by R.P. Burnham
…the soup kitchen scene is a gem, real literature. The Mayan temple feels right, the poetry that sits in the middle. Ridlon, Nevins…ever notice how Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld are enough to send one back to belief in physiognamy, clones?…Sometimes philosophical and social essay are handled self-consciously in the mouths of characters, but that energy doesn't really impede what is a strenuos, serious book. Clear charatacters, up and down the social scale, well differentiated,work in interesting relations. I love the poetry of the Mayan temple, a testmony to the kind of love that might save our species. There is a clear sense of people who can and cannot afford to think much about their lives, so Chris’ demon is always compromised by normal standards... A perfect, quiet ending.
–Paul Nelson
THE MANY CHANGE AND PASS
by
R. P. Burnham
******
PUBLISHED BY:
The Many Change and Pass
copyright 2007 by R. P. Burmham
The One remains, the many change and pass
--Shelley, Ptometheus Unbound, LII
*****
Table of Contents
An Interesting Day
The Pond
Other People
The Garden
Business After Hours
Unwelcome Visitors
Day Trip
Can I See Another’s Woe?
Ave AtqueVale
Panic and Discovery
Duty
Lost Soul
The Turning Point
A Great Reckoning in a Little Room
The Mission
Home
Alles Vergängliche Ist Nur ein Gleichnis
The Horizon
a note about the writer
An Interesting Day
Myron Seavey was reshelving some magazines that patrons of the Wentworth Library in Waska, Maine had been leafing through during the course of the day. He was the director of the library, an exalted title perhaps, though the reality was that he had four employees in addition to some volunteers and an emergency backup librarian (Annette Duval, the former director, now retired) who came in during vacations or when someone was sick. Gathering the magazines from the tables and chairs in the reading room where they were left and bringing them to the magazine display case, he sighed, not because he had to do much of the work and spent little time at his desk, but rather because he was disheartened by the caliber of the magazines. His last job was as a reference librarian at an academic library at a small college in Connecticut where it was a rare day that he didn’t have interesting questions to answer. But here he was collecting Women’s Day, Sports Illustrated, and the like, and the most common research he was called upon to do was to find online advice on some stock or bond a patron wanted to invest in. The only interesting questions he got with some regularity were genealogical. Occasionally for some reason or other high school students would do research here instead of the campus library. The Black Death in England had recently exercised his mind, though even the high school research projects were more often than not on dreary, unimaginative topics. Thus too many days went by without much intellectual stimulation, and that was the reason he sighed.
He paused to look through the double door at the sound of heavy boots clattering on the marble floor of the hall. A young man, with his eyes darting about as if he was casing the place for a burglary, strode by. His long blondish hair was tied into a ponytail; his blondish-red beard was full. He was thin but wiry. Something about him suggested an air of coiled energy that could be sprung at the slightest provocation. Myron thought he was a dangerous young man, dangerous and therefore interesting.
He looked at Myron indecisively for a moment, then continued to the checkout counter where Nellie Olson, the library’s secretary and clerk, was typing on a computer. Myron heard the keys go silent.
“Can you tell me where I can find information on local businesses?”
“You’ll have to speak to Mr. Seavey.”
Hearing his cue, Myron went through the double doors to the hall and approached the young man. “Can I help you?”
While the young man regarded him doubtfully, Myron knew exactly what was going through his mind. He was thirty-five and still young; he was thin, long-faced and square-jawed. His brown hair was parted to the left and kept short on the sides. His hazel eyes were magnified by thick wire-rimmed glasses. He was dressed conservatively in a grey sports coat over a white shirt and tie. He was also reserved and dignified with strangers, which he knew people either took to mean he was shy or felt superior. Those who read him as the shy type did so because they were seeing a stereotype of a librarian—bookish, socially inept, and conservative politically and socially. He had confronted this attitude so often he was used to it. The look in the young man’s eyes told him he’d been pinned as a librarian. He smiled slightly, feeling more amused than perturbed. “I’m Myron Seavey, and you are?”
“Chris Andrews.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Andrews?”
“I’m looking for information on a business.”
“I assume you mean more information than the Yellow Pages provides.”
“A lot more.” He spat out the short phrase like a challenge.
Myron tilted his head as an invitation for Andrews to explain.
For a moment, before he understood the gesture, he stared at Myron. He surveyed the hall, the stacks to his right and the reading room behind Myron, before his glance returned to him. “Specifically I’m looking for businesses that pollute air and water.” He enunciated the word “pollute” with such vehemence his eyes flashed. Yes, he was a dangerous young man.
“The City Directory lists all the businesses, though there’s not much in the way of descriptive information.”
Andrews listened to him with an impatient and unpleasant frown on his face. It was clear that he often met with hostility and had come to expect it. “I saw in the Yellow Pages a business called Ridlon Recycling. Do you know anything about them?”
Myron shook his head. “I’ve never heard of that company.”
“So you wouldn’t know if they’ve ever had trouble with the law or the EPA?”
“No. But we have past issues of the local paper on microfilm, or they can be accessed online. Shall we do a search?”
“Yeah, maybe that would do it.”
