John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

When he moved from San Francisco to southern Missouri, the Ferndeans were away on sabbatical — actually one of the work-leaves John Ferndean took from time to time, just as Martin did. Now the Ferndeans came back to their farm just a few miles from Martin’s — John Ferndean, famous sculptor, his pretty, wildly energetic wife, and their beaming, noisy son, a year younger than Evan.

The first time Martin Orrick met them at a party he picked a fight with the sculptor, scoffed at him for riding to the hounds in a red coat because fox hunting, to Martin, was snobbery and fakery. (In all his life Martin had known only one person who’d ever ridden to the hounds — a tall, elegant lady who borrowed large sums of money which she never returned, and painted large pastel pictures of toilets.) But the sculptor, who’d grown up in England, was real, and he was a marvellous horseman — far better than Martin, who had the seat of an Indian but had never been trained — and he was also a truly extraordinary sculptor, teacher, husband and, perhaps above all, father. Like Martin, he’d come to this place because he loved it. (To be precise, he’d come for one semester as visiting artist from the Royal Academy of Art in London, and had at once bought a farm and settled in.) “Far as ye can see, lad, this land’s all mine — though not on paper, me attorney claims.” Though he stopped for red lights, he was no more than Martin a man bound by trivial rules. If his life was stable, conventional, “moral” (to use a word Martin Orrick describes in one of his novels as “obscene and despicable”), it was all those things by his free and conscious choice. In the life of John Ferndean, to put the matter briefly, Martin Orrick found rules he could approve of.

They rode together often, and sometimes Joan and the sculptor’s wife and all the children rode with them. (Ferndean took a month to get Mary and Evan riding like dragoons.) Temporarily freed from pain by Dr. Krassner’s operation, Joan Orrick could ride with pleasure now, and she learned, with some amazement, how beautiful the countryside was — fog in the hollows, deer poised like listening spirits on the hills, groves full of dogwood trees and waterfalls, and suddenly, when you least expected it, the wide, rolling river, circling eagles overhead. They counted rare species of butterfly, sang what they called horse operas, and after they got back ate lamb or wild goose, and Joan told stories that made everyone roar with laughter, or the sculptor’s wife told stories of life in South Africa (with many an “Achh, Huttt!” ), or Martin and the sculptor talked earnestly, boomingly, of the principles of art, told jokes, played loud games, fiercely argued politics or education or religion, always both of them on the same side. The world grew warmer, healthier, it seemed to Martin — became, mysteriously, more beautiful. The two families took trips together — Mexico, England, Italy, and filled their houses with memory-packed junk. They all became, quite literally and quite perceptibly, more handsome. Even when they were tired, the children almost never fought. They made rambling, magnificent sand castles looking out at the Mediterranean, Martin and John Ferndean working alongside them, inspiring them to greater intricacy and nobler scale, and as they worked through the long, hot afternoon, the people around them — first children, then adults — Italians, Yugoslavs, and impoverished Englishmen — joined the effort one by one until for half a mile the beach was fortified. (“Look, Daddy,” Dennis Ferndean said, “that man’s peeing right into the Mediterranean!” “Nothing strange about that,” John Ferndean said, grinning, his shaggy eyebrows lifted, “standing so close like that, ’ow could he miss?” The children played bobby in Regents Park, built tree houses at home, painted, made clay figures, began learning to play musical instruments, held kite parties and badminton tournaments, played endlessly — though a stranger might have thought them too old for such things — with their innumerable stuffed animals and Legos. The two families, with all their friends, made an endless slapstick movie, in which the sculptor played the dashingly handsome hero and the dogs and horses (Joan Orrick observed) had all the best lines.

Time passed — a year, then another and another — and the Orricks were, much of the time, happy. If Martin Orrick didn’t actively love his wife, he could forget, sometimes for weeks at a stretch, his conviction that, essentially, she hated him. Joan blossomed, even fell in love with Martin’s mountains, as she called them, though there was something more suitable to her nature somewhere else, she knew, though she did not pine for it. Besides, now that Martin was making so much money — he’d had, by this time, three best-sellers — they could take off a semester for writing and travel where they pleased: the mountains were no longer a trap. She could sometimes believe for weeks and weeks, even though she was now in pain again, that the world had grown healthy, buzzingly alive, charged with that deep, jungle-rich Midwestern light she’d known in her childhood. She persuaded Martin that they should spend six months in Geneva, the next year six months in Paris, and the next full year in England. There Evan became a magician in earnest and it was there, too, that he began his work on photography — learning by the book, as he did everything, photographing not people or landscapes — except, of course, when his mother insisted — but mainly dead leaves, cigarettes against a curb, the nostrils of a young giraffe at the London Zoo. Mary began playing the cello and writing poems and stories, sitting opposite where her father wrote, at the kitchen table in their Regents Park apartment beside the canal. When the music teacher at her school was taken ill, Mary went at once to the headmistress and said, with great seriousness and — after six weeks in London — an English accent as impeccable as any English child’s, that her mother was an excellent music teacher, in fact she’d once won the California Teacher of the Year Award.

“Is that so , Mary,” the headmistress said, tilting forward with interest. She was a spiffy lady who wore slacks and bright chokers and fine old rings which suggested that her family was well off.

“California is one of our largest states, actually,” Mary said.

“That’s very impressive indeed, I must say,” said the headmistress.

That afternoon the incomparable Mr. Lyman, second in command on the music front — ha HAH! — in flamenco boots and black trousers so tight he could barely bend his knees, his hair silver-white, though he hadn’t yet reached forty, his fingers aflutter in a way that in America would instantly have pegged him a raving homosexual (he had, in fact, not the slightest inclination), arrived at their apartment with a huge bouquet: “I have come, my dear lady, to seduce you if I can. — Oh, excuse me. I take it you’re Mary’s father? — Ah, madam!” And away he flew toward the livingroom, and Martin Orrick, unshaven, papers in one hand, a bottle of Whitbread’s Ale in the other, gazed after him. “Mrs. Orrick, I presume?” Mr. Lyman said, and bowed grandly and handed her the flowers. “I have come, my dear lady, to seduce you if I can.” In short, she was hired to teach music.

Winter came, and snow. Evan rode the underground to Rutherford School in a tailcoat and top hat, practicing card tricks — in his vest, a magic wand. Mr. Pringle came, mornings, in his horse-drawn milk cart to leave milk in glass bottles. When Mary spoke American it sounded like a clever but distinctly English imitation. Martin, climbing in through an upstairs window when he was so drunk he could hardly have stood on solid ground, fell two storeys into a rock pile and broke his leg. Spring came. He walked with a cane. Joan was composing now, as well as teaching. String quartets for children; then, as she grew confident, music for older people. Martin sat writing in the sunlit kitchen, hour after hour, for all the world like some smooth-running, bleary-eyed, and shaggy machine. Sometimes he would turn and stare for a while at the grass and flowers or the dark mirror-surface of the Regents Park canal. Sometimes he’d go walking, late at night, and would stare, heavy-hearted as a caged bear in rut, at the girls on passing buses. For the first time in his life he attended a pornographic movie. It made him sad, merely. Joan would come in from her work sparkling, that long, red glistening hair electric, tits high, as if she were in a perpetual state of arousal, as perhaps she was. “Baby,” she would say, kissing his bewhiskered cheek as he sat at the typewriter, “come fuck me.” He would obey.