John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

It can be said in defense of Joan’s evil-eyed grandmother that it was mostly thanks to her that Joan’s father and his brothers and sister got whatever education they got, whatever feeling they developed for hard work and duty, and a good part of whatever notion, mostly generous, they got of God. Though Donald and John Elmer were as afraid of their mother as were Emmy and Cora of the Catholic Church, they put their fear behind them with the same abandon their father had showed, the night he shot the Frenchman, and turned to Methodism. Joan’s father, all through the years of her childhood, listened to the sermons with gentle tolerance and no particular interest, viewing them simply as the opinions of one man (and a man with the mouth of an elephant, at that). When it was time to sing a hymn, he ran his eyes over the words, too shy to sing, perhaps a touch ashamed of the noisy part-singing of the church that had raised him, a church where Christianity was not always what it might be, where money was gathered for foreign missions but no charity was left over for Catholics like Joan’s mother, to say nothing of Negroes, with whom he had all his life a curious affinity, though he would never deny, looking back as an old man, that he had a prejudice six miles deep; or he thought about the things he had to do this afternoon — in large part chores an intelligent theologian would describe as Christian acts: visits to sick friends and relatives, or to lonely people whom no one liked but who were, in Joan’s mother’s phrase, “real good people” (always based on evidence with which Joan was unacquainted); or he thought out problems — for instance, some necessary modification of the threading machine at St. Louis Screw and Bolt; or he would wait for the hymn’s too hurried “Amen” (as it seemed from Buddy Orrick’s Presbyterian point of view), so he could once more sit down and get to business catching up on his sleep. When Emmy had things to do or felt unwell and was unable to go to church, he went alone, a fact on which neither of them commented, since they both understood it. It was in a sense his salute to something he believed in; only an enemy, a cynic, a fool would demand that he explain what it was that he believed. Though he slept through the service as often as not, he loved it. To scorn him for sleeping through a thing so holy would be like scorning a man for sleeping through his daughter’s twentieth recital.

His religion was obvious to anyone who looked. His company was one of the first in St. Louis to insist that the union take Negroes in, though Donald had no doubt that all Negroes are lazy. He stood at the top of the main-shop stairs with a four-foot boltmaker wrench in his hands, saying nothing (but everyone knew his opinion), and it cannot be denied — whether one calls it a good thing or a bad thing — that his intellectual position and his position in the way of the shop’s only exit had influence on the Poplar Bluff poor whites who worked for him and did the voting four times before he casually stepped aside, the vote finally having gone as he thought right, and allowed them to go on home. It’s at the same time true that he thought of blacks as niggers (though more often, respectfully, as “coloreds”), tended to believe them transitional between the ape and man — so he’d many a time heard said in church, not that he believed all that churches told him; but he’d given it some thought, standing by the bars holding Joanie’s hand, looking at the gorillas at the St. Louis Zoo: he could come to no conclusion, but though he dismissed the supposed similarity of a colored’s nose and a gorilla’s nose — a blind man feeling with a stick would see the difference — he was struck by the way gorillas’ seats stuck out and by the pinkness of their palms. Once when he and Joan were standing there, watching the gorilla take listless swings at the truck tire that hung from a chain in his cage, a middle-aged black man who stood watching beside them smiled and shook his head and said, “He looks just like my mama.” Donald giggled and blushed and looked down and said heartily, “Yea-uh!” On the authority of coloreds he’d known as a child, he believed firmly — until one morning when he was fifty and it suddenly occurred to him his leg had been pulled — that by some quirk of nature every colored child born was conversant with the language of mules.

Whatever all this may say of him, he was, like every true religious man, every man’s friend and no man’s judge. He joked with whites about blacks and with blacks about whites, not from hypocrisy but because in St. Louis one did not at that time — and does not now, except with great caution — make fun of whites to whites (except of course for Jews, who are fair game for everybody, especially Jews), though one might sometimes joke with blacks about blacks, since part of their charm was the fact that they seemed to encourage it. He knew his world, though he had no conscious systems, and could move around in it easily, safely, doing nobody damage. He was generous and trusting, though he locked his car doors and rolled up the windows in the darker parts of town and in Castlereigh Estates took precautions against burglars. Despite his Baptist raising, he did nothing from duty but acted by virtue of his fundamental love of life and the optimism, deeper than reason, that religion and parents who had loved each other — however they might snap or lash out from time to time — had built into him.

His religion, in short, was middle-class Protestant, a religion for the street. It contained no angels, no clearly defined heaven, certainly no hell. His chief pleasure, when he went to church, was picking up the gossip and seeing people dressed up in their Sunday clothes. Many years later his son-in-law Martin — no Christian by any stretch of the imagination — would defend Donald Frazier’s religious nature with angry fervor; but Martin, for all the care with which he wrote, for all the precision with which he tried to think things through, would have no faintest inkling of the real secret behind his father-in-law’s character. Donald Frazier remembered his mother in a way the old photographs in Joan Orrick’s upstairs hallway neglected to record: as a fanatical idealist, a woman too intelligent by a mighty leap for her time and place, as cruel and misanthropic as Martin Orrick himself, but wildly optimistic, determined to kill the Devil, in whose existence she believed as firmly as she believed in her left foot. He remembered certain instants when his mother seemed to him a dazzling beauty: more such instants than a few. She had four sons, one daughter; and like all lively women who raise handsome, quick-witted sons in a house half governed by a handsome and quick-witted, playful man, she developed, quite unconsciously, ways attractive to men — a laugh, a glance, an occasional sudden gentleness, that softened for her children the bigotry, cruelty of tongue, and uncharitable suspiciousness that tainted her character. She loved music, especially the old Scotch songs and the more lively Baptist hymns (Joan and Buddy, when Lulu Frazier was in her nineties, would sing Irish songs, claiming they were Scotch, to tease her; whenever Joan played hymns and the assembled three generations sang, it was a rule that they must sing all the verses); she loved poetry, for the most part terrible poetry; and she loved fine clothes and festivities — a family reunion, a country Christmas with a huge tree and all the family around her, or every Sunday’s dressed-up, chattering, wonderfully horse-scented buggy ride three miles over hill and dale, through dark hollows, past Negroes’ cabins, past neatly kept fields of wheat and cane, to the Coldwater Baptist Church. Though her sons did not share her belief in the Devil, they had, at odd moments, her unearthly, eagle-sharp eyes. So, of course, had Joan. They could flash like sheet lightning if some affront, some slight to her pride made her furious, so that for many years Martin would be afraid of her, would even imagine she might someday kill him, though occasionally he saw that same flash in the eyes of his gentle son, Evan, and was unsure of himself, unsure of everything. At the darkest time of his life, it must be said, he was at his feeble best when full of doubt and irresolvable confusion.