They went into the reading room to one of the computer terminals, but Ridlon Recycling had only a few routine entries concerning contracts signed with the local hospital and an article about a new building Ned Ridlon wanted to build near the river.
The entries, however, seemed to confirm something in Andrews’s mind. “I see fluorescent bulbs, mercury vapor lamps and neon lamps are among the things Ridlon recycles for the hospital.”
“Those are items that contain mercury. Is Ridlon dumping these things illegally?”
His question caused Andrews’s attitude to undergo another change. “I see you’re familiar with these matters. Good. I have no proof now—it’s too early. But before I’m through all hell is going to break loose in this town. It’ll be in all the papers. Front page headlines too.”
Myron, at first skeptical of this extravagant claim, merely nodded. “If that’s true, it will be interesting. When you say you have no proof, do you mean of dumping or no proof that Ridlon Recycling did it?”
Andrews, surprised at this calm response, backed off a little. He even seemed a bit embarrassed. Still he spoke with the arrogance and self-confidence of youth that recognized no obstacles or difficulties that were insurmountable when he said, “I have to prove my suspicions, but someone is dumping toxic waste in this town, of that I’m positive.”
Myron didn’t change
his neutral expression, but his assessment of the young man underwent a transformation. Here was self-confidence and single-minded determination indeed. “Well, I hope you do—prove it, that is. This town could use some shaking up.”
Again an unexpected response. He could see confusion in Andrews’s eyes as the stereotype of a librarian was further confounded. He looked down at the floor, over to the checkout counter, and then back to Myron. A slight boyish grin broke across his face. “One other question. Where would I find records of who owns land and where in this town?”
“That would be city hall.”
Andrews nodded. “That’s what I thought. Okay, thanks for your help.”
Nellie had been listening. As soon as the door closed behind Andrews, she looked at Myron and raised her eyebrows and made an oval of her mouth.
Myron smiled. He liked Nellie. “Quite the young man, huh? Is he local?” Nellie knew everyone in Waska.
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. There are several families of Andrews in town, but I haven’t heard of a Chris Andrews. Maybe Claud will know. He seemed like a wild young man.”
“Well, he’s young and he has a cause.” He started to walk down the hall to the children’s library, then paused to hear Nellie say, “I just remembered there were some Andrews who moved away ten or twelve years ago. I think they had a boy named Christopher.”
He found Claudette LaVergne, who began her day at two P.M., already surrounded by chaos. She had two drawers from the card catalogue at her desk together with a pile of books two feet high. His sense of order was always troubled by her working habits. When he worked the late shift he had seen ten minutes before closing time her desk piled so high with books she would be hidden behind them. Papers would be scattered all over the place. But by the time she left the cyclone’s damage would be repaired. Early on he would sometimes check the children’s room the following morning, expecting to find books reshelved willy-nilly and papers stuffed into a desk drawer. He always found the room impeccable, however, so he never needed to correct her. Like Nellie, she was very pleasant, and like Nellie she was a short, plump woman who wore big black glasses. He had quickly learned that the children loved her, and very soon he had concluded that they were very wise judges of character. His orderly mind had to be restrained.
“Claud,” he said, startling her. She looked up with panic on her face—the one trait she didn’t share with the phlegmatic Nellie was a certain high-strung nervousness. “Claud,” he repeated, “we just had a visit from a young man named Chris Andrews. Nellie thinks he might have lived in Waska as a boy. Do you know anything about him?”
She thought for a moment. “I remember a boy named Chris Andrews who loved nature. He would spend hours in the winter looking at pictures of animals and birds. He was a slender towheaded kid. That was fifteen years ago.”
“That sounds like our man,” he said as a mother with a little girl came into the room. He left.
At the desk Dora Ritter had just arrived. She was looking through the mail and at first didn’t notice him. Nellie asked if Claudette had any information.
“Yes, he may very well have lived here as a boy. She remembers a lad who was very interested in nature. I can see that growing into a concern for the environment. Dora,” he said, raising his voice and turning to her, “this is my night for the reading group, so I’ll have to leave a little early. I have to stop at the drugstore to get some things for my mother.”
Dora’s body language communicated her disapproval. She was sharp-featured with bony ridges above her eyes, a long thin nose and thin lips. She looked displeased even when she was happy, but now her dark tiny eyes flashed, the bony ridge curled into a frown, as she looked away with a gesture of impatience. They had a frosty relationship, and there wasn’t much he did that she approved of. She had no sympathy for his sick mother, rather regarding her as an excuse Myron used to get out of work. She had applied for the job of library director when Annette Duval retired and was still resentful that she didn’t get it. She had been working at the library for over twenty-five years but had no degrees—not even a B.A. He was chosen because of his academic accomplishments (summa cum laude at Cornell and top of his class in library science at Simmons), his job experience, and the glowing letters of recommendation the trustees received with his application three years ago. He was obviously qualified—even over-qualified—for the job, but Dora still felt robbed of what was rightfully hers.
So she frowned and pursed her lips and looked away, even adding an impatient sigh to the familiar ritual. “How was computer use today?” she suddenly asked.
