Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  I waited awhile—thinking what? Most likely, nothing. (I can sit for whole half-hours, thinking nothing, my consciousness a bowl of thick soup, cooling. You’d never accept that; so often, on the road, when we’d ridden in silence, you’d say “What are you thinking?” and when I’d say “Nothing,” you’d clearly disbelieve me. Why? What mutterings filled your silence? It is how I understand the life of objects. Keats said that he could inhabit a sparrow and peck in the gravel. I can inhabit, say, a walnut log or the white blind heart of a loaf of bread.) Maybe though I thought a few calm sad thoughts on our imminent split—past split, in fact; it was hours old. But I know I wasn’t yet asking why? I was now an engine geared for one purpose—the expulsion of waste parts, self-starting restored. And when, in five minutes, you hadn’t come, I began my cake and called for coffee. In ten more, I’d finished; you were still absent; and the owner walked past me—no word or look—to check you again.

  She returned and I managed to understand through her fury that now you had the outer door locked and had spoken to her but would not open.

  I couldn’t think of how to say “Give her time”; so I must have stared blankly till the owner said in English in a python-hiss (discovering Ssss in two s-free words)—“Go. You go!” She’d have punched me in the breast bone with her short fat finger, but I leaned back and stood and went to the Damen.

  I knocked and called your name.

  You must have been against the door—no sound of steps—but you took a few beats before turning the lock.

  When I opened, you were standing three feet away, by a grimy wash basin, your back to me, your head down but silent.

  I said “Are you hurt?”

  You turned to show me. Your face was splotched from crying; but you weren’t using that—no mercy pleas. You pointed to your shoulder. One single strip of bandage, one inch by two.

  I looked from where I was—I’d entered entirely but the door was cracked open (for needy Damen). It didn’t occur to me to take another step, touch you gently, peel the bandage back and check—was that all my fault? Weren’t you throwing off a field of volts that I’d never have pierced, however determined?

  “One tooth,” you said, “one canine puncture.”

  “Good,” I said. (I knew you’d had tetanus shots and, now from the owner, that Bob was not rabid.)

  You said it to my eyes (I grant you that), “Good? Well, I guess”—another three beats, no shifting of gaze—“Yes, marvelous. Something in me finally. And a permanent mark.” You pressed the bandage. “I’ll carry a little white scar to my grave, the size of a navy bean—a real lion, my summer in Europe. I can show my children.” You reached for your purse and, as you came toward me, said “Chocolate on your teeth” (was I grinning by then?). Then you said, “I need air. Please wash your mouth and I’ll meet you at the car.” You went out past me, half-closing the door again.

  So since the room was empty I went to the basin. In the mirror I seemed unaltered though my teeth were socketed in chocolate. I was flushing my mouth when (I never told you) I saw your little message—to the side of the mirror and in small printed letters but quite clearly your hand (the only graffito, your color of ink, of course in English). Before I could read it, I knew it was not for me. You’d had no way to know I’d enter the Damen—or had you? did you wait to force me to come and see the two lines? Is it why you wouldn’t let the owner in? How could she have minded? She’d have never understood. Who on God’s earth would?—

  Jesus, will you help me now?

  I will. I have.

  I thought at once of Salinger’s Franny—mystical union in the Ladies Room—but I knew that, even if you’d read the story you’d have thought it unforgivably corny to mimic its action, like quoting Edgar Guest at a family funeral. In any case, Franny only squeezed her little book, The Way of the Pilgrim; you addressed Jesus straight and claimed a straight answer. You were surely not drunk, surely not joking. I dreaded facing you. What help had you got? What new fierce power? How much farther could you thrust me?

  But I went, paid the bill, thanked the owner for her help and the chocolate cake—she smiled but despised me—and climbed to the street.

  The car was parked five steps away—no sign of you. I looked toward both dark ends of the street—nothing, empty. I stood yearning to run—to enter the car silently, crank and drive away. You had your passport and traveler’s checks. And I’d taken a step—would I have done it?—when you rounded the nearest corner, stopped in the cone of light. I waited for you to come on to me.

