The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  Brill himself wasn’t in. He’d gone into town to buy ice cream and cookies for tonight’s dorm gathering, his wife informed Louis. A small, harried-seeming woman—and why shouldn’t she be harried?—Mary Ann Brill had always irked Louis, not the least because she insisted on home-schooling the two oldest children, an affront, as Louis saw it, to the Forge School, even though neither of the two children were anywhere near high school age. On her blouse she wore a pin that said MARANATHA: THE LORD IS COMING. For a while, a year or so back, their apartment door had been adorned with a bumper sticker expressing similar sentiments, which he had at last persuaded a reluctant Doug to remove, a frankly authoritarian gesture (Dr. Emmerich had always firmly insisted that the Forge School was not a religious academy) for which Mary Ann, he suspected, had not forgiven him, though she would be perfectly content, when her Lord and Master came, to obey His every command. Certainly in the privacy of her own apartment she was free to adorn herself however she might; Louis couldn’t very well go dictating the private practices of his faculty—as long as they didn’t partake of illegality or moral turpitude.

  Settling one of her smaller children uneasily onto her hip—she had never seemed to Louis much cut out to be a mother, but looks, apparently, were deceiving—Mary Ann told him, no, she didn’t think Noah Lathrop was there yet, but (looking at her watch) he should be soon, since all the boys were supposed to be back at five, as he well knew.

  Yes, he supposed he did know that. He supposed, too, that he should prepare himself for a quietly miserable evening of not knowing certain things he desperately needed to know.

  Stay calm, he counseled himself. Not till tomorrow would things necessarily be dire.

  “Oh yes, Caroline’s doing marvelously,” he reported in answer to Libby’s polite question. They had just seated themselves around the dining room table, and he was uncorking the wine, a promising-looking Australian Syrah the Fallones had brought. “I believe she’s very happy out there. Content with her lot. Wouldn’t you say so?” He turned to Claire for support.

  “I believe Caroline’s just fine,” Claire said dryly.

  Having hoped for a little more encouragement on the subject, Louis felt he should elaborate. “There was a time there, you know, when, frankly, I worried. But I’ve come to the conclusion that Caroline’s simply not interested in marriage. At least not for the moment. Now Susan, on the other hand: the moment she hit adolescence, she was looking for a husband, a family. Caroline’s just not that way. She’s always been much more career-oriented.”

  “Women in science,” Reid observed. “More power to them. This lamb, by the way, scrumptious.”

  “Louis gets credit for the lamb,” Claire said. “It was his idea, so I said, it’s all yours. He so rarely cooks these days, I jump at the chance whenever he seems the least bit interested.”

  “I cook,” Louis defended himself. “Every morning, I cook you an egg.”

  “That’s true,” Claire admitted. “It’s a lovely habit.”

  “Anyway, I hope you aren’t sick of lamb,” Louis apologized to Reid. “I wasn’t thinking.” Wandering the supermarket this afternoon with Claire, distracted by thoughts of Tracy, of Noah, all his unsubstantiated fears, he had chanced upon the superb cut at the meat counter and felt vaguely comforted by the prospect of its succulent delights.

  “Oh, hardly,” Reid told him. “Lamb is one of those essentials. Salt, olive oil, lamb, yogurt, wine.” He ticked them off on the fingers of one hand, ending where he had begun, with the pointer finger outstretched. “You could build a whole culture around those things. Come to think of it, the Greeks did just that.”

  “You need a vegetable or two,” Libby mentioned.

  “Vegetable shmegetable,” Reid told her. “Do you know what the Greeks’ favorite vegetable is? It’s this thing they call chorta, which translates simply as ‘bitter weed.’ That’s exactly what it is. You see old women out in the median strips along the highways collecting the stuff.”

  “Sounds delightful,” Louis said.

  “It thrives on exhaust fumes. The busier the highway, the tastier the bitter weed.”

  “Like life,” Libby said.

  Reid looked at her, and Louis, seeing his expression, was profoundly shocked: how there was nothing there but an indifference so quiet and settled neither Reid nor Libby even seemed aware of it. “That’s good,” Reid told her. “That’s very good.”

