Stillness & Shadows

by John Gardner

  Paul Brotsky said, careful and serious, scraping the ash from his cigarette, not meeting Martin’s eyes for fear of giving offense, “If I’m in the way, Martin—”

  Martin squinted, baffled, glanced over at the sleeping children, then back at Paul. “What the devil makes you think—”

  “Well, you seem to be implying—”

  Martin studied him. It was easy enough to see that he was hurt, but what Martin had done to hurt him he had no idea. He said, “You’re not in the way. I’m glad you’re here. You picked up something that wasn’t there, or anyway something I didn’t mean to put there. Because you’re a Virgo, too sensitive to detail, or because neither of us can do anything for Joan, and helplessness makes us guilty, or because—who knows? The box again—or not a box, a cosmic spiderweb. The genes of your parents and your parents’ parents back to Adam. Also the weather, the spinach in your stomach, the color of the carpet, a helicopter ride you took one time in Viet Nam—”

  “It’s strange the way you keep picking at it. I mean, the whole thing’s so insignificant, so irrelevant. So the world’s run by chance. So what’s the bad news?”

  “It’s stupid, I agree.”

  “I don’t mean it’s stupid.” He spoke more carefully than ever, avoiding Martin’s eyes. “But you keep honing for this thing you imagine you can’t have—freedom, or something. Freedom to do what? You make us all feel—” He glanced up at Martin, then down again, and reached out quickly to scrape the ash of his cigarette away. He said, “You make us all feel that we’re the spiderweb. If you want to be free where I’m concerned, just try me, Martin, just say, Paul, get out. As far as Joan’s concerned—”

  Just that instant there was a scream and a crash from the kitchen, and they both leaped up. Paul put down his cigarette and started for the door, almost at a run, and a second later, Martin followed. There was another crash and another, and Joan’s screams of rage. When Martin reached the kitchen door, Joan was in Paul’s arms, her muscles tensed, her face dark red, not accepting the embrace, accepting nothing, crying, wild with anger. All over the floor there were pieces of broken plates, bits of bacon and lettuce. The kitchen window had been smashed out, also the glass on one of the cupboards.

  “Jesus Christ,” Martin roared, “we said we’d help you!”

  Paul jerked his head around. “God damn it, Martin, get out of here.”

  Martin turned, outraged, planning to walk out on them all. The children were in the doorway, looking in, wide-eyed and pale. He did not notice—though he would remember it later—that they shrank back from him. “It’s all right,” he said. “Your mother’s just…having a tantrum. Better go to bed.”

  They turned, moved away, and their helplessness stoked his fury higher. Evan—Christ!—was almost fourteen. What was going to become of them in this crazyhouse? “Good night,” Martin said, and this time there was no trace of anger in his voice, only sorrow, equally poisonous despair—he heard it himself. “It’s all right,” he said—as he was always saying, to Evan’s black-and-tan just after the car hit him, breaking his jaw, to his own big black horse when he shied from a deer that went bounding suddenly across the trail, to Joan when she lay in bed crying, saying, “Martin, what are we going to do?” He touched the two children’s shoulders gently, absently, with hands like clumsy wood. “Go to bed. It’s all right.” And as they went silently up the stairs, he turned toward the new room looking out at the pool, went down the step and over to his drink on the white formica table. It was almost empty. He drained it and carried the glass to the bar to make another. His heart was beating fast and his face felt hot. Who it was he was angry at he could easily have said if he’d stopped to think, but he couldn’t, that moment, stop to think. He would remember later, thinking back to that moment, that he’d done the same in London once. He and Evan were crossing a wide, busy street—Evan smiling and eager, looking up at the gables of the Parliament building—and leading him through traffic, not holding his hand, Martin had called back confusing signals, so that Evan had run when Martin meant for him to wait, and a car had almost struck him. The driver hit his brakes—a cripple in one of those state-provided three-wheel cars—and Martin had turned and had raged at the man, though the driver had done nothing, nothing whatever except stop with great skill in an emergency. But it was only after the poor man had driven off that Martin had understood that he, he alone, not the driver, not Evan, was in the wrong. So now. But his fingers shook and his heart beat violently, and when, after a moment, he heard Paul and Joan coming into the room behind him, he did not turn.

  “I shouldn’t have yelled at you, Martin,” Paul said. “It was just—”

  “No, it’s all right.” His hand was still shaking.

