by John Gardner
Stillness and Shadows
John Gardner
CONTENTS
STILLNESS
PROLOGUE
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
SHADOWS
BOOK ONE
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
BOOK TWO
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
FRAGMENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Fragments One
Fragments Two
Fragments Three
Fragments Four
Fragments Five
Fragments Six
Fragments Seven
A BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN GARDNER
STILLNESS
Beauty is momentary in the mind,
The fitful tracing of a portal,
But in the flesh it is immortal.
—WALLACE STEVENS
PROLOGUE
“The people are like gnomes,” Martin Orrick would write, “small and quiet, overmuscular, bearing overlarge heads. As your car drives past, just a few miles from town, they draw up from their work in the steaming bottomlands and stand quietly dangerous, though intending no harm, as still as old stumps or fence posts or deer, watching without expression, their eyes like chips of steel. Toward noon, when the heat of the sun grows unbearable, they sink into the dark wooded hills from which they’re sprung, fall back slyly into the shade of the past; and for a while nothing moves but the circling hawks, an occasional eagle, the ear of a sleeping sow in a thick clump of pokeweed, and, always, the river. Oak trees, sycamores, and pines stand guard, and in the places where houses or trailers lie—or places where they once lay—maples, tulip poplars, cedars. Drive on, stranger, there’s nothing for you here. If everyday humdrum life hides here, if men and women touch with years-old affection, or sing antique songs, or tell stories from their days of railroad building, when a few men made fortunes on apples or coal and the rest worked a lifetime for no better pay than their scars, crooked fingers, and shrewd, creased faces, you will not find it, you’ll glimpse no smile not prepared with fearful calculation in advance. Here there is no trust. This is a harsh, inhospitable land: even those poor fools who love it are hardly at home on it, cursing its floods and tornadoes, its rust-red, eroding hills, cursing all those whom God saw fit to send more profitable land, yet clinging, for no reason, to this miserable tick- and mosquito-rich place, spawning ground of rattlers, cottonmouths, and copperheads, half the year drowned out by unrelenting rain, half the year dry as a biscuit. This is no place to pause, sink roots: here all things swirl and churn like the river, and the heart finds no rest, no peace, no stillness but the cyclone’s core. This is a country for gnomes and madmen, a country for the living and dying, not the rich, calm dead.”
Useless, as always, to inquire too narrowly what Martin Orrick meant. He was, obviously, one of those poor fools who loved the place—the southern Missouri Ozarks, where he’d fled from San Francisco in what his psychiatrist would describe, not long afterward, as a desperate attempt to shake the demons from his back, purify his sick heart by fire. That was not how it appeared at the time. He came, one who knew him at the time might have thought, in search of not life but a death worth dying, a death not wan and casual, unfelt. He would gallop his Roman-nosed black stallion through the night, when neither he nor his horse could see—his children in their beds, wide-eyed with fear, his beautiful wife indignant and trembling—and time after time he would fall and, drunkenly, crawl home. Twice he fractured his skull and, though his brain was his living, showed no remorse. Once, so drunk he could barely stand, he rode off on the bicycle his wife had bought him to keep him off the horse and made ten full miles before he tumbled, bicycle and all, down a twelve-foot embankment and came to rest in a stone-filled branch, where at dawn he awakened, guarded by his whimpering dogs. It was not, of course, the fault of the mountains. In their infinite patience, they could bear up any form of life at all: swift, light deer, sly coon, huge, thoughtful cows, squirrels, rabbits, wolves and foxes, skunks and groundhogs, cross-eyed, old-as-the-hills opossum, who murder young chickens for their sport. He would see the place later as gentle and beautiful, when his eye had changed. What he saw now—what he wore flared around him like a wizard’s cape—was suffering, hunger for conclusion: life or death. “Old Man Death,” in Martin Orrick’s phrase, was evidently tempted. Again and again he sniffed the wind and came near, then miraculously drew back.
