The Oasis: A Novel (Neversink)

by Mccarthy, Mary

  Joe Lockman was the only one in the group to be genuinely disturbed by the regression, as he thought of it, to an age of inconvenience. He was an old hand at roughing it—which was not the trouble. Just to show the stuff he was made of, he had spent the whole afternoon with his scythe, subduing the Utopian hillside, working at top speed and with no variation of pace, leaving havoc behind him and alarm in the minds of his colleagues, who did not understand the motive for such a wholesale act of destruction. The signs of industry in his fellows—a man mowing the lawn and another putting up a hammock; a husband driving in clothes-poles and a wife hanging curtains in her window—he had watched with favor, interrupting his work to come down and give a word of advice (“Just let me have that lawn-mower a minute, young man, and I’ll show you how to do it”). Something, nevertheless, in the prevailing attitude did not smell right to him. It struck him that the colonists were virtually playing house. It made him quite uneasy to see those old lyre-backed wicker chairs dragged out so joyfully onto the lawn; he remembered them perfectly from his youth and regretted not having brought his foam-rubber glider from Belmont, brand-new last autumn and a thousand times more comfortable. All those oohs and aahs over the woodstoves and the waffle-irons sounded forced in his ears—could anyone honestly mean them? His wife hated cooking and would never adjust herself to using those clumsy old devices. Ever since the Second War, they had been doing without a regular maid; she seemed to prefer it that way, now that the children’s rooms were empty, just the two of them alone in the house. She liked bakery cakes, ready mixes, redispreads, rolls from the delicatessen; she often had him stop at the S. S. Pierce cold meat counter or the Home Foods department at Schrafft’s on Tremont Street to bring in something for supper. A nice little steak or some chops she did not mind doing, and Sundays, if she had to, if the parents were coming to dinner, she would put her roast in a self-basting pan, set the thermometer on the oven, and go upstairs to lie down. He knew Eva’s habits very well, and he could see that she was not going to get along at all with these younger women ecstasizing over bread tins and butter churns.

  Eva’s objections, however, were not the paramount question. Guessing how things would be, he had left an order with S. S. Pierce to send them a weekly food package—canned fruit, hams, hard salamis, smoked salmon, sandwich mixes, and a bottle or two of sparkling burgundy to be slipped in by a friendly clerk. His wife’s niceties and nerves, her hostilities and resistance to change he had jollied along for years; he almost loved them in her, identifying them with the womanly; he thought her more fastidious than himself and her aversion to the outdoors, he took for a mark of superiority, like her linen pumps and her nylons and her bad times of the month. That Eva would be out of her element here, he had accepted from the start; only the imminent war had made her consent to accompany him; and he was grateful enough for her presence to resign himself to her disapproval, though even now, despite thirty years of experience, he would not quite part with the hope (which he chided in himself as treasonable) that the caustic little queen of his household could become the comrade of his pleasures. But an allegiance even more profound than what he owed his wife’s happiness was being shaken by the behavior of the Utopians. His loyalty to the modern was challenged.

  The modern, with Joe, was a true passion and a cause, something more than a painter’s convention or a designer’s style. A great personal sincerity invested his feelings on this subject, for he was already a modern painter before he discovered the modern movement; the few lessons he had had in a business man’s art club in Boston had taught him only what he now called “a sterile academicism”—he had had to work out his idiom alone in his own backyard. The coincidence between his own efforts and the paintings of the School of Paris, pointed out to him finally by his amazed children, convinced him of the authenticity of the revelation he had had. Under the influence of a teacher who gave lessons in art by correspondence, he came quickly to believe that the modern was some sort of duty laid on every man who had heard its call, a system of knowledge and perception equivalent to revealed religion—and for all those born too early to receive its message, for Raphael and Shakespeare, he felt a kind of pity like that of the pious Christian for the deprived souls of the ancients, who died too soon to get the benefit of the Redemption. The routines of factory and family life, much as he respected them, had long impeded his progress in spontaneous self-expression, so that the summons to Utopia, when it came, had reached him like an awaited signal. When his son felt it necessary to warn him that the colonists held advanced opinions, Joe at once prepared himself for a rigorous testing of his convictions in the crucible of practice. He had flexed his will for cabins built like iceboxes, steel chairs or none, a long communal table in the shape of a streak of lightning, people reciting poems and wearing eccentric costumes, free love even, and the children running about naked.

