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

like to be leaders too.” Yes, all that was true. One of the things most horrible to her when she’d believed Martin was abandoning her was the shame, the unspeakable embarrassment she would feel in front of friends when it was known that she had been a “bad wife”—to say nothing of how she would feel before her parents. And it was no doubt true too that she had wanted too much “to be at the head of things.” That was always Martin’s chief complaint, that in everything she did she sought to dominate him—and it was his chief defense for having fallen in love with Neva, the big, slow-moving, guitar-playing friend who’d betrayed her. Neva accepted, demanded nothing, or so it seemed to Martin, and perhaps it was true. (At every thought of Neva, her mind winced back, enraged. Some people were born to accept, demand nothing, she thought brutally. Some people were born without rights. Joan Frazier was not one of them.) —But if pride was part of what she’d felt that day in the hospital, it was only part. Though the day was bright outside the hospital window, the white and cream-colored buildings glittering like cubes of sugar, falling away toward the heart of the city, the bay beyond, nothing was light or beautiful inside her: she was full of pain and sorrow as loud inside her head as a waterfall, and it was as if all the people and places and things she’d ever loved were being crushed, ground to bits in that churning, falling torrent of pain. She was haunted by memories, one after another—they came over her in a great clattering confusion when she slept—images of sorrow and failure that she’d misunderstood. She remembered with a sudden and terrible vividness Jacqui Duggers’ three hundred pairs of shoes, brave colors, brave hopes, and the way Jacqui’s eyes lit up with eagerness when she spoke—in her defiant white apartment there in dingy St. Louis—of Paris. She remembered angry-eyed, black-bearded Uncle Zack, his broad, lean back turned squarely on the world, his shotgun cracked over his hard, skinny arm—“kin to vipers,” his own sister, Lulu Frazier, called him. And then into her mind came the image of her father, and the sound of his voice, and her anger and despair were baffled, driven back, leaving only her sorrow and confusion. She’d seen him cry rarely—once when, before they were married, she’d thought she was pregnant. He would cry again now. She couldn’t stand it.

Martin said, “I can take the children east with me if that’s what you want. Whatever.”

She leaned up on her elbows, turning on him wildly. “To live with that whore? Not on your life, Martin Orrick. I’ll see you dead first!”

He looked at her as if puzzled, his face slightly tensed, like that of a man forced to look at a wound. “There’s not gonna be anybody with me,” he said. “I’m going back alone.”

Her mind fumbled with it, still full of pain but at the same time rising with foolish eagerness toward a hope too humiliating for her to admit just yet. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you—get rid of all three of us. You could grow a little pot on the back forty and fill your whole tarpaper shack with teenage pussy.”

He said nothing. She closed her eyes, crying again. Every morning she left at seven for the school where she taught, to give the kids extra lessons, lay out the day’s work, grade papers she hadn’t gotten to, and fill out reports or repair broken instruments, and often she wouldn’t get home at night until well after six. It was Martin who got the children up, dressed them, fed them breakfast, typed or read with them playing on the floor beside him. (“The heart of a Cancer,” Paul Brotsky would read in the new room, years later, “may be painfully divided between his family and the sea. They are wonderful providers and can turn a cave into a paradise, but they also like employment with shipping lines and sea travel.”) It was Martin who, as the children grew older, took them every day to nursery school—walked with them down to the trolley-line M car and rode, one arm around each of them, through the long spooky tunnel—and at the nursery school played with them for half an hour (the other parent helpers were women with frosted hair) until it was time to walk the half mile to the college and meet his classes, talk with students. And it was Martin who had time to take them on excursions—to the Pacific, to the zoo, to Chinatown. So she knew, really, that it was not the three of them he meant to be rid of. She opened her eyes and said abruptly, looking at the ceiling:

“Can we go with you?”

He said nothing. She was afraid to see what his expression was, but when he got up from his chair and moved toward the door, she did look, ready to strike out. But he was shrugging, standing half turned away, as if undecided between two lives. As if wearily, ultimately indifferent, he said, “Of course.” The circles under his eyes were darker than she’d ever seen them, and he looked as if he hadn’t had a bath in a month. She would be amazed, later, that she’d failed to see, that moment, the truth, that he was sick—“had troubles,” as her mother would say, apologizing for him, perhaps for everyone, the whole universe to the last scorpion “good at heart.” But plain as his sickness was, she hadn’t seen it. Even when she said softly, “You’re crazy, Martin,” it never for an instant crossed her mind that what she said was true.

“I have to go, Joan,” he said. “Have to pick up the kids.” He moved toward the door.

“Would you kiss me good-bye?” she said. “Out of pity, I mean, because I’m sick.”

He almost smiled, hesitated, then decided to obey.

“I love you, Martin,” she said,