The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “What,” said Callista, “is the virtue of being in tune with the times when the times are corrupt?”

  “Callista, I am rather tired. Must we have one of your—your rather naïve philosophical discussions? All part of the process of adjustment I dare say, but frankly I am not up to it.”

  The big questions, Callista thought, always break the line and swim away. Too big, and a weak line; who wants the great dangerous things anyhow? Not Mrs. Chalmers nor the Thursday Society. “Mother, do you happen to remember the time I spilled that nitric acid?”

  “Happen to remember! Callista, that passes belief.” Large gray upturned eyes filled with tears. “I am not a monster. Am I?”

  “I’m sorry, I spoke clumsily. I meant, do you remember the details? I was going-on-five—it’s difficult—”

  “What details? Naturally I remember them all perfectly. What do you want to know?” The sharpness was excusable; yet Callista wondered whether she truly regretted the cruelty of that blurted question. Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4—she had reread the play in the afternoon. A catalytic action, although it had been a seemingly random choice, a turning to Shakespeare for relief, illumination, distraction, and something more, in a time of trouble, as another might have turned to music, or physical exertion, or the warmth of a friend. Her thought still rang with it, reverberated, and she understood now that the choice had not been random at all: “Let me be cruel, not unnatural: I will speak daggers to her, but use none.” “Your father was drunk, Callista, otherwise I don’t suppose even he could have been so heedless as to leave that bottle where a child could knock it over. Is that what you wanted to know?”

  “No. That’s only what you’ve told me before. Drunk?”

  “Of course.”

  “It keeps coming back to me that his face was burning.”

  “What?”

  “His face was burning. It was the malaria. Wasn’t it? You’ve told me yourself, he brought that home from New Guinea, latent but never cured.”

  “Oh, he had that, yes. A mild form.”

  “Mother, malaria is not mild if it gives you recurrent fevers and collapse. I’ve read up on it. I had to, trying to understand.”

  “You’re very full of book knowledge, certainly.”

  “I’ve found more truth in books than in people. A mild form—why, two years later he died of it, didn’t he?”

  “Now, my dear, your father died, and I think you know this perfectly well, of pneumonia. The doctor informed me that the malaria was at most a—a complicating factor. The pneumonia was induced by exposure, and that in turn was caused by his passing out, as they call it, on a January night, in a drunken stupor, on his way home from a bar.”

  “A drunken stupor, or a blinding fever. I was seven; I remember hearing you answer the telephone—the hospital, I suppose it was, where they’d taken him. I’d been put to bed long before, but wasn’t sleeping. You were having drinks or something with Cousin Trent, after Aunt Cora and Uncle Tom Winwood left. I even remember hearing Aunt Cora say good night, and then your voice going on a long time, to Cousin Trent. I don’t suppose I heard many of the words, but I knew the tone, the one you always used when you were explaining Father’s shortcomings.”

  “Callista!”

  “Wait! I must tell you what I remember, but not about this; I mean the earlier time, two years earlier. Let me tell you what I remember of that, and then I’ll go. I remember running into the studio, dragging my red fire-engine. Father was on the couch. He’d been working, the big table was littered with his things. He sat up and smiled and held out his arms to me. I climbed into his lap. When he kissed me his face was burning, his hands shaking. I know he talked to me, but the words won’t come back. Except ‘Draw me a big horse and a little horse.’ Then I remember lying belly-down on the floor, working with crayons—the horses, I suppose. And he went out of the room, for quinine probably—he had an allergic reaction to atabrine in the Army, didn’t he?”

  “Something like that. Callista, I can’t see—”

  “It was morning, Mother. Sunlight in that east window. Shining aslant across the things on his work-table. From what I’ve learned, what I can remember and piece together, I don’t believe my father would have been drunk in the morning.”

  “Callista, is this your time of the month?”

  “No, God damn it.”

  “Really! Callista, I must ask you to control yourself.”

