When I’d known Elizabeth Mary—or, more accurately, observed her—I had even come to dislike her in a petty way, the way one falls into disliking anyone who’s the center of attention. Now, as she greeted me with a tone of pleasant surprise, of course my feelings immediately fell at her feet.
Elizabeth Mary still had traces of Indian accent—not the exuberant quasi-Welsh singsong, but a fluid hurdling of each emphasized word. Hearing one of her spoken paragraphs was like listening to an expertly run quarter mile of intermediate hurdles. Her whole voice neatly tucked up its lower register, skimmed over, then was in full stride again, gathering its silky rush and hum for the next flit of emphasis.
I was so taken with the laps her voice was making that I lost track of the subject. I remember her saying that Americans had humor but no wit and my not wanting to argue. Then I was admiring her narrow dark gold nose, when there was a silence and I realized she’d been asking me something about Iowa. While I was trying to think of something to mumble, it came echoing back to me that she’d just said she was going to teach there for a term. I guessed that she must be asking about either the faculty or the students. I said, “Well, there’s a spread. It’s hard for me to say; you may find something quite different.”
“Oh, Oliver,” Elizabeth Mary said. “Come right out and tell me the worst. I am prepared for any kind of illiteracy.”
I gathered it was students she was after. I said, “There are a few who are eager.” And I told her several Honorée Hogentogler stories.
Walking back to the Morses’ apartment, Antoinette slipped her arm through mine and slowed us down so that we lagged behind Bobby and Elizabeth Mary.
Antoinette said, “I’m afraid Bobby is introducing you to her. I’d hoped he was completely serious about her. She’d be so good for him.”
I said that I thought Bobby just wanted me to be polite to her for her one-term visit. I added, “When I’m out there I’m devoted to Miss Hogentogler. And when I’m here, you’re my ideal.”
Antoinette wasn’t much of a flirt. She said, “Oliver, that’s like loving your nanny.”
It was in this foursome that I had a pretty good time until it was time to fly back to Iowa. Each of us knew enough about a variety of arts and entertainments and about the taste of the others to be able to make something of a week of afternoons and evenings.
But as soon as I drove out of the parking lot of the Cedar Rapids airport, I was despondent. It wasn’t the three weeks of the fall term trailing into January. It was the first tremor in my major hopes. I had felt until then that all I had to do was keep up with my program of cultural and spiritual progress and I would inevitably reach way stations where there would be other people into whose clarified sensibilities I would be able to see. I had felt that all the efforts I had made toward the fragments of the past (including those whole works I loved most) would be rewarded in the future by whole sensibilities. As every idea anyone had ever formulated about a work of art fell short, was a weak caged specimen of the power of the art at large, so art itself fell short of the power of sensibility in its highest state.
And if one wished to dismiss this idea, one would have only an idea about an idea, which would be devoid of even the caged power of an idea. So this core of belief in progress toward communion had always been at a safe remove from thought.
But of course the danger of belief removed from thought is that it may recklessly add to itself or be added to (who could tell?). At that moment there was certainly some unbalancing or corroding element in my belief.
I had just told stories about Honorée Hogentogler—her laughable tumbling eagerness. Driving through the countryside, I thought that I might be laughable too; Honorée and I might be sisters under the skin.
There was a dull twilight, the rising moon behind a scrim of clouds, the setting sun curtained off by thicker clouds, the light spread about unevenly by the snow incompletely covering the ground. The farmhouses, buildings, and machinery visible from the highway looked makeshift, and only half in use, as though a city had toppled and these were the farthest-flung pieces reassembled. Turkish goat pens made of the ruined stubs of Ionic columns. This regressive and mean vision passed before I pulled into my driveway. In my mailbox was a card from Honorée. A New Year’s card. It was a picture of her coming into a room wearing a white gown and a crown of lighted candles. She wrote: “My father used this for his bank’s calendar. I’m January and my sister is February. See you soon. Love, Honorée.”
She looked embarrassed and very pretty. A birthday cake too pretty to be cut.
I went into my office the next day and at lunchtime went to the Huddle. Honorée was there. She came around the counter and kissed me on the cheek. She seemed stronger and more expansive—I’d been thinking of the picture on the New Year’s card, in which she seemed delicate.
She said, “I wouldn’t have done that except it’s my last day here. I get to quit my job. My dad said I’d showed I could do it and now I’ll have time to work on a movie. I’ll tell you about that in a second. Did you get the card?”
I nodded and said it was very pretty.
She said, “That was taken last year. My mom’s so corny about that stuff. She came from Minnesota.”
I looked puzzled.
Honorée said, “They do more of those Swedish things there. Anyway, things have been hectic. You know my roommate, Miss Quist? Well, she told me before vacation that she was going to room with somebody else next term and so the dorm supervisor’s letting me live in a single room in approved housing. That’s just one thing. And then I got into the acting class and there’s this TA who’s making a movie. It’s just a little farce but he got a grant to do it and I get to be in it. It’s silent, but anyway the main thing is the theater crowd here are so nice. I’d heard—Karen Quist told me—that they were snobby, but they’ve been terrific. This TA said I could be in his improv group. It’s the same crowd he’s making the movie with. Last year they did the experimental one-act that won the student contest. It’s their own technique; it’s very practical—sort of avant-garde Marx Brothers. A lot of physical clowning. Last term the TA substitute taught body movement one time and that’s where he saw me. He said it was good the way I did falls. The secret of good farce is really precision that surprises, and he said it was surprising that I could move so well.”
