Tell her yourself,” she says. He gets on the phone and without saying hello tells me what it is he wants me to know and then gets off without saying goodbye. Back on the phone, she says, “He’s gone.”

  Although he has never liked to talk on the phone, he has always liked to write letters. He usually prefers to write a letter that includes some kind of instruction, or at least a transmission of what he thinks will be new information. For a while, we carried on a correspondence whose regularity was unusual for my family, in which very little has ever been regular or systematic. Then I didn’t hear from him for some weeks. Maybe I was the one who did not answer his last letter. I told my mother to tell him I would like to hear from him, and he then sent me some clippings from the Crime Beat section of their local paper. In the top margin he had written: “The underside of Cambridge life.” Some entries he had marked with a dark line of ink down the side margin.

  “…A Jefferson Park man entered the dispute, slashing the teen just below the right eye with an unidentified weapon. While this happened, the Jackson Circle man stole the bike. Later, police found a Jackson Street man riding the bike. Police arrested the Jackson Circle man, Jackson Street man and Jefferson Park man and charged them with assault with a dangerous weapon (knife) and armed robbery.”

  On another clipping he had underlined certain sentences:

  “Police officers recovered two martial arts swords and a meat cleaver.”

  “At 10 pm an employee of the Cantab Lounge reported that a suspect who had been shut off at the bar assaulted her by throwing a glass at her.”

  “A Cambridge resident reported that he was assaulted with a fingernail clipper by a suspect who was throwing trash around the doorway at Eddy’s Place.”

  “A Rindge Avenue resident reported that her daughter hit her over the head with a glass.”

  “A Rindge Avenue resident reported that she was assaulted with a large pin by two other neighborhood residents.”

  In the top margin of this clipping he had written: “Strange weapons dept.”

  After this he sent me an article he had written. He occasionally wrote an article or a letter to a newspaper about something that had come up in connection with the Bible or some other religious topic. The articles and letters were clever, and by now I was interested in the Bible and religious topics myself.

  This one, on circumcision, was called “The Unkindest Cut” and opened with a sentence about the “male organ.” In his thin, shaky handwriting, he had noted in the margin at the top of the article that I shouldn’t feel I had to read this, nor should my husband feel he had to read it. He was sincere, but he often attached disclaimers to the articles and letters he sent and I generally disregarded them.

  Yet when I tried to read the article, I found it hard to read so much about the male organ as written by my father. I asked my husband if he would read it and tell me the gist of it but he did not really want to read it either. I did not know what to do about this situation, since it would have been awkward even to mention it to my father, but in time, as I took no action, I began to forget it. My father had probably forgotten it long before, since his memory has become more and more undependable, as he and my mother both point out.

  But the letters he was sending me for a while were about the household he grew up in: besides his mother and father, there were two grandmothers and a grandfather who was slightly mad, maids, cooks, and cleaning women who came and went, and his grandmothers’ female nurse-companions and his grandfather’s male nurse-companions, who also came and went. His father’s mother owned the house and dominated it, to his mother’s annoyance. I have seen this house, which still stands in a street not far from where they live, and it looks to me surprisingly modest to have held such a number and variety of people. The last time it was sold, he read about the sale in the paper and wrote to the new owners, explaining that he had been born in the upstairs front room and had played in the hayloft of the small barn. The new owners were pleased to hear from him and sent him photographs of the house.

  He would write to me in some detail and in the midst of it apologize, saying that what lay immediately ahead would be tedious and that I could read fast or skim if I liked. He said he was trying to recover facts that he had not thought of for most of a century. But I would write back asking for even more detail, because I wanted to come as close as I could to a way of life that seemed to me precious for several reasons, one being simply that even the memory of it was slipping away, because fewer and fewer people were alive who had experienced it.

  Most recently we had gotten into a correspondence about the furnace in the house where he grew up. He said that while he lived there, changes had occurred, but they were all additions, and what was there to begin with remained. For instance, a gas stove was installed in the kitchen alongside the coal stove. His grandmother felt that for certain things the coal stove was more economical. A new oil furnace was added in the basement, but the huge old coal furnace remained. At some point electricity was added to gas for lighting. His grandmother kept both because in a storm, she warned them, the electricity might fail.

