“What’s the big occasion?” he says, bringing the empty beer bottle back to the kitchen.
“I just thought it would be nice,” she says, “to have candles for a change.”
She looks at Sam. He’s wearing a short-sleeve sport shirt now.
“Well,” he says, conscious of her gaze, “I guess I’ll have to put on a coat and a tie for this meal.”
“You don’t have to put on anything,” she says, hearing her voice rise. “Come any way you want to.”
“Wouldn’t think of it.” Sam pads back to the bedroom.
The windows are all open but there’s not a breath of breeze and the candle flames are tall, orange, and untroubled. They sit down and she looks at Sam in the candlelight and she feels exhausted. She’d like to go to sleep forever.
A moth has come from somewhere and flutters in sharp darts around the candle flames. Its wings beat a quick staccato as it veers near the flame and then suddenly away.
“Sam!” she cries. “Get it out of here. I can’t stand them.”
“It’s just a little moth. It can’t hurt you.”
“Please!” she says. “I can’t stand it flying around.”
They are both standing up now looking at each other.
“Oh all right,” he says.
He goes into the living room and comes back with a newspaper. Lucille stands watching him. He moves on tiptoes toward the moth, swings the paper swiftly, misses. The moth flutters away.
“Kill it, Sam! Kill it!”
Sam comes around the table, swings and misses again. The moth flies away. The flame is troubled, trembles like a dancer.
“Please, Sam, kill it.”
“Take it easy,” he says. “Wait.”
She can see that he’s panting a little now as he moves around the table after the moth. She sees his eyes are bright with intense concentration, his hand is poised. Expertly he swings and catches the moth in flight, dashes it to the floor.
Lucille doesn’t know why but she begins to cry.
“What’s the matter?” Sam asks.
“Oh, thank you,” she says. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
And then there is only the sound of her own stifled choking as she sobs, crying not so much out of pure weariness as for a sense of joy which she cannot understand.
LAST OF THE OLD BUFFALO HUNTERS
I HAVE NEVER BEEN a close friend of Professor Harvey Peters. Nor can I be numbered among his enemies. There are plenty of both. There are those who find him endlessly amusing, his eccentricities charming, his modest successes laudable, and his petty failures lovable.
“He could have been a good scholar,” one of his friends will tell you, “if he hadn’t been scared to death to take a chance on anything.”
“He’s just lazy as hell,” his enemies say.
As it is, his academic reputation rests squarely on half a dozen anthologies, compiled with the judicious use of scissors and paste, all with sound introductions and adequate notes, published over a span of twenty years. The last of them was mildly “popular” in purpose and made a serious bid for a wider audience. And it was safely remaindered a few months after publication.
His admirers marvel over his inconsistencies as one does over the ambiguous activities of a ne’er-do-well uncle. For instance, Harvey is passionately devoted to social causes. He will sign petitions, organize committees, write letters to editors, senators, and congressmen, send checks to funds for this and that, and read Time regularly just to work up the necessary rage to stir him to forceful action. In a moment, like a magician, he can summon up the whole specter of the Depression, from bread lines to Bonus March. Lest we forget! He has battled indefatigably for social justice since the days of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t find anything unusual or amusing in all this. The irony begins with the simple fact that Harvey Peters is a real old-fashioned snob, an elegant man, a stylish man, even a moderately wealthy man, a gourmet (he founded the College Escoffier Society), a sheltered man, one to whom the least hint of hoarse and sweaty vulgarity would be about as welcome as a fist in the face.
Picture this paradox. Harvey is outspoken, vehement, and articulate in his criticism of the South and its curse of invincible ignorance. Yet he remains an awe-struck, sentimental admirer of the Old South and likes nothing better, as the years roll around, than to be invited to spend his spring vacation in the company of well-to-do Southerners in the spacious arena of some well-preserved antebellum house in Virginia or the South Carolina Low Country, there to sit on the classic rocking chair on the classic verandah, to sip a classic julep, and to stare with satisfaction across a wide, barbered lawn (where classic barefooted darkies move to and fro) at the flagrant white excess of the early dogwood.
