Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  He takes my smile, stores it as a gift. “Did you sleep well, Preacher?”

  I hunch my shoulders, say “Thank you, sir,” and behind my lie floods sudden need—to rise, board him, cherish with my hands, my arms while there still is time this huge gentle body I know like my own, which made my own (made half anyhow) and has hurt nobody since the day I was born.

  But he says, “Lift up. Look yonder at the door.”

  I roll to my knees. Through glass and snow, behind small panes, white curtains, in the center of the house no longer ours stands my mother in a flannel robe, hand raised in welcome the shape of fire. “She waited,” I say.

  “She waited,” he says and reaches for his scarf, his coat, beckons me to him, drapes them around me, steps to the white ground and turning, offers me open arms. Kneeling I ask him, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean to save your life, to carry you over this snow.”

  “Heavy as I am?—you and your heart?”

  But he says no more. His mind is made, his trip is ended. He is nearly home, facing rest, accepting snow like the trees while I stall. Then he claps his palms one time, and I go on my knees out of dry car heat through momentary snow into arms that circle, enfold me, lift me, bear me these last steps home over ice—my legs hung bare down his cooling side, face to his heart, eyes blind again, mind folding in me for years to come his literal death and my own swelling foes, lips against rough brown wool saying to myself as we rise to the porch, to my waiting mother (silent, in the voice I will have as a man), “They did not separate us tonight. We finished alive, together, whole. This one more time.”

  NINE HOURS ALONE

  SATURDAY MORNING when her daughter Leah left for country day-camp and Davis her husband went in to finish a budget request for the trustees’ meeting, she washed every spotted object in the kitchen, dried each gently and laid it in place with a loathing indistinguishable from fondness. She made a full list of what they’d need from the grocery store before day ended. She set each item in the order in which they’d come across it if they took a cart and worked the aisles from left to right—Leah would know. She had bathed herself as she did every day on rising at dawn. So once she hung a clean hand-towel on the oven handle, rinsed her hands and face at the sink, gave the white azalea a grateful look and went to the bedroom, the rest flowed freely.

  She sat at the rickety lady’s desk that had been her mother’s and wrote two letters. The first was to her husband,

  Dear Davis,

  You are absolutely not to blame for what I do. You have tried in every way you know to guide me free, but I cannot go. I have squandered all I promised you, at God’s white altar sixteen years ago; and I will not stay any longer to watch you take the meager scraps I offer now in lieu of the bountiful thanks I owe.

  I leave in utter shame and regret. I cannot even think of the world I leave for you and Leah to walk. And the heart of our tragic fate is this, the person for whom I ruined our lives is still too young to weigh or judge the love I tried to take from you and load on him.

  If you see him again, I trust your forbearance. He has never touched more than the palm of my hand, and he will be as baffled as we at where these two years have ended.

  I understand that, with your faith, you will think I now forfeit salvation and the chance to meet you two again and comprehend how strong you are to urge, as you have, that I remain. I hope you are wrong. I hope we all will sleep forever, no glimpse of dream.

  Thank you,

  Frances

  The second letter was to the person on whose account she would ruin four lives.

  Tom,

  This will not reach you before the news. Like everything that happened around us, it was my idea, the only way I can now imagine to clear the room for you to walk forward into your man’s life and for my husband and daughter to last.

  Teachers have hung their lives on students since time began, I know, and called it love; so at least my crime is old and familiar, if bitterly comic. Knowing clearly that today I harm a patient husband and a valiant child, still I only regret—in all the world—that you had less to give than I dreamed and, though you are three long years from manhood, will never have more.

  That does not stop me wishing you now a useful life, with courage to take what you turned back from me, the harmless gifts that your face earns.

