A High New House

by Thomas Williams

  “Willis!” Lois said again, looking stern. She pointed her finger and slowly moved it up and down as she spoke. “You get that overshoe on and never mind the television!” Harry recognized that gesture, and even that tone of voice, as his own; Lois was unconsciously imitating him. And he wondered guiltily if he was the real initiator of bad temper in this house—because sooner or later he would most likely be the one to yell loud enough to convince Willis that he must actually put on his overshoe.

  There was another reason for having sinking feelings this morning. Harry had remembered just before breakfast that he had agreed to have a conference with Mr. Walter J. Hiskey, an alumnus who wanted to write poetry—who did, in fact, write poetry, which he brought in for Harry to read and criticize. Now, with the sternness she had used on Willis still on her face, Lois returned to this subject.

  “He’s got a lot of nerve,” Lois said. “I’d tell him how busy you are.”

  “It isn’t so much nerve. Well, he’s got plenty of nerve, I suppose, but I don’t think he’s using nerve to see me about his poem. He thinks he has a right.”

  “I’d tell him you’ll charge him twenty dollars an hour. Why can’t he at least pay you for advice? He pays his lawyer, I’ll bet, and his accountant. If he’s as successful as he says he is he ought to know about paying for things.”

  “But this is poetry,” Harry said. “I’m sure poetry and money don’t go together in his mind.” Or in mine, Harry thought, but even if he could put the two together, how could he tell Mr. Hiskey that he couldn’t afford the time, that in any case the poetry was hopeless? Forty years ago, when Mr. Hiskey was an undergraduate, someone had told him he had talent, and no doubt he had, but a career in business (hydraulic valves and pumps) had taken all his time. Now he was about to retire, and that ancient compliment, given by a professor who was probably years dead by now, had arisen full of God knew what golden hopes. Everybody knew what retirement meant; how could he tell Mr. Hiskey it was too late? And Harry had his own work to do, his own poetry to write. He was thirty-five, and lately the years had an alarming tendency to disappear without a trace.

  Then Willis, in his kicking around, knocked over one of the dolls Ellie had lined up so that they might see the television too. The mild antics of Captain Kangaroo were immediately forgotten, and Ellie’s little face, usually so delicate and sweet, turned red and ugly. She screamed that Willis had kicked Brian in the head on purpose. Willis paid no attention to her until she threw an empty cereal box at him and hit him on the overshoe. Then he picked up another doll and threw it over toward her. This doll was named Nancy, and Ellie let them all know that Nancy’s rights had most certainly been violated.

  “Willis, you get your overshoes on!” Lois yelled over Ellie’s screams. But Willis had found that he could rotate interestingly on his hip, and as he did so he pushed against two more of Ellie’s dolls.

  “You dumbhead!” Ellie screamed—a word she’d learned from Willis.

  “You’re a dumbhead,” Willis said mildly, still rotating.

  “I am not a dumbhead!” Ellie screamed back. Lois was purposefully getting up to see about Willis, and Harry recognized in her deliberate movements the acting-out of threat—the primitive slow beat to each gesture, like ritual. By this time Mrs. Worm was singing, so proud of her wavery high notes, and just before everybody, including Harry, began to scream at once, he had a sudden, clear insight into Mrs. Worm and her ability to be proud of herself; it was a case of immediate forgiveness; she knew she had missed the note, but before the next one came she had so utterly forgiven herself she couldn’t believe that her audience hadn’t too; each new note gave her an entirely new chance at perfection.

  But Willis was not minding his mother, and Harry finished the bitter last sip of his coffee before he grew ritually stern.

  “Willis!” The tone of his voice was familiar and yet would always seem strange in his mouth. It seemed borrowed.

  Willis merely looked at him and uttered a sound that was so disdainful it was brilliant: “Unh!” His dark eyes were simply and symmetrically placed on his smooth face; he was too young and too handsome to make so expert an answer. Harry knew that only real anger would force Willis to believe him, and it was partly this knowledge—that he needed to be truly angry—that helped him toward rage. He loved his son, and wanted so much to use his strength only for his son’s protection. How could that energy turn back upon the little boy he knew he loved? It just happened, and the things he found himself automatically doing seemed automatically justified. The threats he so smoothly delivered were reinforced by rage. Willis said, “Unh!” again, bravely, and Harry, still shouting the phrases that justified it all, took the little arm roughly in his hand and shook Willis hard.

