Testing the Current

by William McPherson

  WILLIAM McPHERSON (b. 1933) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning literary critic, editor, journalist, and novelist. Born and reared in Michigan, he attended three universities over the course of seven years but left before attaining a degree. After a stint in the Merchant Marine (he is still an able-bodied seaman), he started at The Washington Post as a copyboy in 1958, soon becoming a staff writer and editor. He spent several years as a senior editor at William Morrow & Co. and returned to the Post, first as its daily book editor, then as founding editor of its independent book section, Book World. Later he moved to the newspaper’s editorial page, where he selected the letters to the editor and wrote a weekly op-ed column. After a two-year leave of absence, he left the newspaper in 1987 to write full time. His first novel, Testing the Current, was originally published in 1984. A second, To the Sargasso Sea, published in 1987, took up the story of the first novel some thirty years later. In 1989 he went to Berlin as the Wall was coming down and ended up in Romania in early 1990, shortly after the fall of the Communist regime, intending to stay for three days. Instead, he spent most of the next six years there, writing about post-Communist Romania for The Washington Post, Granta, and The Wilson Quarterly.

  D.T. MAX is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery, published in 2007, and Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, published in 2012.

  TESTING THE CURRENT

  WILLIAM McPHERSON

  Afterword by

  D. T. MAX

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1984 by William McPherson

  Afterword copyright © 2013 by D. T. Max

  All rights reserved.

  The author wishes to acknowledge the use of some lines from Wilfrid S. Bronson’s Fingerfins, The Tale of a Sargasso Fish, published by Macmillan in 1930. He is also grateful to Jane McPherson and Jon Jefferson for their help in making this edition possible, and to Yaddo, where a portion of this book was written.

  Cover photograph: Carol Betsch, View to Lake St. Clair, Edsel and Eleanor Ford House, Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan, 1998 (detail) © Carol Betsch; courtesy of the artist.

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  McPherson, William.

  Testing the current / by William McPherson ; afterword by D. T. Max.

  p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-602-3 (alk. paper)

  1. Youth—Fiction. 2. Depressions—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.C395T4 2012

  813'.54—dc23

  2012016607

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-59017-603-0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Kinderszenen

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Afterword

  This book is for

  Jane Elizabeth McPherson

  Plus de détails, plus de détails...il n’y a d’originalité et de vérité que dans les détails.

  —Stendhal

  KINDERSZENEN

  THAT SUMMER morning, in the distance, Daisy Meyer bent her blond head over her club, a short iron for the short sixth hole, in effortless concentration on her practice swing. Still engrossed in her projected shot, and seemingly oblivious to the murmurings of the women on the porch, she walked over to the ball, addressed it, and crisply shot it off. For a moment the vision was fixed, motionless, beyond time—left leg straight, right knee bent, arms, shoulders, hips following through, ball suspended in flight—before the breeze stirred the leaves of the elms, her body unfolded, and the ball descended in its slow arc to the green, where it rolled to within a few feet of the cup, as, far across the fairways, the river began to flow again in the sunlight, catching it, and sending it back in sharp, dazzling beams of light.

  Daisy wore a white sharkskin dress, and, from the steps, Daisy, her yellow hair, her white dress, seemed to shine as brightly in the morning sun as the ball that rested on the green. At least Tommy supposed the dress was sharkskin. It was what ladies usually wore on the golf course. It was what Emily Sedgwick, his future sister-in-law, had worn the morning of her first golf date with his mother. Tommy knew that because on that other morning Emily’s enormous St. Bernard had swum across the channel from the Island where Emily and Daisy and the rest of them all summered, bounded across the fairway, and leapt, his forepaws to her shoulders, dropping water and mud on her crisp new dress, destroying the impression of freshness she had hoped to create. Tommy had not seen it but had heard the story many times. It made sharkskin seem the fabric of choice, as the Island was the summer place of choice—it was never known as anything but the Island, the words embroidered in green on the towels, in green on the bed linen, stamped in green on the letter paper—as, one summer, rum and grapefruit juice had been the drink of choice; as golf was the sport of choice. Golf had never been Tommy’s choice, of course, but the choice imposed on him that summer when, as soon as school was out and his foot had healed, he was sent two mornings a week to the club for his lesson with Emil, the pro. It was not that Emil was hard, simply that the game was impossible: mashies, niblicks, spoons, brassies, drivers, mid-irons, putters, wedges, God knew what, never referred to by the number stamped on each club, only by the name that one was simply supposed to know, the way one knew, for example, never to bring a cat near Mrs. Appleton, who didn’t play golf but summered on the porch, rocking, gossiping.