This was another one of her manias. She had talked Annette into getting computers over ten years ago with grant money they received and felt that gave her the bona fides of a modern librarian. They had three of them, two in the main, adult reading room and one in the children’s library. She had also agitated for putting the card catalog online, but no money was available for this scheme. For his part, Myron conceded that computers were sometimes useful research tools, but in their discussions he would point out that studies showed students actually learned better without them. He was committed to the printed word, which she took to mean he was hopelessly antiquated.
“Four or five people used them to go on the web. I helped a young man find some information on a local business. A bit below average today, I’d say.”
“And books?”
“About fifteen to eighteen went out today.”
Here too they differed. He knew that as soon as he was gone she would look to see what books were checked out. Where he ordered biographies of Bach and Shelley, she would order biographies of Bill Gates or Greta Garbo. Her choices were more popular, which he was sure confirmed her in her opinion that the trustees had made a terrible mistake. Myron, remembering how the world had opened to him as a child when he read books on such topics as the Norman conquest or modern physics, wanted the library to be a place where the world of knowledge, of both nature and human culture, awaited discovery. She was right and he knew it—when it came to books he was an old-fashioned guy. He wondered sometimes if she realized it was the knowledge of the world he had gained from wide reading that taught him tolerance for her narrow views. She was also a right-wing reactionary who regarded him as a dangerous communist.
Their good-bye was as frigid as their conversation. Outside the cool but pleasant late afternoon was refreshing compared to Dora’s wintry presence. Spring was in the air, and there was still an hour of daylight left. He paused briefly in the parking lot to take in the beautiful pre-twilight sky with clouds illuminated from below by the low sun. He observed the season’s first robin on a denuded bush at the edge of the parking lot before getting into his car and driving to the drugstore.
The things for his mother he’d told Dora he had to get were actually singular—her heart medication. She suffered from arrhythmia, but her emphysema, the result of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day for most of her life, was more serious. She was a very sick woman, a dying woman in fact. When he was forced to leave his job in Connecticut because the small college where he worked closed its doors, she had argued with him to put her in a nursing home, but he had refused. He knew she suggested it to free him, not because she wanted to be in a cold, impersonal and lonely environment to end her days. He loved both his parents and admired them greatly. The last thing his father on his deathbed had asked of him was to take care of his mother. He had promised, and despite the cost to him personally he had kept that promise. His mother had led an extraordinary life. She was active in the Unitarian Church and engaged in social issues, particularly the problem of starvation in the third world. His strongest memories of her were of her cooking dinner while simultaneously making phone calls to alleviate hunger in Africa or to build a clinic for Mayan Indians in Guatemala. Moreover these were only a part of her life as a activist and doer. She was on their town’s historical society and chaired numerous committees at the Unitarian Church. For years she demons
trated against the many and various wars the U.S. government waged against the third world. For one whose energy was inexhaustible and compassion boundless, to be struggling for breath was very sad. A good day was one in which she could walk from her downstairs bedroom to the kitchen and back. And yet while her body was broken her spirit was still indomitable. She never felt sorry for herself and was still involved with the world, watching CNN daily and still an intractable foe of U.S. imperialism.
Elaine Neault was in the kitchen making a cup of tea when he came through the door. She was his mother’s nurse and was with her all the time Myron was not at home. On occasions like tonight when he would be out of the house she would sleep over. He had gotten her name from the local Unitarian Church, which he attended with his mother when she was strong enough to go. Elaine was a divorced Catholic who had joined the church when she remarried.
He and she had a history that made for a slight awkwardness between them. An unfortunate incident together with her appearance led him to associate her with Dickens’s Mrs. Gamp. She was plump, red-faced, had a certain animal shrewdness in her eyes, and had an air of unrefinement bordering on grossness that rather closely approximated his mental picture of the nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit, but it was her behavior during a crisis two years ago that gave rise to the association, which he knew in hindsight to be unfair. His mother often required oxygen to help her breathe, but one day a defective bottle of oxygen left her gasping desperately for air. When Myron in panic asked what was wrong, Elaine casually glanced at the meter of the oxygen bottle and said calmly, “O deary, this tank’s useless.” Then she had started waddling across the room to get another tank before Myron in horror had rushed by her and retrieved the backup tank. Still too nervous to set the mechanism up properly, he had had to stand by while Elaine calmly and slowly got his mother breathing again. Afterwards unfortunate words were exchanged, or rather he yelled at her and she had calmly defended her actions. “It wouldn’t do for both of us to be panicked, now would it? I’ve been trained to keep calm in a crisis. I’m afraid you misinterpreted that professionalism as indifference.” She glanced at his mother. “But, lovey, you know that isn’t true.” His mother had nodded, and Myron apologized, though he was positive that she wasn’t being perfectly forthright. Perhaps, he later conjectured, she had a fatalistic streak inherited from her Catholic background; perhaps she lacked the imagination to feel his mother’s pain and terror. Since nothing untoward in her behavior had ever occurred again, and since his mother regarded her as a trustworthy friend, he had not tried to replace her. But he didn’t trust her, and she knew it.
