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

brown, black-haired girls with the Oriental eyes, mysterious to him as midnight. Catholics, Jews … He’d hardly dared speak to them. Once on a hayride, something to do with high school, an Italian girl had kissed him. She wore a perfume called Tabu. Even now when, on rare occasions, the scent touched his nostrils, his chest would go light.

He slowed for jaywalkers, three boys and two girls. They didn’t even look up, naturally assuming he would slow for them. Aristocrats.

“Biology,” he said. “You ever read Charles Darwin?”

Elaine said nothing, though her sternness had changed a little, had just perceptibly relaxed, as if she’d begun to imagine possible excuses for him, or begun to turn her arguments inward, against herself. She looked down at the books on her knees, then back up at the windshield.

“I went through a Darwin bender once,” Craine said. “Every book I could lay my hands on. You aware that when he went on his Beagle voyage he didn’t go as ship’s naturalist—went as companion to the captain?”

She said nothing.

“Very interesting fact. Man named Captain Fitzroy. You see, how it was, in those days, the captain was a man of such high class he couldn’t speak with the crew. Gave the first mate his orders, and that was it. All the rest of the time he was alone, even ate alone. Lot of them went crazy, like Captain Ahab. Very common. Five-year voyage, not a soul to talk to … Very common for captains to commit suicide, in fact—as Captain Fitzroy did, about two weeks after Darwin left him. Slit his throat, if I remember. Very strange world people lived in, back then.”

Craine squinted, leaning forward, seeing clearly only now, as he told her about it, what a queer world indeed those old-timers had lived in, friendship between the classes as shocking, in fact unthinkable, as Darwin’s ideas about our great-great-grandfathers and the monkeys. He imagined Captain Fitzroy alone on the bridge, hardly more than a boy—twenty-six when he set out, unless that was someone else, some other old tale—his peasant crew on the decking below him, tugging at their forelocks if they happened to meet his eye … the image was so vivid in Craine’s mind that he almost forgot he was driving and had to veer suddenly to the right to avoid a car. When he glanced at Elaine she was looking at him in alarm. He steadied into his lane, pretending nothing had happened, then remembered to bear left for his approaching turn.

“But that’s not the interesting part,” he continued, pushing in the clutch, then the brake, waiting for his chance, some hint of a break in the two lanes of oncoming traffic. To their left, the campus lay as separate from the town as the world of Captain Fitzroy on the Beagle—buildings, trees, hedges, close-cropped rolling lawns, moss-covered boulder formations hauled in, back in the fifties, on flatbed trucks. Sunlight lay over the campus, the gold-leaved walkways, like grace. “The interesting part is that Fitzroy was a religious fundamentalist. Darwin might be his equal in aristocratic blood, but other than that, poor Fitzroy couldn’t have found a man less like himself if he’d tried. Luckily Darwin was sick a lot, which made him keep to his cabin—he was sickly all his life. And also, no doubt, he was there to gather specimens, and he didn’t want to ruin the chance by getting Fitzroy down on him. All the same, they had some battles, as you can imagine.”

A break came and Craine made his turn, then sped up, almost reckless, making up lost time. Without a word Elaine Glass reached out with both hands, bracing herself on the dashboard. The streets through the campus were inactive, as they always were during class hours. Almost the minute the bell rang, they would clog. On the lawns, in the soft shadows of trees, students sat reading and talking, or lay asleep.

Craine said, “You can’t help wondering how much influence it had on Darwin’s theory—that knucklehead fundamentalism of Fitzroy’s. Darwin, you know, took a very hard line on the God business. Crossed him right off. Not like Isaac Newton, who could manage both opinions, mechanistic and mystic-theological. Darwin said—softly and politely, as is the aristocratic way—‘No God, brothers. Junk evolving into junk. That’s all.’ ”

Abruptly, Elaine Glass said, “That’s sick!”

“Me or Darwin?” Craine asked.

“Darwin,” she said; but she was censoring herself. The tone was reproach.

There was no place to park. He pulled halfway up onto the sidewalk alongside Faner, switched off the engine, pulled the brake on, and opened his door. At once, as if materialized from nowhere, as a reprimand, a blind boy appeared and came tapping toward them, walking faster than a person with sight would walk, overcompensating, making trouble. Craine clamped his jaw and got out, let come what might.

Elaine slammed the door on her side, then saw the blind boy and cried, “Look out for the truck! There’s a truck on the sidewalk!”

The boy jumped a foot, swinging his head around, first right, then left, convinced he was about to be run over. In panic, his left hand thrown out to the side, the cane in his right tapping rapidly, far ahead of him, he rushed toward the street, felt the curb and spun around and rushed, tapping, toward the wall of the building. Elaine stooped quickly, put her books down, and ran to him. “Let me help you!” He swung his face at her and said something, angry, or so it seemed from where Craine stood. She gave him some answer, calming him—calming both of them—then walked with him, cupping his elbow, around past the truck. When she released his elbow he thanked her and set about explaining something, gesturing with both hands. She nodded, answering, smiling nervously, eagerly. He continued gesturing and explaining—by the wheeling and slashing of his cane in the air, it might have been the woe of existence he was explaining—and Elaine went on smiling and nodding. Craine