  Mrs. Appleton, and a lot of other people, too, were surprised when Daisy Addington, Governor Wentworth’s granddaughter, married Phil Meyer, who was Jewish, or part Jewish, even though his parents could be seen every Sunday in the same pew at St. James’, singing as lustily as Episcopalians then permitted themselves to. Blood is thicker than baptismal water, and some remembered when Phil Meyer’s grandfather had come around with a cart, a Yiddish-speaking peddler buying and selling junk, who made his children and grandchildren rich from other people’s trash. When Daisy married Phil, his parents gave them a house—on the hill, the location of choice—and her parents stocked it with china and silver and linens. Between them they filled it with furniture, and whatever may have been lacking in what the Addingtons and the Meyers supplied, other wedding gifts filled in. Daisy and Phil had everything, it was said later, too much—that was the trouble. Tommy did not remember when Daisy and Phil were married, but he’d heard a lot of talk about it. Nor had he ever been in their house, but he had heard a lot about that, too, and he imagined it as being all white and yellow, like Daisy, golden with the sun streaming in, and very comfortable, with plump chairs and blue and white and yellow flowers in crystal vases; fragile and beautiful, like Daisy; comfortable, like Phil, who was more ruddy than fair, with thick wavy hair the color of red sand. He was a good golfer, too, like the rest of them, but kind.

  They had no children. Tommy did not know much about children, being only eight himself, but he had a theory about where they came from. On the wedding night or shortly thereafter, he supposed, something terrible happened, something literally unspeakable, that magically determined the possibility and the number of children that issued forth
over the years. It happened only once, and it was immediately erased from memory, else it would have shown on the face, the shame or the terrible memory. And certainly on Daisy’s face there was nothing but pleasure and, this day, sunlight as she walked toward the green, her clubs slung over her shoulder, to sink her putt. Daisy never used a caddy, and she almost always sank her putts. Phil’s face had a different look, quiet, thoughtful.

  At the end of that summer, just before school started again, Tommy’s parents celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and the house where he had spent his life began to fill with silver: two candelabra from his Aunt Elizabeth in Grosse Pointe, who in the glamorous photograph in his parents’ bedroom reclined forever in dappled sunlight on a wicker chaise; pairs of candlesticks, Sheffield vegetable dishes, a punch bowl, three platters, stuffing spoons, serving spoons, four curious salt dishes with blue glass liners, tiny salt and pepper shakers, candy dishes, cocktail plates, a cocktail shaker, even a silver statue of an antlered elk. There was so much silver Tommy wondered where his mother would put it all, but she liked silver and found a place for most of it. A gift his mother admired very much came from her sister Clara and his Uncle Andrew, who had an apartment in Chicago but lived in a small town near Duluth so his uncle could be near the mines and the timber that kept their establishments going and that provided the dozen silver goblets in the special case lined with blue velvet from Peacock’s in Chicago. It was the best jewelry store in the city. To Tommy, the most interesting thing about the goblets was the way each one fit into its own velvet niche in the case. Even so, his father didn’t like them. They made everything taste like tin, he said, and he refused to use them. Tommy secretly agreed. The goblets sparkled, but when he drank some water out of one of them the water did have a peculiar metallic taste.

