Airships

by Barry Hannah

  And now French Edward was swollen with hatred of the man, the degree of which had no name. It was expelled on the second day of August, hottest day of the year. He called up Word for a match. Not practice, French said. A match. Dr. Word would have played with him in the rain. At the net, he pinched French as they took the balls out of the can. French knocked his hand away and lost games deliberately to keep the match going. Word glowed with a perilous self-congratulation for staying in there; French had fooled Word into thinking he was playing even with him. French pretended to fail in the heat, knocking slow balls from corner to corner, easing over a drop shot to watch the old man ramble up for it. French himself was tiring in the disguise of his ruse when the old devil keeled over, falling out in the alley with his racket clattering away. Dr. Word did not move, though the concrete must have been burning him. French had hoped for a heart attack. Word mumbled that he was cold and couldn’t see anything. He asked French to get help.

  “No. Buck up. Run it out. Nothing wrong with you,” said French.

  “Is that you, French, my son?”

  “I ain’t your son. You might treat my mother like I was, but I ain’t. I saw you.”

  “A doctor. Out of the cold. I need medical help,” Dr. Word said.

  “I got another idea. Why don’t you kick the bucket?”

  “Help.”

  “Go on. Die. It’s easy.”

  When French got home, he discovered his mother escaping the heat in a tub of cold water. Their house was an unprosperous and unlevel connection of boxes. No door of any room shut properly. He heard her sloshing the water on herself. His father was up at Dick Lee’s grocery watching the Cardinals on the television. French walked in on her. Her body lay underwater up to her neck.

  “Your romance has been terminated,” he said.

  “French?” She grabbed a towel off the rack and pulled it in the water over her.

  “He’s blind. He can’t even find his way to the house anymore.”

  “This was a sin, you to look at me!” Mrs. Edward cried.

  “Maybe so,” French said, “but I’ve looked before, when you had company.”

  French left home for Baton Rouge, on the bounty of the scholarship Dr. Word had hustled for him through the athletic department at Louisiana State. French swore never to return. His father was a fool, his mother a lewd traitor, his mentor a snake from the blind side, the river a brown ditch of bile, his town a hill range of ashes and gloomy souvenirs of the Great Moment in Vicksburg. His days at college were numbered. Like that of most natural athletes, half French Edward’s mind was taken over by a sort of tidal barbarous desert where men ran and struggled, grappling, hitting, cursing as some fell into the sands of defeat. The only professor he liked was one who spoke of “muscular thought.” The professor said he was sick and tired of thought that sat on its ass and vapored around the room for the benefit of limp-wrists and their whiskey.

  As for Dr. Word, he stumbled from clinic to clinic, guided by his brother Wilbur, veteran of Korea and colossal military boredoms all over the globe, before resettling in Vicksburg on the avant-garde of ennui.

  Baby Levaster saw the pair in Charity Hospital when he was a med student at Tulane. Word’s arm was still curled up with stroke and he had only a sort of quarter vision in one eye. His voice was frightful, like that of a man in a cave of wasps. Levaster was stunned by seeing Dr. Word in New Orleans. He hid in a closet, but Word had already recognized him. Brother Wilbur flung the door open, illuminating Levaster demurring under a bale of puke sheets.

  “Our boy won the Southern!” shouted Word. “He’s the real thing, more than I ever thought!”

  “Who are you talking about?” said Baby Levaster. The volume of the man had blown Levaster’s eyebrows out of order.

  “Well, French! French Edward! He won the Southern tournament in Mobile!”

  Levaster looked to Wilbur for some mediator in this loudness. Wilbur cut away to the water fountain. He acted deaf.

  “And the Davis Cup!” Word screamed. “He held up America in the Davis Cup! Don’t you read the papers? Then he went to Wimbledon!”

  “French went to Wimbledon?”

  “Yes! Made the quarterfinals!”

