by John Gardner
“In prison,” I said, then started over: “He was taken sick while in prison…. There was a plague of some kind in the seaport towns. We didn’t think it could reach Sparta but—” I glanced again at the old woman. She was hard to talk in front of. If she took a notion to mimic me she could nail me to the wall.
“Plague!” Diana whispered. Her eyes welled with tears.
“Come, come, Diana,” Kleon said. He moved his hand as if to reach out to her, then realized he was too far away. It was Agathon’s kind of scene. Kleon folded his hands, embarrassed.
With a quick, sharp grin, the old woman said, “Kleon’s a lawyer.”
“Kleon’s what keeps this family together,” Diana said fiercely, then looked startled, apologetic, then looked stubborn. I loved her. I would conquer elephants in her name.
There was another silence. The old woman simply waited; time was nothing to her. It was as if she had come to believe she would never die.
Diana wanted details. She was pitiful, sweet I told her all I could, but cleaned it up. How the sickness mysteriously began (I didn’t mention the rats), how it progressed, how the Helots rescued us from prison, and how, finally, he died. He died peacefully in his sleep, I said, and I said I was with him all the time. I didn’t look at the old woman as I talked. Even if she hadn’t read the scroll to the end, she would know how it was, I thought. If she wanted to contradict me, that was her business. If she opened the scroll up, I’d swear it was all lies.
The story took a long time to tell I told it like a poet, and Diana kept using her hanky. It was dark outside when I finished. Diana sat now with her hands over her face, weeping and wiping her eyes with the hanky’s edge. Kleon’s eyes were a little funny, but he hadn’t let us see him cry. He’d gone out for wine for all of us while I was telling the saddest part.
Kleon said huskily, clearing his throat, “He was a strange man.”
I nodded. The old woman was watching me. So was the statue.
He cleared his throat again. “I remember when I was a little boy he used to carry me on his shoulders. He never said a cross word to me. Never once!”
I sipped my wine to keep from the old woman’s eyes.
“He was an important diplomat for Lykourgos, you know. And Holy Apollo what a horseman that man was!” He laughed and shook his head, then shaded his eyes for an instant, afraid of breaking. “He’d gallop over the snow, hunting rabbits—Great Zeus, he’d be going a hundred miles an hour—and the rabbit would go under a six-foot hedge and he’d go over it as if the hedge wasn’t there, and he’d lose the rabbit and he’d yell, ‘Whoa, rabbit! God damn you, rabbit!’—mixing up the rabbit and the horse, you know—” He laughed again, loudly, and this time, having brought Agathon to life, he did break, and covered his face and made peeping noises. I could have told him it would happen. So could his mother. Or the statue.
“Poor, dear Kleon!” Diana whooped, and leaped from her chair and went to him and threw her arms around him. He sobbed on her bosom.
“He loved us,” Kleon sobbed. “At least I think he did. You could never tell with Father.”
The old woman watched me.
“I’ve read the scroll,” she said. She sipped her wine.
“I thought you might have,” I said.
She looked away from me at last, over at her children. She got up, not effortlessly, exactly, but gracefully all the same. I wondered if she could still play the harp. She crossed to them and touched the nape of Diana’s neck gently, then touched her son’s balding head. She looked back at me. “Come,” she said.
We went down the hall and down the long stairs and outside to where the slope was, and at the foot of it, the stone benches and tables. The old serving-man peeked out the door and looked furious, then disappeared and returned a minute later with a torch. He carried it past us and set it in one of the torch rests beyond the tables, behind a thin statue whose features were in darkness. The servant never glanced at his mistress (much less at me), though she watched him like a critic.
When he was gone she said, “It’s true, you know, that I loved him.”
“I know.”
“And Diana loved him too, though she’s stupid, poor thing.”
I nodded. “There are worse faults. I like her.”
She said nothing for a long time. I watched the torch. At last she said gently, as if afraid of hurting me, “You’re aware, of course, that Agathon too was stupid.”
I said nothing for a while. It was a difficult moment. Then I said, “Yes, finally.”
She smiled. Not old. You’d have sworn she was eternal. “However, I happened to love him.”
“Then why did you leave him?” I asked as innocently as possible. A stupid question, she might say. But I’d risk it.
She answered easily. “Because sooner or later he’d have killed me, you know.—In one of those rages that Kleon can’t remember.” She smiled. “Poor Agathon hardly remembered them himself, to judge by the scroll.”
I could see the scar very clearly, a shiny place in the torchlight.
“But if you loved him, as you say—”
“Think,” she said. “If he killed me, and couldn’t kill himself…with his history, you know—after riding his brother down that night, and later the awful thing with Konon…He did love me, Demodokos.”
I nodded. Harp music floated down from the house.
“We were all crazy enough as it was,” she said, and laughed. Then she frowned, sudden as a springtime change of sky, musing. “And of course I was young,” she said. For the first time she evaded my eyes, stared at the death-white hands crossed over her knees. I wanted to touch them. I looked away. She said, “I needed to know he loved me—needed to know he could forgive me for being…unlike him.” She frowned, fine creases descending to the sharp square chin as white as winter. “A woman…” She paused. She tipped her head up, looked at the stars, and smiled as if with amused compassion for all her kind. “A woman needs proofs of a sort no man can possibly understand. Sometimes even violence will do.” Her eyes became tiny chinks and her hands tightened in her lap. “I gave up my death for his sake, Demodokos.”
