Stillness & Shadows Read online

  In a matter of seconds they had the limp body loaded into Martin Orrick’s car. It was then that the nightmare began in earnest. Because he was too shaky, he thought, to drive, he gave the keys to his Rambler to his friend the poet Bob Randolph, an easterner who might with luck get the car to town over the wet glare ice, as no one born here where ice was rare could do, and he himself took the keys to Bob Randolph’s Volkswagen. Bob Randolph took the lead, Martin following in Randolph’s car. They moved tortuously down the driveway, fences and trees on each side blindingly glittering, tires skating. Both cars made the turn, made the dip into the valley, and managed to snake up the winding hill that followed, then began, carefully, the second, much steeper, descent. Hunched over the steering wheel, watching the black car ahead of him—all around him the world aglitter like a diamond, everything white but the Rambler’s two tail-lights—he saw the road’s sharpest turn approaching, sliding toward them like a flaw in the dazzling, faceted brightness, and he knew—knew as if he’d seen it already, like the providential God Boethius understood—that Bob Randolph wouldn’t make it. He slowed the Volkswagen almost to a stop and, as in a slowed-down movie, watched the black Rambler slip slowly, as if casually, toward the edge of the high-crowned, white-fire road, where it hovered a moment, as if thoughtfully, then gradually tilted up like a capsizing sailboat and fell, still slowly, thoughtfully, out of sight. He stopped the Volkswagen where the Rambler had left the road, got out too quickly, and banged down hard onto the ice. Trifling as the fall was, it knocked out his wind, and he lay straining for what seemed a long, long time before air would come. Then, rather than struggle to get up, he crawled to the edge of the shoulder.

  The embankment was gradual but went down twenty feet. Below, the weedy field was ablaze with light, unearthly, ironically Christmassy, like a vastly magnified view from inside some exotic crystal, and at the center of all that light the Rambler stood sharply outlined, forlorn, coal black. Bob Randolph and the three who’d been riding with him were already climbing out, struggling to pull Joan from the backseat. She hung limp between them, like the figure of Christ in some descent from the cross. Their shouts came up to Martin as if from infinitely far away, and his friends’ movements around Joan’s inert form were like a clumsy dance. Martin was not himself, or at any rate not his best self. He simply watched, as one watches the northern lights (once, on their farm, his mother and father had seen perfectly clear angels in the northern lights, and a perfectly clear, unmistakable cross: they were not sentimentalists or religious fanatics and had simply watched, amazed, as he watched now, and later they’d wondered if they’d really seen it—a doubt he understood, because as a child, told to look for the Big Dipper, he had seen, not knowing what a dipper was, a clearly outlined frying pan as viewed from the top: it was the sharpest image he carried from his childhood except for one other, a frozen image of his cousin Joan, now his wife, when they were four), and even as they struggled up the glazed embankment, sometimes sliding back, her body sliding with them, his friends calling up to him in increasing anger, he hung suspended, outside time and space, watching as if it were a movie or a vision on which his life depended, though he himself was indifferent, until they managed to scrape and cut their way near enough that he could take off his coat and hold it out to them like a rope and help them to the road.

  She still showed no slightest sign of life. He drove, took the wheel without thinking, though shakier than ever. He would not remember, afterward, the drive to town. His memory would go back only to the hospital corridor, where he stood, still trembling, drinking black coffee—“You’re drunk,” the nurse had said, crackling with hate—his hands bleeding from when he’d fallen beside the car, his student friends seated on the long wooden bench, ashen-faced, dishevelled, Dr. Crouse saying (distant, as if reserving judgment), “That’s one more time you’ve been lucky as hell, whole lot more lucky than you deserve, that’s the truth.” Even after that violent letting, her blood pressure was dangerously high. If she’d made it to bed, the odds were close to a hundred to nothing she’d have died of a stroke before morning.

  “What should I have done?” Martin Orrick said.

  To Crouse his eyes looked defiant, hostile. His breath, his skin, his clothes, filled all Sikeston with gin-stink.

