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

would not remember, afterward, the drive to town. His memory would go back only to the hospital corridor, where he stood, still trembling, drinking black coffee—“You’re drunk,” the nurse had said, crackling with hate—his hands bleeding from when he’d fallen beside the car, his student friends seated on the long wooden bench, ashen-faced, dishevelled, Dr. Crouse saying (distant, as if reserving judgment), “That’s one more time you’ve been lucky as hell, whole lot more lucky than you deserve, that’s the truth.” Even after that violent letting, her blood pressure was dangerously high. If she’d made it to bed, the odds were close to a hundred to nothing she’d have died of a stroke before morning.

“What should I have done?” Martin Orrick said.

To Crouse his eyes looked defiant, hostile. His breath, his skin, his clothes, filled all Sikeston with gin-stink.

“Well I don’ know,” he said mildly. He was a soft-voiced Missourian with a private smile, obviously friendly, obviously noncommittal. For no good reason, he liked Martin Orrick—the novels, perhaps. Martin Orrick was a far better man in his books than in his life, God knew, yet he had a kind of madman’s charm, some way. Charm like a tiger’s. He was beautiful, powerful, the way mad poets were supposed to be, but he was also, in his madness, dangerous and stupid, burning up his life—everybody’s life—like sunbaked kindling. Dr. Jimmy Crouse had no time for fools, but with Martin Orrick he kept putting off decision. He said: “The way you people live out there, Joanie sick as hell, and you behaving like …”

Martin nodded, a quick, ghastly jerk of the head, and for an instant closed his eyes, suddenly becoming more child than wolf or tiger. Crouse studied him, then put his hand on his arm and grinned, deciding, Oh, the hell with it. “You’re crazy, boy, that’s all’s the matter. You gotta just sort of get on up and turn yourself around.”

Martin laughed.

Crouse nodded, still grinning, though his eyes were solemn. “Well, cheer up. She’ll pull you through, ’f you don’t kill her first.”

“Suppose,” Martin Orrick wrote that year, “one could adjust optimistic Christianity and the gloomy facts of life—the universal banging of atom against atom, planet against planet, heart against heart. Granted, that is, that the whole thing’s a river, mere blindly bumping chances, no prayer of rest—granted that the weather has a good deal to do with what I happen to love—indeed, with whether I survive to love at all—that my life is an accidental tumble of the dice, my ancestors’ genes, my penmanship borrowed from a childhood friend (but strangely like my father’s)—suppose one could learn, by the flick of a switch, to enjoy the hangings, celebrate the swiftly passing patterns as holy. Would that give stability? I hate idealists; no one hates them more or would sooner condemn them to execution. Sitting by the river, studying its refusal to repeat itself, the heavy yellow water never twice eddying in the exact same place, even the course of barges unpredictable, I grow anxious to dynamite Plato’s museum, soft, comfortable home of my lean toward insanity. Process is all I care about. Therefore I write fiction, to make the beauty of change everlasting, unalterable as rock.”

Useless to inquire too earnestly what Martin Orrick meant.

One

At a time when everyone who was anyone was plunging into her identity crisis, Joan Orrick became with a vengeance what she was. No one— certainly no one in her family—was especially surprised, and no one was sorry, though her husband told their friends he had moments of wondering if he’d survive it. She’d been a liberated woman since 1933, the year of her birth. She’d been a red-head (and was still), with a dimple and dazzling eyes and a dazzling wit, and her parents had soon discovered that she had, besides, “a really quite remarkable musical talent,” as her first piano teacher said, with a frightened look. Her teacher, a Miss Huppman, had no talent at all—except for raising begonias—but Joan didn’t know it and was flying, by the middle of her second year, through Bach’s three-part inventions. Timidly, wringing her hankie at the door, Miss Huppman suggested, when Joan’s father came after one of her lessons to pick her up, that perhaps Joan needed a teacher “a little more advanced.”

“I see,” her father said in his tentative way, with his hat in his hands.

He was a minor executive in the St. Louis Screw and Bolt Company—he would later be one of the company’s two top men—but he was not yet (and in some respects would never be) a man bursting with confidence. He was, in fact, a farm boy who’d only reached fifth grade, and even that was partly fraudulent, since he had a brother, John Elmer, who looked remarkably like him and a Scotchman father who felt, perhaps rightly, that the farming couldn’t spare them both. “I see,” he said, somewhat alarmed, since he had no idea how to go about finding a piano teacher more advanced. He was, Joan’s father, a handsome, broad-shouldered man, red-headed, like his daughter, with a Scotchman’s pale eyes and brilliant smile, also a Scotchman’s somewhat overlarge nose, which his daughter had inherited, but he bore it with such grace, as his daughter would do, that no one could ever take exception to it; indeed, years later, on his grandson Evan, that nose would become—elegantly harmonized with other noble features, a gentle disposition, and a splendid intelligence—a thing to make maidens weep.

“Is there,” Joan’s father said, “someone you could recommend?”

“Oh dear,” said Miss Huppman, “these things are so difficult. Mrs. Wulker, I should think. She lives right near you, on Randolph.” She looked at Joan’s father as if she thought he might help her. “Perhaps someone in the city?”

Joan’s father thanked her, paid her the fifty cents she charged, and walked, holding Joan’s hand, to their square green Dodge.

Joan was, in her father’s opinion, the most beautiful, most wonderful little girl in the world. Neither he nor