by Jim Harrison
When and if she emerged her friends and acquaintances back in the neighborhood were bound to prate “nervous breakdown” or “depression” during countless phone calls and lunches. One of the favorite local psychiatrists was an ardent pill pusher in his efforts to remove any socially embarrassing symptoms. The probable cause in her case would be obvious to all—the deaths of Zilpha and Sammy—but her marriage, which was considered to be improbably solid, would not be questioned. The same psychiatrist had offered nothing when she had gone to him, troubled about Donald Jr.’s apparent lack of morals in school. He seduced innocent, homely girls and kept a tally, cheated wherever possible on school work, plagiarized term papers and, as a school leader, made problems for teachers who didn’t give him good grades. The psychiatrist had dismissed all of this as Donald Jr.’s effort to take shortcuts into his father’s world, and when sufficient negative reinforcement came from his “peer group” the behavior would cease. Unfortunately for this theory Donald Jr. continued to be widely admired as charming and capable. His SATs were too mediocre to get him into an Ivy League college, which his father hoped for, but strings were pulled and he was accepted at University of Michigan where he became the president of his fraternity. Donald Jr. had always been impeccably dressed, even for a trip to the 7-Eleven, while Laurel, who had gone to Northwestern, was a slob, drank beer and smoked marijuana, and graduated summa cum laude. She had also been the best student in her class at Michigan State’s veterinary school, neither of which honors made more than a cursory dent in her father’s consciousness.
There was a rustling in the thicket off to the left and Clare’s pulse quickened, but then a barred owl called from the cottonwood and Clare supposed the other creatures were making adjustments to keep out of the owl’s way. At one time Donald Jr.’s character had been puzzling because she was blinded by the fact that he had been a much more loving child than Laurel, helping Clare in the garden, arranging his Audubon cards, building bird houses, acting as a deft little “sous chef” when she cooked. It was as if during puberty he woke up, looked around and decided to become a child of his time.
Clare wriggled closer to the opening for a look at the moon and stars, then sat up and stuffed her bag with dry grass for a pillow. This camping had its moments but she was claustrophobic enough to dread tents, elevators and theater lines, and the stars and moon were a tonic after the dark lid of her thicket. There was still the slightest twinge of pain in her left lobe and she monitored the size of the speck of green light. She heard a strain of Monteverdi, then a bar of The Firebird, and the light diminished. With Laurel the light was steady but the images of Donald and Donald Jr. increased it. She searched for good memories to control her fear of another attack.
When they were first married and Donald had just entered the firm as an assistant office manager he still wore his lumberjack shirts in the evening and on weekends. He hadn’t finished his senior thesis, an essay, ironically enough, on Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, so through the long winter of the pregnancy Clare had actually written most of the thesis. She thought Donald talked brilliantly but didn’t write well, while she was shy but wrote well, if a little too carefully. Some of Donald’s politically active friends from Michigan State were back in the Detroit area and they all met at least once a week. Donald would regale them with stories about the “bourgeoisie” at work and in the neighborhood near their Birmingham apartment.
Clare’s mother had busied herself in her grief by drinking even more than usual and shopping for a perfect home for her daughter. Clare’s brother Ted, younger by five years, was in his junior year at Kent, a prep school in Connecticut, his fourth in four years. When her mother had finally found the home, she and Clare had spent a great deal of time overseeing the redecorating. Clare was unconcerned and felt the project was good therapy for her mother. Meanwhile she and Donald and their scrubby friends ate at inexpensive Polish, Italian, Chinese and Greek restaurants, and went to the wonderful movies of those times: all of Bergman, Fellini and the early Antonioni. They marched with other civil rights protesters, hand in hand with blacks, and listened religiously each Sunday morning to the wild-eyed sermons of the Reverend C. L. Franklin, Aretha’s father. They actually shook hands with the great man himself, Martin Luther King. He had said to Donald, “Keep up the good work, brother,” and Donald had beamed. Like so many others they had been paralyzed with fear by the Cuban missile crisis. Clare had been reading William Faulkner’s The Reivers when she heard on WJR that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Donald rushed home from work and they wept together, glued to the icy, catatonic replays on television.
