The Promise of Rest

by Reynolds Price

  There, with the door half open behind him, was Maitland Moses—big eyed and edgy.

  Hutch said “Did you try to ring? The bell doesn’t work. I was checking on Wade.”

  “No, I’m afraid I just walked in.” Oddly Mait’s voice was under control; had some new hormone just kicked in and anchored his yodeling?

  “Well, you’re under arrest.” Hutch almost meant it; he was private to a fault and had always been. But the sight of Mait’s collapsing face brought him around. “You forget something?”

  “I’m pretty sure I did.”

  “Run find it; I’ve got a million papers to mark.”

  Quick as a burned child, Mait turned toward the door. His shorts (a pair of hacked-off jeans), the poisonous green of his baggy T-shirt, the rosy face of a Dickensian chimney sweep completed the picture of an innocent hapless Chaplinesque clown—a genuine orphan bound for the night.

  “No, find what you lost, Mait.”

  “Sir, it’s nothing I lost; but my bike and I were halfway down the drive when it just came over me that soon I was leaving this good place forever, and we’d never really sat still and talked—not off campus at least, you and I. Not in a real home.”

  Tired and dejected and busy as Hutch was, he had all the teaching instincts of his family still in him, ticking infallibly. Every student plea that was not plainly fraudulent demanded his attention. You can’t turn this wet dog out yet. So he told Mait “Get yourself a drink from the kitchen and bring me that last 7 Up I saved. I’ll wait in here.”

  While Mait found a beer, Hutch sat in his main chair and actually dozed for ninety seconds (the ease with which he could nap anywhere was lifelong boon). When his eyes reopened, Mait was in the opposite chair, looking whole years older than he had in the afternoon—older, calmer and somehow wiser across the eyes and brow. Hutch had a sense that decades had passed or hours at least. But he looked to his watch and saw it was just past nine o’clock, same day. Near him on the table, his 7 Up fizzed in a silver goblet he hadn’t seen for years—the first prize he’d ever won for poetry, in a high school. Mait must have gouged deep in the cabinets. What’ this boy hunting? Hutch took a long swallow of the cold tart drink. “You want to just start in and see where it leads?”

  Mait was puzzled.

  “I believe you said you forgot to tell me something—please don’t confess you copied your poem from an Urdu original of the fourteenth century.”

  Mait gave a good imitation of You caught me! “I did copy, sure, but just from you. You’re bound to have heard it.”

  Hutch smiled. “I may have detected an echo of olden days in the vaults of the Hutchins Mayfield canon, but I meant what I said. You’re very possibly the thing itself, if you need to be—a live working poet. I’m fairly sure of that much, or I’d never say it.” Through the years Hutch had always told his writing students that he wouldn’t manhandle them in class for being less than geniuses; but if they cared to hear his honest opinion of their poems at the end of term, he’d give it to them privately so long as they knew it was just one opinion, subject to error.

  None but the really good students ever asked—maybe a total of six in all the decades, and four of them had published volumes by now. Mait hadn’t asked yet; Hutch had told him anyhow this afternoon and in front of the others. What was left to say? (Hutch tried to wean students once they’d left him—no lifetime correspondence courses. He and every honorable writer he knew had made their own way with bare hands through granite; he thought others should.)

  Mait sa forward and gave an oddly formal speech of thanks—he was from rural upper-class Virginia and a little hypercourtly. Once the speech was past, Mait said “Next I need to know if you despise me.”

  Hutch was surprised. Is this some penitential feast tonight? “Despise you?—absolutely not. What gave you that notion?”

  Mait was agonized and blushing again, and his voice broke loose. “This endlessly prolonged initiation of mine into the sodomite tribe. You’ve had to put up with a lot of navel gazing—or is it weenie gazing?—and I’ve got the sense every now and then that you’d have liked me better if I was a functional lumberjack with a ring of dumb girls hung round my studly shoulders.”

  Hutch laughed. “That might have been picturesque; but no, you’re who you are, my friend. That’s been enough for me. I’ll miss your avid mind and kindly wit, but I know I’ll see your work in print in the next five years.”

