Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  Frail crockery that in a trice can splinter thus

  ’Pon the glib surface underfoot, poor frame

  On which is hung this mortal pulp that e’en thou

  Outlasts i’ th’earth, couldst thou while we’re above’t

  Bear me no better hence? Damned wickerwork my flesh upholster’st,

  Amid whose members no longer in good standing

  Thou thyself so ignominiously sprawl’st,

  How swiftly I am redistributed, to compound the general mess.

  I could even imagine the idiotic footnotes required to make this rubbish intelligible to students. 1. CROCKERY. Here, as in WICKERWORK, Shakespeare is employing an imaginative metaphor for bones, the skeletal framework as such. 2. GLIB. Slippery, slick, referring to the ice on which the victim falls. 3. NO LONGER IN GOOD STANDING. This shows again Shakespeare’s comic genius for puns that shade into metaphor and vice versa. MEMBERS is used in the sense of limbs, no longer in “good standing,” i.e., now that they are sprawled on the ground.

  “God,” I groaned, but good-naturedly, smiling serenely with my hands folded above the blanket. Who will take my classes? Norm himself will undoubtedly be stuck with the Comedies, with Blodgett and McGeese doubling on the Life of Shakespeare and Introduction to Elizabethan Poetry.

  I turn and gaze dreamily out. Why do ambulances have picture windows? I have often been a pedestrian gaping morbidly in, now I can look out. I put on a show for the benefit of an old lady at an intersection where we are momentarily slowed. I grit my teeth in a horrible grimace, as though I am writhing in anguish. She shakes her head in friendly pity, blowing me a kiss. Yes, there is a human family. Then the wail of the siren again and off we bowl along the river road to the hospital, the Demerol now flooding my limbs with a Lethean peace. A compulsive habit carried over from my teaching chores makes me instinctively grade everything I see, and in my mellowed mood I give Him a straight A for the day, also mentally jotting the word of constructive criticism. “A rather striking mezzotint effect in which the gray values of a February morning are effectively contrasted with Your blue sky and the subtly distributed blocks of lemon yellow sunlight on the buildings. Keep up the good work. The handling of the gloomy-bright combination of middle values is a little contrived, a little reminiscent of Burchfield. Watch that.”

  I am given pre-op tests and medications, rolled down to surgery, and back up to my room, where I awaken with my leg in a hip-length cast. Seeing that I have come satisfactorily out of the anesthetic, the hovering nurse departs, to let me sleep again.

  Evening, and I am awakened from a doze by visitors, hoping I have shut my mouth in time. Smiling from the foot of the bed is the motorist in one of those suits that always make me want to ask the name of her tailor, while beside her Hodges! wears that impish grin which he owes to the two incisors standing slightly forward of the rest of his teeth. Why are other people so much more special? I try to be lonely in the midst of crowds, to laugh at points in the movie where other people don’t, but it is no use. I snatch the bowtie and off we are again like the wind. “Don’t worry about it. Everybody is reminiscent of somebody,” I pant over my shoulder as we tear down the hospital stairs into the street and strike out at a steady lope along the river drive. “You’ve been imitating MacLeish so long you sound like Eliot. That’s Nestle Down, an oubliette for nervous cases we’re determined to keep my father out of. That’s the Lamartine estate where I cut grass in summers—”

  “Tom, you poor. Poor. Thing. I only learned about it late this afternoon, and so when Arthur picked me up for dinner I said we can’t go before looking in on poor Tom.”

  “I couldn’t have eaten a thing,” says Hodges!, as though priding himself on this unexpected evidence of humanity in his makeup. “Pretty awful for you, Waltz.” The bowtie turns out on closer scrutiny to be not a Jazzbo with an elastic band at all, but a handsome foulard very possibly selected and even tied for him by a woman. He shows a woman’s civilizing touch. Also he has dispensed with the buffoon’s canvas gloves and is in general a much nicer person. I do not like this development at all. Nor the manner in which they talk, after finding chairs. Their glances are not forthright but keep sliding off me, as though I am coated with invisible grease in layers too thick for their gazes to obtain a purchase. They likewise avoid mention of the chapel incident with an obviousness that only indicates the scale on which it is being discussed outside. Damn their eyes! I cling the more savagely to my sanctuary, the haven in which alone I can postpone being held to account.

