Disciples

by Austin Wright

  Glad he’s dead? Kiss him for me.

  Though it seemed like a long time, it was only yesterday that Davey saw Oliver fall. The altered barn now looked like a church. Rows of folding chairs and a table in front. A television set next to it, also a piano, another table with electronic equipment including a large pair of speakers. The wooden box on the ground next to the table, that must be the coffin. It had leather handles.

  Most of the seats were occupied. The man with black hair showed me to a seat. The woman next to me bulged and her excess pushed me through the ceremony. She couldn’t help it and I forgave her.

  Miller stood up in front. Big man in a red flannel shirt, good quality, and red suspenders, I had a better look now the sun wasn’t shining behind him. He looked like pictures of Ralph Waldo Emerson but with long white hair like Franz Liszt. When he appeared people bowed their heads.

  His voice was resonant in the microphone, though he kept it low. He spoke casually. His eyes were deep and shadowy, hard to see.

  It’s been almost a year since we’ve had a funeral and this is our first in Miller Farm, he said. We’ll use the same format as Stump Island. Melissa will play something. Then some silence and anybody wants to make a speech and Melissa’ll play a little more to wind it up.

  Melissa looked nineteen. She gave a mistake-free rendition of Für Elise on the piano. She glanced at the Emerson man for approval. He nodded and she played the Minute Waltz by Chopin, quite fast. Then back to her seat hiding her face.

  Now silence, the man said. Think what you like but remember why we’re here. That’s because Oliver Quinn died, so if you don’t know what to think about, think about him. If you didn’t know him, which is a lot of you, think about other people who have died. Let’s go five minutes before anybody speaks. That will give you time to relax and forget about time.

  I felt the people around me settle down. Some leaned back and looked at the roof. The woman next to me folded her arms and sighed. All through the silence she sighed as if breath were hard to bear. The man in front of me leaned forward and rested his face in his hands. For a while there was a quality of impatience in the crowd, squeak of chairs, cough, floorboard, the impatience of people waiting for something to end. Then it changed. Silence grew like dough and absorbed everything. The bodies disappeared, the noises stopped, I found myself alone. The silence was no longer around me, it was in me. It was full of my imagination wrapped in crystal or amber where you could see without hearing. The echo of Melissa’s two piano pieces suspended the voices of David and my father and myself as well as the sounds of air and bus travel and Connie Rice and the cowboy. Also my baby and Maria telling me I should have taken better care of her, all these sounds crystallized in amber so I could remember and see but not hear them.

  After a while I remembered that this was Oliver’s funeral. I had not been thinking about him. While the others were grieving (if that’s what they were doing) I had been rejoicing, not thinking of Oliver nor of his death as death.

  So I thought about him now. I imagined him watching us but as he did he turned nasty. You came, he said, vindictively. You didn’t want to but you came. He kidnapped the baby to force me to his funeral. He fell down the waterfall for that purpose. Was this a suicide we were attending? I hoped so, his deliberate death. Then I felt guilty. You did love me once, he said. Think of that.

  I thought of it. I remembered his place, my place, and Cape Hatteras. I allowed myself to remember the motel off the dunes and a village called Buxton, an odd high striped lighthouse, the sand in the daytime room with the blinds closed but enough light through the translucency for afternoon nakedness in the noise of the wind and hushing surf nearby. Remembered the surge, the nuzzling and giggling, his grin and his boastful cock, the animal growling that seemed so cute at the moment and so strange later with screwing screwing screwing all afternoon and night and next day too while I invented an impossible future.

  Not the real future, which was downhill like gravity. Down down to the kidnapping of my child which I will never forgive and his literal drop through rushing water into the sealed box in this room. It left me with no trace of love or sorrow so that even Cape Hatteras was only a madness remembered without feeling except that crude tingling surprise that must be what people call lust. My question later was how I could have felt even that. The reason was that I didn’t yet know him, which enabled me not only to enjoy lust but to think it was love.

