She told me that as noon approached, he would reverse his route and study the same landscape from opposite angles and in the harsh light of a cold December day. He would wind up at the Zollicoffers’, phone from their kitchen and tell her he was taking lunch with Herman. Then he and the Zollicoffers would review the sordid facts of the murder. Lukas seemed to have an insatiable hunger for information about the way Herman had reacted to the various aspects of the crime.
She said he would return home about two, take a short nap, rise, get into his car and reverse his original morning route, eager to see the locations at dusk, then wait till almost seven at night for a rapid spin around the entire circuit, detouring to see where along the Wannsee Applebutter had thrown the steel bar. He would return late for dinner, and when Emma asked what he had been doing he would give the same answer: ‘Scouting the land.’
TUESDAY, 24 DECEMBER: This afternoon, as has been my custom through the years, I piled our car with carefully wrapped gifts and had Oscar drive me through the countryside so that I could deliver them in person. At Yvonne Marmelle’s new home I was greeted with the news that our manuscript was in promising shape, and at the motel where Professor Streibert was staying I received an actual draft of his essay, which was a greater gift to me than I could have given him. Thrilling reading, it made Timothy spring alive.
At Zollicoffer’s I had to stop for spiced cider and Christmas cookies. The couple told me that Yoder dropped by almost every afternoon to ask endless questions about the murder and their reactions to it, and Herman added: ‘He’s a bulldog till he gets everything straightened out in his head.’
I therefore approached the Yoder farm with some apprehension, and as soon as I entered that warm and lovely kitchen redolent of Christmas delicacies I realized that the debate over the murder was as active as ever, for Emma greeted me with: ‘How fortunate you came! Lukas is on the verge of starting a new novel, and I’m trying to warn him against it.’
Lukas, sitting in his favorite chair, looked up sheepishly and said: ‘No, no! I’m not. Not at my age.’
‘But I know how you work, Lukas,’ she said as she tended her cooking. ‘You memorize the land—keep talking with people like Zollicoffer you may want to use as models for your characters.’
‘It’s just that I’m preoccupied with Timothy’s death—and the clever way Zollicoffer guessed what must have happened.’ He addressed this to me, but Emma answered: ‘I’m warning you, Lukas. Neither of us is capable of facing another siege.’
‘Why does she keep calling it a siege?’ he asked me. ‘It would only be the kind of work I’ve always done.’
‘But it is a siege, Lukas. For both of us. And I’m too tired to attempt it another time.’
I broke the impasse by saying: ‘Aside from making my deliveries, I also came to invite you to the midnight Christmas Eve service at Valley Mennonite,’ and they both cried: ‘Yes! Yes!’
Toward eleven that night Oscar drove me back, and we picked up the Yoders and Zollicoffers and drove the short distance to the church that overlooked the rolling farmland toward Dresden.
Many of the women who attended wore the white-lace Mennonite bonnets while their husbands displayed their best black suits. The children, of whom there were many, were dressed in such bright colors that they brought a mournful pang: on the Christmas after Timothy was orphaned by that hideous crash I thought he might be cheered by a new set of clothes for Christmas, and I chose an outfit in colors suitable for infants, forgetting that he was six. When he saw it laid out on his bed he looked at it, and then kissed me and said: ‘You told me I must be a big boy now.’ We passed his new babyish clothes along to the roly-poly Fenstermacher boy who would later be nicknamed Applebutter.
Dismissing the pain, I surrendered to the spirit of gaiety and Christmas cheer that enlivened this plain but handsomely designed church. Branches of spruce decorated the windows; a tree rose in austere beauty; along one wall stretched a putz, the local name for a German nativity scene in which some two dozen very old figurines, many brought over from the Rhineland in the 1700s, depicted the sacred scenes of Saint Luke. There were black princes come to worship the infant Jesus, emirs in flowing robes, Roman soldiers staring menacingly at the Mother and Child, and, as befitted what was essentially a Pennsylvania Dutch farm scene, a host of farm animals, not carved to scale, so that a pig might be as big as a cow or a calf no bigger than a plump chicken.