One evening, before they had moved into the house, all of their friends had come over for dinner and to listen to blues and jazz records on their new stereo. Donald discoursed on Charlie Parker, Muddy Waters, B. B. King and the primitive discs recorded by Alan Lomax, before carefully putting the needle on the record. Among their favorites were Forest City Joe singing “Chevrolet” and Vera Hall’s “Can’t You Hear That Wild Ox Moan.” Clare thought that perhaps that evening had been the beginning of the end. Laurel had been sick with a cold, and Clare at the time was a distinctly amateur cook. Hearing of the party, her mother had volunteered to send over a little something from the club. Two waiters showed up at eight P.M. sharp when the guests were groggy from Gallo burgundy and famished to despair. Clare went into the bathroom, embarrassed to the point of tears when the food arrived. She primped herself, wiped away her tears, blew her nose and emerged when she heard the shouts of joy from the other room. There were only ten of them but her mother had sent over a huge prime rib roast, a Smithfield ham, side dishes including six dozen oysters, a mixed case of French wine and two cases of imported beer. Their friends were utterly thrilled with the food, without a single negative comment. They ate, drank, danced and laughed, and at the bleary end of the party Clare wrapped up ample packages of leftovers for each of the guests.
In the morning they had the first serious argument of their marriage, over, oddly enough, a novel by James Baldwin and a profile of Malcolm X in a Detroit newspaper. A week later they moved into the house and things were never the same again, nor were they meant to be. Despite his jokes about work Donald had become a well-concealed predator, a skilled manipulator, something he had learned as a political activist, and was earning a degree in accounting at night school at the University of Detroit. During the longish evenings alone Clare began reading again and hadn’t stopped since. Over the long haul she couldn’t have endured Donald without her books, but now the idea of the books without Donald seemed rather nice. Two years after Laurel, who had been nicknamed “Papoose,” Donald Jr. was born, and when Donald arrived late at the hospital with three dozen roses he announced, in his first tailored suit, that he had been elected a member of the Detroit Athletic Club. Clare put down the book she was reading, a novel called The Deer Park by Norman Mailer, in which there were no deer to be found but lots of intriguing bad behavior. She remembered looking closely at Donald, a long pause where she waited patiently for him to mention the birth of his son.
Clare dozed for a half hour, waking fearfully with a deep chest pain, then smiled because she had rolled over and clenched a fist against her heart, mistaking it for an attack. The fire was down to embers and she decided to use the largest of the sticks in hope that it would last until she slept long and deeply, if ever. She strained above the hiss and sputter of the fire to hear something just on the edge of the audible. There it was again. And again. A dog barking far to the south, she imagined in some barnyard at the outer edge of the arc thrown by a porch light, the dog’s body stiffening as it barked at the night as Sammy’s body had every single night just before bedtime. It was an unimaginably comforting sound and tears of joy formed in her throat. How wonderful it would have been to have the dog with her, not for protection, as Sammy’s bravura was mostly fake, but for companionship. Sammy had been afraid of cats and snakes, but her thunderous bark warned away possible intr
uders and door-to-door salesmen and the irksome approach of Jehovah’s Witnesses. For unclear reasons she liked the Federal Express man but loathed the one for UPS. The black furnace repairman once threw her into a fearsome rage which caused Clare to offer an embarrassed apology after she had closed Sammy up in the garage. The black man, who was about her age, looked at her strangely, then offered his hand. It turned out they had been in a civil rights march together well over twenty years before, and the man’s little son who had played with Laurel in Hart Plaza now taught high school science in Ypsilanti. When the repairman left it wasn’t the happiest occasion because the intervening years acquired the sharpest of focuses. The man had mentioned seeing her name in the Detroit News where she had been referred to rather nastily as a “well-heeled liberal environmentalist.”
