The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  “Can I tell you what I hate about this woman?” Sharia went on. Claire knew she was smiling wanly, ready to bear the brunt of whatever was to come.

  “First of all, I hate the uppity way she talks.” Sharia tried out her best upper-crust British accent. “‘This claret is rah-ther too too disagreeable,’” she mimicked. “‘And the mutton—simply revolting. La-di-da-di-da.’ How’m I expected to listen to a woman who talks like this? Girl, get off your high horse and get your hands dirty like the rest of us. She don’t know the first thing about working for a living. And you show me a house with a room of your own when you got five kids running around and I’ll show you Buckingham Palace. She needs to get her feet on the earth before she can even start talking to folks like me.”

  Of all the feminists, early and late, it was Virginia Woolf who spoke most fervently to Claire’s heart, so she chose her words with care, reluctant to say anything that might offend and yet unwilling to leave her idol undefended.

  “One has to,” she began, then found herself rephrasing so as not to sound too like Virginia Woolf herself. “You have to make allowances for the particular time and place a writer grew up in. Certainly Woolf has her limitations, but she also had her vision, and we need to try to see what was revolutionary about the vision without getting too distracted by the ways in which she very much remained bound by the limitations of her time.”

  Sharia looked highly skeptical.

  “She’s rich, she’s white. I don’t see what she’s got to complain about.”

  “She’s a woman,” Claire said. “She never was able to go to university like her brothers because women weren’t allowed. She never had a chance at half the education that’s available to somebody like you. In fact, she’d probably say, Sharia Washington’s getting a college education, which opens up all sorts of doors and possibilities I never had. So what is Sharia Washington complaining about?”

  Had she gone too far? Sharia had a sullen look on her face—but then, she usually had a sullen look. Delicately, amiably, Claire tried to backtrack. “All I’m saying is, it’s a historical document. You can’t expect it to be more than it is. But without the insights of women like Virginia Woolf, we couldn’t have gotten where we are today. In a sense, it’s part of Woolf’s success that we’re now able to perceive her shortcomings. Because of the tools she gave us, we’re able to go beyond her. And, I hope, we’re able to look back with critical distance and judge her contributions clearly.”

  “I don’t understand why we can’t just take the damn tools and move on,” Sharia said. “Why we got to spend so much time looking back and making excuses? It’s like earlier, when we were reading about Susan B. Anthony and that other one, what was her name?”

  “Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Claire said with a sinking heart. Was Sharia going to repeat her brilliant but disruptive diatribe from last week’s class? She’d even managed to cow Tim Veeder that particular evening.

  “Yeah, those two uptight old ladies who were all against giving black men the vote after the Civil War ’cause they were worried what it would do to the cause of white women getting the vote. So yeah, I know, you say the argument’s the same there too, we have to make allowances. Well, allowances in your book are excuses in mine.”

  “I wish you weren’t so dismissive,” Claire said boldly. The last thing she wanted was to alienate Sharia. At the same time, it was condescending not to hold her to the highest intellectual standards. Sharia deserved at least that much from her teacher, but how to convey that? “If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that the unfortunate thing about life is that everything’s mixed. There’s no absolute good and there’s no absolute evil. There’s just a lot of confusion. Even Hitler had some good traits. Just as, I don’t know—say Abraham Lincoln had his share of bad traits. The Emancipation Proclamation was as much for political reasons as for moral ones.”

  “Making excuses,” Sharia muttered.

  Frustrated, Claire tried one last time. Unlike Louis, she’d never been good at arguments. They wore her out; they upset her. In the early years of her marriage she had watched aghast as Louis and Reid went at it for hours at a stretch, till it seemed they could never be friends again. Yet the next day, there they were, no harm done. “Look at it this way,” she said. “The people who owned slaves, back in the nineteenth century, most of them considered themselves decent, upstanding, God-fearing Christians. They honestly didn’t think what they were doing was evil. So were they evil? It would be easy to say yes, that owning slaves made them evil. But they didn’t go around thinking they were evil. They thought they were doing the right thing.”