  Nothing could have been better calculated to disturb his preconceptions than the 1910 summer hotel into which he found himself moving his drawing board. Of all periods in American history, the age of Taft made the least appeal to his imagination; he remembered it too well for it to hold for him any charm or mystery. Progress, in fact, to his mind, was measured against that era. Electric light, radio, television, labor-saving devices for the housewife, the abolition of piece-work, the tractor, all the benefits to mankind that had been developed within his memory, seemed to him to have ameliorated beyond estimate the life of the average person; and though he believed that there had been some tendency to substitute mechanical pleasure for living (a favorite doctrine with him), to depend too uncreatively on the juke-box, the movies, and the automobile, he considered this merely a misapplication of inventions basically good. He knew that he himself could set off tomorrow with a bowie-knife and a compass and forge out a life for himself, should atomic raids oblige it, but he was too chivalrous to dream of this as a solution for the problems of mankind in general (what would become of poor Eva?), and the idea that the splitting of the atom was in any way evil in itself had never entered his mind. The derogation of technology that was going on all around him was something strange to his ears; it struck him as slightly blasphemous, and he hoped that his wife would not hear it. The notion, moreover, that the past thirty-five years, the whole of his adult life, had been misspent by society, a notion that seemed to be current on the lawn, in the kitchen, in the lounge, filled him with consternation. He felt disillusioned with the colonists and did not know what to think.

  On the porch, waiting for Eva to call him to supper (irregular meals were bad for a diabetic condition), he experienced a sudden antagonism to Macdougal Macdermott, who sat laughing over a yellowed newspaper with a picture of a doughboy on the front page. Joe himself had fought in that war; indeed, his manhood had been seasoned in it—today, in his son’s old fatigue uniform, rolled up in the legs, with his slightly belligerent stance, he looked the veteran still, though grey and almost visibly aging, as though time were galloping through him like a horse racing to the finish. Amour propre urged him to insist that the first war had been necessary (he was not so sure about the second, in which his son had been wounded—Hitler, he thought now, should have been stopped in the Rhineland), but his positiveness was shaken by a sense that the bearded man’s self-assured laughter proceeded from obvious certainties to which only he was a stranger. He felt hurt, in his memories, the most defenseless part, and, unable to digest an emotion except through the catharsis of action, cast about for a way of making this clear to the others. A brace of partridge rising from the hill suggested the material for an object-lesson, a form of admonition, which had never failed him with his children or his salesmen. “Get them laughing, get them thinking,” he quoted, and went up to his room for his gun. In a few moments the party on the verandah saw him emerge onto the lawn, shoulder arms comically, and march off in drill-step singing “Over There.” “What’s up?” ejaculated Macdermott, interrupting himself briefly to cast a baffled glance at the manufacturer. A fellow intellectua
l shrugged. “Good hunting, Mr. Lockman!” trilled an oblivious voice from an upstairs window, serene in its malentendu. The rebuke had missed fire; no one had caught his meaning; and, half-puzzled, half-dismayed, Joe, still in march-time, his thin-skinned face knotted in conflict, vanished into the trees.

  Up above, in the meadow, flushing the long grasses for game, he came upon Will Taub, still standing on the peak. Joe had no way of knowing that the soul of the realist chieftain was in a delicate condition, enceinte with a new man. He had observed him down on the lawn and marked him with a foreman’s eye, being as yet too much of a novice in intellectual circles to distinguish conversation as an authorized branch of labor. Idleness actually frightened him; he could not behave normally in its presence. He was tired himself now, though he did not admit it, and the sight of the able-bodied man young enough to be his son (here Joe was mistaken; there was only ten years difference in their ages) taking it easy on the summit brought on in him one of those fits of nervousness that another’s inactivity always produced in him. He felt an impulse, not so much to chide Taub, as to do something to get him moving. He knew very well that he ought not to interfere; the man was a stranger to him—“Remember, you are not at home,” Eva had warned him already; “don’t be too familiar; these people don’t know you, Joe.” But the same fatality that made him drop a pot-lid in the kitchen at seven o’clock in the morning when he had promised to be quiet and was moving about on tip-toe overrode him now. “Just a word to the wise,” he said to himself in extenuation. “Come on, Joe, let’s get the lead out of his pants.” “State Police reporting,” he announced in a loud voice, coming up from behind Taub and shouldering his shotgun playfully. “Work or the guardhouse!”