  Discomfited—he hadn’t realized things were half so bad these days at Castel Fallone—Louis seized the wine. “More, anyone?” he asked after refilling his own glass. Libby shook her head, but Reid held out his glass, and so, after a moment, did Claire. Of his latest Athenian exploits—he’d been there a full three weeks—Reid had reported nothing, not even when the two found themselves alone over the martini shaker in the kitchen, and Louis was distressed to discover that his friend’s silence, far from relieving him, instead cast a further pall of anxiety over his evening. Never, it seemed, did anything satisfy him: what he heard, he didn’t want to hear, and when he needed words, there was only silence.

  “And how’s the other half of the family?” Libby asked. Louis watched her, wondering if she knew everything, if Reid had told her. She seemed surprisingly at peace, out of reach of her husband’s shocking indifference. Perhaps it had indeed done her good to lie low for the holidays, as she had claimed she wanted to do. He always suspected her of binge drinking in Reid’s absence—a phrase like “lying low” certainly sounded like code to him—but Claire insisted that her friend did no such thing. Well, he thought, if he were Libby, he might consider binge drinking a rather attractive option along about now.

  “I think Susan and family are doing quite well,” Claire told her. “This was their year to spend Christmas with Greg’s parents in Seattle. It’s hard when everyone’s so far-flung, geographically. I suppose it’s equitable, but I admit it’s a little disappointing, especially when the little boys are at this age, when they change so quickly. Susan plans to bring them east this summer, though, so we’ll see them then.”

  “Why would anyone choose to live in Alaska?” Libby wondered.

  The truly disgraceful thought occurred to Louis that he much preferred Caroline to Susan, whose proposed two-week interruption of their midsummer rhythms he was already beginning to dread. He could see his book, like a little boat that has lost its bearings, drift ever farther out into a sea of blank pages, unwritten words. Unlike her younger sister, Caroline was no beauty; she was hard and direct. And unlike her failure of a father, she had not let distractions stand in the way of her work. She had gotten on with it, and her essays on plate tectonics were highly regarded; in her field she was already, at the age of thirty-five, what they called a “name.” Had this, then, been the whole of his destiny: to sire these two daughters, so very different from each other, the one awash in the fecund and chaotic joys of family, the other solitary and focused? Despite what he said publicly about Caroline, he greatly admired her for not having married; it bespoke a certain integrity. And while Susan’s life had altered itself, under the pressures of marriage and motherhood—and, he supposed, the bracing rigors of life in Alaska—to the extent that she seemed at times unrecognizable, Caroline had remained admirably herself, intensified rather than diluted by her journey into adulthood. If she had a lover, either male or female (the thought did cross his mind from time to time), she was discreet about it. In their two weeks in her house, he had seen not a trace of cohabitation, and was convinced that she did, as she claimed, live alone with her cats, her fine collection of Indian pottery and blankets, her flowering cactuses, her shelves and shelves of fastidiously organized scientific journals. And yet how lonely it must be, never to have settled with a companion by one’s side. What wild and desperate impulses it must on occasion give rise to, what acts of reckless abandon.

  But it was not, he realized, about his daughter he was thinking, but about Tracy Parker. Had loneliness driven him to put his arms around a boy in some doomed
semblance of love?

  “It all sounded terribly frightening,” Reid said. “I must say, she handled herself like a real trooper out there.”

  “We were very fortunate here,” Claire replied. “Weren’t we, Louis?”

  Alarme he nodded vaguely. He hadn’t a clue what they were talking about.

  “I haven’t been to the campus yet,” Reid said. “What’re things like over there?”

  How had they gotten from Caroline and Susan to the storm? Had Castel Fallone suffered? He’d have to find a way later, without completely embarrassing himself, to ask Claire about it.

  “It wasn’t bad,” he said, banishing Tracy resolutely from his mind. “We came through intact.” All at once he had the clearest image of the Forge School as one of those walled gardens in a medieval Book of Hours, a paradise safe from the savage wilderness beyond. But where did that thought lead, except to the image, equally clear, of two naked figures, a man and a boy, amid the clover and lilies in blissful, forbidden embrace? Even in the garden, wolves were prowling.

