The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

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The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 66

by Donald Harington


  But, just possibly, that sleuthing urge yet smolders in the wings, gratifying you when, for example, you discover from thin clues that a genre painting attributed to William Sidney Mount is actually the work of Frank Blackwell Mayer, even if not more than a dozen people will really care. Your credentials for the little job I’ve got for you are good enough: you have a knack for looking at the overlooked, a sharp art historian’s eye, a hungering after truth…and a stagnancy of soul. The perfect devious devil’s advocate. Besides which, you know the country almost by heart.

  There’s one other thing, G. [Those dulcet iambics of that last movement are a tough act to follow; but maybe this prose will come as a breath of fresh air…or a sip of strong French roast coffee after an oversweet gulp of Cointreau or Chartreuse.] That same uncle of yours—“Wick,” I’ll shade him—there was another vocal use Wick had for “G”: when he was plowing or driving with his team of mules, Wick would say “Haw” to make them stop, and, to make them go, “Gee.” So, hoss, gee! Go!

  2

  You will go. Your eye is the “I” briefly glimpsed in the Overture and then heard interviewing Felix G. Spofford near the end of the First Movement. But then, except for your brief sad appearance at the end of the Second Movement, you seem to lose the trail; at least we haven’t caught another peep of you since then; although we’ve somehow had the feeling that you are still following us, closing in on us, about to catch us. It is as if you are deliberately hanging back, dawdling as it were, giving me a chance to get a good head start, all the more to dramatize the speed of your catching me. Now here you come.

  How it all will happen: in January, during what they call “intersession” at the small New England liberal arts college where you work, while you will be teaching what you like to call an “intercourse” [you kill me, G], a small seminar, “George Caleb Bingham and Other Painters of The Frontier,” the president’s secretary will bring word that he would like for you to drop by his office at your earliest convenience. You will go at once. The president [since the first three letters of his name are the same as the first three letters of the college, no mean coincidence, and if I were to shade the college “Winfield,” could I then shade him “Winston”?] President Winston is a friend of yours; he personally had hired you seven years ago; although you aren’t drinking buddies or anything like that, you always speak to each other candidly, man to man, as if, like long friends, you understand fully each other’s hearts, those hearts which are cold. His would be because the pressures of administration make him a businessman first, an academician second. Yours would be because…well, we’ve time enough later for that. You and President Winston never mince words or bother with pleasantries. He will tell you now to have a seat, a good twelve feet from him across his immense moon-shaped desk, necessitating that you make minor adjustments to the controls of your “aid,” as the audiologists and salesmen would shade it.

  Then he will say, in that voice which you have likened to the rattling of gravel in a tin can—or is it just your aid?—“Six years ago, G, after finishing your first year with us, you asked me to tell you if I’d caught any negative feedback from the students about your success as a teacher. Do you remember my answer?”

  You will say: “You said, ‘Don’t worry, mister. I’ll tell you the minute I hear anything, you’d better believe it.’”

  “And I never have,” he will say.

  “And you never have,” you will agree, then ask, “Why?”

  “Because I never heard anything,” he will say with impatient patience, as if explaining the obvious. But then will add: “Until lately.”

  “Oh,” you will say, and on pretext of scratching your ribs give a slight turn to the volume control. “What have you been hearing?”

  “One,” he will say and grab the thumb of his splayed hand, “that you haven’t been hearing. The students say you can’t hear them any more. Or, two,” he grabbed his index finger, “that you haven’t been trying to. Because, perhaps, three,”—the middle finger—“you haven’t been much interested in your students lately. Which could be the result of, four,”—the ring finger—“a loss of interest in your subject, or even in the business of teaching. Due to, I suppose, five,”—“some kind of disenchantment with yourself.” He will make a fist of those enumerated fingers which have so neatly encapsulated you, and will bang the fist lightly on the papers atop his desk. “You’re washed out, G.”

  “You can’t fire me,” you will remind him. “I have tenure.”