  “That still doesn’t say you don’t despise me.”

  Hutch said “For what? What I know about you is what I’ve seen, none of which repels me. Granted, I haven’t trailed you around with a night-vision scope, spying on your murky secrets. But in any case, ‘Nothing human is foreign to me,’ as some Roman said.” After nearly four decades of teaching, like most workers at any trade, Hutch was finding it nearly impossible to produce anything like a fresh reaction to a youthful question. However well-meaning he meant to be, he’d hear his words limp out from his face and creep like tattered tramps toward the young; or he’d pick up an imaginary needle, set it down precisely on his mental record and play them a paragraph or two from his greatest hits—home truths, convictions, lines from old poems: things Hutch had mouthed a thousand times.

  Mait was not satisfied with secondhand wisdom, and he winced hard. The sudden age and depth of his face were holding up. “Then I need to ask you a violent question.”

  Hutch laughed. “What’s a violent question please?”

  “I feel like, deep down, you understand everything I’ve ever felt. You’ve done everything I want to do—that’s made you mighty awesome to me.”

  Hutch smiled to think he’d at last understood. “Are you asking me if I’m queer too?”

  Mait’s eyes looked doused in welcome relief. He was plainly heartened by the opening, so much so that he doubted his luck. “What makes you think that?”

  Hutch said “You’re claiming I understand you, to the shoe soles and sockets. All right then, my world-famed understanding tells me you’re feeling like nothing but queer; and you’re hunting down volunteers for your little lifeboat.”

  Mait said “Bingo!” in a scooping yell.

  Hutch pointed behind him toward Wade’s room and whispered “He’s sleeping.” Then he drank the rest of his drink and faced Mait, working with more than a little amusement to drain the chalky professor from his look. “Queer—me? No, not now nor any other night—not that pure a label, no one pigeonhole.” That seemed truth enough.

  Mait leaned in. “Bisexual?”

  And Hutch thought it through but finally laughed. “No, every man I’ve met who claimed bisexuality was a full-time queer in under six months.”

  Mait agreed. “Me too. But you understand loving your own cut and kind?”

  With no trace of compunction. Hutch grinned and agreed. “Still there’s never been a slot or group or club I was comfortable in. God—for instance—I voted as a yellowdog Democrat at every election since Jefferson ran; but I’ve never once worn a campaign button, never confessed in a telephone poll, never felt a hundred percent like a donkey. As for love and rut, I can freely tell you I’ve loved more than one man—oh Christ yes, loved men in every practical way from stem to stern, plus a few ways that strained the laws of physics; and I enjoyed the hell out of most of those nights.

  “I can even say that, looking back, those days and nights were my main pleasure—the height of the pleasure my body’s known anyhow, actual joy down the length of my skin. Men do know how to ring men’s bells. And I think of those few men, all my time near them, with a lot of thanks and very slim regrets. The only regrets are for my own skittish meanness when people leaned on me. Somehow I couldn’t bear another man’s weight for long at a time—maybe because I bore a lovable breakable father right through my childhood. But I can’t recall an act I’ve done with my bare body that I’m sorry for—I say that with full awareness, I think, of the moral codes of most religions.

  “Still when I was only a few years olde
r than you tonight, toward the end of my years of study in England, I honest to God felt my mind undertake a wide slow turn westward. It felt like some strong gyrostabilizer moving a ship onto some new course and locking it there. Whatever, I gradually found my mental, spiritual, sexual needs homing in on one certain young woman—my girlfriend for years, whom I’d mistreated on more than one continent. Her name was Ann Gatlin. We married once I was home from England, we had our son Wade, and I thought we were doing as well as old yoke-horses after decades together; but Ann thought otherwise a short while back and went her own way. You met her two years ago, when I first knew you—”

  Mait said “I did. She’s a striking lady.”

  “I’ll tell her you said so. She’s fine all right.”

  “So you see her still?”

  “She comes by regularly since Wade is home.”

  Mait said “Don’t answer this if I’m out of line, but surely you were tempted hard after you chose her.”

