News of the Spirit

by Lee Smith

  I’d come home at suppertime each day to find Sam in his chair on the front porch, holding Blackie, waiting for me. He seemed to have gotten smaller somehow—and for the first time I realized that Sam, so much a part of my childhood, was not growing up along with me. In fact, he would never grow up, and I thought about that a lot on those summer evenings as I swung gently in the porch swing, back and forth through the sultry air, suspended.

  In August, I went to Memphis for a week to visit Dixie, whose house turned out to be like Tara in Gone With the Wind, only bigger, and whose mother turned out to drink sherry all day long. I came back to find Mama out of the hospital already, much improved by shock treatments, and another surprise—a baby-blue Chevrolet convertible, used but great-looking, in the driveway. My father handed me the keys.

  “Here, honey,” he said, and then he hugged me tight, smelling of sweat and tobacco. “We’re so proud of you.” He had traded a man a combine or something for the car.

  So I drove back to school in style, and my junior year went smoothly until Donnie announced that her sister Susannah, now at Pine Mountain Junior College, was going to Dartmouth for Winter Carnival, to visit a boy she’d met that summer. Susannah just couldn’t wait to look up Bubba.

  Unfortunately this was not possible, as I got a phone call that very night saying that Bubba had been kicked out of school for leading a demonstration against the war. Lily, who had become much more political herself by that time, jumped up from her desk and grabbed my hand.

  “Oh, no!” she shrieked. “He’ll be drafted!” The alarm that filled our study room was palpable—as real as the mounting body count on TV—as we stared white-faced at each other.

  “Whatever will he do now?” Donnie was wringing her hands.

  “I don’t know,” I said desperately. “I just don’t know.” I went to my room—a single, this term—and thought about it. It was clear that he would have to do something, something to take him far, far away.

  But Bubba’s problem was soon to be superseded by Melissa’s. She was pregnant, really pregnant, and in spite of all the arguments we could come up with, she wanted to get married and have the baby. She wanted to have lots of babies, and one day live in the big house on the Battery that her boyfriend would inherit, and this is exactly what she’s done. Her life has been predictable and productive. So violent in his college days, Melissa’s husband turned out to be a model of stability in later life. And their first child, Anna, kept him out of the draft.

  As she got into her mother’s car to leave, Melissa squeezed my hand and said, “Keep me posted about Bubba, and don’t worry so much. I’m sure everything will work out all right.”

  It didn’t.

  Bubba burned his draft card not a month later and headed for Canada, where he lived in a commune. I didn’t hear from him for a long time after that, tangled up as I was by then in my affair with Dr. Pierce.

  DR. PIERCE WAS A FIERCE, BLEAK, MELANCHOLY MAN who looked like a bird of prey. Not surprisingly, he was a Beckett scholar. He taught the seminar in contemporary literature that I took in the spring of my junior year. We read Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O’Connor, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon, among others. Flannery O’Connor would become my favorite, and I would do my senior thesis on her work, feeling a secret and strong kinship, by then, with her dire view. But this was later, after my affair with Dr. Pierce was over.

  At first I didn’t know what to make of him. I hated his northern accent, his lugubrious, glistening dark eyes, his all-encompassing pessimism. He told us that contemporary literature was absurd because the world was absurd. He told us that the language in the books we were reading was weird and fractured because true communication is impossible in the world today. Dr. Pierce told us this in a sad, cynical tone full of infinite world-weariness, which I found both repellent and attractive.

  I decided to go in and talk to him. I am still not sure why I did this—I was making good grades in his course, I understood everything. But one blustery, unsettling March afternoon I found myself sitting outside his office. He was a popular teacher, rumored to be always ready to listen to his students’ problems. I don’t know what I meant to talk to him about. The hour grew late. The hall grew dark. I smoked four or five cigarettes while other students, ahead of me, went in and out. Then Dr. Pierce came and stood in the doorway. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He looked tired, but not nearly as old as he did in class, where he always wore a tie. Now he wore jeans and a blue work shirt, and I could see the dark hair at his neck.

