Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “I couldn’t,” said Buddy, but it was unconvincing.

  “We’ll stop by Susie’s on the way,” said Jack. “You hungry?”

  “Boy, at your age, I was hungrier than I was horny,” said Sam.

  “Still are,” said Ned.

  “You better eat, son, before what you got falls off your bones,” said Steve.

  “Susie’ll fix him up,” said Jack.

  “Is she your girlfriend?” asked Buddy, shyly.

  “Might as well be,” said Steve, smiling.

  “She cooks for him every night,” said Sam.

  “She’s four hundred pounds and ugly,” said Jack. “But she makes a mean gravy.”

  Buddy looked from one to another, uncertain.

  “Susie runs a diner on the south side of town,” said Wallace, passing by.

  “Marry her, save yourself some money,” said Sam.

  “I been married,” said Jack, shaking his head slowly, side to side. “Cash is cheaper, in the long run.” He turned to Buddy. “We’ll get on over there, sooner or later.”

  It was sooner rather than later, I suppose; I left Stokes’s a few minutes after that, dribbling out of the bar with the rest of the men, separate from them, and yet all of us furtive in the same way, scraping back our chairs and mumbling our goodbyes, leaving Jack and the boy alone to finish their beer. We didn’t stop to talk amongst ourselves the way we’d usually do, either, when we were alone together outside the door. We didn’t comment on the boy or even look at one another, just went silently to our cars and trucks and drove off, taking our memories with us, as though we were jealous of them and wanted to hold them to ourselves a while longer before giving them up to the scrutiny of the stranger.

  Naples blood or not, Buddy Whyte wasn’t quite welcome.

  I went home to the house across town. It was dark when I drove in, but no lights shone in the windows. I found my wife, Joan, in the room that used to be my father’s, reading by the light of a single lamp. She was in the old rose-patterned chair, absorbed, with her feet curled up under her, and she looked up when I came in.

  I smiled, not yet certain what kind of day it was for her.

  “Hello,” I said, and bent down to kiss her. She drew away a little at first and then relented, accepting my lips against her cheek. As though we had not been married these thirty years. “What are you reading?” I asked her, pulling up a footstool.

  “Josephine Tey,” she answered, in a voice light as leaves and without expression.

  “The one about the king?” I asked. I had never read any of the books, but Joan had, again and again, and had repeated their plots to me so often that I felt as familiar with them as if I had read them myself. Early in our marriage, she had even read one or two of them aloud to me, in a fine, expressive voice. It was an evening ritual, once; we had abandoned it long ago.

  “The one about the boy who comes back,” she said.

  I reached out to take one of her hands; she let the book fall closed upon the other, keeping her place. I traced the veins running over the fine bones, the slight white knobs of knuckle, the short fingernails, and then looked up into her face. At fifty-two, she was still beautiful, as beautiful as when I’d married her, although in a different way. She’d been fey then, with a transparent, distracted look. Age had robbed her of that youthful blitheness; it had pulled away the air of vulnerability which in our early marriage had shrouded a surprisingly steely will. Then, she was an ultimately practical woman with a fairy look; now, ironically, her appearance was far more ordinary. She looked capable and determined. It was an impression she sought to reinforce beyond the barriers of the house; but within it, she often left off that veneer of competence and skill, and drifted through the rooms like an uncertain ghost.

  “I’ll make supper,” I said.

  Joan shrugged.

  “Did you see the doctor today?” I asked, gently.

  She nodded.

  “Bad?” I asked.

  She looked away, toward the shuttered windows. “It was hard,” she said, at last.

  “But it’s helping,” I said.

  “I guess so,” said Joan.

  “Good,” I told her, pressing her hand.

  “How can you live with me?” she cried suddenly, dropping her face forward, so that a dark eclipse of hair fell across it. I reached out and smoothed the hair back, behind her ears.

  “Everything’s all right now,” I said.

  She looked at me, as an animal might examine its captor; searchingly, as though estimating my power to harm.

  “You stay here, read some more,” I said. “I’ll make that chicken thing.”