An anecdote will serve to illustrate his stance. A few years ago we were fighting (as we are still) a losing battle with our railroad passenger service. The trains, then, as now, were too few, too late, and wildly overcrowded. In the heat, the thunder and lightning of a protest meeting, Professor Harvey Peters arose to give us his point of view.
“Last Friday, coming back from the city,” he began in his rich, Roman senator’s voice, “it was with the greatest of difficulty that I succeeded in getting a seat in the parlor car. God knows what it was like for those poor people down in the coaches!”
Enemies? He has plenty. They will tell you flatly and unequivocally that Harvey Peters is “a brag and a drone and a tank of air.” They insist his reputation is a mansion with a false front built upon the shifting sands of pure lethargy and improbability. They see both his democratic vistas and his aristocratic affections as simple sham. They go on to say that he has the backbone of a jellyfish and the soul of a rag doll. His inefficiency is criminal and his service to any good cause is The Kiss of Death.
And I … until recently I pooh-poohed both his friends and enemies. I maintained that they were all making much ado about a plump, pink-cheeked, tweedy, moderately intelligent and modestly successful Walter Pater Professor of Belles Lettres at our college.
That was before the book came along, the novel. And now you can’t be neutral. You have to have a feeling one way or the other about it.
One of his students returned from a stint in the Peace Corps with the manuscript of a novel in his duffel bag. A reputable publisher promptly accepted it. Harvey was charmed and delighted and could talk of nothing else over coffee or the lunch table. For young Roy Kelly was the first of a whole long procession of bright and literary young men, protégés guided and guarded and shepherded and advised by Harvey, to have anything accepted by a publisher. There had been twenty years of them, one or two young men from each class, carefully selected, entertained, their talents cultivated and nurtured. The others had written their books, which had been duly rejected by all the publishers; and then, usually following a short and happy siege in the Village, they had one by one capitulated. They had surrendered unconditionally and gone into the ranks of Business or Advertising or, perhaps haunted by some gray vestige of interest and dedication, they drifted into publishing, where they soon had the pleasure of rejecting other people’s manuscripts.
So goes the world.
But now at last Roy Kelly—lean, handsome, well-bred, well-dressed, intelligent, and sensitive—had returned from Africa and somehow had turned the magic trick. Harvey Peters was justified. Though he had not yet actually seen the manuscript, he was confident that it was a very superior first novel. He allowed as how he and Roy had often discussed the subject—the problem of how a young man, lean, handsome, well-bred, well-dressed, and well-to-do, growing up in a thoroughly corrupt and decadent society (ours) eventually, and chiefly by means of a long night spent in a second-rate motel with a married woman and an automobile accident in which his best friend is killed, finds himself. Harvey couldn’t wait to receive his inscribed advance copy.
About a month before the publication date Harvey suddenly dropped the subject. He was very busy teaching
a number of courses and with committee work. (One of these was his own creation—the Lightening Committee, a group of earnest professors making a close study of how much time was being lost by their colleagues through committee work. A perfect Peters paradox.) He did not mention Roy Kelly’s novel, nor did anyone venture to remind him of its imminent appearance.
When the book finally did come out we all knew why.
A Field of Fists is a pretty bad book any way you want to look at it, though I don’t imagine Harvey Peters was very much concerned about its literary value. I doubt that he got far enough into the book to make a critical judgment. He must have quit reading right after the third chapter, which was exclusively devoted to the merciless, heavy-handed satire of a Professor of Belles Lettres in a small college. The name of the professor in the book was Hervey Pierce. He was depicted as an officious ass, a phony, a loudmouth, stentorian, naïve, foolish, and vaguely vicious man. His house, his things, his tastes were exposed to cruel ridicule. Even his wife was not spared. It was, in short, a personal disaster for old Harvey.
It might have been worse if Harvey had read on past the third chapter, because then he would have found, unkindest cut of all, that he was never mentioned again in any role or capacity whatsoever.
