"Hi, Dad," he brought out, and somehow managed to go to him and get down on his knees beside him and put his arm around his back. He felt dizzy now, nauseated, and he was crying like his father. "I hate you," he whispered too softly for any of them to hear.
His father stayed. He worked long days, in control once more, though occasionally he smoked, pacing in his room nights, or rode off on his motorcycle for an hour or two, and seldom smiled. Nevertheless, in a month he was again reciting poetry for schools and churches and the Grange, and sometimes reading Scripture from the pulpit Sunday mornings. Jack, sitting rigid, hands over his face, was bitterly ashamed of those poems and recitations from the Bible. His father"s eyes no longer flashed, he no longer had the style of an actor. Even his gestures were submissive, as pliant as the gra.s.s. Though tears ran down Jack Hawthorne"s face-no one would deny that his father was still effective, reading carefully, lest his voice should break. "Tomorrow"s Bridge" and "This Too Will Pa.s.s"-Jack scorned the poems" opinions, scorned the way his father spoke directly to each listener, as if each were some new woman, his father some mere suffering sheep among sheep, and scorned the way Phoebe and his mother looked on smiling, furtively weeping, heads lifted. Sometimes his father would recite a poem that Jack himself had written, in the days when he"d tried to write poetry, a comic limerick or some maudlin piece about a boy on a hill. Though it was meant as a compliment, Jack"s heart would swell with rage; yet he kept silent, more private than before. At night he"d go out to the cavernous haymow or up into the orchard and practice his French horn. One of these days, he told himself, they"d wake up and find him gone.
He used the horn more and more now to escape their herding warmth. Those around him were conscious enough of what was happening-his parents and Phoebe, his uncles, aunts, and cousins, his mother"s many friends. But there was nothing they could do. "That horn"s his whole world," his mother often said, smiling but clasping her hands together. Soon he was playing third horn with the Batavia Civic Orchestra, though he refused to play in church or when company came. He began to ride the Bluebus to Rochester, Sat.u.r.days, to take lessons from Arcady Yegudkin, "the General," at the Eastman School of Music.
Yegudkin was seventy. He"d played princ.i.p.al horn in the orchestra of Czar Nikolai and at the time of the Revolution had escaped, with his wife, in a dramatic way. At the time of the purge of Kerenskyites, the Bolsheviks had loaded Yegudkin and his wife, along with hundreds more, onto railroad flatcars, reportedly to carry them to Siberia. In a desolate place, machine guns opened fire on the people on the flatcars, then soldiers pushed the bodies into a ravine, and the train moved on. The soldiers were not careful to see that everyone was dead. Perhaps they did not relish their work; in any case, they must have believed that, in a place so remote, a wounded survivor would have no chance against wolves and cold weather. The General and his wife were among the few who lived, he virtually unmarked, she horribly crippled. Local peasants nursed the few survivors back to health, and in time the Yegudkins escaped to Europe. There Yegudkin played horn with all the great orchestras and received such praise-so he claimed, spreading out his clippings-as no other master of French horn had received in all history. He would beam as he said it, his Tartar eyes flashing, and his smile was like a thrown-down gauntlet.
He was a barrel-shaped, solidly muscular man, hard as a boulder for all his age. His hair and moustache were as black as coal except for touches of silver, especially where it grew, with majestic indifference to ordinary taste, from his cavernous nostrils and large, dusty-looking ears. The sides of his moustache were carefully curled, in the fashion once favored by Russian dandies, and he was one of the last men in Rochester, New York, to wear spats. He wore formal black suits, a huge black overcoat, and a black fedora. His wife, who came with him and sat on the long maple bench outside his door, never reading or knitting or doing anything at all except that sometimes she would speak unintelligibly to a student-Yegudkin"s wife, shriveled and twisted, watched him as if worshipfully, hanging on his words. She looked at least twice the old man"s age. Her hair was snow white and she wore lumpy black shoes and long black shapeless dresses. The two of them would come, every Sat.u.r.day morning, down the long marble hallway of the second floor of Killburn Hall, the General erect and imperious, like some sharp-eyed old Slavonic king, moving slowly, waiting for the old woman who crept beside him, gray claws on his coat sleeve, and seeing Jack Hawthorne seated on the bench, his books and French horn in its tattered black case on the floor beside him, the General would extend his left arm and boom, "Goot mworning!"
Jack, rising, would say, "Morning, sir."
"You have met my wife?" the old man would say then, bowing and taking the cigar from his mouth. He asked it each Sat.u.r.day.
"Yes, sir. How do you do?"
The old man was too deaf to play in orchestras anymore. "What"s the difference?" he said. "Every symphony in America, they got Yegudkins. I have teach them all. Who teach you this? The General!" He would smile, chin lifted, triumphant, and salute the ceiling.
He would sit in the chair beside Jack"s and would sing, with violent gestures and a great upward leap of the belly to knock out the high B"s and C"s-Tee! Tee!-as Jack read through Kopprasch, Gallay, and Kling, and when it was time to give Jack"s lip a rest, the General would speak earnestly, with the same energy he put into his singing, of the United States and his beloved Russia that he would nevermore see. The world was at that time filled with Russophobes. Yegudkin, whenever he read a paper, would be so enraged he could barely contain himself. "In all my age," he often said, furiously gesturing with his black cigar, "if the Russians would come to this country of America, I would take up a rifle and shot at them-boof! But the newspapers telling you lies, all lies! You think them dumb fools, these Russians? You think they are big, fat bush-overs?" He spoke of mile-long parades of weaponry, spoke of Russian cunning, spoke with great scorn, a sudden booming laugh, of Napoleon. Jack agreed with a nod to whatever the General said. Nevertheless, the old man roared on, taking great pleasure in his rage, it seemed, sometimes talking like a rabid communist, sometimes like a fascist, sometimes like a citizen helplessly caught between mindless, grinding forces, vast, idiot herds. The truth was, he hated both Russians and Americans about equally, cared only for music, his students and, possibly, his wife. In his pockets, in scorn of the opinions of fools, he carried condoms, dirty pictures, and grimy, wadded-up dollar bills.
