Cynosura

by Tito Perdue

  You can imagine her in those days, sitting on the front porch with an idiot in her lap. Childish and naïve, Christianized, democratized, equalized, she believed it right to defray her own abilities—and she knew by now that she had some—defray them in an unavailing effort to lift her brother to just the most basic level. She wiped away his snot, using for that purpose her ironed and laundered kerchief. She whispered stories into those dead, dumb ears while standing at the stove. Her eyes were as diamonds, his were lumps of coal.

  Nine

  Apart from a general passivity and capitulationist mindset, there was nothing about the girl’s father that needs criticizing. An uneducated person, ignorant of the new technology, society had no better use for the old man than to put him atop a grain elevator to weigh the corn and soybeans brought to him by the nearby growers. From this post, he could see the medieval Tennessee countryside with its barns and cattle, its large and small cities apportioned in higgledy-piggledy fashion across the wrinkled countryside. His money was small, and any residual ambitions of his had long before this been set off to one side. He had a shotgun, a dog, a truck, and a television, and had been permitted to enjoy in silence the genial indifference accorded him by the more active citizens. He did have that daughter. He used to sit at table, glancing in her direction from time to time. How on Earth had she arrived on this planet? Her advice was better than her mother’s, her figure was precocious, and though she carried sunshine in her hair, yet her face had somewhat of a melancholy cast. This happens sometimes, a certain assemblage of female material brought together in paradise by dwarves working in unsleeping shifts. Not to mention an IQ assayed variously at one hundred twenty-seven and one hundred thirty-two.

  The mother of this miracle was a drab sort of individual consecrated mostly to slopping the hogs, peering into the oven, and bending over the ironing board. Life, she thought, was what she saw around her. Very seldom did she chide her eldest daughter, or anyway not until that day she espied her in the shower. Not for a long time had she seen the girl in her naked condition.

  “Oh, my lands,” she said, “you’re going to get in trouble looking like that!”

  “I want to.”

  “There’s no call for that, baby! You be careful now, I mean it.”

  It is of course true that the country’s prettiest girls always derive from the southeastern countryside. All that cornbread and black-eyed peas, those large-eye animals protected by barbwire fences. Look at her now and think of her riding on a cow. She did that.

  By 1954, the town began to be aware of her. Cars slowed, and boys anguished at the sight of her. What, did she think she was a goddamn queen or something? Kill her. As for the women, it was too late now to prevent her from having come to Earth those fourteen years ago. Only a bath of hot acid could now suffice.

  Her father curtained the windows. These days she was permitted to wander but to the edge of the property, a limitation that seemed not to bother her. She had her horse and pigs, and more recently her rented violin. Her nose was alert, her forehead luminous, while her agile breasts had been chosen from the world’s very best. Wickedly, she preferred tight sweaters.

  Ten

  She wasted years trying to become as modest and friendly and shallow as America insists. Wasted years on her idiot brother who grew ever more stupid the more she lavished on him. Squandered years practicing tolerance and learning how to smile. She tried so hard to be average and win friends to her side. Her shoes were well-kept and small enough to fit her. She had a green beret, the gift of a teacher. She dasn’t wear it, however, lest she violate beauty’s limits.

  From small beginnings, her cosmetics trove soon filled both drawers, and by 1954 it needed most of her wee salary to sustain it. Obviously she had given up on hiding her . . . aplomb. On the contrary, she learned the joys of sticking it in people’s faces. Better still was the joy of being hated.

  Her brother was at last consigned to the state asylum while her two sisters remained at freedom to pursue their low-level ways. The youngest of them had a baby, also perhaps an idiot, who was to need eight years to learn to crawl. The remaining sister, the better of the two, studied social work and married a soldier stationed in Germany. Free now of the burden these people had imposed and lucky enough to have a docile mother, the Divine One went about her project of getting perfect grades while earning $2.25 per hour as a part-time bookkeeper at the nearby Ford distributorship, this in addition to managing the family farm. She proved good at buying cattle and disposing of them at profitable prices. She understood the sort of people who adhere to home and soil, and never in her whole twenty-two-year-long life was she ever to impugn them in any way whatsoever. She respected animals, too, particularly on account of their patience and willingness to submit to higher intelligences. Admired their ability to endure the weather and consume foodstuffs that she preferred to avoid. She watched them copulating in the field, an ambiguous experience. Ignorant of history, these barnyard creatures believed their own generation to be the first of its kind. They replied to their surroundings, but not a single one of them knew that he or she actually existed. Each night was a new terrifying experience. Her own brother had known better than that.

  It was Thursday, 1955, that I encountered this angel (angel in a green sweater) for the first time. I had come to town on some mission or another—I forget why—when she was pointed out to me, a figment from another planet. “Gracious!” said I. (I’m a genteel type, and at that time was employed as Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Tennessee.) “Gracious! What is that?”

  She floated past, her sweater just a bit too tight, her face calm, and her head tilted slightly skyward. I was given a two-second glimpse of her profile, a golden coin of Syracuse. Already she knew all things, good and bad, and unlike the boy described below and above, accepted everything in full serenity. See how much a Professor can divine in just two seconds flat?

