A High New House
Thomas Williams
Dzanc Books
Dzanc Books
1334 Woodbourne Street
Westland, MI 48186
www.dzancbooks.org
Copyright © 1963 Thomas Williams
All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.
The story “The Skier’s Progress” copyright © 1963 The New Yorker Magazine
Published 2013 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection
eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938103-21-6
Cover by Awarding Book Covers
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Acknowledgment is made to the following magazines in whose pages some of these stories appeared: Esquire, The New Yorker, Saturday Evening Post.
The lines from “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot are reprinted from COLLECTED POEMS OF T. S. ELIOT by permission of the publisher, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.
CONTENTS
A High New House
The Buck in Trotevale’s
The Hand that Rocked the Cradle Has Kicked the Bucket
Ten Years Out
The Orphan’s Wife
I Cannot Tell a Lie
The Skier’s Progress
Goose Pond
A HIGH
NEW HOUSE
They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them—aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs…
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs.…
A High New House
When Robert and Alice Stiles bought the lovely old house they knew that the field across the road belonged to Forrest Sleeper, and that he wouldn’t sell. He worked in the ball-bearing factory in town and lived in the big mill tenement next to it, but the cellar hole of the house he was born in was on the edge of the field, and he still kept several cows in the one small barn that was left, dark and swaybacked as the cows among the overgrown lilacs and the blackberry patches. Robert Stiles wanted to buy the land, of course, for insurance (it was worth, at the most, twenty dollars an acre), because like many old farmhouses his was quite near the road, and if someone had decided to build on the old Sleeper cellar hole the two houses would have faced each other with ridiculous familiarity.
The cows they didn’t mind—the Stileses rather enjoyed them. On summer evenings when the colors of the surrounding pines and maples were a little too blatantly green, the one field would grow dim and brown like an Innes landscape, a cow would bawl, and the gentle sound of a cowbell would remind them of the bucolic past they were so interested in. Besides, the cows kept the field from growing up in brush and saplings, as had all the land on the Stiles’s side of the road.
As soon as he managed to pay for the removal of the false brick siding from the house and for the installation of the rather expensive narrow clapboards they wanted, Robert Stiles intended to reclaim at least one of the fields on his side, but until then Forrest Sleeper’s field was the only opening in the third-growth scrub and brush, and gave the eye relief from the patternless, dense fog of thin branches and trunks which had taken over the rest of the countryside.
The Stileses were young, and though they knew the renovation of such an old and mistreated house would be slow, dirty, and expensive, they continually surprised themselves with progress. One week the parlor looked as drably grubby as the kitchen (the old linoleum smelled of feet); by the next they had opened and cleaned a plastered-over fireplace, torn from the walls six layers of flowered wallpaper (smelling like humus—as if the printed flowers themselves had decayed—“‘…and the rotten rose is ript from the wall,’” Robert said), taken three turns on the rented foundation jack to square the corners of the windows, uncovered a wall of pine paneling made of boards twenty inches wide—and somehow the rewards were always greater than the effort. Suddenly a room would change, and they could see in it its original symmetry; Alice Stiles would brush the plaster from her dungarees and make them a drink. They would stand together in a corner, as far back in the corner as they could, and plan the future of the room: this would be the library, and there would be the special shelf for all the books Robert would someday write. Right now there would be only the one issue of Modern Language Notes which contained his piece on the anacoluthon in The Monk’s Prologue, and he pleasurably considered whether he should balance one copy there, or set up all twenty copies. It would be cheating to do that, he decided, and anyway it wouldn’t matter; he felt invincible. In the beautiful room, in the beautiful house, he would be successful.
Alice held her glass in one hand and with the other fluffed some plaster dust out of his hair. She was thirty-three—his age—and held the marks and decorations of a long-time graduate student’s wife: little lines above the cheekbones, a blonde toughness that was lithe and muscular. She had with her jobs and care put him through those last nervous years of the Ph.D., helped him still in the first few years of teaching while he looked and schemed for the place he wanted. But he was not sure that she wanted this house or the tenure he would receive with his next promotion. She had grown used to making him happy enough to work, to think of him as a man being constantly pressured and tested. Was it her idea, or his, that on his sabbatical they would try to adopt a European orphan?
“You’ll work here,” she said. “It’ll be all brown and gold and lovely in here. The books will give it most of its color.”
“A sort of eighteenth-century desk,” he said, “with thin legs.”
“And a pewter inkwell!”
They hugged each other, put their drinks down unfinished, and went back to work. At that time there had been ten cartons of books stacked in his office at the college, and he wanted them home.
Now they had been at it for nearly a year, and even as it took all their money the house grew more beautiful. They forgave it the expensive defects it had hidden from them (seven hundred dollars to a mason: the chimneys were canted, the mortar rotten, the fireplaces had no dampers or downdraft shelves, and whenever it rained puddles of creosote, like molasses, would form on the hearths). These were fixed. Immediately, without a moment of doubt or reconsideration, they forgave the house each of its few unhappy surprises.
