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

Joan leaning forward toward the music not really in order to see the notes but because Buddy’s mother and sister were crowding her from behind; yet it wasn’t miserable, only funny and exciting, he cluttered room, completely unlike anything you would ever have seen at her mother’s house—the piano top so crowded with pictures of friends and relatives, including a large, colored picture of herself, that you could hardly find a place to put a pencil down—the clutter of emotions—the family’s pleasure in the music and delight in her cleverness, Buddy’s nervousness, his slight embarrassment at the behavior of his family, though it was obvious that he also felt affection for them, and her own confused feelings of pride, love, embarrassment, claustrophobia. When they finished the first movement Buddy’s mother and sister clapped and cried “Bravo!” and Buddy was more embarrassed than ever. Then his father came in, smelling of the cow barn, and came to the doorway, smiling as he always did at sight of her, and said, “If music be the food of love, play on!” Buddy looked down, and Joan studied him, then said, “Ready, baby?” He glanced up and, after an instant’s hesitation, nodded.

After the recital they all went out to eat, Joan and Buddy’s mother and his aunt Mary—after whom, years later, their daughter would be named. They ate in the high-ceilinged, dark diningroom of some old hotel, and Buddy’s mother and Aunt Mary spoke over and over of what a beautiful recital it had been and what a shame it was that Buddy’s father and Uncle George had had to miss it. While they were eating Joan felt a sudden sharp pain, a pain so fierce she went white and almost fainted. It was exactly like the time her appendix had ruptured, and she was so frightened she couldn’t even cry out. She managed to say in a whisper, “Aunt Mary, I—” and Aunt Mary, who was a nurse—head of the maternity ward at Genesee Memorial—looked at her and said, “My dear!” and got up so quickly she almost knocked the table over. The next thing Joan knew, they were driving very fast to the Rochester hospital in Aunt Mary’s car, Joan lying in the backseat with her head on Buddy’s lap, and he was bent over her, looking white and frightened, touching her face gently, brushing away her tears and saying, full of concern, “You’ll be all right, Joan. You will.” As if because his voice was magical—that high-tone, flat eastern accent she loved—the pain shrank away and, after a moment, vanished. She was about to tell him, then changed her mind. Outside the car windows, streetlights and snowy trees flew by. She felt a flurry of panic at what she was about to do, then whispered, “Buddy, kiss me.” His eyes widened slightly and then, timidly, he obeyed.

At the hospital, as at so many hospitals later, the doctor found nothing wrong. It was impossible, they told her, that her appendix could have grown back. “But it must be something” she said. Did they think she’d made it up?

The doctor, who had a round head and a large brown moustache, merely smiled and looked at the middle of her forehead. “It seems to be just one of those things,” he said.

“Just thank the dear Lord it’s gone and pray it won’t come back,” Aunt Mary said, and took Joan’s arm, severe as a sergeant—her normal way of showing affection. They returned to the room where Buddy and his mother were waiting.

“Nothing?” his mother said, incredulous, prepared to be annoyed at the doctor.

“Nothing they can find,” Aunt Mary said, with such finality that Buddy’s mother shook her head and said no more.

As they walked back to the elevator, Buddy took Joan’s hand.

Ten

His uncle George was a short, dapper, big-jawed, quick man who wore gold-rimmed spectacles and three-piece suits, usually brown ones and fairly conservative, though his nature made them seem merrier than they were. (In no corner of his jubilant Scorpio soul did George Preston wear checks or flashy bow ties or a moustache; though he was a teller of stories and a first-rate salesman, he was serious about life, ready every day to be called to some delicate, important work, or a friend’s marriage, or a funeral.) He was full of pleasure and darting curiosity; there was nothing decent that he wouldn’t try his hand at, from butchering cows to leg-wrestling a Seneca Indian, and nothing he tried was he bad at except for English grammar, for which he had no flair. His house on North Lyon in Batavia, New York, was atoggle from end to end with ingenious devices he’d run across in his Popular Mechanics magazines—he kept a great stack of them by the toilet in his bathroom—strings, pulleys, and levers for turning lights on and off again, or for opening or closing or starting or stopping things. When his basement flooded, as basements in his part of the city did each spring, regular as the mail, he had a steamship’s pump that he’d built, himself, to empty it. On every door and window of his house and garage and potting shed, he had clever devices he’d constructed himself to keep burglars and mischievous children out. The arches he wore in his wide brown highly polished shoes were of his own design and basement manufacture.

Given his talent and boundless energy, George Preston might have been anything; but his father died when he was still a young man and, though he wasn’t the eldest and thus wasn’t, by a certain line of reasoning, responsible, he threw himself into taking care of the family and sacrificed, pretty much without a second thought, whatever chances he might have had as an artist, engineer, or who-knows-what. He’d driven ambulance during World War I and had a thousand stories, most of them so funny that people laughed until they cried, sitting around the table in his crowded, brightly lit diningroom, or at the picnic table he