There was a party at the Orricks’ high-gabled, pillared house, gray under starlight, the security lamp, and the shadow of trees—the roof and square tower surrounded like a graveyard by wrought-iron fence, and the hill on which the pretentious, severe old house stood (and the horse-barn, chicken house, smokehouse, and pump house) surrounded by low, shaggy mountains and, in the valley to the east, the silent, wide Mississippi. It was a party for one of Martin Orrick’s students, who had that day passed her comprehensive exams. Though the house shook with music and light came bursting from every narrow rectangular or round-arched window—though cars stood everywhere, glinting like jewels, like the branches, the rooftops, the winter-darkened grass, all thickly cased in ice—Death would not be fooled, driven from the place by mere music and light—so a stranger with a taste for the gothic might have thought, and Martin Orrick would think before morning. Inside the high door with the fox-head knocker (firewood piled high to the left and right), the ceiling was low, like the roof of a cave, and the dark, crowded furniture sagged and bulged under the weight of slow-talking, slow-gesturing grad students, some of them asleep with their drinks in their hands, some noisily drunk, some asleep but still talking, smoking pot. Useless to try to drive home on that ice. (It had rained all day, then at sunset had suddenly begun to freeze.) It was five miles to town, over Ozark roads. Even the sober might never reach the foot of the driveway.
In the new room, the room that looked out on the pool, Martin Orrick, famous novelist, professor of classical and medieval literature, held forth like a blear-eyed prophet. Joan, his red-headed wife, watched in silence. She’d taken Demerol to kill her pain, such a dose that the world was like a landscape seen through blowing lace, and she suffered, besides, an odd dizziness not usually part of the Demerol high, and a ringing in her ears. She should go to bed, she knew, but she was afraid to. Martin grew, every day, more difficult. If she turned her back, he might suddenly attack some favorite student with cruelty and scorn he would refuse to believe himself guilty of tomorrow, or he might lure some young woman to the storm cellar or the barn or the tower. They would all know, these students who loved him and were always as embarrassed as she was, and helplessly they would watch, pained but not judging, big intelligent grown-ups baffled and hurt and struggling to approve, like children. She had no choice but to prevent it if she could, control him; and sensing her subtle, unspeaking control, he might at any moment turn on her in rage, say terrible things to her, and she, foggy, ringing with that damned, mysterious pain, would be defenseless. They must surely understand that he was mad, simply. Nevertheless it would be she, Joan Orrick, who would be guilty.
Baggy-faced, paunched, standing like a sumo, but icy-eyed, druidic—waving his martini and sometimes ferociously driving home a point with a stab of his pipe or th
e square index finger of his free, dark-red right hand—he spoke belligerently of the fall of man. “It’s a three-part process,” he said, or rather fumed, so mean of eye that one might well have imagined—or so it seemed to his wife—that the man to whom he spoke, half asleep on his feet, his skin splotchy pink, his beard a mass of tangles, was responsible. The ice-crusted trees on the lawn stood motionless, hungrily listening—if Martin’s weird theory of the universe was right—and the black, silent river hurried on toward New Orleans, huge helpless mother of animals and men, bearer of St. Louis and Chicago poisons, also treasures of silt, generous feeder of bottomlands, smasher of dikes.
“First,” he said, and cocked back like a horseman, “there’s the fall out of Nature, the fall that makes primitive bear cults and corn cults. We kill to eat, and thanks to our consciousness we can’t help but notice that in the act of killing we take a step back from the general connectedness, the harmony of Nature, old Schopenhauer’s universal howl of will: we’ve judged and condemned brother bear to death, or brother stalk of grain—you follow what I’m saying?—and however our intelligence may deal with the event, the chest—the right lobe of the brain, if you like—calls it murder and shudders with guilt.” His eyes bugged, he spoke so earnestly. He stood with his hand drawn dramatically to his chest. “We invent the Corn God, or Artemis-Ursus, and do terrified obeisance, kill virgins to buy our way back in.” He was outraged.