  When I found myself pregnant he left, and I adapted. I excavated my head to cast him out, after which he returned barging into the hospital the night the baby was born claiming to be the father with a father’s privileges. But I was cured of Oliver Quinn. He hung around, disappeared, came back, disappeared again. I thought he was gone for good thank God though I could have used some child support. Once again he came back and told me he had discovered God Himself living as Miller on a place called Stump Island, which made me wonder how I ever took him seriously. Finally he swiped my baby. He didn’t want her to grow up under the influence of a black man like David Leo.

  The least funereal funeral I ever saw. I heard a male voice speaking. If you could tell us, it said, how such a thing could happen crossing the waterfall where nobody ever fell before. Answered by Miller in the microphone: Accident. Accidents happen.

  Isn’t an accident an Act of God? the inquiring voice asked.

  That’s correct, Miller said.

  Well?

  A voice said, Rumor has it someone was with him when he fell.

  If a rumor can be confirmed it is no longer a rumor, Miller said. If it can’t be confirmed it is only a rumor.

  More silence. I was sleepy. A woman’s voice brought me back. She said, I didn’t know Oliver Quinn. I have no reason to mourn except the general mourning, the universal sadness of God.

  That’s good enough, Miller said.

  The man in front of me stood up. I have something to say, he said. He was thin, young, his face blemished, his yellow hair tight and curly. His voice was high and timid.

  I have something to say, he repeated.

  Someone said, You have something to say.

  What am I supposed to do now?

  No one spoke.

  He tried again. What am I supposed to do now?

  Don’t do anything, a voice said.

  I don’t know what to do.

  Sit down.

  Don’t tell him that, another voice said. Tell him to trust God.

  Melissa went back to the piano. I was almost asleep. The first notes were shockingly loud but that was because of the contrast to the silence. She played Clair de Lune, not as slowly as I’m accustomed to. When she finished, Miller got up. That’s enough, he said. The cremation will follow, down at the pool. Anyone can attend.

  Everyone stood up and suddenly all around me voices chanted in unison. Three times, loud and deep:

  Miller is God, he made me what I am.

  Miller is God, he made me what I am.

  Miller is God, he made me what I am.

  That was the only thing during the whole ceremony that seemed crazy, yet it was so solemn it was hard not to join in myself. They dispersed. A group of men picked up the coffin by the handles, took it out and set it on the back of a jeep. Some of the crowd went with it down the hill, others to the cottages or the big house or up the road. I didn’t see the black-haired cowboy. He was supposed to call David to come get me from the motel. Since I didn’t see him I went back to the cottage to see my baby again.

  11

  David Leo

  You wonder about me, why a normal guy like me should be interested in the white girl Judy Field. You excuse it by my background, my father a professor in Massachusetts with not many blacks in the college town where I grew up, and I living most of my life a little apart from my black cousins. Or you suspect me of not considering my people good enough. Either way, you find it a little unnatural, what draws me away from my own kind, and wonder what it means about me. I’ll tell you.

 
Three years ago, my first on the faculty, I organized a writing group with Jeff Maybury. We sent out flyers to the departments and ten people came to the first meeting. None of them were black. Since I was the only black member of the English Department, I was used to this. Among the ten was Judy Field, a secretary in the Dean’s office. She was pale and shy and nervous, and she peered out from under the dark hair on her forehead like looking out to sea. I was living with Charlene, and Judy was only a white girl with an interest in writing.

  I did not know that I already knew her father, and several weeks passed before I realized who he was. I knew him at lunch. He was one of a group of professors who ate together. One was a geologist, a couple were historians, others came and went. We talked about the news and the university administration and the Tuesday science pages of the New York Times. We talked across the disciplines, and I felt more at home with this group than with the members of my own Department.

  Eventually it came out. My daughter’s in your writing group, he told me. She thinks you’re wonderful. Wonderful? The powerful word stimulated me. The writing group met every week. Conscious of Professor Field’s daughter watching me, I made vigorous critiques of the stories presented. When others spoke she looked at me, thinking me wonderful. It gratified me and made me eloquent. Her own stories were amateurish. We also discussed mine, which she admired. Her admiration gave me a thrill and I hoped her enthusiasm wouldn’t wane.

