John Gardner - October Light

But it was silly, all the same, to worry about it. For all its faults, she’d hate to have to live, herself, without her color TV. Perhaps it was true, as magazines kept saying, that somewhere in the world — in big-city ghettos, presumably, or in the suburbs where rich people’s children all took drugs — there were people who did the things they saw on TV. If so that was too bad, but she and Lewis weren’t about to snap matches into somebody’s eyes because they’d seen it on Kojak. For them it was all harmless make-believe, trivial and insignificant as stovepipe potatoes, and they would stretch out in their chairs in the darkened room, Lewis with his bottle of ginger ale, she with her cigarettes and coffee, and they would rest after the wearying activities of the day, turn their minds from the bills that somehow never got paid, piled on the kitchen table, and the repairs around the house that would never be finished no matter how hard they worked, and they’d relax and let the noise and pictures bathe over them for an hour or two or three, drifting off occasionally, waking when the music got ominous or sugary to watch some character whose name and significance they’d failed to notice fall screaming off a cliff or be run over by a train or kiss some beautiful woman on the mouth and throat. It was a way of life, nothing more than that but nothing less, either. Having it taken away when you were used to it — as her father in his righteousness had taken it from Aunt Sally — would be a terrible deprivation. For Aunt Sally especially, when it came to that. TV was her link, almost the only one left, with life as she’d known it in North Bennington. They had concerts there, from time to time. (Ginny’s father had never heard a concert in his life.) And in North Bennington people had all the latest gadgets. It was at Aunt Sally’s and Uncle Horace’s that Ginny had seen her first Saran Wrap, her first plastic dishes, her first dishwasher, her first TV dinner. Coming to Ginny’s father’s must have been, for Aunt Sally, like sinking back to the Dark Ages. Shooting her TV was like locking her away in a dungeon.

From downstairs came a cooking smell, her father making something in Crisco. “I guess I’d better go check on Dad,” she said. Then, “Don’t you think we ought to take that gun down before something happens?”

“Nothing’ll happen,” Lewis said, and went on working. “He ain’t even pulled back the hammers.”

She looked up at the gun but was immediately distracted. There was a car pulling into the driveway.

“Get it down, Lewis,” she whispered. “Someone’s coming!”

2

Estelle Parks had been a nextdoor neighbor of Sally and Horace Abbott’s in North Bennington. For years and years she’d been an English teacher in the local school, a spinster taking care of her irascible old mother — her name had then been Moulds — devoting her life to others with selfless good humor, beloved by her students and even by the crabby old woman, her mother, who loved almost nobody else. Estelle was as happy as a bluebird on a fence, a bird she distinctly resembled. She’d once had headaches, it is true, and acid indigestion, which had gotten her into the habit of taking Bromo-Seltzer and had eventually led to terrifying nightmares, the typical bad dreams of a bromide addict; but Dr. Phelps — who was her doctor still, though retired years ago, and was also Sally Abbott’s — had recognized the problem and changed her medication, and the bad dreams had stopped. It is true, too, that she’d had her share of sadness and frustration. She was a pretty woman, though a stranger might not notice it instantly, since her nose came to a point and she had very little chin; but sooner or later one could hardly help but see that Estelle had a pertness, a bright and uncriticizing eagerness of eye, a virginal sweetness and softness that made her almost beautiful. She’d always been careful of her appearance, not compulsively but strictly and dutifully, living as she’d been taught and believed to be right, and careful of her scent — which was stronger and more floral than absolutely necessary — just as she was careful about the appearance and scent of her house, which she kept, with her mother’s help (while her mother remained alive) spotless. It was a house of dark panels; gleaming, rather spindly but tasteful antiques; small, dark paintings of English landscapes and birds — she was a lover of birds and had several of them in cages, all with classical names, Iphigenia, Orestes, Andromache — antimacassars on her chairs; stained glass in the windows beside the door and in the bathroom; mirrors — in the entryway and at the foot of the stairs — with frosted fleur-de-lis borders. She slept on a high brass bed with a pink flowered coverlet.

She was, a stranger might have thought at first glance, a classical type out of a certain kind of novel. She knew it herself. No one read more novels than Estelle Moulds Parks. Half the fiction in the town’s Free Library contained, engraved in blue, her EX LIBRIS • ACCIPITRIS, ESTELLE STERLING MOULDS. But the stereotype, to Estelle’s discerning eye, was unjust and petty-minded.

She had had, as the type was expected to have, her unfortunate enamorments. A young man, for instance, at Albany State Teachers’ when she’d gone there many many years ago. (She’d studied with the great Professor William Lyon Phelps, no relation, so far as she knew, to her doctor.) The affair — not, of course, in the modern sense — had been tender and sweet, they’d read poetry together and acted in a play, but its end had not been, as a novelist would make it, a devastation. He had chosen someone prettier, a friend of Estelle’s, and Estelle had cried half the night but after that it was over. He had not been, in fact, very handsome. That was the error in the fictional stereotype. All the handsomest, cleverest men were always taken by the cleverest, prettiest girls; people like herself got the seconds. Perhaps some young women, such as she’d been then — sharp nosed, small chinned, with a distinct overbite — wasted their affections on unattainable males; that would be sad, no doubt. But Estelle had never been that sort. She’d been quick to like people — had been gregarious all her life — but moderation was her essence: even with the finest man in the world she would not have been the first to fall in love. She’d gotten along comfortably with her second-bests, growing fond when all signs showed that the boy had grown fond, and landing on her feet, as a novelist would say, when it was over. Gradually the inclination to grow fond had passed. Life went on and, unlike the fictional character she resembled, she had been happy. She had loved teaching. She had loved not only the literature and the children but the money as well. Over the years, having only herself and her mother to support — and after the death of her mother, no one but herself — she’d gotten on dashingly, as Henry James might say, and had been able to take trips to Italy and England.

“How,” someone had asked her, “can you stand to teach the same old poetry year after year?” Estelle had laughed, taken by surprise. “But it’s not to the same students every year,” she said, and then she’d laughed again, because it wasn’t that either. The poems grew and grew on her, richer with every decade — she was teaching, by then, her former students’ children, seeing faces she half knew, as a woman sees the face of her father in her son. Once a blond boy of fifteen had chosen, as the poem he would memorize, Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” and something rather odd had gone through her —déjà vu? a premonition? it was impossible to say — but then, weeks later, when he recited the poem, she’d heard distinctly the boy’s father’s voice, her student long before, and she’d covered her face with her hands, weeping happily, listening to the curious sweet irony in the lines, and she’d wanted to laugh aloud or sob, in love with flying Time.