He was talking loudly, but perhaps not as loudly as it sounded in Joan Orrick’s head. The bearded, pink-faced student nodded, sorrowful and logy, keeping his eyes open and smiling politely by a mighty act of will. He stood tipped back, the bottle of beer out in front of him for balance. In the shadows around them—a clutter of bottles and potted plants, a fog of cigarette smoke, a thick stench of gin—other students listened, their heads thrown forward, not so much from interest in Martin Orrick’s theories—they’d heard them all before—as in faint alarm at his drunken intensity. Martin drank quickly from the glass in his hand and, before anyone could speak, widened his eyes again, lifted his eyebrows, and plunged on, still more loudly, shouting down a sudden swell of music from the speakers. “Second, there’s the fall from humanity,” he said. The people around him nodded, and to Joan Orrick’s drugged perception it seemed they nodded in synchronization, like puppets, like a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus. He said, swinging forward dangerously, “ Gilgamesh, for instance! He enslaves his own people—makes them build a great wall for their own protection”—his left arm dramatically cast a wall up through the ceiling—“and thus rightly, necessarily, Gilgamesh sets himself apart from his fellow men, and the people, rightly, cry to heaven for vengeance. Like the hunter, he’s stepped out of the ring of the living. New rituals, some new kind of religion must be found. So we get, for example, Greek tragedy: we watch the hero raise his head above all others and we watch it blasted by the lightning of the gods, and in compassion and fear we at once admire him and reaffirm our common humanity. Ha!” He raised his hand in what looked like sharp warning. “Or consider Achilles and Priam in the tent, or Jesus on brotherly love.” Again his eyes bugged, and his stance was an actor’s pose: utter indignation.
“Or consider Martin Orrick,” someone said behind him, and raised her glass in what looked like a perfectly serious salute. Martin didn’t hear.
Bob Randolph, young poet in a fisherman’s hat, trudging by slowly, as if watching a stream, saluted with his new glass of bourbon and said, “Whole point of Moby Dick.” He laughed as if to himself, for some reason—or giggled, rather—though the comment was serious, apparently, and walked on, out of Martin’s range.
“Exactly!” Martin snapped, turning for a moment toward Bob, then back, blushing, glancing in embarrassment at his pipe. Then he said, “Third—” He hesitated, as if he’d lost his place, looked downright panicky, sipped his martini, then abruptly remembered. “Third—” He spoke still more fiercely now, trembling with emotion, for no reason she could guess. “There’s the fall out of Self—the fall we read of in Jean-Paul Sartre: fall into nothingness, alienation of the eye.” (Or perhaps he meant—she couldn’t tell—“the I.”)
The bearded, pink-faced student said, “Are there rituals to cure that?” and laughed loudly, like a bleating goat.
Joan Orrick was aware of something going by too fast for her drugged brain. For an instant she had an impression of herself as a child, schoolbooks in her arms, watching them in horror. “Buddy,” she would cry—Martin had been “Buddy” when the two of them were children—“what’s the matter with you?” She, Joan-grown-up, had no way to tell her, could hardly explain what had happened even for herself. And then the child’s eyes swung around to meet her own, as she’d known they would, accusing and terrible—a beautiful child with hair like cut copper—and the older Joan shrank back, cheeks stinging as they would if she’d been slapped, and her mind cried through time, I’m sorry!
Perhaps the pink-faced student said it twice, or perhaps time snagged and she heard it twice: “Are there rituals to cure that?”
Martin looked as if he was about to have a stroke. So did the student he was talking to.
Martin laughed exactly as the student had done but looked sick with distress. “I don’t know,” he said. “There may be no cure but Jesus’ mercy—‘He that loses himself shall find himself,’ or …” He shook his head, flashed a horrible grin, pushed back his long silver hair in fierce annoyance. “I don’t know. No one does. ‘Luck.’ ‘Amazing Grace’—whatever that is.” He laughed again, grimly, nodding. “That’s the price we pay for our sensible ‘ungoded sky.’ ” He glanced up at the ceiling as if in anger. One could hardly believe that a split second ago he’d been laughing. She remembered that Hart Crane—ungoded sky—had killed himself.