  I liked Professor Field, who was in his last year before retirement. I read some of his writings though I knew little about his field. He had a knack for making scientific questions easy to understand and he was interested in their implications outside of science. Since I didn’t know anything about science I sat in on his class in Darwin. He was pleased that I wanted to expand my knowledge and he invited me to dinner with Charlene. There were four of us, Harry and his wife Barbara, Charlene and I. Not Judy, who was living in her own place. This was not a disappointment, for I had no expectations to be disappointed.

  In fact I didn’t know anything about her personal life. I didn’t know that while she was admiring my critiques, she was seeing Oliver Quinn. I didn’t want to know if she had a boyfriend. I hoped she had one to make her normal and I hoped she didn’t for other reasons, but it was none of my business either way.

  The next year Harry Field, now retired, held a private seminar in his home. Each week for the benefit of nonscientists he discussed someone like Newton or Galileo or Darwin or Freud. I realized I could learn from Harry Field and I attended these meetings. He was like a mentor, I a disciple. Joe and Connie Rice were also in the seminar. They were the more privileged disciples for they had studied under him formally. They were organizing a Festschrift in his honor and spoke of writing his biography. There was something fanatical in their adulation whereas mine was moderate and sane.

  The writing group was smaller this year. We met less often. My critiques were getting stale and I wondered if Judy was bored. I wanted to revitalize her interest but didn’t know how. One day I saw her eating lunch in the Student Union. I sat down with her. Two days later I joined her again. It became a routine. The writing group failed but I now had lunch regularly with Judy Field. I ate with her on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and with her father and my faculty friends on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I thought of her as a friend.

  In the fall she told me she was pregnant. I was stunned. I didn’t know she was married, then realized she wasn’t. She was calm about it, as if it were according to plan. I couldn’t figure the plan out, though. She said the father, whose name was Oliver Quinn, was gone. Gone?

  Scrammed. She told it like a joke, he run off from the pregnant woman like someone in Faulkner. I prepared to be shocked, thinking scandal in the old professor’s family, but she refused to be scandalized and never dreamed that she was ruined. She chattered like it was a relief to tell me. The dastardly Oliver Quinn, I agreed. I wouldn’t run away like that, not me. I thought of Charlene. I wondered, if I were free and Judy were black would I rescue her? Even then the thought occurred to me.

  So she moved back to the Field house, and then she too joined her father’s seminars while getting bigger week to week. I saw a lot of her now, three times a week at lunch and weekly at the seminars. It was so routine that any lapse alarmed me. I was afraid she would lose interest, without specifying what interest it was that I didn’t want her to lose.

  Well maybe I could specify it. I didn’t want her to stop admiring my mind. My sharp critical insights, my logic, my lucidity, the clarity of my thought. Also my wisdom and sympathy at the lunch table. Judy’s appreciation, her father’s too, I told myself it was the whole Field family I cared about, like my own. I imagined them talking about me, appreciating me.

  The baby was born in March. No one told me until days later. I wondered if I had a right (maybe even a duty) to visit her at home, I being not a female friend like Connie but an indefinite male substance in her life. I decided to wait until the natural course of events brought her back into view. This would not be at lunch. Nor the next seminar, which Harry moved to Joe Rice’s house because of the baby at home. The seminar was tedious in Judy’s absence. During the break Harry and Joe Rice talked about Oliver Quinn, who after months of absence had showed up at the hospital when she had the baby, requiring the parents and friends (which did not include me) to wait outside while he had the privilege of the delivery room.

  Oliver’s return prevented me from visiting Judy. She had her Oliver, I my Charlene. But the seminars returned to Harry’s house. There she was, holding her extremely tiny baby and looking pretty. I didn’t want to think of her as pretty. Intelligent, attractive, but not pretty. She greeted me like an old friend and turned her cheek to be kissed. That embarrassed me. I met Oliver one seminar night. A large man with reddish hair, who looked like a truck driver or furniture mover, holding her baby. He said the academic world was not for him, and I wanted to hit him. He made me think of police dogs and I wondered how Judy could be interested in a person with so coarse a face.