  Furtively he checked his watch. Was it too late to try calling Tracy again? And perhaps, just for good measure, he should check in with Brill and make sure Noah—and all the other students, of course—had arrived back at the Forge School in one piece.

  For a single reckless moment he allowed himself to entertain the remote possibility that Tracy and Noah had run away together, that no one would ever see them again.

  Ridiculous, he told himself. Here he had leaped to a conclusion nothing warranted in the least.

  “Pardon me,” he said, as Claire rose to clear the plates in preparation for dessert. “There’s a phone call I need to make.”

  Claire glanced at him oddly. As if taking his cue from her, Reid surmised, with a chuckle meant to indicate that he wasn’t to be taken seriously, “Forgot to call off that midnight tryst?”

  “I told Doug Brill I’d give him a call about a little matter that came up earlier today.”

  “Oh,” Reid said knowingly, with a broad wink. “That little tryst.”

  “What are you talking about?” Louis asked tensely.

  “It’s a joke,” Reid told him.

  “Oh,” Louis said, more to reassure himself than anything else. “Of course.”

  He went into the hallway, where a black rotary phone sat in its immemorial place on the side table. Lux stood patiently at the front door, his forehead pressed against it as if he wanted to go out.

  “What’s the matter?” Louis asked him.

  He opened the door to a surge of cold air. But Lux did not move. He seemed confused. A great sigh came from deep in his lungs, and he turned and lumbered back toward the kitchen.

  From the dining room behind Louis came an unnerving silence, as if, in the absence of others, Reid and Libby could find not a single word to say to one another. Surely, Louis thought, this couldn’t go on? But of course it could; it could go on indefinitely.

  He picked up the receiver and dialed. The cheerful chaos of the Brill household flooded his ear.

  “Mary Ann said you stopped by earlier. And what can I do for you, sir?”

  He felt foolish, a prying old fussbudget—nevertheless, he was headmaster, and a headmaster was concerned with the well-being of his students.

  “Sorry to bother you, but I’ve had a couple of conflicting messages concerning one of our students, Noah Lathrop. I was just wondering if he got back here without any difficulties.”

  There was a very brief pause, which nonetheless felt immense. Then Brill said the dreaded thing: “Actually, he’s not back yet. But I have a message saying he’ll be in first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Mary Ann did. She’s the one who took the message down. It doesn’t sound like there’s a problem.”

  “No,” Louis said, feeling sick. “I suppose there isn’t. Again, sorry to interrupt your evening.”

  “We were just going to put out some refreshments for the kids. You know, welcome them back.”

  “That’s a fine idea,” Louis told him. “I’m sure they’ll appreciate it.”

  He hung up, then stood motionless, staring down at the phone. In the dining room, talk had resumed.

  “It looks wonderful,” he could hear Reid say of the slice of tarte Tatin Claire was presumably presenting him with.

  He picked up the receiver and dialed Tracy’s number. When he heard Tracy’s recorded voice, he hung up.

  The stillness was unutterable. In such moments, could one suspend one’s heartbeat, it might be possible to hear time itself gliding noiselessly past in the night’s plush gloom. For a long time he sat motionless at his desk, staring into the black vacancy held within the window before him—as if the future lay there, obscured but implacably in wait: the future toward which everyone was rushing at the speed of a heartbeat (he could feel the reliable old muscle in his chest pump out its unvarying rhythm, seventy beats to the minute, as it had done without fail for sixty-five years).

  His nerves felt shredded, his nightcap of scotch pulsed dully behind his eyeballs and sleep was as far away as ever.

  He pulled his notebook from the bottom drawer of his desk and began idly to leaf through its pages. Four decades of notes preparatory to the commencement of his masterwork. Or if not his masterwork, then at least a well-considered tome. Or if not that, a distinguished slender essay. Or if not that, if indeed perhaps nothing…

  He read at random.

