John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

At the hospital, as at so many hospitals later, the doctor found nothing wrong. It was impossible, they told her, that her appendix could have grown back. “But it must be some thing” she said. Did they think she’d made it up?

The doctor, who had a round head and a large brown moustache, merely smiled and looked at the middle of her forehead. “It seems to be just one of those things,” he said.

“Just thank the dear Lord it’s gone and pray it won’t come back,” Aunt Mary said, and took Joan’s arm, severe as a sergeant — her normal way of showing affection. They returned to the room where Buddy and his mother were waiting.

“Nothing?” his mother said, incredulous, prepared to be annoyed at the doctor.

“Nothing they can find,” Aunt Mary said, with such finality that Buddy’s mother shook her head and said no more.

As they walked back to the elevator, Buddy took Joan’s hand.

His uncle George was a short, dapper, big-jawed, quick man who wore gold-rimmed spectacles and three-piece suits, usually brown ones and fairly conservative, though his nature made them seem merrier than they were. (In no corner of his jubilant Scorpio soul did George Preston wear checks or flashy bow ties or a moustache; though he was a teller of stories and a first-rate salesman, he was serious about life, ready every day to be called to some delicate, important work, or a friend’s marriage, or a funeral.) He was full of pleasure and darting curiosity; there was nothing decent that he wouldn’t try his hand at, from butchering cows to leg-wrestling a Seneca Indian, and nothing he tried was he bad at except for English grammar, for which he had no flair. His house on North Lyon in Batavia, New York, was atoggle from end to end with ingenious devices he’d run across in his Popular Mechanics magazines — he kept a great stack of them by the toilet in his bathroom — strings, pulleys, and levers for turning lights on and off again, or for opening or closing or starting or stopping things. When his basement flooded, as basements in his part of the city did each spring, regular as the mail, he had a steamship’s pump that he’d built, himself, to empty it. On every door and window of his house and garage and potting shed, he had clever devices he’d constructed himself to keep burglars and mischievous children out. The arches he wore in his wide brown highly polished shoes were of his own design and basement manufacture.

Given his talent and boundless energy, George Preston might have been anything; but his father died when he was still a young man and, though he wasn’t the eldest and thus wasn’t, by a certain line of reasoning, responsible, he threw himself into taking care of the family and sacrificed, pretty much without a second thought, whatever chances he might have had as an artist, engineer, or who-knows-what. He’d driven ambulance during World War I and had a thousand stories, most of them so funny that people laughed until they cried, sitting around the table in his crowded, brightly lit diningroom, or at the picnic table he had in back, behind his garden, by the horseshoes court, or at some other man’s table, for instance the long one in the high-ceilinged room in Duncan Orrick’s house. Dozens of those stories would show up in Martin Orrick’s novels. He had also, in certain moods, darker stories — and a darker streak in his character — stories of atrocities he’d seen at first hand, half-crazy Americans who drove tanks in to finish off wounded boches or took shots at the drivers of the German Red Cross. Though late in life he would come to believe he’d made a sad mistake, he resolved to bring no children into a world so bleak and dangerous, a world in which even the best of men, if the cards were right, could revert in the twinkle of an eye to murderous gorilla.

After the war he’d bumped around for six months, then worked for a while in the family dry-cleaning establishment, the Sunshine Cleaners, a long, airless place sweet-smelling as a bakery, except the smell was of starch and warm cloth and soap and cleaning fluid — a small establishment just off an alley across from the furtive back entrance to a bank and next door to a farm-implement repair shop. The rooms behind the cheerful, plant-filled front lobby were as filled with steamy windows as a winter snowstorm has flakes of snow, the walls between the windows painted dead-man gray, all the rooms crowded with bagged and loose laundry with yellow or blue tickets, and antique machinery, workers without faces, and the noise of the equipment — the woof and hiss of the big steam presser, the clush of washers, the rattle of hangers as they slid along their long wooden bars.

Later, though he still kept an interest in the place, he took on various selling jobs — as a Watkins man serving the local farmers, small-townsmen, and villagers from Rochester to Buffalo and from the shore of Lake Ontario to the hill towns of Warsaw and Perry, then as an independent “grocer on wheels” serving, among others, the people of the Tonawanda Indian Reservation, with whom he learned to speak a little Seneca and whose virtues he would admire, and whose stories he would quote, in sombre imitation of the Seneca manner, for the rest of his life; still later as a furniture salesman in one small-town furniture store after another.

Everyone liked him and he was famous for his honesty, though that was not true of the people for whom he worked. He read books about salesmanship and personal magnetism, whatever came to hand, also books that might help him judge the character of his customers — books on phrenology, palmistry, and astrology — and if he made a mistake in attempting a sale he made a careful note of it in a ledger he had, and made an effort never to repeat it. (He had once chanced upon a book about calligraphy and wrote, even when he was seventy-two and could barely hold a pen, in an elegant, tasteful hand. He used the slanted, hyperlinear hand of a nineteenth-century professional scrivener.) He was not, for all that, a hard-sell salesman but a man who believed that business was an honorable and responsible profession and, indeed, in a democracy of ordinary men, as noble a profession as a man could turn his hand to. He wouldn’t sell shoddy goods to any man if he could find him something decent for a price he could afford, nor would he lie about the value of the goods he sold — wouldn’t even lie by keeping silent. To his bosses’ displeasure, he resisted selling what he knew in advance the customer would have trouble making payments on: he would talk with the man in his merry, joking way, trying to make the man see sense and perhaps, incidentally, selling him something else he had equal use for and could more easily afford and might someday be glad he’d gotten hold of. Not at all that he was a pious moralist who delighted in butting in on other people’s business. His judgments of the customer — however merrily he talked, ducking and weaving and feinting like a boxer, rubbing his hands like a man undecided about what to eat first at some splendid potluck — were complex and serious-minded, and he understood that, when a family buys furniture, practical considerations are not always of the first importance. Occasionally people have urgent need of what they cannot afford, and the salesman’s just business is to get the sale made in the way least likely to do damage. It was not from arrogance or the wish to play God that he drew that opinion. He saw business as a service, and even used the word. Though he did not believe and would not say — except jokingly, after he’d lost a sale — that “the customer is always right,” he saw the customer as his only true employer, himself as the customer’s agent and faithful servant. He believed that if he proved himself a trustworthy servant, the customer would return when he needed George Preston’s services again, and would mention the name, or pass on the card, to people they knew who had need of him.