Horace Afoot

by Frederick Reuss

  “Yup. My daughter.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s deaf. Been deaf all her life. Anyway, the hernia. I’ve had it for years. Happened just after my wife died. Who’d you say you were?”

  “Horace.”

  “Don’t believe I know you.”

  “You don’t.”

  “What’re you calling for?”

  “To find out if you’ve noticed the flowers.”

  “You ain’t a social worker, are you?”

  “No.”

  “I been telling you people over there to stop pestering me.”

  I try a few more, but nobody seems as distracted by the news as I am, so I put the telephone away and eat an early lunch. Around midday I head out to the mound to see if the archaeologists have turned up yet. Mohr says they’ve got all the permits they need. About a month ago the professor from the university came to go through the archives one more time. I didn’t have a chance to meet her. I was sick with a cold I caught walking back from Sylvia’s house. It was the worst cold I’ve ever had. It lingered for weeks. I haven’t seen or heard from Sylvia since that night. Every now and then I consider going over to the pharmacy to say hello. But something keeps me away, and I don’t know what it is. Or maybe I do.

  All the way out Old Route 47 I notice the daffodils. The air is cool and clear. Small puffs of cloud move across the sky. A recent selected philosophical essay informs me that there is an ordo amoris at work in the world, a basic ethos. It is, simultaneously, the subjective ordering of love and hate that lies at the center of our perception of the world and the objective order of what is worthy of love in all things, an independent order that can’t be created or destroyed but simply is. On the subjective side, it can be trampled and deformed and confused by any number of things: personal trauma, world events, the tenor of the times. The damage is not easy to repair. I wonder if Sylvia’s can ever be fixed?

  Early spring is when the ordo amoris is most apparent—when the vast world swarms and stirs the heart and the passions and rekindles a many-sided interest in the things of this world. The philosopher wrote that the ordo amoris is what attracts and repels us to everything. It is what makes flowers beautiful. I have been struggling to get my ordo to work properly so that on this fine spring morning I may feel myself drawn outside toward whatever fate has in store for me. The daffodils help. And as I stride along the shoulder of the road I remind myself that without the ordo amoris, I could easily slip back into fearing contingencies, as I did for most of the winter, rather than offering myself up for them to do with me what they will.

  There aren’t any archaeologists at the mound when I arrive. The padlock that secures the gate is rusted and shows no signs of having been opened recently. The ground is too soft for digging. They must be waiting for the weather to get warmer and the ground to dry so they can dig and sift more easily.

  I climb the fence at my usual spot near the gate and drop into the perimeter, feeling more like an intruder than I did in winter when deep snow blanketed the ground. The path is muddy and slick. I lose my footing twice on the way up and wipe the mud from my palms on the trunk of the elm tree growing near the top. The snow has melted to reveal the same old charred logs in the fire pit. It is comforting to recognize these little details of the ground after so long and deep a winter. Something of a surprise too. I search for and find the remains of the empty Marlboro box in which I found the cigarette I smoked when the sheriff came to arrest me. I wish I had a cigarette to smoke now. The grass is damp, and I sit on a fallen branch on the side of the mound that faces town. The fields all around have been plowed. Brown furrows extend for acres in machine-dug parallel lines. The parking lot of Semantech is almost empty.

  I sit for an hour in the warming rays of the sun. A few cars blow by but do not stop. They don’t even slow down. Birds in the elm tree keep up a steady chirping. I watch one high among the branches as it builds a nest. It flies away and returns again and again carrying the small twigs and sticks of its new home in its beak. The ordo amoris—if it is anything—is what comes to life at the observation of all these little facts of the world. I wonder where the bird’s old nest is? Was it corrupted by the passing of time? Did it fall? Or do birds abandon their homes and build new ones every season? The image of the abandoned nest begins to crowd my thoughts and forces an urgent inspiration.

  It is time, again, to change my name.

  At Town Hall a clerk shuffles through a filing cabinet and hands me a series of forms, circling the instructions with a pencil. “Come back when you’re done with step number four,” he says, scratching behind an ear with the end of the pencil. “We’ll fix you up with a court date.”