  Joan said, almost finished with her crying, “I’m sorry I lost my temper. I burned myself on the fucking stove, because of the drugs—I couldn’t think right—” At the memory she began to cry again. She brought out, “I wasn’t blaming you. You should see what it’s like, just once, Martin.”

  Now he did get up and turned to them, full of rage and grief, though not rage at them. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. For the love of God—”

  “Martin,” Paul said sharply, “you didn’t do anything.”

  “I know, it all just happens. That’s the point.” Tears rushed into his eyes all at once, and his rage and helplessness increased, and as he fought the tears a whimper came out, childish, infuriating. Instantly, Joan came to him, put her arms around him, and pressed her face against his chest. “Joan, I’m sorry,” he said, and was crying now in earnest. “We’ve got to change our lives.” He half sobbed, half laughed.

  Joan said, “Paul’s told me about his psychiatrist in Detroit. I want to go to him, Martin.”

  Martin nodded, clinging to her, unable to speak. He brought out, “Do. Yes, do.” He reached, like a feeble, foolish old man—or so it seemed to him—toward Paul’s shoulder, bringing him into the embrace. Martin Orrick had, needless to say, no hope that a psychiatrist could help. She’d been to plenty before. But perhaps; perhaps. Paul’s presence helped, certainly—helped them to break their deadly patterns, circle for a moment more like dancers than like fighters. So he told himself now. But he’d known from the first, and would know tomorrow, that when she threw those dishes, she threw them—in her mind—at him. And she was right; he should have noticed and helped.

  Eight

  Causes and effects are not neatly separable, as we sometimes find them in fiction. Martin Orrick’s nature helped the accident to happen, and the accident helped to shape his nature, each feeding on the other as past and present do, or ends and means, or—as Orrick would say—the brain’s two lobes. In any event, part of what Joan’s mother called his “darkness” had to do with this: One day, in a farm accident, Martin—that is, Buddy—ran over and killed his brother Gilbert. It was an ugly and stupid accident which, even at the last moment, Buddy could have prevented by hitting the tractor brakes; but he was unable to think, or rather thought unclearly, and so watched it happen, as he would watch it happen in his mind, with undiminished clarity, again and again until the day he died. It was a shattering experience, needless to say, for all the Orricks. Buddy’s father was almost unable to go on living. Sometimes Buddy would find him lying in the manure on the barn floor, crying, unable to stand up. Duncan Orrick was, as I’ve said, a good man—gentle and intelligent, a dreamer. He’d loved all his children and would not consciously have been able to hate Buddy even if Buddy had been, as he seriously imagined himself, Gilbert’s murderer. But of course he could not help seeming to blame his son, though in fact he blamed no one but himself. Though he was not ordinarily a man who smoked, he would sometimes sit up all night or move restlessly from room to room smoking cigarettes and crying, or he would ride away on his motorcycle, trying to forget, or playing with the idea of killing himself, hunting in mixed fear and anger for reasons not to do so and coming down, always, to just one, the damage his suicide would unquestionably do his c
hildren. Sometimes, as his son would do long afterward, he would forget for a while by abandoning reason and responsibility for love affairs. He was at this time still fairly young, distinctly handsome, and so full of pain that women’s hearts went out to him automatically. At times he would be gone from the farm for days, abandoning the work to Buddy and whoever was available to help—some neighbor or one of Buddy’s uncles. A fool might have condemned Duncan Orrick for all this, but no one in the family did, certainly not Buddy, not even Buddy’s mother, though it increased her sorrow. He had always been a good and faithful man; no one, whatever the pain he might cause, would dream of demanding that he do more than survive.

  As for Buddy’s mother, she cried all night, sometimes lying alone, and did as much as she had the strength to do—so drained by grief that she could barely lift a pot or pan—for her husband and children. She comforted Buddy and his younger sister, and herself as well, by embracing them almost ferociously when the waves of guilt and sorrow swept in, or by thinking up work that would distract their minds, or by prayer. And because she had great strength of character, and because, also, she was a woman of strong religious faith, she kept the family functioning. Her children would have no real sense until long afterward just how much strength that period demanded of her or how heavily she depended, for her own survival, on Duncan’s sister Mary and Mary’s husband, Buddy’s uncle George.

