Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  Sara touched the bust, its pink features fresh and vapid as a baby’s. Then she said with more force than the stillness required, “Any man of thirty with a face bare as this, deserves to die.”

  “It’s the sculptor,” he said. “Don’t blame poor Cary.”

  “But I do,” she said. “If he’d been half a man, left behind a man’s memory, his wife or whoever would have never paid for this—” She thumped the smooth forehead; it thudded, all but grunted. “Say his poem anyhow.”

  Charles Tamplin obeyed, for one line, in a whisper—“It is not growing like a tree—” Then refused, clamped shut. Deserve, she had said. She did not deserve this. One waste he could spare himself.

  In his pause, she prompted; completed the sentence (all she knew of the poem)—“In bulk, doth make man better be.” Then she watched him and waited.

  He did not face her but he shook his head. She accepted, walked on, so he stood alone and said to himself, slowly and clearly to the walls of his skull, Jonson’s ten perfect lines to the memory of Cary—

  It is not growing like a tree

  In bulk, doth make man better be

  Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,

  To fall a log at last, dry, bald and sear.

  A lily of a day

  Is fairer far in May

  Although it fall and die that night;

  It was the plant and flower of light.

  In small proportions, we just beauty see;

  And in short measures, life may perfect be.

  He felt as though a green leaf uncoiled on his lips. A kindness to himself, the first for weeks. As though he might yet survive the scorch, live to tell the tale. What tale? His and Sara’s, the one he knew, only tale there was. Name another than theirs. Nothing so grand as betrayal or treason; only the oldest story of all—the simple entire failure to meet, to serve one another and delight in the work. Imagine a life of telling that—stories, poems for another fifty years. Well, he could and must, beginning tomorrow, in eighteen hours. His own small proportion, just beauty, alone.

  When—stronger for the moment of solitude used—he had wandered toward Sara, past altar and choir, he found her not in tears nor with her pallor-of-victim but with head back, eyes wide and fixed on a spot high above on the crowded wall, the skin of her forehead and jaw taut with triumph.

  “Do you know that?” She said. Not facing him, she pointed to a marble plaque—Bartholomew.

  He knew of a house by that name in the village, but this he had missed—a long inscription. He shook his head, No, and began to read silently.

  “I found it,” she said and forced him to listen—

  “Lo, Huddled up together lie

  Gray age, green youth, white infancy.

  If death doth nature’s laws dispense

  And reconciles all difference,

  Tis fit one flesh one house should have,

  One tomb, one epitaph, one grave;

  And they that lived and loved either

  Should die and lie and sleep together.

  Go, reader. Whether go or stay,

  Thou must not hence be long away.”

  He heard her to the end, eyes on her not the poem. Then he left, half-ran to the south door, the yard; and had run through half the ruining tombs there (of wool merchants, stone wool-sacks on each) before he knew he was fleeing again. He stopped in the light and, though he did not turn, knew she had not followed, was still inside. Could he leave her there now; go his own way at last, unexplained, free?—give her all the time she needed to copy, memorize, digest her newest triumph; then find her own way to Southampton, her ship? No. He turned.

  She stepped through the south door herself, into sun; walked briskly to him. “It’s better,” she said. “It’s a truer poem. It could change whole lives.

  He shrugged in a quick gust of wind—still not spring. “We’ll drive toward Shipton,” he said. “They had snow.”

  So they had—a late flurry, two days before, of which rare patches clung on in the sun, at the roots of trees, the lee of walls. As he drove them slowly upward through the long empty hills, it was all they had to fasten on—a hunt for snow, like a child’s hunt for lucky white horses to stamp. He would see a white patch, point it silently to her; she would crane, nod silently, then find one herself. Time unreeled behind them, an exhausted ribbon. Then they reached a crest and rode for a while on its bare bright ridge—not a flake of snow, not a house, a tree. For half a mile, Charles Tamplin continued searching, the rising taste of panic plating his teeth. At last, again, they were locked alone together. And all his doing, a simple ride to kill a day as painlessly as possible; and now the whole world, in conspiracy, had slunk into hiding, leaving him and her, her on him, no escape, no choice, only needs to face, their airless symbiosis to swallow, their sentence to accept.