When I, a woman whose Christmases had been pure Charles Dickens, visited Valley Mennonite, I was reminded that Christmas in America was essentially a German tradition and that only the Pennsylvania Dutch knew how to celebrate it properly.
At the far end of the putz stood two tables laden with the rich food of the valley, cakes and pies and cookies and canned goods galore; they were for the impoverished and the homebound. When the unfamiliar German hymns reverberated, I caught the feeling of what Christmas must have been like in colonial days, but finally the choir came to a sequence of the timeless English carols, with which I was familiar, ending with ‘Silent Night’ in German, and on this first Christmas Eve following the death of the last member of my family, my heart filled with love.
WEDNESDAY, 25 DECEMBER: On Christmas Day I joined Yvonne’s new neighbors at her new home as we brought her gifts. We had an enjoyable visit, and toward two in the afternoon Professor Streibert stopped by, accompanied by Jenny Sorkin, who had invited herself to Yvonne’s party and was most welcome.
While Streibert and we women discussed the manuscript, which was almost ready for typesetting, Yoder and Zollicoffer sat off by themselves reviewing aspects of the murder, and once when I chanced to look in their direction, I saw that Lukas was ashen and his lower lip trembling. ‘Mr. Yoder!’ I called. ‘Are you ill?’ He replied in a quavering voice: ‘I was thinking it must be a cruel Christmas at the Fenstermachers’,’ and although he fought against it, tears came to his eyes and he was unable to speak. It occurred to me as I looked away from his stricken face that he was Fenstermacher. He was not with us. He was in that farmhouse with the murderer’s parents, and their emotions were his. That was the secret of his writing: he became the people he wrote about, lived in their skins, suffered in their hearts, shared their mental confusion. We others could ignore the Fenstermachers on this Christmas Day, but not he, and I suppose that was why he was a novelist and we were not.
Mrs. Zollicoffer broke the spell: ‘Partly their fault. They did allow their son to sass them fearful—even curse at them. First time a son tried that on me, the Mister would of broke his jaw.’
‘And accomplished nothing,’ Emma said, always the determined little schoolteacher. Frieda replied: ‘It would of stopped his cursin’, wouldn’t it?’
A few days later Emma told me something that illustrated her husband’s ability to project himself into the lives of others: ‘When Lukas was writing Shunning, I found him using suspenders to hold up his trousers, something he’d never done before. But he was using only one of the straps, over his left shoulder, and when I asked: “What are you doing?” he said: “Trying to imagine how your grandfather felt.” A week later he was wearing neither belt nor suspender pender and I teased him: “So now you’re the brother,” and he said: “I am.” ’
SATURDAY, 28 DECEMBER: For the account of what happened to the Yoders in the next three days I’m indebted to my friend Emma, who told me the facts, sometimes with the mist of affection clouding her eyes.
‘On the day after Christmas,’ she began, ‘Lukas disappeared altogether, not even stopping at Zollicoffer’s for lunch, and when he came back at dusk I really lit in. Said I could not stand by and watch him kill himself with overwork. He didn’t want to listen, promised me he wasn’t working on a new book. But he added: “If I were to try another, and I’m not saying I am, it would be entirely different. Not the way I used to write. Some of Streibert’s ideas make sense. New approaches are needed. New ways of looking at things—expressing them.”
‘I asked if he was out of his mind, and he repli
ed: “No. Jenny Sorkin—she’s teaching at the college now—took Tull’s place. She asked me to read a chapter she’s recently finished. Strong stuff. A white football player rapes a coed, then forces her to have an abortion. She’s black and the entire university establishment jumps on her—”
‘When I asked why, he explained: “To save its reputation and to protect the boy’s chances for getting national publicity and a lucrative professional contract.”
‘I asked him what kind of book it was and he said: “A very powerful one, the way she writes it.”