  “The paperwork isn’t enough?”

  “Not in this state it ain’t.” He taps the papers with his body-prober pencil. “Just do what I said and follow the instructions.” The petty authority in his voice is irritating. I gather the papers up and leave, feeling the man’s extruded presence cleaving to me until I’ve left the building.

  I walk over to the library to fill out the forms. Mrs. Entwhistle and Mohr are standing next to the circulation desk when I enter the reading room. Mohr is not wearing his wig. His head is shaved, and he is dressed in a stylishly cut dark suit and tie.

  “Horace. I’m glad you’re here,” he says with his usual difficulty. Mrs. Entwhistle stops speaking and nods curtly. Since Mohr left, a little over two months ago, she is growing less and less tolerant of my presence in the library. My reserve-shelf privileges are already being threatened on the grounds that space behind the circulation desk is limited. She makes a point of being nice to me. This she does in a nasal middle American vernacular so overladen with phony pleasantry it actually hurts to hear it. Horace, I just haaate to have to have to aaask you. I hope you don’t miiiind … etc., etc.

  “I like your suit.”

  Mohr produces a dark gray fedora and perches it on his bald head, tugging the rim down rakishly to one side. The hat is a good touch and looks better than that awful wig; it adds some weight to him and gives the attenuated, lonely tendons at the back of his neck something to support. He looks like Fernando Pessoa—or one of his heteronyms, Bernardo Soares, maybe, Assistant Bookkeeper of the City of Lisbon—or just any mortally conscious poet from the first half of this century. He steps back so I can regard him more fully, produces a cane, and leans forward on it, both hands on the polished silver handle.

  “Very elegant. Where are you off to so dressed up? An audition?”

  Mohr grins his clacky dentured grin. “Just the oncologist,” he says. “I like to put my best foot forward.”

  “For radiation?”

  Mrs. Entwhistle shoots me a horrified look and returns to the circulation desk.

  “For chemo,” Mohr says.

  “Why bother getting all dressed up for that?”

  Mrs. Entwhistle emits a little gasp. If I were her son or her husband she’d probably swat me.

  “I’ve found that they stop treating you like a hopeless case when you’re well dressed.” He asks Mrs. Entwhistle if she would mind if I accompanied him upstairs.

  “You two go right ahead,” she says, her mock cheer regained. “Just make yourselves at home.”

  The suit hides Mohr’s advancing sickness well. I follow him upstairs as he tells me that he has had to force himself to stay away from the library.

  “Maybe you should come back to work,” I say as we reach the second floor.

  Mohr waggles his cane. “Too late for that. And anyway, I’m settling into my books. You’d be surprised how long it takes to get back to real reading after a lifetime of noisy distraction. But also what a pleasure.”

  “What is real reading?”

  Mohr doesn’t respond. We enter his old office, and he stands in the doorway for a moment, leaning on his cane. The blinds are drawn, but a fair amount of light filters through the slats. “It’s stuffy,” he says
and advances toward the window to pull up the blind. The room is transformed by the light. Mrs. Entwhistle has cleared away the boxes that cluttered the floor but left the room essentially the way it was before Mohr left.

  “I don’t understand,” Mohr says. “Why hasn’t she moved in? This is the head librarian’s office. Why doesn’t she use it?” He sits down behind his old desk and twirls his cane between his knees. The desk top is clear except for the telephone and an old blotter pad decorated with decades of Mohr’s own doodles.

  “She’s waiting for you to die,” I blurt.

  Mohr looks up at me for a moment, holding his cane between his knees. “I think you might be right.”

  Now I know I don’t like her. Some macabre sense of propriety is preventing her from staking her claim. She wants the place completely and absolutely to herself and doesn’t want even to be reminded of Mohr. The worst is that she would never admit it.

  “What are those papers you have?” Mohr indicates the legal forms rolled in my hand.

  “I’m going to change my name.”