You can imagine how it was.
“Serves the old fraud right,” the enemies said. “Of course, it is a little crude, but you’ll have to admit young Kelly nailed his ass to the cross.”
“Someone should give young Kelly a public thrashing,” the friends said. “He broke Harvey’s heart.”
Me? I read the book and its locally famous third chapter and I remembered the one time that I had met Roy Kelly. It was at a cocktail party at Harvey’s house. I was more or less offended to start with. I don’t like getting drunk in the company of students and the only reason I would ever go to a party at Harvey’s is to get bombed on his good liquor. I had reached the age of thinning hair and a thickening waistline, a time when it is not at all unusual to despise the young and the fair. Kelly’s lean, tanned good health (he looked as if he ought to be wearing a blazer and carrying a couple of squash rackets under his arm), his pleasant self-confidence, and his glib literary talk bored and annoyed me.
But when we all left at the same time he offered to drive me back to the campus in his new sports car. I was torn between the wild horses of my pride (I didn’t own a car at the time) and my curiosity. I accepted and we drove back to school together swiftly along the country road with the fine air of a spring twilight flowing over us. He was a little tight and excited about everything. It was his last semester. He began to talk about Harvey Peters.
“You’ll never believe this,” he said, “but I really love that old bastard. He’s been good to me and you can’t help but love him. But it is all kind of pathetic.”
“Pathetic? How’s that?”
“Oh, you know what I mean,” Roy Kelly said. “He’s so out of place. I mean out of time. He’s like an old whale stranded on the beach.”
“Sort of a poor man’s Moby Dick.”
“I’m serious,” he said. “That was a bad analogy right off the top of my head, but I’m serious. The thing is, he just doesn’t belong in a time like ours. In this day and age he’s so helpless and hopeless and ineffectual, the only way you can see him is as a comic character.”
“Like the stranded whale?”
“No, that was a bad one, I already admitted that. Say he’s like the last of the old buffalo hunters. A kind of an academic Gabby Hayes with a scrubby beard and a broad-brimmed hat and no teeth and a powerful, lever-action rifle, riding round and round in some fenced-in park looking for the old, lost, wild game. Only the thing is there isn’t any wilderness anymore. Just public parks and cultivated pasture with a few Black Angus cattle moping around for decoration.”
That is all I remember of Mr. Roy Kelly’s conversation. Like a lot of people, he talked a little bit better than he wrote. Or maybe he should have written his book drunk.
One day later on I was having coffee in the Faculty Club and I just happened to have a copy of the novel with me. (I was returning it to the library. I wasn’t about to buy the damn book, even for a few laughs.) I saw Harvey Peters come in and head for my table. I managed to get the book hidden under Douglas Bush’s English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century. Apparently it wasn’t noticed because Harvey sat down and drank his coffee and talked amiably about trying to raise some money to come to the aid of a convicted ax murderer. I even promised to give him a check for five dollars for the cause. Just as he rose to leave, however, he reached across and tapped the back of A Field of Fists with his finger.
“Never let them write a book about you,” he said. “Don’t live that long if you can help it.”
I looked at him, thinking that he had come to terms with his disappointment and now found refuge in the tragic pose. I was wrong. His expression was sad enough for tragedy, but it was mild too.
“You know,” he said, “so many, many things have never worked out right for me. I was born to be a buffoon, a kind of amusing fool. There’s a very precise word for it in Yiddish, but I forget what it is. It’s a stock character in Yiddish literature. The book didn’t really hurt me much. It all started, all that, so long ago.…
“When I went to college—it was a small, poor college upstate—we didn’t have all the amusements they have now. I guess we had more of mischief than anything else. When winter came around, every freshman had to prove himself a man by riding a sled down a really fierce, icy slope. There was one very bad turn and there was one tree that you had to miss. The infirmary was full up and half the class was wandering around on crutches. I was scared to death of the whole idea; but it had to be done. I kept putting it off and putting it off until there were only a couple of us left who hadn’t done it. Finally I steeled myself against the inevitable, and I did it with half of the student body looking on. I hated doing it, but I did it anyway and I did pretty well too. A nice smooth run. No bumps, no bruises, no scratches.