  Taub swung around with a start; his trembling hands jerked up hastily above his shoulders, as if by their own volition, in a gesture out of Keystone comedy which appeared both ludicrous and utterly natural, as though his whole life had been an apprehensive preparation for this summons. He stared woodenly at Joe, his mouth opening and closing. Joe broke into a laugh. “Gotcha,” he shouted, “brother. Say, boy, what’s wrong with your nerves?” But as Taub’s face began to relax, Joe saw from it what he had done. The sympathy he had ready for all sick and wounded creatures commenced at once to flow. “Oh,” he said impetuously, “I’m sorry.” He put out a hand to touch Taub’s shoulder. But he could not modulate to solicitude without a glissade of buffoonery. “Aw,” he exclaimed, mock-wheedling, kicking a foot in the dirt in imitation of an urchin, “I didn’t really scare ya, did I?” Getting no reply, he grew still more contrite and serious and spoke finally in a natural voice. “Forgive me,” he declared with a sigh. All this time, he was studying Taub’s face eagerly, hunching his neck and pressing his own unshaven face with the rimless glasses forward, like a woman pleading her cause and searching the features of her lover for some token or clue. The reality of this terror was patent enough, but he was concerned to find the reason behind it. Having injured Taub, he had no wish to think ill of him (contrary to general practice), and the idea that Will was naturally fearful could not therefore enter his mind. A thought finally dawned on him. “Shucks,” he exclaimed. “I ought to have known. You’re a radical.” Taub nodded dumbly, accepting this, almost with gratitude, as the most favorable explanation of his conduct. But as soon as it occurred to him that he was after all a radical (the premise of his career recalling itself like the features of a forgotten friend), a righteous anger took possession of him. The trampling hooves of the police horses, the night-sticks flailing about, tear gas, arrest without warrant, torture, tar-and-feathers, all the indignities he might have suffered for his beliefs came vividly before his eyes: for all Joe knew, he had undergone them in person, and Joe’s ignorance now of the real facts of his history allowed him to think quite sincerely that this hypothetical case was his own.

  “Ignorance is no excuse!” he yelled suddenly, turning on Joe and advancing a threatening step in his large white shoe. “What are you doing here?” He knew very well that this must be one of the colonists but chose to act as if no common tie could connect them—in this way he imagined that he was freed from the usual sanctions of behavior. Heedless of Joe’s expostulations, he brandished a fist in the air and bellowed, “Get out,” sternly. “No trespassing,” he added, carried away with his thoughts and pointing to an imaginary sign. “This is private property.”

  Joe’s face looked pained. “I guess introductions are in order,” he suggested with mild reproof. He was perfectly certain that Taub knew him for a Utopian; Taub’s eyes, seeking to avoid an act of recognition, kept sliding insecurely away from a meeting with Joe’s face, so that his very violence had an element of constraint and even dissimulation which Joe did not find sympathetic. Nevertheless, to save Taub embarrassment, he presented himself formally. Taub stared at him a moment, and then broke away without answering. He had placed Joe suddenly in his mind and remembered that it was Macdermott who had imposed him on the Utopian council. “Fools!” he muttered to himself as he strode off to his cottage. “Why did they bring him here? They must have been mad to think of it.” All his benignity had vanished; it seemed to him that the apparition of this clown was a part of a plot to deride and humiliate him in some fashion that was still obscure. His whole being felt outraged by what he had just gone through: practical jokes were anathema to him; they belonged to an order of things which defied his powers of anticipation, like children, birds, cows, water, snakes, lightning, Gentiles, and automobiles. The thought of associating with Joe over a period of months struck him as truly preposterous; he felt deeply offended with Macdermott for having taken it for granted that he could.