  But you pointed behind you down the hidden street and held your place.

  So I went to you, more curious now than dreading. You were back in darkness before I reached you—I was both spared and deprived full sight of your face. “You’re all right?” I said.

  You didn’t answer that. You pointed again toward the end of the street—what seemed a small park, a knot of trees.

  I said, “Do you want to walk?”

  You said, “No, I’ve got something to show you.”

  I walked beside you but you were leading.

  The park was two concentric rings of sycamores that all but filled the dark space above with limbs, leaves. Only a piece of sky twenty feet square, say, was visible; but despite the glow of Munich and the few park lights, there were stars—oh a dozen. You took us to the center.

  I looked round—alone; all benches empty.

  Then you said “Straight up!”

  I looked, half-thinking you had lost a screw; even one-tenth wondering if you’d stab my unprotected gut (you who trapped spiders in my Oxford rooms and conveyed them, live, outside to grass).

  Again you were pointing. “See those two stars there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now shift to the right and down an inch or so.”

  I did.

  “See that blur?”

  I waited, straining not to blink; then I saw it—a faint smear, an old chalk fingerprint. “Yes.”

  You moved closer on me and, there as I was, hands loose at my sides, head back, throat stretched taut, I considered again that you might have plans and means to kill me—a sacrifice to what? Your Jesus-of-the-Damen? Some Eastern star god?—Ishtar, Ahura Mazda? For that moment, it seemed an acceptable fate—or not to over-dignify it, acceptable next act, Tosca and Scarpia, finalmente mia! (Is it from this whole full day that my total fearlessness emerges? Death would startle me, granted, but roughly as much as an air-filled bag popped behind my ear. I face all prospects quite nicely, thank you; let Nothing mishear me though and apply misfortunes.)

  But you only spoke. “Do you know what it is?”

  I said “Do you?”

  “NGC 224.”

  “Is that a space ship?” I said (no satellites yet, though the Russians were cranking up, a little to our right).

  “No, the great spiral galaxy in Andromeda.”

  I had vague recollections of boyhood astronomy, photographs in My Weekly Reader from Mount Palomar; but I certainly made no leap of awe.

  You said, “Do you know how far away it is?”

  “No.”

  “One million, five hundred thousand light-years. And what its apparent diameter is?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Sixty thousand light-years.” Your hand was still up, no longer quite pointing but in a sort of arrested Boy Scout salute; and your lips were parted—you were just beginning.

  Yet my dread, such as it was, was ebbing. The worst possibility now seemed clearly nothing more than a Thornton Wilder sermon on Justus and the Stars—you were drunk, I thought; this was way below standard.

  You dropped your hand but continued silently looking up.

  So I felt I had to speak. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Forgive me,” you said.

  That was meant to be worse than a sacrificial knife. It was. I must have wobbled. At some point I said “For what?” I was facing you now—or your dim profile; you would not look downwards.

  �
�You know,” you said.

  “For waiting back today at Dachau?”

  “More than that,” you said.

  “Say what then, please.”

  “For not thinking you were safe to follow. “

  “Into poor Dachau? It’s a national park. There are not even bears.”

  “Don’t joke. You know.”

  I didn’t know but I didn’t ask—because, just then, I didn’t want to know and, after the whole day, couldn’t care much. Simple as fatigue.

  You apparently knew—had thought through your balking and, in asking for pardon, were asking your way back into my life. I was safe, after all, to follow?—was that it? Or safe as you guessed you could hope to find? Or maybe you’d realized after all that you’d led, not followed, all those years in any case?

  I wasn’t standing there, in silence, asking questions—again I was locked in simple fatigue.

  Then you looked at me and said “You haven’t answered.”

  “What?” I said.

  You said again “Forgive me?”