  Frances Barnes

  She propped her husband’s letter on his pillow; Tom’s she sealed, stamped and left on the desk. Then she crossed an enormous stretch of floor to the dim tile bath. There she opened the bottle of sleeping pills that were hid in the deepest back of the closet. She rinsed the toothpaste stains off her glass and dried it hard on a clean towel. Then she ran tap water to the count of sixty—cold and fresh. She counted out twenty capsules and drank them in half a minute. The only words in her mind were numbers—sixteen, seventeen. She smoothed her hair. In her final sight of the face she’d worn for thirty-eight years, she was smiling mildly.

  She turned aside and moved to their bed. As she scuffed her shoes, lay back and covered herself with the afghan, she knew that she had nine hours alone before either Leah or Davis was due. It was ample time. The weight of the melting drug in her stomach was welcome like Leah’s first shrug in her womb. She held to that thought till her mind forgot it. As her eyes shut down, the muscles along her lean jaw pulled again at her lips, reclaiming the smile from light-years back.

  NIGHT AND SILENCE

  FORTY YEARS later I’m still astonished at the luck we had and managed to hold—to meet at the excellent pitch of youth and give each other our entire best: unadulterated coupling, the fullest courtesy and never less than the plan to last together somehow all our lives, no grudge or stint. What’s that but the rarest bird in the woods? I was twenty-two at the start, you twenty-one; and a hundred snapshots make a case for the primary fact—we were both the heirs of strong-faced kin; and even that early we were good to see (you with gold hair that sprang at the touch and hooded eyes the color of your old Viking genes).

  Three years on, we’d passed that peak; and our bodies slowly spent those legacies, turning in time to normal skin. But while that rank power lasted, we saw each other clearly and shared our unearned gifts, openhanded as children. And though I hope to last years more, lately I’ve felt a pressing duty to note at least the better days so others we know or strangers unborn have one gauge anyhow for states like flat-out pleasure and trustworthy peace, the bounds of magnanimity through long lives.

  The week before Easter we flew as far as student funds let us—misty London to misty Geneva—then plunged south through the smug white Alps, the stifling dark of the Simplon Tunnel and a break-out onto full sun pounding the station at Domodossola where Italy starts. We stretched our legs on the snowy platform, bolted down salt ham on bread and gave our passports to a customs guard no older than we. Despite his underpowered mustache he still had the right to bar our entry on the mildest whim; but he barely glanced at the aim already condensing between us, our imminent threat to the laws of man; and he smiled to himself as he stamped us in, “Benvenuto”—Well - come then: two sworn conspirators breach the frontier. I all but shook in the hope he somehow knew our future and grinned at the prospect, but even to you I mimicked freezing and blew out a cold white cloud on the air. Your face had been so much my target these past five months— the face and all that lay beneath it—I could barely watch you; but I guessed all of it was mine for the asking, though till then I’d never asked for more than your sight in a room.

  Milan by dusk in stinging rain and on by tram to the central square. No reservations, not even the name of a likely hotel and maybe thirty dollars between us. You’d said if we stood on the steps of the duomo and merely waited, a reliable tout would step from the crowd, offer us a warm dry room at negotiable rates and lug our bags to the hotel door. (It often happened, those better days before the world was gorged with tourists. Even somewhat farther south than this, you could leave your bag on a station platform an
d go eat a meal, with beggars on all sides; and your bag would be in place when you finished.)

  But we stood on till the rain had soaked us; and no one broke from the evening mob to take us in, though there was one madman endlessly boxing the square at a trot and shouting numbers as he turned each corner. When I finally heard him cry “Ninety nine!” I offered to pay two-thirds of the bill for just tonight at the too-deluxe hotel there beyond us, a shining rescue launch in high seas.

  Past midnight, after two hours standing in the roof at La Scala as Karajan hauled a wrecked soprano through Salome, we’d fed ourselves at a trattoria and were back in our exorbitant space. You’d refused my offer of most of the rent and paid your half; so we had a big room, a thick mahogany brassbound door, twin beds stiff with actual linen and pillows bulky as dirigibles.

