John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

She understood what he meant. Like all old, happily married couples, they’d been talking in a kind of code for years. She touched his hand. Hers was white and liver-spotted, his, dark red and rough, with cuts and scabs where he’d barked his knuckles prying a board loose or tightening a bolt with a wrench too large. “You should tell them, Duncan. You should raise your hand and tell them.”

“No, I can’t,” he said. He tried to get his breath.

“You should. It’s something they should think about.”

“No, no.”

She leaned closer to him, pursing her lips. “Are you all right?” she said.

“Perhaps I need some air.”

They got up, with difficulty, their bodies old and stiff, and moved toward the exit, he slightly tilted, favoring his back, she walking with a great rolling limp, legacy of the time, a few years earlier, when she’d broken her hip.

The woman on the platform was reading angrily, “… and the glory of children are their fathers.”

He was better, out on the street, walking.

She said, “I think you should have stood up and told them what you think, Duncan.”

“I couldn’t seem to get my breath,” he said. “But next time.”

On two or three occasions when the two families met in Missouri, the reason for the visit was that Buddy’s family had driven out to pick up his Grandma Davis — his mother’s mother, Joan’s father’s aunt — who had been staying, for the past six months, with the Missouri cousins. She stayed with the Orricks normally, but it was in Missouri that she’d grown up — John Frazier’s twinkling, hell-raising sister — and it was in Missouri that she’d met her Welshman husband, a carpenter, and raised her children. The house she’d lived in had burned to the ground many years ago, and the friends of her childhood and the days of marriage — those who weren’t dead — were scattered now from coast to coast, living with relatives as she did, or at any rate most of them were. But even with her friends gone she loved Missouri and obviously belonged there. Though yellowish white now, her hair had once been red — like her brother’s, like Buddy’s mother’s, like Donald Frazier’s, like Joan’s — and her complexion, though faded, still carried a hint, like a painting’s undercoat, of the warmth that came from Missouri sunlight or the red Missouri earth. She could be happy anywhere, she always said, and it was true, no doubt; she loved to be with people, hear their stories, look carefully through their photograph albums, glance over at the children, observe their changes; but it was also true that whenever they drove across the Chain-of-Rocks Bridge, bringing her home for one of her visits, her face took on a mysterious peacefulness, as if she thought she was entering the Promised Land. She stayed sometimes with Betty Lou’s family, sometimes with her brother for a day or two. She didn’t get on well with her sister-in-law Lulu: against Lulu’s fierce Baptist righteousness she raised the impenetrable, infuriating battlements of her placid, all-forgiving Methodist piety, proving in her brother’s hushed, worried house that, though it may not be the case that “a soft answer turneth away wrath,” it is certainly true that it can leave wrath speechless, fuming, and more terrible than before. Her brother, who had his own ways of dealing with things, would sit rocking on the porch, his narrow head tipping in rhythm with the rocker, his crafty, wickedly humorous eyes gazing off through the peach trees that edged his front lawn — his sister in the lumpy gray armchair beside him, Lulu in the house banging pots and pans as if seeing what it took to knock holes in them — and he would say, for instance, “Sis, I b’lieve you better move on into Donald’s before Lulu gets so riled I got to shoot her.”

Mostly, during her Missouri visits, she stayed with Joan’s parents, Donald and Emmy. She was an even-tempered, generous woman who, little as she had, supported more charities than a man could shake a stick at. She would gladly mind the children, wash the dishes, dust-mop the floors, do whatever was needed, though it was not in her nature to notice, especially in a house as meticulously, inhumanly German-clean as Emmy’s, that things needed doing. She would sit in the livingroom reading old copies of the Reader’s Digest or taking a little nap sitting upright in her chair, her head supported by her goiter, and it would never occur to her to wonder what on earth had become of Emily (she was down in the basement, doing the wash, feeling persecuted); or she would sit in the kitchen, hands folded on the table, talking about old times or kinfolk, while Emmy washed and wiped the dishes, cut up celery and carrots, peeled potatoes, shucked peas, husked corn, sifted flour, made lemonade and tea, and Emmy would answer Grandma Davis’s questions with seeming interest or would remark, “Well ye-es,” or “I declare.” Since, like most people, Donald and Emmy made abstract, general human virtues of the particular natures they happened to possess, they never dreamed of hinting to Grandma Davis that if she was going to live with them — eat their food, use their telephone, sleep in their bed, pile her amber hairpins on the dresser that was theirs — she should try to be a little more help. Asking her to work would have tried their basic timidity, and since they, in her place, would have seen at a glance what needed doing and would have done it, they could only feel she took terrible advantage of their hospitality. She would have been shocked and hurt if she’d ever had the faintest inkling of how they felt — if she’d known, for instance, that when she was well out of earshot Donald would sometimes call her, with a giggle and a blush, “the Queen.”

For all that, she was in fact something of a queen. Much of the day she wrote letters in her room, keeping up with the friends and relatives she had left, or sending whatever little pittance she might have to needy Indians, orphans, southern Negroes, churches or medical stations in Africa and India, Oklahoma and New York. She was a preserver of traditions and rituals, telling the children stories of the family, how her father’s people had come up from South Carolina to Kentucky and eventually to Missouri — you could walk in a straight line all day long and never leave Frazier land — or she would gather them around her chair and read the Bible to them, explaining the meaning of everything, explaining without rancor — with sympathy, in fact — how the Jews, despite all the warnings of the prophets, had betrayed Our Lord and had been forced, exactly as the prophets foretold, to wander the face of the earth all these centuries, despised by mankind, and had never been granted a home. “It’s a strange thing, a terrible strange thing,” she said thoughtfully, almost with distress, but never for an instant would she question her Maker’s plan.

Buddy Orrick would remember all the rest of his life certain moments from those times Grandma Davis had spent with them, talking of Jesus and heaven’s golden streets and angels. He would remember her reading of the story of Samuel, and how deeply impressed he had been by its message: if ever he should hear a voice call his name in the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep, he should answer, “Here am I, Lord.” Joan would remember not the briefest flicker of those pleasant times — perhaps she’d experienced fewer of them; more likely she’d seen past Grandma Davis’s opinions instinctively and, when the old woman talked, let her mind wander. What she remembered — not clearly, but with the greatest pleasure — was a book her mother had read to her, a large book with pictures that had a great deal of purple in them, the story of Mr. Mixiedough, a story that somehow involved the whole world’s becoming dark.