Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  He was no sentimentalist; he only attracted them. I stood tearless, taking note of how he managed it. His parents must be professionals at such scenes but that could only help so much, considering who we had here.

  A perfect blond pebble skips three times across the lake’s surface. Then, the next try, it skips just once. A third, in every way identical, it only sinks. But it settles right where you can—in water this clear—see it go straight down and rest upon its side there on the very very cold very bottom.

  Porch Angels

  esterday morning, years after most of the funerals, rising just before dawn, seeming to wake at some sound half-heard only in sleep, wearing a nightshirt Angie gave me, I wandered downstairs to make the necessary coffee. I’ve long since learned to drink mine black. Why? Ossorio, with a third-world cavalierness about refrigeration, could never keep his cream quite fresh. Daily, you would pay for the black addicting brew, you’d glory in its potent heat, you’d pour white into the dark disc and see a sudden irregular world map evolve. Here was the separation of the land from the sea and you saw it and you saw that it was not good. The cream.

  I carried my mug out onto the porch of this, my Carolina clapboard claptrap. Such a porch was bound to be a selling point. It’s almost U-shaped; though the left upright of the U has been lopped out of respect for an ancient magnolia towering there. My side porch overlooks an old graveyard and, beyond that and its church spire, our village’s single busy street. I had settled in the one rocker that looks most like Robert, an Eastlake beauty if not that cozy for that long. I bent, nursing my coffee, listening as earliest birds got cranked up. Our third-grade teacher, Miss Crab tree, taught us: Birds don’t sing for joy; they do it to insist upon their territory, to make themselves erotically attractive to their own tiny kind. We’re eavesdroppers, turning guardian peeps into “music.” So it was war and love I overheard in those trees. But surely, at this hour, some joy must seep in too.

  This far from New York, this many years later, I’ve learned to distinguish every local birdsong, and not just by species. I mean I know which song comes from which actual bird. I have my faves, of course. Hear that? The brilliant male cardinal with a nest in the left-leaning sweetgum tree out back. The female jay’s cry, in half-light, sounds urban with its nasty metal edge. My Carolina wrens make their sweetness felt—each bird no longer than your finger puts out a costly amplifier’s worth of volume; the mourning dove repeats itself, a certain energized self-pity. And all piled up among the chips of mica-sound from silly English sparrows.

  Light was just coming clear among the tree limbs near the silhouetted church. I sat rocking, thinking of my dead. The word “my” so warms that cooler noun, now doesn’t it? I sat here feeling full yet robbed. I sat alone, longing for further news and texture from that missing quarter of my heart’s address. I rocked, and drank my coffee black, a person clear and neutral, if hidden. At forty-seven, I’d been rendered further invisible by thinning hair, by the long lull in my résumé. Who was present? Just me and thirty casual acquaintances, the birds.

  Then, from a few blocks off, from our volunteer fire department, a clanking and three shouts. The sirens started. Their noises built, needlessly, terribly, loud in a burg so hushed. Red light, drawing closer, stained many trees. Being pulled from my defenseless reverie, yanked to such modernity, I felt the clamor and light to be violent, half obscene. Sirens in New York, I’d cease hearing. But in this village, everything soft even sounds loud.

  Red truck headed right by here, I’d braced. And it was just then I heard the secret transaction.

  I heard the birds—still tucked into dim thickets, the birds that send out cries not just for joy, but to state their claim and make lives felt by their own kind—adjust their volume upward. They planned to go on being heard above the fire truck’s din. So, the rheostat in every little feathered throat turned up a bit. I felt I had just overheard some secret of the universe.

  Birds’ transparent sounds—till now so permeable and random, competitive—knit at once, shot vertica in stripes, defending this, my acre lawn, their home. Their sounds shielded me, and before official sunrise. I recalled those foreground webs in Angie’s pictures.

  How automatic came this impulse to defend—one’s tree, one’s young. However solitary I felt here, I remained an animal among other living animals.