  Willis cried loudly, fell back on the rug and put his small hands over his face. Tears came out from under his hands. Harry stood over him like a giant. Ellie, indifferent now that Willis was being administered what she considered adequate punishment, had turned back to the gentle world of Captain Kangaroo. Lois, too, seemed indifferent; she smoked a cigarette and blew a long stream of smoke against the window she had turned to. Her face was cold and tired, as though it had seen too much brutality. Her dark hair, in that morning light, looked pale as a wash of water color.

  And then, as it usually did, the occasion of his looking so big and dangerous became more complicated, for Willis was now crying and hiccupping words which Harry could not quite understand, but which made it all unfair. Unfair to Harry, really, because Willis now seemed to be complaining that he had merely been turning around, like radar, in order to find something.

  “Not fair!” Willis cried, but he still lay back passively on the rug, his square little hands over his face. His mouth was big, like Harry’s, and the red lower lip stretched below his hands as he cried. He had perfect teeth.

  “What isn’t fair?” Harry shouted. “What isn’t fair?”

  “I was just look—ing for it!” Willis cried.

  “What? Looking for what?”

  But Willis knew he had the advantage; the question proved it. He cried desperately.

  “You answer me, God damn it!” As Harry’s own voice echoed in his head—at least it seemed to be his own voice—he remembered that his son was only six years old. Willis could seem to be so big, so willful, and then suddenly he could shrink in size and force, as if by a miracle, back into the little boy he was. Now his shoulders jerked up and down compulsively, as if he had an itch under his shoulder blades, making Harry feel guilty. But none of it was fair.

  “What were you looking for? You weren’t looking for anything at all! That was what you were looking for!”

  Then Lois turned and said, “It’s Busby’s head. We’ve been looking for Busby’s head.”

  Simple to say that, and prove his guilt. For just a moment he felt pressure in the very center of his head, and little lights in the shape of triangles twirled in his eyes; it was all a plot against him. He hadn’t started this argument. All he’d meant to do was to help Lois out by enforcing her commands about the overshoes, and now she’d pulled out and become so exasperatingly calm while he had to look like a bully. But that moment passed. Again Willis miraculously grew back into the size of a very little boy. Almost a baby.

  “Where is Busby’s head, then?” he asked inanely. “And why do you care? You never liked Busby anyway!” His voice had turned as harsh as that of a cross-examining lawyer, and Willis sobbed. Now he wanted to pick Willis up and comfort him, but he knew that Willis would not forgive him so quickly.

  “We don’t know where it is,” Lois said to the window.

  “It’s been missing for three days.”

  “Thanks,” he said bitterly. For some reason this mood in him always communicated itself to Ellie, no matter what she was doing, and now she slipped out of her chair, forsaking Coco, her lavender bear, and ran to him. Her blond hair was all fuzzed up at the back, where it, too, looked in its unsubstantiality almost lavender. Her foot was
up out of one of the feet of her pajamas, and a snap popped at her waist as she ran to him.

  “I love you, Daddy,” she said, embracing his leg. He had a quick fear that she might bite him; his first reaction was not of gratefulness that she pitied his need to be sarcastic, but that she was perhaps slightly a monster to have been so callous toward Willis’ unhappiness. And he felt the same toward Lois, who still looked tiredly out of the window.

  “We can’t put Busby back together,” Ellie explained sweetly, and went to fetch his body.

  Willis was not putting on his overshoes.

  “You’re going to be late for school,” Lois said, and as if these were the real words, the true words he had been waiting for, he said, “Oh,” and got busy. Now he neither sobbed nor hiccupped.

