by John Crowley
And Go Like This
stories
by
John Crowley
Small Beer Press
Easthampton, MA
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.
And Go Like This: Stories copyright © 2019 by John Crowley (johncrowleyauthor.com). All rights reserved. Page 337 is an extension of the copyright page.
Small Beer Press
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Easthampton, MA 01027
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Distributed to the trade by Consortium.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Crowley, John, 1942- author.
Title: And go like this : stories / by John Crowley.
Description: First edition. | Easthampton, MA : Small Beer Press, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019013499 (print) | LCCN 2019015563 (ebook) | ISBN
9781618731647 | ISBN 9781618731630 (alk. paper)
Classification: LCC PS3553.R597 (ebook) | LCC PS3553.R597 A6 2019 (print) |
DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ 2019013499
Paper edition printed on 30% PCR recycled paper in the USA.
To the Prospective Reader, Upon Opening This Book
Books, unlike some other modes of communication, require no instructions for use. It’s one of the reasons they’ve lasted so long. But a note as to why this book is perhaps worth a reader’s attention might be welcome.
There are writers who form a style early on and apply it to what interests them. As their interests change or new ones develop, the style adapts but doesn’t necessarily need to change; even radically different fictional situations and plots can be well served by the writer’s refined and updated (but not necessarily reformed) style. Such writers can often be recognized in a single sentence: I think I could recognize any Thomas Pynchon sentence in the context of no context.
Then there are the chameleons of fiction writing, whose verbal and story-telling styles change with the subjects they alight on. Such writers are less likely to be identifiable in a single sentence extracted from their work; instead of the sturdy and dependable style, adaptable to any circumstance, there is a restless search for a proper coloration—that is, finding a way for the matter of the story to produce the language appropriate to it, as the mythical chameleon is colored by the background on which it rests and not the other way around.
You will already be thinking that I count myself in the second category, and I believe a reading of this collection will bear that out, even if the whole isn’t read (though the whole will certainly demonstrate it). The chameleon mode doesn’t involve just phrases or sentences; it can be seen in the deployment of time, how events are contained within the recounting of other events, past moments recalled that shape present moments and even endings—what might be called reader-writer relations, a form of diplomacy, in which readers are self-selected by the work if the work is inviting enough to them. Fiction doesn’t need to be a conversation—most of Beckett can’t be said to be—but the chameleon style almost has to be. In this collection readers may choose conversations that reflect the ordinary circumstances of ordinary lives in the approximate present (“Mount Auburn Street,” in three parts) or the first-person—invented—memory story (“The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines”) or the fantasy-history couched in language flavored by the time-period (“Flint and Mirror”) or the tenderly metafictional “This Is Our Town.” Two or three brief joke stories that each require a language (“In the Tom Mix Museum,” “The Million Monkeys of M. Borel,” “And Go Like This”) might form a tasting menu reflecting the chameleon method I am describing. In any case, I am confident (or vain) enough to think that almost any reader will find one or two things here that touch or amuse, and—the utmost hope—are remembered long after.
The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines
In the late 1950s the state of Indiana had its own Shakespeare festival, though not much of the world knew about it. Far too little of the world, as it happened, to keep it in existence. But for a few summers it was there, a little Brigadoonish, or like the great Globe itself, that leaves not a rack behind.
That was a time for Shakespeare festivals. One had recently begun in Stratford, Ontario, directed at first by the great impresario Tyrone Guthrie. I used to pore over the pictures in my Theater Arts magazine. (I was surely one of the few boys my age who had a subscription; who asked for a subscription for Christmas.) It had begun as simply a big striped tent, then became a tentlike building; it had a clever all-purpose stage set on which Roman and Venetian and English plays could all be accommodated. The man who got the idea for a Shakespeare festival in this little town was a disabled war veteran, who liked the fact that his hometown was named for Shakespeare’s. There was a picture of him, shy and good-looking, leaning on his cane.
Stratford, Connecticut, had a Shakespeare festival too, about as far from Indiana, where Harriet Ingram and I both lived, as Stratford, Ontario, was. On a summer trip to the sea—from which long ago her mother had been taken away by her father to sea-less Indiana—Harriet wangled a visit to the Connecticut Stratford. While her family picnicked on the great lawn waiting for the matinee to begin, Harriet walked up and entered the cool dark of the theater, whose smell is one of the few she can recall today from that time; she passed around a velvet rope and down into the empty auditorium. On stage an actor read lines to himself under a single rehearsal light hanging over the stage. Harriet walked down closer and closer, seeing up into the flies and inhaling the charged air, when the floor beneath her vanished and she fell into darkness.
