Collected Stories, page 36
I heard the phonograph the moment I opened the door; my mother was sitting alone in the kitchen. Her life was right where I had left it. As I stuck my head and half my body into the light and warmth she jerked to her feet, and her eyes went from my face to the front of my sweater where dirt from the cabbage root had rubbed off on me, and from that to my hand, still out of sight holding the cabbage behind the door jamb.
“Where did you go?” she said. “Are you all right?”
Already my confidence in what I had done was leaking away; the last block of the way home, the cabbage had weighed like solid lead. It seemed to me that all that day I had been carrying weights too heavy for my arms up to that house I hated and took refuge in. Now by its root I dragged the upended head around the door, and searching her face for her response, I said, “I brought you something.”
She was standing straight by her chair. Her head did not move as she glanced at the cabbage; only her eyes flicked down and then back. She said nothing—not “Oh, how nice!” or even “Where did you get it?” Nothing.
Panic began to rise in me, for here in the kitchen I couldn’t pretend that the cabbage was anything but ridiculous, a contribution to our household that would have made my father snort in incredulous contempt. Moreover—and this was worse because it concerned her, not him—it had been stolen. She knew at once it was a theft I offered her. I remembered her angry whisper coming with the rush of air through the register: I wonder how we’ll feel if he turns out bad? What if we make him into a thief, or worse? How will he ever be able to tell right from wrong?
“Ma …” I said.
It was more than I could do to support her still look. Still clutching the cabbage, I let my eyes wander away until they settled upon the castra. There lay reassurance: the daubed walls were tight and neat, the tents lay in mathematically precise rows. Like a dog on a track, my mind ducked to one side, and I found myself repeating other words like castra that had a different meaning in singular and plural—words like gratia-gratiae, and auxilium-auxilia, and impedimentum-impedimenta, and copia-copiae—and even going over some of the words that customarily took in with the accusative: names of towns, small islands, domus, rus.
Out of the register came the squawk of a record ending, a big burst of laughter, a woman’s squeal, shouts whose words I resolutely would not hear, then the music again: good old “Nobody Lied,” my own contribution to the parlor fun. I brought my eyes around again to her, opening my mouth to say, “I …” She was still looking at me intently; her hands hung awkwardly before her as if she had forgotten them there. Her mouth twitched—smile, or grimace such as she made when the parlor got rowdy?
Perhaps the true climax of that rueful day and that rueful period of our lives is this tableau in which I after a fashion present and she in some sort accepts the grotesque vegetable I have stolen to compensate her for the wrongs and uncertainties and deprivations of her life. I bring her this gift, this proof of myself, and we stare at each other with emotions mixed and uneasy. What shall we say there in that kitchen? What another family might greet with great belly laughs we cannot meet so easily. We have no margin for laughter.
The slaptongue sax is pounding and throbbing through the pipes. I want to say to her, I am awful, I have filthy thoughts, I steal, I would even cheat if I couldn’t get A any other way. I’m a cry baby and people laugh at me and I’m sorry I …
I say none of it. She says, with her eyes glittering full, “Ah, poor Davey,” and puts up her arms and I creep into them, and I suspect that, hugging each other in the sanctuary kitchen, we are both about half comforted.
A Field Guide to the Western Birds
I must say that I never felt better. I don’t feel sixty-six, I have no gerontological worries; if I am on the shelf, as we literally are in this place on the prow of a California hill, retirement is not the hangdog misery that I half expected it to be. When I stepped out of the office, we sold our place in Yorktown Heights because even Yorktown Heights might be too close to Madison Avenue for comfort. The New Haven would still run trains; a man might still see the old companions. I didn’t want to have to avoid the Algonquin at noon or the Ritz bar after five. If there is anything limper than an ex-literary agent it is an ex-literary agent hanging around where his old business still goes on. We told people that we were leaving because I wanted to get clear away and get perspective for my memoirs. Ha! That was to scare some of them, a little. What I Have Done for Ten Percent. I know some literary figures who wish I had stayed in New York where they could watch me.
