Stillness & Shadows John Gardner (nice books to read .txt) 📖

would have done when he was younger, when there was, he thought, still a chance for him. It was as if he had seen one death too many, had lost utterly the power to feel grief—as if he had finally understood that this was the world’s essential nature: idiotic conflict with no prayer of resolution—raving Arabs, raving Jews, raving blacks, raving whites; destruction of the innocent, Evan and Mary lying in their beds, listening. “Let’s not drink anymore,” he and Joan would say in the morning when they woke up and couldn’t remember what had started it; but his hatred would still be there, burning like a coal, and her absolute insistence on her rightful ownership of his every emotion, and he would drink, yes yes yes, Christ yes!

He could hear the water now, deep and slow-moving, weighed down by silt, dragging dark masses and branches like the bodies of old men toward the Mississippi. He moved toward the sound, the dogs running closer now, perpetually circling, herding him back. He came to the caves, the smell of foxes, and he stopped, leaning on the slippery rock, panting. When he crawled in, the air was icy cold. The dogs came in after him, shook off water, pressed against him and settled. He listened to the rain, thinking of his children, thinking of his own childhood, the people who had shaped him and those who’d shaped Joan, or damned them, more like, though they’d meant no harm and though finally it was nobody’s fault but his own, not even Joan’s. He shivered, closed his eyes. The ground under him was smooth and cold, like a coin.

He couldn’t remember, waking up shivering and numb in the morning, why it was that he’d come there.

Three

Both families were religious. Joan’s went to church, did what was asked of them there and more, and never spoke, even in church, of religion. Someone who knew nothing of the lives of ordinary religious people—someone who knew only lapsed Catholics or lapsed fundamentalists, some unlucky member of that great unlucky class Martin Orrick would describe (with typical rancor and the plain injustice that served as his main form of irony) as “cynic-intellectuals, keen-eyed analysts of the interface subtleties of shit and Shinola, finger-wringing, foot-stamping, failed Neoplatonists,” or, in another place, as “the gentle libertarian who curls up his lip when he says ‘Wasp,’ ”—might perhaps have dismissed Joan’s parents as hypocrites or trimmers, or—finding no disparity between their regular, seemingly mechanical and unreasoning attendance at the Ferguson First Methodist Church and their generally upright, warmhearted, and generous everyday behavior—might have put them down, simply, as two more credulous, pitiful ciphers in that vast majority whom Thoreau alleged to live “lives of quiet desperation.” Nothing, in fact, could have been farther from the truth.

Though they were silent, both Joan’s father and mother were more deeply religious than the official policies of the churches they’d grown up in. Joan’s mother had been a Roman Catholic, and in a sense was still. When she settled her heart on marrying a Baptist, a boy she’d grown up with and loved from the beginning, whose virtues and defects she’d come to know like the back of her hand, she quietly scrapped the opinions of her church—not without some stress, even superstitious fright—asserting and affirming that the God she worshipped could not conceivably be such a narrow-minded fool as to despise Donald Frazier for the doctrinal persuasions of his parents. Religion for her had always consisted, essentially, of two things: a timid but deep love of ritual—an appreciation, fundamentally aesthetic, of the gestures of the Mass, of music and vestments, of statues and wide convent lawns (there was a convent in Florissant, not far off)—and, secondly, an unostentatious devotion to basic goodness, the quiet morality, fair-mindedness, and general optimism she observed in her parents and in her older brothers and sisters, some of whom were grown up and had moved away when Emmy—Emily—was born. Though she was by no means unintelligent, she had never especially concerned herself with theological questions—no more than had the rest of the countrified Catholic congregation she grew up with, or the dirt-poor, absentminded priest who served them. But she understood fairness: it was unfair to make a husband switch to Catholicism and break his mother’s heart, and unfair to her family that she shift to the camp of those who most openly denounced them. Forced to leave the Church or else renounce Donald Frazier, for reasons not even her father was sure of—as he all but admitted, turning from her sternly, pulling at his beard—she quietly moved her Catholicism to another building, the bland, friendly House of God as the Methodists understood him, and no one was especially troubled except, of course, Donald’s mother. Emmy was robbed, in the Methodist Church, of ritual, and sometimes even here she must sit through tirades against the religion of her parents; but even in middle age she would look over at Donald, who sat with his head tipped up, as if politely listening, or sat with his elbow on the wall of the pew, the inside of his hand across his forehead, eyes closed—he was fast asleep—and she would decide again that she’d been right, that God was Love, simply; it was as plain as the nose on Donald’s face. In her later years she would seldom go to church, but nothing had changed. She found her ritual in the comings and goings of birds, the rise and decline of her roses, in sunrise and sunset, the exactly punctual five o’clock phone call from her sister Cora, and the ten o’clock news before she and Donald settled down to sleep. As for basic goodness, her children were a great satisfaction to her—even James. For all the unhappiness in his life, he was happy in his work, and good at it. And Donald, with hair now whiter than snow, was an amazing man, a saint. When you came right down to it, she