  “The doctor said he never saw such a filthy break and that it will take months to heal. He drove three spikes into my leg to hold things together down there. They do that now, you know. And when the leg’s all healed I’ll have to come back for another operation to have the spikes out. And so on.”

  The motorist rises to inspect the cast, bending near so that I catch a deranging whiff of her scent, as well as a glimpse of the little doves I have felt fluttering in the palms of my hands. There has been one kiss so ecstatic that, scarcely able to breathe, I raised my head and said, “This is no good.” She knows that only supreme moments wring this hard truth from me. I get rid of Hodges! by significantly clacking the lid of my water pitcher with a thumb, to show that it is empty, watching till he is safely out in the hall looking for a utility room before turning sharply to the motorist.

  “Well, I must say it’s nice of you to bring a friend when you visit a chap in the hospital.”

  “Well, of all the. After I explain expressly that I came to see you even though I had a date. I mean here you go switching it around to that.” She shakes her head, sadly but at the same time briskly, and continues in the polemic vein so natural to her, though I know very well that I am hearing a playback of some Ethics class notes. “How narrow to look at affection always in the purely sexual sense anyway. That’s the curse even of sexual relations, have you ever stopped to think of that, Tom?” Is the phrase “even of sexual relations” underlined in her notes too? “Love isn’t just a physical bond. It’s got to be part of man’s whole. Spiritual. Makeup.” This plenitude is illustrated by a rounded gesture of both hands rather unfortunately like that with which lewd men carve a nude in the air to dramatize the concept of voluptuousness. “It’s why we’re sick. We think we can separate the two. You can see the havoc being wrought by this attitude among young people. Remember as recently as when you and I were in school there was all this talk about how serious kids were because they got married so early? Well, the first precincts are coming in, and they’re getting divorced just as fast.”

  “Sometimes with children. It’s outrageous. I’ve just learned that two of my students are divorced. I have a friend in the graduate department at Columbia who says five of his classmates are divorced. Five!”

  Hodges! returns, his errand of mercy accomplished with amazing speed. “Getting lectured, Waltz?” he says as he sets the pitcher down. This means that he has come to know my sweet driver’s habits rather intimately. I cannot let this pass. “Marion’s on the side of the angels,” I tell him quite crisply.

  My reward is the light in his eye that I have come to recognize as a sign that he has seen a way of snatching the conversational ball and running you back eighty yards with it. He gives the impish smile that helped more than any other single feature to bring off his “clown” period, now, apparently, a thing of the past, another shell outgrown and left beside life’s unresting sea. Before that there was said to be a brief spell on the road as a beatnik, one of the Telemachus types engaged in the symbolic search for a Father figure, the inadequate original of which is luckily back home wiring the dough so the Quest can go on.

  “Now there’s an expression there’s something very interesting about—‘the side of the angels.’ Not one in a thousand knows where it comes from. Do you, Waltz?”

  Since Waltz is hanging like a bat over the side of the bed, looking under it for something to hit somebody over the head with, he does not reply save for a
grunt of generalized distaste. Being the salt of the earth entails certain obligations, so the other’s ignorance is not reproved by any outward measure.

  “Disraeli said it in a speech in England,” continues our nonesuch. “The controversy about Darwinism was raging at the time, whether man is an ape or an angel. ’I, my Lord, am on the side of the angels,’ Disraeli said. Meaning he believed in the traditional Biblical view of creation, nothing more. Not what people usually do by the term at all. It’s one of those things that have been completely corrupted by popular usage. Did you know that, Waltz?”

  “Ah, water.” I gratefully pour myself a glass, which they watch me gulp thirstily. I make a mental note to check Hodges!’s facts, to see whether in truth Disraeli coined the phrase or was simply ringing a change on it. “Well, what more can you expect from a century like the nineteenth than confusion like that?”

