by John Gardner
He turned back toward the stairs and registered now for the first time that there were pay phones over by the elevators. He crossed to them quickly—only one of them was in use—and hunted through his pockets for dimes, then called Hannah.
“Any news?” he asked.
“You heard about the man at the computer center?”
“Professor Furth, yes. They’re sure it was an accident?”
“I don’t see how they can be, but I haven’t talked with McClaren yet.”
“Did Meakins catch up with Terrance Rush?”
“Hasn’t checked in yet. I expect I’ll get a call from him any time.”
“OK. Listen, Hannah, I need you to take over with the girl for me. I got some things I gotta do. All right?”
“Whatever you say, Craine,” she said, less than eager.
“Make it ten minutes, then. No, on second thought, half an hour. And bring the Bible.”
“What?”
“The Bible—you know, the big white one.”
“Craine,” she said, then hesitated, then came out with it, “what for?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Magic.” He felt pressed, surrounded, beginning to rise to anger. Whose business was it, etc., etc. But it was an interesting question, why he wanted the thing. Magic was the truth. The way he looked forward to getting it in his hands again was the way a child looked forward to a toy or some particular suit of clothes that would change his life—or looked forward to being four, or riding on the school bus. From the minute he’d bought it, God knew why, it had been clear to him, at least in the back of his mind, that there were stories he wanted to look at again, after all these years. Purely for pleasure, he would have said: the sense of getting out of oneself. How the prophet Nathan had been so furious at Saul for raising him from the dead that he’d prophesied Saul’s death in battle the next day, with all his sons. How King David had looked over and seen what’s-her-name sunning on the roof. How the ghost of Jesus had appeared to the fishermen and called out, “Boys! Cast your net over there on the left!” It would not have been the same, he would willingly admit, if the stories in the book were “Rumpelstiltskin” or even Shakespeare’s Macbeth or The Tempest. Tomes, tombs … If all books were séances, conversations with the dead, there were times—for some reason unknown to him—when some ghosts’ voices cried out with vastly more urgency than others. He looked forward to getting that Bible in his hands as if he thought when he held it the light would change, become the airier sunlight of his childhood, before his mistakes. He looked forward to reading those stories—not just reading them, poring over them, boring into them, digging down and down, all his muscles snapping steel, the way you’d dig into some newly discovered great cave of the Incas—as if he thought they had a spell in them, the Fountain of Youth, such magical power as the Vedic priests, in that book he’d started, had imagined they’d worked into Sanskrit. A fool would say, “So Craine, in his old age, is hungry for religion.” If it was true, it wasn’t true in any sense a common fool would understand. There was something he’d known and hadn’t known the importance of, and had a feeling he could maybe know again. Not life-after-death, or “walking hand in hand with God.” Something those sharp-eyed, big-nosed Jews of old had known, dickering with God, dying for righteousness, carefully, carefully writing it all down—some truth, some lies, the same way other poets wrote, but with some strange ingredient that suffused the whole, crept through the parchment like the hungry, ever unfulfilled spirit of the vowels . never written in the name of God.
In a word, he had no idea why he wanted it. It was an impulse that had come over him, a dowser’s hunch.
“All right,” Hannah said, “I’ll trine remember.”
He hung up, felt to see if his dime had come back, then hurried for the stairs.
It was only when he was walking down the second-floor corridor toward the room where he’d left her that Craine understood, with a jolt, the mistake he’d made. It was not that those classes had gotten out early. It was at ten minutes to, not on the hour (as he’d thought), that classes ended. He’d abandoned her just as her class was getting out, and had left her alone there for nearly ten minutes. His hand went to his coat pocket, but the whiskey wasn’t there. “Damn,” he whispered, hurrying more now, again and again banging his fist into his palm. He was in trouble again, more than before, he thought. She’d be sure he’d done the whole thing on purpose, and maybe in some crazy way he had. “Jesus,” he whispered.