  He will laugh one of those devilish cackles for which he is so well noted, and fix upon you that sardonic eye so remarkably like that of the actor George C. Scott. “You know me a lot better than that!” he will say, and point a long finger at the door, or at the world out there, the cold Outside. “I could get you out of here so fast and so cleanly the A.A.U.P. couldn’t find a trace of dirt left behind! You know it!”

  You will have known it.

  “But,” he will hasten to add, “I’m not so hasty. I’m not thinking of throwing you out for good. You’ve been around as long as I have; you’ve become a kind of fixture. That’s it. Fixtures don’t do anything. They’re just fixed there. Maybe you need a rest, a rejuvenation, is that it? What the hell are you teaching intersession for, anyway? Do you need the money?” He will pause, and when you don’t say anything, he will ask, “Did you hear me? Is that thing turned up?”

  “It’s up,” you will acknowledge, and say, “Yes, I need the money. My wife and kids have…they’ve left…for a while; they’re out visiting my wife’s mother in Arkansas, and it takes extra money to support them away from home. You know.”

  He will have known. The president himself not too long ago has undergone the unpleasantries of a protracted divorce proceeding. The eyebrow he lifts will be sympathetic. “Everything all right on the domestic front?” he will ask.

  You will shrug. “That’s for her to decide. I’ll have to wait and see. But she said she didn’t want to live with me any more.”

  The president will grimace as if to ward off further news of matters both painfully familiar and irrelevant. “Well, I’m sorry,” he will say. “Maybe you should take it to a counselor or somebody. But couldn’t it be related possibly to this other thing? You’re a tired man, G. You smoke too much. The janitors tell me your ashtrays are overflowing. They also tell me you make an urn of coffee in your office every morning and drink most of it yourself. Ten or twelve cups a morning? Incidentally, the janitors have complained of the mess in the lavatory, when you clean the coffee maker and leave wet grounds in the wastebaskets. A minor detail, surely, but I’m the only one who will listen to their complaints. And act upon them. From the look of you, I’d hazard a guess the reason you need all that coffee is to sober up in the morning. Right? Okay, these things never get any better. My point is: your business is your business, but where it encroaches on this college, then it becomes my business. My advice is: take a rest. Get things in perspective. Straighten out your family problems, if you can. Get some help. See your doctor. Have a chest X-ray while you’re at it. Get some exercise. Take up cross-country skiing. Or, better yet, get out of this snow for a while. Beachcomb the Bahamas. But do something, man!”

  He will stand up, his signal that he has nothing further to say, except the terms: “You’re on official leave of absence. All of the spring semester. At full pay.” He will slap you on the back and usher you out the door.

  3

  So you will be cut loose and cast adrift, in the middle of the winter. The same cold nights that find us living it up in the splendid isolation of Lost Cove, endlessly entertained by the unearthly chatter of a spook named Flossie, these same nights will find you alone, at loose ends, incarcerated in the emptiness of that big white-brick New England colonial house of yours. You could not have left it; it is home; home is the right place, although you will think, wryly, of Frost’s definition of home as “the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in,” and there will be nobody
there but you to take you in. You will not begin talking to yourself…yet; that will come later. Mostly you will just drink and read books, trying to get caught up on all the unread volumes in that ostentatious library of yours. You will drink and read books. You will drink books and read the labels on your bottles. You will drink your labels and read your bottles. In time, whether from ennui or intoxication, you will discover that page after page of your reading has left not a line imprinted on your consciousness. You will try lighter reading, novels successively “easier,” until you will be all the way down to Harold Robbins, and when you cannot even follow him, you will resolve to quit. You never succeed in sticking to your resolutions, but you will stick to this one. You won’t read another book for a long time.

