by Tobias Wolff
He rocked to his feet, looked sourly around, then started toward the shed where the mower was kept. It would come later, if it came at all. Sometimes it didn’t. He lost patients and hardly ever thought of them again, and then with a regret that he recognized as mostly formal.
No, if it came it would come from behind and push him into a hole so deep he’d forget what it was like to be out of it. That was what happened with his beautiful niece Angela, his sister’s only child. Joe had warned her—she had diabetes and was drinking heavily—but somehow he’d failed to expect it himself. He got clobbered a few weeks after her death, laid low. And something like that happened to him after his son was born. One night, holding the baby, he remembered with suspicious clarity his own father holding him, looking down at him, and smiling; there was that roguish gap between his teeth, the crazy upcurved eyebrow. It was a look of unguarded benevolence. Joe knew it well, he’d grown up in the light of his father’s pleasure in him, and now he figured that by some trick of the mind he had imposed it on a scene too distant for recall.
False or not, he couldn’t shake the memory. And others followed that he knew to be true, though he hadn’t thought of them for years: his father’s amused, bottomless patience in teaching him to drive or tie flies or work the cash register; the stories he told about growing up wild in rural Georgia, and about his older brother Chet. Chet had been killed on Peleliu, his body unfound, and Joe’s father was never able to hide the grief that still overcame him because of that death.
Joe’s parents had been close to forty when he was born. He guessed he’d been something of an accident, but a welcome one, especially to his father. They’d been friends. And yet Joe had somehow come to resent his father’s sickness as a betrayal, a desertion. He didn’t think it out in those terms, didn’t think it out at all, but it felt like that, then, as if his father had willfully—perversely—surrendered to the weak, wheezing, yellow-faced sufferer who’d taken his place. Joe’s knowledge of his own real desertion, the depth of its injustice and cruelty, came slowly. He’d managed it well enough until the birth of his son, then hardly at all. For weeks it seemed that every new joy came with a shadow of remembrance and shame. His wife grew impatient with his moods, then disgusted. But what was he to do? Others might forgive you—he knew his father would—but how do you forgive yourself? You don’t, really. Yet one day the weight is lighter, and the next lighter still, and then you barely know it’s there, if it’s there at all. So it is with the best of men and the worst of men, and so it was with Joe.
The lawn mower had a bent blade and shook convulsively as he maneuvered it around the yard. It was folly to use it in this condition, but the pushing felt good and he kept muscling it on. He spun through a corner and saw his mother in the kitchen window, her face overlaid with leaves reflected from the orange tree. She looked worried. Joe raised a hand and she gave a little wave back, the same regretful gesture she used to make from the departing car when they left him at scout camp in the summer—except that she was strong and handsome then, and now she was old and had to wear a diaper. He turned his attention to the rock border where he’d pranged the blade last time, and when he looked up again she was gone.
He squared the yard and kept moving toward the middle. The shaking of the mower no longer held his interest. It was part of the cadence of the work, like the crisp turns he made and the extra push he gave when he hit a thick clump of grass. His hands tingled; his brow dripped; his shirt was soaked through. As he worked he ceased to think, or to feel himself think, and then it came to him. Chip Ryan, the real estate agent Mary Claude had been fooling around with…little Chip! He hadn’t placed him at first because the boy was so young, just seven or eight, when Joe left Dunston. Chip’s older brother had been a friend of his. Chip used to hang around while they played records and talked, but he didn’t butt in or act bratty. Joe had been struck by that—what a nice kid he was, little Chip, sitting there with his pet rabbit, stroking its ears while he looked up at the big boys.
Little Chip and Mary Claude.
The letter didn’t say whether Chip was married or single. Either way he was on the prowl, or they wouldn’t be telling that story. And of all the women in that long green valley, he had to pick Mary Claude. If it was true. But of course it was. Leave it to Mary Claude to come up with a game like that, all or nothing, no room for error.
He bullied the mower through the last couple of turns and cut the engine. A pall of exhaust hung above the yard. He heard the music again. Violins. Strauss, still. He nodded helplessly along as he toweled himself off with his shirt. He’d heard the piece fifty times, a hundred times, Candace dancing naked through their apartment to the rise and fall of it, gleaming with sweat, eyes half closed—but when he reached for the name he felt it slip away. It baffled him that he couldn’t hold on to something he’d known so well, and he stood fixed in his puzzlement as the song swelled to a finish and died, and a dog barked somewhere, and another waltz began.
These stories originally appeared the following publications: “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” “Next Door,” and “Two Boys and a Girl” in Antaeus; “The Liar,” “The Other Miller,” “Sanity,” and “A White Bible” in The Atlantic; “Flyboys” in Doubletake; “The Chain,” “Smorgasbord,” and “Soldier’s Joy” in Esquire; “Lady’s Dream” in Harper’s; “Say Yes” (as “Washing Up”) in The Missouri Review; “Powder” in The New York Times Magazine; “Awaiting Orders,” “The Benefit of the Doubt,” “Bullet in the Brain,” “Deep Kiss” (as “Kiss”), “The Deposition,” “Down to Bone” (as “The Most Basic Plan”), “The Night in Question,” “Nightingale,” and “That Room” (as “In the Hay”) in The New Yorker; “A Mature Student” in Playboy; “Firelight” in Story; “Hunters in the Snow” and “Leviathan” in Triquarterly; “Desert Breakdown, 1968” and “The Rich Brother” in Vanity Fair; and “Her Dog” in Walrus. “Mortals” was originally published in Listening to Ourselves: More Stories from “The Sound of Writing” edited by Alan Cheuse and Caroline Marshall (Doubleday & Company, Inc., New York, 1994).
“In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” “Next Door,” “Hunters in the Snow,” and “The Liar” were published in In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff (Ecco, 1981); “Soldier’s Joy,” “The Rich Brother,” “Leviathan,” “Desert Breakdown, 1968,” and “Say Yes” were published in Back in the World (Houghton Mifflin, 1985); “Mortals,” “Flyboys,” “Sanity,” “The Other Miller,” “Two Boys and a Girl,” “The Chain,” “Smorgasbord,” “Lady’s Dream,” “Powder,” “The Night in Question,” “Firelight,” and “Bullet in the Brain” were published in The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
ALSO BY TOBIAS WOLFF
Old School
The Night in Question
In Pharaoh’s Army
This Boy’s Life
Back in the World
The Barracks Thief
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2008 by Tobias Wolff
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint the stories “Hunters in the Snow,” “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” “The Liar,” and “Next Door” from In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff, copyright © 1981 by Tobias Wolff. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wolff, Tobias, [date]
Our story begins : new and selected stories / by Tobias Wolff.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi book”—T.p. verso.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-307-26880-8
I. Title.
PS3573. O558O97 2008
813'.54—dc22 2007044262
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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