  “But they weren’t,” Sharia said. “And so they were evil. If I was to kill somebody, even if I thought it was a good thing, it’d still be wrong no matter what I thought.”

  “And yet we sometimes say that killing is justified. Look at war. The death penalty.”

  “Owning another human being is never justified, however you look at it.”

  Claire was not winning this; in fact, she suspected she was only confirming Sharia’s absolutist thinking. And perhaps Sharia was right. Perhaps it was due to a sort of moral laxity on her part that Claire had let everything become so clouded.

  “Think about it,” she said, seizing with desperation on something Tracy had said once in one of his conversations—arguments, rather—with Louis. “A hundred years from now, society may well think that killing and eating other animals is evil. Everybody’s seen the light, and they’re all vegetarians in the twenty-first century. And they look back on us in the twentieth century and say, How could they not have known that it was wrong to eat meat? How could a whole society have been so evil? But of course we don’t go around thinking of ourselves as evil. And yet the future may think we are.”

  “That’s silly,” Sharia said. “There’s nothing wrong with eating meat. We have to eat meat. It’s part of nature. You can’t compare eating meat to owning slaves. They’re two totally different things.”

  “We see it that way now,” Claire said forlornly, wondering just how fatuous Sharia would find a young man like Tracy who did, when you came down to it, have everything, everything going for him. “But the slave owners thought it was natural to own slaves. So what if we’re just as wrong about what we think is natural? What if the future judges us just as harshly as you’re saying we should judge the past?”

  “Then I guess we’ll just have to take our lumps,” Sharia said stoically.

  “But do you really believe that?”

  “I’m too tired to know what I believe,” Sharia admitted with a sigh of exasperation. “I’m just registering my protest against Virginia Woolf.”

  Claire made herself smile. “Protest accepted. But I do hope you’ll go on thinking, being engaged by the things we read. And we’ll be getting to more modern writers, black women writers, women of color, before too long. Angela Davis, Audre Lorde. Toni Morrison. Women I think you’ll like.”

  “I better,” Sharia said suspiciously, “because so far I ain’t liked much of anybody.”

  “You will,” Claire said hopefully. “Trust me.”

  In the greenish light of the empty pool she felt deliciously anonymous. No one ever knew her at this hour, her favorite of the day, that lull between five-thirty and six when, team practices having ended and the boys gone off to dinner, the Forge School’s gym was almost completely deserted. Three times a week she came here to swim her thirty minutes of lengths before heading home, pleasantly reinvigorated, and three times a week she marveled that she had missed out on this pleasure for so much of her life. As a girl she’d been too self-conscious about her thin frame and giraffe-like limbs to enjoy the pool’s near-nakedness. Only after having reached an age when she no longer particularly cared whether anyone stared at her body, because in fact she had reached the age when no one ever did, had Claire been able to forget herself and find enjoyment in swimming.

  At sixty hers was not, she knew, a body she need feel particularly ashame
d of, having gardened assiduously for years, and of course for three weeks nearly every summer she and Louis had done their strenuous walking tours of Germany and England. She did not regret having grown old; age quelled so many of the little disturbances one had imagined were simply part of the package.

  Water lapped hollowly against the sides of the pool, and in the gym’s rafters a pigeon cooed, its call soothing, even enchanting. Was it trapped? Should it be rescued? She wondered if she should alert Louis. From the locker room came the bright voices of boys amplified and echoing like a rougher version of plainchant sung in a cathedral. Pushing off from the side, she swam the crawl, breathing between both right and left strokes as she had recently trained herself to do. Flow, she thought, it was about bodily flow, and indeed, at some point, on her four or fifth traverse of the pool’s length, the water seemed to welcome rather than obstruct her passage. After twenty lengths she pulled up, more winded than she might have liked, to see that a young man she had not noticed before stood at the opposite edge of the pool, a figure in black trunks, not a boy but a young man, arms crossed over his chest and looking, perhaps, a bit bewildered—though without her contacts she could not make out clearly the expression on his face. Nevertheless, an odd thing happened. He waved to her.

  “Claire,” he called out. “Hi.” With that, Tracy Parker dove into the water and swam her way with clean, powerful strokes.

