Stillness & Shadows

by John Gardner

  In their search for something beyond mere illusion, George Preston’s father and uncle Bill gave psychic tests to George and his brothers and sisters. They would deal out, for instance, a pack of ordinary playing cards, face down on the table, from which each member of the family was to select one without looking at it, and was to sit with his fingertips just touching the card until he believed he knew the card’s value. It was a foolish game, George’s mother thought, more tiresome even than guessing thoughts or Ouija, and no one in the family would have played it if George’s father and uncle Bill hadn’t been salesmen as clever as George Preston was to be. They would play this “game,” as they called it, hour after hour, on the brothers’ theory that psychic power was a thing that required developing, like a muscle; and time after time the members of the family would, after much thought, name the cards they thought they had, and the cards would be turned up, and everyone would be wrong.

  One night, according to family legend, an odd thing happened. Buddy Orrick’s uncle George, who was six at the time, fell asleep in his chair while the game dragged on. When his father called his name, he looked around, confused, realized what was happening, and named a card at random—the four of clubs. “Turn it over, Georgy,” his father said, a touch impatient, and he was already turning to the next player when George’s small fingers turned over the four of clubs. According to George Preston’s story later, the family whooped with delight and hugged him, overjoyed because in this game for loonies and idiots someone had finally won. His father and uncle were eager to deal the cards and try again, but it was late and George’s mother—she was a pinched-looking woman who wore her hair in a bun and, judging by her photograph, had no good to say of anything—put her foot down: the children must get some sleep.

  The brothers agreed at once, but they were unscrupulous mad scientists and had their plans prepared. Half an hour later they crept furtively to little Georgy’s bed, candles in their hands, their flickering shadows towering behind them, looking over their shoulders, half wakened him from sleep to give him a playing card, keeping the face from him, and asked him what it was. “The queen of diamonds,” he said. It was, indeed, the queen of diamonds. He would remember years later how, looking up into the two men’s crazily eager, candlelit faces, his father holding another card to him, he’d felt a wild surge of excitement himself, a sudden conviction that in some way he couldn’t put his finger on, he knew how he’d done it and could do it again. But he knew the next instant that he’d been wrong about that. He had no idea what the card he was touching now might be.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Come, come,” his father said, smiling, the candlelight glinting on his teeth. “Make your mind a blank.”

  Their heads were tipped toward each other, and their smiles, their slightly lifted eyebrows, the way the fingertips of their right hands gently touched their beards, were identical. It seemed the intense reality of their image that blocked his vision of what the card might be. The room was becoming more solid by the moment: the wallpaper, stained where the roof had leaked, the commode with its shiny, cracked pitcher and chamber pot and washbasin, the scratchy curtain, every thread more precise than usual—as if the two men and the room were a startling, unreal vision, so that his ordinary knowledge of the value of the card had been driven from his thought by the intensity of the strange dream risen before his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said again. “I’m sleepy.”

  “That’s right,” his uncle said, and tilted toward him like a huge automaton. “You’re sleepy…very sleepy.” He raised his hand, moved it slowly from left to right. George slept.

  He could never have proved, he would readily admit, that it had been anything more than luck that night. His father and uncle had continued to force the game on the family—also other games of the same kind: for instance, one with painted matchsticks, where one was supposed to guess what color had been picked from the painted, round tin box. He was not especially impressed by the fact that, according to his father’s careful records, his guesses were right with surprising regularity, particularly those he made when, as he played the game, he was so tired he could barely keep his eyes open. What did impress him—though he knew it was of no scientific use and could find in it no meaning beyond its pure facticity—was the feeling that sometimes came over him that he was in curious hands. Once, driving his grocery truck, he was suddenly overcome by extreme fear that had no apparent cause—such terror that he was forced to pull off the road. The terror turned to nausea, he had to vomit in the weeds. Coming from the family he came from, he looked at his watch and wrote down the time on the back of one of his order blanks. The terror had come, he discovered later, within one or two minutes of the death of his uncle Bill.