The trap was only six or eight feet deep, and Harriet claimed to be all right, but the actor, who had heard her tumble down, made her lie still till help could be called; they got her out and took her backstage and bound up a nice long gash on her arm with yards of gauze, and she was made to call the theater’s doctor on the phone, who put her through a series of movements to find out if any bones were broken. Then the young actor who had rescued her took her all over the theater, into the dressing rooms and the scene shop and the rehearsal rooms. When her mother finally found her, she was talking Shakespeare with her new friend and some others, like Jesus among the doctors, with probably something of a religious glow about her too.
Indiana had no town named Stratford, but there was one named Avon, an almost quaint little Brown County town through which a small river ran, where swans could be induced to reside. Not far from the town, a utopian sect had once owned several hundred acres of farmland, where they began building an ideal community before dying out or moving West; what remained of their community was a cheerless brick dormitory, a wooden meeting house, and a huge limestone and oak-frame circular barn: circular because of the founder’s scientific dairying theories, and circular because of his belief in the circle’s perfection. The barn was over a hundred feet in diameter, and lit like a church by a clerestory and a central windowed turret; when an ad-hoc preservation committee first went in, in 1955, it still smelled faintly of hay and dung. It was as sound as a Greek temple, though the roof was just beginning to leak.
So History wanted the place preserved; and Commerce wanted it to turn a profit and bring custom into the town; and Culture wanted whatever it was used for to be not vulgar or debased. A young man who had grown up in a big house nearby, who had made money in New York and then come home, conceived the festival plan. His money and enthusiasm brought in more, some of it, as we would learn, from unlike
ly places; and the process began to turn the great round barn into an Elizabethan theater. Among the methods the organizers used to publicize, and partly to underwrite, the Avon festival was to offer a number of apprentice positions to Indiana high-school students: these were a little more costly to the chosen students than a good summer camp would have been—I think there were scholarships for some—and provided the festival with some enthusiastic labor. When Harriet, that year a junior, heard about the program, she felt a tremendous grateful relief to learn that the world was not after all empty of such a possibility, and at the same time an awful anxiety that this one would escape from her before she could secure it for herself.
Harriet’s mother used to explain Harriet by saying that she was stagestruck, but that wasn’t so, and Harriet resented the silliness of the epithet; she connected it with a girlish longing for Broadway and stardom, glamour, her name in lights—Harriet’s ambitions were at once more private and more extravagant. When one of her parent’s friends asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up—she was about thirteen—Harriet answered that she wanted to be a tragedeean.
Harriet and I grew up on different sides of the state. Her parents taught (history and economics) at a little Quaker college in Richmond, in the east; my father was a lawyer in Williamsport. The Williamsport house was a big square Italianate place, almost a mansion, built by my mother’s grandfather, who had been lieutenant governor of the state and Ambassador to Peru under Grant. A ten-foot ormolu mirror in the front hall came from Peru.
Harriet went to a smelly old public school—Garfield High—and after classes she took dance lessons and on weekends she rode horses; and she read, in that deep and obsessive way, with that high tolerance for boredom, that is (it seems to me) gone from the world: read books about Isadora Duncan and Mae West, read Shaw and Milton’s Comus and the plays of Byron and Feydeau and Wilde’s Salome. And Shakespeare: carrying the family’s Complete Works around with her, its spine cracking and its fore-edge grimy from her fingers. She read the major plays, of course, though to this day she hasn’t read Lear, but mostly she turned to the odd numbers, Cymbeline and Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida. She keeps surprising me with the odd things she read then and still remembers. I went to a little private school my family had an interest in, and spent a year home-schooled (as they call it now) because of my asthma, mostly better now. So we were both smart, sheltered, isolated kids, she isolated by being an only child, I surrounded by four sisters and a brother but miles from anything and dreaming about Theater, or Theatre, as I much preferred to spell it.
Mine was a kind of megalomania not so unusual in a kid with my statistics, so to speak; dreams of dominance and glory. Most of my ambitions, and most of my knowledge, came out of books; just like Harriet, I’d never seen many plays, though I tried to see as many as I could reach. They all seemed comically inadequate to me, shaming even, I bit my nails to the quick and squirmed in my seat till my mother took my shoulder to hush me.
I didn’t quite understand then that the theater work I dreamed about mostly dated to a time thirty or forty years before, when the town library acquired the albums and monographs in the Theater section that I pored over. I was studying Max Rheinhardt’s vast productions in Weimar Germany, the stage designs of Gordon Craig (he was Isadora Duncan’s lover). Once, I found in that library a book about how to build your own Greek theater and put on pageants. I tried to convince my mother that a Greek theater like this would be perfect in our broad back yard, over in front of the tall poplars (the drawings in my books were full of poplars) and look, you could buy these Ionic columns from any building-supply house for ten dollars. The book, however (my mother showed me, laughing), had been published in 1912.
Harriet thought that was a sweet story. I told it to her in Avon, that summer we were both apprentices there, the summer that changed everything. We were sitting by the campfire the apprentices made most nights, far enough away not to be grilled, near enough so the smoke discouraged the mosquitoes. She listened and laughed and then told me about falling into the open trap in Stratford, Connecticut. By the end of her story everybody was listening.