  But she did not speak, continued searching too; so the panic leeched away and he felt alone, not with her but with her story, hers and his— this very day a well-shaped story itself. Their neutral lunch, his victory over her at Cary’s bust, her excited discovery of a mass-epitaph, his moment of flight and now this ride which would last on till dusk, bring them down silently from the hills into Woodstock—a walk by the darkening lake at Blenheim (the lake sliding through a whole gallery of painters with each moment’s change of light—Corot, Monet, Manet, Courbet), supper at The Bear, then Oxford, separate sleep; in the morning a calm end. He drove now mechanically, no longer looking, seeing only the shape of that story, lean, rounded. A small sad proportion, short measure, but beautiful. He was smiling slightly. He was healing. Safe.

  “Look,” she said.

  He looked, straight ahead, hit the brake, barely stopped them. A flock of tan sheep filled the road, buffed his fender.

  “My god,” she said. “You nearly killed us.”

  He winced, invisibly, at her automatic us (women had invented the first-person-plural: when we got our doctorate; when we were in the army); but the whole offered sight was compensation. The stalled car straddled a narrow road. The road was the spine of the highest hill. Sides sloped away quickly onto milder hills, green and gold prospects hung like flats, “effects” in a nineteenth-century play—villages, towers, warrens of life. Sheep filled the road before him and were aiming rightward through a breeched stone wall down the sinking slope. Grass seemed no greener there than where they had left, browner in fact; and a squat bare fruit tree was all the shade. But that seemed their aim—why? “To see the other side”?

  They crossed on another half-minute or so, rising from the left, eyeing skittishly the car, but bent all the same on their profitless choice, as though south Ireland lay yards away, sweet green to their knees. Then a black dog shot up, a harassed sergeant, smartening his line, butting, nosing in furious silence—or was it? The car-glass excluded all noise, all sense but vision.

  Charles Tamplin felt himself suspended, space and time. This might as easily be Galilee as Oxfordshire, before Christ, before green hills burnt to sand.

  And with the last sheep—mostly new slow lambs—a shepherd rose. Young himself and slow—maybe fourteen, red-haired, a credible David, a stick in his right hand which hung loose, languid, oblivious to his flock. As he hopped the shallow ditch, stepped into the road, he might have been awakened that instant by warmth, drawn from sleep under leaves by sun, the melted snow. His eyes squinted sleepily; his face, hands, clothes seemed fresh with dirt of a hibernation. He took less notice of the car than his sheep, passed an arm’s reach from it, never flickered a glance. Only—at the last moment of his profile—he faltered a step, cocked his chin as though listening but to something ahead, in his own slow path. Another sound Charles Tamplin strained to hear, balked by glass. Yet though the road was clear now, he did not move, to crank the car or speak; for the shepherd had reached the bare fruit tree and—his sheep gone on—bent now and reached to the ground at its roots where a patch of snow no larger than a plate had survived both sun and the trampling flock. Now he stood, f
aced round, ate a handful of snow, rubbed the rest on his eyes, smiled—awake now and quick—quite clearly to Sara, said a word to her, waved. His lips had said “Sorry.”

  Sara smiled in return, nodding pardon to him happily.

  He took it, waved again, then ran with his dog out of sight down the slope.

  Charles Tamplin looked to Sara—the back of her head. She still watched the boy—or the space where he’d stood and staged his grace as natural as breath. She was gone now, a foot away, still here beside him but gone for good. There were other doors. She had seen that at last. Had opened one at least—and shut another. The crown of her black hair stood now against him, the thickest gate, barred, guarded, perilous. He cranked the engine, shifted gear quietly. She still faced the bare tree, the uneaten snow; so Charles Tamplin thought they could move on now toward the end of the day, tired and calm. But the wheels had not rolled one turn before he knew—clearly and from her, as though her hidden eyes had flung it backward, a vise for his heart—that the day, the story, ended here, not before or later; ended with the happy boy’s word, with Sara’s smile; an end but a door blown fiercely open on a world, older, simpler, deeper than he’d known. A family huddled together in death, a handful of snow in early spring light, a “Sorry” through glass, a smiling pardon. Small proportion?—gigantic perhaps, crushing, stifling but just and most beautiful, a possible tale, a possible life, secret extended to all but him. Yet tale, life, secret which it now must be his duty to describe, celebrate, adore at a distance. The happiness of others. He adored them through tears.