  Of course, I knew “my” birds did it just to keep on being heard, by other birds. But, in half-light, alone, it seemed to me their voices raged a bit for me, too. Friends on duty, guarding me now; thirty friends are a lot of friends, especially at dawn.

  Soon the siren faded, soon our yard sank back to mist and hush. But, settled here in my RobertRobertRobert rocker, surrounded by an implied fortress that’d just ascended to some feathery Celestial City, I found I could finally tilt forward, I could breathe. With gratitude, which was my potential.

  I said aloud to no one, everyone, just “So.”

  I nursed my still-warm cup. I held it closer to my chest, and some stray steam touched annex chins. A strange maturing chord change fathered forth down both my arms. Then, simple as a whistled three-note song, I understood:

  I was on my porch alone. But I remained in chosen company.

  I was in my life.

  Rite

  uring the long flight toward Iowa to bury him, both of us transferring into planes of decreasing size, I had felt aware of myself sitting with posture intentionally as good as his—him, a horizontal now—below me. And I held up fine. I reread “The Wound-Dresser.” I told myself that my own mourning for Robert had been so long and gradual, there would, at the funeral, be fairly little left to do. Oh these necessary lies.

  Even when his parents waved from the gate (father short in clerical garb, the mother Robert-colored but in a blue floral), even as I descended this primitive outdoor gangway (be careful going down careful), I was okay, really, glad for my recent time with these folks. It made this at least half a homecoming.

  Odd how close I’d grown to the parents of many friends. At Ossorio’s, our circle had pretended we owed nothing to our hick towns pre-New York. We behaved like a stable of young centaurs—amused by the rustic dray horses who believed they’d sired and foaled us.

  But now, hungry for any proof of Lost Boys, I found exceptional evidence in these older faces—their genetic address books. The parents mostly showed such kindness, an odd grace, now the worst had happened.

  —Cedar Rapids Airport requires you to use the outdoor ladders. These get wheeled against the side of your cropduster. I felt troubled by this detail from early aviation; had our pilot worn goggles? Had the crew left Robert back at O’Hare?

  The Gustafsons and I would now wait for Angie’s plane—San Francisco via Hawaii from Berlin. I’d reached her with the news just as she was getting dressed for her big opening at D.A.D. I hated the timing but it couldn’t be helped. For once, I tried not blaming myself. The beginning of wisdom. Nothing personal in any of this.

  The German press adored her rough name and the confident supple work, so colorful, so easy to discuss thematically. The Institute was showing everything, including a fragment of a childhood wildlife mural (it was amazing, the colors from the start were hers). This show would be a big stride forward in her International reputation. It’d help her chance of getting into the MOMA lobby someday.

  While we expected Angie (late as usual, but this time not her fault), Robert’s parents led me to the snack bar. Without saying why, we all sat along one side of the big booth, each facing one mirror with a view of the plane I had just left. We needed to make sure he had been on it. None of us acknowledged watching, as we made rueful formal small talk.

  When, finally, the crate (fuckin’ plywood!) came ratcheting down a rickety conveyor belt too narrow, we stopped midsentence. We sat here, all lined up, then somehow were holding hands as simply as kids will. We stayed hushed. On the runway, a hearse appeared from nowhere. One plump young man in a gray suit climbed out, carrying a clipboard. After
he’d gathered the needed signatures, with help from airline staff, he eased the box into his deep black car. Then I saw him bound back around to the front of the plane. He stood facing the sun and, in exactly our direction, this mortician gave a single index finger salute.

  “Ben. That Ben! Saw us.” Robert’s dad waved. I understood how small this town must be, how closely preachers must work with funeral directors, how suddenly visible we all were. Oh, when all this was done, how I would welcome village life again in North Carolina.

  “We have gotten the most amazing flowers, from all over the world. One gigantic spray was made up by our local florist who tries hard but Val is not … New York. You see, we think it’s intended to represent a ship. From something called Lifeboat Number Thirteen.”

  “Yes, he was in it. I mean, the group,” I explained, and added (do it now, Hartley) there was actually something of Robert’s that I wanted.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh?” She warmed the word.