The door where her class had been was closed, and inside there was a different class. His blood ran cold, or anyway so it felt, no warmth in his body, his neck hairs rising. He jumped to the little window and pressed his eyes to the glass to see as much as he could. The teacher was now a man, short, white-bearded, waving a cigar. Craine’s hand was on the doorknob, but he decided not to turn it; she wouldn’t be there. Where then? he wondered, spinning around in panic, looking down the corridor one way, then the other. Now nausea leaped up in him, and the building swayed. This had happened before, one minute the girl right beside him, and the next … His mind went blank.
“Mr. Craine!” Elaine cried, “what’s the matter? Are you all right?”
He turned to her, baffled. She was right at his shoulder, her hands closed on his arm. Her eyes were wide with fear.
“I’m all right,” he said. “Just faint.”
“You’ve been drinking!” she said, half angry, half pitying him. “I suspected that was it, when I came out and you were gone.”
He nodded, accepting it, leaning back for a moment against the wall and gently putting his hand on hers, wearily smiling.
“Have you?” she asked, beginning to change her mind.
“I’m all right,” he said, and freed her hand. “I guess it gave me a start there, when I thought I’d lost you.” When he saw that she was thinking about the murderer, he said quickly, “I thought you’d decided to dump me, get some other private eye. Quite a shock to the ticker.”
She smiled. “I was in the ladies’ room.”
“Ah,” he said, and pushed his hat up with one finger. “I’d have thought of that sooner or later. No dummy, take my word for it.” He straightened up from the wall and held out his arm to her, formal, like a fancy-dress escort.
She looked at his arm, then up at his face, then laughed, shaking her head, shifted her books to her left arm, and with her right took the arm he held out to her. “Thank you, sir,” she said, and gave a curtsy.
“My pleasure, ma’am,” said Craine, and bowed.
They made a curious couple, an objective observer would perhaps have remarked: Elaine with thick ankles and blue, pointed shoes, on her square face the smile of a girl strangely happy, also nearsighted; as for Gerald B. Craine, he walked with his chin out, his hat tipped back, his dyed-black hair hanging down over his forehead, walking not at all like an old man, just now, or a half-crazy drunkard, though it was true, an objective observer would have noticed, that his coat hung low, something bulky in the lining, and his shoelaces were not well tied.
He thought of her weightless, long hand on his arm and pondered the image of her smile inside his mind. Exactly what he was thinking he could hardly have said: something about cancer, and murder, and his peculiar sense of peace.
Fragment Seven
The room was white. There was snow outside. That was a rare thing in Carbondale. Voices coming in were like muffled bells. There were faraway voices—children playing by the street—and nearer voices—those of the attendants at the end of the corridor. Here in the sunroom there was no sound at all, though the television was on—just the picture, sufficiently in shadow that he could just make it out. But what Craine was mainly aware of—seated on the cold gray plastic couch, magazines around him, the Bible in his lap—was the dazzling winter light, so brilliant, glancing off icicles and snow, that his eyes, however long he squinted, refused to adjust. He was like a man just emerged from imprisonment in some cellar, who takes in the world by cautio
us peeks, then squeezes his eyes shut and sees it all again, vermilion. He was alone this afternoon, except for an old woman in the chair by the television. She sat head down, as if fast asleep, though she was not asleep, merely wilted; when she slept, she snored. Each time Craine looked, for over an hour, she was exactly the same. Then once when he opened his eyes for a moment he saw that she was raising her head, slowly, and slowly turning it, like a ghostly sunflower, more or less looking in his direction. He realized now that there was someone beside him. He looked up: a young woman—early middle-aged—a fellow patient, though not in a hospital gown like his. She wore a clean, unwrinkled white robe, expensive. A shining haze of blond hair hung, brushed and electric, to just below her shoulders, carefully fastened with a clip that glittered like a diamond.