  In bed that night while Charlene slept I raged silently over this discredited man. I need not have worried. He vanished again, and she never mentioned him. Meanwhile Connie, Joe, Harry, everybody talked about helping Judy, she with her baby and no time to herself. She had plenty of babysitters, her grandparents and all her good friends. I was one of those friends, a reliable family intimate.

  Charlene and I were tired of each other and she moved out. I missed Charlene in the apartment but less than expected. It was strange to be without a woman. I thought I should look for one, but no rush. This too surprised me, how little need I felt.

  I continued to see Judy at her father’s seminars. The baby got bigger, three months, six months, getting close to a year. Connie and Joe and I, we took good care of Judy and her baby. When the grandparents went to the Caribbean I babysat so that Connie and Joe could take Judy to the movies. Later someone proposed that I take Judy to the movies while Connie and Joe babysat. I held her coat and opened the door to my car. Disgusted with myself for being nervous, like a kid, a date, love. Exactly what this was not, not date nor love and she a white girl. Only friendship and flattery, my status the same as Connie’s and Joe’s. In spite of which I was clumsy holding doors, walking beside her, getting tickets, sitting by her in the theater, so that it might as well have been a date.

  This set me thinking at last, wondering if this preoccupation with Judy was a version of love. Not so, because there wasn’t any sex in it. She was not what I thought about when I thought about sex. I had no naked fantasies about her nor any urge to touch. It was not her touch I wanted, it was her esteem.

  That thought kept me steady. The barrier was racial, a natural recoil like an electric fence. I was relieved to discover the fence was still there because of the times I had feared I was turning white. I saw the black world from which my father had kept me mostly through the protected windows of the academic world, a feeling that though I came from them I was not of them
. I felt ashamed of this sometimes, whether or not it was my fault, and I had plans to make amends, reconcile with my brothers, but not yet. My first task was to meet my father’s expectations and get my career off the ground.

  I called my obsession with Judy a platonic attachment. That made it noble, which was also a relief. You of course see the contradictions. On not wanting to touch her, well actually I did want to touch her. As I came out of the movie I wanted powerfully to put my arm around her and bring her close. Not sex though, because it wasn’t as if I wanted to touch her. For a couple of months I had no desire to touch her while restraining my desire to grab. In truth, the instant I called it platonic, it ceased to be so in my heart.

  Then Oliver kidnapped Judy’s baby. A chance to be a hero. Why should I want to be a hero? Don’t ask. When I boarded the plane to Bangor you would think it was some old chivalric love except that it wasn’t. Pretense, practice. An exercise in as if. As if I loved Judy. If you don’t believe in love or think it an illusion, then pretend the illusion. Suppose I flew to Bangor for love. Suppose I drove a rented car to Stump Island for love, stayed in the inn, went out to the island. Imagine that I drove from Stump Island to Wicker Falls for love, risked my neck out to Miller Farm for love, and watched the shocking death of Oliver Quinn for love. Never mind the resemblance, I said, it is only a favor for a friend.

  At the Sleepy Wicker Motel I rented a room for Judy next to mine. If taking her to the movies a month ago simulated a date, renting her a motel room next to mine simulated an affair. I put her bag in her room. The sexual question was on my mind now, no doubt about that, but I fought it off.

  It took this form. I thought: this is a class of situation, man woman and motel, full of conventional assumptions. You can’t blame me for thinking of them, which is different from acting upon them, a thing I have no intention of doing, since my love for Judy is platonic.

  That’s what I thought Saturday while I waited for Judy’s arrival and looked ahead to the next day and the strategy of coping with the kidnapping and getting the baby back. I thought about the stereotype. In the stereotype the man reserving a room for a woman at a motel would naturally invite himself into that room. Either that or invite her to his. She would accept the invitation, and the rest would follow. No matter what unrelated events took place during the day, the convention would take over at night making them like everyone else. This I added firmly does not apply to us. We’re different, it’s not what we want to do. I was in the middle of this thought when it occurred to me it was what I wanted to do. It was exactly what I wanted to do.