One day a new horn he"d ordered from Germany, an Alexander, arrived at his office-a horn he"d gotten for a graduate student. The old man unwrapped and a.s.sembled it, the graduate student looking on-a shy young man, blond, in a limp gray sweater-and the glint in the General"s eye was like madness or at any rate l.u.s.t, perhaps gluttony. When the horn was ready he went to the desk where he kept his clippings, his tools for the cleaning and repair of French horns, his cigars, photographs, and medals from the Czar, and pulled open a wide, shallow drawer. It contained perhaps a hundred mouthpieces, of all sizes and materials, from raw bra.s.s to lucite, silver, and gold, from the shallowest possible cup to the deepest. He selected one, fitted it into the horn, pressed the rim of the bell into the right side of his large belly-the horn seemed now as much a part of him as his arm or leg-clicked the shining keys to get the feel of them, then played. In that large, cork-lined room, it was as if, suddenly, a creature from some other universe had appeared, some realm where feelings become birds and dark sky, and spirit is more solid than stone. The sound was not so much loud as large, too large for a hundred French horns, it seemed. He began to play now not single notes but, to Jack"s astonishment, chords-two notes at a time, then three. He began to play runs. As if charged with life independent of the man, the horn sound fluttered and flew crazily, like an enormous trapped hawk hunting frantically for escape. It flew to the bottom of the lower register, the foundation concert F, and crashed below it, and on down and down, as if the horn in Yegudkin"s hands had no bottom, then suddenly changed its mind and flew upward in a split-second run to the horn"s top E, dropped back to the middle and then ran once more, more fiercely at the E, and this time burst through it and fluttered, manic, in the trumpet range, then lightly dropped back into its own home range and, abruptly, in the middle of a note, stopped. The room still rang, shimmered like a vision.
"Good horn," said Yegudkin, and held the horn toward the graduate student, who sat, hands clamped on his knees, as if in a daze.
Jack Hawthorne stared at the instrument suspended in s.p.a.ce and at his teacher"s hairy hands. Before stopping to think, he said, "You think I"ll ever play like that?"
Yegudkin laughed loudly, his black eyes widening, and it seemed that he grew larger, beatific and demonic at once, like the music; overwhelming. "Play like me?" he exclaimed.
Jack blinked, startled by the bluntness of the thing, the terrible lack of malice, and the truth of it. His face tingled and his legs went weak, as if the life were rushing out of them. He longed to be away from there, far away, safe. Perhaps Yegudkin sensed it. He turned gruff, sending away the graduate student, then finishing up the lesson. He said nothing, today, of the stupidity of mankind. When the lesson was over he saw Jack to the door and bid him goodbye with a brief half-smile that was perhaps not for Jack at all but for the creature on the bench. "Next Sat.u.r.day?" he said, as if there might be some doubt.
Jack nodded, blushing.
At the door opening on the street he began to breathe more easily, though he was weeping. He set down the horn case to brush away his tears. The sidewalk was crowded-dazed-looking Sat.u.r.day-morning shoppers herding along irritably, meekly, through painfully bright light. Again he brushed tears away. He"d been late for his bus. Then the crowd opened for him and, with the horn cradled under his right arm, his music under his left, he plunged in, starting home.
STILLNESS.
It would be a strange thing, Joan Orrick often thought, to have second sight, as her grandmother Frazier was supposed to have had. It occurred to her, for instance, one day when she was forty, when Martin stopped the car to wait for a light at the corner of Olive Street and Grand, in St. Louis. They were just pa.s.sing through. Martin had delivered a paper at Urbana, and now they were heading for Norman, Oklahoma, where he was to serve on the jury for something called the Newstadt-Books Abroad Prize. "What is it?" she"d asked when first the invitation to Oklahoma had come. "Actually," he"d said, and had put on his pompous look, then changed his mind, "G.o.d knows." "Maybe we should drive through St. Louis," she"d said. He"d agreed at once, generous and expansive as he always was when preparing a lecture he thought impressive. She"d been less impressed than she"d pretended, but that was in the past now. And when they"d left Highway 70 and nosed past the arch into the city, she wasn"t much impressed by St. Louis either. Beyond the stadium, the scrubbed, unconvincing show of government buildings, the husk of the grand old railroad station where she"d met him all those birthdays and Christmases-the years before he"d gotten his motorcycle-everything was gray, windblown, burnt out. Riding down haunted streets, brooding on the thought of second sight, she was sorry she"d come.
What would she have thought, though-sometime in the late 1940s, standing on this corner, on her way to her part-time accompanist"s job at the Duggers School of the Dance-if she"d suddenly had a vision of what downtown St. Louis would be like just twenty-five years later? What would she have thought, what would she have felt, standing on that crowded, noisy corner, if the crowd had suddenly thinned to just three or four hurrying figures and the buildings had gone solemn, like prison or mausoleum walls?