  “No,” said Joan, pulling her hand from mine, putting the book aside, and straightening her legs, preparatory to rising. “I’ll make soup,” she said.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “If you can wait a while,” she said. “I got some things at the market.”

  “I can wait,” I said.

  “Before we were married,” she said, looking into my eyes, “I promised your father I’d cook for you. He said you’d been in the kitchen too long.” She stood up, and I stood with her, marveling. So sudden, her changes; released now from her mood by some private alchemy, Joan stood solid and strong. She lifted her hands and ran her fingers through her hair, which fell around her face in the old style, girlishly simple, now streaked with grey. She smiled, tipping up her chin, so that I might kiss her. I did, hardly bending at all to accomplish it. She was a tall woman, coming up past my shoulder, although she gave the impression of being much smaller, and she made no noise when she walked.

  “A nice cream soup,” she said. “And biscuits and salad.” She might have been completely normal, her eyes blank and calm, fitting with her expression, as though she were thinking of nothing, nothing at all besides the evening menu. That’s how she does it, I thought, that’s how she goes into the world and fools everybody.

  “Sounds good,” I said, giving an ordinary response, to fit into that highly ordinary conversation. Sanity resides in such small exchanges as these. I followed her into the kitchen.

  Joan herself had told me once that I worried too much over her. “You needn’t be so careful with your every word,” she said. “And that doting expression.” She made a moue. “It makes me feel like an invalid auntie.”

  That had been one of her good days. She labelled them herself: good and bad. “On good days,” she’d told me, “I feel hopeful.” I didn’t ask her what she hoped for then. On good days she confided in me and recovered her sense of humor from that lost dark place where she wandered during the other times. On bad days, she trembled at every sound and hardly spoke at all, carrying herself cautiously across the floor, as though it might shift and open up at her feet. Twenty years, a deep tunnel and hardly any sight of light at its end. But lately, so many more of her days had been good than bad; we were seeing the far light now.

  Going behind her, turning on lights, I wondered how to tell her. I knew I ought to; otherwise, she would certainly hear about it elsewhere, somewhere harborless and cold, outside of the house, where she would be defenseless. Better that I be the one to tell her, and better it be here, where she could react. I watched her silently, as she moved around the kitchen.

  “There was a stranger in Stokes’s tonight,” I said at last, rattling ice cubes into a squat heavy glass. Joan was half listening, flipping through her box of recipe cards.

  “Oh?” she said.

  “He says he’s Beth Miller’s son,” I said carefully, measuring out the whisky.

  “Who?” said Joan, and then, “Oh.” She looked at me. “You mean Crawford.”

  “Whyte, actually,” I said, conversationally. “She married again, in New York.”

  “Beth’s son,” said Joan.

  “He says so,” I said. “He’s just a boy, maybe nineteen.”

  “What’s he like?” she asked, surprising me.

  “Skinny. Shy.” I hesitated. “Nothing like her.”


  “What does he want?” she asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “He says he’s making a movie.”

  “Did Beth come with him?” asked Joan, standing very still, looking down at the index card she had chosen.

  “Beth is dead now.” I said it as gently as I could.

  “Oh,” said Joan. “Oh,” she said again, turning, going toward the stove, then turning again and going toward the refrigerator, blind, half-completed movements. Finally, she stood still in the middle of the floor with her hands at her sides.

  “Thank God,” she said, hissing into the air between us.

  “Joan,” I said, moving slightly toward her. She flinched at my approach and moved away. “Joan.” She said nothing; she stood with her fingers tensed up on the counter like thin white-legged spiders, her back to me.

  “We can talk about it later,” I said.

  I retreated to the living room, where my own book lay, abandoned since the night before, split and flattened, facedown on the coffee table. I picked it up; a history of the Reconstruction, it had been a birthday present from Joan nearly six months before. I was a fast reader, but the book was dense, and I had gotten only to the seventh chapter in that time.

