Stillness & Shadows

by John Gardner

  It was a pleasant place for a reading—a small, comfortable hall in what had once been a barn, wooden floors worn smooth and shaped by generations of students, small-paned windows of a kind she’d found common in the east, the whole thing totally unpretentious, which was precisely why one felt here so real, so classy, so solidly connected with the past and therefore the present. The people gave her the same feeling—their clothes, the way they sat, the structure of their faces. They might have been sitting here, calmly listening—without intense Midwestern hunger or squinting fascination, without mulish reservation or timidity or gall—as long as the low, accommodating mountains of Vermont had been listening, as long as flat eastern voices like Martin’s had been speaking of life’s steady sorrows and hurrying joys.

  He was reading in a black robe with a great, silver chain, as he often did lately. He was such an eccentric it looked natural on him, very handsome, in fact, his prematurely silver hair flowing down his back, his English-Irish-Welsh voice singing through language as the voices of his preacher teacher lawyer ancestors had done all those years, or centuries rather, calling in vain for heaven’s mercy. People wept, listening. She could have wept herself, but against the power of the story, against the “dark vision” his reviewers absurdly, perversely praised, her pleasure in his looks, his power to move strangers, triumphed. He was now distinctly fat. She liked him fat. And it struck her that, whatever his faults, he had never lost that childlike fairness: principles were evil, never people, in his fiction. He created no bad characters, and if he’d seemed not to love her, from time to time—the complaint was behind her—it was nevertheless true that all through the years, every heroine he’d put on paper was recognizably herself. All but one of them were red-heads. In fact in one of his novels—he was obviously unaware of it—all the characters were red-heads. It startled her to notice that just now, here in this roomful of “Bennington girls,” also talented and handsome eastern woman-teachers—musicians, novelists, scientists, painters—she felt perfectly at home—in fact queenly. She recalled that her father had called her “princess” when she was little. (Her mother, because of the Parkinson’s disease, now trembled, no longer drove a car, wrote letters in which the penmanship was so small you very nearly needed a magnifying glass. But she seemed wiser than she’d seemed when she was pretty and young. When she and Martin visited her parents now—and the same was true when they visited his parents—they all talked like friends, like adults. They were all, of course, proud of him, and he was properly grateful; he would mention in interviews all they’d done for him.)

  He was coming to the end, building toward it like a Russian composer, turning the lights out one by one, unostentatiously, forcing nothing, offering no opinions, the music speaking for itself. She was startled by an odd discovery, and though no one sitting near her would have noticed the change, she came suddenly wide awake, thinking, He believes all that! It was, she would write in her own novel—the one she began in her mind that night—the most important discovery she’d ever made about him. She saw him all at once as different from herself—after all this time with Behan, trying to learn to see people as essentially like her, encouraged or wounded by the same kinds of things—saw him as a completely separate human being with separate problems: nothing was her fault. He was simply like that, and her love, or her failure to love him as she should, had nothing whatever to do with it, had only to do with how things stood between them. She found herself loving him, pitying him, admiring him with absolute detachment. It was as if the room had suddenly grown enormous, as large as the universe he was forever bringing into his stories and novels, and he was a star at the edge of it, rushing outward from the calm, hushed center, and it was not her fault.

  When he finished reading his typically mighty final line, there was a moment of stillness while the usual chills ran up and down the people’s backs (not that she meant to be unfeeling; it was wonderful, wonderful; but she’d been through it many times): then applause, intense and prolonged. He was instantly transformed to his ordinary self, shy, slightly suspicious that they couldn’t really mean it, unworthy of this frightening honor. When the crowd of adoring maidens thinned she went up to him. “You were terrific!” she said. As they were leaving, going to the party, he took her hand.

  Casually, over drinks, someone asked if he’d be interested in teaching at Bennington College for a year. He grinned and asked her what she thought. She said, “Certainly!” “Really?” he said, surprised. “I like it,” she said, “—not that I want to boss you, understand.” “Boss me?” he said, and actually looked blank. She smiled, radiant, for the benefit of the others, and Martin, looking slightly baffled, said, “If Joan thinks we should come, I guess we should come.”