In another year the library-study was all brown and gold, and why not forgive the house its few bad habits? Like a child, Robert supposed, a real house that is loved and imperfect must give with its joy a few bad moments. He found that he could work at his eighteenth-century desk, too. He’d been a little worried about that—the old myth about the elaborate preparations for study before the scholar falls asleep. This had come in the form of a polite warning from the Dean, who had at a party mentioned all the bright young scholars who, upon receiving tenure, “died.” The Dean had called this “the lawn-tending, or horticulture, syndrome.” But now there was the monograph on Chaucer’s use of the word space, in PMLA, and the freshman anthology he was doing with Pierce of N.Y.U. No, he would neither perish, nor would he, granted the soporific effect of tenure, ever “die.”
That was settled, at least to his satisfaction—but now, sitting on the lawn in the late September afternoon, waiting for Alice to bring him a martini, the slanting sunlight warm and dry on his face, he wondered why he had added in his mind that last qualification. “At least to my satisfaction,” he said out loud. Yes, satisfaction. They had been playing badminton, and he could feel the pleasant knotting of his forearms, and see the white canvas of his tennis shoes,
so clean and healthy against the green grass. Alice would come in her white shorts and he could watch her as she carried the tray—watch her trim brown legs flash. (Did they flash? They had always seemed electric, magic in some way to him: no, not silly now, he thought. You’ll never be very good at describing things, Robert.) But he did feel so good he let his aluminum lawn chair fall over backwards, and he lay with his head in the cool grass and his legs up in the air. That blue, that blue-gold sky with a swallow in it, and a moth of some late-season kind, the swallow high, high up, and the moth at roof level, aimlessly patting the air with its white wings.…
Alice brought the tray and put it down beside him. She sat cross-legged on the grass and handed him the tiny, icy glass.
“You can’t drink in that position,” she said, but he took the glass and balanced it on his chest.
“I don’t need it,” he said. She kissed him—her head suddenly covering the sky, a glint of her gold hair as if the bright edge of a cloud had passed. Then her lips, hard and just a little salty. “We’re rugged,” he said. “You know that?”
“Well, thanks!” she said.
He smiled; the moth had disappeared against the straight white clapboards of the house, and Alice threw back her hair with a familiar, loved motion of her head.
“Must I drink this gin?” he asked. “Should I feel better than I do now?”
“Sit up and look at the house,” she said. “Look at it! Isn’t it beautiful?”
Yes. There it was, with the sun now etching out the deep lines of the clapboards, lightening the green shutters where it hit the paint obliquely, the paint already mellowing in the weather. The house was one hundred and forty years old, but stood on well-drained granite; they had been very lucky about rotten beams and purlins, carpenter ants and other symptoms and diseases of aged houses. Two particularly beautiful rock maples, with branches like knotted muscles, framed the lawn, and even in this they were lucky, for the Dutch elm disease could not hurt them either.
“We’re so lucky,” he said, and had a delightful shiver from his first sip of the martini. A bumblebee cruised by, heavy with sound, and then a dragonfly hovered for a moment over his head, so close he could hear it crunch the carapace of the insect it had caught. Then it moved away. All the bothersome insects had disappeared in middle August. Below the lawn the narrow, winding blacktop road appeared and disappeared among the trees, where it led to the little university town five miles away.
“It’ll be cold enough for a fire,” Alice said. The sun had left them all at once, but the sky, deep now with several swallows, hadn’t changed at all—as though it hadn’t noticed. Alice rubbed his arm with her grass-stained bare foot. “Let’s have a little fire in the library and sit in front of it until dark.”
The freshmen always looked formed, most of them, until he got up close to their faces and saw that they bore their glands and hairs quite badly. From the front of the room there didn’t seem too much difference between his age and theirs; only when they came up to him after class, or came for conferences in his office was he able to see their unformed, soft jaws and worried eyes. When he met them again as sophomores, they had grown up. As juniors and seniors they seemed his contemporaries. But when they came back a year after graduation, or even six months after (he had been teaching just long enough to experience this), how old they were! The girls were nervous women, the boys were soft and doughy again, but with a certain nervous quiver in their cheeks.
He had been telling this to his office-mate, a new instructor named Geoffrey Lubie.
“Well, it’s not easy for them,” Lubie said. He looked, at twenty-six or so, rather unformed himself. For a week his face had looked actually dirty, but finally he confessed that he had been growing a beard. The department chairman, when he now met Lubie in the hall, laughed hugely, but Robert detected more than a little regret in the chairman’s usually benevolent eye. There had been no beard on Lubie’s application snapshot.
Lubie ran his finger down the indentation between his nostril and the corner of his wide, rather defenseless-looking mouth that was now surrounded by long thin hairs. Then he pulled on some of the fringe, so that his lower lip bloomed red. “I’ve got the length but not the density,” he said seriously.