  Ellie came downstairs with Busby’s parts hugged in her arms. The front legs and feet were attached to the thorax, but one hind leg was attached to his neck hole. Busby had been made to be treated like this. He was a plastic creature out of Dr. Seuss: Busby, the Tassellated Afghan Spaniel Yak. With a soft plastic snap, Busby’s leg came off, then his brown abdomen, then his long white tail. Unlike Ellie, Willis had never liked the looks of Busby, and had never played this game of dismemberment. The surface of the plastic had been molded to look like feathers, and the oversized parts of the body were, upon examination, almost gruesomely organic-looking, as though Dr. Seuss, that master of the benevolent nightmare, had just for a moment stopped being cute and had arranged for this monster to be able to come alive—had left room for internal organs like kidneys and a liver and a huge stomach.

  Harry remembered the missing head most vividly: a sad spaniel’s head on this gutful body. More than sad, though, the expression was really quite dignified, and not too bright, as though it were saying, “Well! Really! Must you pull off my leg? Must you dismember me?” A pained expression, resigned but unshakably moral, too, saying that indignity is to be expected but not condoned. No matter from which joint upon the grotesque body the head stared, its essential, somewhat feeble-minded dignity could not be denied.

  Ellie had Busby in all his several parts, but now there were no pained spaniel eyes to comment upon his condition.

  “No one has time to look for his head now,” Lois said.

  “Both of you will be late for school.”

  “I’ll be late for school, too!” Ellie said.

  “No, Ellie. You don’t go to school yet,” Willis said coolly. He now had his milk money jingling in his mitten, and his astronaut lunch box, but no hat. Lois fixed that.

  “Good-by,” Willis said. His shoulders twitched once; his brown eyes were still.

  “Good-by, Willis,” Harry said. Willis glanced at him—a nervous little boy. Harry wanted to hold him for a while and make it all calm again, but it couldn’t be done that cheaply, he knew.

  “Well, good-by,” Willis said, and left. In order to shut

  the heavy front door he had to transfer his lunch box to his other hand, and this took a while, but then the door shut with its ponderous thung, and Harry watched him walk, smaller and smaller, down the walk and off past the hedge. So he sent his son to school—a hard place, as everybody knew—with tears drying on his face and maybe a sore arm where he had shaken him.

  And then he had to be off to school himself, with his brief case full of freshman themes he should have corrected a week ago.

  After his nine o’clock class Mr. Hiskey would, of course, be waiting for him. That was the hour he had saved on Fridays in order to prepare for his eleven o’clock class, and as he walked the half-mile to school he began in his mind to try to place those little islands—facts or ideas—and to plan the little voyages between them that might lead, he hoped, to some sort of meaningful fifty-minute pattern. He had to find at least fifteen minutes in which to read that day’s essay, The Allegory of the Cave; he could never remember from one year to the next just where those cave men sat in relation to the fire, and upon which wall flickered the shadows that were, for them, reality. And who marched the silhouettes across in front of the fire, but behind the men? That kind of technical problem was always most important to the freshmen, some of whom, at least, had an interesting ability to disregard the allegorical altogether, and to stick to the physical, the “concrete”; so did he, for that matter, being a poet. And so, before eleven, he had to find fifteen minutes for Plato. So why hadn’t he done it last night?

  Mr. Hiskey: he wished him a broken leg, a flat tire, bursitis—anything to keep him away. The man was unbelievable. He might have come out of a different decade—perhaps the middle twenties. Sometimes as he listened to Mr. Hiskey he had the strange feeling that time was going backwards, and that Mr. Hiskey was a fantasy man come to haunt him. Mr. Hiskey rarely wanted to listen, for one thing, and yet he lacked any sort of vocabulary with which to talk about his own poem, which was entitled, “Parson Weems’ Cherry Tree.”

  “You bet!” he’d say. “You said it! I got in the rough there, all right! But I got out my number three iron and blasted back onto the fairway!” For “rough,” Harry read “cliche.” Mr. Hiskey quite often used his number three iron, which meant the next line of poetry. But they seldom actually got that close to the text, for each time Mr. Hiskey came—about once a month—he had to explain all over again why he wanted to write his poem, because there was something not quite manly about such an undertaking, and in the most desperate way Mr. Hiskey had to reconcile his manliness with this preoccupation he had been conditioned to suspect.