She imagined the vision coming as pure image, like a photograph or drab doc.u.mentary film, with no hint of explanation-saw herself, in her 1940s schoolgirl"s clothes, pleated skirt and short-sleeved sweater, dark green coat and light green headscarf, bobbysox and loafers, her hair in a permanent, shiny and curly and a trifle stiff, books in her arm-since she came in directly from school on the bus, or on a chain of buses that shuttled her from Ferguson to Normandy to Wellston to downtown. There had been-was it on this corner?-a wonderful ice-cream place, the Park Plaza, where for a dollar you could get a parfait two feet high, and all around this section there were magnificent theaters, as colorful as circuses, with high, bold marquees on which yellow, red, blue, purple, green, and white lights (lightbulbs, she remembered, and even then the few that had burned out weren"t replaced) went racing around tall, urgent t.i.tles-Rope, The Purple Heart, The Return of Frank James-and inside, the theaters were like palaces: great gilded lions; red-velvet-covered three-inch-thick ropes on golden posts; majestic wide stairways that made everyone an instant king or queen; ushers in uniforms from the days of Empire (G.o.d knew which empire); and in the great domed theater itself a hush that was patently religious, the boom of voices from the people on the screen coming from all sides and from within, or so it seemed, oracular.
All the great stores had been downtown then, Famous-Barr, for instance, glittering, high-ceilinged, richly ceremonious inside its towering gold-framed revolving doors-the aisles choked with shoppers, most of them white, the counters and high walls revealing wonders, coats and sombre-toned stately dresses with the sleeves pinned straight out, extended for flight far overhead like hovering angels, and-everywhere-draped artificial-pearl necklaces or ruby-red or pool-ball-green or -blue or -yellow costume baubles, bracelets the color of copper in flame, and everywhere the scent of perfumes and talc.u.ms, newly printed books, the leather of new shoes, a smell as exciting and at the same time cloying as a vault of roses in one of the big downtown flowershops, or the thick, sweet incense in a Catholic church. Suppose in the twinkling of an eye, Joan thought, that whole world had vanished, and the girl on the corner, herself at fifteen, looked, stunned and afraid, at a city gone dark and empty: suppose a silence had fallen, as if all the gay sounds of the world had been abruptly turned off, like the music and static on a radio, and there came the same instant a visual stillness, as if a heart had stopped-no motion but three or four hurrying Negroes, strangely dressed, dangerous, with hair grown long and alarmingly puffed up, nothing else stirring but two pigeons overhead and a newspaper blowing along the pavement. "I"m in the future!" the imaginary Joan would finally have realized, "and there"s been some terrible war, or a plague, and everything"s been ruined."
Who"d await the future if she could see it in advance? No use to tell the girl on the corner, "We"re happy, Joan. Don"t be afraid! There are beautiful places, though this one may be gone." She"d have backed away, frightened and betrayed-yes, terrified, of course. What else could she be, addressed by a strange, wild woman in dark gla.s.ses such as Negroes wore then in the most dangerous parts of East St. Louis, a fur coat that looked as if the lynx had died of terror, adrenaline exploding, every hair on end-a woman whose beauty was like fine cutlery, hair falling plain as an Indian"s, except red, as brightly burnished and fiery as her own-leaning from the window of a dark blue Mercedes Benz driven by-how weird!-a sorrowful, baggy-eyed man with silver hair that swept down like angelhair to his heavy, hunched shoulders-a monster who was, she had a feeling, suddenly, someone she was meant to recognize.
The girl would have stepped back in fear and anger, raising her hand to the braces on her teeth, and the real Joan would have called to her, shouting past the dead years in pity and anguish, "Child, child, don"t be silly! We"re as harmless as you are, we"ve betrayed n.o.body, nothing! Look at us!" Now the child did look, and recognition came: the rich, wildly eccentric lady (who had beautiful teeth, Joan thought, and smiled, feeling a surge of affection for the big-nosed innocent on the corner), the lady in the fur, with emeralds and a ruby and a diamond on her fingers, was herself-her own "child," Wordsworth would say-and the driver was Buddy Orrick, grown sadder and crazier, but still alive, and married to her: so they"d made it, they"d survived! She came a step nearer, her face eager, full of questions (We could drive her to Duggers, the real Joan thought; it"s only a few blocks) and her small hand came cautiously toward the real Joan"s hand on the Mercedes" wing-window, both hands equally pale and solid, the child"s and the woman"s, until suddenly the child"s hand was gone and Joan Orrick was gazing at a cracked sidewalk, a piece of dirty cardboard: Fragile.
Martin glanced over and saw her tears. "Hurting?" he asked.
Yes, she was hurting, as she nearly always hurt these days, sometimes such pain that she pa.s.sed out for a moment-hurting even when the drugs were at work, as now, causing visions, or almost-visions-but she said, "No," and gave him a rea.s.suring smile, "just thinking."
He reached over, touched her hand. The light changed, and the car glided forward without a sound.
She said, "The Duggers School of the Dance was just up ahead. Remember?"
"Which building?" He ducked down over the steering wheel to look.
She pointed as the car came abreast of it. It had been gutted by fire, like most of the buildings in this neighborhood. He scanned the boarded-up, blackened storefronts. She could see he wasn"t sure which one she meant.
Jacqui Duggers was tiny, the cla.s.sic teacher of ballet but in perfect miniature, hair so tightly drawn back you might have thought from a distance that it was paint, as on a j.a.panese doll. She spoke with the accent all ballet teachers use, even those raised in Milwaukee or St. Louis, wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist like an actress, called Joan "dahling" with perfect seriousness and unfeigned affection, though one failed to notice the affection at first, since she was always hurried, always slightly tense, as if in half an hour she must catch a plane for Munich or Paris. She was-or so it seemed to Joan-a superb dancer, though Joan never saw her dance more than a few steps. Her old photographs seemed to confirm the impression: the Jacqui Duggers in the pictures had that authority one sees at a glance in professionals, and they proved she had danced with good companies of the so-called second rank in both the United States and Canada. "Ah wone," she would say, and Joan"s hands would move automatically on the keys of the piano.