“Hello, Elaine. How was my mother’s day?” he asked as he placed his briefcase on a small table by the door and retrieved his keys from the lock.
“Oh, fairly routine,” she said in the cheerful, sentimental tone that always rang false to his ear. “We had a little walkie around the house and she ate her lunch except for some crackers. We had soup, you see.”
She sat down, prepared for a little chat, as she dipped her tea bag in and out of the hot water a few times. She favored weak tea. “And Reverend Hallam stopped by. She told Barbara she was looking strong and then we prayed together. Yes, a good day it was.”
“That’s good,” he said, his back to her. He needed an early dinner tonight because of the reading group, and was searching through the refrigerator.
“Oh, another thing. Rev. Hallam was talking to Mrs. Hamilton the other day. She said a lovely thing about you—Mrs. Hamilton, I mean.”
He turned and raised his eyebrows.
“That you were not only a librarian but a walking library.”
He smiled, then turned back to his survey of the refrigerator. “She’s referring to my reference librarian background. You have to know a little about a lot in that line. I happened to know some things about lowland Scots. That was Mrs. Hamilton’s query, you see. She was looking into her Scotch ancestors.” He spotted the lasagna he’d made two days ago. Tonight was as good a time as any to have that.
He took a beer out and opened it. “Well, I’ll just go check on mother now.”
“She may be sleeping,” Elaine said. “She missed her nap because of Rev. Hallam’s visit.”
Quietly he approached. Finding her asleep, he stood indecisively for a moment and surveyed the room. Her bedroom, the former owner’s study, was on the first floor next to the dining room. It had a shut-in old lady’s smell, which he was used to. The interior wall opposite the dining room was entirely composed of a built-in bookcase from floor to ceiling. The shelves were mostly empty since he kept his books in a room upstairs. Across from it against the other interior wall was the large hospital bed on which his mother slept and spent most of her time. It had a mechanism to elevate the bed into a sitting position. Beside the bed was a small table and an oxygen bottle. Plastic tubing went from the oxygen tank up to a rack above his mother and then down to her. On the table was the radio on which his mother listened to Red Sox games during the season. On the other side of the bed was a large easy chair where Elaine spent the day, Both women watched a great deal of television, CNN mostly, though a couple soap operas Elaine followed were aired every day in the sickroom. His mother often dozed when they were on. Beside the door was the television. At the end of the bed were two tables on casters. One had medical accessories, and the other was used to bring his mother her meals when she felt too poorly to walk. Between the two windows was a large mahogany dresser with an oval swivel mirror. On the dresser were some of his mother’s things—her hairbrush and some cosmetics she never used but which she could not bear to have removed. The same dresser with the same items were in the bedroom she shared with her husband for over forty years back in Connecticut. Finally in the corner was a fold-up bed that Elaine used on the nights like tonight when she stayed over.
For most nights when Elaine was absent there was also a buzzer hanging from the rack above his mother’s bed which she could easily reach in a crisis, and recently as her condition worsened he had bought a baby monitor so that he could hear her breathing at night. Myron lived in terror of her being unable to get her oxygen and being too weak to even summon him. She had snorted when he suggested it but hadn’t actually disallowed it. He knew sometimes she was afraid. To him her courage was beyond heroic. He couldn’t imagine anything more terrifying than being unable to breathe.
He stood silently watching her, and just as he was about to creep away and leave her to her rest, her eyes opened.
“Hi, Mom. Elaine says you had a good day.”
She thought for a moment. “Good as can be expected is the way I’d put it.” Her eyes twinkled. “I didn’t run a marathon, you know. But I did make it to the kitchen.”
He smiled and sat down on the edge of the bed. Taking her wrinkled, liver-spotted and thin, sinewy hand in his, he said, “I’m going to heat up the lasagna I made last Sunday. Think you can make it to the kitchen for a second time?”
Again she deliberated with herself. She turned the oxygen on and breathed in and out three or four times, then turned it off. She shook her head.
“Okay,” he said. “Then I’ll bring supper in here and have it on a tray.”
She nodded and peered at his face anxiously.
“What’s wrong?”
“Only me and what I’m doing to you. I was wishing you had a woman to…that you’d meet a woman.”
“Woman! Mom, I’m surrounded by them all day.”
Her brown eyes widened. He remembered hearing once that hazel eyes were the result of having a blue-eyed parent and a brown-eyed parent. His father’s eyes were blue, so he combined the two of them—and not just in the color of his eyes. He practiced his father’s Quaker nonviolence and his mother’s Unitarian social activism.
“I don’t mean middle-aged and old women. I mean a young woman.” She looked at him lovingly. “Such a handsome man…” She reached over and stroked his cheek. “I often think of her.” Becoming agitated, she started gasping.
“You mean Alison?”
“Yes.”