  I should not want you and others to have the impression that a mode of feeling which I respect because it is almost necessarily infused with mind (far more necessarily so, at any rate, than the “normal” mode) should be something that I should want to deny or, insofar as it is accessible to me (and I may say, with few reservations, that it is), wish to disavow.

  You cleverly recognized the artistic reason why this might seem to be the case. It is inherent in the difference between the Dionysian spirit of lyricism, whose outpouring is irresponsible and individualistic, and the Apollonian, objectively controlled, morally and socially responsible epic. What I was after was an equilibrium of sensuality and morality such as I found perfected in the Elective Affinities, which I read five times, if I remember rightly, while working on Death in Venice. But that the novella is at its core of a hymnic type, indeed of hymnic origin, cannot have escaped you. Letter of July 4, 1912.

  At even went to the Club…I was absorbed in admiring an elegant young man with a gracefully foolish, boyish face, blond, refined, rather frail German type, somewhat reminiscent of Requadt. Seeing him unquestionably affected me in a way I have not noted in myself for a long time. Was he a guest at the club, or will I meet him again? I readily admit to myself that this could turn into an experience. Diary, Fri. Dec. 20, 1918.

  In my exhaustion, forgot to note that yesterday the Hermes-like young dandy who made an impression on me several weeks ago attended my reading. In conjunction with his slight, youthful figure, his face has a prettiness and foolishness that amounts to a nearly classical “godlike” look. I don’t know his name, and it doesn’t matter. Diary, Sun. Mar. 30, 1919.

  Loneliness brings forth what is original, daringly and shockingly beautiful: the poetic. But loneliness also brings forth the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd, the illicit.

  Hofmannsthal’s Frau ohne Schatten: It must be strange and voluptuous to fantasize like that. Diary, Tues. Nov. 25, 1919.

  A nice observer once said of him in company—it was at the time when he fell ill in Vienna in his thirty-fifth year: “You see, Aschenbach has always lived like this”—here the speaker closed the fingers of his left hand to a fist—“never like this”—and he let his open hand hang relaxed from the back of his chair.

  Looking up from his notes, Louis gazed out at his reflection in the window. Closed Fist, Open Palm: Moral Discipline in the Works of Thomas Mann, that lucid and powerful work of scholarship and speculation, whose tenacious weaving together of rich, varied strands of argument would
point out for a grateful generation the possibility of reconciling intellectual license and moral discipline, whose capacity for mustering facts, and, further, whose fluency in their presentation, would lead judicious critics to place the treatise alongside Mann’s own great work, some even claiming, in headier moments, that the aspirations of the disciple very nearly superseded the accomplishments of the master….

  In the window, where before he had seen only vacancy, his reflection gazed back. He was shocked to see how drawn and weary he looked. How old he had become. Time, indeed, was running out. Soon would come the night in which there was no more work—not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart. The bitter truth peered back at him unflinchingly. He was a self-deluding old fool. Closed Fist, Open Palm. The book he had spent his life preparing to write would never be written.

  In a sudden fit of revulsion—or was it revenge?—he turned to the final pages of his notebook and read avidly.

  Saturated afternoons, the Tatra Mountains in fullest August. The rains do not stop. It is as if the whole countryside must drown. Inside the great summer house—gabled fantasia of stone and timber and mossy shingles—the cool walls sweat. The room is dark and damp. Somber, intricately flowered wallpaper rises to meet high ceilings. In the center of the room a regal four-poster bed holds court.

  No one uses this room. It has the air of having been forgotten, as if disuse has rendered it invisible to the rest of the house. As if it is a dream erased daily by the sturdier realities of waking life.

  They undress wordlessly, the two young cousins, the dark-haired boy from the military academy, the blond beauty who is pampered, often kept at home. Thump of shoes, jangle of belts, whispers of cotton or linen. Two neat stacks of shed clothes rise side by side on the chest at the foot of the bed. This useful fiction of an afternoon nap: for some minutes they indeed lie together on the capacious bed as if napping is, after all, their intent. The air is cool but not so cool that they cover themselves. They are young and warm-blooded.