  A nurse and a man in white came up to crush the noise from Word. Levaster went back into the closet and shut the door. Then he peeped out, seeing Word and his brother small in the corridor, Word limping slightly to the left, proceeding with a roll and capitulation. The stroke had wrecked him from brain to ankles, had fouled the centers that prevent screaming. Levaster heard Word bleating a quarter mile down the corridor.

  Baby Levaster read in the Times-Picayune that French was resident pro at the Metairie Club, that French was representing the club in a tournament. Levaster hated med school. He hated the sight of pain and blood, and by this time he had become a thin, weak, balding drunkard of a very disagreeable order, even to himself. He dragged himself from one peak of cowardice to the next and began wearing sunglasses, and when he saw French Edward fend off Aussie, Wop, Frog, Brit and Hun in defending the pride of the Metairie Club, Levaster’s body left him and was gathered into the body of French. He had never seen anything so handsome as French Edward. He had never before witnessed a man as happy and winsome in his occupation. Edward moved as if certain animal secrets were known to him. He originated a new, dangerous tennis, taking the ball into his racket with a muscular patience; then one heard the sweet crack, heard the singing ball, and hung cold with a little terror at the speed and the smart violent arc it made into the green. French was by then wearing spectacles. His coiled hair, the color of a kind of charred gold, blazed with sweat. On his lips was the charmed smile of the seraphim. Something of the priest and the brute mingled, perhaps warred, in his expression. Baby Levaster, who had no culture, could not place the line of beauty that French Edward descended from, but finally remembered a photograph of the David statue he’d seen in an old encyclopedia. French Edward looked like that.

  When French Edward won, Levaster heard a louder, baleful, unclublike bravo from the gallery. It was Dr. Word. Levaster watched Word fight through the crowd toward French. The man was crazed with partisanship. Levaster, wanting to get close to the person of French himself, three-quarters drunk on gin he’d poured into the iced Cokes from the stand, saw Word reach for French’s buttock and give it a pinch. French turned, hate in his eye. He said something quick and corrosive to Word. All the smiles around them turned to straight mouths of concern. Dr. Word looked harmless, a tanned old fellow wearing a beige beret.

  “You ought to be dead,” said French.

  “As graceful, powerful an exhibition of the grandest game as your old coach would ever hope to see! I saw some of the old tricks I taught you! Oh, son, son!” Dr. Word screamed.

  Everyone knew he was ill then.

  “Go home,” said French, looking very soon sorry as he said it.

  “You come home and see us!” Word bellowed, and left.

  French’s woman, Cecilia Emile, put her head on his chest. She was short, bosomy and pregnant, a Franco-Italian blessed with a fine large nose, the arrogance of which few men forgot. Next came her hair, a black field of delight. French had found her at LSU. They married almost on the spot. Her father was Fat Tim Emile, a low-key monopolist in pinball and wrestling concessions in New Orleans—filthy rich. Levaster did not know this. He stared at the strained hot eyes of French, having surrendered his body to the man, and French saw him.

  “Baby Levaster? Is it you? From Vicksburg? You look terrible.”

  “But you, you . . .” Levaster tripped on a tape and fell into the green clay around Edward’s sneakers. “. . . are beauty . . . my youth memory elegant, forever!”

  The Edwards took Levaster home to Covington, across the bridge. The Edwards lived in a great glassy house with a pool in back and tall pines hanging over.

  French was sad. He said, “She still carries it on with him. They meet out in the Civil War park at night and go to it in those marble
houses. One of my old high-school sweethearts saw them and wrote me about it. She wrote it to hurt me, and it did hurt me.”

  “That old fart Word? Impossible. He’s too goddamn loud to carry on any secret rendezvous, for one thing. You could hear the bastard sigh from a half mile off.”

  “My mother accepts him for what he is.”

  “That man is destroyed by stroke.”

  “I know. I gave it to him. She doesn’t care. She takes the limping and the bad arm and the hollering. He got under her skin.”

  “I remember her,” Baby Levaster said. “Some handsome woman, auburn hair with a few gray ends. Forgive me, but I had teen-age dreams about her myself. I always thought she was waiting for a romance, living on the hope of something out there, something. . . .”

