by Les Weil
Vedettes - A Collection of Stories
by Edward Loomis To the memory of Guy de Maupassant
Contents
On the Short Story, Introduction
The Valley of the Shadow
A Revenant
The Squatter
Charity
Young Love
The Writer
The Duel
In Training: A Sketch
A Kansas Girl
On the Short Story
introductory to Vedettes
What a lot of language to tell the damn things! -portentous and heavy, like sermons.
Stories are discussed in writing classes, and there the great critical terms (reality, symbol, character, etc.) may be imagined to hover in a dim sublime over the unpretentious text: the instructor has the only copy of the manuscript, and he will wait until the discussion is over before he attempts a summary. The language in which stories are composed is not much talked about, however, all that being left to the grammarians.
The received idea is that plots are forbidden in stories -they are bad form, belong to the Saturday Evening Post, are made from plot cards.
The genre is wonderfully discreet. It's mousy. The tone of voice is restrained. The elements of it are a little dialogue, a little description, a pattern, a conflict, some symbols, 5000 words more or less, and some living characters.
Characters exactly as living as the Angels of the Lord -certainly this is no problem for a grammarian!
Nevertheless, there are stories one is glad to have, and there will be more. Most of my stories run to the familiar pattern, which I take as the normal, though I am often constrained to attempt a plot -no one really minds. The "sketch," "In Training," is a variation from the normal, and my models for it are mostly drawn from Hawthorne.
The Valley of the Shadow
Edward Loomis
One day I went looking for health in a hospital, and saw a fearful thing.
It was a Veterans Administration Diagnostic Hospital in Los Angeles, and I had come up from San C~ to talk to a neurologist. I got directions from a receptionist, went up a flight of stairs, turned a corner, and came to him, squatting on a bench with his arms about his shins, like a monkey; an attendant was standing beside him. I went near, and the head was distinct, leaning to one side; the long, muscular face was deeply scored, in lines which recommended something limited and vague. The lips were dilated, the eyes dark, and exposed, as if they had been driven a little way forward in the sockets. The face turned -the eyes wavered, showing a smear of white; the attendant winked, immoderately.
I passed on, knowing that I might become such a creature as that huddled alien. I guessed that he was epileptic, and perhaps also feeble-minded, and I learned from the neurologist that he was indeed epileptic. I dared to ask why he was there, and the neurologist answered that he had been brought in for an encephalograph. When I left, the epileptic was gone, and the corridor was tame again.
I found my way southward with fierce pleasure in the speed of the machine that carried me - a Vincent motorcycle that I will not readily give up, for I like a danger outside myself, that I can leave at the curb, or in a garage; and this is magic, not to be ignored.
I believe in magic, and meditate what it can do. I can afford to be serious, for I am obliged to be so. (My motto is "Health, not Awareness!") I am a son of the middle class, with a father to pay necessary bills, and I am not unreasonable. My demand on myself is that I not be a fool, and so I have been getting along pretty well in my world. I am sick, but I believe that sickness is helpful to my case; I instruct myself in living by trying to recuperate, and I do it, at the expense of the last two generations in my middle-western family, in San C-, which is a resort town on the coast between San Diego and Los Angeles. Highway 101 passes through the town, and our stop lights impede the traffic. There are public beaches, a pier, a golf course, and, a few miles to the south, a surf that the lean boys with boards are fond of.
I live in the San C- Hotel, an edifice of the 'Twenties which is already in 1951 very old, entirely of the past. I keep my motorcycle in the alley, with a chain on it; I go down to the beaches for sun, and I have a lady whom I visit for love. Her name is Edith Cripps, and her home is an elegant big house in Laguna Beach; she comes to see me at a beach cottage owned by a friend of hers, and of which I carry a key to the front door. It is a pleasant arrangement, and may remain so, I think, unless Edith's husband grows ambitious at loving, and this is not likely.