  I’ve lost the link to what came next, five of the crucial minutes I’ve lived through, the bridge across a laughing short friendship to the next steep plateau—strange as floating Tenochtitlán with Moctezuma hid in its heart and found by me, uncovered in all its buried veins of untold profit by my right hand, reckless as Cortez. But rising tired before sunup and crossing the lap of Europe all day, we must have thought we were dead with exhaustion. When we’d laughed though at a memory or two and turned our separate ways to sleep, the tide of the night—in its own rhythm—reversed in thorough mountainous silence and towed us in through the strong rip-current.

  In all that speechless strain to breathe, I must have told myself we were safe as we’d ever be. I know by then your back looked ready; and before the final light was out, I was by your bare side, bare myself and eager to serve as you rolled flat and lay full-length to offer all the eye could see and all the other senses seize, stupendous goods laid freely out in your and my lives’ first frank meeting—four stories high over nearly a million sleeping workers tossed like damned souls between our dare and the city limits as late dawn sifted in through blinds and Leonardo’s ruined Last Supper, a few blocks over, entered its four hundred fifty-ninth year of crumbling off its soggy wall, awaiting our visit if morning came.

  Good Friday in a black drowned Venice, fording the floods on wobbly duckboards; then a melodrama of parting skies and pale sun for the rush in a packed express toward Rome on Easter night, reaching our hostel to find I’d slipped and booked a room for thirty days hence (they showed us my plainly mistyped letter). So there we hung—dog-eared, dirty and barred from touch by the fish eyes of groggy pilgrims on the holiest day of the Christian year.

  Your turn to solve a quandary—back to the station at one A.M., the door of a pokey office you’d seen as we arrived: League for Protecting Catholic Youth. When we crossed the sill, you gave me an earnest backward look and said—full voice in 100-proof blarney—“We’re Dublin Irish.” And once we’d waited till the nun in charge arranged a ticket to Malta for a knocked-up girl fierce-eyed as a panther, you told the nun an honest tale, far as you went. We were victims of our own foolishness and needed a bed—un letto, singular.

  She took you, face value; and as we stood, she also rose and bowed your way. “Buon Pasqua, signore. Christo è risuscitato.” I’d never heard your views on Christ, live or dead, still haven’t today; but I know you bowed to her then, unsmiling, and said “Ah, sì.”

  By two A.M. we were warm in a cell in a private school for Catholic boys decamped for Easter—two stern cots, a crucifix, a pitcher and bowl with midget towels, doll-sized soap and, down the hall, a cavernous toilet that always sported at least one monk on the porcelain throne of a covered stall, moaning in terminal constipation or some clandestine ecstasy of soul or body.

  Chaste as the schoolboys—likely chaster, and I at least as famished as sand—for two long wandering days and nights (Capitol, Forum, Rostrum, Palatine, Mamertine, Sistine, the intact Pantheon grand as the sky). Then our hostel emptied of bankrupt pilgrims; and we were back in secular walls: a narrow room of bone-white plaster, two narrow beds and the landlord’s radio on through the night (soccer from the walls of space). Yet there in all but total dark through ten more nights, time and again you climbed like a phosphorescent vine through every plane and entry of my willing skin, grappling every secret I’d kept till you said “Now,” then freely yielded.

  And long before we paid and left, I’d many times consumed the codes of your warm gist and made them silent units of me, the means of comprehending what you’d need or dread right down your life, while down our block some fifty yards the Field of Mars still rocked in the dark to three millennia anyhow of soldiers’ feet—wide-eyed delicate bird-voiced Etruscans, sun-kilned Roman legionnaires, the shaggy Goths (drunk on clear light) and us this past slow afternoon: polo-shirted, maps in hand, you as frankly splendid as Cleopatra’s son by Caesar, gold doomed Caesarion borne in triumph by desert slaves blinded to spare his face their eyes.

  A Sunday drive with Roman friends our age but rich, in all but our news, and plumed like pheasants for a country visit—a village an hour south of town, lived in from the Old Stone Age through the eighteenth century, then ghosted out by a plague of fever. One churchtower, roofless huts, a hundred miles of hungry ivy, a billion shards of brick and limestone, silence broken only by our plumed friends’ cries of baldfaced wonder at the peace those years had made from silence.