I said, “I hope this doesn’t take too much time away from your work.”
“Oh, no. I had good grades at midterm. If I do as well on midyears, I’ll have a three point six.”
I found all this news, or rather Honorée’s exhilaration about it, hard to fit in. After she’d come out to visit me and I’d driven her back to her dorm, I’d been afraid I would have to have a talk with her. She’d seemed innocent and helpless in her aspiration to what she thought of as college life—the whole corny turmoil that I’d skipped but which I was afraid she hoped to find in me. And I’d been troubled by our kiss. I’d had a clear sense of Honorée by sight and sound, and then these two known languages had been complicated by the third, as though I’d turned the Rosetta stone and found a hieroglyph which I wasn’t sure I wished to translate.
And I’d had other ambiguous thoughts about her when I hadn’t been busy assessing my New York life. One of these unbidden visions of her was particularly persistent for all its absurdity. The plot was that Honorée had been left on my doorstep as a child and then suddenly grown into a lovely pliant child who kept me company. This Silas Marner fantasy was as embarrassing to me as any of the other moments of embarrassment that popped into my head from my real life, dumb things that I’d said years before—for example, some attempted elegance that had failed and which could still make me suck in my breath with shame.
And yet this guardian mode was the one that kept floating to the top. I’d entertained the idea of heartlessly abusing her trust, of accepting what pleased me from her affections while remaining free to shake her off. I had no absolute scruple—certainly not a notion of an eternal fathe
r sending a thunderbolt or shower of frogs to punish my lust. I could easily imagine that there was such a plausible mode as the carefree rake, a jolly scoundrel who could take pleasure because he gave pleasure, no cobwebs of feeble piety. But I knew that was not my sensibility. That essentially comic role would take either more energy or less energy than I spent in my life, but certainly a different kind of energy.
Honorée said, “When I was two or three, my mother claims, I had a Swedish accent. We went to church for a Christmas pageant and I looked at all the girls dressed up like angels carrying candles and I said, ‘Look, Mama! Dere’s a yady with a yight. And dere’s anudder yady with a yight.’ ” Honorée laughed at her singsong. She said, “I dreamed about that. Except you were there and you could really talk Swedish and that made my mother really happy. Except later on in that dream, or maybe it was another dream, I had to go to a party and everyone but me was speaking in blank verse. Just like Twelfth Night. They’d even say a rhymed couplet before they’d exit. It was really awful. But I think I know what that’s about—it was my anxiety about the theater crowd. And that’s not a problem anymore. I don’t know why I didn’t have any confidence this fall. I guess I thought there was just one way to be good at things—there was a set of rules, and either you knew or you didn’t. You know, the way Miss Quist just seemed to know what was O.K. and how to do things. But then I saw you just going ahead and being the way you were and talking about the way you thought and not caring about whether that made you popular. And then talking to you by myself, I saw you were completely sincere about the way you were in class. Well, that was one thing I learned—that you don’t need to be heart-broken about anything. Someone will appreciate you. You were so nice about that—well, not really nice, because that would mean you weren’t sincere about what you think of me.
“And now everything’s just sailing along. Just think. If all this can happen before the first year’s even over, what’ll the next three years be like?”
I had a sudden sense of Honorée’s sensation of her life then—prettily piled-up clouds sailing by on a short spring day.
I went back to my office, where I found my Okie officemate moving his things out. He was embarrassed. “Did you get my note?” he said. “I’m just going down the hall. I’m moving in with the guy that uses a lot of the same books. I left a note in the mailbox; I wasn’t sure you’d be back so early. Your mail’s all there still. This is going to work out better for our schedules—I was always getting in your hair.”
I said something amiable.
He lifted his carton of books and notes with his typewriter perched on top. I asked if I could help carry the typewriter.
“No; thanks anyway.” He said, “Well, I sure won’t miss the view.” We both laughed. The view was of the parking lot. Actually, I rather liked looking down on the parking lot—it was the one place one could see the coming and going of the Easter parade. But I wanted to be polite.
I lost myself in typing, a mindless anthill task. Insect tedium, carrying one grain of sand after another under a sky that was too vast.
I read my office mail when I got home. My feelings were less hurt—my ex-officemate had written a nice note. There was also a Christmas card from Honorée, which she’d mailed before vacation. Santa and his reindeer landing on the roof of a house. She’d written: “At least it’s not an airplane.”
I called her to ask her to come out for supper on Saturday. She said, “Oh,” several times and then said she couldn’t. We both hung up with surprise.
When I picked up the phone a little later to ask her to come Friday instead, two women were talking on the party line.
