John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Joan’s mother was pretty and intelligent, the youngest daughter in a large German family even poorer than Joan’s father’s. The latter at least had a good-sized farm, an old, old place just off Sinks Road, Missouri, ten miles north of St. Louis, a fairly unprofitable farm at the time, cratered like the moon — except the craters were lush, filled with water, edged by trees — but a gold mine later: there was oil under those sinkholes, and huge caves where the Laclede Oil Company would buy rights to store natural gas; and besides, urban sprawl was hurrying north, so that in the fifties, lots overlooking the convergence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, of which the farm could offer several, would go for five thousand dollars an acre. One such lot, a large one, would be the site of Joan’s father’s large, modern house when he moved his family back home “to the country” from Ferguson. Joan could remember what it once had been like. When she was little the land was still heavily wooded, populated by wolves and cranes and her peculiar, black-bearded great-uncle Zack, who had a cabin with linoleum on the walls. Every spring he floated his mules across to the long, dark, vine-filled island and ploughed a little patch of it, where he grew horse corn and pumpkins and sweet potatoes. The place was infested with great fat rattlesnakes and copperheads. He’d sit on the porch and smoke his pipe and, he said, watch them play. She only saw him once or twice. He didn’t even come out of the woods to go to church. Thankfully, as all the family said, he was long gone — his cabin in ruins, letting in light like an old broken crate — when the bulldozers came. The landscape would change beyond all recognition, and tony people would move in, or flambuginous-tony. Possum Hollow, where her great-uncle Zack used to hunt, would become “Castlereigh Estates.”

Joan’s mother’s side was less fortunate, materially. They lived in a small house that — beneath the shingles on the outside and plaster on the inside — was a crooked old log cabin of a sort you might expect to find Negroes in. It went back to before the Civil War, but its antiquity gave it no particular charm. It was beautifully set, on a rise beside one of those rich, dense hollows one finds only in Missouri — a creek, huge old trees with crows in them, over by the fence a matched pair of mules — but the house itself was about as handsome as a tooth in a field. It was in excellent repair and always clean as a whistle — the family was, as I’ve said, German — but its only real glory was the people who lived in it, warmhearted, hardworking, good-looking people, of whom Joan’s mother, Emmy, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was the nicest and prettiest of all. Her sister Cora, two years older, was also very fine; not as pretty, quite, but more relaxed, not inclined to have headaches. When Emmy married Joan’s father, Cora would marry the brother who looked so much like him, John Elmer.

Joan’s mother and father had been, of course, childhood sweethearts. They’d married during the Depression, but they were both working fools, energetic, tense people, though they mostly kept a secret of their nervousness — not that they were, in the bad sense, ambitious. Joan’s father was handy; there was nothing he couldn’t repair or build — in fact, later, he’d patent a number of inventions; and Joan’s mother was a shrewd manager. They made a perfect team, as everyone said. They escaped to the city, then to the suburbs, then to better suburbs, and as their horizons widened, Joan became for them, increasingly, a creature to wonder at. If they doubted at first, they could doubt no longer: Joan did indeed have, as Miss Huppman had said, a really quite remarkable musical talent. At thirteen she had a weekly half-hour radio show.

Her talent was a difficult thing for her parents to deal with, to tell the truth. They were gentle, good people with no social pretensions; they hated snobs or, at any rate (since they hated, in fact, no one), felt extremely uncomfortable in their presence; and they saw overconfidence, even the slightest hint of it, as a dangerous thing if not an evil in itself. Joan was, alas, not as humble as she might be. People called her a genius and a prodigy, often people who ought to know. She was bound, her parents feared, for trouble, and they did everything possible to keep her from getting a swelled head. When people praised her piano playing, her mother said only (partly, of course, from shyness), “Well, she seems to enjoy it.” When she brought home from school a report card with nothing but A’s on it (in English, in science, in music, in phys.ed., in typing, in geography, in whatever she touched), her father would say, “Don’t they give A pluses?” Joan would laugh, make some joke; but the truth was, she began to feel unsure of herself. Though it should have been obvious at a glance to anyone, even a total stranger, that her parents were so proud of her they were downright afraid — afraid that they might perhaps in some way fail her — Joan began to doubt that she was loved.

Also, at this point in her life she became, as old photographs show, slightly ugly. God moves in strange ways, and in the long run it was the best thing that could have happened to her, because it drove her to humor, added one more component of that splendid, living work of art she would later become. But it was a terrible thing at the time, for Joan. She had been, as a small child, beautiful. Years later, when she was a teacher, composer, novelist and wife of a novelist — also famous party wit — a friend would sometimes happen across, among other family pictures she had on the wall in the upstairs hallway, the picture taken of Joan when she was five, and would say, startled, “Is this you , Joan?” “That’s me,” she’d say and smile. And because she’d changed so, though she was beautiful now too, the friend would say, surprised into a childlike innocence exactly like that which the long-dead photographer had caught, “Why, you were beautiful , Joan!” To which Joan would respond, with just the right turn, just the right mock-sorrow (she was no longer one to take less than she deserved), “Wasn’t I, though!” And the friend would glance at her, and though he or she might not put it into words, would notice once more that Joan Orrick was, in simple truth, more beautiful than any painting or valley or tropical bird that ever flew.

But between the ages of about twelve and sixteen, Joan was, to put it mildly, not as pretty as she might wish. She suddenly grew tall — taller than most of the boys in her grade. Her head became large, with far-apart eyes and a wide-bridged nose that was always slightly red and which frequently, for no reason, gushed blood. Her mouth, in the shadow of that mighty nose, was small, and — because of how the corners turned down — looked rather like the mouth of a shark. Her chin was small, her neck long and thin, her shoulders narrow, her breasts undeveloped, her hips oddly wide. She became pimply, and, mysteriously, her teeth, which were small, became misaligned, so that braces, Dr. Vogler said, solemnly nodding, were really the only prayer.

In unobvious ways, her parents reacted to the change. It was as if she’d betrayed a trust. They changed subtly, of course; so subtly that they weren’t aware of it themselves, and even Joan, if anyone had asked her, couldn’t definitely have asserted that things were different. The war was just over, the factory was making money, Joan’s youngest brother was recovering from polio — a sweet, gentle boy who’d grow up to be the kindest, gentlest of men, plagued by a weak heart. What was wrong between Joan and her family, for all these reasons and for others, was hard to see. But it was nonetheless a fact that something had gone wrong, and it came down, finally, to this: she had been beautiful and brilliant; now she was only brilliant; and though her sense of humor improved — she was so funny, in fact, that she had to spend much of her school time in the hall: her remarks, though much quoted in the faculty lounge, disrupted classes — the humor had, her parents thought (and they were essentially right), a cruel edge to it. She had an eye for faults and for, worse, mere unhappy resemblances. Woe to the minister who had the chinless, triangular mouth of an elephant, the neighborhood pharmacist with a bunny rabbit’s nose, the otherwise pretty beautician who had the eyes of a turtle! Her eye for types was so keen and merciless, and her dislike for certain types so fanatical, that no new style of dress could be successful in the schools she attended, no new student, teacher, or principal could be popularly accepted, no moneymaking project could be mounted by either her school or church until the word was in from Joan. Of a tiresome woman at the Methodist church, Joan’s mother once said with careful charity, “Well, she’s good at heart,” to which Joan, then aged twelve, added quickly, with great innocence, “To make sure people notice, she wears light blue hats with white berries.” One laughed, but one couldn’t approve. (Her brother James, the eldest after Joan, imitated her humor and developed a harsh cynicism he would never get rid of. It would in the end nearly ruin his life.)