Her husband, Pete Duggers, taught tap-dance in the mirror-walled studio below. He was nearly as small as she was, but thicker, almost stout, in fact, and he looked and moved like some Disney cartoon of a tap-dance teacher. He had a red face and wonderfully merry blue eyes, wore vests and old-fashioned arm-elastics. If he ever touched the floor when he walked (and he did), Joan had been prepared to believe that he did so by whim. Jacqui"s movements at the barre had a look not of lightness, cancellation of gravity, but of eloquent, powerful control, as if her muscles were steel and could no more speed up or slow down against her will than the hands of a clock could escape the inclinations of its mainspring. Rising on her toes in the middle of the room-a brief jerk and click as the heel and ankle locked, a brief trembling like a spasm, then the firmness of an iron wedge-she gave the impression that touching her calf or thigh would be like touching a wall. Pete"s dancing feet moved, on the other hand, as if swinging by themselves, as if his body were suspended like a puppet"s from invisible wires. His taps were light and quick, as if he never put his weight down with either foot, and they rattled out around him as gaily and casually-and as unbelievably fast-as the fingers of his Negro piano player, a tall, flat-haired boy who sat sprawling in his chair with his head laid far over so that he seemed to be always, except for his forearms and fingers, fast asleep. The speed and lightness with which Pete Duggers danced were amazing to behold, but what was truly miraculous, so that it made you catch your breath, was the way he could stop, completely relaxed, leaning his elbow on empty air and grinning as if he"d been standing there for hours, all that movement and sound you"d been hearing pure phantom and illusion. That was unfailingly the climax when he danced: a slow build, with elegant shuffles and turns, then more speed, and more, and more and still more until it seemed that the room spun drunkenly, crazily, all leading-direct as the path of an arrow-to nothing, or everything, a sudden stillness like an escape from reality, a sudden floating, whether terrible or wonderful she could never tell: an abrupt hush as when a large crowd looks up, all at the same moment, and sees an eagle in the sky, almost motionless, or then again, perhaps, the frightening silence one read about in novels when a buzz-bomb shut off over London. He stood perfectly still, the piano was still, his young students gaped, and then abruptly reality came back as the piano tinkled lightly and he listlessly danced and, as he did so, leaned toward his students and winked. "You see? Stillness! That"s the magic!"
Olive Street was already going down at that time, so the storefront was shoddy, solo dancer and dance-cla.s.s pictures on the windows, big, vulgar stars, the gla.s.s around the pictures crudely painted dark blue, as if the Duggers School of the Dance were some miserable third-rate establishment not worth breaking into or stealing from, though the door was not locked. But that was a trick-the dancing Duggers had trunkfuls of tricks: artists to the marrow of their chipped and splintered bones. The scuffed, unpainted door in front opened into a scuffed, unpainted entryway with a door to the left and a knotty, crooked stairway leading upward. On the door to the left, a sign said "TAP DANCE STUDIO," and above the worn railing at the side of the stairs, a sign, c.o.c.ked parallel to the railing, said "SCHOOL OF THE BALLET ." When you opened the door to the tap-dance studio for the first time, you did a mighty double-take: there were glittering mirrors with round-arched tops and etched designs of the sort Joan would occasionally discover years later in the oldest London pubs, and above the mirrors there were walls of red and gold and a magnificent stamped-tin ceiling. In fact she"d never completely gotten over her surprise at the elegance inside, though she"d worked there four years, into her college days. It was a large building, at one time a theater. The tap-dance studio-and the ballet studio directly above it-took up the first thirty feet; then there was a railing, also red and gold, from which one looked out at the long, wide ballroom floor, at the front an enormous stage boxed off by ratty, stiff wine-colored velvet curtains, along the side walls candelabra between high, painted panels-dancing graces, Zeus in majesty, nymphs and satyrs, peac.o.c.ks and fat reclining nudes done in highly unsuccessful imitation of the late style of Rubens.
She"d walked there once with Martin-in those days "Buddy"-when he"d motorcycled in from his college in Indiana and had offered to drive her to work in her father"s De Soto. He"d driven fast, as usual, his eyes rolling up to the rear-view mirror, on the look-out for police cars, and had gotten her to work much too early.
"Care to have an interesting experience?" she"d said.
Their footsteps echoed. The ballroom was half dark. They could just make out the carved figures on the ceiling, two storeys up, circling around the empty s.p.a.ces from which once had hung huge chandeliers.
"It"s like a church," he said. He had a crewcut. Leather jacket. He hung his cigarette off his lip like Marlon Brando. Already he"d written two novels-unpublishable; terrible, in fact, though of course she hadn"t said so. She was convinced, in spite of them, that he"d someday be famous, someday when he"d given up James Joyce.
She"d squeezed his hand and they"d stopped and, after a moment, kissed, then walked on, up to the front of the ballroom and up onto the stage, where the Duggers students gave their dance recitals. They looked up at the shuttered lights, ropes, catwalks-it was darker here, spooky, as if the stage machinery belonged not only to a different time but to a different planet. Again they paused to kiss, and he put his arms around her and after a minute she moved his hand to the front of her sweater, then under the sweater to her breast. With his usual difficulty, for all his practice, he unsnapped her bra. She felt her nipples rising, and he pressed closer to her. With a grandiose sweep of his free arm in the direction of the dim, ghost-filled hall, he whispered, "Lady, how would you like to be f.u.c.ked, right here in front of all these people?"
"Hmm," she said. After a moment, still with his hand on her breast, her hand keeping it there, she led him toward the further wing and the small door opening on a room she"d discovered weeks earlier, half filled with crates, electric wire, old tools, cobwebs, the rotting frames of old sets. Here and there stood old pieces of furniture-chairs, tables, couches-protected from the dust by tarpaulins. "Maybe we need a rehearsal," she said. They pa.s.sed under a high window through which a single crack of light came and she glanced at her watch. Fifteen minutes. She stood looking around, both his hands on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, until he finally noticed the couch and went over and pulled away the tarpaulin. As he came into her, huge and overeager, as always-but so was she, so was she-she said, "Isn"t this an interesting experience?"