  A clatter of pots began from the kitchen, signalling that Joan had left her frozen stance by the stove and was now engaged in the fragrant mysteries of soup making. She had a large repertoire of soups, nearly all of them gleaned from her Hungarian grandmother’s collection, copied carefully by Joan onto those tidy index cards. She made gulyás, fat chunks of meat and clear limp onions floating in liquid scummed livid with paprika. She made thick white soups from cauliflower, and thin beef stocks with soft slices of carrot, the beef falling into slivers under the fork. She fed me well, as she always had, but always now with some reservation, with a kind of pinched goodwill, as though she were feeding the enemy, a Yankee soldier quartered in her Southern home. Though it was she who was the foreigner, the Yankee, and it was my father’s house we lived in, built deep into the Virginia soil, and my mother’s saucepan that Joan was now filling with water and carrying over to the stove.

  It would be some time until supper; some time until Joan spoke again. But I had known she would take the news badly, and I could wait. She often took herself off like this, in order to recover from a blow; somewhere in the chopping and simmering, she would mend whatever injury my news had caused her. She would call to me to help her, some simple task like slicing bread or dressing salad. By then, she would have set the stage for intimacy, and we would find ourselves cheek by jowl in the kitchen. Conniving together, so that even in that large space, there would not be room enough to keep us distant. I would put my hand over hers accidentally, reaching for a cloth, and she would brush by me on her way to the sink. Eating, we would be restored again, newly allied, no longer sheared by doubt.

  I settled to the waiting, opening my book. Drawing comfort from the definite: the dark clear letters against the white paper; the words they made up; the facts and names and dates. From the real: the lamp glowing above my chair; the textured binding of the book I held; the faint cacophony of cookware in the background. I fastened to these details. Better not to think; better to grasp what could be grasped than to look back into darkness past or to look ahead to disasters that might not come. Better to revel in the good things, the things that could be counted upon: the rich story in my lap, the rich soup to come. The sounds of healing, the promise of mercy.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Belle of Naples

  “TALK ABOUT YOURSELF,” says the young man, Buddy, from across the room. He’s fiddling with black, shiny equipment as he speaks. He keeps saying he wants me to be comfortable, but I am not; I am very hot in this chair; he’s gathered all of the lights in the parlor around me, plugging and re-plugging them until the wall sockets bristle with electrical cords.

  “Say anything,” he says, looking up from where he is struggling. “Tell me anything at all.”

  Jack Corbin, now, he’s a slick one, and no mistake. I knew him when he was small, and he was always the same, always up to something. Those kind that don’t say much, they’re the ones to watch, they know more than they’re telling.

  Fancy, schoolwork meaning all of this truck; all we got to do was parse sentences and memorize arithmetic tables. Here you are telling me that you’ve got to make a moving picture. Times move on. You wouldn’t understand, though, you’ve lived all in one time, haven’t you? You’ll understand by and by, I expect, unless they manage to do away with old age entirely by the time it’s your turn.

  That sounds nasty, doesn’t it? Your turn. Don’t mistake my meaning; I’m not one of those bitter old ladies, those Faulkner Emilies, locked away into their houses, mourning their withered youth. I never valued youth all that much when I had it; it would be pure hypocrisy to start weeping over it now.

  Can you tell, from looking at me, that I used to be known as the Belle of Naples? A ridiculously romantic appellation, but then it was a romantic era. To tell the truth, I was no prettier than the average pretty girl, but there weren’t all that many girls here then, at least not of my class, and so I stood out. I was quite sought after, can you believe it now? Don’t be embarrassed; I know what the years have done to me. I’ve made peace with it now; I’m no miserable aging belle with all of the mirrors shrouded and the curtains pulled. And I don’t lie about my age. I’m eighty-four next month, born with the new century. Eighty-four; that’s old. Yes, old. Practically nothing is euphemised so much as age. You’re said to be ‘getting on,’ as though you hadn’t gotten there already. You’re deferred to by people with rigid, polite faces, while it’s obvious they don’t care a hoot what you say or think, they just can’t wait to get somewhere and talk about the things that truly interest them. I’ve been called ‘wise’ so many times you wouldn’t believe it, and by the most unlikely people. What do they know about wisdom? What do they care? It’s a cheap commodity; by the time you’ve gathered some, no one wants to hear about it.

