John Gardner - October Light

They’d stopped whirling now and stood laughing, still holding hands. Then Richard looked up and saw them and waved. After a moment the Flynn girl waved too. It took courage, knowing Richard, but he came up toward them, leading her, still holding her hand. He introduced her, stumbling on her queer old Gaelic name and blushing. She too blushed, so that the freckles were hidden for a moment, eclipsed. Horace bowed formally, exactly as he would if he were meeting a new patient, someone he wished to assure of his care and respect. He was shorter than the girl. Her beauty made him seem a mere dandy.

When they were in the car, later, starting for home, Richard watched, trying not to make it too obvious, until the bright orange hair and white dress were out of sight behind the trees.

Then Ginny said, looking up at Sally, “Isn’t she pretty?”

“She’s beautiful,” Sally said. She studied Richard’s face, smiling to herself. She added, “Don’t you think so, Horace?”

He seemed lost in thought, his soft hands closed firmly on the steering wheel, his head still drawn back and tilted. She knew pretty well what was going through his mind. It wasn’t good to intrude in another man’s family affairs; but also young people had a right to fall in love as they pleased. It was the most obvious of all lessons of history. “A very nice girl, I thought,” he said.

It was true, they’d learned as they later came to know her. She was a joy and a delight, gentle and quick-witted, passionate, full of fun — though she also had a temper, and when she chose to, she knew how to sulk. They had valued her none the less for it. If she dared to contend with James L. Page, she’d need all her weaponry. Little by little Sally and Horace Abbott had become implicated in the lovers’ schemes. Sally, for one, hadn’t minded. She would do it again.

She looked down at the book, staring through it, still gazing at that elegant dance on the lawn, the Flynn girl’s red hair flying. No, not a dance, she corrected herself, feeling sudden irritation: the natural exuberance of young people in love.

But it was also a dance. An artifice. An illusion. She half closed her eyes, studying the image more critically, watching the stylized gestures, listening to the voices.

It was a curious reverie, Sally Abbott realized, awakening with a start. It was as vivid in her mind as the pictures that rose when she was reading the book — and probably not much more true to life. But what was strangest about it, she realized now that she’d noticed what she’d been thinking — what sadness she’d been savoring — was that the thought, the whole mood, was so unlike her. She’d always been an optimist, a person who enjoyed life. She was never one to brood: she cleaned house, cooked meals, took hold of things firmly and did her best with them. Why these doubts of the obvious, this ugly cynicism? It was an effect of the novel, she had to suppose. An unhealthy effect, no question about it!

No question about it, she thought again, but her fingers were trembling. Sally Page Abbott had been a handsome woman once, well married and well off, wonderfully proud of her nephew and niece, though sorry, of course, to have no children of her own. When she looked around her now … She glanced away from the page, then back, snatching a little breath.

She was staring at the print, and it came clear to her that she did intend to go on reading, merely to pass the time — merely to escape the stupidity, the dreariness, the waste of things. Never mind how foolish the book might be, how artificial. Her niece’s meetings were right, in the end. Mumbo-jumbo; flags. By all means, throw up a screen! Sing hymns! Speak verse!

She glanced in annoyance at the light above the bed, soft, over-shaded, then at the ceiling globe, hardly brighter. They’d certainly never been designed for reading. She could do as well lighting up the kerosene lamp on the commode.

She thought, for some reason, of James’ wife Ariah, pretty-faced and witless, dead now for years — a kind of cancer. The whole house, this house in which Sally had grown up, bore yet the stamp of Ariah’s sweet, soft character. She remembered her putting up lace curtains in bright sunlight, singing. “You have a lovely voice,” Horace had said. He’d always been especially polite to ladies. It had to do, partly, with his dentistry work. Ever after that time, whenever Sally and Horace had come up to visit, Ariah had found reason to sing to herself. It was annoying.

The old woman returned, somewhat abruptly, to her book.

2

ALKAHEST’S CONVERSION

John F. Alkahest, sitting in his wheelchair at the polished rail of the Coast Guard cutter, peered down through his opera glasses at the fishingboat below. The whole evening had made his heart race — it was his first ride on a Coast Guard cutter — but this was beyond his wildest dreams. The word suicide had shogged through the night, and now Guardsmen, pumping elegant, animal muscles, chins poking forward with glorious intent, hurried back and forth, prepared for self-sacrifice and wide heroic gesture, though mostly they had nothing to do. John Alkahest was not a Guardsman but a medical doctor — an ex-brain-surgeon, who had had, in his day, an excellent reputation. He was now eighty-three. Several things stood out about him. First, he was paraplegic. He’d been in a wheelchair since the age of nine, when his father, disordered by a tumor and hard to live with in any case, had shot him in the back. Second, he looked like a man dressed as Death for some macabre party. His head was like a skull, as white and devoid of sheen as chalk, and his hands were so ashen you’d have sworn he carried in his vessels not blood but formaldehyde. Along with the paleness went a curious hypersensitivity, a gift for precise sensory definition highly unusual in elderly persons: he was — as he sometimes remarked himself — like one of those characters in gothic tales who could hear a dead woman’s shroud rustle many rooms away. He had a nose more delicate than a hunting dog’s, and his sense of touch was extraordinary. Only his sense of sight was inferior. His glasses were thick, a smoky yellow-brown. And whether because of his myopia or for darker reasons, Dr. Alkahest’s eyes, set deep in his head, had a glitter that even old colleagues who’d known him for years found unnerving. It was to counteract the effect of those eyes that he smiled, whenever he remembered, his death’s-head smile. He was, it goes without saying, vain. He wore dark, natty suits, funeral ties hand-made in Italy, a ruby stickpin, and, tonight, a great Austrian overcoat with a black fur collar. His motorized wheelchair was a luxury model, a Mercedes-Benz among wheelchairs: a black leather seat, silver spokes, and black leather arms. He had a handsome purple lap rug draped over his knees.

The reason for Dr. Alkahest’s presence on the Coast Guard cutter was a remarkably powerful feeling he’d developed, in recent months, that his life was a pitch-black, bottomless pit devoid of all pleasure, all direction. He needed thrills, he thought; quasi-sexual thrills, the kind he’d gotten, for a while at least, after hiring his cleaning woman Pearl, who’d been raped. Though once notorious among the English set and a sometime celebrated frequenter of gay bars, old Dr. Alkahest had been inactive for years. He had lost all sense of …

“Drat,” Sally Abbott said. There was a leaf missing, pages eleven and twelve. She looked through the other loose pages in the book, but it was lost completely. It occurred to her that maybe it was still on the floor, where she’d found the book, or had slipped under the bed. She put the book on the table, open to her place, and got out of bed to look. She bent down — still spry for all her years — and with her left hand raised the dust-ruffle. The page was not there. She straightened up again, scowling out the window toward the road.