She glanced at Martin-Buddy middle-aged. He stared past the steering wheel, professional, absentminded. They"d slipped from his thoughts already, those years, the Duggers. His hands on the wheel were soft, almost fat, though still strong. She looked at his face. "What are you thinking?" she said.
Martin flicked his eyes open, half apologetic. "Nothing," he said. "Something Athene tells Odysseus. Nothing." He looked suddenly embarra.s.sed.
She glanced out the window again, then reached for her purse, opening it, fumbling for a pill.
"Hurting again?"
Her mouth tightened in annoyance at that "again." "Just tired," she said.
"We should have taken a plane," he said, and ducked to look up past the buildings.
The sky was gray, luminous and still, like Lake Erie from one of those hushed, abandoned beaches. She thought of Jacqui Duggers.
"There"s still a little coffee in the thermos," Martin said.
"Coffee?"
"To help swallow the pill."
"Oh. No, it"s done." His helplessness cheered her. "Odysseus," she thought. Homer had been the subject of his lecture at Urbana. She smiled a little sadly. So he was wishing, as usual, that he might talk about himself. Not that he would do it; he had far too much taste. And she, for her part ... She shook her head and smiled again.
The whole left side of the building, as you entered from the street, was the Duggers" apartment. It was the most beautiful apartment she"d ever seen, though not as original or even as spectacularly tasteful as she"d imagined at the time. She would see many like it in San Francisco, and far more elegant examples of white-on-white in London and Paris. Everything was white, the walls, the furniture, the chains holding up the chandeliers, the wooden shutters on the windows. Against all that white, the things they"d collected stood out in bold relief: paintings, presumably by friends, all very curious and impressive, at least to Joan-smudges, bright splashes of color, one canvas all white with little scratches of gray and bright blue; sculptures-a beautiful abstraction in dark wood, a ballet dancer made out of pieces of old wire, museum reproductions, a mobile of wood and stainless steel; books and records, shelves upon shelves of them. Their record-player was the largest she"d ever seen and had a speaker that stood separate from the rest. Once when Jacqui invited her in, to write Joan her check for her week"s work, Jacqui, leading the way to the kitchen, stopped suddenly, turned a ballerina"s step, and said, "Joanie, I must show you my shoes, no?" "I"d like to see them," Joan said. Jacqui swept over to the side of the room, her small hand gracefully flying ahead of her, and pushed open a white sliding door. Joan stared. On tilted shelves that filled half the room"s wall, Jacqui had three hundred pairs of tiny shoes. She had all colors-gold and silver, yellow, red, green, some with long ties as bright as new ribbons, some with little bows, some black and plain as the inside of a pocket. "Where"d you get all these?" Joan said. Jacqui laughed. "Mostly Paris," she said. She gave Joan a quick, appraising look, then laughed again. "Dahling, Paris you are going to love. There is a store, a department store, Au Printemps. When you go there, blow a kiss for Jacqui!" She rolled her eyes heavenward. "Ah, ze French!"
Years later, the first time Joan shopped at Au Printemps, she would remember that, and would do as she"d been told. And she would remember Jacqui too a few years later when, at Lambert Field in St. Louis, deplaning with her family from a European trip, she was approached by a news crew of very cool, very smart blacks from KSDF-TV, carrying camera and wind-baffled shotgun mike, who asked if she had any suggestions for improvement of the airport"s services. "Way-el," she said thoughtfully, smiling prettily, batting her lashes and speaking in her sweetest Possum Hollow drawl. (Martin and the children had fled into the crowd.) She tapped her mouth with a bejewelled finger and gazed away down the baggage area, then said pertly, as if it were something she"d been thinking for a long, long time and rather hated to bring up, "Ah thank it would be nice if awl these people spoke French." Her performance was included in that night"s local news. Her parents missed it, as was just as well. Relatives telephoned to report with pleasure that Joanie had been on television. No one mentioned that anything she"d said was peculiar.
"I wonder if I"ll ever get to Paris," she"d said that afternoon in Jacqui"s apartment.
Jacqui had laughed like a young girl, though she was then over forty. "Keep playing the piano and don"t theenk twice," Jacqui said. "If you don"t go to Paris, then Paris will have to come to you."
Where would they have gone, Joan wondered now, when the neighborhood had grown too dangerous to live in? Were they still alive? It came to her suddenly, for no apparent reason, that Pete Duggers had looked like the hero of her favorite childhood book, Mr. Mixiedough, in the story of the whole world"s slipping into darkness. It was a book she"d wanted for Evan and Mary, but there seemed to be no copies left anywhere; not even the book-search people from whom Martin got his rare old books could find a trace of it. Had it been the same, perhaps, with Pete and Jacqui Duggers-swallowed into blackness? She"d asked about him once at the Abbey, on Thirteenth Street in New York, when she"d gone-three times-to a show called The Hoofers, which had brought back all the great soft-shoe and tap men. On the sidewalk in front of the theater afterward, while she was waiting for Martin to come and pick her up, she"d talked with Bojangles Robinson and Sandman Sims-they"d shown her some steps and had laughed and clapped their hands, dancing one on each side of her-and she"d asked if either of them had ever heard of Pete Duggers.
The Sandman rolled up his eyes and lifted off his hat as if to look inside it. "Duggers," he"d said, searching through his memory.
"You say the man worked out of San Looie?" Bojangles said.
"I played piano for his wife," Joan said. "She taught ballet."
"Duggers," said the Sandman. "That surely does sound familiar."
