by Barry Hannah
“When men were realler, they drank for good reasons. Look at Grant and Churchill with their great wars. Look at Poe and Faulkner and Jack London and their masterpieces. Now you’ve got a national curse of drugs and drink, millions of nobodies who never once had a great day or a fine thought. This puny selfism, uff! It seems to me you became a drunkard just for lack of something to do. Just a miserable fad. No direction, no strong legs under you.” She was building.
“Don’t you want to add ‘no intestinal fortitude’?” Edgar said helpfully, blazing inside.
“Now your proposed treatise or whatever, Bums of. Name your poison. Why, Lord, that’s less a topic than a confession of kin. You want to go to school and still wallow with the wretched? Where’s the merit? With your history, it seems you’d seek something higher for your interest. You’d have got a snootful of bums in the Depression. It took a Roosevelt and a world war to get them off the streets.”
“I suppose”—this was the limit—“you labored greatly for your fortune and all was perfect with your marriages.” Her first husband, by what Edgar knew, amassed his wealth in lumber and chickens by deliberate long hours away from her. The second, before he went willfully deaf, was something of a bonds genius. He built this vast house—for her, why?—then fled to a single basement room where he did woodwork with loud tools.
“You’re a spiteful young person. And not very young. I was not idle. I guided their affairs, if you want to know. I had presence and spirit. Both your uncles had weak hearts and not very much will. I don’t know why God matched me with such invalids, but that was what I got. I’m not the prettiest thing on the block.”
Her voice had quieted to something like a lament. He wondered how deeply she believed herself. What was the truth? Maybe he was the last of her invalids. Maybe she must have them. When was she going to die?
“Well, about supper.”
“I’m no good for supper now, thank you. Go ride your present. Ride it, please, with one thing in mind: your talent. I’ve read your letters, of course, and I saw your notes, scrambled as they are. You can write. You have seen trouble. You have conquered a great flaw. Now, Edgar, nobody has known it, but I have diaries. I have jotted histories of my time. I believe there would be a discerning audience for it. And you can write it.”
“Write what?”
“My life. My life and times.”
He turned and went to the motorcycle, still in his suit, drenched with perspiration and stinking of acrimony. The BMW seemed a nasty, irrelevant toy. A mighty vision shot to hell. But when he got it going down the streets, big beam out front, sweet cut grass smells flowing by, the wind whipping, he began to giggle. There it was: her patronage, her life as done by Edgar who could write no more at all. He drove on to Emma’s. Why not?
He felt rangy, and much better. In the summer his work in the classroom went well. He knew many of the answers and seemed to have the good questions too. His more rural peers gave him some reverence. Some of them were hardly more cosmopolitan than the rube who sang about Kansas City in the musical Oklahoma!
Even better, Emma Dean seemed to be going for him. He recalled Snooky and tracked the difference. This time he had to do almost nothing. It was a rapid impassioning with young Emma—was she twenty-seven? But there was an unhappy strangeness to it on her part. She wanted him near, but it seemed she wanted him mournfully. The affair was making her sad. But Emma persisted: she bought him things, and slyly hinted at the times when Michael the Math Monster, who was deaf, would be out of the mobile home. She told him mysteries about the deaf and what they knew. What that permanent silence gave them—some claimed to hear music from heaven, or right from the brain.
One night in mid-June she was impatient and gloomy, yet suddenly she pulled off her dress. This “courting” could not go on forever—they weren’t infants. She did cry out like a panther, bless her. Edgar was very happy, but she wept. She wouldn’t tell him why, and he could only tenderly guess, remembering her history. He knew things would get better, more natural. Most stunning, though, was the certain knowledge she would be his last woman. The truth banged him with an enormous bright weight—at last things were in motion. He was very lucky to have her. And this time he would not destroy.
For Emma he improved his history, sometimes believing it. After the collapse of the band he said he’d become a long meditator. It did not necessarily mean failure. It was a long wait with a nobler design. He had shed material wants willingly and sought different, wholer, more authentic company. These phases were not unknown to many great men, not that he was great. But he felt a mission, and had for a long time.