  She was still living at home, still supervising the cows, still dithering with her violin. And then on Wednesday came the second-best day of her career when she was made to surrender her violin and take up the cello instead, a profounder and more mellow instrument withal. It sorted perfectly with her gorgeous face and those traces of far-away melancholy in her eyes.

  Eleven

  And then at age seventeen she went off to college, a blessing that came to her in the form of a scholarship. She had been seen playing on her enormous guitar [sic] while dressed in a gown that failed to obscure her figure. It was required dress for girls in the orchestra, a boon for girls like this one. Seen, I started to say, by an alumnus of the University who happened also to be a significant donor to that school. She had just given a performance of Kodály’s unaccompanied cello sonata, her own fourth-favorite piece, and he came upon her just as she was exiting the auditorium. Her father had taken charge of the instrument and was transporting it back to the truck in a bespoken cardboard “suitcase” that conformed to the size of the thing. Early April in Tennessee it was, and the weather was sweet.

  “No, you’re very good,” the alumnus said. “Have you been playing long?”

  “Near ’bout a year,” her father replied. “But we didn’t try to stop her.”

  “Do you have a coach?”

  “Mr. Osborn,” the girl’s father again replied. “Track and field, don’t you know. But we put a stop to it. Not good for girls.”

  They were by now in the outside world with the departing audience, some hundred or more of them giving wide berth to the celestial-looking cellist. Her hair was done up in the way that she was to insist upon in the following years.

  “They make her dress like that.”

  “When do you graduate?”

  “Fifty-two days. Not me, her.”

  Together the man and daughter lifted the instrument into the back of the truck and were quite prepared, it seemed, to abandon the alien where he stood.

  “Well, g’night I reckon.”

  “Have you thought of co
llege?”

  The vehicle actually did go forward a few inches.

  “Say what?”

  “College. How are your grades?”

  “Nothing wrong with those grades! Just about the best anywhere around here, I reckon.”

  “Is that right?” the stranger asked, coming near and inserting his face to within about six inches of the one belonging to the girl. “How good, exactly?”

  She turned and looked at him calmly.

  “Perfect. Except for attendance.”

  “Perfect?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  They drove to the farm, stopping along the way for a can of tomato paste and a half-gallon of milk. It was not an impressive building, the family’s, and some work was needed on the roof. A hoofed animal of some nature waited on the porch, and the girl’s mother was at the ironing board.

  It was past nine o’clock already, wherefore they were given but a slice of warmed-over blackberry pie with a wedge of cheese on top. All four optioned for coffee as well. Very soon the girl dispersed to her own room to change into other clothes, a decision the stranger regretted. He didn’t call her back, however. That left just three of them to discuss the weather and associated topics.

  “Really, she ought to attend college, that girl of yours.”

  “I know it. But it’s not as easy as what you people seem to think. She’s got a job now, and there’s her mother and me.”

  “You’re both in bad health, then?”

  “We will be. And the herd. I can’t do everything.”

  “No, no one wants that. What would it cost to hire someone, I wonder?”

  “Plenty, that’s what. Real plenty.”

  “She’s got talent, I think.”

  “Yeah, we figured that out long time ago. And Sarah, too, she’s real good at making clothes and so on. All my babies are good. Except one.”

  “And he can’t help it,” the mother added quickly.

  “I do believe I could get that girl—what’s her name?—could get her into a good college,” the strange man said. “And I know just the one, too.”

  The man and wife gazed at each other.

  “Imagine that. Coledge.”

  She practiced every day while holding down a full-time job, and by autumn had accumulated money enough and sufficient virtuosity to enter music school with better than two thousand dollars’ worth of money, cash, and clothes. Conservative with mascara and eye liner, she gave preference to low heels, blue-plaid skirts (rather short ones, actually), and white sweaters that failed to deemphasize her cultured breasts. Her demeanor was conservative, forbidding even, while her face remained forever serene. She was thinking rapidly but calmly, her eyes fixed upon a place in the clouds. No one called to her, or anyway not from a remove of less than about forty feet. From that distance she might hear someone cooing lewdly in her direction, negro voices that didn’t register on her. Her cello was well-formed, but no one ever confused it for the girl herself.

  She entered the departmental building on that first Friday and found her way to the Chairman’s office, a bald man, not unfriendly, who looked her over with some concern before signaling her to a chair. She sat and waited patiently, her knees, in good hosiery, extending perhaps three inches beyond her hem. The man glanced in that direction.

  “So. Cello?”

  “Yes. And harp.”

  “Really? We can use that.”

  She took out a cigarette and lit it with a red-headed kitchen match of about two inches in length. It produced a considerable flame that loitered briefly in midair. With her phosphorescent hair, lipstick, knees, and the slim leather briefcase that held her music, she comprised a much-better-than-ordinary scene.

  “And you’re the one who . . .” (He rifled through his papers) “. . . was given the Woodridge Fellowship?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good for you. It even covers your books, I believe.”