  “Don’t leave me, Baby. I need your mind with me. Somebody from the hometown. Somebody who knows.”

  “I used to whip your little ass at tennis,” Levaster said.

  “Yes.” French smiled. “You barely moved and I was running all over the court. You just stood there and knocked them everywhere like I was hitting into a fan.”

  They became fast friends. Baby Levaster became an intern. He arrived sober at the funeral of the Edwards’ newborn son and saw the tiny black grave its coffin went into behind the Catholic chapel. He looked over to mourners at the fringe. There were Dr. Word and his brother Wilbur under a mimosa, lingering off fifty feet from the rest. Word held his beret to his heart. Levaster was very glad that French never saw Word. They all heard a loud voice, but Word was on the other side of the hill by then, bellowing his sympathetic distress to Wilbur, and the Edwards could not see him.

  “Whose voice was that?” asked French.

  “Just a voice,” said Levaster.

  “Whose? Don’t I know it? It makes me sick.” French turned back to Cecilia, covered with a black veil, her handkerchief pressed to lips. Her child had been born with dysfunction of the involuntary muscles. Her eyes rose toward the hot null blue of the sky. French supported her. His gaze was angrier. It penetrated the careless heart of nature, right in there to its sullen root.

  On the other side of the cemetery, Dr. Word closed the door of the car. Wilbur drove. Loyal to his brother to the end, almost deaf from the pitch of his voice, Wilbur wheeled the car with veteran patience. Dr. Word wiped his head and held the beret to his chest.

  “Ah, Wilbur! They were so unlucky! Nowhere could there be a handsomer couple! They had every right to expect a little Odysseus! Ah, to see doubt and sorrow cloud the faces of those young lovers! Bereft of hope, philosophy!”

  Wilbur reached under the seat for the pint of philosophy he had developed since his tour of Korea. It was cognac. The brotherly high music came, tasting of burnt plums, revealing the faces of old officer friends to him.

  “James,” he said. “I think after this . . . that this is the moment, now, to break it off with Olive—forever. Unless you want to see more doubt and sorrow cloud the face of your young friend.”

  Word’s reply was curiously quiet.

  “We cannot do what we cannot do. If she will not end it—and she will not—I cannot. Too deep a sense of joy, Wilbur. The whole quality of my life determined by it.”

  “Ah, Jimmy,” Wilbur said, “you were just too long a queer. The first piece you found had to be permanent. She ain’t Cleopatra. If you’d just’ve started early, nailing the odd twat like the rest of us . . .”

  “I don’t want old soldier’s reason! No reason! I will not suffer that contamination! Though I love you!”

  Dr. Word was hollering again. Wilbur drove them back to Vicksburg.

  Cecilia was too frightened to have another child after she lost the first one. Her body would not carry one longer than a month. She was constantly pregnant for a while, and then she stopped conceiving. She began doing watercolors, the faintest violets and greens. French Edward took up the clarinet. Baby Levaster saw it: they were attempting to become art people. Cecilia was pitiful. French went beyond that into dreadfulness; ruesome honks poured from his horn. How wrong and unfortunate that they should have taken their grief into art, thought Levaster. It made them fools who were cut from glory’s cloth, who were charmed darlings of the sun.

  “What do you think?” asked French, after he’d hacked a little ditty from Mozart into a hundred froggish leavings.

  “Yes,” Dr. Levaster said. “I think I’ll look through some of Cissy’s pictures now.”

  “You didn’t like it,” French said, downcast, even angry.

  “When are you going to get into another tournament? Why sit around here revealing your scabs to me and the neighbors? You need to get out and hit the ball.”

  French left, walked out, smoldering and spiteful. Baby Levaster remained there. He knocked on Cecilia’s door. She was at her spattered art desk working over a watercolor, her bare back to Levaster, her hair lying thick to the small of it, and below, her naked heels. Her efforts were thumbtacked around from ceiling to molding, arresting one with their meek, awkward redundancies, things so demure they resisted making an image against the retina. They were not even clouds; rather, the pale ghosts of clouds: the advent of stains, hardly noticeable against paper.