  As a diversion, to take your mind off the evil habit of bookreading, or at least to prevent you from holding a book in your hands, you will take up chair caning. It is difficult to learn, but, once mastered, relatively easy, and automatic. Your wife had several years previously purchased a set of six Thonet bentwood dining chairs, old and used, with all of their cane seats punctured or ruptured or torn. If you were to recane all of these seats, mightn’t she come home? No, but it will be something to do. It will fill the hours. Several days of steady labor to cane one chair. Vocational therapy is it called? Your fingers will be nimble enough, dexterous enough, at least until the sixth or seventh bourbon and branch. But, in time, as a mnemonic device to aid you in the endless braiding or weaving of the cane, to remind your fingers to go over this strand and under that one, the involuntary phonograph of your mind will begin playing an old cigarette commercial: “Over! Under! Around! And Through! Pall Mall travels the smoke to you!” You will not be able to turn it off. There are several thousand over’s and under’s in the caning of any one chair, and this ditty will be like to driving you sane. Even though, eventually, you will try for diversion a German translation (Über! Unten! Rundherum! Und Durch! Pall Mall reisen zu Ihnen der Rauch!), the monotony will be enervating. Day by day, the integrity of the ditty will disintegrate into drivel (Hover! Hinder! Hound! And True! Pell Mellie’s smelly smoke is blue!) until any ordinary mortal would have been soured on any cigarette, let alone Pall Malls, forever. Yet you will smoke more than ever, three packs a day (yes, Pall Malls), and keep on caning. Lover! Plunder! Unwound! And Toodle-oo! Paw’s Maw unravels her joke’s last clue!

  At last you will recall President Winston’s suggestion that you take up cross-country skiing. You will squander eighty dollars on a set of skis and poles and books and wax and torch and instruction book, and get out of your house, into your back yard. A shameful disaster. You will blame it on the weather (it will be only 10° above zero), but the real reason the mild acclivities of your back acres suddenly become steep mountain slopes is that you will be in such abominable condition: twenty or more pounds overweight, weak of lung, weaker of knee, bronchitic and asthmatic and possibly emphysematous. Less than twenty minutes after you will have started out, your cries for help will summon a neighbor lady on snowshoes to drag you home, your eyes blinded by their discharge, your beard and moustache caked with the discharge of your nose and mouth, your extremities all five frostbitten. You will be laid on the floor register of your antique coal furnace to thaw out.

  You will make an immediate appointment with Dr. Ricardo Barto of Brattleboro [copyeditor: I let the shade slip, but leave it stand] and, longing for the balm of summertime and the peace of your lush vegetable patch, you will begin a premature indoor implantation of various seeds, in windowsill pots: tomatoes, lettuce, even corn, even muskmelons (!), even okra (!!) and black-eyed peas (!!!).

  In time, the combination of cold, your foolhardiness, and fumes escaping from your antique coal furnace, will kill everything except the lettuce, which will struggle weakly on.

  Dr. Barto will probe your various orifices, send you to the laboratory for nine X-rays of head and chest, and four blood tests, send you to an allergy specialist forty miles distant in another state for a full series of tests, and then send you to bed for a week to await the results. Your bed rest will be an incomplete imposture: you’ll have to get up thrice a day to stoke the antique coal furnace, and, since you’ll have no one to wait upon you, and have therefore set up your bed in the kitchen between the refrigerator and the stove, the one for your ice cubes and TV dinners, the other for heating the latter, you’ll still have to get up to reach the sink faucets, not to mention the bathroom.

  Loneliness and bed rest play grievous tricks upon one’s perspective: you will bring to your land of counterpane little hills of family memorabilia: scrapbooks, photo albums, old letters and such; poring over these, you will systematically delude yourself into believing that your wife had never actually nagged you, or, if she had, that you deserved it; you will forget all the unkind things she has said to you; you will forget that she had been indifferent to your needs; you will even forget that she left you of her own accord. You will begin to miss her most miserably. Then you will begin to write to her, day by day, long eloquent endearing letters, showing her how wise and sound it would be if she were to come right on home. She will never answer.

  4

  “How old are you now?” the good Dr. Barto will ask, at the beginning of your return appointment. “Thirty-six, would it be?”

  “Thirty-five,” you will minutely correct him.