  No one doubted for long that she’d been brilliantly right, as usual. In Bennington the children could go to good schools that offered interesting courses not available at home, and they could play in the Sage City Symphony—she and Martin as well. The man who taught strings and conducted the orchestra in the Mount Anthony Junior and Senior High schools turned out to be Daniel Antoun, as fine a teacher and musician as anyone in the east, knocking off concerts, one after another, that few civic orchestras could have touched. Evan would turn, overnight, into a really first-rate horn player, and Mary would begin taking lessons on the harp in Schenectady. Joan, one afternoon, found a house for sale, a splendid old place with leaded windows, a hanging staircase, a third-floor ballroom (which they would immediately turn into a theater). It cost half what their house in Missouri cost, and it was right next door to the oldest house in Vermont and the most beautiful church. “Could we?” she said. “We could live here six months and in Missouri for six months. The children love it, Martin.” Which was true. He called his publisher, got an advance on a new novel. They signed the papers.

  She met, at one of the Bennington parties, a New York City anesthesiologist who made some use of hypnotism—or mesmerism, as Martin stubbornly insisted on calling it, in memory of his uncle George. He could teach her autohypnosis, he said, and at least to some extent get her off the drugs. She could kill at least part of the pain and still compose, perhaps teach. (She had no immediate need of a job. She was doing psychotherapy, on those days when she was well enough, at the college. She imitated Dr. Behan’s method, but added touches no one but Joan Orrick would have thought of. She gave students the words to “When You Walk Through a Storm” and “Climb Every Mountain” and urged them to sing them with feeling whenever depressed.) Though both Martin and Paul Brotsky had been urging her to try autohypnosis for years, the hypnotist’s suggesting it made it suddenly a concrete possibility—in fact, she knew at once that it would work. She had to do something, she knew. She was working as much as possible on her novel now, and it was infuriating that she couldn’t think clearly.

  “If I could only concentrate,” she’d said to Dr. Behan, “I think I might turn out to be, you know, really good.”

  He’d smiled. “Does it matter?”

  “Oh, very much,” she’d said.

  And he: “If you are, what will Martin think?”

  She’d said without an instant’s hesitation, knowing it was true, “He’ll think it’s wonderful.” Then, a second later: “But he’ll hate it if it’s bad. It won’t be anything personal—nothing to do with whether or not he loves me—but oh my God will he hate it!” And then suddenly, exactly as she’d done as a child, she’d laughed: “So let him hate it! Fuck him!”

  Dr. Behan smiled, looking her over. “That should do it, yes.”

  The minute the hypnotist suggested he could help, she excused herself and went to find Martin—he was talking to a dignified gray-haired lady named Babs—and dragged him back to where the hypnotist sat. She told him what the hypnotist had recommended, and said, “Could we try it, Martin?” “What’s this ‘Could we’?” he said.

  She began the lessons, flying down twice a week to New York. It was at first disappointing, and she would soon learn that her hopes had b
een too high; but the hypnotist insisted that her progress was miraculous, considering the dosage of drugs she was on. “Serious pain isn’t easy to talk yourself out of, Joanie,” he said.

  “He just wants to get into your pants,” Martin said.

  She kept trying and began to have a little success. She began to go for days at a time without drugs. She could drive again, at least sometimes: she knew when she could make it without dizziness or fainting.

  She said to the hypnotist, leaning forward in her chair, that what he’d done for her life was astonishing. He asked her, timidly, if she’d be interested, perhaps, in having an affair. She thanked him but declined. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “what I’d really like is a dog.” She’d seen one advertised in the Bennington Banner.

  “A dog?”

  “I haven’t had a dog since I was four,” she said. “When he was run over, my mother was heartbroken, and all I ever had after that was cats—and a pig, one time, and a pony that bit;”

  “Dogs bite,” he said, trying to be helpful.