Alison Rollins was the woman he lived with for three years and had been engaged to marry. They met in Boston when he was at Simmons and she was working for an advertising agency. This was at a party given by a mutual friend. They got on together very well right from the start, so well in fact she even quit her job in Boston and took a less prestigious one for less money in Connecticut when he got his first position at Blackwood College. Then his mother became ill, at first with emphysema, followed shortly thereafter with her heart troubles. Soon after his father died, the event that led ultimately to his splitting up with Alison. The problem was that his older brother worked overseas in the foreign service and his sister had married and moved to California. Only he remained near enough to home to take care of their mother.
The mention of her name conjured up an image in his mind that told the story. He remembered how her thin-lipped mouth was always set determinedly when she wanted to get her way. During the last few months they were together it was her usual expression. At first with broad hints and then more and more explicitly, she objected to his taking care of his mother. At the end she said, “I would be glad to marry you. What I don’t want to do is marry a man and his mother.” She had spoken contemptuously, as if he was a mother’s boy.
For a long time after their final parting he worked at convincing himself that a woman who didn’t recognize a simple human duty or even common humanity was no loss. Mostly he succeeded, though there were times when he’d be filled with regret and envision how his life would have been different if he had married. He’d have children, the oldest perhaps five or six, and he wouldn’t have the sense of life in abeyance or of being hounded by a feeling of emptiness. But, then, he wouldn’t be doing his duty to his helpless mother and would have no self-respect.
And so he dismissed his mother’s remark easily. “She’s the past, Mom. I’ve already forgotten her—it’s been seven years. But I understand what you’re saying. Actually there is a woman I’m interested in, and I think she’s interested in me. But I would prefer not to discuss it until things develop a bit further.”
She watched him with a pleased look and shining eyes. She reached out for his hand. “It would please me to see you settled. Then I could die in peace.”
“Let’s have no talk of dying, Mom. That’s a long way off.”
He left her to her rest and went into the living room to drink his beer and read the paper, where he found himself looking for news about toxic waste and Ridlon Recycling. The thought that that young man, Chris Andrews, was just the beginning of an interesting day lifted his spirits, and while he heated the lasagna and made a salad he found himself whistling a tune from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.
Elaine ate in the kitchen while he joined his mother for the early supper. His high spirits continued. He told her about seeing the first robin of the spring and said in another month she would be able to sit in the backyard and take walks around the perimeter of the garden. He talked about the times when he was a boy and they would drive to western Massachusetts to open up their lakefront cottage in early May. “I used to be so excited about the prospect of swimming and boating. Dad of course would have his projects. Remember he had one every year—rebuilding the dock, adding a closet, improving the water pump. That was his fun.”
“The woman you spoke of, are you seeing her tonight? Is she in your reading group?”
Surprised, he looked at her. “How did you know that?”
She smiled mischievously, and for a moment she was young again, young and vibrant and filled with joy. It occurred to him that if he fell in love it would revive her.
“There’s a spring to your step. You were whistling earlier. You seem happy. In the spring a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love.”
He smiled. “Not another word, Mom. We’re only talking about possibilities here.”
But even he thought it was much more, and that is why his good humor continued as he reviewed the novel for a half hour and then drove to the library for the seven o’clock session. The promise of spring must have been affecting everybody, for when he walked into the library he found the two volunteers were also in a jocular mood.
Abby Parry and Laurel O’Connor were working on preparing the new books. They were at a table behind the counter with a glue pot and scissors before them. They stopped working as soon as they saw Myron. Like most of the volunteers from the Friends of the Wentworth Library, they were middle-aged or older and enjoyed talking with a young man. They were all a little in love with him he sometimes suspected, though Abby and Laurel were married women.
Abby picked up a book and held it to him. “Who’s going to read this one?”
He squinted to see it was An Ecological History of New England. Many books were ordered from the suggestion box, but this was one he had ordered. “Well, perhaps I will.” He paused and thought of Chris Andrews. “I can think of one other who might be interested. But I got it for reference. We have to be ready to answer questions patrons ask.”
“I have a question, Myron,” Laurel said with a broad smile that turned into a giggle. “Is there a young woman in your reading group named Becky Paine?”
He nodded, uncertain where this was leading.
“She’s here with Lynn MacArthur. They’re upstairs,” Abby said, also with a giggle.
Myron affected nonchalance, wondering as he composed his face how they would know he was interested in Becky Paine before realizing with a start that somehow they had learned of her interest in him. His pulse quickened, but he refrained from asking any question that would give his secret away.
“You’re surrounded by old girls all day,” Laurel said. “It’s interesting to see a young woman around.” She looked at Abby, and both of them repressed another giggle.
They were very girlish, a fact Dora Ritter did not like. Through the inner door he could see her at one of the computers in the reading room clicking the mouse with a look of furious concentration on her face. She looked up and frowned at him. He nodded to her, then looked back at the volunteers. It was strange that they had repeated the same observation that his mother had made earlier. “Well, I better get upstairs and get ready for a good discussion. Do you ladies need anything?”
They didn’t, so he went up the stairs excitedly thinking about the information he had just received. Laughing seemed endemic in the library, for as he approached the door of the conference room where the group met, the sounds of high-pitched female voices, half laughing, half giggling between words could be heard. It was a good sound and put him into an even better humor.
“What’s all the laughing about?” he asked, pretending to be stern. “Tess has died, remember. I was thinking of wearing a black band on my arm tonight.”
