John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“I guess he’s hunting,” Kozlowski said.

Clumly blew out smoke. “You guess he’s hunting.”

It did not matter, now that Clumly had seen her. He was ashamed of having hoped for a parade.

4

Clumly was in plain clothes. A blue serge suit. Trousers with enormous pleats in them, a double-breasted coat, dark brown shirt, wide tie, black hat on his head. On the wire hanger in the closet of the otherwise empty room he had his black winter coat. He stood by the window, leaning on his knees, in the third-floor room where he went to listen to the tapes, and to look at him you would have thought he had taken on still more weight, the past few hours: he might have weighed tons and tons, like one of the damned. When Kozlowski had let him off this afternoon, Esther was out. Clumly had come up at once to where he had hidden the tapes, and he’d found that the tapes were gone.

“Impossible!” Clumly had said. “My own wife!” He’d run down to the bedroom (still wearing his uniform) and hunted there — through his shirt drawer, his underwear drawer, the drawer in the highboy where he kept his father’s old shaving equipment. He looked in the closet, in the box he kept under the bed, in the medicine chest in the bathroom. He stood patting his cheeks, trying to remember. He looked downstairs. Useless. Life is full of deadly ironies.

He went back up to the bedroom and closed the door behind him and leaned on it, thinking. Well, he’d known, hadn’t he, that his time had run out? There would be criminal charges no doubt. Correct. (It flitted through his mind that the Sunlight Man was a natural for “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met.” He shook his head crossly to get rid of the thought. Getting old, he thought. Even his mind would allow him no dignity.)

Where was I? Yes. They’ve got hold of the tapes, so they know. “This is irregular, Clumly.” “I’m aware of that. Yes.” “Highly irregular. Negligent.” “Yes, yes, yes.”

Someone had died, he remembered again, through his incompetence.

He thought of the stages of life the psychiatrist had mentioned. Strange to say, he had heard it all without listening. Clumly was in the twilight stage. Not that sixty-four was old, exactly. He still had his teeth. He’d be going strong at ninety. Good stock, as Miss Woodworth would say. But twilight, nevertheless. No longer fit for the world. One further injustice. Was a man no more than a monkey? Young monkeys played games, learning the tricks that would keep them alive when playtime was over. They reached maturity and they reproduced, and they used what skills they had to protect the young. Then the old monkey died. Not so with man. At the Tonawanda Reservation — and it was the same everywhere with Indians, or with those African savages you read about — the old people were the keepers of the law, the guardians of the mysteries: it was not a case of mere sinking into the unconsciousness of childhood, it was a further progress, a final stage in the sun’s long ride into darkness, and in that final stage the sun carried all it had known before, all its intellect and activity, but now surpassed mere intellect and activity, surpassed mere propagation, mere earning, mere things of nature, and rose to the things of culture, to civilization! Not so with us. “What is the wisdom of the American old man?” asked Clumly of the room. He contends with the young. For all his pot belly and his ashen skin, he throws on his bikini and parades himself at the edge of the pool. He colors his hair, reads dirty books, perhaps; drinks beer. A sobering thought. He went over to the bed to sit down on it, and when he looked up he saw himself in the mirror, a shrunken old cop with handsome teeth, still wearing his uniform. Thoughtfully, he un-knotted the tie and unbuckled the collar. Then, though he never wore ordinary clothes except every second Saturday, when he had his day off, and Sundays of course, he changed into street clothes. He had stepped down, as Moss would express it. He would meet the Sunlight Man, tonight, as Fred Clumly, Citizen. Or less. As Fred Clumly, merely mortal, nothing more than — without any grandiose overtones — a man. Then, carrying his coat on his arm, not because he would need a coat but because it was a business which demanded the greatest formality, and, lacking his uniform, he could not endure it without, at least, the black coat handed down to him by his father, he went up to the third-floor room to watch and wait.

He stood by the window, leaning on his knees, and you would have thought he weighed tons, like the devil himself. Here, above where the trees intercepted the sunlight, there were certainties, including certainties of doubt. He doubted that he had been a good husband, for all his devotion to duty and justice with respect to his wife. He doubted that he had been honest with himself or honest with his wife either. There was a good deal he could have done and should have done. He should have sailed around the world, should have bought himself a boat on Lake Ontario. The unrealized life lurched and groped inside him like some primeval creature in an ancient jungle, and its presence inside him mocked and poisoned the life he had lived. “Nobody’s life is perfect,” he said. But there were reasons for that. Any life a man chooses, Clumly mused, betrays the life he failed to choose. And now it was no longer important, it was enough to know that it was so. “Good luck,” he said aloud, seeing again in his mind’s eye the physician who could not choose which harm to inflict on his son. “And good luck to Kozlowski,” he thought. Because Kozlowski would come for him, would imagine it was his solemn duty to escort the old man to this last conversation with the Sunlight Man — with Taggert Hodge, condemned. But Clumly would not be there when Kozlowski came. He would be gone, dressed as an ordinary man, and whatever he learned or failed to learn would have nothing to do with law and order in the common sense. He had promoted himself. He was now Chief Investigator of the Dead.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to speak to you tonight on Law and Order. No subject could be more familiar, and more strange. What do we mean by Law and Order? Think back to the time when you and I, not human yet, bumped our blind way through this world as fish. .

Looking almost straight down, just over the gable of the porch roof below him, he could see, between the branches of the nearest tree, a small patch of grass and sidewalk. Four boys ran into the area framed by roof and leaves, one of them wearing a bright yellow jacket, and then the next instant they were out of it again, bounding up onto his porch and along it to Clumly’s right and then away, out through the garden. “Stop!” he thought. But though his policeman’s instinct was strong, he did not stir a muscle. A moment later a man with a stick came into the small space Clumly could see and paused there, looking left and right. Clumly thought of raising the sash and calling down to him, but still he did not act. The man went off to the right, still looking around. There were voices now, two adults, the words distinct. Clumly felt queerly removed from it all, emotionally as aloof from the world where hooligans ran through people’s yards as he was physically aloof from the street.

It was half an hour later that Esther came home. He watched her come slowly up the walk, her white cane in one hand and, in the other, her sewing basket. She too, you would have said, had taken on weight. Esther had taken the tapes. Her reason was unimportant. When he heard her coming up the stairs toward the second floor he tip-toed out of the third-floor room where he’d been waiting and went up the splintery attic stairs to wait while she replaced the tapes, if she’d brought them back, or changed her clothes, if that was her intent. Nothing especially mattered but that she not see him just now, not trouble him with a confession of error, or with malice, or with freighted silence, or with anything ordinarily human. He heard her coming on toward the third floor now. Around him, rafters with cobwebs, boxes, trunks, the furniture from Aunt Mae’s sunporch — it had been here for years and years — lamps, mason jars, rope, his father’s violin. He’d forgotten about that, the violin. He’d sit in the kitchen in the gray shingled house they’d lived in then, on the Lewiston Road, and, bow lightly hanging from his plumber’s fist, he would play for hours and hours. He played well. Fred Clumly’s mother would sit under the clock darning, nodding her head. It was dark outside, and inside there was only the comforting yellow of the oil lamp’s light above his mother’s elbow. When she nodded her shadow would extend itself on the wall, then quickly retract. “Good luck,” he whispered to the dead.