"White man married to a ballet teacher," Bojangles said, and ran his hand across his mouth. "Boy, that surely rings a bell, some way."
"Duggers," said the Sandman, squinting at the lighted sky. "Duggers."
"He used to go faster and faster and then suddenly stand still," she said. "He was a wonderful dancer."
"Duggers," Bojangles echoed, thoughtful, staring at his shoes. "I know the man sure as I"m standing here. I got him right on the tip of my mind."
At the motel that night, sixty miles past St. Louis-it was a new Ramada Inn, as new as the concrete and dark-earth slash through what had lately been farmland-Joan sat up after Martin was asleep, unable to sleep herself, waiting for the Demerol to start working. On the mirror-smooth walnut formica desk lay Martin"s paper, "Homeric Justice and the Artful Lie." Though he"d delivered it already, it was a maze of revisions. He"d been "working it over a bit," as he said, before he"d at last given up in despair, as usual, kissed her on the cheek, and gone to bed. Eventually, no doubt, he"d include it in some book, or make it the plan of some story or novel. He was forever revising, like her stern-jawed, icy-eyed grandmother"s G.o.d-or like G.o.d up to a point. Joan Orrick thought for an instant-then efficiently blocked the thought-of the doctor in New York who had spoken to them, incredibly, of psychiatric help and "the power of prayer." She slid Martin"s paper toward her with two fingers, glancing at the beginning. "In Attic Greek," he"d written-and then came something in, presumably, Greek.
She looked for perhaps half a minute at the writing, tortuous, cranky, as familiar as her own but more moving to her: it contained all their years-they"d been married at nineteen, had been married for more than half their fives-and she found herself thinking (she was not aware of why) of her grandmother Frazier"s sternly Southern Baptist attic: old Christian Heralds full of pictures of angels, stacked tight under cobwebbed rafters; small oak-leaved picture frames as moldy as old bread; a squat deal dresser with broken gla.s.s handles; tied-up bundles of music as brown-s.p.a.ckled and brittle as her grandmother"s hands; and on the attic"s far side, trunks of clothes-dusty black and what she thought of as Confederate gray. The old woman"s predictions had been terrible and sure, or so legend had it. Her brother, Joan Orrick"s great-uncle Frank, would stand on the porch of his cabin by the river when a tornado came roaring like a thousand trains, and would fire at the wind with a shotgun.
The cabin was long gone, like her grandmother"s house, like her grandmother, like Martin"s beloved Homer. She touched the pulse in her throat with two fingers and looked at her watch. Normal, and yet she felt drained, weary. Not entirely an effect of the wine they"d had at dinner, though also it was not yet the drug. She slid away the paper, rose quietly, and moved past the wide, still bed where her husband lay sleeping, his broad, mole-specked back and shoulders uncovered, motionless as marble except for his breathing, exactly as he"d always slept, winter and summer. She was slightly surprised for an instant by his lighted gray hair. Outside, the parking lot was dusty with the still, cold light of lamps half hidden among maples the bulldozers had left. She looked hastily back into the clean, noncommittal room.
When she"d crawled into bed with him, carefully not waking him, she lay for a time with her eyes open, eyes that might have seemed to a stranger, she knew, as cold and remote as her grandmother"s. As she drifted toward sleep it crossed her mind-her lips and ringless right hand on Martin"s arm-that sooner or later everyone, of course, knows the future.
THE MUSIC LOVER.
Some years ago there lived in our city a man named Professor Alfred Klingman, who was a music lover. He was a professor of Germanic philology or something of the sort-or had been before his retirement-but he never spoke with anyone about his academic specialty, nor did anyone ever speak with him about anything but music or, occasionally, the weather. He"d lost his wife many years before this story begins and had lived alone in his dingy downtown apartment ever since, without pets, without plants, without even a clock to attend to. Except in the evenings, when he attended concerts, he never went out but sat all day listening to orchestral music on the radio, or, on Sat.u.r.day afternoons, the opera. His solitary existence made him-as no doubt he"d have admitted himself, since he was by no means a fool-peculiar. One might have thought, to look at him, that he lived alone for fear of giving other creatures offense. Even in the presence of lapdogs, you might have thought, Professor Klingman would feel inferior. He walked with his shoulders drawn in and his raw, red face stuck out, anxiously smiling, timidly bowing to everyone he pa.s.sed, even cats and, occasionally, lampposts.
This story makes use of parts of Thomas Mann"s "Disillusionment," all slightly altered.
But every man who survives in this world has at least one area in which he escapes his perhaps otherwise miserable condition, and for Professor Klingman this area was music, his wife having been a piano teacher. Whenever there was a concert-which was nearly every night except in summertime, since our city had a famous school of music, a professional symphony, an amateur philharmonic orchestra, and innumerable choirs-Professor Klingman would dress himself nervously and meticulously in his old brown suit, his rather yellow white shirt, and black bow tie, and would pull on his long brown overcoat, fit his brown hat on his head, take up his cane, and, after inspecting himself for a moment in his mirror, exactly as an orchestra conductor might have done, or a featured soloist, he would hurry, his near-sighted, smiling face thrown forward, looking terrified and slightly insane, to the civic auditorium. As soon as he entered the hall he would look in panic at the clock above the ticket window and would check it against his gold pocket.w.a.tch. Though he was invariably some twenty minutes early, his look of furious anxiety would remain until he"d checked his coat and hat, climbed the wide red-carpeted stairs (helping himself with his crooked brown cane), and made his way to his accustomed seat in the front row of the balcony, right-hand side, the area his wife had found acoustically most pleasing. Then he would relax to a certain extent, sitting motionless except for a minuscule tremble, his pale eyes glittering and darting as the theater filled. He had bushy red eyebrows and a large, lumpy nose. His ears were extraordinarily large and as pink as flowers. In his nostrils and ears he had tufts of red hair (and in one ear a large gray hearing aid), and there was yellowish fuzz on the backs of his fingers. The hair on the top of his head was white.