Lynn MacArthur’s freckled face crinkled in mock horror. He had met her when she brought her fifth-grade class to the library for a tour, and as she was a regular patron they had talked often during the past two years. It was during one of their conversations that the idea of a reading group was born. She solicited her parents and her friend Becky Paine, and six others had joined from a notice Myron had put on the bulletin board.
“Thoughtless and shallow us, we were thinking of having a lottery,” she said.
“Oh, about what?”
“You.”
“Oh?” He put his briefcase on the conference table and leaned against the wall with his arms folded. He took the opportunity to look at Becky Paine. She was very blond and very pretty. She was dressed in slacks and a light blue winter sweater and appeared slightly embarrassed. She was ordinarily very dignified and reticent, qualities he liked in a woman. But, then, he also liked good humor and friendship too.
“Well,” she said, glancing at Lynn and smiling, “we read that next winter the Maine Audubon Society plans to sponsor a cross-country skiing race to benefit bird sanctuaries. We were thinking of having a lottery for where you’d place in the race, but—”
; “—But we thought we’d have to first have a lottery on whether you’d enter or not,” Lynn interrupted. “You’re always talking about your love of winter sports that you learned from your father, so we thought…”
“If this was a poker game, I’d say you were calling my bluff. But you can dispense with the first lottery. I might very well enter the race.”
“Would you win?” Lynn asked with a schoolgirlish giggle.
“Maybe not, depends on the competition, of course. I think I’d do respectably, though. And it would cost you. I’d get the whole group to sponsor me.”
Simultaneously all three turned towards the sound of voices coming up the stairs.
“That would be my father and mother. Dad’s already talking up a storm,” Lynn said.
Angus MacLeod was his name. In many ways he reminded Myron of his own father, and not only because his father was a professor of civil engineering at the University of Connecticut and Angus was a retired engineer. He was small and wiry, of advanced age but healthy as a horse. His bright blue eyes brimming with youth, life and intelligence belied the leathery crevices that lined his face. He and his wife Doreen owned a recreational vehicle which they took to all corners of North America—to Labrador or northern Quebec in the summer, to Florida, Arizona and California in the winter. Angus had made all kinds of renovations to the camper to make it exactly as he wanted—a characteristic that reminded Myron of his father forever tinkering with and renovating their summer cottage. Though an engineer, Angus had a good literary mind and read and responded to the books they read with intelligence and insight. They were traveling in the southwest during January and February, but he read Moby Dick and Our Mutual Friend and reported his responses via e-mail. He had also developed a teasing, jocular relationship with Myron, which was shown by his first remark upon entering the room.
“Hey, Myron, I was just talking to Abby Parry, and she claimed the book drop-off was your handiwork. Any truth to this rumor?”
He shrugged off the apparent compliment. “It’s amazing what you can do with a few power tools and time on your hands.”
“And the latch for the double doors. They haven’t worked for the twenty-five years I’ve been coming here. I hear you fixed that too.”
Myron tilted his head slightly.
“I’ll tell you what I think. You should have been an engineer like your father. Doing things, making things, now that’s the life. You build a bridge and you’ve done something. You fix a latch and you’ve done something. But books? Books! I don’t know.” He grinned.
“Depends on your perspective, Angus. Knowledge can be a bridge. Think of reading classics as a bridge to the past.”
“A literary metaphor, I do believe. But, okay, it does give you perspective. Compared to the tarts we have today, Tess is a pure woman.” He looked at Lynn and Becky and bowed slightly. “Present company excepted, of course.”
“Dad! Since when have you been an enemy of women?”
“Since Myron explained last week what a pure woman was—and that Dante business too. You’ve been messing with our minds for centuries.”
“Honestly, Angus,” Doreen said, “can you ever keep your mouth shut?”
Becky looked at Myron, anticipating an interesting response. He knew why. When they discussed the nature of Angel Clare’s love for Tess in last week’s meeting, he had made a digression and talked about Dante and Beatrice. His remarks, he could see, made a deep impression on Becky, who had leaned forward and listened with an intensity that revealed she was learning something new about life. What he had said was that Dante and Beatrice were one of the most famous examples of romantic, ideal love, and yet Dante never spoke to Beatrice. He saw the young girl of about thirteen one day and found her so beautiful he instantly fell in love. But think about what he did. Ask yourself if he loved her. How real could she have been to him? He actually fell in love with his idea of her; the one he loved was a creation of his own mind. Really what he did was objectify her so that she was a form of self-love to him. And I think to the extent Dante is responsible for our notions of romantic love, he has a lot to answer for. Every time I hear about one of those horrible cases where a man stalks a woman and murders his “love” after she rejects him, I think of Dante. Whatever love is, it certainly is not that. It is the surrender of the self, a going out of the self to another. It is not egoism and selfishness. Well, can we accuse Angel of this kind of idealized self-love? Did he make Tess his own image of her and not see her? Yes, he did. He’s also creepy when he says, “We’ll stay together for form’s sake,” showing here he was a typical dreary Victorian keeping up appearances. He’s conventional—a slave to convention, in fact. But to give him his due, remember he said good morals are the only safeguard for us poor human beings. He thought in marrying below his class he was at least getting purity. He spurned Tess because he had also sinned—it wasn’t really a double standard.
