John Gardner - October Light

For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought …

So years had passed. She’d sailed across to Europe on the Liberté with her old friend Ruth Thomas, the town librarian, and they’d spent a month in Florence and a month in Rye, in a cottage around the corner from Henry James’ old house, a cottage on the edge of the churchyard. She’d experienced unhappiness — the death of friends and friends’ parents and children, tragedies of her students — and innumerable disappointments; but all the same, life had been good to her. She’d gotten her teeth fixed, correcting the unsightly overbite, and she’d taught and read and traveled, keeping in touch with everyone she loved, and little by little she had grown, without knowing it, beautiful. She had realized it only when Ferris Parks, a professor of mathematics up at Bennington College and a widower, a man she’d seen often at Sage City concerts — he reminded her a little of Gregory Peck — had asked her, one night, to have dinner with him. She’d blushed scarlet, or so he’d told her later. There followed what she liked to call, mimicking bad novelists, a “whirlwind courtship,” then marriage. They’d been married eight years — the happiest of her life, playing bridge with friends, drinking sherry with Horace and Sally Abbott, traveling, when school was out, to Europe or Japan. Then one night coming across the mountains in midwinter, Ferris had been killed in a car accident. Her life reeled. If it hadn’t been for Horace and Sally, she might never have survived it.

All that was, of course, many years ago. She was now an old woman: eighty-three.

Estelle knocked again, firmly but not imperiously, at James Page’s door. A chicken watched her with its head cocked.

3

“Hello, James,” Estelle said, smiling. Tipping her head, she looked in past him. “Oh dear me, you’re having supper!”

“No, I be finished,” he said. He backed away to let her in.

Now his daughter Virginia was at the foot of the stairs, just opening the door into the kitchen. She looked white as a sheet.

“Why, hello, Virginia!” Estelle said.

“Oh! Hi, Estelle. How nice of you to visit.” She forced a smile.

Estelle smiled back happily, though she was not such an old dim-witted fool as not to have noticed there was something peculiar going on. She made her way carefully, leaning on her canes, far enough into the kitchen that James could shut the door. “Mmm, how nice and warm it is,” she said. “Outside there it’s cold as the dickens.”

“I know,” James said. “I been out.”

She glanced at him, then smiled again. “Is Sally home, James?”

“I’ll call her,” Virginia said — it was a little like a yelp — and turned back to the stairs.

Estelle moved carefully, pushing down hard on her rubber-tipped canes, toward the table. James came along awkwardly beside her, reaching toward her elbow but not touching it. He looked glum as could be, she saw, glancing at him briefly. She gave him another smile.

“Aunt Sally,” Virginia called, looking up the stairs. “Can you come down? You’ve got company.”

Estelle heard the rumble of a man’s voice above. Virginia, standing on the stairs, pulled the door to behind her, talking with him.

James had now brought over a chair for Estelle. She hooked the two dark, wooden canes together and leaned them against the table, then lowered herself carefully to the edge of the chair. “That’s it,” he said behind her, “that’s got it.” She felt on each side with her gloved hands, got herself lined up, and carefully, heart fluttering, fell backward. “Oop!” she said, but all was well. She smiled. James pushed her, as though she were sitting in a wheelchair, closer to the table. “My goodness,” she said, and laughed.

He went around the corner of the table to where his plate and glass were and picked them up. He said, “Your nephew bring you over?”

“My great-nephew, yes,” she said. “Terence.”

James studied the glass and plate, scowling. “He oughtn’t t’ave to wait in the cah,” he said. He carried the glass and plate over to the sink and turned the water on. He stood bent, washing them in hot water from the tap — rinsing them, rather — and Estelle smiled thoughtfully at the wide, gray X of suspenders on his back. She said, “Don’t you mind about Terence, James. He’s got the radio, you know.” She listened to the hum of conversation beyond the stairway door. “Is Sally sick?” she asked.

“No, just cranky,” he said.

It was not so much the words or the way he said them as the way he stood, like one of her twelfth-graders feeling picked on and furious, years ago, that made her ask, full of sympathy, “You mean she’s cross with you, James?”

“Gone on strike, that’s the fact of the matter,” he said. He put the dish and the glass and some silverware in the strainer beside the sink. “Locked herself up in her room. What you think about that?” He turned to glare at her, wicked as a donkey. When Estelle only smiled, hardly knowing what to say, he reached down into his shirt pocket and got his pipe and tobacco, a bright red foil package, and clumsily, as if his fingers were wood, began poking the tobacco into the bowl. Estelle pulled her gloves off, delicately letting him know she was here to set things right, if she could, and no use his resisting. Her fingers were small and crooked but still supple, still usable, even on the piano, though hardly what they’d once been. He came toward the table. He was bent at the waist. Old.

“Poor Sally,” she said, thinking what he’d done to her television. “—And poor James, too! How long has she been on strike?”

“Two nights and two days,” he said.

Estelle’s eyes widened. “My my!” she said.

The door to the stairway opened just then, and Virginia looked out, smiling falsely. At once the smile faded. “Dad?” she said. Her eyes shot guiltily toward Estelle.

“She asked how’s Sally,” James said, “so I told her. There somethin wrong with that?”

“Now don’t be ashamed, Ginny,” Estelle broke in quickly, “these things will happen. You mustn’t blame your father — and you mustn’t blame your Aunt Sally either. That’s one of the things I learned in teaching. Trying to lay blame is a huge waste of time. No matter how it comes out, someone’s going to feel cheated — and so would you, if you were in that person’s place. It never fails.” She smiled first at Ginny, then at James. “So let’s agree no one’s to blame and just try to get this settled.”

Ginny looked doubtful, something between guilty and petulant, but came a step farther into the room.

“That’s all very well to say,” James said, “and I’m sure it works fine on schoolchildren, but it won’t work here, I give you wahning.” He lit his pipe.

“Why, James!” Estelle said, as though he were a favorite pupil in whom she was disappointed.

“Dad,” Ginny said, “be reasonable.”

The old man said nothing, his flat mouth shut tight, the bowl of his pipe sending clouds up. There were footsteps now on the stairs behind Ginny and after a moment Lewis appeared and came around her into the kitchen.