  But Blenheim now, dinner, sleepless night, their final day.

  2

  A Dog’s Death

  I HAD WATCHED the ship leave—and among waving hundreds, one still passenger—at ten that morning, prompt and smooth as a Swiss railway. And it did seem to slide on rails not water—unpitted, firm, two-way, returnable—though it moved toward the winter Atlantic on a trip which would never return to me at least. Then I had driven home dangerously, courting a sharper permanent pain, my conscious destination being bed, drowned sleep. Home was one rented room in the house of a childless working couple—brown walls—and I reached it by noon, fell fully clothed on my narrow bed, flung myself onto sleep like a bale. Sleep took me—as it always kindly has—held me dreamless, careless, alone but not lonely till knocking reached me wherever I lay. I have always waked as quickly as slept, and as desperately—each nerve instantly flayed and clanging—so I was on my feet and moving before I knew what the noise was or where.

  Only the knuckles of a hand on my door, a voice—“Mr. Tamplin?”

  My landlady—home. Why home at this hour? I glanced to the window, the sky—gray of course but not late, not evening. “Coming,” I said and opened on her face; said “Oh,” helpless, at what she had become since breakfast—her skin ribbed and thin as cigarette paper, whiter even; hennaed curls collapsed and clinging to her skull, a monstrous child; her eyes red; lips drawn; long neck corded by the effort to speak.

  She said, “I am sorry. You were sleeping, I know, on troubles of your own but help me ple—” Her throat refused her.

  I waited till she had control again; but when her lips moved they were silent, only flapped—a rain-soaked flag. So I said “Oh I’ll live” to her opening apology, smiled, went on—“What’s the trouble, Bett?”

  She began and found she could manage, but slowly. “Mr. Tamplin, I meant not to worry you, knowing you have your own heartache. I told Buck this morning when he said you’d help. ‘Buck, he’s low himself. We won’t tell him till it’s over and done and the flowers planted. We must face it ourselves.’” She stopped, looked over the stairwell rail. “But she’s down there now and we can’t face it. Not after twelve years.”

  I honestly did not understand. “Face who? Face what?”

  “Her,” she said. She stabbed with a finger down again. “The lady vet. She’s come for old Peter.”

  “What’s happened to Peter?”

  Again she was silenced, stared struggling at me. (Peter was their dog, a low white Sealyham; had been theirs all his life—twelve years—was half-blind now but still, I thought, as strong as a trap. Not a week before, I had entered the front door late at night—on Peter in the hall, lurching on stump legs but galvanized by my sound and smell. He had charged, bare teeth that could pierce a boot. I had dodged, he had lunged—a small rhino—missed me, struck the wall, fallen. I had made it safely to the dark front lounge, another joke on Peter, Bett laughing behind me as she came to retrieve him.)

  But she won at last and said, “Tumors. All over. He’s chocked with tumors. I found the first one four days ago when he wouldn’t eat. I was feeling his soft throat”—she felt her own—“when I found this bird’s egg in there, slipping out of my touch. Then I felt him all over. They had beat me to him—everywhere, little sliding eggs. For three days I didn’t say a word to Buck nor you—I knew you faced your own separations—but I fed Peter what he would eat, sweet chocolate. Still he’s failed every day. Wouldn’t move this morning so Buck went to pet him and felt for himself. They had grown half-again as big in that time. He went to the vet, paid her extra money to come to the house. She’s just now looked and says it’s hopeless, nothing but pain. We must put him down, the only kind thing—she must; we can’t.”

  I said, “I’ll miss not having him to dodge.”

  “That’s it,” she said. “He didn’t take to you. Nothing personal though. Never took to anyone but me and Buck. He’d have torn that vet’s hand off by now if he wasn’t so weak. What I’m asking is, why I’ve waked you is—since you and him never got along, would you go now and be with him when she puts him down?”

