by John Gardner
An agonizing two or three minutes passed. The cat watched us with the innocent malevolence of her carnivore nature; indistinct shadows craftily began inching across the ceiling and floor. The silence stretched on, acutely embarrassing for both of us, surely; I must think of a way to break it, I kept thinking. I cleared my throat, a time or two, little half-involuntary growls like a sleeping dog’s, but nothing came. I hadn’t felt so self-conscious and uncomfortable since the days old Slash Potter, my thesis director, would require me to sit waiting in his high marble office while he thumbed through my latest revisions. Not that it was all Agaard’s fault, it struck me. It was I who, hoping to flatter him, had demoted myself. As I suspect may be clear already, I did not actually like old Agaard’s book, though I’d been vastly impressed when I was younger. I still respected it, of course. It was, and is, the work of a mind I do not hesitate to call far superior to my own. His gift for languages, his absolute originality, his uncanny intuition, all these were awesome; indeed, I wouldn’t be disposed to quarrel with the widespread though hardly universal opinion that the fellow is without parallel. Nevertheless, I don’t care much for the book.
Be all that as it may, the fact was, I could see now, that I had lied to him, in effect. Perhaps it was from the falsehood itself that he cringed, verbally slapping my hand away, refusing a charity that had in it no true caritas. Time grew heavier second by second. Then by lucky chance I thought of Jack Jr.—how we, two intellectuals (perhaps not in the sense that Sven Agaard was, but by no means fools), could sit smiling with affection, serenely silent in one another’s company for hours at a time. At once, as if the thought of my son had released me, I found myself saying—leaning forward, trying to sound at once concerned and hearty—“It must be difficult, living here alone, having to take care of your son. He does live here with you, I presume?”
“Oh yes, he lives with me,” the professor snapped, raising his head, then lowering it, pointing his nose at his knees again. Though I watched him closely, his eyes gave me not the slightest clue to where the son was kept.
After another little pause I remarked, smiling, tilting my head to show interest (any slightest movement, I was finding, made the chair creak), “I imagine it must all be rather painful.”
He nodded, smiling grimly, raising his cup to drink. “Yes, it would be natural to imagine that.” Above the rim of the teacup he gave me a look of what might have been fury.
I looked down, once again shrinking a little, struggling to sort out my confusion. Was it possible, I wondered, that it had been someone else, some malicious prankster, who’d written that letter inviting me up? But I’d mentioned the letter on the phone; it was Agaard who’d written it, all right. Had he changed his mind, then? gotten cold feet? Perhaps one couldn’t blame him; I’d have to know more about his son to judge. Certainly if he wanted me to leave, I’d leave at once. I should let him know that. I glanced at my watch, then at Agaard. “Good heavens, it’s after four,” I said. “I have a plane to catch at eight.” Only as I said it did I hear how ridiculous it sounded. Trying to save myself, I said, “Does it take long to get to the airport?”
“Twenty minutes,” I thought he’d say with a murderous sneer and a baa; but again he surprised me completely. He leaped up and went to the window, then blanched. With a voice and expression that might have been extreme alarm, he said, “Look! It’s snowing! You have a plane out tonight?”
“It’s at eight,” I repeated uncertainly, guardedly.
Professor Agaard stood perfectly still for an instant, hands clasped tightly, torso cocked forward, staring as if in growing surprise at the storm. At last he shook his head and turned back to me, eyes narrowed, stepping grimly toward his chair. “It will never take off,” he said. “Right to the last minute they’ll say the planes are flying, and then, with apologies, they’ll post a one-hour delay, and then another, and then another; what do they care?” He gave a laugh, waving one arm. “The airport can be packed like a can of sardines, people can be sleeping all over the floors, little children can be bawling, they’ll go right on lying—company policy, not to mention human nature! Baa! Take my word for it, Winesap.” He closed his right hand on the back of his chair. “They’ll never take off. I know these storms out of Canada. I’ve lived here for fifteen years.” He seemed to consider sitting down, eyebrows driven inward toward the bridge of his nose, eyeballs slightly bulging, then decided to remain standing.