  “I was never colder. I think I must have a fuller memory than most. It comes back, how serious I was about the drawing, at going-on-five. Precocious. I still possess some talent that way.”

  “Callista, as you know, you have a quite considerable talent that way, if you would learn to discipline it, and—well, and outgrow your taste for the unpleasantly morbid and erotic subjects that seem to attract you so much. I have never understood in fact why you chose to be so childishly disagreeable a year ago when I ventured to show some of your—your less controversial drawings to the Thursday Society. Very well, I should have asked your consent, being merely your mother. Now Mrs. Wilberforce, who is after all an art teacher of somewhat wider experience than yours, to say nothing of having written and illustrated a number of altogether charming children’s books, Mrs. Wilberforce felt that one or two of those drawings showed distinct promise. Distinct promise.”

  “Yes, Mrs. W.’s a nice lady. O Mother, so much comes back! Spring of 1945—he was invalided home a whole year before then, wasn’t he? 1944? Didn’t I have him a whole year before my face was burned? Why are you crying? Wasn’t it 1944?”

  “1944? Yes, he came home that year. And to think, she even offered to let you try some illustrations for one of her own books, was willing to instruct you, help you in every possible way!”

  “Who?—oh, Wilberforce. Yes, she’s nice—what a pity the books are garbage. Why are you crying? Cousin Trent? That little man?”

  “Trent—why, I never—Callista, you are hysterical.”

  “I was never colder. ‘Mother, you have my father much offended.’”

  “What? What are you saying?”

  “I’m not thinking of Cousin Trent—that doesn’t matter. It couldn’t matter if you sneaked into the sheets with him a hundred times—”

  “Callista!”

  “It doesn’t matter, I said. The real infidelity was in the way you treated my father, day to day, the nagging, belittlement, the wearing down, little needles of disparagement, mental castration—but I don’t think you ever managed that, I think he stayed a man. I was seven when he died—you think I couldn’t feel what you were doing to him, and can’t remember it? I do. Even more I think of how you’ve gone on since then, trying to destroy him for me—why, in your view nothing he ever did was good, or wise, or even honorable. Isn’t that why you cut me off from Aunt Cora Winwood—because she knew better? Mother, he was one of the gentle ones—a fault if you like—is that what you held against him? That he couldn’t black your eye when you needed it? Mother, I have three paintings he did to please himself, escape from commercial work. Just three. He must have done a great deal that was never sold. There must have been sketches, unfinished things, portfolios put aside. I never asked you this before, afraid of the answer I think: what became of that work?”

  “I simply will not endure any more of this.”

  “What became of my father’s work?”

  “Oh, if you mean—well, when we moved here from New York, and there was so much—”

  “I was right then. You threw it away?”

  “If you will control yourself and listen reasonably: yes, your father did leave certain drawings and paintings which were very obviously done to please himself, as you put it. They were—I am sorry, Callista—they were vile. No one could call me a prude, but there are certain limits—”

  “Now it’s out.”


  “Callista, I must ask—”

  “They were all destroyed, all his visions? Everything beyond the level of, say, the Thursday Society—destroyed? Everything? You didn’t save one charcoal sketch, one line drawing, one bit of a doodle on scratch paper? If you did I’ll stay, to beg you for it—or steal it if I can. I want nothing else from you, ever, but for one scrap of my father’s work I’d go on my knees.”

  “Callista, you are out of your mind.”

  “‘Mother, for love of grace, lay not that flattering unction to your soul, that not your trespass but my madness speaks.’”

  “Oh, this morbid dramatizing, this neurotic—quoting ‘Hamlet’ at me as if I—are you laughing?”