Sometimes before the orchestra came on he would push his program toward the person beside him and whisper timidly, pointing to some item, "Excuse me, what"s this? What"s this piece? Do you know it?" The question was abrupt, one might even say frantic, since Professor Klingman had lost, in the years since his good wife"s death, the technique of polite conversation. It was she, of course, who had done all their talking. One might not unnaturally have gotten the idea that, despite his smile, the professor fiercely disapproved of the item which was about to be performed (perhaps he imagined it immoral, or fascistic) and was merely checking to make sure the piece was what he thought it was before steeling himself and rising to cry out, in his piping voice, challenging and halting the performance. If, as sometimes happened, the person beside him was familiar with the piece and could hum a few bars, Professor Klingman would brighten, crying "Yes, yes! Thank you!" in a voice embarra.s.singly cracked by emotion. Strangers could not know that in former years, attending concerts with Mrs. Klingman, the professor had always been advised by his wife what tunes he was about to be favored with. No charitable person, observing his curious concert behavior, could doubt that Alfred Klingman"s feelings were deep and sincere, but he was, no question about it, something of a nuisance, even for an elderly person. Also people noticed that he was singularly uninformed about music, for a concert devotee. He could not identify by number and key any symphony but Beethoven"s Fifth, and even in that case he could never recall the key.
On the other hand, no one could be more responsive to the anguished wellings and sweet palpitations of the music itself. When Mahler was played, or even the coolest, most objective of Bruckner, tears would run streaming down Professor Klingman"s nose, and sometimes he would sob audibly, so that everyone around him was made uncomfortable. At musical jokes he would sometimes guffaw, though how a man so ignorant could know that the musical jokes were jokes was hard to see. And even when the music was neither tragic nor comic, merely sang its way along, in a manner of speaking-one of Mozart"s less dramatic concertos, for instance-Professor Klingman could manage to disgruntle his neighbors. Sometimes he tapped his feet, sometimes he nodded (slightly out of time), and sometimes, especially to Kabalevsky or Liszt, he would thump his rolled-up program. People touched him on the shoulder, whispered politely but sternly in his ear. His contrition, at such times, was touching to see, but it lasted for only a few minutes. Charitable people ignored him and said, when the subject of his concert behavior came up, "Well, music is all the poor man has, you know," or, "Well, he feels things deeply, you know; too bad more people don"t." All our concert-hall ushers knew him, and the leader of the music school"s string quartet would always look up and smile if he was present. Not that he was loved universally, of course. Sometimes children who were not well brought up-and sometimes even college students-mimicked him cruelly, thumping their programs, bobbing their heads, and pretending to swallow back agonized sobs. To such mockery, of course, Professor Klingman was oblivious. From the first note to the last, even if the concert was abysmal, Professor Klingman was in heaven.
One evening in late autumn, Professor Klingman attended a School of Music concert which was advertised as offering "three contemporary pieces." He would never have attended had he any idea what he was in for. Professor Klingman, it should be mentioned, was by no means a man of conservative taste. He had disgraced himself by literally whooping his emotion at Janek"s Slavonic ma.s.s and had once sat, enraptured and stunned, unable to applaud, at a performance of Bartk"s Concerto for Percussion, which he later remembered as Stravinsky"s greatest masterpiece. But this particular departure from musical tradition-this so-called "three contemporary pieces"-was a new and terrible experience for him. It opened with a cello concerto in which the soloist used not a bow but a saw, a fact Professor Klingman missed at first, because of his eyesight. By the end of the piece, which was distressing enough in any case, the cello had been sawed in two. The second piece featured two radios tuned to different stations and a violinist expressing his musical impressions of a life-sized photograph of an ape.
Timid as Professor Klingman was in life"s more ordinary situations, he reacted to this music with the unselfconscious abandon that had made him mildly notorious among concert-goers in our city. He wrung his fingers, groaned, covered his eyes, and on one occasion cried out loudly, "Oh my G.o.d! My G.o.d!" On each side of him and behind him, embarra.s.sed fellow sufferers labored to shush him-to no avail. He caught the pale hand of the lady beside him (Mrs. Phillips, the wife of Reverend Irving Phillips, who plays second clarinet in our philharmonic orchestra) and whispered, violently shaking, "Insane!"
"Be still!" she whispered, cold as ice, though it was clear she was not in complete disagreement. She was tall and stately, with a pale blue face, a face almost exactly the color of her pearls. She was breathing like a person who is about to experience a heart attack-whether from anger at the musical outrage or from anger at the mad old man beside her, no one could say.
Mrs. Phillips" words had no effect on the professor, but a moment later he became aware, as one could see by the anxious craning of his neck and the darting of his eyes in their thick-lensed gla.s.ses, that he was surrounded by mimics, all wringing their fingers, twisting their faces into masks of agony, and moaning and groaning, driving their timider friends into shuddering lunes of demonic giggling. Professor Klingman clung to Mrs. Phillips" hand, feeling sick at heart with shame and anger, and squeezed his eyes shut, waiting in silence for the intermission. He could not notice, in his misery-or perhaps did not notice because of his eyesight-that a man in the box to the left of the stage was watching all he did with a queer fascination, watching as a scientist might study an insect, never shifting his gaze for an instant toward the stage.
At last (incredibly, from Alfred Klingman"s point of view) the intermission did arrive, the houselights came up, and he was able to scramble, or, rather, stagger, to the aisle and up it, toward the exit sign, pushing through the crowd in a way quite unlike him, apologizing right and left to faces he probably could not see, since he was weeping. He somehow reached the cloakroom and retrieved his hat and coat, then pushed toward the street door. There, however, he found he could go no further because of the violent pounding of his heart. He leaned on the wall, wide-eyed, pink-nosed, clutching his chest as if aware that if he did not calm himself, this excruciating night might be his last.