  But for all his mother could do for him, Buddy Orrick had suffered psychological damage that would take a long time to heal. He had been, before, suspicious, easily hurt, self-absorbed. He became now more withdrawn, more self-absorbed than ever. The accident had happened in early spring. He’d seen, the day it happened, the first light-blue wild flowers blooming along the road. Working the farm, ploughing, disking, dragging, cultipacking from morning to night, he had plenty of time to think—plenty of time to replay the accident in his mind, against his will, his whole body flinching from the picture as it came, his voice leaping up independent of him, as if perhaps a shout could drive the memory back into its darkness. Driving the big Farmall F-20 over rocky fields, dust rising behind him or, when he turned into the wind, falling like dry rain until his face and hands were as dark as a Negro’s and his hair was thick and stiff—the hills all around him greener every day, the spring wind endless and steady and sweet with the smell of coming rain—he had all the time in the world to cry and swear bitterly and hate himself. He had not loved his brother—or anyone—as much as he should have, he thought, as much as he now helplessly and for the most part without showing it loved his father and mother and sister and, a short while later, his new, red-headed baby brother. He was basically incapable of love, he thought. He was simply a bad person, a spiritual defective.

  He had always told himself stories to pass the time when driving the tractor, endlessly looping back and forth, around and around over a twenty-acre field, fitting the land for spring planting. He told them to himself aloud, taking all parts in the dialogue—here where no one could see or overhear him, half a mile or more from the nearest house—gesturing, making faces (exactly as he’d do in the study where he wrote his short stories and novels, some fifteen years later). Once all his stories had been of sexual conquests—always very chaste; lasciviousness was not one of his weaknesses—or of heroic battle with, for instance, escaped convicts or kidnappers who, unbeknownst to anyone, had built a little shack where they kept their captives (female and beautiful) in the woods beside the field where he worked. But now they were all of self-sacrifice, pitiful stories in which, as in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, he made something, at last, of his worthless life by throwing it away to save some other, fit to live. At some point in these stories he would confess his worthlessness, naming all his faults and giving numerous examples, granting himself no mercy; and, absurd as it may sound, he would weep honest tears of remorse as he angrily denounced himself. If on some unconscious level he hoped he might in this way ground his guilt and sorrow, the trick did not work. The foulness of his character (as it seemed to him) became clearer and clearer in his mind until, like his father, he began to toy in earnest with killing himself. As it would do all his life, his chest would fill with anguish, as if he were drowning or bleeding internally, and his arms and legs would grow shaky with weakness, until he had to stop the tractor and sit for a few minutes sobbing. But he lacked even the strength of character to kill himself, as it seemed to him. He was finally indifferent to the agony his mother and father suffered—otherwise wouldn’t he have killed himself long ago? Once at night his father found him up in the pitch-dark silo, lying in the corn ensilage, crying, and he climbed in through the silo door and felt his way over to him and took him into his arms and tried to speak to him but couldn’t, since now he too was crying; and Buddy was aware—though he could do nothing about it—that whereas his father’s crying was real, his own was self-conscious, false. Bits of ensilage had gotten under Buddy’s collar, cold and tickling, and his mind would not ignore the unpleasantness, would not, whatever his wish, abandon itself to grief.

  Thus it seemed to him that everything in the world condemned him, and condemned him in vain, since he lacked the nobility of heart to feel pain as he should. When the wind was high outside his window at night, making the screens and pinetrees groan like sorrowing ghosts, he wanted to feel horror, recognition of his state of damnation; but he felt only unloved and afraid, felt above all, perhaps, a tawdry embarrassment over the fact that, day after day, his family must see him, strangers must see him, knowing what they all must know, that he had killed his brother. That was the heart of it: he was tawdry—though the word was not one he knew at that time. That was what he hated most in his innumerable faults: they were tawdry.