‘I told him to let the young people do their thing, as they say. He wasn’t obligated to write violent love scenes, for instance. It wasn’t his style, and besides, he’d be too nervous if he tried. He replied: “That’s not the point, Emma. She’s writing about football as it is. I’ve been thinking about describing Dresden as it is now.” ’
At this point Emma stopped to press her fingers against her eyes: ‘I was terrified by what he was saying. I could see him plunging headlong down a mountainside, as it were. But since writing is a vital part of his life, it has to be of mine, too. So I asked him what he had in mind at his age, this breaking of new paths? And he said: “I’d like to show how the stolid, unyielding ways of the Dutch could produce a murderer. No long descriptions, no formal introductions as if it were a play. Certainly no chapters of explanation. Scenes would flash by and dialogues would be half as long as I used to make them.” ’
‘How did you respond?’ I asked, and she said: ‘Although I could foresee only disaster in such a drastic reversal of style at his age, I knew I had to stand by him. So I went to his chair, hugged him and told him that he wasn’t obligated to write like the young people. He listened, nodded, then said: “But the problem goes deeper. When I read their material I find it scintillating, but not one of them knows how to tell a straightforward story, keeping it fresh and moving ahead. I’d like to marry their new skills to my old ones. That could be explosive.” I looked away.’
TUESDAY, 31 DECEMBER 1991: When I accompanied the Yoders on a holiday walk through the town, viewing the Christmas decorations and greeting friends, Lukas told us: ‘Wait a minute,’ and darted into a stationery store. He reappeared shortly with two small wire-bound notebooks four and a half by three inches.
As soon as Emma saw them she cried: ‘Lukas! You bought them to take notes for a novel.’ Then turning to me she said: ‘He insists on starting a new novel in a new style.’ Eager to avoid a domestic spat, I left them as they entered our little market with the amusing name of Superette, and as I watched them grab two carts for their year-end grocery shopping I said to myself: Look at that pair! I calculate from what Yvonne tells me they’ll earn well over three million dollars this year. But it wouldn’t occur to them that they could afford a maid. A cleaning woman once a week, yes. But a cook to intrude on Emma’s kitchen? Never.
Back at Windsong, I helped Oscar and the maids complete arrangements to receive the neighbors, who soon came streaming in to offer condolences for the death of my grandson. I shook hands warmly with each couple, glad to have their friendship, and when several wanted to tell me how appalled they were at what the Fenstermacher boy had done, I let them know that I had no further interest in that Neanderthal: ‘I worked diligently to help identify and apprehend him, but I was never driven by a desire for revenge. Rather by a compulsion to learn who had done it and why. Today I have no yearning to see him electrocuted, even if Pennsylvania law permitted it.’
By four the guests had left. I took a leisurely bath and found enormous comfort in the fact that at eight o’clock that night the people I called the Timothy Tull Cadre would be coming to Windsong for a quiet dinner, at the end of which we would greet the New Year. Yvonne Marmelle, Jenny Sorkin and Professor Streibert were precious to me, and when they entered my house I embraced them—in Jenny’s case, as if she were my child or grandchild.
At ten that night, in the intimacy of the book-lined library, I served a light French dinner with apologies: ‘This is a poor thing compared with what we had at Seven and Seven, but we all have to work next year and a dinner like theirs could incapacitate a person well into March.’ But toward the close of the meal, to get my friends laughing, I rang a cowbell and the two waitresses, assisted by Oscar, brought in for dessert three enormous pies he had purchased the day before from 7&7—apple, pumpkin, mince—and we had a true Dutch ending to a relatively austere dinner.
When we returned to the big room, talk once more became literary: ‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said, ‘or, more appropriately, brooding about the great ones who died young. Chatterton, Keats and my beloved Kit Marlowe. What a wonderfully gifted man he was, roistering at the Mermaid, writing little in his brief twenty-nine years, but all of it touched with the fire of genius. In many lines he even excelled Shakespeare.’
‘I find that hard to believe,’ Streibert said, whereupon I sent a maid for a notebook in which I had written Marlowe’s soaring line: ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Illium?’ and below it Shakespeare’s maladroit re-creation: ‘Was this fair face the cause why the Grecians sacked Troy?’
‘I stand corrected,’ Streibert conceded.
‘But one passage in Marlowe has always haunted me, from the time I memorized it in college. We gave a performance of Doctor Faustus, all young women, and I was the elder who lamented the death of the necromancer:
‘ “Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough,
That sometime grew within this learned youth …”
‘The last line really ends with learned man, but in these days I’ve modified it to my purpose.’
