John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

The minute he spotted her waiting on the porch of her apartment house, Craine knew he was in dutch. He swung the truck into the driveway almost without slowing, then hit the brake and skidded, meaning to let her know he’d been hurrying, it wasn’t his fault that he was late. It was only when he heard the gravel spitting, flying from the tires, that he realized he’d sent the wrong signal: she would assume he was drunk. Nothing could be farther from the truth, in fact. He’d jumped into the truck, turned the ignition, and jerked forward all in one crazy motion, not even thinking of taking the bottle from under the seat where it was hidden. Now as he sat bent hard over the steering wheel, his left foot on the clutch, his right on the brake, staring out the window with widened eyes as if no one could be more surprised by the suddenness of his arrival than he was, he understood that, by crimus, he’d done it this time. If she’d begun to trust him, she was finished with that now. It surprised him that she didn’t turn instantly into the house, or dart down onto the sidewalk and stride away without him. She simply stood there in the porch shadows, small and furious, clutching her armload of books and staring at him, her dark eyes sharp as an Injun’s. He thought of yelling something at her, taking the offensive, and thought in the same mental motion of calling out, Sorry I’m late! He tried to think of some lie — it was true that his watch was undependable, he thought, then backed off from the thought, somehow confused: was it or wasn’t it? And all at once he understood that he’d waited too long, it was too late now to say anything, nothing to do but sit there.

Suddenly, to his astonishment, she broke free of the pillar she’d been leaning against and came hurrying down the porch steps into the sunlight and over toward his truck. Like an eager servant, he reached over to open the right-hand side door. She climbed in. She met his grin with a black-eyed flash of anger, then turned her face forward, staring out the window, saying nothing. He shifted into reverse and hurriedly, smoothly, let the clutch out.

“Do you realize what time it is?” he heard her ask, clear as day, though her mouth never moved.

“Yes I do,” he said crossly. “I got a watch, same as you.”

She shot a startled look at him, then looked forward again.

“You’re only maybe fifteen minutes late,” he said. Part of his mind stood back from the rest, pondering the strange possibility that he’d begun to read minds. He asked, “What building’s your class in?”

“Faner,” she said.

“English class?”

“Biology.”

“I thought Faner was mostly for English,” he said, merely to be talking; he’d never thought one thing or another about what was taught in Faner. The place was too big, he realized on reflection, to be the province of any one department.

The girl said nothing, still punishing him, or punishing him and thinking. It was interesting, Craine mused, that she’d decided to ride with him in spite of her anger. No real choice, maybe. He was the only ride she had, and it was too far to walk; he’d seen enough to know she was something like obsessive about her schoolwork. Yet that wasn’t all of it. She’d stood there waiting in the shadows of the porch like an orphan, waited some twenty minutes beyond the time he’d said he’d come; and with good argument against it, when he’d come into the driveway like a crazy man, she’d decided, suddenly and sternly, to ride with him. Her skin was brown, slightly golden, as if maybe she’d spent the summer in Florida. He remembered — and thought, the same instant: There it is again, memory, live and healthy, as if it were all half an hour ago —how as a child he’d watched, furtively, those brown, black-haired girls with the Oriental eyes, mysterious to him as midnight. Catholics, Jews … He’d hardly dared speak to them. Once on a hayride, something to do with high school, an Italian girl had kissed him. She wore a perfume called Tabu. Even now when, on rare occasions, the scent touched his nostrils, his chest would go light.

He slowed for jaywalkers, three boys and two girls. They didn’t even look up, naturally assuming he would slow for them. Aristocrats.

“Biology,” he said. “You ever read Charles Darwin?”

Elaine said nothing, though her sternness had changed a little, had just perceptibly relaxed, as if she’d begun to imagine possible excuses for him, or begun to turn her arguments inward, against herself. She looked down at the books on her knees, then back up at the windshield.

“I went through a Darwin bender once,” Craine said. “Every book I could lay my hands on. You aware that when he went on his Beagle voyage he didn’t go as ship’s naturalist — went as companion to the captain?”

She said nothing.

“Very interesting fact. Man named Captain Fitzroy. You see, how it was, in those days, the captain was a man of such high class he couldn’t speak with the crew. Gave the first mate his orders, and that was it. All the rest of the time he was alone, even ate alone. Lot of them went crazy, like Captain Ahab. Very common. Five-year voyage, not a soul to talk to … Very common for captains to commit suicide, in fact — as Captain Fitzroy did, about two weeks after Darwin left him. Slit his throat, if I remember. Very strange world people lived in, back then.”

Craine squinted, leaning forward, seeing clearly only now, as he told her about it, what a queer world indeed those old-timers had lived in, friendship between the classes as shocking, in fact unthinkable, as Darwin’s ideas about our great-great-grandfathers and the monkeys. He imagined Captain Fitzroy alone on the bridge, hardly more than a boy — twenty-six when he set out, unless that was someone else, some other old tale — his peasant crew on the decking below him, tugging at their forelocks if they happened to meet his eye … the image was so vivid in Craine’s mind that he almost forgot he was driving and had to veer suddenly to the right to avoid a car. When he glanced at Elaine she was looking at him in alarm. He steadied into his lane, pretending nothing had happened, then remembered to bear left for his approaching turn.

“But that’s not the interesting part,” he continued, pushing in the clutch, then the brake, waiting for his chance, some hint of a break in the two lanes of oncoming traffic. To their left, the campus lay as separate from the town as the world of Captain Fitzroy on the Beagle —buildings, trees, hedges, close-cropped rolling lawns, moss-covered boulder formations hauled in, back in the fifties, on flatbed trucks. Sunlight lay over the campus, the gold-leaved walkways, like grace. “The interesting part is that Fitzroy was a religious fundamentalist. Darwin might be his equal in aristocratic blood, but other than that, poor Fitzroy couldn’t have found a man less like himself if he’d tried. Luckily Darwin was sick a lot, which made him keep to his cabin — he was sickly all his life. And also, no doubt, he was there to gather specimens, and he didn’t want to ruin the chance by getting Fitzroy down on him. All the same, they had some battles, as you can imagine.”

A break came and Craine made his turn, then sped up, almost reckless, making up lost time. Without a word Elaine Glass reached out with both hands, bracing herself on the dashboard. The streets through the campus were inactive, as they always were during class hours. Almost the minute the bell rang, they would clog. On the lawns, in the soft shadows of trees, students sat reading and talking, or lay asleep.

Craine said, “You can’t help wondering how much influence it had on Darwin’s theory — that knucklehead fundamentalism of Fitzroy’s. Darwin, you know, took a very hard line on the God business. Crossed him right off. Not like Isaac Newton, who could manage both opinions, mechanistic and mystic-theological. Darwin said — softly and politely, as is the aristocratic way—‘No God, brothers. Junk evolving into junk. That’s all.’ ”