  Mohr’s brows arch slightly. “But Quintus Horatius Flaccus is such a—nice name. Why change it?”

  I shrug, not really in the mood to explain myself.

  “Have you decided on a new one?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do you have any ideas?”

  “A few.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Flavius Arrianus. Arrian for short.”

  Mohr nods his head appreciatively. “Whom are we referring ourself to this time?”

  “The author of the Discourses of Epictetus.”

  Mohr nods again, continues twirling his cane. “Why not go all the way?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Call yourself Epictetus.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I lack prosopon.”

  “Prosopon? As in prosopopoeia? Or prosopography?”

  “Prosopon is Greek for person. But Epictetus meant it in a special way. For him, prosopon meant the proper character and personality of a person.”

  Mohr continues his nod, repeats the word prosopon several times.

  “It’s a Stoic idea. When one finds one’s true character and personality—one’s nature—it is one’s obligation to display it to the world.”

  “So you don’t think you’re up to Epictetus. But you can handle his amanuensis?”

  “You could put it that way. I’d rather think Arrian is Epictetus in the same way that, say, Plato is Socrates. Or the poet Fernando Pessoa is Bernardo Soares, Assistant Bookkeeper of the City of Lisbon. You look like him, by the way.”

  “Like whom? Pessoa?”

  “No. Like the Assistant Bookkeeper of the City of Lisbon.”

  “Thank you, Horace. But that’s enough. I’m getting confused.”

  “If Arrian didn’t call himself Epictetus, how can I?”

  “I don’t know what to say about the logic of it,” Mohr answers in an indulgent tone of voice. “But your reasoning is interesting.” He pauses for a moment. “What about Horace? Do you think you had the prosopon?”

  “Maybe. But it’s time for a change.” I walk over to look out the window. It is late afternoon, time to go home, drink a few glasses of wine, watch the daffodils. The sun’s rays slant long and golden. The big white house behind the library looks almost yellow in the light.

  Mohr’s chair creaks as he leans back in it. He is amused by our conversation and wants to continue. “Can I offer a suggestion?”

  “Be my guest.”

  I sit on the edge of the desk. A glint escapes Mohr’s eyes that I haven’t seen since the evening we drank together at my house. Maybe it’s the suit, his new dapper look. He leans forward, placing one hand over the other on the hilt of his cane. “Forget Arrian,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “You’re too young for Stoicism. And too healthy. Save the forbearance stuff for later. When you’re in my shoes.” He stops for a moment to clear his throat, then continues, “Besides, I don’t think you really believe that the whole, undivided universe is really all good. Do you?” Before I can respond he continues, “And there is a theistic element in Stoicism that can’t be escaped.”

  “So?”

  “So. You have always struck me as more agnostically inclined.” He smiles, reshuffles his hands on the hilt of his cane. “I was going to suggest something more eclectic, in the direction of Cynicism.”

  “The Cynics are too demanding. The wallet and staff thing is too much. I don’t want to live in a barrel and harangue people and beg. It’s too noisy and extreme. Besides, they’d throw me in jail.”

  Mohr waves off my objections. “I agree. I don’t see you barking at people in the street either. Or hugging icy statues and masturbating publicly.” He breaks into strangely noiseless laughter and drops his cane. His whole frame shakes weakly, and a few tears erupt from the corners of his eyes, which he wipes away with the back of his hand. There is something unfunny about his outbreak, and I can’t bring myself to laugh with him, so I just smile and look down at the floor and shake my head in mirthful sympathy. He recovers and bends to pick up his cane. I twist around and look past him through the window. The tops of the trees just outside the window are swaying in the breeze.

  “I’m sorry,” Mohr says. “I didn’t mean to be so. Silly.”

  “Then let’s have your suggestion.”

  “I was thinking of Lucian. Lucian of Samosata.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  Mohr drops his cane again and bends to pick it up. “You don’t know Lucian? Shame on you.”

  “Was he Roman?”