  Years later, when he met Lulu Frazier for the first time (George Preston was then fifty), she stared at his face for a long while with her deep-set, malevolent-looking eyes and finally said to him—they were seated at the dinner table at Joan’s Grandpa Frazier’s, and loud conversation was going on all around them, but the old woman seemed unaware of the noisy laughter and talk—“Second sight comes from the Devil. Beware of it.”

  A chill ran up and down everyone who heard, and the talk died down. She was a frightening woman, those last few years. George Preston made some joke, but her staring eyes bored into him.

  “Lulu, you hush,” John Frazier said, and he made no pretense that it wasn’t a warning. If she troubled him again, maybe he’d get up, in front of all the company, and hit her one.

  But the warning was wasted. Staring straight at George she said, “This man you brought here has second sight.”

  “Then it certainly doesn’t come from the Devil,” Aunt Mary said. Her blue eyes flashed.

  Eleven

  Anyone could have predicted that Joan and Martin’s marriage would be a stormy one, and not just because, as the painter John Napper took such pleasure in discovering, years later in London, he was a Cancer, she a Leo. In fact her mother, at the wedding, just before Joan went down the aisle, had said jokingly, “Just remember, it’s a good first marriage.” It was of course the last thing in the world she’d have said in earnest, not only because she was still essentially a Catholic but also because, when you came right down to it, she loved him almost as her daughter did. She was in a certain way in love with his father too, as a matter of fact, though it was not at all the solid and serious love she felt for Donald. Duncan Orrick had sad and beautiful eyes and a shy tenderness that made him abnormally vulnerable but also able to write and speak poetry, and these virtues or defects his son had too.

  It seemed to Emmy very risky, their marrying at nineteen, neither of them ever having seriously considered anyone else, though she and Donald had done everything in their power to encourage Joan to go out with other boys. Buddy and Joan were very different kinds of people, that was what frightened her—different in a way she and Donald, or John Elmer and Cora, or even Buddy’s parents, had never been. She was brilliant and lively, wonderfully funny, she kept things hopping. Buddy was, well, morose. Emmy understood, of course, and she didn’t like to be critical, but he really was, as she’d said once fretfully to Donald, an odd one. He’d come roaring in on that motorcycle from his college in Indiana, two hundred and fifty miles away, having driven straight through, no doubt as fast as his horrible, noisy machine would go, and he wouldn’t even have shaved, though he was coming to see his fiancée, and he’d have on jeans and that grizzly leather jacket and boots with holes in them, and dark circles under his eyes because he never slept, and when Joan persuaded him to take a bath he’d leave such a ring around the tub you’d think he’d been working all month in a coal mine. He never brought a suit, brought not even a toothbrush, brought only his French horn and a book or two and the machine he rode on. (Emmy was terrified by motorcycles, always had been. One of her brothers had been killed in a motorcycle accident.) He would sit in the livingroom and smoke and smoke until the whole house reeked, and long after she and Do
nald had given up and gone to bed, he’d still be there, sitting on the couch listening to records with Joan, or lying beside her (to call a spade a spade), as they’d been doing now for years—though just what, just how much they’d been doing she wasn’t quite sure and would rather not know. The kinds of music he listened to were gloomy, morbid, not at all the light, sparkling kinds of music Joan always played. Some of it presented no discernible melody, or if it did have a melody it was the kind that made you cry. There they’d lie—or lay?—listening half the night with the lights off, hardly ever speaking. It was all, she said to Donald, “so unhealthy.” But they’d of course done the same, she and Donald, riding in his father’s car, Donald’s arm around her, his hand near her breast, she subtly encouraging him. And then once—well, never mind. If they loved each other as she and Donald had loved each other, and if their love would grow as hers had grown, and Donald’s, then she had no objection, was glad for them, in fact joyful—but did they? Everything was so different now. What was a parent supposed to do?