  “To go with other men? I can tell you this much and it’s simply the truth—you may not believe me; I barely believe myself in the matter—but though I’ve looked at a good many men and imagined my way into their hid places, I’ve literally never cheated with anyone, male or female, since the day I married Ann.”

  “How much did that cost you?”

  Hutch had never calculated. He paused to try. “Not more than a few thousand dollars a year—to translate it crassly. Nothing I couldn’t fairly easily afford.”

  “But now you’ve been alone out here for—what?—at least a year.”

  “Longer. And I’ve kept to myself. I’ve never been a barfly or bus-station hound. Still, just when I might have looked elsewhere to feed my mind, Wade Mayfield got dreadfully sick and that grounded me.”

  Mait said “I hate to ask this too, but isn’t it the plague—Wade’s thinness, his eyes?”

  “Didn’t he tell you outright this evening, you and the others? I thought that was clear.”

  “He never said the word.”

  Hutch said “No but he drew a stark picture. All his life, Wade’s been a poor liar.”

  “Did you know he’d talk the way he did out there today?” Mait pointed outside as though Wade were still there, confessing in the dark.

  Hutch could see Mait was back on his best calm stride; his eyes were drinking up information like a ditch of dry sand. “No, but once he’d started, I knew I was glad.”

  “Glad of what?”

  Hutch studied this boy before him intently. Why should I tell this raw near-stranger? But he knew this stranger was at least as magnanimous as any captive dolphin so Hutch went ahead. “I guess I’m glad because what Wade confided to you and the class tonight means I’ll get to talk to him now myself and tell him all—he knows next to nothing about his father.”

  “—Which is you, his blood father?”

  “Absolutely. Can’t you see my eyes in him and the shape of his head?”

  Mait said “Oh yes sir” as if caught in some implication of bastardy. When Hutch said nothing, Mait said “I told you I’ll be around this summer, right?”

  “You got the grant then?”

  “Three thousand dollars to live, eat and scribble on.”

  “Will you keep your apartment?”

  “I doubt I can. My well-heeled roommate’s leaving for a year in Japan next week, and four hundred dollars a month’s mighty steep for an unpublished poet. I’ll get something smaller or move in with the Poufs—they’ve got a cheap old barny house just off east campus.” The Poufs were an ongoing, only mildly embarrassing, pair of near-transvestites in sequins and pumps and Joan Crawford shoulder pads.

  Hutch said “Do yourself a favor—find an ex-convict or a nice axe-murderer, but don’t stay long with those painted queens.”

  Mait grinned and mugged. “They speak well of you.” But Hutch was in earnest. “Don’t narrow your choices sooner than you have to. Just because your miserable Poufs have cut themselves a path one micron wide and a millimeter deep through the whole of human feeling, please Mait, don’t you. Drive off in every direction you can manage, and crash if you must—you likely won’t die—but don’t slim your choices down too soon. Not to feathers and lizard bags. You’ve got a real chance to understand the world, not just one tribe and its rhinestone blinders.”

  Mait’s face assumed a generic expression Hutch knew too well—the universal muscular response when a student hears the teacher babbling outdated nonsense and seals himself off without saying so, least of all contradicting: the eyes go glassy and the lips beam thinly. In Hutch’s silence the boy said finally “I came back mainly to say I can help you any way you need me all summer long, maybe longer than that.”

  At first Hutch was puzzled. Help, what help? “With Wade, you mean?”

  “It’s the least I can do, much as you’ve given me.”

  “But I’ve hardly seen you outside class.”

  Mait said “In my work, in the way I’ll try to live.”

  To hear that was harder than any sympathy Hutch had got lately. All the others—Grainger, Straw, Emily. Ann, Ivory, Boatie—had blood or near-blood stakes in Wade’s life. This tenderfoot poet at hand here tonight, with his naive offer to enter a tunnel as bat-lined as any since the black death killed a third of all Europe, seemed a sudden return on Hutch’s years of teaching, a trade that amounts to work in the dark with almost no immediate rewards (it was after all a teacher’s long dream, to know he’s connected and moved a young mind a few yards forward toward a sane useful life). At least Hutch managed to say what he felt. “That’s as welcome an offer as I’ve ever got.”