  I should have said Yes. It was surely the instinct, the reflex of my feeling; but with Yes in my mouth, I balked and thought, “I must wait till tomorrow. It would be my tiredness talking, and the wine.” It would—I know now—have been my heart but wait I did. I said “Give me time.”

  You nodded, gave it and went to the car only slightly before me.

  But in two further weeks on the road, I never answered. (Not that I forgot; it was all I thought of—a glaze of scum which I laid across all those Rembrandts and Vermeers that might have saved us if they’d cared enough to fight. They survived it though, my self-surrendered vandalism. You and I didn’t, no masterworks.) And you never asked again. You should have. Why not? You had led so much of the way. Your silence and patience only fueled my flight, stoked a natural warmth of sadism in me which let me ride beside—lie beside you—for weeks more and still wish that you would vanish, speaking civilly but coolly, touching you only by accident. (If you were awake—and I did wait until you were breathing like sleep—I beg your pardon now that twice in those last weeks I lay beside you, not ten inches away, and took what pleasure my head demanded from my own dry self with my own dry hand: dry to keep the slapping down. Fun, fun.)

  Why? You never asked that even. Why, after years of assuming I required you-daily sight of you—, daily touch—after gladly embracing the prospect of life with you, your one false move in the parking lot at Dachau thrust me from you in a helpless irresistible rush? Worse than helpless, grinning. I was glad, I thought, to go. Blessed clear space at hand—empty, free—toward which I flew at stunning speeds like your galaxy.

  Well—Jesus—we’ve uncovered the secret of Dachau, of all the camps, every act of submission, why no one refused, even the de Wieks—they were glad to go! In secret glee, which they could not have borne to face or seek themselves, millions like us were permitted to abandon all human contracts, bonds—duties!—to shed all others like last year’s skin and to stand, if only for a few hours, free; breathing free air (unshared by wives or children) till the air became gas. There were two women smiling in that photograph, remember? holding their children for the last heavy moment before pitching forward, dead in a ditch, but alive maybe one moment longer than the child. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? We should never have acquired it, by chance or intent. Yet you forced it on us—by your simple refusal twelve years ago at Dachau.

  I’m back where I started, Sara—why did you refuse?

  Never mind. I won’t care now. But one more thing—your astronomy lecture, so unheralded that night in the Munich park, when I thought you’d gone nuts if not homicidal (messages from Jesus and NGC 224)? I’ve been working on that lately—what you might have intended, short of an open-air homily on the need for love in the drowned depths of space. I’ve read up on your pet galaxy Andromeda—Fred Hoyle, the Larousse Astronomie, even old Sir James Jeans’ Mysterious Universe with its chilling, exhilarating, unanswerable conclusion—

  We discover that the universe shows evidence of a designing or controlling power that has something in common with our own individual minds—not, so far as we have discovered, emotion, morality, or aesthetic appreciation, but the tendency to think in the way which, for want of a better word, we describe as mathematical. And while much in it may be hostile to the material appendages of life, much also is akin to the fundamental activities of life; we are not so much strangers or intruders in the universe as we at first thought. Those inert atoms in the primaeval slime which first began to foreshadow the attributes of life were putting themselves more, and not less, in accord with the fundamental nature of the universe.

  Were you making one last try, that night, to accord us with the universe?

  I’ve bought its picture—your galaxy’s. After years of wondering and stumbling across it, badly printed and dingy, in various books, I ordered its photograph from Mount Palomar. For two weeks now it’s hung above my desk—only just below Jesus, your other messenger (Rembrandt’s Hundred Guilder print, in a first-class fake). So it watches me this minute (as it watches perpetually, day-sky or night). The picture (through the 48” Schmidt telescope) is in color—the great spiral itself in white, rose and lilac on a matte brown sky pierced by single stars. If I didn’t know, it could be several things—a Miami lady-decorator’s dream of the ultimate ballroom chandelier. Or—for me most pleasing—the loveliest toy ever made. It could be that (sixty thousand light-years across)—a cooling circular platter of light that whirls round its billowing center in utter silence, having no final rim but diminishing slowly into thinner clouds of stars and finally night; my dream of a mobile to hang in my bedroom to wake to at night; or the sort of gift that God the Father might have willed for the Infant Christ (trumping the Magi) in a Milton ode (what if Milton could have seen it?)—

  And for a sign of My delight in Thee,

  I hang this tilted wheel above Thy bed,

  Attended at the rim by Hosts who smile

  And, smiling, face the axle drowned in light

  Whence My eternal love for Thee streams fire.