  Sure enough, after his nine o’clock class there was Mr. Hiskey. A rather big man in a brown suit, he held his hat and a manila envelope behind him in his big fingers as he read the notices on the bulletin board next to Harry’s office door. For this purpose he wore his glasses, which he would immediately take off as he shook hands: left hand to glasses, right hand out to shake, reddish-brown eyes somewhat popped, chest out, stomach in, vest buttoned except for the last button.

  “Professor Hosmer!” he said happily, and yet even here in Beech Hall he could not be easy about his sinful hobby. “I worked like a slavey on this verse!” he declared manfully as they settled themselves in their usual places at Harry’s desk. “When I got home I said to the wife, ‘Get some supper on, wife! I’m going to write poetry!’ And I did! ‘Shut off the TV,’ I said. ‘Woman, I’ve got higher things on my mind!’”

  “Well, let’s see it,” Harry said. But Mr. Hiskey had not yet to his satisfaction equated versification with normality, and he told of the things he had had to neglect: his golf, his poker game, his woodworking project (a gun rack). His were the most manly of hobbies. His lathe had cost four hundred dollars. His oldest son had graduated from Harvard Business School. His house was worth thirty-five thousand dollars. Always he had to recite a list of solid accomplishment. As he spoke on Harry had to slide the manila envelope out from under his hand—the polished, bristly hand with its fat, golden class ring—, open the envelope and try to read. Typographical errors he never mentioned any more, or punctuation errors, for they were not important. Mr. Hiskey didn’t want to discuss such small matters; it was poetry he wrote, not sentences, not grammar. He wouldn’t discuss these things at all, for in Mr. Hiskey’s mind, Harry was certain, the only thing that might excuse so suspect an occupation was sheer greatness, greatness beyond those chicken marks and antecedents, those grammarschool problems. And Harry could not avoid seeing an expression which often lay across Mr. Hiskey’s face like a light—the almost desperate wistfulness of the creator.

  Oh Parson, Parson Weems

  Your lie was not a lie

  It seems

  For greater truth must lie

  Where conscience dreams

  Upon the simple greatness of the man

  George Washington,

  Who could not to his father tell a lie.

  Irritating stuff, and if only the man would shut up Harry might find something here to like. But why should he lie at all in order to tell Mr. Hiskey that he liked something i
n this hodgepodge of possibly accidental conceits?

  George Washington,

  The maker of a nation

  For one

  We make our celebration.…

  A small, hysterical voice seemed to be screaming in Harry’s head. What are you doing here? What are you preparing to do?

  At ten-thirty his hands were shaking. “I’ve got to go now,” he said with great difficulty. He could never stop believing that his lies were transparent. “Why don’t you send me your next verses?” Mr. Hiskey was just a little irritated; his voice grew a little steely as he suggested that they have a make-up, in that case.

  “There are ten more verses there we haven’t touched,” he said, and as he spoke, the untouched verses took on authority, and became, against whatever will Harry had left, his duty.

  “Send them to me. Leave them with me.” How Harry hated himself for trying to smile! “Come next Friday.” Like a bad actor he looked at his watch. Mr. Hiskey was not quite mollified. He got up reluctantly, and reached for his overcoat and hat. “Appointment,” Harry lied. He stood posed, polarized somehow by the door, leaning toward it a little; the pose seemed to him as obvious as the starting position of a sprinter. He had to continue, as if to expiate that lie with other lies.

  “You’ve shown a great deal of improvement, and I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of the poem.” Then, leaving Mr. Hiskey to put on his coat, he walked, and did not run, down to the men’s room, where he hid in a stall.

  “Literature, literature,” he found himself muttering. Literature did not need a poem in praise of George Washington just now—not that one, anyway. And why should Harry Hosmer have been appointed trustee of poetry around here? He took a leaf of toilet paper and spread it out on his knee. When could he write his own verses? He’d give Mr. Hiskey five whole minutes in which to depart, but meanwhile he might as well use the time. Sure. He drew a picture, his pen tearing little triangles in the paper, of Plato’s cave. It looked vaguely like a stomach. Maybe he would write a sestina on Plato’s cave—he’d always wanted to write a sestina. If he had a month free sometime he’d try one. Maybe a sestina on Plato’s cave and George Washington—that would be an interesting juxtaposition. How had Mr. Hiskey’s lines gone?