Again I was baffled. It sounded for all the world as if, despite the sneer, the misanthropic snarl, he was asking—almost begging—that I stay over, keep him company. The thought, I must confess, made me shudder. “Well—” I began. I sat motionless in my spindly little chair, or rather hovered just above it, my elbows rigid, weightless on the arms.
“No, no,” he said emphatically, clicking his dentures and bending stiffly toward the teapot, “it will never take off. I doubt that you could even get a taxi in weather like this.” He shot an angry or maybe terrified look at the window.
I too looked. It was like night out; a gloomy, shifting marchland beyond which lay heaven knew what.
“Of course we have beds here—no shortage of beds, such as they are!” He gave his sharp little baa, his expression triumphant. “Here, have more tea,” he said, and hurriedly came at me with the pot.
HE WAS A difficult man—never in my life had I met a man more difficult, now snivelling, now snarling, now cackling with glee, always with his mind somewhere else, I had a feeling, turning over and over that secret or guilty confession he couldn’t quite find it in his heart to let loose of, much as he might wish to—stroking it with his fingers, clutching it greedily to his bosom, watching me, his chosen antagonist, with unrelenting vigilance in his dim, crafty little eyes. It was not just his son, I was by now persuaded; he’d made graver mistakes than by chance giving life to a “monster,” as he’d called him. I gave the old man time, sitting there opposite him, our shoes almost touching. It was surely true that no planes would be flying from Madison that night. If Agaard was a mystery, both generally speaking and from moment to moment, I needn’t be in any great hurry to get to the bottom of it. I’d figure him out. And of course the old man was hoping I’d catch him; or a part of him was. I had nothing to lose, nothing except the chance, back in the city, of finding more congenial company—if nothing else, the tinny cheer of some motel TV. I began to enjoy myself. En garde, Agaard! It was you who threw the glove!
At the moment Professor Agaard was busy bringing it to my attention that, like most members of the human race, I am a scoundrel. “‘Pseudo-history,’” he said, with a scornful little head-shake. I blinked, not sure whether it was a joke or a slip of the tongue, and tentatively corrected him, my tone ironic: “Psycho-history.” He nodded, accepting the revision without interest, giving the air a little bat with the back of his hand. He made a face as if, either way, the term repelled him, as no doubt it did. I couldn’t really blame him. I’d felt that way myself when it first became popular, mostly in connection with fanciful, unfriendly biographies. We’d shifted to wine now, the old man trying to trick himself, perhaps. He was drinking rather quickly, as if his throat were parched and the wine had no more taste than water. In point of fact, I might mention, the wine was excellent. It surprised me a little that, disliking me as he did, the professor hadn’t brought out Gallo. The fire beside us had burned down to a few glowing embers. The cat was asleep. Old Agaard had resisted my every effort to turn the conversation to his son, ducking in distress from every faintest hint, willing to chatter like a magpie on any and every subject but the one that, we both knew, had brought me to his house. “What a curious thing for an intelligent man to spend his life on!” he said. “‘Pseudo-history’! I take it you call yourself a ‘pseudo-historian’? Baa!” His face had grown whiter as the room grew more murky; it was as if he had on powder.
I thought of correcting him again. Was he deaf, or was it simply that once Agaard got an idea in his head it was there, firm as bedrock, to th
e end? I decided to let it pass. I smiled, in fact. Pseudo-history. Why not? It had a ring to it. Anyway, our point of disagreement was substantive—never mind the name!
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I think one could spend one’s life in worse ways.” The backs of my legs ached from the strain of keeping part of my weight off the chair. My gestures were constricted—a thing I never like—by my wish to do no harm to his miserable antique. “It’s true,” I said, “that psycho-history is not always a terribly serious pursuit. It’s sometimes trivial, nothing more than a pleasant entertainment—not that that’s all bad.” I flashed him a smile. “I mean of course studies of the ‘deeper implications’ of Lyndon Johnson’s bathroom jokes, or the social attitudes secreted away in castration imagery in the tales of Paul Bunyan. Yet we learn things, here and there. Any way of looking at the past is still looking at the past.” I glanced at him, carefully waving my wine glass. Again his eyebrows were rammed inward against his nose. “We’re after the same things you are, you know. The twists of human pride, humanity’s age-old survival tricks.”