  He was forever telling lies—for no earthly reason, not to hide things, not to make himself seem better than he was, not even to hurt people, though sometimes the lies did turn out to do harm. It was an astonishing thing, and even more astonishing that he could do nothing about it. He made up story after story, things he’d seen, people he’d met. He told friends at school that his family was Polish and had changed the family name. (In later years he would claim and even to some extent believe that he was Welsh, though the only Welsh blood he possessed was that of his carpenter grandfather, who was only half Welsh himself.) He told his art teacher, merely to make conversation—he had at the time a great, sad crush on her—that a cow had died last night. When she ran into his father the following day she asked about it, with great sympathy. Buddy Orrick, thinking of his stupid habit, would grind his teeth and clutch his head in both hands, or sometimes jerk angrily at his hair. Also he was lazy. He simply couldn’t make himself do his school assignments. He would swear at himself aloud and order himself to work with furious indignation (he would all his life be one of those people who talk to themselves); but it was useless, the very sight of the printing on the pages of his textbooks filled him with a drowning sensation like sorrow or perhaps anger, though the work was not hard. He would get out his French horn to play for just a little, and the next thing he knew, his father would be poking his head in at the door, saying wearily, with red-rimmed eyes, “Buddy, it’s after midnight.” Also he was a fool, and a dangerous one. He once walked five miles with his closest school friend, completely forgetting that the boy had a heart condition. The following day the friend nearly died.

  Buddy Orrick’s faults hounded him, or when he slept rushed over him as nightmares. At times he would abruptly stop brooding on them and, instead, would struggle for oblivion. To avoid the nightmares, he learned to get by on less and less sleep; in school he became a troublemaker, a tiresome smart aleck; at home, when not working for his father, he learned to concentrate so intensely on his horn playing, alone in his room, or his writing, or composing at the piano in the livingroom, that nothing at all could break in on him, from within or without—except that picture, the replay of the accident. He would be known, years later, as one of the most prolific “serious” writers of his time, despite a
heavy schedule as professor, scholarly editor, and public reader. His secret was that he had learned all too well, during those painful years, to concentrate totally, dropping out of ordinary reality as a ghost sinks down through the stones of a castle floor. Lying beside him, racked with pain, Joan would never cease to be amazed by how, the moment his head touched the pillow, he was fast asleep.

  He had various means of avoiding painful feeling at this time, his early adolescence. He would do endless trigonometric identities, mindlessly driving on like a circling atom, using up great swatches of butcher paper; he began at this period to write poems and stories, to draw and paint in oils, and to compose music; but his chief means of escape was playing the French horn.

  It was odd that he should be at all good at it. Though he’d taken piano lessons for seven years, he’d never gotten past the John Thompson fourth book, could play a Bach two-part invention only stumblingly, and had an idiotic and infuriating habit (in Joan’s opinion) of holding the pedal down. But on the horn, luckily, he turned out to be less inept. He was soon studying on Saturday mornings with a man who was at that time one of the best French horn teachers in the world, Arcady Yegudkin—“the General”—at the Eastman School of Music; and owing to a scarcity of decent French horn players in the area at that period—and owing, too, to Yegudkin’s influence—he was soon sitting in at concert time with small civic orchestras throughout western New York and southern Ontario.

  There are no such French horn players left as was Arcady Yegudkin. He had played principal horn in the orchestra of Czar Nikolai, and at the time of the Revolution had escaped, with his wife—dramatically. At the time of their purge of Kerenskyites and supposed sympathizers with the older order, the Bolsheviks loaded Yegudkin and his wife, along with hundreds of others, onto flatcars, reportedly to carry them away to imprisonment. The Bolsheviks’ intention was of course somewhat darker. In a desolate place, a forest hundreds of miles from the nearest city of any size, machine guns opened fire on the people on the flatcars; then soldiers pushed the bodies off into a ravine and the train moved on. The soldiers were not careful to see that everyone was dead—they believed in the Revolution, but they were not to the last man bloodthirsty maniacs and did not relish their work; besides, they believed that in a place so remote, a man or woman only wounded, not yet dead, would have no chance against the cold and the wolves—and so they cleared the flatcars, averting their eyes from the fellow Russians who stirred or groaned or whimpered for mercy, washed away most of the blood from the flatcars, and fled. Arcady Yegudkin and his wife were among the very few who survived, he virtually unmarked, she horribly crippled. Peasants who hated even politics ostensibly undertaken in their behalf, and who were outraged that any government anywhere should raise its monstrous, idiot hand against poets and musicians (four famous poets were killed in the massacre) nursed the Yegudkins back to something like health and smuggled them to what had been, until lately, St. Petersburg, and thence into Europe. There Yegudkin played horn with all the great orchestras, all the great conductors, and received such praise as no other master of the French horn has ever been given with the possible exception of Dennis Brain, who was at least approaching Yegudkin’s power when his car crashed in 1957.