John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Martin said, “I can take the children east with me if that’s what you want. Whatever.”

She leaned up on her elbows, turning on him wildly. “To live with that whore? Not on your life, Martin Orrick. I’ll see you dead first!”

He looked at her as if puzzled, his face slightly tensed, like that of a man forced to look at a wound. “There’s not gonna be anybody with me,” he said. “I’m going back alone.”

Her mind fumbled with it, still full of pain but at the same time rising with foolish eagerness toward a hope too humiliating for her to admit just yet. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you — get rid of all three of us. You could grow a little pot on the back forty and fill your whole tarpaper shack with teenage pussy.”

He said nothing. She closed her eyes, crying again. Every morning she left at seven for the school where she taught, to give the kids extra lessons, lay out the day’s work, grade papers she hadn’t gotten to, and fill out reports or repair broken instruments, and often she wouldn’t get home at night until well after six. It was Martin who got the children up, dressed them, fed them breakfast, typed or read with them playing on the floor beside him. (“The heart of a Cancer,” Paul Brotsky would read in the new room, years later, “may be painfully divided between his family and the sea. They are wonderful providers and can turn a cave into a paradise, but they also like employment with shipping lines and sea travel.”) It was Martin who, as the children grew older, took them every day to nursery school — walked with them down to the trolley-line M car and rode, one arm around each of them, through the long spooky tunnel — and at the nursery school played with them for half an hour (the other parent helpers were women with frosted hair) until it was time to walk the half mile to the college and meet his classes, talk with students. And it was Martin who had time to take them on excursions — to the Pacific, to the zoo, to Chinatown. So she knew, really, that it was not the three of them he meant to be rid of. She opened her eyes and said abruptly, looking at the ceiling:

“Can we go with you?”

He said nothing. She was afraid to see what his expression was, but when he got up from his chair and moved toward the door, she did look, ready to strike out. But he was shrugging, standing half turned away, as if undecided between two lives. As if wearily, ultimately indifferent, he said, “Of course.” The circles under his eyes were darker than she’d ever seen them, and he looked as if he hadn’t had a bath in a month. She would be amazed, later, that she’d failed to see, that moment, the truth, that he was sick—“had troubles,” as her mother would say, apologizing for him, perhaps for everyone, the whole universe to the last scorpion “good at heart.” But plain as his sickness was, she hadn’t seen it. Even when she said softly, “You’re crazy, Martin,” it never for an instant crossed her mind that what she said was true.

“I have to go, Joan,” he said. “Have to pick up the kids.” He moved toward the door.

“Would you kiss me good-bye?” she said. “Out of pity, I mean, because I’m sick.”

He almost smiled, hesitated, then decided to obey.

“I love you, Martin,” she said, searching his face.

He nodded, noncommittal.

She had an image of him, all at once, living with Neva, growing weirder and weirder, dirtier, smellier, wilder of eye, and she had a flash of understanding, as if from outside herself, that she did not want him to destroy himself, and that finally it had nothing whatever to do with her own desires. “So you imagined,” he would say later, scornfully, when she told him of the feeling, and there was no way she could prove it was the truth. But she knew. It was like the free will argument he was always on about. For all his reasoning, for all his fancy logic, all his long-winded quotes, you knew when you were free and when you weren’t, it was as easy as that. Some things were certain — many things, in fact — and if reason undermined those certainties, it was best not to listen.

“Nevertheless,” she said firmly — she could not know until he told her later, that her tensed cheeks, her sternness made it seem like tyrannical assertion, an attempt to command his feelings—“I do love you.”

After he’d left, she asked herself in panic, “What in hell am I going to do in the godforsaken Ozarks?”

That night, because of the drugs, perhaps, she had a brief, frightening memory of the man she’d seen coming toward her through the rain, just before she’d fainted. He had his head slightly tipped, his arm stretched toward her as if he was greeting her, had been looking for her. His skin was gray, and for a moment it seemed to her that she remembered seeing Death. She toyed with the idea, knowing all the while that he’d been only an old man, perhaps an old man alarmed by her cries and hurrying to help her; and she remembered something she hadn’t thought about in years, that her Grandma Frazier was supposed to have seen Death many times. She’d seen him one day when she was a child, in church — or so she claimed and obviously believed. They were singing a hymn, and a stranger came into the back of the church — an elderly country man in a shabby black Sunday suit, his hands folded limply in front of him, his head just perceptibly moving, as if with palsy, his lips touched by little involuntary tremors — and he’d come timidly down the aisle, no usher noticing him or coming to his assistance, and he’d come to a bench where there was room to sit and had stopped there. He didn’t join the hymn, merely looked, with a somewhat curious, intent expression at a cousin of hers, a girl named Dora McClaren. When the congregation sat down, he too sat down. Then the sermon began — the message from the Lord, they’d called it then — and she’d stopped watching the man, though she could still feel his presence, still feel the oddity of no one at all’s having noticed him. Whenever she happened to glance over at him, he was still gazing as if thoughtfully at Dora. And then once when she glanced over, he was gone. She started as if from a dream and looked all around her and back down the aisle behind her, but it was as if the boards of the church floor had opened up and swallowed him. That night Dora McClaren took a fever; three nights later she was dead. No one believed Lulu Thompson’s story of the man she’d seen in church.

Joan pushed all that away, as she’d always done, or had always done at least since the age of twelve. She would never understand those misty times, she’d decided long ago, the days when Missouri was like a tropical jungle, full of snakes and vines and rich, dark green grasses, Indians, riverboat Negroes, dour, bushy-bearded Germans, lanky Scotchmen with eyes like flint — a time when every voting day meant murders and riots, when the Mississippi River had no bridges, only ferries, and the houses, like palaces, in downtown St. Louis were centuries apart from the cabins where country people chopped down trees and sank ploughs into the land and shot snakes. It was possible, perhaps, that her grandmother had told the truth about what she saw in plain daylight, walking along Halls Ferry Road, or sitting half asleep under a shade tree near Coldwater School. Looking at the faces in old photographs, the buildings sharp-edged, as if cut out of paper, the sky oddly luminous, she had the feeling, sometimes, that things might have been visible then that were visible no longer.

But what she mainly felt now, and only partly because she’d remembered again the stories of her grandmother’s second sight, was revulsion at the thought of returning to that place. It was a feeling she could never have explained to Martin — he demanded logic, reason, possibly because if she worked by those rules he could always win — and her feeling about Missouri was the very opposite of logical. She loved the place, loved her family, and did not want to be there. She could say no more. Where was it, then, that she wanted to be? That was the kind of question Martin would ask. Paris, perhaps. Geneva. How was she to know? For now, San Francisco. He would think it immoral that she had no idea where she wanted to live, what she wanted to become. It wasn’t immoral, it was good —but what was she to say? When he told stories of adventures he’d had with the children, things they’d said or seen, she felt cheated of a natural right. That too she wanted, to play with them as Martin did, let the hours slip by as a child’s hours do. She wanted everything, all of it — but not return, not roots, not a life she’d lived already.