John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Martin nodded, a quick, ghastly jerk of the head, and for an instant closed his eyes, suddenly becoming more child than wolf or tiger. Crouse studied him, then put his hand on his arm and grinned, deciding, Oh, the hell with it. “You’re crazy, boy, that’s all’s the matter. You gotta just sort of get on up and turn yourself around.”

Martin laughed.

Crouse nodded, still grinning, though his eyes were solemn. “Well, cheer up. She’ll pull you through, ’f you don’t kill her first.”

“Suppose,” Martin Orrick wrote that year, “one could adjust optimistic Christianity and the gloomy facts of life — the universal banging of atom against atom, planet against planet, heart against heart. Granted, that is, that the whole thing’s a river, mere blindly bumping chances, no prayer of rest — granted that the weather has a good deal to do with what I happen to love — indeed, with whether I survive to love at all — that my life is an accidental tumble of the dice, my ancestors’ genes, my penmanship borrowed from a childhood friend (but strangely like my father’s) — suppose one could learn, by the flick of a switch, to enjoy the hangings, celebrate the swiftly passing patterns as holy. Would that give stability? I hate idealists; no one hates them more or would sooner condemn them to execution. Sitting by the river, studying its refusal to repeat itself, the heavy yellow water never twice eddying in the exact same place, even the course of barges unpredictable, I grow anxious to dynamite Plato’s museum, soft, comfortable home of my lean toward insanity. Process is all I care about. Therefore I write fiction, to make the beauty of change everlasting, unalterable as rock.”

Useless to inquire too earnestly what Martin Orrick meant.

At a time when everyone who was anyone was plunging into her identity crisis, Joan Orrick became with a vengeance what she was. No one— certainly no one in her family — was especially surprised, and no one was sorry, though her husband told their friends he had moments of wondering if he’d survive it. She’d been a liberated woman since 1933, the year of her birth. She’d been a red-head (and was still), with a dimple and dazzling eyes and a dazzling wit, and her parents had soon discovered that she had, besides, “a really quite remarkable musical talent,” as her first piano teacher said, with a frightened look. Her teacher, a Miss Huppman, had no talent at all — except for raising begonias — but Joan didn’t know it and was flying, by the middle of her second year, through Bach’s three-part inventions. Timidly, wringing her hankie at the door, Miss Huppman suggested, when Joan’s father came after one of her lessons to pick her up, that perhaps Joan needed a teacher “a little more advanced.”

“I see,” her father said in his tentative way, with his hat in his hands.

He was a minor executive in the St. Louis Screw and Bolt Company — he would later be one of the company’s two top men — but he was not yet (and in some respects would never be) a man bursting with confidence. He was, in fact, a farm boy who’d only reached fifth grade, and even that was partly fraudulent, since he had a brother, John Elmer, who looked remarkably like him and a Scotchman father who felt, perhaps rightly, that the farming couldn’t spare them both. “I see,” he said, somewhat alarmed, since he had no idea how to go about finding a piano teacher more advanced. He was, Joan’s father, a handsome, broad-shouldered man, red-headed, like his daughter, with a Scotchman’s pale eyes and brilliant smile, also a Scotchman’s somewhat overlarge nose, which his daughter had inherited, but he bore it with such grace, as his daughter would do, that no one could ever take exception to it; indeed, years later, on his grandson Evan, that nose would become — elegantly harmonized with other noble features, a gentle disposition, and a splendid intelligence — a thing to make maidens weep.

“Is there,” Joan’s father said, “someone you could recommend?”

“Oh dear,” said Miss Huppman, “these things are so difficult. Mrs. Wulker, I should think. She lives right near you, on Randolph.” She looked at Joan’s father as if she thought he might help her. “Perhaps someone in the city?”

Joan’s father thanked her, paid her the fifty cents she charged, and walked, holding Joan’s hand, to their square green Dodge.

Joan was, in her father’s opinion, the most beautiful, most wonderful little girl in the world. Neither he nor Joan’s mother would dream of expressing that sentiment to Joan, though they managed to communicate it, to some extent. Indeed, he sometimes called her — with what might have been a faint touch of irony — his princess. But the irony was really just his shyness — or his caution. She looked like a princess, and she ruled like a princess, not that anyone minded. (Thirty years later her daughter, Mary, would be exactly the same, an absolute — fortunately benevolent — despot.) When they could afford it, they bought Joan presents, pretty dresses, toys, books, a long-haired, cinnamon-colored dog named Flopsy (run over by a trolley car the first month she had him), and above all what was, for them, an enormously expensive spinet piano, a Story & Clark. They paid for a succession of piano teachers, including, finally, Leo Serota, the best pianist in St. Louis at the time, formerly chief piano teacher at Tokyo University; they bought her a twenty-five-dollar violin, later a fifty-dollar cello; they drove her, or rather her father drove her, to symphony concerts, where her father would fall asleep — not, as Joan imagined, because he didn’t care for music, but because his day began at five, the music was soothing, the hall was dark, and he was an innocent, or at any rate innocent of false pride. He also took her, four times, to the opera — each time, by some fluke, the same opera, Boris Godunov —and innumerable times to what was then the glory of that wonderfully naive, ridiculous German city (as she would later remember it), the “Muny Opera,” where she saw (and later played in the orchestra for, after she’d become a violinist and cellist) The Red Mill, Desert Song, Springtime, The Student Prince, The Vagabond King, and An Evening with Gilbert and Sullivan. (Though she was still in her teens, she could have told them when they put on that Evening with Gilbert and Sullivan thing that the Muny was finished, an epoch had ended; put your money on KSDF.)

Those were, naturally, wonderful times. The whole family would go to the grandiose, pseudo-Greek open-air theater in Forest Park — Joan had now two younger brothers — and sometimes her favorite aunt and uncle would go too, or the cousins from New York State. They would sit under the stars, hoping it wouldn’t rain, or at any rate that was the hope all the grown-ups laid claim to if the smell in the air suggested doubt, though possibly they too took pleasure in seeing the huge set hurriedly rolled away, folded in on itself like a Chinese paper dollhouse, and the audience rushing out with programs held over their heads like housetops, and the huge old trees of the park bending, black against gray, and then the fierce Midwestern rain sweeping in, brightly lighted, like a theater curtain, and the low sky majestically booming, booming as if for joy.

Mostly, of course, it didn’t rain, and they sat listening to the music, swaying to the dancing (swaying inwardly, that is; they were inclined to be timid), eating hot dogs or ice cream from the people who came selling them up and down the aisles like the vendors at a circus or a Cardinals’ game. And then, very late (as she’d judged time then), her father would drive them home, going wonderfully fast, as he always did, the lights of the old houses flashing by like comets. Joan’s mother, at corners or intersections, would suck air between her teeth and sometimes whimper, “Oh Donald, please!” and he’d pretend, for a time, to drive more cautiously.