  “I’d like to have lived in the eighteenth. That’s the century for me. How about you, Marion? When would you like to live, if you could have your choice?”

  “The eighteenth century,” I interject while she sits mulling this, as though Hodges! has asked the restaurant at which it would amuse her most to dine, “had a splendid physique but a rotten constitution. The seventeenth century had a splendid constitution but a rotten physique. The nineteenth century had a rotten constitution and a rotten physique. The—”

  Hodges! looked at the clock and yawned. “We really must run along, Marion, if we’re going to the Half Moon. Andrew doesn’t like to serve after nine, you know, and it’ll take us a good half hour to get there from here.” My phone rang just then and they made their escape in a flurry of whispers, leaving me alone with the voice of Dr. Norman Littlefield. I groaned in my teeth. Would the scope of my folly mitigate the enormity of my crime in his eyes, by entitling me to pity in addition to that accruing from the broken leg? That was the continuing and at last now critically focused sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.

  “Waltz, how are you?”

  “Oh, Dr. Littlefield, nice of you to call. Yes, I’m in pretty bad shape to hear them tell it.”

  I lay like a corpse in whom remained some vestigial knack for receiving impressions through a mechanical contrivance while Littlefield made formal expressions of condolence, in a voice betraying, I must say, nothing of the emotion he must have felt at being publicly pilloried by an underling and assumed protégé. With closed eyes I learned that Blodgett and McGeese were indeed taking my classes in my absence. At last I heard what I expected.

  “Of course I have something more to say to you, Waltz, a good deal more, but that can wait until—”

  “Oh, how can I ever, how could I ever, I mean a man all his life thinks he’s a rational being, and then kablooey, this thing comes out of him from God knows—”

  “Later, when you’re feeling better. You sound a little dopey still. We’ll go into the whole thing then. All I want to say now is that in a way I’m glad it happened, much as it gives aid and comfort to enemies in certain quarters. Brings everything out in the open if you know what I mean. The thunderclap that clears the air. When you find out how somebody really feels about you—”

  “Oh, Dr. Littlefield.”

  “But I’ll say no more tonight. You need your rest. You sound rather rocky. I’ll look in on you in a day or two, and then we can talk the whole thing over. Good night.”

  Waltz spends the laudanum hours mentally drafting letters of application to other institutions of learning, or rather one master letter which he spends the next day putting down on paper. He tries to give some idea of his pedagogical worth, as well as his accumulated background for teaching the specialty for which he has a special zeal—Shakespeare. He assures prospects that he has in hand a long-range research project, the Clowns in Shakespeare, work on which goes forward with its customary relish, and on which articles should soon begin to appear in the better academic quarterlies, complete with offal in 6-point at the bottoms of the pages. It is wisest to keep lines out in your present profession in case no openings develop in another—like lawn maintenance or snow removal.

  Growing drowsy in the late afternoon, Waltz lets the pencil drop from his fingers as he muses on the pioneering contribution he has made to that scholastic ideal, small classes. The best schools like a pupil-teacher ratio of seven or eight to one. Waltz has improved on that in his Dramatic Poetry Workshop, an elective, in which an enrollment of two the first semester has dwindled to none now. That is carrying the ideal of small classes a bit too far, admitted, and he has tacked to the bulletin board an announcement that the course has been withdrawn owing to a conflict in the instructor’s schedule.

  The Dramatic Workshop was normally offered by a woman teacher now on leave. I ruefully ponder the term “normal.” The poor thing is at Nestle Down now, to which she was forcibly removed after accusing one of the students of blowing gas under her bedroom door at night in order that he might ravish her in her sleep. Momentarily roused from my doze by the arrival of afternoon juice, I work out, as I sip it, a little episode as the Bard would have done it. First I fashion a straight character of the kind who are always trying to outdo the clowns, thus making matters twice as bad, to say, “Call’st that a normal college?” So that the clown named, oh, Stumble, may answer, “Hath it not the customary deficit? It would be state-supported were’t not for the state it’s in.”

  “What state art thou in, fool?”