  No reply. She wasn’t responsible for what he believed. It also covered her living expenses up to three thousand two hundred dollars for the nine-month session.

  “You’ll have to work very hard to hold on to that.” (Now, though he really didn’t want to, he glanced at her knees.) “Lots of applicants. New ones every year.”

  There was a secretary in the next office, a prune-like manifestation staring at the knees through the open door.

  “Will you be using the dormitory?”

  No, she had taken a two-room apartment on the west side of college, an airy dwelling, she was told, at fifty-two dollars per month. Having finished with the chairman, she now hurried across campus to her new place, never entirely unaware of those who stared at her wherever she went.

  It was a stern-looking woman who opened for her. After a brief discussion, and after seeming to approve of the girl’s . . . aplomb, the woman softened somewhat. She conducted the girl up two flights and into the expensive (expensive for that time) two-room affair with its desk and chair, its leather sofa and, in the next room, its narrow but amenable-looking bed that along with its pillow and coverings resembled a dumpling. The quilt was pink and blue and had been constructed, she divined, by three gossiping women sharing one eye between them. The window, otherwise broad enough to allow a person to pass through it, had been fitted with bars. She rented the place at once.

  “I actually prefer music students,” the landlady revealed. “Though not so much the trumpet players, of course.”

  They smiled at each other.

  “I go to nearly all the concerts. And every one of the operas without fail. But you, you look like a stringed instrument to me.”

  “Cello,” the girl confessed. “And harp, when it’s needed.”

  “Oh, good gracious yes, I do like the harp. We’re going to get along real fine.”

  She was left alone, the girl, in her appealing apartment. There remained now but to retrace the three-quarter-mile hike back to campus to gather her instrument—two cars, both driven by charitable young men, offered to drive her—and then to toddle on back to her first private quarters. To explore the rooms in full required better than an hour.

  Twelve

  By this time, a certain amount of time had gone by. They hadn’t yet realized, his parents had not, that he had already broken with them, but had carried it out so gently that they weren’t aware of it.

  “It surprises me,” the old man said, “that you haven’t been more active. Student government and so forth. Sports. No, that could be good for your career. Wish I’d done that.”

  The boy nodded. “Right. I’m pretty good at tennis, though.”

  “Yes, you are! Good.”

  And in short, the man wanted what was most advantageous for the boy within the context of the unanimity of the day. Instead, the miscreant continued to read unnecessarily heavy books in blue covers organized by size in his personal cabinet. Gleaning for wisdom (as he represented himself to me), he had been grappling with Nietzsche, Spengler, Evola, and other heavyweight authors whom he only halfway understood. Meantime his tennis remained at high levels, and in order to stay in good physical condition he had added chess to his inventory of self-inflicted things.

  Chess: he must have wasted five hundred hours on this minuscule pursuit before it finally dawned on him that he was not becoming a more excellent or more dangerous person as a result, and in place of that began to read up on female psychology and how to bring some of those people into his orbit. He loved no one, but wanted very much to be loved by beautiful girls. Unusual for a boy of his age, he thought of sex as but a trivial pursuit as compared to being desired, hopelessly desired by girls pursuant to abandoning them, a peculiarity of his that some have seen as just short of outright mental illness. He began to groom himself, pleased that it set him off from his colleagues. There is no doubt that he would have been made to pay for his vanity had he not in the meanwhile become friendly with a former professional boxer, an alcoholic willing for a liter of beer to spend an hour or two per week with him.
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  “Speed,” the man had said, “that’s the ticket. And don’t be trying to hit a man in the goddamn head, that won’t do any good. Hit through the head and out the other side. You fuck up his brains, he won’t hit back. Good! Do it again.”

  He studied hard, the boy, studying also the “integrity,” as he thought of it, the integrity inscribed on that man’s face in terms of his bent nose and what looked like boils.

  There is among the males of the world an international communication system that tells whether or not another male may be set upon with a decent possibility of success. To activate the system needs only a single event, in this case when the boy had just completed his sixteenth year and dared to wear a suit and tie to algebra class. Remember, he weighed hardly one hundred thirty pounds at that juncture but did have good speed, pretty good, and had trained himself to concentrate on uppercuts to places where bone breakage was most available.

  Paisley was his favorite color, and dark blue the pattern he chiefly preferred. He kept his socks in good order, too, and by the end of his junior year had an academic record that was the most nearly perfect in the whole organization. To be sure, he was inordinately ambitious, though not precisely in the way the adult world approved. Just sixteen years old, he was already a little bit “dangerous,” and after his first and only fight, the son-of-a-bitch felt he was on his way.

  Thirteen

  By the middle 1950s, he had read so much and had so often heard that history follows a cyclical path that he had begun seriously to doubt it. Finally on Thursday, he put together a paper for his teacher wherein he maintained that history is rather like a kaleidoscope in which elements come together at hazard to form unique tableaux that never repeat. He read the report twice, did his teacher, and then gave it back with compliments. It was clear he had understood none of it. But even that was better than the editors of scholarly journals who never replied at all.