  It flustered her a little; had he been watching her as she swam? Or had he only recognized her the same instant she had laid eyes on him?

  “What a pleasant surprise,” he told her, bobbing beside her, water-darkened hair slicked down almost into his eyes, skin glistening with beads of water. He had not yet lost his summer tan. She clung to the side of the pool and felt the full force of his friendly smile. He did not scrutinize her, for which she was thankful, though she found herself casting glances his way: there was something vaguely stirring about being next to this naked flesh. His upper arms were admirably muscled, his chest broad and lightly etched with hair. She felt no ludicrous stab of desire—those days were too distant—but she did feel appreciation, the old fleeting joy of being young. She was happy for him, happy in his existence here among them at the Forge School.

  “Is it always this deserted?” he asked.

  “At this time of day, yes. It’s a great secret. Isn’t it lovely?”

  He seemed, however, a bit disappointed. “Don’t you get spooked?” he wondered.

  That had never occurred to her. Though perhaps it was odd to relish as she did her time alone in this expanse of water so uninflected with anxiety that it could almost seem, as she swam, a loving extension of herself.

  “Well, there’s certainly no danger of colliding with anyone,” she told him humorously.

  “Oh,” he said, perhaps also humorously, “I don’t mind the odd collision now and then. But don’t let me interrupt. You were doing laps.”

  “A few,” she said.

  “I’ll swim with you if you don’t mind the company.”

  “I’d be delighted,” she told him.

  She took it slowly and deliberately, feeling not the least bit self-conscious—put, in fact, entirely at ease by his presence beside her, and though clearly Tracy could have pulled effortlessly ahead had he wanted, instead he seemed to prefer being companionable to burning off calories. She thought of dolphins running alongside ships at sea, at once serious and playful; she thought of Louis traipsing loyally beside her on those long, peaceful rambles through the Black Forest, the low hills of Swabia, the Thuringian highlands. If Louis’s possessiveness toward their new friend sometimes irked and even—dared she admit this?—hurt her, she now felt content. She would have her own friendship with Tracy, on her own terms. Let Louis ply him with opera and scotch late into the night; at the moment she thought she much preferred the frank communion of a swim with the young man. And perhaps this would be their mode with one another. She allowed herself to imagine, as they moved silently together through the unimpeding element, some brisk fall afternoon when they might drive out to Jack Emmerich’s old farmstead, still held by his sister, and take the steep path to Indian Rock, where a vista of the Neversink Reservoir and the hazy blue range of the Catskills beyond waited to reward the winded climber.

  They had done ten lengths together, which made, for her, thirty in all. The blood coursed pulsingly in her veins; her strong heart was feeling grateful. Yoked to her cumbersome pace, was Tracy getting impatient? Louis, she knew, would have covered twice as many alpine miles in his summers had he not had her in tow, though he, like Tracy now, had slowed his pace to accommodate her. In any event, her exercise time was up; Louis was no doubt lying on the sofa, listening to All Things Considered and, if the day had been particularly trying, as most days seemed to be, seeking refuge in a scotch.

  Remembering that they had concert tickets for later—though there was plenty of time; she had only to reheat the quiche she’d thrown together this morning, before heading over to school—she told Tracy, “That’s all for me. Louis will be wanting his dinner soon. Then we have to make an eight-thirty concert in Poughkeepsie. It was very nice to see you.”

  “An unexpected pleasure,” he said, seeming nonetheless mildly distracted.

  “This is my regular time to swim,” she mentioned hopefully. “Maybe we’ll run into each other again.”

  “I hope we do,” he said, his gaze fixed in the direction of the door. She looked that way, but could see nothing other than two boys wearing the bright red Speedos of the Forge School swim team. Presumably it had been their voices, boisterous yet oddly musical, she had heard from the locker room. Was there a home meet later tonight? she wondered. Uninterested as he was in sports, Louis usually made a point of attending home games whenever possible. Which had he forgotten, the swim meet or the concert? She worried, lately, that he paid less attention to things than he used to, retreating more and more frequently into the consolations of his music.