At dinner when she brought up the repairman Donald had become vague and nearly morose for a minute. It had been difficult for him lately as one of his minor saving graces was an abiding concern for probity in government, and the successive scandals in Pentagon procurement, HUD and the enormity of the savings-and-loan mess disturbed him deeply. She tended to go easy on him on the rare occasions when he became vulnerable, but two summers before, near Bay View in Petoskey, they had come upon a ragged Chippewa selling Korean-made moccasins. Clare had bought several pairs, quipping that the Chippewa apparently didn’t own any oil wells, a reference to a Reagan gaff. They usually avoided political discussions, settling for canceling each other’s vote at the polls.
Laurel, however, was merciless and could redden Donald’s face by saying that she wanted to go to Costa Rica and speak Latin just like Dan Quayle. Laurel was never particularly interested in novels or poetry, and her single misquote was from Yeats, the sense being that while the best lacked all conviction, the worst were full of passionate intensity. That appeared to sum up Laurel’s feelings toward the political world. Donald Jr. tended merely to be a more cynical version of his father. Clare herself had come to the point that all the highest hopes of her twenties had dissembled to the degree that she was relegated to writing checks to distant organizations and trying to save the occasional pond, creek or sorry woodlot in Michigan. The heady idealism of the Labor State had died with Walter Reuther, and the prospects for social services and the environment had become dismal in the face of lobbyists’ opportunism.
Fortunately, the thought of politics made her sleepy, though sodden might be a better word, she thought. She heard the dog’s bark a little more clearly and there was an eerie moment when she thought it might be her own ghost dog, but the image of it barking out its loneliness under the porch light was dominant. The stars and the moon didn’t seem quite high enough, and she remembered Donald’s chagrin when they added a master bedroom with a sixteen-foot ceiling. Clare couldn’t stay in newish hotels where the windows didn’t open. She often regretted her mother’s gift of a house so soon after they were married. Money tended to derange people when it arrived so abruptly, and the house wasn’t, ultimately, fair to Donald. The ceilings were high in Europe but less equitable societies made her nervous after a few weeks. When this was over she intended to live in an apartment or in a smallish house on the far edge of a town. It would be near a woods and farm country. She would find a job in a library or bookstore where she could make herself useful, a sense she had lost since Donald Jr. had gone off to college. The woman who ran the local office for the charity in Costa Rica had said she was an overworked volunteer and that sounded good to Clare. The woman had advised against visiting the child and she was right. The family had been fearful that something might be taken from them, that they were being judged, but they had warmed to Zilpha and the atmosphere had become relaxed in the one-room stucco cottage near Punta Arenas.
Clare traced a finger across the dew gathering on her face. She had learned enough Spanish to translate the thank you notes from the child who was now in her early teens. The parents had been painfully shy but the second child, a boy of seven, was perfectly round and had thought everything about Zilpha was funny. Clare’s mother definitely had been a problem drinker and Clare thought again of the nightmares caused by rich, overgenerous alcoholics. The new, homely word “yuppie” had been devised for the grand-children of the Depression and she wondered how gracefully they would age. Another ugly word was “schmucks.” Last Christmas when Donald Jr. came home from Chicago with a rather pretty but vacant girl, he told Clare her “main problem” was that she expected too much from people when they were really only schmucks.
Sleep was too far away for the clumsiest of prayers. She got up, put another stick on the fire and looked at her bed in the brief yellow flare-up. It was the nest of a not very skilled animal, a temporary measure like a deer bed in high grass. She turned and the wider row she had come down a lifetime ago was now aligned with the moon, a darkling path between silvered leaves which a breeze was lightly rustling. It was a path from a children’s book of the twenties in the golden age of illustration, lovely, foreboding, irresistible. She decided to walk herself to sleep as she did so often with her dog at home. Donald had bought her a small pistol which she never took along because the presence of a pistol would have changed the nature of the walk. And Sammy, though still frightened by cats, thought she was a grizzly bear after dark. Besides, she was in fine trim, and asked Donald why they’d remained in so otiose a neighborhood if it wasn’t the safest in the Detroit area. She could tell he didn’t know what “otiose” meant but pretended he did as he watched Bob Pisor, his favorite late-news baritone. Oh, fuck Donald, she reminded herself. I am here because he isn’t.