Though no time had lapsed, or so it seemed, the people in the room were suddenly not where they’d been standing an instant earlier, and it came to Joan Orrick that, sitting upright among the pillows on the waterbed couch, she had fainted. Martin stood exactly where he’d stood before, like a smoldering fixed star, but Steve—the pink-faced, bearded student—was gone, asleep in the bathtub, probably, and it was the pianist, Joe Liberto, the one she liked best, at least among the men, certainly the one she was most willing to trust—he’d helped her hunt for Martin one time, when it seemed almost certain he’d drowned himself in the Sikeston sewer—it was Joe Liberto that Martin was lecturing. She could stand guard no longer, whatever might come of her abandoning him. Where were you, Joe, she heard herself thinking, when I was ready to get married? And she heard herself answering, sadly, but also laughing at the absurdity: Not born. She would faint again soon, and though the fainting so frightened her that she could hardly bear to think of it, much less wonder what it meant, she would rather be in bed when it happened.
She felt for the edge of the waterbed couch, one hand on each side of her, and carefully rose to her feet. The girl, Cezaria, who’d come to sit beside her, looked up, smiling, perhaps slightly puzzled, and she returned the smile, trying to think what Cezaria was saying, then moved, carefully balanced, toward the music room door. As if floating or dreaming, she passed the grand piano, the lounging students in the darkened livingroom, and drifted over to the square, sharp-edged newel post at the foot of the stairs. She paused a moment, steadying herself for the climb.
She’d said nothing to Martin about the fainting. She was sick to death of being always sick, always in pain, always drugged, and though no one could reasonably blame her for it, she was ashamed and angry and afraid it would finally drive him from her. How could he help but believe it was one more trick meant to keep him in her power? That was what he constantly accused her of—not without reason, she told herself bitterly, not without reason. She’d quietly stopped driving—he’d never even noticed that for nearly a month now she’d regularly evaded the steering wheel (she was secretly enraged that he failed to notice)—and she’d managed even to avoid ever mentioning the light-headed feeling. What was the use of telling him?
she’d asked herself, and the question had filled her eyes with tears. There was nothing any of them could do. No use going to doctors either. She’d finally resigned herself to that. All her complaints were beyond their skill.
“Have you ever had anything like this before?” the one in San Francisco had asked.
“It’s been happening for a long time,” she said. “Off and on, I mean. No one’s been able to figure out what’s wrong.”
“Hmm,” he’d said, and had pulled at his moustache with the tips of two fingers. “Well, whatever you had before, you’ve got it again.”
She was terrified all the time, day and night. She knew no psychology, but she knew it was important that all her dreams were nightmares. Yet she couldn’t tell Martin. When she jerked in her sleep, she let him believe it was muscle spasms. To tell him the truth would be to make him more helpless, more guilty for no reason—more suicidal. Often she wished she could die and be done with it—but then what of the children? She knew well enough what would become of Martin if … something happened to her. And so she wept in secret, or secretly raged behind her mask of calm and weariness, pitying herself, hating herself, pitying and hating the world.
She took a deep breath, glanced over the bannister at the students in the room, none of them watching, then started carefully up the stairs. At the top of the stairway she could see the beginning of the wall with family pictures on it, her family, Martin’s, their two blond children at various ages, the dogs, the horses, the houses they’d lived in in St. Louis, Iowa City, Oberlin, Chico, San Francisco … She stared hard at the wall of pictures as if it might draw her to the safety of the landing. She felt the stairway growing brighter, solider, and felt the lines of the picture frames, the door to Evan’s room, the dented brass wall-sconce becoming sharper, sharper—unnaturally sharp—and understood too late that she was fainting.
Martin, in the new room, broke off mid-sentence. “Listen! What was that?” He stumbled toward the sound, up into the music room and into the livingroom’s darkness toward the stairs. He found her at the foot, sprawled unconscious. She lay impossibly still and ghostly pale, with her eyes open, and where she’d struck her head on the newel post the blood gushed out like water from a hose. The pool of blood around her grew quickly as he watched, and though he knew about scalp wounds he was instantly certain that he’d finally done it, had finally killed her. (Why he should be guilty was a question that never crossed his mind. It went without saying that the fault was somehow his, however obscurely—and given the general complexity of things he was no doubt right.) “Christ,” he whispered, and felt for her pulse. He could get nothing. He called for help.