  The boys’ voices, unpleasantly loud and boastful, more like crows than pigeons, disrupted the gym’s calm, and she could not but feel unkindly intruded upon. Tracy, however, seemed to study them with curiosity, as if they were some strange species foreign to these parts. And indeed, she had often remarked to herself, adolescent boys often seemed foreign, not only to others but to themselves as well, betrayed into these new, ill-fitting bodies they could hardly recognize as their own. Like colts they gamboled about, eager but graceless. She felt sorry for them; the only thing good about the awkward age was that one mercifully grew out of it soon enough.

  As she climbed from the water, a little reluctant to leave its shield, Tracy made no movement to follow, nor had she expected him to. “I think I’ll stay in here a bit longer,” he told her “Say hi to Louis for me. And enjoy your concert.”

  It occurred to her that he might enjoy accompanying them at some point in the future. Perhaps they could treat him one of these days.

  “Is there a meet tonight?” she asked him casually, nodding toward the boys.

  Tracy looked at her blankly, “I don’t know,” he said. “Why?”

  “I was just wondering,” she told him.

  As she passed the two boys who stood bantering with each other, all long-limbed, hectic flesh and very nearly obscene in those microscopic Speedos of theirs, it was as if she were completely invisible; they did not look her way at all. No matter; neither did they interest her in the least. But as she glanced back, on an impulse, toward the pool, she could see that Tracy was staring at the two swimmers with an intentness that might almost, at first glance, and absurdly, be mistaken for longing.

  Valiantly, as if a symphony were a house one had to build from the ground up, the orchestra sawed and hammered its way through Brahms, the task proving, despite the handsome young conductor’s heroic attempts at encouragement, just beyond the grasp if not the reach of the Mid-Hudson Philharmonic. The music making that resulted was both exhilarating and sad to hear in the ornate, half-empty hall of the Ba
rdavon Opera House in downtown Poughkeepsie, and Claire reminded herself, not for the first time during the evening’s all-German program, how important it was to support the local arts.

  Of course there was the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Philharmonic, and the many world-class orchestras to be heard at Carnegie Hall, and of course she would not miss those occasions for anything. Nevertheless, Claire could not shake the notion that her own life, in its way, curiously resembled the Mid-Hudson Philharmonic’s plight. Like those provincial opera companies in places like Ulm and Freiburg and Nuremberg whose passionate, rough-edged, colorful productions she and Louis used to arrange their walking excursions around, the musicians laboring ardently before her on stage tonight had all her sympathies, for like them she could glimpse the highest peaks glittering in sunlight, and like them she herself struggled somewhere creditably in the ranks of the second-best. As she had learned at Barnard, then relearned years later in SUNY Albany’s graduate program, others would always, and effortlessly, surpass her. Never had she suffered from the illusion that things would be anything but challenging for her. Perhaps that was the difference between herself and Louis, whose rigid posture in the seat next to her signaled his mortification at the butchering some of his favorite music was subject to this evening. At Cornell, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, he had been brilliant—everyone had said so. The possibility had never occurred to anyone, and certainly, she suspected, not to Louis, that he might fail to achieve great success and recognition in the hallowed halls of academia. He would be a great authority, a world-renowned scholar pronouncing solemnly and profoundly on the accomplishments of Schiller and Goethe, Stefan George and Thomas Mann.

  And it had all come to nothing. Taken as a whole, of course, Louis’s life was hardly a failure. The Forge School was a noble enterprise, after all, and he had certainly acquitted himself admirably for the last fifteen years as its headmaster, had kept the school going in difficult times, had even seen it prosper. Nonetheless, Claire knew he felt himself a failure, his dissertation wrecked on the shoals of his own perfectionism, his whole life shadowed by that foundering. She often had to wonder what might have been, as he himself apparently wondered as well, sitting for hours alone in his study, even now, thirty years after the eclipse of his hopes, with his beloved volumes of Mann, his black notebook in which, from time to time—at least this is what she surmised—he jotted various inspired nocturnal observations that would never coalesce into a manuscript capable of withstanding the bleaker scrutiny of daylight.