John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Every Saturday that year he drove her the ninety miles to St. Louis, to see her psychiatrist, though neither of them believed for a minute that the pain was psychological. At the end of the year the psychiatrist was convinced that Joan Orrick was as sane as anyone, except perhaps for that peculiar devotion, even now, to her long-haired, cave-eyed husband. The psychiatrist shook his head, pursing his lips. He was young, and in a weak way, good-looking. Joan had changed his life. When she’d begun her sessions he wore dowdy clothes, talked pompously, like the Oklahoma boy he was, and never read a novel, sent back bad food at a restaurant, or attended a concert. She’d given him advice on what he ought to wear, what he should read, where he ought to go. Toward the end of her year of work with him she discovered — or rather Martin pointed out to her — that the notes he took during their long, rambling sessions were all on phrases she’d used that he wanted to imitate, musicians she’d mentioned that he wanted to hear, or interesting art shows, places to eat. On her psychiatrist’s advice, she checked into Barnes Hospital for more tests. The bill was enormous. They found nothing.

Martin kept writing, as he’d always done. It was the one thing in their lives that was stable, invariable. He would get up before dawn and would write until it was time for him to go teach his classes — he’d have no breakfast but coffee and would hardly notice either her or the children — and he’d write when he came home, far into the night. Those were the only things he cared about, it seemed sometimes, his writing and his teaching. But that wasn’t quite true. He cared about the place. It was the one way the children had of reaching him. The three of them would walk through the pasture, holding hands, or would explore the woods, finding caves and waterfalls, learning where the foxes and skunks kept their dens, where the beavers had dams, where the rattlesnakes crawled out onto rocks to get the sun. Whatever he loved, they loved, automatically, without question. They learned the names of birds — far more names than he knew, born and raised in the east, where one never saw a cardinal, a purple waxwing, a prairie chicken or mockingbird. They learned the names of trees — Evan brought home books from the school library, and they’d search through them together, or huddle around them in the woods, trying to make out what kind of tree it was they stood under. And circling around the farm with him, talking about things, they learned his ridiculous, tortuous way of reasoning about things, judging, weighing, pondering what-ifs, until the supper table became what it had been at Martin’s father’s house, an endless debate of — nothing. Once in St. Louis he bought an old French horn — he’d sold his long ago, when they’d needed money in graduate school — and he began to play it a little now and then. Evan too began to play, though only casually, tentatively, as if testing to see if his playing the horn was what his father really wanted. And again and again, though they were terrified, they tried to learn to ride the horses. It broke her heart, watching them, their lips pressed together, their eyes full of fear, their blond hair streaming out behind them as they cantered around the yard. Couldn’t he see that they were terrified? She tried to tell him, begged him to wait till they were older, but the children pushed as hard as he did. Once when he had Mary on the green-broke Arab he’d bought for her, a rabbit jumped up in the path and thundered off, and the horse bolted. Mary clung to the saddle horn screaming with fright, Martin galloping behind her, unable to overtake her, and she made it all the way from the bottom of the pasture to the old peach orchard behind the house before she finally fell off. She could have been killed, even Mary must have known it, but that very afternoon they’d caught her luring the horse to the high wooden gate, so she could get on again, and that same night, in spite of everything, there the three of them were at the kitchen table, studying once more the books on horsemanship they’d inherited from Uncle George, things he’d gotten from his horse-trainer father. Paul Brotsky would say years later, lying beside her, smoking a cigarette, Martin on the other side, “It’s a strange thing to think about. We keep the dead alive. We carry on the things they cared about whether we like it or not. They’d be nothing without us — that is, nothing but dead — but on the other hand, without them, we’d be nothing. I guess if you like that means we’re determined — you know, chained by the past. Or you can look at it another way: the things they were interested in, the things they were, give us our possibilities.” Martin said nothing — she could feel him smiling, gloomy in the dark. He understood though, she knew. It was Martin who’d brought it up. She said, “Do you realize William Shakespeare never heard a Mozart string quartet? Isn’t that incredible?” Paul groaned in mock-agony. “Jesus, Joan, must you keep screwing up the syllogisms?” “You keep telling me to stick to the facts,” she said, “and I tell you a fact and you yell at me.” They had walked in the old Vermont cemetery that day, reading the names. It was interesting that you could know without anyone’s telling you what a man looked like, even how he thought and talked, if his name was Nathan Harwood. “Course, you have to bear in mind the date of birth,” Paul said, gently making fun of Martin’s thoroughly uninformed and slightly too fashionable interest in astrology (but it was Paul who had memorized the zodiac characteristics, Paul who knew that, born November 5, 1804, Nathan Harwood was a Scorpio). “Exactly,” Martin said. “Also helps to know if his mother was an Indian.”

The children picked up, too, Martin’s freakish love of violent Midwestern weather. When tornadoes came — first a blanket of terrible, swiftly moving clouds and then, in the lightning-filled distance a funnel, pitch-black and swaying, rushing toward them — she was so terrified she could hardly move, but Martin would stand at a thudding, rattling window or even out on the windswept, rain-drenched lawn and would watch in awe and a kind of crazy joy. If he would condescend to go down with them into the storm cellar, he would stand near the foot of the stone steps listening, and as the roar came nearer, the boom-boom-boom of colliding, warring mountains and skies, his mingled excitement and welcome fear would make his eyes demonic. “Listen to it!” he would say, and the children, one on each side of him, would take his hands, thrilled and terrified, and would stand, knees bent, as if prepared to run for the darkest corner of the storm cellar, their white faces peering up the stairway at the crack of greenish light. She remembered that her peculiar uncle Zack used to stand — so people said — on the listing porch of his shanty in the woods and fire his shotgun at cyclones when they came near. And she remembered that once when someone spoke of it, her Grandma Hughes — her mother’s mother, who’d lived with them a while when Joan was four — had said, making everything strangely clear: “He likes cyclones.” (Grandma Hughes was tiny and wore floor-length skirts and a Mother Hubbard bonnet. Joan’s father had cut her toenails with hedge clippers. She rarely spoke and made very little sound when she walked. She got up early and worked steadily all day long, endlessly circling with her dust mop or broom, or patching at whatever little chores she could find to do. Sometimes she would suddenly smile.) And now, watching Martin, Joan happened to remember that her Grandpa Frazier, too, for all his gentleness and playfulness, had loved storms. How strange and complicated everything was — as if everything in the universe was secretly connected, tending toward some meaning too large for human beings but sure, just the same, and final, and perhaps serene. Then the cyclone was past, leaving nothing but a wide, sweet stillness, and she felt that in a moment something would come clear to her. Martin held out his arm to her. He said, “May I escort you back into the world, madam?” She smiled. The children were smiling too. Had she imagined all those fights? Imagined the drunkenness, the fear of her that showed in his eyes, or hatred? “Wah, mah goodness ,” she said, “yo so kind, suh!” They waltzed toward the stairs.