Edith comforts me, and gives me love, and helps me in my recuperation. ("You still look like a veteran," she says.) She gives me her breast or shoulder to rest against, and I give her a sense of interesting complexities -her own life being over-simplified, with two sons away most of the year at an eastern boarding school traditional in her husband's family, so that she is expected to keep busy with ladies' clubs and a concern for her tan. We get along; we would be married if that were possible, and without marriage we yet feel responsible for each other. After I resigned from the Graduate School at Stanford (because I was no longer able to use a pen or pencil), I needed a decent woman, and was fortunate enough to find her, at a party in Corona del Mar.
I tell her things, and our style of being together is chiefly designed to make that possible; and so I told her about the epileptic in the hospital corridor.
"And is he a veteran like you?" she asked.
"He's probably the son of a veteran," I said. "The Army would never take an epileptic." And I thought, "It could take one inadvertently, or cause one, though."
"His case is different from yours," Edith said. "You're only philosophically sick, after all."
She smiled at me -hers was always the smile of intelligence. She was in her early forties, and thus had an authority of years with me. She was knowledgeable, free of contentiousness, alert.
"You mean I'd like to be philosophically sick," I said.
"It's a commendable ambition," sine said quickly. "If you can't be well."
Six years after the war (I had been a soldier of the infantry), I was plagued with unfortunate symptoms of a malady which had not been satisfactorily diagnosed. I had endured major convulsions, tics, spasmodic motor activity, and even pain; as I talked to Edith, I could feel my right leg numb in the great muscles and hurting sharply at the knee. I could not read for long without suffering a neural pulse in my throat; soon after I took up a pencil or pen, my hand sprang outward and threw the instrument away. The subsequent clatter is a thing I have gotten used to.
The neurologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital was inclined, if I read him rightly, to think about epilepsy and multiple sclerosis; a psychiatrist, were I to consult one, might think of hysteria; and I found it possible to think that my sickness protested something in my world -and especially a matter which the war made vivid for me. The use of force was that matter: I have heard it called the argument of blood. We are all like Hawthorne's Puritan family, we have been given blood to drink, and are we not supposed, as rational beings, to choke on such a diet?
I could never get used to the heavy fit. It has a taste, and the elders at a sacrifice may have enjoyed it as they watched the priest lean in over a white throat. Of course I am prepared to admit that I may be a victim of vanity in thinking my illness has a civic meaning. Why not? Such vanity would be only another variety of moral passion, and our American history can show many cases of that. But I do not think I am vain.
I stand at a battleground in the history of ideas, and I do not plan to put down my arms. They are caution, reason, and attention, and they exist as I have learned to use them, in an enterprise where they may prevail, and I shall not forget them if they do, though there are precedents for that as for everything, in
the history of the race.
"Edith," I said, "it's good you're skeptical. And who knows? One day I may be well."
"That would be nice," she said.
That night my brother came to see me, a soldier stationed at Camp San Luis Obispo, and he came to tell me that he was thinking about deserting the army. "As a gesture," he said. "If you can be sick philosophically, why can't I be a criminal philosophically? My reasons will be as good as yours, certainly."
He was my younger brother, twenty-two years old at the time; he resembled our father, and his idea was of an intensity that our father would admire -that honest and innocent man! He was in Ohio, a widower, Professor of American History at one of the pleasant small colleges which abound in that state. He had taught us (chiefly after the death of our mother, which happened when we were in grammar school) that we must be idealists if we wanted full lives, and those were his terms, amateurish enough, and bound to make trouble for anyone who took them seriously; but they were the terms he knew, and it would not occur to him that he might find a reason to apologize for them; and he expected no criticism, for the society he moved in was without criticism.
And now my brother was preparing an idealistic act (that was his phrase) which our father, being a good patriot, could not approve. I, from my vantage point above the banal streets of San C-, could recognize the consequences of an idealistic act, and wanted to mention them. I did so, and they were received like blessings.
"You'll have to live like a criminal. When they catch you, and they'll catch you, there'll be the guardhouse and prison, and tough guards at both places, and after that, I expect, a bitterness that won't quit for a while."