Craine nodded, timidly, or rather bowed, a gesture grotesquely exaggerated, an observer would have said, but plainly not meant to be ironic. He drew his large feet closer to the couch, meekly offering the stranger more space. She moved away a little. On her small, stockingless feet she had pale leather slippers. Craine wished he had a drink and reached to the pocket of his pajamas, then the pockets of his robe, hunting for his pipe, unaware that he was doing it until he realized that indeed he had no pipe, nothing in his pockets but some wadded-up Kleenex, no defense against the eyes of the stranger but the Bible in his lap. He looked at her again, trying to read her face, but the brightness made her a blur. Though her face was turned slightly to one side, she appeared to be watching him, neither friendly nor, so far as he could guess, openly hostile. Watching him, though, that was the thing. It was that, chiefly, that made him aware to the bottom of his slippers that this was a woman from a different world from his. Rich, probably. He smiled, almost fiercely, and bowed to her again, then opened the Bible in his lap and put his finger down at random, preparing to read, or, rather, pretend to.
As he lowered his head she said, “Good afternoon.” Distantly, coldly. A voice with an unnerving authority in it. He looked up once more, wondering in panic why she spoke to him.
“Which are you,” she asked, “alcoholic or mentally ill?” The question made his heart jerk—the terrible directness. She was a teacher, it came to him; a lady professor. He should have known by the glasses hanging down by a cord, the boyish yet severe way she stood. She waited, partly turned away from him, not meeting his eyes, but expecting him to answer; requiring him to.
“You might say both,” he said. Then, after a moment, making a bold leap. “Which are you?”
She turned away more and took a step toward the window as if the question annoyed her, too stupid to waste time on. Craine shrank inward. She had a cigarette in her hand, and she held it in a way that seemed to him disdainful. As she drew it toward her mouth it began to wobble violently. It struck him like a bolt of lightning that she was sick, miserably unhappy, for all her degrees or whatever, just a woman, a child. He doubted the insight; perhaps it was something else. Though she alarmed him, seemed clearly to blame him for something, he was conscious of watching her—that is, squinting blearily up in her direction—as Meakins would, full of helpless sorrow. Abruptly she changed her mind, turned to glance at him, then looked away. She stood now in front of the window, dead center, her bathrobe and hair like fire. In a voice bristling with hatred she said, “Someone committed me.” She gave a sort of laugh.
“I’m sorry,” Craine said.
For a long time she said nothing, ignoring him, smoking, her hand jittering like a machine. “I’m as sane as anyone,” she said suddenly, as if to herself. “There’s a professor in my department, lives right next door to us, he carries a clothespin in his pockets so he can always touch wood. He’s fat and little. Jewish. Black suits. Brilliant mind, very famous—but let me tell you, he’s a swamp. Walks down the sidewalk with an umbrella on his arm and his nose in a book, and when he comes to a corner where he has to turn right, he turns in a circle three times to the left. Never stops reading. I’m as sane as that.”
Craine nodded, noncommittal. Her words weren’t really loud enough to hear, though mysteriously he’d heard them. Again she stood silent, jittering and smoking. Then abruptly she came back, taking quick little steps. “How come the Bible?” She spoke loudly now, as if she thought he might be deaf. “Are you a minister?”
Craine tipped his head and shrugged, almost cringing, apologetic. “I was a detective,” he said.
“You’ve shifted to higher criticism?” She shouted it, flashing a smile like a razor.
Again he shrank from her. She turned, somehow offended, and walked in rage to the window. She stayed there a long time, smoking and whispering, with her back to him. He leaned forward, thinking of leaving, but he hesitated too long, and she edged back toward him, keeping her eyes from him till the last minute. Then she looked at him, frowned angrily, smiled again. “They put you here to watch me.” Her index finger—the hand that held the cigarette—jabbed at him. Ashes struck his knees.