"Monstrous!" he whispered over and over, probably more loudly than he knew. "Monstrous! Blasphemous!"
Then, as men will do in such desperate situations, Professor Klingman tried to reason with himself. "Yet what harm, after all?" he said loudly, his red-lidded eyes squeezed tight shut. "No doubt an inexpensive, even worthless cello. A harmless little joke. What harm in that?" But his heart, it seems, was thudding more violently now than ever, and, judging from his face, some sorrow vast and plangent as the sea was threatening to drown him. He opened his eyes as would a drunken man to steady himself by the solid lines of furniture and vistas of neatly patterned carpet.
A small, anxious crowd had gathered around him, largely composed of people he knew, fellow regulars, though apparently he couldn"t focus any faces. And now one of the crowd moved forward, extending his hands toward him.
"You"ve had a shock, my good man," the stranger said kindly, taking hold of the professor"s trembling hands. "Come with me, I beg you. Let me buy you a drink."
Professor Klingman accepted-being, of course, in no position to resist, though not a drinking man. Little did he know what man he was putting his trust in. Slowly-to the crowd"s considerable relief-the two men went through the foyer, the professor leaning on the younger man"s arm. They entered the lounge, where the younger man guided Alfred Klingman to a table by the window looking out on a river and park. The night was tranquil, dark except for an occasional streetlamp. On the grounds of the park, which were safer in those days, one could see, here and there, pairs of lovers walking, and over by the golfcourse a woman with a dog. The younger man brought drinks of some kind, then took a chair opposite Alfred Klingman"s and sat watching him fixedly, much as he had watched from the box to the left of the stage.
Gradually the professor regained his composure.
"The music disturbed you deeply, I see," the stranger said.
"I"m afraid so," Professor Klingman confessed. "I"m afraid I behaved like a dreadful old fool." He made an effort to smile, but blushed instead, a slow blush, remarkable on a man so old, that rose to his hatbrim. "A harmless little joke, harmless little trick on the audience-" He broke off abruptly. His eyes filled with tears which he made no effort to explain, if, indeed, he knew their explanation. He removed his thick-lensed gla.s.ses and wiped them on his handkerchief.
The younger man continued to study him. He was a thin, sallow person of thirty-five or forty, dressed in a black suit with a black waistcoat and black bow tie. His forehead was high and queerly narrow, like the forehead of a horse, and his eyes, which blinked continually, were unnaturally bright and alert, like a chicken"s.
"Perhaps the music was not a joke," the young man said, and smiled in a way that might have been malicious.
Professor Klingman merely looked at him and raised his right hand to his hearing aid.
"Perhaps you alone, in all that fat, complacent audience, understood tonight"s music," the young man said.
"Yes, perhaps," the professor said tentatively, slowly lowering his hand. He cautiously waited for things to become clearer.
"Let me explain myself," the young man said. He leaned forward, vaguely aggressive, still rapidly blinking, placing his strikingly long white fingers on each side of his gla.s.s. "I grew up in a clergyman"s family, in a very small town not many miles from here. There reigned in our home a punctilious cleanliness and a pathetic, bookish optimism. We breathed an atmosphere of dusty pulpit rhetoric-large words for good and evil which I have learned to hate, since perhaps they are to blame for all our human sufferings."
Professor Klingman touched his chin, considering.
"For me," the young man hurriedly continued, "life consisted entirely of those grandiose words, since I knew nothing more of it than the infinite, insubstantial emotions they called up in me. From people I expected divine virtue or hair-raising wickedness; from experience either ravishing loveliness or consummate horror. I was full of avidity for all that existed, and full of a pa.s.sionate, tormented yearning for True Reality, whatever form it might take, intoxicating bliss, undreamt-of anguish.
"I remember my first disillusionment. There was a fire one night in my parents" house. It spread insidiously until the whole first floor was in flames, and soon the stairs would be on fire. It was I who discovered it. I went rushing through the house shouting, "Fire! Fire!" I know what emotion underlay those cries, though at the time it may not have come fully alive to my consciousness. "So this," I thought, "is a fire. This is what it"s like to have a house on fire. Is this all there is to it?"
"Heaven knows, it was serious enough. The whole house burned down; only with difficulty was the family saved, and I myself got some nasty burns. It would be wrong to say that my fancy could have painted anything much worse than the actual burning of my parents" house. Yet some vague, formless idea of an event that was even more frightful must have existed somewhere within me, by comparison with which the reality seemed flat. This fire was the first great event in my life.
"I need not go on to recount all my various disappointments in detail. Suffice it to say that I zealously fed my magnificent expectations of life with the matter of a thousand books. Ah, how I have learned to hate them, those poets who chalk up grand words on all the walls of life-because they had no power to write them on the sky with penpoints dipped in Vesuvius! I came to think every large word a lie and a mockery.
"Ecstatic poets have said that speech is poor: "Ah, how poor are words!" they bleat. But no, sir! Speech is rich, extravagantly rich compared with the poverty of actual life. Pain has its limits-physical pain in unconsciousness, mental pain in torpor. The same is true of joy. Our human need for communication has found itself a way to create sounds which lie beyond these limits.
"Is the fault mine? Is it down my spine alone that certain words can run so as to awaken intuitions of sensations which do not exist?"
There was no question now of the malevolence in the young man"s smile. But old Alfred Klingman, who"d spent a lifetime teaching the young and outraged, watched him with a look that seemed more bafflement than horror. He may have felt even a touch of admiration for the man"s rhetoric.