  “I can’t turn around, but hello,” said Cecilia.

  “What are all these about?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know . . . smudges? The vagueness of all things?”

  “They aren’t things. They’re emotions.”

  “You mean hate, fear, desire, envy?”

  “Yes. And triumph and despair.” She pointed.

  “This is subtle. They look the same,” Levaster said.

  “I know. I’m a nihilist.”

  “You aren’t any such thing.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Because you’ve combed your hair. You wanted me to come in here and discover that you’re a nihilist,” Levaster said.

  “Nihilists can comb their hair.” She bit her lip, pouting.

  “I’d like to see your chest. That’s art.”

  “You toilet. Leave us alone.”

  “Maybe if you are art, Cissy, you shouldn’t try to do art.”

  “You want me to be just a decoration?”

  “Yes,” Levaster said. “A decoration of the air. Decoration is more important than art.”

  “Is that what you learned in med school? That’s dumb.” She turned around. “A boob is a boob is a boob.”

  Dr. Levaster fainted.

  At the River Oaks Club in Houston, French played again. The old happiness came back to him, a delight that seemed to feed off his grace. The sunburned Levaster held French’s towel for him, rosined French’s racket handles, and coached him on the weaknesses of the opponents, which is unsportsmanly, untennislike, and all but illegal. A Spaniard Edward was creaming complained, and they threw Levaster off the court and back to the stands. He watched French work the court, roving back and forth, touching the ball with a deft chip, knocking the cooties off it, serving as if firing a curved musket across the net, the Spaniard falling distraught. And throughout, French’s smile, widening and widening until it was just this side of loony. Here was a man truly at play, thought Levaster, at one with the pleasant rectangle of the court, at home, in his own field, something peaceful in the violent sweep of his racket. A certain slow anomalous serenity invested French Edward’s motion. The thought of this parched Levaster.

  “Christ, for a drink!” he said out loud.

  “Here, son. Cold brandy.” The man Levaster sat next to brought out a pint from the ice in a Styrofoam box. Levaster chugged it—exquisite!—then almost spat up the boon as he noticed the fellow on the far side of the brandy man. It was Dr. Word. The man beside Levaster was Wilbur. Word’s noble cranium glinted under the sun. His voice had modulated.

  “Ah, ah, my boy! An arc of genius,” Word whispered as they saw French lay a disguised lob thirty feet from the Spaniard. “He’s learned the lob, Wilbur! Our boy has it all now!” W
ord’s voice went on in soft screaming. He seemed to be seeing keenly out of the left eye. The right was covered by eyelid, the muscles there having finally surrendered. So, Levaster thought, this is what the stroke finally left him.

  “How’s Vicksburg?” Levaster asked Wilbur.

  “Nothing explosive, Doctor. Kudzu and the usual erosion.”

  “What say you try to keep Professor Word away from French until he does his bit in the tournament. A lot depends on his making the finals here.”

  “I’m afraid the professor’s carrying a letter on him from Olive to French. That’s why he’s not hollering. He’s got the letter. It’s supposed to say everything.”

  “But don’t let French see him till it’s over. And could I hit the brandy again?” Levaster said.

  “Of course,” said Wilbur. “One man can’t drink the amount I brought over. Tennis bores the shit out of me.”

  In the finals, Edward met Whitney Humble, a tall man from South Africa whose image and manner refuted the usual notion of the tennis star. He was pale, spindly, hairy, with the posture of a derelict. He spat phlegm on the court and picked his nose between serves. Humble appeared to be splitting the contest between one against his opponent and another against the excrescence of his own person. Some in the gallery suspected he served a wet ball. Playing as if with exasperated distaste for the next movement this game had dragged him to, Humble was nevertheless there when the ball came and knocked everything back with either speed or a snarling spin. The voice of Dr. Word came cheering, bellowing for French. Humble identified the bald head in the audience that had hurrahed his error at the net. He served a line drive into the gallery that hit Word square in his good eye.