The term mission, in regard to Auntie Hadley’s request, still made him giggle, then snarl. He began writing even worse at school. He had never answered her. This was a petty and vile act, but it bought him his first taste of power in her petty and vile world. The only token in her land was cowardly muteness. Wasn’t it cowardly, after all, to nag and bite like she did? Wasn’t it the life choice of a nit? He pretended to be hurt by her comments against him and his family for much longer than he actually was. She was watching him cautiously now, and keeping her mouth shut more. It wouldn’t do to offend the author, for nit’s sake. Giggle. But he was not rotten enough to tell Emma about it. All in all, he couldn’t get away from pity for his aunt.
“Let’s go riding on the bike, you behind, Emma.”
“But I’m afraid.”
“You won’t be. And let me suggest something—take off your underpants and wear a dress instead.”
“Excuse me.”
“Please do it. Women find a whole new world, I hear.”
“Well, I’m all for that.”
She was game, and by Lake Tornado, she was hugging him with delight, bountiful sighs going in his ear. He was sly. Nature was with him. She liked that he’d had a wife and was experienced. She told him he was a new man, all bronzed and straight, on the motorcycle. They would have times, good times. Yelling back, he assured her—the best time, he shouted. Ah, he was all gone for her now.
They’d told him at the ward, just hang on, hang on. Good things would come, eternal things. It was a law of recovery, tested millions of times.
Take it at the flood, then, Edgar Alien Po’ Boy, which is what Emma now called him. Her love name. Oh, the wimmens, the wimmens. Their world—holy smoke!—and how he’d missed the light hands, the sly codes in the whole little city—its own language—they set up around you. The unexpected, priceless gifts, good nowhere but the city of love. “Give me some sugar,” she said. How long since he’d heard that. Despite her Emory degree, summa cum laude, Emma stayed more the congenial truck-stop waitress, the charity that most got near him. Maybe because of her many brothers she understood the good-natured cuffing that men did and the brawny highway troubles behind them. She was a pal, a corker, a skit, handed to him. Pale fire burning through it all. With her, Edgar found, in some discomfort, that he could write better, he could wax forth. But she was always a bit sad, though she worked diligently with her deaf people in the institution south of Atlanta. It was not an unworthy mission—here we were—to alleviate suffering: find its cause, cut it off, and kill it, as General Powell said he’d intended with the Iraqi army in Kuwait. Emma was a great cheerleader of the war. Her patriotism was caught up. Democracy, freedom! Protection of our sand brothers. The tattoo on his throat—Emma’d never seen it, they made love with her glasses off—caused him no end of grief. For he felt Southern now: proud and brave with no irony or cynicism. Leave that to the hag in the Tudor dungeon.
Yet Emma stayed sad.
There was something in her he could not yet touch.
Nobody had said of this mission that the good things wouldn’t be tough to get. He was with her a great deal. Good Michael the Math Monster, attuned quickly in his deafness, stayed out of the mobile home for long tracts of time. Edgar halfway moved in, while he worried about the feelings (and money) of his aunt.
After, at last, the long honest letter to h
is parents, Edgar shook with relief. They would go to Athens. It was time, and Emma agreed. He was gratified by her presence. He still did not feel worthy to meet them alone. Emma, a prize, would tell them he stood tall. A weak and dim man could not have her. A dim and weak man could not handle the BMW with this intelligent brunette frightened on the backseat. Deliberately he drove right into the racing ring-road fury of Atlanta traffic, cocky and weaving at seventy-five plus, envied. Emma almost died, a happy leech on his back. It was the city of her “ruin,” but she laughed at it, another whole venue. A woman’s shouts of pleasure could knock down buildings.