“Pah!” he said, then laughed. “Baa!”
It annoyed me, of course. No one likes his life’s work dismissed quite so lightly, not even a man who, like myself, holds all effort to be at least partly vanity, a heroic, death-defying labor of bees making honey that will rot in a season. To cover my annoyance—and perhaps nervousness (he did, of course, make one conscious of limitations)—I put my wine glass on the floor beside my foot, got my pipe and tobacco out, and began to load the bowl. I prudently stopped myself from asking if he’d mind if I smoked. “As I’m sure you know,” I said, soberly catching and holding his eye, “our work is no more fanciful than the next man’s, in the end. All history at least from the days of Thucydides is in a way ‘pseudo-history,’ as you call it—the tale of human struggle as it’s told by the side that won.”
“I know all that,” he snapped. (I had it coming, I’ll admit. I’d gone just a little sentimental there; downright self-righteous.) He got up to put another log on the fire. The cat came awake and shrank back, then fled at his approach. “All history as fiction,” he said, “psychological projection, ‘a distant mirror’—et cetera, et cetera.” As he was about to bend toward the log he paused and turned his whole torso to look at me, rolling his eyes to the corners like a horse. “It’s extremely useful stuff, you’ll tell me.” He waved toward the ceiling, bitterly ironic, and put on, again, his prissy look. “What’s heaven itself but pseudo-history? Yet we all die the happier for it, eh?”
“Some do,” I said cautiously, lighting my pipe.
He barked—literally barked like a dog—then bent down, picked up a log, carried it to the fire, and dumped it in. Sparks flew wildly. One fell on his trousers. He slapped at it. “I’m not against religion,” he said angrily, as if at the spark. “I’m not against fairytales either, for what they are. What I mind is historians that say anything they please. That’s what your discipline encourages, Winesap! Why do people choose it? Why is it the rage in every supposedly respectable university from Harvard to Berkeley? Baa. Because it’s easy, that’s why! No grubbing around in Latin or Old Slavonic, no sorting through dirty old books in the basements of libraries! Just hunt down sexual metaphors and allusions to ‘dusk’ in the papers of Thomas Jefferson! (You’ve read Garry Wills’ piece demolishing that, I hope.) So these eager intellectuals of the Now Generation come flooding to your courses—their courses, I mean; I don’t mean you personally, necessarily; you’ve done serious work from time to time. I mean those others, my busy little colleagues, the ones who were ‘Marxist revisionists’ five, ten years ago, and before that cracker-barrel Toynbees.” He stopped, panting a little; he’d lost his thread. Then abruptly, remembering, he raised his arm like a general, plunging on: “They flood into your courses, which helps the F.T.E., brings in money to the department; and they pour out their fairytale histories of ‘Blacks’ and ‘Chicanos’—baa—the history of people who have no history, which brings them federal grants, research assistants, free trips to the Bahamas to lie in the sun and write Freudian reconstructions of the Great White Sugar-dance!” He stood trembling, whistling like a bat.
My hand slightly shaking, I reached for the wine bottle and held it toward him. “Have more wine,” I said, and smiled. Angry as he made me, I had to give the old man an A for rhetoric.
He laughed, a kind of snort, eyes widening behind the thick, tinted lenses. “I admit it, Winesap, I’m not very civilized. I’m rigid and inflexible, and I’ve never learned to put the truth nicely.” He came a step nearer and held his glass out. I poured. When he’d swallowed a little, standing there in front of my chair like a student, his head only inches above the level of mine, he held out the glass again, this time pointing at my chin with it. “I’ll tell you the trouble with trying to learn history from fairytales,” he said, strong emotion in his voice. He came toward me a step, crowding me, still pointing. “They’re mindless—even the best of them!—all bullying, no intelligence, no moral profluence, ergo no real history! Static! They’re exactly true to life, those dreary flats between historical upheavals. The handsome prince comes; he finds his beloved and they live happily ever after; and no one any longer speaks or sends cards to the stepsisters.” He leered.