  “Ah,” he said in that way of his that rendered all his remarks oddly significant. “Ah! Miss Christian, is it not?”

  He knew it was. I felt uncomfortable, like he was mocking me. He made a gesture; I preceded him into his office and sat down.

  “Now,” he said, staring at me. I looked out the window at the skittish, blowing day, at the girls who passed by on the sidewalk, giggling and trying to hold their skirts down. “Miss Christian,” Dr. Pierce said. Maybe he’d said it before. I looked at him.

  “I presume you had some reason for this visit,” he said sardonically.

  To my horror, I started crying. Not little ladylike sniffles, either, but huge groaning sobs. Dr. Pierce thrust a box of Kleenex in my direction, then sat drumming his fingers on his desk. I kept on crying. Finally I realized what he was drumming: the William Tell overture. I got tickled. Soon I was crying and laughing at the same time. I was still astonished at myself.

  “Blow your nose,” Dr. Pierce said.

  I did.

  “That’s better,” he said. It was. He got up and closed his office door, although there was no need to do so, since the hall outside was empty now. Dr. Pierce sat back down and leaned across his desk toward me. “What is it?” he asked.

  But I still didn’t know what it was. I said so, and apologized. “One thing, though,” I said. “I’d like to complain about the choice of books on our reading list.”

  “Aha!” Dr. Pierce said. He leaned back in his chair and made his fingers into a tent. “You liked Eudora Welty,” he said. This was true; I nodded. “You liked Lie Down in Darkness,” he said. I nodded again.

  “But I just hate this other stuff!” I burst out. “I just hated The End of the Road, I hated it! It’s so depressing.”

  He nodded rapidly. “You think literature should make you feel good?” he asked.

  “It used to,” I said. Then I was crying again. I stood up. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  Dr. Pierce stood up, too, and walked around his desk and came to stand close to me. The light in his office was soft, gray, furry. Dr. Pierce took both my hands in his. “Oh, Miss Christian,” he said. “My very dear, very young Miss Christian, I know what you mean.” And I could tell, by the pain and weariness in his voice, that this was true. I could see Dr. Pierce suddenly as a much younger man, as a boy, with a light in his eyes and a different feeling about the world. I reached up and put my hands in his curly hair and pulled his face down to mine and kissed him fiercely, in a way I had never kissed anybody. I couldn’t imagine myself doing this, yet I did it naturally. Dr. Pierce kissed me back. We kissed for a long time while it grew completely dark outside, and then he locked the door and turned back to me. He sighed deeply, almost a groan—a sound, I felt, of regret—then unbuttoned my shirt. We made love on the rug on his office floor. Immediately we were caught up in a kind of fever that lasted for several months—times like these in his office after hours, or in the backseat of my car parked by Goshen Lake, or in cheap motels when I’d signed out to go home.

  Nobody suspected a thing. I was as good at keeping secrets as I was at making up lies. Plus, I was a campus leader, and Dr. Pierce was a married man.

  He tried to end it that June. I was headed home, and he was headed to New York, where he had a fellowship to do research at the Morgan Library.

  “Charlene—” Dr. Pierce said. We were in public, out on the quadrangle right after graduation. His wife walked down the
hill at some distance behind us, with other faculty wives. Dr. Pierce’s voice was hoarse, the way it got when he was in torment (which he so often was, which was one of the most attractive things about him. Years later, I’d realize this). “Let us make a clean break,” he sort of mumbled. “Right now. It cannot go on, and we both know it.”

  We had reached the parking lot in front of the chapel; the sunlight reflected off the cars was dazzling.

  Dr. Pierce stuck out his hand in an oddly formal gesture. “Have a good summer, Charlene,” he said, “and good-bye.”

  Dr. Pierce had chosen his moment well. He knew I wouldn’t make a scene in front of all these people. But I refused to take his hand. I rushed off madly through the parked cars to my own and gunned it out of there and out to the lake, where I parked on the bluff above Donnie’s cabin, in the exact spot where Dr. Pierce and I had been together so many times. I sat at the wheel and looked out at the lake, now full of children on a school outing. Their shrill screams and laughter drifted to me thinly, like the sounds of birds in the trees around my car. I leaned back on the seat and stared straight up at the sun through the trees—just at the top of the tent of green, where light filtered through in bursts like stars.