  You’re not here because I’m wise, now are you? No; you’re here because I’m old. No need to look apologetic. You’re not the first. When the Historical Committee, as they call themselves, that bunch of hens and milksops, were looking around to gather up facts about Naples, they came running straight up here with their tape recorders. By now, I’m quite accustomed to my role as a font of local history; but I must confess that the camera’s new to me.

  Being old isn’t so bad. I’m old, I ought to know. And I daresay I’m wise, too, although the one has little to do with the other, in my opinion. Age doesn’t engender wisdom as surely as it engenders boredom; unfortunately, the world prepares one for the wrinkles, but not for the ennui.

  There are consolations. When one is young, one is forever sneaking about trying to learn things—at least I did as a girl, the world wasn’t anything like as liberal then as it is now—but now I’m old, people often simply talk in front of me, as though I were a piece of furniture and incapable of understanding. They assume that I’m hard of hearing, you see, and although I never have been afflicted that way, I let them go right on thinking it. It’s amazing what I learn. Sometime I do have to strain a little, to hear whispers. Even if they think me deaf as a post, they still go and whisper sometimes. Seems that when the subject is delicate, people instinctively lower their voices. As if they’d shock me. Strange, that I am treated more carefully at eighty than I was at eighteen. As though living made one more fragile, instead of harder.

  Of course, it’s not so nice, is it, eavesdropping all the time, instead of being told things straight out. But if I adhered to the niceties of etiquette, I’d never hear anything interesting at all. It’s terrible that I have missed all this—freedom, would you call it?—by an accident of birth. Timing plays a greater role in things than people imagine. I wouldn’t want to be growing up nowadays, however. No, if I could, I’d go right back to the time when I was young and be young all over again. Decrepitude is mighty dull, but th
is time has no magic in it. Everything laid wide open, nothing mysterious anymore.

  But I am not a good judge of what the world is like now; Gaston reads the paper to me, but it has been a good while since I saw anything for myself, or had the desire to. It is all much of a muchness to me now. It didn’t used to be that way. When I was a child, there were ordinary days and holidays; and then school came along and divided up the days quite nicely. As a young wife, my days were tagged for baking, washing, marketing, paying calls; and when I had a child, his needs got crammed in, too, so that the time just flew by. How I longed for Sundays! Now, the days are much the same, and time is endless, with an abhorrent divisionless quality to it. I mourn my crested and variegated weeks. Now they are marked only by Sunday; church, of course, in the morning, and afterward I sometimes receive visitors. Every day before and after Sunday falls away from it, like pitted fruit falling away from the stone. I try to keep track, for appearances’ sake. Today is Tuesday, but it might as well be Thursday or Monday for all it signifies. All I am certain of is that it is not yet Sunday.

  But listen to me, going on about getting old, so like the people I despise who are obsessed with it, as though it were not nature but some private injustice, something that happens only to them. I’ll tell you a secret: everybody gets old. It’s not a secret, of course, but the way people act it might as well be. And I’ll tell you something else: I wouldn’t really want to be young again. For the most part, I have seen and done what I wanted to see and do; I went to Europe twice, and how many people in Naples today can say that? And it’s not such a small town anymore, upwards of twelve thousand where there used to be four, and they’re talking about another shopping center, as if we hadn’t enough of those already. Or so I understand from Gaston. He keeps me abreast of local developments, and he’s not one to exaggerate.

  Gaston; that’s his name, though you’ll hear him called Gus around town. It is a silly sort of a name for him, I don’t know how his mother came up with it. I’m sure there’s not a drop of French blood in the family. You may have assumed that Gaston is my servant; a common mistake, fostered by those insipid tales of the South. I never had an eighteen-inch waist, and my family may have owned a few slaves at one time, but just a very few, and I am quite sure they were never whipped. Television stories; people believe what they see; just so many cattle. I actually see it that way—all across America, horned beasts tossing their heads and lowing, the silver antennae poking up, and all the time that irritating whine from the box itself. Mercy, this isn’t going to be on television, is it? Well, good.