John Gardner: October Light

“Grampa,” little Dickey had whined to him once, his breath steaming in the deep-winter cold. (She had watched it all from the back-room window.) The old man ignored him, and the boy touched his sleeve, cautious as a city man reaching toward a horse. “Grampa, what does it mean when you say ‘cold as a cane’?”

“Kind of hail,” her brother answered, pushing him back out of the way of his axe, “sticks instead of stones. Coldest thing there be.” He would say no more, miserly with words as with everything else. James, chopping wood, had only thin wool gloves on.

Dickey said, after a reasonable wait, “What’s pussley broth?”

“Nubbidy knows.” He gauged his stroke, squinting, and brought the axe down hard. He was splitting blocks of elm. Only two weeks in a year was it cold enough for elm-splitting. Most people said you couldn’t split elm at all. “Trick to ’t,” he’d say, and would say no more.

Dickey said, “Grampa, what’s tunkit’ mean?” He danced to warm his feet.

The axe came down again, clean as the sound of a stone against a stone — it was twenty below zero — and the block fell apart as if opened by a spell. He brought the axe away, looking with self-satisfaction and casual ferocity at the boy. “Why do pigs sleep in trees?” he said.

Her brother was more like their mad uncle Ira than he knew, she’d mused. It was not a thing she planned to mention to him. He’d be flattered and maybe turn still meaner.

“Boy, go inside where it’s wahm,” James said, pointing with the axe.

“I ain’t cold,” Dickey said. He continued dancing, steam all around him, his mittened hands tucked inside his armpits.

“The hell you ain’t, boy,” the old man snapped, chaining him there by the pride in his voice. She had turned from the window, disgusted.

To will one thing.

She looked back at her novel — or rather, began to pay attention again, since while her mind had wandered her eyes had gone on reading, dutifully moving from word to word like well-trained horses through a haylot. She drew them back to where the sense had stopped registering and realized with satisfaction that Peter Wagner spoke not, as she’d thought at first, in earnest, but in anger and scorn, taunting the psychiatrist, taunting all the stiff, self-righteous world. Again she saw him dangling in his overcoat, below him churning fog and San Francisco’s colored lights. She imagined the psychiatrist, at the rail above, with baggy-lidded eyes, the policemen like storm-troopers in a World War II movie.

“Get the rope,” someone said.

Looking down at the fog, insofar as he could, was like looking at clouds from above.

“That’s from Kierkegaard,” Dr. Berg said with sugary interest.

“You’re an intellectual,” he said.

A rope came down, with a grapnel on the end, and they fumbled it toward him. He broke free with his left hand, hanging only with his right, and Dr. Berg said, “Lay off,” then whispered, “Let me talk to him.” Dr. Berg said, “You think I don’t know about suffering? You’re suffering.”

“It’s true. Christ.” It was not true, except that his fingers had lost their numbness and his knuckles were in pain.

“You feel as if all life’s a waste. You’ve read the philosophers — hungry, hungry — and nobody’s got a real answer. You’re practically an authority on existentialism, absurdism!” He carefully spoke French.

“Christ, yes.”

“Love is an illusion. Hope is the opiate of the people. Faith is pure stupidity. That’s how you feel.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

“Let him drop,” Dr. Berg said coldly.

The gloved hands let loose but he hung on.

“Is there a ship underneath me?” he asked.

Berg laughed. “You’re testing me, friend. You’re a very complex person.”

“Is there?” he said.

“No. Not right now.”

“You’re a very complex person too. If you can’t win, you want me smashed on some fucking ship.” He looked up and the mushroom face smiled.

“That may be true,” Dr. Berg said. “It puts you in kind of a bind, doesn’t it? You’re too drunk to tell if there’s a ship underneath you, and since I’m a professional psychiatrist, with a certain inevitable ego-involvement in the work I do, maybe I’d rather see you smashed on a ship than gently sucked out by the ocean if I’ve got to lose.”

“That’s true,” he said. He began to cry, carefully listening to the foghorns. “The whole modern world is a catastrophe for the individual psyche. I’ve tried everything — love, drugs, whiskey, withdrawal to the Old Symbolic Sea, but everywhere I turn falsehood, illusion. I want to die.” He glanced quickly at Dr. Berg, then down again. “Waaa!” he bawled.

“I know how you feel,” Dr. Berg said, vastly gentle. “You think I haven’t felt it? Listen. I’m married. A sweet, good wife, three sweet, good children. You think I’m ignorant of despair?”

“Where have we gone wrong?”

“That’s what Tolstoy asked himself.”

They had cars going over the bridge again now. It seemed a little unfeeling. How could they know Peter Wagner was not that poor mad weeping maiden, or the bow-legged prostitute, hardly more than a child? Yet all life is compromise, of course. The mail must get through, and the groceries; almonds to San Diego, squash to Pasadena. God bless, God bless. His father had made his fortune in sugar beets. A splendid man; frail and coughing, those last few years, but optimistic to the end. His rural background. “Europeans,” he said, “know how to live. We’re mites by comparison to the wise old Europeans.” Everything he said was true, always, for the moment at least. Peter Wagner’s respect for his father was boundless, his admiration downright religious, though he agreed with him in nothing. “Between them, big government and the unions are ruining this country,” his father said, “and a few unscrupulous big businesses.” It was not that what his father said was untrue; it was merely tiresome, like great art forever staring ga-ga at the black abyss. “Drink up, Andrew,” his mother would say. That too was a tiresome philosophy. His uncle Morton had a book, which he was unable to get published, about “the great Negro-Jewish conspiracy.” The rest of his childhood, so far as he could remember, had been bird-baths and elm trees and lawns. Sometimes at parties, to his horror, his stepmother spoke French.

“Doesn’t it?” Dr. Berg asked sharply.

He realized his mind had been wandering. He wondered if arthritis was the feeling in his knuckles now. He called up, “If despair is the meaning of life, a man should seize it, clutch it like a god!” He felt his overcoat ripping at the armpits.

“That’s true,” Dr. Berg said. “Or anyway, it’s as true as anything else. So drop.”

“You’re a very complex person,” he said. “You make it extremely difficult for a man to drop.” He felt openness below him. Another ship was moving in. A small one. Half a mile away there was a blurry searchlight, a Coast Guard cutter. Ah, civilization! Swift, swift! The cutter came on with incredible speed. It was too late already. He hung on. He said: “Death is as meaningless as life. You agree, Dr. Berg?”

“Of course. So what else? Listen. Come talk with me in my office. If you convince me that suicide is the only way, I won’t prevent you. You believe me?”

“I do, I do!”

“Then let us pull you up.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Then drop.” He saw his mistake instantly. The ship had passed and the water below was clear. “Grab him!”

He dropped. The beautiful lights of San Francisco hung level for a time then sank upward, slowly, slowly. The rush of wind sucked his breath out. He fell and fell.