John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

I did what I could, I was a better wife than some. There were times when it seemed to her that they were happy, more happy than anyone she knew. She would sit in the truck at the Indian Reservation and smile fondly to herself while he talked his ridiculous pidgin English to some fat drunken Indian she could smell from fifteen feet away. “Buyum vanillum,” he would say — selling Watkins products then — and the Indian would say “What the hell is ‘vanillum’?” But my dear good Clumly would not understand, for, whatever his other virtues, his greatest virtue was tenacity, especially when the idea he was clinging to was wrong. But they liked him, understood him, by some clear and infallible instinct knew that he was not looking down or milking them of whatever he could get but merely bungling: “N’yas-kah-weh-noh-gah-gweh-goh,” he would say at the door, and they would answer in ancient Seneca and not laugh in his face, and when his truck mired up to the axles in some yard set deep in the woods they would take off their shirts and come grunt him and hoist him up to hard ground again, and they’d laugh and they’d slap each other’s shoulders and they would shake her hand and, if they were drunk, would kiss her. She was young, still able to charm without intention. Then old Mrs. Blue-eyes.

She was old, and her granddaughter was blonde, they said. We always went into her cabin when he sold to her, and that night the granddaughter was there. She was home from college. She moved as silently as any of them, but her smell was the smell of a white girl from the city. “I want you meet my granddaughter,” Mrs. Blue-eyes said, and the girl stood before me and I said, “Hello.” “Clara is her name,” Mrs. Blue-eyes said, and I said, “What a pretty name.” The old woman said, “Her eyes are blue, like all my children, so therefore she is white.” “Let me look at you,” I said, and she came a step closer. The instant my fingers touched her cheek I knew she was beautiful, and as I moved my fingertips over her forehead and down past her eyes and the wings of her nose to her mouth, I became afraid. “How do you like college?” I said. “I enjoy it very much,” she said. And I thought, Do you pity me? Do I disgust you? I had seen the line of her mouth, and though it was a gentle mouth there was pity in it, disgust. I said when we were driving home, “She’s a beautiful girl.” He said, “Oh, so-so.” It was the first time he’d lied to me, as far as I could tell.

Enough. That was not what she’d started out to say.

We were happy, much of the time, she’d meant to say.

Were we?

Well, we made do. She was glad to say, he was always a man who loved work. Jobs that would have bored another man were exciting to him. Even the bakery truck. He would calculate ways of speeding up the loading, ways of rearranging the bakery goods he carried so that everything was conveniently in reach. He would think about it nights, and when he solved some trifling problem, he was radiant. She thanked God. How lucky I was, I thought, to have a husband like him. There were times when I felt less than human, and studying my face with my fingertips in the dark, I knew I was no longer pretty — if I had ever been pretty. Uglier than ever then, to speak plain. But it was not as great a disaster for me as for many women: my husband was not that kind. He loved his work, sat fascinated beside the radio listening to Drew Pearson or Lowell Thomas or Gabriel Heatter, or sat with some magazine, grunting with surprise or interest or irritation, and it seemed to me that he was better than other men, more mature, a rock.

She would hear them in the evening, she sitting on the back step in a holy spell of peace and silence, when he was working in the garden, and some neighbor was telling him some dirty story. His laughter was merely polite, a little embarrassed, annoyed. On Saturday nights their neighbors to the left would sit up drinking late, and when she and Fred were in bed half-asleep the neighbors would begin to shout, and they would call each other such names it made your heart race, and sometimes he would beat her. “Dear God,” Esther would cry in her heart, “I thank you! Watch over my precious, good husband who hasn’t the sense to watch over himself, and make him happy.” He seemed to be happy. He was so wise, so considerate of others, it used to make her cry. “There’s a very good chance that if you have children,” the doctor said, “they’ll be afflicted.” Blind, he meant; half-blind at birth and, by twenty, blind as bats. They had wanted children. It had seemed a kind of payment life owed for what they’d suffered. She was ashamed. Once again it was all her fault; her weakness — some ugly burnt-out thing in her blood — was once again an invisible wall raised more around his life than hers. He accepted it, with such terrible kindness that she was robbed of any right to anger — the rage that had been building in her all day, since the doctor had told her — anger that for sanity’s sake she had to vent on him because there was no one else, had no possible outlet — and so she raged at him, unthinkably cruel, stark mad, in fact.

Why do I do this? Over and over and over the same old ground. So much love, so much happiness.

(“But perhaps, in spite of all you say, he drove you to it,” Reverend Willby said. His voice seemed sly. Then is nothing good? Is nothing honest? “I don’t say that, my child, not at all. But isn’t it interesting, after all, that all his loyalty and patience and kindness should inspire in you no self-confidence! Think of the love of our Heavenly Father. As I said in my sermon, just the Sunday before last, what freedom, what confidence we feel when we know in our hearts that the Lord is our shepherd, He loves us and forgives us and cherishes us as we cherish our children! My child, my child, I believe you when you say that your husband is kind and patient and good, but I cannot believe you when you hint that he is beyond all the sticky unpleasantness of our common human nature. Surely we must not forget, dear lady, that there is pleasure in our self-sacrifice. Our kindness has been tainted with masochism since the world began, and it is not to our best interest to forget it. Think better of yourself, my dear Mrs. Clumly. No man was ever perfect but Jesus Christ. Do you think it doesn’t give you pleasure — if only a drop of pleasure — to tell me that you are unworthy of being alive? And, on the other hand, do you think I don’t find some touch of pleasure in suggesting that your husband is less than he seems — no better than yourself, in fact? Perhaps worse?” She had not believed him but she had felt better afterward, riding home in the taxi. Reverend Willby had no idea what human goodness was, and no more religion than a fly. She sat smiling to herself like a crafty witch, as though she had just avenged herself — though in fact she’d said nothing to the minister, of course: had nodded her thanks, as if thoughtfully, and had retired timidly, ashamed of herself for having turned to a man she had no reason to trust. And yet her anguish had been urgent, so terrible lately that she was afraid of the approach of September. She had been right to ask for help, merely wrong in imagining that anyone could give it. When the cab driver opened the door he reached in and caught her arm and threw her off balance a little, so that she bumped the door with the side of her head. Let go! she cried inside her mind, get your hands off! but she said nothing, paid him timidly and allowed him to lead her up on her porch, where she said, “Thank you, you’re very kind,” and gave him a quarter and hoped he would swallow it and choke. “No trouble, Ma’am,” the driver said. You don’t know, she said in her mind. You’ll never dream! Blindman’s tears seeped down her cheek, more horrible, she believed, than tears from the dead.)