  He remembered how one of the cleaning women used to comb her long hair in the kitchen at the end of the day, so that she could go forth suitably neat. She would then extract the hairs from the comb and put them, not in the stove, which required the effort of lifting one of the iron covers, but on top of the stove, where they burned to an ash that remained visible until someone thought to remove it.

  In the early days, he said, a “furnace man” would come at about seven in the morning to shake down the big furnace, remove ashes and clinkers, and shovel more coal in from one of the two big bins whose board sides projected into the cellar, resting on the cellar floor. An early furnace man was named Fr
ank and his grandmother continued to call subsequent ones “Frank” as her memory for names weakened. The furnace was a matter of constant concern in very cold weather. Even when his father was home, his grandmother would go down to investigate, and then, in order to force his father to act, would do something deliberately noisy to it. He would shout “Mother, Mother,” pounding on the floor with his foot, and rush down the cellar stairs. She was not supposed to go down them, for they had no banisters, and there was a drop on either side to the cellar floor below. The only lighting came from the open door of the kitchen, from tiny dirty outdoor windows at ground level, and from a gas pipe that came down from the ceiling and supplied the same kind of feeble, naked flame that his mother used in her room to heat her curling iron.

  On ash collection days the furnace man lifted the barrels up the steps of the bulkhead. In winter, a boardwalk was put down from the street in front to the bulkhead. Along this, or in the soft gravel when the walk was not in place, the furnace-man, on the days of the city collection, rotated the tilted ash barrels. To bring the coal in, along the same boardwalk, required a two-man team: one man would shovel the coal into a container on the back of the second man, who would carry it into the yard, unshoulder it with a twist of his body, and dump it down the chute. Coal delivery was by horse and wagon when my father was a child. He said on a normal working day there would be at least three horses and wagons on his street, delivering ice, coal, milk, groceries, fruits and vegetables, or express packages, or peddling, or buying old newspapers or old iron. There was also a horse-drawn hurdy-gurdy.

  What he said about his furnace and all the trappings of the furnace made me go down and look more carefully at our own furnace. Our house is either a hundred years old or a hundred and fifty, depending on which town historical document we believe. This furnace was converted to gas from coal probably forty years ago. The trappings were still there, a coal hod on the floor of the coal bin and, hanging on the wall, pronged iron bars for opening the hatches. I looked up and saw two long, stout boards stowed above the coal bin. Now that I had read what my father wrote about the men bringing the coal in across the snow, I had no doubt these boards were put down for the coal delivery here too. I was excited to discover this.

  I wrote back to my father about what I had discovered, knowing that for several reasons he would be less interested in my coal furnace than his memories of his own. It is natural for an old man to be engrossed in his memories and less interested in the present. But he has always been more interested in his own ideas than anyone else’s.

  Although he likes to have conversations with other people and hear what they say, he does not know what to do with an idea of someone else’s except to use it as a starting point from which to produce an even better idea of his own. His own ideas are certainly interesting, often the most interesting in a given situation. He has always been interesting at a dinner party, even though as he aged, a time came when he would have to leave the table part of the way through and go lie down for a while.

  Dinner parties were an important part of the life my mother and father had together from the very beginning. There was a skill to taking part in a dinner party, and a technique to giving one, especially to guiding the conversation at the table. There was an art to encouraging a shy guest, or subduing a noisy one. My mother and father are still sociable, but they are handicapped by their age now and limit what they do. Now they have people in for tea more often than dinner, and at a certain point during the tea, also, my father leaves the room to go lie down.

  Though my mother still goes out to concerts and lectures, my father rarely does. One of the last events they went to together was a grand birthday party held in a public library. Four hundred guests were invited, coming from around the world. My mother told me about it, including the fact that during the party my father fell down. He was not hurt. She was not in the same room with him when he fell.

  He is unsteady on his feet, and has fallen or come close to falling quite often in the last few years. I was present when a health technician came to give advice about rearranging the apartment so that it would be safer for the two of them. The health technician observed my father there in the apartment for a while. My father’s head is large and heavy and his body is thin and frail. The technician said he noticed that my father tended to toss his head back, and this threw him off balance. The technician said he should try to change that habit and also use his walker in the house. Although the technician was friendly and helpful, he was very energetic and spoke in a loud voice, and toward the end of the visit my father became too agitated to stay in his company any longer and left to go lie down. After that visit, my mother told me, my father tried to remember to use his walker but tended to leave it here and there in the apartment and then had to walk around without it to find it again.

