John Gardner: October Light

The old woman lowered the book to her lap, wondering, half-unconsciously, whether or not she was in a mood to continue. She was finding the story at least mildly interesting — certain little oddities of attitude and style awakened in her mind brief flickers of satisfaction. But even for an old woman imprisoned in her bedroom by a lunatic, there was no denying it was a waste of time, and since she knew in advance that there were pages fallen out — for all she knew, whole chapters might be lost — it was a more or less serious question. Yet it was not exactly in those terms that she framed it.

“That’s what we’re down to,” she said half aloud, as if to someone in the room. She was thinking how, when Horace was alive, they’d sometimes gone down to New York City to some play by William Shakespeare. She remembered the city lights, the crowded sidewalks, the sudden excitement of entering the theater, stepping abruptly into a whole new world — new qualities of sound, red seas of carpet, red, velvet-covered chains on brass posts, the people all dressed in their finest. She thought of that moment, just after the lights dimmed, when the outer curtain rose, lifting like the skirt of a curtsying grand lady, and then the second swept away, and there stood the set, unreal, magnificent, a lure to an even more magical kingdom where unreal creatures in spangled, bright clothes walked their stylized walks, making stylized gestures, faces brightly painted like the faces of dolls, intoning in a language never spoken by men,

Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour

Draws on apace; four happy days …

Sometimes, in the years since Horace’s death, she’d gone down to the city with her friend Estelle, and though it wasn’t quite the same, it was thrilling nonetheless, that magical step into a world all sharp color and high sentiment. How paltry these modern novels were, compared to that!

And yet it was not merely the excitement of the stage. What could be more humble — more ridiculous, even — than her friend the village librarian, Ruth Thomas, sitting on a milkstool behind her husband’s cows, reading to him and to his hired men stories out of Edgar Allan Poe or Wilkie Collins? Sally had not heard it, actually, had only heard Ed Thomas speak of it, and sometimes Ruth; yet she had no doubt that the excitement was nearly the same. As he moved like a thoughtful bear from cow to cow (Ruth loved speaking of her husband as a bear, mimicking him as she did so, looking far more like a bear than he did, since she was large and lumbering), Ruth would read expressively, casting her voice above the milking-machine noise, and if he missed something Ed would call, “What? What?” and she would read the line again. So Horace, long ago, had frequently read to Sally Abbott. They had meant something then, works of literature. The world had been younger, feelings had run deep.

Yet even as she thought it, she doubted that it was true. With sudden vehemence and grief, she thought: Books have no effect at all, no value whatsoever.

Horace had been a voracious reader, as well as a lover of music and art. One might have supposed that it was there he had found his serenity and wisdom — for nothing could ruffle him except, occasionally, her brother. But Richard too, Horace’s nephew and all but son — certainly as dear to them both as a son could have been — Richard too had been a lover of books and good music. Shakespeare and Mozart and the rest had not saved him. With grim purpose, alone in the house where his parents had first lived, he’d drunk himself indifferent and gone up to the attic …

The old woman sighed, her mind flinching back to the commonplace. Where was Ginny?

It was an embarrassment to think of her niece at her Lodge meeting, sitting in a kind of imitation throne, with a satiny, sashlike thing slanting from one shoulder, speaking to her “sisters” in stylized mumbo-jumbo, making stylized gestures, exactly like characters in some tedious play without a story. It was all, in the old woman’s opinion, shamefully low-class, artificial. In her mind’s eye she saw them seated in their get-ups, prim in wooden folding chairs all around the room, the middle of the room left empty so that three or four of them — no doubt Ginny among them — could parade with their Christmasy dark blue and scarlet flags: pudgy, fat-hipped women moving carefully in step, furtively glancing left and right to stay in line, imitation soldiers on the march to God knew what. The very thought sickened her. Yet how much of life came down to that, really — mere dress-up, ridiculous make-believe!

She sighed again, more shallowly this time, her reverie drifting toward a sensitive place. Everyone was guilty, of course. (Now the old woman was safe again, though her expression was sad.) Even Horace, she thought, evading the tedium of life, the plainness and ultimately, hopelessness of it all, playing Swan Lake on his office phonograph while he picked at decaying teeth. Even she, Sally Page Abbott herself, drifting through this novel full of clever, weary talk—

Where have we gone wrong?

That’s what Tolstoy asked himself.

— Tolstoy indeed!

It was covering, all covering, mere bright paint over rotting barn walls. It was perhaps that that her nephew had realized, that night.

She remembered with a pang the annual Bennington Antiques Festival, where she’d first seen Richard with the Flynn girl. One single image came into her mind, and the emotion, dimmed by years but still sharp, that went with it. It was August, the time when all through Vermont every village had its fair, in those days, its battery of church suppers, its evening band concerts and firemen’s demonstrations. It was a time of almost daily celebration of high summer and the beginnings of the harvest, one last communal fling before September, when the harvest came in earnest — apples, corn, pumpkins — and with it increasing signs of autumn, and then locking time, and then winter. She and Horace, that year, had taken Richard and Ginny — he was seventeen, Ginny perhaps ten, both of them golden-haired as angels and both full of life, always laughing and romping. The children had gone through the rooms of exhibits and the temporary shops with only casual interest, even Richard too young to understand the importance and beauty of old tables and lamps, wooden plows, old paintings that represented actual scenes of Vermont life seventy years ago; and while she and Horace lingered over hand-painted dishes and Bennington pottery, Ginny and Richard had gone on out to the lawn where there were games in progress and where, unbeknownst to Sally Abbott, the Flynn girl stood watching, heart fluttering, for Richard. When she and Horace emerged, arms loaded with packages — and this was the image that remained in Sally’s mind — Richard and the Flynn girl were on the bright green slope that dropped gently toward the brook, holding hands and swinging each other around and around in a kind of wild primeval dance. She had on a white dress, and her red hair was flying. Behind them stood pines and the dark greenish blue of Mount Anthony. Ginny looked up as she and Horace came out, her expression slightly furtive, knowing. “Richard’s in love,” she said. Her smile was proud, proprietary, as if perhaps she herself had arranged it.

They stood still, looking; and after a moment Horace said, “With the Flynn girl?” He spoke as if bemused.

They’d been surprised to discover, the next instant, how fully little Ginny understood the implications. “Daddy doesn’t know,” she said.

“Would he mind?” Horace asked — disingenuous.

“She’s Irish,” Ginny said, and smiled again.

Horace had showed nothing. Sally had looked thoughtfully at her niece, not quite sure what her own feelings were, though part of what she felt was, of course, distress. To Ginny, clearly, it was all just delightful; and Sally had mused, half-unconsciously: how easily nature overwhelms stiff opinions, dead theories. Horace said, his nearly bald head tipped, his suitcoat bunched up from when he’d lifted the armful of packages, his mild eyes gazing past his load at the pair on the slope: “Well, well! Irish, you say!”