It was this digression that prompted Angus’s high-spirited sally, but since he was teasing the women more than him, Myron yielded the floor to the women to defend themselves.
“Your engineering mind missed the point, Dad. It’s men who have been messing with women’s minds.”
“Impossible,” he scoffed. “I’ve always heard we were perfect.”
“If you’re perfect, Dad, how come you forgot to pay the light bill last month?”
“If men were perfect,” Becky said with a shy glance at Myron, “they wouldn’t be human. We have to forgive Angel his shortcomings to do justice to the book.”
“I’ve got something to say about that man, but it can wait. And I’m not perfect,” he added, turning to his daughter, “just close to it.”
The other four members of the group arrived, two maidenly sisters, Elizabeth and Shirley Biggar, very quiet and insecure about expressing their views, and another retired couple. Unlike the peripatetic MacLeods, Letty and Malcolm Richards were snowbirds in Florida from Christmas to late February, and again unlike the MacLeods they did not read the books assigned during their two-month absence. They were joiners and liked activities of any kind as long as it made them feel young. They were not very astute readers of literature; Myron surmised that these inveterate joiners were not blessed with enough self-knowledge to understand the group was not for them. To the extent they talked in class, they talked not about the text but about their retirement community in Florida. In the first meeting last fall they had spoken at length about their life as Florida snowbirds, calling their fellow retirees “old coots” to distinguish them from themselves, the young-at-heart.
“Some of those old coots want to do nothing but go to Disney World as if they were big kids. We wanted to do activities like go to the Everglades to see the wildlife or play golf or even shuffleboard. Either that or organize group games.” So spoke Letty.
“At night we were in tune because we love bridge.” Thus spake Malcolm.
“And don’t forget bingo, dear,” Letty said with a slight smile. “Some of us like to gamble as long as it’s respectable.” The smile widened into a self-satisfied grin, but it was unclear whom she was satirizing, her husband or the old coots.
That display constituted Myron’s initial impression of the pair, and it hadn’t changed much over the months. They were the least serious members of the group. Two others had started with them before dropping out. A widower in his late fifties had come to the first meeting and not returned. Myron suspected he was looking for a place to meet available women. The other dropout was a single mother who wanted to go to college and thought the reading group would be a good test of her potential. Unfortunately her life was too hectic for her to continue. He hoped that next year the Richards would follow suit and better students would take their place. As for the Biggar sisters, though they were too shy to speak much in class, he saw intelligence and recognition in their eyes during discussions and knew they were enjoying the sessions.
With everyone present they started the last discussion on Thomas Hardy’s
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and thanks to Angus, Lynn and Becky it was a lively one. They began by revisiting Angel’s attitudes towards Tess. Everyone, not just Becky, seemed intrigued with the explanation of romantic love he shared with them last week and discussed it further. Only when Angel saw the real Tess was he truly in love with her, they concluded; only then was he free from illusion. They talked for some time about the murder of Alec (with less enthusiasm since no one had much sympathy for him) and the symbolism of Tess’s stretching herself on a rock at Stonehenge. Both the MacLeods and the Richards had been to Stonehenge and could well imagine a pagan sacrifice at that strange edifice. Angus, the resident devil’s advocate, found Alec’s transformation into an itinerant preacher hard to swallow, and when they came to discuss the ending with the suggestion that Angel would marry Tess’s sister, he again criticized Hardy.
“The coincidences in the novel are okay, maybe, but this is simply hokey,” he said.
Earlier Myron had defended Hardy by emphasizing that in reading literature one had to call upon historical imagination. “You have to see things the way people of the time did. You have to understand in Victorian times it would be a very big thing for Angel, a gentleman, to marry a peasant like Tess. That partly explains his severe reaction when he realizes she was not a ‘pure’ woman, and it gives him credit later when he comes to see that she was pure and a victim. But,” he conceded, “the ending with Tess’s sister is a different problem. Not impossible, maybe, but certainly stretching verisimilitude. Of course, it’s not absolutely stated that they marry or become lovers, but it is strongly suggested, and most people take the scene to mean they do have a relationship. Can anyone defend him?”
Lynn said, “Angel feels guilty for what he did to Tess. This is one way of making it up.”
Becky said, “When he saw Tess’s true worth, he assumed her sister would have much the same character. And it was as close as he could get to undoing the wrong he did to Tess and her family.”
“Good. I think Hardy would accept these explanations. But Angus still looks doubtful.”
“I am. I stand by my word ‘hokey.’ It just seems tacked on, this new-love business.”
“Okay. I think it’s time we see a very important thing about Hardy. He isn’t a realist. He gives in his novels a poetic vision of life as he sees and feels it. He’s a moral realist. Recall all the coincidences in the novel and remember the statement at the end—‘the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.’ Hardy is giving us the feel of how life can crush individuals. Call it fate or whatever, but Hardy’s vision is that the cosmos is indifferent to human desires. That, I think, is a valid vision. It is to me at least, so I can accept these things that appear hokey because to call them hokey is to miss what Hardy is showing us. You have to differentiate between realism and moral realism. You have to realize that Hardy is primarily a poet. I love his books myself. I hope you loved this book too.”
