John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Craine shook his head, whether to make the picture clearer or to drive it away he could hardly have said. They had not been close, though she’d made cookies for him — they’d be waiting in the yellow and white cookie crock when he got home, two hours before she did, from school — and whenever they went downtown she’d taken him to tea rooms, where he sat, among blue-haired old ladies and ate cucumber and watercress sandwiches. “Isn’t this fun, Gerald?” his aunt would say (she’d been slightly buck-toothed, it came to him now) and her shy, affected-sounding laugh would float lightly above the table. His aunt had had no idea what to do with him, this knee-splitting, sneaker-wrecking legacy from her younger sister. When his grades were bad — and they were always bad, though she knew he wasn’t stupid, or so she’d told him — she could only say, “Gerald, what are we to do with you, dear?” When he’d quit school and joined the navy she had cried half the night out of guilt and relief. In her letters she implored him to please not do anything dangerous. The letters were full of clippings about people from his high school, usually people he’d never met. “Evelyn Kelley has asked to be remembered to you,” she’d write. He could remember no one named Kelley.

The second set of images that came into his mind began with his aunt at the polished mahogany table, staring down as if at her reflection, her hand, white and thin, around her forehead. He couldn’t recall what it was that had drained all color from behind the rouge, though he remembered clearly, or perhaps supplied now by some mental trick, the dry lace curtains on the window behind her, the parakeets in their cage, the silver-gray flowers on the wallpaper, the blue china cup. He was older in this memory, eleven or twelve, and this time the charge of the memory was guilt and dread. Whether or not there was any real connection, he remembered she’d fired the maid, because he, little Gerald, had told on her. The maid was sixteen, a girl named Delores, from the orphanage. He could recall her face only dimly. She’d been more than just a maid, more like an all-round handmaiden. She’d taken him to movies, washed dishes while he dried, and told him — shyly, both of them blushing, avoiding each other’s eyes — her erotic dreams. Once unfortunately she’d told him something that had not been a dream, or so she’d claimed. She had a boyfriend named Frank, some years older than she was, a brakeman on the Illinois Central. He’d persuaded her to let him put his thing inside her, because they wanted to be married and it would be wrong if the two of them didn’t fit. The revelation had distressed Craine immensely, for some reason, and though he’d known it was a secret, the darkest in the world, he’d told his aunt. He had no idea now how he’d managed to bring it up, though certainly he’d known it was treachery. His aunt, ashen-faced, trembling in her fury and cold as winter, had fired the girl at once. “After all I’ve done for you!” she’d whispered. She had the tone of an outraged conspirator. “Unspeakable!” she hissed, “unspeakable!” The girl had backed away from her, her close-together eyes welling tears like a child’s (Craine had seen it all through the crack in the warped bedroom door.) Her door stood wide open when he looked the next morning — the room where she’d taught him to kiss, one night. A cunning business. She’d told him stories about boys who’d lost girlfriends by not knowing the right way to kiss—“and things like that.” She’d taught him in the dark. She’d be embarrassed, she said, to teach someone to kiss with the lights on. What kind of girl did he think she was? He’d gotten stiff as a tree, and when she’d accidentally touched him — touched his trousers, that is — she hadn’t realized and had let her hand linger there a moment. She kissed him harder, making her mouth more wet and soft, and then suddenly his aunt was home, calling up the stairs. They’d both of them nearly had heart attacks.

Afterward, Delores would never let him kiss her, always teasing him, sliding her eyes at him, letting out, shyly, the details of what she did, or more often almost did, with Frank. Gerald had stolen a pair of her panties and had hidden them in his bed, between the slats and the mattress. So now, the day after he’d told on her, her door stood open, the room full of dust-specked light, stark and empty as a crypt. And so in this later now of Gerald Craine, in the image that had triggered these embarrassing recollections, his aunt sat, drained, at the table; and like the gloomy vaults in the museums where they sometimes went on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, the room was full of serpent coils and wings. “The Babylonians,” his aunt had said on one of those excursions, “worshipped wicked, filthy things.” “What things?” he’d asked. “You’ll learn when you’re older,” his aunt had said. “Like snakes?” he’d said. “Well—” she’d said, “well, yes. Like snakes.” Intuition had leaped in him, and he’d looked at her, cunning. “Horrible dark caves?” She glanced at him, then looked casually over at the guard. “I don’t know if the Babylonians had caves or not,” she’d said.

For all its galaxy of associations, the image of his aunt at the table flashed only for a moment in Craine’s mind, then receded, taking all it had brought with it — sank away to darkness. Its passing, as if it were the passing of his life, left him numb. The world was pink now, as if he were seeing it through a sickly ruby. He felt alarm. Something had gotten into him. It made his stomach convulse, and for an instant he believed he would vomit. But the sidewalk he stared at eased back toward focus — at the edges of his vision small animals scurrying: rats, perhaps, yet not so definite as rats. Whatever they were, they were suddenly gone; the jagged lines of the sidewalk had closed like steel jaws, and his stomach quieted. He remembered, with a start, why he was here. Royce, up the street, was looking at him oddly; and no wonder, no wonder — old Craine planted on the sidewalk like an oak, three fingers on his beard, staring into dazzles of nothing like an old-time prophet out too long in the sun. Had he spoken? he wondered, glancing around in embarrassment. He was speaking now. I’m speaking now , he was saying.

He snapped his mouth shut and started walking.

It was in front of the Varsity Theater that Elaine Glass first became definitely aware that Royce was tailing her. It came about because Craine abruptly stopped, struck by a perfectly terrifying thought — a vision, rather — a great electric flash like an explosion of blinding white snow across his mind, a sudden, awful silence as if all the Muzak in the world had been ended by the indifferent flick of some stellular switch. The wide intersection into which Craine had been preparing to lower his left foot was shoetop deep, from curb to curb, in blood. Staggered by the sight, gaunt and trembling, as gray as a terminal cancer case, Craine turned on his heel (carefully, carefully) and started back in the direction from which he’d come, that is, walked straight toward bearded, stooped Elaine Glass. She stopped, open-mouthed, looking horror-stricken, awkwardly bent forward like an upright ant, then quickly pretended to be studying the glassed-in Coming Attractions. She looked to be maybe eighteen or nineteen, twenty at most. (Her type could fool you though.) She had a sickly, sulfur-yellow doughy complexion, hands so long-fingered you’d have thought she could fly with them. So far as you could tell, considering the baggy, shapeless coat, she was skinnier even than Gerald Craine. Royce nearly bumped into her, coming right behind her when she suddenly stopped dead; and when she turned toward the theater posters, Royce also turned and brazenly pretended he too was interested in the Coming Attractions. She seemed not to know him. If she’d been spying on the agency, as she’d claimed, she was a very bad spy. Craine looked, full of apprehension, above their heads.