“How are your classes?” Robert asked him, and at the question Lubie’s face grew dedicated and somewhat, Robert could only think with a kind of sympathetic distaste, Christlike. He had always distrusted the teaching mystics, and he had become certain in the first few weeks of the semester that Lubie was one. He could be heard from outside his classrooms, his voice shrill as he railed, never against his students’ particular deficiencies, but against, Robert was sure, a kind of massed, vague wave of ignorance that all should consider perilous, ominous but not personal, not in them; this sort of method needed from its hearers love, and never argued face to face with its enemy; it just spoke about it.
But Lubie was dreaming of his little humans. “They’re so good, you know?” he said. “So ignorant, but so uncommitted to evil.”
“Or to anything,” Robert said.
“Oh, yes. But they want to be.”
Robert felt that he was becoming, in Lubie’s mind, dangerously close to one of those cold monsters of intellect that are the real villains of the mystic’s perfectible universe. And because in a way he admired Lubie, he resented it.
Lubie moved his hands in the air, and of course he would never admit, as his face grew dreamy and his eyes grew dim, that the monster could be present. “They don’t want to hate. They want to love, but they don’t know why. They don’t want to accept prejudice! Really, they’re so basically clean and innocent!”
Not so innocent as you, Robert thought. They bothered to squeeze their own pimples, those freshmen, and saw what came out of their innocent flesh. He would always see the fingernail marks on their chins and cheeks. Show me a man with an unsqueezed pimple, he thought, and I’ll show you an innocent.
Of course Lubie had one, centered in the depression of his left temple. He also had a wife and two children, the wife pale and thin as he, the children strangely slack-jointed and gaunt even at the ages of twelve months and five years, with too much snot at their pallid nostrils, and dull, confident eyes. There was no doubt they loved each other—all four of them. When one of the children cried its nasal, plugged whine at them out of the bedroom (Robert and Alice had been to their apartment for dinner) both the Lubies rushed away from the middle of anyone’s sentence and were gone too long into the dark room. When they returned they had forgotten, it seemed, not only what had been the topic of conversation but whom they might find in their living room, and for a while both dreamed upon the miracle of their children and themselves. They would drive clear to Boston to see a doctor, not trusting the local M.D. to treat their holy children.
Yet as Robert waited for his student to appear for a conference, and as Lubie spoke just as he would in class, always against hate and indifference, this disorganized man who had about him no taste, nothing formed and beautiful, seemed to remind Robert of a world, or an attitude, he had once shared. A strange nostalgia, he thought, to have this fellow awake in him.
Then Lubie stopped speaking for a moment as the long sigh of a B-47 passed across the sky. Even in their basement office the sound, not sharp but somehow all-encompassing, took for the short time of its passing one part of sense completely away. One could see, feel, but hear nothing at all. The air base was twelve miles away, and unless one thought consciously of airplanes, these short moments of silence throughout the day were simply a part of life. Moments of silence, Robert now thought, startled, shared by all instructors, all students, all across the campus—a moment of silence while the bomber, probably trailing its gay little parachute while it turned to try another landing, hushed the world beneath it. Fortunately the main landing patterns did not include the sky over the University, and only when a plane had to go around again—quite often, it seemed—did it come over the campus.
Then it pa
ssed and Lubie began without comment exactly where he had left off; they were all used to this phenomenon and had long since stopped remarking about it. Lubie’s theme was, as usual, that there were those who cared for people and those who didn’t, and he brought up an essay by Hemingway which described the broken bodies of workers after a munitions factory had blown up, in which Hemingway had attacked humanists for their indifference to humanity. And because he did care for Lubie, Robert was about to prepare certain of Irving Babbitt’s arguments on this subject when his student knocked on the door frame and looked in.
Mr. Morrow, who still would not come through the open door, but stood grimacing in embarrassment, making the most effeminate little moues, the expressions flashing on and off his face as though whole minutes of suggestive, ironic conversation were going on in double time. He would not be waved in, either, but had to be asked to come in and to sit down. He flashed a gloriously apologetic smile at Lubie, moued, scowled at himself, shrugged his shoulders at such incurable boorishness in a brash, interrupting freshman, and sat down neatly—rather as if, Robert thought, he had inserted his hind end into the chair. He hadn’t said a word, and now looked at Robert much as do beagles and spaniels: “Kill me; I love you.”
Mr. Morrow gave Robert the creeps. No one could be so painfully effeminate—certainly he had no girls in his classes who came anywhere near Mr. Morrow’s effeminacy. It was as if he had to act out every emotion on the surface of his skin. Mr. Morrow had, however, remembered to bring his themes with him. The next student on his conference schedule probably wouldn’t, but would offer to run right back to the dorm and get them—to run, no doubt, using only the major articulations of the body; Mr. Morrow, at least, did not have that other sickness of freshmen, the conviction that movement per se is not virile, and that to have mastered the stance of the male lion is the essence of manliness. Even the girls had caught that one. But even as he spoke to Mr. Morrow of his syntax, trying to explain the red corrections on the pages before Mr. Morrow abjectly agreed in advance (and in ignorance), he said to himself that it was necessary for him to stop right there in his judgments of the freshmen; he realized that it would not be healthy for Robert Stiles’ world, the value of his work, even his happiness, to generalize further about these humans.
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