  I had said “Yes” before I thought of a reason—it would wrench my mind off me awhile, a chance to begin a life again.

  She went down two of the steps, called “Buck.” Out of sight, he opened their parlor door. She said, “You come here with me. He’s coming.”

  Buck said “All right” and I went down past her, pressing to the wall not to touch her body—any part of her, clothing, hair—pressed past Buck also as he climbed toward her, paused, said to me, “It’ll only be a moment. Quite painless, she says. But you’re very kind.”

  I nodded but did not say a word. No word, no touch. This new chance had its own rules, cold as glass.

  Peter lay in his circle of wicker basket on a bed-pillow covered with a clean white case. His upward eye was open, black, on guard toward the woman, the vet on a hassock beside him; it flicked to me as I entered and said my name; and with recognition he rose in front on two legs, but silently.

  I waited, hand on door, for his verdict—enemy breaching his citadel or final friend.

  He only looked downward—no other move, no growl, no teeth.

  “Come in,” she said firmly—a large woman in her late forties, bobbed hair—then softer, “Did you shut the door tightly?”

  I nodded Yes, still pressed against it.

  “There is really no use your being here—nothing for you to do, that is. Simplest job I ever perform—simplest in the world—but they wanted a witness. Of my kindness perhaps. I am kind,” she said and raised (not flourished) her large right hand which poised in the air, an elaborate claw composed of her fingers and a hypodermic—middlesized, plunger drawn on a column of air.

  I nodded comprehension.

  But she had her own rite to perform, her defense to build—before only me though she spoke it to Peter as she kneaded his chest with her empty hand. “The kindness is not what I do but when—not whether to kill; when to kill, you see.”

  The last had not been put as a question; but again I nodded, as sanction now of her motive and act.

  The claw moved swiftly toward its job.

  I said “No.”

  She looked to me stunned, her fine hand balked three inches from Peter. Her lips said “No?” in genuine fear. I had questioned her life, defied her defense. “He is not yours,” she said. “I have orders from them.”


  Before her fear became anger, I said, “I must do my part.” My part, I saw, was to stand nearer in. I took the steps, stood a foot from Peter—he was still half-risen, watching his feet. I said “All right.”

  The claw flew toward a taut space she had stretched with two free fingers in Peter’s chest. The needle popped as it tore the rind. Her thumb pumped downward for three steady seconds, every atom of air.

  Peter buckled on his legs, fell forward on his pillow. He had never looked up, shown surprise or coughed.

  She breathed and began to stroke his ear. “Beautiful,” she said.

  He seemed now to me—had always seemed—a pile of soiled feathers. “Peter? Beautiful?”

  “That death,” she said.

  I knelt and touched the ear myself—the rules allowed that, now he was dead—brushed her own still finger, thought of a ship on the black Atlantic, in its white heart my love borne smiling away from me kneeling here, my throat crammed with knowledge that now was the time, that the time was past, to murder that love but powerless to serve myself, unkind.

  3

  Scars

  SAPPED BY a bath, Charles Tamplin slept on his back entirely naked but alone, unthreatened, leaned on only by afternoon sun, the light a quiet unneedful companion—as was the room. He had propped the room slowly round himself in the weeks since his first love failed and left; and though it was forming like a reef, with no plan, it seemed already (sparse as it was, awaiting funds) a sufficient fort against all but death. And portable—nothing his car couldn’t haul wherever his future, his new self-sufficient life, would steer. “Companion and guard,” he meant it to be; and the chief guards mounted watch now on his sleep—his books in shelves; on the desk a draft of half his thesis and notes for his novel; beside them a six-inch Japanese ivory (two men, a lady and a baboon dancing, tight in a ring, calligraphy all down the baboon’s kimono); above on the wall two large dark etchings, one a perfect old German Rembrandt fake, the Hundred Guilder print, Christ ganged about by most of His life (disciples, Pharisees, the sick in carts, children for blessing); the other, genuine (bought with the savings of his recent solitude), Picasso’s naked minotaur by a sleeping woman, his huge left arm lifting her cover, right arm extended—extending?—toward her, both urgent and static; she naked and plain, bleached in moonlight, oblivious but troubled.