John Gardner - October Light

“Sally,” she called, “it doesn’t seem right to keep your door locked even against your friends.”

“I know it, Estelle,” Sally answered. “But I haven’t got much choice, do I? I sometimes think—” Her voice became slightly theatrical, the self-pity more distinct, as if she were speaking lines out of Shakespeare or Tennyson: “I sometimes think we’re all characters in some book. It’s as if our whole lives are plotted from start to finish, so that even if the end should be happy it’s poisoned when we get to it.”

Estelle’s eyes widened. “Sally Abbott, what on earth’s got into you?” she said. “Why, that’s the silliest thing I ever heard!” She looked over at Lewis. A decision was building in her. “Lewis, dear, help me downstairs,” she said. “I need to use the telephone.”

He looked alarmed but at once put down the scraper and came to help.

5

James Page stared out his kitchen window in a fury of indignation. “What the hell?” he said. He rolled the October Saturday Evening Post in his hands as if making it a weapon, his spectacles hanging cockeyed down his nose.

“Company’s coming,” Dickey called excitedly from the living room.

It was a quarter past eight. James Page’s front yard was lit like the parking lot at Mammoth Mart, and pretty near as filled with cars, or so it looked to James.

“Good heavens, I’d better put cocoa on,” Virginia said, bursting into the kitchen, cigarette in hand. She’d puffed up her hair and put lipstick on and powder on her cheeks to try to hide the dark circles. Halfway to the pots and pans she stopped. “No,” she said, and the cigarette in her hand began wobbling violently, “I’d better see them in.” She was thinking, in fact, of the lilac bushes, thinking perhaps she could steer the company off the path and away from them so no one would know.

“I’d like to know what in tunkit’s goin on here,” her father said.

“Oh, Dad, for heaven’s sakes calm down!” she said. She had the door open now, waving and carrying on, yelling “Hi there! Hi there! Over this way!”

Lewis appeared at the foot of the stairway, paint-chips all over him. “Looks like somebody’s drove up,” he said. He looked guilty as sin.

Estelle Parks said, leaning on both canes, peeking out from the living room — she’d taken her coat and hat off now—“Why, who in the world can that be?”

“You ought to know, you meddlin old buzzard,” James Page said, white with anger. “You called ’em youahself, in there on the telephone.”

“Why, James!” she said, and then quickly, as if just remembering, “That’s true, so I did.”

“If that just don’t beat hell,” he said. He raised the rolled-up Saturday Evening Post as if to hit something, found nothing to hit, and lowered it again. A loud crack came from his pipestem. He’d bit clear through it. He spit and put the pipe in his shirt pocket.

“This way! Yoo hoo! This way!” Virginia was calling. She was off the porch now, herding them away from the lilacs. The car lights were off and the yard was full of happy voices and the sound of feet. He recognized Ed Thomas’s hefty Welsh laugh.

James leaned his head toward Estelle, his wide mouth twitching. “Just what in the world you think you’re doin?” he said.

“Now easy there, Dad,” Lewis said mildly, looking not at his father-in-law but at the painted cap where the stovepipe had once gone. “It’s a dahn good idea and you’d ought to go along with it. We’ll just have a few people in, that’s ah, have a little singin and story-tellin — little ahguin, mebby, about politics“—he grinned, “—little sweet smellin food. Ye never know, Aunt Sally might just decide ‘Shoot!’ and come on down and join us.”

“It’s an Indian remedy,” Estelle said, and smiled. It was a pretty smile, apologetic and kindly, and James was for a moment disconcerted. “When an Iroquois Indian had a tapeworm in him, the medicine doctor would starve the man and then brace the man’s jaws open and put out some broth. Pretty soon, out popped the tapeworm.”