  Did we really see it that August night? Was that smudge above Munich really it? Or were you lying? Or did you not know? I haven’t yet found in any of my reading whether or not the Andromeda galaxy is visible ever to the naked eye—and if so, was it visible in Munich that particular night (or early morning)?

  Look. I’m going to assume that you really thought you saw it and that—calling me and pointing up and reeling off those almanac-facts as prelude to asking forgiveness—what you meant to say was something like this, another effort at the poem you were always aching to write (your poem, not mine; mine would be better but that’s my job, right?)—

  There it hangs, a million and a half light-years away, sixty thousand visible light-years across, composed of billions of separate stars all drowned in isolation yet all wheeling round a common center at something like a half million miles per hour, a stroke of radiance on your retina dimmer than the luminous dial of your watch. Or there it hung a million years ago, for the instant it took to launch this present light in its unimaginable outward flight toward the curved walls of space. Flight from what though?—the Big Bang? Maybe. But maybe flight from us, simply you and me, the two repellent objects at the core of space from which all other matter hurtles at speeds increasing till they pass the speed of light (and hurtled for millions of years before us in anticipation of this one day). Or a little less narcissistically—in flight from the blue planet, home of men. For elsewhere, all creatures desire perfect union—desire not require—and each one’s desire is silently achieved. Parallels meet. It is how the world is made. Andromeda—the millions of other universes, the billions of planets—is swarmed with pairs who serve each other. Or, baning that, is empty; has the grace to be empty. We will not be forgiven for forcing their flight. Turn. Return.

  I’d add only this—it is all no doubt grander, funnier than that. God only watches comedies, can only smile
. Waterloo, Dachau. The end is planned. There are no options.

  Sara, come back.

  THE GOLDEN CHILD

  IF SHE WERE alive she’d be sixty-seven. But she died at nine, in agony. And so while she lives in a few minds still, she lives by the name she was always called in family stories—Little Frances. The stories were few and remarkably sketchy, as if my endlessly tale-telling kin knew they must use her but could hardly bear to portray her fate on the bolt of wearable goods they wove from the lives of all our blood and neighbors.

  We knew she was “both her parents’ eyeballs,” a local expression which meant “their all.” Her father was “Stooks” Rodwell, my mother’s youngest brother. Her mother was “Toots,” from Portsmouth, Virginia; and all their married life, the two lived there. By the time I knew them, Frances was dead; and they showed how badly scarred they were. Stooks was roughshod and raucous, the family cynic. Toots was acid and managerial, though both craved fun and were as loyal in trouble as good sheepdogs.

  Before I was five I knew nearly all I’d ever know about Frances. She was blond and fine to see. She fell while skating on the concrete sidewalk and scraped a leg. The scrape got infected but seemed to heal. Then a few weeks later she ran a high fever that wouldn’t break. The doctor diagnosed it as osteomyelitis, a deep bone infection. In 1931 there were literally no effective internal antibiotics. The only treatment was to scrape or saw out the affected bone, crippling the patient.

  But with Frances’ fever, surgery was impossible. Infection roared through her. The relentless fever triggered convulsions. My mother told me more than once how “Little Frances’ head would bend right back and touch her heels—she spasmed that hard.” The child suffered torture for several days. Her lips dried crusty, her voice went hoarse, but she still pled for mercy. Everybody hovered and prayed; nothing helped in the slightest but death. It came at last, though nobody left alive was the same ever again, not at the thought or mention of Frances—Little Frances, welcome as daylight, tortured to death as a lovable child.