  And finally you, somehow safe, high in the cracked belltower and the best these ghosts had seen in centuries. You set your head in the empty socket of the old town clock; and your voice struck the hour, five P.M., mimicking the lost bell. Bass notes passed our startled ears and lazed off down the broad campagna to a hairline river, bright as mercury (the source, no doubt, of the leveling plague).

  You’d ended the day and, though our speeding host’s Fiat struck a child in the edge of the road by a tenement (and we poured out, sick with fear to check her limbs from crown to toe as a mean mob gathered—she was scarcely bruised and left the scene in her father’s arms with a fistful of cash), you and I were back in our poor-boy quarters less than a minute before your voice—the day’s curfew—said “Rest now please.”

  Hard as we worked in the swarming dark, it amounted to rest.

  Our pensione lacked tub or shower; so when our sponge baths began to lose ground against the spring heat, the landlord sent us back to the station—public baths beneath the concourse: clean private white-tiled rooms with showers, liquid soap, a scrubbed-down bench, no windows and a lockable door. In such dream cubicles, Jack the Ripper could have flayed a whore with impunity, not to mention the lavish conditions for love.

  We only washed. And even now I can wonder why, with no regret. I have that lucid sight of you as you dried yourself with the patient care of an invalid, though you burned with an unselfconscious force umatched by all the marble hulks we’d seen—the ruins of the Emperor Domitian’s baths adjoined the station, museumed now and chocked with gods and paramours. Not all the tangled crests that rode their canted groins could match the burnished wiry shrub that, on your drying body there, threatened to speak God’s private present name—“I Am.”

  Florence (the English Italy, all indoors and muted but with David’s oddly untrimmed cock for mascot); then back through Geneva on our way north toward college again for a summer term that drowned in torpid afternoons, stuffed with cakes, by the pond at Blenheim; on the broad brown river or country rides in my new Morris down Cotswold roads past Iron Age forts and the inexplicable megalithic leavings of a people older than the Celts.

  Near as we were in the red-trimmed car, we never left its low-slung roof to bare our hides to the English sky—was it weird respect for your native ground or a caution learned from the older faces and limbs we passed, cycling slow up hedge-bound lanes at the end of light with profiles dull as hatchet blades, their worked-out bodies lost past finding in thornproof wool? Still no technician or artisan since known to me has neared your mastery of the gawky room of a compact car; in seconds, up a hawthorn track, you’d have mine rhapsodizing like Liszt.

  July though and all of August, we’d
ferried the car from Tynemouth to Bergen and eased our way through dirt-road Norway, warm as new bread, and immaculate Sweden, chill as a scallop. We sat on the porch of an elderly widow outside Stockholm, followed her pointing hand to the road and heard her say “I sat in this chair and watched the Nazis march, with our blessing, across my fields toward Norway ten hot summer days and cursed my country’s treachery” (all night in her blond-wood guest room we worked at a new fidelity).

  Then we split the still-numb heart of Germany—Hitler! still scrawled red on walls—to redeem Bavaria and the west end of Austria, pausing in Mozart’s Salzburg birthhouse, clean as a modern delivery room, buffing the sides of his boyhood spinet with our cotton jackets and grooming our vagabond beards in its mirror; riding out midsummer nights as luminous as the dawn we watched past each other’s brow in Munich the week they freed Admiral Dönitz, Führer for less than a week after Adolf burned to cinders in flat Berlin.

  Laying the curse on a thousand rooms in which the S.S. racked and murdered, we only ever joined in rooms; and our invisible joy and knowledge multiplied along the road back up the Rhine through sacked Cologne and Holland where we risked our bond in the blasting radiance of almost endless rooms of Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, Van Gogh. It held unfazed and for relief we walked the beach at Scheveningen where Vincent aired his foaming brain, sketching the grass and lapdog waves like answers to prayer as his self-hatred flung out strangling intrinsic roots.