Athens had grown, of course. The university took in forty-five thousand now. Edgar got solemn when they rode into his block. He hadn’t remembered his house as this unprosperous. It was stained from tree sap. The yard was shaggy. All this dereliction was unlike his father in the old times. Inside it smelled like used lives—corpus smells in the homes of the meek, hard to believe of one’s people. His own smell was in there somewhere, he reckoned. But the chicory coffee his mother drank constantly—a special blend from the French Market in New Orleans—was sweet nostalgia. She’d cooked a raisin-apple pie for them, too.
For his advent, Edgar’s folks—Oliver and Sue—had dressed up. His father wore a tie and the gray strands of his hair were nursed back. His mother had on a blue churchy dress. She had a lot of hair, but it was white, a grief to Edgar. What did he expect though? Athens was out there, doing better than they were, that was all. His dad moved slowly with arthritis of the feet. His mother seemed resolute on showing off her younger health, bouncing a little with her coffee cup.
It went much better than he’d hoped. A taste of the coffee—like a swat—filled him with a glow. They said he looked wonderful, all grown and mature, maybe taller. He almost forgot Emma. Out back with his father, they laughed about his aunt. Edgar played her as a more minor crank than she was and spoke of “paying her off when I head out on my own.” On horn or in academe, his father wanted to know. Not the horn, Edgar said. His dad didn’t understand: why couldn’t Edgar recover it all? He was still young. What a gift, what years! Edgar turned and saw Emma with her coffee, not glad, eavesdropping from behind the kitchen door. The backyard was bleak, rutted with water drainage.
When he left, despite the small melancholy, Edgar felt fixed and relieved.
Emma did not. She didn’t speak on the motorcycle all the way back. In Atlanta, he thought he heard her crying through the wind.
He was attentive and wanted to help. But it was a cruel night for Emma. She claimed her back hurt and he could tell she wanted him to go. She’d been hurt and made sad all over again; she didn’t even try to smile. There was maybe even something like hate in her eyes. Well, Edgar Alien Po’ Boy’s out of here, he said. This got nothing from her. The mobile home looked glum, newly desperate, not the lake cabin it had seemed before.
At his aunt’s he sat unbending from his trip snags. After a while he felt there was something different about his plush garret. Then he saw—how could he have missed them? Stacked neat and high on his desk were handsome purplish leather-bound books. There were two stacks, each two feet up—her diaries and “jottings.” They made him angry. They were arrogantly under lock and key, but with the keys out for him to jump in and have a go. Hadley was away somewhere. He let go an uncommon obscenity. Then he went straight to bed.
At breakfast she was on him before he could dart to class an hour early. Quietly, more like a human being, she began.
“Edgar, one thing I notice about your graduate studies: you don’t really do that much. You’ve time for all kinds of things. I’ve seen your motorcycle at Emma Dean’s . . . place, more than a few times.”
He resented this, and braced. But she wasn’t her old self. He frankly liked her pleading.
“You, if you could just do a bit of work every day, say two hours, on our book. You could make your own notes and start the outline, almost idly. Do the readings. I’m offering you treasured, secret views of a heart and mind that has been through crucial times. You never knew, for instance, that I had my day with music, did you? Not your noisy success, not your . . . bubble. My time was milder and private as girls were taught. Why, I’d play an afternoon triumph of Chopin, there would be Father, sneaking in to listen in the hall. He’d have tears running down his cheeks. Too, I did dollwork, their porcelain faces showing history and nationality when there was no world-consciousness in Georgia at all. They’re still in the attic for you to see. And I will be constantly available for you to consult. I’ve bought a new tape recorder, which is of course yours after our interviews are done. I’ve completed an outline. We can compare outlines once—”
The horror! as Edgar Alien Po’ Boy might have written, grabbed him.
“I was no mean student, nephew, but in composition I couldn’t quite express myself, though I was excellent in elocution. Ethical elocution—I was the star there. My first husband dragged me from college. There was heartbreak. Big moments in the sun were probably waiting for me! But love, love, was the order of the day. Edgar, I’m not going to live forever, I wouldn’t think.”
Was that a frightened giggle, a voice from a little girl in her horse-drawn carriage?
