John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

As a general rule, the stores for which he worked didn’t share his philosophy — not surprisingly, of course: it was late in the day for an old-time Yankee peddler. The stores for which he worked were owned by people interested in making money quickly, people who knew about interest rates and inventory shift, but nothing about gluing or angled joints or fabrics. They were in “business,” not “furniture.” They were strangers who came to the hardware-store and tourist-court villages of western New York from the high-pressure clip joints of Syracuse, Rochester, or Buffalo, where volume was the not very carefully guarded secret and where the customer expected to be cheated and was. Personal relationships between salesman and customer were unheard of in such places, if only because the customer was forever on the move, chasing down leads on the American Dream in Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, leaving in his wake a great flutter of unpaid bills. George Preston hated his employers and made no bones about how he felt; but he was easily the best furniture salesman in the area, and after a little unpleasantness his employers invariably let him go his way until, despite his efforts, their shoddy business failed and another stranger bought up the inventory and the battle began again.

He was a fiercely energetic salesman, one who would drive miles after the store had closed to look at a piece of furniture reported as failing to hold up — he would do a little carpentry or tacking or sewing and then a better sales pitch than he’d offered the first time, this time for free — and he would personally look into the problems of a customer who couldn’t pay the installments, yet he had abundant energy left over for other things. He had a vegetable and flower garden that was the envy of all who knew him — a picket-fenced, rose-gated square of land behind his ordinary house, a garden with pebble paths and neatly lettered signs, flowers and vegetables arranged to suit the markings on an intricate map he kept in what he called his den. He had at one time done beautiful pencil and charcoal sketches, mostly pictures he’d copied out of books and magazines; and though a professional artist would eventually have noticed that he’d never had a lesson, no ordinary eye could have discerned the fact. In their small, thickly over-furnished house, he and his wife, Buddy’s aunt Mary, had charcoal sketches of hunting dogs, landscapes, horses, old mills, barns, cattle in a pasture, forests; and though they were amateur, and some of them copies, they were the work of a man who had an eye. One sees the same thing in the photographs he took. He’d begun because, working in his garden evenings — with his sister Hattie, who lived with them — he had loved sunsets, the special green light that came over the garden and the vacant lot behind, the cloud formations and depths of red, yellow, blue, orange, violet that would blossom for an instant and never be repeated. He worked up to a two-hundred-dollar 35mm Kodak with all the trimmings — tripod, lenses, lens brushes, carrying case — and took hundreds of pictures of sunsets and roses, later boxes and boxes of pictures of the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, and the South Dakota Badlands, wherever he and his wife chanced to spend their once-a-year two-week vacation; also hundreds of pictures of places in Pennsylvania and New York State that they could reach— sometimes with Buddy and Joan — on a weekend. He took the usual photographs, trying for the world, not artistic innovation — the arches at Watkins Glen, the Bridal Veil at Niagara Falls, the waterfall and trestle at Letchworth Park — but the photographs he took had unusual power. He understood light — understood the single beam that comes slicing through the darkness of a vine-hung grove, the ripple of light in a brook as it emerges from an overhang of roots, the polychrome haze above a factory. Toward the end, he took photographs only of people, always people he loved and understood. Some of them would hang on Joan Orrick’s upstairs wall.

Despite the fact that he read all he could find about astrology, phrenology, palmistry, and the rest — and tried to make practical application of what he learned — he was never a credulous, superstitious man. As he explained to Buddy Orrick once, leaning toward him, taking his arm in his right hand, the way salesmen do, and gesturing with his left, “Pontius Pilate was right: ‘What is truth?’ That’s the question. Yet it exists, we all know. The real moral of that horrible story is, Pity the bastard that guesses wrong!” He had no use for organized religion. He’d once been cheated in a business deal by a minister at the Batavia Presbyterian Church, and it was a thing he could never forgive or even be persuaded to try to understand. He could have forgiven almost anything — fornication, sacrilege, theft, even murder — but never dishonesty in business. Business was precious; its laws were the holiest laws he knew. A man who could defile the laws of business could do anything, and the fact that such a man could occupy a pulpit put God’s special interest in churches in the gravest doubt. “God was a businessman,” he used to say merrily when ministers came to call. “Big funny-lookin brown-eyed Jewish fella. Matter of fact he was in the furniture business. Did cabinetwork.” He didn’t scorn churches; he dismissed them with a wave, as he dismissed flying saucers. His wife was a faithful churchgoer, and that was fine with him, but as for himself he’d never again darken a church door, or rather, brighten it, since everywhere he went people smiled and traded jokes with him, mostly off-color ones, or spoke of their families and latest strokes of luck, and thinking back later to his wonderfully beaming bald head, they would smile again.

Though he was not credulous or superstitious, he was interested all his life in magic and psychic phenomena and had in his library, which later went to Martin Orrick, books ranging from the works of W. W. deLaurence to those of Swedenborg. Both his father and his father’s brother Bill, who lived with them, had been turn-of-the-century amateur magicians who attended experiments of the notorious Dr. Luther Flint, witnessed escapes by the incredible Houdini, and bought every magic book or illusionist’s device they could afford. Like Flint himself, they were fascinated by the possibility that, despite the certain fraudulence of nearly everything they saw in the theaters or the upstairs séances of sharp-eyed old Rochester ladies, something in all that mumbo-jumbo might be true. It was, perhaps, the safety valve of their rationalism. George Preston’s father was, by profession, an animal trainer: he broke horses for the coach or wagon or “the ladies’ pleasure” and, on the side, trained dogs, cats, and mice. Men had at that time fewer books on the training of animals than we have today, and a trainer earned his reputation by learning to analyze an animal problem and solve it. Though “behaviorism” was a word that had not yet been perpetrated, all nineteenth-century animal trainers were behaviorists, and those who were religious, as was George Preston’s father, sooner or later confronted the greatest and oldest of philosophical problems.

Men had of course special reasons, at that time, for suspecting that there might be more to the occult than the ordinary skeptic would admit. Mesmerism was still new and shocking, and though the Académie Franchise had denounced Mesmer as a charlatan, anyone who troubled to learn the technique knew that “animal magnetism” was real. George Preston’s father and uncle Bill learned the art and were soberly convinced that the only reason they couldn’t mesmerize people who were miles away was that they were doing something wrong. They had long discussions of these mysteries and attended every experiment they could get to. Also, on the side, less for simple pleasure than as insurance against the chance of bunkum, they learned tricks with cards, goldfish, rabbits, nickel-plated pistols, and mirror boxes. Many of these George Preston learned, some only when his father and uncle were dead and he inherited their books. At his own death he passed them on to Buddy, through whom they reached Evan, who made them the backbone of his wonderfully skillful, ridiculous act. (“Goldfish?” he would say, raising the handkerchief behind which he was supposed to find the ace of hearts. “Oh well,” he would say to the audience, smiling and blushing with pleasure, exactly as his grandfather would do, “it could be worse. Once I got chickens.”)