Craine shook his head. Now, for some reason, he could see her features clearly—petulant, like a child’s; beautiful even in their wrong-headed fury, or so it seemed to him. Her cheeks were very pale, as if powdered. In spite of his distress, he was tempted to smile, as at a child’s performance of a tantrum. Her eyes were narrowed, her shoulders pushed forward. When he failed to speak, she was checked a little, and darted her eyes away. He leaned back. She remembered the cigarette and drew it to her mouth, trembling violently again, and sucked at it. Craine said, “I’m in no condition to watch anybody. They put me here because I pretty near blew a man’s head off.” It was not, strictly speaking, the truth, but it expressed Craine’s feeling.
“Maybe he deserved it.” She liked the idea. Scent of blood.
Craine nodded thoughtfully, avoiding her eyes, and clasped his hands together. “It’s a mystery.”
She sucked at the cigarette again, then let out smoke through her nose and mouth in a way that showed practice, maybe practice long ago with a mirror. “Bullshit,” she said, cold as ice. “Mystery.” She laughed. She turned away but did not leave, stood instead staring out the window, elbows stiffly at her sides except when she remembered to take a pull at the cigarette. Craine watched her, squeezing his hands together, straining to make her form come clear; but the sunlight and snow and the whiteness of the room were, if anything, brighter than earlier. Something made him think all at once that she was crying—standing there, hands at her sides, letting tears run down her face. His mouth opened, and he thought, for a fleeting instant, of Elaine Glass. “Crying,” he said to himself, a kind of whimper, thinking simultaneously of the professor and Elaine. It was like seeing the stars from the perspective of a new geometry.
A Biography of John Gardner
John Gardner (1933–1982) was a bestselling and award-winning novelist and essayist, and one of the twentieth century’s most controversial literary authors. Gardner produced more than thirty works of fiction and nonfiction, consisting of novels, children’s stories, literary criticism, and a book of poetry. His books, which include the celebrated novels Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, and October Light, are noted for their intellectual depth and penetrating insight into human nature.
Gardner was born in Batavia, New York. His father, a preacher and dairy farmer, and mother, an English teacher, both possessed a love of literature and often recited Shakespeare during his childhood. When he was eleven years old, Gardner was involved in a tractor accident that resulted in the death of his younger brother, Gilbert. He carried the guilt from this accident with him for the rest of his life, and would incorporate this theme into a number of his works, among them the short story “Redemption” (1977). After graduating from high school, Gardner earned his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis, and he married his first wife, Joan Louise Patterson, in 1953. He earned his Master’s and Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa in 1958, after which he entered into a career in academia that would last for the remainder of his life, including a period
at Chico State College, where he taught writing to a young Raymond Carver.
Following the births of his son, Joel, in 1959 and daughter, Lucy, in 1962, Gardner published his first novel, The Resurrection (1966), followed by The Wreckage of Agathon (1970). It wasn’t until the release of Grendel (1971), however, that Gardner’s work began attracting significant attention. Critical praise for Grendel was universal and the book won Gardner a devoted following. His reputation as a preeminent figure in modern American literature was cemented upon the release of his New York Times bestselling novel The Sunlight Dialogues (1972). Throughout the 1970s, Gardner completed about two books per year, including October Light (1976), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the controversial On Moral Fiction (1978), in which he argued that “true art is by its nature moral” and criticized such contemporaries as John Updike and John Barth. Backlash over On Moral Fiction continued for years after the book’s publication, though his subsequent books, including Freddy’s Book (1980) and Mickelsson’s Ghosts (1982), were largely praised by critics. He also wrote four successful children’s books, among them Dragon, Dragon and Other Tales (1975), which was named Outstanding Book of the Year by the New York Times.
In 1980, Gardner married his second wife, a former student of his named Liz Rosenberg. The couple divorced in 1982, and that same year he became engaged to Susan Thornton, another former student. One week before they were to be married, Gardner died in a motorcycle crash in Pennsylvania. He was forty-nine years old.