  It had always seemed to Tommy that his Aunt Clara’s gifts were meant to be admired rather than enjoyed, which was also the way Tommy felt about her. The Christmas he was in kindergarten they had stayed with his aunt and uncle at their apartment in Chicago. Before the tree could be approached and the gifts opened, he had had to sit through soft-boiled eggs, which made him gag, broiled bacon because it must never be fried, orange juice, and coffee, in that order, because even adults should not drink orange juice and coffee on an empty stomach. His aunt that morning had worn an ice-blue satin dressing gown that matched her eyes and fell in heavy folds to her slippers, and she ate very slowly, pausing often to discuss President Roosevelt’s criminal behavior. His Uncle Andrew was nice to him, though. He let him dial the telephone for him, and Tommy had never seen a dial telephone before. He didn’t remember much else about that time in Chicago except that the train trip was fun. He had his own berth.

  His parents’ anniversary party was going to be a great event, a dinner and dance at the country club. There was going to be a real orchestra, and Tommy was going to be allowed to go for a little while because he was family. No other children would be there; it was a grown-up party. It was going to be at least as nice as the Sedgwicks’ famous house party and dance, which Tommy did not remember at all but had heard about, mostly from Mrs. Steer, who was there despite the fact that the Steers had lost all their money in the Depression so Mrs. Steer had to make her own evening dress. His mother didn’t talk about things like that. Tommy’s father had actually made money in the Depression—somehow taken it out of the hole everyone else’s was going into, Tommy supposed—and they were very fortunate.

  Early that summer, when his foot had healed and the golf lessons had begun, Tommy was sitting on the broad steps leading toward the tee, watching the elms in the summer twilight and, beyond, the river. It was after dinner—he ate at the country club a lot on summer nights, with his parents and once in a while, as this night, with one or the other of his brothers, who were usually somewhere else, with their girls, probably—when Phil Meyer came through the swinging doors, sat down and put his arm over Tommy’s shoulder, as if they shared a common sadness. “Mac,” he said—he was the only person in the world who ever called him Mac, which was his father’s name—“what’s on your mind?”

  Tommy was flattered and touched because it was generally assumed that, being eight, he had nothing on his mind, certainly nothing that would engage a grown-up’s attention—nothing more than a skinned knee, eating hazelnuts from the bush or shaking green apples from the Slades’ tree next door to his house, playing in the woods up the street or on the Island, catching bees in jars or toads in the hand, and chasing snakes through the endless days of summer. And at that moment, as he stared off into the dusk, beneath the paper lanterns hanging from the eaves of the long porch and the moss baskets of ivy and begonias, there was nothing on his mind that he could put into words, more a state of mind than anything on it—solitude, the mystery of life, that sort of thing, which, at eight, he had a sense of but lacked the structure in which to put it.

  Tommy liked Phil. He was never sure if he should call him Phil or Mr. Meyer, because although Phil was a few years older than his brothers he was near of an age to them. He liked Phil’s voice, softer than Phil’s father’s, which was warm but gruff and quite loud. Emily’s mother called Mr. Meyer a diamond in the rough, and everyone agreed. Tommy liked Phil’s hand on his shoulder, implying as it did a certain comradeship under the sky, an equality of man and boy. It was a heady feeling, there on the porch, that there might be something on his mind that would be of interest to an adult male in white flannels, handsome, an athlete, a married man but not like the other, much older married men who were his parents’ friends. Tommy wondered where Daisy was. She was elsewhere, that was clear, and Phil was sitting here beside him, in white flannels—he always imagined Phil in white flannels—asking how his golf game was coming, what was on his mind. Golf game, imagine! An eight-year-old with a golf game! He might as well have asked him about the WPA. So they sat there in silence for a few moments, watching the purple and amber glow of the lanterns and the fireflies’ rising from the lawn to signal in the stillness, while Tommy wondered what might be on his mind that would interest Phil Meyer. Not his skinned knee, not the abysmal shame that was too embarrassing to speak of, of not being able to swing the club, the mashie—it was supposed to be the easiest to handle—so as to hit the ball somewhere, anywhere. No, he could not say that, or any of the other things that flickered through his mind, such as what the women were saying as they watched Daisy tee off. They were talking about her, he knew that, because when he came along Mrs. Appleton said, “Little pitchers have big ears,” and they all stopped talking. He supposed Mrs. Appleton thought he didn’t know what she meant, but he wasn’t that stupid. He knew they weren’t admiring Daisy’s shot, or her grace. Maybe they were envying the way she looked. None of them looked so cool, so elegant, so in control approaching the ball. None of them could play as well, either. Only Mrs. Steer was better at the game, and she hadn’t been there that day. Except for Mrs. Appleton, though, some of them were pretty good at it. His mother was very good at it, but not so good as Daisy or Mrs. Steer, and so was Emily Sedgwick, his brother John’s girlfriend. Sometimes his mother played with Daisy in a foursome, but not often. His mother was older, for one thing, and they moved in a different set, although everyone who came to the country club or summered in the old shingled cottages on the Island really belonged to the same set.

