John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“I think, actually—” Esther said.

“No no, you stay right there. I’ll run get the tea.”

Esther sighed.

Suddenly there came from the bathroom a kind of bumping noise, and they both caught their breath. Miss Editha had fallen.

“God damn her,” Miss Octave whispered. “She always does that. She does it to get attention!”

“Let me help you,” Esther said.

They could hear her calling to them, a kind of whispered moan of rage.

“Oh well, don’t you know,” Miss Octave began. But she was confused, and still Miss Editha was calling.

At last, full of revulsion and grief of a kind large and vague, as if for all humanity (but it was not: she knew what she was grieving for), Esther got up and groped her way ahead of Miss Octave to the bathroom. The smell was overpowering, unspeakable, violent, and the old lady’s moaning was wound inextricably into the smell. Esther Clumly felt her way toward the noise, walking bent over, both arms out, reaching, and came at last upon a cold, wet, bony knee pointing up at the ceiling from near the floor. She felt up the body toward the head, awkwardly but quickly, and at last found the elderly poetess’s arm and shoulder. “Let me help you,” Esther said.

Behind her Miss Octave whispered clearly, like some Eastern priestess pronouncing the terrible secret, “She’ll outlive us all. Don’t pity her. She’s indestructible.”

It was dark out now, the way Esther Clumly liked it best. She could tell by feel when it was dark. Main Street east of the business section was solemn and full to overflowing with nightsounds as crystal-clear and clean as the taste of a glass of white wine from the refrigerator. She passed the iron fence of the Children’s Home, and, straining her ears, she caught the pleasant sounds of their playing inside the big house. One of Batavia’s mansions, in the old days. People said it was falling to ruins now, huge ugly cracks in the white brick walls, the fire escapes gone rusty and crooked with age. Through the wrought-iron posts of the fence she discovered stiff grass almost waist-high. Poor children, she thought. And poor Miss Octave, poor Miss Editha, poor Ed Burlington, poor Fred, poor Esther. Once May Brumstead had run the Children’s Home, the kindest, sweetest woman who ever lived. She’d been a singer once. The sweetest singer in the world. She’d studied in New York, and Lily Pons was a friend of hers. She’d given her life for those children, and when she was there it really had been a home, whatever it was now. She was as round and soft as a pigeon, and her voice was exactly like the gentle cooroo of the pigeons in Esther’s father’s hayloft, long, long ago. It would be good to give one’s life for a worthy cause, find satisfaction. And it was terrible, oh, terrible, to be, instead, a Cause for other people.

I was a person of talent, Esther Clumly was saying to herself. I could carry a tune when I was very young, or so my father used to say, and I was a quick learner. I could have written poetry, like Editha. Fred used to say I talked just like a poet, and I did. “How beautiful it is,” I would say, standing with him on the hill looking down on the gravel plant stretched out gray and mysterious in the dusk. “It’s like fog gently drifting on the breast of a quiet sea.” He’d squeezed my hand. “You’re like a poet, Esther,” he would say. But I lost that. Why? It made me feel odd, I guess, trying to talk that way. There were people who would laugh and say cruel things. That girl. What was her name? She had white-blonde hair, and she was a cousin of Fred’s, no more than a child, sixteen or so, and I was in my twenties. I said, “On a day like this you feel God’s very close.” She said, “We better look busy.” She was right though. I felt foolish, and the reason was that the thing I’d said was silly, whatever Fred might think, and perhaps it was after that that I began to see that all the pretty things I had always thought and said were horribly horribly silly. I wanted to do something, change beautiful hollow words into actions. I remember thinking, if only I could see, so that I could paint. But I couldn’t see, and so I tried to take music lessons — as my mother had wanted me to do. But it was too late, and, worse than that, there was something the same about pretty words and music. I wanted to be

Horrible

Dear God I want

(She saw herself squatting in the garden, turning over a chip of earth-smeared brick. She wanted to be a piece of dirty brick, or an old wooden crate, or one of those tumbledown barns on her father’s farm. The foolish blind woman stands up now, vague face crafty, rubbing the dirty brick between her fingers and thumb. A saint, ha ha ha. Full of visions of joy forever lost, the steep green hillsides of Liberty, N.Y., the noise of the waterfall, the thrill of running in an open field, head thrown back, hair flying, beyond the fence six cows and a bobcalf watching with bored curiosity. One grew up, in spite of everything, and life became self-betrayal.)

Words. More empty, pretty words.

Self-betrayal.

Tulips.

Steam shovel.

It’s interesting, when you think about it. All love poems talk about the lady’s eyes. It’s impossible to write a love poem without speaking of eyes. Eyes are the windows of the soul; something like that. A poem, if I remember. Then a woman without eyes cannot be loved. Her soul is sealed up like a vicious dog chained in a cellar, and little by little it goes mad, or loses spirit and eventually dies, and lucky to escape, at that. My only hope must be giving my love to others, and I’ve failed. At the Sunday school, when Ed Burlington was there, I couldn’t control them. “Make them love you,” they said. But they missed the point. Then I tried to help out at the Blind School after that, and there I was worse, because the children were as rowdy as any other children, still stupidly happy, or so it seemed to me. And then too, of course, all that self-pity of mine. Surely no one in the world has ever been more sick with self-pity. A dungeon worse even than blindness, inescapable. The very wish to escape turns into self-pity, and so the shovel I try to escape with turns out to make the dungeon room smaller and smaller.

Stop this this instant.

Yes, certainly. I meant to. Any minute now.

But still she was moving her lips as she walked through the center of town, past the stores, the movie theaters, the solemn stone and granite banks where her footsteps came back to her more sharply than elsewhere, and the noise of passing cars took on a harsher, more insistent growl.

As she was passing the police station she frowned and her lips stopped moving and she stopped to think. Then, abruptly, she turned up the walk to go in. Why not? She would stay for just a moment. A nice surprise.

As she touched the door it opened away from her as if by itself, and she was startled.

“Well look who!” a cheerful voice boomed at her. Miller, she realized after an instant. “Hey Shorty! Look what the cat dragged in.” Again he laughed, and Esther felt, suddenly, like Esther the Queen. She heard Figlow coming around his desk to greet her. Behind him the police radio was crackling and spitting as usual, and overhead the old-fashioned fan was mumbling softly. The room smelled of smoke and linseed oil — the oil on the floor.

“Hello there, Mrs. Clumly. Long time no see,” Figlow said. He took her hand and squeezed it, like a gentleman. “To whatta we owe the occasion of this honor?”

“I thought I’d just drop in and say hello,” she said. “I was passing by, you know. Is Fred in?”

“The boss?” Miller said. “He went home.”

She could imagine him smiling at her, winking perhaps.