  “Not one bit. Samosata was some backwater in Syria, I think. He lived at the time of Marcus Aurelius. A satirist—with a Cynic bent who lived to expose shams and phonys. He traveled the world of his day delivering diatribes on every subject. Mainly he poked fun at the bigmouths and the pompous philosophical schools of the day. Best of all.” He rests his chin on his hand and continues with a wry grin, “He thoroughly despised his own epoch.”

  The door opens and Mrs. Entwhistle pokes her head into the room. “I’m not interrupting, am I?”

  I want to say she is, but Mohr waves her in. “We were just having a little philosophical conversation.”

  Mrs. Entwhistle steps in, leaving the door open behind her. “Memories, memories,” she says in a sickeningly cheerful voice. “I hope you don’t mind. I’ve done a little straightening up.”

  “Not at all,” Mohr responds with his shaky reed of a voice, returning cheer with cheer. “But tell me. Why haven’t you moved in yet?”

  Mrs. Entwhistle crosses her arms over her narrow bosom. “Well, Mr. Mohr. I just haven’t had one extra minute since you left, and until my position is filled I don’t see any reason to begin moving things around. And besides,” she pauses to choose her words carefully, “I just can’t get used to not having you up here.”

  Mohr swallows the bait. “Well, Mrs. Entwhistle, I honestly can’t get used to it either.” A moment of subdued silence ensues, and I slide off the corner of the desk and make for the door. “Leaving us?” Mohr asks.

  “I still have some things to do.” I hold up the rolled papers in my hand. Mrs. Entwhistle begins to rearrange a stack of papers on one of the shelves along the walls.

  “I wanted to tell you before we got off the subject. The archaeology team arrives next week. They’ve told me we can come out to watch the excavation. Would you like to join me for an afternoon?”

  “I’d like that.”

  “I’ll call you to arrange a time.”

  I detour through the stacks and locate a battered old bilingual Greek/English edition titled The Diatribes of Lucian. Mohr’s suggestion intrigues me, and, testing my library liberties, I leave a note for Mrs. Entwhistle informing her that I have taken the book.

  On the way home I stop in Winesburg Wine and Liquor. I haven’t visited for over a month, since I bought a case of
1981 Château Léoville-Las-Cases and a case of Hattenheim Steinberger that Anderson became sold on after a short trip to Germany last fall—as he did on everything German. He happily shows off his newest selections and invites me to sample a bottle he has just opened.

  We stand in the neon light of the small store, and I listen while Anderson tugs at his walrus mustache and rambles on using jargon taken from magazines and his growing collection of wine books. He keeps them on a shelf near the register for the benefit of his customers, whom, he says, he has been trying to educate for years. Anderson sees himself as something of a novelty in the town, but in fact he is the kind of man who lives contentedly by all the accepted conventions of taste—a true connoisseur, in other words. We stand facing each other, Anderson’s belly pressed up against the counter, savoring the wine.

  “Full bodied,” he says, swirling his glass. “Nice tannins.” He pokes his nose back into the glass, snorts and sips and smacks with red-lipped relish. “Big. Very big,” he says from under his walrus mustache. He delivers his appraisals and opinions with guarded enthusiasm—amusing, since I know that none are his own. He has adopted wine to substitute for a basic lack of originality, which is to his credit because without the veneer of connoisseurship he wouldn’t have anything to think about at all and would just be a slave to his alcoholism—like me.

  A motorcycle drives up to the door with a loud rumble. Tom Schroeder, wearing black leather from head to foot, dismounts and marches into the store, closing the door behind him with a bang. “How’s it goin’?” he asks, taking the two of us in at a glance.

  “Now, Tom,” Anderson begins, “you know better than to come waltzing in here like that.”

  Schroeder holds up his hand, reaches into his jacket, and brings out a driver’s license, smirking. He is spattered with mud and wearing leather gloves that leave the upper halves of his fingers exposed. “Turned twenty-one last month. Ein und zwanzig.” He saunters over and presents the laminated plastic card to Anderson with a ceremonial flourish. “And I got the stretch marks to prove it.” He turns to me. “Horace, right?”