But here I sit on this terrace in a golden afternoon, finishing off an early, indolent highball, my shanks in saddle-stitched slacks and my feet in brown suede; a Pebble Beach pasha, a Los Gatos geikwar. What I have done for ten percent was never like this.
Down the terrace a brown bird alights—some kind of towhee, I think, but I can’t find him in the bird book. Whatever he is, he is a champion for pugnacity. Maybe he is living up to some dim notion of how to be a proper husband and father, maybe he just hates himself, for about ten times a day I see him alight on the terrace and challenge his reflection in the plate glass. He springs at himself like a fighting cock, beats his wings, pecks, falls back, springs again, slides and thumps against the glass, falls down, flies up, falls down, until he wears himself out and squats on the bricks, panting and glaring at his hated image. For about ten days now he has been struggling with himself like Jacob with his angel, Hercules with his Hydra, Christian with his conscience, old retired Joe Allston with his memoirs.
I drop a hand and grope up the drained highball glass, tip the ice cubes into my palm, and scoot them down the terrace. “Beat it, you fool.” The towhee, or whatever he is, springs into the air and flies away. End of problem.
Down the hill that plunges steeply from the terrace, somewhere down among the toyon and oak, a tom quail is hammering his ca-whack-a, ca-whack-a, ca-whack-a. From the horse pasture of our neighbor Shields, on the other side of the house, a meadowlark whistles sharp and pure. The meadowlarks are new to me. They do not grow in Yorktown Heights, and the quail there, I am told, say Bob White instead of ca-whack-a.
This terrace is a good place just to lie and listen. Lots of bird business, every minute of the day. All around the house I can hear the clatter of house finches that have nested in the vines, the drainspouts, the rafters of the carport. The liveoaks level with my eyes flick with little colored movements: I see a red-headed woodpecker working spirally around a trunk, a nuthatch walking upside down along a limb, a pair of warblers hanging like limes among the leaves.
It is a thing to be confessed that in spite of living in Yorktown Heights among the birdwatchers for twenty-four years I never got into my gaiters and slung on my binoculars and put a peanut butter sandwich and an apple in my pocket and set off lightheartedly through the woods. I have seen them come straggling by on a Sunday afternoon, looking like a cross between the end of a Y.W.C.A. picnic and Hare and Hounds at Rugby, but it was always a little too tweedy and muscular to stir me, and until we came here I couldn’t have told a Wilson thrush from a turkey. The memoirs are what made a birdwatcher out of Joseph Allston; I have labored at identification as much as reminiscence through the mornings when Ruth has thought I’ve been gleaning the busy years.
When we built this house I very craftily built a separate study down the hill a hundred feet or so, the theory being that I did not want to be disturbed by telephone calls. Actually I did not want to be disturbed by Ruth, who sometimes begins to feel that she is the Whip of Conscience, and who worries that if I do not keep busy I will start to deteriorate. I had a little of that feeling myself: I was going to get all the benefits of privacy and quiet, and I even put a blank wall on the study on the view side. But I made the whole north wall of glass, for light, and that was where I got caught. The wall of glass looks into a deep green shade coiling with the python limbs of a liveoak, and the oak is always full of birds.
Worse than that for my concentration, there are two casement windows on the south that open on to a pasture and a stripe of sky. Even with my back to them, I can see them reflected dimly in the plate glass in front of me, and the pasture and the sky are also full of birds. I wrote a little thumbnail description of this effect, thinking it might go into the memoirs somewhere. It is something I learned how to do while managing the affairs of writers: “Faintly, hypnotically, like an hallucination, the reflected sky superimposed on the umbrageous cave of the tree is traced by the linear geometry of hawks, the vortical returnings of buzzards. On the three fenceposts that show between sky and pasture, bluejays plunge to a halt to challenge the world, and across the stripe of sky lines of Brewer’s blackbirds are pinned to the loops of telephone wire like a ragged black wash.” I have seen (and sold) a lot worse.