  “Desperation, for I must seek another position. An’t please thee, I’ll assume a lying one to rest a bit, and think on’t.”

  “Dost do anything but lie, fool?”

  “Marry, ’tis sometimes necessary, and I’ll stand on that. I can be upright when needed. But as to positions, I must find a new one or be state-supported myself, i’ faith.”

  “What wilst do, ass?”

  “I will lift up mine eyes unto the Hills. Dost know the Hills, varlet? A most wealthy and influential family in this town who could re-enstate e’en an ass were he to bray ardently enough.”

  “Thy faculties are wandering, fool.”

  “Worse, oaf, my students are.”

  I shake my head, amazed again that grown men can take such bilge seriously, even devote entire professional lifetimes to learned dissertations on it. I lift up mine eyes unto the ceiling and emit an inarticulate howl of rage and despair, which brings a nurse’s aid in at a gallop to see if anything is wrong.

  The hospital’s general level of functioning I have decided to give a C—, with floor care itself a D+. The place is no worse than most institutions of mercy, from what I hear. The trouble is apparently understaffing, and being in such demand has made registered nurses somewhat choosy and fastidious as well as bossy. They are always working on charts and feel their next most important function to be that of safeguarding the doctors from demands on their time by the patients. Physical contact with the sick is now pretty much a thing of the past among them; that is largely relegated to the practical nurses and aids, or, in extreme conditions, the mortician. The unregistered personnel are all that save the hospital from a flunking grade, the A—I give them pulling the overall mark up from the F it would otherwise have rated. At least in my estimation. There are other nurses besides Miss Wurlitzer and Mrs. Dart, and perhaps patients by the sight of whose flesh they are not so openly repelled as they seem to be by mine. The woman I like best is one in charge of a department on a lower floor called Therapy, to which I am periodically trundled for instruction in the use of crutches.

  By evening I had rough-drafted a letter that satisfied me, which I then neatly rewrote, remembering to round out the characters in my handwriting so as to reflect warmth and generosity of spirit, being especially careful to avoid those breaks in the downward loops, as in the g’s and y’s, which indicate sexual disorder. Who wants that? I had by now nearly eliminated my naturally neat and persnickety t-bars, said to betray a confined and unimaginative nature, in favor of quick spearlike dashes—sometimes entirely missing the main body of the letter�
��so suggestive of creative spontaneity and romantic flair. I put the result by, with the warning to myself to get copies off to the colleges I wanted to apply to the minute I get home. That done, I turned onto my side, as well as my encumbered limb allowed, and looked out the window at the fading day.

  We at Slow Rapids lie cupped in a shallow valley formed by a confluence of low hills merging in the near west, from which river mists arise to meet the cold air above, so that we are continually treated to a succession of sunsets now largely out of date. Generally Pre-Raphaelite in feeling, they sometimes descend to the level of Corot, and bad Corot at that. At their worst they are sheer calendar art. I often tell Him as much. “The straightforward romanticism at which You persist is by now basically uncongenial to the modern temper, which aims rather at implication and understress, as I have told You before,” I mentally jot by way of helpful comment on what I see now, “while the sun centered so exactly between Your banks of lilac cloud (suffused with rose yet!) is quite contrived. This kind of sentimentalization of nature is simply unpalatable to contemporary taste.” I then add the helpful criticism. “If You wish to pursue the pantheistic vein I would suggest study of some of the painters who have done so to their profit, and to ours. The trees in the foreground are nicely executed, though of course reminiscent of Renoir. C—”.

  The dawns are not to be believed. More women to whom the human, or at any rate masculine, form is repugnant enter and with averted eyes set down pans of water, with a clatter serving the simultaneous function of awakening you from a much-needed sleep. The soap floating in the pan completes its resemblance to the dumpling soup served for dinner the night before. This is all part of a general, well-orchestrated hubbub commencing suddenly everywhere. The rumble of carts supplements the reports of curtains shot back from between beds in double rooms and wards, like artillery fire supplementing infantry. To this is added a steady muffled beat from directly below, where the kitchen is said to be located. It is of course all part of the notorious dawn barrage of hospitals.