Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

by Lydia Davis

  After I wrote to my father about my discovery of the boards, he answered my letter with another about his childhood and also another memory of coal men, this one dating from when he was grown up. He said he was out driving with my sister next to him in the car when he happened upon an accident that had just occurred. He said that two men had been delivering coal. The delivery truck had been parked at an angle in a driveway. The driver was talking to the owner of the house, presumably about the delivery. The second man, his assistant, was standing at the end of the driveway with his back to the truck, looking out at the street. The truck’s brakes were apparently faulty and the truck rolled backward down the driveway. Either no one saw this or no one cried out in time, the coal man’s assistant was struck by the truck and run over, and his head was crushed. My father said he drove some distance past the accident, parked his car and, instructing my sister to stay where she was, went back to look. A short way beyond the man’s crushed head, he saw the man’s brains on the pavement.

  My father said he knew he was wrong to go and look, he should have driven on. Then he began to talk about the anatomy of the brain, that the incident dramatized a conviction he had always had. He had always believed that consciousness was so dependent on the physical brain that the continuation of consciousness and one’s identity after death was inconceivable. He admitted that this conviction was probably metaphysically naive, but added that it had been strengthened by a lifetime’s observation of many insane and manic-depressive types, some in his own family. Among the manic-depressive types, he said, he included himself. Then he went on to talk about the mind of God, whom he described as a Being with presumably no neurones.

  Now the new furnace is installed and working but the house does not seem any warmer. The rooms that were always chilly before are still chilly. There is still a perceptible change in temperature as we go up to the second floor. The only difference is that because this new furnace works with fans, we can hear it while it is on. It is much smaller than the old one, and shiny. It makes a better impression on anyone visiting the basement, which was one reason to get it, I realize now, since we may one day want to sell this house. I have cleaned out the coal bin, at last, preserving the coal hod and the sections of chute and storing them in another wooden stall in a part of the cellar we haven’t touched yet that contains an old pump, among other things.

  My correspondence with my father about the furnace seems to have ended, as has our correspondence about his family. His letters, in fact, have shrunk to small scrawled notes attached to more clippings from the local paper.

  Twice he has sent my husband and me the same “Ask Marjorie” column, one that discusses the shape of the earth and points out that the ancients knew perfectly well that the earth was round. Both times he wrote a message on the back of the envelope asking my husband and me if we were taught that in ancient times people believed the earth was flat.

  He has also sent me more items from the “Crime Beat” section.

  “At 10:30 pm a Putnam Avenue resident said an unknown person broke into the home by pushing in the rear door. A dollar bill was taken.”

  “At 9:12 am a North Cambridge man from Mass. Ave. said someone had broken in but nothing was missing.”

  “A Belmont resident working at a Mass. Ave. address stated that another employee told her that she had been fired and then proceeded to scratch the victim in the neck.” By this one he wrote in the margin: “Why? What is the connection?”

  “Friday, March 11. At 11:30 pm, a Concord Avenue woman was walking down Garden Street near Mass. Ave. when a man asked her ‘Are you smiling?’ The woman said yes, so the man punched her in the mouth, causing her lip to bleed and swell. No arrests were made.”

  “Three men were arrested for assault and battery on Third Street near Gore Street at 2:50 am. Two men are Cambridge residents, both charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, a shod foot. A Billerica man received the same charge, but with a hammer.” My father put an X in the margin beside the grammar mistake.

  “Tuesday, June 13. A Rhode Island resident reported that between 8:45 am and 10 am, at an address on Garden St., an unknown person took her purse with $180 and credit cards. A male was witnessed under the table but the victim believed that it was someone from the power company.”

  On my last visit, my father seemed in worse condition than I had seen him before. When I asked him if he was working on anything in particular now, he said, “No,” and then turned his head slowly to my mother and looked at her in bewilderment, his mouth hanging open. There was an expression of pain or agony on his face that seemed habitual. She looked back at him, waited a moment, impassive, and then said: “Yes, you are. You’re writing about the Bible and anti-Semitism.” He continued to stare at her.

  Later that evening, before he went to bed, he said: “This is symptomatic of my condition: You’re my daughter, and I’m proud of you, but I have nothing to say to you.”

  He left to get ready for bed, and then came back into the room wearing dazzling white pajamas. My mother asked me to admire his pajamas, and he stood quietly while I did. Then he said: “I don’t know what I will be like in the morning.”

  After he went to bed, my mother showed me a picture of him forty years before sitting at a seminar table surrounded by students. “Just look at him there!” she said in distress, as though it were some sort of punishment that he had become what he was now—an old man with a beaked profile like a nutcracker.