  His mood was somewhat bettered by an encounter with two of the purist children, who, having witnessed the scene on the peak, leapt out at him from behind some bushes, pointing make-believe guns at him and shouting, “State Police.” This time, at least he was not taken off his guard. Recognizing a young Macdermott, he tried a genial tone. “Well, little man,” he said, appropriating from some long-dead uncle this form of address, “what does your father think of your pointing guns at people?” “My father is a dope,” young Macdermott answered promptly, and Taub laughed aloud with pleasure at this echo of his own thoughts. “Ha, ha,” he said, “that’s good,” and he went off toward his cottage rehearsing the child’s phrase softly, well pleased with himself and the world. His own question and the boy’s answer seemed to him extremely witty: Susan disappointed him, when he stopped to tell her the story, by taking it too matter-of-factly (she had many nieces and nephews). “Poor Macdougal,” he elucidated, with a groan of half-genuine sympathy as he set himself in the ideologue’s shoes. “What a comedown for a pacifist! His own children call him a dope.”

  Yet this deathblow, as he felt it, to the pretensions of the Macdermott faction did not quite dispose of the anger evoked by the collision with Joe. He went to bed in a bad humor, having quarreled with his wife about the stove, and was awakened very early by the sound of shots outside. To get back to sleep was impossible. In the city, he would have dressed, gone out tieless onto the street, bought coffee and a paper and felt himself king of the morning, the news, and the sleeping Village. But here he could only toss and wait for the communal breakfast, which was to be served in the central building, at an hour he was powerless to advance. When he came out at last onto the lawn, wearing new work clothes that scratched him and cumbered the freedom of his gait, he found a small commotion. Off to one side in the clearing, Joe was doing target practice at an improvised rifle-range he had created by fixing some tin cans to locust-trees. The young veteran and the news editors had sauntered off to join him; others remained to watch, for the news had already got around that the oil stove was flooded and breakfast would be delayed. A good thirty, however, were gathered in the kitchen, where the cook of the day was sobbing, having burned off her bangs and eyebrows when she put a torch to the stove. She was laughing and crying at the same time, for while she prized her appearance (it was she
who had brought the elaborate wardrobe), she had, so it happened, been Joe’s sponsor, together with her husband, and, recognizing her protégé’s hand in what had just befallen her, she was trying to treat the matter as lightly as possible.

  “What happened, Katy?” Taub inquired with real solicitude; an accident to another moved him to identification. “Him?” he conjectured softly, darting a serpentine glance in the direction of the clearing, and nodding his head profoundly as he felt his suspicion confirmed. “Joe?” she answered vaguely. “I suppose. He was trying to get his breakfast without asking anybody anything. I ought to have warned him not to touch the stove.” Katy Norell was aware that this forgivingness sat well on her, in lieu at least of eyebrows and hair, and she continued to repeat the explanation of just how it had happened to everyone who entered the room, until what had begun as sincere extenuation became, by asseveration, a kind of unpleasant accusal, since the latecomers would never have connected Joe with the accident if Katy had not told them exactly how he came to do it. Joe’s wife, Eva, in fact, tapping forward from the doorway on her small high heels, flung her a bitter look and absorbed herself very pointedly in a study of the stove’s mechanism, as if to suggest that the conviction rested on dubious testimony, and that this silent iron witness would tell a different story if it could. Young Preston Norell, observing this, put a cautionary finger on his wife’s bare elbow and nodded with his eyes toward Eva. Katy broke off in confusion. “Did my husband do that?” Eva demanded, facing her now directly, with a tone of impeachment. Katy blushed and hesitated. Everyone had turned toward her; there was an expectant silence in the kitchen as the colonists waited to see how this first crisis would be met. It was not a friendly atmosphere but one of suspended commitment. “Watch this!” said Taub’s eyes prophetically to Susan; at the door, someone hushed a member who demanded to know what was happening. The interest, for the spectators, centered on Katy’s character. With anyone else, it would have been a simple matter to say No or Yes and make an end of it, but the struggle she was having to pronounce a ready disclaimer was visible even through the soot on her expressive features. She did not dare to say Yes, though this was what nature urged on her, and she feared that a strong No would imply a previous lie. “It was only an accident,” she said finally, in a feeble and unveracious voice. “Somebody was careless and left the oil turned up without lighting the stove.”