I nodded, reserving judgment, half inviting him to continue. Though he clung to his image, his argument had made a sudden, uncharacteristic skip of theme and logic—had leaped, arms and legs flailing, toward chaos. Perhaps we were about to get somewhere.
His voice became still more emotional, barely in control. “People like you, Professor Winesap,” he said, “may pity the stepsisters, the wicked old stepmother. You may try to understand them by some theory of dream-analysis. You may even work it out that the cruel old witch who’s behind it all is of use in the world, provoking those she injures toward greater benevolence.” He turned around jerkily, preparing to step to his chair again, but remained where he stood, bent forward, pointing back at me with his glass. “It never occurs to you that the beautiful princess and the wicked old witch believe exactly the same thing. Anything at all, including cunning and lies, will work for the beautiful; nothing helps the ugly.”
“That’s true,” I said lightly, “that never occurs to me.”
He baa’d, then went to his chair and abruptly sat down. “Well, it’s a fact, Winesap. Take my word for it.”
I nodded, pushing my tongue into my cheek. I could see why they felt as they did about him, those people at the party—why Agaard, in his troubles, could turn only to a stranger.
He was saying, almost a shout, “I’ve had experience with the happy, blessed people of the palace, if you follow my metaphor.”
“The lucky ones.”
“Exactly.” He looked at me fiercely, as if I were the cruellest, most unfeeling of the lucky, then glanced away. Yellow flames leaped up around the log he’d put on, though I’d have sworn, a moment earlier, that the fire was dead.
He swallowed a little wine, then said, feeling he’d gone too far, no doubt, relaxing a little by an act of will, bringing his foot out from under his chair, “Well you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I prefer the old-fashioned ideal of history. Hard-won facts, incontrovertible proofs.”
I nodded. The trouble with incontrovertible proofs I might have told him, is that they shut down conversation, inspire not mutual exploration through debate but scorn and attack. You prove that your man in his castle of logic and hard-won facts got some trivial detail wrong (I might mention the term psycho-history), and as his knights come fleeing in dismay to your side—blushing, stammering, hitting themselves for shame—you blast his elegant fortress to Kingdom Come.
“If history were done properly,” he said, “it would make us better men.”
I avoided his eyes.
“Men and women,” he said, clumsily correcting himself.
“We’re not in disagreement about that,” I said. I decided to let it rest there, a truce agreed upon by m
utual misinterpretation. If he was trying to think of some new way to attack me, nothing came to him. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, I thought. I no longer cared; his opinion was no longer of interest. Let him tyrannize his students, his son. It wasn’t my sport.
He stared for a long time, unmoving, into the fire, his eyebrows jammed inward, eyes darting here and there. He too could see that we’d come to an impasse, a classic stalemate; let him break it if he could. Then it seemed to me that I heard something move, somewhere above us. When I glanced at him I saw that Agaard had heard it too, though he was careful not to turn or look up. I continued to listen and heard it again, perhaps the sound of a chair being dragged across a floor upstairs. In embarrassment I drew back my foot, noticing that I’d been tromping rhythmically not on the claw of the table leg but Agaard’s shoe. He cleared his throat and glanced at me—we both looked down—then turned his toe inward, out of my way.
Now we both sat motionless, the whole house utterly still, like the hush between heartbeats. The sound came again.
All at once Agaard said, “You haven’t asked about Freddy.”
“I thought I had,” I said. Our glances met and dropped again, two rams backing off. Quickly, I said, “I meant to. I’d be interested to hear.”
He put on a pained smile for a moment, then let it twist to unabashed woe and turned his face away to stare at the high, dark windows, no neighbor’s light anywhere, so far as I could see; then he whispered something and, snatching off his glasses, covered his eyes with one hand. I sat more erect, startled by his sudden emotion; I was half out of my chair. He sat rigid, regaining self-control, then lowered his hand and said sternly to the table between us—his hands relaxed, as if his body weren’t involved, his eyes squinting for sharper concentration—“He’s a sensitive boy. He writes poetry, in fact.” His laugh barked out: then instantly his face was serious again. “I don’t know if it’s poetry. Long things in prose, vaguely historical. He used to let me read it. Lately … I suppose I must have said the wrong things.”