  Lying in the darkness, Donald’s arm around her waist, both of them listening to the record playing and thinking of Joan on the couch beside Buddy, she felt as if her insides were bleeding, she was so worried, and from time to time she would ask Donald, really not knowing, herself, “Should we tell them to go to bed?” She suspected, naturally (and rightly), the worst. “It’s just the sex thing that draws them together so,” she complained to Donald one night. “Those two just look at each other and boom, it’s an explosion.” But Donald said wearily, sorrowfully, “No, they was like that before they ever heard about sex.” And that was true, all right. She’d known it herself, had merely wanted Donald to say it. She ought to be reassured but, like Donald, she was worried just the same, worried sick. She would smile, long afterward, when poor Buddy—that is, Martin—had to suffer the same thing, when it was his own daughter, Mary, that was in love. And she would smile, too, at how needlessly they’d worried, though that was what life was all about, of course. They had their troubles, Joan and Martin, but thank the Lord they made a great deal of money, and their children were wonderful, which must be a sign that the marriage was better than anyone back then could have hoped it would be—though Cora and John Elmer, she must admit, and Mary and George Preston had had no doubts at all. When they came back to visit, when they were middle-aged, Martin a famous novelist now, with silver hair falling down his back like a woman’s (“That’s expected of famous writers,” she told friends, though she had, of course, her doubts), and Joan a composer who’d had her music recorded by some orchestra in New York—pots and pans, it sounded like, or planets in collision, though Emmy was the first to admit she wouldn’t know (she liked it, secretly; was it supposed to sound childishly funny, full of joy?)—when they came back, anyway, or when they invited Donald and her for a visit in England, while they were living there, it was not like seeing one’s children but more like, well, bumping into old friends. No one would dream they’d been through what they had. “She’s turned out to be a nice-looking girl,” Donald said. Though she was usually more careful, Emmy had laughed straight at him, the understatement was so ridiculous, and he’d blushed and laughed too. Their grandson Evan was an absolute jewel, as saintly and gentle as Donald and as, well, pedantic as his father, but not gloomy, not crabby or misanthropic—not that there was anything wrong with Martin, she added quickly in her mind. He was good at heart. It took some getting used to, the way Evan’s hair fell past his shoulders, like a girl’s, or like his father’s. But he was a wonderful boy, he really was, doing those magic tricks with his tailcoat and top hat, acting as if he never knew himself what miracle might happen next, cunning and innocent, exactly like Joan. She’d laughed until she thought she might fall out of her chair.

  In London everyone was a magician of sorts, or at any rate everyone at their party was. The great, tall silver-haired painter Mr. Napper did mind-reading tricks, and his brother who was some kind of television director did tricks with cards and forks, and finally they’d all prevailed upon Evan to do his show. She’d really been fooled by his bumbling at first—as why shouldn’t she be, a gangly yellow-haired twelve-year-old claiming that before he could do his tricks he had to find his rabbit, and hunting foolishly behind doors and under chairs until Mr. Napper, the one who was the painter, said (they must all have been in on it), his face lighting up—and his eyes so wonderfully, beamingly sneaky she should have guessed that very instant—“It’s coming to me!” Evan stopped and looked at him, smiling in a way that was supposed to be innocent but was as obviously crooked as the smile Donald had when he’d skinned somebody out of a five-thousand-dollar machine for, say, two hundred dollars; and Mr. Napper said, “Sh! The spirit’s speaking! Yes, spirit? Yes? (This is very difficult, he’s speaking Swahili …) Come in, spirit! Ah!” And then, with a wildly mischievous look, “If my translation’s correct, it’s in a large black purse.” Innocently they all looked around for a purse, and one by one they ended up staring at the purse in her lap. She blushed, feeling very strange, as if the laws of the universe had altered, and tentatively opened her purse. Out peeked a rabbit. “Oh,” Evan said to Mr. Napper, “gee, thanks.”

  He was also a wonderful musician, as Joan had always been, but played French horn like his father—except better than his father—though she didn’t like to say it—and of course she might not know. He was really more like Donald than like either of his parents, a mathematical whiz. As for his younger sister, Mary, well, she was a joy, simply. She too had that unreal-seeming yellow hair—in the summer almost white. She wrote poems and stories like a little professional, acted in plays, took lessons on the harp … It was wrong, Emmy knew, to brag on one’s grandchildren, but she was too old, had seen too much, to pretend she wasn’t proud. It made her see her own past in a whole new way, made her see the world in a whole new way. She had, now, Parkinson’s disease. She’d learned to understand very simply what things made her happy.