James’ eyes widened. “Great Peter,” he barked, and slammed the Saturday Evening Post against his leg, “Sally’s no tapeworm! She does a thing, she’s got reasons for it.” His hands were shaking at the indignity of it all — or so it seemed to Estelle and Lewis, who were suddenly filled with remorse over what they’d done. But the matter was a little more complex than they understood. He was indeed indignant at their treating his sister — however outrageous her behavior might be — as some mindless creature that could be coaxed through fire with a graham cracker. But the thing that had mainly gotten into James Page was Estelle’s smile. Old fool that he was — so he put it to himself — for an instant James had felt powerfully attracted to her, emotion rising in his chest as sharp and disturbing as it would in any schoolboy. Even now he was upset and surprised by it. Metaphysically upset, in point of fact, though the word was not one James Page would have used. They were old and ugly, both of them, and the body’s harboring of such emotions so long past their time was a cruel affront, a kind of mockery from heaven.

“I’m sorry, James,” Estelle said — and damned if the thing didn’t leap in him again. But he didn’t have long to think about it, or endure it, rather, for now the company was sailing through the door, little Dickey standing there holding it open, grinning like a duck, as if he thought it had suddenly turned Christmas.

“What are you doing up, you little whippersnapper?” Ruth Thomas —née Jerome — said, tousling Dickey’s hair and making her eyes cross. Then, pivoting her three hundred pounds like a dancer, she threw out her arms and embraced the room. “Happy October one and all!” she cried. Her puffy, spotted hands came, graceful as the hands of an actress, to her lips and she blew them all a kiss. From the elbows to the shoulders, her arms were exceedingly fat. Ruth Thomas was, in the old sense, mad. She had a voice like music, for all her years — as remarkable a voice as this world has ever heard, a study in contradictions. It was a clear, ringing voice — or so nature had intended it — a voice built for sweetness and volume, the voice of a singer. For years, indeed, she’d lent her rich, somewhat breathy alto to the Congregational Church Choir in North Bennington, and she’d given more recitals at the McCullough Mansion than anyone now living could remember, including Ruth Thomas. At the same time, her many years as head librarian in the John G. McCullough Free Library — or possibly some other cause — had given her voice a not-quite dulcet, artificial throatiness that seemed at once studiously cultured and seductive, or at any rate intended to have that effect, unless it was mockery, or self-mockery, or something else. She spoke, or sang, or did both at once, like an unsubmergeably strong piano with the soft pedal pressed to the carpet. She enjoyed good talk — she talked constantly — and had a powerful laugh.

Her body, even now that she was seventy-six, was a creation as curious as her voice. Her walk was no longer spry — she’d limped badly ever since she’d slipped on a shag-rug and broken her hip, six years ago (she had a pin in it now), and her thick gray-stockinged legs were bent just slightly the wrong way at her knees, so that she looked, standing up, like a large deer balanced on its hind legs in an orchard, reaching up for apples. Aside from her walk, her every gesture was the soul of natural grace. For all her weight, she might have been the model of elegance if she’d liked — might, that is, have been a graceful and elegant fat woman — but Ruth was too much the clown for that (for which some people liked her and others did not), delighting in mimickry and buffoonery of every sort, from parody of Queen Victoria to the low bumps and grinds of burlesque halls. This too her years as librarian had tended to modify and inhibit, as was perhaps just as well. She’d learned to limit herself for hours at a time to nothing more outlandish than a clever, perhaps slightly overstated mimickry of primness. Her native impishness showed only, for the most part, as a wicked sparkle in her bright blue eyes and a tendency to make faces. “This book,” a visitor to the library might say in high dudgeon, as though it were Ruth Thomas’s fault, “is stupid.” “Stupid?” Ruth Thomas would exclaim, as if distressed. Before she could stop herself, assuming she wanted to, her upper teeth, or rather dentures, would protrude and her bright blue eyes would cross. With children — or at any rate with most children — it had made her, for years and years, the Queen of North Bennington. On other occasions her curious ability with gestures would slip out — a Jewish shrug, an Italian’s flip of the hand for “eh paesan,” the silly go-get-em-boys jab and cross of a dim-witted highschool coach.