She set off at a relaxed but steady pace, fixed on the moon as if she were trying to walk to a place directly under it. After a few hundred yards she quickened her gait and felt that delightful sense that her joints had become oiled, and the night air was sweet and drinkable. Dr. Roth liked to say that the overexamined life was not worth living, and that the quasi-upper-class life had become the shabbiest of self-improvement videos. Goddamn but her mind was so exhausted with trying to hold the world together, tired of being the living glue for herself, as if, if she let go, great pieces of her life would shatter and fall off in mockery of the apocalypse. Or it would simply deflate, letting off its sour air like a punctured rubber ball. She was delighted when she thought she saw the moon move a bit as it must. Time moved the moon. You should be lucky enough to be there when the tree falls in the desert. Dr. Roth, who was fascinated with the history of religions, gave her what he called a “nice Jewish present,” The Unvarnished Gospels, a new translation by Gaus. The language was so stark and commonplace as to be almost unreadable.
The world is likely commonplace, she thought. There was the amusing memory of the second term of her sophomore year when East Lansing was frozen in dirty ice. She had met a boy in the periodicals room who was reading her favorite literary journal, Botteghe Oscure, edited in Rome by Marguerite Caetani. Clare’s secret ambition was to be Marguerite Caetani’s secretary and meet the French poet René Char, whose long poem “To a Tensed Serenity” was in the latest issue. The boy reading the journal was shabby, condescending, an avowed “beatnik” who smelled strongly of potato chips. She found him exciting though he looked down his pale, mottled nose at her pleated skirt and gray cashmere cardigan. The boy let her sit near him at Kewpee’s, a cafeteria favored by the intellectual and artistic types, the latter having the advantage of smelling like paint rather than something else.
She and the boy would sit as close as possible to a table of seniors dominated by a strange-looking young man who, on alternate days, wore army surplus or the kind of suit and Chesterfield coat worn in her hometown. He was more vigorous and arrogant than her suicidal instructor and she and the boy listened raptly as the young man droned on about Rimbaud, Verlaine, Laforgue, Péguy, Alain-Fournier, Camus, Kierkegaard, Yesenin and the “obvious” structure of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. He had taken to glancing at her legs now and then and once loudly told a story about fucking a fat, drunken waitress who wore a
n ankle bracelet which spelled “Herbert.” One day the man looked over at her and asked her if she had read Dostoevsky, especially the new translation of his Notebooks wherein there was an entry about a girl who, one cold St. Petersburg afternoon, drank a bottle of wine and committed suicide out of boredom. She answered that she hadn’t read Dostoevsky but Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches was one of her favorites (it was actually her father’s favorite). “That’s good,” he said, “but read Fathers and Sons. I’m actually Bazarov. Get off your pretty ass and read all of Dostoevsky or you’ll become a punching bag for some Grosse Pointe fraternity boy.” Then the man stood up and announced to his cronies that it was time to get drunk and play pool. On the way out the man paused by her chair and pronounced loudly that she was “edible” which confused her somewhat.
After she said goodbye to the boy she cut a class and went immediately to the campus bookstore and bought all of the Dostoevsky in the Modern Library editions, the Constance Garnett translations. She read The Idiot, The Gambler, Notes from Underground, The Possessed, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Her eyes were hot red balls in her head but her life was changed. The great Russian had devoured another piece of her each time she wept over a hero or heroine, a grand conception, the marriage of heaven and hell that was his peculiar genius, and spat her out in bones and gristle. But after she and the beatnik boy had returned on three successive empty days they finally heard the young man had suffered a nervous breakdown and had run off to New York City, leaving a wife and child in married housing. Clare stayed in her room for a week until a dorm counselor escorted her to the campus psychiatric clinic where a sluggish doctor advised her to construct some effective shields against her emotional life, a project at which she proved most successful.