Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

looked at his watch. Three twenty. This delay too, of course, she would blame on Craine. Rightly, no doubt, from a certain point of view. At last, his explanations concluded, the blind boy turned away from her and, after a last brief hesitation, went tapping down the sidewalk. Elaine turned her head to look reproachfully at Craine, then started for the entrance and the stairway.

“You forgot your books again,” Craine called.

She stopped and simply stood there with her back to him. He stepped to the books, scooped them up, and hurried toward her. When she held out her arms for them, he pretended not to notice.

“Which floor’s your class on?”

“Second,” she said.

“We better hurry, you’re twenty minutes late,” he said. He made a slight movement in the direction of the door, then waited. She compressed her lips, then bent her head—in profile, her face was like the face on some ancient coin, Craine thought—and, together, they started for the entrance.

“Listen, I’m sorry if I wasn’t on time,” he said, not turning to look at her. “I hurried as fast as I could, scout’s honor. I’m also sorry I put the truck where the blind boy could run into it. I really am. Look, Miss Glass, stop being mad at me.”

“All right,” she said. She glanced at him sideways and, seeing that he was watching her, gave a shrug. “So all right.”

He reached out ahead of her to open the door, and perhaps against her principles, she stood politely waiting till it was open, then stepped through. “I’m also sorry about the mindless chatter about Darwin,” he said as he started up the stairs behind her.

“I didn’t mind. It was interesting.” Whether or not she was still angry seemed impossible to tell. Ruefully, he watched how her brown-golden legs took her springing up the stairs—he, Craine, laboring behind her, winded by the time he reached the first-floor landing. By the time they reached the second, where her class was, he was ready to gag, like Royce bent over with an attack of emphysema. She went striding down the hall. He hurried, coughing into his hand, trying to catch up with her. At one of the classroom doors she stopped and stood for a moment with her head bent, listening. Craine went up to her to give her her books, his legs aching, almost trembling, from his climb. She nodded, awkwardly taking the pile.

She said, meeting his eyes and then looking away, embarrassed, “I should talk to you sometime about that thing we were talking about before, the difference between people and animals, the way we lose touch because of words—remember? I was thinking about what I’ve learned in analysis, and I think—I’m not certain, I mean, but—I think you’re wrong.” She turned from him to look through the little square window into the classroom.

“I’ll be waiting,” he said. “Anything you like, I’m your servant. Craine’s Last Case. One last feeble push for humanity, and then amen, amen.”

She jerked her face around, her eyes very wide behind the magnifying lenses. She’d understood him better than he’d meant her to, he saw. He winked and grinned to throw her off, but her expression did not change. Without a word, she turned the doorknob, opened the door just a little, and slipped in.

Craine watched her out of sight. The professor was saying, working up interest, though she’d said it a hundred times, no doubt, “If you could put all the people in the United States on a postage stamp, that’s how many rods there would be on a single retina. And as for the cells of the brain itself, if people were scaled down to the size of cells, we could hold the whole population of the earth in our two cupped hands, and there wouldn’t be enough to make a brain of.”

There the door clicked shut, and though he could still have heard if he were willing to strain, Craine gave up listening. He turned away from the classroom, folded his hands behind his back, and for a moment stood gazing out the large, gray-tinted window.

The sunlight fallen over the campus seemed now ever warmer, more golden, bronzing the trees, making them like trees in some noble old painting from the eighteenth century.

Fragment Five

There on the dark, quiet lawns and the shaded brick and stone entranceways where students stood waiting, inaudibly talking—they all seemed now features in some classic oil painting, fallen out of time. The Golden Age, Craine thought, and gave a little nod as if someone else had said it. Strange, downright mysterious, how placid university campuses could seem. He knew well enough that it was partly an illusion. It was here, after all, that Ira Katz made his living, full of anger and sorrow at the failure of his marriage. You could pretty well bet that once, at least, he’d loved that wife of his; no doubt believed, when first they’d gotten married, she was the prettiest creature that ever walked this earth, and the cleverest too—Wendel Davies, his chairman, seemed to think so, so to Ira, who’d loved her, it must have been all the more obvious. Emotions like that would be hard to get over: his memory of how it was at the beginning of their marriage (it was always the same, that first stage of marriage, like the first stage of a drunk), all the time love-making, night and morning and under the not-yet-paid-for kitchen table; and his memories of the hospital, when she was having their children, how she’d clung to his hand as if to crush the bones, rolling her widened eyes at him, mouth opening for a scream; and memories of moments when she’d shone and he’d been proud of her—some party where everyone was surprised at her wit or sweet modesty, whatever (more likely wit, Craine decided, studying the photograph in his mind): say she was wearing a dress she’d made herself, very tasteful, stunning, the neck perhaps a slash that showed her