I am beginning to understand the temptation to be literary and indulge the senses. It is a full-time job just watching and listening here. I watch the light change across the ridges to the west, and the ridges are the fresh gold of wild oats just turned, the oaks are round and green with oval shadows, the hollows have a tinge of blue. The last crest of the Coast Range is furry with sunstruck spikes of fir and redwood. Off to the east I can hear the roar, hardly more than a hum from here, as San Francisco pours its commuter trains down the valley, jams El Camino from Potrero to San Jose with the honk and stink of cars, rushes its daytime prisoners in murderous columns down the Bayshore. Not for me, not any more. Hardly any of that afternoon row penetrates up here. This is for the retired, for the no-longer-commuting, for contemplative ex-literary agents, for the birds.
Ruth comes out of the French doors of the bedroom and hands me the pernicious silver necklace that my client Murthi once sent her in gratitude from Hyderabad. The bird who made it was the same kind of jeweler that Murthi is a writer; why in hell should anyone hand-make a little set screw for a fastener, and then thread the screw backward?
I comment aloud on the idiocy of the Hyderabad silversmith while I strain up on one elbow and try to fasten the thing around her neck, but Ruth does not pay attention. I believe she thinks complaints are a self-indulgence. Sometimes she irritates me close to uxoricide. I do not see how people can stay healthy unless they express their feelings. If I had that idiot Murthi here now I would tell him exactly what I think of his smug Oxonian paragraphs and his superior sniffing about American materialism. If I hadn’t sold his foolish book for him he would never have sent this token of gratitude, and all the comfortable assumptions of my sixty-six years would be intact. I drop the screw on the bricks; invariably I try to screw it the wrong way. Cultural opposites; never the twain shall meet. Political understanding more impossible than Murthi thinks it is, because the Indians insist on making and doing and thinking everything backward.
“No fog,” Ruth says, stooping. At Bryn Mawr they taught her that a lady modulates her speaking voice, and as a result she never says anything except conspiratorially. A writer who wrote with so little regard for his audience wouldn’t sell a line. On occasion she has started talking to me while her head was deep inside some cupboard or closet so that nothing came out but this inaudible thrilling murmur, and I have been so exasperated that I have deliberately walked out of the room. Five minutes later I have come back and found her still talking, still with her head among the coats and suits and dresses. “What?” I am inclined to say then. The intent is to make her feel chagrined and ridiculous to have been murmuring away to herself. It never does. A Bryn Mawr lady is as unruffled as her voice.
“What?” I say now, though this time I have heard her well enough. It just seems to me that out on the terrace, in the open air, she might speak above a whisper.
“No fog,” she says in exactly the same tone. “Sue was afraid the fog would come in and chase everybody indoors.”
I get the necklace screwed together at last and sink back exhausted. I am too used up even to protest when she rubs her hand around on my bald spot—a thing that usually drives me wild.
“Are you ready?” she says.
“That depends. Is this thing black tie or hula shirt?”
“Oh, informal.”
“Slacks and jacket all right?”
“Sure.”
“Then I’m ready.”
For a minute she stands vaguely stirring her finger around in my fringe. It is very quiet; the peace seeps in upon the terrace from every side. “I suppose it isn’t moral,” I say.
“What isn’t?”
“This.”
“The house? What?”
“All of it.”
I rear up on my elbow, not because I am sore about anything but because I really have an extraordinary sense of well-being, and when I feel anything that strongly I like a reaction, not a polite murmur. But then I see that she is staring at me and that her face, fixed for the party, is gently and softly astonished. It is as definite a reaction as they taught her, poor dear. I reach out and tweak her nose.
“I ought to invest in a hair shirt,” I say. “What have I done to deserve so well-preserved and imperturbable a helpmeet?”
“Maybe it’s something you did for ten percent,” she whispers, and that tickles me. I was the poor one when we were married. Her father’s money kept us going for the first five or six years.
She laughs and rubs her cheek against mine, and her cheek is soft and smells of powder. For the merest instant it feels old—too soft, limp and used and without tension and resilience, and I think what it means to be all through. But Ruth is looking across at the violet valleys and the sunstruck ridges, and she says in her whispery voice, “Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it really perfectly beautiful!”