  She said, “My husband and children have dogs, but not me, not my own.” She looked out at the buildings, the dirty snow. “What I was thinking I’d like is an Old English sheepdog. A boy dog.” She grinned.

  She said the same thing to Martin, and after she’d mentioned it four or five times he surprised her with an Old English sheepdog, male, which she named Bennington. She’d made a mistake, she realized; an Old English sheepdog wasn’t what she meant, she’d had in mind some other breed, a whole lot smaller. But Bennington (Bennington the Dog, as they called him, to keep things clear—and for some reason they spoke to him only in French) was a joy and fell madly in love with her, though he was almost impossible to housebreak.

  She was happier than ever. “Look, it’s snowing!” she would cry out, every time it snowed. Evan would look up from his paperback of card tricks, or the photographs he’d developed and was now trimming with scissors, or from his French horn etudes, and would grin at her. “Neat!” She went skiing and skating; she bought tap-dance shoes and started practicing in the back room with Bennington the Dog, who barked at her like crazy. Mary would roll up her eyes and moan, exactly like Martin, “Culture, culture, culture.”

  “This,” Joan said, “is a buck-and-wing.”

  The house shook, the dog barked insanely.

  “But is it Art?” Mary said.

  When she was caught up with the schedule she had for her novel, she composed horn duets for Evan and Martin, harp pieces for Mary, string ensembles for them all—including Paul, when he came to visit. They all went, every Sunday night, to the rehearsal of the Sage City Symphony. Martin growled about his students, the dogshit, the cost of food (he’d always been cheap; now that they were rich he was downright stingy). He complained about the endless paperwork Bennington College required of him; wrote half the night (“Genius, unmitigated genius,” she would say, looking over his shoulder, and would kiss him on the bald spot), and often lay in bed late with her mornings, holding her in his arms. She drove through the mountains in the big blue Mercedes, with Bennington the Dog on the leather seat beside her, buying curtains, carpets, furniture. Every other day she was asked if she was interested in having an affair. She wore, everywhere, except when she visited Dr. Behan in Detroit, where display could be dangerous, her rings: a big diamond, two emeralds, a ruby in an antique setting from Carrier’s. (Deep down, Martin too was an absolute snob.) Also one of her enormous fur coats (not endangered species except for, possibly, she wasn’t sure, her second-hand lynx; anyway, Martin apparently didn’t notice: he was still on whales). “Who’s that woman?” strangers asked. She decided to see if she could improve on the effect. She went on a diet, made a habit of the Canadian Air Force exercises. Martin refused to diet. He liked himself fat, thought it made him look more mature, more significant. Some interviewer asked her if success had “spoiled Martin Orrick.” “Oh, horribly!” she said. “Unbelievably!” Martin of course denied it. “It’s not success,” he said, “it’s simple recognition, as when one remarks, ‘Ah ha, there goes a camel.’ ” She suggested that if he were to go on a diet he would look even more mature and significant, like a trim little London banker. He wasn’t fooled. “Loveliness is not my bag,” he said.

  Her self-confidence increased. Even Martin was impressed, was almost, in fact, regularly cheerful. “Maybe all women should be issued adhesions,” he said. She laughed. She had learned to hide from him almost completely the fact that she was in pain, except, of course, when it was so bad she had to turn to the drugs again, and could no longer manage full control. Pain or no pain, she laughed a lot, these days, and made other people laugh. Once when they stopped to buy fish at the fish truck that came over the mountains every Thursday from Maine, bringing lobsters, clams, crabs, and bluefish, a big burly man in a lumberjacket dared to step in front of her in line. She was wearing a black leather coat and beret and leather boots and looked, more than usual, like a high-priced Girl Commando. She at once stepped around him and in front of him, reached up and poked him in the chest, and said, “Watch yerself, buster, or I’ll push yer face in.” His eyes widened, his mouth opened, and then he bent over and laughed, slapping his knee, and couldn’t stop. The fish man laughed too, and she had to stand there, leaning on her elbow, waiting to be served.