"I know it won't be easy," my brother said, almost happily. His name is George Curtis Jackson, a serious name, clearly; and he is a serious boy.) "But it's what I've got to do."
We had been at this problem before, and worked at it as we were able. George held that I was indeed sick as I wanted to be -to enact a meaning, to be critical, and he sympathized; but he did not approve, for his will was to resist a society that needed the use of force as a principle of its being. He would not accept the blood to drink. He could be eloquent in condemnation of the communion proffered; he was eminently sober and designing.
"You're probably killing yourself, Sam," he told me, "and that's not right. I'll protest it. Maybe I can get you to change your ways." He grinned at me, and said, "I'll save you from yourself, old man."
We were good brothers, you see. He was a fine type of the second son, having had the cast-off bicycle and roller skates and even a cast-off clarinet, and not been much hurt by the deprivation. He was in tune for sacrifices. He was tough in will, and it was his time for an important decision. He wanted to know what he would choose; he was curious, and eager, as he stood on light ankles at the edge of a new life.
"You did all right in the war," he said. "You did what you thought you had to do; and now I want to do the same. But not for a week or so. I'll have some arrangements to make - it's complicated, being a Pacifist. By God, Sam, the Jacksons'll make their mark yet!"
The next week, I went again to the Veterans Administration Hospital, for a spinal tap. I worried about seeing the epileptic, of course, and conjured up an image of his face, motionless and fascinating, that I think I will never be rid of; but I did not find him. I got on a table, and, taking the fetal posture, I lay on my right side while a nurse embraced me against a spasm that might deflect the needle; after an anesthetic for the lower trunk, I felt the needle bumping lightly at the very source of strength, and could not move or protest. I had a cold sweat, that dampened the fine hairs on the nurse's arm, and, when the tap had been accomplished, I saw that the neurologist had drained off ten cubic centimeters of a colorless liquid.
He advised me that I might have headache over such a loss, and so I hurried home (the engine singing!), and the headache came; I took the empirin with codeine which I had been given, and slept deeply. Toward morning, I had a dream that brought a metaphysical pain, and I found myself started on a difficult time. I dreamed that I was in prison, in an arctic region of blue and ice. The sky was blue, and the air-like inner volumes of the glacier were streaked with blue. The prison was of gray stone, almost invisible because I was its citizen; and it had me under sentence of death. One day my father, lucid and prompt, appeared at the prison, and took me to a darkened room among the Warden's offices; he went apart from me, he began rummaging through papers, and he called out, "I'll pull your irons out of the fire!"
I was encouraged; he then returned, carrying a Manila folder, and said, "I'll take your case out of the file," and I knew that this was what he had said before, what he would say again.
I thus acquired a new ghost, my exiled self of the prison in the country of the cold blue and I was obliged by it to consider, for the first time seriously, the possibility that my neural agues were nothing more than Freudian Hysteria, to be dispelled by appropriate charms. I conversed with Edith on this matter, and charmed her.
"I want to be just," I told her, "because my vocation is to be a critic. I want to be sensitive to the necessary idea . . ."
"I think you like being in trouble," she said. "Melodrama suits you -"
"I can see the position, Edith. Oedipus has me in his pocket, while I shout philosophy. I want a mission in life, and so I invent one out of accidents. I fool myself. I hide my real motives, because I think they're shameful, when really all I need is to express them somehow -to become aware of them- in order to be well."
"You're very clever, dear," Edith said. "But suppose they're right? Wouldn't you be happier -more cheerful then?"
"Why, I might; and you sound just like a wife -you want me to be nice- pleasant around the house."
"Well, I want you, all right," she said, and reached out to touch me.
