Christopher Hacker - The Morels

I went out onto the patio for a smoke, and to my surprise Mrs. Wright joined me. We stood side by side, looking out. I offered her a cigarette and, with a glance over her shoulder, she nodded. She kept her back to the door and her elbows tucked in and smoked with small movements so as not to betray what she was doing to those inside. Without looking at me, she began to talk about the predicament the Wrights found themselves in with their son-in-law.

Although they both had their reservations about Arthur’s left turn into fiction and worried over his ability to be a financial asset to their daughter and grandson, they were nevertheless supportive of his need to express himself creatively and of his decision to make a go of the writing life. Especially Frank. Give the boy some room to breathe, he said. After all, the family had some money, and whatever drain it might be on their daughter’s finances to have a writer for a husband certainly would be made up for by the buzz it would bring.

“We are strivers, you know,” Mrs. Wright said. “Our friends, too. As a group, we’re a competitive bunch.” And the contestants in this competition, she explained, were the children. Whenever she would get together with her friends, they traded their children’s achievements like they were playing a game of cards — a graduation, a new job, a child on the way — keeping the failures close to the vest. Arthur’s first bloom of success was a coup for her and Frank as well. There was something giddy about it she couldn’t explain and something generous that allowed their friends to participate without being jealous. So she perceived. Whereas Ethelyn Owen’s new grandson was a success only for the Owens, and subject to the petty jealousies that they were all helpless to, Arthur’s minor splash as a debut novelist was something they could all share in, as a community. And it was a success that promoted itself — neither she nor her husband ever had to mention it — their friends would come to them with news, sightings of the book in a magazine or in a bookstore. It was the prestige felt at the blackjack table during a winning streak — proud in a shy way of the table’s attention — even though you knew it was only luck that brought this about. They admired Arthur’s success in a way they wouldn’t have had it been their own child. Of their children’s success, they felt differently. They would have counted it as their own, as owed — a success they were at least partly responsible for. But Arthur’s success was a gift, and for it they were grateful.

Then came the new book. That passage at the end.

She didn’t want to think what kind of recesses such writing had come from in Arthur, or what life experience had led him to write it. She wished she could undo having read it; she didn’t want to associate Arthur with those words on those pages.

What are we supposed to do about this? Frank had wanted to know. He was worried, as was she. They were together in this at first — in their concern, in their confusion at their son-in-law, in their attempt to reconcile this young man who married their daughter and of whom they were so fond, with the man he revealed himself to be in this book.

They tried out explanations on each other: he was merely voicing a part of himself we all have, the id. Or Arthur could have been abused as a child, and this was his way of coming to terms with it. Frank reminded her that Arthur was an artist, and this is what artists did. They pushed buttons, pushed boundaries. And what about Lolita ? she added. Wasn’t that book banned in this country? Maybe it hadn’t even been Arthur’s idea. There was an agent, after all, and a publisher. Maybe somebody along the way had told him his story wasn’t risky enough, “artistic” enough. They couldn’t sell some boring old book about a sad sack. And so they insisted he spice it up. Maybe Arthur didn’t even write the passage — it could have been added after the fact, to make it more marketable to a reading public who expected extremity in their literature. Or could it be that Arthur was referencing some other work of literature? Maybe it wasn’t at all about what it seemed to be about. It was an allusion — the real subject hidden, subtextual. The way Joyce was really writing about Greek heroes when it only seemed he was writing about drunk Irishmen. She had always been too literal minded when it came to literature.

Whatever it was, and whatever the reason Arthur wrote it, it was something in their lives that they couldn’t resolve, that couldn’t be settled, as most unsettling things in their world were settled, with one of Frank’s conversational one-liners. Global Warming: Buy property in Siberia — it’ll be worth a fortune! The Massacre in Texas: Is it Waco or Wacko? Somehow, at the end of the day, having done their moral obligation of watching the news open eyed to its daily dose of horror, mulling over the tragedies of the day, to have Frank pronounce his one-liner was a real comfort. It was a way of closing the door on the world’s sadness, for the time being. It meant that they were no fools; they knew how cruel and hopeless humanity could be, and by addressing each sadness they were paying tribute to it. Joking about it was a way of distinguishing their own lives from the lives of others. She would groan at Frank’s bad joke, tell him to knock it off, these weren’t issues to joke about, but this just part of the ritual, a way to have Frank say that if you couldn’t joke about something serious, then you were really in trouble — if you couldn’t laugh at the world, then you might as well put a bullet in your head. She didn’t know what this meant, but Frank said it in a way that seemed powerful and true.

There was, however, no one-liner for what Arthur had done. The matter remained in the air, unsettled, floating between every pause in conversation.

Her friends grew conspicuously quiet on the subject of the book. But Frank’s “buddies,” the men at the veterans’ lodge, were a different matter. She didn’t know why he insisted on going to that hole-in-the-wall twice a week — three times a week, now that he was retired. It was the stomping grounds of the local bigmouths. She refused to learn any of their names — they were not friends of the family; they were men Frank drank with, nothing more. And unlike the people she counted as her friends, these men were not quiet on the subject of Arthur or his book.

For a while, Frank cast himself as Arthur’s staunchest defender. You should hear what they’re saying, he said. Bunch of ignoramuses. Ignorami? You’d think the kid was another Hitler. I said, Ever heard of Oedipus? If these guys had their way, the only books in the library would be car-repair manuals. I mean, thank God for Arthur, am I right?

But then Frank stopped relating these arguments to her; even though she was fairly certain the talk about Arthur at the lodge hadn’t stopped. Three times a week now, Frank came home in a dark mood and fell asleep in front of the television. He avoided talking to Arthur on the phone. He would call Penelope’s cell to speak with her and had her put his grandson on. If Mrs. Wright was talking with Arthur, Frank would wave the phone away when she tried handing it to him.

“You should talk to him, I tell him. What is he supposed to say, he wants to know. Say you’re angry. You’re confused. But Frank’s not the type.”

As we sat around the table with our empty plates waiting for Penelope, Will rallied us into a game. “We played it on our first day at school,” he said. “You don’t need a board or to learn any complicated rules. It’s simple. We go around the room and tell three facts about ourselves. Two of the facts are facts, and one of the facts is a lie. Then everybody has to guess which one is the lie. It’s fun, you’ll see.”