I nodded.
She mused, then she gave her head a barely perceptible jerk, as if driving away the first faint mumble of a dream. She smiled, slightly scornful, like a beautiful young girl. “That’s stupid. I made it up.”
I shrugged. “But interesting.”
She smiled again and touched my hand. Her tremble went through me. “Ah, Demodokos, Demodokos! You do me good!” Darkness was pulling her outward like old light.
A Biography of John Gardner
John Gardner (1933–1982) was a bestselling and award-winning novelist and essayist, and one of the twentieth century’s most controversial literary authors. Gardner produced more than thirty works of fiction and nonfiction, consisting of novels, children’s stories, literary criticism, and a book of poetry. His books, which include the celebrated novels Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, and October Light, are noted for their intellectual depth and penetrating insight into human nature.
Gardner was born in Batavia, New York. His father, a preacher and dairy farmer, and mother, an English teacher, both possessed a love of literature and often recited Shakespeare during his childhood. When he was eleven years old, Gardner was involved in a tractor accident that resulted in the death of his younger brother, Gilbert. He carried the guilt from this accident with him for the rest of his life, and would incorporate this theme into a number of his works, among them the short story “Redemption” (1977). After graduating from high school, Gardner earned his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis, and he married his first wife, Joan Louise Patterson, in 1953. He earned his Master’s and Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa in 1958, after which he entered into a career in academia that would last for the remainder of his life, including a period at Chico State College, where he taught writing to a young Raymond Carver.
Following the birt
hs of his son, Joel, in 1959 and daughter, Lucy, in 1962, Gardner published his first novel, The Resurrection (1966), followed by The Wreckage of Agathon (1970). It wasn’t until the release of Grendel (1971), however, that Gardner’s work began attracting significant attention. Critical praise for Grendel was universal and the book won Gardner a devoted following. His reputation as a preeminent figure in modern American literature was cemented upon the release of his New York Times bestselling novel The Sunlight Dialogues (1972). Throughout the 1970s, Gardner completed about two books per year, including October Light (1976), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the controversial On Moral Fiction (1978), in which he argued that “true art is by its nature moral” and criticized such contemporaries as John Updike and John Barth. Backlash over On Moral Fiction continued for years after the book’s publication, though his subsequent books, including Freddy’s Book (1980) and Mickelsson’s Ghosts (1982), were largely praised by critics. He also wrote four successful children’s books, among them Dragon, Dragon and Other Tales (1975), which was named Outstanding Book of the Year by the New York Times.
In 1980, Gardner married his second wife, a former student of his named Liz Rosenberg. The couple divorced in 1982, and that same year he became engaged to Susan Thornton, another former student. One week before they were to be married, Gardner died in a motorcycle crash in Pennsylvania. He was forty-nine years old.
A two-year-old Gardner, shown here, in 1935. He went by the nickname “Buddy” throughout his childhood.
Gardner on a motorcycle in 1948, when he was about fifteen years old. He was a lifelong enthusiast of motorcycle and horseback riding, hobbies that resulted in multiple broken bones and other injuries throughout his life.
Gardner’s senior photo from Batavia High School, taken in 1950. Though he found most of his classes boring, he particularly enjoyed chemistry. One day in class, Gardner and some friends disbursed a malodorous concoction through the school’s ventilation system, causing the whole building to reek and classes to be dismissed early.
Gardner and Joan Patterson, his first wife, in the early 1950s. The couple were high school sweethearts and attended senior prom together in 1951.
John and Joan’s wedding photograph, taken on June 6, 1953.
A Gardner family photograph from 1957. From left to right: John Gardner, Priscilla (mother), John Sr. (father), Jim (brother), and Sandy (sister). John Sr. and Priscilla took in thirteen foster children after John and his siblings grew up and moved away.
Gardner at the University of Detroit in 1970. He was a distinguished visiting professor at the university.
Gardner’s children, Joel and Lucy, circa 1975. Joel is the founder of Camp Gardner Films, and Lucy works in publishing. Both currently live in Massachusetts.
Gardner playing the French horn around 1979. He began playing in high school and played in the Batavia Civic Orchestra.
Gardner and Liz Rosenberg at their wedding on Valentine’s Day, 1980. Liz’s dress was a wedding gift from John, who had it made in Kansas City by a woman he had met at a reading there. Liz later remembered that instead of following her specifications, the dressmaker made her “Cleopatra’s shroud.”
Gardner in the early 1980s. In the last years before his death, he had become much more interested in politics than in literature, declaring at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1982 that “if you’re not writing politically, you’re not writing.”
Selected images from The John Gardner Papers, Department of Rare Books/Special Collections, University of Rochester.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1970 by John C. Gardner
cover design by Robin Bilardello
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0388-0
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