  BUT I COULDN’T GIVE HIM UP, NOT YET, NOT EVER.

  I resolved to surprise Dr. Pierce in New York, and that’s exactly what I did, telling my parents I’d gone on a trip to Virginia Beach with friends. I got his summer address from the registrar’s office. I drove up through Richmond and Washington, a seven-hour drive. It was crazy and even a dangerous thing to do, since I had never been to New York. But at last I ended up in front of the brownstone in the Village where Dr. Pierce and his wife were subletting an apartment. It was midafternoon and hot; I had not imagined New York to be so hot, hotter even than McKenney, Virginia. I was still in a fever, I think. I rang the doorbell, without even considering what I would do if his wife answered. But nobody answered. Nobody was home. Somehow, this possibility had not occurred to me. I felt exhausted. I leaned against the wall and then slid down it, until I was sitting on the floor in the vestibule. I pulled off my panty hose and stuffed them into my purse. They were too hot. I was too hot. I wore a kelly-green linen dress; I’d thought I needed to be all dressed up to go to New York.

  I don’t even remember falling asleep, but I was awakened by Dr. Pierce shaking my shoulder and saying my name.

  Whatever can be said of Dr. Pierce, he was not a jerk. He told me firmly that our relationship was over, and just as firmly that I should not be going around New York City at night by myself, not in the shape I was in.

  By the time his wife came home with groceries, I was lying on the studio bed, feeling a little better. He told her I was having a breakdown, which seemed suddenly true. Dr. Pierce and I looked at the news on TV while she made spaghetti. After dinner she lit a joint and handed it to me. It was the first time anybody had offered me marijuana. I shook my head. I thought I was crazy enough already. Dr. Pierce’s wife was nice, though. She was pale, with long, long blond hair, which she had worn in a braid on campus, or twisted on top of her head. Now it fell over her shoulders like water. She was not much—certainly not ten years—older than I was, and I wondered if she, too, had been his student. But I was exhausted. I fell asleep on the studio bed in front of a fan that drowned out the sound of their voices as they cleaned up from dinner.

  I woke up very early the next morning. I wrote the Pierces a thank-you note on an index card I found in Dr. Pierce’s briefcase, and left it propped conspicuously against the toaster. The door to their bedroom was open, but I did not look in.

  On the street, I was horrified to find that I had gotten a parking ticket and that my convertible top had been slashed—gratuitously, since there was nothing in the car to steal. This upset me more than anything else about my trip to New York, more than Dr. Pierce’s rejection, or his renunciation, as I preferred to consider it—which is how I did consider it, often, during that summer at home while I had the rest of my nervous breakdown.

  My parents were very kind. They thought it all had to do with Don Fetterman, who was missing in action in Vietnam, and maybe it did, sort of. I was “nervous,” and cried a lot. Finally my aunt Dee got tired of me mooning around, as she called it. She frosted my hair and took me to Myrtle Beach, where it proved impossible to continue the nervous breakdown. The last night of the trip, Aunt Dee and I double-dated with some realtors she’d met by the pool.

  Aunt Dee and I got back to McKenney just in time for me to pack and drive to school, where I was one of the seniors in charge of freshman orientation. Daddy had gotten the top fixed on my car; I was a blonde; and I’d lost twenty-five pounds.

  THE CAMPUS SEEMED SMALLER TO ME AS I DROVE through the imposing gates. My footsteps echoed as I carried my bags up to the third floor of Old North, where Dixie and I would have the coveted “turret room.” I was the first one back in the dorm, but as I hauled things in from my car, other seniors began arriving. We hugged and squealed, following a script as old as the college. At least three girls stopped in mid-hug to push me back, scrutinize me carefully, and exclaim that they wouldn’t have recognized me. I didn’t know what they meant.