There was a general murmur of assent. Angus just grinned. “I liked Dickens and Melville better.”
“You liked Melville because he has a Scottish name,” Doreen scoffed.
“And therefore even more perfect than most men.”
Myron checked his watch. The hour was almost up, so he decided against discussing the novel in terms of Aristotelian tragedy. Since they weren’t English majors and since imposing an intellectual construct on the novel would not add too much to their enjoyment or understanding of the book, Aristotle could be dropped. He announced that next week they would discuss Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and after that short book they had a collection of great plays from the western tradition to deal with. They would have time this year to read two of the plays. He closed the class with the suggestion that they all think about which two plays they would like to read.
The two Biggar sisters and the Richards left immediately, but the others lingered. Angus said that one of the plays should be Macbeth.
“That’s because it’s set in Scotland,” Doreen said.
“I think we should do A Doll’s House,” Lynn said. “I read it in college and think my dad would benefit from what we’d learn there.”
“Well,” Myron said, “one of the plays should certainly be Shakespeare. I favor Hamlet.
“Shakespeare, kick in the rear,” Angus said with his usual grin.
When the three women looked perplexed, he added, “Myron, I bet you know what that means. Tell these dear creatures.”
“It used to be every kid’s first introduction to the name of Shakespeare. A little piece of Americana, you know. A kid would come up to another kid and put out his hand. ‘Shake,’ he’d say. Then as the other kid extended his hand, the boy would spear him in the belly, announcing the action with the word ‘spear.’ Spearing the kid would in turn cause him to double over. Then with his foot the boy would reach around and kick him in the rear as he announced that action too. Is that what you’re referring to, Angus?”
“You’ve explained it to a T,” he said.
Everyone had a pleased and silly grin on their faces as they started to leave. Myron saw Lynn whisper something to Becky, who nodded. She looked nervous. Going down the stairs, Lynn began talking to her parents while Becky held back.
“Did you like Hardy?” he asked her.
“Yes, very much. I really felt for poor Tess. I thought reading Dickens was more fun, but I like what you said about Hardy’s poetic vision. He makes a deeper impression on you because of that, I think. You really taught it very well. You’re a wonderful teacher, in fact. Did you ever consider a career as an English professor?”
“Yes, I did. I was an English major at Cornell, but I quickly dismissed the idea.”
“But why? You’re a natural. You obviously love it. We all feel very lucky to be in this group. And I know you are better than any of the English teachers I had in college.”
“Thanks,” he said, feeling embarrassed at the compliment. “I really appreciate your saying that. But it was really a question of bread with me. My adviser told me there were ten Ph.D’s for every available position. That’s when I decided on being a librarian. That way I could still be involved with books.”
They were in the hall now. Lynn and her parents were twenty feet ahead of them, pausing by the door and evidently still discussing the plays to be chosen.
“Becky, are you interested in music—classical, I mean?”
She smiled nervously. “Well, I took a music appreciation course at Bates and have meant to pursue it.”
He looked down the hall. Lynn, still talking to her parents, glanced at him, then quickly looked away. “I ask because Jason Buckley, a young phenom of a pianist from Waska, is appearing with the Portland Symphony Orchestra in two weeks. Would you like to go?”
Her face was intense. An unruly cheek muscle twitched. “Yes, I’d love to. I’ve heard him mentioned and have been intrigued.”
“Wonderful. Perhaps dinner first?”
“Yes.” She took a deep breath, and then as she relaxed a radiant smile broke across her pretty face. “That would be very nice.”
“Wonderful,” he repeated. “I’ll order the tickets and see about making a reservation at a restaurant. Do you have any preference regarding food?”
She shook her head. “No, I like all kinds of food.”
He looked down at Lynn, who understood his signal and came up to them. Later he would have to contemplate nonverbal communications. In a court of law a conspiracy between them could not be proved—there were absolutely no words on the subject of Becky’s availability ever exchanged between them—and yet they were coconspirators and had been for weeks. It started the day last November she let it be known she knew he had been engaged. He knew the story must have originated with Elaine Neault and then got relayed to Nellie Olson, who was a distant cousin of Lynn’s. For a moment he felt defensive and concerned about his privacy, since if Lynn knew about it probably half the town did. But she was smiling, looking very friendly
, so he said, “Guilty as charged,” and they had talked about it for a while. She also knew the reason the engagement was broken off and clearly admired his sacrifice. Sometime later when she was in the library alone she told him Becky’s tragic story of how her husband was killed by Nazi racists three years ago. She didn’t say anything specific, but he came away from that conversation with the knowledge that she was telling him Becky was available.
He saw her exchange a meaningful glance with Becky that also communicated nonverbally. “It was a great night, Myron. Very interesting. Thanks.”
Yes, he thought, it had been a most interesting day and night.
The Pond