“Academic people, I’ve noticed, will delay things forever. Why, I sent some things to the press at Athens years ago. It took a year to get them back, and with a beastly note, beastly.”
Edgar became, though sickened, interested in the long confession. Here was a sick glee, close to a great pop of vodka in a rushing airplane.
“In Savannah, old Savannah!, there were gay times. Homosexuals won’t steal that term! There were lanterns on the levee indeed. I was good with horses. What a picture, I on my roan Sweetheart on the way to third grade in the city! Horses were thought elegant, a whole culture gone with the wind! Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage in ten days, I believe. Not that you, with all our source material—seventy-three years! But Edgar, you are falling behind. I won’t watch you do that again! You’ve a degree from one of our great universities.”
“I’ll read and form an opinion,” said Edgar flatly with ire.
“Further, it would be all right, I would allow, to have Miss Dean stay here with you. You can have a larger room—Hank’s, with his special woodwork, and a television, too, and his Victrola, unused since his deafness. I’m no prude. I can modernize. I don’t want you at that trailer. A man needs pleasure, but in the right place. I’ll put in the large couch with a fold-out. We’ll get right to it. Shelley had his muse.”
“Didn’t she write Frankenstein?”
You couldn’t get to the old thing anymore. She just faded away.
That night, Emma still in grief, he sat his horn cases on his desk next to the books. He didn’t know quite what he was doing. Both things made him sick. He stared a long time, judging the contest.
At the end of the summer after two major exams, essay-type, the chairman called him in. Edgar liked him. No great achiever either in the classroom or in research (though there was a rumored thin book, When God Was a Boy, they said), Schmidt cheered the worthy and had no envy. He said Edgar looked good, but there was a problem.
“Your prose style. Your writing. We don’t see that kind much. I agree academe needs shaking, but there is a sort of . . . grunt-talk, a primitive getting-there. Seems almost to cause you . . . pain. And some to the reader. Now I am a Hemingway fan, a Raymond Carver zealot, but are you trying something new, dimensional, I don’t know, would this fit the bums’ world, is that what?”
“No, sir. I’m not trying anything that I’m aware of.”
“This is your best?”
“I’m looking for an awakening, I guess. In the old days at Northwestern, though, I could write better.”
“Then we’ll just root for you. I appreciate your honesty. We want to get life and expression together. Isn’t that the whole point?”
“Sure.”
“The example of pain into flowers, ho?”
Edgar nodded.
“Because very soon it’s thesis time for you. There are outside readers.”
Peets Lambert and his band came into town, out from seeming nowhere. Lambert was still alive. Someone called Edgar from the college and said Lambert had left tickets for him in the chapel where they’d play. The student coordinator later said Lambert was very cordial and, whoa, eighty-five years old. It had been almost twenty years since Edgar first played with the band. Lambert remembered him well and wanted to chat after the concert. The student, who knew Edgar, said Lambert wanted to know everything about him and had even driven by his aunt’s house, but had found nobody home the previous afternoon.
Edgar, Emma and Auntie Hadley went together. Emma thought it would be cruel not to invite her. She’d love big band swing. This would be quite the sentimental evening for everybody! Obscurely, Emma had gotten happy again.
And swing it was. Snooky wasn’t there, nor anybody near her age. Lambert had brought back some of his old friends including Woodrow and settled for what he could get on the nostalgia circuit—hence La Grange. By far he was the leading ancient, but several in the band were close. They had a bad singer, and no one looked particularly happy in their black suits. The playing was sloppy and sometimes verged on the funereal. But Lambert hammed and was hip, very, like a confident ghost pawing at the band. Surprisingly, Edgar sat through it calmly. It was a sort of music, and he did not hate it, he was not made ill. To his left, he saw his aunt looked very pleased. Her eyes seemed to be swooning back in her biography. The band played a Charleston, capping with the bad singer, the only leaping youth in the band. The students who were there—not many—liked it, they were charmed.