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

waist, both of them listening to the record playing and thinking of Joan on the couch beside Buddy, she felt as if her insides were bleeding, she was so worried, and from time to time she would ask Donald, really not knowing, herself, “Should we tell them to go to bed?” She suspected, naturally (and rightly), the worst. “It’s just the sex thing that draws them together so,” she complained to Donald one night. “Those two just look at each other and boom, it’s an explosion.” But Donald said wearily, sorrowfully, “No, they was like that before they ever heard about sex.” And that was true, all right. She’d known it herself, had merely wanted Donald to say it. She ought to be reassured but, like Donald, she was worried just the same, worried sick. She would smile, long afterward, when poor Buddy—that is, Martin—had to suffer the same thing, when it was his own daughter, Mary, that was in love. And she would smile, too, at how needlessly they’d worried, though that was what life was all about, of course. They had their troubles, Joan and Martin, but thank the Lord they made a great deal of money, and their children were wonderful, which must be a sign that the marriage was better than anyone back then could have hoped it would be—though Cora and John Elmer, she must admit, and Mary and George Preston had had no doubts at all. When they came back to visit, when they were middle-aged, Martin a famous novelist now, with silver hair falling down his back like a woman’s (“That’s expected of famous writers,” she told friends, though she had, of course, her doubts), and Joan a composer who’d had her music recorded by some orchestra in New York—pots and pans, it sounded like, or planets in collision, though Emmy was the first to admit she wouldn’t know (she liked it, secretly; was it supposed to sound childishly funny, full of joy?)—when they came back, anyway, or when they invited Donald and her for a visit in England, while they were living there, it was not like seeing one’s children but more like, well, bumping into old friends. No one would dream they’d been through what they had. “She’s turned out to be a nice-looking girl,” Donald said. Though she was usually more careful, Emmy had laughed straight at him, the understatement was so ridiculous, and he’d blushed and laughed too. Their grandson Evan was an absolute jewel, as saintly and gentle as Donald and as, well, pedantic as his father, but not gloomy, not crabby or misanthropic—not that there was anything wrong with Martin, she added quickly in her mind. He was good at heart. It took some getting used to, the way Evan’s hair fell past his shoulders, like a girl’s, or like his father’s. But he was a wonderful boy, he really was, doing those magic tricks with his tailcoat and top hat, acting as if he never knew himself what miracle might happen next, cunning and innocent, exactly like Joan. She’d laughed until she thought she might fall out of her chair.

In London everyone was a magician of sorts, or at any rate everyone at their party was. The great, tall silver-haired painter Mr. Napper did mind-reading tricks, and his brother who was some kind of television director did tricks with cards and forks, and finally they’d all prevailed upon Evan to do his show. She’d really been fooled by his bumbling at first—as why shouldn’t she be, a gangly yellow-haired twelve-year-old claiming that before he could do his tricks he had to find his rabbit, and hunting foolishly behind doors and under chairs until Mr. Napper, the one who was the painter, said (they must all have been in on it), his face lighting up—and his eyes so wonderfully, beamingly sneaky she should have guessed that very instant—“It’s coming to me!” Evan stopped and looked at him, smiling in a way that was supposed to be innocent but was as obviously crooked as the smile Donald had when he’d skinned somebody out of a five-thousand-dollar machine for, say, two hundred dollars; and Mr. Napper said, “Sh! The spirit’s speaking! Yes, spirit? Yes? (This is very difficult, he’s speaking Swahili …) Come in, spirit! Ah!” And then, with a wildly mischievous look, “If my translation’s correct, it’s in a large black purse.” Innocently they all looked around for a purse, and one by one they ended up staring at the purse in her lap. She blushed, feeling very strange, as if the laws of the universe had altered, and tentatively opened her purse. Out peeked a rabbit. “Oh,” Evan said to Mr. Napper, “gee, thanks.”

He was also a wonderful musician, as Joan had always been, but played French horn like his father—except better than his father—though she didn’t like to say it—and of course she might not know. He was really more like Donald than like either of his parents, a mathematical whiz. As for his younger sister, Mary, well, she was a joy, simply. She too had that unreal-seeming yellow hair—in the summer almost white. She wrote poems and stories like a little professional, acted in plays, took lessons on the harp … It was wrong, Emmy knew, to brag on one’s grandchildren, but she was too old, had seen too much, to pretend she wasn’t proud. It made her see her own past in a whole new way, made her see the world in a whole new way. She had, now, Parkinson’s disease. She’d learned to understand very simply what things made her happy.

Yet their worry at the time Joan and Martin were getting married was natural, inevitable. At his college in Indiana he rarely went to classes, rarely left his room—“writing a book,” he said sourly, daring you to challenge him. When he came to visit Joan, he would glumly put on the suit she’d bought him and kept in her closet for him to