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

kill the Devil, in whose existence she believed as firmly as she believed in her left foot. He remembered certain instants when his mother seemed to him a dazzling beauty: more such instants than a few. She had four sons, one daughter; and like all lively women who raise handsome, quick-witted sons in a house half governed by a handsome and quick-witted, playful man, she developed, quite unconsciously, ways attractive to men—a laugh, a glance, an occasional sudden gentleness, that softened for her children the bigotry, cruelty of tongue, and uncharitable suspiciousness that tainted her character. She loved music, especially the old Scotch songs and the more lively Baptist hymns (Joan and Buddy, when Lulu Frazier was in her nineties, would sing Irish songs, claiming they were Scotch, to tease her; whenever Joan played hymns and the assembled three generations sang, it was a rule that they must sing all the verses); she loved poetry, for the most part terrible poetry; and she loved fine clothes and festivities—a family reunion, a country Christmas with a huge tree and all the family around her, or every Sunday’s dressed-up, chattering, wonderfully horse-scented buggy ride three miles over hill and dale, through dark hollows, past Negroes’ cabins, past neatly kept fields of wheat and cane, to the Coldwater Baptist Church. Though her sons did not share her belief in the Devil, they had, at odd moments, her unearthly, eagle-sharp eyes. So, of course, had Joan. They could flash like sheet lightning if some affront, some slight to her pride made her furious, so that for many years Martin would be afraid of her, would even imagine she might someday kill him, though occasionally he saw that same flash in the eyes of his gentle son, Evan, and was unsure of himself, unsure of everything. At the darkest time of his life, it must be said, he was at his feeble best when full of doubt and irresolvable confusion.

Again his pale blue eyes had the dead look, though tonight there was no sign of rage in them. He puffed at his pipe every three or four words, as if drawing what little life he had from it, his left hand closed lightly around the pipe bowl, his right around the rim of his martini glass. King Rolf, the Alsatian, lay beside him, his head on his paws; Evan’s black-and-tan, as large as a lion, lay by the sliding glass doors that went out to the pool. You could hear the drone of the television coming from upstairs, where the children were watching God knew what—nothing worse than their life. He said:

“We’ve got to talk, you say. But it’s futile to talk. There’s no reason left in the world anymore, not even the illusion. It’s like Johnson saying with the greatest sincerity, ‘Let us sit down and reason one with another,’ and lying about everything from Tonkin Bay to the price of a Job Corps T-shirt. Not that he didn’t ‘mean well,’ understand. But it’s over, that’s all. No trust left, no faith. Why talk fairly with someone who obeys no rules, intends to destroy you? Better we trade insults, see if we can give each other heart attacks.”

“It must be terribly painful to be the last honest man,” she said. She lit another cigarette. Though her voice was calm as steel, her fingers trembled.

“You have a sharp eye. Yes indeed, my suffering’s a rare and splendid thing.”

“We don’t suffer, of course.”

“ ‘We’ being, I presume, you and the children, the great united front.” He rolled his eyes up, as if in brief prayer to some ferocious, bored god, no doubt some half-wit god jugged to the gills.

“You could try to talk,” she snapped. “You’re supposed to be this marvellous lecturer, the finest in your department, as you so frequently remark.”

He pushed his chair back angrily and stood up, not to leave but to be farther from her, free to pace if he should need to. “When in hell am I supposed to have called myself a marvellous lecturer?”

“Except of course when you don’t bother to show up.”

His eyes widened, enraged but also baffled. He looked terrible—scratches all over his face from his rampage last night, bleary, baggy eyes. “Name one single time since I left San Francisco—”

“You’ve forgotten. You can’t remember anything anymore. You drink and drink—it’s a wonder you can sometimes still remember your name.”

“God damn you,” he roared, “stay on one subject for fifteen seconds, will you? What are these classes I’m supposed to have missed?”

“Plenty, Martin! Do you really think everybody doesn’t know? I’ve tried to get hold of you a dozen times—ask Georges Fauré, ask John Porter. Nobody can find you. You’re supposed to be in class, they say, but there’s nobody in the room.”

“That’s impossible!” But he was staring at her, perhaps trying to remember, perhaps trying to judge whether or not she’d found something out.

“Does she massage your shoulders? Does she like to be fucked in graveyards?” She smiled, mock-sweet.

He stared. His breathing was growing calmer; he was thinking something, she had no idea what. Finally he said, swirling his drink around and around, speaking as if to his glass, not her: “You fight with great spirit, but your stupidity beats you. Beats me too, in the end, but never mind; it doesn’t matter.” He raised his glass, extended it toward the darkness outside, to the right of the swimming pool, where the trees began to circle out, as if offering a toast to evil spirits. “Behold here the ruin of centuries of Nature’s blind plodding. I give you, in this lady, the glorious culmination of a bold experiment, homo non sapiens: centuries of careful evolution in clans, selective breeding until the last trace of judgment was eradicated, nothing in the universe right or wrong but by virtue of its plaid and the loch it had the honor to get born beside; then a final bit of polish in the American South, magnificent Eden of noninterference, though black