I visualized the mighty Marlowe being slain in a barroom brawl and asked: ‘What might he have become, had the branch not been cut?’
‘Who?’ Jenny asked, ‘Marlowe or Timothy?’
‘I’m not sure … whom I intended.’
‘You can be sure, Mrs. Garland, that Tim was destined for greatness—in his own sphere.…’
‘Do you honestly believe that, Jenny?’
‘I do. Working on the concluding pages of Dialogue convinced me. I’m sure he was moving toward some stunning departure from conventional writing.’
Having said this, the young novelist excused herself: ‘I promised my students who remained on campus that I’d help them kick in the New Year with a beer bust.’
Soon we heard her car wheels whipping through the gravel. When the sound faded, Yvonne said: ‘You can’t believe, Karl, the giant strides that young woman has made in her third draft. But what gives me confidence in her future is the ease and naturalness with which she uses simile and metaphor.’ She showed us several pages of manuscript on which she had marked lightly in pencil phrases and sentences she had liked: ‘As frenzied as a mother trying to squeeze three kids through a revolving door.’ Her description of a line coach at Nebraska: ‘He would have been invaluable when Hannibal was trying to get those elephants over the Alps,’ or the way she skewered a show-off quarter-back who could never deliver: ‘With him it was always The Night Before Charisma.’
‘I suppose I was prejudiced in my judgment of her and her work,’ Streibert said. ‘I saw her only as a bad influence on Timothy.’
But I had seen her as his salvation. This evening I was not unhappy to have her go because I wanted an opportunity to speak with Streibert and Yvonne alone, and now I broached a subject that concerned us all: ‘We’ve so much in common. We’re the ones who lost our beloved. For me, three times, my husband, my daughter, my grandson. You twice, Karl, the Irish professor you visited in Greece, and now Timothy. You, Yvonne, that gifted fellow who could talk but not write.’
‘How do you know so much?’ Yvonne asked, and Karl echoed good-naturedly: ‘Yes. You are a snoop.’
‘I had to be careful whom my grandson chose as his mentors. He chose well—I like veterans of the human wars who are scarred.’ I added: ‘I
started out afraid of you, Karl. You could have proved a very bad influence on my grandson, but fortunately Jenny came along to point him in a safer direction. And I was also afraid of you, Yvonne. I feared you were too brittle, too much of what I heard a student call “a smartass Jewish intellectual, no heart.” The way you nurtured your writer friend is the best love story I’ve heard in recent times.
‘So in the knowledge of pain you are my brother and sister. And now I propose that we pick up the conversation where we dropped it some weeks ago. Karl, are you going to resume your private life here in Dresden? And if so, on what terms?’
He sat silent, so at ten to midnight, I turned on the television and as the final minutes of 1991 ticked away, I said: ‘Good riddance! Who could tolerate another year like this?’ But I eased my judgment: ‘There were good moments, but I suppose there always are if you live enough days.’
When the silver ball dropped in New York and cheers from that vast crowd filled the big room, I rose, kissed Streibert and embraced Yvonne, managing it so that they were left standing side by side and could not escape greeting the New Year with a kiss.
As they were preparing to leave I took from the small bookcase in the big room an anthology my husband had given me years ago during a tour of Great Britain: ‘On wintry nights like this I do enjoy The Eve of St. Agnes and imagining myself immured in that medieval castle on the night of January twentieth.’ When they departed I sat down in a deep chair, with a light over my shoulder and the book in my lap. The maid extinguished the other lights and I was left in near darkness, reading.
Then a frightening thing happened. As I looked at the familiar lines of St. Agnes I had the overpowering sensation that they had lost both their vitality and their relevance to me. They were from another century, clichés almost, wordy and signifying little. They were rhythmic and predictable, with nothing fresh or meaningful about them. As I skipped here and there through the long poem I saw the phrases as different only in skill from the platitudinous rhymes of Longfellow that my grandson had ridiculed, and at last I understood what Karl Streibert, Ezra Pound and F.X.M. Devlan had been sponsoring: a dialogue between people of intelligence, heightened in significance and intensified in emotion.
The Novel Page 44