  Saying goodbye, I held his hand longer than usual. He may not have liked it. It is impossible to tell what he is feeling, often, but physical contact has always been difficult for him, and he has always been awkward about it. Whether out of embarrassment or absent-mindedness, he kept shaking his hand and mine up and down slightly, as though palsied.

  Recently, my mother said he was still worse. He had fallen again, and he was having trouble with his bladder. Can he still work? I asked her. To me, it seemed that if he could still work, then he was all right, no matter what else was going wrong with him. Not really, she said. “He has been writing letters, but there are odd things in some of them. It may not matter, since they’re mostly to old friends.” She said maybe she should be checking them, though, before he sent them.

  It was a phone conversation with another old woman that reminded me of a name I had forgotten for this time of life. After telling me about her angioplasty and her diabetes, she said. “Well, this is what you can expect when you enter the twilight years.” But it is hard not to think that my father’s bewilderment is only temporary, and that behind it, his sharp critical mind is still alive and well. With this younger, firmer mind he will continue to read the letters I send him and write back—our correspondence is only temporarily interrupted.

  The latest letter I have seen from him was not written to me but to one of his grandsons. My mother thought I should see it before she sent it. The envelope was taped shut with strong packing tape. The entire letter concerns a mathematical rhyme he copied from the newspaper. It begins:

  “A dozen, a gross and a score

  plus three times the square root of four

  divide it by seven plus five times eleven

  equals nine to the square and not more.”

  Then he explains mathematical terms and the solution of this problem. Because he changed the margins of his page to type the poem, and did not reset them, the whole letter is written in short lines like a poem:

  “The total to be divided by 7 consists

  of the following:

  12 plus 144 plus 20 plus 3 times

  the square root of 4.

  These are the numerals above the line

  over the divisor 7. They add up to 182,

  which divided by seven equals 26.

  26 plus 11 times 5 (55) is 81.

  81 is 9 squared. A number squared is a number multiplied by itself.

  The square of 9 is nine times nine or 81.”

  He goes on to explain the concept of sq
uaring numbers, and of the cube, along the way giving the etymologies of certain words, including dozen, score, and scoreboard. He talks about the sign for square root being related to the form of a tree.

  I tell my mother the letter seems a little strange to me. She protests, saying that it is quite correct. I don’t argue, but say he can certainly send it. The end of the letter is less strange, except for the line breaks:

  “For me memory and balance fail rapidly.

  You are young and have a university library

  system for your use. I, who have

  a good home reference collection,

  sometimes can get other people to

  look up things for me, but it is not the same.

  I have to explain that I have increasingly

  lost my memory and sense of balance,

  I can’t go any where, not the libraries

  or the book stores to browse. We have to pay

  a young woman to walk out with me

  and prevent me from falling

  though I take a mechanical walker with me.

  I don’t mean it has an engine that propels it.

  I do the propelling, but that it is

  shiny and metal and has wheels.”

  Young and Poor

  I like working near the baby, here at my desk by lamplight. The baby sleeps.

  As though I were young and poor again, I was going to say.

  But I am still young and poor.

  The Silence of Mrs. ILN

  Her children found it impossible to understand old Mrs. Iln now. They were forced to call her senile. But if they had paused a moment from their wild activities and tried to imagine her state of mind, they would have known that this was not the case.

  Decades before, when her recent marriage had cast a pleasant light over her otherwise homely features, she had been as articulate as any other woman, perhaps even more articulate than was necessary. If her husband asked her where his cufflinks were, she might answer, “I think they are in the top drawer of your bureau, though it could be that you took them off in the dining room and they are still there, on the table, or perhaps they have fallen onto the floor by now, in all this confusion; if they got stepped on I don’t know what I would do, I just don’t know…” When she had had a little wine and felt moved to give her opinion of the political situation, she would burst out with “You know what I think? I think it’s a case of collective madness: I think they’re all insane, we’re all insane, but it isn’t our fault, and it isn’t the fault of our parents, and it isn’t the fault of our parents’ parents. I don’t know whose fault it is, but I would like to know…”

  A few years later, she and her husband understood one another too well to need long explanations. Her opinions did not change over time, but hardened into obsessive and monotonous responses, and remained thoroughly familiar to her husband. She began to curtail her sentences, and her meaning was always clear to her husband and to her children, as they grew up. When her children left home, one by one, Mrs. Iln was gradually overcome by the feeling that she had no purpose in the world and no reason to be alive. She lost sight of herself completely. Her husband had grown into her until she hardly distinguished him from herself, and now her sentences were reduced to a few words: “Dresser drawer in your bedroom,” she would say, or “completely insane.” Since her husband knew what she was going to say before she said it, even those few words were unnecessary and in time were left unspoken. “I wonder where my cufflinks are,” her husband would say softly, more to himself than to her. And even before she wagged her head toward the bureau, he would be there rummaging among his handkerchiefs and foreign coins. Or when he read aloud to her from the morning paper she would purse her lips and give him a certain stormy look and he would hear the “insane” of a few years before echoing in the air. He too might have stopped speaking, if he had not grown to like the constant murmur from his own lips.

