John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

In their search for something beyond mere illusion, George Preston’s father and uncle Bill gave psychic tests to George and his brothers and sisters. They would deal out, for instance, a pack of ordinary playing cards, face down on the table, from which each member of the family was to select one without looking at it, and was to sit with his fingertips just touching the card until he believed he knew the card’s value. It was a foolish game, George’s mother thought, more tiresome even than guessing thoughts or Ouija, and no one in the family would have played it if George’s father and uncle Bill hadn’t been salesmen as clever as George Preston was to be. They would play this “game,” as they called it, hour after hour, on the brothers’ theory that psychic power was a thing that required developing, like a muscle; and time after time the members of the family would, after much thought, name the cards they thought they had, and the cards would be turned up, and everyone would be wrong.

One night, according to family legend, an odd thing happened. Buddy Orrick’s uncle George, who was six at the time, fell asleep in his chair while the game dragged on. When his father called his name, he looked around, confused, realized what was happening, and named a card at random — the four of clubs. “Turn it over, Georgy,” his father said, a touch impatient, and he was already turning to the next player when George’s small fingers turned over the four of clubs. According to George Preston’s story later, the family whooped with delight and hugged him, overjoyed because in this game for loonies and idiots someone had finally won. His father and uncle were eager to deal the cards and try again, but it was late and George’s mother — she was a pinched-looking woman who wore her hair in a bun and, judging by her photograph, had no good to say of anything — put her foot down: the children must get some sleep.

The brothers agreed at once, but they were unscrupulous mad scientists and had their plans prepared. Half an hour later they crept furtively to little Georgy’s bed, candles in their hands, their flickering shadows towering behind them, looking over their shoulders, half wakened him from sleep to give him a playing card, keeping the face from him, and asked him what it was. “The queen of diamonds,” he said. It was, indeed, the queen of diamonds. He would remember years later how, looking up into the two men’s crazily eager, candlelit faces, his father holding another card to him, he’d felt a wild surge of excitement himself, a sudden conviction that in some way he couldn’t put his finger on, he knew how he’d done it and could do it again. But he knew the next instant that he’d been wrong about that. He had no idea what the card he was touching now might be.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Come, come,” his father said, smiling, the candlelight glinting on his teeth. “Make your mind a blank.”

Their heads were tipped toward each other, and their smiles, their slightly lifted eyebrows, the way the fingertips of their right hands gently touched their beards, were identical. It seemed the intense reality of their image that blocked his vision of what the card might be. The room was becoming more solid by the moment: the wallpaper, stained where the roof had leaked, the commode with its shiny, cracked pitcher and chamber pot and washbasin, the scratchy curtain, every thread more precise than usual — as if the two men and the room were a startling, unreal vision, so that his ordinary knowledge of the value of the card had been driven from his thought by the intensity of the strange dream risen before his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said again. “I’m sleepy.”

“That’s right,” his uncle said, and tilted toward him like a huge automaton. “You’re sleepy…very sleepy.” He raised his hand, moved it slowly from left to right. George slept.

He could never have proved, he would readily admit, that it had been anything more than luck that night. His father and uncle had continued to force the game on the family — also other games of the same kind: for instance, one with painted matchsticks, where one was supposed to guess what color had been picked from the painted, round tin box. He was not especially impressed by the fact that, according to his father’s careful records, his guesses were right with surprising regularity, particularly those he made when, as he played the game, he was so tired he could barely keep his eyes open. What did impress him — though he knew it was of no scientific use and could find in it no meaning beyond its pure facticity — was the feeling that sometimes came over him that he was in curious hands. Once, driving his grocery truck, he was suddenly overcome by extreme fear that had no apparent cause — such terror that he was forced to pull off the road. The terror turned to nausea, he had to vomit in the weeds. Coming from the family he came from, he looked at his watch and wrote down the time on the back of one of his order blanks. The terror had come, he discovered later, within one or two minutes of the death of his uncle Bill.

Years later, when he met Lulu Frazier for the first time (George Preston was then fifty), she stared at his face for a long while with her deep-set, malevolent-looking eyes and finally said to him — they were seated at the dinner table at Joan’s Grandpa Frazier’s, and loud conversation was going on all around them, but the old woman seemed unaware of the noisy laughter and talk—“Second sight comes from the Devil. Beware of it.”

A chill ran up and down everyone who heard, and the talk died down. She was a frightening woman, those last few years. George Preston made some joke, but her staring eyes bored into him.

“Lulu, you hush,” John Frazier said, and he made no pretense that it wasn’t a warning. If she troubled him again, maybe he’d get up, in front of all the company, and hit her one.

But the warning was wasted. Staring straight at George she said, “This man you brought here has second sight.”

“Then it certainly doesn’t come from the Devil,” Aunt Mary said. Her blue eyes flashed.

Anyone could have predicted that Joan and Martin’s marriage would be a stormy one, and not just because, as the painter John Napper took such pleasure in discovering, years later in London, he was a Cancer, she a Leo. In fact her mother, at the wedding, just before Joan went down the aisle, had said jokingly, “Just remember, it’s a good first marriage.” It was of course the last thing in the world she’d have said in earnest, not only because she was still essentially a Catholic but also because, when you came right down to it, she loved him almost as her daughter did. She was in a certain way in love with his father too, as a matter of fact, though it was not at all the solid and serious love she felt for Donald. Duncan Orrick had sad and beautiful eyes and a shy tenderness that made him abnormally vulnerable but also able to write and speak poetry, and these virtues or defects his son had too.

It seemed to Emmy very risky, their marrying at nineteen, neither of them ever having seriously considered anyone else, though she and Donald had done everything in their power to encourage Joan to go out with other boys. Buddy and Joan were very different kinds of people, that was what frightened her — different in a way she and Donald, or John Elmer and Cora, or even Buddy’s parents, had never been. She was brilliant and lively, wonderfully funny, she kept things hopping. Buddy was, well, morose. Emmy understood, of course, and she didn’t like to be critical, but he really was, as she’d said once fretfully to Donald, an odd one. He’d come roaring in on that motorcycle from his college in Indiana, two hundred and fifty miles away, having driven straight through, no doubt as fast as his horrible, noisy machine would go, and he wouldn’t even have shaved, though he was coming to see his fiancée, and he’d have on jeans and that grizzly leather jacket and boots with holes in them, and dark circles under his eyes because he never slept, and when Joan persuaded him to take a bath he’d leave such a ring around the tub you’d think he’d been working all month in a coal mine. He never brought a suit, brought not even a toothbrush, brought only his French horn and a book or two and the machine he rode on. (Emmy was terrified by motorcycles, always had been. One of her brothers had been killed in a motorcycle accident.) He would sit in the livingroom and smoke and smoke until the whole house reeked, and long after she and Donald had given up and gone to bed, he’d still be there, sitting on the couch listening to records with Joan, or lying beside her (to call a spade a spade), as they’d been doing now for years — though just what , just how much they’d been doing she wasn’t quite sure and would rather not know. The kinds of music he listened to were gloomy, morbid, not at all the light, sparkling kinds of music Joan always played. Some of it presented no discernible melody, or if it did have a melody it was the kind that made you cry. There they’d lie — or lay? — listening half the night with the lights off, hardly ever speaking. It was all, she said to Donald, “so unhealthy.” But they’d of course done the same, she and Donald, riding in his father’s car, Donald’s arm around her, his hand near her breast, she subtly encouraging him. And then once — well, never mind. If they loved each other as she and Donald had loved each other, and if their love would grow as hers had grown, and Donald’s, then she had no objection, was glad for them, in fact joyful — but did they? Everything was so different now. What was a parent supposed to do?