  I dared not look at Mrs. Gustafson, I studied instead the winter horizon, “Just one thing. But, I warn you, it’s big.”

  “The bed? The bed. Good, because we have only nine-foot ceilings in the parsonage, it’d never fit. Imagine chainsawing the legs off that, below the pineapple line. Yours. Done. Never quite understood what our boy did in a bed that size … I mean besides sleep.” I told her he composed there.

  “So, just to say a word about the service later, Hartley,” she went on. “I will be leading my choir in a vocal transcription I’ve made from ‘Barber’s Adagio for Strings.’ Bob has some remarks that he is enough of a pro to get through. In the bulletin we just put ‘Reading by Hartley Mims, friend.’ Hope that was all right. I copied the spelling from your magazine stories Robert always sent us. He was your biggest fan, as you know. And now we are.”

  She asked which poem I’d chosen. (They had said they would not impose on me for a eulogy. God knows I was willing, and able, but I sensed that this was a father’s right. I understood. I had no official role here, past “friend.” Which surely counts for something.)

  Robert had asked that I read or speak. I now pulled from my satchel his own well-worn peach-colored collected Whitman.

  Seated in the airport diner, they asked, “Would you consider. Now?—Her plane’s not here for another twenty-three minutes. Would you, as … practice, to see if you … how it feels. It would be a favor to us really. Our small talk today feels increasingly small. Be nice to some poetry he liked.”

  I nodded, feeling uneasy, but why? Then I heard almost a laugh, and felt him breathe over my shoulder, amused, even by the awkwardness, especially that, since, among us, awkwardness is often what’s most alive! That’s why it scares us so.

  So, here goes, over sounds of flight announcements and Muzak’s arrangement of “Strangers in the Night,” I cleared my throat, I leaned a little more their way:

  “‘In Paths Untrodden’ by Walt Whitman, from the Calamus poems, Leaves of Grass. Okay … here goes …

  ‘In Paths Untrodden’

  “In paths untrodden,

  In the growth by margins of pond-waters,

  Escaped from the standards hitherto published, from the usual

  pleasures, profits, eruditions, conformities,

  I know now a life, which does not exhibit itself, yet contains all the rest,

  And now, separating, I celebrate that concealed but substantial life.

  And now I care not to walk the earth unless a friend walk by my side,

  And now I dare sing no other songs, only those of lovers.

  Was it I who walked the earth disclaiming all except what I had in myself?

  Was it I boasting how complete I was in myself?

  O little I counted the comrade indispensable to me!

  O how my soul—How the soul of man feeds, rejoices in its lover, its

  dear friends!

  Here by myself away from the clank of the world,

  Tallying and talked to here by tongues aromatic,

  No longer abased—for in this secluded spot I can respond as I would

  not dare elsewhere,

  Resolved to sing no songs today but those of manly attachment,

  Bequeathing hence types of athletic love,

  I proceed for all who are or have been young men,

  To tell the secrets of my nights and days,

  To celebrate the need of the love of athletic comrades.”

  They nodded, held back. It seemed okay. “That’ll preach,” the father said. Then we could, till Angie arrived, pick our way amidst the flat earlier conversation about weather, urban blight, my fantasy house search, how many square feet I’d like, comforting, nothing.

  We soon stood at the gate awaiting her plane. This tired, I found myself feeling briefly miffed that Gideon, Ansel, and Marco weren’t coming, why always me? Till I understood they were also dead.

  Ansel’s mother had just mailed Angie his obit in an envelope otherwise unmarked. I recalled the other two’s funerals. I’d once heard of an athlete so fast he could throw a ball up and over the roof of his cottage and, by bolting through its open central door, catch it as it rattled down that roof’s far side.

  If it weren’t for Angie as my fellow survivor, insanity would’ve seemed the likeliest of available bad options. To be in a nice white room of rest, a chamber decently padded, to be strapped in safe with a certain Mr. Whitman as a baritone male nurse read to me. The real Santa, and Santa’s small would-be helper, fastened down here, me, safe.

  It was good to expect something alive coming down out of that same sky that had brought Robert home.