  “Not very much. I was thinking how neither poor Herb nor Cousin Trent fits the picture very well—it doesn’t matter. There’s more than one way to pour poison in the ear of a king. You did it with words, millions of little nibbling words, all the years he lived with you and—and for a final dirty joke of the fates, begot me—but I think he knew I loved him, as much as a child’s capable of loving, maybe it gave him something, after all he couldn’t see ahead. And I was thinking: I must write to Aunt Cora, I think she’d remember the crazy brat who adored her and then couldn’t come to see her any more, because Tom Winwood d-r-rinks! She might have some of his work, and might send me to friends of his, people you never knew. I was thinking, Mother, how differently you’d feel if his work could be recognized, now that he’s been safely dead for twelve years. What a change! Then you’d be—what, his inspiration?”

  “Callista, don’t! Stop it! Do you have to break my heart completely? What have I done?”

  “‘Such an act’—oh, poor Mother, nothing, nothing at all. Maybe that’s the worst of it. You’ve done nothing, just lived inside the shell of your own vanity—as everyone does, I suppose. I’m sorry, Mother. It’s all right, I’m going, and I won’t come back. My own vanity tricked me into saying too much, but you’ll forget, and go on in your own way. I haven’t changed anything. ‘Assume a virtue if you have it not’—remember? ‘Forgive me this my virtue, for in the fatness of these pursy times’—you don’t have one little scrap, a three-line scrawl on the back of an envelope?”

  Callista’s mother, weeping with her head on her arms, did not answer that. To Callista, standing in the doorway not yet able to turn and go, it seemed as though all hatred and resentment had drained away suddenly from within her; including the old dark aching hatred for herself, which until then had seldom released her except at certain times in the warm presence of Edith Nolan. She would have liked to cross the room, try for some physical contact implying comfort and forgiveness with that stranger over there who still made strangled sounds of self-pity and other kinds of pain, all of them real. But having no confidence in her skill at such gestures, no illusion that a relation thus broken could ever be repaired, and fearing to lose the new-found inner quiet, Callista only said: “Good night, Mother.” Downstairs then, pausing on the landing, her hand tightening on the rail as she waited on the passing of a curious nausea. Too early for the sickness of pregnancy, wasn’t it? Nothing else wrong, and the nausea did pass. “My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time.”

  She wondered, standing there still faintly sick, how the self of a week before could possibly have knelt in that wild garden, pulled up those innocently wicked plants, broken off the roots to be dropped in her handbag, and thought: This way would solve everything and hardly hurt at all. Yet the self of a week before had done that; the self of a few hours past had glanced at the brandy bottle, death dissolved and waiting, and had thought: Have it out with Mother—there could be some of his work, maybe buried in the attic where my searching never uncovered it—and then, then probably—

  The self pausing on the landing, hand letting go the rail and moving again softly, shelteringly, over the secret life in the womb, had thought practically and sensibly: Throw away that stunk-up mess as soon as you get home. And the self of twenty minutes later, arriving at the apartment with a burden of abnormal fatigue and drowsiness, had forgotten—(is there any true forgetting this side of death?)—forgotten all about bottle and canister, everything except bed.

  The self on the landing thought: It’s all right, Funny Thing, look, it’s all right, I’m going to bear you. I’m going to take care of you. I can do that. I will. Had wondered, incidentally, if the small bra wasn’t already a bit tight. The girl on the landing ran a finger lightly along the column of her neck—wasn’t there slightly more fullness, softness? Should go to a dentist too—and—oh, lots of little chores. Never mind anyhow, Funny Thing, never mind the details, it’s going to be all right for you and me.

  The self seated on the cot where Kowalski had left her stood up uncertainly, with a sense of listening, although she knew Kowalski was gone, Watson was keeping quiet, the night also was in a deep hush with no longer that occasional whine of wind beyond the barred glass. No one had spoken. Unless I did.

  She glanced at the window, uneasy as though the blank of winter night beyond it had paled, and might show again some light or color if she stared patiently enough. No. Not that window. Not that blank. And no true sound of speech.

  She stood with eyes closed and hands pressed over her ears. Waiting; and hearing at least the dull noise—muffled, as it ought to be on the other side of a closed door—of a bottle, heavy glass, drawn across resonant wood from the back of a shelf. Faint pop of a cork and clink of glass, and tap of high heels: “Callie, come on now! I poured a little drink for you.” And that fool lying frozen on the bed down there—why, how long had that fool held herself frozen, knowing everything?