  If I ask my mother, on the telephone, how my father is, she often lowers her voice to answer. She often says she is worried about him. She has been worried for years. She is always worried about some recent or new behavior of his. She does not seem to realize that this behavior is not always recent or new, or that she is always worried about something. Sometimes she is worried because he is depressed. For a while she was worried because he so often became hysterically angry. Not long ago she said he seemed to take an unnatural interest in their Scrabble games. After that she said he was losing his memory, did not remember incidents from their life together, kept referring to one family member by the name of another, and sometimes did not recognize a name at all.

  He had to stay in a rehabilitation hospital for a while after his last fall, to have some physical therapy. To my mother’s astonishment, he did not mind playing catch with the other patients in the physical therapy group, or tossing a beanbag in a contest. She said this was not like him: she wondered if he was regressing to a childish state. She suspected that he had enjoyed the attention there, and the food. Since his return home, she told me, he had not been eating very well. She was upset because he did not seem to like her cooking anymore. On the other hand he did finish a piece of writing he was working on.

  A year ago, when my mother herself was in the hospital with a serious illness, he and I went out to look for a restaurant where we could have supper before going back to sit with my mother. It was a cold, windy night in May. We were downtown in the city, in a neighborhood of hospitals, tall well-lighted buildings all around us. There were walkways over our heads, and underground garages opening on all sides, but no restaurants that I could see. Stores were closed, not many cars went by on the streets and almost no people walked on the sidewalk. My father was unsteady on his feet and I was watching for every curb and uneven piece of pavement. He was determined to find a restaurant where he could have an alcoholic drink. At last, we entered a passageway in one of the tall buildings, walking into what looked from the outside to be a deserted mall. Going down an empty corridor and past some empty store windows and up some steps, we found a restaurant with a bar and an amount of good cheer and number of lively customers surprising after the empty streets outside. We sat down at a table and talked a little, but my father’s mind was on his drink and he kept looking for the waiter, who was too busy to come to our table. I was thinking that this dinner was likely to be the last one I would have in a restaurant with my father, and certainly the least festive.

  In an upper floor of one of the tall buildings nearby, my mother lay suffering from a rare blood disorder and all the other ills that came one after another because of the treatment itself. We thought she might be dying, though my father seemed to forget this at times, or rather, if she seemed better one day, he cheered up completely and began making jokes again, as though she would certainly get well. The next day he might arrive at the hospital to find one of us crying and his face would fall.

  My father grew so impatient for his drink that he stood up on his unsteady legs, bracing himself with his cane. The waiter came. My father ordered his drink. What he wanted so much was a Perfect Rob Roy.

/>   His hearing is not good, and his eyesight is not very good either, and for a while, if I asked him how he was, he would say that except for his eyes and his ears, his balance, his memory, and his teeth, he was doing reasonably well. In order to read certain sizes of print he has to take off his glasses and hold the text within an inch or two of his nose. It used to be that sometimes, when I asked my mother how my father was, she would answer: “He was well enough to go to the Theological Library today.” Then he stopped going to any library because it was so hard for him to see the titles of the books and to bend down to the lower shelves. Then his balance became so bad it was very risky for him to go out by himself at all. Once he fell in the street and hit the back of his head. A stranger passing in a car called an ambulance on his cell phone. It was after that fall that he went into the hospital for physical therapy and after he returned home did not go out by himself anymore. On one of my last visits, at Christmas, he said he needed a magnifying light for the large dictionary in the living room.

  He has always enjoyed looking things up in the dictionary, particularly word histories. Now my mother says she is worried about him because he is no longer merely interested in word histories but obsessed by them. He will get up from a conversation with a guest at tea and go look up a word she has used. He will interrupt the conversation to report the etymology. He has always preferred an illustrated dictionary. He likes to study the pictures, particularly the pictures of handsome women. At Christmas, he showed me one of his favorites, the President of Iceland.

  I have gone down to look at the furnace again because in a few days it will be removed and new one put in its place. The dust is deep and gray in the old coal bin. The wooden planks that form the sides are rich in color and smoothly fitted together. Tossed in the dust and half buried are the old coal hod and some metal parts of the coal chute. I ask my husband if the men who come to install the new furnace will have to remove the walls of the coal bin and he says he thinks they will not.