I heard one speak with what I thought was unnatural slowness. “Did you get to that sale I told you about before? I got to it right at the end … and I bought …” She listed a dozen things and their prices. The agonizing stretch of speech and pause depressed me. But I didn’t hang up. The other woman spoke, even more slowly than the first. “I got there all right.” She described in detail who had taken her in which car by what roads. She said, “You know what Jim said … when I told him … about buying a new bra? He said, ‘You know what they call them now? They call them over … the … shoulder … boulder … holders.’ ”
There was a long pause and then both women laughed. There was another pause of a slow breath and they laughed again. The second woman repeated the phrase and, after another pause, laughed.
The first woman said, “There’s Jim coming back now. I guess I got to go.”
They fixed a time when they would speak again and finally hung up.
Honorée said she couldn’t come for supper on Friday but she would come out Friday afternoon.
I stepped outside and strolled around the yard.
I remembered my landlord showing me the house, slowly explaining how to take down the screens and put up the storm windows. We went to the basement. Behind the furnace there was a sawhorse, and across it there was balanced a long saw with a handle at either end. My landlord said, “So that’s where that got to. Last time we used that was cutting a fence post on V-J day.”
Now I thought of that saw balancing for twenty slow years.
I looked at the line of road, at the flat ridge along which a tractor moved as slowly as a cloud. The sky was still.
I had an attack of agoraphobia—not just a fear of open space, but of open time, a fear of the slowness of the woman’s comfortable speech, of time expanding until all incident, all definition, and all rhythm were diminished. My thought was of less importance than my breathing, which, mysteriously, refused the panic in my mind. Breath followed breath, infinitely small fractions of an invisible cloud troubling nothing.
I recovered by Honorée’s visit on Friday afternoon. I’d received a note from Elizabeth Mary Chetty announcing when she was arriving to spend the spring term. The thought of her tropically dense intelligence gave me pleasure. This anticipated pleasure settled me. Honorée came out in a pickup truck she’d borrowed. Because she hadn’t walked out, she said we had to go for a long walk. With her as my guide, the landscape didn’t seem dangerously transient but a simple well-behaved background to her childish prettiness. Honorée’s walking tour took us across the nearest field and into the woods to a stream. On the way across the field, she pointed out rabbit tracks in the snow.
She said, “Look. Here he’s just walking along. And then here he starts to run. See how the two front paws are together and he’s really jumping with his back legs. That’s those long tracks right there. And over there you can see how he zigzagged. And then they end here. If you look right there and there you can see why.”
“Why?”
Honorée pointed to two faint brushings in the snow about a pace apart. “Those are from the wingtips of an owl. Maybe a hawk, but more likely an owl. That little hole in the snow in between the wings is where he got caught. An owl doesn’t just snatch, you know—they open up their claws so they just stick straight in. Their wings open up right at the end of their dive to keep them from crashing. They don’t want to land at all—it’s hard for them to take off from the ground, they’re so big.”
I found this narrative of signs sad, but Honorée was filled with good humor and energy. She bounced around the woods in her gum boots as though she were dancing. She bent a sapling down to the ground and rode it like one end of a seesaw. It didn’t work very well. She dismounted and let the sapling go.
She said, “When I was little, my father would pull over a green tree like this and I’d go flying right up into the air. My father was the one who got me interested in modern dance.”
I said, “I thought you were a gymnast in high school.”
Honorée said, “Oh—yes; that was the nearest thing to it in that high school. But my father drove us down to the next town for modern dance every Saturday. His only fault was that he thought we were all wonderful. That’s why I couldn’t trust him after a while, because he’d always say I was wonderful no matter what. But it was good to be en
couraged, I guess. You remind me of my father some. Except of course you don’t exactly overpraise me—but that’s good. The way you decide something’s good or bad is so definite, so when you finally do decide something’s good it isn’t just because you like some person. And of course it works the other way around too—you could tell me something I’ve done isn’t any good and I wouldn’t be worried that you didn’t like me.”
She gave a tug at the sapling. “I think it’s not really springy enough because it’s winter.”
I thought her appreciation of me was false—rather like a nineteenth-century picture-book version of the Middle Ages. But it didn’t matter for the moment; we were alternating in a pleasant pretty way, as though we were singing two different songs in a round—“Frère Jacques” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
We had tea and watched the sun set. She seemed to have a good idea of how pleased I was by her visit. It made her more articulate; I’d known she had a sense of humor but I hadn’t realized she had a precise, and at times even skeptical, intelligence. She also had a sweetly bossy side—advising me to eat more, to lower the heat in my house so I wouldn’t catch cold from going out overheated.
She suddenly stood up. “Oh, my gosh. I’ve got to be at the theater. We all have to see this Marx Brothers movie together. Oh, they’ll hate it if I’m late.”
I said I’d give her a ride.
She laughed. “I drove myself out.” She said, “Don’t you notice what’s sitting in your own yard?” She pointed out the window to the pickup truck. For some reason my absent-mindedness embarrassed me. Honorée had been about to laugh again, but stopped when she noticed my expression. Her attention embarrassed me more, an embarrassment now absurdly out of proportion to a trivial cause.
Testimony and Demeanor Page 9