John Gardner - October Light

His mother was always listening to Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier, and as soon as he’d noticed there was a piece for each key he had understood — so Terence had believed — the whole meaning of the piece. The meaning of the section in D minor was D minor, as if Bach should say to his numerous children, “Listen, my children, to what D minor makes me play!” What Terence had discovered about music was not quite respectable, he’d realized. Narrow minded, perhaps snobbish, not easy to defend. There were places in Mahler where the drums insisted on your thinking of an army, or the violins made you think of … whatever. Then he’d deal with Mahler and Beethoven later. For now, he’d decided, it was enough to understand firmly what he understood, that Tippett’s Sonata for Four Horns was entirely about horns.

So he’d decided. But as he listened this time, thinking of the music and of Margie Phelps, thinking of battered and bruised James Page in the house with his shotgun — down the mountain, not far from where the suicide had been, the garnet glow of his still-burning truck — Terence’s stomach was suddenly all butterflies, as if something terrible were about to happen, some great evil, some monster in the music, about to emerge. Whiffle-whiffle-whiffle! went the second, third, and fourth, humorous but threatening, perceptibly malevolent, the tip of a dangerous iceberg. The first horn sailed over them, oblivious as a child or fool, in an entirely wrong key.

Last night Terence had explained his theory, as he’d had it worked out then, to Margie Phelps, realizing as he talked that he was talking about her —the scent of her, the way her hands moved, the way she walked just a little pigeon-toed (he wouldn’t have her walk any other way), unique as a snowflake and, in Terence’s eyes, infinitely more beautiful. “I mean, everything should be what it is,” he’d said, “you know? Absolutely free.”

With a solemn expression she’d looked up at his face — she’d been watching the ground as he told her all this, not speaking except now and then to ask a question: “How do you think of things like that?” she’d said. “I could think for a million years and never come up with it!” Only now, in retrospect, was he fully aware of the darkness all around them and swirling up within them, two innocents chattering, while the old man schemed murder and Aunt Estelle, in the car, sat trembling.

Margie’s words, her perfectly serious expression, had transformed him, given him value and potential. So it had seemed to him and seemed to him now. She had seen him, seen his seeing of the music, and he had therefore seen himself.

Something stirred in the music, darting from dark place to dark place. His eyes snapped open. Had he slept for an instant? For an instant at most; yet he seemed to have dreamed of the suicide — the story his aunt had told him years ago of the young man hanging calm as stone in his attic, in the house below him, Mozart. In the dream — or perhaps inside Tippett’s music — Terence had stared at the faceless, still figure and had realized someone was in terrible danger, drifting out of key, out of orbit toward nothingness, toward emptiness and itself. Margie? he wondered in brief panic. Ed Thomas? Aunt Estelle? For a split second he understood everything, life’s monstrosity and beauty. Then he was listening to the horns again.

His father, on the couch, opened the center-page foldout and looked at it without interest, then raised his eyes and looked at Terence. “What’s the matter?” he said, grinning.

“Nothing,” Terence said, and blushed.

6

“You mean to thay you ain’t comin out even now?” James called in.

She was silent a moment, hugging herself against the cold and watching herself as she might a stranger, seeing if she’d relent. “Nothing’s changed,” she said.

“Nothingth changed!” he yelled. “By God, Thally, you’re the meaneth, thtubborneth, bitchieth, mule-headedeth, vengefulleth cold-blooded therpent in the Thtate of Vermont!”

“That may be true, and I don’t say I’m proud of it, but it don’t change the facts one iota.” She stood with her chin lifted, her two hands holding the bathrobe together, one of them clutching the paperback book, her whole being braced against the world, against God and all His angels if need be.

James was hopping mad. She could see him, in her mind’s eye, bent over the doorknob, wild blue eyes bulging from his black-and-blue, scratched up face. Well rant on, Lucifer! She hadn’t made him get crazy drunk and drive that truck off the road — smash up his truck till there was nothing left of it and he couldn’t even drive to the hospital to visit his daughter.

“Ith a lucky thing for you they don’t thtill burn witcheth!” he yelled. “You theen the blood out here? Little Ginnyth half-dead in the hothpital and that don’t change nothing?”

“Applecrate want meant for her and you know it,” she snapped. “It was you started wavin that gun around, James Page.

I was just setting here mindin my own business, and you went—”

“And eatin appleth!” he yelled.

“What?” she said.

“You wath juth thettin there mindin your own bithneth and eatin appleth! Pretendin you wath goin on a hunger thtrike like Mahatma Gandhi, and all the time you wath cheatin like you’ve cheated me all your life! You wath livin on appleth!”

The old woman clamped her lips together and her eyes flashed. “That’s not the argument we’re havin,” she yelled, faster and sharper than a horsewhip snapping, “and don’t you go slitherin from one thing to another like I don’t know a cow from a cornknife. If your idea is to bring up every speck and mite of dirt you can think of from fifty, sixty years ago, why let me just warn you I can bring to mind a few little incidents myself that I’d be pleased to tell you, so if I was you I’d drop that, and faster’n you’d ever drop a bumblebee!”

“Damn!” he yelled. He stamped his foot. “Damn if you don’t make me want to come in there and thute you all ovah again! You jith won’t quit! Therth my little Ginny in the hothpital—”

“God knows that applecrate want meant for Ginny. If you’d took it on the head yourself as you was meant to—”

He was incredulous. His voice went up two octaves. “Ye’d have killed me, Thally! Damn if you wouldn’t. I’m an old man! Ye’d have thmathed my head like an eggthell and broken my back! Who’d ye gone and lived off then, damn it?”

“I never started it, believe you me, and I don’t see the need for all this swearin and coarse language. If your daughter’s in the hospital it’s nobody put her there but you, James Page, same as you put old Ed Thomas in the hospital and would’ve put me in the hospital if not in my grave if I hadn’t defended myself. You can rant and rail till the cows come home, and try to make me feel guilty and come clean up your mess for you — all the blood you spilt and the dishes you broke and I don’t know what-all — but the situation hasn’t changed one iota, or if it has it’s for the worse: I came into this room because you chased me with stove-wood, and ye’d like to have killed me then and there if I hadn’t stepped lively. That’s how you do things, that’s all you know. You think the whole world’s just a herd of milkcows that you can drive wheresoever you please by hittin ’em with a stick or throwin some stones or maybe sickin the dog on ’em. Well believe you me it won’t work on Sally Abbott and that’s all there is to it, so here I sit!” When she finished, far stronger and firmer than she’d started, rising on her anger and rhetoric to conviction — becoming like her mother in her final years, Rebekah Page, tall and unyielding, sober-eyed and stern as Old Testament Justice — and also like her grandmother Leah Starke, who had borne sixteen children, most of whom died young, and had survived to the age of a hundred and three, much of that time in the Old Folks’ Home — her voice was ringing like an old-time orator’s, so that the silence that followed was like a sudden courtroom hush. She waited for him to answer, half alarmed by her own gall. Instead, she heard him moving away.