  Her doctor said, in his dingy little office in Shaftsbury, “You realize, Joan, this hypnotism’s all very well, but that stuff’s in there working. You’re going to have to face up, before long, to another operation.”

  “I know,” she said, “and another and another.”

  “Well—” he said.

  She smiled, listening to the ticking of his clock. “Not just yet. But soon. I promise.”

  He shook his head, chewing on his pipe. “What’s your secret?” he said.

  “I’m in love,” she said.

  “Does your husband know?”

  She leaned toward him confidentially. “My husband is a fool.”

  Dr. Faris was nonplussed and looked at her forehead. “It doesn’t seem to bother you much,” he said.

  “Well, you see, he’s rich.”

  Driving home down the mountain afterward, she thought about it. They were rich—not that, in point of fact, they had all that much money. But his sad, hopeless stories made people who heard them or read them come alive, made them gentle, made them notice their compassion for one another. His readings had the effect of a really good funeral: they made people come together and defy that age-old horror of things, the restless churning of sudden births and deaths, a universe of clumsily bumping bits of force, a cry out of the grass—and they were better than funerals, because the horrors he wrote of were all made up, mere airy might’ve been. (She knew what horror was, knew in, excuse the expression, her guts. “Watch yerself, buster,” she said to Death, riding, sadly watching her, in the wide blue real-leather seat behind her back.)

  As she walked into the house, Martin was shouting as if in Euripidean rage, defying the gods, cursing the gray earth that so patiently bore him, “God damn Bennington!” Either the college had sent him more forms or he’d stepped in some dogshit.

  “Hi, Martin, I’m home!” she called.

  “Hi, Mom,” Evan said, grinning, looking up from the carpet where he was reading a great, fat paperback, Martin’s last best-seller. A sign of their progress was that Martin’s mad rages no longer frightened Evan at all. Mary waved hello from the couch, where she was writing, not bothering to look up.

  Martin hadn’t heard her call of greeting, still howling his anger like a Midwestern tornado. She poked her head in at the study door. “Bennington the College, dear, or Bennington the Dog?”

  “You’re home,” he said, staring with murderous, icy eyes. But he loved her, it wasn’t personal.

  “Mmm,” she said, nodding. “I’m home.”

  SHADOWS

  The external world of physics has become a world of shadows. In removing our illusion we have removed the subs
tance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions … The sparsely spread nuclei of electric forces become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow.

  —SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON

  BOOK ONE

  One

  Something poked him on the shoulder, and a soft voice whispered in Craine’s good ear, “Detective, you’re being watched!”

  He jerked his sharp nose and thick glasses from the book, heart leaping, throat constricting, just in time to see Two-heads Carnac’s blue choir robe go flying around the end of the bookshelf. Craine glanced left and right, trembling and blushing, half in rage, half in embarrassment, black eyebrows lowered, cheek muscles twitching, but so far as he could tell, no one had seen. The gloomy old bookstore—Tully’s Tome Shop: Used Books & Maps—was practically deserted, as usual. There might be browsers among the floor-to-ceiling stacks that ran the length of the store, butted against the brown cracked plaster wall on the street side, but in the area he could see—the dim central cavern with its map-cluttered tables, astrolabes, and faded, illegible old globes—no one had looked up. A white-haired professor, soft-featured, large-eyed, like a wise old white Tom in an expensive gray suit and spectacles, stood leafing through a dictionary, bent over the pages with a round, brass-framed magnifying glass—he was a man Craine knew, though the name now escaped him; a doctor, member of the medical faculty—and over by Wilbur Tully’s desk a young woman in a shabby black floor-length cape with a collar that went up into two sharp points stood picking through paperback books on the occult. Her hair had a dead look; maybe she was pregnant. Except for Tully himself, hunched over his ledger in his usual gray cardigan, frameless spectacles gleaming—behind him his grizzled brown bulldog waiting with infinite patience beside his dish—there was no one else in sight.