  “Well I don’ know,” he said mildly. He was a soft-voiced Missourian with a private smile, obviously friendly, obviously noncommittal. For no good reason, he liked Martin Orrick—the novels, perhaps. Martin Orrick was a far better man in his books than in his life, God knew, yet he had a kind of madman’s charm, some way. Charm like a tiger’s. He was beautiful, powerful, the way mad poets were supposed to be, but he was also, in his madness, dangerous and stupid, burning up his life—everybody’s life—like sunbaked kindling. Dr. Jimmy Crouse had no time for fools, but with Martin Orrick he kept putting off decision. He said: “The way you people live out there, Joanie sick as hell, and you behaving like …”

  Martin nodded, a quick, ghastly jerk of the head, and for an instant closed his eyes, suddenly becoming more child than wolf or tiger. Crouse studied him, then put his hand on his arm and grinned, deciding, Oh, the hell with it. “You’re crazy, boy, that’s all’s the matter. You gotta just sort of get on up and turn yourself around.”

  Martin laughed.

  Crouse nodded, still grinning, though his eyes were solemn. “Well, cheer up. She’ll pull you through, ’f you don’t kill her first.”

  “Suppose,” Martin Orrick wrote that year, “one could adjust optimistic Christianity and the gloomy facts of life—the universal banging of atom against atom, planet against planet, heart against heart. Granted, that is, that the whole thing’s a river, mere blindly bumping chances, no prayer of rest—granted that the weather has a good deal to do with what I happen to love—indeed, with whether I survive to love at all—that my life is an accidental tumble of the dice, my ancestors’ genes, my penmanship borrowed from a childhood friend (but strangely like my father’s)—suppose one could learn, by the flick of a switch, to enjoy the hangings, celebrate the swiftly passing patterns as holy. Would that give stability? I hate idealists; no one hates them more or would sooner condemn them to execution. Sitting by the river, studying its refusal to repeat itself, the heavy yellow water never twice eddying in the exact same place, even the course of barges unpredictable, I grow anxious to dynamite Plato’s museum, soft, comfortable home of my lean toward insanity. Process is all I care about. Therefore I write fiction, to make the beauty of change everlasting, unalterable as rock.”

  Useless to inquire too earnestly what Martin Orrick meant.

  … but love can move mountains, love can burst all bonds, even steel; nothing can stand in its way, as we all know. It’s our own mediocrity that makes us let go of love, makes us renounce it.

  —EUGÈNE IONESCO

  One

  At a time when everyone who was anyone was plunging into her identity crisis, Joan Orrick became with a vengeance what she was. No one— certainly no one in her family—was especially surprised, and no one was sorry, though her husband told their friends he had moments of wondering if he’d survive it. She’d been a liberated woman since 1933, the year of her birth. She’d been a red-head (and was still), with a dimple and dazzling eyes and a dazzling wit, and her parents had soon discovered that she had, besides, “a really quite remarkable musical talent,” as her first piano teacher said, with a frightened look. Her teacher, a Miss Huppman, had no talent at all—except for raising begonias—but Joan didn’t know it and was flying, by the middle of her second year, through Bach’s three-part inventions. Timidly, wringing her hankie at the door, Miss Huppman suggested, when Joan’s father came after one of her lessons to pick her up, that perhaps Joan needed a teacher “a little more advanced.”

  “I see,” her father said in his tentative way, with his hat in his hands.

  He was a minor executive in the St. Louis Screw and Bolt Company—he would later be one of the company’s two top men—but he
was not yet (and in some respects would never be) a man bursting with confidence. He was, in fact, a farm boy who’d only reached fifth grade, and even that was partly fraudulent, since he had a brother, John Elmer, who looked remarkably like him and a Scotchman father who felt, perhaps rightly, that the farming couldn’t spare them both. “I see,” he said, somewhat alarmed, since he had no idea how to go about finding a piano teacher more advanced. He was, Joan’s father, a handsome, broad-shouldered man, red-headed, like his daughter, with a Scotchman’s pale eyes and brilliant smile, also a Scotchman’s somewhat overlarge nose, which his daughter had inherited, but he bore it with such grace, as his daughter would do, that no one could ever take exception to it; indeed, years later, on his grandson Evan, that nose would become—elegantly harmonized with other noble features, a gentle disposition, and a splendid intelligence—a thing to make maidens weep.