  How long before that fool was telling herself: I didn’t really hear her, I couldn’t make out what she said—how long? Whining maybe before the Blank shut down complete: It wasn’t anything I did, I wasn’t there, I couldn’t move, anyway how could I know she’d drink it herself? Saying later (O the Blank!) in righteous innocence to Mr. Lamson: “I don’t know, I can’t remember.” Screaming in the secret heart where not even Cecil could hear it and understand: I don’t want to know! I don’t want to remember!

  Eyes open, hands fallen, she noticed by the cot the handful of trifling possessions allowed her. She fumbled through it, unsure what she sought until her fingers held the lipstick pencil. To the wall then, dizzy and obliged to lean against the cool plaster while her hand labored, but the effort was interesting; she could feel wryly, justifiably certain that no hand had ever written these words on this wall, ever before. She stood back, dizziness gone, and saw how the red letters in the dim light took on a magnificence, a glory like tranquillity:

  I AM GUILTY.

  IV

  Edith Nolan pressed her fingertips over eyes grown tired from work. Possibly when she opened them and looked again at the broad sheet of drawing paper on the table, she would know whether her curious urgency of the last hour, the sense of good achievement that had driven her to this exhaustion, had been something more than self-deception. A glance at her wrist watch before she closed away vision had told her it was past one in the morning. Time to quit, if she was not to arrive for the next courtroom session hopelessly unintelligent from weariness and lack of sleep.

  She lowered her hands, looking very briefly down. The faces, hands, shadows of the big drawing did leap astonishingly into life; but she said half-aloud: “Not yet.” She got up without another look at it and crossed the room to stand, huddling in the blue bathrobe stiff and a little cold, before Callista’s watercolor of a pine tree on a windy hill. She could not quite see Callista’s vision, or not as much of it as she wished; she resisted a while longer the pull of what waited for her back at the drawing table. It may be, she thought. This once I just may have done it.

  In the past, no work of her own had ever pleased Edith Nolan enough to give her a complete sense of belonging by natural right in that small company who can now and the
n draw from the confusion of the world’s raw material a new synthesis, a work of disciplined imagination worthy to last a while. She knew the company, in books, music, painting; and in at least one other person: Callista, who belonged there so inevitably that the girl had probably never even wondered whether she had a “right” to call herself an artist. In need of hard work and long study, yes, but Callista knew it, and while she had struggled and learned and enjoyed the struggle, she had still been drawing and painting as naturally as a robin sings in the morning.

  Sam Grainger had considered that he did not belong. “I’m a performer,” he said once, “so I may get well-to-do some day; and a performer, as of course you’ve noticed, Red-Top, can be an awful nice guy, but…but God damn it, I can’t compose, and I have a most un-American impulse to get down and lick the boots of anyone who can.”

  She remembered saying: “Why, you’re creative.” Sam had just grunted, inarticulately annoyed. In those days Edith had not been fully aware of the dismal condition rapidly overtaking that once honorable word, and Sam had been surprisingly insensitive to words and the rich changeable life of words, as if he could hear only one kind of music, or believed other kinds irrelevant. Nowadays Edith’s skin crawled when the corpse of the word “creative” was being kicked around. It gave off a squashy noise; was almost as offensively decayed as the corpse of “heritage.” Today everything’s creative, including beauty culture, business letters, and the application of new superlatives to old laxatives. There was, Edith had heard, an operation known as “creative selling.” We wait perhaps, she thought, for the day when the market will offer a creative toilet as an aid to positive thinking.

  Reluctant, not quite frightened, Edith returned to the drawing table and looked down at twelve pen-and-ink faces. They returned the gaze, with intensity, with the force, savor, complexity of an authentic life that no exploration could ever exhaust. But—my hand—My hand?