  Yet their worry at the time Joan and Martin were getting married was natural, inevitable. At his college in Indiana he rarely went to classes, rarely left his room—“writing a book,” he said sourly, daring you to challenge him. When he came to visit Joan, he would glumly put on the suit she’d bought him and kept in her closet for him to wear when he came, and he’d go off with her to concerts or the Institute’s dances, and he’d stand around all evening hardly speaking to her friends, and not just from shyness: Joan had nagged him about it once in Emmy’s hearing and he’d answered, “What’s to say?” He’d often talked like a Jew or an Italian, in those days. Why it hurt her feelings, Emmy didn’t know. He had a cruel, vulgar streak. Joan liked nice things—clothes, furniture, houses. He was utterly indifferent, even scornful. He hurt her. Emmy saw it, but she was helpless. Joan was beautiful and lively, eager for life, and she’d fallen into the oldest trap in the world, or so it seemed to Emmy: she’d fallen in love with a handsome, gloomy-souled misanthrope. He could be funny when he wanted, and there were things he took pleasure in—how often she’d wished people who didn’t know him as the family did could see him at his best!—but no mistake, he was a dark one.

  Nonetheless, they were married; there was no preventing it. Donald and John Elmer made an apartment for them upstairs in Donald and Emmy’s house. Buddy—or Martin, as Joan now called him, to his regal disgust—transferred to Washington University and took a part-time job in the Pine Lawn Bank. Joan gave up her chance to tour with the Symphony again—so willingly that Emmy couldn’t help but wonder if there hadn’t been some trouble—and took courses in music education to help Martin through graduate school. It was a strange two years. Sometimes they—the family—would sit up late playing bridge, or he and Emmy would have talks in the kitchen about the meaning of things, such as the value of religion even if it was false (he had strange ideas, and it was a long time since she’d played, except by herself, with strange ideas), and it seemed to Emmy that everything would be all right. But at other times she couldn’t hel
p but think, however she fought it, that the marriage was nothing short of a crime, a shameful waste—a girl of Joan’s ability enslaving herself to a young man whose idea of a worthwhile life was writing stories and novels full of crude obscenities. Emmy said only, cautiously, “If you get your novel published, will you use your own name?” But Martin was at least attending classes now—doing well in them, in fact. For graduate school, to everyone’s amazement, especially Martin’s, he got a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. It paid what seemed to her a great deal of money.

  They moved to Iowa and were happy, apparently, Joan teaching a great flock of Bohemian-American musical naturals (so she wrote), Martin sometimes helping, more often studying and writing every day, all day long, far into the night. Her letters were full of happiness and there was really no question that everything was wonderful, except that they couldn’t manage money. They were of course not the kinds of letters that encouraged you to read between the lines. Emmy would learn only long afterward that (as she’d suspected) they had their trials. They had fights sometimes. They had violent tempers, both of them, and Buddy—Martin—was selfish, prickly, he wanted to do nothing but work in his room. He was also resentful. He didn’t like it that Joan earned most of the money, didn’t like, ever, to be told what to do, hated even her gentlest suggestions, even hints that he might possibly clean his fingernails or buy new shoes when the soles were flapping when he walked. (On the other hand, of course, her “wit’s cutlery,” as Martin called it, was not always her best friend.) Martin was also secretive, sullen, and occasionally dishonest—he’d sometimes pretend he’d been at school all day when in fact he’d been home writing. He was a mess, really, though at times when they weren’t fighting that wasn’t Joan’s opinion. Beautiful, sunny Joan loved her sad-eyed Martin more and more. Partly she pitied him—held him when he had nightmares, soothed him when his black depressions got frightening. But also they had a good time together. The fiction he was writing now seemed to her fairly good, and he had cheerful moods when he would actually, as she put it, come out and play.