I resolved to continue philosophical. I had a privilege with my troubles; they were private property; I could do with them what I liked. I undertook to make my sickness philosophical by so living it that it might one day intend a meaning; I could believe that it might then accomplish a statement, for the intention normally precedes the perception. I continued my course, and almost immediately noticed that my appetite for food was falling off. I had been losing weight for more than a year, and I had no thought about it very seriously, but now I began to be alarmed. I discovered that I had a habit of doing without lunch, and I could recall several days when I had gone without the other meals (perhaps I was fasting against evil spirits) - and I never ate much. I was beginning have digestive disturbances, warnings from the gut that nourishment would not be welcome. In high school I had competed in athletics at 180 pounds, and been strong, and now I came to a little under 150 pounds, astonished at the obesity of others.
Edith worried too. "You have quite substantial bones, dear -they're showing through. You look like a skeleton!"
But she expected to revive me with love, and so she did not quite so vividly as I did. I believed that I was in danger of dying out of hand. I thought it possible that I might, without my consent, as it were, be found dead in my room, banal and silent, and I did not want that to happen. My ambition was to be a mote in the world's eye. I wanted to cause a blink in that sleepy organ!
Meanwhile I had duties and responsibilities, mostly with my brother George. He appeared one Tuesday morning at my hotel room, and I knew instantly that he had taken a decisive step. He would not be legally away from his camp at that time in the week; and he was excited. He was about my size and build, and even looked like me -as I had been. He talked as I might have talked in his situation, and I was flattered to see his determination, for that too resembled one of my own qualities. He stood on my shabby carpet, and he looked sturdy and combative in his off-duty garb of sport shirt and slacks; he said,
"I'm on the lam. I've done it. I'm more than twenty-four hours overdue."
I then spoke my arguments against his decision; he listened politely and refused. "Every time I see you, Sam, you say these things, and
every time you look a little sicker. It's time for me to find a remedy!"
Maybe I'm sick with something merely personal," I said. "Lately I've been considering that-"
"And it may be so; but it's civic, too; that's because you have a conscience. You've convinced me. But Hell's bells, Sam, let's be happy!"
We had drink, celebrating an event likely to be remembered in the family, and then I asked him what he would do -what his plans were. He told me he had a room in Los Angeles, a job washing dishes, and some friends. I said that the prospect looked bleak, and he grew restive.
"Where are you bound, George?" I said. "In your life, I mean, where do you think you're going?"
"Mainly out of things. Toward the edges. Away from the nice people."
"And what kind of people will you find?"
"Not a very good kind, maybe; but I'll give 'em a chance. What kind of people live in rooming houses, Sam? Those grey frame houses -well, there'll be some women, anyhow. I'm pretty sure of that. I've already made one contact; why it'll be living! there'll be good times!"
He was alert, and he seemed formidable; had he elected to be a soldier; he would have done well in the Korean hills. He was not at all naive; his eyes were calculating. "I've met some amateur anarchists here -on this side," he said. "Maybe I'll meet some real ones over there. I'd like to. But mainly I want to see things. I want to get out of our life, Sam; out of our father's life, I guess it is. I want all that behind me; so I'm turning. I'm on my way; and I feel good! -I'll send you news from the frontier."
That night I put him up at the beach cottage (he was reluctant to stay at the Hotel, for fear of police), and the next morning he left for Los Angeles on the bus, having told me that he would get off somewhere between stations, again for fear of police. Quick and strong, he departed as men might still depart for the free life of the sea - to be at exotic ports, to know strange women, to be made new, as if that were possible.
For the rest of the day I felt humdrum and tedious.
Time passed, autumn to winter, and there was rain. I got out my leather pants and waterproof boots, so that I could stay with the motorcycle (at a season when many riders take to buses and cars). The state of my health changed, but did not improve, and by the end of January I was down to 143 pounds; I surveyed myself in mirrors, wherein I proved an interesting object, emaciated, starved. After Christmas, I had a phone call from George's company commander, wanting knowledge of George, but I heard nothing from any other relevant authority. George wrote letters occasionally, about world affairs, calling my attention to portents of war. There was nothing for me to answer, and he gave no return address.