  Since nothing happened in her house that had not happened before, since her children, who found her silence unnerving after the din of their own homes, rarely visited her, Mrs. Iln no longer had any reason to speak, and silence became a deeply rooted habit. When her husband fell gravely ill, she tended him silently; when he died, she had no words for her grief; when her oldest children asked her to live with them, she shook her head and went home.

  Sometimes she felt the need to give a word or two of explanation especially to her grandchildren, as she watched them from beyond her wall of silence; sometimes her children begged her to speak, as though it would prove something to them. And at these times she struggled as though in a nightmare to bring out one sound, and could not. It was as if by speaking she would have damaged something inside herself.

  More and more often in her loneliness, thoughts would come to her as they had never come before, not even in her youth. They were thoughts more complex than “insanity,” and she would hear the words mounting in turmoil within her. But when her children came at the weekend to sit with her for an hour or two, it was hard to find the right moment to begin speaking of all she had thought, and if the moment came, when their restless chatter stopped and their eyes fell on her old pitted face, then she could rarely summon the words that had flown hither and thither in her head all week. And if she managed to summon the words to her mind, then she could never, never break through the last barrier and free herself from the constriction of her speechlessness.

  At last she stopped trying, and when her children came they saw an expression on her face that had not been there before—a stiff, dead look, a look of blankness and defeat that reflected her hopelessness. They immediately seized upon this expression as evidence of senility. She was astonished and hurt by their reaction. If they had been more patient with her, if they had stayed with her for longer periods of time, they would have seen something in her that was not senility. Yet they clung to the idea of senility and registered her name in a nursing home.

  At first she was horrified, and everything in her cried out against the coming change. With renewed vigor she frowned at them and sent them a look that her husband had well understood. But they were not moved. In their eyes, her every gesture could now be called senile. Even quite normal behavior seemed mad to them, and nothing she did could reach them.

  But once she was actually living in the nursing home, she made peace with her surroundings. During the day she sat in the library reading and thinking. She read very slowly and spent many more hours staring at the wall than at the book. She tested her mind against what she read and it grew stronger. Only the nurses were not quite real to her and puzzled her: she thought their brittle good humor was not honest. They did not like her, because her lucid eye made them uneasy. But she moved comfortably among her bloodless, wrinkled companions, more comfortably than she had ever moved among the vigorous people of her former life. She found the silence in the crowded dining room appropriate. She understood very well the morose men and women who struggled along the garden paths in the afternoon or sat staring through the porch railings at the street during the long summer twilight. Tentatively at first, and with growing wonder, she realized that she had been nearly dead among the living. Among the nearly dead, she was at last beginning to live.

  Almost Over: Separate Bedrooms

  They have moved into separate bedrooms now.

  That night she dreams she is holding him in her arms. He dreams he is having dinner with Ben Jonson.

  Money

  I don’t want any more gifts, cards, phone calls, prizes, clothes, friends, letters, books, souvenirs, pets, magazines, land, machines, houses, entertainments, honors, good news, dinners, jewels, vacations, flowers, or telegrams. I just want money.

  Also by Lydia Davis

  Novel

  The End of the Story (1995)

  Stories

  The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976)

  Sketches for a Life of Wassilly (1981)

  Story and Other Stories (1983)

  Break It Down (1986)
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  Almost No Memory (1997)

  Selected Translations

  Death Sentence by Maurice Blanchot (1978)

  The Madness of the Day by Maurice Blanchot (1981)

  The Last Man by Maurice Blanchot (1987)

  Scratches by Michel Leiris (1991)

  Hélène by Pierre Jean Jouve (1993)

  Scraps by Michel Leiris (1997)

  By Way of Swann’s by Marcel Proust (2002)

  Acknowledgment

  I have only to add

  that the plates in the present volume

  have been carefully re-etched

  by Mr. Cuff.

  SAMUEL JOHNSON IS INDIGNANT. Copyright © 1976, 1981, 1989, 1990, 1993, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 by Lydia Davis. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Davis, Lydia.

  Samuel Johnson is indignant: stories / Lydia Davis.—1st Picador ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-4668-0101-1

  1. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.A9356 S36 2002

  813’.54—dc21

  2002066775

  First published by McSweeney’s Books, New York