  Because Tommy could not say any of these things, which did run through his mind, he asked a question, turning the subject away from himself. He was, as his father said, always full of questions, and this was something he was curious about. Paul Malotte had learned about it when he made his First Communion, but he couldn’t explain it either. It was the commandment they talked least about in Sunday school, one of the mysteries of the adult world, else why the name?

  “What’s adultery?” he asked. There was a long pause. The fireflies played, the lanterns burned soft and steady, music and laughter and the sounds of dancing floated out from the clubhouse.

  “Adultery?” Phil Meyer gave hi
m a quick look. “Well, I guess you’d say it’s something that married people do. Maybe they used to like each other, maybe they still do,” he replied, “but something happens and they end up hurting each other a lot.”

  “But they’re not supposed to do it,” Tommy said. Paul had said so. It was one of the things you couldn’t do, like stealing or murder.

  “No,” Phil said, “they’re not supposed to do it. You don’t need to worry about that yet, Tommy. Worry about keeping your eye on the ball. You keep your eye on the ball and the rest of the game just comes naturally.” Phil took his hand away from Tommy’s shoulder, gave him a playful tap on the arm, man to man, and went back into the clubhouse, the wide screened doors swinging after him. A few minutes later Tommy’s brother was calling his name, impatient to take him back to the Island while his parents stayed on to play bridge.

  In those days the country club was the center of Tommy’s life. It wasn’t much of a country club, as he discovered later when his brother John, married then, took him to Tam O’Shanter and Westward Ho, two really fancy clubs outside Chicago, with swimming pools and tennis courts and vast fairways and crystal chandeliers and many, many rooms. But its members believed it to be the oldest in the state, among the oldest in the country, and they were very proud of it. Certainly it looked old, and it had its own charms. The dining room was made of split birch saplings and birchbark panels, lighted by wooden chandeliers and sconces with birchbark shades. The same people took their dinners there every night, or so it seemed—every night he was there, at least: the older Meyers, who drove a maroon Buick; the Sedgwicks and Mrs. Addington, Daisy’s mother, who came over from the Island, sometimes with her own mother, Mrs. Wentworth, sometimes with Mr. Wolfe if he was in town, or old Mr. Treverton; Dr. and Mrs. Rodgers, who often ate by themselves, usually in silence, interrupted occasionally by perfunctory words about one thing or another—the salt that wouldn’t shake, the weather, the monotony of the chicken, the freshness of the whitefish. Dr. Rodgers smoked Camels and had a voice like falling gravel. He would always say, “Hello, boy”—Tommy thought he couldn’t remember his name—and Mrs. Rodgers, who had the most amazing thick white hair knotted around her head and whose nails were short but brightly polished, would smile and say, “Good evening, Tommy,” in her cultivated, throaty voice. Dr. Rodgers was thin, but Mrs. Rodgers was fat. And some nights Daisy and Phil ate there too, often with the Griswolds, or at least they used to, and sometimes with Mr. Wolfe. Mr. Wolfe used to eat there with Mrs. Slade, too, but she didn’t come to the country club anymore. It had been a long, long time since Tommy had seen Mrs. Slade at the country club. And every night, when Tommy and his parents and whomever else they were with would pass by the groups of diners, they would pause and exchange greetings, and his mother would nudge him if he forgot to say “Good evening” in return.