“The trouble was that after it was all over I felt that I had earned the right to a little shred of pride. But they never even gave me that much. When they saw my pale face and my knees trembling, more from pure relief and joy than anything else, they laughed. Oh, it was hilarious! By doing the thing I had earned myself even more of a reputation as a coward and a buffoon than if I had refused to do it at all.”
He looked at me with the same mild, sad, serious expression, as if he wanted me to say something or, perhaps, to ask a question or change the subject.
“What do you think of that?” he said finally. “Do you know I have never told a soul that story, not even my wife?”
I smiled and shrugged. At that moment I could have bitten my tongue in two because I was neither a friend nor an enemy and there was nothing right for me to say or do.
WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH MARY JANE?
MILDRED GLANCED ACROSS the room. She looked past tense, close-packed heads, all bobbing like floating apples and most of them gashed, bitten it seemed, here a mouth open, there the flash of good teeth. Here a smear of red lips, and everywhere tongues. Tongues fluttering, lolling and loose, all talking, talking, talking to each other at the same time. Didn’t anyone bother to listen anymore? Did anyone ever stop talking and for one bright moment become nothing more than a pair of eyes, a pair of attentive ears, five alert senses devoted wholly to concentration on something or somebody else? Or did they clothe themselves, disguise themselves in words? Was there anything worth saying? She felt empty. “Empty as a broken bowl of everything save light and air,” she recalled a line from one of her husband’s poems.
Looking across all that, feeling now as bodiless as a ghost or a shadow, she watched her husband and the actress. They were talking, too, both at the same time it seemed. They had found themselves a quiet corner, a corner anyway, for no zone in that small, walk-up apartment could be called quiet. The actress was sitting, regal, in a comfortable armchair. Mildred’s hu
sband, Bill, sat on the arm, his legs dangling, his body half-twisted toward the actress, so that Mildred saw him in profile.
She watched her husband’s jaw moving. He wouldn’t just be chewing gum, would he? The actress stopped talking for a moment, and even appeared to be listening to him. She was a tall, big-boned, handsome woman who seemed not only able to listen, but to react as well. Good training. The best-trained ones always react well. Now the actress was saying something to him, intently, slowly, as if weighing her words with care. Bill’s jaw stopped moving as he gave her all his attention.
Who would have imagined she could listen to anything but the fluent music of her own rich voice?
The two of them over there seemed out of place. There they were with the whole room whirling and dancing around them, with cigarette smoke swirling at the level of the ceiling like a convention of genies just freed from the prisons of their bottles. There they sat while faces and bodies were joined together and swept this way and that by a fickle wind. Only they seemed anchored, at ease and safe. It made Mildred furious.
Then looking more closely at her husband with a critical eye—what he called her “First Sergeant’s look”—she noticed even at this distance the gaping hole in the side of his wool sock. She had knitted them for him. Why would he wear them if there was a hole in them? She should have darned them, would have if she had only known. Why didn’t he tell her? Maybe it was deliberate, an intent to shame her. Then it occurred to her that perhaps they were the only clean pair of socks he had. She was not, she was the first to admit, a good housekeeper. They didn’t teach you the joys and sorrows of that. You didn’t major in sock-darning at Smith.
Sometimes when she thought about the way she treated him, she felt so sad she wanted to cry. He didn’t have to put up with it, though, did he? Why didn’t he stand up for his rights?
“You about ready for another, doll?”
Smiling, she turned her attention to the young actor. His face—pale, intense, angular, Jewish, bright-eyed—blurred and swam near her. Like a face on the television screen going in and out of focus. The head of the actor, as if ghostly, disembodied, came close and then receded, as if he were on a swing. Up close he looked vaguely double, superimposed upon himself.
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