  “Ah,” he will say, and pretend to consult your folder while framing his next words in his mind. You will have known that he would be blunt; you admire him for his bluntness as you admire it in President Winston and others. And he will be blunt: “Dr. G,” he will say, shaking his head slowly back and forth, “you are going to have a heart attack in the near future. If it fails to kill you, something else will. Pneumonia, possibly. Throat cancer. I won’t discount tuberculosis. You need an operation on your sinuses. You need also to have removed two quite enlarged nasal polyps, as big as this—” he will show his meaty thumb-pad. “Also, the allergist reports that you have, I quote him, ‘hit the jackpot.’”

  “Jackpot negative or jackpot positive?” you will ask.

  “Positive,” the doctor will reply. “You are allergic to virtually everything. Dust. Mold. Weeds. Trees, even. Dogs and cats. Brunettes. Bookpaper. Bananas. Babies….”

  You will interrupt, “Am I allergic to bourbon?”

  He will consult his folder. “No, unfortunately,” he will say. “But you must cut down. You must. I have said this before, and you have been deaf to me. Speaking of deafness, your hearing constantly deteriorates. The audiometer shows no hope. I have said this before, too: you will have to begin taking lessons in lipreading.”

  “Pardon me,” you will say, “I didn’t catch that.”

  Slowly and patiently, with exaggerated lip movements, the doctor will repeat himself. Then he will go on: “You must discipline yourself to an intensive program, a mass-ive program. You must take the lessons. You must cut down on destructive tastes and habits. You must dust-proof your house, particularly your bedroom. You must dry and de-mold your damp cellar.”

  “My damn what?” you will say. “My damn salad?”

  “Dampp cell-arr,” he will say. “Of your house. Your wet basement. You told me once you have frogs down there. They must go too. You must give up your mushroom culture. Avoid all spores.”

  “Sports? But you said I need exercise….”

  “Spo-errss,” he will enunciate. “As in mushrooms. But no, you must not avoid sports. You must find a sport, a strenuous sport, and you must cultivate it. You must give up the booze and the smokes. I mean it.” Then he will become silent and stern.

  After a while, you will ask, “Is that all?”

  He will hold up an index finger. “You must diet.”

  “I know it,” you will say. “I know I must die. It’s why I drink and smoke and generally wreck myself.”

  “Die-ittt,” he will correct you. “Get rid of your—” but then he will stop and study you quizzically for a long moment. Quietly and gently th
en he will ask: “Do you want to die?”

  “Why not?” you will say. “It happens to the best of people, sooner or later.”

  “Would you perhaps be willing to consider the possibility,” he will ask, “of having perhaps a small conversation or two with Dr. Sanderson or Dr. Fossett at The Retreat?”

  “Psychiatrists?” you will say. “I couldn’t afford it.”

  “The amount of their fee is commensurate with your ability to pay.”

  You will shake your head. “I don’t need a shrink.”

  Gently he will ask, “What do you need, Dr. G?”

  You will nearly blurt out the one word which is the only answer to such a question, but it would have cost you some embarrassment; he is only a medical doctor, after all, and what you need is not anything he could have written a prescription for, so instead of that word you will substitute another of the same number of letters “Rest,” and then you will tell him that your college has put you on leave and that you hope to recuperate.

  Then he will say that he hopes you would consider vigorous exercise a form of rest, and he will write you out two prescriptions, some green pills for your nose, some yellow ones for your lungs, and at his door he will say, “Don’t forget the dust.”

  You will have misunderstood even that casual remark, but will nod, and go on home, idly wondering why you should not forget the toast. Had it been on his list of things to avoid? It doesn’t matter. You could have just as easily given up toast as you could have given up “the booze and the smokes,” which is to say that you could not have given up anything. The attic of your house is crammed with things that you cannot have given up. The attic of your mind is full to bursting with concepts, fixed ideas, delusions, that you cannot have given up. Your life is an omnium-gatherum of habits, routines, tastes, faults and follies, that you cannot have given up. It seems the only thing you will be willing to give up is, simply, your life itself.

 

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