  Mait said “I mean every syllable of it.”

  “But, friend, we’ll be in black water soon—right here in this house. This will get truly awful. I already diaper that dignified, powerfully accomplished young man, who only happens to be my son, six or eight times a day.”

  “It’ll teach me a lot I need to know.” Mait’s face had taken on an old-fashioned fever of righteous ambition.

  “Is that your main reason?”

  Mait said “God, no. I liked Wade immediately. I’ve loved you for four years—a fifth of my life.”

  Hutch was genuinely ambushed by the claim. “Me? I’m more than forty years your senior, a scarred old walrus.”

  “You know you’re magnetic.”

  Hutch said “I feel as magnetic as lint. But thanks anyhow.” He thought of a necessary stipulation. “We’ll work out a way to recompense you fairly.”

  Mait looked struck across the eyes; he shook his head. “Not a penny, no sir. I’ve thought about this for more than a week, thinking I might meet Wade here tonight; and I’m sure as a bullet on one main point—this’ll be my first contribution someway to a world I’ve barely visited yet. I guess it’s also a partial payment to God or whatever for who I’m turning out to be.”

  At that moment, out the window on the lighted terrace, a female raccoon made a fearless appearance. Surprisingly tall in the arch of her back and magisterial in cool neglect of the house behind her, she smelled her unquestioned way round the bricks and the rock where Wade had sat. Nothing of any serious interest in the fading scents of an irrelevant species, she seemed to say. But then at last she faced the wide window; and whether or not she saw Hutch and Mait, she raised her nose in a comical snub—a dowager’s proud dismissal of a sighting unworthy of notice. She ambled off.

  But a dry voice behind them said “What day is this?”

  When they turned, there was Wade again in the hall door. He’d somehow slipped out of his diaper and waited, naked and stunned, just beyond them.

  For eyes trained like Hutch’s and Maitland’s, Wade seemed to be two things—a young man suffering intolerably, far past their reach, and also a likeness of hundreds of images in Western art. All of them were young men tortured toward death—the lynched dying Jesus, starved desert saints, impaled rebels in Goya’s Disasters: all long past help and as pure as new light in their unearned agony.


  Hutch stood in place and smiled toward Wade, though the eyes were plainly blind again. “It’s the same night you fell asleep in, darling.” He realized he hadn’t called Wade darling in ten years, maybe fifteen. When Wade said nothing, Hutch said “You been dreaming?”

  Wade was sure of that much. “I haven’t dreamed for two years.” It seemed to be all he had to tell them. With his arms out stiff from his sides for balance, Wade slowly steered himself around and back out of sight.

  Mait said “He’ll freeze before morning; it’s chilly out.”

  Hutch said “I’ll cover him up in a minute.”

  “I could sleep in his room tonight, if you need me to.”

  “I’ll need you more later on,” Hutch said. “Get some rest while we can. And deep thanks, Mait.”

  They parted in a silence that felt to Mait like actual music, sober but useful.

  5

  BY half past midnight Hutch had slogged his way through four more papers from the daunting stack. As ever he came away from the task numbed by a question—What can have happened in America, in the past hundred years, that a people who readily speak to a friend in a room with human force and directness will seize up like an oil-drained engine when they try to commit those words to writing? Why do so many—most of them veterans of long years of schooling—melt down, when they attempt to write, into a gummy mass that not only lacks grace and economy but, worse, conveys no legible message? Any half hour’s look at a volume of eighteenth or nineteenth century letters or diaries by ordinary frontier Americans—from semiliterate riverboatmen to newly arrived East European immigrants and escaped African slaves—will show a sweet or searing intensity of feeling and a taken-for-granted trim eloquence that passes from writer to reader with no smoke or flame. Why are those qualities as rare today throughout the nation as wit and elegance? And what huge, or silent, disaster does the loss predict? For surely no republic unable to write its chosen tongue with lean precision can do its civic and personal business for long, not in clear-eyed justice and compassion.