  “Is there,” Joan’s father said, “someone you could recommend?”

  “Oh dear,” said Miss Huppman, “these things are so difficult. Mrs. Wulker, I should think. She lives right near you, on Randolph.” She looked at Joan’s father as if she thought he might help her. “Perhaps someone in the city?”

  Joan’s father thanked her, paid her the fifty cents she charged, and walked, holding Joan’s hand, to their square green Dodge.

  Joan was, in her father’s opinion, the most beautiful, most wonderful little girl in the world. Neither he nor Joan’s mother would dream of expressing that sentiment to Joan, though they managed to communicate it, to some extent. Indeed, he sometimes called her—with what might have been a faint touch of irony—his princess. But the irony was really just his shyness—or his caution. She looked like a princess, and she ruled like a princess, not that anyone minded. (Thirty years later her daughter, Mary, would be exactly the same, an absolute—fortunately benevolent—despot.) When they could afford it, they bought Joan presents, pretty dresses, toys, books, a long-haired, cinnamon-colored dog named Flopsy (run over by a trolley car the first month she had him), and above all what was, for them, an enormously expensive spinet piano, a Story & Clark. They paid for a succession of piano teachers, including, finally, Leo Serota, the best pianist in St. Louis at the time, formerly chief piano teacher at Tokyo University; they bought her a twenty-five-dollar violin, later a fifty-dollar cello; they drove her, or rather her father drove her, to symphony concerts, where her father would fall asleep—not, as Joan imagined, because he didn’t care for music, but because his day began at five, the music was soothing, the hall was dark, and he was an innocent, or at any rate innocent of false pride. He also took her, four times, to the opera—each time, by some fluke, the same opera, Boris Godunov—and innumerable times to what was then the glory of that wonderfully naive, ridiculous German city (as she would later remember it), the “Muny Opera,” where she saw (and later played in the orchestra for, after she’d become a violinist and cellist) The Red Mill, Desert Song, Springtime, The Student Prince, The Vagabond King, and An Evening with Gilbert and Sullivan. (Though she was still in her teens, she could have told them when they put on that Evening with Gilbert and Sullivan thing that the Muny was finished, an epoch had ended; put your money on KSDF.)

  Those were, naturally, wonderful times. The whole family would go to the grandiose, pseudo-Greek open-air theater in Forest Park—Joan had now two younger brothers—and sometimes her favorite aunt and uncle would go too, or the cousins from New York State. They would sit under the stars, hoping it wouldn’t rain, or at any rate that was the hope all the grown-ups laid claim to if the smell in the air suggested doubt, though possibly they too took pleasure in seeing the huge set hurriedly rolled away, folded in on itself like a Chinese paper dollhouse, and the audience rushing out with programs held over their heads like housetops, and the huge old trees of the park bending, black against gray, and then the fierce Midwestern rain sweeping in, brightly lighted, like a theater curtain, and the low sky majestically booming, booming as if for joy.

  Mostly, of course, it didn’t rain, and they sat listening to the music, swaying to the dancing (swaying inwardly, that is; they were inclined to be timid), eating hot dogs or ice cream from the people who came selling them up and down the aisles like the vendors at a circus or a Cardinals’ game. And then, very late (as she’d judged time then), her father would drive them home, going wonderfully fast, as he always did, the lights of the old houses flashing by like comets. Joan’s mother, at corners or intersections, would suck air between her teeth and sometimes whimper, “Oh Donald, please!” and he’d pretend, for a time, to drive more cautiously.