  Beside me, at the low gate, with two haphazard boy-guards to keep us off the field, Robert’s mother said, in a girlish voice that made me recall my own mom’s recent unruly youngish laugh, “I just feel I look so discomposed, Hartley. We ladies have our days when we appear acceptable and these other days. Of course, as I told Bob, how should I look? I’ve kept feeling ugly since he died. I am clean at least, right? Ask Bob.”

  “You’re far from ugly, Mrs. Gustafson. You look just like him and we all know what he looks … like.” Her husband gave me a glance that meant, She is upset, don’t mind, most natural thing in the world, really. And man to man, my eyes responded.

  “Yes, but it’s strange, you know, that if I had just bought some new clothes, ones I believe Robert would’ve adored and called ‘fabulous’ whether he truly felt that or not, it would’ve helped me. Not to boast, but I was the one who taught him that word, you know, but in the original sense, as in a fable. So, to say fabulous means that something is really worthy of a fable, or a fairy tale. He was, of course. By the time we got back home from New York, sixty greetings and messages from around the world were waiting. People seemed to know without being told. Surprising, the scale of it … There’re days I believe that Robert’s great gift was to make us love him and, through that, to find each other. I did sometimes wonder if he received half of what we all sent him daily. He seemed to inspire more love than anyone, ever, but to need it less. Is this awful, I’m saying? Do I shock you, shock myself? I think not. When he was about two, I remember going in to check on him. Afternoon nap. It’d sure been quiet in there. My baby was sitting in his crib, just waiting for me, and then he smiled. I saw he’d planned to. Hard explaining. At times, the beauty of him then was almost spooky, even for me. You’d catch him with his thoughts. When I was pregnant, of course we didn’t know whether to paint his nursery pink or blue, so I chose a pretty yolk yellow, and what it did to the color of his hair and skin all the time! That day, his eyes were bigger than they’d ever look again but I felt he was testing me.

  “He was seeing what he could make me do by smiling like that. He had been spending his whole nap time practicing smiling, lying in wait. He didn’t need a mirror. Robbie knew exactly how he looked, from when he was eighteen months. Our darling knew too much, and at the strangest angle, from the start. Seeing how much could a smile like that get him! The answer, of cours
e, was—anything. Hartley, you might not know that he got into a little trouble way back when. Had certain scrapes, unexpected as it was, with drink.”

  “Yes, I heard him talk about that.”

  “But I’ve had no shopping time, what with our just getting home two days before … this day. Anyway, it’s not like out East. We don’t have one shop fine enough to sell me a dress that’s good enough for Robert’s … taste.”

  “Beka, you don’t have to talk, sweet. Young Hartley here doesn’t need to be entertained all day.”

  “I know. But I like to now. You were very kind to us in New York, and even before we knew what was going to have to happen. I hope we were all right back there. When you were so late, meeting us at his place, I hope we didn’t seem snappish …”

  “I was running just eleven minutes behind …”

  “Yes, it’s all right. Now I wish we’d flown out East for his concert, and with Aaron Copland, too. It was so foolish of us. You get busy and cannot see past Wednesday choir practice. Was it … really good?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “Where is that plane?—I know young Angela will look fetching today. She looked so well when we last saw her in New York. She wore old-fashioned pearls out to dinner with us, very smart against her dark clothes. Very old-fashioned and tailored I would say. She seems so organized. Unlike me, she will know just how to do all this. I mean, to be in Berlin one day, and here for his service that same long day. In New York, she seemed so ‘put together’ as the fashion articles all call it now. She was Robert’s ideal, really, wasn’t she, Hartley? At one time, I’d hoped they would … But I’m not modern, I never understood all that much of what was really going on, I guess. But I think she’s like the young Audrey Hepburn. She will be collected in a way I want to learn from. You see, that’s it, I am trying to enjoy and learn now from his friends, Robert’s. Our boy was always fortunate in his friends. Good judgment. Good judgment, right, Bob?” She touched my shoulder and I nearly leapt. She was trying to straighten my jacket collar, which I think, did not strictly need straightening.