  Sweaty and exhausted after carrying everything up to the room, I decided to shower before dinner. I was standing naked in our room, toweling my hair dry, when the dinner bell rang. Its somber tone sounded elegiac to me in that moment. On impulse, I started rummaging around in one of my boxes, until I found the mirror I was looking for. I went to stand at the window while the last of the lingering chimes died on the August air.

  I held the mirror out at arm’s length and looked at myself. I had cheekbones. I had hipbones. I could see my ribs. My eyes were darker, larger in my face. My wild damp hair was as blond as Lily’s.

  Clearly, something had finally happened to me.

  That weekend, Dixie, Donnie, Lily, and I went out to Donnie’s cabin to drink beer and catch up on the summer. We telephoned Melissa, now eight months pregnant, who claimed to be blissfully happy and said she was making curtains.

  Lily snorted. She got up and put Simon and Garfunkel on the stereo, and got us each another beer. Donnie lit candles and switched off the overhead lamp. Dixie waved her hand, making her big diamond sparkle in the candlelight. Trey, now in law school at Vanderbilt, had given it to her in July. She was already planning her wedding. We would all be bridesmaids, of course. (That marriage would last for only a few years, and Dixie would divorce once more before she went to law school herself.) Donnie told us about her mother’s new boyfriend. We gossiped on as the hour grew late and bugs slammed suicidally into the porch light. The moon came up big and bright. I kept playing “The Sounds of Silence” over and over; it matched my mood, my new conception of myself. I also liked “I Am a Rock.”

  Then Lily announced that she was in love, really in love this time, with a young poet she’d met that summer on Cape Cod, where she’d been waitressing. We waited while she lit a cigarette. “We lived together for two months,” Lily said, “in his room at the inn, where we could look out and see the water.” We stared at her. None of us had ever lived with anybody, or known anyone who had. Lily looked around at us. “It was wonderful,” she said. “It was heaven. But it was not what you might think,” she added enigmatically, “living with a man.”

  I started crying.

  There was a long silence, and the needle on the record started scratching. Donnie got up and cut it off. They were all looking at me.

  “And what about you, Charlene?” Lily said softly. “What happened to you this summer, anyway?”

  It was a moment I had rehearsed again and again in my mind. I would tell them about my affair with Dr. Pierce and how I had gone to New York to find him, and how he had renounced me because his wife was pregnant. I had just added this part. But I was crying too hard to speak. “It was awful,” I said finally, and Dixie came over and hugged me. “What was awful?” she said, but I couldn’t even speak, my mind filled suddenly, surprisi
ngly, with Don Fetterman as he’d looked in high school, presiding over the Glee Club.

  “Come on,” Dixie said, “tell us.”

  The candles were guttering, the moon made a path across the lake. I took a deep breath.

  “Bubba is dead,” I said.

  “Oh, God! Oh, no!” A sort of pandemonium ensued, which I don’t remember much about, although I remember the details of my brother’s death vividly. Bubba drowned in a lake in Canada, attempting to save a friend’s child who had fallen overboard. The child died, too. Bubba was buried there, on the wild shore of that northern lake, and his only funeral was what his friends said as they spoke around the grave one by one. His best friend had written to me, describing the whole thing.

  “Charlene, Charlene, why didn’t you tell us sooner?” Donnie asked.

  I just shook my head. “I couldn’t,” I said.

  Later that fall, I finally wrote a good story—about my family, back in McKenney—and then another, and then another. I won a scholarship to graduate school at Columbia University in New York, where I still live, with my husband, on the West Side, freelancing for several magazines and writing fiction.

  It was here, only a few weeks ago, that I last saw Lily, now a prominent feminist scholar. She was in town for the MLA convention. We went to a bistro near my apartment for lunch, lingering over wine far into the late-December afternoon while my husband babysat. Lily was in the middle of a divorce. “You know,” she said at one point, twirling her tulip wineglass, “I have often thought that the one great tragedy of my life was never getting to meet your brother. Somehow I always felt that he and I were just meant for each other.” We sat in the restaurant for a long time, at the window where we could see the passersby hurrying along the sidewalk in the dismal sleet outside, each one so preoccupied, so caught up in his own story. We sat there all afternoon.