So it is; that ought to be enough. If it weren’t I would not be an incipient birdwatcher; I would be defensively killing myself writing those memoirs, trying to stay alive just by stirring around. But I don’t need to stay alive by stirring around. I am a bee at the heart of a sleepy flower; the things I used to do for a living and the people I did them among are as remote as things and people I knew in prep school.
“I am oppressed with birdsong,” I say. “I am confounded by peace. I don’t want to move. Do we have to go over to Bill Casement’s and drink highballs and listen to Sue’s refugee genius punish the piano?”
“Of course. You were an agent. You know everybody in New York. You own or control Town Hall. You’re supposed to help start this boy on his career.”
I grunt, and she goes inside. The sun, very low, begins to reach in under the oak and blind me with bright flashes. Down at the foot of our hill two tall eucalyptuses rise high above the oak and toyon, and the limber oval leaves of their tips, not too far below me, flick and glitter like tinsel fish. From the undergrowth the quail cackles again. A swallow cuts across the terrace and swerves after an insect and is gone.
It is when I am trying to see where the swallow darted to that I notice the little hawk hovering above the tips of the eucalyptus trees. It holds itself in one spot like a helicopter pulling somebody out of the surf. The sparrow hawk or kestrel, according to the bird book, is the only small hawk, maybe the only one of any kind, that can do that.
From its hover, the kestrel stoops like a falling stone straight into the tip of the eucalyptus and then shoots up again from among the glitter of the leaves. It disappears into the sun, but just when I think it has gone it appears in another dive. Another miss: I can tell from its angry kreeeeee! as it swerves up. All the other birds are quiet; for a second the evening is like something under a belljar. I watch the kestrel stop and hover, and down it comes a third time, and up it goes screeching. As I stand up to see what it can be striking at, it apparently sees me; it is gone with a swift bowed wingbeat into the sun.
And now what? Out of the eucalyptus, seconds after the kestrel has gone, comes a little buzzing thing about the size of a bumblebee. A hummingbird, too far to see what kind. It sits in the air above the tree just as the kestrel did; it looks as if it couldn’t hold all the indignation it feels; I think of a thimble-sized Colonel Blimp with a red face and asthmatic wheezings and exclamations. Then it too is gone as if shot out of a slingshot.
I am tickled by its tiny wrath and by the sense it has shown in staying down among the leaves where the hawk couldn’t hit it. But I have hardly watched the little buzzing dot disappear before I am rubbing my eyes like a man seeing ghosts, for out of this same eucalyptus top, in a kind of Keystone Kop routine where fifty people pour out of one old Model T, lumbers up a great owl. He looks as clumsy as a buffalo after the speed and delicacy of the hawk and the hummingbird, and like a lumpish halfwit hurrying home before the neighborhood gang can catch and torment him, he flaps off heavily into the woods.
This is too much for Joseph Allston, oppressed with birdsong. I am cackling to myself like a maniac when Ruth comes out on to the terrace with her coat on. “Ruthie,” I tell her, “you just missed seeing Oliver Owl black-balled from the Treetop Country Club.”
“What?”
“Just as Big Round Red Mr. Sun was setting over the California hills.”
“Have you gone balmy, poor lamb,” Ruth whispers, “or have you been nibbling highballs?”
“Madame, I am passionately at peace.”
“Well, contain your faunish humor tonight,” Ruth says. “Sue really wants to do something for this boy. Don’t you go spoiling anything with your capers.”
Ruth believes that I go out of my way to stir up the animals. Once our terrier Grumpy—now dead, but more dog for his pounds than ever lived—started through the fence in Yorktown Heights with a stick in his mouth. He didn’t allow for the stick and the pickets, and he was coming fast—he never came any other way. The stick caught solidly on both sides and pretty near took his head off. That, Ruth told me in her confidential whisper, was the way I had approached every situation in my whole life. In her inaudible way, she is capable of a good deal of hyperbole. I have no desire to foul up Sue’s artistic philanthropies. I can’t do her boy any good, but I’ll sip a drink and listen, and that’s more help than he will get from any of the twelve people who will be there when he finally plays in Town Hall.