It seemed then that Harriet had a better chance than I did of going on the way we were both headed. My visions all needed pots of money to realize, and the cooperation of many others, and the kind of tyrannical will and willingness to be boss that it would turn out I had none of. But everything Harriet needed came right out of Harriet; all she had to do was bring forth more, and there was more—that was clear. I knew it even then.
It’s the middle of June in Harriet’s thirty-eighth year, a brilliant day of high barometric pressure. Harriet gets up early to take her camera out and make some pictures.
The camera is a huge eight-by-ten plate camera of polished wood, cherry and ebony, with brass fittings and a leather bellows. Harriet thinks its the most beautiful and affecting object she owns; with its tripod of telescoping legs, also wood and brass, and its great glass eye, it seems to Harriet to be more a relative than a belonging, a gaunt beloved aunt, an invalid but still merry husband. Did you ever ever ever in your long-legged life (Harriet sings) see a three-legged sailor and his four-legged wife.
Harriet has been using not film in the camera but paper, ordinary panchromatic printing paper. When exposed, the paper becomes a negative, and it can be printed by contact with another sheet. The resulting image is exact and exquisitely detailed but softened and abstracted—both warmed and cooled—by the light’s passing through a textured paper negative rather than through a transparent plastic one. The very first photographic negatives were made on paper.
So by the yellow safe-light in her bathroom Harriet on this morning removes from their box six sheets of paper, and slips them into her three plate-holders, front and back: six exposures, the most she would ever make on a single trip, even on such a day as this one. She slides each black Bakelite slide back over the face of the paper and locks them up, safe in total darkness till their moment of day has come.
Dismantled and shut up, the camera fits in the back of the Rabbit, though it takes Harriet three trips to bring it and its tripod and the bag of plate-holders out to the car. Harriet goes out of town early, driving up from the river into the old and largely abandoned farmlands above: hillside fields bordered by old woods are a thing she likes to photograph when the slanting sunlight seems to set fire to the tall sedges’ heads and the shade is deep; another thing is dirt roads lined with old maples, the sun picking certain masses of leaves to illuminate like stained glass and the sun falling in tigerish stripes over the road’s arched back.
Once Harriet and I were talking about what we would most like to have been if we weren’t what we are. I said—I forget what I said, but Harriet said she had always thought it would be impossible to be a landscape painter and be unhappy; unhappy in your work anyway. She still believes it’s so but only if you are better at it than she was or could expect ever to be. For a while when she was younger she did paint, and it made her not happy at all to work all day and then next day look at what you had done, which claimed to be what you had seen and felt but wasn’t at all. The opposite of happy. But these photographs don’t disappoint that way. The happiness they give is a little pale and fleeting—half an hour to set up the camera and make an exposure (hurry, hurry, the earth’s turning, the light’s changing) and an hour or two to make a true print: but it’s real happiness. Since they’re made from paper negatives rather than film, they seem to Harriet not to have that look of being stolen from the world rather than made from it that most landscape photographs have; they are shyer and more tentative somehow. Not painting, no, but satisfying in some of the same ways. And she says they are selling pretty well in her shop too.
By nine the sun has stopped making the effects that Harriet likes; she’s made four exposures. She’s more weary than she expected to be, getting in and out of the car, dealing with the camera’s three legs, and her own four. The
tripod lies on the back seat, her two steel crutches (enameled maroon) on top of it.
Coming back into town, Harriet’s car pulls up next to mine at a stoplight. She calls over to me:
“Did you hear the news?”
“What news?”
“Somebody killed the Pope. I just heard on the radio.”
“Yes. I heard that. But he’s not dead. He’s just hurt.”
“Oh.” She glances at the red light and scoots over in the seat to see me a little better. “I’ve been thinking about your question,” she says. “I have.”
“And?”
“And I have,” she calls. “I have.”
The month before, heart-turning May, I asked Harriet to marry me. She hasn’t answered. The light changes, and we turn in different directions.
Those of us chosen for the Indiana Shakespeare Festival at Avon (it included almost all of those who applied that year, being a summer option unthinkable to most people in that state then or now) received a letter in May that showed a bust of plump Shakespeare, pen in hand—an etching of the monument over his grave in Stratford, I can see now—and instructions on what we were to bring that sounded like any summer camp’s: raincoat and sweater, blanket and sneakers and writing materials for letters home. I watched my mother sew tapes with my name on them into every pair of shorts and socks.
We came from around the state by car or bus, pulling into town on the appointed day uncertain where anything was or how to get to the theater or the place we were to go, only to find that the town was so small that it was evident where everyone was gathered, on the little green by the riverside, where a Union soldier stood on a small granite plinth, the names of the town’s dead carved on it.