  Joan’s mother was pretty and intelligent, the youngest daughter in a large German family even poorer than Joan’s father’s. The latter at least had a good-sized farm, an old, old place just off Sinks Road, Missouri, ten miles north of St. Louis, a fairly unprofitable farm at the time, cratered like the moon—except the craters were lush, filled with water, edged by trees—but a gold mine later: there was oil under those sinkholes, and huge caves where the Laclede Oil Company would buy rights to store natural gas; and besides, urban sprawl was hurrying north, so that in the fifties, lots overlooking the convergence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, of which the farm could offer several, would go for five thousand dollars an acre. One such lot, a large one, would be the site of Joan’s father’s large, modern house when he moved his family back home “to the country” from Ferguson. Joan could remember what it once had been like. When she was little the land was still heavily wooded, populated by wolves and cranes and her peculiar, black-bearded great-uncle Zack, who had a cabin with linoleum on the walls. Every spring he floated his mules across to the long, dark, vine-filled island and ploughed a little patch of it, where he grew horse corn and pumpkins and sweet potatoes. The place was infested with great fat rattlesnakes and copperheads. He’d sit on the porch and smoke his pipe and, he said, watch them play. She only saw him once or twice. He didn’t even come out of the woods to go to church. Thankfully, as all the family said, he was long gone—his cabin in ruins, letting in light like an old broken crate—when the bulldozers came. The landscape would change beyond all recognition, and tony people would move in, or flambuginous-tony. Possum Hollow, where her great-uncle Zack used to hunt, would become “Castlereigh Estates.”

  Joan’s mother’s side was less fortunate, materially. They lived in a small house that—beneath the shingles on the outside and plaster on the inside—was a crooked old log cabin of a sort you might expect to find Negroes in. It went back to before the Civil War, but its antiquity gave it no particular charm. It was beautifully set, on a rise beside one of those rich, dense hollows one finds only in Missouri—a creek, huge old trees with crows in them, over by the fence a matched pair of mules—but the house itself was about as handsome as a tooth in a field. It was in excellent repair and always clean as a whistle—the family was, as I’ve said, German—but its only real glory was the people who lived in it, warmhearted, hardworking, good-looking people, of whom Joan’s mother, Emmy, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was the nicest and prettiest of all. Her sister Cora, two years older, was also very fine; not as pretty, quite, but more relaxed, not inclined to have headaches. When Emmy married Joan’s father, Cora would marry the brother who looked so much like him, John Elmer.

  Joan’s mother and father had been, of course, childhood sweethearts. They’d married during the Depression, but they were both working fools, energetic, tense people, though they mostly kept a secret of their nervousness—not that they were, in the bad sense, ambitious. Joan’s father was handy; there was nothing he couldn’t repair or build—in fact, later, he’d patent a number of inventions; and Joan’s mother was a shrewd manager. They made a perfect team, as everyone said. They escaped to the city, then to the suburbs, then to better suburbs, and as their horizons widened, Joan became for them, increasingly, a creature to wonder at. If they doubted at first, they could doubt no longer: Joan did indeed have, as Miss Huppman had said, a really quite remarkable musical t
alent. At thirteen she had a weekly half-hour radio show.

  Her talent was a difficult thing for her parents to deal with, to tell the truth. They were gentle, good people with no social pretensions; they hated snobs or, at any rate (since they hated, in fact, no one), felt extremely uncomfortable in their presence; and they saw overconfidence, even the slightest hint of it, as a dangerous thing if not an evil in itself. Joan was, alas, not as humble as she might be. People called her a genius and a prodigy, often people who ought to know. She was bound, her parents feared, for trouble, and they did everything possible to keep her from getting a swelled head. When people praised her piano playing, her mother said only (partly, of course, from shyness), “Well, she seems to enjoy it.” When she brought home from school a report card with nothing but A’s on it (in English, in science, in music, in phys.ed., in typing, in geography, in whatever she touched), her father would say, “Don’t they give A pluses?” Joan would laugh, make some joke; but the truth was, she began to feel unsure of herself. Though it should have been obvious at a glance to anyone, even a total stranger, that her parents were so proud of her they were downright afraid—afraid that they might perhaps in some way fail her—Joan began to doubt that she was loved.